Ubuntu 16.04 proves even an LTS release can live at Linux's bleeding edge - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/ubuntu-16-04-proves-even-an-lts-release-can-live-at-linuxs-bleeding-edge/ <comment><USER3> > now with 100% less "spyware"

> Canonical dug itself an even deeper hole when it went after [...] > FixUbuntu.com for trademark violations.

1\. I find it both positive and daunting that the first section of this press release is "They're not being assholes this time". Linux systems should be the guardians of nonspying/noncloud systems.

2\. It's excellent they have a theme on stability. I'm not sure how many customers it costs them every year. I personally when to Mac after my second Ubuntu upgrade (1st: the mouse, 2nd: the network).

3\. I'd pay $200/yr for a free OS on a developer machine which just works, where I don't even _know_ whether I'm running Gnome, Unity or KDE. I also want UX improvements (the Amazon search) to be well-UX tested (or rejected) before publication. Something like elementary.io, without the installation errors (yeah I've tried), and with on-the-phone magicians if there's a problem. Something like Mac OS X, but paid. I hope they'll do it one day, I wonder whether there's enough customers for that.

<comment><USER4> You don't have to pay anyone for something that just works, take that 200$/yr and pay it to yourself as you investigate if your hardware is well supported by Linux.

Alternatively, go for System76 or Entroware hardware. That hardware ships with Linux.

<comment><USER5> Time is money- plenty of people would trade $200 for not having to spend time doing that. That's the sort of thing that's really fun and cool and interesting if someone's a hobbyist and/or student and/or in the larval hacker stage, but at some point in life after spending decades having to make sure their hardware is supported by Linux/FreeBSD/whatever, the bloom can come off that rose pretty hard and it's a blessing to just give someone money to worry about something you don't want (or don't have the time) to spend time doing.

Of course, plenty of people do have plenty of time to read HOWTOs and hardware compatibility lists and so on and still enjoy doing so- more power to them. Especially if $200 (or whatever) is still a meaningful amount of money to them that they need for other things. But I've always felt that a big reason why so many people advocate that approach and present it as a rational choice is because they themselves enjoy doing that and would do it anyway regardless of the time/money tradeoff.

<comment><USER6> I don't think Linux has that much of a hardware compatibility problem these days.

I've built several intel PCs over the last few years without ever researching hardware compatibility and every one Just Worked with a basic Ubuntu install.

Integrated wifi, and even AMD graphics cards are supported out of the box.

<comment><USER7> I've got an AMD laptop with AMD graphics and have to install the Catalyst software to get responsiveness from Ubuntu graphics. If I don't completely uninstall and purge Catalyst before allowing system updates, then reboot using a custom boot command, then shut down and reboot (with the custom command again), and then reinstall Catalyst, I end up with a machine that boots to a black screen and is essentially useless until I wipe the drive and reinstall from scratch. With 15.10 I thought this had changed with a new set of non- Catalyst drivers, but the problem reappeared.

I hadn't expected this, as my previous two Dells with Intel or Nvidia graphics hadn't caused any problems since years ago when wireless issues got sorted out. Linux has made a lot of progress with hardware compatibility, but if you find one of the weird issues it can be damn near intractable and user forums are a maze to sort through.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Speaking of upgrading, I can't recommend this setup enough:

[https://www.stavros.io/posts/provisioning-your-computer- one-...](https://www.stavros.io/posts/provisioning-your-computer-one-command- awesome/)

My laptop was getting bogged down with cruft acquired in my homedir over the years, so I decided to reinstall 16.04 from scratch. It took a few minutes to get Ubuntu on the disk, and a single command to get every setting and configuration file back on the machine, the way it was.

Not only that, but you can synchronize settings and installed programs across computers as well. I love it.

<comment><USER9> Something about `git clean` being capable of deleting your entire home directory just sounds messy. It's a cool project, I think it could use better implementation.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, definitely agreed. You _should_ use a better implementation, this one just suits me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Am I alone in being scared of the tone of this thread?

So many people are saying "yep, installed it and all works ok"

Were you expecting it to NOT work? This is a LTS release, I'd hope the Ubuntu team tested it enough to ensure there isn't major issue.

Not to get off topic but maybe because I've solely run *BSDs for the last few years I take for granted releases "just working".

<comment><USER11> Worse than that: "The only things that aren't working is the webcam and suspend / hibernate, but I don't really care about those and suspend even seems fixable."

SRSLY?

<comment><USER12> I go to great lengths to be able to run Linux, cannot live without a properly functioning tiling window manager. I don't mind that the webcam support is coming in a (couple of) year(s). As the laptop (re)boots in a couple of seconds, I don't mind the shutdown when I go to bed (eco friendly even ;))

<comment><USER13> > I don't mind the shutdown when I go to bed (eco friendly even ;))

What exactly is eco friendly about shutdown versus suspend where it uses < 1W? Besides, the wear and tear of repeated shutdown/powerup cycles might mean it is a _less_ "eco" friendly option in the end.

I don't think the way you run your laptop has appreciable environmental impact. The damage is in manufacturing and disposal. The best way to be eco friendly is to buy laptops that don't need to be replaced as often.

<comment><USER14> > Besides, the wear and tear of repeated shutdown/powerup cycles might mean it > is a less "eco" friendly option in the end.

Assuming grandparent comment is shutting down the computer once or twice a day, it should be fine, I'm pretty sure the hard drive isn't going to fail from that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My (6 year old) macbook pro got bricked and I was daring enough to get the new Macbook Pro retina (MacBookPro11,4).

Before installing Arch (assuming I needed the latest kernel for anything to work) I tried installing Xubuntu 16.04, and it amazes me how well it works! After installing refind everything just seemed to work out of the box.

The only things that aren't working is the webcam and suspend / hibernate, but I don't really care about those and suspend even seems fixable.

For anyone interested, I got the intel graphics drivers installer to run by changing DISTRIB_CODENAME to "wily" in /etc/lsb-release and changing it back to "xenial" after installation (make a backup: sudo cp /etc/lsb-release.backup /etc/lsb-release)

<comment><USER15> I don't know if it's the same webcam in the newest Macbook, but the the reverse engineered driver works perfectly for me on a 2013 model: [https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie/wiki](https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie/wiki)

Just follow the instructions exactly. If it doesn't work first time, try `sudo modprobe -r bdc_pci` and then retry `sudo modprobe facetimehd` and see if it creates `/dev/video0` (which means it's working)

For suspend, is it waking up after you close the lid? I fixed this with:

        sudo -i
        echo XHC1 > /proc/acpi/wakeup

Then give it a test. If it works, pop it into a startup service somewhere.

<comment><USER12> Webcam works now, thanks for that!

I added that script to echo XHC1 to wakeup here: /usr/lib/pm- utils/sleep.d/100macfix without any luck (made it executable)

I also removed light-locker (that was the cause wakeup problems on my old macbook pro (6,1), but no luck with that either.

I will play with it another time and report back here if I make progress.

<comment><USER15> Awesome that the webcam is working!

For suspend: did typing the commands manually work at all? (it should basically work until your next reboot)

I was assuming the issue is that when you close the lid, it sleeps for a few seconds, then wakes again. Is that what happens, or is it something else?

<comment><USER12> Typing the commands manually didn't work either, I also tried disabling LID0 (sudo sh -c 'echo LID0 > /proc/acpi/wakeup')

No luck with that too, I verified the command working with

        cat /proc/acpi/wakeup

It shows

        XHC1	  S3	*disabled   pci:0000:00:14.0

When I close the lid it suspends, when I open it again I just get a black screen (fans still on, no way to get to another tty)

I also tried suspending via the menu / power button: same results

<comment><USER15> After a bit of poking around, this is perhaps a kernel bug that is fixed in 4.4.8

You could try upgrading your kernel if you're feeling adventurous. If that is the issue, it will probably be backported at some point though.

<comment><USER12> Cool, I'll wait it out as it isn't really an issue for me, thanks for helping out though, it's really appreciated!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can we come up with a different archetypal bad/clueless user than "grandma"? My son's grandma manned a crew-served grenade launcher and ran radio intercept equipment in the Army and now owns her own database consulting company. The way it's used brings to mind a crooked, old, white haired woman who spent her life in the kitchen. That's increasingly not _anyone 's_ grandma. Using the name in this way is both sexist _and_ ageist.

