Show HN: Hash your work and store it in a bank transfer for priority statement - <AUTHOR> http://rschoenm.github.io/prioprepare/ <comment><USER2> Courts don't really give a damn about postmarked letters and other gimmicks for preserving priority.

If priority matters for you, it costs about $100 to file a provisional patent application and that's what you should do.

</comment><comment><USER3> What actual (as opposed to 'theoretical') problem does this solve? I understand it solves the fictitious 'prior art' problem many technical people think exists, but which few or no people who actually do patent stuff I know consider to be a real issue. Then again I haven't done any actual research on whether it is an issue, I'm just wondering if anybody with a legal background was involved in this.

(disclaimer: I have a law degree but have never practiced and have only ever written a few papers on patent matters, none of which directly involved the issue at hand).

</comment><comment><USER4> Am I the only one that doesn't think this idea is particularly new or interesting? My cryptography professor in undergrad talked about the idea of hashing your work and publishing the hash in the classifieds of a newspaper as a publicly verifiable way to timestamp it. That was like 10 years ago and I don't think the idea was new at the time.

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't pretend the idea is new (although Ralf did not find prior scientific works talking about this). We just want it to spread since it is simple and cheap.

<comment><USER4> A quick Google shows there is a good deal of prior published work on the idea of time stamping with hashes. The Wikipedia articles on the topic lists published references as early as 1991 and notes that the general idea itself dates to 1660 when Robert Hooke of Hooke's law fame published an anagram in a newspaper to timestamp his discovery.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_timestamping](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_timestamping)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping#History](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping#History)

On another note, is using a bank transaction as a means of publishing even a good idea? The banks I use only keep recent transactions available online, between 6 months to two years. So, you would have to print out your bank statement save it and present that as the proof which isn't particularly convincing. With a newspaper anyone can go find a copy of that newspaper at a library and independently verify it. They won't be able to get your private bank records w/o a lot of hassle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do you also store the original document? From a quick overview it seems you only store the hash. A typical situation that might occur is that a client hashes his document, a couple of years later he want to proof priority but doesn't have the original document anymore (perhaps he appended it, fixed spelling errors etc). Now his priority statement is worthless.

Why not provide a facility for the client to store his document along with the hash, encrypted off course. He can encrypt the document himself or you can provide an application that does it for him.

Charge extra for this feature...

<comment><USER6> If you were going to hash your document and store the hash in a bank transfer comment field, then it would be in your interest to make sure you don't modify the document in any way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems the online tool does nothing other than compute the SHA-1 hash. Given that it seems the documents that a user would want to hash for this method are likely to be sensitive, it seems prudent to suggest that users use an offline method of generating the hash.

<comment><USER8> Here's my exploration of asm.js and the file API for making a offline SHA256:

[https://rawgithub.com/kristofferkoch/web- lafs/master/test/sh...](https://rawgithub.com/kristofferkoch/web- lafs/master/test/sha256file.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I am using [https://code.google.com/p/crypto- js/#SHA-2](https://code.google.com/p/crypto-js/#SHA-2) but no web workers yet, this can be a problem with large files.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why not just push your work to a private GitHub repo? That would establish priority and ownership in a much clearer way than inserting a hash into a bank transfer.

I really think hashing the work causes more problems than it solves.

<comment><USER10> You can fake the dates on git commits. This repo has commits dating back 20 years: [https://github.com/Gawen/life/commits/master?page=3](https://github.com/Gawen/life/commits/master?page=3)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, Ralf and I would love to hear the feedback of HN about the idea of using bank transfers to store a hash of a document and use this for priority statement (to prove that you had the document at a certain date). Our goal is to spread the free idea since we do not think it is used a lot. We created web and windows software to help people computing a sha256 of their document. Any feedback is welcomed. Thanks

<comment><USER11> Do you want others to implement your idea as well?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our main goal is to help spread the word and see others using this technique. Implementation is not so difficult since only a hash, but if you want to contribute or implement it, sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wouldn't the blockchain be a better place to be sending people to do things like this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, This was also the feedback we had from /r/crypto on Reddit. You are right, the blockchain would be completely fine and could be even more automated. But we think that bank statement are more familiar to judges. Banks have to duty to keep the statements and be able to issue an official copy when requested for a few decades.

<comment><USER13> [http://www.proofofexistence.com/about](http://www.proofofexistence.com/about) \-- blockchain version.

Do banks have to maintain the "Comments" by law?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You could probably get the same effect by just sending an e-mail using Gmail (or equivalent online service that wont let you modify its internals) though?

Seems much simpler, and you don't have to explain hashes to anyone....

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, the idea is here. But I am not sure if Google can be a trusted party regarding timestamps of emails in court.

<comment><USER14> This sounds like a case of crypto nerd's fantasy: [http://xkcd.com/538/](http://xkcd.com/538/)

In theory...

Judge: "The SHA1 hash in the bank transfer dated 1 Jan matches the hash I calculated for the document you supplied me, so you must have had access to the document on 1 Jan. I believe you"

In reality...

Judge: "Wait, you sent an e-mail with this document on 1 January?" You: "Sure, here's my gmail account. See this screenshot" Judge: "Well, that sorts it"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Related: Bitcoinproof

Create a forgery-proof timestamp for your data, secured by the bitcoin network.

[http://vog.github.io/bitcoinproof/](http://vog.github.io/bitcoinproof/)

<comment><AUTHOR> /r/crypto also suggested [http://www.cryptostamp.net/](http://www.cryptostamp.net/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is this any better than using pastebin? One may argue that banks are more trusted for storing money than pastebin is for data, but is there another reason?

<comment><USER17> I assume that the rationale is as follows.

When standing in court trying to prove that you wrote something at a point in time, the judge is more than likely going to accept a bank statement than pastebin.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> ... or put it somewhere publicly accessible/verifiable.

For example a crypto currency block-chain.</comment>


Why there is no Jewish Narnia - <AUTHOR> http://www.jewishreviewofbooks.com/publications/detail/why-there-is-no-jewish-narnia

<comment><USER2> Isaac Asimov told stories of faster-than-light travel and the Three Laws of Robotics (which no robot-maker in the galaxy could avoid). Both are fantasy.

Of course, Asimov was a Humanist.</comment>


Instapaper Server Update - <AUTHOR> http://blog.instapaper.com/post/6854208028

<comment><USER2> I think you're more than justified in assuming no compromise happened. Someone with legitimate authority had physical access to your server. That has happened before and will happen again. Your server's cage opens several times a month, probably, as techs and whatnot do their icky atom-touching sorcery. Physical access to your server by the adversary means untraceable compromise, sure, but if that is true, hasn't it happened before? (Sure, the techs might be more trustworthy than the FBI... Unless they were the FBI, which is paranoid squared, but if you think that agents executing a warrant routinely grab servers in the vicinity because, hey, computers tend to have juicy stuff on them and we have way too much free time, then assuming infiltration seems almost reasonable by comparison.)

In a threat environment this bad, you would personally be scrutinizing sign-in lists every month. You have better things to do, right? Right. Because this is really not Instapaper's threat environment. You got mildly inconvenienced as a side-effect of routine government operations. You can pick whether you want to escalate that to A Full Crisis. That seems like a bad call, which you recognize on the legal side. Do it on the security side, too.

You may think that vocal parties will disagree with "This was a non-event for us.". They might. Screw them. You're a CEO; dealing with paranoid ramblings does not generate business value like two months of normal operations does.

<comment><USER3> Isn't there a way to get information from HDD's about how long they have operated from when they were manufactured using SMART? Not that anyone keeps those records on hand once the HDD is no longer in their possession, but if you are paranoid, you could start offloading those records every minute to a different server. That way if yours is seized, you could at least know if someone had turned on your HDD's and for how long.

It'd be cool if HDD's/SSD's started compiling rough stats about numbers of reads and writes for this purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> +1 to the attitude. It's all about getting the service back up and making it better. We (collectively) tend to spend too much time trying to figure out who to blame instead of just doing the cool shit that needs to be done. Kudos!

<comment><USER5> Sadly, I simply cannot agree. I absolutely understand Marco's desire to focus on developing Instapaper, but there's quite a bit more at stake here, and his willingness to move on without even a bit of protest is concerning.

He claims that there's nothing that can be done, but there are definitely legal actions one can take in this scenario. Sure, they might not ever fully compensate him, nor convince the skeptics, but it will at least reveal the details behind the seizure, and it will send a message to both the FBI and to others like DigitalOne that could prevent further "seize first and ask questions later" style operations.

<comment><USER6> So for a one-man software shop, given the choice between:

a) Spend money and time on legal action against the FBI for holding onto his servers for a couple of days while in the process of an investigation, in order to hopefully try and make a larger point.

and

b) Spending his time and no money by actually improving his bottom line by enhancing the features of his software,

you expect any rational person to choose (a) ?

<comment><USER7> Sorry, but the suggestion that fighting for justice is somehow the thing only "irrational people" would choose totally pisses me off.

I totally understand someone making a rational decision in favor of other priorities. It's what most people would do. But thank god for people who take the road less traveled. It's to them we owe the rights and freedom the rest of us take for granted. There's nothing "irrational" about that.

<comment><USER6> A major thrust of what I'm saying is in the fact that Marco is a single indie developer. Not a large company with more resources.

