Google scores most effective TV ad with Dear Sophie - <AUTHOR> http://tideart.com/?id=4ebaafd6

<comment><USER2> _"Go Daddy surprisingly aired the most ads that got poor ratings."_

Surprisingly?

I'm all for watching hot chicks bounce around in skimpy outfits, but that can't be the beginning and ending of a conversation about a brand or a service (unless that brand is in the T&A industry). GoDaddy's ads basically communicate "We're sketchy and lowbrow." And, typically speaking, I want neither of those things in a domain registry service.

Conversely, what Google does really well is demonstrate its product -- and the benefits of that product -- in a very simple, human, touching way with big emotional impact. Google is getting you to understand _and_ love its brand at the same time. The ads are really well done.

<comment><USER3> > GoDaddy's ads basically communicate "We're sketchy and lowbrow." And, > typically speaking, I want neither of those things in a domain registry > service.

Exactly!

The popularity of such extremely sketchy registrars is disturbing, of course most registrars are more or less sketchy, but there almost seems to be correlation between popularity and sketchiness in this field, and I can't figure out why.

<comment><USER4> > there almost seems to be correlation between popularity and sketchiness in > this field, and I can't figure out why

Domains are a commodity; people want them cheap. Expensive things signal high status—so, conversely, low-status things signal cheapness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
      The account "dear.sophie.lee" has been deleted for
      violation of the Google Names policy.  The Names Policy
      requires that you use your actual, legal name.  Nicknames,
      titles, etc. are not permitted.

      We emailed you following a review of your profile and gave
      you a 4 day window of time to edit the name of this
      account.  Since you did not, we have deleted it.

      We understand that our new Google-wide policy may not be
      for everyone.  We'd be sad to see you go. Please consider
      creating a new account with a real name and starting over
      fresh.

      Thanks for using google services

<comment><USER6> A for effort -- but you picked the wrong policy to rail against.

The problem with Sophie Lee is that she is too young and if you create a GMail account with her real age it will be immediately locked out due to COPPA regulations. This isn't really Google's fault though -- but did make the Dear Sophie ad a little confusing due to this legal restriction. Presumably you have to sign up using your own age since it is an account managed by you. When your child turns 13 you can transfer the account to them.

GMail users are not subject to any Real Name policies. Nice straw-man, though. It probably eluded most.

<comment><USER7> No need to be so snarky. Potential TOS violations, and the very real possibility of a life-long Google account being hijacked or revoked, are thoughts worth considering.

Google seems to be presenting itself as a life-long data repository. But they have basically no customer support, no means of data recovery, etc. If they want to advertise themselves as a family scrapbook, I expect them to be as reliable as one.

<comment><USER6> Which is why Google Takeout exists. What other company is posturing this way and also lets you backup (soon to be?) all of your data?

Account lockouts due to TOS violations are often cases in which Google's hands are tied legally.

Very few things are life-long, so backup early and backup often. Google is the only cloud hosted service provider I feel comfortable using because I can easily sync my data with my backup server.

<comment><USER8> > Very few things are life-long, so backup early and backup often.

I can't imagine why that wasn't included as part of the ad. ;)

<comment><USER9> WTF are you talking about? The ad makes no claims that the data is kept around _forever_. Your snarky comment applies to all digital media, mind.

<comment><USER8> > Your snarky comment applies to all digital media, mind.

Thus far, I don't know of any other digital media that's claiming to exist long enough for your child to grow up. Entire companies could crumble during that period.

Google's the last place you want to put a digital time capsule to your child. You'd want it in several places, none of which ought be encumbered by the policies a company like Google needs to keep its operations running. But they wouldn't want to mention that in an ad.

Any better for you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Except that I cannot create an account for my son who's 6 months old. I have to create an account with a false birthday.

<comment><USER11> You can create an account to receive emails (with your own birthday info) and give it to your son when he's 13. Since you're the one creating and accessing the account, it should have your birth info, not his.

I'm pretty sure Sophie isn't reading the emails as they come in.

<comment><USER12> _I'm pretty sure Sophie isn't reading the emails as they come in._

Correct, which is why he writes in the end _I have been writing you since you were born.....Until then..._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Google has had some smart, touching ads of late. I think they're helping to romanticize the web, or maybe just highlight and help legitimize the beauty that's already there.

<comment><USER5> Yes. I particularly liked the "Parisian Love" super bowl ad <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU>

Brilliantly done.

<comment><USER14> I found that one to be powerful, but double edged. It's unpleasant to remember that ad when researching a serious situation that is likely to have a negative outcome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As a geek dad, I loved this ad. It was really cool, really well done, and memorable, even though I only saw it once on TV.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's all those clicks that do it, even when you can't see or feel it the sound of a buckling-spring keyboard just comforts you.

</comment><comment><USER17> Paying attention to well designed ad campaigns can let you gleam a lot of information about a company. When picking stocks I put more weight on their ads than I do the stock quote history.

In a sea of shitty advertising where companies recycle bad ideas and rely on special effects or catchy jingles to sell, you end up with an arms race between competitors telling you why to chose them over the alternatives. They completely forget to say why you should want the product at all. It just ends up leaving people suspicious of advertising in general.

This ad was really effective because it didn't hype the technology. They thought about what is important to people and found a way to show their products as enriching that experience.

It is rare to find ads this good, but they are the kind that will stay in their minds for years to come.

I am at the age where I look forward to having children. I want to establish some stability before I do it and so it is still a few years off. Despite this, I find myself thinking on a daily basis what values and skills I want to teach my kids. I am making lists of books, films, projects, etc. that I will introduce to them at the appropriate age. After seeing this ad, I went ahead and registered a few accounts with names that my wife and I talk about every once in a while.

I bet many other people at the same stage of life as me are doing the same.

Kudos to google.

</comment><comment><USER18> Slightly tangential, but I recently compared this ad to Facebook's intro video to the Timeline in a blog post:

[http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/10755504272/intimacy-and- perf...](http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/10755504272/intimacy-and-performance- on-facebook)

What's interesting here is that Google seems to understand what technology means to people a lot better than Facebook does.

</comment><comment><USER19> Godaddy has the least effective... who would have thunk it

(Oh right, everyone)

</comment><comment><USER20> We are having our first child in December. This past weekend, my wife asked, "Are you going to send here eMails like this?" Looks like I'll be signing up for another gMail account in the near future.

</comment><comment><USER21> Let me get this straight. The father made an account for his daughter, but lied about her birthday and broke the ToS?

</comment><comment><USER3> I can see how some people think it is cool, but I'm the only one creeped out by this?

I'm probably weird and I'm not sure I can explain it rationally, but if my parents had done something like this I'm not sure I'd be too amused.

Maybe it is just too cheesy for my taste.

(And obviously I don't mean just the act of going and publishing it in an ad, I'm assuming the whole illustration of the idea is fabricated.)

<comment><USER22> How is this different from photo albums and letters written to children stored in a box somewhere? I know my mom has an inordinate amount of childhood paraphernalia stashed away somewhere. I could see it being a touching gift to give to your child later on in life.

<comment><USER23> I have 9 siblings and my mom had at least one box for each of us with stuff. When I got married my mom gave the box to my wife. :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sorry, but this is just creepy and weird. Not to mention it's a PITA and facebook does it better.

</comment><comment><USER25> So the biggest spam company on earth buys slots from the ad industry to attract "users" to sell back to the ad industry. Interesting business model.

EDIT: Uhh, I'm getting downvotes. I assume it's because I called Google a spam company? Well then, let me clarify: I don't like any company or industry that lives off of advertising. Advertising is intrusive, it's noisy, it finances or subsidizes mostly crap (turn on a TV if you don't believe me), and it promotes profoundly bad ideas and values (keyword: consumerism) in the intellectually and psychologically weakest members of society. There's the rant, now you can downvote all you want. Doesn't change a thing. Until Google makes something that people are actually willing to pay their hard-earned cash for, they are in the same category as spammers.

<comment><USER26> Intresting. Here is Google, probably the most technically advanced company in the world. How do suggest they make money off their excelent search engine?

<comment><USER25> I may have strong tastes but I'm not stupid enough to presume I'm going to tell Google how to go about their business. I just can't help but notice that after all these years, they are still making the majority of their money on ads -- not on making something that is valuable enough to people that they will pay for it in a straightforward transaction. So, isn't it ironic then that an ad company will pay other ad companies to create ads to draw in users that they can then turn around and basically sell back to the industry?

<comment><USER26> Well, I believe the Industrial Revolution started in a similar way. Deep coal and iron mines needed steam engines to pump water out, steam engines required iron and coal to make and operate.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Firefox Privacy How-To Guide - <AUTHOR> https://restoreprivacy.com/firefox-privacy/ <comment><USER2> Many of these sites suggest making edits via "about:config". The problem is it's difficult to keep track of which settings you've altered. I highly recommend you use a user.js [1] file. The best part is you can make notes so later you knows why a setting was enabled or disabled.

The only downside is if you decide to undo a setting in user.js you'll also have to make the same change in about:config.

[1] [http://kb.mozillazine.org/User.js_file](http://kb.mozillazine.org/User.js_file)

<comment><USER3> Firefox's about:support page lists the about:config prefs that have non- default values ("Important Modified Preferences"). That includes prefs you've changed and internal prefs changed by Firefox code.

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately the info provided by about:support doesn't separate changes made via the gui and changes made via about:config. It also includes settings that may have been altered by Add-ons.

