How the EVE Online Servers Deal with a 3,000 Person Battle - <AUTHOR> http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/planning-for-war-how-the-eve-online-servers-deal-with-a-3000-person-battle <comment><USER3> The report of the battle they link to (<http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/28/eve- online-battle-asakai/>) is even more fascinating to me. You spend hours and hours of effort in order to get a ship, and one way of thinking about them is as the time spent to earn them compressed into 3d form. Unlike (most) other MMO's, battles actually destroy things. So in that youtube clip, you're watching years and years of effort getting evaporated because of a mis-click.

In most of the games I play, the pay off of the grinding is getting to enjoy fighting more. But I could never play EVE, because battles would be so anxiety provoking. There would be no pleasure at all in earning a Titan, because I would be forever terrified of losing it.

Of course, all games are kind of there to destroy your time. But for some reason it doesn't feel quite as wasted when you have a virtual thing there that is bad-ass in proportion to your time investment.

<comment><USER4> That feeling of "My ship! My beautiful, beautiful ship!" is offset by the fact that major alliances tend to have strong reimbursement programs. If your dreadnought goes boom in a fleet op, you get the cost of another hull and gear, and get to draw on corp/alliance stores as well.

Otherwise, they'd never get their supercap pilots out of the hanger :)

<comment><USER5> What would be the point of having all this cool stuff if no one else even gets to see it and you don't get to use it?

<comment><USER4> If you spent six months grinding the ISK to buy and outfit a carrier, how willing would you be to take it into a battle where any of a hundred things could destroy it, including server lag or a random disconnection?

<comment><USER5> I would invert the causality. Why would I spend six months outfitting a carrier if I had no intention of using it in combat or even flying it anywhere where other people would see it?

<comment><USER6> Same reason people spend hours tending their farmville farms...

<comment><USER5> I've never played Farmville, so I probably shouldn't speculate, but I'm under the impression that it is at least ostensibly a social game where you invite people to help with or at least view your farm.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, but so is EVE and other games like it. I have never played EVE for any significant amount of time, but I did play WoW for awhile and there were tons of things that people would sink time into for purely social reasons. I imagine EVE is the same way. You don't just want a Titan because it is useful in the game, you want a Titan so you can have a Titan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [Edit: this comment turned out not to really be about Eve and more about the difficulty of real time MMOs]

This blows my mind. I've been thinking about writing a small multiplayer game for a few weeks. And today I was actually doing back of the napkin calculations. The thing that quickly became clear is bandwidth is O(n^2) where n is the number of players in the same location, since you have to share the location and velocity of each player with each other player.

Here's an example of a calculation I was using. It's the monthly bandwidth in TB of having a certain amount of players in a shared space (3000 in this case), assuming that the location/orientation/velocity of each player's ship is contained in a measly 48 bytes and you attempt 30fps.

(48 * 30 * 3000 * 3000 * 3600 * 24 * 30) / 1e12 = 33592 TB = 33 PB

THIRTY THREE PETA BYTES to simulate a single battle for a month.

I'm looking around at various VPS providers and the bandwidth they offer. Using the naive calculation above and the cheapest Linode offering and it'd take $3 million/month to support a single one of these ongoing battles.

Now, I'm sure the numbers above aren't used in reality. Obviously, you can reduce the updates per second... but not by much. You can't shave much off how much you send. It at least gives you a sense of the orders of magnitude required to support such a thing. Even contemplating supporting 100-1000 people at once is looking very difficult for me to pull off.

<comment><USER8> I think one thing Eve has going for it (and this is only an assumption) is that it wouldn't need to sync each player's position on each frame. It could reduce the load dramatically by only sending the acceleration / orientation data for a ship.

So if a ship has set a course and has stopped accelerating it doesn't need to send anything else unless that course is changed.

<comment><USER7> I haven't really played Eve, so I can't say. I'm imagining ships flying around and changing course constantly in a battle, but if someone can give a better description, I'd appreciate it. It'd be further reduced by several players sharing a ship... no idea how common that is.

What I'm describing is definitely leaning more towards players that are constantly moving around though. It helps explain to me why in Asheron's Call, for instance, when you had too many people in the same city a "portal storm" arose and people started getting teleported out of the city randomly.

<comment><USER9> If you check the video you'll see it's very slow paced and the ships basically don't seem to move at all (maybe tiny unseen ones do I don't know)

<http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/28/eve-online-battle-asakai/>

<comment><USER10> Part of the reason it is so slow is that (as mentioned in the article) the server slows time down (as far as 10% of normal) in order to ensure that nothing gets lost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fun facts: This fight was between the Honeybadger Coalition (HBC) and the Clusterfuck Coalition (CFC). The core of the Honeybadger Coalition is TEST Alliance, and the core of TEST Alliance is Dreddit, the "original" Reddit- based corp (there are / have been several, some of which predate Dreddit and have since folded).

HBC routed the CFC, which has Goonswarm as its core, which is organized around the Something Awful forums.

TEST Alliance was nurtured by the CFC for a long time, splitting off only in the past year to forge a more independent identity. As such, the hostilities between these old friends is hard to gauge. At this point, the presumption is that it's all in good fun. But that may change.

<comment><USER12> Admittedly I haven't followed Eve politics for over a year, but I would be very surprised to see Test and Goons get in a "real" fight (e.g. over sovereignty or revenue-generating moons). They both treat the game in the same way (a strange mix of competence, incompetence, and irreverence) and have too much shared history. I suspect the only reason they're even hostile right now is because they have absolutely no external threat and are bored.

<comment><USER13> Fits with what I read on Reddit when it came up. Was a fun fight and TEST won but no one is really mad at anyone else:)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's like each solar system is a VM, and they can't move their VMs to a new physical server without disconnecting all clients. And all of their physical servers are at 100% load all of the time? Oh, I guess it's 100% utilization, not 100% load. As in, they don't spin down servers to save power during off- hours I guess.

The time dilation is a neat solution to the server load problem, but it's sooo annoying as a player. In beta, it was interesting to watch the entire game desync and grind to a halt, but we could still chat and look around. Interesting, but frustrating.

<comment><USER15> Two main solutions (given that the article mentions that they have huge machines already):-

A) Allow a single solar system to span multiple machines. Very hard, especially if the server software isn't architected for this. Retrofitting this can be nigh on impossible.

B) Have a few _huge_ machines that can be used to host scenarios like this and, more importantly, have a way of migrating users over to the huge machine seemlessly.

The latter can be done but it's tricky, especially if transferring game state between instances of the server is not simple (I'm not talking about transferring the VM itself with something like vMotion). It comes down to:-

1) Being able to make the bigger machine act as a temporary proxy pushing connections data back to the smaller machine.

2) Having a way of telling clients to make a new connection to the bigger machine and, once that connection is made (and the data is being proxied to the smaller machine) cut the connection to the smaller machine. Users see no loss of service or reconnects at all.

3) Once all clients are now being proxied by the bigger machine; pause and transfer the game state from the smaller machine to the big machine and then continue. Obviously it works best if a chunk of state can be transferred in the background and then the final transfer (and pause) is as short as possible in order to transfer over the bang up to the minute state.

Option (A) is always the proverbial "In v2 of the server we'll do it a completely different way..."

<comment><USER16> Option 4C) Create a raspberry pi cluster farm, and host every player with one microserver.

<comment><USER17> How would the microservers keep up to date with each other fast enough to be useful? "eventual consistency" doesn't work with real time strategy games.

<comment><USER16> How would they not? Latency between servers would be near zero, and if they all handled point to point transactions while broadcasting their state on each transaction, you're getting all the power you need. We're not talking about complex processing here. It's an RNG coupled with simple health and xyz.

<comment><USER17> Broadcasting their state to what? All the other nodes? So each "microserver" would still need to handle thousands of connections and data for every player?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is a nice article.

A friend of mine did some research for DARPA/NSF on internet 'crowds.' His research was looking at the question of fractal gatherings, which was basically you were 'near' the people around you in the virtual 3D space and could hear what they were saying, you were adjacent to people who were one space away but could hear them if they 'shouted' and the crowd was at a gathering that was sharing an experience from a presenter who was 'projected'. Basically a virtual concert venue for example where process affinity scheduling took into account where you "were" in the 3D space. The questions are many and as far as I can tell the folks who research this are few and far between.

Process migration continues to be a hard thing to do. VMware and others have made progress, virtualized interfaces and peripherals, self contained 'state'. Works 'ok' at the VM level but still doesn't work at all AFAIK at the 'thread' level.

World of Warcraft addresses this somewhat by 'instances' which is that under certain circumstances (entering a dungeon for example) you and your party of 5, 10, 25, or 40 people all transition (through a loading screen) into a place with nobody else (except you). They can dedicate machines to host an instance and do process migration at that level.

DARPA is interested of course because they would love to have a way of connecting warfighters into a virtual command and control center regardless of where they are physically. Essentially being in two places at once is a big force multiplier.

