Why This Tech Bubble is Worse Than the Tech Bubble of 2000 - <AUTHOR> http://blogmaverick.com/2015/03/04/why-this-tech-bubble-is-worse-than-the-tech-bubble-of-2000/ <comment><USER2> So Cuban started (what became) Broadcast.com, ramped it up to $13.5 Million revenue per quarter [1], and sold it to Yahoo for $5.7 billion (in stock, but we'll disregard that fact for now). On track to do $54 million in a year, means he sold for 1,000x one year's revenue.

15 years later, Facebook brings in $3.2 Billion in revenue and has a market cap of ~$41 Billion, or about 12.8 times one year's revenue. [2]

And we won't mention Google, despite the fact that they're the most obvious tech company to compare the likes of AOL to, because they make more money than God, and it would harm the argument. Uber, Twitter, etc. may be overvalued, but they bring in cold hard cash, and they're barely getting started.

Things are frothy right now, for sure; there are some really high rounds being raised that are justified by portfolio theory, and some no-product seed rounds at really high valuations. There will be some major catastrophes, and people will lose a lot of money.

But I have no idea how Cuban could possibly make the argument that _it 's worse than 1999_.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Cuban#Business_career](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Cuban#Business_career) [2] [http://ycharts.com/companies/FB/market_cap](http://ycharts.com/companies/FB/market_cap)

<comment><USER3> He isn't arguing firms are overvalued by a greater degree now relative to 1999. He's arguing that investments in private firms, which are far more popular now, are worse for small players due to their lack of liquidity.

If things start going south in a private investment, a share holder may not be able to exit even at a large loss.

<comment><USER4> If things start going south in a public investment, a shareholder may not be able to exit that, either. The truth is, it's all about liquidity, and liquidity dries-up on the way down.

<comment><USER3> Sure they can except in the most extreme corner cases. You an contrive situations in which it's difficult to sell stock on the NYSE or NASDAQ, but it's basically always quick and easy (e.g., you can move $100K of FB stock in seconds using your phone during just about any market hour and often even outside of them). That is definitely not true of private markets, at least at the moment.

<comment><USER4> Next time the market is in melt-down mode -- like it was just beginning to be last October -- watch how wide the spread gets. Sure, if you're somebody willing to take any price in a fire sale you can get out of anything.

<comment><USER3> I'd consider that a corner case. And even then, it is possible to get something out. With private investments, that just may not be true or involves high ad hoc transaction costs.

My original reply was intended to point out that what was the top article comment at the time _completely_ missed the point. Cuban is arguing that severe liquidity restraints are bad, especially so for small time investors. For scenarios like you describe, public exchanges aren't perfect either, but they are very, very good at facilitating near-instantaneous liquidity and they strictly dominate the current set of private crowd funding vehicles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think Cuban is wrong. It's WORSE when ordinary investors are risking their money. Today, you've got angels and VCs that have risked their money. And this is money they don't need. Big deal if everything implodes, what do they lose? Simply their bets. Back in 2000s, a lot of ordinary people lost money they couldn't afford to lose.

<comment><USER6> VC's are not risking their money they are risking yours. VC's get money from your insurer, pension provider, 401K and similar saving options. While you might invest and gamble with your own money, VC's are literally gambling with everyone's future. And these days the regulations limiting insurance companies and private pension providers in investing their money in a VC or other types of risky capital are looser than ever.

While I won't to pretend to understand the details behind the article, but just looking at the many "startups" without a clear business plan, revenue stream not to mention profits which are valued in billions of dollars all of a sudden should make everyone's eyebrows rise if just a little.

10-15 years ago if you made an exit in 100's of millions it would be a worldwide sensation, these days it seems you sneeze and get 100M in funding and the WSJ posts an article about your company being valued higher than the GDP of some developing nations.

I remember when in the mid 90's Checkpoint got like 70M $ in it's NASDAQ IPO which was then a sensation which was talked about for year, these days that's considered a cold round 2 funding run for the next sexting app. Even with "inflation" and all that other nonsense the fact that since 2006-2007 you could probably count at least 40 US techstartups which got valued for over 1bln should hint a that something stinks.

Heck evernote which their current business model seems to be more focused around selling 70$ socks and 200$ messenger bags instead of you know their own actual techonlogy is valued these days at what 4-5bln, really? A company with 18M in yearly revenues after almost 8 years with no real assets to speak off, with a user base smaller than even marginally popular online games with almost no profit that hasn't even returned it's initial investment runs is valued at 300 times their pre-tax income?

<comment><USER5> Pension funds and similar investment vehicles put a tiny percentage of their money into VC funds. Those losses shouldn't affect the individuals much.

<comment><USER6> [http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-09-23/are- public-p...](http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-09-23/are-public- pensions-inflating-a-venture-capital-bubble)

Insurance companies and pension funds make up 50% and upwards of an average VC. The rest of the money also comes from sources which directly affect you such as local government, banks, and other "public" institutions. "Rich individuals" on the other hand do make up only a fraction of the VC source funding with less than 2% on average.

And while it's true that it doesn't represent the portion of the money a pension fund has invested in a specific VC. If you look at the breakout of your pension fund you'll find just how ridiculously high that percentage actually is. And BTW an insurance company or a pension fund that gets hit with even 5-10% loss means that tons of people lose coverage, premiums sky rocket and you end up losing more money that you could invest yourself otherwise.

<comment><USER7> CalPERs only allocates ~1% to VC (still billions). VC is actually a pretty soft risk in the big picture of their private allocations:

[https://www.calpers.ca.gov/eip- docs/investments/policies/inv...](https://www.calpers.ca.gov/eip- docs/investments/policies/inv-asset-classes/pe/pe-prog.pdf)

<comment><USER6> It's their target not sure if those are actually the figures because in 2014 they were to scale from 7 to 1% in 5 years. There's info on that in the article. It was also not because of risk but because of low returns.

Besides public funds you also have corporate and private funds which also risk a huge portion of their money in risky capital not only VC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "All those widows and orphans"

Spare me. What are the numbers on those widows and orphans? Because the thing is, tech investment right now is driven by investors and funds—entities that by definition should be able to handle their losses. Entities that by definition are more educated about the downside risk than the tons of John Q Public idiots that were day trading Internet stocks back in 2000.