Another benefit to using a user.js file is that your changes are persistent. If Mozilla changes a setting via an upgrade, like they did with experiments and plan to do with DoH, your changes aren't overridden.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sigh, yet another "privacy" guide that has you enable options like DNT that make you easier to fingerprint.

And it suggests you disable HTML5 EME, which has nothing to do with privacy _at all_. Whatever your views on DRM, that's not a privacy concern.

This is yet another "opinionated guide to Firefox" that misleadingly uses privacy to convince people to read it.

Do not harm your friends and family's experience by making the changes suggested in this guide.

<comment><USER5> > it suggests you disable HTML5 EME, which has nothing to do with privacy at > all.

Does the DRM really not leak data about the content you're watching to the license server?

<comment><USER6> That's my thinking as well. I've been to a few non-media sites (eg. aliexpress) that inexplicably ask to play DRM content.

<comment><USER7> Do you have a URL for a page that exhibits this behavior without obvious reason?

<comment><USER6>
        https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32678087225.html

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Someone can explain what's the reason to disable telemetry? Telemetry data is anonymized and important for Firefox development. What and how is transferred is documented well. If certain measures are suggested, there should be given a reasoning.

<comment><USER9> While nice for supporting the development of Firefox, it adds nothing to your subjective browsing experience. As far as I understand, disabling it is also not a data point by which you could be fingerprinted.

You're taking it for granted that the reported data is adequately anonymized to the point of being impossible to make any inferences about individuals, which is a huge leap, not only in trust, but data science.

As mentioned later in the article, Mozilla is based in a country with sweeping surveillance legislation, and so should not be trusted to hold or process [potentially] personally identifying data, no matter how well intentioned they themselves may be.

<comment><USER10> > it adds nothing to your subjective browsing experience

Firefox decision makers actively consult the telemetry data when making decisions. If you've disabled telemetry and I haven't then my experiences count double and yours are discarded entirely.

For example, TLS 1.0 (and 1.1) is deprecated and will be disabled by mutual agreement among browser vendors in 2020. On the road there, Firefox are watching their telemetry to determine how many users are affected and how much effort it's appropriate to put into mitigating difficulties for those who have systems that can't be upgraded.

For me this will go fine, I don't have any systems that aren't capable of TLS 1.2 and very few that can't do TLS 1.3 so my telemetry data will show all is well. Maybe you are not so lucky. Too bad, you've disabled telemetry so nobody is coming to help. Bye.

<comment><USER11> > Firefox decision makers actively consult the telemetry data when making > decisions. If you've disabled telemetry and I haven't then my experiences > count double and yours are discarded entirely.

Yours won't count double unless there are only two users, in which case decision makers will likely disregard telemetry data all together.

You're right that the individual's usage pattern isn't directly considered, but for most users that won't matter because their usage patterns aren't uncommon. If you're one of a small group of users that do $weirdThing and that group is so small that your individual telemetry data contributes significantly, a) that group will likely be ignored and b) anonymizing is a problem you may not want to be involved in as a user.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I don't really buy that telemetry is actually guiding design in the first place. Rather, I wager telemetry most often gets used to create post-hoc rationalizations for changes somebody already has their heart set on. And if the most relevant statistic plainly doesn't support the change, then a less obvious statistic is found instead and said to be more important (e.g. _" telemetry says 85% of our users use this feature.... but telemetry also says that 90% of users close the application within five minutes of using this feature every time they use it, so users might think they like this feature but actually they're wrong and it drives down user engagement."_)

I've not worked at Mozilla, but that's how I've seen it happen just about every time I ever saw telemetry get cited in situations I had some insider insight into.

<comment><USER13> FWIW, I work at Mozilla and I have used telemetry in the way it's meant to be used. I'm sure there are cases where it's misused the way you describe, but by no means are all the cases like that.

<comment><USER12> Relating to my other comment in this thread, when you used telemetry at Mozilla did you make or violate the default assumption of user equality? Were all users given equal weight, or were socially influential power users given a greater weight?

<comment><USER13> All users were given equal weight. From the dashboards at telemetry.mozilla.org you can't even tell which users are more socially influential. And to be precise, with many of the metrics that I've used, they tend to be per-pageload or per-action rather than per-user.

Edited to add: my comment makes it sound like there is some other way to tell from telemetry data which users are more socially influential. That's not the case as far as I know.

<comment><USER12> Has anybody at Mozilla been pointing out that "data-driven" design predicated on incomplete data, making incorrect assumptions about the relative importance of different users, might be contributing to the decline of Firefox?

A single power user who happens to be a system administrator for a public school district has the power to install or uninstall hundreds of firefox instances. And it was power users that spread word-of-mouth awareness of firefox the most during the days when firefox was actually growing. Continue to treat them as equals to all other users and I predict firefox will continue its tragic slide into obscurity.

<comment><USER13> Yes, this argument comes up once in a while, and is handled by people who know more about it than I do.

<comment><USER12> Are you sure they know more about it than you, or do they just style themselves as knowledgeable? If mozilla really wants to be truly data driven, then maybe they should look at the data and realize that perhaps _trying_ to be data-driven has contributed to Firefox's decline into relative obscurity.

The way I see it, "data driven" design is often similar to an over-reliance on standardized testing or zero-tolerance policies; a way of abdicating responsibility for a decision and covering your own ass. _" Users hate this but I'm not to blame because I was just going off the data"_ has become the new _" Sure everything ended up going sideways, but can you really blame me for buying IBM? Nobody gets fired for buying IBM."_

Where is the data to suggest that data-driven design actually produces the desired results? That seems to be missing.

<comment><USER13> This is not a very productive discussion. I don't want to blow you off with a "trust the experts" kind of response, but that's basically what it boils down to. You are certainly entitled to second guess people whose livelihood it is to keep Mozilla going from your comfortable armchair, but I'm going to extricate myself from this discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is pretty good -- there are a number of config options here that I didn't realize existed.

My only real quibble is that I don't think people should turn on DNT if they can help it. _Most_ sites don't respect it, and for some sites it's actually another tracking vector on its own.

I believe if you turn on fingerprinting protection in Firefox it gets automatically enabled, so this isn't a suggestion anyone can practically act on. But if I had the choice to disable DNT, I would. I think we should deprecate any tracking protection that relies on good actors respecting our choices.

But overall, good article.

<comment><USER15> > DNT

Leaving it as default makes you hide in the crowd

<comment><USER14> I'm pretty sure that DNT is off by default in Firefox. That's what I mean when I say that turning it on can be an additional tracking data point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ironically, making changes like this makes you far, far more fingerprintable, as the vast majority of users don't make changes like this. Thus, the users that do stick out like a sore thumb. The article does mention this.

<comment><USER14> A lot of Firefox's fingerprinting protection is genuinely helpful because the stuff it's blocking can be used to very, very precisely target you.

Canvas/WebGL fingerprinting is a good example of this. Yes, very few people block it, but the fingerprinting for canvas is so individualized to each device that there is no hiding in the crowd if you leave it enabled. You're hiding in a crowd of size 1.

Think of it like wearing gloves during the summer. Yes, that's unusual. But a human fingerprint (except in rare-ish cases) will usually be good enough to track an individual person. In a world where people are regularly collecting fingerprints or tracking them around town to figure out who's been in what stores, being unusual is preferable to being unique.

There are a few settings (normalizing screen sizes) where the benefits aren't so clear-cut. But at the very, very least, you should be doing stuff like turning off webRTC/webGL/canvas. The majority of changes being listed here are strict improvements to privacy.

<comment><USER17> I have only just taken an interest in the canvas fingerprinting. My understanding is that it relies on a unique hash of an "image" created using HTML5, including the time it takes to draw. Is it not possible to alter this hash by throttling or slightly modifying some GPU settings? I know this is a weird and most likely highly technical question. I'm just curious.

<comment><USER14> Short answer, I don't know, but probably not?

Long answer, I'm also curious about this. I feel like the future of fingerprinting resistance isn't refusing to give up information (since sites can block you or force you to turn the settings back on) -- it's lying. Don't block microphone access, just feed it white noise. Don't block the location, just spoof it.

BUT, a bunch of people who are smarter than me have decided that zeroing out the canvas is better than making it return random values, so for the moment, I assume there's something they know that I don't.

<comment><USER18> The CanvasBlocker extension which has been around for longer than Firefox started implementing anti-fingerprinting measures does exactly this: spoof canvas readout values. Since blocking Javascript is no longer an option for most people, blocking fingerprintable APIs simply breaks many sites. What we need is frictionless ways to spoof values for these APIs unless the user trusts the site in which case real values can be sent (example the site needs to work and fake values will not be useful to the user).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Maybe a bit tangential, but I have been having a difficult time using Google Sheets lately in Firefox (like starting about 2-3 months ago). I keep track of my expenses (like groceries) in Google Sheets and always use Firefox to do data entry. Nowadays, Firefox browser freezes for a minute or two when I load/modify cells in Google Sheets.

I only have one extension, 'muBlockOrigin', installed in Firefox and have been using that for many years, so I'm sure the extension is not getting in the way of loading Google Sheets. So that leads me to believe that Google is probably supporting less and less of Firefox.

<comment><USER20> Google products (Sheets/Analytics/Gmail) simply run slower on FF these days. It's clear that Google optimizes their products to run well on Chrome, and doesn't bother benching performance on FF. I have a chromium portable laying around for the sole purpose of logging into google products that I need to access for work, and access everything else in FF.