</comment><comment><USER19> This was particularly interesting for me. I've already built a scalable MMO server architecture in Erlang, which hosts all players on one world, using server nodes that can be moved between machines. I calculate that my server architecture can handle up to 10,000 moving players in a local area. That's characters, not EVE-style ships (characters are heavier).

If anyone is interested in talking about this, helping, or funding me, please get in touch. My server is called Proxima and my game is First Earth (you can find it if you're interested). I've been slowly bootstrapping it for 3 years.

<comment><USER20> Have you got more details? Links?

<comment><USER19> I haven't been public about my process of building the server or its details (I just don't have time), but the game is at: <http://firstearthgame.com>

Someday I'll make time to blog about the server.

<comment><USER21> Wow, those screenshots look impressive!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I always wondered how Eve coped with what seems like a massively data heavy game, keeping track of battles and logging data especially for epic battles where alliances are pitting their expensive ships against each other. Pretty insightful article, would love to know a bit more about their development processes and how they go about pushing new changes up. It's such a sensitive game, changing just one thing could throw the whole game into disarray. It's crazy when you think that they not only have to track battles, but they also have to capture every other action and movement within the game; mining, agent missions, the marketplace and all of the other components that rely on accurate and up-to-date data capture and realtime reporting.

What makes this all even more crazier is the game has been around for over 10 years and counting. I still play Eve everyday, once you get past the menial tasks, you can have some real fun with this game being a drug runner, miner or just straight up renegade roaming the infinite environment.

</comment><comment><USER23> The environment EVE creates in almost every aspect of the game is just fascinating.

It is the only game I ever played I actually felt an enormous thrill and adrenaline rush when playing pvp. It doesn't matter if you're pvping alone or with a fleet. The fact that you actually lose/gain on a fight differentiates the game from any other MMO. Events that you may have experienced in-game can be recorded forever and actually impacts the whole game universe.

I really hope more companies invest into having one persistent world in their MMOs. Instead we see this segregated servers in which great players/achievements/events are limited to this little server. It ends up lessening the interest of many players, specially older ones.

Funny thing is that, normally, when the hit MMO stops being a hit they end up merging lots of servers anyways. Which IMHO end up lessening even more the time people have spent on that game.

<comment><USER24> "The fact that you actually lose/gain on a fight differentiates the game from any other MMO."

Could you please expand on this? I'm interested in this point, but I haven't played Eve or other MMOs.

<comment><USER25> For instance; I play Guild Wars 2. If I die, I lose a little bit of in-game cash from having to repair my armor after restarting (less cash than I can make in 5 minutes), and will possibly have to have to trek a couple of minutes back to where I was.

But back when I played EVE (that's a very long time ago, the game's changed since)... I was playing as a trucker in low-sec, essentially carrying goods in somewhat dangerous territory. I was really lusting for T2 transports (blinged out trucks), and it was my goal to get one. So I trained and saved for months, until I finally could afford it. I'm not a very patient person, so I took it for a ride before it was fully fitted with the modules I needed for my protection. Some pirate jerk blew it up. It was insured, but I wasn't quite able to easily replace the modules I had lost. In one fight, weeks of my in- game time were lost.

In other MMOs, winning and losing can mean that you've wasted a few minutes of your time. In EVE, it can mean months of wasted effort.

<comment><USER24> Thanks for your reply. Do you think this game mechanic would work without the availability of insurance? I would think all but the most hardcore would be dissuaded.

<comment><USER23> Well, insurance in EVE does not free you up to suicide your ship. There is a saying in EVE "don't fly what you can't afford to lose at least 3 times". It is a hardcore game, for those who want it to be :)

You can always just live in high-sec (safe zone) and probably never lose your ship. Of course the game tends to reward you for taking risks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Second Life (I may be wrong on the game itself) talked about how it manages game scale across many servers.

The entire game is a virtual machine.

When a player leaves a server boundary, their player VM state is packaged up and sent to the next world server and then resumed on that server.

Players don't even notice they crossed server boundaries, and this was possible because the game can be paused mid flight for that player - <USER2> neat.

</comment><comment><USER27> I haven't played EVE in years, but I always love reading these reports to reminisce. It took a huge time investment but it was a lot of fun. Reading that CFC apparently has hundreds of titans and lost 3 just in this battle is crazy. I was playing when the first Titan was built, and I remember distinctly when the first one was destroyed.

</comment><comment><USER28> On moving the game to a beefier server: _"This is the machine that systems get reinforced on when players request that. Unfortunately, the same thing above applies – anyone in the system when the move happens gets disconnected. Because of this, it's basically never done,"_

It seems like a fairly small addition to the game logic to allow the game to freeze for a few seconds and be forcibly moved to another server. Is this kind of scenario so rare that it's not worth the trouble, or am I missing something else?

<comment><USER29> The problem (I believe) is that they don't have a way to 'freeze' and transfer a running game. Think of it like any program -- it is easy to "save your work" and load the file on another computer. It's much harder to exactly save the state of all parts of a running program and transfer that to another computer. Each user is represented by a stackless python program, these are hard to shut down and move.

As you say, it could probably be done, but it would be a lot of work, which wouldn't get used very often.

<comment><USER30> The other problem is that they would have to 'pause' the entire game while the physical move was in progress, otherwise players would still be able to move around in the rest of the game world (other than the cluster of stars they took offline to move them). As I understand it, this is already sort of a problem with the Time Dilation mechanic they currently use; time moves at 10% normal within the fight, giving people outside the slowed-down star systems time to deploy forces at 10x speed relative to the fight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> And of course it's a video of the former Goonswarm[GOONS] now [GEWNS]

</comment><comment><USER32> Aww, and now I want to start playing EVE again :).

Great article, great battle.

</comment><comment><USER33> This alliance has some guy who does simultaneous translation to russian?

</comment><comment><USER34> tl/dr: Sharding and slowing everything down.

<comment><USER35> Eve isn't sharded in the common MMO sense.

<comment><USER34> No, but they talked about disconnecting the battle from the surrounding solar system, and the negative consequences. Essentially sharding.

<comment><USER36> Actually they do not disconnect the battle from the solar system the battle is in.

What they said is they run many solar systems on one server. During a major battle they migrate those other solar systems to different servers so that the server only has to deal with the one system.

So in a sense, yes, each solar system is its own shard.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nissan driverless car guilty of "close pass" overtake of UK cyclist - <AUTHOR> http://www.bikebiz.com/news/read/nissan-driverless-car-guilty-of-close-pass-overtake-of-uk-cyclist/020846 <comment><USER2> The car clearly identified the bicyclist, so this just seems like poor training/rules, which is easy enough to fix.

I'm more interested in the second video from the BBC where it couldn't identify the maintenance vehicle. If the driver hadn't intervened, would it really have plowed straight into it? I seems like even a current, non-self driving car, would have intervened with automatic braking (or slowing down with auto-cruise control) in that situation.

<comment><USER3> > _this just seems like poor training_

Heh. Yea, passing too closely is what many humans do.

Speaking of potentially murdering cyclists, since they already got all those sensors, they could prevent drivers and passengers from "dooring" cyclists.

The "dutch reach" (opening the door with your other hand which automatically makes you look over your shoulder) is unfortunately not commonly taught in driving schools.

<comment><AUTHOR> _" The "dutch reach" (opening the door with your other hand which automatically makes you look over your shoulder) is unfortunately not commonly taught in driving schools."_

Excellent idea, going to use that one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Though the article shows some bias, it's nonetheless something that shouldn't have happened

More interestingly, this was a LHD car in an UK road, might have something to do with it (though the navigation system seemed to be aware of it).

<comment><USER5> > shows some bias

The clue is in the name, it's a mag about cycling. It's run by Carlton Reid, a well-known expert on cycling - his most famous book is "Roads were not made for cars", a history of the intertwined histories of cars and bicycles and how motor transport came to dominate our roads almost to the exclusion of all others. So I'm not sure it's a "bias" so much as "what he thinks about cars and bikes".

> More interestingly

No, that's a minor point. The important thing is that cyclists get killed in close-pass situations, and those that don't are often put off cycling permanently. Along with the Uber car jumping a red light in SF, and Uber basically saying "it doesn't matter", this shows a worrying tendency for self- driving at any cost, including safety, which many of us were hoping would be a benefit of such technology.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for your comment

You're right cyclists get hurt or killed in close-pass situations (by humans).

It seems here the navigation identified the cyclist and avoided it. It _incorrectly_ didn't follow the legal clearance but nobody got hurt (because the avoidance happened correctly it seems). It's an unsafe situation but the car did not ignore the cyclist.

The chance for someone to get injured or an accident happening seemed to be much higher in the Uber case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is perhaps the real risk of AI. In the first wave, the industry is dominated by a wish to make a great product. In the second wave, the bean counters walk in and start to optimize everything. And then we start getting the behavior from Fight Club.

I don't see any way out of this loop except for penalizing bad business behavior (on an individual level) heavily while protecting engineers who fight them.