Maybe the numbers support what he's saying. If they do, I'd love to see them. _shrug_

<comment><USER9> You are absolutely right. I don't know what widows and orphans he is talking about, but it is very unlikely that anyone of the people pushing hundreds of millions of dollars into start-ups today has any problem affording repairs on their cars.

He is making up a victim here.

<comment><USER10> ...

it's an expression, not a literal statement.

<comment><USER9> Yes, it is an expression usually used to refer to relatively poor innocent people. This does not apply here, poor people are not getting into the private funding rounds of top tier start-ups. So even if you use the expression figuratively, he is still making up a victim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The current heat in the startup market is largely due to the Fed pumping money into the economy by setting interest rates so low that large institutions can borrow nearly for free.

While most of that money is going into less risky things like firms who are expanding rather than contracting thanks to the supply of capital, lax regulatory landscape, etc.

The extra employment and associated consumer spending, along with the optimism obtained from a large number of people feeling like "owners" thanks to crowdfunding programs, helps create a culture of ideas and optimism.

And of course if you're rich enough you want to have some money in some highly leveraged, risky bets, and so VCs and LPs are refining that market substantially, helping money flow into it efficiently. Mattermark is an example of serious analytics to help with deal flow that is growing in number of deals far out of proportion to the total dollar amount.

Similarly, "financification" is happening in areas of real estate that have previously been slower markets driven by insider knowledge and minimal transparency.

Financification is actually the broader trend. Companies like Mattermark realize that and are applying it to what they know (startups) but it's also being done at Farmlogs, Reonomy, and many, many others.

Such businesses are pro-cyclical in that they lose value if deal flow slows, not to mention the inevitable liquidity assumptions that underly all such predictive analytics.

I think that the financial instruments needed to truly make these things work medium term are obscure or even banned, so it will be interesting to see how that plays out.

</comment><comment><USER12> Over the last three years Cuban has consistently, publicly said he doesn't see a bubble.

Now he's seeing one derived from crowd funding? I'm not sure whether to think he's on to something, or whether he dislikes the idea of having vastly more competition for the sort of angel deals he frequently does. These new crowd funding sites are pushing up his cost to get into early rounds on good companies. There's no chance he likes seeing his entry fee substantially pushed upwards (lowering his returns); he has frequently pointed out how much he dislikes Silicon Valley's expensive early valuations and has proclaimed he views that as an isolated bubble.

<comment><USER13> That confused me too. Almost as confusing as wealthy people complaining that seed rounds are "ridiculously overpriced". I share his concerns about "Crowd Funded Equity" because I think it creates an opportunity for fraud which are infeasible to preemptively defend against.

<comment><USER14> > I share his concerns about "Crowd Funded Equity" because I think it creates > an opportunity for fraud which are infeasible to preemptively defend > against.

Like penny stocks?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is why most angels have to be accredited investors, meaning that they need to have $1MM in assets. Millionaires investing in new ideas aren't exactly naive widows and orphans (though they could be). With public stocks there is indeed high liquidity, but there was also strikingly high volatility during the tech bubble. It's good to be able to sell your shares, but less so if the price can drop 80% in a day. That's when the common person gets hurt and the effects of a bubble are felt by the general public.

Accreditation rules can seem unfair, but this scenario is exactly what they're designed to prevent. Crowdfunding is a whole different issue. Most crowdfunding campaigns trade products for money, not equity for money. Kickstarter campaigns tend to go bust frequently, but people don't invest their life savings in a crowdfunded project hoping to strike it rich. People with disposable income investing hundreds or thousand of dollars in an idea isn't a sign of a bubble. It might turn out to have deleterious long term effects, but, we'll see.

Maybe I'm not understanding what Cuban is saying here, but it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

<comment><USER16> accredited investors?

Who accredits investors?

Is there legal status for this?

<comment><USER12> Yes. It varies by country of course.

"In the United States, for an individual to be considered an accredited investor, they must have a net worth of at least one million US dollars, not including the value of their primary residence or have income at least $200,000 each year for the last two years (or $300,000 together with their spouse if married) and have the expectation to make the same amount this year.""

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor#United_Stat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor#United_States)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Broadcast.com, AOL, Netscape, etc. Today its, Uber, Twitter, Facebook

Even mentioning his company in the same breath as Uber, Twitter and Facebook shows how out of touch he is IMO. Broadcast.com was hardly a business! Those companies have BILLIONS of dollars of real revenue.

<comment><USER17> I'd never heard of Broadcast.com before this post. Checking [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast.com](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast.com), I see that "In April 1999, Yahoo! acquired the company for $5.7 billion (or over $10,000 per user) in stock and renamed it Yahoo! Broadcast Solutions. The company had 570,000 users. "

I"m comfortable calling that a Bubble.

<comment><USER18> My God I feel old.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I get a sour taste in my mouth every time I hear wealthy people "looking out for" the small-time investor who may end up needing the money to fix their car after they've invested it.

I would take a poor, but well-educated and well-informed investor in a transparent marketplace light years before I would blindly accept an arbitrary rule that states you can't invest your money where you want to just because you don't have enough.

</comment><comment><USER3> This isn't an indictment of valuations being necessarily inflated more than they were in 1999. He's critiquing a new preference for private investments which are very, very difficult to liquidate. That lack of liquidity, combined with easier access to investments via crowd funding has the potential to crash very similarly to mortgage backed securities.

It's easy to get in and impossible to get out. If things start falling, investors are locked in for the whole ride down. That structure combined with a heady appetite for putting it in the first place primes the pump for a painful crash.

[edit for question] He implies the SEC is restricting mechanisms for adding liquidity to private/crowd funded investments. Any idea if he has a specific proposal in mind?

</comment><comment><USER20> So the argument here is that the SEC should lessen investment restrictions so that VC's can pawn off their junk stock to the unsuspecting John Q. Public as soon as they see (and hopefully for them right before) the bubble pops?

