America uses stealthy submarines to hack other countries' systems - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/07/29/america-is-hacking-other-countries-with-stealthy-submarines/ <comment><AUTHOR> If this sort of stuff interets you, I highly recommend the book "Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage". [0] It tells the story of Cold War espionage from the submarine warfare point of view. The book also covers "Operation Ivy Bells" which was a joint Navy/CIA/NSA mission whose objective was to place wire taps on Soviet underwater communication lines during the Cold War. [1] Sub placed a listening and recording devices over Soviet cables and was able to capture their communications. The device was fairly large as can be seen from this picture [2]. I'm sure they're smaller now.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Man%27s_Bluff:_The_Untol...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Man%27s_Bluff:_The_Untold_Story_of_American_Submarine_Espionage)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells)

[2] [http://www.therebreathersite.nl/11_Closed%20Circuit%20Rebrea...](http://www.therebreathersite.nl/11_Closed%20Circuit%20Rebreathers/images/GE%20MK10/UnderseaEspionage.jpg)

<comment><USER4> >>> I'm sure they're smaller now.

I'm betting not. Ivy Bells was back in the days of copper wires being tapped by external sensors placed atop undersea cables. Today's undersea cables are optical. You'd need to splice in, or at least open up a cable to get at the individual fibers to install similar taps. I cannot see how that would be done in the pressurized world of submarines. Normal procedure for such work involves hauling the cable to a surface ship where it can be picked apart by hand. A sub would have to somehow pull the cable inside its pressure hull, a very dangerous task. Any sub equipped for such an operation would surely be noticed (massive doors, reconfigured interior spaces, special station-keeping thrusters etc).

Maybe they do it in very shallow water, but then you would still need a dry environment. You would have to deal with the current passing through the cable, somehow without detection or cooperation from the cable's operators. There are just too many difficulties to make splicing-by-submarine practical.

<comment><USER5> I wouldn't put it beyond the capabilities of a nation state to tap fiber by putting a kink in it and processing the light that leaks out.

<comment><USER6> Non-invasive fibre optic tap technology has been commercially available since at least the early 1990s. I recall seeing ads for a hand-held device at that time. By carefully bending the fibre over a mandrel, a small amount of light can be made to leak out through the cladding past the angle of total internal reflection. No need to cut and splice the fibre.

The ads implied the device worked on jacketed fibres; I suppose that depends on the transparency of the jacket to 1064nm IR radiation.

<comment><USER7> Bending isn't required, and the transparency of the jacket doesn't matter if it's thin enough. The term to Google is "evanescent wave coupling."

<comment><USER8> There is even a "laser razor" kickstarter that utilizes the effect. When a beard hair goes near the fiber, the light escapes from the fiber, and burns the hair, cutting it.

<comment><USER9> Hoax tho

<comment><USER10> That one didn't seem like a hoax, just a neat idea that wasn't really possible to make into an actual product. (as in, it kind-of worked but wasn't going to be physically possible to make into a remotely satisfying product)

<comment><USER11> So a hoax, no?

<comment><USER10> No, a hoax implies they were deliberately trying to scam people.

It seems like they learned about a neat concept, made a proof of concept that actually worked, but ran into physical reality when they tried to turn it into a reliable product (while being optimistic along the way). It's real hard to stop being optimistic at exactly the right time, and I'd be pretty forgiving if it seemed like everybody was giving an honest effort.

<comment><USER11> I've read a lot of /r/shittykickstarters and this smells like all the scams there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "...mast-mounted antennas and collection systems atop the conning tower, some of them one-of-a-kind devices made for hard to reach or specific targets, all of them black boxes of future war."

That's a quote in the article from a source who is another pair of journalists writing for Gawker.

RF doesn't propagate well through water - in fact VLF is best and only goes to about 20 meters depth. Subs are most vulnerable when on the surface.

So the idea that we'd be using underwater manned platforms at a cost of $1.7 billion each to monitor enemy radio from the conning tower (without even using a buoy) seems a bit absurd to me.

The NRO has launched 3 spy satellites already this year. They're monitoring signals from within 150 miles using high gain antennas without the constraints of salt water, risk of detection and negative effects of a low altitude antenna and a tiny radio horizon.

I too want to believe we have badass hacker subs, but this feels like laying the groundwork for a budget request.

<comment><USER13> Former navy submarine officer here. So SIGINT is absolutely a capability of US submarines, but isn't necessarily a primary purpose. But there are absolutely times and places where the ideal source of intelligence for the US government is a submarine offshore of country X with very small masts sticking out of the water gathering SIGINT. Satellites don't/can't catch everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Did you know that the subsea fiber optic cables which the submarines hack are only 17mm thick? [0]. Great companion story at ARS from a while back worth a read.

[0]: [http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/how- th...](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/how-the-internet- works-submarine-cables-data-centres-last-mile/2/#h2)

<comment><USER15> I was going to reply that this was surely nonsense and I've seen the thick cables the size of a man's leg, but as the article says these images we've seen are only for shallow areas and the majority of the cable really is just the size of a marker pen, shielded with just a few millimetres of plastic.

<comment><USER16> [http://mikesenese.com/DOIT/wp- content/uploads/2011/11/Unders...](http://mikesenese.com/DOIT/wp- content/uploads/2011/11/Undersea-cable-580x553.jpg)

^undersea cables are typically made up of a central fiber line, which look like human hairs in a small tube, and a shell of insulation and copper. You need power to send the signal across the ocean floor and, as we do not generate electricity underwater, all of the current needs to be sent from one end to the other to power all of the repeaters along the way.

The fiber optic cable is 17mm, but the cable itself can't be because of the power constraint (unless I'm missing something deep; feel free to correct me if so).

<comment><USER14> > The nearer to the surface you get, the more protection—armour—you need to > withstand potential disturbances from shipping. Trenches are dug and cables > buried in shallow waters coming up onto shore. At greater depths, though, > areas such as the West European Basin, which is almost three miles from the > surface, there's no need for armour, as merchant shipping poses no threat at > all to cables on the seabed

[http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/how- th...](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/how-the-internet- works-submarine-cables-data-centres-last-mile/2/#h2)

<comment><USER17> Fishing trawlers are more likely to cause damage: _By far the most common problems, however—accounting for about 60 percent of cut cable incidents—are dropped anchors and fishing nets_.

The cables are on sea charts so this can be avoided, but that won't stop deliberate saboteurs. _The strategy for safeguarding undersea cables has been described as "security through obscurity."_

[http://www.wired.com/2015/10/undersea-cable- maps/](http://www.wired.com/2015/10/undersea-cable-maps/)

<comment><USER18> Not very obscure if you can find them on a sea chart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> On a related note I can strongly recommend _The Silent Deep_ which goes into a lot of detail about what Royal navy submarines got up to in the Cold War:

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0171SWRGI/ref=dp-kindle- redirec...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0171SWRGI/ref=dp-kindle- redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)

e.g. Operation Barmaid, where a nuclear submarines was equipped with a giant set of cutters to allow it to cut and steal the towed sonar array from a Warsaw Pact vessel:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Conqueror_(S48)#Operation_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Conqueror_\(S48\)#Operation_Barmaid)

</comment><comment><USER20> The Russians also have a long history of "special purpose" submarines, and are currently expanding their fleet of them again. Lots and lots of details eg largish "mini" submarines that dock on the underside of massive subs at [http://www.hisutton.com](http://www.hisutton.com)

</comment><comment><USER21> Which is amusing if you consider that a very long-distance, underwater cable which would be difficult to physically monitor (e.g. with cameras), would make a perfect use case for link encryption (at just above the physical layer).

I do not see why that wouldn't be technically possible, unless someone cares to comment.

<comment><USER22> Because encrypting a 60Tb/sec data stream in real-time is computationally hard?