<comment><USER17> Can we not say people are generally dumb? Einstein is a person and he was not dumb.

I can do syllogisms all day long.

<comment><USER16> Except you can't be "general people-ist".

It's funny. You'd think that, with our industry's reputation for being both sexist and ageist, we'd work to try to understand how we've _gained_ that perception, rather than just double-downing on it and claiming there is no problem.

Here we go, why don't we just say "clueless user" instead? That would cover all the Millenials who have to google search to find the Facebook login page, too.

<comment><USER18> People are less sympathetic to "clueless user" than grandma or grandpa. That's probably also the reason to prefer grandma, not sexism.

<comment><USER16> -isms don't rest on whether or not negative qualities are being assigned, or if the assigned qualities make the character more sympathetic. -isms are about denying the agency of individuals, by treating everyone as objects that are carbon-copies of their demographic.

You're the first person in this thread to use the word "grandpa" in this context. If it were really "just as good" of a term, it should be random chance whether people use "grandma" or "grandpa". But there are eight instances of the word "grandma" used in context in this thread alone, and the first time anyone even thought to use "grandpa" was in trying to defend their subconscious sexism, rather than try to use it as an opportunity to learn how to reduce narcissism in their life and be more compassionate to others.

We all have narcissistic tendencies. Our contemporary culture promotes it and contributes to its growth. We all have to work hard to fight the trend and remove it.

<comment><USER18> > You're the first person in this thread to use the word "grandpa" in this > context.

That's because it's common to talk about "grandma's house" and similar things with feelings of quaint comfort. The reason to pick that arbitrary sex is not because of an -ism, it's because it's cliche. It's like using 'he' for unknown gender. It's biased, and that bias is bad, but it's not done out of _sexism_. It's not out of preference for people of either gender.

> treating everyone as objects

It's a rhetorical device. You're not _supposed_ to be talking about real people. The stronger the disconnect there the better. That's why "clueless user" is also bad. It makes things a bit too personal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Ubuntu LTS + a few carefully selected apps as upstream APT repositories or PPAs is the best of both worlds; solid predictable base and the latest software where it matters: Chrome & dev tools in my case.

Except for the browser and local dev tools, I don't think I miss or have any use for desktop software. Everything from music (the Spotify web player is excellent, if little known), videos, calendars to email all happen in the browser these days, making it easier than ever to switch to Linux even as desktop usage declines. Increasingly the OS should fade to the background instead of trying to woo with apps or functionality. You don't have to provide an office suite or an email client at all, and I think it would be interesting to see what a distro could do with that kind of sharp focus. I think the core apps of say GNOME, while of generally good quality, probably see fairly limited use in practice.

Personally I look forward to not having to think about the OS until the next LTS in a few years time. It's a great environment for getting stuff done.

<comment><USER20> You must have a rock solid internet coverage in your world. I do use offline stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Installed it on my old laptop, a Dell XPS 15Z, and everything is running fine so far. Only issue I had at install was control panel crashing right after installing the nvidia driver, was solved with logging out and in again.

I don't see that much difference compared to 14.04. Everything just seems to work.

A few packages that make the experience evern better: Guake for a quick access (quake style) console. Kupfer for a fast launcher (I'm not a fan of the unity launcher).

Edit: I'm waiting a while to install it on my main work laptop, a lenovo t450s, since I use it with a dock and when trying 16.04 out on it (live usb), it would sometimes crash when undocking :/

<comment><USER22> I have the same machine (t450s), and I've just upgraded from 15.10. No issues with docking, or even suspend for that matter.

<comment><USER21> Are you also using the ultra dock[1]? I've got 1 DVI and 1 HDMI screen attached.

I tried just when it came out, so could have been fixed in updates ofc.

[1] = [http://shop.lenovo.com/ISS_Static/ww/emea/merchandising/opti...](http://shop.lenovo.com/ISS_Static/ww/emea/merchandising/options/images/large/_460_0_40A20090UK_V1.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I ran into a bug in the installer myself: if you select "download and install updates" then for some reason the dialog that says "We autodetected your timezone as America/New York" cannot ever be closed (and it never unfroze for me)

This is apparently a bug that spans multiple sub-distributions (Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu) and dates back to at least 11.04, it was reported over _five years ago_. Now, _once you know the solution_ it's easy to get around, but it was by no means easy to track down the problem - and who _wouldn 't_ want to install fresher packages? It's kind of amateurish to allow major bugs like that to linger in your installer for multiple years.

I was installing Lubuntu on a Liva X mini-PC with N2808 processor and eMMC memory. I actually still couldn't get it to boot after I finished the install - the UEFI doesn't see the eMMC drive as a valid boot target in the boot menu and it just goes straight to BIOS. Not sure if I don't have GRUB installed to the right place, or if there's some other Ubuntu-specific bug cropping up, or what.

</comment><comment><USER24> I just updated my Ubuntu mail server recipe for Ubuntu 16.04 ([https://www.exratione.com/2016/05/a-mailserver-on- ubuntu-16-...](https://www.exratione.com/2016/05/a-mailserver-on- ubuntu-16-04-postfix-dovecot-mysql/)). It only took a day of work to find all the holes and fall into them.

Everything core Ubuntu and core mailserver worked fairly well. The standard issue Apache/PHP 7 seems to have some odd kinks around the edges, though - <USER2> one point the only thing that worked to make it recognize a newly installed PHP module package was to restart the whole server. I have to wonder if this was something relating to systemd, but I'm not familiar enough yet to tell.

Subsidiary packages had a number of issues, but this is probably just standard PHP ecosystem raggedness at the edges for a new distribution. The Roundcube version installed via package is just outright broken due to bad symlinks, for example.

On the whole I was pleasantly surprised as to how much of a nonissue the transition to systemd was.

<comment><USER25> Hey there - thanks for your guide! I used it as a base for my own guide but tweaked for Slackware64 14.1 ([https://gerardozamudio.mx/2015/04/25/slackware- mail-server-w...](https://gerardozamudio.mx/2015/04/25/slackware-mail-server- with-mysql-postfix-and-dovecot/)). I'm in the process of updating it for the upcoming Slackware 14.2 release. I'd love to get your feedback on it if you ever have some spare time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It worked great for me on my Thinkpad. These days I have to use gekkio's PPA to get xmonad working nicely with Gnome but that was available the first week 16.04 was out and everything installed smoothly.

<comment><USER27> I have been facing networking issues. The network list completely disappears. "sudo systemctl restart network-manager.service" is needed to bring those back. Read somewhere that it has something to do with systemd.

<comment><USER28> This bug has been reported, but the Gnome folks need a Network Manager log to fix the problem. Can you reproduce and send them the log? Here are the bug trackers:

[https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=765831](https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=765831) [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network- manager/+b...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network- manager/+bug/1576314)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Installed 16.04 last Saturday no large issues but then my scope of _customization_ is really small. Nvidia drivers also installed without an issue which is honestly a first (for me on any distro).

<comment><USER30> Although I am mostly a Windows guy nowadays, I started using GNU/Linux distributions back in the day with Slackware 2.0.

Tried dozens of distributions and spent endless hours trying out desktop themes and other desktop customizations.

Nowadays I just use whatever defaults are there. Probably the only customizations I do are related to power management and what should happen when closing the laptop lid.

<comment><USER29> >Nowadays I just use whatever defaults are there. Probably the only customizations I do are related to power management and what should happen when closing the laptop lid.

Same boat. After ~15 years of nearly daily fighting with computers to do the right thing. Fighting with them to look pretty WHILE doing the right thing just seemed like wasted effort.

Also modern slackware is pretty nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What's kind of annoying is that Ubuntu has moved most of the system from upstart to systemd, but user sessions are still managed by upstart. If I want to customize my user sessions, I need to learn how to use a system that's being phased out and is incompatible with the rest of the world.

<comment><USER31> Come try Arch, you might like it here :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> My upgrade to 16.04 (Xubuntu) hit a rather unsuspected bump. During the upgrade process my computer froze (the lone mechanical HD was at fault). Only thing to do was cut the power/reset. Alas the upgrade was stuck in a limbo state and I had to manually remove some stuff with dpkg but eventually everything upgraded smoothly.