<comment><USER7> Yes, no engineer has ever behaved badly, or been complicit in ethically grey areas, and all the world's ills are due to business types.

<comment><USER6> Well, sure, there's another point.

Programmers should have a similar guild/organization that medical doctors do, and people who abuse the ethics should be barred from practicing.

<comment><USER7> I fully agree. It would solve a lot of problems we currently face in technology, but there are two issues that I see:

1) Doctors, surgeons, engineers (actual professional engineers, not people with comp sci degrees who call themselves engineers), lawyers, etc. are called professionals because they have professional colleges of their peers that oversee things like ethics and can revoke licenses, etc. They're self- regulating.

This works because for things like medicine and engineering and law, there is a large barrier to entry. You have to go to a recognized school and pass an ethics/comprehensive exam. This isn't so with programming. There's almost no barrier to entry.

Any kid can open up a tutorial on MySQL and call themselves a back-end engineer. Unless the software industry is willing to require formal qualifications on all their hires, this will remain a problem.

2) One of the great things about software is the democratic aspect. Software is great precisely _because_ any random kid can open up a tutorial and notepad.exe and start writing code. To rectify problem #1, you'd to a certain extent kill the democratic nature of learning which is a large part of why many people are in the industry today. I also think that a large portion of people who work in software would be highly resistant to this sort of thing, to say nothing of the difficulty of enforcing ethical behaviour if you can't see what's going on due to proprietary licensing and obfuscation.

<comment><USER6> You're right. But then again, let's consider how little time has passed, even if the progress has been very fast.

Anyone could have called themselves a doctor-analogue 100 years after the invention of "medicine", too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Would a radar reflector on my bike help me? Like this but smaller: [https://aceboater.com/media/guide/1/radar- reflector-3.jpg](https://aceboater.com/media/guide/1/radar-reflector-3.jpg)

<comment><USER9> This was because of decision made by software, not because of not detecting the cyclist.

<comment><USER8> Are you sure? I read bycicles are really hard to detect. And I thought a bigger radar signature, pumping up some confidence value, might influence the behaviour too.

<comment><USER10> You can see the cyclist on the bottom screen in the video, represented as a yellow speck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Playing devils advocate here.. Couldn't you argue a driverless car simply needs less space to guarantee the same/better safty for the cyclist?

<comment><USER12> A cyclist can swerve very quickly for all sorts of reasons. Drivers (human or computer) need to allow space for this.

<comment><USER13> Swerving is good way to get yourself killed. If you find yourself swerving to the center of the road without making sure there is no traffic trying to overtake at the moment, then you have to figure out what to do to avoid that.

Relying on each an every driver to leave enough space just in case you need to swerve is a losing proposition.

<comment><USER14> a cyclist should be treated the same as any other vehicle on the road. they might need to swerve to avoid an obstacle while the car is overtaking, just as a car may need to swerve while another car is overtaking. when a safety margin is possible, as it was here, it costs nothing to apply one.

<comment><USER13> I don't know where you live that you have that much space. My personal rule is don't swerve. If you don't have time to signal that you are going to move, or look to make sure other traffic is not in the way, then either brake hard or continue straight (with the obvious exception if not swerving causes you to hit another person).

There are just too many roads where you can't swerve without causing a head on collision. If you make it a reflex to swerve, then you will also do it when there is no space for other traffic to avoid you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Amazing how Nissan have managed to get their car to emulate 99% of London drivers.

<comment><USER13> The Dutch rule is basically, that the driver is liable if an accident happens, even if it's the cyclist's fault (unless you can prove that the cyclist deliberately caused the accident).

So there are not a lot of rules on what you should do. And this kind of passing is required often enough on narrow streets, that usually cars don't swerve if there is more space.

So that means that those self driving cars have to have a per country profile on how to behave. So if you have to do that for every country in the EU then that will make developing self-driving cars quite a bit more expensive than the current system where you have a common market.

<comment><USER16> Self-driving cars should try to avoid collisions regardless of fault and should not adjust that behavior based on who the local liability laws will hold responsible.

As far as traffic regulations specifying behavior go, yes, they differ from country to country and self-driving cars do need to be able to follow them. That doesn't necessarily mean the cars need to learn to follow a bunch of weird rules; it may be more of a lobbying problem. "Standardize your rules so we can offer self-driving cars that are X times safer than human drivers in your country" isn't a terribly hard sell.

<comment><USER17> >Self-driving cars should try to avoid collisions regardless of fault and should not adjust that behavior based on who the local liability laws will hold responsible.

I would love to watch a show called "Driverless cars in India".

<comment><USER7> The Russia edition of that show would be quite entertaining as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Well remove cyclists from streets. Its as simple as that. Remove humans from streets. Also remove all cars from the streets that need a driver. It will happen sooner or later. Humans will eventually be the single point of failure.

<comment><USER19> Let me simplify that for you.

>Remove humans</comment></comment>


Elefant CMS/web framework hits 1.0, so here's my project rationale - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/113221475545022629802/posts/YVkrGL9yUa8

<comment><AUTHOR> Also a direct link to the project website:

<http://www.elefantcms.com/></comment>


Backdoor in Captcha Plugin Affects 300K WordPress Sites - <AUTHOR> https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2017/12/backdoor-captcha-plugin/ <comment><USER2> This is pretty wild. It's common to have a Drupal site (and probably most PHP- based projects) with permission to write-then-execute, also. On some of the more robust CMS-specific hosting platforms, there are host-imposed limitations that only allow scripts to be executed from certain locations, and those locations are not writable by the user that the scripts run as (e.g., Acquia) -- in fact only the git/CI user can write to the script locations. All user- generated-content that has to be on disk goes off to the side in a directory that expressly will not execute PHP. The downside is that you give up letting the site itself be your update GUI, and for less savvy users (e.g., without knowledge of permissions, git, etc.) I guess that's a big downside. But this is what happens.

Of course, permission to write to disk isn't exactly a hard requirement for a backdoor to arrive (see Drupageddon). But it certainly opens doors, one might say.</comment>


Would Chinese-style education work on British kids? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33735517 <comment><USER4> It made me kind of sad when the British students preferred copying things from a chalkboard. I tried to implement a flipped classroom -- 15 minutes of "lecture" at the beginning, 25 minutes of group practice, 15 minutes of individual practice, then a 5 minute formative assessment/quiz -- when I taught chemistry in a low-income public high school in Mississippi. My students were really disoriented at first and preferred the less mentally- active work of copying notes or listening to a teacher... I actually had to tell them not to copy everything off my 15 minute presentations because they could just print it later or view it on their phones, and I'd rather they actively engage with the material. Many complained that they'd rather get a packet of notes to transcribe during class time.

The good news: by my second year of teaching, kids from the first year were telling their friends how a flipped classroom takes work away from studying notes and puts them into your classroom time. My students were more confident when they practiced concepts in class then assessed their own knowledge with a low-pressure quiz at the end of class. My second year I had students (and their parents) fighting to be in my chemistry classroom instead of a 30-year veteran's traditional classroom with 55 minutes of lecture.

Based on what we know about learning and cognition -- and with the way that the internet and mobile technology is de-emphasizing the need for memorized fact and emphasizing asking questions and performing creative problem solving -- I don't know why we're looking towards rote learning models to educate a 21st century workforce.

<comment><USER5> Is it really normal for American high school teachers to lecture for the entire period? No exercises, just note-taking?

I hazard to guess that the British students prefer copying things from a chalkboard because it's a novelty and requires considerably less effort than doing exercises. If they did it on a regular basis they'd quickly get bored.

<comment><USER6> Depends on the class. History tends to have a lot of lectures. Science classes, math and English I don't recall as many (this was about 10 years ago). Also varies by teacher and I would assume school.

<comment><USER4> Math is probably the class that most easily follows this pattern: the teacher demonstrates how to solve a category of problem, the entire class practices it together with the teacher calling on students to provide answers, then after students are confidently solving the problem together they try to solve them independently -- a process that usually continues after class with homework problem sets.

Science classes in higher-income schools often follow this method too -- present a problem/question, introduce some bit of science knowledge, then investigate with a lab -- but low-income schools lack the resources to do lots of labs and as a result it's a lot of copying vocab/notes and doing problem sets that tend to be vocabulary-heavy.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I think that sounds reasonable to me. I was thinking about my history classes more and there was a decent amount of interaction, just my memory about it was a bit fuzzy, since I haven't thought about the classes themselves in some years.

It had a decent amount of q/a and discussion, but it's rather hard to escape lectures in history. They didn't bother me though, since I had great history teachers that knew their stuff and made the lectures themselves interesting through anecdotes and personal experience. History was always my favorite subject, even though I obtained a degree in computer science.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Funny. Some brits look up to the Chinese system to educate their kids, but come time for university and every single Chinese parent would rather their kid go the oxbridge route than any chinese school.

