FBI Director Comments on San Bernardino Matter - <AUTHOR> https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-director-comments-on-san-bernardino-matter <comment><USER2> _It should be resolved by the American people deciding how we want to govern ourselves in a world we have never seen before. We shouldn't drift to a place—or be pushed to a place by the loudest voices—because finding the right place, the right balance, will matter to every American for a very long time._

So why are they asking the courts to stretch the 1789 All Writs Act beyond its breaking point, instead of going to Congress for a new law? The magistrate that signed off on this isn't even an Article III judge.

<comment><USER3> Except he did go to Congress, and came back with nothing, forcing him to use the AWA.

So who is pushing who exactly? And who has a louder voice in criminal justice matters than the FBI?

<comment><USER4> Hadn't thought about it this way before, but he might be turning to the AWA because a reasonable piece of legislation can't make it through congress.

<comment><USER5> Reasonable according to whom?

This is why we have _Rule of Law_. There is no "we follow the law when it seems reasonable". Whatever the law is, it should be followed, and it does not matter at all what anyone's personal opinion is regarding what the law should be.

Perhaps it is more complex than this, for example in cases of civil disobedience. However, civil disobedience is for cases of conscience when you cannot _personally_ participate in something that is immoral, so you refuse to participate or you protest it. The key here is that this is ignoring the law to resist immoral uses of power, not ignoring the law to remove intentional restrictions to the application of allocated authority.

This applies doubly to the legal system itself. An appeal to the inability of legislatures to "get things done" has been the argument of every tyrant since Caesar.

<comment><USER4> I was suggesting following the rule of law. Congress passes laws when they get around to it. I'm not in any way advancing that we should ban encryption or support backdoors (effectively banning encryption). I will not however pretend that I have exhaustively considered all legislation that would allow the FBI to open this phone without setting dangerous precedents.

I can't think of any at the moment but I don't think anyone in a position to do anything with an answer is trying. The issue is too good a political bludgeon to bother even seeking some creative solution to the problem (again, not that I am 100% sure there even is a legislative solution that wouldn't be a vastly undesirable and possibly unconstitutional blow to encryption).

It is not a good starting presumption that no reasonable answer can be reached, especially when the topic under discussion isn't a core issue like "backdoor all encryption" but rather "is it possible to pass reasonable and generally acceptable legislation such that Apple can legally be compelled to aid this decryption effort without setting a terrible precedent?" There may be no solution to that problem, which is fine, but don't suggest that I was endorsing some vaguely Orwellian shit because I don't presume as a given that our opponents on the general issue of encryption have malicious aspirations of tyranny.

<comment><USER6> It's not vaguely Orwellian. Given an ability to disregard the rule of law, and sufficient charisma, and some hard times, any country can become a dictatorship in 5 years.

We can't kill every charismatic person, and we can't prevent hard times. We can insist on the rule of law.

<comment><USER4> I suggested that a disagreement might have a non-specified solution a) exists and b) would be achievable through legislation, passed by an elected legislature. Nothing I suggested requires killing charismatic people (?) or advocates against the rule of law.

Normally when people intentionally misread me in the most uncharitable fashion possible I can at least see the deranged logic, but in your case I can't see what evil you claim I am advancing or how you arrived at that conclusion.

<comment><USER5> I am still talking about your original comment.

I understand your clarification, I was nitpicking that you were saying my response to the original comment was 'crazy' or something, but without the context you gave in your reply I think my original response was appropriate.

I agree with your larger point, there is probably a workable solution that balances the threat of government with the benefits of government, but I disagree that it is 'not getting things done' that is the cause of us not finding that compromise.

In general, I think that appeals to 'a lack of will' are almost always incorrect. People, even politicians, are generally good and want to find good solutions. There is a lot of disagreement on what is a good solution, and even more disagreement on what the long term consequences of choices are. This is why there is gridlock, and if you read the Federalist Papers (in the case of the US), you will see that this gridlock is a Feature of the system, not a Bug.