<comment><USER23> There isn't a single 60Tb/sec datastream though so it is quite feasible (and I'd be shocked if people aren't doing it, especially after the post-Snowden rush to MACsec).

Undersea cables are DWDM systems where you have N x 10G,40G,100G waves. 100G MACsec is available in merchant silicon and out of the box on switches from Cisco & Arista (off the top of my head, I'm sure there are others).

You wouldn't even encrypt the undersea cables specifically, you'd encrypt your transport links before they leave your datacenter, that way you don't need to trust your carrier, the cable consortium, or anyone else (aside from your switch vendor...)

<comment><USER24> Further, the individual traffic streams in a 10 gigabit per second circuit would be encrypted at layers 4 through 7. Assuming that people are using properly implemented public /private key cryptography, of course.

Even so, the metadata of who is talking to who and traffic flow analysis is very valuable to the NSA.

<comment><USER25> That's why link-layer encryption adds value over higher-layer encryption - <USER2> also encrypts layer-3+ headers and metadata.

<comment><USER24> Anecdotally I don't know of a single ISP that buys N x 10 Gbps transpacific or transatlantic waves/transport (ex: one Wilshire to Equinix Tokyo) that uses link layer crypto. In my example the ISPs are customers of the organizations that actually run the DWDM terminals.

Highly redundant core routers like an asr9010 with 2nd/3rd gen line cards, or an mx960 are already expensive enough without making a 24-port 10GbE linecard twice as costly to buy by having crypto features. It is super rare to see such hardware in production for commercial ISPs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Assume all oceanic cables rigged. The CIA has been doing this for decades.

Added: [https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine- Espionage/...](https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine- Espionage/dp/006097771X)

<comment><USER27> Welcome to the fish bowl.

But don't worry too much. As recent terrorist acts have shown, our intelligence communities retain their efficacy in the face of modern technological advances.

<comment><USER28> They don't use this information for preventing terrorist attacks... it is more to gain an economic advantage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Edward Snowden revealed a long time ago that the NSA also taps the undersea communications cables for mass surveillance (which obviously includes US citizens).

<comment><USER30> That was hardly a Snowden leak. The Russians have had one of the Ivy Bells listening taps on public display since 1999. The book Blind Man's Bluff details the taps and was published in 1998.

These days, tapping them isn't likely to be particularly useful. Anything sensitive transiting them is gonna be encrypted. Ivy Bells was possible because the Soviets thought it would be impossible to tap the cables - <USER3> were within Soviet waters and the tech used to finally do it was quite clever - so they didn't encrypt anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> >But despite the rising prominence of Russian hackers in this news cycle — and Chinese hackers before that — it's worth pointing out that the United States has grown fairly proficient in cyberspace, too.

How am I not surprised that in an article about US espionage the American s̶t̶a̶t̶e̶ media makes sure to remind yet again us how bad, bad, bad the Russians are.

<comment><USER32> It reads the exact opposite to me. 'You know how everyone's upset about Russian/Chinese hacking lately? Remember that the US did it first and on a far larger scale than them.'

<comment><USER33> But who's going to impose sanctions on us?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I first learned about this when I read about a patent dispute. Someone (I don't recall the name) invented a coupler that could be used to easily splice a fiber optic cable (e.g. under water) and tap into all it's signal undetected. The inventor was denied patent rights and lost all control of his invention b/c the U.S. government claimed States Secrets, thus no court case on the matter could proceed.

<comment><USER35> Based on what you described I found this old Wired article from 2005. It sounds like this could be the case you're remembering.

[http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2005/09/68...](http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2005/09/68894?currentPage=all)

<comment><USER36> Ooh, this lead to all sorts of interesting reading.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_secrets_privilege](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_secrets_privilege) """The privilege was first officially recognized by the Supreme Court of the United States in United States v. Reynolds, 345 U.S. 1 (1953). A military airplane, a B-29 Superfortress bomber, crashed. The widows of three civilian crew members sought accident reports on the crash but were told that to release such details would threaten national security by revealing the bomber's top-secret mission ...

...

In 2000, the accident reports were declassified and released, and it was found that the assertion that they contained secret information was fraudulent. The reports did, however, contain information about the poor condition of the aircraft itself, which would have been very compromising to the Air Force's case."""

So a Supreme Court case established precedence based on false claim of secret privilege from the government. That's pretty awful- if correct, it's a huge abuse of privelege.

Incidentally, I was not surprised to see Lucent mentioned in the Wired article- its predecessor, Bell Labs, had a very strong relationship with national security (The Idea Factory showed that the head of Bell Labs and the head of AT&T both maintained "secret schedules" where they would go to DC and share a lot of AT&T's access with security agencies.

<comment><USER37> I wouldn't jump to that conclusion. The state of military aircraft is extremely valuable information to an adversary that is trying to size up your forces.

<comment><USER36> While I agree (and actually support the concept of State Secrets), I want my Supreme Court cases and the precedences they establish to be grounded in cases where the facts actually support the idea that the government is protecting a state secret, rather than covering up its own problems. The secret documents in the Reynolds case were declassified later, and showed that it was unlikely their exposure would have damaged state secrecy (the russians had already cloned the B29, the accident report didn't give any details on the confidential equipment on board), and a fairly strong argument can be made they showed the government was trying to apply the privilege to hide their own failures in maintaining the aircraft, rather than protect critical secrets).

In short: privilege should be applied sparingly and the precedence for it should be unimpeachable. In this case, the precedence is not unimpeachable; the specific case is still considered contentious.

<comment><USER37> My point though is that a failure to maintain military aircraft is sensitive information that could be used by the enemy. You don't want your enemy to know your weak spots. I'm happy for the courts to give the government broad deference in these cases, especially when constitutional principles are not hanging in the balance.

Don't forget the time period that this happened in. The Soviets had tested their first nuke only a few years prior, Eastern Europe had fallen behind the Iron Curtain, communist movements were on the rise in the rest of Asia and had succeeded in taking China. The prospect of total war was very real. That you're doing a bad job of maintaining a certain class of warplane is very sensitive information in such an environment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm calling BS on this. The stealthiness of a sub, it's only real purpose, is defeated the moment you start transmitting via a big antenna. It wouldn't happen. Subs no doubt are used for surveillance, but the concept of them sitting offshore and actively "hacking" communications is absurd. It would be a suicide mission with a billion-dollar asset.

The OP reads like a funding request. It's a pitch for a world where hackers will live inside submarines close to the action, when we know from experience that even when submarines were used to tap lines that the submarine did nothing other than install the tap and scurry away. (They also retrieved the recorders, but then too scurried away asap.) You don't risk something like a sub, and the lives onboard, on information management that can be done from afar. A drone capable of operating untethered far away from the mother ship might as well be controlled from thousands of miles away. The sub may launch the hacker-drone, but no matter the navy's fantasy, subs won't be at the center of the flowchart.

<comment><USER38> If it's absurd, please explain p.26 of [https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/collect/snowden1/...](https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/collect/snowden1/index/assoc/HASH0669.dir/doc.pdf) where we see the USS Annapolis being used for interactive operations ("Connection via: NEPTUNETHUNDER, BLINDDATE/HAPPYHOUR", "Successful exploits at 4, 6, ad 8 NM with 4 watt access point") and for man-on-the-side operations ("Inject using BLINDDATE/NITESTAND", "Successful inject at 4NM to 100mw client computer").

Or to p.27 with a flowchart of the "Afloat Computer Network Operations", which uses Fleet Comms to connect to the Annapolis, which connects to a set of antennas?

You wrote "subs won't be at the center of the flowchart", but the sub literally is the closest box to the center of that flowchart.

(This is from an April 2012 document which is part of the Snowden leak.)