Interestingly I hadn't noticed that resolv.conf isn't a thing anymore and the resolvconf package is used now...yikes how long didn't I configure a network interface via the command line to not notice that :D

Runs very smoothly on my systems and my parents' systems.

</comment><comment><USER33> In 16.04 they broke importing a saved VPN configuration. Again. Previous time they broke it with a previous LTS release, 14.04 (sic!) [1]

Another failure of such magnitude that affected me - breaking the switching between keyboard layouts with Ctrl+Shift (to introduce a new dialog in place of the one that worked for years) was in 13.10 - not the LTS release, at least.

I wonder if they will fix the VPN by 16.04.1, due in July.

Sometimes I wish they were not so strict about time-based releases, if only to allow for the bugs like this one to be fixed.

[1] [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager- op...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager- openvpn/+bug/1294899)

<comment><USER34> What did you mean about their strictness? Does Ubuntu not push out fixes for critical problems like this except at certain times?

<comment><USER33> I mean they rather strictly hold on to the release schedule [1]: _ready or not_ , you can count on .04 version to come by the end of April, rather than in May. I'd prefer that they didn't release with such glaring bugs as I mentioned, even if a bit late.

[1] Xenial Xerus Release Schedule [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/ReleaseSchedule](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/ReleaseSchedule)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> So, in the last few weeks I updated an old Kubuntu 14.04 desktop installation (which has seen little or no use in the last few years) up to 16.04. Now kwin dies as soon as I login and I open any window. The underlying reason is probably some badly updated package or config file. Still, attaching the debugger I can see kwin segfaulting inside the Qt Javascript interpreter. I have no idea why a window manager would need to run a javascript interpreter nor why it would be a good idea.

Bottom line, tonight I'm installing Debian testing and switching to Xfce (which I have been using for years on my latptop).

</comment><comment><USER36> I did a double take at one sentence in the article: "In order to retain some file browser functionality, Nautilus remains at version 3.14." That sounds like the current version of Nautilus has no file browser functionality--which struck me as ironic, because a while back I tried everything I found suggested to stop Nautilus from changing my wallpaper (um, Unix philosophy?) to no avail, and ended up reconfiguring Cinnamon so it would always run Nemo and never run Nautilus.

I hope what was meant was that 3.14 had some particular features related to file browsing that later versions dropped.

</comment><comment><USER37> Question for those who have an install of 16.04 - if you type `hostname -f`, do you get the "command not found" error? I didn't have time to dig into it, but the man pages indicated that `-f` was still a valid option, but it appears that `hostname` was shifted to quasi-function.

I came upon this while trying to bring up my vagrant development box against 16.04, part of which was to set the hostname via `server.vm.hostname`.

<comment><USER21> You mean in a console? Works fine here.

<comment><USER37>
        $ vu development-16
        Bringing machine 'development-16' up with 'virtualbox' provider...
        ==> development-16: Importing base box 'ubuntu/xenial64'...
        ==> development-16: Matching MAC address for NAT networking...
        ==> development-16: Checking if box 'ubuntu/xenial64' is up to date...
        ==> development-16: Setting the name of the VM: ubuntu-xenial-16.04-cloudimg
        [...]
        ==> development-16: Machine booted and ready!
        ==> development-16: Checking for guest additions in VM...
        ==> development-16: Setting hostname...
        The following SSH command responded with a non-zero exit status.
        Vagrant assumes that this means the command failed!

        hostname -f

        Stdout from the command:

        Stderr from the command:

        sudo: unable to resolve host ubuntu-xenial
        mesg: ttyname failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
        hostname: Name or service not known

        $ vssh development-16
        Welcome to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.4.0-22-generic x86_64)

         * Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com/

          Get cloud support with Ubuntu Advantage Cloud Guest:
            http://www.ubuntu.com/business/services/cloud

        0 packages can be updated.
        0 updates are security updates.

        ubuntu@ubuntu-xenial:~$ hostname
        ubuntu-xenial
        ubuntu@ubuntu-xenial:~$ hostname -f
        hostname: Name or service not known
        ubuntu@ubuntu-xenial:~$ which hostname
        /bin/hostname
        ubuntu@ubuntu-xenial:~$ \hostname -f
        hostname: Name or service not known
        ubuntu@ubuntu-xenial:~$ cat /etc/lsb-release
        DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
        DISTRIB_RELEASE=16.04
        DISTRIB_CODENAME=xenial
        DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 16.04 LTS"

Fun times.

<comment><USER21> Seems very odd, here it works

      clemme@ubuntu:~ $ hostname -f
      ubuntu

      clemme@ubuntu:~ $ cat /etc/lsb-release
      DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
      DISTRIB_RELEASE=16.04
      DISTRIB_CODENAME=xenial
      DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 16.04 LTS"

<comment><USER37> Yeah, does seem odd. Looks like I'll need to ping Vagrant, since `ubuntu/xenial64` is their managed box.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Based on feedback here and on reddit, I plan to jump on with the next minor release. Maybe Mate will fix the issues found in using the Citrix receiver on Unity.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/4h58mj/ubuntu_1604_i...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/4h58mj/ubuntu_1604_is_just_so_unstable/)

</comment><comment><USER39> I installed it from scratch on my laptop, had trouble installing chrome and virtualbox. Two straightforward installs required me to fix using the command- line, that was a deal breaker for me. Not the smooth start I was hoping for, I don't have the time to manually fix everything. Back to 14.04

<comment><USER40> It seems that the new gnome store thingie, does not pull dependencies when you try to install deb file directly, not sure why (at least it does that in ubuntu gnome 16.04). A command line install will indeed work just fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I've been running 16.04 with cairo-dock, which has been my favorite non i3/awesome setup in a while.

<comment><USER42> The only thing stopping me from using it is the window shadows. I wish there was an easy way to turn it off.

<comment><USER43> The shadows are quite subtle. How does it annoy you?

You can disable through 'compizsettings'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> When I installed 12.04 LTS, I was shocked at how radically different it was than 11.10, and that it was going to be an LTS release. This introduced Unity as the default, among other changes, and I was concerned that they were being too aggressive.

It's odd to be applauding them for this attitude, frankly.

<comment><USER20> I loved 10.10. That would have been a perfect LTS distro.

<comment><USER45> Yup. My all time favourite Ubuntu releases were 6.06 (Dapper Drake) and 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat); 14.04 has also been rock solid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I remember fglrx being essential for gaming, even if it was awful. Are the open-source drivers better now, such that dropping fglrx support won't be a big problem?

<comment><USER43> For most games, amdgpu is ok. If your game requires fglrx, then stick to 14.04 or 15.10.

fglrx does not work on 16.04 and all resources from AMD now go to amdgpu so it gets fully useful by the end of 2016.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> The Dell XPS 2016 doesn't work properly, there is a graphic bug where your screen keeps flickering. It seems fixed using the 4.6 DRM kernel.

</comment><comment><USER48> Anyone tried ZFS from 16.04 yet? How did that go?

</comment><comment><USER49> Why is never anyone talking about using Ubuntu with Gnome 3? Mate is outdated by design, LXDE a Win95 clone and don't even let us get started with unity.

The only 2 modern and productivity focused WMs (except from everything tiled) are KDE and Gnome 3.

<comment><USER50> You say modern and productivity focused, I say bloated and opinionated. Gnome and KDE seem to want to show off, while Mate/LXDE wants to get out of my way and let me work.

Gnome brings nothing new or interesting to the UI table. An "activities" system that doesn't match the way actual people use their computers, a mobile- first design that I swear was cribbed from Microsoft, just with a rough file taken to the window corners. (This looks more and more out of place when you see something like, say, the Boxes app. Why does my virtualization tool look like a tablet toy?), and oh yeah, developers who will break your shit and then tell you its for your own good when you go to complain, if they respond at all.

(Me? Bitter?)

KDE at least doesn't suffer from those problems, but I find the UI to be gaudy (think WinXP Luna), and unless you like bright themes, unusable.

<comment><USER49> Personally i love to use Gnome because it gets out of my way so perfectly. Its like it is only there when i just need it, and this works flawlessly with 2 screens (where most WMs including Metro have annoying issues)

It really comes down to personal preference, i am aware of that. But using a UX style that was invented more than 20 years ago seems a bit strange to me as well. (Cinnamon, Mate, LXDE, XFCE, ...)