<comment><USER21> That's what's really going on, it's a great way to make some quick money. But if you were to ask the standard free-market ideology side of it can always be mustered - "we're just trying to get the pesky and inefficient government out of markets so they can 'function better'", despite the efficacy such claims proving incredibly dubious over the last few decades and even more doubtful when empirically tested [1].

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Misbehavior-Markets-Financial- Turb...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Misbehavior-Markets-Financial- Turbulence/dp/0465043577)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Some investors spin doom and gloom as an excuse to lowball entrepreneurs they're offering to invest in.

Shark Tank is a pretty good example of this, even if Cuban's not the worst offender on there.

<comment><USER23> That show drives me nuts. They take WAY too much equity unless they are doing heavy lifting (that is to say, as much as the extant founders.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Cuban's weirdly wrong in several ways in his post.

2014 was the second biggest year in the history of the US stock market. More than 275 companies went public to raise more than $85B. In 2000, 406 companies raised about $96 billion. So sure, last year, there were fewer IPOs and they were on average larger than 2014. But this is not a sign of over-regulation.

Heavy SEC regulations did not crush IPOs for SMBs. That's a knee-jerk blame government reaction that conveniently ignores the real reason why IPO-able companies don't go public much any more. They don't need to.

Uber is a good example. Their Series E is coming in at over a billion. Historically, they would have had to turn to public markets for that money.

But the JOBS Act actually made it possible for private companies to stay private a lot longer, because they are no longer penalized for granting stock to their employees, for example.

Personally, I would overjoyed if it was impossible to sell crappy private companies' shares. That would limit the damage to the rest of the economy, but sadly that's actually not the case. SecondMarket, Exhilway private capital market, Campbell Lutyens, Cogent Partners, Probitas Ps and Triago all serve the secondary market for shares of private companies.

If Cuban can't find a greater fool to snap up his shares, he's doing something wrong. There are plenty of venues to offload that stuff.

Cuban also seems to misunderstand liquidity in public markets. Just because a company is listed on a public exchange doesn't mean its shares are liquid. There are many listed companies that see very little trading in their shares on any given day. And if their valuation tanked, for whatever reason, that limited liquidity would evaporate altogether.

During the 2008 crisis, it was impossible to unload many companies' shares without making the price tumble. You just couldn't move a large block.

</comment><comment><USER9> So Cuban is essentially complaining that the market for small time ipos is dead. Maybe he is right, I do not know.

But I am very much against any attempts to lessen the reporting requirements for IPOs. What people complaining about the SEC have to understand is that if the public lose trust in the markets, we will have absolutely no markets whatsoever. There will be no market for small caps or for big caps of for IPOs of any sizes. And we came perilously close to that with some of the big accounting scandals.

The most important thing about the markets is that the public trusts them. If that creates accounting requirements that are too onerous for some small time ipos, so be it. Because if there is no trust, there are no markets and there won't be any small time ipos anyways.

</comment><comment><USER25> Heaven forbid you read the comments section before the actual article. His point:

>The bubble today comes from private investors who are investing in apps and small tech companies. ... >Why ? Because there is ZERO liquidity for any of those investments. None. Zero. Zip.

Is he wrong?

<comment><USER9> Yes he is wrong. This is a non-sequitur. He is offering a conclusion that does not follow from his argument. Why should the lack of liquidity cause a bubble? Usually lack of liquidity acts in the opposite direction. It causes prices to go down not up.

Furthermore, the bubble dynamic usually requires liquidity. The bubble dynamic happens when prices are going up so much that participants do not care about an underlying valuation but are certain they will be able to sell in the near future for a higher price due to the market momentum. This whole way of thinking, requires liquidity.

If there is indeed a bubble, I do not see how it can logically be caused by lack of liquidity.

<comment><USER26> This is a misunderstanding. Lack of liquidity can cause both. You forget that prices are valuations and are very different from prices actually paid.

Simply put:

1) valuation = price of last share sold * number of shares

2) value = price at least one buyer is prepared to pay for the entire company

Lack of liquidity in private companies generally comes from the fact that you can't buy or sell shares without agreement from the board. So "price of last share sold" is quite simply directly set by the board, people who have a vested interest in this number being as high as possible.

It is normal for valuation to be larger than value (for public companies), but not by much. You could actually buy (very nearly) all of Microsoft for 360 billion dollars (it's market cap). A bubble can probably be best defined as valuation >> value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "In the tech bubble it was Broadcast.com, AOL, Netscape, etc. Today its, Uber, Twitter, Facebook, etc."

Did he just compare himself to Uber and Facebook? Wow...

<comment><USER28> no you are taking it out of context. Read :

In a bubble there is always someone with a "great" idea pitching an investor the dream of a billion dollar payout with a comparison to an existing success story. In the tech bubble it was Broadcast.com, AOL, Netscape, etc. Today its, Uber, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Until companies with serious cash to spend [0][1][2][3][4] stop buying up startups, this bubble won't end anytime soon.

[0] - [http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=UA+Key+Statistics](http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=UA+Key+Statistics) (just recently spent ~$900M on acquisitions)

[1] - [http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=MSFT+Key+Statistics](http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=MSFT+Key+Statistics)

[2] - [http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=GOOG+Key+Statistics](http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=GOOG+Key+Statistics)

[3] - [http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=ORCL+Key+Statistics](http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=ORCL+Key+Statistics)

[4] - [http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=EBAY+Key+Statistics](http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=EBAY+Key+Statistics)

</comment><comment><USER30> If the definition of a bubble is when people are knowingly making bad investments and counting on a greater fool, then if there is zero liquidity then that pretty much means that we can't be in a bubble.

<comment><USER31> He seems to be defining it a bubble as _a category investment opportunities so overhyped that even people who don 't understand liquidity pile in thinking they'll get a return_, which isn't such a terrible definition.

Though he doesn't help his argument by suggesting that well-networked angels are in the same category as equity crowdfunders pumping money into an idea and a 2 minute pitch video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Pretty sure they were called "Angels" back then too

</comment><comment><USER33> Could someone please point out something smart Mark Cuban has ever written? Because everything I read of his comes off as out of touch.