<comment><USER4> Those are tests, not operations. They were against friendly targets, specifically consumer wifi/bluetooth devices (based on the wattages). Had the target been actively looking for attacks, the sub would have been located within seconds. You wouldn't do this against an attacker with any ability to respond physically. The only time this would be useful would be against an unsophisticated target, but then why bother with the sub?

An airborne drone could do, does, the same job at 0.01% of the cost and 1/0 less lives on the line. The sub is ridiculous overkill.

<comment><USER38> I take your point. I don't think now that it's unreasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Who would have thought War Driving would turn into War Diving?

</comment><comment><USER40> Before Snowden and Manning there was the more old fashioned Ronald Pelton who was just released from his 30 years in prison last year for revealing information about submarine phone tapping. His motives were different but he was still treated horribly by the US for revealing the truth.

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

<comment><USER41> Pelton was just your garden variety spy. He wasn't acting out of any concern for the general welfare.

<comment><USER40> Sure he was more traditional and self interested. But his actions were nonetheless essentially "good" in the same way He informed people that they were having their telecommunications secretly listened to. Just because it was for the benefit of Russians instead of Americans doesn't make it wrong. They're people too.

<comment><USER41> >But his actions were nonetheless essentially "good" in the same way...

No. He gave US security information to the government USSR, not to the Russian people. By your definition any spy anywhere is "good".

Just because moral distinctions can be difficult to make doesn't mean we throw up our hands and say all actions are equally moral.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> > These days, some U.S. subs come equipped with sophisticated antennas that > can be used to intercept and manipulate other people's communications > traffic, particularly on weak or unencrypted networks.

Isn't (most of) the communication over these links encrypted? What is the point of tapping into the information flow? Is it possible that they are able to decrypt it?

</comment><comment><USER43> I would have thought that by now that the interesting stuff would be flowing through cables using Quantum Key Distribution (QKD)

</comment><comment><USER44> There are many people who are saying that the NSA would use radio waves / only store the data. Why not forward the data to another fiber optic connection which is friendly to you to a datacenter.

</comment><comment><USER45> Because they can, or because Navy do not have access to Shodan?</comment>


For once the World Bank says something smart about the real causes of prosperity (and poverty) - <AUTHOR> http://reason.com/news/show/122854.html

<comment><USER2> This is a great article. When I read it in WSJ last week I realized that it helps explain why startup hubs such as Silicon Valley are so important for startups. These locations simply offer more intangible wealth to founders. Just by being in a place like Silicon Valley you have more immediate access to investors, a society which understands and encourages startups, and like- minded peers. These are intangible items that may not immediately seem obvious but are contributors to success none the less.

When this reasoning is applied it makes sense why founding a company in a place like SV is so important. When you are not in a startup hub, you are instantly at a disadvantage because you do not posses as much intangible wealth as a competitor who is.

<comment><USER3> The World Bank runs a regression analysis trying to identify factors responsible for growth, and ends up with a remainder that is larger than any of their "measured" variables, including capital.

This says nothing at all about "hubs" or "culture" or "language" or anything else. A better headline would be: Economists have no clue what causes growth

<comment><USER4> Good point that we easily read too much into the study. On a positive note, it's already something to know that "80% of the wealth of rich countries and 60% of the wealth of poor countries is of this intangible type", that is, we know what the wealth is _not_.

Further based on the (non-academic) article: "According to their regression analyses, for example, the rule of law explains 57 percent of countries' intangible capital. Education accounts for 36 percent." Wouldn't you say that's a clue at least?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's in the right direction, but they're missing something: social attitudes. A country where it's frowned on to take risks or do things out of the ordinary will do worse too.

<comment><USER6> That's just another component of intangible capital though. The reason risk- taking isn't mentioned separately is because it's of far less significance (either because it doesn't make much difference, or because the delta between developed and less-developed countries is small) than education, property rights, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Here's the deal" (winks the capitalist to the Mexican/Indian/Filipino), "You come here and take a job for less than the prevailing wages. In exchange, you get to live in a place that has traditions, institutions, infrastructure, social programs, laws, etc, that supplement your salary...all at no cost to me."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons>

Keep in mind, that _everything_ is paid for. By someone. Just because it isn't person X who is paying, doesn't mean it is good policy when person X writes a column in Reason magazine.

<comment><USER8> I think it's clear that on average, people in America generate more wealth than they pay toward the commons. Hence, more people will generate even more wealth, giving even more toward the commons.

<comment><USER9> If I have 10 programmers and they're finishing 10 projects a month, will I necessarily get 11 projects done if I add another programmer? Or, does the result depend on the new programmer and other factors?</comment></comment></comment>


Cascaded Displays: Spatiotemporal Superresolution using Offset Pixel Layers - <AUTHOR> https://research.nvidia.com/publication/cascaded-displays-spatiotemporal-superresolution-using-offset-pixel-layers <comment><AUTHOR> Video showing its capabilities : [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XwaARRMbSA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XwaARRMbSA)

<comment><USER2> Very useful thanks.

In 10 years the before example in a before/after vid will still look like it does in that video - just as it did 10 years ago.

The before example shots never seem to evolve - which makes me cynical about display technology demos I don't see in person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very interesting approach.

I think one interesting aspect of this is that it couples spatial as well as temporal interpolation. This means that you get a higher resolution as well as a higher framerate, but on the downside seems to introduce additional artifacts depending on how these two interpolations interact.

I have not yet read the technical paper and only watched the video without sound, but from this video it seems that moving sharp edges introduce additional artifacts (can be seen when looking at the features of the houses in peripheral vision at 5:11 in the video). This is what you would roughly expect to happen if both pixel grids try to display a sharp edge, but due to their staggered update, one of these two edges is always at a wrong position.

This problem could probably somewhat alleviated through an algorithm that has some knowledge about the next frames, but this would introduce additional lag (bad for interactive content, horrible for virtual reality, not so bad for video).

I intend to read the paper later, but can anyone who already read it comment on whether they already need knowledge about the next frame or half-frame for the shown examples?

<comment><USER4> > _on the downside seems to introduce additional artefacts_

It definitely introduces a form of ghosting visible near the rear end of the motorcycle.

As for lag, I can already see John Carmack cringing! There may be an interesting effect though, in that the increase in apparent resolution is quadratic when the increase in computation is linear. Hardware-wise this possibly could be done straight in the double-buffering phase without additional lag if it can be made to race the beam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If I understand correctly the idea is that you get a high-resolution display by putting two low-resolution displays in fromt of each other?

<comment><USER6> Yeah, this is what I'm wondering about as well. What does the actual implementation of this look like? Is it just one display being fed 2 low- resolution image streams? And is there any effort required to synthesize the cascaded image?

<comment><USER7> I guess the main point is lower production cost. For 4k screen you need 4x more density pixels than a 1080p one, which is difficult to make with a high defect rate, by cascading two 1080p LCD you get as-good results but the cost is very cheap.

Besides you don't need to 4x your display bandwidth, just double 1080p.

Just my guess.

<comment><USER8> I guess this would also be a nice improvement for smartphones' screens since you would only need to power half the number of pixels for the same equivalent density which will save on the battery

<comment><USER9> Nya, the light will have to travel through two LCD layers, if I've understood it correctly. You'd need a very powerful backlight.

<comment><USER10> In the video, some of the captures for the cascaded displays were actually brighter (eg: 4:20 mark). I'm not sure why and it looked like they were just using a single display's backlight. Anyone know?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have difficulties understanding the mecanism of this supersampling (2 succesive images to make one ?). Can anyone explain this in a simple way ?

<comment><USER12> They have two layers, slightly offset (by half a pixel in both directions) on which they show different images which, together, combine to one of higher resolution. They also can show different frames shortly after another quickly enough so that they appear to belong to the same image, but each contributing different parts to either temporal or spatial resolution of the final image.