Fighting against the federal government over this seems like picking the wrong battle. He got is server back in a couple of days. Obviously its likely that the feds have already cloned it but its not like they kept it indefinitely or wiped it clean.

Does it suck? Yes. Is this something he should be fighting over? Not in my book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tangent alert! Marco makes me feel great.

One of my favorite things about Marco is that he gives me confidence that there is not a gaping wide chasm between the skills of the best engineer- entrpreneurs and me. This time, it was his frank admission that he was taught by commenters and emailers than his current password encryption was unsafe and that there were better options out there.

When you realize that someone as successful as Marco has the same learning to do that "the rest of us" do, it makes me feel great.

<comment><USER9> News flash: Security breaches happen because almost everyone in the industry sucks at this stuff, including (most importantly) those who SHOULD KNOW BETTER, yourself and Mr. Arment included.

<comment><USER8> And now we do. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Out of curiosity, does anyone know how volume-level encryption (like dm-crypt) holds up against this sort of thing? I find myself wondering what I'd tell customers if my server were seized as collateral damage like Instapaper's were. Will that sort of encryption serve as a plausible safeguard of customer data, or is it more of a padlock (easily broken with the right tools)?

<comment><USER11> It would certainly make it much harder to steal the data -- and at the same time it would make it much harder to boot the machine, because at some point you'd have to enter a passphrase. It's possible to do so over SSH, but it's still a bit tricky. Rebooting the server while you're away from an internet connexion will leave it in a useless state.

That being said, even with volume encryption, the key is in memory somewhere. RAM isn't wiped as quickly as you might think, and it's apparently possible to extract keys from memory after the machine has been powered down. So be warned, and be paranoid!

<comment><USER12> Indeed, the encryption keys can be recovered from memory fairly easily. [http://www.usenix.org/events/sec08/tech/full_papers/halderma...](http://www.usenix.org/events/sec08/tech/full_papers/halderman/halderman.pdf) is very readable; <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDaicPIgn9U> is a well-made 5-minute introduction by the authors.

<comment> mike-cardwell I thought this issue had been partially addressed by overwriting the memory containing the keys on unmount. Of course, that doesn't work if somebody just pulls the plug on the machine.

There was an article I read recently about a patch for the Linux kernel to store the key in CPU registers instead of memory as well...

<comment><USER13> A lot of servers I've seen have had 'chassis intrusion detection', which is a fancy way of saying they had a microswitch hooked up to one of the SMBus lines that could detect when the case is opened.

Take one of those, and a Google-style Lead-Acid internal UPS, and you'd have an incredibly hard time getting access to keys held solely in memory.

For the extra paranoid, accelerometers or a simple mercury vibration/tilt switch would make it even harder, at the risk of losing/hanging your server every time someone worked on the rack, or drove a heavy pallet cart nearby.

I recall seeing somewhere a device designed for law enforcement, which was essentially a cart-style UPS with probes designed to be clamped onto, and penetrate, the power cable, allowing seizures without any power-loss, which I assume is for this eventuality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Assume all data on the drives has been cloned.

There's little chance they didn't.

<comment><USER15> He should absolutely assume that the data has been cloned, but there is about a 99% chance that it wasn't.

If the data was cloned on-site, then we wouldn't have heard about the search warrant (there'd have been a gag order).

And as this happened yesterday, there's almost no chance that the server could have been taken to the lab, imaged, and then returned to be reconnected today.

I would bet 100 dollars that the actual target server of the raid is still sitting on a dolly in the forensics cage while a tech is waiting for someone to tell him what he's supposed to be looking for.

<comment><USER16> You'd be surprised. I've worked with forensic law enforcement in the past, and they were equipped to clone drives quickly and easily. The idea is to create a clean image of the drive that they can use for evidence, and they don't boot the machine so if there's any trapdoors or whatever they won't hit them. And this was a local police force over 5 years ago, I can't imagine what the FBI would be capable of these days.

<comment><USER17> Some should build a hard drive that logs being powered up and powered down!

<comment><USER15> I wouldn't be surprised if SSD's somehow had information like that stored in them (or at least the ability for it to be stored). Thankfully I got out of the Forensics racket before they were mainstream.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "I'm not convinced that they did everything they could to prevent the seizure of non-targeted servers, and their lack of proactive communication with the affected customers is beneath the level of service I expect from a host."

I can't speak to the level of service you did or did not receive but I seriously doubt DigitalOne could have done more to prevent "non-targeted" servers from being seized. If it was in the same rack as the "targeted" server I'm sure that 100% of the time LE would take it and find out whether it was related later. It's their job to take every step necessary to preserve evidence first and foremost when executing a search warrant like this.

I agree with you that the data was almost certainly not compromised and I think it's great that you're so proactive about protecting your customers by moving to bcrypt.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is all just assumptions, since amazingly the hosting company still has no comments at all. Who exactly rebooted the server? Not the FBI, for damn sure.

</comment><comment><USER20> I hope he securely erased the data rather than just deleting it, otherwise it might not be just the FBI who have potentially got a copy...

<comment><USER21> Would there not also be backups at DigitalOne?

<comment><USER22> With dedicated servers, the responsibility is on the client to back up what matters to him. Ditto with VPSs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think a neat idea would be to create 1U - 4U lock doors that could be bolted in front of a server in a rack.

I wonder if this would be enough to give each server it's own legal "separate space" insomuch as to prevent a whole rack from being seized due to warrants like this.

<comment><USER24> The server that was taken from Marco was a blade server, and he just rented a single node in the blade. Locking the single blade he was on wouldn't have prevented the situation that occurred, as the FBI seized a number of enclosures, rather than servers. Most likely, the agents who took the servers didn't understand a blade server, and took the entire enclosure, rather than pulling a couple nodes out of the blade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Should services consider storing all user data on encrypted volumes?

Pro: after a powerdown, seizure/theft/cloning of the volume won' reveal user data

Con: need a secure way to supply decryption passphrase on each reboot

</comment><comment><USER26> Man, you have an awesome service. It served me greatly through my post secondary education. I am glad you got your server back, and you can keep on keepin on.

Again, thank you for the services you offer.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is the exact opposite approach dropbox takes - well done with good communication. Props.</comment>


Sex lives of app users 'shared with Facebook' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-49647239 <comment><USER2> Also discussed at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20921531](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20921531)

</comment><comment><USER3> It pains me to see PhDs from all spheres of engineering and beyond getting funneled into a few companies, drawn by the easy money (for people not in the know, you can easily start your post-PhD career at a big corp with a salary of above 300K USD per year, and that is if you don't negotiate strongly), doing some variation of gradient descent and creating products that are absolutely immoral.

<comment><USER4> Anyone would be drawn by "easy money" if they were swimming in debt.

<comment><USER5> To be fair, anyone would be drawn by that money even if they weren't swimming in debt. People need to realize that times are hard for a lot of people. USD300,000 is a lot of money to the vast majority of working Americans. Law of averages says that at least some of those Americans will be smart enough to get a PhD. So you're gonna have PhD's out there who, yes, will jump at the chance to make 300 bands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is the other side of the coin regarding the debate of whether Apple should build its own first party versions of these kinds of apps.

When Apple announced period tracking in its Health app, there was another round of articles of how Apple eats its own from the app store.

I mostly agree that it's problematic that Apple runs the App Store AND competes with other apps on it. But we have to take this sort of thing into consideration too.

But we have found again and again, that these third party apps have absolutely no data protections and will happily sell your data to other entities.

So if you want to track your period (and other such sensitive data) and not have your sex life sold to everyone, use the first party app. Even Apple can't see your data.

<comment><USER7> There's nothing stopping Apple (or any other app store vendor) from creating a middle ground, by requiring third parties to agree in advance to a strong set of data-handling and privacy rules in order to sell apps in their store. They could even periodically audit those third-party products; failure to live up to the terms the third party agreed to when they published the app would be pretty solid grounds for kicking them out of the store.

That stuff would cut into the planet-size hoard of profit Apple makes off the app store, though, so I wouldn't hold my breath.

<comment><USER8> It would also be nearly impossible to enforce. How would Apple be able to verify that a company is complying with these terms? I don't think many companies would be happy to let Apple poke around in their backend, just as I don't think Apple wants to spend the resources to do that.

Edit: "impossible" -> "nearly impossible"

<comment><USER9> Write in compliance requirements with provisions for regular third party audits.

If personal data companies don't start regulating themselves they will get it forced on them by the government. Financial, medical, and defense companies already do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Isn't that why Zuck invented Facebook in the first place?

</comment><comment><USER10> "Facebook has announced it will launch a tool for users to stop apps and businesses sharing their data with the social network."

What a joke!!

</comment><comment><USER11> The qualm here should be with the app developers, not Facebook. The app makers chose to use an advertisement company's SDK (Facebook) to monetize their app by sharing data and showing personalized adds.

Everyone knows thats facebook's whole business model and they aren't shy about it. If you're developing an app that collects personal data, its in your hands to make sure its shared appropriately.

<comment><USER12> The qualm should be with both. You should be upset with people selling poison as a health drink, and you should be upset with people reselling it as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Having initially been against GDPR (with hindsight that was a knee jerk reaction), I am now in favour of it. Many large companies have been able to collect data and use it as they liked with impunity. In the past, users have had limited rights when it came to their data and GDPR has changed that.