<comment><USER34> I'm sure he's written a couple of checks that wouldn't be considered out of touch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> >If stock in a company is worth what somebody will pay for it, what is the stock of a company worth when there is no place to sell it ?

A stock that is personal and non-transferable once bought, should probably be valued using discounted future dividends. Or discounted buy-out price.

</comment><comment><USER34> I think he's conflating two very different problems. One is the issue about liquidity and the other is the so called tech bubble. The liquidity issue is real, market bubbles are not.

</comment><comment><USER36> Only thing I agree on in this article is that equity based crowdfunding is a bad idea

</comment><comment><USER37> "Everyone was in or _new_ someone who was in"

</comment><comment><USER38> I bet this is about liquidity.

( _reads article_ )

Yep, it's about liquidity.

I bet the HN comments don't mention liquidity categories.

( _reads comments_ )

Nope, not a single one.

How did I know!!!!??!!11

He's right that sub 25M is dead. You're either the next Uber or you're not getting anything. And if that's the case, then money will be on the sidelines waiting for the next big thing, not the next _incremental_ thing. That will cause a shortage of liquidity for new proposals (the dreamers) and keep those capable of bigger proposals busy. (the titans) You will have a liquidity shortage for the dreamers.

He is right. Incremental investment is no longer possible. All you have is a gigantic bar-to-entry for dreamers and when the titan shortage becomes apparent (no amount of liquidity will reveal more titans to keep the game going), the dreamers will be flushed out. A few titans might go down in the fallout as well.

You either solve everything or nothing today. It's an untenable position that will keep liquidity on the sidelines and stifle innovation. It's also very bubbly as you have more money than there are opportunities (As classified by laws) to chase.

<comment><USER39> His point is that Sarbanes-Oxley killed the possibility for small-medium companies to go public (~1B market cap). With less than $1B market cap, the overhead costs of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance are a huge % of revenue.

The only way the shareholders can cash out is via a sale to a larger (idiot?) buyer (Facebook/Google/Microsoft/Yahoo).

Even worse, a lot of these companies don't really have a clear path to revenue or profitability (like Tinder).

<comment><USER38> Then you look at the cash reserves of the titans (Apple comes to mind) and you see it's not in circulation, which proves there are large sums of liquidity on the sidelines not investing.

<comment><USER40> Granted a lot of the money that these Titans have is actually spread all over the world and not in the USA (or Australia).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


C++ Has Become More Pythonic - <AUTHOR> http://preshing.com/20141202/cpp-has-become-more-pythonic/

<comment><USER2> I haven't been involved in the C++ world in a long time. However, I'm a huge fan of Python. So as long at C++ still has the ability to be granular, and step back, using things like 'auto', I see the steps as good. Honestly and admittedly, I haven't had a chance to review the C++!4 release in detail and I probably won't, since I just use Python. If there are no serious performance tradeoffs, and I was forced to use C++ for work, I'd be excited about any changes that make C++ more pythonic.</comment>


Quantum theory cannot consistently describe the use of itself - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05739-8 <comment><USER2> "Quantum theory" does not contain any instructions for how to give "quantum behavior" to observers. Either you imagine there being observers outside of the system (in which case there are some rules for calculating the probability distributions of what they see), or you imagine one big system with no special role of observer (in which case you can "count" the dominance of some states over others in the great big universal superposition).

In the first case there is such a thing as an observer but they aren't quantum, in the second case there is no distinguished role of observer.

<comment><USER3> Very good point!

Is it non-controversial to assume a randomness generator in a fundamental thought experiment? Also macro state. It is hard to see how the deterministic part of QM could be inconsistent. However the interpretation of its application to accommodate classical concepts had never seemed self-consistent even before this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Scott Aaronson discussed this on his blog,

[https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3975](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3975)

The discussion there suggests there might be some semantic disagreement over exactly what is meant by certain measurements and observer states in the paradox, and so Aaronson at least does not agree that the paper creates the trilemma situation that it primarily focuses on.

This discussion also breaks down the paradox into terms that describe it as a combination of both the previously known thought experiments for Wigner's friend and Hardy's paradox.

</comment><comment><USER5> The first requirement of their no-go theorem ("an agent can be certain that a given proposition holds whenever the quantum-mechanical Born rule assigns probability-1 to it") is interesting, considering the fact that "happens with probability one" is no longer synonymous with "always happens" when you have a probability space with infinite cardinality. Hence the distinction between the technical terms "almost always" and "always" in probability theory.

I haven't finished reading the paper, but does anyone who has already encountered it know if this objection is covered (either in the paper itself or in later discussion)?

<comment><USER4> I don't believe it was raised anywhere, also just one harp on what you said: it's not just having infinite cardinality but also having an appropriate probability measure on the space. For example, the positive integers have infinite cardinality, but you can put probability distributions on that space for which there are no non-empty subspaces with probability zero, like (1/2)^k.

However I don't think this issue would actually matter, because from the observer's point of view in such a situation the probability of discovering you are in one of the Everett branches where the probability-1 event did not occur is exactly 0, so in terms of forming beliefs, you'd assign zero probability to that outcome.

Think of it this way, if I create a random continuous function on [0, 1], the probability that it is also differentiable is 0, even though there are tons of familiar examples like x^2 or sin(x).

So if I offer you a wager of whether the randomly generated function is differentiable, your belief ought to be that it _always_ is not, even though the technical term would be "almost always" in formal measure theoretic probability theory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is four months old and much heralded when it was published. Has there been any response to it since then?

<comment><USER6> Just found this refutation:

[https://dustinlazarovici.com/wp- content/uploads/comment_renn...](https://dustinlazarovici.com/wp- content/uploads/comment_renner_new.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Too bad it uses Bohmian Mechanics.

<comment><USER8> Why is that bad?

<comment><USER7> Bohmian mecahnics isn't identical to Quantum mechanics empirically. I used to think that but there are counterexamples. Additionally, the metaphysical strains it takes are philosophically appealing but not experimentally productive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Discussed a few months ago via a couple of popular articles: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18023452](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18023452)

</comment><comment><USER10> Could the conclusion of this paper point towards a useful quantum computer being an impossible result?

<comment><USER11> It's purely an opinion and interpretation.

