A Forth Story... - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.forth/browse_thread/thread/4e15a2197c0aaafe/95c3f82d1c681296?#95c3f82d1c681296 <comment><USER2> Quite a story, and it seems it does not have a happy ending, but for all the wrong reasons.

About 2/3rds in (past the 'read more') the Novix rates a mention. I think that that is possibly the most underrated CPU design that ever saw the light of day, at the time it was so out of the ordinary that only very few people knew what to do with it.

A high level language (forth is by most definitions a high level language) directly executed by the CPU.

At the time I worked for a company called dadadata in the Netherlands, they were in the process of developing a bunch of real time software to process video images for classification and recognition (1988 or thereabouts). The Novix chip arrived and would have definitely blown the socks of anything that I could have done with a regular PC at the time, if not for one small problem: someone dropped a dime into the power supply and the whole development kit was toast. A couple of all nighters later we had a working reproduction of the code in 'C' and that was used for the customer demonstrations. Still, the power of that little chip is something I'll never forget and it is a pity that the Novix and its successor which iirc was called shboom never made real headway. The forth code for the novix was probably only about 10% or so in size of the equivalent C code. The head forth honcho there called C sneeringly a 'great' language.

There is still hope, even today that one day that power will finally be available in some package that sees wide distribution, the heritage of Novix lives on in the greenarrays line (which is now shipping dev boards and chips).

<http://www.greenarraychips.com/>

To kill forth and the concepts behind it permanently will take a lot of garlic and stakes, I think it will always have its champions.

<comment><USER3> I took a close look at Green Array recently and found a few blogs from engineerings who were beginning to play with them. At first they seemed too good to be true, but it appears that the architecture is only a good match for tasks that can easily be parallelized by hand. Computer vision would be one of those tasks, but then is rewriting CV code from scratch on a new architecture something you can viably do anymore?

Anyway, I hope these find a niche so that this kind of architecture might one day make a comeback. The advantages are staggering.

<comment><USER4> _the architecture is only a good match for tasks that can easily be parallelized by hand_

Could you expand on that?

<comment><USER5> It forces you to structure your application as tiny communicating processes which you route by hand. You're actually coding quite close to the hardware. When you want a process to communicate with another – correct me if I'm wrong somebody – you can only communicate processes that are physically adjacent on the chip and you actually write something like "the one to the left/right". Each process is very small and one of the blogs I looked at was very much about optimizing code-size to fit in such a small place. This results in a situation where if your problem does not easily map to this kind of architecture, then you have no other option.

But the same thing can be said of programming at a low level with a Von Neumann architecture. Such architectures are an exceptionally bad match for what the Green Array (dataflow) architecture is good for, namely highly concurrent applications involving processing flows of data such as sensor networks, computer vision, and all manner of routers.

The way that Von Neumann systems handle this problem is by having high-level programming languages (like C), which gives you some level of abstraction from the hardware so that you can model your program however you like and force it to map to the architecture, even if the problem intrinsically doesn't map well. This is why parallel programming is a hard problem. It's not actually a hard problem (well, it could be intrinsically harder), it's just a hard problem for architectures that are not designed for it. On a Green Arrays chip, parallelism is the most natural thing in the world.

Currently Green Arrays has no equivalent of C, and as I understand, this is unlikely to change as the philosophy of Forth is to stay close to the metal and make that an enjoyable experience. That's probably a good thing actually. it's more efficient to design problems to fit the hardware than to use one architecture for absolutely everything as we've been doing for the past 40 years or whatever (with notable exceptions like the Transputer, the Connection Machine, Xmos XCore chips and FPGA's to a certain extent).

<comment><USER6> Your description of inter-core communication in the GA144 is on the money. In addition to the challenge of mapping your problem to the grid, you have the interesting problem of _initializing_ all those cores with their programs, since it's only possible to do serial communication with a few cores on the edges of the chip. In one of his recent "fireside chats", Chuck discussed how he first fills the chip with a zigzag pattern of of programs that act as a pipeline and then pumps the desired binary along, replacing the scaffolding backwards toward the serial port he's using. It reminds me a bit of the design of biological systems- not only do you have to write a program, you have to make it self-assemble.

If anybody's interested in the GA144, GreenArrays recently put up a series of free self-paced courses about the architecture: <http://school.arrayforth.com/>

<comment><USER3> That sounds awesome – reminds me of cellular automata – but also, um, I just can't see Joe Engineer figuring that out. My first thought when I started researching Green Arrays was that this was an amazing idea that I would love to see take off, but their UX and marketing will really get in the way. Not like that have much competition though – the entire microcontroller world is hopelessly obscure with the exception of Arduino and all of the projects that it inspired.

<comment><USER6> Fortunately Chuck's already done the nasty parts and you can (presumably) leverage his upload code if you use GreenArrays' tools, but there's always the possibility that your code will require some very specific sequence of node initialization and you'll have to wade in and do it manually. I agree that this tech will probably never be mainstream. If I had an unlimited supply of free time I would be very tempted to develop some third-party devtools for GA chips- I enjoy programming in Forth and I could get used to the F18 instruction set, but using a custom keyboard layout and ditching my text editors and source control systems in favor of a block editor is pretty hard to swallow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I got one of the first Apple II computers (serial number 71) and after I wrote the silly little Chess program that Apple provided on a demo cassette tape, I was considering getting FIG Forth running on the Apple II.

One Saturday morning I was in the local Computer Land store in San Diego and was talking about my just beginning side project of porting Forth. One of the new sales guys got really pissed off and started ranting about why would I waste my time on that, lots of people were doing it, etc. The owners of the store Dan and Dave were friends and they glared at their sales guy, and the conversation turned to more pleasant topics.

I decided that afternoon that the obnoxious guy was perhaps right and started instead spending time with Bill Budge's cool 3D library for the Apple II.

A few months later someone came out with an inexpensive product that was Forth ported to the Apple II and I always wondered if the sales guy who got so mad that Saturday had any involvement with that product.

<comment><USER8> > A few months later

Unlikely. Porting Forth is not a few months long project ;-) Most of Forth is usually written in Forth anyway - all you have to do is to port some primitives and you're set.

In any case, I did a lot of interesting stuff with Paul Lutus' GraFORTH and TransFORTH. Much more mileage than I ever got out of Aztec C.

BTW, I probably shouldn't say that, but that chess program was most likely the one that came on the boot disk of my first Apple II clone (I live in Brazil and it was impossible - as in "a fellony" - to get a computer from abroad). Thanks for the many hours of challenging chess. I never had the patience to play against humans, however. Meat is too slow. ;-)

<comment><USER2> He didn't say it took that person a few months to do a port, he said that person launched their product a few months later.

<comment><USER9> I think he's saying it was unlikely that the sales guy was involved, given the time interval.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One of the problems with our field is the fixations that programmers, and organizations, develop with particular solutions. They form a really bad alliance with language/platform specialization that leads to a reinforcing spiral which shuts experienced, adaptable programmers out of the market. If Asia were not available to pick up the slack, the problem might be more noticeable.

<comment><USER11> In some alternate universe, the Forth/Forth++ programmers are sneering at the silly die-hard C programmers. :-)

Back in the time that most of the story takes place, there was not the glut of well-developed, thoroughly documented, cross-platorm tools with helpful user communities that we have today. Every machine had its own set of 2 or 3 first- class development development packages (i.e., pascal, cobol, basic, fortran: choose any two).

So when a small, elegant cross-platform development solution like Forth or C comes along, folks would get really excited about it. If you found something you could be productive with, and could take it from job to job, it was hard not to. It just didn't make sense to use the best tool for that particular machine when you knew there was a high probability that you might never use that vendor's hardware for any other project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Forth is the as simple as beautiful as Lisp and Smalltalk are. It's, in fact, vastly used... in the form of PostScript, which based on Forth. Back in the Apple ][ days, Forth became popular as GraFORTH. As a langue, today it has its limitations, but it's not impossible that Forth will have the Clojure that Lisp got and start its second life.

<comment><USER6> You might argue that Factor is "the new Forth".

<comment><USER12> You're right!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Forth's necessity of carrying the stack in short-term memory while coding and debugging has seemed to me its deepest flaw as a tool for mortals.

<comment><USER6> Honestly, maintaining the stack in your head is a skill that can be learned with practice. In my own experience, it was very hard at the beginning but over the course of a few weeks it became second nature. You get used to idiomatic ways of doing things- arranging expressions so that they don't become deep, factoring words apart as a means of reducing the number of elements you care about in a given context, when to use a variable or two to untangle a complex expression.

From the debugging side, well-factored code consists primarily of short pure functions with a very small number of code paths. This couldn't be a more perfect scenario for TDD. In my own projects I use an extremely simple unit testing system called the Test Anything Protocol (TAP). Here's an example of a fixture:

[https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Mako/blob/master/lib/Test/tes...](https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Mako/blob/master/lib/Test/testMath.fs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What happened to the first three?</comment>


How the sandwich consumed Britain - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/24/how-the-sandwich-consumed-britain <comment><USER2> As a Frenchman, I have to say it: I was in England two years ago, got those sandwiches around the cities I visited (London, Margate, Brighton) in bookshops, train stations, street vendors and to be honest, they're very good.

Usually heavy on the sauce and easy ingredients like bacon, eggs, mayonnaise, but still, props to the UK for producing quality sandwiches like that on a such a HUGE scale.