I don't think Google is maliciously making FF slower on their products, but I believe they simply don't care to tweak/tune performance on FF like they would have years ago. As everything else google does, the devs metaphorically cover their ears and proclaim " _lalalalalala we are google we don 't care!_" ...and it's more telling every passing year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> A word of caution, some of these settings break stuff.

I don't remember the exact items anymore, but seemingly innocous privacy- related changes I did some time ago from a list very much like this broke the ability to paste to google docs (which was a bit confusing, since I noticed it weeks later when it "just" didn't work with no messages hinting why) and the integration for the Evernote WebClipper plugin; and it was a bit of a hassle to find which changes I need to revert.

<comment><USER22> Likely `dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled`:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Mozilla/Preferences...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Mozilla/Preferences/Preference_reference/dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled)

If someone else is in the habit of randomly selecting text and they're using linux, they may want to disable at least `clipboard.autocopy` if they don't use it. No reason to simply tell websites every selection you do, IMHO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> this article doesn't address the main issue with firefox and privacy: it sends your very complete fingerprint to google on its very first launch, before you get the chance to change any privacy settings. from that moment on, unless you have JS disabled, google will know your every move one way or another.

all their talk about privacy is hot air as long as that is true.

<comment><USER24> GA was removed from the first run page [https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/pull/7621](https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/pull/7621)

<comment><USER23> oh. didn't know that, and yeah, can confirm - all requests on that page are made to mozilla.org. good! might have been an oversight then.

so this pretty much invalidates my other two comments here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Has anyone worked out if Do Not Track is actually worth it's weight?

You're effectively flipping another bit that de-anonymises your browser a little bit more, and I can't why a bad actor (the people you're actually worried about) would honour it.

<comment><USER26> Enabling DNT is worth it, but not for the reason which seems obvious. The DNT header was created so Internet advertisers could point and say, "only 0.1% of users have enabled DNT - this is evidence that people don't care about or even WANT to be tracked" in the face of scrutiny by regulators. It's a single extra bit of information about your request; I wouldn't worry about "de- anonymization" resulting from enabling it, but would suggest enabling it as a token gesture anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> And Firefox refuses to load the page because of a cert error. Oh, the irony!

<comment><USER14> Works for me on the most recent version of Firefox. Might be a clock issue?

Regardless, Outline link for anyone who can't read: [https://outline.com/T3fGAk](https://outline.com/T3fGAk)

If Outline doesn't load, try enabling referrer headers. I always forget to do that and get annoyed when Outline links break. I should _probably_ just switch to a different service at some point, since I refuse to leave referrer headers enabled permanently.

<comment><USER10> That's quite a clock issue given the cert is valid from May 2018 to May 2020, so the entire year is wrong on their system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is an ok guide for people who don't know what to do, however I'd argue using ghacks userjs, and also disabling the built in content blocking and safebrowsing entirely is in order, along with disabling captive portal detection, and dns over https.

These all call back to google and/or mozilla, cloudflare.

[https://github.com/ghacksuserjs/ghacks- user.js](https://github.com/ghacksuserjs/ghacks-user.js)

</comment><comment><USER29> There are so many hardware and OS level fingerprinting vectors that software tweaks like these are only marginally useful.

Once you've done your tweaking, have a look at [https://amiunique.org/](https://amiunique.org/) to see how anonymous you really are.

<comment> 0-_-0 amiunique.org only checks whether your fingerprint is unique, but if some data that was used to create your fingerprint was random (as common with some anti- fingerprinting methods) then that doesn't mean you're identifiable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Ironically, uBlock flags this site leaking tracking cookies to two third-party sites, getclicky.com and presidium.com. Who watches the watcher, eh?

But there's no denying that site is a good handy guide to things in Firefox that can be tweaked to suit one's privacy stance.

</comment><comment><USER31> Caution: I kept having problems in websites where timestamps were hours off, and every captcha was super annoying. It took me a while to figure out it was due to the fingerprint protection that I had enabled.

</comment><comment><USER32>
      privacy.resistFingerprinting = true

breaks whatsapp web login page, interesting

</comment><comment><USER33> This howto isn't helpful on first run when Firefox sends tons of telemetry to Google: [https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658588961766604...](https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/1165858896176660480)

<comment><USER24> GA was removed from that page [https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/pull/7621](https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/pull/7621)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> about:config shows a screen that says "This might void your warranty.". Is this supposed to be a joke? Which warranty is being voided here?

<comment><USER35> Yeah it's a joke. These settings might break a few websites, although I don't recall that ever happening to me. And any websites these settings break shouldn't be websites you're visiting anyway.

<comment><USER36> > dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled = false

This breaks copy-paste for quite a few rich text editors (it was the reason why pasting into Riot didn't work for me for several months). So, some of these options can subtly break harmless websites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Step 1. Stop using browsers that don't respect user freedoms.

There are plenty of good firefox forks out there.</comment>


ZMap: Internet scanner maps all of IPv4 in 45 minutes - <AUTHOR> https://zmap.io/ <comment><USER2> I thought the approach they took to permuting the address space was particularly clever, but was quickly schooled on Twitter by how bog-standard the approach apparently is (I very much concede the point!). In the interest of honesty about how easily impressed I am, and because I still think it's a neat little trick:

You want to generate a permutation of the entire IPv4 address space, but you don't simply want to shuffle every possible IP address because that would require you to keep an insane amount of state. So instead, work in the multiplicative group modulo _p_ for prime _p_ > 2^32, find an appropriate generator, and iterate by multiplying with the generator mod _p_. Remember the prime, the generator, the starting address, and your current address and you can detect a complete traversal of the space when the starting address recurs.

There are a number of simpler ways to do this (after sheepishly conceding that this is pretty fundamental stuff, I played with using PRFs and card shuffling to do it; DrHoney suggested Gray codes), but I liked how immediately obvious the multiplicative group solution was, and that I could code it from a simple description.

<comment><USER3> The problem of generating a non-repeating (2^n)-1 n-bit numbers permutation is equivalent to generating a m-sequence ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_length_sequence](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_length_sequence)) and the simplest way is a n-bit LFSR with a primitive poly, called maximal LFSR. It's so much simpler and faster (some XORs and n bits of memory), I cannot see why they chose that weird prime multiplication algorithm, in fact right now I'm not completely sure that algorithm is correct.

<comment><USER4> A 32-bit LFSR generates a sequence _of bits_ with period 2^32-1; what you really want is a Lehmer-like generator using arithmetic in GF(2^32).

<comment><USER2> You mathematicians, with your... understanding of the basic mathematics behind things we developers already use every day, you all think you're better than us, don't you? DON'T YOU?!

Can't I just be left to be impressed by a direct use of the math behind a crappy textbook random number generator in peace?

-.-

<comment><USER4> I'm not 100% sure if that was tongue-in-cheek or not, so I'll clarify: I was disagreeing with aortega. This is not a typical PRNG, where the seed generally marks the initial point of _the same sequence_. Choosing a random generator matters, because we want a _different permutation_ every time, not simply a different starting point. It is akin to running a block cipher in OFB mode with a different key each time.

What they are doing modulo 2^32 + 15 is IMO the simplest way to achieve that goal. Yes, you could do it without overflowing 2^32 using a binary field; you could also cook your own mini block-cipher. But that increases the complexity of the code and is not really faster everywhere.

<comment><USER3> >Choosing a random generator matters, because we want a different permutation every time, not simply a different starting point.

Ah thanks, now it makes more sense, I knew I was missing something. What about choosing different prime polys for a galois lfsr? I believe you will get the same result.

<comment><USER3> Also you could XOR the LFSR output with any number to get a different permutation each time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When they say "scanning the whole Internet in 45 min" they mean scanning only _one_ port of every IP address (for example sending a short GET request to port 80/tcp) over a Gigabit link:

2^32 (IP addresses) * 1 (port per IP) * 80 (bytes per packet) * 8 (bits per byte) / 1e9 (throughput in bit/sec) / 60 (sec per min) = 46 minutes (note: excluding multicast space, RFC 1918 space, etc, scanning time would be reduced down to ~35 min)

That's equivalent to "scanning all 65,535 ports of a /16 subnet in 45 min" which does sound less impressive...

<comment><USER6>
      scanning all 65,535 ports of a /16 subnet in 45 min

...or in other words:

      scanning all ports in the reserved Class C range,
      from 192.168.0.0 to 192.168.255.255, in 45 min

<comment><USER7> > ... "class C" ...

I realize lots of people are simply in the habit of saying "Class C" when what they really mean is a /24, "Class B" for a /16, etc. but classless routing[0] has been around for 20 years now and these terms need to go away.

[0]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter- Domain_Routing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing)

<comment><USER8> Except that qwerty_asdf wasn't referring to a /24 subnet, (s)he was talking about one of the three address spaces defined in RFC 1918 and described thusly:

"Note that (in pre-CIDR notation) the first block is nothing but a single class A network number, while the second block is a set of 16 contiguous class B network numbers, and third block is a set of 256 contiguous class C network numbers."

So it is common for crusty old network engineers and sysadmins to refer to 192.168/16 as "the class C" private block, even when they understand that you can subnet it however you'd like.

<comment><USER7> > ... (s)he was talking about one of the three address spaces defined ...

Right, I realized that when s/he said "reserved Class C range". It was more of a general observation. I always forget I have to be extremely specific here on HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm somewhat surprised there is no reference to scanrand[1][2], a fast stateless syn scanner by Dan Kaminsky in 2002. It wasn't directly geared towards scanning the entire Internet, but instead scanning large subnets (like for a pen test of a /16 network... takes a long time to scan).