<comment><USER4> Every time I hear someone defend the recent state of affairs by bringing up the gridlock being a feature and not a bug, I feel like someone who owns a delivery truck that won't go more than 10 mph. I go to the dealer and ask what the fuck, and the dealer says that there's a speed governor on the truck that won't let it surpass 80mph and the governor is just working better than usual.

<comment><USER5> That is a clever analogy.

I think we are fine though, we are safer than ever before. We don't need to extend government snooping power, because there is no need to do so. If someone disagrees, that is fine, but that is why we have a speed governor.

People have always complained about decisions being made too slowly, but they have never been made faster, if anything they are made more quickly now than ever before. Congress used to only meet a few times a year for a few weeks!

<comment><USER4> When they only met a few times for a few weeks they were passing laws that were readable in whole by individuals during those sessions. The scope of their responsibilities has increased and I expect them to apply a correspondingly high degree of effort.

I want the legislature to be passing laws rolling back the security state, I want them to cancel or rework programs that don't work across the board. They can't do those things if they spend all their time in some arcane ritual circle jerk whose only and ultimate goal is just to make some of the other participants ultimately look more ridiculous than other participants.

We've normalized and accepted parliamentarian bullshit at the expense of governing (on both sides, but the republicans are the undisputed masters of the dark arts) for a couple decades now. Legislative lethargy (sorry, had to) is supposed to derive from lengthy debate and substantive disagreement, not from participants purposely tanking the process to score points in the cheap seats. Part of the reason that they got shit done in a couple of weeks in ye- olden-congress is that it was closer to a turn based game, news traveled slower and so the results of the whole session were what constituted news, not every little BS stunt.

The frustrated and vindictive part of me hopes that not a single senator or congressman pays a price for their cynical abandonment of their duty to govern. That way, next term we see months long shutdowns of the whole federal government and a collapse of federal services until [Bernie|Hillary] signs a budget that reallocates all non-entitlement social spending to some insane shit that polled well among likely voters suffering from bathtub-gin induced brain damage. The revolting (both senses) congressmen won't actually care about getting the spending reallocated, but them "standing up to" [Bernie|Hillary] will play well with their group so so be it.

Edit: to clarify the frustrated and vindictive part would be rooting for it in the sense that the worst part about democracy is that people get the government they deserve, and at the moment it doesn't seem like the process thinks we deserve much.

<comment><USER5> Again, you seem to think we are getting 'worse' government, but we have the best government we have ever had. Just because you can see it close up (in a historical sense), you are aware of it's warts. But I assure you, the governments of the past had all the problems we have today, and many, many, many more. If you were to get in a time machine and go back even 50 years, you would be shocked at how _corrupt_ the government was then compared to now.

Stop with your short sighted, historically ignorant whining already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'll go ahead and say that it sounds extremely sincere and straight-forward, much unlike most official statements I've seen from the FBI. He does _suggest_ that his view is right, but he does the right thing, as apple did, in supporting a public discourse about the so-called balance between privacy and safety.

I know many people seem to gravitate to the extremes on every issue, but both Cook and Comey are right in saying that we as a nation need to question our fundamental assumptions in our thinking and think through what the would be the best balance between the two, if there be any. As Comey says, and I personally agree with this, the "balance" shouldn't be decided "by corporations that sell stuff for a living" or by "the FBI which investigates for a living,"...or in general, the government. We shouldn't be grass in a fight between two elephants. The American people need to decide how much involvement both government and large multinational corporations have in their lives. That's what this all comes down to, after all.

<comment><USER8> Security vs privacy is a false dichotomy here. Backdoors can help law enforcement achieve some goals but weaken overall security. The debate is security vs security, and framing it any other way reflects either willful deceit or ignorance.

<comment><USER9> Encryption could also help obstruct justice and let criminals get away with things. Most people won't understand till it impacts them personally but imagine if you are robbed of all your money and the answer of who did it lies in a computer you are able to get your hand on. Wouldn't you love it if the police had a backdoor now.

You are wrong in framing the debate as security vs security. Its like everything else when it comes to liberty and protection. The question is how much liberty are we willing to give up for protection. We can't let a corporation or the government anchor our opinions on the left or right.

<comment><USER10> Can you cite a case where encryption has obstructed justice or prevented a crime from being solved?