I agree that it is a bit bloated. Before i had my current machine i used fluxbox with FBpanel, because Gnome, KDE and unity would lag like mad.

<comment><USER51> It's because the "old styles" worked well and were easily discoverable, tested over decades instead of at random whim.

The new fischer-price look and feel desktops however target grandma and tablets, and are not what I need in a workstation at all. Mate is almost as good as the XP/Classic theme was, it's all been downhill from there, where every good new feature comes with debilitating regressions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> what's the Linux's bleeding edge ??

<comment><USER45> Fedora Rawhide, Debian Sid, Arch, Ubuntu Development Version, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Of these Tumbleweed waits a while before upgrading from upstream so it's not literally the bleeding edge. So is Ubuntu Development version.

And only Arch and Tumbleweed are recommended to be used by plain users (as opposed to developers and beta testers).

<comment><USER53> Debian testing used to be recommended.

<comment><USER45> Yes, but Testing isn't a full rolling release AFAIK. It undergoes a lengthy freeze before a new Stable is released and I believe manual intervention is needed to continue staying on Testing. Plus security patches take a bit of time to land on Testing from Sid, so the Debian guys don't recommend Testing if you need the fastest access to security updates.

<comment><USER53> _> Yes, but Testing isn't a full rolling release AFAIK. It undergoes a lengthy freeze before a new Stable is released_

Not more than unstable really. The only difference, testing is more polished overall. Other than that, they are both semi-rolling. Debian tried to reduce freeze period for a while already, and the last one was shorter than one before that.

 _> and I believe manual intervention is needed to continue staying on Testing._

What kind? Normally it should just roll forward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> When I clicked yes to upgrading Kubuntu to 16.04, it broke hard, into a state which would be 100% unrecoverable for grandma (and quite likely the support guy she would have shipped it too as well).

<comment><USER55> There should be an Ubuntu-distribution called Gubuntu, (Ubuntu for grandmas).

No, seriously, there's a serious market for this -- Ubuntu's UI is crap (with the little triangles indicating which windows are open? Give me a break, I'm mid-20s and I have trouble seeing that). We cannot have that for our grandmas, gnome would probably be better.

Also, grandmas don't need a lot of bells and whistles... only the absolute bare essentials. Like wordprocessing and and internet browser... the minimalism nature would make support easier for you.

Lastly, I guess consider Windows 7. Windows 7 was probably the high point in terms of "oh, it's obvious how I do this..." for grandmas (I think the flat theming in Win10 took that away).

<comment><USER45> Since a few years I've settled upon Xubuntu, because I like the Ubuntu base and the XFCE desktop environment. Personally, I think it hits close to the happy middle ground between lean and minimalistic on the one hand and flashy with everything including the kitchen sink on the other hand. I think MATE (UbuntuMATE) is also virtually equivalent to XFCE (Xubuntu).

Something like Xubuntu, UbuntuMATE, Linux Mint or elementaryOS might fit the bill for grandmas (and for me, as I want something that just works, is relatively simple and resource efficient and based on the traditional desktop paradigm).

<comment><USER56> Not only for grandmas. XFCE with Compton is perfect for any user.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Linode Manager Connectivity Issues - <AUTHOR> http://status.linode.com/2013/08/linode-manager-connectivity-issues.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The status report mentions a DoS attach is specific to Sunday (yesterday as of this writing), but the manager is still not resolving for us. [https://twitter.com/StatusLinode](https://twitter.com/StatusLinode) doesn't appear to mention anything more recent than yesterday either.

</comment><comment><USER2> I've also been trying to connect a few times tonight. No luck over the last 3-4 hours.

I have a migration scheduled in a couple of days and this is getting scary. The 7th is the last day for migrations and these attacks are making it much harder for my to do any maintenance and last checks before that happens.</comment>


Show HN: Shido is personal assistant bot in Slack that gets small shit done - <AUTHOR> http://www.shidobot.com

<comment><USER2> Thanks Ash for posting! For some more insight: [http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/06/30/shido-bot-for- slack...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/06/30/shido-bot-for-slack-lets- you-outsource-tasks-to-freelancers-from-within-your-channel/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Also: www.producthunt.com/tech/shido and: [http://www.producthunt.com/tech/speedlancer](http://www.producthunt.com/tech/speedlancer)

</comment><comment><USER3> How are the quality of the writers?

</comment><comment><USER4> I use speedlancer like mad. Love this thing, whoever made it is a genius.

</comment><comment><USER5> Good stuff!

<comment><USER5> Been waiting for Speedlancer to come out with the slack integration and now it's here!

<comment><USER2> :) what types of tasks interest you the most?

Most common: blog posts, proofreading, social media graphics, banner ads, and lead gen

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Love this thing. Whoever made it is a genuis</comment>


Ask HN: Tool/service for monitoring websites for search terms - <AUTHOR> Do you know any tools/services that monitor websites and send an alert when specific search terms are found? <comment><USER2> No, but I do know some reasons why you don't see them.

Conventional search engines return a score from 0..1 which is not closely related to the probability that a document is relevant. Often a score of 1.0 gives at best an 0.7 chance of being relevant, and it rapidly gets worse from there.

Thus if you sort documents by time and then cut off at some particular score you never find a place where the recall is satisfactory and the relevance is not embarrassing. In the mainstream of IR research, this problem is thought of this way:

[http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00235ED1V01Y2...](http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00235ED1V01Y201004ICR015)

Now in principle you could do better if you created a model of relevant documents and a model of irrelevant documents, but you would have to train on a lot of documents, and good results could be tough because irrelevant documents could be a million times or more common than relevant documents, particularly on the WWW where even "relevant" documents are often trash documents. (ex. spam, accidental or deliberate duplicates, have pop-ups, etc.)

Anyway, I would be glad to talk more about it, click on my HN user link and send me an email.

</comment><comment><USER3> Try Google Alerts. I think that's still a thing.</comment>


PoE for Raspberry Pi for under $2 - <AUTHOR> http://albert-david.blogspot.com/2019/09/poor-mans-poe-for-raspberry-pi-3-under-2.html <comment><USER3> Using a 1N4148 diode for reverse polarity protection might be a bit under- specced: the Pi-3 + peripherals can draw something near 800mA under heavy load and the 1N4148 is rated at 300mA max continuous current, 500mA max repetitive peak. Something like a 1N5817/1N5819 schottky diode would be better - <USER2> maybe a 3A 1N5822 if there's any power-hungry USB peripherals. That buck converter claims to be good up to 3A.

Ref: [https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/43285/raspbe...](https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/43285/raspberry- pi-3-vs-pi-2-power-consumption-and-heat-dissipation)

<comment><USER4> True, and a clear sigh that it was chosen by misinterpreting the data sheet [1].

The way the author trims the output voltage is also wrong: these small modules come by default with the trimmer feature enabled, that is, if you need a voltage different from those written near the pads just leave the pads alone and use the trimmer. But if you need one of the fixed voltages available, then before soldering the corresponding pads, the re's a thin track that needs to be cut in order to disable the trimmer so that a vibration or touching it by mistake won't affect the output (small trimmers like that one are the weakest point in every cheapo module). The thin track is just left of the "ADJ" pad; if you look closely it closes the trimmer pad to make the board adjustable by default so it has to be cut to use fixed voltages.

Also, the chip used in the regulator module is a MP2315 whose safe input voltage can be between 4.5 and 24V, which is ok for a 12V input like in the photos, just to add some data since it wasn't specified.

[1] Never, ever, ever, ever base any project on the absolute maximum ratings of any part. Especially when they're completely misleading as in this case: the 2A which the 1n4148 should sustain (it can't) are related to a peak surge of 1 microsecond, and not even close to the continuous current which is a fraction of what a Raspberry PI can draw.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Has anyone found proper PoE injector/extractors modules that do negotiation (not passive) at a decent price?

<comment><USER6> The "DSLRKIT" splitters that are around on Amazon are reasonable in my experience, although the nominal output voltage varies by upto 10% between units.