EDIT - wow I got downvoted for being in favour of GDPR!?

<comment><USER14> >wow I got downvoted for being in favour of GDPR!?

Absolutely, yes. Remember, this site is chock full of people in adtech, and the GDPR works directly against their employers' goals. Remember the old saying: "It is very difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it." On top of that, software people in the US skew disproportionately libertarian, and they think that any law curtailing business behavior, no matter how abhorrent, is bad and that we should rely on "the invisible hand" to regulate everything.

<comment><USER15> I think that many people who work in ad tech are in favour of GDPR. They have seen the mishandling of personal data on a massive scale first hand. This is true in my case.

<comment><USER13> There is a view out there that European regulation around data/tech is anti- American. A certain level of patriotism which wants to protects the profits of the nation's pride and joy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I was sure this would be about cybersex on messenger. Oh, hey there kettle!</comment>


Something really scary is going on in Germany - <AUTHOR> http://martinweigert.com/something-really-scary-is-going-on-in-germany/ <comment><USER4> Belgian papers sued Google a few years ago over similar uses of their content. It sort of backfired on them when google stopped crawling their pages. The internet and Google are more powerful than the German print media. [http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/07/18/belgian- papers-a...](http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/07/18/belgian-papers-anger- at-google-move/)

<comment><USER5> What a great article. So brief, yet so much justice.

Ok, ok, also a little bit of schadenfreude.

<comment><USER6> >so much justice

I suggest the "careful what you wish for" lesson applies both ways. "Justice" implies that Google can and should get away with a lot of things under threat of removing your content from their index.

<comment><USER7> Since Germany is a populous and wealthy country, Google has a strong commercial interest in not removing German content. It's hard to imagine what nefarious thing Google would force Germany to do this way.

<comment><USER8> why there are other Publishers that will step in to fill the gap New Scientist has just launched a German language site for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> To be fair, there were a few positive/neutral articles, for example by Frank Rieger, a popular member of the Chaos Computer Club, in the FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) but they are in the minority.

Of course, there is the obvious ignorance regarding technical facts like: "robots.txt is from the stone age. On or off for everyone is the only possibility" [1] which reminds me a lot of the discussion we had some time back regarding internet filters. But the one thing I find really dangerous is that they (meaning major newspapers, politicians, etc.) managed to spin the story so that the narrative is now "greedy google" vs hard working journalists. I applaud google for their efforts (and I am fully aware of their commercial interests in this matter) but I slowly begin to think they did their cause a disservice. If a discussion takes place its always about google and their lobbying. The extend of this law which could lead to bloggers being sued (btw: a side effect of the very fuzzy written law which leaves a lot open and almost certainly will need a court to decide on the details) when they link to news articles is almost never mentioned.

One last thing: Recently, two big news newspapers had to shut down and that print sales are declining is nothing new. I cant remember the last time I bought a newspaper and I am also pretty sure that although blogs/twitter/whatever are a good addition they cant replace classical media. There is definately a need for the discussion for new sources of incomes for classical paper based medias as ad sales from their online publication wont cut it. Perhaps something like a "culture/media tax/flatrate" as we currently have with the GEZ (for the financing of the public tv stations)? I dont know, but the #lsr is certainly not the way to go.

[1][http://www.golem.de/news/leistungsschutzrecht-springer- vergl...](http://www.golem.de/news/leistungsschutzrecht-springer-vergleicht- google-mit-den-taliban-1212-96172.html)

<comment><USER10> "But the one thing I find really dangerous is that they (meaning major newspapers, politicians, etc.) managed to spin the story so that the narrative is now "greedy google" vs hard working journalists."

Isn't there a certain degree of truth in this? Truly, there is a big problem if the rates for borrowing content is too high. But I think what the German public is responding to is how journalism has changed and not in ways that are necessarily positive. There is far less incentive to be a good journalist now since the quality of a given article is likely much lower than in the past -- research is more limited, articles are written in a greater hurry, even some articles these days are largely written by computer or by individuals overseas.

What this law is reasonably trying to address is that content of whatever form -- be it newspaper articles, images, whatever -- has inherent value that should be recognized. Surely enforcing that value with an iron fist like the RIAA is not the right way to go. But allowing free expropriation (even of abstracts) may also be unfair.

I think a good analogy, fifty years ago, would be a newspaper that sends out people to read other newspapers very early in the morning (say at 5 AM) and then produces its own newspaper at 6. Surely such a thing would not have been possible fifty years ago, but something similar is possible today with the advent of the internet. If this behavior had occurred fifty years ago and hadn't been regulated, imagine what would have happened: the overall quality of newspapers would have been diluted and the incentive to produce good articles would have likely declined.

Now, of course, this isn't quite perfect. Again, Google is borrowing very small snippets. And surely -- if anyone remembers this -- the French courts were wrong several years ago when they allowed some newspapers to sue Google for simply posting a few sentences or a link to an article. But what if newspapers could charge a modest fee commensurate to the value an article link is to Google? Over time, the fees could certainly accrue. The question, I think, is how high these fees are and how this sort of regulation is imposed.

<comment><USER11> _the French courts were wrong several years ago when they allowed some newspapers to sue Google for simply posting a few sentences or a link to an article. But what if newspapers could charge a modest fee commensurate to the value an article link is to Google?_

I don't understand the distinction you are making between these two situations.

Think about the larger precedent that you're setting here, however. Should I not be able to quote a few lines and link you to a news story without paying money to the source I'm linking to? (whether the license was compulsory or not). What is google news but a factual stating of "here's what a bunch of sources said about the news today"? If a major event happens in your home town, how much money will it cost you to put up a blog post saying, "here's a roundup of coverage on this event"?

<comment><USER12> Just for the record, French laws about "droits d'auteurs" and quotations allow you to quote any text under "droits d'auteur" as long as it remains a quotation (the definition of which is vague, and varies from one case of "jurisprudence" to another, but 300 words is generally considered reasonable)

This sortof is an essential preamble to free speech. Now, i agree with you, there's "quote" and there's "quote".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm very disappointed with Europe. There is a trend of idiotic legislation drafted, & voted on by people who don't really understand the implications. They just don't understand the internet & technology enough and/or aren't smart enough. It' embarrassing.

The other recent example was/is the brain-dead UK/EU cookie law. Is our privacy any more protected? No. All we got was some dumb generic "cookie policy" popups that we have to "agree" to and further balkanization of the web. Additional costs to having a website (are there any scaremongering companies offering auditing to make sure your website does not expose you to legal risk?). Disempowering people by raising the barrier to running a site.

All downside. No upside from any perspective. We can't even blame lobbies or interested parties because literally nobody got anything positive from this. Just pure stupidity.

They should have know better than this.

<comment><USER14> Not all bad. [http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/9/3009157/netherlands-net- neu...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/9/3009157/netherlands-net-neutrality- law-passes-senate)

<comment><USER13> Thanks. It's relevant though that nothing like this is likely to come from the EU itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Step 1: Make Google pay for including you in search results.

Step 2: Force Google to include you by demanding something like search engine neutrality.

<comment><USER16> Step 3: Google requires payment from German publishers to be included in the search index, exactly offsetting fees incurred in Step 1. It would be quite reasonable, I think.

<comment><USER17> Step 4. Only commercial sites from Germany are in Google, cause it's too much paperwork to have all these fees canceled if you're not doing this full time.

Both Google and newspapers in Germany are glad from such resolution, only some naive young people complain about something. They're surely pirates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As this site is nearly down, I add my thoughts as a comment here as well:

Well, some media (FAZ) did a pretty good job, letting Frank Rieger explain the "Leistungsschutzrecht". OK, even there, it was one article of many. And only one.

And what is new, when it comes to the press not publishing anything, that goes against their own agenda. Even across a lot of publishing-houses. Well nothing new under the sun.

What is really, really bad, is the fact, that the law is so fuzzy, that everyone quoting from another source might be potentially liable. This law is so bad, because it just might kill the independent voices. And I think there might be a reason for this.

Because the press oftentimes has no incentive to dig deeper, to ask critical questions, when it comes to the really important questions, this job is left for the independent voices, that do this out of a feeling of necessity. But if these voices are silenced through fear...

... well, I think you get the drift. And I know, this sounds a lot like conspiracy - and I am not saying, my thoughts come anywhere near the truth, but I just wanted to share the thought.

Just one example: The so called "Netzsperren" (blocking sites, because of content with filter-lists - aka censorship) were reported by the big media as being bad, after a lot of independent bloggers had written about it and the discussion just could not be "ignored" any longer.

<comment><USER19> Some have argued that even just linking to an article might get you sued. After all, most URLs include the title of the article. Obviously, courts will have to decide, but the possibility alone is frightening.

<comment><USER18> Some years ago here in Germany there has been an court sentence, that a link is no infringement. >The publishers wanted to kill Google News in this way.

Some years before that a friend of mine had written a news search engine, that did exactly the same as Google News, but he did not have the money to fight before court. So he had to remove a lot of publishers from his index.