<comment><USER9> Yes, [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/12/opinion/apple-google- when-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/12/opinion/apple-google-when-phone- encryption-blocks-justice.html?_r=0)

Also I believe even without the citation that the notion that criminals can use encryption to protect themselves is pretty obvious.

<comment><USER10> Even more obvious is the notion that innocent civilians use encryption to protect themselves from mass survelence and needless data collection.

Is the end goal no longer total information awareness? [0]

Side note: that was a rather scathing and slanted article you cited. It would have been nice to see the simple facts of the case presented in a neutral light.

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

<comment><USER9> My point is that encryption is good and bad, but we can't completely enable it to be utilized for criminal activity. There will be the need for a resolution to be reached on who gets access to this information, in what situations, and maybe even strict prosecution if the information is ever used incorrectly.

<comment><USER10> Encryption is either secure or it isn't. You can't have a middle ground. It's unfortunate that under rare, and very particular circumstances criminals can perhaps evade crimes because they have access encryption, but it's also unfortunate that they can get away with crimes because they have access to guns, knives, vaults, cars, basements, gasoline, matches, duck tape, chain saws, shovels, etc...

Yet we don't cripple the effectiveness of these items for the sake of preventing crime. Doing so would only harm the quality of lives of the vast majority of innocent people who we trust to use these thing for their own benefit as free citizitens of a free country.

<comment><USER9> >unfortunate that they can get away with crimes because they have access to guns, knives, vaults, cars, basements, gasoline, matches, duck tape, chain saws, shovels, etc...

But investigators can get access to basements, cars, knives and guns and use them to solve the crime. In this case, post-crime, there is no way to gather information that could be important.

<comment><USER10> > But investigators can get access to basements, cars, knives and guns and use > them to solve the crime. In this case, post-crime, there is no way to gather > information that could be important.

Which is irrelevant to how these individual items are used to actually prevent the crime from being solved.

While encryption prevents access to information that may or may not be useful, guns are used to kill witnesses that are never found, shovels are used to burry bodies that take decades to find, cars are impounded or destroyed after a getaway, I could go on. Often enough, even if any of these items are found, it doesn't help solve the crime because the criminal was simply too smart.

I fail to see why encryption is being treated differently than any other legal thing we, as free and innocent citizens, have access to. The cynic in me believes the only actual difference is in the level of familiarity the majority of the voting population has with this particular legal thing. They seem to have, unfortunately, been misinformed and poorly educated about this issue and technology in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> These people are either being intentionally deceitful or are simply incompetent in understanding the full implications of what they're asking. Either possibility is disturbing.

<comment><USER12> Despite the obvious application of Hanlon's razor, the latter is simply not plausible. The release statement opens with a stone cold lie.

[https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/70115236890220134...](https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/701152368902201344)

[https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/70115264061335142...](https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/701152640613351424)

[https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/70115296105404006...](https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/701152961054040069)

[https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/70115860701918412...](https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/701158607019184128)

[https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/70115891912992768...](https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/701158919129927682)

<comment><USER13> So they know this leads to an Orwellian state and they do not care? Maybe, but it would be political suicide to admit that.

Certainly Comey is being deceitful in his first sentence. Even Hillary called for a Manhattan-like project to circumvent encryption back in December [1]. That shows it's something that's being discussed in Washington quite frequently.

I doubt any will ever admit they're trying to lead us towards an Orwellian state. Also, encryption is part of our protection from that. Heads of state and encryption currently appear to be directly at odds.

[1] [http://www.cbsnews.com/news/democratic-debate-transcript- cli...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/democratic-debate-transcript-clinton- sanders-omalley-in-new-hampshire/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In other words, they're sticking to their story.

No mention of the iCloud password reset either.

<comment><USER14> > No mention of the iCloud password reset either.

Exactly. How can you not address that?

They necessitated this whole mess through their actions. I try not to ascribe malice to what can easily be explained through incompetence, but to not even mention it? Shameful.

<comment><USER15> Honestly, I'm ascribing it to malice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Didn't he and other FBI/DHS officials just get done testifying to congress for the need to backdoor encryption standards?!