<comment><USER3> I had some very fresh and tasty sandwiches I cafes in Dublin Ireland.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a Brit now living in the US, I can't help but feel like the popularity of packaged sandwiches in the UK is largely driven by the fact that people in England are terrible at sandwiches.

A ham and cheese sandwich in the UK is usually a thin layer of ham, a thin layer of cheese, and some butter.

In the US, it's thick wodges of both, plus tomato and lettuce. It's just a more compelling option, and a small sad thing in a cardboard box pales in comparison.

<comment><USER5> I'm a Brit living in Canada and I concur, in general the British are _terrible_ at sandwiches. However, I would say that outside of Subway and arguably Mr. Sub, North Americans aren't a whole world better at making them.

I'm a firm believer that if you ain't putting any love into making the sandwich, it's not worth eating. The only exception where you need simple is butter and salt and vinegar crisps. Everything else requires lettuce, tomato and cucumber, salt and pepper and depending on the meat a proper condiment for that meat - Ham & Mustard; Turkey & Cranberry Sauce; Chicken & Mayonnaise; Beef & Horseradish Sauce.

<comment><USER6> Italian delis run by Italians often have very good and tasty sandwiches some are Americanized (pastrami on rye) but you find great Italian sausages and peppers, Italian meatballs, as well as traditional American Reuben sandwiches. But you gotta find the places that make their stuff in-house, rather than buy wholesale from some provisioner.

Razzano's in Glen Cove, is a good example, if you're on long island, NY. Molinari in SF is okay.

<comment><USER7> Bay Cities in Santa Monica and Gioia's in St. Louis are two of my favorite.

One thing I have found, and hadn't realized until I had left LA, is that the quality of the bread can really elevate the quality of a sandwich.

<comment><USER5> The quality of bread is _everything_. Portuguese buns are the best, put them in the oven to crisp them off at 350 for 10 minutes. You get the light fluffy inside and a nice crispy outside. One thing Americans aren't great at is your definition of "crusty" bread. Crusty is supposed to mean that when you bite into it, the outer crust crunches before you get to the soft fluffy bread inside. If it doesn't crunch like chips (crisps) crunch, it's not crusty, it's just _bread_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8>
        There is an art to the business of making sandwiches which it is given
        to few ever to find the time to explore in depth. It is a simple
        task, but the opportunities for satisfaction are many and profound.

Reading this in 1992 I was entertained by Douglas Adams's whimsical storytelling talent. But now with this bit of historical context I see there was also, as in many of his stories, a social commentary which had passed me by as an American.

Of course over here we have restaurants such as McDonald's and White Castle. Did those chains not have a presence in the UK in 1980? Or do other countries make a distinction between beef patties on a bun and sliced bread sandwiches?

<comment><USER9> We do make a distinction. While a burger is clearly meat between two bits of bread, it's not usually considered a sandwich.

McD's was certainly not widespread until later in the 80s, IIRC, and White Castle has never had a presence here AFAIK.

<comment><USER10> White Castle also isn't present across most of America either. Subway is the largest fast food chain in the world so it would be more interesting to hear what sort of presence they have.

<comment><USER11> Subway are everywhere in the UK. Having colonised most town centres they're now popping up in garage forcourts (service stations).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of my small pleasures in life is timing the daily visit to my local supermarket just when all the sandwhiches have been marked down from £3 to 75p to clear them.

You'd think you'd get tired of the "all day breakfast triple", but nope!

<comment><USER13> What time of day does that happen in your neck of the woods? Asking for a friend...

<comment><USER12> Typically around 14:30 onwards, essentially any sandwich that's gonna expire that day and didn't shift by 2:30 usually ends up discounted by then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One of the things I noticed moving to Canada was that every drug store (rough Boots equivalent) and grocery store did not have a vast selection of packaged sandwiches. Having lived off them for work lunches for years I was initially at a bit of a loss for what to eat.

I do sometimes wonder when visiting the UK what cultural difference accounts for the relative lack of popularity of such a wildly successful product in Britain here in Canada. Having not eaten bread for many years now though it's largely an academic question these days.

I never understood Subway here, just the smell walking past one on the street makes me feel slightly queasy.

<comment><USER15> When I first started traveling under my own steam around Europe, it took me a while to realise that sandwiches, which seem so obvious as to be universal, are such a British thing. Wandering around a foreign city, expecting to be able to just grab a sandwich from almost anywhere and continue sightseeing, only to discover that sandwiches (at that time) just didn't exist was a jarring experience.

<comment><USER16> Same here - I moved from Scotland to Finland and I still catch myself thinking "I'll pop into this corner shop for a sandwich".

Larger grocery stores do indeed sell sandwiches, but the selection is very small, and they're just not quite "right".

Fast food is easy, but sometimes you just want to sit down drink a decent cup of tea & have a sandwich..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Maybe it's my cultural heritage, but for me a sandwich - at least the one I eat on a regular basis - has to be made from fresh ingredients.

I am not talking about the taste: I am sure you can make anything asymptotically tasteful, but I do not want to eat a sandwich that resists unaltered for weeks.

<comment><USER18> With the volumes they are pushing, there is no chance that a sandwich has been on the shelf for weeks.

<comment><USER17> Maybe you are being ironic. My point was about chemicals.

<comment><USER12> I think most supermarket sandwiches are on the shelves for about 2 days max. On the second day if they've not sold then they cut the price drastically to sell them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love a good sandwich, but would hesitate to call any of the sandwiches from pre-packed places good. Or from Greggs or Pret for that matter.

And I do sometimes eat sandwiches for dinner - on fresh bread of my choosing, with piles of fillings I like, nothing pre-prepared comes close.

That's not to say I object to a packet of sandwiches ow and again, but it rapidly loses its charm if that's all there is near work. I am lucky enough to have street food markets nearby in my current role.

<comment><USER19> I love sandwiches and like the idea of packaged sandwiches, but unfortunately packaged sandwiches in the US tend to be soggy, and that ruins them for me. Usually the bread, but sometimes the meat and cheese is even wet and that makes me queasy.

I wonder if the Brit's have figured out something that the local marts in the US haven't?

<comment><USER9> Actually it's in the article - there are tomato varities used specifically because they leal less water, and the sandwich makers talk about "barriers" like butter and mayo to keep the bread from getting wet.

So short answer - yes, they have figured it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It might be unpopular opinion but I totally hate those prepacked triangle sandwitches. Mainly because bread is so bad. When I first time moved to Ireland I was astonished how much people eat them and consider them a regular lunch.

<comment><USER21> I've lived in London for a few years and recently went on a trip to Dublin. I found there to be more sandwich shops (and for some reason doughnut shops) there. While London has better food overall, there is no doubt that Dubliners know how to make better sandwiches. Even a dingy looking sandwich place near a bus stop made sandwiches that were a step above anything I have ever had in London.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Having recently been diagnosed with coeliac, one of the things I'm really missing is being able to grab a tasty sandwich for lunch. Sometimes there are gluten free alternatives, but generally the texture is terrible.

<comment><USER23> Amen, brother, sing it!

Therein lies the problem: the texture of GF breads at room temp. No matter the incantations, or the application of chemical ingredients, no one has conquered the problem of dry, crumbly GF bread. The only solution seems to be the application of heat, whether it be by oven or microwave.

Of course, asking your sandwich vendor to 'wave your sandwich for 45 seconds is to be met with a blank stare.

Oh, well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Whether the packaged sandwich industry is setting its sights on dinner, it has long since set its sights on _Christmas_ dinner. A work colleague this year inspired me to update one of my Frequently Given Answers, which I first put up ten years ago. The trend was already observable back then.

* [http://jdebp.eu./FGA/christmas-sandwich/](http://jdebp.eu./FGA/christmas-sandwich/)

<comment><USER13> Well, they're not going after Christmas Dinner.

It has been a tradition all my life, and in the lives of every Brit I know that on Boxing Day (which is what we call the day after Christmas Day for those of you who aren't British), the family will have sandwiches using leftovers from the Christmas Dinner.

This turkey, cranberry, pigs in blankets and vegetable concoction is a very, very fond memory from my childhood. I'm instantly transported back to a very happy time in my life whenever I eat it.

It's not surprising then that retailers have tried to mimic it in the month or two before Christmas, and that I will readily give them money for this brief glimpse of happiness in the middle of an otherwise miserable, boring or frustrating average working day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Having visited Britain, this was about the only food you could buy and consume that felt at least somewhat British.

The joke is that food in Britain is terrible, but I am at a loss to find any food that is British, other than Fish and Chips, breakfast and, well, the sandwich. On the other hand I can list many foods that are French, foods that are uniquely Danish, foods that are German (although I hope never again to have to eat saur-kraut).

<comment><USER5> We have a whole bunch, I won't cover Chicken Tikka Masala or Madras because it could be argued that we've really just appropriated them due to our love of Indian food - and they really are delicious.

\- Shepherd's Pie

\- Ploughmans Lunch

\- Roast lamb and Yorkshire Pudding

\- Toad in the Hole

\- Fish & Chips

\- Cornish Pasty

\- Pork Pies

\- Meat Pie

\- Beef Wellington

\- Spotted Dick

\- Treacle Pudding

\- Sticky Toffee Pudding

\- Christmas Pudding

\- Trifle

\- Scones

I'm sure there are stacks more, these are just the ones I can list without stopping to think.

<comment><USER13> You're forgetting all the offal based dishes (black pudding, white pudding, liver, etc.), the various ways we will repackage pork (scratchings, sausage rolls, etc.) and the regional specialities (black peas, jellied eels, etc.)