Since they're using off-the-shelf LCD displays for their prototype, I guess the final result is not yet flicker-free (they probably cannot show more than 60 fps, and thus not more than 15–30 high-resolution frames per second). Also evident as they're demonstrating the capabilities with 5- and 10-fps video. But that's just a matter of a higher refresh rate for the displays, I guess, unless computing the individual frames is too taxing for now (it doesn't seem to be, they do plenty of work in shaders, being NVidia and all).

Major benefits seem to be cost, simplicity and size; their prototypes were built as a head-mounted display and a small projector.

<comment><USER13> I found this aspect of the build interesting:

"The bare liquid crystal panel was affixed to the base plate, held in direct contact with the first LCD at a fixed lateral offset. As assembled, the front polarizer on the bottom LCD is crossed with the rear polarizer on the top LCD. Rather than remove the polarizers from the thin glass panels, we placed quarter-wave retarder film between the two (American Polarizers APQW92-004-PC-140NMHE): rotating the polarization state to restore the operation of the top LCD."

It's probably extremely basic knowledge for people familiar with polarization, but I didn't know it could be so simple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would really like to see some data on the memory savings using this technique. How significant are they?

<comment><USER15> I would guess 0. My understanding is that you are rendering at the full higher resolution then simply computing the proper subpixels on the offset displays to align them right. You still need all the data there using the full amount of memory otherwise you can't really perform the calculations necessary for the subpixel/temporal interpolation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Unfortunately this will be yet another proprietary technology from Nvidia that nobody else will use - which means it won't have mass adoption - which means it's ultimately pointless (unless someone else creates an open source version of it).

<comment><USER17> > Unfortunately this will be yet another proprietary technology from Nvidia > that nobody else will use...

This is a scientific/technical _research paper_ for a computer graphics conference. It's not even near being a technology that ships.

There's a reason that there are so many "Nvidia only" technologies. Take the G-sync displays for example. It's a problem dating back to cathode ray tube display technology but to overcome it, it takes integration between the display controller hardware (in the graphics card) and the panel control electronics. Display manufacturers do not make the GPU hardware so the only option is for a GPU company to try to make the first step.

In the long run some of these technologies will become standard and widespread but someone has to take the first step and that must be economically viable.

<comment><USER18> Except what G-sync does is not Nvidia only. What G-sync does is it sends frames at maximum speed (DVI, HDMI, and DP only send frames as fast as absolutely needed to get done in time, ie, at 60hz, it takes approximately 1/60th of a second to send the frame, even if the connection had an available clock rate to send it in 1/144th of a second), and then it sends it on demand instead of at the next frame interval (to reduce latency and jitter).

However, before Nvidia announced G-sync (which requires special and expensive hardware), a group of companies lead by AMD submitted an addition to the DisplayPort standard called Freesync which does the same thing using existing hardware (and some monitors already in the wild could be theoretically upgraded to support Freesync with only a firmware update).

Nvidia (as a company that makes gamer-grade GPUs) will be required to support Freesync on their GPUs (no existing GeForce can do it according to Nvidia due to HW issues, AMD says Radeons that are GCN should be able to do it with driver updates) because VESA accepted the Freesync proposal and finalized it into the next Displayport spec (VESA/AMD announced it at CES 2014, shortly after Nvidia announced their much more expensive and proprietary G-sync).

<comment><USER17> Yes, you are correct. But G-sync (kind of) ships already, you can buy a DIY module to mod a display with it. I'm not aware of any other solutions that would ship yet.

I sincerely hope that these proprietary technologies will get put in a standard that will ship with several vendors. All the variable refresh rate demos I've seen look _amazing_.

But the point above still stands, it took the initial effort of the GPU companies to make progress happen on this. It would have been impossible for a display manufacturer, let alone a panel manufacturer to make this happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What is the real use case for this? Gaming and VR?

we have no problem making 4K Screens and Hardware isn't bound by it either.

<comment><USER20> Well, display hardware isn't the problem. 4K, 8K, there's no end to it. Cascaded displays using multiplied layers seem to help achieve benefits like sharpness at super high resolutions & effectively smoother results at low frames per second (staggered) video playback. This helps remove a major obstacle that high-res display technologies will face in the short term, which is processing power. Presently, high-end graphics cards can barely crank out 30 FPS at 4K resolutions for games. Also, any compression artifacts etc. in textures are much more pronounced on high-res/big sized displays. While requiring the need to change the workflow (of game development) a little bit, cascaded displays can potentially help render higher resolution, better quality/sharper images at lower frame-rates (i.e. much more cheaply) while still providing that 60fps feel.

Personally, if this takes off, I can see it saving the XBox One's ass, as a lot of the complaints from gamers have been regarding it's inferior capabilities for rendering high-end games (It renders many games at 720p 30 frames/second, while Playstation 4 is able to crank out 1080p for the same titles), and also, play another factor in prolonging the shelf life of the present generation of consoles, by enabling them to deliver much better graphics with the same hardware. Kind of like what Normal Maps (among other things) did for Xbox 360 & PS3, you can see the difference in graphics between a game released in 2005 vs a game released in 2013 on the same hardware. Among a lot of other factors, that was why it took 7 years before we saw the next generation of consoles being released. Comparatively, the Xbox 360 came out within 4 years of the release of the original Xbox.

TL;DR - It's not about the display hardware itself, it's about the ease of rendering graphics to meet the demands of high-end display.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure if processing power is going to be any different here. To get acceptable results from the proposed method you need twice the resolution (two displays) _and_ twice the frame rate. Which translates, surprise, to four times as much processing power needed, just as a quadrupling of the resolution would.

<comment><USER10> I think they actually propose something like rendering two 1080p streams at 60hz to get the effect of _both_ higher resolution than 1080p and higher framerate than 60hz. That's their intent, apparently, who knows if the staggered frames actually create problems for viewers if the frame rate isn't just doubled.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet (1999) - <AUTHOR> http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html <comment><AUTHOR> I was going to point out my favourite bits, but this article is full of good insights and very well-written.

One of the best things I have read in a long time. Totally worth the 5 minutes.</comment>


How to start your own ISP (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.whoishostingthis.com/blog/2015/03/09/start-your-own-isp/ <comment><USER2> This is terrible. If I'm being charitable it's at best a 1,000,000 foot view which will help exactly nobody understand what it actually takes -- if I'm not it's leaves out so much detail that it crosses over into being wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. It answered the question for me: what would it take to break away from the chains of the ISP oligarchy? The answer: a lot, unfortunately, and is probably out of reach of most individuals. But it can be done with a small community of people.</comment></comment>


Notorious Hacker 'Phineas Fisher' Says He Hacked the Turkish Government - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/phineas-fisher-turkish-government-hack <comment><AUTHOR> Phineas Fisher has more information about the hack on his Twitter account: [https://twitter.com/GammaGroupPR](https://twitter.com/GammaGroupPR)</comment>


Hangouts Now Works With Google Apps Account - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/30/hangouts-now-works-without-google-account-becomes-part-of-google-apps-for-business-and-gets-sla/

<comment><USER2> Pretty awesome. I was tired of having a Google Plus account for personal use and for work just to access Hangouts.

Very annoying that people would "discover me" on both Plus accounts when I did my best to hide both profiles.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Update: Google had given us early access to its blog post about today's > announcement. In it, the company specifically referenced that anybody with a > "Google account" could now use Hangouts with needing a Google+ profile. The > final copy of the blog post changed that language to "any Google Apps > customer account." We regret the error.

</comment><comment><USER4> The requirement to log in coupled with multiple Google accounts made starting a Hangout so painful every single time. I switched to [http://appear.in](http://appear.in) months ago and love the simplicity it provides.

<comment><USER5> But does it provide a mobile interface and syncs accross your clients?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This has been a pet peeve of mine, the fact that, even in an organisation paying for Google Apps, you were required to enable Google+ to use Hangout.