Perhaps this article should be more explicit in that it involves comparison between CHinese practices and those of a subset of British schools. I went to a british-style boys school, a rugby school. It was nothing like the one in this article. We did plenty of memorization. We paid attention and worked hard for many hours beyond what is expected of the kids in this article. By grade 12 I had actually read all the major Shakespeares, read them well enough to have opinions and write papers. (First year university was a total walk in comparison.) The brits need not go to china for inspiration.

<comment><USER8> "every single Chinese parent would rather their kid go the oxbridge route than any chinese school" \- citation needed!

The oxbridge (as in "the bridge of the ox", a very logical outcome from "the ford of the ox" and "the bridge of the cam") are more of commercial enterprises than teaching institutions, and the preference for them are first and foremost the result of commercial advertising. The business model in here is to attract a great mass of pupils, be very selective about it (in order to have high-profile prospects), be very expensive (because the networking happening there must worth the hassle), then selling the achievements of these high-potenial strictly-preselected material to others as the results of its own merit. The research, the eccentric curriculum, or any other quirk that sets these institutions apart from others are just secondary. That is the naked truth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Chinese education kills the real genius, but does make the ordinary kids a skillful engineer(relatively), so the best kids still want to go overseas while the rest can do math better than any other west countries after repeatedly practice.

The USA education system does allow their top kids fly freely(which is really a small percentage), however the demanding on the average kids are too little, many kids gave up or drop out and could not find a decent job thereafter. No- child-left-behind can only do so much. There is nearly no grit/hard-working attitude in middle/high schools here at USA comparing to China.

Note 1: Not all Chinese students going overseas are top kids these days anymore, in fact most of them are having a rich dad meanwhile they can not stand up the fierce competition in Chinese schools. Note 2: The Chinese education system(in that sense, the India's) produced lot of "good-enough" engineers eager to fill up the H1B quota annually, those USA kids with the same IQ ended up not being a STEM engineer most likely, which is considered too nerdy or more, too hard for them. -- No pain, no gain.

<comment><USER10> I'll pull out one part of your comment to ask a question: you wrote,

 _The USA education system does allow their top kids fly freely(which is really a small percentage)_

and I would like to ask, where does that happen? What place in the United States allows the top kids to fly freely? I ask, because I interact online most regularly with parents who have children identified as gifted children through regional Talent Search programs or specialized summer mathematics programs or the Davidson Institute for Talent Development.[1] I only very rarely hear of "top kids" (by any reasonable definition of top kids) whose parents report that the USA education system allows their children to fly freely. I just looked at your Hacker News user profile to see if you identify what country you are from. It is unusual enough here in the United States to say "USA education system" rather than "U.S. education system" or "United States education system" that I wonder whether you have ever experienced the education system here in the United States during your own education. On my part, I get the distinct impression that the United States education system underperforms for all learners in its care,[2] although not as badly as, say, Mexico's or India's.

[1] [http://www.davidsongifted.org/](http://www.davidsongifted.org/)

[2] [http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/timss2011/international- results-...](http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/timss2011/international-results- mathematics.html)

[http://educationnext.org/when-the-best-is- mediocre/](http://educationnext.org/when-the-best-is-mediocre/)

<comment><USER11> So keep in mind this was a decade ago and I'm sure it's changed but when I was in highschool in Florida you could go Dual-Enrollment and the district would pay for any class and reimburse you for books. I went to college with my first three semesters of college finished. While that was particularly open handed many districts will at least pay tuition for what ever advanced classes you can test into as long as it fits the curriculum (X english classes, Y math classes...).

My local community college implies that sophmores and above (including home schoolers) can take any 1000 level or above class free (although the highschool gets veto power).

[http://www.cnm.edu/depts/outreach/dual-credit/dual-credit- th...](http://www.cnm.edu/depts/outreach/dual-credit/dual-credit-the-best- deal-in-town)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> While China has a great and deep culture, I don't see a strong reason why the UK should look to China for inspiration for its education system. The West continues to do great things in every field including technology. I think that the increasing representation of Chinese in technology is mainly due to the fact that hard technical skills are much more transferable across language and cultural barriers, than to any inherent advantage in China's education system. And while it's great that the Chinese government wants to invest more in cutting edge research, right now the most advances are still being made in the West.

</comment><comment><USER13> _> It is, however, abundantly clear to me that Chinese parents, culture and values are the real reasons that Shanghai Province tops the oft-cited Pisa tables rather than superior teaching practice._

Yes, there's a reason that the High Expectations Asian Father is a meme[1]. Even at home outside of school, the strict attitude of always being mindful of schooling was also made famous by the Tiger Mom author.[2]

When kids have 2 parents apply pressure like that, an inept high school football coach with a degree in General Studies could teach physics to Asian students and it wouldn't matter.

[1][http://highexpectationsasianfather.tumblr.com/](http://highexpectationsasianfather.tumblr.com/)

[2][http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Hymn-Tiger-Mother- Chua/dp/01431...](http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Hymn-Tiger-Mother- Chua/dp/0143120581)

<comment><USER14> I agree. There is a lot of emphasis put on the education systems when the real difference is the culture

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The top 20% of British kids do very well, academically and in the job market. The problem is the other 80% and I'm not sure it's the fault of the schooling system.

</comment><comment><USER16> Would it help children achieve higher scores on standardized tests? I find it easy to believe it would. But does that actually help anyone?

Might some children prefer it over less regimented styles of education? I find it easy to believe that some would, because in the Chinese style, it's clear what they're supposed to be doing at any given moment, and clear what their goal is (to achieve high scores). But does this actually help anyone? The problem as I see it is that they are practicing in an unambiguous situation when life itself is inherently ambiguous.

</comment><comment><USER17> I went to a public school in England (ie. fee-paying) and it wasn't too dissimilar from this. Hours were 9am-9pm for classes, two meals, afternoon sport and evening study. Copying everything from the whiteboard was standard for a lot of classes. The only major difference would be class sizes, which were kept to 10-15 per lesson instead of 50.

Maybe they're really just discovering the benefits of a bit of hard work and discipline.

Edit: I've also never really understood why British state schools let kids out at 2-3pm. Why not just keep them til 6pm when their parents get off work? It saves the parents huge trouble over childcare, whilst also having a demonstrably better effect on their education.

</comment><comment><USER18> It is over 40 years since I left school. The most striking thing about the programme is that that some of the children have learning difficulties. No, they're not ESN, but lack manners, so they eat / drink / chatter / giggle in class, and are astonished that this behaviour is regarded as unacceptable. Tell them the rules, and if they unable to comply, exclude them so that they don't distract others (teachers and pupils).

Then discuss philosophy of 'I hear, I forget; I see, I remember; I do, I understand' etc.

</comment><comment><USER19> No because the reason China scores so high is

1 They cherry pick students. 2 The teachers in these specialised schools only teach one subject for only 3 hours day.

</comment><comment><USER20> This article is too short to really approach the question asked in its headline. Instead, we get a glimpse at Chinese teachers in British classrooms. The article's voice is a little unclear, but I guess it's written by one of the students.

Edit: I had trouble telling that each section was written by a different author.

<comment><USER21> 3 separate voices, actually. One by the headmaster, one by a student, and one by a teacher. Each had very very different viewpoints.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A reader of this thread asked me off-forum to comment here. I've been reading the comments posted earlier in this thread, and just finished reading the fine article. I wonder how much background on the school and the teachers (both the British teachers and the Chinese teachers) the full television program provides. I felt that the article kindly submitted here teased with just a few details and didn't provide a lot of context. For example, when the article notes, "an experiment was carried out at the Bohunt School in Liphook," I immediately wonder what kind of school that is compared to other schools in Britain, especially when I see the headteacher of the British school say, "As the weeks passed, thanks both to the support of Bohunt's pastoral staff and a slight shift towards a teaching approach more recognisable to our pupils, behaviour improved." Most schools here in the United States, and I think most schools in Britain too, do not have a "pastoral staff," and maybe that school and its students are unrepresentative of students in general in the English- speaking world.

The point in the article that students have to be acculturated to what their school expects is very well taken. Students at a school-within-a-school for highly gifted students (a situation that exists in my local school district) have to be especially brought on board a school culture that differs from everyday school culture. And so it is for any school that introduces a change in curriculum, and for any school enrolling students who used to live elsewhere and attend other schools (a VERY common situation in the United States, and a situation I experienced while growing up).

Several comments here talk about "copying" or "regimentation," but the fine article points out that the Chinese teacher wanted to inductively lead students through a proof of the Pythagorean theorem--something I have done for much younger students here in the United States--while the British students insisted on just being told applications of the theorem without having to think about how the theorem is proved. A Minnesota Public Radio report just yesterday, based on a recent Aspen Ideas Festival discussion, "Is Math Important?"[1] includes statements that I think are factually incorrect about comparisons between education in the United States and education in China, but I have to agree with Professor Jo Boaler's statement that a mathematics lesson in secondary school in China is anything but memorization--it is all about students discovering mathematical ideas by pursuing a few hard problems each day with group discussion. There is a whole book about what Americans don't know about how elementary mathematics is taught in China[2] that is a good read for any participant here on Hacker News.