The 802.3at-specced ones are a little more efficient than the af for the same power draw, I'm using them at home in a couple of applications where I'm feeding 802.3af but the power budget is cut a little close.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would put a suitable USB plug on it rather than wiring to the GPIO pins as I am certain in a rush I would plug it in wrongly damaging the Pi!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats the reason why diode is used for protecting the non-PoE switch's Port when raspi is accidentally powered through micro-usb port(or usb-c for pi-4)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> be careful POE can be anything up to 48 volts. Unless you control the input voltage. I suggest using a DC-DC converter with a larger input voltage.

<comment><USER9> It is passive POE, you _need_ to supply your own input as it won't work with a POE switch or anything like that.

<comment><USER10> There are some switches that supply passive PoE, such as many of Ubiquiti's products.

<comment><USER9> Sure, but you have to explicitly enable it. When would you not have control over the input?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


An Infinite Loop in the Brain - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,591972,00.html <comment><USER2> Wow. If there were ever a person my opposite with regard to memory, it would be this woman. I can't recall what I had for dinner the day before yesterday (just ate left over pizza from last night so I'm not sure if that's cheating) and over the entirety of the rest of my life I probably only have about 20 memories I can recall with any accuracy, all of which are incredibly vague and almost entirely without a sense of time other than placing them "when I was younger" or "within the past 5 years."

If something happened in the past few years I can usually answer "yes" to the question, "Do you remember that time when...?" Although I'd be hard pressed to provide any details outside of those given to me and even providing the year it happened can get sketchy. Oh, and I'm left-handed, so either there's no correlation there or I'm an anomaly. I'm with her, though, it's a blessing and a curse either way.

Interestingly, I've also found the mirrored effect with regard to emotion; even if I can recall a traumatic event that happened I never actually feel the emotions associated with it. I just sort of recall the memory as if I were an indifferent bystander watching it unfold.

At least I can remember the important stuff, like programming languages ;)

<comment><USER3> I've got a hint of your problem, particularly when it comes to remembering the dates of events. I remember people pretty well, and I remember things that happened, but I have a real trouble with timing and sequence, even for things that only happened six months ago. The advent of email archives and iCal has been quite useful!

 _even if I can recall a traumatic event that happened I never actually feel the emotions associated with it._

As the article suggests, this is an understandable correlation. Emotionally- colored events are easier to remember. If you don't tend to have emotional color to your memories, that might make them less likely to stick around.

Honestly, I'm kind of happy to be leaning toward the forgetful side. Losing your memory can occasionally be traumatic, but compared to being constantly tortured by memories that won't go away...

<comment><USER2> Yeah, it sucks not being able to remember much from my childhood, but it's quite convenient to essentially be reborn every few years. The timing thing can become an issue...

Mom: "Well hello, stranger!" Me: "Come on, I just called you guys last week!" Mom: "That was 3 months ago, sweetie."

 _DAMN!_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [new member]

I read a wonderful article about Price in National Geographic sometime last year. The most important feature of the NT article, which is overlooked here, is why Price's 'personal' memory is faultless while her memory, in general, is average.

One psychologist suggested it was because Price had an intimate and unrelentingly interest in herself, as her extensive diaries suggest. So, if you enthusiastically submerge yourself in an area of study memories come.

I think there's an important lesson here: above all else love what you do.

<comment><USER3> Of course, if I were compelled to remember every single event of my life in perfect detail I'd probably get really interested in myself, too. My own past would be everywhere. I'd never really be able to escape it. It would probably be hard to focus on much else.

So, as the title suggests, there's a feedback loop here.

I really feel for this woman -- this is a terrible condition. Perhaps the fact that she isn't completely crippled by PTSD is a tribute to her skill at self- analysis. It may be that she has had to become a conscious expert on herself just to be able to talk herself through the fear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For the life of me, I can't remember people.

Fuck.

</comment><comment><USER6> ObBorges:

"Funes, The Memorious"

<http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/borges.htm></comment>


Nvidia Project Denver: ARM Powered Servers  - <AUTHOR> http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2011/01/16/NVIDIAProjectDenverARMPoweredServers.aspx

<comment><USER2> I predict that this is primarily going into a Cell like architecture -- (relatively) pissweak main MPU surrounded by a bucketload of kickass specialized processors (in Toshiba/Sony's case, beefy vector units, in Denver, super high end nVidia GPU cores) on a v. fast memory bus. The presence of Windows for ARM is interesting, too -- I wonder if we're looking at the beginnings of XOBX 720 here.

<comment><USER3> Doubtful. Specialized graphics processor combined with a weak CPU makes sense in a console where graphics generation and display is core task.

In a server context, GPUs don't make sense. They won't make your web server or a database or Ruby any faster. In fact, in a server a GPU could be stripped off completely to save cost and power without impacting the performance.

Programming a GPU or other specialized processors requires custom code. You can't just recompile your database written in C or Java to magically take advantage of them. And since people can't afford to rewrite the whole software stack to take advantage of such capabilities just to serve web pages, it's not going to happen.

As the article says, the main reasons those chips might get traction is low power (and possibly low cost) since the cost of power is very important at scale and ARM is better at power management than Intel.

<comment><USER4> That's a key issue; strong GPU + weak CPU is great for just about every market _other than_ general-purpose servers. So is it worth it for Nvidia to build a separate ARM-only chip just for the general-purpose server market? (especially considering that Marvell and Calxeda are already targeting that market)

<comment><USER2> I don't think Denver is going to end up in many general purpose servers regardless of what the press release might say.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What happened to SeaMicro? <http://www.seamicro.com/> I remember there was a boom with their PR and then silence.

<comment><USER4> One might speculate that they're working on an Armada XP-powered version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if "managed" cloud hosting services like Heroku (Ruby), Azure/AppHarbor (.NET) and AppEngine (Python/Java) could deploy ARM-based data centers to save power, since their platforms are basically processor-agnostic.

<comment><USER7> Even processor agnostic programs will run poorly on a GPU. GPUs are about doing very basic tasks very quickly. CPUs can do more but are slower. Most computer programs take advantage of the extra features in a GPU and would not be able to run on a GPU.

<comment><USER6> What do you mean? ARM is not a GPU.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If this doesn't work out at least some Atom servers would be nice as well.

It would be great for datacenters that need to save cost on energy and are IO bound, like those saving email/messaging with an already underused cpu anyway. I wonder what the maximum memory would be for these new servers.

</comment><comment><USER9> Even if MSFT ever sell an ARM port of Windows Server and if you are running big server tasks (Oracle, SQLServer, IIS)etc then you will still need Intel for the horsepower.

If the servers are just low power, high efficiency file servers then every NAS already uses an ARM core to run Samba

<comment><USER10> Assuming the ARM servers can beat Intel in "work per joule", which I think they will, then they can win in what is now the VPS space.

I use virtual private servers from three different vendors for a number of projects, and they make a lot of sense from the cost standpoint, but they have a huge drawback that you are sharing resources with others and their workloads impact your abilities (plus any one of them could be a vector to introduce a hypervisor exploit and compromise the system). I'd much rather have a small computer to myself.

Imagine a 1U system[1] with 32 independent 1GHz ARM servers[2]. That hits about the same power use as a modern intel machine, has an amazing memory bandwidth by comparison, and if you rent them out for ~$8/month each (smallest slices available now) it is a money farm.

Systems like this will also work for problems that scale laterally. Pushing that a bit, imagine if a CDN vendor started putting racks of these at their strategic locations, you could improve your application's response time by hosting nearby, handling locally what you can, and bundling the heavy lifting back to your big servers in an efficient way.

[1] Or 2U if space isn't at a premium. They are easier to cool. [2] Disks go elsewhere, say across a 1gbps ethernet switch to a SAN. Build in the switches and you don't need the magnetics for the ethernet, there are clever capacitive solutions.

<comment><USER11> Actually the issue is maximum amount of RAM, not CPU power. 2x 12-core Opterons gives you 24 2Ghz cores out of the box, with up to 128 or 256GB of RAM.

<comment><USER12> ayup. I've looked into renting out small ARM servers rather than VPSs, and the biggest thing stopping me is that the ram is not socketed, and all the boards I can get are made for client boxes (e.g. not enough ram, and too much video hardware driving up the cost.) I mean, in the hosting industry, we expect to pay off our hardware in something like four months, and unless you are a lot better at marketing than I am, it's difficult to charge a whole lot more than $20 per gigabyte of ram per month, so the total cost for the unit (including cpu and disk) has to be around $80 for every gigabyte of ram or so. right now, the panda board looks like the best choice, and even before disk you are looking at almost $200 for something with a power supply, etc..