It is a bit obscure, but it did do tricks like encoding encrypted data in extra mutable fields (just the sequence number for scanrand) for validation purposes. Actually, scanrand 2.0 can apparently measure latency (without state!) by encoding timing information in the source port field, which zmap doesn't currently do.

I think this research is great, but I just hate to see interesting old projects get forgotten.

[1] [http://dankaminsky.com/2002/11/18/77/](http://dankaminsky.com/2002/11/18/77/) [2] [http://www.sans.org/security- resources/idfaq/scanrand.php](http://www.sans.org/security- resources/idfaq/scanrand.php) [3] [http://s3.amazonaws.com/dmk/SBO_Hiver.ppt](http://s3.amazonaws.com/dmk/SBO_Hiver.ppt)

<comment><USER10> I currently scan the entire internet once a week using a re-implementation of scanrand I did myself. (and will be switching to Zmap shortly)

There aren't as many people using it as you'd think because 1) finding a working download link is quite an exercise and 2) compiling paketto is near impossible except on Dan's machine. :)

<comment><USER11> check out dscan from dugsong, which was built around 2003 or so to address that problem, that dan doesn't often write portable code.

[https://github.com/dugsong/dscan](https://github.com/dugsong/dscan)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The anonymously published whole Internet survey scanned 100 ports on every address as well as a few other things. It took something like 30,000 devices and months of work though so I guess this is pretty impressive.

[http://internetcensus2012.bitbucket.org/paper.html](http://internetcensus2012.bitbucket.org/paper.html)

<comment><USER13> A friend of mine conveniently built a search around the data:

[http://exfiltrated.com/querystart.php](http://exfiltrated.com/querystart.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Running this from any web host will almost certainly get your server turned off along with a pile of abuse emails. To make it run even faster you should scrub all the Bogon routes on this list: [https://www.team- cymru.org/Services/Bogons/http.html](https://www.team- cymru.org/Services/Bogons/http.html)

I would also scrub all the sinkholes and captured botnet C&C ip addresses as hitting those will lower the reputation your netblock. List we use at meanpath is: [http://mirror1.malwaredomains.com/files/domains.txt](http://mirror1.malwaredomains.com/files/domains.txt) [https://zeustracker.abuse.ch/blocklist.php?download=domainbl...](https://zeustracker.abuse.ch/blocklist.php?download=domainblocklist) [https://zeustracker.abuse.ch/blocklist.php?download=ipblockl...](https://zeustracker.abuse.ch/blocklist.php?download=ipblocklist) [http://malc0de.com/bl/IP_Blacklist.txt](http://malc0de.com/bl/IP_Blacklist.txt) [http://hosts-file.net/download/hosts.txt](http://hosts- file.net/download/hosts.txt) [http://www.joewein.net/dl/bl/dom-bl- base.txt](http://www.joewein.net/dl/bl/dom-bl-base.txt) [http://www.dshield.org/feeds/suspiciousdomains_High.txt](http://www.dshield.org/feeds/suspiciousdomains_High.txt) [http://www.malware.com.br/cgi/submit?action=list](http://www.malware.com.br/cgi/submit?action=list) [https://spyeyetracker.abuse.ch/blocklist.php?download=domain...](https://spyeyetracker.abuse.ch/blocklist.php?download=domainblocklist) [https://spyeyetracker.abuse.ch/blocklist.php?download=ipbloc...](https://spyeyetracker.abuse.ch/blocklist.php?download=ipblocklist)

</comment><comment><USER15> As a phun side note. Reverse mapping government censorship of DNS. Since I think governments are starting to go down the slippery slope road of censorship here is how map out the censorship.

If you have the list of the whole internet servers which answers on http port 80. Then you can reverse map government censorship dns list. Ie you can find out what the government wants to censor by doing lookups in the censored dns and for example opendns on the servers ip that answers on port 80, then you diff the results from the dns servers and if you get different answers you find out the government black list.

</comment><comment><USER16> "How to get dropped by your ISP in under an hour."

There has been a very positive trend recently in the quality of documentation, a move away from dry, man-style listing of options to more operational descriptions, tutorial, examples, a bit of hand-holding. Here's a Docker tutorial[1], still on the front page.

[1] [https://www.docker.io/gettingstarted/](https://www.docker.io/gettingstarted/)

<comment><USER17> A move _away_ from having man pages isn't necessarily a thing to be celebrated - a well-written man page is an extremely useful thing.

In the ideal case, you might have a quality man page that provides usage information and links to more detailed documentation (that would include tutorials, implementation info, etc.) on the web somewhere.

<comment><USER18> I suppose the internet generation never really took the time to read man pages (nor to write one for that matter).

<comment><USER7> That's too bad. When I was getting started, the best documentation available to me was the man pages (this was before I had an "always-on" broadband connection) and TLDP's "Linux HOWTO's". I printed many of them and took them with me to high school to study in class.

It's great that we have blogs and such nowadays where anyone and everyone can contribute their own documentation, guides, tutorials, etc., but there was something awesome about having a single, centralized, authoritative HOWTO covering a particular topic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is very cool, but I'm curious as to why they stuck with ZMap. Nmap's graphical interface, Zenmap, sounds very similar and has a huge following among security researchers.

For the technically inclined, a good white paper describing the advantages of IPv4-wide scanning for security reconaissance and the advantages of ZMap vs other tools like NMap can be found here:

[https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity13/sec13-paper_durumeric.pdf)

<comment><USER20> Probably because the author's first name is Zakir.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wonder why they didn't mention unicornscan in their paper?

User-land Distributed Portscanner released in 2005: [http://unicornscan.com](http://unicornscan.com)

Defcon Presentation Introducing Unicornscan from 2005: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdCEo6yoEWA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdCEo6yoEWA)

</comment><comment><USER22> 1) "ZMap supports both blacklisting and whitelisting network prefixes. If ZMap is not provided with blacklist or whitelist parameters, ZMap will scan all IPv4 address (including local, reserved, and multicast addresses)."

What an absolutely stupid default setting. Thanks for giving a bunch of noobs a simple IPMC DOS application. If this thing gets popular it will soon be the bane of network admins everywhere.

2) There are at least 2 obvious omissions from their default blacklist file. There might be more but these are the obvious ones that come to mind. class-E 240.0.0.0/4 CGN 184.108.40.206/10

3) Can someone explain to me why I wouldn't just want to use nmap to do this same thing? Why do we need a new tool for this?

</comment><comment><USER23> In case anyone is wondering if this worked on IPv6, and the rate was constant (45 minutes to do 2^32) it would take about 2 octillion days to scan all of the IPv6 addresses.

</comment><comment><USER24> gonna try it over university network

<comment><USER25> I did something similar when I was researching search technology at my university[0]. Then when coming back from lunch some weeks later I found two gays from the it-department had locked them self into our office to investigating what we where doing. Apparently we had hit a lot of honeypots :)

0: [http://www.boitho.com/](http://www.boitho.com/)

<comment><USER26> Why would you assume they were gay?

<comment><USER25> Lol. I meant guys :) English is not my first languages ( gays/guys, "let's have a beer/bear" etc don't get caught in most spell checkers... ).

<comment><USER27> Just for a moment I thought I was reading a plot for a gay porno. LOL

<comment><USER28> Good thing TCP/IP legalized same-sex connections. NCP was not so open minded.

The old NCP networking protocol required that connect and listen sockets must have different parity gender (one even, the other odd -- I can't remember which was which, or if it mattered -- they just had to be different). The act of trying to connect an even socket to another even socket, or an odd socket to another odd socket, was called "homosocketuality", and it was strictly forbidden by internet protocols, and was called the "Anita Bryant feature".

[http://www.saildart.org/IMPSER.DOC[SS,SYS][1]](http://www.saildart.org/IMPSER.DOC\[SS,SYS\]\[1\])

Illegal gender in RFC, host hhh/iii, link 0

The host is trying to engage us in homosocketuality. Since this is against the laws of God and ARPA, we naturally refuse to consent to it.

[http://www.saildart.org/FTP.OLD[S,NET]1[2]](http://www.saildart.org/FTP.OLD\[S,NET\]1\[2\])

        ; Try to initiate connection

        loginj:
                init log,17
                sixbit /IMP/
                0
                jrst noinit
                setzm conecb
                setom conecb+lsloc
                move ac3,hostno
                movem ac3,conecb+hloc
                setom conecb+wfloc
                movei ac3,40
                movem ac3,conecb+bsloc
                move ac3,consck
                trnn ac3,1
                    jrst gayskt            ; only heterosocketuals can win!
                 movem ac3,conecb+fsloc
                 mtape log,[
                       =15
                        byte (6) 2,24,0,7,7
                             ]          ; Time out CLS, RFNM, RFC, and INPut

        [...]

        gayskt:    outstr [asciz/Homosocketuality is prohibited (the Anita Bryant feature)

        /]

            ife rsexec,<jrst rstart;>exit       1,

(The code above adds the connect and listen socket numbers together, which results in bit 0 being 0 if they are the same gender, then TRNN is "test bits right, no change, skip if non zero", which skips the next instruction (jrst gayskt) if they different sex.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's interesting to see that this supports pushing to redis lists, which is clarified as being an 'output module.'