The other interpretation is that the experiment shows that collapse of potential fields into manifest reality is individual for each observer.

<comment><USER12> > The other interpretation is that the experiment shows that collapse of > potential fields into manifest reality is individual for each observer

General Relativity makes sense because our interpretation of a phenomenon is distorted in a mathematically reversible way which is localized to the observer.

If it were to be proven that a given wave function could collapse into two distinct quantum states simultaneously depending on the state of the observer, it would basically throw a wrench into the entire system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nothing is capable of describing itself and the system in which it exists. It's a much more complicated version of a file that contains its own hashsum

<comment><USER14> It's more subtle than that, for example:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self- verifying_theories](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-verifying_theories)

<comment><USER15> An inconsistent theory can prove its own consistency, so in what sense does a system proving its own consistency provide evidence that it is consistent?

<comment><USER14> This issue is addressed informally in the introduction to the authors paper available here [1]. The pivotal move that addresses your complaint head on is Theorem 4.3.

[1] [https://www.jstor.org/stable/2695030](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2695030)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's mind-boggling that they don't cite Gödel.

Edit: This is a Quora gem: [https://www.quora.com/Did-Russell-understand- Godels-incomple...](https://www.quora.com/Did-Russell-understand-Godels- incompleteness-theorems-Is-there-any-writing-of-Russells-thoughts-on-Godels- incompleteness-theorem-Is-there-any-reliable-historic-biographic-source-on- Russells-understanding-of-Godel)</comment>


Amazon's Cloud Is Growing So Fast It's Scaring Shareholders - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/07/amazons_cloud/ <comment><USER3> Misleading headline. Investors are scared of Amazon's persistent lack of profits despite their hugely popular offerings.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. Investors are afraid Amazon has found another low profit business to dominate. If they can't yield even a low margin profit at $80 billion in sales - eg 3% Walmart style, or $2.x billion in net income - why would anyone believe they will at $160 billion in sales. Not to mention they're a 20 year old, unprofitable business.

<comment><USER5> And a lot of their profit is essentially reliant on competing by dodging taxes - their margin advantage to the consumer could, in many markets, simply disappear with the closure of a few sales or corporate tax loopholes.

<comment><USER6> Not charging sales tax in a jurisdiction you have no presence in isn't a loophole, it's an intentional feature at the federal level. States can't legally tax interstate commerce.

Amazon is only starting to charge sales taxes in states because they're establishing local presences in those states.

<comment><USER7> They skirted the rules for local presence for a long time too. They had an engineering office in California, but were not charging sales tax. The office was a wholly owned subsidiary

<comment><USER8> IMHO skirting the rules is legal. If you care about Amazon's behavior because of the law you should have no problem here. If you care about local presence for some other reason you should be talking about that instead.

You can't blame companies for operating within the four corners of the law. Perhaps you would prefer that they break the law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > as [AWS] matures to the size of a company like VMware

LOL. VMware has never been able to hold a candle to what AWS is doing. To draw an equivalency between the two is misleading.

The true danger to AWS is not coming from any of their competitors (Azure is a long way from not sucking, and the Google challenge, while serious, only supercharged Amazon's growth).

Their true danger lies in the fact that Amazon doesn't treat their engineering/product employees well enough. The AWS products will suffer from high turnover and poaching if they don't address this.

<comment><USER10> Azure and Google are good enough in the eyes of a lot of people to compete, and Amazon believes this to be true, otherwise they wouldn't match price cuts the other two make. They have.

The problem for Amazon is that Microsoft and Google don't need to profit on Azure and Google Compute the way Amazon does. Microsoft can sell Azure services at low margin and make the rest of their money selling Visual Studio and MSDN subscriptions and whatever else to developers working on sites hosted on Azure, and selling Office 365 and whatnot to companies shifting their in- house resources towards the cloud. Microsoft sells a lot of complements that mean it can get away with selling services on Azure at close to cost and still make money. Google's in a similar position, in that it has other complements (AdWords, services like Maps, Android, etc.) for developers working on its stack, and it has enterprise products like Google Docs as well. Amazon meanwhile is selling AWS products but no strong complements. So being dragged into a pricewar with Google and Azure means a very real chance that they continue to not make a lot of profit on AWS, even if they beat Microsoft and Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> that's a little misleading. From the article:

> Yesterday Amazon said that while its cloud business grew by 90 percent last > year, it was significantly less profitable.

Investors aren't scared because AWS is growing too fast, they're scared because profits aren't growing along with it

</comment><comment><USER12> A fairly vacuous article, but here's the takeaway:

> The company is taking losses to invest in the future, and Amazon's 10 > percent stock drop today shows that some investors are uncomfortable with > that.

While its tough to be sure exactly what motivated that drop, the reasoning sounds accurate. More importantly, it shows a huge part of why public corporations in the US are so broken and may actually be hurting the US's competitiveness.

In a recent study ([http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1959125](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1959125)) entitled "The Dark Side of Analyst Coverage: The Case of Innovation", the researchers found that publicly traded companies who attract the attention of financial analysts are less innovative. Why? Share prices.

For many in upper management of these companies, their compensation is tied to share prices. Management works hard to keep their share prices high. Further, if share prices drop too much, the Board might decide it's time to start firing their "inefficient" managers. In a worst-case scenario, if a company has value but their share prices continue to drop, they leave themselves vulnerable to a hostile takeover, thus risking everyone's job.

In a publicly traded company, everyone is working together to prop share prices up. How do they do that? Amongst other things, they're much more risk- averse. Taking a risk is a strong signal to the market that you might fail and they reward you with lower share prices. That's why the above paper found that public companies produce fewer patents and of lower value: everyone is so focused on short-term goals that long-term opportunities are at odds with their mandate of maintaining shareholder value.

Curiously, it looks like public corporations can share the same defect that democracy does: people can vote. Sadly, democracies produce mediocre politicians because average voters have average intellect (duh) and can't evaluate brilliant candidates ([http://www.livescience.com/18706-people-smart- democracy.html](http://www.livescience.com/18706-people-smart- democracy.html)). Rhetoric takes the place of thoughtfulness and we see this with corporations, too.