Also, nobody makes a reasonable power backplane (so I can power 10 or what have you of these little pandaboards off one power supply.)

If these things took DIMMs or the like, the ram problem would be solved. (Really, I'd want ecc, which isn't usually available in SODIMMs, but I bet there are enough people who don't care to sell such a service even without ECC.)

But for now, virtualizing larger servers is a better idea. If you are that concerned about others stepping on you, it's possible to dedicate a disk to a particular virtual server alone; that would solve the biggest resource contention problems that come with virtualization.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Urban sql injection - <AUTHOR> http://seanbonner.tumblr.com/post/3200064101/jacobjoaquin-r03-urban-sql-injection <comment><USER2> Zwolnij just means "slow" in Polish.

The second frame is telling a particular (valid) polish license plate number to slow down.

<comment><USER3> I think the photos are meant to imply that the system is reading external input as text and so might be vulnerable to an injection attack like what the bottom picture shows. I don't think it was intended to suggest that the system has actually been hacked in that photo.

Of course, the whole thing is meant as a silly joke (and that's one of the reasons I wish it wasn't posted here). It's unlikely that the camera would recognize something that's so obviously different from a license plate, let alone use a SQL database.

I'd love to see a real discussion on how the ubiquity of computers creates interesting vectors for attacking infrastructure. It seems inevitable that these systems will be connected to higher-value targets and that non- traditional input devices can still be used for launching attacks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pretty funny but I would have to agree these systems are likely meant as a self contained warning appliance and are not powered by a database.

The more interesting question is whether YOU would've thought to sanitize license plate input?

</comment><comment><USER5> [2009] - Early post on the subject: <http://niebezpiecznik.pl/post/fotoradar- injection/> [Polish]

Edit: Author's original post: <http://dabroz.scythe.pl/2009/10/29/ocr- injection> [English]

<comment><USER6> Google page translate seemed to have failed so here is the manual version of the page:

As reported by the driver, the 1994 national road safety camera mounted was interesting: [http://niebezpiecznik.pl/wp- content/uploads/2009/10/radar-40...](http://niebezpiecznik.pl/wp- content/uploads/2009/10/radar-403x350.jpg)

The camera scans car number plates in excess of the speed, and a few dozen meters away, a special table shows the following message: [http://niebezpiecznik.pl/wp- content/uploads/2009/10/radar2-4...](http://niebezpiecznik.pl/wp- content/uploads/2009/10/radar2-450x265.jpg)

I wonder what happens when the national road 94 driven into the car [http://niebezpiecznik.pl/wp- content/uploads/2009/10/radar3-4...](http://niebezpiecznik.pl/wp- content/uploads/2009/10/radar3-418x350.jpg)

P.S. The whole reminds me of an old strip xkcd: [http://niebezpiecznik.pl/wp- content/uploads/2009/10/xkcd-450...](http://niebezpiecznik.pl/wp- content/uploads/2009/10/xkcd-450x147.gif)

<comment><USER7> More Englishy translation of that page:

Drivers report that an interesting radar camera has been installed on Rt. 94.

The camera scans license plates of cars that exceed the speed limit, and a few hundred feet further there's a special display that shows this:

[DW 530GS SLOW DOWN]

I wonder what will happen when a car like this drives down Rt. 94?

The whole thing reminds me of this old XKCD strip

<comment><USER6> Oh fine +1 for you making it more "Englishy" =P

Yeh its like Rt. 94 [http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...](http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=94&aq=&sll=52.288323,20.390625&sspn=2.150551,6.591797&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=94,+Poland&ll=50.691238,17.85965&spn=0.069598,0.205994&z=12)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While it's funny and mind-opening, the OCR system will probably miss the small punctuation marks such as ' , and ;

</comment><comment><USER9> Bobby Tables [1] gets a car.

[1] <http://xkcd.com/327/>

</comment><comment><USER10> Click through to the larger image. Its much clearer <http://i.imgur.com/haspR.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER11> Could there be anything illegal here? They took a picture of you...

</comment><comment><USER12> But, did it work?

<comment><USER6> Thats what I dont get. On the car it looks like the driver is writing some other sort of License, ZU O666 but the sign is telling DW 530GS to slow down. Not enough images of the car to prove if it did, or did not tell the driver exactly to slow down. But for the sake of making this awesome, lets say it did work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This sucks</comment>


You Can't Be What You Can't See: How to Get More Women in Tech - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailymuse.com/tech/you-cant-be-what-you-cant-see-how-to-get-more-women-in-tech/

<comment><USER2> "Even people who don't know what a computer scientist actually does would recognize the quintessential stereotype of one: a pale, sweaty Star Wars fan hacking into the Pentagon from his gadget-filled basement.

Indeed, "hacker" culture is frequently described as overrun with techie boys who care only about computers—not a place for extroverted girls with passions ranging from healthcare to education to business to fashion."

WHAT THE FUCK? I don't know a SINGLE pale, sweaty, overweight programmer (ok fine this 50 year old I know has a bit of extra weight on him). And 80% of programmers I met are HIGHLY social. And 80% of programmers I know are engaged in tons of sports and physical activities, and enjoy them quite a bit, much more than most people go to the gym. In fact most people fitting those categories are in the bad programmer category. Smart people care not just for their minds, but their body and happiness. The description above is a world of warcraft player.

If I was to describe a programmer stereotype it would be:

"Usually a physically fit person, who frequently cares more about self- improvement and enjoys an intellectually stimulating discussion regardless of topic."

<comment><USER3> That's from your perspective inside the industry, to be fair.

However, it does annoy me when articles make broad, sweeping cultural generalizations without any support.

<comment><USER2> Well said good sir. I want a developer writing this stuff. The "Lighten Up" is a post I can respect, as it points out a REAL problem, not a media hyped one that we read about every other day.

The writer of this article seems to be a developer or at least is trying to present herself as one.

"Media depictions of computer scientists only serve to further alienate women from the profession. When I watched Revenge of the Nerds as a child, it was hard to relate to a nearly all-male cast.

Turns out, I'm not alone."

Also I worked in laid back, and corporate environments, and my observation stands for every place I worked at. The more laid back the more fit and lively and sociable the people are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Marissa Mayer is hardly the best role model out there for computer scientists, in the classical sense of the word "scientist". There's a very clear distinction between programmer, hacker, and scientist which the author may not be aware of (or has completely forgot to mention).

IMO, role models for female computer scientists would be Grace Hopper [1], in whose name there is now a scholarship for graduate students, or someone like Barbara Liskov [2], who won the Turing award recently. Though perhaps less popular than Marissa Mayer, I feel these are the role models that should be better known among young women about to choose a career path.

/pedantry

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_hopper> [2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Liskov>

</comment><comment><USER5> It can't be just about making women more visible. The girl scouts did a study and the most common reason high school girls didn't want to study STEM fields was because they'd have to work harder than men to be taken seriously. Seeing other women can help, but even more helpful would be seeing men take those women seriously and publicize their work day-to-day, instead of just when trying to encourage girls to consider their field.

Right now, young girls may be accurate in assuming that entering the field will suck more for them than their male friends. It's not like there aren't plenty of alternatives: digital archiving and computational biology, for example, are non-male-dominated programs coding-inclined women can pursue instead.

If we want rational people to join our field, it has to be the best choice out there.

</comment><comment><USER6> Has there been any study showing that fields that went from being dominated by one sex to having a more balanced ratio benefited in any significant way. No seriously...

For instance, has there been an explosion of new ideas and research in the legal or medical fields since women started being more prominent in those fields that could have only come from women? The underlying belief in these types articles seems to be that women have a lot to offer the tech industry _just by virtue of them being women_.

<comment><USER7> While not at an industry level, which I agree would be interesting analysis. There is some research indicating at the group level, in general, women do have a beneficial influence: [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100930143339.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100930143339.htm)

But I think there are two aspects of including more women, or any other underrepresented group, in tech. One is what you mentioned in regard to pushing the state of the art, but the other is providing service to different sectors of the population.