The issue is that Google+ leaks information: your profile picture and full name get returned from google searches, even when all privacy settings are turned on.

If you are in a position where security and privacy are somewhat important (even if it's only to yourself), your only resort is to not use Google+ and by extension not be able to use Hangout, which becomes an issue when other people in the organisation need to communicate with you.

Fortunately, [https://appear.in](https://appear.in) works great (even in China, unlike Hangout) and there's no extra software to install.

<comment><USER7> Appear.in is fantastic! FYI screen sharing requires the installation of a chrome extension, although the UX for getting this going is painless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is quite welcome. Having to run two G+ presences to be able to use hangouts personally and professionally was a big annoyance.

That said, I think it bodes poorly for the future of G+, since Hangouts is one of the biggest things it has going for it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Now please extend this to Play Store app reviews and YouTube comments...I won't be holding my breath.

</comment><comment><USER10> Too. Late. Users. Gave. Up. Already.

Signed,

Real Name? Ha!

<comment><USER11> I use Google Hangouts all the time. At least for my D&D group, it worked when Skype didn't and I can add people's real phone #'s for free...

<comment><USER12> I am looking to play D&D, would you guys accept an outsider?

<comment><USER11> We stopped playing last year when grad school started. Sorry.

It's not that hard to find a D&D group though - just ask around at your local board game shop and I'm sure you'll be able to find something.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Python? - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882 <comment><USER5> "Old LISPer that I am, I also looked at various current dialects of Lisp and Scheme—but, as is historically usual for Lisp, lots of clever design was rendered almost useless by scanty or nonexistent documentation, incomplete access to POSIX/UNIX facilities, and a small but nevertheless deeply fragmented user community."

I find this still a pretty accurate assessment of the world of Lisp, 8 years on. I'm keeping an eye on Clojure, though, as a potential break in this pattern.

<comment><USER6> As does MzScheme.

This rift and indecision in lisp implementations only exists as long as we continue to allow it. If people just start hacking and using a system in larger numbers, it'll grow. The world is _so ripe_ for the next big language to be Scheme.

<comment><USER7> _If people just start hacking and using a system in larger numbers, it'll grow._

 _If_ being the magic word...

 _The world is so ripe for the next big language to be Scheme._

Why do you say that? Scheme is not new. Something radical would have to happen to make it popular out of nowhere.

<comment><USER6> What's new is where a lot of independent programmers are. Tons of people are coming off of a Ruby and Python high and wondering where the cutting edge is going.

Scheme is positioned to be that next edge to cut with. It's very much like Python and Ruby, with similar usage properties and library distribution practices. But at the same time it's got a simpler core and a more powerful syntax layer.

If we can just get people to stop discriminating against parenthesis and maybe get a nice web framework and a good deployment tool, we could see an explosion of usage in the Scehme world that inflates the space much like what happens with Ruby.

I yearn for the day when using Scheme professionally is No Big Deal.

<comment><USER7> _What's new is where a lot of independent programmers are._

What's necessary is for something very practical to require scheme. Ruby would still be a hobbyists language if Rails didn't come along. Perhaps arc could help here in the future but even the scheme community isn't totally amped on arc and therefore not rallying behind it.

Erlang seems better suited to be the next big lang than scheme. It has already found it's way into some of the big names like facebook and amazon, demonstrating practical importance, while solving problems that are still _hard_ in other languages. _cough_ concurrency...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Python could then evaluate the fetchmail --configdump output and have the configuration available as the value of the variable "fetchmail"._

Never ever do it. Python has very good parsers now. Using "eval" is crazy. Python is _not_ just a scripting language like JavaScript, it has a full power of C under the hood, thus it's evaluation must be restricted. Or someone will set your or your client's "fetchmail" environment variable to '__import__('os').remove(...'.

</comment><comment><USER9> You may want more recent resources about Python, because Python has changed significantly since 1997.

Mark Pilgrim's book _Dive Into Python_ (Also free online at <http://diveintopython.org>) is a pretty good intro to the language, and does a good job of exploring its strengths.

(And, seriously, people. #1?)

</comment><comment><USER10> I didn't finish it. I browsed the author's website a little. He seems grossly arrogant.

<comment><USER7> First experience with ESR?

Check out the cathedral and the bazaar.

[http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral- bazaar/cathedral...](http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral- bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/)

<comment><USER11> That's crap. Check out his sex tips for geeks!

<http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/sextips/>

<comment><USER12> The Cathy lady he asks for opinions is his wife. Not totally unbiased, then.

<comment><USER11> Not to mention that one person's opinion is _not_ data. The best way to find out what _your_ partner wants is either to ask or experiment. Much better than listening to ESR. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Look, there's merit to this article, but if it's really necessary to post it to the front page of Hacker News, I'm sure SICP deserves mention as well.

<comment><USER14> Like a HN obSICP, equivalent to 1. X, 2. ??? 3. Profit on /.?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is pretty old, but as an avid Python advocate, it's always worth a re- read.

<comment><USER16> "Python advocate"...pft.

I'm an advocate of open source tools. Who has the time or the motivation to be an advocate for one specific technology unless they're developing it themselves?

Don't get me wrong, I use Python on an almost daily basis and like the language. But the only "advocacy" I practice is by example.

<comment><USER15> Haha, fine, an avid Python fan.

In my world, which is dominated by C, C++, and Java, advocating agile technologies can be well worth my time.

<comment><USER16> I respect that. I think that the Ruby guys have bestowed upon me a healthy knee-jerk reaction to anything resembling fanboyism.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, anytime I see "RoR", my eyes narrow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _write compilers and interpreters for fun_

Yet I do not know a single person who uses an ESR language, nor any even semi- mainstream language that is influenced by his ideas. The only thing he has IIRC is /etc/termcap. Someone's gotta do it, but doing it doesn't make him an authority on anything...

</comment><comment><USER18> Good question.

</comment><comment><USER19> ESR is a poseur.

<comment><USER20> What makes you say that?

<comment><USER17> Because he is an observer of hacker culture but writes as if he is a participant.

<comment><USER9> He's definitely a participant, both in terms of software (off the top of my head: fetchmail, several contributions to Linux, Emacs, and Nethack) and tech books (The Art of Unix Programming, some of Learning GNU Emacs, others).

If anything, the problem with ESR is that he considers himself an expert on explaining hacker culture to outsiders, yet tends to excessively project his own values, politics, etc. on it when doing so.

<comment><USER17> Perhaps instead of "a participant" I should have said "as if he is representative of hackers" which manifestly he isn't.

Now excuse me, I'm going to play my flute for a bit, then go and shoot something, and maybe write some more of my sex-advice column :-P

<comment><USER20> The concept that any one individual could be representative of hackers is fallacious, and neither does ESR purport to be representative of hackers, even though many of his views and his style of reasoning are indeed common amongst hackers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why not Python?

      - <USER4>
      - <USER4>
      - did I mention the GIL and the sub-performing interpreter? guess I did.
      - <USER4>

<comment><USER16> Next time I'm in a debate, I'll repeat my only point tersely and hope nobody notices.

<comment><USER21> It's really the only knock I have against Python ;/</comment></comment></comment>


Kixeye CEO says his company is aggressive, but not racist (exclusive interview) - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/07/kixeye-ceo-says-his-company-is-aggressive-but-not-racist-exclusive-interview/

<comment><USER2> The interview answers were pretty much expected (I did enjoy the use of the 'bro-' prefix), but one of the questions...