Frankly, I have no idea how to avoid these dilemmas but pretending they don't exist is surely not good.

</comment><comment><USER13> I sincerely wonder what percentage of institutional investors have any semblance of a fucking clue what "the cloud" actually stands for, or for that matter, that Amazon is even in the cloud business. I talk to friends in finance all the time who have no idea that Amazon is more than just an e-commerce website. Granted, they do not specialize in tech, and no 22-25 year old analyst is making any real investment decisions, but the general sentiment makes me wonder.

Who are the people responsible for tech sector investing at large investment banks? Do they know anything about the operational details of "the cloud," or is their knowledge limited to marketing gimmicks and enterprise parlance?

The fact is, the technical details of cloud businesses are what differentiate them, and ultimately what sway engineering decision makers one way or the other in terms of choosing an offering. Yet I get the feeling that the investors in these cloud companies have no fucking clue what any of these technical details are.

Wall Street is a joke.

<comment><USER14> If you (or someone you know) understands the cloud better than the existing investors and analysts, perhaps you should be trading shares of cloud companies yourself. Of course, if a deep technical understanding of such things does greatly influence long-term market value, you can expect there to be some competition doing the same thing already.

There are undoubtedly less-informed participants in every market...otherwise very few trades would ever occur.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> When a business first buys into cloud computing, they're likely to compare prices between providers. But I think once most businesses are using a particular provider, they're going to have too much inertia to switch based on a minor difference in price.

Cloud computing is still sort of new. A lot of businesses are still switching from other options, and the cloud industry as a whole is growing rapidly as a result. But that will slow down at some point. That sounds to me like the right time for Amazon to start profiting.

</comment><comment><USER4> "After all, if chipmakers deliver more and more transistors every two years, Amazon should be able to do more computing for less."

Pretty bad conclusion by the author, particularly given this is Wired. If chip makers deliver more transistors, customers of AWS will use them all up, Amazon will not be able to just sit on their hands and offer up the same computing at a lower total cost.

<comment><USER16> If amazon charges 10 $ for 10 Ghz, and by mores law the price to deliver 10 Gz is reduced by half, then Amazon should be able to do more computing for less. Without competition and with Moore's law, Amazon can can offer lower prices AND increase its bottom line due.

<comment><USER4> That assumes customers do not eat all the computation gains. That's an incorrect assumption, cloud customers will always eat all computation gains. Every unit of extra power a customer can get at zero additional cost, they will consume. It's a corollary to Moore's Law, and it's why customers bother to upgrade processors each generation.

In the time Amazon's cost for 10 Ghz went down by half, the demand for processing doubled.

<comment><USER17> That's good news. If they offer X processing for the same price and demand doubles that means revenue doubles. If they get 2x supply for current 1x price then they just made more profit.

Just because computing gets cheaper doesn't mean they have to offer it for cheaper. It's likely competition will force the price down, but the point the parent is making is that the price of service doesn't have to come down as fast as the cost of service does. That would imply more profit without raising prices, merely holding them steady while costs go down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can anyone explain what they mean by this?

"It's invented and then built a nearly $5 billion cloud computing business catering to fickle software developers"

<comment><USER19> Amazon built AWS. AWS does $5 billion in business. AWS has the variety and depth of services that software engineers expect.

<comment><USER20> More importantly, it has managed to replicate the entire hosted rack experience without requiring a company employ staff to manage it. Rackspace is nice but they use OpenStack, which still struggles behind the plethora of networking options and protections AWS has - including VPCs, load balancers, firewalls, subnets both private and public, and so on.

There's very little I can't virtualize in AWS that I might find in a typical rack at a co-lo facility, and in that, AWS has no competitors.

(There are other offerings with varying degrees of awesomeness - <USER2> comes to mind - but bang-for-buck, my company still bets on AWS. My only gripe is I/O and the need for local-SSD-fast disk access for clustered KV database stores, which may finally cause us to start looking elsewhere.)

<comment><USER21> The other thing Amazon has done is build a service that managed to be both extremely complex (meaning I have a lot of control over it), but relatively straightforward for a novice sysadmin to actually use. This is clearly something they are investing a ton of time in these days. The web interface is getting a lot better.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Augmented Reality - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10202623

<comment><USER2> I've been very interested on this for a while. I even had the chance to work in a related project for a client for a very brief lapse of time (after a few years working in games and virtual reality stuff).

Most common solutions for this require real time computer vision, which is hard to develop, but very interesting of course...

</comment><comment><USER3> Vernor Vinge's latest book, 'Rainbows End', uses this heavily.</comment>


Not So Fast: Sony's PlayStation Network Hacked Again - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/industry/2011/05/18/not-so-fast-sonys-playstation-network-hacked-again/

<comment><USER2> I think, at this point you either have to be insanely loyal or pretty clueless to still use PSN. Yet, Sony was saying yesterday that only a small percentage of users are deleting their accounts. What gives?

<comment><USER3> I think a lot of the inertia is due to the fear that deleting an account could invalidate your purchases with that account. I've bought a few games and DLC packs myself--there's a lot of content I own* that I'd suddenly lose out on. It may be chump change, but I'm not about to walk away from money I've spent in good faith.

I think at this point if Sony would give us a cut-and-run solution to let us kill our accounts but keep our purchases--they won't--we'd see a surge in account deletions, especially after today's news.

Probably worth mentioning that I don't play many online games, so most of the time when I sign on it's to buy single-player content.

<comment><USER4> Exactly right. If you delete your account, all your purchases disappear. For some of us, that's hundreds of dollars.

I won't ever hand Sony a credit card again, and I'm limiting my purchases to exclusives... And even then, I'll think long and hard before I give them the money for those.

<comment><USER5> It sounds so strange to say that your "purchases dissapear". It's as if Sony steals them from you.

Not that I'm saying they are stealing it, it just sounds surreal.

<comment><USER4> If it weren't my own action causing it, it would be exactly like Sony stealing them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a tangent to the article itself, is "THENEXTWEB" a scraper site or content farm?

Who the hell ends an article with this sentence?

        If a multi-billion dollar company like Sony can have the

Do they not have editors? Do they not check what they post after it's posted?