To answer the question posed by the article title, "Not without a lot of careful preparation, but it could possibly be an improvement for some students in some British schools."

[1] [http://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/08/03/mpr_news_presents](http://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/08/03/mpr_news_presents)

[2] [http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary- Mathematic...](http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematics- Understanding/dp/0415873843)

[http://condor.depaul.edu/sepp/mat660/Askey.pdf](http://condor.depaul.edu/sepp/mat660/Askey.pdf)

<comment><USER22> _Most schools here in the United States, and I think most schools in Britain too, do not have a "pastoral staff,"_

The American schools I've seen did have such staff, but they called them guidance counselors or something like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm assuming "no". If the asnwer were "yes", this headline wouldn't need to be phrased interrogatively.

</comment><comment><USER24> Nothing says globalization like the swap ability of international teaching styles.

</comment><comment><USER21> I had an extremely unusual k-12 education - homeschooled in a very rigorous fashion the entire way. There was a very specific curricula, a hard start time, along with specific hours for specific tasks. My mother has a bachelor's degree and taught at an old-fashioned private school prior to my birth. Each specific hour was for a particular subject, with some % dedicated to lecture(ish), along with some % for seatwork. So even for homeschoolers, I was unusual in this discipline and educator's background.

So. I judge that my education's implementation was neither "Chinese" nor "American (British-ish?)" (I quote these words, because I don't know that they are adequately representative). However, I think that the conceptual precepts were much closer to the "Chinese" approach. Education and learning were expected. For instance, it would have been completely inappropriate and unacceptable for me to:

\- complain about clothing (I did not have clothing requirements - if I had gone to a school with a uniform, so long as the clothing was functionally adequate for the weather, it would not have been acceptable to moan about fashion).

\- complain about having no say in my education. In time, I got the chance to co-design my curriculum on the elective level, but not taking Math (as an example) would have been unacceptable and not up for discussion.

\- Not doing assigned work. I was expected to complete the day's assignments. Interestingly, my school day finished at around 2pm (started at 8), with the rest of the day for assignments and my own time. The goal was understanding, not memorization (beyond the obvious facts that need remembering).

\- complain about dullness. There was no conception that entertainment (i.e., fun) was part of the purpose of education. It was - in a hazy and unforced way - my duty and obligation to learn. Learning was the entire orientation; if it was dull, it was dull: sucking it up and moving on was the way to go.

A portion of how I was taught was entirely along the lines that the maths teacher (Mr. Zou) delineated:

> . When I first introduced Pythagoras's theorem, I decided to let the > students find the proposition, prove and apply the theorem. That process is > an important feature of maths teaching in China.

> But a lot of students said they found it unnecessary to prove Pythagoras's > theorem - knowing how to apply it was enough.

Understanding the essence of the problem was a key component of the situation. Simply turning the math (or grammar, or history) crank and having an answer falling out was not considered to be a "good" way of going, and to perform at that level was to be only adequate. It was not the expected level - <USER2> expectation was to understand the material enough to build the equation. Learning in depth was _normative_ , not _unusual_. This is very important to understand. I was _not_ pulled out of school because I was gifted and talented. I was placed into homeschooling because my parents judged that the public schools of the area were inadequate to deliver an adequate education, which includes understanding the causes of the knowledge.

This expectation of in-depth understanding was then fed into the process of curriculum selection and analysis as I shifted into "high school" grades. As I prepared for college, my parents and I cooperated in building my coursework and knowledge base. In this I believe we sharply diverged from the "Chinese" model, as I was given broad freedom to learn on my own outside of the non- elective areas.

Fundamentally, education in my youth years was part of the appropriate process of growing up and becoming a fully formed adult. Not having a deep education was simply out of the question.

I think - given my experience - that the "Chinese" have a much better handle on how to educate. Let's dissect this -

> I'm used to speaking my mind in class, being bold, giving ideas, often > working in groups to advance my skills and improve my knowledge.

The basic question here is - _are the student 's ideas worth hearing_ ? If the student's ideas were _that_ good, perhaps they shouldn't be in the class. I recall very distinctly group work/group grading in college. I did not go to that class to be graded by my classmates - they were equally ignorant as I was! I wanted to learn from someone who knew what they were doing! But this also presupposes that the teacher also knows the subject adequately. Learning doesn't _have_ to be unpleasant, but it's better to learn unpleasantly than to remain blissfully ignorant.

<comment><USER15> It looks like you were brought up with Western education and Chinese style discipline. I had much the same education as you, sans the discipline. And my father growing up had the discipline without the education.

So I find it a bit odd that you then say "I think - given my experience - <USER3> the "Chinese" have a much better handle on how to educate."

Going through point by point:

\- complain about clothing

Discipline. Chinese.

\- In time, I got the chance to co-design my curriculum on the elective level

Education. Western.

\- Interestingly, my school day finished at around 2pm (started at 8)

Education. Western.

\- The goal was understanding, not memorization

Education. Western.

\- complain about dullness.

Discipline. Chinese.

> The basic question here is - are the student's ideas worth hearing ?

Actually, that is rather besides the point. Being able to discuss ideas, go out on a limb, work well in groups, etc are important skills. Providing feedback to the teacher is critical in a group setting. Even incorrect ideas put forward by a student can get the other students to really think about the topic.

<comment><USER21> I would say, rather, that I was brought up on principles that emphasized discipline, along with intellectual freedom and curiosity. The implementation of this emphasized discipline as I was a young child, then shifting towards freedom as I got old enough to have useful impact on curricula development. Neither of those precisely map to the US or the Chinese norms.</comment></comment></comment>


VLC developers refuse to consider updates over HTTPS - <AUTHOR> https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/21737 <comment><USER2> [https://web.archive.org/web/20190119162021/https://trac.vide...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190119162021/https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/21737)

The issue appears to be that while VLC does in fact verify the authenticity of a downloaded update, it also allows it to be signed with a key that it doesn't yet know, in which case it will retrieve this key from the VLC servers _via HTTP_. If that's true, it is a perfectly valid issue that needs to be resolved.

However the tone of the original ticket _is_ a nasty one, which seems to have resonated with the VLC dev in a wrong way.

<comment><USER3> I reported the issue months ago [1], and I'm sure many have reported it before me. The devs have been ignoring the issue regardless of this particular author's tone.

[1]: [https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/21422](https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/21422)

<comment><USER4> The site is down. But a valid threat model was requested and not given by the original OP.

If there was a post with a valid threat model. That would be interesting, until otherwise, it remains closed

<comment><USER3> My ticket was closed without requesting a threat model. As a trivial example this is a privacy leak - anyone on the network path can see what version you're upgrading to. It doesn't sound like a huge deal but we are moving to a 100% encrypted world, and it is a one character change to fix the issue. If VLC wants to keep the update over plaintext then they should justify why they want to do that, not have users justify why it should be over https. Instead, it feels like the VLC devs are having a kneejerk defensive reaction.

<comment><USER5> You can check VLC website to know what's the last version. It's not a secret. While I don't know the reason to prefer http over https, the only legitimate http threat is to serve non-latest version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am not an expert on VLC security, but here are a few things I can say.

1) The reaction is due to the fact that VLC developers know very well it updates over HTTP on Mac. It has been reported at least 10 times in the past.

2) The comment mentioned by eps about the ability to MITM the key exchange is probably wrong. The update code the poster was looking at is not the one used by VLC on Mac, as JB Kempf (president of VideoLAN) commented. VLC uses Sparkle which is a popular updater for Mac applications, not custom update code.

3) There _may_ still be a vulnerability. Typically apps that update over HTTP and verify using GPG are vulnerable to an attack where the attacker serves an older version vulnerable to _another_ attack, signed with the same key. There are mitigations for that but I don't know if VLC uses them. The Sparkle project itself advises the use of HTTPS for both the updates and the appcast ([https://sparkle-project.org/documentation/](https://sparkle- project.org/documentation/)).

<comment><USER7> We do block downgrade attacks in the installer.

What you can do is freeze the update, but HTTPS will not change that.

<comment><USER8> There is another attack where the user is updated to a _particular version_ by a MITM. That is distinct from a basic version freezing attack.

<comment><USER6> This is almost what he said they block in the installer (downgrade attacks or replay attacks).

The difference is there might still be an attack where:

\- User is at version N

\- Version N + x is vulnerable

\- Version N + x + y is latest

\- User terminal asks for N + x + y and the attacker serves N + x

However this attack is much less critical than anything letting an attacker downgrade (only applies against versions updated infrequently).

Regarding VLC on Mac, which uses Sparkle, this issue could be avoided by using HTTPS _just_ for the updates feed (AppCast), which is not mirrored.

<comment><USER7> This attack-to-not-latest exists, but it's very rare, since 99% of the security issue we have are in all versions of VLC, because of old code (2000s) in VLC and libavcodec.

It could happen, sure, but that is very far from the "OMG, updates are in HTTP" issue, or even a downgrade attack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What they mean is: a Man in the middle attack is very unlikely and not easy to setup. They will not spend time on this issue untill the OP has a valid threat model. Which the OP has not given.