Yeah, sorry, but I don't think I'm gonna trust them even though they promise it will only be this one time.

</comment><comment><USER17> You don't get it, Comey. The problem isn't that you want this information. Obviously you want this information as an investigator of a crime. The problem is, we can't fucking trust you or anyone enough to cross that bridge, because we know if it's there, you're just going to want more. You and every law enforcement agent in the United States has lost our trust. Call it overreach, or overzealous prosecution, high incarceration rates, crooked judges sending kids to jail for kickbacks... fuck if I list any more, I'm going to want to drink some more.

I'd love to live in a world where I trusted a government, which is supposed to be a composition of its people, more than a profit-motivated, self-interested business, but in some weird turn of events, something vastly different has festered in the last 15 years. You blew it, you asshole, you and every other cop.

<comment><USER9> A few things. If you want to make your argument legit, refrain from calling the other person names. Second, besides drinking and making yourself essentially useless, what are you doing to improve this situation. One person may not be enough to make a difference but its better than zero.

America is entirely being driven by fear and anger. The current presidential race is a perfect reflection of the hate, anger, and fear that Americans believe exists. The system is a reflection of what the "good" people allow to happen.

The FBI has a job, and Apple has a commitment to its customers. Technology is going to get more advanced, does that mean that we should let it be a tool to obstruct justice. You may not trust the people tasked with the investigation, but people should also look at the fact that the encryption here is obstructing justice.

Tomorrow if a criminal kidnaps a bus of school children and the police are able to get a hold of a locked phone that holds their location, would you be as opposed to the current situation?

The creation of a method to disable the phones encryption is a slippery road, but the option of not aiding the FBI is also a slippery road. This is a organization created to protect the people.

We need to have a open discourse on how the information can be taken off this phone while minimizing the loss of public security and privacy . This is not a black and white issue like many people are treating it.

And just to make it clear, I do agree that the government has done extremely questionable things as well as committed offenses against the publics privacy. We need to fix the issue of distrust, because a lack of trust in our system is equal to cancer within a body.

<comment><USER17> Counterpoint: Just going out on a limb here, but I'm pretty sure James Comey isn't leafing through Hacker News reading our arguments. If he'd like to have a civil discussion, I'd be more than happy to bring the civility.

Second, our system is essentially set up to make me powerless. It's actually engineered that way. I do what I can to educate people around me, but when it comes to voting or having any control over who's in office or who officiates our most important government positions, the ball's not just not in our court, it's on another planet.

Technology, as you said, will continue to get much more advanced. I reckon at some point, literally every moment of our lives will be perfectly catalogued, from birth to death. This is why what Mr. Comey wants scares me so much, because you can practically hear him salivating in that letter.

We have guarantees built into our constitutional freedoms, and one of the most important guarantees is that the government can't compel us to do things. Sure, there are laws to maintain the peace and common order, but you don't have to house or attend to military in your home, you don't have to testify against yourself, you're not compelled by police to follow their wishes until you're under arrest (which they ostensibly can't do without probable cause), and you don't have to aide in an investigation if you're not involved. These are vital because the moment we're legally compelled to aide investigators, all bets are off. We are no longer able to even protect ourselves against undue search and seizure.

<comment><USER9> I agree with you. The motives of those with access to this information is questionable and being forced to do things impedes personal liberty, but the people who wrote the constitution could have never imagined this type of situation. It quite literally requires an in-depth discussion by the people and those we trust in power to develop a solution, but the idea that no backdoor will ever exists is not realistic.

Look at history. The encryption the Nazis had created helped them commit terrible acts of war and it was the backdoor the Allies discovered that helped bring justice to them.

I'm being devils advocate here because I don't people should view this as "us vs them". Comey may seem like he is salivating to you, but he does raise the notion that at the other end is a corporation, who also has an agenda.

<comment><USER10> > Look at history. The encryption the Nazis had created helped them commit > terrible acts of war and it was the backdoor the Allies discovered that > helped bring justice to them.

Are you suggesting the Nazi's were the only ones to use encryption during World War II?

You forgot to mention at least 9 other nations (including the USA)

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

<comment><USER9> My point is to show how encryption in the wrong hands can also have terrible consequences.