<comment><USER7> Maybe they got confused since most of the income/valuation figures for Sony are in Yen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reseting passwords using email addresses and birthdays.

Admittedly, given the information that Sony knows about you, what else could they use to reset passwords that the bad guys don't have?

Edit: Wait, reading more of the articles, this exploit doesn't send a password reset email, or similar, to the users; and just allows them to enter a new password? That's ... convenient, but at an enormous cost. I retract my confusion.

</comment><comment><USER9> Somewhat ironic: PSN HQ is in Redwood Shores, also home to a few high-profile security companies like Qualys, Imperva, and Checkpoint.

You'd think that after two successful hacking incidents, the execs would have brought in top-notch security people to get the house in order. (Maybe they thought they did.)

<comment><USER10> Even if they did, PSN is a fairly big piece of IT and considering what we've seen so far I'd expect the issues to run deep into the system. It's not like a month is sufficient to completely reimplement everything from the ground up, especially when SCE first spent a week saying everything was fine and nothing had happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> :(

</comment><comment><USER12> Will someone pull these assholes aside, slap them a couple of times and remind them that they're messing stuff up for the rest of us? Call of Duty multiplayer be damned, every time this happens they're giving those knee-jerk, reactionary geniuses in Washington more rope to hang us all with when it comes to the Internet.

<comment><USER13> Which "assholes" are you talking about? The Sony developers who left a huge glaring security hole wide open on their website, the third-party security consultants whom Sony hired to catch these kinds of mistakes before going live or the person who spotted the obvious security flaw and did the reasonable thing to alert Sony about their mistake.

<comment><USER14> Is the "reasonable" thing here "hacking the sony site"? If it is, you are wrong. That isn't reasonable.

<comment><USER15> Hacking the site? They found an obvious security vulnerability, tested it, and alerted the company. What should they have done? Sit back and wait for a bad actor to exploit it?

<comment><USER12> Okay did you read the article? It points directly to a link that explains how someone found yet another vulnerability in PSN and that individuals were already exploiting it.

[http://sony.nyleveia.com/2011/05/17/warning-all-psn-users- yo...](http://sony.nyleveia.com/2011/05/17/warning-all-psn-users-your- accounts-are-still-not-safe/)

<comment><USER15> I think I misunderstood who you were talking about in the grandparent post: It seemed like you were railing against the people who wrote the article for testing the exploit and describing it online.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The future of simulation - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAFhkdGtHck#!

<comment><USER2> Some amazing work in there.

What was the unreinforced masonry demo from? That seems extremely interesting - what is the structural support capability of something like that, is it load bearing?</comment>


Higher GDP Equals Longer Life - Here's the Chart to Prove It - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/1656059/infographic-the-health-vs-wealth-connection <comment><USER2> Those charts are terribly confusing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Causation or correlation?</comment>


New Floating Cycle Roundabout (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2012/08/23/spectacular-new-floating-cycle-roundabout/ <comment><USER2> Another multi-level roundabout dating back to the 1940s, De Berekuil: [https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Berekuil](https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Berekuil) (The Bearpit)

We like our cyclists.

<comment><USER3> This is even better by letting the cars do the vertical movement, while the bikes stay on flat ground.

<comment><USER4> Possibly but images like this an be misleading. As the article on the floating roundabout points out it's not all that high above ground, the junction itself is below ground level. The cars are in fact doing most of the vertical movement.

The floating roundabout does have the disadvantage that you need a bigger height difference to allow the cars to pass below it.

<comment><USER5> I know both the "Berekuil" as well as the "cycle roundabout" as they are both down here in Eindhoven.

The Berekuil is nice, but very confusing as to what direction to go as you no longer can see the roads once you are down in there.

The floating cycle roundabout OTOH is fantastic as you keep having a great overview. It really is a marvel of engineering.

The slope is not a problem on either of them for the average bicyclist in the Netherlands.

edit: Just noticed that the referenced Berekuil above is another one in Utrecht. I meant this one [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berenkuil,_Eindhoven](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berenkuil,_Eindhoven)

<comment><USER6> There is yet another in Arnhem, the "Airborneplein" is also nicknamed Berekuil.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Damn, these guys must have some good engineers / PMs to finish that in 6.5 million euros. Doubt a version here could be done for that or even just stand up when it's done considering the novel design.

<comment><USER8> >Damn, these guys must have some good engineers / PMs to finish that in 6.5 million euros.

Or just normal engineers/managers working within a system that doesn't bleed money to "not quite technically corruption" at every step.

<comment><USER7> Could be, but that's even worse because it means their people are better at keeping their systems non-corrupt in a way that we have failed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow, this is how you prioritize safety for cyclists. Really impressive.

</comment><comment><USER10> I cycle over the Hovenring almost every workday, and I drive underneath it often too. Now you know roughly where I live. Ask Me Anything...

<comment><USER11> Patat or Friet?

<comment><USER10> Excellent question.

Friet, although I have to remember to ask for patat when visiting Oma en Opa.

<comment><USER11> I'm not a hardliner so that's an excellent and balanced approach

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Current Google Maps view:

[https://goo.gl/maps/dfKWDZjcjsKa5sjM9](https://goo.gl/maps/dfKWDZjcjsKa5sjM9)

There's quite a contrast between the elegance and simplicity of the bike route and the seeming chaos of lane markings of the underlying motor vehicle intersection.

</comment><comment><USER13> Looks elegant. I wonder how to use it would be to a car crashing into the central pole?

<comment><USER10> I've never tried crashing my car into the central pole, but as you can see here [1] there's quite a lot of clearance around it, and in my experience the lights are almost always red when approaching the junction anyway, so you rarely get the chance to crash at high speed.

[1] [https://goo.gl/maps/Ke4NFcE2osEvCNTH6](https://goo.gl/maps/Ke4NFcE2osEvCNTH6)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> [2012]

</comment><comment><USER15> This is the kind of construction that is great if you can afford it. As a cyclist I would love it, as a taxpayer I am not sure I do: it is not cheap enough to be mass implemented, building one (or a handful) is then a marketing stunt. If I use the bicycle to go to work I have a dozen of heavy traffic intersections to cross, about 1/4 of the trip time I spend waiting for a green light, if one of these would be built there will be no significant change to the overall experience.