They already cryptographically sign and validate the updates, which is why it is ignored. It's another solution for the same problem ( reducing change of a malicious update)

PS.

> This is a security risk and should be solved ASAP. Thanks

This has a unfriendly tone of the OP. I would have done the exact same thing in the same situation as the VLC developers ( since there is already a solution implemented).

<comment><USER9> Yeah, this doesn't really hold water when your software is as widely installed as VLC - I've lost count of the number of _deeply_ nontechnical people I've installed it for, for what that's worth. Checking file sizes is serious half- assing IMO - it's not beyond the wit of teenagers running a botnet to deal with that, never mind determined criminals.

<comment><USER4> NASA could also be hacked by determined criminals, VLC hasn't got unlimited resources to spend. The HTTPS change could be easy, but you don't know what other things can be affected at first glance ( eg. update mechanism on older versions with no https support).

If the attackers can do a MITM, they probably also have other stuff at their disposal :)

But more important, issue the bug with a valid threat model and it could be fixed. As long as there is no threat model and perhaps an active discussion ( this is how open source works), the ticket stays closed.

The OP had 2,5 days to respond.

<comment><USER10> so suddenly the onus of developing the threat model is on the user?

I believe both devs and users should have the liberty to discuss and propose threat models, but if there already is "some level of precaution" the real question is where was the previous threat model that dictates signing? or is this security theater?

<comment><USER4> If the developers think there is no threat. Then yes, it is for the user to prove this.

<comment><USER10> you can't prove a threat model. a threat model is part of what is in or out of scope.

the first thing that should happen is for VLC dev to set up a threat model, if the user base disagrees with the narrow scope of the VLC threat model they should fork.

the second thing that can then happen is that given a threat model, a user could file a bug report to complain how a certain hypothetical attack (within scope of the threat model) violates the security.

think about it this way: for all non-security bugs, would you ask users to "prove that resolving a certain bug is within scope of the project"? how can a user prove what is within the developers' scope?

<comment><USER11> I think you are making a wrong analogy here. A "threat model" in security is like a "user operation" for the feature.

So in the non-security bug world, the exchange would look like:

Bug report: the program is missing blue circle in the top right corner. Please add is ASAP.

Developer response: what would possibly be the use of this feature? Please tell me of I will close the bug.

<comment><USER4> Here is a decent developer response: [https://www.beauzee.fr/2017/07/04/videolan-and- https/](https://www.beauzee.fr/2017/07/04/videolan-and-https/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Oracle's practiced the same policy with VirtualBox distributions and that's been fine because they signed packages. VideoLAN signs their packages too. It seems to be a common practice for a highly loaded services to outsource as many cryptography to clients as possible. I think for the same reasons Google dropped CSRF tokens for their api in favor of different security measures.

<comment><USER13> This isn't any different from many download procedures. Consider that even a general-purpose package manager like Pacman uses HTTP, because there's little point in using transport-level security when the payload is cryptographically signed and there's a solid root of trust.

The only reasonable problem I see with this approach is that a MITM can make clients download an older version that is known to have critical bugs.

<comment><USER14> > This isn't any different from many download procedures. Consider that even a > general-purpose package manager like Pacman uses HTTP, because there's > little point in using transport-level security when the payload is > cryptographically signed and there's a solid root of trust.

This IS different.

If the VLC update is signed with a key not known to VLC, VLC will then go fetch the new key from the update server over HTTP, and not verify the key in any other way.

This renders the cryptographic signing of the updated binary a complete no-op. Anybody in a position to tamper with the HTTP download of the signed binary can equally change the HTTP downloaded, unverified key VLC retrieves to verify the signing. It is effectively unsigned, and the root of trust is as solid as mist.

<comment><USER11> No, this is not the case, as many other people in the thread said.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I might be missing some context, but I am deeply unimpressed with how Rémi Denis-Courmont chose to handle this. As far as I can tell, Rodger Combs gave a perfectly lucid explanation of a plausible threat model. If this is how the VLC developers typically handle security issues, then I'm unsurprised that the EU has decided to offer a bug bounty.

[https://www.zdnet.com/article/eu-to-fund-bug-bounty- programs...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/eu-to-fund-bug-bounty-programs- for-14-open-source-projects-starting-january-2019/)

<comment><USER16> Well, it's not the first time he has been controversial, e.g:

[http://cdm.link/2011/01/as-apple-pulls-gpl-licensed-vlc- the-...](http://cdm.link/2011/01/as-apple-pulls-gpl-licensed-vlc-the- developers-version-of-events-what-it-means-for-free-video-2/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/h6jmp/r%C3%A9mi_deni...](https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/h6jmp/r%C3%A9mi_deniscourmont_the_asshole_who_got_vlc_off/)

[https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1133166](https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1133166)

<comment><USER17> I saw no controversy in at least the second (reddit) link, appart from an anonymous coward insulting him and making random gratuitous hypothesises - moreover likely unrelated to anything...

<comment><USER16> Isn't having some people against you the very definition of controversy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This looks like it went bad because of poor communication. There is a lesson in that. For both sides.

For example, what would have happened if the reporter had either reported the security issue via the security process, to people who should understand this, or took a moment to explain the that model.

Or, what if the person who responded had politely asked for more detail or asked the security issue to be handled through that process?

How we treat people can make a world of a difference

</comment><comment><USER8> If the updates are cryptographically signed and validated, then it makes no difference. A MITM would just be giving free bandwidth to the VLC project.

The best argument is for defense-in-depth—in case someone breaks their signing scheme.

Edit: u/dcbadacd makes a great point about old but vulnerable versions potentially being served up by a MITM.

<comment><USER19> The issue says that the cryptographic checking is broken, and accepts new public keys as authoritative in the presence of MITM.

Which makes the report totally valid, if true.

<comment><USER20> VLC checks the downloaded file using the newly downloaded key??

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The big issue is that HTTP increases greatly the attack surface of VLC. The VLC client needs to parse the response from the "update server", and this response must be considered as potentially 100% malicious.

<comment><USER7> Of course not. The response is GPG-signed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Mirror as the bugtracker seems to be taking a beating from the post: [https://archive.fo/Dmtwo](https://archive.fo/Dmtwo)

</comment><comment><USER23> Q: Is this a Sparkle (popular non-MAS update framework) insecurity issue?

I use the long dead Bodega client to discover and check all local apps for Sparkle updates manually. I wish there were a similar app that both checked for updates periodically and checked the security model of each app's update server implementation (it's a difficult problem to audit the client's update security).

</comment><comment><USER24> Refuse to consider, or have considered and refuse to implement? Two very different things.

</comment><comment><USER25> iTunes does the same thing (signed downloads over HTTP): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18582060](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18582060)</comment>


Lambda School – interesting model, only pay for lessons when you get a tech job - <AUTHOR> https://lambdaschool.com/ <comment><USER2> Recent discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18854881](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18854881).

</comment><comment><USER3> There is something similar in the UK where you need to start paying off the student loan once you have job with a certain wage and above. [https://www.gov.uk/repaying-your-student-loan/when-you- start...](https://www.gov.uk/repaying-your-student-loan/when-you-start-and- finish-repaying)</comment>


Longest Polar Bear Swim Recorded (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/07/110720-polar-bears-global-warming-sea-ice-science-environment/ <comment><USER2> I had a chance to talk to an expert in non-invasive polar bear research. He believed that this, and most other polar bear studies, are deeply flawed because of how traumatic the data collection is.

Before this particular polar bear's swim, it was: (1) pursued by a helicopter until it couldn't run any more. (2) Shot with a tranquilizer dart. Did you know that large animal tranquilizers don't put the animal to sleep? They merely paralyze its muscles so researchers can work on it. So it's entirely awake but unable to move for step (3) Extract a molar with pliers, to estimate the bear's age. Also add a collar with a GPS tracker. (4) Let the paralysis wear off in captivity. (5) Release it.

So, pretty fucking traumatic. Polar bears are intelligent scavengers which means they're curious, but very danger-phobic. The fact that it swam for hundreds of kilometers afterwards doesn't prove anything about any normal behavior.

<comment><USER3> I'm going to need a source on that tranquilizer bit.. When giving a paralytic to a human, you need to have them attached to a vent in order to keep them alive and breathing, I'd be surprised to learn that bears react differently to paralytics. I'm under the impression they use opiods / benzos for large animal sedation.

<comment><USER2> I can't find a reference for polar bears, but it's probably the same as for grizzly bears where they use a mixture of Xylazine ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylazine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylazine)) and Telazol ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiletamine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiletamine)), a dissociative in the same family as Ketamine. So not a paralytic, but the animal retains memory of the experience.

[http://www.mammalogy.org/uploads/Cattet%20et%20al%202008.pdf](http://www.mammalogy.org/uploads/Cattet%20et%20al%202008.pdf) documents the process of helicopter darting and reports substantial health and behavioral changes for weeks after capture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I fear the imminent future of polar bears and this is a truly depressing story. But it should be noted it's from 2011, not new.