This is a two way street.

<comment><USER10> > encryption in the wrong hands can also have terrible consequences.

So can literally _anything_ in the wrong hands, though.

<comment><USER18> Cars, cellphones, fertilizer, kitchen knives, baseball bats, apple seeds, etc. Encryption is only special because of the power dynamic that shifts in the average citizens favour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > We don't want to break anyone's encryption or set a master key loose on the > land.

This directly contradicts Tim Cook's statement, in fact he used the same term "master key":

> In the physical world, it would be the equivalent of a master key, capable > of opening hundreds of millions of locks — from restaurants and banks to > stores and homes.

It either is a master key or it isn't.

<comment><USER20> It isn't.

the FBI asked for a specialised OS image that would have a check so that it could only work on this specific phone. Combined with Apple's encryption/signing of the update, this image could not be applied to any other device.

So the "work" asked of Apple would produce something that would only work on the phone with the warrant

<comment><USER19> So Tim Cook was wrong? Look at what he wrote:

"Specifically, the FBI wants us to make a new version of the iPhone operating system, circumventing several important security features, and install it on an iPhone recovered during the investigation. In the wrong hands, this software — which does not exist today — would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone's physical possession. The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor. And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control."

<comment><USER20> Yes, Tim Cook is lying (EDIT: perhaps not lying, but being creative with the meaning of "potential").

The software asked for by the FBI would only work on one phone because it would both have a check for the specific phone, and be signed by Apple (so can't be modified).

The software would need to be modified and resigned by Apple to be used on another phone.

<comment><USER21> Really?

You really, honestly, truly and genuinely believe that if Apple just does this for them, just this one time, just for this one phone, then that's the end of it? That the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies would _never_ , not once, not for the rest of the lifetime of the universe (and certainly not, say, about 24 hours later) come back and say "Well, we're glad you helped us with that case, now here's this list of other cases we'd like help with, and now you've proven that you can do this we're going to be bringing you a lot of these"?

That's what Tim Cook is worried about: it won't stop with this one phone unless it's stopped before that one phone gets unlocked and becomes the precedent that makes this just another routine thing. _Every_ now-routine violation of privacy and security was originally marketed as "just this one case, this one's unique and special and sensitive and we absolutely _have_ to get it done, just this one, trust us" and eventually morphed into "eh, it's Tuesday, time to ship off another truckload of requests to have this done to people".

<comment><USER20> Of course the FBI will ask again and again. And Apple could be compelled to comply each and every time.

The slippery slope argument being applied here is that FBI search warrants will now work on phones less than the iPhone 5S from now on (until Apple closes the iOS update backdoor I guess). This is far from "China will be able to mass-hack into iPhones from now on"-style comments I've seen from others.

The fact is that Apple left a backdoor in their phones and are now being told to exploit it. An argument against having the backdoor in the first place.

<comment><USER22> Apple _will_ be compelled. You either don't understand the US legal doctrine of stare decisis or are being intentionally obtuse.

Furthermore, the US legal system encourages elaboration on stare decisis, applying prior case law to novel cases rather than hashing out new decisions. This means that creative applications of this ruling ("give me an uncontrolled backdoor") are simply a question of time once the landmark case is made.

<comment><USER20> considering that the single-use nature of this exploit is a fundamental part of the ruling (and of the validity of the search warrant itself), you would not be able to use precedent to just get an uncontrolled backdoor.

<comment><USER22> Whether the exploit is single-use, about a phone, Apple, the 5c, or any other specific parameters is fundamentally irrelevant.

What this case is doing is setting precedent that the courts can compel a company to _create_, no matter how trivial one may think that creation may be today. _That_ is the precedent so many draw exception to, because stare decisis is also a doctrine of incrementalism, of gradual expansion of interpretations. Today Apple is compelled to create a very controlled firmware; who's to say in the figurative tomorrow that Samsung won't be compelled to create and send a firmware update to a specific Blu-Ray player that creates an air microphone out of the laser? Where does it stop?