That's just for starters.

P.S. - it's Roast _Beef_ with Yorkshire Pudding. Roast Lamb is lovely with some mint sauce, and you can put a Yorkshire pudding next to it, sure, but most people would consider it more traditional to use beef.

<comment><USER5> Sure, whatever, I'll concede that :P However, we're not exactly renowned for our huge beef cow raising operations. In fact we were a laughing stock for quite a while because we couldn't eat beef on the bone because of the whole BSE thing. As a Brit in Canada, I'm still regularly reminded of this, despite it being sorted for almost 3 years - mostly as banter, but still.

<comment><USER13> The French nickname 'rosbif' for the English goes back to the Napoleonic wars thanks to our historic association with it.

According to the RSPCA, the number of beef breeding cows in the UK was around 1.6 million in 2013, which is one for every 17 households. I'd say that's pretty respectable, albeit about quarter the rate of the US.

<comment><USER26> We taught the French how to cook beef (OK sort of).

Originally, the French boiled their beef but during a siege of Paris by British troops, they noticed that our troops cooked theirs over the fire/griddle. The rest is history.

The word beef is derived from boeuf. Biftek is derived from beef steak. So you have a borrow word that has really done the rounds!

<comment><USER27> In most languages, the name of the meat is the same (or similar to) the animal it comes from.

In English, the name of the meat was derived from the French aristocrats who were running the country hundreds of years ago, and while peasants referred to animals by name, the aristocrats referred to the food by the name they knew it as - which is why in English we have two names for these things, but other languages generally only have one.

<comment><USER5> It's funny, since I turned to farming, I find myself referring to the meat I eat as the name of the animal rather than those you see on the packaging in the grocery store. It started off as humour and kind of stuck. Cowburger, pig chops... oddly I still call chicken and turkey the same thing :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interestingly, you still can't buy a pre-made sandwich from a supermarket in Australia. We have Subways and sandwiches at cafe's and corner stores, but actually barely any "ready to eat" meals at our supermarkets.

I wonder whether we have regulations in place that prevent this, just like we do with alcohol? Or is it that the Aussie market is different? Or is there an un-tapped market ready for the taking?

<comment><USER29> Insufficient population density, small market, high average distance to market, low "eat out" frequency (but increasing), short commercial hours, arguably higher freshness / quality standards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The way the company representitives talked about "breaking into dinner" was almost dystopic. How could you be proud to think of disrupting an evening meal with a convenience item for your own profit? It's a damning sign of the way the workforce is made to get by if a need for quick food manages to take over even the time away from the office.

<comment><USER31> No kidding, and I am surprised this is the only comment on here pointing this out. This article is really quite sad, except for the small historical tidbits.

It really reminded me of the sad state of affairs that capitalism has brought us to: we are all tugging at the cart in different directions, not really caring which direction it ends up going in. As long as it is _our_ direction – as long as it is us making the money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I lived in the UK for several years and lived on sandwiches for lunch at work, primarily from Pret a Manger (BLT and Thai Chicken mainly).

But I also visited particularly several times and as much as I enjoyed my lunch sandwiches the street vendor baguettes were in a whole different league.

<comment><USER33> Yes going to a Proper cafe run by what looks like extras from EastEnders is both cheaper and a better experience.

If you see Coppers (policemen) taking there lunch break there you know its going to be OK

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> 1\. I love 'shop bought' sandwiches.

2\. My wife used to work a night shift at a sandwich factory when she was a student.

</comment><comment><USER33> Probably also due to the reduction in staff canteens as Thatcherism over took the UK

</comment><comment><USER35> I like optimism in the article, but raise of sandwich is nothing to celebrate.

</comment><comment><USER36> We figured it out many decades earlier - we call our ubiquitous convenient sandwiches 'hamburgers'.</comment>


LastPass Account recovery broken for 2 days - <AUTHOR> https://lastpass.com/recover.php <comment><USER2> I'm unlikely to renew LastPass when it comes up, it seems there no security, devops, or even browser integration talent remaining, and it hasn't really progressed in years apart from a minor Vault UI overhaul and a price doubling. When I think back I heard about them from the shameless SecurityNow podcast around 2009 - this was before the terms paid "influencer" was a well known thing.

What are the decent 2018 alternatives that work on both Firefox and Chrome and work on the linux desktop (so 1password is out last time I looked), securely synced to the cloud (yes, I'll take that risk over Keepass) but also with offline support too, and maybe a android mobile app too?

Companies that don't update their status page is often straw that breaks the camel's back for me... #fail

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually tried 1Password recently. Their online offering is new. The browser addons had problems. I'm a Linux/Android user so that's an extra problem. I'm just looking something that works xplatform and potentially has family/team sharing.

I do like 1Password team/ui better and it's probably going to be a solid eventually, but couple month ago it was a bit too raw.

I've also found [https://bitwarden.com/](https://bitwarden.com/), but haven't checked it yet. It can be self-hosted, but it's C# which may or may not be your cup of tea.

There are also pass (the cli tool based on PGP) based browser extensions, maybe worth investigating that stack again.

<comment><USER2> 1password will probably a good candidate for me when they have a Firefox extension which seems dependent on webextension API supporting all they need and dropping chromium specific API. On watch list.

Nothing against C# as a lanaguage, especially if it's running on .Net Core and packaged nicely into a container, but self-hosting of a password manager isn't something I want to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> They acknowledged it on Twitter[1]. Status page[2] doesn't reflect that it's down, but this is serious degradation of service.

There is also a forum post[3] from couple days ago which means that it's hasn't been fixed for more than 2 days.

      - [1] https://twitter.com/LastPassHelp/status/973306914925924352
      - [2] https://status.lastpass.com/
      - [3] https://forums.lastpass.com/viewtopic.php?t=294555&p=983515

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been keeping a keepass on my Google drive (and locally) and is always in sync on all my computers. I've been trying to get my father off of the lastpass experience ever since I've noticed the degradation of service from LastPass, maybe today is the day I help him do it. It isn't hard.</comment>


Javascript Best Practices - <AUTHOR> http://www.javascripttoolbox.com/bestpractices/

<comment><USER2> > Use onclick In Anchors Instead Of javascript: Pseudo-Protocol

WHAT?

No, you do _NOT_ mix JavaScript into your HTML elements. Total disregard for separation of concerns, maintainability nightmares abound.

You put script, surprisingly, into the


The dark side of electronic waste recycling - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/4/20992240/e-waste-recycling-electronic-basel-convention-crime-total-reclaim-fraud <comment><USER2> Not defending Total Reclaim's misrepresentation BUT.... the market for many recyclable commodities is insufficient to justify processing expense in the US. Why? Two reasons. First, there's little manufacturing capacity remaining in North America to utilize many (not all) recyclable commodities. Second, subsidies and currency manipulation continue to dump virgin commodities and new products into the US. This is not a consumer demand problem. It is not a US regulatory problem. It's no longer the fault of US product designers. The decisions that drive this environmental and safety disaster are made in Shenzen and Beijing, period. The US cannot legislate how China manufactures its products, nor how they are recycled in China. US consumers and recyclers now have nowhere else to go for supply or end-of-life solutions. Those of us who have warned about this dystopian reality were laughed at, gaslighted and ignored for the past 20 years. It's going to get worse. Electronic waste today. Civil rights tomorrow. Don't believe me? Here's a couple youtube videos featuring real experts on the issue. The future is bleak.

Hudson Institute: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8UUKYf-7Ws](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8UUKYf-7Ws) Chris Balding: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1h9ciK7Yfk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1h9ciK7Yfk)

<comment><USER3> There's no for-profit motive to justify recycling of much, that's true. However, recycling can still work well if there's money built in to the price of items for recycling what they're made of.

In other words, a surcharge built into the cost of e.g. a flatscreen monitor for recycling is held in escrow during the device's lifetime. When it's end of life, the company that recycles it can claim that charge as part of its fee for ensuring the materials are not improperly disposed of.

This sort of system would also have the benefit of encouraging purchase of more recyclable items by making the less recyclable ones more expensive.

Of course, there are a thousand ways this system could be subverted... and the real problem in the US is a corrupt government that won't create laws to stop export of e-waste.

<comment><USER2> There is no way the CCP is going to legislate that into reality. There is no way the US Congress is going to further handicap American industry with what then amounts to another subsidy to China. It's not a solution. Nor is barring e-waste exports a solution. That material will end up in landfill. Terrible idea.

<comment><USER4> An extra fee on imported goods isn't a subsidy, it's a tarrif.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am convinced that most of the outsourcing from the developed world to the less developed world is done to arbitrage regulations in how workers are treated, how they are paid, or how toxic byproducts are handled.

</comment><comment><USER6> Back in 2009 my family member was a partial owner of an electronics recycling facility in northern California. I worked in warehouse at times and I can tell you from experience that everything was incinerated or recycled. They had huge deals at the time with Apple and Lucent. Part of the deal was that all the precious metals that were recovered were given back to the companies for manufacturing. Most surprising thing for me was that the cost of insurance was one of the most expensive things on the books because of the amount of precious metals they had on hand at any given time.

<comment><USER7> Also, the big manufacturers do NOT want you to re-use what they made.

They'd much prefer it all get melted down and make their new equipment inputs much cheaper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Total Reclaim grew into a fixture in the community, and in the process, > Puckett and Lorch grew close. Puckett says he took Lorch's advice on issues, > brought Total Reclaim into internal meetings, and if a reporter interested > in e-waste dropped in, he'd offer them Total Reclaim as an example of how to > do e-waste recycling the right way.