If the primary thing you need as an entrepreneur is to understand the needs and wants of your audience, there's only so far I can go before it's at best a purely intellectual understanding. Same thing with small startups, if they are growing out of scratching my own itch, the lack of women means needs specific to them are much less likely to be addressed.</comment></comment>


AT&T stealing/misrouting 126.96.36.199/29 for some of their residential customers - <AUTHOR> https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r31901379-AT-T-gateway-5268ac-maybe-others-misrouting-1-1-1-0-24 <comment><USER3> Sigh, those AT&T gateways are such a dumpster fire. What's sad is that it's not likely that there will be an easy way to fix this as those gateways do not have any kind of bridge mode which is a crime in and of itself. The best they've got is DMZ+ mode which fakes giving the LAN device the public IP address but it's still doing NAT behind the scenes and routing everything as normal so it doesn't work for any IP protocol other than TCP, UDP, and ICMP so no IPSEC tunnels or GRE with those modems.

<comment><USER4> The biggest crime is that AT&T uses these on their FTTH to turn ethernet from the GPON transceiver into ethernet for the home. Thankfully, in that application, you can bypass it, but it's still a tragedy. My equipment is perfectly capable of handling Ethernet, thanks (it's also perfectly capable of bridging 802.1x packets to the gateway, and keeping all the rest of the packets :)

<comment><USER5> Do you have a write-up of this anywhere? When I installed AT&T fiber I looked into this briefly, but I didn't find any success stories other than manual VLAN reassignment.

<comment><USER6> [https://bzsparks.com/2016/10/05/using-an-ubiquiti- edgerouter...](https://bzsparks.com/2016/10/05/using-an-ubiquiti-edgerouter- with-att-gigapower-fiber/) here's an example for a ubiquiti edgerouter to not have to do the vlan garbage. I'm going to try getting it to work on pfsense later this week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think Icomera's bus WiFi systems also use 184.108.40.206 somewhere in the hotspot process.

TBH, I'm not surprised, and this definitely isn't the first time something like this has happened. For example, Hamachi (before being bought by LogMeIn) squatted on 188.8.131.52/8, and then (when 22.214.171.124/8 got allocated) on 184.108.40.206/8 (which was already allocated to the British MoD).

This is really nothing new, and now that I think of it, not really surprising!

<comment><USER8> It's probably running Cisco WLC. [https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/88qt5k/announci...](https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/88qt5k/announcing_1111_the_fastest_privacyfirst_consumer/dwmlcst/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Semi-related: once some hardware arrives, I should be able to finish finding a way to rip the 802.1x certs off of the 5286AC so we can use our own routers, or at least put these things into a proper bridged mode.

[https://spun.io/2018/03/18/getting-into-the-pace-5268ac- rout...](https://spun.io/2018/03/18/getting-into-the-pace-5268ac-router- part-1/)

<comment><USER10> Please fully disclose your work! I was looking into this earlier and found the other post you mentioned. Unfortunately, they stopped following up with RE details on the 5286AC after they got a bunch of CVEs assigned. Was really disappointing.

Either way, thank you! Would you be willing to send me the URL for the firmware? I don't have time to desolder anything at the moment but would love to look at the image.

<comment><USER9> Update: private keys acquired. Need to figure out the password for these now. [https://twitter.com/DominoTree/status/984272671549677568](https://twitter.com/DominoTree/status/984272671549677568)

Here are links to current firmware images:

[http://gateway.c01.sbcglobal.net/firmware/00D09E/10.6.0.5300...](http://gateway.c01.sbcglobal.net/firmware/00D09E/10.6.0.530094-PROD/5268.install.pkgstream) [http://gateway.c01.sbcglobal.net/firmware/00D09E/10.6.0.5300...](http://gateway.c01.sbcglobal.net/firmware/00D09E/10.6.0.530094-PROD/att_config.pkgstream) [http://gateway.c01.sbcglobal.net/firmware/00D09E/10.6.0.5300...](http://gateway.c01.sbcglobal.net/firmware/00D09E/10.6.0.530094-PROD/att_eapol- certs.pkgstream) [http://gateway.c01.sbcglobal.net/firmware/00D09E/10.6.0.5300...](http://gateway.c01.sbcglobal.net/firmware/00D09E/10.6.0.530094-PROD/att_cms- certs.pkgstream)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yep, I noticed this yesterday and mentioned it [0] when trying out Cloudflare's new public DNS service.

A Cloudflare employee (marty) also mentioned on NANOG that they were aware of several other devices with the same issue.

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16729845](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16729845)

</comment><comment><USER12> What is truly disturbing here... who wrote these firmwares? You'd think something as widely distributed as an Internet gateway for a major ISP would be written by someone who at least know some Internet basics (like which IP ranges are public and which are private). And, how do you test if this can happen. And if they made this mistake then what else is lurking in that particular piece of software?

<comment><USER13> Wait, you weren't aware that most equipment manufacturers' software teams leave every edge case and design decision to a coin toss between 'fastest to code' and 'least effort to code' and let the rest of us bitch and scream about the stupidest of egregious bs for years until that piece of gear isn't sold anymore, then do it again with the next model?

<comment><USER14> "Weren't you aware that most equipment manufacturers' _managers_ downprioritize quality and demand that the developers to produce code that can handle the managers' incomplete solution requirements given the smallest possible budget?"

FTFY

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Comcast / xfinity was null routing 126.96.36.199/32 for residential customers up until Monday morning/afternoon. They removed the null route fairly quickly. I assume it was done to reduce the amount of garbage traffic going to 220.127.116.11 from hitting Comcast's core.

<comment><USER16> Which garbage traffic? Where does it come from?

<comment> matthew-wegner Part of CloudFlare's arrangement with APNIC is to study this traffic.

See "Enter 22.214.171.124" section on this post: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/)

<comment><USER17> So is all this 188.8.131.52 garbage traffic now directed to Cloudflare's servers? Or will ISPs port filter everything sent to 18.104.22.168 except DNS (and DNS-over- HTTPS) requests headed for Cloudflare?

<comment><USER18> Can't really filter out such things efficiently, so Cloudflare gets it, yes.

[https://www.nanog.org/sites/default/files/wed.general.traffi...](https://www.nanog.org/sites/default/files/wed.general.trafficdiversion.serodio.10.pdf)

<comment><USER19> Is there still some sort of traffic "balance" requirement for settlement-fee peering?

Cloudflare sends so much data out that they probably want to get more sent to them so things balance out. The more garbage traffic, the better! :)

I'm totally out of my bailiwick here, it can't be that simple, can it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> RIPE Labs ran some tests back in a day, on this subnet, with interrsting conclusions

[https://labs.ripe.net/Members/franz/content- pollution-18](https://labs.ripe.net/Members/franz/content-pollution-18)

<comment><USER21> Super interesting! It's the IP address space equivalent of a no mans land - <USER2> dead zone where stray packet radiation will cook your servers. One can only wonder what goes on under the surface..

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I just got bite by this. If your ISP is AT&T (I have AT&T fiber) don't use 188.8.131.52, only use the CloudFlare secondary DNS resolver 188.8.131.52.

         <<>> DiG 9.10.6 <<>> google.com @22.214.171.124
        ;; global options: +cmd
        ;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

</comment><comment><USER23> T-Mobile US did (and maybe still does?) hijack 18.104.22.168 and 220.127.116.11 to silently redirect them to their own crappy DNS server.

[http://esd.io/blog/t-mobile-dns-hijack.html](http://esd.io/blog/t-mobile-dns- hijack.html)

<comment><USER24> From that link you provided, there's an update dated 11/5/2014 stating they don't do that anymore.

<comment><USER23> I wrote the link :) Someone sent me a message a while back that it was happening again but I haven't investigated myself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Never ever ever use the hardware firewall that your ISP tries to sell/rent to you.

Better still is to use an old Linux desktop with IPtables doing masquarade, that's what these cheap things are doing anyway but now you have control.

<comment><USER26> Sadly you can't with AT&T, they have a cert on their routers and won't give out any IPs to anything else other than their hardware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Are people really that surprised 22.214.171.124 won't work everywhere?

I suck at networking, but I worked that job just long enough to know there is some pretty horrible stuff such as 184.108.40.206 being hard coded all over the place, even in high-end hardware.