 _"Speaking of confusion and what could have been going on in the minds of some of these people. … I think of Xbox Live and how there have always been racist and sexist comments you hear from people that you play with online. The confusion might be that that's okay in the workplace..."_

That's one of those connections that I made and had to decouple several times. So thanks VB for at least going for it; it's a flimsy connection but it's still an issue. Used to play a lot of xbox live and had little choice but to just learn to deal with all the comments or let the game suffer for lack of audio.</comment>


Buzzfeed reviews the iPhone 7, and nails it - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/nicolenguyen/iphone-7-review?utm_term=.pwKjvEwQ4#.sfzx4Wy29 <comment><USER2> For me iPhone 6 has the ability to charge and play music through a headphone without having to buy anything extra.

I personally value this feature more than anything else offered with the iPhone 7.

So I'm going to brave it and keep my iPhone 6 instead of upgrading.

</comment><comment><USER3> Title on page: I Used The New iPhone 7 And, TBH, Having No Headphone Jack Was Not That Bad

<comment><USER4> I can't decide which is worse.</comment></comment>


IBM open sources new approach to crypto - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/03/ibm_open_source_homomorphic_crypto/

<comment><USER2> > The encrypted file – if The Register understands the paper correctly – > embeds actions that are permitted on that file (for example, the ability to > read and write to parts or all of the file. The Evaluate function is able to > use the combination of the public key and permitted actions (described as > circuits) to operate on the file without decrypting it.

I'm pretty sure that this has nothing to do with permissions. Homomorphic encryption maintains certain properties of the plaintext (through some isomorphism) to allow pre-defined operations (operations that the isomorphism are designed for).

Also, why theregister? Why not link to the actual article (<http://eprint.iacr.org/2011/277>) or the github project (<https://github.com/shaih/HElib>) They're much, much more informative.

<comment><USER3> The Register article is much easier to read as a news piece, especially for people unfamiliar with encryption algorithms.

Besides, the article includes links to more technical materials, including the project page should the reader want to find out more.

<comment><USER4> It's cases like this where it would be useful to be able link to multiple articles at once (to avoid possible blogspam appearing as the intermediary).

<comment><USER5> Destructuring links? I'm sure Ted Nelson specified those somewhere.

<comment><USER4> Is that a Xanadu term? Looks like a "google whack" at my end at the time of posting: <http://www.google.com/search?q=%22destructuring%20links%22>

<comment><USER5> I was semi-joking. I would not have been surprised in the least if he had invented them at some point. Between him and Alan Kay, you've got about 90% of everything covered. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very good previous discussion about HELib from last week for reference: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5630917>

</comment><comment><USER7> Is there some simple description of the operations supported and the space and time complexity of them, as well as their effects on "hidden" parameters of the ciphertexts anywhere?

All the available documentation seems to focus on the underlying implementation and mathematical proofs without clearly stating the user- visible performance behavior.

For example, if I have N encrypted signed B-bit integers (treated as modulo 2^B), and add them all with homomorphic encryption, how much time does that take and how large is the resulting cyphertext?

What if I have two N-dimensional vectors called v and w of B-bit integers (treated as modulo 2^B), and want to compute the value v^T . M . w where M is an NxN matrix?

What if they are floating point instead? Is that supported? Are integers modulo M supported for any M?

Is the sign(x) operation available or just addition and multiplication?

<comment><USER8> Regarding the last question, if you have an encryption method that can encrypt 0 and 1 and has (efficient) algorithms for multiplying and adding the plaintexts corresponding to encrypted messages then you can efficiently compute any boolean circuit.

So any fast algorithm that can be computed without encryption can be computed efficiently by a homomorphic encryption scheme (in time that is some low degree polynomial of the time needed for the unencrypted algorithm).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How about patents? I remember having read that IBM holds patents for homomorphic encryption. Does the open sourcing also include a royalty free license to IBMs patents?

EDIT: Just saw GPL2 or later, so choosing GPL3 would mean patent license included, right?

<comment><USER10> If they release it under GPL3 then you'd be able to use it even if it's infriging on IBM's patents, if they release it under GPL2 then no.

<comment><USER11> I'd put it other way round: If software is infringing on someone's patents then it is illegal to license it under GPL3.

<comment><USER12> The above poster was specifically referring to IBM's patents. IBM licensing this code under the GPL also extends a patent license for all of their own patents. This comes from the word "contributors" in section 11.

They obviously can't grant a patent license for patents they don't hold, but that's life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone know whether one can host open source crypto code on GitHub without risking violations of the US Export Administration Regulations? One issue could for example be that GitHub doesn't block access from countries under US embargo, AFAIK.

<comment><USER14> Yes you can. BIS effectively decontrolled open source encryption software a few years ago, essentially admitting that attempts to control the export of something that was already available world-wide was a waste of time.

<comment><USER15> There are still some restrictions on exporting cryptography. For example, under US law you can't export strong crypto to Iran, North Korea, and a few other countries.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_in_the_U...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_in_the_United_States#Current_status)

<comment><USER14> Actually you can, you just need a license. That you'll never get one is assumed, however. You need a license to export anything to the AT (Anti- terrorism) countries but for some items you _probably_ can get the license, at least for certain items to certain end users.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community - <AUTHOR> https://github.blog/2019-04-29-apache-joins-github-community/ <comment><USER2> Apparently, one of the big motivating reasons for this was "cost".

> The foundation's 2018 five-year strategic plan noted that infrastructure > services account for more than 80 percent of the total ASF expense budget, > adding: "Increasingly, project communities have infrastructure requirements > that strain the capabilities of the ASF."

> The report noted that, given burgeoning costs, encouraging the use of more > externally provided services was its best option. ("Using a simple growth > forecast to project expenses and effective governance and mentoring to > ensure that using externally provided services does not in any way present > barriers to entry to projects or reduce transparency, inclusiveness and > diversity.")

[https://www.cbronline.com/news/apache-software-foundation- gi...](https://www.cbronline.com/news/apache-software-foundation-github)

Given that I find ASF has always been very moral with their fundraising and careful with their money (unlike a couple other major non-profits I happily would name in any other context), as disappointed as I am with this decision, it is difficult for me to blame them for making it: git is extremely difficult to scale correctly (due to its reliance on interactive protocols), which led Google Code and then GitHub to rewrite large portions of it (of course, as closed source internal-only this-is-our-competitive-advantage projects); when you are a small non-profit, knowing that you would have 5x the resources for staffing if you just swapped out some mere tooling has got to be a really really tough choice for something that isn't quite your core moral (as it would be with say, the FSF).

<comment><USER3> Holy shit, they're spending $800k a year on infrastructure! Honestly, it's difficult to understand why they haven't sooner moved to GitHub, or even GitLab or the like - it feels reckless. That money could be put to _far_ greater use - as an Apache supporter who hasn't ever felt the need to look at their costs, I have to say that I'm very disappointed.

<comment><USER4> I encourage you (and everyone else) to look _more_ closely at the ASF budget. As noted above, it's 80% for infrastructure, and that is supporting hundreds of projects. Some of those are simple, some are not at all (Hadoop, Cordova, Spark, OpenOffice, Mesos, CloudStack, etc.).

In fact, many of those projects rely on other resources not included in that 800k: How much does it cost to run a testing farm for all the devices Cordova has to run on? Do you really think 800k is such a crazy number?

The ASF runs lean. It has to, because it is a 501(c)(3) charity and cannot be as responsive to large donors as some might prefer (i.e. giving them more direct control over the foundation in return for more funding.)

<comment><USER5> Note that the asf infra is - at best - insufficient. Cassandra relied heavily on donated Jenkins worker VMs for all tests because the asf donated VMs couldn't run the test suites. Recently we started moving tests to circleci... because it was better than waiting 24 hours for tests to run in Jenkins.

<comment><USER4> While Infra's suite of services is perfectly adequate for many projects, it's not uncommon for resource-intensive projects which strain Infra in one way or another to have to improvise. That's what I was alluding to with the build farm for Cordova -- don't quote me on this, but I believe it's provided by Adobe (and may even run on PhoneGap).