This sounds like an example of being a poor regulator and then being captured by it. A regulator or an entity holding businesses to account should have no involvement in promoting or marketing their industry's best/favoured product.

Pockett fucked up by trusting this business instead of bolstering the local regulatory framework. So he promoted a monopoly on ethical recycling with his 'friend''s firm instead of pushing to legislate. And then he acts upset because this business acted in favour of money and not his personal ethics.

Separation of Corp and State should be equally as vital and constitutional as separation of Church and State.

<comment><USER9> They're not a regulator, though. They're an advocacy group.

He "acts upset" because they committed _criminal fraud_ , not because they were just greedy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Shouldn't one of the solutions be for manufacturers to make the products easier to recycle to begin with and/or use safer materials in the construction? Even at a higher level I think it would help if we had e-products that end-users could repair easier. Apple touts how environmental they are but then make it nearly impossible to do something as simple as replace a battery in a Macbook for instance.

<comment><USER11> Its corporate green washing. Companies know that customers generally feel some amount of guilt over the products they purchase due to the environmental impact of them so they get the marketing teams to find some way to ease that guilt without actually doing much at all.

Recycling has mostly been a global scale PR move to make people think they can buy as much product as they want and its ok because it gets turned in to new products after. What most people don't understand is while many things _can_ be recycled, most things aren't. And most of the time recycling is actually downcycling. The product gets turned in to a lower form of material and after that its garbage.

Its also a method to turn the blame around. Environmental damage isn't the corporations fault. Its your fault for not recycling enough even though the recycling centers have just shipped it off to the 3rd world to be burned.

<comment><USER12> Producers and consumers are equal partners on pollution. If consumers don't want to buy polluting products they must stop, by self-control or by passing laws.

<comment><USER13> It would be a start if people had an easy way of comparing the pollution caused by each product when they're shopping. Like they can compare calories or fat in food, or the energy efficiency of light bulbs.

Of course, if such a system were in place, it wouldn't be a big leap from there to slapping extra tax on each item depending on the amount of pollution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can someone summarize what they did? Just when I think the article is going to tell me - it breaks into the life story of some guy from Seattle.

<comment><USER15> A well-thought-of Seattle recycling firm created a fake paper trail for toxic e-waste which covered up what they were really up to. 'Conspiracy to defraud'. They were caught by environmental activist surveillance. They got slap-on-the- wrist sentences (28 months, down from 20 years). They're still in business.

The video. (10 minutes). [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vufLW4xOsS4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vufLW4xOsS4)

The BasilActionNetwork's website, where you (and corporations, governments, and institutions) can track your IT disposals. [https://www.eartheye.org/](https://www.eartheye.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I can tell that even 10 years ago LCD panels were worth very little to recyclers. I used to be involved in part time electronic recycling.

How you could make millions in profit on 8 million lbs of LCD panels is mystifying to me.

</comment><comment><USER17> For a gritty SF version of Guiyu e-waste recycling, check out Waste Tide[1], plot is a little convoluted, but it's certainly got lots of atmosphere.

1: [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39863294-waste- tide](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39863294-waste-tide)

</comment><comment><USER18> PBS video buried in the article: [https://www.pbs.org/video/kcts-9-documentaries- circuit/](https://www.pbs.org/video/kcts-9-documentaries-circuit/)

This reminds me of one I saw quite some time ago: The Toxic E-Waste Trade Killing Pakistan's Poorest ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axYKPbr9_MA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axYKPbr9_MA))

IMO it would be nice to have better circumstances for more Dr. Frankensteins putting more working machines together from scrap. That means big-name equipment and semiconductor manufacturers need to be more open with their tech specs and datasheets and obsolete firmware _sources_ and so on, especially for parts and protocols that aren't even used in "current" machines-- instead of trade secrets in black boxes being the only reason working electronic bits are no longer usable.

Then we can give more "weak" frankenputers to more poor kids and more 3rd world countries, in theory.

edit: Last year I replaced an entire SMPS & CCFL backlight driver PCB from a TV that stopped turning on. I'm not terribly good at diagnosing SMPSs but I found a chip that was getting power and not giving power, so I looked around for a replacement-- and it's not available. Its design was found to be infringing on some other semiconductor giant's patent, so places like DigiKey and Mouser were not legally allowed to sell it any longer. But hey, I can get the whole board on eBay for <$50, so who cares? I care that there's this whole 99.5% perfectly functional board with a dozen now-useless FETs and some nice HV transformers-- and the final 0.5% was strictly a legal matter, an artificial obstacle. Well, presumably. I can't even find out for sure that I was correct to even want to replace it-- I can't even prove that replacing it doesn't help (OK, I _could have_ borrowed the good one from the working board, which I should not even have needed to buy, but I'd rather have it just keep working). All together, that is annoying.

<comment><USER19> Did you try TaoBao or AliExpress? Sometimes you can get ICs there which major western resellers don't carry for one reason or another, although it can be a bit closer to eBay than Digikey.

<comment><USER18> No, it never occurred to me, so I'll have to check. It'd be nice to resell a refurbished board to someone, someday... at least the connectors are all labeled, so testing it is still possible without the TV. Thanks for the tip.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The long term solution is using excess energy from renewables to incinerate, capture, and separate elemental components.

There is never going to be a way to make transistors repairable or separable.

</comment><comment><USER21> >Ideally, he explains, electronics could be easily broken apart and recycled.

this should be addressed with regulations. it is obvious regulating downstream is not effective

</comment><comment><USER22> related/recent article from the Times: The Price of Recycling Old Laptops: Toxic Fumes in Thailand's Lungs [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/world/asia/e-waste- thaila...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/world/asia/e-waste-thailand- southeast-asia.html)

</comment><comment><USER23> There is a lot more detail about this and its aftermath available from other sources. Google "total reclaim Seattle".

</comment><comment><USER15> "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."</comment>


Windows DRM Files Used to Decloak Tor Browser Users - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/windows-drm-files-used-to-decloak-tor-browser-users/ <comment><USER2> I only ever use Tor for security research and with the nature of my particular work, I don't have a reason to download files but...

If I did and I cared about anonymity I would never download a file unless all internet on my machine or VM was piped through Tor (such as using Whonix or some dedicated security appliance). If I was using the Tor browser I wouldn't even even turn on Javascript without those protections for that matter.

On the other side of the spectrum, running Tor on Windows is insane. Almost every flaw I have seen in Tor mostly or only effects Windows users.

</comment><comment><USER3> The list of file formats that can trigger the viewer to fetch a resource over the internet is so large that it's impossible to cover them all. Unless you're working with plain text or something you _know_ is safe, don't open files downloaded over Tor if you're running on a standard OS (and not, say, in a whonix workstation that's isolated from direct internet connections).

</comment><comment><USER4> Tor was developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory as a munition (that's the strong view of cryptography and developing munitions is what NRL does). There are a number of assumptions baked into it's design. Among them is hygiene appropriate when handling munitions in the external operating environment.

Viewed as a munition, the fact that Tor source code was opened up more than a decade ago but well into the post-Patriot act era suggests that its direct value as a munition had become less significant. However, since the release seems to have had the effect of retarding development of alternatives for some years, this might be seen as an indirect value of Tor as a munition.

Practically speaking, Tor on its own and absent an ecosystem of serious security hygiene, is likely to leak data to an attacker with targeted intelligence and barely non-trivial technical means. Because relatively few people have the will and the technical skill and the need to do all the other things that are required to use Tor in a secure manner.

Or to put it another way, in the context of the GWOT, it seems likely to me that Naval Research Labs only provided a free and unlimited crytpographic munition only because it could readily defeat its use by adversaries.

</comment><comment><USER5> What's the standard way to use Tor for people who are really diligent with their operational security?

Personally I haven't used Tor except for short casual testing. But if my personal security would depend on the anonymity provided by Tor, I think I'd seriously consider adding an additional layer of protection to avoid information leaking out "to the sides".

<comment><USER6> Use Tails or Whonix which prevents leaking data outside of the Tor network. Qubes OS makes Whonix easy/transparent (though I haven't had the pleasure of trying out Qubes yet).

Never access files downloaded over Tor outside of those environments, and _never_ mix identities: if you're going to be pseudononymous, don't access files downloaded under another pseudonym or visit websites you'd access (especially if logging in) under another. If you're going to be anonymous, don't save the data: let it be ephemeral, which is easy in the case of Tails, which is ephemeral by default.

Always use Tor Browser, not Tor over Foxyproxy in a vanilla Firefox or something. Don't rely on torify on your normal setup for complete anonymity, for reasons above.

But it depends on your threat model. I _do_ do both things in the previous paragraph for my day-to-day stuff where my threat model involves e.g. advertisers and other privacy-invading trackers, where I'm reading tech- related articles or downloading videos of talks, for example. But that involves a number of other addons as well (e.g. Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere, NoScript, uBlock Origin, self-destructing coookies, ...).

Edit: Forgot to mention: [https://www.whonix.org/wiki/DoNot](https://www.whonix.org/wiki/DoNot)

<comment><USER7> It's also a good idea to assume Tor is already pwned and to follow good opsec(burner devices, mac address cloaking, using open/pwned wifi APs, loading & running OS completely through ram, and use hard drive write blockers). True anonymity is tough nowadays.