AT&T's crime isn't really that they are stealing stuff, but rather that they aren't doing anything to fix the millions of legacy stuff with broken 18.104.22.168

Granted, the most plausible explanation is they thought: "To hell with it, it's broken, we are going to use it."

</comment><comment><USER28> Few ISPs (Movistar, Vodafone) here in Spain also use 18.104.22.168 for router internal stuff... So we can only use 126.96.36.199 at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER29> My CenturyLink provided gateway gobbles up 126.96.36.199 as well, thankfully 188.8.131.52 works.

</comment><comment><USER30> Can confirm. Have that same router; same issue. 220.127.116.11 works fine, though.

</comment><comment><USER31> I didn't have any problem getting off the ATT Fiber network, but it was getting dropped down the line towards the datacenter.

</comment><comment><USER32> does the term "stealing" really apply here?

<comment><USER33> The usual non-technical word that would get picked here is "hijacking". If I get on a bus home, and some nutjob with a gun to the driver's head insists it goes to Springfield instead, the bus wasn't stolen, but it was hijacked and now I don't get where I was headed.

Hijacking can occur in several places in Internet infrastructure, but hijacking IP addresses is arguably the worst since there's almost nothing we can do about it. Cloudflare might have (perhaps even purposefully) struck the one thing you can do if you want to, which is put a popular but optional service on the address, and then let ordinary users scream blue murder because it doesn't work.

[ Other examples of hijacking: Web browsers will fetch the path /favicon.ico from your site. Why? Because Internet Explorer did that to add "favourite icons" for web sites, so now that's all you can use it for; firstname.lastname@example.com can't just be the email address for somebody who fancied the handle "administrator". Why? Because Certificate Authorities decided that if somebody receives email sent to firstname.lastname@example.com that person must be authorised to have certificates for any name in example.com. No existing rules told them this was safe, but they did it anyway, so now you have to allow for that ]

<comment><USER33> Oh, I should point out that "The Internet" (to the extent it's any distinct thing) also hijacks things. All ISO/ITU object identifiers used in Internet standards are under the OID 188.8.131.52, but, er, 1.3.6 belongs to the US Department of Defense, so how did the Internet get the nice compact 126.96.36.199?

Turns out there's just an RFC from 1988 which says "This memo assumes that DoD will allocate a node to the Internet community", it says it assumes this will be 22.214.171.124, and of course thirty years later it would be pointless to say "No, the DoD does not allocate this node to you".

<comment><USER14> To be more specific, RFC 1065 states its use of the subtree that was initially held by the U.S. National Bureau of Standards. The NBS transferred the subtree to DoD, which had not stated how it intended to manage it. Thus, the DoD might have chosen a different value for the last digit of the internet subtree, but that's all.

This isn't really hijacking, although it does seem a bit haphazard. Considering the "official" handling of the subtree transfer, I suspect that the DoD did accept the decision after the RFC was submitted as a draft, with the RFC just not updated to reflect this.

30 years later, I don't think anyone cares about OIDs.

<comment><USER33> "I suspect that the DoD did accept the decision after the RFC was submitted"

You suspect that an enormous Federal bureaucracy "accepted" something but it isn't written down anywhere? Does that sound right to you?

If you mean "accept" in the tacit sense that they can't do anything about it now, well, of course, that's why I called it "hijacking". I can't do anything about the fact I'll be home late when my bus is hijacked, but let's not pretend I've "accepted" the new destination and somehow now the nutjob with a gun has my permission to take it there.

Funny thing about OIDs, everything that needs to enumerate things and touches any of the ISO/ITU X series standards uses OIDs, yes, still in 2018 and presumably forever. For example you might have noticed that TLS 1.3 is now (probably) finished. Grep through that and you'll find it mentions all the OIDs you need to use to make it work, and introduces OID filters so that you can write key-value matches for client certificates like "I only want client certs which have the following policy OID".

OIDs are fine, there is no reason to create a new parallel system that would work the same way and presumably either duplicate the OID hierarchy or try to displace it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> When 18.104.22.168 launched here in Spain, it was inaccessible from several major carriers. Some had network-wide routing problems to that IP address, and some had installed CPEs that included static routes to 184.108.40.206/24 and stuff like that, probably for internal purposes.

Nothing of this strikes me as odd, let alone malicious. It's such a weird IP range, I even remember having my LAN configured as 184.108.40.206/24 at some point, because who would ever use those IP addresses?

Also reminds me of when Spanish ISPs were given IP ranges by RIPE for their customers beginning with 37.* -- those had never been used, so many network administrators had them added to their bogon list, which meant for those customers lots of web pages were inaccessible. The solution was to reboot their CPEs until they got a good ol' IP address from the ol' ranges :D

<comment><USER35> Nothing like that is an excuse. You have 10.0.0.0 for that - it's huge and you can use it for whatever you want without stepping on anyone's toes.

There are absolutely zero reasons I've seen so far (I'd be interested to hear abstruse ones? "I thought who cares" isn't one) to avoid using one of the private ranges.

10.0.0.0/8 isn't even noticeably harder to remember or type, really.

<comment><USER36> Using the 10/8 or any of the other RFC1918 had great potential to step on their customers toes. That is exactly why rightly or wrongly they used the 188.8.131.52/24 range. Hardware manufacturers generally used the range for interfaces that were local to the device and often only used on interfaces internal to the device. They knew this equipment would be deployed into environments where RFC1918 addressing would be used but they had no idea what RFC1918 address ranges, so using addressing from the RFC1918 networks meant potentially impacting their customer's data. They chose to instead use addressing which at the time they believed would not impact their customers.

APnic is not blameless here. They knew the issues with this space when it was assigned to them as a research network. For quite awhile they allowed Google to advertise the space and collect data on it's usage. I assume Google no longer was providing the infrastructure to do so and APnic saw an opportunity to have someone collect data for them for free.

Collecting data on traffic sent to this ip range is one thing but approving its use for a service available to the public knowing the accompanying issues much of the public would have accesssing it is in my opinion not responsible use of a research network.

<comment><USER37> > Using the 10/8 or any of the other RFC1918 had great potential to step on > their customers toes.

There are better options though. Why not the class E reserved addresses, or just using some address space you actually own?

Though apparently an RFC from... 2012... has a solution. 18.104.22.168/10 is for internal ISP use.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tony Fullman NSA Intercepts - <AUTHOR> https://www.documentcloud.org/public/search/%22Project%20ID%22:%20%2228715-tony-fullman-nsa-file%22 <comment><USER2> Here's the article that the documents relate to, for context: [https://theintercept.com/2016/08/14/nsa-gcsb-prism- surveilla...](https://theintercept.com/2016/08/14/nsa-gcsb-prism-surveillance- fullman-fiji/)

<comment><USER3> It smells like the NZ government wanted to throw Fiji a bone and find a valid way to either extradite or jail some enemies of the Bainimarama regime.

People in New Zealand should be very upset over this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is this a warning shot in the Shadow Brokers/DNC battle? Snowden previously insinuated that the NSA had interfered with US ally's elections...

Very unpleasant stuff, it's disturbing to see how far it goes.

<comment><USER5> Why do you need the NSA for that? The US has always interfered with elections and other political activities globally and it did so quite publicly.

Quite recent examples are Obama stating pretty clear opinions about the Brexit and the US state department funding an NGO that its goal was to vote out Benjamin Netanyahu during the last Israeli elections as well as sending top advisers that worked on the Obama campaign to run it.

[http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/12/obama-admin- se...](http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/12/obama-admin-sent- taxpayer-money-oust-netanyahu/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I see a distinct lack of metadata.

<comment><USER3> What you see and what is recorded are totally different things. This is simply a PDF representation of the collected data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> At the top of every page is the following: _" This information is provided for intelligence purposes in an effort to develop potential leads. It cannot be used in affidavits, court proceedings or subpoenas, or for other legal or judicial purposes"_.

I understand that the NSA wants to hide their sources and methods, but it seems to me (as a non-lawyer), that this goes against the principles upon which courts are supposed to based. If they are going to charge someone with a crime (presumably the intended outcome of such an investigation, if it comes to anything), are they not supposed to provide all the evidence upon which those charges are based?</comment>