Things would probably be different if the ASF was a pay-to-play 501(c)(6) "business league" rather than a 501(c)(3) charity. Then the Foundation would have more funding at the price of having to answer to corporate masters.

But since ASF Infra must run lean, it is forever trying to find ways to do more with less -- and Github integration is an instance of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I believe the ASF blog[1] to have a much better title: "The Apache® Software Foundation Expands Infrastructure with GitHub Integration"

"joins" sounds very wrong to me. Apache has had a Github account for years and the mirrors have existed for years as well.

The ASF still hosts their own Git repositories at [https://gitbox.apache.org/](https://gitbox.apache.org/) In fact all ASF projects needed to migrate from the old git-wip to gitbox just recently (December 2018) [2] and in that announcement they said: "When your project has moved, you are free to use either the ASF repository system (gitbox.apache.org) OR GitHub for your development and code pushes"

So I believe the ASF still hosts a fully up-to-date git repository for each of their projects that use git. It's just that the integration has gotten much better between ASF infrastructure (e.g. Jira) and Github.

[1] <[https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache- softwar...](https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-software- foundation-expands>) [2] <[https://blogs.apache.org/infra/entry/relocation-of- apache-gi...](https://blogs.apache.org/infra/entry/relocation-of-apache-git- repositories>)

<comment><USER7> According to the announcement:

>In February 2019, the migration to GitHub was complete, and the ASF's own git service was decommissioned.

P.S - the links you provided are not formatted correctly, and leads to 404 pages due to trailing '>'

<comment><USER6> Sorry for the broken links.

Yes, you are correct, that's what it says in the announcement but that is not correct. The "old" ASF git stuff was decommissioned, yes. It's a bit misleading.

A more detailed explanation has been put up here: [https://blogs.apache.org/infra/entry/apache-and-github-a- fri...](https://blogs.apache.org/infra/entry/apache-and-github-a-friendly)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Important clarifications: \- The announcement is only about technology, there's no "partnership" between the ASF and GitHub. The ASF is vendor-neutral about all of it's operations. In particular, there is an expectation that Apache project communities continue to do much of their community and release management on ASF servers, not solely on GitHub. \- Many Apache projects asked to use GitHub. It took a while, but Apache infra now allows that, as long as the repos are in our organization. Many projects still use our Subversion repo(s) too. \- The ASF hosts it's own Git repos with all auditable history. So GitHub is merely one way that Apache projects can _choose_ to allow users to contribute. If GitHub went away overnight, the ASF would still have all our own code and could keep working with our own build tools and plain old `git`. The ASF didn't decommission it's own git repos, just some of the tooling we used to mirror between our repos and GitHub.

Lars elsethread brought up a useful ASF blog post: [https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache- softwar...](https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-software- foundation-expands)

And yes, [https://github.com/apache](https://github.com/apache) is the ASF.

<comment><USER9> Is the tooling decommissioned because you're using alternatives or because you're no longer mirroring repos?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It confuses me why so many traditionally pro-FOSS projects move to a not-free- nor-open tool like GitHub. Do they think that they'll get enough new contributors this way to offset the (more than slight) irony?

<comment><USER11> Better participation. A lot more people know how to use GitHub's tools. It'll likely increase the amount of development, participation, pull requests, etc that ASF projects get. Does it matter that GitHub themselves is not open source?

<comment><USER12> > Does it matter that GitHub themselves is not open source?

It matters a lot actually; a lot of free-software/open source software are licensed that way because the projects themselves are ideologically predisposed.

While that does not hold true for certain (even large) projects like Linux, it certainly holds true for Apache (historically) and GNU.

To put it another way; if you found out GNU coreutils were hosted on Window machines using IIS web servers then you would probably consider that the people making the software (or, certainly those hosting it) are ideologically at odds with the project and are hypocritical.

So, I mean, you get to choose, if you go the Linux way and say "we are open source for pragmatic reasons" then there's no doublethink. If you say "we believe that all software should be free" while simultaneously forcing your users to contribute using closed source software on a proprietary platform then then you're not practicing your ideology, and worse; you're forcing that non-practice on your developers and users.

<comment><USER13> I think the ASF, being non-copyleft, is much less ideological than you're thinking. They're big on having rules to foster healthy community and community based decisions, but the license is really just a laissez faire BSD- ish license with some particular edge cases addressed. It's open-source but flexible and friendly to businesses with hybrid models. Something like GitHub that promotes input from people involved with other projects to participate is not a surprising move for them at all.

<comment><USER14> > the ASF, being non-copyleft, is much less ideological than you're thinking

Do you somehow consider copyleft style licenses "more ideological" than those which are not? That is probably more telling about your own views on licensing than it is on ideologies.

FreeBSD is not copyleft, and they work actively on eliminating GPL from their base. Debian mostly under the free software umbrella, but welcomes BSD code in their base.

Stallman is about as idelogical as you can get but has been known to argue for the MIT license in some cases. Just to mention a few examples.

<comment><USER13> Sure there are counterexamples, but I certainly don't hesitate to say copyleft does tend to be more ideological. In every instance I can think of, every serious discussion I've had with a company about project licensing that ended with anything other than the GPL, the concerns are virality, even when they like open-source (which is a practical concern overriding an ideological one), and a lack of any real interest in how it's licensed, just wanting it put out there with very few strings attached.

<comment><USER15> There is a very practical reason for choosing a copyleft license as an author. If you choose a non-copyleft free software license, then downstream users actually have _more_ options than you do. They can take your code, add small modifications and then release the result under a non-free license. Even if you implement those features as well, you aren't playing on a level playing field. You have to support _all_ of the software and they only have to support their small additions. The end result is that they can offer a product with a value-add at a lower cost than you can. You are essentially competing with yourself.

Of course you can decide not to release your code under a free software license, but that rather defeats the purpose of running a free software project ;-)

Looking at it another way, more permissive licences grant _more_ options to downstream users than copyleft licenses. It doesn't make sense to argue that you are offering only copyleft licenses to benefit those downstream users individually (and I know of nobody who makes that claim). Instead, the argument is that it is better for the _group_ that everybody has equal restrictions and can't use proprietary code to gain an advantage over everyone else.

This is actually one of the reasons why if anyone asks me to assign copyright for my side projects over for work, I'm happy to do so: on the provision that all of my work is licensed under the GPL. It barely matters to me at that point who owns the copyright (though to protect yourself further you should ensure that no one person has copyright over the entire work).

IMHO, although the choice to write free software at all is often ideological, the choice of using a copyleft license or not is usually pragmatic -- at least among those who understand _why_ copyleft licenses are written the way they are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I guess GitHub right now is like Facebook was in 2012, everybody is on it, it's a super vibrant community, it's backed by a huge amount of money, it locks you in (at least with wiki, issues, URLs).

And a second guess is that it will also do what Facebook does, getting out of control by trying to monetize on its monopoly.

It's just so mega ironic that the whole Open Source movement collectively decided that for a little bit of convenience they're more than OK to let Microsoft host their stuff and to sacrifice so much freedom (and especially the URL which does the lock-in to GitHub).

<comment><USER17> Lucky for us GitHub unlike Facebook don't rely on selling advertisments to make revenue. Plus git is decentralised. You can migrate your entire code anywhere you want. As far as issues are concerned I am pretty sure competitors like GitLab supports exporting them via GitHubs awesome API. It's not as bad as make you sound it. Things could have been much more worse.

<comment><USER18> I can migrate _my_ code, but not all my consumers which use "github.com/my/package" as the import qualifiers all over the place.

<comment><USER19> I assume that's a reference to Golang? I gave up Go after one too many times dealing with its terrible package management

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I didn't find any link to their GitHub profile in the blogs or press releases:

[https://github.com/apache/](https://github.com/apache/)

<comment><USER21> I wonder how long this name was reserved and by whom.