So I do not think, that linking will become a problem here - but who knows. But the real problem is, that this law might silence independent bloggers. And it was them, who brought important topics into the public discussions, that were ignored by the big publishers, like a planned web-censorship law, that was discussed some years back...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> FWIW, I've written to my member of parliament [0], expressed my dissatisfaction and asked him to oppose the law. He wrote back saying hat his parliamentary party is already opposing this law but for slightly different reasons: It won't increase the quality of journalism and will just create a flood of lawsuits. Lastly it is far too vaguely phrased as to not have grave side effects.

The changes of the opposition are slim though as there is a conservative majority the parliament.

Interestingly, he has a personal axe to grind with Axel Springer AG as he was a big part of the student movement of '68 which was so intensely vilified by said company ("Youth in the street - Germany going down the drain ...").

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Christian_Str%C3%B6bele>

<comment><USER21> fuck ströbele ! he voted in favor of the war in afghanistan and yet he still participates in all the peace rallies. He's just another lying corrupted politician

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is why Germans must vote for Pirate Party at the next elections.

Oh, and I've noticed Twitter shows snippets from websites, too, now, so this will affect them as well.

<comment><USER9> I would really like to like the pirate party but in their current state they are absolutely unvotable for me. This is one of their core topics but I havent heard anything from them yet. What I have heard is that the youth organizations of almost every party (yeah I know, including the young pirates) have voiced their concerns regardings the lsr.

<comment><USER22> That does seem strange. Any idea what is happening to them? Are they going through leadership change inside the party or policy change, since that last scandal with one of their female leaders?

<comment><USER9> People closer to the pirate party might disagree, but from my outside perspective it has much to do with procedural problems the very nature of the party brings with them. They are primarily concerned with themselves. Lets take flat hierarchy goal for example: A good thing in theory which leads to a very tiring process when it comes to making decisions.

On the last big conference for example there was a last minute petition for the further research of time travel. And it has to be discussed. Sure, it was dismissed relatively quickly and it was meant as a joke but those were 30 minutes lost for good.

Apart from that, and this is just my personal opinion, they are missing likable leading figures (a concept they dont really like). Head of the pirates Bernd Schloemer for example is more of a silent leader. One of the most famous pirates Christoph Lauer comes across as rude, uninterested and smug. A social behaviour 101 wouldnt be that bad for some of the members.

<comment><USER21> the pirate party certainly has some procedural problems. they would probably be the first to admit just that. But those problems stem from the fact, that they are trying to implement completly new procedures for political assemblies. procedures that take advantage of modern technology instead of just replicating an essentialy unchanged process from the 18th century. And if they should succeed, it could redefine democracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm very curious to know how they would determine how much Google should pay, and how to distribute that money to the different publishers.

Anyway, I think that Google, if the law is passed, should refuse to pay and stop publishing news from publishers from Germany (there are always still Austrian and Swiss newspapers for German news).

<comment><USER9> Just because they share the same language doesnt mean the journalistic quality regarding local/national news is equal.

A german newspaper will always be more detailed and in-depth when it comes to national matters.

<comment><USER23> Of course the quality and quantity of German news on Google would worsen, but the point would be to see if it is Google benefiting more from the newspapers, or the other way around.

<comment><USER9> It would be interesting to see an official statistic from the big papers where they get their traffic from. I get my news by surfing directly to their homepages. I think I read somewhere that they get most of their hits through the google search although I cant really belive that.

<comment><USER24> I would imagine the bulk of traffic comes from headline news. Some people check the paper every day, some people catch a bit of news on the bus or TV or whatever, then google it.

I think the rest of the traffic historical articles, looked up by people trying to win arguments on the internet. I don't know how many times i've been pulled to the NYT because of that sort of behavior. I would guess all of that traffic comes from google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Interesting and sad. I don't know if it is possible but I am wondering if such a law could include an 'opt out' policy. Something which said to search engines and the like that they are allowed to snippet your articles.

Then have Google turn off indexing of everything that doesn't have opt-out enabled.

My expectation would be that the opt-out publications would flourish and the ones who had opted "in" would quickly die or decide to join the "opt out" group. I can't imagine anyone looking at their referrer links would think this scheme was a "good" idea.

<comment><USER26> robots.txt ?

<comment><USER9> yes. They dont want to block google or other crawlers. They still want their traffic, but they also want to get paid for getting crawled and listed.

<comment><USER25> Well I can only read English transcribed interpretations so perhaps a native German speaker can correct me.

As I understand it this is their argument:

Google crawls site X, a user visits Google News or Google Search, Google displays a page which has extracted content from site X as a link (usually the headline) and a "snippet" of what that title is referring to. Google also has advertisements on the page.

Now, as I understand their argument, The publishers claim Google makes money off someone who clicks on an advertisement on these 'constructed' pages. Google's news page is full of headlines and snippets that came from other publications. Google doesn't pay those publications, but the only "reason" that someone is reading the news page in the first place is because those headlines and snippets are on that page. Therefore Google should either share any revenue they got from the ad click with the people whose 'content' was on the page, or they should pre-pay for that content in the first place.

Does that seem like it captures it? If you agree that it does, then we can speculate that the publishers lobbying for this 'law' believe that in this economic transaction Google is getting a better deal than they are.

Except that they conveniently _ignore_ the economic benefit they are getting from Google for telling the world that their web site has interesting content (or at least content related to the news interest or search interest of the web searcher).

Presumably these publishers make income either through sales or advertising on their web site. And those sales are proportional to the traffic at their web site. Google _could_ charge to include them in their search/news results (and they in fact do that in search with AdWords) and would it be more or less than the papers would charge to use a snippet?

The easiest way to educate a publisher on the value of having their results appear in Google is to stop having them appear in Google. Ask any web site that was knocked off the first page by the Panda update how that feels. Those guys really "get" the value they receive by being up there. Publishers don't get that yet. (well not all of them). So Google stops indexing them. Their traffic goes back to pre-1995 levels (which means nobody goes there) and their internet costs (hosting, etc) now exceed the revenue from online advertising. Whoops! Education achieved.

Of course I could be totally off base here, there could be some moral argument I'm missing but frankly I think its all about the money here and not all of the 'value' is accounted for.

<comment><USER27> You get it right, from the parts of the debate I followed this is their main argument - "they display extracts of our texts, and people then don't visit our page but stay on Google News", which is of course unprovable.

(you could get the amount of people clicking through by stopping to list these snippets - the visitors you loose are the visitors that used to click through)

Another thing to add is: Google runs no ads on Google News, so _directly_ they don't make any money using other people's news (indirectly by binding customers etc.)

<comment><USER28> In addition: Google has no ads on the google news pages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> If they succeed they will simply remove themselves from the discourse and accelerate their obsolescence.

<comment><USER30> Sure, and I would welcome that. But I think smaller publishers (including bloggers) might have problems, too. The law would apply to their blogs as well, they would have to figure out how to allow Google and others to still quote them. It might be so complicated that it would cause a lot of blogs to shut down.

Other news processors were already mentioned in the article. I just fear that it would make it too costly to experiment and would kill small publishers.

<comment><USER31> Would it work to just put your blog under a permissive distribution license (Creative Commons or the like)? I know nothing about the German legal system or the exact phrasing of this law; could someone with more domain knowledge comment on how this would interact with licensing terms?

<comment><USER30> I don't know the exact phrasing either. Also not sure if everybody wants to put their content under CC.

I think the government could make this messy enough to even foil the CC plan. For example they could set it up like GEMA for music - there would be an entity distributing the money and collecting it on behalf of the content providers. Besides, is there a standard way yet to announce CC content? That would be necessary to make it work for search engines.

<comment><USER32> AFAIK this is the way to go: <http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking_works>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Why is it that every time that something like this happens, Google is the only tech company that comes forward with a message? Doesn't having a free and open internet benefit any other company?

<comment><USER34> I feel that its because google is of a size where the idea of getting a letter from its lawyers is a scary prospect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The bigger trend to this story is that information changed from something that was scarce to something that is now abundant.

What the German publishers don't seem to understand is that their once so valuable and scarce goods (information and news) are becoming less and less valuable. Looks like they are trying to defend a dying business model with legislation.

Herbert Simon said in the 70s: "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." Google is a major dispenser of attention, and I think the German publishers are doing themselves a huge disservice by making it harder for Google to send attention to the publishers.

The big unresolved issue is: how can we finance good journalism in an era where the value of static information approximates zero very quickly? Maybe the answer is in moving away from static information to an information process as the product... Something that can't be copied easily.

<comment><USER36> Exactly right. I made a similar point here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4886376>

Media companies are in the attention harvesting business NOT in the information delivery business. The marginal value of the information product is virtually zero. The marginal value of attention redirected to ads is some rate greater than zero - some rate greater than the cost of delivering that information product. So profit can be made. But the power is in delivering the attention, not the information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> From the first comment on that:

 _"What's wrong with newspapers being paid for the content that they produce? No one has to use their headlines if they don't want to pay for it."_

What about fair use? Does that exist in Germany? I'm a quote geek for example. I love collecting "favourite quotes", giving a source (link if possible). I started out with the general quotes everybody knows, but of course I also copy and paste from the web in general, and sometimes I actually type what I read in a book, and translate it to English. Man, I even love talking about it. I love quotes.

Now, I consider that "fair use", and since I do it mostly in English the noobs left me alone so far. But I don't even know if there _is_ such a thing as fair use in Germany... any ideas?