[https://zmap.io/documentation.html#extending](https://zmap.io/documentation.html#extending)

Very good, very extensible.</comment>


Three Months, What Now? - <AUTHOR> http://steamcommunity.com/games/372770/announcements/detail/74657886688515827/

<comment><USER2> I would say indie developers upload their partially developed playable demos for real-time feedback, instead of having the game developed fully and then re-think.

<comment><AUTHOR> They are all dreamers until reality hits them square in the face.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This post just really kind of touched me and I am interested in seeing what the rest of HN has to say about it...</comment>


Decrement carbon: Stripe's negative emissions commitment - <AUTHOR> https://stripe.com/au/blog/negative-emissions-commitment <comment><USER3> It's a small step in the grand scheme of things... But it's a huge step (and commitment) coming from a single company.

I can honestly say that no company the size of Stripe has even come close to being this "cool" (in a good way, not in a superficial sense) on so many things: company culture, remote-ok, perks, and now environment. At least from my point of view.

Kudos. Lots of kudos. Keep the good work, guys.

As a side note: I personally think that the way we look at environment and impact is plainly wrong. E.g. it is much more effective to plant trees (called "afforestation") rather than sequester CO2. Here's some old but decent sources [0], [1]. Can't find a proper source, but afforestation, when done together with habitat restoration, can be even cheaper than these numbers, when done in certain areas of Africa, South America and Central Asia.

If Stripe wants to go the proverbial extra mile, it should consider "educating" people on the subject AND take consequent action, as opposed to "just" taking action following conventional wisdom.

[0]: [https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40562.pdf](https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40562.pdf)

[1]: [https://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/pubs/pnw_gtr888.pdf](https://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/pubs/pnw_gtr888.pdf) (afforestation "price" starting at ~$50/ton)

<comment><USER4> Don't you then need to worry about enforcement mechanisms to keep those trees from getting cut down? If they're all harvested after say n decades, there's no net effect on climate.

<comment><USER5> How does it follow that there's no net effect on climate (or amount of atmospheric carbon) if the tree is cut down? I can only see that if the timber is burned for fuel. If someone instead carved the timber up into N skateboards, modulo waste, the carbon would stay with the skateboards.

<comment><USER6> Skateboards don't stay skateboards forever. Eventually they'll be thrown out, where they'll degrade & eventually decompose, re-releasing the stored CO2.

<comment><USER7> Mostly into the ground, no? Isn't that how petroleum was formed in the first place?

<comment><USER6> It depends entirely on where the skateboards and other wood-derived waste ends up. If it's not properly disposed of (e.g. litter), then it will release most/all of it into the atmosphere. If it's incinerated, it's all released. If it's in a landfill, it depends on whether and how effectively the landfill is sealed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just to summarize (warm up those downvotes...):

* "almost certainly more" than 84% of stripe's emissions will not be sequestered because it's "financially infeasible"

* no mention of stripe's actual carbon footprint

* talk of startups and trillion dollar industry "by the end of the century" but no mention of government intervention / green new deal to turn the tide in the next decade before it's too late

Verdict: free market ideologues are not ever going to be leaders on climate. We need massive mobilization at the federal level to hit the necessary emissions reductions within the next 12 years if we are to avoid a catastrophic rise in temperature.

<comment><USER9> > We need massive mobilization at the federal level to hit the necessary > emissions reductions within the next 12 years if we are to avoid a > catastrophic rise in temperature.

That doesn't really make sense IMHO, global warming isn't a US problem, it's a worldwide issue. Let's say the US becomes a benevolent dictatorship with the mission to reduce CO2 emissions by any mean necessary (and is somehow successful), you still have the global problem. And then what, do you go to war against other countries?

<comment><USER10> You do your part, other countries try to do the same, and various means and strategies are implemented and shared globally.

This "but we can't fix it all alone, it's a global issue" thinking mode has to go. All contributions are important in reducing the speed of warming, whether your neighbour participates or not.

Interestingly, the longer you wait, the more you can expect people with more extreme agendas to pop up around the globe because they will see the point in coercion to save the world. Early investment at a massive scale is worth it.

<comment><USER9> > This "but we can't fix it all alone, it's a global issue" thinking mode has > to go.

Ok, why? It is a global issue, that's not something we can ignore. You can change your way of thinking if you want, but I don't see why you would ignore that point. I find it disingenuous to say "if the US government doesn't do X in 12 years then we are doomed", because it's not true. Of course I'm not saying that nothing should be done, and I never said it cannot be fixed (or dealt with), that's just you putting words in my mouth. But the US government has a terrible history at dealing with other countries, and creating a giant mess all around. Just imagine Trump deciding to focus on climate issues, I cannot see how that wouldn't result in a complete disaster with international conflicts.

I think that we should keep the framing on the global aspect, and think about it as a common goal.

I don't disagree with the rest of your comment, I completely support any effort at a local level.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For people really into carbon removal --- Check out AirMiners, the largest community of entrepreneurs, researchers, and funders exploring opportunities in negative emissions and carbon removal. Folks from every major carbon removal startups like Climeworks, Global Thermostat, etc.

Join 320+ of us on Slack!

Apply here to join: [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/12L8drO9a6OZf3-I9578PieBI0fw...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/12L8drO9a6OZf3-I9578PieBI0fwe- RuPBpqWXsvyYK4/edit)

There's also a public meetup group in the Bay Area: [https://meetup.com/CarbonRemoval/](https://meetup.com/CarbonRemoval/)

<comment><USER12> Let's say I'm a regular web developer and know nothing about climate science, carbon removal, or any related science or technologies, but might be interested in donating my time and and skills.

Do you have any recommendations?

<comment><USER13> This is probably a really sensitive topic but.. Donating your time to help get politicians elected who are serious about doing what's necessary may be the best thing you can do.

<comment><USER11> Politicians are powerless without good technology options.

Today, the technology options are not good. but good options are within sight. As a technologist, let's go make better tech.

Climate change is a technology problem and a marketing problem.

YC's carbon site does a great job marketing for these crucial technologies: [http://carbon.ycombinator.com/](http://carbon.ycombinator.com/)

<comment><USER14> The technology options today are good enough. We can start building wind turbines and solar panels _right now_. We can insulate homes _right now_. We can replace oil and gas heating with heat pumps _right now_.

Storage only becomes a problem when a quite significant chunk of the generation is intermittent. But even then, today's batteries are good enough for overnight storage, and for longer term storage we can use power-to-gas processes.

<comment><USER11> heck yeah let's do that! Solar tech has gotten so much cheaper and better, my friend is replacing what used to be $30k of panels for $2k.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Shameless plug here but anyone interested in helping us prototype test an app to track/gamify/offset daily carbon emissions? We are a start-up in Singapore called CAPTURE :) all about helping people become aware of the impact their daily actions can have on their carbon footprint, make it fun and add a little competition, then for what you can't reduce - we will offer in-app offsetting via CAPTURE forests, where you'll be able to track your individual trees and watch your forests grow via a monthly drone update! Would be super grateful for any feedback. Early stages but testers/those interested please sign-up at www.thecapture.club

</comment><comment><USER16> Bravo to Stripe's continued leadership and exemplification of what a modern corporation can and _should_ be. The CCS area I've been most fascinated by recently is listed as their first area of interest: natural carbon sinks via land management practices.

I've been reading a little more about mob-stalked, heavily mobile grazing techniques (rotating cows/buffalo/ruminants daily) which increases the grass productivity per acre, thus capuring more carbon in the grass --> soil. If anyone knows of any resources/studies comparing the carbon sequestration of grasslands, which have incredible biomass cycles over several decades, vs managed forests which do not see the same level of biomass turnover, I would love to see them.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm surprised by the size of the commit. If $1M is the floor for what a Stripe-sized org is willing to spend, how expensive would a carbon tax actually be? Are there good estimators for my impact as a consumer and how much I need to commit to this?

Basically I want to know how much it costs to feel ok about my flights to go skiing.

<comment><USER18> I've been posting about this a lot, but check out Project Wren! ([https://projectwren.com/](https://projectwren.com/))

It costs me $40 a month to offset my own carbon footprint, but I take a lot more flights than the average person.

<comment><USER19> Great, didn't know about that. Subscribed on the spot and sharing it around, thanks for posting.

<comment><USER18> We need lots more people like you! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is an amazing pledge and very powerful statement.

However, I am not 100% convinced morally of CCS solutions. The main counter argument being that CCS technology enables the status quo of fossil fuel burning to continue.

On the other hand, there are some heavy industries (steel production?) that do not have any alternatives to coal burning in order to operate and CCS can offset the carbon footprint in these industries. I would however not call this "negative emissions" but rather "emission-free" or similar.

What is your opinion on CCS? Can people convince me in either direction?

<comment><USER21> There isn't some intrinsic moral sin to burning carbon. There are just practical problems with having too much in the atmosphere. If you can remove carbon, especially if you can also convert it back into fuel, that solves the problem.

(Carbon isn't the only emission from burning coal -- it contains sulfur and thorium too. But these can also be mitigated with some expense. And if you're converting CO2 directly to fuel, there's no increase in pollution at all.)

<comment><USER22> no, this is too simplistic. extracting carbon from the ground is neither free nor reversable so this analogy isn't appropriate here. even if one could turn it back into whatever it's original form was (impossible to do without additional energy due to thermodyamics/entropy), the site of extraction is way worse for the wear.

<comment><USER23> No one cares about the "worse for the wear" problems of digging holes in the ground in Saudi Arabia. The whole problem is the CO2 that ends up in our air on the other end of the process.