To be complete (as was pointed out in another sibling thread) incrementalism may be curtailed if implications are carefully argued and acknowledged by the judge. I am skeptical of the value of that approach, but have no hard argument against it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> >The San Bernardino litigation isn't about trying to set a precedent or send any kind of message. It is about the victims and justice.

This is a big fat lie.

The way US legal system works makes any case like this about setting a precedent, be it intentional or not. The fact that the FBI director goes and straight up lies about this just supports the theory that it may very well be intentional.

<comment><USER24> I don't believe this is tied to the San Bernardino case. The topic of weakening encryption has been brewing for the past 6-12 months, and the FBI is using the SB case as a convenient hammer to put a nail in the coffin of encryption.

[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/28/the- fbi...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/28/the-fbi-used-to- recommend-encryption-now-they-want-to-ban-it)

[http://www.dailydot.com/politics/second-crypto-war- hearing-w...](http://www.dailydot.com/politics/second-crypto-war-hearing- washington/)

[http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-fbi-has-no-idea-how- to-...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-fbi-has-no-idea-how-to-solve-its- encryption-problem)

These were all about a year ago.

<comment><USER23> >I don't believe this is tied to the San Bernardino case. The topic of weakening encryption has been brewing for the past 6-12 months, and the FBI is using the SB case as a convenient hammer to put a nail in the coffin of encryption.

This is about much more than just weakening encryption. I think Congressman Lieu put it well

>This FBI court order, by compelling a private sector company to write new software, is essentially making that company an arm of law-enforcement. Private sector companies are not—and should not be—an arm of government or law enforcement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > ...it does highlight that we have awesome new technology that creates a > serious tension between two values we all treasure — privacy and safety.

I hate this narrative so much. Just because we happen to be storing everything we do now, doesn't suddenly create tension between privacy and safety. We used to not store it at all! It's really just a question of _keeping_ privacy with new tech.

<comment><USER26> Yes, it's a false dichotomy. Either we have a police state, or the terrorists win, take your choice! Don't forget the children, and the .0001 % chance of horribly brutally muderdered by terrorists!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think it's reasonable to say that the HN crowd is predominantly more educated on this matter than the average American. We are not the target audience of this letter. Neither is Apple. Comey is playing on the emotions and technological ignorance of the bourgeois. He refers to brute force hacking as, "...try to guess the terrorist's passcode..." Then he plays on Americans' current distaste for large corporations and says that the, "American people," need to decide whether this is right or wrong. No, we don't. Every cryptologist, cyber-security expert and halfway decent IT is saying that this is a catastrophic proposal with the power to mutilate the fourth amendment and send a whole Jenga tower of rights tumbling after it. It shouldn't even be a question.

The FBI appears to be using this tragedy as a trojan horse by which to commit atrocities upon our crucial freedoms. No, our thoughts and prayers are not enough, but our privacy and security is far too much.

<comment><USER13> > We are not the target audience of this letter

Maybe, but it's fun to discuss, and there are enough of us spread throughout that can educate on this single issue. It's pretty easy for me to explain to my non-tech friends the implications of what the FBI is asking. Word of mouth travels fast and I would give pro-encryption the upper hand in this "debate". I have not heard anyone outside government protesting that Apple yield on this issue and I doubt I will.

In fact, the only ones who speak up against encryption are those who do not listen to the people. Since they're supposed to represent us, they will be very easy to not vote for.

Like you said though, it isn't even a question, encryption is here to stay whether the American government permits it or not. Ironically, by putting up such a fight, the government is simply telling criminals where the weak points are in law enforcement, and are thus empowering criminals.

I hope our government can have a good sit down with tech company leaders and experts in cryptology. Despite Comey's request to have an open discussion, they seem to be excluding this group. It's apparent from his discourse, Hillary's, and Obama's that they've spent no time sincerely listening to anyone with any knowledge about the benefits of encryption. The "conversation" he so desires has only happened in Washington among people with no tech background. Presumably there will be some public hearings coming up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Could Cook even compel his employees to write the desired operating system? If I worked there and was asked to violate/reverse the core of my company's principles, I would quit.