<comment><USER38> In the spirit of DRY, here's a link to the a comment of mine, 200 pixels away on this very page, answering that exact question:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4883289>

But I suppose I really should have refactored the comment out into a top-level comment and linked to it from both. :)

<comment><USER37> Okay, that kinda leaves Israel since I'd never move to the US :P Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The Economist talked about this a week ago in an article :

"Taxing times As newspapers' woes grow, some are lobbying politicians to make Google pay for the news it publishes"

Not necessarily the end of the world (see Brasil) but might not have the intended consequences :

[http://www.economist.com/news/international/21565928-newspap...](http://www.economist.com/news/international/21565928-newspapers- woes-grow-some-are-lobbying-politicians-make-google-pay-news-it)

</comment><comment><USER40> Frankly, I can understand the publisher's point, but I'm surprised that they do not seem to see how this could backfire if Google simply stopped crawling their sites.

But what's more: I think if this law became a reality it wouldn't affect my personal web usage at all. News sites are about the only type of website left where I still type in the URL and go to the page directly instead of doing a search.

</comment><comment><USER41> I think the intuition behind these proposed laws is that Google has become so dominant in providing the information substrate of society that it should be subject to regulation as a monopoly. The argument would be something along the lines that search works best when provided as one comprehensive resource. Therefore, as a natural monopoly it should be regulated for similar reasons that other utilities are (electricity, water). The publishers are trying to make a case that their product has value as a "public good." Classical economic theory says market forces alone will produce a sub-optimal supply of a public good with out regulation.

Something like that. It's not a totally implausible argument. It does seem notable to me that Google is able to extract value from content that the creators can't.

</comment><comment><USER42> 503\. Here's the Google cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://martinweigert.com/something- really-scary-is-going-on-in-germany/)

<comment><USER43> I didn't listen much in high school English; is linking to a Google cache of this blog post ironic?

<comment><USER44> No. When a site is down, it is customary on Hacker News for someone to go to Google and get the last cached (saved) version of the web-page from them to post it those that can't access it to read, as a sort of convenience. It's also common for the plaintext of the article to be posted here.

<comment><USER43> I meant that it seems like precisely the sort of thing that would be outlawed by the proposed legislation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> IANAL but trying to read the law, it seems to be a rather blatant lex google.[1] They specifically state "search engine or similar services" should be prohibited from (in an extreme interpretation) linking to newspapers, if they do not pay. ( The rest of the law is probably just redundant, since it seems to reimplement copyright for a small subset of already copyrighted material.)

[1]<http://dip.bundestag.de/btd/17/114/1711470.pdf> (German)

[EDIT: spelling]

<comment><USER36> Google should state a new policy. We're not going to spend our money on servers and bandwidth indexing and linking to German publishers who won't pay - I guarantee you the value of the traffic they get from Google dwarfs what Google gets back from them in terms of marginal revenue directly attributable to their content. That's the thing about Google. They make tons of money - <USER2> given that they're a prime mover of traffic around the Internet they make a damn site more money for other folks - including newspapers.

So Google should charge. Then they can do like the phone companies with termination fees and call it a wash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> The proper term for pushing this law is "rent-seeking". You must include our content, and you must pay us for it.

This is a general problem with people and businesses perceiving themselves as working for society. They cannot see the wrongs they cause - because it's all for an even better cause.

German newspapers can use robots.txt and obey the social contract of the web like the rest of us.

<comment><USER36> If the newspapers could make a profit putting pictures of cats riding unicorns on every page with any text written in swahili, they'd do it every day it worked for them and not give a damn about the societal benefit - they'd cry that they're businesses and they've got to be allowed to make a profit. This is exactly what's happened over the decades as they cut international staff, and investigative staff and focused on lifestyle and entertainment news more and more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This ultimately comes down to the fact that newspapers are going out of business because not enough people want to buy them any more, and they're lashing out in desperation.

I think there's a simple argument with content and markets that all of these media companies disingenuously ignore. If no-one is prepared to pay for your content then the market rate for your content is, by definition, zero. We pay in two ways - direct purchasing, and delivering surplus attention beyond that required to consume the media, which can be redirected towards various forms of advertising. When you cannot run your business on advertising revenue alone it means that not enough people are giving enough surplus attention of enough value to cover.

This argument about the "inherent value" of one form of content or another - of the need to pay artists or creators, or in this case journalists - doesn't extend to other realms. If I decide I want to be a carpenter, I cannot build a table and demand someone buy that table for $1,000. If the market won't bear that price for the table then the government isn't going to force others to pay me $1,000 because I feel that's what it's "worth".

The market rates for all forms of media have plummeted due to there being more supply of attention-draining media than there is demand either in terms of hard-dollars in direct payment, or surplus attention to be redirected towards paid advertising (and its ilk).

When old media companies had a stranglehold on distribution because paper production and distribution was expensive, or video production costs were prohibitive, only a small elite were able to publish their opinions, and the monopolistic distributors were able to charge a premium for the limited access to information or entertainment they provided. They weren't paid well because they provided an outstanding product (though it often was), they were paid well because they limited supply. Those limits are gone. Many many people produce entertainment and informational content. Many do it just for fun and are happy not to get paid. Many more do it with the hope of getting paid anything without the expectation of the lavish salaries and expense accounts of journalists of old.

This undercuts their economics and doesn't even touch on the fact that the newer voices often offer media that is more attractive to younger audiences. Not to mention declining quality of the product in many cases. Many media companies as they've become bloated monstrosities have undermined their own product quality with short-term-profit-focused decision making which had long term harm.

Is it really the case that piracy accounts for all problems in a record industry where the giants spent the pre-Internet-boom '90s crushing independent labels, monopolizing market channels and creating a modern-day payola system on radio where programming was rigidly sliced and diced to the lowest common denominator? Is none of the loss of popularity of the New York Times down to their abandoning their predominantly liberal subscriber audience during the Bush years and being guilty of mis-leading story after mis-leading story in the build up to the Iraq War, destroying people's confidence in their role as a reliable neutral arbiter?

tl;dr The publishers referenced by the OP aren't happy at the market rate for their product and services and want government to rig the market to pay them a cushy wage. Such subsidies rarely save industries in the long term, and the public should be outraged - because legislation of this sort is a public subsidy on a privileged elite in no uncertain terms.

<comment><USER13> I think the point that is unnoticed is that medium matters. More specifically, medium & distribution matter.

Mediums beget business models, not content. Game Of Thrones has business model closer to X Factor than to Avatar, because similarity of the medium is more important than similarity of the content.

The best way to see this is by looking at the history of porn, the content industry with negative lobbying power. Adult cinemas had the same business model as (and competed with) live shows. Certain types of content got produced. Then home videos changed it entirely. DDifferent types of content got produced for different people. Then DVD + online sales, changed the industry (growing it again). Then live streaming shrunk it.

Each time the medium & distribution changed the whole industry changed. Different producers, different consumers, different content, different size industry, different business model.

Online consumption of news media is not the same as dead tree. That is reality. All of the characteristics of the industry change when that happens. Douglas Adams said it best " _It's like trying to explain to the Amazon River, the Mississippi, the Congo and the Nile how the coming of the Atlantic Ocean will affect them. The first thing to understand is that river rules will no longer apply._ "

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Is there no such thing as Fair Use in German copyright law?

<comment><USER38> _"While many other countries recognize similar exceptions to copyright, only the United States and Israel fully recognize the concept of fair use."_

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Influence_internationa...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Influence_internationally)

<comment><USER48> This is entirely misleading, because it makes it seem like the policies in other countries is questionable with regards to fair use, or perhaps with lesser rights.

In France, for example, there is no such thing as fair use, but that's only because 'fair use' in the US is not defined as what you're allowed to do, however, but as a sort of vague statement about perhaps being able to use things.

In France, it is strictly codified: You are able to make private showings of copyrighted material You are allowed to make private copies (with a few exceptions, e.g. software backups allowed, but copying your poster so you can hang it in two different rooms is illegal, as is copying your software to two different computers so two different people can use it) You can make copies of non-educational works for educational uses (ie. no photocopying textbooks, but you can copy yesterday's newspaper article all you want) Parody Citations Etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Isn't this a case for the internet bat signal? I must admit I still haven't included it on my sites, mostly because last time I looked they only provided JavaScript hooks making my site vulnerable to their site being hacked. Perhaps they have an API by now?

</comment><comment><USER49> They should google ''Wyatt's Torch'' before voting.)

</comment><comment><USER50> Why is this topic so complicated? A Google news snippet very rarely would suffice for a user, if they are interested they would click through, if they are not, they would not visiting the newspaper anyway. Google are not showing ads in Google News, although they might show them in search results. But still, no profit that newspaper could address is being taken by Google. In fact, Google is providing traffic.

So taking all the philosophical statements out of the way, what is the econimical case that the newspapers are making? If Google actually showed a bigger part or the whole articles, they'd obviously be taking revenue from newspapers, but it's not the case.

<comment><USER36> Right. Back in the pre-web days when I was a mere teen I would spend breakfast, and often late afternoon going through the English broadsheet newspapers. Usually back to front to read the sports first.

But the key is that the first read, the morning one, involved skimming articles for their gist and reading the ones that interested me. The afternoon session possibly involved reading more, due to boredom.