<comment><USER6> Tails randomizes the MAC address by default, I believe.

(Edit: [https://tails.boum.org/contribute/design/MAC_address/](https://tails.boum.org/contribute/design/MAC_address/))

But yes, you need hardware you can trust. Burner won't be a bad idea if your life depends on your anonymity.

<comment><USER8> Out of curiosity: Why is this necessary? Being not exactly a network expert I would have assumed that leakage of the MAC address terminates at the next router or switch (which eg. would be my home router, if using TOR from home). Is the MAC address part of IP packets somehow?

<comment><USER9> It's not part of the IP packet, but in some previous cases exploits on Tor (such as the one the FBI used in the Freedom Hosting takedown) have explicitly queried the MAC address and then exfiltrated that information. I assume the intent was that they could then arrest the suspect and compare the captured MAC address to the physical machine to prove it was the same person.

<comment><USER10> In addition to providing confirmatory evidence, MACs are essentially serial numbers in a can. Every batch of chips sold can be traced to an OEM. If that was a laptop OEM then the manufacturer will know the serial number of the device with that MAC, and CPU ID etc. There is a good chance they can trace who initially purchased the laptop.

Also, if it is a WiFi MAC then your laptop is blasting that out constantly, and many services collect that info. Fortunately we are slowly seeing a move to randomisation of the MAC used when scanning. Unfortunately an active probe can pierce the veil by causing the true MAC to be used. Lots of venues (shopping malls) offer free Wifi because it causes the phone to reveal its true address when it connects, allowing tracking (lots of other entropy in Wifi apart from the MAC though).

There is no reason random MACs shouldn't be used for all transmissions in modern systems except for software inertia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not just windows DRM files. Specifying a special codec is enough to trigger an auto download attempt in certain players. You can even embed smil animations in quicktime files to trigger content downloads.

This is why the feds want to redistribute child porn for weeks at a time. They can't break tor to de-anonymize users. They need to distribute files with beacons in them for this plan to work. Never mind that the police have become the child porn traffickers.

[http://disinfo.com/2016/01/why-did-the-fbi-operate-a- child-p...](http://disinfo.com/2016/01/why-did-the-fbi-operate-a-child-porn- site/)

</comment><comment><USER12> While true this is like any other file type that connects back to the internet. It has nothing at all to do with DRM in particular.

For example you could download a HTML file over Tor, that file could have a <img /> tag in it which reveals your real IP when you open it in the non-Tor browser. Ditto with Office macros, any scripting language, Adobe Reader, etc. If you're going to just accept through warning dialogs then you're in trouble.

<comment><USER13> There are other ways of doing a similar attack which have been covered by HD Moore. We found this one interesting due to the minimal interaction required on Windows and the prevalence of media sharing on the darknet (for good or evil).

<comment><USER13> just to clarify, there are no warning messages doing this with signed WMV files. There is a single warning from Tor which you can selectively disable - and I am sure many users do. You open the file and the action is triggered, office documents now have protected mode which comes with alerting and I am sure that Adobe warns users in a similar fashion. Most users would not expect playing a movie file to perform this action hence why it has a use case here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> OFFTOPIC: Does anyone know the name of the song from that video? I searched for the title of what was playing, but only came up with some weird anime soundtracks for some reason.

<comment><USER15> Ask @hackerfantastic (Twitter). He made the video.

<comment><USER13> It is a copyright free video from bassrebels.

<comment><USER14> Couldn't find the exact video, but great music. I needed some background music like this to listen to at work.

Also, great work on finding the exploit in the video.

<comment><USER15> It's this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUKjM_3DHc8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUKjM_3DHc8)

<comment><USER14> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It would be interesting to see if this could be extended to images? Can't Windows DRM be used with certain image formats? It's just a thought.

</comment><comment><USER17> >such a niche attack

Niche indeed. The potential target group of users who think "just use Tor and you're safe" is vanishing rapidly.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is a TOR exploit in the same way that downloading a blob through TOR is a TOR exploit.

<comment><USER15> Nobody said it was a Tor exploit. It's just a deanonymization technique, which like most, rely on social engineering (convincing the user to push a "Save File" button).

<comment><USER19> Would simply saving it, without opening it, execute it?</comment></comment></comment>


FDA to crack down on use of the word "milk" - valiant-comma https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/07/an-almond-doesnt-lactate-fda-to-crack-down-on-use-of-the-word-milk/ <comment><AUTHOR> I want to see them bust "Muscle Milk", particularly when you can mix your own protein drink which is much better with protein powder and (real) milk.</comment>


Is WebP really better than JPEG? - <AUTHOR> https://siipo.la/blog/is-webp-really-better-than-jpeg <comment><USER2> Every time I run an image comparison, the webp version looks worse and yet Google insists it's the same quality. It's baffling.

Even if the above were just an individual... bafflement? and not an actual issue, the size savings really don't seem worth the compatibility hassle, the extra manpower/workflow complexity to support 2 formats, the additional storage (and caching) caused by this duplication.

And the above is if it's done RIGHT. 80% of people outside this forum won't understand that you're not supposed to convert from a lossy format to another, and just convert jpegs to webp.

Webp seems so pointless. A progressive jpeg with an optimized Huffman table can be understood by a 27 year old decoder without issues, achieves 90% of the quality/size claims of webp and can be produced losslessly from your source jpegs. This is without even touching Arithmetic Coding (also lossless, part of the official standard, but poorly supported due to some software patents, even though they all expired by now), or playing with customized DCT quantization matrices to get more compressible outputs (incurs a generation loss, but produces standard files).

<comment><USER3> I also don't get it why people insist on the same quality with lesser size. How about more quality and the same filesize?

<comment><USER4> > people insist on the same quality with lesser size.

Because a great proportion of people browsing the web have slow connections and/or data caps.

> How about more quality and the same filesize?

We're already able to get acceptable quality.

<comment><USER3> >Because a great proportion of people browsing the web have slow connections and/or data caps.

That doesn't matter one bit. See "webpages are doom".

>We're already able to get acceptable quality.

Apparently not when some examples are worse.

<comment><USER5> Maybe it's just me but I couldn't tell the difference between the comparison images in the article without zooming in a bunch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder, why nobody mentioned Patrice Bellard's BPG[1]. It is based on HEVC and can be supported in any browser via a Javascript. From his website:

      BPG (Better Portable Graphics) is a new image format. Its purpose is to replace the JPEG image format when
      quality or file size is an issue. Its main advantages are:

      * High compression ratio. Files are much smaller than JPEG for similar quality.
      * Supported by most Web browsers with a small Javascript decoder (gzipped size: 56 KB).
      * Based on a subset of the HEVC open video compression standard.
      * Supports the same chroma formats as JPEG (grayscale, YCbCr 4:2:0, 4:2:2, 4:4:4) to reduce the losses during the
      conversion. An alpha channel is supported. The RGB, YCgCo and CMYK color spaces are also supported.
      * Native support of 8 to 14 bits per channel for a higher dynamic range.
      * Lossless compression is supported.
      * Various metadata (such as EXIF, ICC profile, XMP) can be included.
      * Animation support.

[1] [https://bellard.org/bpg/](https://bellard.org/bpg/)

<comment><USER7> _can be supported in any browser via a Javascript_

I think you answered your own question right there.

I'm not going to use a dumptruck to bring a single sack of sand to my garden.

<comment><USER8> For an image gallery, the balance could be the opposite: a small (56k) download of a decoder allowing to show many large (a few megs each) pictures.

I wonder how good the performance of that decoder is, though; if the decoding delay is much longer that the network transfer delay, the approach becomes much less appealing.

<comment><USER9> It's also not common to need a ton of huge images all at once — in almost all applications you're either displaying thumbnails and JPEG is fine and will load faster thanks to the browser's preloader getting those requests in faster than the JavaScript can run or you're looking at something like pages where the latency is easily hidden by preloading.

That means that in most cases the main driver is lower network transfer and you need to be serving a LOT of images to outweigh the cost of having to support something new and complicated versus something as widely tested and supported as JPEG.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I just relaunched a website that makes extensive use of photographic collages that necessitate alpha backgrounds. They were previously shipping "retina- grade", multi-megabyte images all over, a typical page load could easily reach 25mb.

I managed to refit it with `<picture>` tags using WEBP as well as JP2. The latter was a great deal of trouble, it appears that "the community" (notably Gatsby and Contentful) are very happy to talk about the benefits of WebP but conveniently ignore that Safari is the most important mobile browser, and Safari desktop is not insignificant.

I bring this both to point out that there is a very valid reason to use WebP over JPEG — alpha blending — and that this entire field is still a gigantic mess.

<comment><USER11> Safari Mobile is a broken mess not worth supporting.

<comment><USER12> I think by the nature of being the second most used browser, it's worth supporting. You don't have to like supporting it however.

[https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php](https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php)

<comment><USER11> It's impossible to test for without buying expensive hardware, so I'll pass.

<comment><USER13> A used iPod Touch is $35, the same price as a Raspberry Pi.

Is a Raspberry Pi "expensive hardware"?

<comment><USER11> Right, I'll put "Designed for used iPod Touch" in the footer then.

<comment><USER14> If the browser is the same what difference would it make?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Unfortunately, targeting same SSIM makes this test basically bullshit. It would be far better to make images that are the same size, and then we can use both our eyes and various objective metrics to compare the images.