Frankly, this type of order would deeply hurt moral at Apple. I imagine Cook knows that, and in addition to doing the right thing, he must double down on ensuring employee retention and future sale of products. End-to-end encryption is a feature many people buy the phone to get. If that disappeared, many techies would stop recommending it, and sales will slide.

There's a lot on the table here. I don't even think you could measure the impact for reimbursement by the government. _sigh_ , at least you CA folks elected Ted Lieu, good job!

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if they did or what would have happened if they had approached Apple in a non-compulsory manner regarding this.

He is right on the fact that the specific task they're seeking Apple to perform is more or less obsolete and will be entirely so shortly so I'm inclined to believe that they're not really going through all this to abuse that specific tool (though the precedent would be worth the fight in order to abuse it).

It would be sad, but entirely his fault, if his prior efforts to set bad faith precedents to end-run consumer encryption alienated industry to the point where productive conversations are no longer possible.

<comment><USER28> It seems that Apple got sick of servicing these requests, particularly as they started increasing in frequency. The NYTimes [0] reported earlier this week that Apple had been basically complying until last year, when they decided that they could no longer deal with the burden of evaluating the large amount of legal orders they were receiving and unlocking or retrieving data from phones. It seems unlikely, given their (new-ish) stance on privacy that they would comply with any request at this point.

[0] [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/19/technology/how-tim-cook- be...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/19/technology/how-tim-cook-became-a- bulwark-for-digital-privacy.html)

Edit: I'm not trying to suggest that Apple is suddenly being arbitrarily obstreperous in cases where they may have once been compliant. Apple made a decision to change course and it wouldn't make any sense for them to go back on it just because the FBI asked "Pretty please?".

<comment><USER21> As far as I can tell Apple has _never_ complied with a request for what the FBI is asking for here. It has complied in cases where the phone was not encrypted, or where a backup in iCloud could be made available to law enforcement, but Apple has never actually produced, signed and installed a custom "this phone only, and only so law enforcement can brute-force it" version of iOS.

And given that we're talking about a federal government that was perfectly happy with pictures of the TSA's master luggage key being published in newspapers, I don't fault Apple one bit for being scared of handing over what are basically the keys to the kingdom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > We simply want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the > terrorist's passcode without the phone essentially self-destructing and > without it taking a decade to guess correctly. That's it.

Bull crap. The FBI has it within their power to break the encryption in less than a decade by spinning up tens of thousands of EC2 GPU instances. Forcing Apple to develop products that don't yet exists is simply a choice of economy, with the added benefit of being able to strongarm any other business into creating new products in the future if it suits the FBI.

<comment><USER30> > Bull crap. The FBI has it within their power to break the encryption in less > than a decade by spinning up tens of thousands of EC2 GPU instances.

How? They either need to break the PIN or they need to break the AES256 key that is used to encrypt file metadata.

They cannot use EC2 GPU instances to attack the PIN because the function that derives the AES key from the PIN uses a key that is unique to each phone and not readable by software so they cannot get a hold of it unless they resort to opening the crypto chip and trying to read the key by examining the hardware (and if they do that, they won't need a GPU...any desktop computer would be able to brute force the PIN quickly).

They can use EC2 GPU instances to go after the AES256 key for metadata encryption, but that will take a hell of a lot longer than a decade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> "The San Bernardino litigation isn't about trying to set a precedent or send any kind of message. It is about the victims and justice."

When the government revokes the Gulf of Tonkin resolution I will again put faith in its ability to act responsibly with emergency powers and provisions that might, just might set a precedence. Until then, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, fuck you.

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't like it, but I think we're better off if the courts side with FBI on this case, because it should accelerate the inevitable: either Apple and other mobile device makers give up on privacy and governments around the world get whatever they want, or they make zero knowledge devices that can't expose their data unless the user complies.

In the meantime, FBI losing this case just means they try again. And again. And so will other governments, not just federal, but state and local. And foreign.

The reality is Apple can change the software to in effect cause the data to become accessible. Apple doesn't have keys to the front door. But they have the power to weaken the hinges. Saying they won't do that isn't the same as it not being possible.