The real problem the newspapers have is that most of the articles they produce fail the skim test. I don't want to read more. I get the gist. I'm not interested. If they're good I click through and read them on the original site... often then clicking to other things I find there. Win for the Google link to them. If it's a hot topic I'll often read many articles from many pubs on the same topic. But in a world with so many news sources the truth is they don't stand out, I am not going to check a thousand sources very day, or even ten. So I'm not going to wade through to find the things I'm interested in. If they don't want their headings and summaries in Google I don't care about their product.

And I'm a Google user. I pay Google's bills. I don't want them raising my rates in other areas to pay publishers for links to content that I may skim over and never want to read in depth. Why should my costs for Google - <USER3> terms of what they can deliver me for all that surplus attention of mine they harvest over a year - go up to subsidize failing newspapers producing product for which the market rate doesn't support their costs?

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Do they really thing this will stop the continuing decline of their newspapers?

</comment><comment><USER52> I'm sure some lawmakers have heard of robots.txt, so what is their rationale?

<comment><USER53> Greed?

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Technology generally finds a way around poorly written laws but I think there is a real underlying problem. Google News has become its own thing now. The headlines, snippets and icons I get from a variety of newspapers is often enough to skim over the day's news and I only click on maybe one or two stories for more in-depth reading. I think a way for Google to charge news sources and for news sources to charge Google both make sense but they have to be developed by willing participants, not by legislators.

</comment><comment><USER55> Nothing scary, they just are aiming carefully to shoot their own buttocks with some good German schrapnel. If there will be no readership for them, they will not be able to sell ads and die in 3-5 years, depending on long term contracts. And this is a good thing. Since you can use free Russian and Urdu headlines for free! Oh, I forgot to mention Chinese.

</comment><comment><USER56> It would seem that Google could quickly kill this law by de-indexing all the relevant newspapers, right now. Why are they waiting?

<comment><USER57> No one likes to burn bridges, even if they get sued. They could do a "this is how google would look if you go through with this" day, but for now they look to be taking the more safe route with lawyers.

<comment><USER58> So, in other words, the posters defending Google are being totally disingenuous when they claim that Google couldn't care less about these petulant little publishers and that the publishers need Google far more than vice versa. Apparently, Google really doesn't want to take these publishers off Google News.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> This is rather interesting that it would be coming from Axel Springer. As someone involved in the Berlin tech scene I've seen them really investing a lot of money in innovative events and companies. My guess is there is some typical corporate disconnect there. I doubt this makes it through the legislation.

</comment><comment><USER60> _which is why the law proposal, called "Leistungsschutzrecht" (hashtag #lsr), is currently being discussed in the German Parliament_

Next time a German native speaker tells me his loves his mother tongue because of the possibility of concatenating words together, I will point them to that hashtag.

<comment><USER50> That statement doesn't make sense. If they didn't contatenate, the string would be even longer and less useful as hashtag, or it would be concatenated again, as most hashtags in English are concatenated words...

<comment><USER60> Note that the hashtag they are using is #lsr, not #Leistungsschutzrecht .

The irony is that they are not taking advantage of concatenation, in a language register where it is widely used (twitter), and in a tongue where it is idiomatic (German).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> what is really scary is not the proposed law but the public relation campaign google is mounting against it. It is a (very likely) unprecedented internet lobbying effort involving not only googles advertising network, but also a link on google.de (no longer visible). To a casual observer, watching the short youtube clip or reading the campaign slogan "Willst Du auch in Zukunft finden, was Du suchst?"("Do you want to continue to find what you're searching for ?") it could seem like the government was trying to shut down google search.

It seems like a scary prospect to think of the ways google, a private company, could start to use its unparralled reach to lobby for legislation in its favor around the entire globe.

</comment><comment><USER52> I think our decentralized streams protocol should solve this kind of thing.

Basically RSS with push and access controls. You subscribe to a feed and get pushes / pulls as long as you are paying it. Why isn't there a standard protocol for this on the web?

</comment><comment><USER61> I will put a contrarian point of view (just for the sake of discussion):

The law is good because Google can afford to pay and the hordes of blogspammers can't.

Therefore Germany will be the first country without blogspam.

<comment><USER62> > blogspam

You have a weird definition of 'blogspam' if using a headline to point to an article you're commenting on qualifies as 'blogspam'. There's nothing in the law (from what I've seen) that says "If you have more than a paragraph of text, this doesn't apply to you" or anything similar to that.

</comment></comment><comment> daniel-cussen The reason newspapers are sacrificing their credibility for money is quite simply because they're running out of money faster than they are running out of credibility.

</comment><comment><USER63> This is scary? I expected Nazi zombies!

</comment><comment><USER58> Here are a few points to consider:

1) The notion that the systematic clipping of one or two sentences from every news story you can find on the Internet for the purpose of selling ads is "fair use" is totally absurd.

2) The "robots.txt" argument misses the point because the publishers never gave permission to use their content, so the presence of an "opt-out" mechanism is irrelevant. The mechanism must be "opt-in", i.e., Google must ask to use their content.

3)If we believe that intellectual property has become an obsolete concept altogether, we should be prepared to accept all of the consequences of this, e.g., a site might pop up using a new TLD that accepts a search query from a client, passes it on to Google using a spoofed IPv6 address, and passes the result back to the client. We also shouldn't care about plagiarism, trademark infringement, etc., because the Internet has clearly made these concepts obsolete and laws related to them unenforceable.

<comment><USER64> And here's why those points don't matter:

1) The debate is centered on Google News. As far as I know, News is one of the few services where Google haven't, don't and won't show ads. "Systematic clipping of one or two sentences [...] for the purpose of providing an ad-free overview and linking to the respective stories" sounds like "fair use" to me.

2) They are publishing their material on the web, for the world to see. If you'd want an opt-in for every crawler out there, no search engine would ever be able to take off and index a significant portion of the web. By the way, an opting out from all (obedient) crawlers is as simple as "Disallow: /"

3) Passing a query on to google through a spoofed IPv6 address doesn't make any sense. Apart from that, there's several services offering just that functionality. Try DuckDuckGo, for example. (I'm not quite sure which search engine they use nowadays, but afaik, the project started out using Google.)

<comment><USER65> 2) There is no such thing as "fair use" in Germany's copyright law.</comment></comment></comment>


Can Quantum Mechanics subsume Philosophy? - <AUTHOR> http://marojejian.tumblr.com/post/25310182446/why-is-there-an-argument-instead-of-nothing <comment><USER2> I find most scientists I know startlingly bad at philosophy, and startlingly arrogant about how much science actually tells us. If only more people read philosophy instead of Popular Science.

<comment><USER3> It would be great if there were popular philosophy books _not_ written by the lunatics of the philosophy world. Focus on a question the mainstream philosophers have answered and lay out the answer step-by-step, like a popular science book that goes through how we know what goes on inside the Sun, for example, and how we found out.

<comment><USER4> Can you give an example of one interesting question that philosophers have answered?

<comment><USER5> Questions that can be answered aren't the domain of philosophy, and if these questions ever do get answered the question gets retrospectively moved out of the philosophers' domain. Often philosophers _do_ answer questions -- e.g. Russell answered a whole bunch, but we call the bits where he actually got definite answers "mathematics".

Philosophy, done right, isn't about answering questions but it is about refining them. Consider a difficult question, consider the logical consequences of a bunch of possible answers, and hopefully pop out at the other end with a _better_ question. A question like "What is the right way to behave?" might not ever get answered definitively, but at least we can put labels on various possible schools of thought and distinguish between them in a bunch of rather contrived situations involving lifeboats and runaway trains.

<comment><USER3> I'd deny that mathematics is at all related to philosophy except to about the same level physics, for example, is. Mathematics is a wonderful intellectual game that occasionally (and unpredictably) has results useful for science and engineering.

<comment><USER5> So where, in your opinion, is the boundary between philosophy and mathematics? On which side is logic?

<comment><USER3> Philosophy discusses human problems. Mathematics is a symbol game.

Logic is (at least) two concepts referred to with the same term and I won't answer until I know which one in specific you're talking about.

<comment><USER6> Philosophy does not discuss human problems. Philosophy discusses human thought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> See also, Betteridge's Law of Headlines <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines>

</comment><comment><USER5> The two linked articles

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/a-universe- fr...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/a-universe-from-nothing- by-lawrence-m-krauss.html?_r=3) being David Alpert's review of Lawrence Kraus's book, and

[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/has- ph...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/has-physics-made- philosophy-and-religion-obsolete/256203/) being an interview in which Kraus responds to the charges,

are far more interesting than this piece of borderline-blogspam, which claims to settle the question merely by overstating what Kraus originally said (I don't think he ever claimed that physics subsumes _all_ of philosophy, only some areas).</comment>


Ask HN: Work Around for passing C Pointers - <AUTHOR>

hey, I'm wondering if there's a way to get the ptr to a caller of a function from within the called function in c (without passing in the ptr as an arg). Basically, I've been experimenting on how to do oop style programming in c, so any ideas or suggestions here are more than welcome :) Here's an example to help clear things up.

  struct Person {
   char name[32];
   char * (*setName)( struct Person *, const char *);
  };

  char *setName( struct Person *self, const char *name) {
    strcpy(self->name, name );
  }

  int main(void) {
    struct Person *p = (struct Person *)malloc(sizeof(struct Person));
    p->setName = &setName;

    // here I'd really like to not have to pass the ptr 'p'
    // is there any way to do this?
    p->setName(p, "John Doe");
  }
 Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> Let's rearrange this expression

       p->setName(p, "John Doe");
       (p->setName) (p, "John Doe");

Here can you see that (p->setName) is entirely independent of (p, "John Doe"), so no, there is no way to pass p as an argument automatically.