<comment><USER22> > digging holes in the ground in Saudi Arabia

are you aware of fracking and tar sands and their environmental impacts? you cannot possibly trivialize those as "digging holes in the ground".

<comment><USER23> Meh. In the grand scheme of things, those environmental impacts are nothing compared to the problems of climate change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm a big 'ol fan of Stripe, but large scale change isn't going to happen through corporate self regulation.

I wish tech companies that insist they want to make large, positive changes would come to terms with the fact that putting pressure on political levers is fundamentally necessary. I would be far more aggressive in my support of this effort if it was explicitly "we're doing this effort to cover our own tracks and we're contributing to a PAC that will support politicians who prioritize sensible environmental policy."

<comment><USER25> >I wish tech companies that… want… large, positive changes would [accept] that putting pressure on political levers is fundamentally necessary.

I agree that corporate self-regulation is the laziest political solution. But instead of doubling down on a mistake, let's get _all_ company hands off the political levers and have real separation of corp and state. Company influence on politics is an arms race that entrenches the most powerful firms, many of which are fundamentally opposed to climate change regulation.

<comment><USER24> Absolutely, agreed. But unilateral disarmament isn't the way to do so. If Stripe has a nice post about vehemently supporting politicians and policies that aim to get corporate money out of politics, they will quietly get my upvote and thoughtful nod of approval.

<comment><USER25> 100% I realize I was unclear that I meant corporate lobbying should be used to end corporate lobbying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> >This leads to Stripe's Negative Emissions Commitment. We will seek to purchase negative CO2 emissions at any price per tCO2, starting immediately. We expect that the best price will initially be very high: almost certainly more than $100 per tCO2, as compared to the $8 per tCO2 we pay for offsets. We don't expect to be able to sequester all of our carbon emissions, both because the relevant technologies are not yet operating at sufficient scale, and because it would be financially infeasible for Stripe. And so we commit to spending at least twice as much on sequestration as we do on offsets, with a floor of at least $1M per year.

What is the difference between sequestration and offsets?

<comment><USER27> Sequestration means literally filtering CO2 out of the air. Offsets are essentially just a contract that someone who would otherwise have created emissions, won't. For example, instead of deforesting an area I own and selling it for wood, I might sell an offset contract and keep it intact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've seen a lot of tech companies carefully analyzing impact of commute. Essentially re-locating closer/central to employees like using the commutestudy tool.

100% public transit commute is a long term goal, so work/live distance should be as short as possible short term.

<comment><USER29> > 100% public transit commute is a long term goal

Why is this a goal? Public transit isn't inherently cleaner. What makes it environmentally more attractive than personal ownership of electric vehicles, or a transit system subsidized by the government instead of run by it?

<comment><USER28> Even personal elec vehicles is a dumb way for millions to get to/from work in the future. Its very 'western' and old way of thinking. In 100yrs ppl will be either walking/biking/public transit or remote.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Proud.

I'm in the process of setting up a new consulting business, and one of my major commitments is to donate a significant percentage (at least 10%; likely more) of profits towards CO2 reduction / capture efforts.

I'm watching this space eagerly.

<comment><USER18> Trail of Bits (a security consulting firm) recently subscribed to an offset program that offsets all of the carbon from their employees!

[https://twitter.com/trailofbits/status/1155840018797256711](https://twitter.com/trailofbits/status/1155840018797256711)

<comment><USER30> I had an incomplete checkout process with Wren.

Just signed up for 200% (I suspect the estimate is on the low side as I don't know the impact of producing a lot of the things I own).

Cheers for the reminder!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Interesting that they are willing to pay any price the market offers, and expect to pay over $100/t. I wonder to what degree large scale burying of biomass would be effective? It'd be effectively the same process that created the hydrocarbon fuels we use today, which would be fairly effectively sequestered if we didnt drill them out of the ground.

It seems the idea has certainly been thought of: [https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0...](https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0680-3-1)

<comment><USER21> The problem with burying biomass is that it gets metabolized by bacteria into CO2 and (worse) methane, which escapes into the air. Some landfills manage to capture most of the methane, but on the 100-year time scale it's not clear that burying is very effective.

<comment><USER31> The study I linked addresses that point - they suggest that "only 0–3% of the carbon from wood are ever emitted as landfill gas after several decades". I don't consider myself qualified to evaluate that claim, but it certainly seems plausible, given that wood clearly decays far slower than, for example, kitchen scraps found in household bio-waste.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Data centers are factories without smoke stacks, they are voracious consumers of energy and since "cloud" everything computing is the name of the game at least for medium term, tech companies would do a favor if they focus on tackling the datacenter related issue.

Also chip fabrication is a dirty dirty dirty business, as the consumers of the computer hardware, we as an industry has responsibility to pollution reduction of this process.

Planting trees is good, giving aid money is good, but cleaning your own shit is better!

<comment><USER33> I'd argue that "the cloud" makes traditional computing more efficient. Since their motto is "pay for what you use", it automatically aligns with motives for the most efficient use.

Not to mention that the usage of computers has reduced the need for much more power hungry methods. We can now efficiently calculate much stronger, lighter, easier to manufacture parts and building patterns.

There is no need to drive/ride/walk to a place to hear the message, radio broadcasting is much more effective, even though it itself consumes power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I personally wish more companies worked like this. I know in about six months once i sort out the spend rate for engineering at my startup i am going to be looking at if we can give back either to environment or to open source. There is an inevitability as the old die off and the young more hyper aware we forge ahead to a less pollution intense world.

</comment><comment><USER35> They might make up for their electricity bill 1:1 but they'll never go neutral on the amount of carbon wealth they consume in payment for their services.

Imagine I have a business where I busk for money with my guitar outside of a coal plant and a single coal minor is my patron. I may be "carbon neutral" but in fact I owe my whole existence to coal being mined and burnt. Coal is my life blood and the sole source of wealth in my life. I may as well mine the coal myself and play guitar for myself, and if you consider me and the miner to be a unit it's obvious the two of us are living on coal and the fact that he does all the work while I play guitar hardly means anything.

Companies like stripe are sufficiently separated from coal and oil that they can believe they don't suck at the teat of fossil fuels, and that the only coal wealth they consume is whatever powers their light bulbs and servers. But ultimately you can track back the wealth that comes their way - all of it - <USER2> operations that generate quite a bit more emissions.

We can run subsidies and credits in little isolated corners of our economy, but it's like running a refrigerator in a closed room. Ultimately you're just burning wealth which creates a greater load on the wealth-generating machine that is the fossil fuel industry.

Real advances that make it possible to generate wealth without fossil fuel money in subsidies should be celebrated. These tech guys taking $1m of their $100m in profits (the coal miner pays the busker using stripe) to pay their $1m light bill is a shell game

<comment><USER33> I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say. Are you discounting their efforts? Their motives?

You're not responsible for everyone else, or if you were, they'd not need to be for themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Major respect to Stripe for starting this program, as this helps solve a real problem in the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) field. At Project Vesta (thanks for the shoutout[1]), while we have a plan for individuals to pay for their CO2 removal by donating directly for a specific tonnage of olivine to be placed on a beach in their name, all of the investors/fund advisors who have approached us and are interested in getting into the CDR field, have generally been limited in that they can only make investments into an organization if there is a way to get a financial return. They can't put money in non-profits, even to potentially help "save the world," as they are still operating with a fiduciary responsibility and for-profit motives. If no one is paying for carbon removal, there is no business. For scientists and others trying to create carbon removal solutions, this represents a major problem, as no matter how good or cheap their CDR technique is, they also have to come up with a market of who will buy their CDR "product."

So even though many groups/companies want to get involved in CDR, if there is no market for paying for "CDR as a product," investors will not put money in. Having Stripe and other companies guarantee payment for carbon dioxide removal would actually make a real difference in helping to spur the CDR market. Companies would be able to point at who will buy their "product" and at what price, and then investors would be able to invest.

Creating a carbon price is the most obvious and simple solution to make the "free market" solve a problem created by the inefficiency of the "free market" in the first place, of not pricing in the real world cost of the externalities from each tonne of CO2 released. The emitters should have to pay because each tonne of carbon put out into the atmosphere causes economic damage in terms of health effects and more. Some 30,000 people die prematurely in the US each year due to air pollution, yet most emitters do not pay these costs[2].

This is termed the "social cost of carbon" (SCC) and based on estimates from the U.S. governmental Interagency Working Group in 2013, each 1 metric ton of CO2 released is said to have an SCC of around $37 (2007 USD).[3] So even though there is a consensus among most scientists and economists that there should be a carbon price, and companies technically owe around $37/tonne, no one is sure when it will occur or at what price it will be at. This uncertainty and lack of a large scale market is what prevents major private investments into large scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies.

It is particularly frustrating because if the free market was truly rational, polluters would be paying for the externalities on their CO2 emissions, and the CDR field would blossom. By creating a market themselves and also offering to pay at a range of prices (even though there may be cheaper options available), Stripe can help foster CDR companies when they are most vulnerable, helping them breakthrough their technological learning curves and achieve scale. At the very least, just keeping companies subsidized and advancing technologically until the world corrects this economic error, is a worthy cause.

Having a guaranteed CO2 removal price would allow these companies to just focus on their technology and not have to individually force the global economic system to price carbon, in order to be viable. So again, great job Stripe in starting this, and to other companies/organizations, please start similar initiatives.