<comment><USER5> Though not "news," the climate situation in the Arctic is only getting worse. Long polar bear swims are just the canary. The entire Arctic Ocean/tundra ecosystem is already racially altered. Climate change is hitting the top of the world first and hardest.

Expect ice free summers in the Arctic Ocean soon: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline#/media/...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_sea_ice_decline#/media/File:Arctic- death-spiral.png)

Also, if you are USA based, I highly recommend the good people at: [http://www.alaskawild.org/](http://www.alaskawild.org/). I'm no longer affiliated, but I know first hand that they are effectively pushing the Federal govt to pay more attention to the region. Your favorite climate focused NGO is generally a good use of resources, as they will pressure your elected and appointed officials on your behalf. While we all wait for Elon to innovate us out of the problem, I also recommend including climate/energy in your basket of issues when you go to the ballot box.

And yes, we have already dug ourselves a deep hole. We still have the collective choice to stop digging deeper.

<comment><USER6> The sad thing is the vast majority of our emissions could be described as discretionary, at least if you live a standard US lifestyle. We don't even need Elon to save us, we just need to live a lifestyle that plenty of people do already. We're possibly destroying Earth's ability to sustain civilization (not to mention cool stuff like polar bears and whales) so that a relatively small fraction of the Earth's population can have more stuff.

If you: * Eat less meat * Live in a place that allows you to walk or cycle for your daily trips (work, groceries, etc.) * Have two or fewer children * Use LED lighting, have good insulation, and don't live in the most hostile climates in the world (e.g. Phoenix or Siberia) * Source your electricity renewably, which can be as easy as changing providers and, at least in my experience, adds perhaps $10 or so to one's monthly bill

we'd be most of the way there. It's not like people haven't already shown you can have one fifth the carbon footprint of the average American and not be happy.

Unfortunately, if you _do_ live in the US, or really any place that was built in the last 60 years, you're essentially forced to live a high-carbon lifestyle unless you're fabulously wealthy or willing not to be part of normal society. There aren't very many affordable, walkable developments in places with job opportunities and housing. We've made it illegal to build them through single-use zoning and parking minimums. If we haven't done that, we (and SF is incredibly guilty of this) have made it basically impossible to expand existing walkable places by allowing homeowners to forbid the construction of new homes in their neighborhoods, which is about as logical as saying "I own a bicycle. I can get rich by making it illegal to build new bicycles and thereby increasing the value of my own, so I'm going to vote for just that."

There is no shortage of sprawling developments where houses are cheap and suburban roads heavily subsidized by the taxpayer, though, so that's where most people live. Of course, if you suggest taxes go towards funding rail or buses people shriek that it never pays for itself, but I hardly see I-5 turning a profit.

Fair disclosure: For all this, I am a hypocrite. I cared enough about the above to change continents, but I fly too much. It's shocking how much that emits, and some years it's 80-90% of my carbon footprint, if the online calculators are to be trusted.</comment></comment></comment>


The Business Implications of Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dbreunig/the-business-implications-of-machine-learning-11480b99184d#.kdhyrfcmw <comment><USER2> > Until we have better software we're unable to build good models from small > datasets. (And when I say "small" I mean, not ginormous.)

This is completely wrong - to build a useful model your model just needs to be able to distinguish between the signal and noise in the data. There are decreasing returns to scale with increasing size of your data, as percent statistical uncertainty goes like 1 / sqrt(N).</comment>


Introduction to the Polymath Project - <AUTHOR> http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/introduction-to-the-polymath-project-and-density-hales-jewett-and-moser-numbers

<comment><USER2> This is really cool. Does anyone know if some people are actually developing tools that would make such collaboration easier because keeping track of mathematical insights on a blog in the form of comments can't be too much fun.

<comment><USER3> The Math Overflow (<http://mathoverflow.net/>) format looks promising.</comment></comment>


2 Studies Point to Pesticide as a Culprit in Bees' Decline - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/science/neocotinoid-pesticides-play-a-role-in-bees-decline-2-studies-find.html

<comment><USER2> It's great to see Colony Collapse get more attention but the article fails to mention one important factor. One of the reasons many people suspect CCD has been so devastating, whatever the root cause, is the very small gene-pool from which most commercial honeybees arise. This makes the entire industry extremely vulnerable, something highlighted by destruction called by the varroa[1] mite and several viruses[2].

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varroa> [2] <http://www.beeologics.com/iapv.asp></comment>


The 12 Most Retweeted Programming Quotes - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/statuscode/the-12-most-retweeted-programming-quotes-2b039c45ca39#.w6xevnvub <comment><USER2> "A good programmer is someone who looks both ways before crossing a one-way street." — Doug Linder

This one is so spot on in my view it made me giggle here. Gonna be using it. It's a very naive way to explain why we tend to become little control freaks, that like to find problems in everything.

It's very common to have to stop myself from arguing/questioning a lot about what people said, my brain just start searching problems while people are talking, sometimes it's really annoying.</comment>


Dear Mom and Dad ...  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.zachklein.com/post/1535065768/dear-mom-and-dad-i-know-you-have-hard-time

<comment><USER2> Just wanted to say that's an incredibly slick approach at a sales letter. Rather than directing the letter to the consumer it's directed to Mom & Dad, which creates an audience to whom the concept can be explained in a simple manner. There are all sorts of emotional responses to this approach too, which creates warm and fuzzy feelings toward Boxee.

Well played sir.

<comment><USER3> It would've been a lot better if he'd included even a single link.

Especially on this bit: "Tell them it's even available on Amazon!" That would be an ideal place to link to the product page and sell the thing.

<comment><USER4> [http://www.amazon.com/D-Link-DSM-380-Boxee-Box- by/dp/B0038JE...](http://www.amazon.com/D-Link-DSM-380-Boxee-Box- by/dp/B0038JE07O/ref=sr_1_12)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This actually left a bad taste in my mouth -- the "I should call more often" leading directly into press-release tone conveys anything but familial warmth and respect.

Is your audience geeks who don't call their mom? Then maybe it's OK. Is your audience moms? Then you might want to tweak it some more.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd suggest that the author browse some of the old Buffett letters, you can get some good tips on how to communicate complicated topics to ordinary people:

<http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html>

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice, but still waaay too technical for my mom and dad...

Dear Dad,

My customers are small business people (retailers, wholesales, doctors, lawyers, etc.) who own computers that have replaced their file cabinets and some of their clerical employees. Those computers came with lots of stuff in them but need more as their business changes or they discover stuff they forgot. I upgrade their computers with the stuff they need. We call that stuff "software". They pay me. Well enough for me to buy you dinner Sunday night and take you to the Steeler's game. What do you say?

Love, Eddie

Dear Mom,

I sit in an office writing all day long. I have a fridge and a microwave and occasionally go out to lunch with people down the hall. When it gets cold I wear the sweater you bought me last month. I love what I do. I write stuff, kinda like Stephen King or Danielle Steele, but business stuff, not fiction. My customers love what I write for them and they pay me well, so you never have to worry about me again. I showed Uncle Lenny what I was working on and he thought it was great. I'll pick you up for lunch and a trip to the mall at noon on Saturday. See you then.

Love, Eddie

<comment><USER8> This is usually attributed to Einstein (but I can't find a definitive reference): " _You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother_ ". Clearly he has a way to go still.

<comment><USER9> I think the quote is from Richard Feynman:

" _If you can't explain something to a first year student, then you haven't really understood it._ "

Although WikiQuotes says it's unsourced: <http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Richard_Feynman>

<comment><USER10> Whether he said it or not, he definitely practiced it. For many years, Feynman taught an informal seminar for freshmen at Caltech, called "Physics X", at which he offered to answer any physics questions the freshmen could come up with.

<comment><USER11> Not quite any physics questions. Feynman imposed a rule that he would "not take any question the answer to which did not match the impedance of your knowledge." So a freshman asking "What is quantum chromodynamics?" was gently nudged into a simpler answer that they might learn something from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I find it fairly sheisty that Boxee Box does not support Netflix. Or rather that they are ambiguous about its support on Boxee Box. It's displayed plain as day on the introductory video on boxee.tv. There's been a lot of "we can't say anything until launch day" kind of stuff. Well, it's launch day and as far as I know there's no Netflix on Boxee Box, so just say it. I came within an inch of buying this thing until I read the fine print and realized that Netflix is only available on PC and Mac versions of Boxee due to use of Silverlight.

Other than, great software. If it ran Netflix and Hulu+ on the Box, it would be a no brainer for purcahse. But as it is, without Netflix, I have to wonder if Apple TV2 is the right way to go, esp. at 50% the price.

At this point I just assume Hulu+ won't work on anything. It barely works on our iPad, and that's a supported platform.

Hopefully Roku will support Hulu+ before the end of the year.