<comment><USER16> Its about safety, not traffic efficiency. BIcycles were being run over when folks made a mistake (and they made a lot of mistakes in this massive roundabout)

And I'm not sure civil engineering jobs like this are more efficient en masse. They're all essentially one-off?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> That's just insane, building two sets of parallel road systems, it's probably the most inefficient engineering ever, are you also going to build a new set when a new type of vehicle comes along? what about a scooter only road? And all of this because of the irrational believe that cyclists are inferior and can not share the road with motorists. I am so glad I don't live in Denmark.

<comment><USER18> What makes cars deserve a big piece of asphalt but cyclers not? We have a lot of cyclers in the Netherlands and they deserve the safety and convenience of separate roads, away from multi-ton vehicles.

Also, bike roads are not as overly constructed like car roads (maybe just 1 or 2 layers of asphalt instead of more)

<comment><USER17> The problem segregating bicycles is that that automatically means that they are excluded from the best infrastructure which are the regular roads, which by the way do not belong to cars. I suffer that discrimination everyday when I ride my bike and there is a bike path adjacent to the road in places where I had no problem before, and that's after many years of riding so I can tell you that it is completely safe to share the road. Bike paths are built to kick us out of the roads it is pretty obvious to me now.

<comment><USER19> Unless you ban cars completely from streets, no matter how good the asphalt is I would not want to be around cars. I actively avoid cars if I have an option to go longer path, but with less car nearby me. I have no driving license, but I'm sure that as a car driver I would also prefer to see cyclists away from me.

I don't see how someone would want to go on main street if you have an option to drive on a separate road.

<comment><USER17> Whenever I wanted to go to a place by bike I used to go into google maps then clicked on the "avoid freeways" option and I would take that route. Nowadays where I live I have to not only avoid freeways but streets or roads with bike paths, it is really awful. I've been riding my bike to work every day for the last 13 years and I realize that If I want to keep using the road safely and correctly I am going to have to buy a car or a motorcycle.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


"Bye bye electronics ... all now in custody/seized" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Sidragon1/status/588572906063409152

<comment><USER3> So, he jokes about messing with a plane he's on and then posts sad pics of his computer hardware being confiscated? Or maybe I misuderstand. Jokes at 1pm, Confiscation at 10pm. That looks like a pretty solid narrative.

If that's true... I just don't know. Even as a kid I've always respected the "Don't joke about a bomb as you pass through security." culture. I mean, christ, a plane flight is so f-ing short. Best practices is shut up, sit down, and keep quiet. It's hyper-public, seven powers of magnitude more touchy than screaming "Fire" in a crowded theatre.

Airplanes, airports, and other international public places are not sanctified platforms of free speech. They're special cases, like visiting your in laws that you want to be on the good side of. Religion, politics, blue-humor, graveyard whistling, none of them are appreciated by anyone, for the most part.

Right? Am I completely retardomantobhan?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Apparently authorities noticed this tweet: [https://twitter.com/Sidragon1/status/588433855184375808](https://twitter.com/Sidragon1/status/588433855184375808) and confiscated his devices.

Edit: I submitted this link not because the action wasn't justified (joking about hacking into the electronics on a plane obviously isn't OK) but rather as a reminder of who is listening and what can happen.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Harmless pranks" like this can have bad results... however they highlight how insecure flights can be in a way that will grab attention in ways that would otherwise be ignored.

There needs to be more available venues for PenTesters and white/greyhat hackers to be paid for their line of work. But security is often overlooked because the masses aren't educated on the subject.

The number of companies that have lied about "your information is totally secure" is beyond belief. This is one of the reasons why.

<comment><USER3> Yes, more venues for PenTesters! Forms to fill out for the volunteer ombudsman. But Twitter is not it. A few screen shots and anonymous submission maybe. All done well after the flight you're on.

<comment><USER4> How would compensation be done? What about public awareness? How would the PenTester know the security flaw was patched?

These sorts of changes would need to be drastic - and therefore are unrealistic. Until something bad happens because of them... unfortunately that's the only thing that causes change.

<comment><USER3> > How would compensation be done?

That's what freelancers are for. If a citizen PenTester found something I guess there should be some kind of token "reward". But I can imagine that a big company doesn't want every Tom, Dick, and Harry poking at their sensitive bits.

>What about public awareness?

What about it? I think Computer Security and Security in general should be taught in school along side critical thinking. But that's not happening any time soon.

>How would the PenTester know the security flaw was patched?

That would most likely be in the compensation agreement, lots of legaleese.

<comment><USER4> >But I can imagine that a big company doesn't want every Tom, Dick, and Harry poking at their sensitive bits.

I think they'd prefer whitehats over blackhats poking at their sensitive bits.

>What about it?

Situations like this can make the news. They can cause a big hubbub. They can raise awareness. Not always (this case seems like it definitely won't) - <USER2> doing these greyhat sort of pranks has a larger chance than never talking about it at all.

>That would most likely be in the compensation agreement, lots of legaleese.

I meant if it was anonymously reported (unless this is optional) - they would not be able to be contacted for compensation. I'm all for emailing/anonymous tips without expectations of compensation.

Should we really be defending companies because "they shouldn't have to pay out money to improve their security of OUR PERSONAL DATA"?

I don't care if every Tom, Dick, Jane, and Harry is poking around sensitive areas. If they're getting into 'secured' areas or stealing personal information - that's a problem for people and it's the companies job to have tighter security.

<comment><USER3> I agree with everything you say. Except:

>Should we really be defending companies because "they shouldn't have to pay out money to improve their security of OUR PERSONAL DATA"?

I don't think anyone was saying that.

... and would like to add: If an idle, up to date, informal, and benign actor can poke around the sensitive bits of a company that company needs to do some serious work, possibly firing sec staff or suing previous freelancers. I think that at a high level businesses need to do due diligence, but then also trust professionals and experts that a job done is actually done.

Also, my previous statement about systemic secEd would apply here as those businesses would understand that security is a process not a destination. Right?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>