[1] "Interesting ideas include crushing rock with natural forces" [[https://ProjectVesta.org](https://ProjectVesta.org)]

[2] [https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/23/health/air-pollution-us- death...](https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/23/health/air-pollution-us-deaths- study/index.html)

[3] [https://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/expertconsensusrepor...](https://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/expertconsensusreport.pdf)

<comment><USER37> Thanks Eric. This well-captures what we hope to do. Please drop me a message at firstname.lastname@example.com -- I'd love to talk about how our projects can work together.

<comment><USER38> Hi Christian, first of all I think it's a great commitment.

May I ask what measures stripe has taken when it comes to energy efficiency to reduce emissions - often this can be cheaper than cleaning up the mess afterwards. Do you know, and are at liberty to disclose, how much energy your datacenters consume and what measures to reduce their footprint have you taken? Also, I read on stripe's homepage that you heat using natural gas. While this can result in rather low emissions it hugely depends on the source of the gas - if the leakage rate is too high (with fracking it often is) , it can even be worse than lignite especially when looking at shorter timeframes (20-30 years opposed to the 100 which is often used for the co2eq factor)[1] so alternative heating options if available might reduce the emissions.

[1] [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ese3.35](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ese3.35)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Missed opportunity to call this C-- !

<comment><USER40> C-- the programming language already exists: [https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/c--/index.html](https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/c--/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> What kind of margins do they have that enables them to just throw money around like this? Is the payments industry that big of a cash machine to allow this kind of spending that has nothing to do with their core business?

<comment><USER33> You would find that banking and it's related fields are indeed very profitable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Best thing you can do to limit carbon emissions is run an efficient business that gets a high ROI. Dollars to doughnuts, $$$ spent tracks with barrels of oil burned to crank out those goods/services consumed.

</comment><comment><USER43> Our normal state should be doing good for the planet, and not bragging for doing the right thing. For starters, Stripe staff should fly far less, invest in remote working, or research how to make payments with the lowest carbon footprint. Cash is the baseline. I hope that there isn't an hidden agenda of carbon credits as a business.

<comment><USER44> _Should_. Doesn't mean it's possible.

When the market doesn't favor doing the right thing, companies trying to do it die quickly, outcompeted by those who don't care. That's one reason why this has to be a gradual process, involving carbon credits and companies bragging about doing a bit of the right thing, and hopefully having that bragging be positively received.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Why not invest in new solar power generation instead of removing co2 at this point.

<comment><USER46> Why not both?

At least in terms of priority, the damage is done and is already in the atmosphere. imo, we need to first focus on cleaning that up and getting some form of homeostasis before it gets much worse, WHILE working on solar/nuclear/renewable tech to make sure we don't just relapse and make the problem worse again.

I'm optimistically hoping that's the route we'd take anyways. Money tends to say otherwise tho. =(

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Wonderful leadership. Thank you, Stripe!

</comment><comment><USER48> So they're basically going to pay for the CO2 emissions at around 100$ per tonne (10 cents per kg), right?

Well, we can calculate the C02 exhaled by a typical human, as [1] 36.84 mg = 0.03684 kg of CO2 per breath. (0.03684 kg @ 10c per kg) Therefore each breath you exhale is worth 0.003684 cents....

So how do you want to pay me @stripe?

[1] [https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-mass-of-the-carbon- dioxide...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-mass-of-the-carbon-dioxide- exhaled-in-a-breath)

<comment><USER49> Are you saying you're going to stop breathing after receiving the money?</comment></comment>


Getting 60 thousand pageviews with 2 carefully constructed posts - <AUTHOR> http://maxklein.posterous.com/getting-60-thousand-pageviews-with-2-carefull <comment><USER2> Max misappropriates value from follower count. He says that the new followers that were valuable were "real business men with high follower to followee counts" (um, spammers?) and that the second article got him followers that were "unimportant people with low follower counts"

This is backwards. Get those first kind of people to follow you and they may retweet your stuff once in a blue moon but it's just noise amongst the rest of their noise. Get a lot of that second group to follow you and those people will GO TO BAT for you. They're real, engaged followers. Your tweets are far more likely to register with them (or even just be seen) and they can just as easily start network effects that reach the big boys anyway. As a whole they're far more valuable than 1000 of the 'real business men'.

<comment><USER3> Excellent point. Twitter accounts with moderate followers represent real people that are more likely to be engaged with your tweets. The "big boys" are more likely to be using Twitter as a broadcasting marketing tool. The former group are more likely to become your users/readers/customers.

<comment><USER4> I think the most valuable twitter user is he who followers 100 people but is followed by 10.000 people. Do you disagree?

<comment><USER5> That depends on the 10,000 people. If they're all outside the demographic that I'm interested in or if the person that follows me never retweets stuff that interests my demographic then it's useless.

In general though, assuming there is some bond between you and the person that follows 100 people and the 10,000 people that follow him in turn contain some real live bodies that are in the right demographic he/she will be a useful follower.

Personally I have not seen much action on twitter from people with 10's of thousands of followers, they are usually fairly reluctant to re-tweet unless it suits them perfectly, exactly _because_ of their large following, and also because people with that many followers usually have those for their own glorification and not specifically as a tool to communicate with people with who they have a strong (2 way) bond.

<comment><USER4> That's quite interesting. I don't actually know how that works since I've obviously never had more than 200 followers. I see the point though - I have revised my opinion hereforth.

<comment><USER6> As a "reader" on Twitter I usually dont follow anyone over a few hundred followers unless they are _really_ interesting. Because mostly it is just noise.

I suspect the demographic of their followers isn't hugely useful for "sticky" readers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So, essentially we've been social engineered :)

Congratulations!

Knowing that I might be a bit more reluctant to visit maxklein.posterous.com links in the future.

<comment><USER4> You´ve not been social engineered - you´ve received a post that was personalised for you. I don´t write to gain twitter followers - I really don´t care - but in order to test my theory, I needed some type of metric, and that seemed like a relevant one.

My further posts are no longer going to be manipulated in that manner -- well, till I think of something interesting to try out again.

The only difference between what I did and what lifehacker or any such site does is that I explained afterwards.

(Sorry about the weird apostrophe, I got a new macbook and it has a strange keyboard).

<comment><USER5> > You´ve not been social engineered - you´ve received a post that was > personalised for you.

That's your interpretation, mine is different. You've used your reputation to get me to visit your site, specifically not the text of those links. You've written interesting stuff in the past and I wondered what this was about. (edit: reputation+title = click, reputation alone or title alone would probably not have been a click, but that's after the fact).

> My further posts are no longer going to be manipulated in that manner

So you say.

> well, till I think of something interesting to try out again.

See, that's what I mean. You've abused your reputation in order to do your experiment, and you've succeeded in your goal. Now I'm going to be more wary, and will think twice before I click, no matter how enticing the title. In fact, the more enticing the title the _less_ chance that I'll click because that will make it more likely that you are pulling another stunt.

> The only difference between what I did and what lifehacker or any such site > does is that I explained afterwards.

A good magician _never_ explains his tricks to the audience.

I know that that is a fine line here, but even though I'm sure you have good intentions and you are in a way making up for tricking people by explaining it I can't help the feelings that it creates.

Trust is a fragile thing, and in some sense you have broken that trust.

You've taken 'link bait' or 'title bait' one step further and created 'article bait'. That's an achievement in its own right, and I find it quite impressive that you managed to pull this off but at the same time you've shown yourself more than willing and capable of doing this with intent.

> I don´t write to gain twitter followers

No, but you write "My aim in both cases was to increase my name recognition. I wanted the right people to be aware of "Max Klein". "

If twitter followers are a measure of that then we can use that to gauge your success and effectively you _were_ trying to gain a following.

That's what social engineering is all about. It's a hacker term for getting people to do what they otherwise would not do by outsmarting them. That's not limited to getting passwords over the phone by pretending to be the sysadmin.

<comment><USER4> There are a lot of blogs there talking about tech and talking about money. I could join their ranks and just write the same stuff I write here.

But I choose not to. What I want to write is a meta blog. A blog where the things I write to pull people to my site are further explained and analysed. Like getting traffic by writing an article about how to get traffic and in that article analysing the traffic the article itself would get. That is the experiment I want to do.

Yes, unfortunately, you are my test subject, and it is your choice if you choose to participate or not, but I think it will be interesting.

So I am the magician explaining and analysing my tricks. Not everyone likes that - some just want to see the magic.

<comment><USER5> The basic mistake you make is that as both the audience _and_ the test subject you lose perspective, it's one thing to stand on the sidelines and see you do great stuff with text in order to really achieve something.

If you had a specific goal other than 'increasing the name recognition of Max Klein' then that would be cool with me.

Say you invent a gadget and you apply this technique and you sell a million of them and document it. That's the exact same thing but with one major difference, there is a concrete goal.

The audience itself is not the goal, and neither is simply increasing your name visibility. It's like a branded box with nothing in it. Other than your 'cleverness'.

By closing the loop and making the whole thing about how to attract visitors you are like a spammer that mails you a guide on how to get traffic, the guide tells you to spam people and send them guides.

There is no _real_ goal here.

That's a harsh analogy, but that is the way it appears to me.

So, what do you really intend to do with the audience that you have got ?

Are you going to get to some kind of conversion goal or is it just a numbers game ?

<comment><USER4> Actually, I do have a plan. I was intending to phase it in, but it makes no difference if I say it now:

Step 1: Write interesting articles where I deconstruct the art of gaining name recognition, and in the process gain a lot of name recognition. At some point, I will have a following of about 1000

Step 2: I am going to challenge one of the established software players that I am going to make software that is better and more loved than theirs

Step 3: I will program and release something very promising. My followers will spread the news. It will grow

That's my overall plan. There is software I am developing where I am going to stake my reputation on. But what's a reputation to stake if you have none, ey?