You say that you want to "get the ptr to a caller of a function". However there's nothing that is a "caller". You have a function pointer. Where you got that from (inside a struct perhaps) is nothing to do with the call that you later make.

However, what you could do is

        char *setNameImp( struct Person *self, const char *name) {
            strcpy(self->name, name );
        }

        char * (*setName)( struct Person *p, const char *name) {
            p->setName(p, name);
        }

        int main(void) {
            struct Person *p = (struct Person *)malloc(sizeof(struct Person));
            p->setName = &setNameImp;

            setName(p, "John Doe");
      }

So have a static wrapper that calls the virtual method for you.

Also, you should not be using strcpy into a buffer without checking that the buffer is large enough.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the detailed response! that clarifies the static wrapper method a bit that I've seen used in the mri source and other places. Yea, I should have just done strncpy but was just typing in a quick example and didn't think buffer overflows would be an issue :)</comment></comment>


Stroustrup: C++ is a waste of time - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/jokepg/joke_19980216_01.txt

<comment><USER2> This is a well-known hoax: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/648998/is-c-a- waste-of-ti...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/648998/is-c-a-waste-of- time)

Personally, I still found it enjoyable to read. It raises some real problems with C++.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice file name. 'joke_19980216_01.txt'

</comment><comment><USER4> funny. i was totally trolled for the first paragraph or two.

did anyone else immediately have to go check how big hello world builds?

elipse@lappy:~/Desktop$ echo "#include<iostream> using namespace std; int main() { cout << \"hello world\"; } " > hello.cpp elipse@lappy:~/Desktop$ g++ hello.cpp elipse@lappy:~/Desktop$ ls -lh a.out -rwxr-xr-x 1 elipse elipse 8.8K Dec 6 13:46 a.out elipse@lappy:~/Desktop$

not half a meg, but still kinda big if you stop and think about it, but the c way with printf was only a couple of hundred bytes smaller...

</comment><comment><USER5> Can't tell if serious...

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I'm not sure I understand what he's trying to say.

EDIT: Oh, I just read the url.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Clear hoax, but I do find it interesting, because C++ engineers do seem to be outearning people in more high-level languages, which is surprising not because it's low-level but because it's a _bad_ language at its level of abstraction (C, on the other hand, fits its level well). I don't know of anyone cracking $250k in anything other than C++ (usually in low-latency trading) or Java.

It does seem, for now, that using a painful language increases one's compensation potential at least at the high end. I suspect that that will change in the future, but it may not happen quickly.</comment>


McFly's Hoverboard Is Now a Reality? - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2012/02/23/hoverboard-reality-video/

<comment><USER2> Nils Guadagnin's original link is here: <http://nilsguadagnin.blogspot.com/2010/05/hoverboard.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> Someone had to get started working on this by now, McFly uses them in 2015!</comment>


Show HN: Nowcation - find spontaneous travel deals - <AUTHOR> http://nowcation.com/

<comment><USER2> It would be nice if the departure locations were alphabetical, or at least let me type in to search.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very nice idea. I love the idea of being able to find random, good value, vacation ideas.

It would be nice to be able to apply some filters, or to have your algorithm filter out some of the junk ideas. For example, I was given several options to fly somewhere for one day and then return the next day. Some of the itineraries actually had me landing in the late afternoon and having to come home early the following morning. This is not a trip most would be interested in seeing and it adds noise to the results page.

The list of cities also seems like it should be organized alphabetically or by state. I didn't understand at all how it's organized now.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is awesome! I've been tossing this kind of idea around for awhile, because every once and awhile I find myself browsing hipmunk for "cheap flights today" to see if there's anything interesting, and a UI with the express purpose of selling short notice cheap flights has a lot of potential.

My thoughts:

\- When I'm booking a vacation, especially on short notice I'm going to need lodging. A lot of the price is hidden in the lodging and so I can't be sure if these are good deals or not. Going forward, it might be possible to load lodging in (possibly bake the deals a few times a day to reduce server load) and display 1 singular price that includes everything.

\- While you're at it, why not keep playing up this instant vacation thing, take it to the next level. I click the button, pay, and you dispatch a uber to my house to take me to the airport.

\- Selling package deals allows you to skim a little off the top in the way of "booking fees", but more interesting is the possibly to use yield management to buy tickets when they are the cheapest, then resell as a "nowcation" later.

Hope you keep working on this.

<comment><AUTHOR> These are all awesome suggestions. If a service did this for me, I would love it forever. I will definitely look into the quickest ways to implement stuff like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not sure how you're doing your 'booking' to photo matching, but you've got a great pic of Toronto, Ontario matched with a booking to Ontario, California. I noticed this after switching to the Seattle section.

Nice simple presentation.

</comment><comment><USER6> Just letting you know that avast pops a malicious url warning for trying to load <http://www.ineedstorage.com/images/sd.jpg> when you enter the site.

<comment><USER7> Me too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Brilliant!

I was just asking about that! <http://travel.stackexchange.com/q/11620/>

I hope you have plans for implementing it in Europe sometime!

</comment><comment><USER9> Hmm...It did not work for me. It says flight from New York to Orlando is just $128 but when I clicked to buy it - it sent me to Kayak and it was $210.

Great idea tho...

<comment><USER10> heh, the devs were telling me about an issue they solved with caching, sounds like a side-effect

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love sites like this. But, it would also be extra great if the site's price included estimates for the cost of lodging (say, at a particular quality level).

</comment><comment><USER12> Isn't it obvious that the departure locations need to be sorted? Or do people who want to go somewhere now not care from where they leave?

</comment><comment><USER13> Is there something like this for people living in London?

I would specifically like something with weekend deals if such a thing exists.

<comment><USER14> Me too. This would definitely be of interest to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Great idea. I was looking for a solution like this last night as I was trying to plan a last second trip. I hope you can pull this off. I often get random urges to take a 1-3 day trip, but I want to be able to find a flight that leaves the day that the urge hits.

It would be awesome to see deals from Hotel Tonight inline with the flights.

</comment><comment><USER16> I like it. Where are you getting the data from? Could it be expanded to include other cities outside the US?

</comment><comment><USER17> Great idea, nicely executed.

It seems that the price estimates are only for the flight costs (and not for lodging costs) - I was confused about this a little.

I would love to see something similar for lodging costs as well.

</comment><comment><USER18> Heads up- That faux styled dropdown is very difficult to use with a smartphone.

<comment><USER19> Or the iPad. Took 5, increasingly slow and methodical tries to actually get what I was trying for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is cool... What data sources do you use?

Something I've always wanted is to be able to say, I'm looking for a flight from x to y, email me if it ever gets X cheap.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is GENIOUS. Nothing more to say. Now buy some ads, contact big news websites and profit. Maybe take some vacations, I know a great website to find awesome deals ! ;)

</comment><comment><USER22> Well, think I'll be taking a vacation sometime soon!

</comment><comment><USER23> This really is a cool idea. Who doesn't occasionally yearn to get away from it all?

I'm not in the US, though that's not your fault.

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks nice!

I'd like to see a feature where I give it a budget, maybe a temperature preference, and it books me a random trip.

</comment><comment><USER24> Pretty cool idea. I'd like to see the students expand on this by adding some filter features like location, date, etc.

</comment><comment><USER25> Is this really a common use-case? When I travel it's always driven by the "where" not by the "now"...

<comment><USER26> Common enough to make a living off it. There are times when I want to take a big planned out vacation. There are other times where I just want to sit on a beach for 4 days, and really any beach will do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Nice idea, but nooo contact information, nor an about page reachable from the landing page?

</comment><comment><USER28> Pretty sure "wanna get away" is trademarked by Southwest Airlines.

Overall, great layout.

</comment><comment><USER29> Gorgeous photos. Love the simple UX. Watch your backs, Expedia, Travelzoo, etc.

</comment><comment><USER30> Isnt this just a prettier version of expedia or any of those travel sites.

<comment><AUTHOR> The main difference between Nowcation and Expedia is that Nowcation helps you find your destination. With Expedia, Orbitz, and other travel sites, you have to know where you want to go before finding deals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> neat... found a flight to shanghai for 75% off... will keep an eye on this for future deals... do you guys do tracking? like can i track future deals for shanghai?

</comment><comment><USER32> Would be awesome if you added Boston as an origin :)

<comment><USER33> +1

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is so smart! Really nice animations, too.

</comment><comment><USER35> Very cool. Can you support Canada?

</comment><comment><USER36> Woah. Respect++;

<comment><USER36> Also, I like how you've tweaked Isotope.js and got individual content boxes to become bigger on click with the slick animation. Good stuff. :D</comment></comment>


What Is Google Chrome Helper, and Why Is It Hogging My CPU Cycles? - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/10/google-chrome-helper/ <comment><USER2> Short version: the Wired journalist doesn't really understand what they're talking about. I can't believe no-one has pointed this out yet.