<comment><USER12> Sorry if this post was overly negative. This is actually a really exciting time for cord cutters. I think we're finally at the threshold of being able to buy a black box that just works and gives me pretty much everything I would reasonably need on my TV without having to pay a $80/month life tax to Cox/Comcast/TW/etc. It's been a long time coming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Boxee is literally one of my most favourite startups - right up there with Dropbox etc. Boxee has changed how I consume and discover media. It is incredible.

</comment><comment><USER14> I know I've made this comment before; and I'm not trying to distract from what a great product Boxee is. However, without the major sports leagues taking back their streaming rights from cable providers and allow people to sign up directly, as much as I love this box, it sadly won't be able to replace cable TV. :(

<comment><USER15> Broadcast still works well for sports, as long as you're interested in your home team. It's what I use for NFL.

<comment><USER14> Sadly; I don't live in my home team's market anymore; so I'm stuck using 3rd party sources.

Actually, as far as the NFL goes, I really don't have a choice but to use pirated streams online. The building in which I live can't get DirecTV so I have literally no other option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "available to buy in over 30 countries" ... leads to ...

"The page you asked for does not exist You may have followed an out-dated link, or there may be an error in our service. We apologize for the inconvenience."

Whoops.

</comment><comment><USER17> It is unfortunate however that he indicates the problem is that most of the content he watches that isn't on user-generated sites is via Hulu or Netflix. As far as I know, Boxee currently does not support those two platforms. I'm not blaming boxxy as I'm sure there are complex legal/financial constraints at play, but imagine what a compelling product it would be with access to Netflix and Hulu content. Ideas like this should keep cable company CEOs awake at night.

<comment><USER18> Boxee has Hulu & Netflix, plus a ton of other sources featuring both user generated & professionally produced content.

My only gripe with Boxee is I find it to be very finicky (or at times completely broken) when it comes to playing content from any flash-based site on my Mac Mini.

<comment><USER19> I believe the box will only have Hulu Plus - not full Hulu. I'm not sure if they're still kind of back dooring Hulu in. But Hulu's corporate masters are generally trying to only allow Hulu plus on the big screen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've been a Boxee user for a long time, and I was SO excited about the Boxee box. I was about to click "Pre-order", and at the last second I thought "Wait, what's the size of the hard drive?.."

And that's all she wrote. I cannot believe they didn't put a hard drive in there. For me, that completely kills the purpose of this thing ...

<comment><USER21> I think the thinking here is that hard drives are cheap and ubiquitous.

I have a whole drawer full of old hard drives, and though most people don't, I'm sure a lot of boxee's eventual user base does.

Given the amount of streaming content available, I can see why they didn't include it, I think if you're likely to want to have a hard drive inside this thing, you're the kind of person who'll have very little trouble finding one and plugging it in. The less savvy users won't notice it isn't there.

I realize I'm setting up a straw man problem here: a problem that'll only exist for people with the solution already, but I simply don't see a strong case for needing a hard drive. Do you need it to store video locally? If so, then they could never have included enough space, if you're only storing a few things temporarily, they you're likely able to buy a small thumb drive & store things there. Are there other reasons to have a hard drive that I'm missing?

EDIT: never mind about the flash drive: there's an SD Card reader on the front of the thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think boxee may just the best solution out there right now - it seems they've hit a sweet spot between the cheap-but-simplistic appleTV and the expensive-and-ambitious-but-half-baked Google TV.

<comment><USER23> Don't discount Plex <http://plexapp.com/> and their deal with LG. I run it on my Mac Mini now, but you can expect some consumer devices with it pre- installed some time soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm lucky...my mom had to recuse herself from the committee where they decided on whether to buy the software my company makes (for obvious reasons).

</comment><comment><USER9> <http://www.boxee.tv>

Pretty slick website. The background video effect is pretty rad.

</comment><comment><USER25> Too bad the marketing department put it in a box that wont fit anywhere. Probably could mod it into a normal box though...</comment>


Startup Developers: Telling Schmucks from Superstars (5 min quiz) - <AUTHOR> http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/3504/Startup-Developers-Telling-Schmucks-from-Superstars-5-min-quiz.aspx <comment><USER2> See: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=98230>

Seems that there was a misspelling of "schmuck" in this previous URL, which lead to the system accept two submits of the same article...</comment>


A fake blog written by AI shot to the top of Hacker News - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/fake-ai-generated-gpt3-blog-hacker-news-2020-8 <comment><USER2> >megaserg 28 days ago [–]

>I think this was written by GPT-3.

It didn't fool everyone.</comment>


'Let Me Stress How Shocking NSA Revelations Are': View From Inside Defense World - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/10/let-me-stress-how-shocking-these-nsa-revelations-are-a-view-from-inside-the-defense-world/281052/

<comment><AUTHOR> "At the risk of Godwining the email, this is the essence of the 'banality of evil' in the precise Arendtian sense of the term."

"Those charged with assessing the risk we face are the same ones who will be blamed for underestimating it. They are also the ones who benefit by overstating the dangers."

"The national-security complex was charged after 9-11 with this credo: 'Never Again'. This is a mission so absolute that it permits no cost-benefit analysis of any kind."

"The surveillance-state apparatus creates a chilling effect on the very democratic activity that is prerequisite to its dismantling."</comment>


Ask HN - journaling software? - <AUTHOR>

Most creativity books suggest journaling - can anyone suggest a good journaling software?  I know, this could be done with notepad, but it would be nice if it could be a bit more than notepad. <comment><USER2> It depends on what you want to journal. I like OhLife (<http://ohlife.com/>). Evernote might also work for you. If you want to journal meetings you have, I'm working on a product for that (I'm not going to post a link here because it feels spammy, check my profile to find it).

</comment><comment><USER3> Why not something like Google+? It seems like it would be ideal.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you are on Mac you can try MacJournal. Is amazing.

However, lately I've been doing all my writing in Evernote.

</comment><comment><USER5> I like (<http://750words.com/>)

</comment><comment><USER6> evernote?</comment>


Ask HN: Is it legal to sell email list? - <AUTHOR> I am wondering, how do sites like builtwith, adapt.io,prospect.io sell email lists of a company? Doesn't it break GDPR rules? <comment><USER2> There are major differences in the ethical standards of people who sell mailing lists.

I've seen mailing lists that get crazy-high response rates (send 10,000 emails and a few hours later you have $6000 worth of orders for plants).

I have also seen mailing lists that have some addresses that don't even have an @ sign.

Empirically what will get you in trouble is having a list with a high bounce rate. Bounces are a better signal of a bad list because the rate of spam complaints is not very high (compared to the number of people who get spammed) -- many people don't unsubscribe or send complaints because they are afraid it will prove their email is valid and will get them more spam. Other people send spam complaints because they hate you for other reasons.

</comment><comment><USER3> IANAL, maybe it is legal even in the EU with GDPR but the buyers must get the consent of the data subject before using the addresses. Unfortunately they can't use the addresses to get consent because the data subject doesn't know about them so they shouldn't get the addresses to start with.

It's probably the seller that has to get the consent to transfer the address to that very buyer.

The idea is that the data are owned by the data subject and they lend them to companies. They can ask if they can sub lend to somebody else. It's not polite to lend a borrowed book without asking the owner, right?</comment>


Google Wins Freeze on U.S. Contract With Microsoft  - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-01-05/google-wins-freeze-on-u-s-contract-with-microsoft.html

<comment><USER2> It seems the point of this fight is bidding when the company/government is already biased towards a specific vendor.

I have seen too many software vendors beat out the competition on an objective technical scale that I have taken a part in evaluating only to have Oracle win the entire contract with a sub par product and watching management skew the numbers into Oracle's favor so that their bosses remain happy. They'll spend more money for a lesser product simply because that is the status quo.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does $560 per user for _email_ in 2011 strike anyone as borderline ridiculous (minus the borderline part)?

<comment><USER4> The contract is probably for 3 or 5 years, so the yearly cost is probably around $110 - $190 per user per year. $190 would probably be a bit on the high side, but it depends on the technical and security requirements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I just wish Google would have taken 508 compliance more seriously and thus gotten more government contracts in the past. They have only recently begin catching up to Microsoft on 508 compliance in their hosted e-mail solution. If they had done it sooner, more of the CSU system would be using Gmail instead of live@edu and OWA.

</comment><comment><USER6> As much as I like seeing MS getting shafted, Google was pitching _hosted_ email solution whereby they would run a "government only cloud". Telling them No was a very sensible thing to do. I'd rather have the government use an Exchange server than share its internal documents with Google. Apparently the govs are of a similar opinion which is quite telling.

<comment><USER7> Microsoft's solution was also cloud-hosted:

 _Microsoft, in an e-mailed statement, said Interior "determined that the dedicated, U.S.-based cloud solution offered by Microsoft met its minimum security and other requirements after a careful and thorough evaluation, and that Google's solution did not."_

<comment><USER8> I could be totally wrong but I think the issue was that Microsoft was willing to host it (the private cloud) on-premise whereas Google wanted it in their data centers.</comment></comment></comment>