<comment><USER22> GitHub is generally pretty loose when it comes to reassigning accounts owned by squatters.

<comment><USER23> Although the Apache Software Foundation is considered a squatter themselves by some folks.

<comment><USER24> why is that?

<comment><USER25> I suppose it is because of the feud between OpenOffice (Apache) and LibreOffice (Document Foundation).

For years, OpenOffice has been Apache's most downloaded project[1]. But it is only because of the past glory of this name when Sun promoted it, and by confusion with LibreOffice.

When Apache was given OpenOffice by Oracle, they let the code rot, with just a few dozens commits a year. IIRC, their strict access policies lead them to reject the initial cooperation offers from the Document Foundation. So the Document Foundation "dropped" OpenOffice and created the fork LibreOffice (from Go-OpenOffice). Circa 2011, there were many angry post about this.

[1]: The home page of "Apache OpenOffice" claims: "Over 3.2 million downloads of Apache OpenOffice 4.1.5 ".

<comment><USER26> I'm pretty sure Tomcat and the Apache HTTPd get more downloads than that, it's just harder to measure as they usually come from package repositories for various Linux distros or homebrew.

<comment><USER25> When Apache published OpenOffice 4.0, there were about a million download per week, for a total of 85M downloads in 2.5 years[1].

Fortunately, that is no more the case. OpenOffice is in maintenance mode (last minor features were 5 years ago). So, even if the project seems alive at first glance, its user base is thinning out.

[1]: [https://blogs.apache.org/OOo/entry/apache_openoffice_in_2013...](https://blogs.apache.org/OOo/entry/apache_openoffice_in_2013_a)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> In 2009, I brought the idea of using github up on the members@ list and was called a troll. Agreed, at the time, the message was trolling...

[https://imgur.com/a/JPQtCQ4](https://imgur.com/a/JPQtCQ4)

I brought it up again later in 2010 and 2011 on the members@ list too. Lots of discussion with the general consensus that it wouldn't happen because it isn't an 'open' platform.

I even wrote a blog post about it in 2011, which was also discussed on members@ and in the blog comments...

[http://lookfirst.com/2011/11/contributing-to-open- source.htm...](http://lookfirst.com/2011/11/contributing-to-open-source.html)

Even though it took 10 years, I'm glad to see it finally happen.

<comment><USER28> Nice effort. Some people are slower to adapt than others... as you say in your blog post, GitHub (or something like it) was always going to be much more attractive for people to contribute than the "old ways" of mailing lists... but there's always the risk you'll invest on a platform that will be dead in 2 years. So being conservative is necessary for larger organizations.

<comment><USER29> Is it Microsoft's acquisition that's won Apache over? (Though my first thought was 'wow, in bed with the devil'.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> For many years now, it's felt like Apache software foundation is where projects go to die.

It's a shame its taken so long, but I'm glad to see this news - it's pretty much guaranteed to increase participation in Apache projects.

<comment><USER30> What do you mean to die? Projects like Kafka, Airflow and Spark are widely used today and the teams are constantly releasing new features.

<comment><USER3> Apache has a few big hitters, yes, but for dozens more it's been more akin to a _tomb_ than an incubator. I really believe a large part of the reason for that has been their dogged determination to stay off GitHub.

<comment><USER31> what percentage of repos on github would be legitimately considered "active"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> From the ASF press release:

> In February 2019, the migration to GitHub was complete, and the ASF's own > git service was decommissioned.

I'm confused. [https://git.apache.org/](https://git.apache.org/) doesn't look decommissioned.

<comment><USER33> > I'm confused. [https://git.apache.org/](https://git.apache.org/) doesn't > look decommissioned.

That's a read-only mirror service.

OTOH, [https://gitbox.apache.org](https://gitbox.apache.org) doesn't look decommissioned, either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I am quite happy about it. There are large number of very useful libraries and infrastructure projects (along with J2EE inspired frameworks which I have decided to ignore) which remain essential for Java related software development.

</comment><comment><USER35> So... I guess this April fool's Jira from a few year's ago might actually come to fruition?

[https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524)

</comment><comment><USER36> I hope projects will get rid of JIRA now!

<comment><USER37> I recently moved to a company that uses Jira. What kinds of problems should I be looking out for?

<comment><USER38> We use Jira in a very small company and I avoid it when possible. Wrote a command line hours tracker, that saves 1/3rd of my usage. Maybe I'll write an issues CRUD application some time as well, but I think going further down that rabbit hole costs more time than it saves.

My previous employer was a little larger (some 40 employees) and I can say that Jira solves nothing that we couldn't solve much better with text files parsed by Perl/Python/sed/awk, sometimes having a little bit of editing help (such as syntax checking on :w) from Vim/Sublime plugins (both had users that maintained their plugins).

Maybe Jira is meant for larger companies? There is a _ton_ of special characters that trigger all sorts of crap: square brackets, double curly braces, ampersands, semicolons, colons, underscores, asterisks, at symbols, backslashes, octothorpes, pluses, carets, tildes, double question marks, pipes, and even hyphens. It takes about num_characters*20 seconds to escape a regex so it doesn't format or hide parts of it (it doesn't help that you can only check by saving, a lot of formatting does not show up in the "visual editor"), but there are probably a lot of features there that one could be using.

<comment><USER39> I'm at a company which we have hundreds of Jira users, and for us, it works quite well.

It's really about how the team/department uses Jira, how it's setup, and the overall process.

My last company we were ~30, and it was a total mess (although we were only ~3 developers). It's really about how it's setup.

<comment><USER38> What is the difference that makes it work for you now where it didn't before?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> When i see a person solve a problem with a Github repo, the first thing i try to know is that: What's the problem he's trying to solve.

Then i ask myself: OK, the problem is real, but what about generalizing it ?

Tons of OSS projects focus more on generalizing solutions, not problems. And it's the problem with OSS.

</comment><comment><USER11> I found this title very confusing. I thought it was the equivalent of their non-profit being absorbed by GitHub. Meaning, the corporate structure."

Why don't they just say that Apache will officially host their repositories on GitHub moving forward?

<comment><USER41> Because the writer, Bryan Clark, is Director of Product for OSS Maintainers and is trying to contextualize the move to feature the company he works for, not the code thats been around for far longer.

"apache moves to github" makes it sound like apache made a rote and boring switch, which this sort of is. They just as easily could have moved to sourceforge or gitlab. joining a team has implications that github (c) works together with open source. while it certainly hosts a lot of it, github isnt open source.

Headlining this as your "open source community" also helps avoid the uncomfortable issue of an open source product moving to a completely proprietary system for CI and development.

<comment><USER42> > while it certainly hosts a lot of it, github isnt open source.

Yep. This was something that surprised me

[https://github.com/github/markup/issues/1266#issuecomment-48...](https://github.com/github/markup/issues/1266#issuecomment-484293407)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> And the 3 dozen GitHub to Gitlab migrants are trying to find ways to come back while still saving face.

I have personally seen people who, for example, not only use powershell (on Linux of all places) but also build tooling around it and file issues on the GitHub repo. The same people left GitHub when MS acquired it.

</comment><comment><USER44> So the "Open Apache Graveyard" is moving to github, for better visibility, interaction, and where the users are.

Thats a good move. Although most of the software from the "Open Apache Graveyard" like OpenOffice and others is kinda dead already.

Just my very biased IMHO.

<comment><USER14> That's silly. Most projects on Github are "kind of dead" too.

It's not like the ASF doesn't have active projects too.</comment></comment>


Google hosting bulk downloads of USPTO information - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/googlebooks/uspto.html

<comment><USER2> This is HUGE. These data formerly cost about $30k just for the historic patent data. Similar costs on TM side. This is a big win for transparency and innovation.</comment>