There is a Google Chrome Helper process for each tab you have open, for each extension you have installed, for each plugin that is currently running and one to talk to the GPU in your system.

If you enable "Click to play" and open Chrome with one empty tab you'll still have at least two Google Chrome Helper processes. One for the empty tab and one for the GPU process. If you've installed any extensions you'll have more. There is no way to "destroy the Google Chrome Helper".

That article is very badly written.

<comment><USER3> > In many cases, the plug-ins and processes they're handling aren't listed by > name because the APIs don't allow it. Google Chrome Helper is a martyr.

The author's chief complaint is that Google Chrome Helper obscures the source of crashes/hangs, making diagnosis that much harder. The article is badly written, sure; but the workaround does allows you to isolate suspect content from everything else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Short version: It's the process that runs extensions and plugins like flash.

Interestingly the solution to problems with it is the same as implemented in Opera 12 years ago: Configure the browser to run plugins only when the user explicitly activates them.

<comment><USER5> Info on how to set "Click to Play" in chrome settings: [https://security.berkeley.edu/content/how-do-i-enable- click-...](https://security.berkeley.edu/content/how-do-i-enable-click-play- google-chrome)

<comment><USER6> Did this on my 2008 MacBook, still running Snow Leopard. The speed was immediately noticeable when browsing the web.

I'd recommend it if anyone else has noticed a slow down at all.

<comment><USER7> I gotta ask: why are you still running Snow Leopard?

<comment><USER6> I don't feel there are any real benefits in upgrading. It'll just slow down my MacBook even more.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the honest reply. I wasn't trying to be judgemental, just trying to understand specific reasons, rather than admit the nebulous cloud of "because".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article won't help much. Many people are saying this issue occurs without any plug-ins. I doubt it is the true cause. There are many Google Chrome Helper CPU eating up issues. Some are obviously not plug-in and extension related.

Chrome for Mac is almost useless because of this issue. I first encountered this just after Maverics release and Google has not fixed it until now. Very odd.

Issue 373923 - chromium - Google Chrome Helper Process Taking up >100% CPU on Macs

[https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=373923](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=373923)

Issue 397642 - chromium - Google Chrome Helper (not responding) on Yosemite Beta 1

[https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=397642](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=397642)

Issue 399960 - chromium - Video playback, CSS transitions, and other GPU operations drastically heat up 13" Retina Macbook Pros

[https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=399960](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=399960)

Issue 367593 - chromium - Multiple Google Chrome Helpers are spawning and slowing severely slowing down my browser

[https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=367593](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=367593)

Google Chrome Helper using far too much CPU power - Google Group

[https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/LfBqIl...](https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/LfBqIlfFoSo%5B1-25-false%5D)

</comment><comment><USER9> Switched to Safari for casual browsing because of similar issues and much better battery life on many occasions.

<comment><USER10> Best solution for me is firefox + noscript. Super clean and fast.

<comment><USER11> You also get to see which sites are pulling javascript from 20+ other locations. Sometimes it's an almost-fun game of 'hunt the snipe' to find the javascript source that will present the actual content to you...

<comment><USER12> We have much different ideas of almost-fun.

<comment><USER13> It really does get quite amusing when you see "oh, two blocked scripts and one looks like their CDN, no problem" and temporarily enable them. Then the page reloads and 13 more scripts are blocked, so you make some reasonable guesses and it turns out the site won't play the goddamn video unless you also load some disqus comments, send a referrer header, allow something that looks like an XSS attack and sacrifice a goat.

I end up just leaving two browsers with different profiles loaded half the time, one of them tweaked to be as revealing as possible, for loading stuff I just want to see and don't want to play unblocking games with. Then when I close it all the cookies, localstorage, etc. goes poof. As he said, it's almost fun. Not actually fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> i have been wrestling with this for weeks, both professionally and personally. I'm fairly certain that in this process/before we noticed the problem we burned up one of our machines.

The thing is, there's no flash involved. We've narrowed it down to css3 transitions running amok. In other cases we've poorly constructed JS loops causing problems.

Recently i've noticed it on everything (even gmail, drive and calendar) in chrome.

No problems elsewhere, although in a side-by-side comparison with mozilla showed mozilla nearing similar cpu usage (30-60%) but never sustained (lasting seconds)

Not sure if this helps anyone, or if this is just 'duh.' The css3 transitions being involved i have not read out in the wild, so i thought i'd toss that idea out.

</comment><comment><USER15> Related bugreport: [https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=373923](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=373923)

</comment><comment><USER16> One of the most annoying things about Chrome is that I can't kill individual tabs via the task manager. Occasionally one tab will go crazy, then I have to click around trying to figure out which tab. Task manager can only close group of tabs.

I know this isn't the same issue just a whole bunch of annoying things about chrome

<comment><USER17> Chrome actually has a built in Task Manager which can be super useful for this sort of thing.

For example, it allows one to see CPU & Mem usage per tab. It also has the ability to kill problematic tabs, extensions and background processes with ease.

Chrome's Task Manager can be found under Menu Icon -> (More) Tools.

In fact, this feature was being used often enough, that I ended up assigning it a shortcut. (for me: command-shift-1)

<comment><USER18> Doesn't it have a default shortcut? I think "Shift + Esc" opens it.

<comment> mh- on windows. doesn't on mac for some reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does that come along for the ride if you use Chromium rather than Chrome? I'm not next to my Mac, but I believe I remember chromium being available through the homebrew cask system.

I don't care if I don't have flash (actually I care to NOT have flash). So what reason would there be to not simply run Chromium? Or am I forgetting something useful that I'm likely using?

<comment><USER20> Certain YouTube videos use Flash instead of HTML5, particularly at higher resolutions. You can probably live without this, but it's worth noting.

<comment><USER21> Not anymore—all videos can be viewed in Chromium as well (except those with special DRM).

They're using DASH with small .mp4 snippets. It's also the reason why videos don't load completely anymore and why audio and video sometimes go out of sync. Also the reason why nothing works as expected.

<comment><USER20> That's good to know, thank you. I knew that they transitioned to DASH but I didn't think that brought HTML5 everywhere. For live stream events (e.g. Apple's announcements), do they still use Flash?

<comment><USER22> Apple's announcements usually use the Quicktime plugin, at least if you're viewing on OSX. You can also usually extract the source stream and play it in another app if you dig through the markup/scripts/etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> On the topic of Chrome performance tips, if you always have dozens of open tabs in different windows, this nifty extension will freeze them out (unload them) until you actually want to look at them again : [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great- suspende...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great- suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en)

In theory, this is what memory paging is for. In practice, this is higher level and seems to work much better.

<comment><USER24> I disabled it after a while. Its time lapse can't be changed although available from setting. It tends to suspend tab within a couple minutes and constant reload when switching between tabs. Very poorly developed, a nice idea though. A similar addon in firefox has done this long time ago and I can keep over hundreds tabs in firefox almost all the time, while only a few is loaded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> While I haven't noticed 'Chrome Helper' problems, sometimes Chrome slows my machine with a ton of 'lsof' processes. I suspect an updater going haywire; more details here:

[https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/chrome/26gO8swn...](https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/chrome/26gO8swnI8E/8ySgJvsejCAJ)

Anyone else seen or worked-around this? (It's been a while since it's noticeably recurred, so maybe it's been fixed.)

</comment><comment><USER26> Maybe plug-in execution ought to stop when the relevant page is in the background. At least on battery-powered devices. Some Flash content tends to run in the background, doing who knows what, probably something related to advertising, tracking, or general obnoxiousness. On phones, "Run in Background" is usually a privilege that's discouraged.

<comment><USER27> Many people expect to be able to listen to say, music on youtube in one tab, while browsing the internet in another. So it's a bit of a hard problem (not to mention that a plugin just keeps running, and you have no real control over it). However, all the major browsers try to throttle javascript in background tabs. Usually by making setInterval return only once a second.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It doesn't go to (Not Responding) mode if you use Chrome canary with OSX Yosemite

</comment><comment><USER29> tl;dr extensions and plugins.

</comment><comment><USER30> Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my disk?

</comment><comment><USER31> AFAIK this has only been a real problem since Yosemite. I noticed it when running the GM Candidates but never saw it in Mavericks.

<comment><USER32> I'm on Mavericks and I see it as my top CPU hog occasionally too.

<comment><USER31> Well, everyone's downvoting me, but I swear I never noticed this until Yosemite.

Either way, the weird thing is that if you go to the Window menu and hit Task Manager... you can monitor extension CPU usage, etc.

I never had a problem until recently, and yet now I'm seeing red in the Activity Manager due to Chrome. It's bizarre.

<comment><USER33> You're probably downvoted because it's been pretty widely known that Chrome is a CPU hog on OS X. Checking the energy shaming feature, Chrome is pretty much always in the "Apps Using Significant Energy" section. I did a quick search on "Chrome energy OS X" and found a number of pages that mention it, all of which date back to Mavericks which is the first time energy usage was reported (separate from straight CPU usage).

I only use Chrome if I need to use a site with Flash and I use the "Open Page With" item in Safari's Develop menu to open the appropriate page. Then, I quit once I'm done with it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>