The reason for this is basically that most codecs do _not_ target SSIM internally. They're using their own algorithms to determine how to allocate bits, so two images with the same SSIM may look better or worse depending on what codec is used. Many modern codecs (e.g. from x264 onwards) _deliberately_ take approaches that lower the score of the result on objective metrics but usually look better to the human eye.

This exact issue was originally highlighted on the x264dev blog: "How to cheat on video encoder comparisons" #3: "Making invalid comparisons using objective metrics". [1]

If you really want to compare image codecs, I'd look at one of the many comparisons from this family on Github. [2]

In my judgment WebP is _clearly_ better than Mozjpeg for most images.

[1] [https://web.archive.org/web/20141103202912/https://x264dev.m...](https://web.archive.org/web/20141103202912/https://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/472)

[2] [https://wyohknott.github.io/image-formats- comparison/#abando...](https://wyohknott.github.io/image-formats- comparison/#abandonned-factory&webp=s&jpg=s)

<comment><USER16> This. JPEG has way too many artefacts on naturally smooth areas (like sky) to be ever considered a pinnacle of lossy image compression. WebP or not, but some adaptive technique must be the future, if there is any space for lossy compression in the future at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> In my opinion, the true contender to JPEG is JPEG XL. [1], where is has better quality than even AVIF at >0.5 bpp ( Bits per Pixel ) [2].

But the truly amazing next generation VVC manage to compress image with even better ratio than JPEG XL.

Both JPEG XL and VVC is expected to be finalised in July/Augest. JPEG XL will be royalty free. VVC as usual is lots of unknown.

[1][https://cloudinary.com/blog/how_jpeg_xl_compares_to_other_im...](https://cloudinary.com/blog/how_jpeg_xl_compares_to_other_image_codecs)

[2] [https://medium.com/@scopeburst/mozjpeg- comparison-44035c42ab...](https://medium.com/@scopeburst/mozjpeg- comparison-44035c42abe8)

<comment><USER18> VVC is definitely not going to be royalty free, and it's unlikely its intra coding will compete with JPEG XL for the same target (relatively high bitrate high quality images).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Some data from when we deployed WebP generation: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-very-webp-new-year-from- cloudf...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-very-webp-new-year-from-cloudflare/)

</comment><comment><USER20> JPEG XL is worth mentioning here. It includes a JPEG1 repacker (Brunsli) that saves about 20% and allows recovering the original file exactly. All that existing JPEG1 content isn't going anywhere, so that seems good. It has some other neat features like the ability to mix a DCT-based codec with lossless (modular) mode in an image. Its lossless/modular mode (successor to FLIF/FUIF) is interesting on its own.

It can be illuminating to stretch codecs a bit _past_ the visually- indistinguishable threshold, both to better nail down where that threshold is and to see how annoying the artifacts you end up with are. Lots of comparisons you can do; this is a fun one: [https://encode.su/threads/3108-Google-s- compression-proje%D1...](https://encode.su/threads/3108-Google-s-compression- proje%D1%81ts?p=64512)

At _very_ few bits-per-pixel like the first (bridge) image, everything has some artifacts. On that image AVIF tends to just blur lower contrast areas, whereas HEIC produces some visible ringing (faint lines that weren't there before) around the bridge. Unlike JXL, AVIF and HEIC both have spatial prediction (extend pixels above/to the left of this block in whatever direction), which is particularly helpful with straight sharp lines like the bridge image happens to have. I wouldn't put too much stock in results on that one image, but I do like being able to judge results subjectively.

(FWIW, a presentation on JPEG XL suggested they were targeting the equivalent of ~2bpp JPEG quality[0], so perhaps performance in this super-low range wasn't as much of a priority.)

Anyway, I hope both these formats get wide support, because they each have clear benefits in some application: JXL's include the upgrade path for JPEG1 content and the multiple modes, and AVIF may be able to salvage a bit more quality at super low bitrates. AV1 (on which AVIF is based) has wide industry backing, and the JPEG XL effort is also going for a royalty-free codec and has support from Google, so hopeful they actually will be usable relatively soon.

(Although HEIC's images are OK and it has Apple's support already, it's patent-encumbered, limiting what you or I can do with it.)

[0]: [https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings- of...](https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of- spie/11137/111370K/JPEG-XL-next-generation-image-compression-architecture-and- coding-tools/10.1117/12.2529237.full?SSO=1)

</comment><comment><USER21> > Note that Mozilla somewhat walked back from this and implemented WebP > support for Firefox in 2019

I wouldn't call the decision to support a format 6 years after first evaluating it a walk back, it's a concession that the format has been adopted by the industry. If the most popular browser supports WebP and sites are using it, it makes sense that you should support it.

<comment><USER22> WebP also supports animation, and is clearly more efficient than GIF.

<comment><USER21> What's the benefit of WebP over something like h264? Most sites today just convert uploaded GIFs to MP4 or GIFV.

<comment><USER23> Or just use .webm without audio.

<comment><USER24> Webm is a container, not a codec.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> My results with libvips have been way more encouraging than this post suggests with MozJPEG and the WebP reference encoder!

Here's a MEGA folder with my example files so you can compare for yourself. Sorry I know this host might be blocked in many places, but every image host I tried (imgur, postimg) recompressed my uploaded files negating the fairness of the test. If anyone has a suggestion for a better host I'm happy to re-upload.

[https://mega.nz/folder/JsUXWIqI#xYIohBdiVKrGYTi- BeENEA](https://mega.nz/folder/JsUXWIqI#xYIohBdiVKrGYTi-BeENEA)

e: another host: [http://www.filedropper.com/libvipswebpvsjpeg](http://www.filedropper.com/libvipswebpvsjpeg)

My random sample is a black-and-white JPEG photograph vs its WebP equivalent. The results are in line with my results for many other images of different types, like other black-and-white photos, color photos, clean computer graphics, screenshots of UIs and media/games, etc etc. The original image for this test can be found here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Hill_Road](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Hill_Road)

Both test images were output by libvips after loading the original JPEG. The libvips-generated JPEG is 1.22mb, smaller than the 1.26MB original, but the libvips-generated WebP is 944KB! I included two sceenshots of each libvips- generated version opened in a same-size window too, both much smaller than the full res. Tabbing between the two on my PC does not visibly change on screen at all.

I don't entirely enjoy WebP just because the software support is still spotty, but I haven't been able to argue with the compression benefits!

</comment><comment><USER26> Extremely subjective, personal data point: I've been running with an extension ([https://bandwidth-hero.com/](https://bandwidth-hero.com/)) that compresses all images (including jpeg) and renders them in webp.

I'm a typical social networks browser, so among the images I see a high majority of them don't need high quality. I'm running the extension with max compression but still keep colors: compression artifacts are clearly visible, but in my opinion they're not a problem. Looking at /r/all right now, there are 2 images that "deserve" to remain at the original resolution, the rest is typical pictures of text/memes that don't need all the bytes they currently have.

The result: overall I saved 80% of data, just with images.

In my case it's not so much a debate of JPEG vs WebP, but a debate of whether it's ok to keep images _on the web_ in their unoptimized form the way they are today, to which of course my answer is no. We don't need high quality images of a Facebook screenshot when compressing it to 20% of its original size can convey the same information with no subjective loss.

I do agree on the unwieldy nature of WebP though, it's still mostly a read- only format right now and turns the web into a consumption platform

<comment><USER27> How does an extension resize an image without downloading it? Can it selectively read bytes from the stream?

<comment><USER28> It uses a proxy server as said on the landing page. That said, the service is shut down apparently so you have to self-host your own proxy server. That's not too useful for me so I uninstalled the extension.

<comment><USER26> I self-host my own proxy server on my VPS, so I'm hoping said server is close enough to the origin to be useful in the overall reduction of transferred bytes

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm surprised this doesn't include Google Guetzli ([https://github.com/google/guetzli](https://github.com/google/guetzli)) in the comparison. In my experience trying to optimize product images for an eCommerce site, this provided the best compression. Yes, it's ridiculously slow, but for encode-once-transmit-often scenarios, it's perfectly usable.

<comment><USER30> Did anybody really find any reason to use that?

[https://www.pixelz.com/blog/guetzli-mozjpeg- comparison/](https://www.pixelz.com/blog/guetzli-mozjpeg-comparison/)

"MozJPEG files had fewer bytes 6 out of 8 times

MozJPEG and Guetzli were visually indistinguishable

MozJPEG encoded literally hundreds to a thousand times faster than Guetzli

MozJPEG supports progressive loading"

<comment><USER29> I am compressing 200x200px and 800x800px images. For those sizes, while the encoding speed is slow for real-time use cases, for product images it's completely irrelevant - anything under 1 minute/image gets a pass and lower, generally, isn't better (or worse). I'm looking at absolute image quality/byte and it's even more niche than that - it's bytes to pass a threshold of acceptable quality (85 on Guetzli IIRC). I don't care about very low or very high qualities.

In terms of absolute bytes to pass this threshold, Guetzli felt the best when I was doing the research (~ mid-2017). I don't have any hard data to back this though - I did the experiment with 5-6 different product images, drew the conclusion and started using Guetzli.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > I think Google's result of 25-34% smaller files is mostly caused by the fact > that they compared their WebP encoder to the JPEG reference implementation, > Independent JPEG Group's cjpeg, not Mozilla's improved MozJPEG

Well, MozJPEG didn't exist until four years after WebP, so I suspect that might explain why.

</comment><comment><USER32> One of the biggest barriers against adoption of these newer formats is the lack of pure java implementations for use server side.