<comment><USER7> Now that's interesting, a social engineer + software developer = new kind of entrepreneur? The plan: outsmart people in the social space (creating a momentum) and then start selling them software (creating long term effect).

The problem here is how actually you create good software

<comment><USER4> Well, I work in research doing software mainly, so technically, I am competent.

<comment><USER7> Now you should be well settled in for applying to YC

<comment><USER4> I did in the past and was rejected. I don't need to anymore, this month I will make 15k in revenue + still have my salary. I'm comfortable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _I wrote the articles to test my theories on what captures attention on the internet_

 _I don't have any analytics installed on this site_

That seems counter-intuitive?

To me this reads purely like deliberate controversy to get some notoriety. The posts you mention I actually read (both I think) and found one of the 2 to be of interest. To suggest they were some sort of trick just seems weird.

</comment><comment><USER8> This article was as informative as someone who would write "Getting 60K pageviews by a carefully constructed competition"

It's not hard to get page views.

I have approx 30K page views per post and great discussions around them and re-tweets up the yazoo, but it's based on what I find interesting, what I want to spend my time on. Not on writing content that isn't important to me.

The real metrics you should look for is average time spent on site, number of page views per visit unique visitors, what kind of discussion you can generate around it, if people start contacting you for your input.

That's worth something and it's solid.

</comment><comment><USER9> Did anyone else not want to click that, just based on the title?

<comment><USER5> Exactly, that was my feeling.

He _is_ clever though, you have to hand him that.

But by showing his hand and how 'clever' he's been the author has possibly completely undone the effect.

There is an unwritten social contract between content creators and audiences, they don't mind being duped (if it isn't blatantly obvious), but don't rub it in.

<comment><USER7> Isn't it a hackers' website? Also, isn't there a question on the YC application form asking how one hacked something non-computer?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I once had a blog post get 100,000 uniques in a day: [http://www.nextthing.org/archives/2005/08/07/fun-with- http-h...](http://www.nextthing.org/archives/2005/08/07/fun-with-http-headers)

That was back when Digg could still drive traffic. The Apple interns e-mail list liked my post, and they all upvoted it on Digg (there were a lot of interns).

<comment><USER7> The point here is to be able to reproduce it on will

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> While we're on the topic, am I the only one who noticed that posts starting like "Am I the only one to think that..." or "I'll probably get downvoted for this but..." tend to get upvoted a lot?

I cringe whenever I see this. Usually, the poster's opinion is somewhat obvious and would definitely not get downvoted if it were just stated. But adding the "lone sane person" spin to it seems to get a lot more upvotes anyway.

<comment><USER12> I have a personal policy of always downvoting such comments when I see them, (1) to reduce the distortion caused by the effect you mentioned and (2) in the hope of slightly discouraging them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Shocker, the topic of your blog post determines reader interest and demographic. Isn't most writing for public consumption carefully constructed? One of the tenants of a good author is knowing your audience and writing for them.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'd like to know how would you get the world to know about your article unless you post it on HN and have small number of twitter followers?

<comment><USER5> It depends on what you have to say and how well you go about saying it. A very few people reading your stuff can get the ball rolling. If one of the major aggregation sites picks up on you you could easily see a few thousand visitors from one article. And possibly much more than that.

If a few of those put you in their reader the next post will get traction a bit quicker, assuming you keep the quality constant.

It's a long process but the value of the kind of following you build up like that is likely a lot higher than from 'stunts'.

If you build a solid reputation and you continue to treat your audience with some respect, they're likely to be loyal for a long time.

edit: and if you're just writing to up your follower count in twitter then you have to stop and ask yourself what the actual goal is that you are trying to achieve. The number of people following you on social news sites does not automatically translate in to clout. It's just an abstract, a number. If it makes you happy to see a larger number then go for it, but other than that the question is: "what are you going to do with those followers?"

Are you going to somehow harness the power of the people that receive your tweets / posts or is it just a numbers game?

For some, it is apparently all about the numbers. Others, with _far_ smaller 'followings' meanwhile (but with a good plan and some respect and serious intentions) will move mountains.

If you want to achieve some goal it is unlikely that a simple increase in your follower count is going to help you to achieve that goal. It's just a (very small) tool that may help you along the way when used wisely. And when used badly it can cut you just as easily. Reputations are built up slowly and destroyed in a heartbeat.

<comment><USER15> Writing for the simple task of getting followers is redundant.Write your articles and landing pages first,and get everything ready for production, with NO followers.Then simply go to <http://gdi.bz/twitterads> and follow the simple instructions for getting 10,000 followers in 60 to 90 days.(I'm not sellin' anything here,It is one hundred % free to do) These will be targeted followers for whatever niche you are writing about.Then,after you have your 10,000 followers.look on my twitter profile <http://twitter.com/tristanginnett> and look for the auto-post software in my updates, that will auto-post YOUR blog,affiliate,website link out 24 hours a day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nothing so special in here. Thats exactly the ways movies have worked, from times immemorial.</comment>


Kathleen Howell is developing potential orbits around a Lagrange point - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-25/one-woman-s-math-could-help-nasa-put-people-on-mars <comment><USER2> This article just teases interesting details. I want to see a simulator I can play with an move and rotate in 3d.

<comment><USER3> I wasn't able to find an interactive simulator online, but this video has a nice visualization: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5O77OV9_ek](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5O77OV9_ek)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > perfect prediction is in principle impossible. "You can't include everything > in the universe in your calculation,"

The issue is even worse. Even if you just include the Earth, Moon and sun, the actual orbit is impossible to calculate. That is, we do not have an exact solution, and approximate solutions diverge quickly, and require a lot more computation to remain accurate for a bit longer. This is all related to the fact that it is very hard to establish whether a 3 body system of bodies is even 'stable'. That is, whether one of the bodies reaches escape velocity and just shoots off.

<comment><USER3> The belief that there's no exact solution to the three-body problem is common but wrong. There is one, and it was found about a hundred years ago. The history of the problem, and its solution, are all described in the book _Poincare and the Three Body Problem_ , published by the American Mathematical Society. It includes a section about potential reasons for the pervasive belief that no solution exists.

<comment><USER4> " A complete solution for a particular three-body problem would provide the positions for all three particles for all time, given three initial positions and initial velocities. In general, no closed-form solution for such a problem exists, and the time evolution of the system is believed to be chaotic. " from wikipedia [1]. Not a fool-proof source, but it seems to disagree with you.

It does seem the case that whether the system is chaotic isn't yet determined.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three- body_problem#Gravitation...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three- body_problem#Gravitational_systems)

<comment><USER5> There is a series solution to the 3-body problem, which can in principle be computed to an arbitrary level of precision. So while there's no closed-form solution (as the wikipedia article notes), there is a solution. However, my understanding is that this series solution converges slowly enough as to not be useful in practice.

<comment><USER4> Ah, that is interesting. I figure Numerical ODE solvers might be faster. But there is philosophical value in a series that is proven to converge for any time t. Do you happen to recall whether it is uniform convergence?

<comment><USER5> I don't have more than a cursory knowledge of the solution, but the Three-body problem wikipedia page should have enough info to get you set in the right direction: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three- body_problem#Sundman's_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three- body_problem#Sundman's_theorem)

It says that the series should converge for all t, except for systems which begin with zero angular momentum.

It additionally states that:

> in 1930, David Beloriszky calculated that if Sundman's series were to be > used for astronomical observations, then the computations would involve at > least 10^8000000 terms

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What she does sounds fascinating, but it's application in this case is a waste. The Lunar Gateway is just a unnecessary expensive jobs program, that's going to retard, not help, future exploration of both the moon and Mars.

<comment><USER7> From what I understand, the Lunar Gateway is more the result of an expanding business interest in space. The space tug sounds like it could cheaply ferry experiments to the moon at a fraction of the cost; sounds like a boom for innovation. I expect the highly specialised space exploration will continue regardless if countries want to remain at the bleeding edge of 'space tech.'

<comment><USER6> NASA is going to spend over $3B per launch for the SLS, which has similar lift capacity to a $130M Falcon Heavy.

You really think the space tug is going to be cheap?

And no commercial company wants to stick anything in a lunar parking orbit, because its a huge waste of energy that makes zero sense for any missions. The only commercial companies that are interested are SLS contractors who want more free money in their government pig trough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why L2 and not L1? Isn't L1 supposed to be more stable?

<comment><USER9> I can only speculate, but the article alludes to establishing permanent communication with the moon's backside:

> A satellite or spacecraft in a halo orbit [around L2] can be constantly in > Earth's sight and can therefore maintain communication between astronauts on > the far side of the moon and control rooms back home.

<comment><USER10> China currently has a relay satellite at the Earth-Moon L2 for exactly this reason, they're going to launch a mission to land on the back side of the moon.</comment></comment></comment>


Google trials ads on Gmaps in AU. Limited to relevant company logos. - <AUTHOR> http://www.smh.com.au/technology/google-charts-new-territory-with-ads-in-maps-20100317-qect.html

<comment><USER2> I've long been a fan of logos on maps as an advertising opportunity that can also add value to the user. Over and above making it known that a store they may want is nearby, store signage helps with directions and navigation.

After all, which is more obvious to someone driving - a street sign or a McDonalds? So put golden arches on every GPS / UBD.</comment>