The Java wrappers around a native binary are helpful, but for many projects not very useful and this hinders adoption.

[https://github.com/haraldk/TwelveMonkeys/issues?q=is%3Aissue...](https://github.com/haraldk/TwelveMonkeys/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22Sponsor+needed%22)

<comment><USER33> Using Java code for things that are this performance critical doesn't feel like a good idea. It will work of course, but it will probably GC a lot, and while modern JVMs do JIT, the code they generate can't be as optimal as something that has manual SIMD optimizations.

<comment><USER34> Using C code is how you get the next cloudbleed. I'm happy to pay a performance cost for the sake of memory safety.

<comment><USER35> Fix this easily by abstracting the manipulation of user uploaded files to chroot/serverless.

<comment><USER34> That doesn't fix the problem. The process can still fix any data that it has access to, which includes other users' confidential uploaded files.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Is there something wrong with the AVIF decoder's chroma upscaling? E.g. look at "Kodim 3", where the colored hats overlap each other. There's severe blocking, where I'd expect blurring instead. All the other formats blur, which is much less distracting.

<comment><USER37> I've noticed that too. I've been testing AVIF, and the reference encoder[0] defaults to 4:4:4 (no chroma downsampling) if you don't tell it otherwise. I tried 4:2:0 and it looked horrible, but the size hit for 4:4:4 wasn't bad and looked much better.

[0] [https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif](https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Subjectively, I'd say at those settings the WebP versions look slightly worse, though they don't suffer from the blocking artifacts native to JPEG.

For the images I serve on my sites, a few KB here and there aren't going to make a huge difference, and I'd rather avoid the hassle of serving content that isn't universally supported.

<comment><USER36> In most cases I prefer the WebP versions, but the JPEG formats handle chroma noticeably better. E.g. look at the purple band on the rightmost helmet in the 500 pixel version of Kodim 5. WebP reduces the saturation by excessive blurring. CJPEG handles this image best IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> So what's this AVIF format they mention that's actually better than both?

WebP did not take off.

But will AVIF be any better?

<comment><USER40> > So what's this AVIF format they mention that's actually better than both?

AVIF is an image format based on the intra-frame coding of AV1, as WebP is to VP8 and HEIF is to HEVC.

AV1 and HEIF are super recent though, the AVIF 1.0 spec was only released in early 2019. By comparison, WebP was initially released in 2019. So AVIF currently has very little support (it's behind flags in Firefox and that's it).

 _However_ all the big names are part of AOM, which oversees AV1 (and AVIF): [http://aomedia.org/membership/members/](http://aomedia.org/membership/members/)

So chances are pretty high it'll get widespread support, eventually.

There's one problem though: like WebP, AVIF just is not solving a big issue.

<comment><USER41> \- WebP was initially released in 2019

\+ WebP was initially released in 2010

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I really want a better alpha-mask standard to emerge. PNG24 is attractive, but huge. PNG8/GIF works well, but is pretty limited.

I don't think WebP is it, but we'll see what comes out of the scrum. I'll work with whatever that is, but I won't waste my time chasing will o' the wisp "standards."

<comment><USER43> It's still relatively huge, and not widely supported without a polyfill, but FLIF [0] is a pretty neat format that tends to be smaller than the equivalent PNG, and can be converted to a lossy image "on the fly", and also supports alpha transparency.

The polyfill is still kind of slow, at least compared to native PNG rendering on the browser, but it does work, and hopefully some day it can be integrated into the standard.

[0] [http://flif.info](http://flif.info)

<comment><USER44> >hopefully some day it can be integrated into the standard.

see jpeg-xl

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Does anyone know how these compare with the HEIC format that it seems my iPhone now uses by default? Is that non-mainstream, or otherwise not fit for comparison?

<comment><USER46> It's a proprietary patent-encumbered format which isn't really widely supported in the web browsers.

<comment> Y-bar Patent-encumbered? Yes.

> proprietary

No. It is an open standard (ISO/IEC 23008)

<comment><USER47> Being patent-encumbered kind of makes it moot on the web though, just like H.265 video.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> As someone who hosts images on their site, what is the best software (preferably open source) one can use to compress JPEG images imported from a digital camera? I would be glad to serve only JPEGs and dispense with WebP versions and simplify my site html.

A straightforward encoding of a JPEG into a WebP (using GIMP) does give me an almost 1/3rd reduction in file size, which is not insignificant.

<comment><USER49> Others have mentioned you're using 2 lossy formats. You would probably get a similar end file size with jpegoptim. Compile it with mozjpeg for even smaller sizes.

<comment><USER50> Not sure about his images, but WebP supports lossless compression. If they are coming from a camera, it seems reasonable that they might be lossless, depending on the camera settings.

[Update] Just noticed he's going JPEG->WebP so my comment makes no sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Improving image compression should really free up some space on my website so I can fit in a few more javascript frameworks.

</comment><comment><USER52> Obligatory mention of FLIF [0], FUIF [1], pik [2], and JPEG XL [3] as well as Jon Sneyers

FLIF & FUIF were created by Jon Sneyers - [http://sneyers.info/](http://sneyers.info/) and are lossless but progressive, generating better resulting images at every step of the image download and brilliant mobile support (your browser can just stop downloading the image once it reaches the quality sufficient for the viewport).

A new update on the JPEG XL is worth reading:

\--> [https://cloudinary.com/blog/how_jpeg_xl_compares_to_other_im...](https://cloudinary.com/blog/how_jpeg_xl_compares_to_other_image_codecs)

[0] [http://flif.info/](http://flif.info/) \-- superseded by FUIF

[1] [https://cloudinary.com/blog/fuif_new_legacy_friendly_image_f...](https://cloudinary.com/blog/fuif_new_legacy_friendly_image_file_format) \-- FLIF is lossless and amazing, in part absorbed by JPEG XL

[2] [https://github.com/google/pik](https://github.com/google/pik) \- from Google, got absorbed by JPEG XL

[3] [https://cloudinary.com/blog/how_jpeg_xl_compares_to_other_im...](https://cloudinary.com/blog/how_jpeg_xl_compares_to_other_image_codecs)

</comment><comment><USER53> Question for people more knowledgeable on the topic: is it reasonable to expect a future where audio, image and video are easy to work with and compression / decompression / encoding / decoding is done transparently by the hardware? Like, an OS read call giving you a standard plain format directly? I know PS5 is doing something like that for 3d assets, but I wonder how difficult it would be to do this and just spare the rest of humanity from having to suffer with formats for the rest of our lives. Or would there be too many cons?

<comment><USER54> It has been said PS5 uses Kraken. If its this [http://www.radgametools.com/oodlekraken.htm](http://www.radgametools.com/oodlekraken.htm) then nothing really changes. PS4 games use RAD Kraken today. Texture assets themselves have standardized long time ago, currently on the desktop we are at [http://www.reedbeta.com/blog/understanding-bcn-texture- compr...](http://www.reedbeta.com/blog/understanding-bcn-texture-compression- formats/) with history going all the way back to 1990 patents for Apple Video 'road pizza' codec, later ripped off by S3 and re-patented as S3TC texture compression in 1997.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Av1 images are way better, and you can already do them in Firefox with a video with 1 frame in it. It's a shame it hasn't been adopted as a singular format yet

<comment><USER44> >It's a shame it hasn't been adopted as a singular format yet

it has been. look up avif, you can already sorta try it out on firefox nighty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I make a lot of memes for Reddit with MS Paint. I tend to avoid WebP because of compatibility issues. Neither Reddit's native image host nor Imgur allows WebP files, and I save memes using images from multiple formats (e.g. a jpg, a png, and a WebP) in jpg or png to avoid that. When a WebP file is saved into jpg or png Paint gives an error message about how this will erase all transparency, but for my purposes that is not a problem.

<comment><USER57> I mean Photoshop doesn't even support it either so every encounter I have with this file format has been an exercise in frustration and honestly would have preferred it if it just went away and was replace with something companies are free to implement safely.

<comment><USER58> IIRC WebP is open-source and unencumbered by patents so there's no reason it couldn't be implemented. That said, it's not a good source format.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> In my experience, when building websites, webp has always been smaller thus far.

For anyone interested and building sites with Next.js, I've released a plugin for optimizing images and converting to webp with fallback to jpg/png: [https://github.com/humaans/next-img/](https://github.com/humaans/next-img/)

</comment><comment><USER60> ASK HN: Since this discussion has come up, I would like to ask HN if you are interested for an in-depth comparison on a production workload.

I run this [https://www.gumlet.com](https://www.gumlet.com) which serves more than 50M images per day. We can put entire study on different image formats if HN finds it helpful. Please let us know.

<comment><USER61> Yes, I'm personally quite interested. Although more for my own curiosity than any business use case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I've recently converted some images to WebP on my side project Portabella [1]. I did it to appease Googles page speed test for SEO. But I agree with other comments in this thread that it's annoying so I might switch them all to JPEG and be done with it.

[1] [https://portabella.io](https://portabella.io)

</comment><comment><USER63> What really sucks about all this is that they're actually ruining the credibility of lighthouse audits this way; what has been for years the best all-in-one automated performance+accessibility analysis tool for any web app/site and is now being used to promote some random new image format no one wants to care about.

You spend all this time improving your stack, reducing your app bundle size, convincing your company on the benefits of server side rendering, improving your devops, getting your manager to see these measurable benefits by running lighthouse audits themselves etc...

Then all of a sudden it turns out that the main tool you used for this has been turned into a.. a f __king ad platform.

I apoligise for this emotionally charged rant, but seriously though, is that how you plan on getting developers adopt your dubious new standard, by p*ssing them off?

</comment><comment><USER64> FWIW one of the reasons this has become relevant again is because the next version of Safari supports WebP. The article's discussion of AVIF is interesting but you're not going to be able to use it on the web any time soon.

I'd be curious to see a WebP vs PNG comparison, since (IIRC) it has a lossless mode too.

<comment><USER65> Lossless is pretty easy, there's no subjective qualities to compare, just file size.

WebP Lossless almost always results in a smaller file than PNG. I have seen exceptions to this, but they're sufficiently rare that it's not worth worrying about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> If you're writing an Electron app, using WebP/WebM is a Free space optimization, especially in lossless mode for GIFs or sprite maps. You can also make really beautiful, 60FPS animations with WebM that are as easy to use as GIF

</comment><comment><USER67> This is a weird comparison, while I get the comparison of non-transparent images jpeg or webp are probably fine.

However the main benefit of webp is alpha backgrounds or transparency. It can destroy PNG when it comes to compression and size.

<comment><USER68> I would say it really depends on the PNG compression library you are using. Tools like RIOT or Compressor.io can give you optimal results on PNG compression.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> > Only concern I have is the excessive blurring of low detail areas?

Couldn't the person who picks the compression ratio tell the encoder which part of the image is important? And even have it done automatically to some extent. If you are going to send a 5MB picture from a person at their birthday party, if feels worth it to spend a few more bits on that person than its surroundings.

Extrapolating to smartphone pictures where you generally select a focus area (and sometimes selectively blur the rest), they could use that information to keep more bits of information in this area.

</comment><comment><USER70> JPEG quality can probably be better (but slower) when using sophisticated decoder libraries. This way, a JPEG image with a WebP size may look with the same quality. But I didn't test.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22245788](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22245788)

Also, Google has a "brunsli" library, that can recompress JPEG to JPEG XL format without loss.

[https://google.github.io/brunsli/](https://google.github.io/brunsli/)

</comment><comment><USER71> The software versions are never mentioned and since the article says "cwebp only supports TGA input" I suspect that's a very old build of cwebp.

</comment><comment><USER72> Two major advantages: transparency and optional lossless. JPEG blocky artifacts are very hard to remove for high resolution images unless you hand tune them.

</comment><comment><USER73> An implicit assumption is that "smaller file size is better" and if this discussion were about audio would probably be mp3 vs ogg vorbis... but flac is the BEST to em because I want all of the audio data in the best lossless compression scheme. As a photographer, I would like to have ALL of my image data in a losslessly compressed format as well. What is the FLAC equivalent in the photo/image space?

<comment><USER74> TIFF, I believe? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIFF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIFF)

<comment><USER75> There are lossless versions of PNG, BPF and there is also a lossless JPEG enhancement.

<comment><USER76> PNG is always a lossless format. You can only control the level of compression.

There are tools that let you re-encode a PNG after applying a lossy filter, but the PNG still encodes it losslessly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Regardless of whether it is better, I sure wish Macs would support them natively, such as in Preview and Finder. Really annoying that if you save an image from the web they aren't as usable as pngs and jpegs. Now, I typically save it locally, see it's a webP, then go back and screenshot it so it is a PNG. (and then find it on my desktop, rename it, move it where I want it to be, etc)

</comment><comment><USER78> You can make a lossless webp from a png. I use this on my site, and it consistently results in smaller images than what I get from png.

</comment><comment><USER79> Another reason to prefer MozJPEG to webp is that Safari and Edge don't support webp yet. [1] Although it looks like that's changing very soon for Safari.

1: [https://caniuse.com/#feat=webp](https://caniuse.com/#feat=webp)

</comment><comment><USER80> As an observer of video codec development, I heard Daala (PVQ) used activity masking to make quantization steps finer (don't discard all detail) in low- contrast areas. I don't know if that's practical in AV1 (a DCT block-based codec).

</comment><comment><USER81> These numbers need decompression computational complexity for completeness. I am not better off if I save 1ms downloading, but it takes 5-10 more ms decoding. Bandwidths in the 100s Mbps are common now..

<comment><USER82> Not for me. I'm in the United States in an urban area and mobile data is 1 cent per megabyte (my provider is Google Fi). Decoding is nearly pretty fast for me, but the time for page elements to download is in the _seconds_ (not even milliseconds). And if there's any low signal (wifi or mobile data), then over 10 seconds is not uncommon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Does anyone have insight as to whether this same evaluation re:AVIF applies to WebM?

Edit: saw somewhere that it is used in production for real-time video, but had trouble using rav1e as opposed to libvpx

<comment><USER9> Yes: Google heavily promoted their format but unless you're serving a high volume of traffic it's not worth the cost of doubling your storage and maintaining a separate toolchain to lower your transfer by perhaps 10%. By now more devices have hardware support so its performance is more competitive but at this point I'd go straight to AV1.

<comment><USER83> Perhaps should clarify. Much of the reaction appears to be to Safari support for WebP. Those reacting believe that WebP will stick around even though used VP8 (Could have just hurdled straight to AV1). So curious to ask if those same people reacting think WebM will also stick around longer. It's a bit different since WebM uses VP9, but, there perhaps there are still potential issues, and personally not know about browser landscape/hardware support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> It's all about Google wanting control. Their own file formats, their own protocols, AMP, not showing URLs in Chrome. The goal is to turn the web into a closed Google ecosystem.

<comment><USER85> How does a royalty-free codec with an open source implementation turn the web into a closed ecosystem?

Not that I trust Google, but in this case I don't see the harm.

<comment><USER84> _How does a royalty-free codec with an open source implementation turn the web into a closed ecosystem?_

Google did it with Android. It's "open source", but try to do something without Google Play Services.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> I'm more interested in hearing about support for AV1.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1)

<comment><USER40> AVIF is in the comparison, and the article notes it's in Firefox (behind a flag) and ought be coming to Chrome soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> Of course. JPEG doesn't support transparency and animation.

</comment><comment><USER88> Summary: - No. It's roughly the same.

Mandatory Google bash comment: - It's mainly another wheel reinvention from Google, because reasons.

<comment><USER7> _Mandatory Google bash comment: - It 's mainly another wheel reinvention from Google, because reasons._

Pithy comment, and reaction, aside, that's enough to give me pause about implementing it.

<comment><USER88> *pity

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> We have too many different formats! Let's make a new standard!

 _2 years later_

We have too many different formats! Let's make a new standard!

 _shrug_

</comment><comment><USER90> I can't wait for AV1 and AVIF to take over the world. We've needed better formats for awhile now.

</comment><comment><USER91> Does anyone know of a comparison that looks at the encoding and decoding times / cpu requirements?

</comment><comment><USER92> We use WebP for a number of reasons:

\- supports lossless

\- supports alpha

\- excellent decode speed

\- open business friendly license

In essence, it eliminates PNG.

</comment><comment><USER93> I'm using Firefox and just tried to save a webp image and it tried to save as a web page. [initially, I said no.. see edit below]

Edit: Looks like it was that specific website and they are doing something odd, so I retract my initial judgement.

<comment><USER94> Is that server sending the image with the correct mimetype?

<comment><USER93> Good point! I just went back and checked that specific site, and they are definitely doing something odd. I retract my previous judgement

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> tl;dr: it's not.

And it's also a very annoying to deal with them, I might add, especially when you need to save them or to work with them, as they are not natively supported by macOS or win.

</comment><comment><USER96> bad enough that google are pushing AMP, let alone trying to take over the webs image formats as well. No more Google!

</comment><comment><USER97> chrome keeps changing downloaded images to webP which is annoyin af. can't even find a way to disable it

<comment><USER98> It's not and you can't. The website is service up the images as webP. Chrome is just giving you what the website gives you, there's nothing to "disable".

<comment><USER99> There's an extension you can use to save it as a different format, but it's transcoding.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-image-as- type...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-image-as- type/gabfmnliflodkdafenbcpjdlppllnemd)

In theory, you could probably do some combination of altering the user agent, and/or blocking .onload for webp images (which is often used to detect webp support).

If you changed both, most sites would probably serve you a jpg/png version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> WebP would never have been adopted and nobody would care about it if it wasn't developed by the owner of the world's largest browser and the world's largest website (which ranks everyone else based in part on what formats and conventions they use), who has the ability to implement it on both sides, and force everyone to care.

WebP is a blatant example of how monopoly power is used to push bad things upon everyone else, and as seen here, for literally no good technical reason.</comment>


State's predicament in Flint is how to dispose of 76,000 bottles of water - <AUTHOR> https://www.mlive.com/news/flint/2020/03/states-predicament-in-flint-is-how-to-dispose-of-76000-bottles-of-water.html <comment><USER2> Send them to the people hit by the tornadoes in Tenseness.</comment>


A new class of attack via LinkedIn Skills - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/rjurney/status/567455739245895681

<comment><USER2> Sorry to be that guy, ([http://xkcd.com/1053/](http://xkcd.com/1053/) and all), but this isn't new. It was discovered soon after the skills feature came out.

Here's a buzzfeed article from 2013:[http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/heres-how-to- endorsmen...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/heres-how-to-endorsment- bomb-your-friends-on-linkedin)

Congrats on your independent discovery though :-)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I did it all for the lulz.</comment>