</comment><comment><USER33> It's a real media posturing war going on right now. I wish Apple would win the argument on merits of the argument alone, but it's obvious with this the FBI thinks it can rely on the terrorism argument alone.

Notice that Comey doesn't even bother to refute the technical and legal precedent arguments that Apple and other privacy advocates raise in the media.

Google or Facebook have to get involved and put something on their homepages; else, I think that the FBI wins this.

</comment><comment><USER34> There's a certain hypocrisy I'm noticing in these forum discussions whereby many of you are distrusting the FBI, but apparently you're fine with Apple having the best chance of cracking your phone.

Everyone is going on about encryption, but notice it's not just encryption that protects us, but also vendor-controlled measures such as self-destruct.

I prefer a level playing field in these matters. I don't want the FBI to have a better chance at cracking my phone than anyone else, but I also don't want Apple to have the best chance either.

It's all or nothing. My vote is for strong encryption, but up until that point, everything else should be on the table for all parties such as crime investigators, not just exclusively controlled by tech giants.

<comment><USER35> The hypocrisy is only superficial. It seems at first thought that the government (being owned by the people) would be more trustworthy. But...

Based on incentives, the government is incentivized to put as many people in jail as possible. Apple is incentivized to make people's phone/laptop experience as good as possible.

Based on worst-case actions, Apple can use your data to 1) sell you more devices, 2) generally reduce your consumer purchasing power, or unlikely 3) sell/share your data and seriously compromise your privacy. The government, on the other hand, can throw you in jail, for life.

Based on history (Germany, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, ...), governments have demonstrated real threats with user data in hand that corporations have never really come close to competing with.

<comment><USER34> Your idea that Apple are incentivized to make people's phone experience as good as possible sounds like a wishful proposition. There's plenty of examples of Apple features and restriction designed as eco-system lock-in, behavior manipulation, or control limiting for commercial reasons. "What's good for Apple is good for our customers" is what they want you to believe, but as a long time iOS device owner, I reject that on numerous grounds.

There's also an equivalence flaw in your argument that sounds like it's coming straight from infowars.com: "the government is incentivized to put as many people in jail as possible".

I'm with your on incentives though. And one thing Apple have no commercial interest or incentive for, is fighting crime.

We don't live in Star Wars. There's more than dark vs light. My position doesn't mean I am not aware of western government corruption, bungling, even war crimes. But I am not permanently polarized, forever holding "the government" in contempt for misguided actions and evil intentions.

On history... if we're talking tyrannical governments, then "protection of user data" I suggest would _not_ have stopped any given government in your examples from unleashing hell on its people one way or another.

<comment><USER35> Well I think my main point was just to say that the "hypocrisy" you mention actually has a rational backing. Not that the backing is bulletproof, but it's certainly more than a hypocrisy.

You seem to most strongly disagree with the assertion that "the government is incentivized to put as many people in jail as possible". It's pretty clear from my original comment that "the government" is referring to law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI. Note that the FBI has thousands of agents whose performance is measured ultimately by the percent of cases they close. Thus, the claim that FBI agents "are incentivized to put as many people in jail as possible" is more an observation than some crackpot theory. It doesn't mean that we should change that - running a law enforcement agency any other way wouldn't make much sense. But it does provide the rational backing for someone to be more concerned about worst-case government abuse of data than worst-case corporate abuse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> > Maybe the phone holds the clue to finding more terrorists. Maybe it doesn't.

Interesting admission that they don't really have "probable cause" here, rather they apparently want to go on a fishing expedition. I guess if the owner of the phone is already established as a terrorist then that is cause enough, but I still would have expected them to be arguing they have specific reason to believe the phone is necessary for their investigation.

<comment><USER37> The owner of the phone is San Bernadino County, which gave the FBI permission to search the phone. Pretty sure probable cause is a moot point when the owner of the phone grants you permission to search it.

<comment><USER36> Absolutely. I just think it significantly weakens their argument to admit they don't even know if they phone data will be useful. I would have thought when they are going to court to compel a company to do something they would be asserting something more than "who knows, it might be useful?" in support of their case.</comment></comment></comment>


TeX/LaTeX Stack Exchange - <AUTHOR> http://tex.stackexchange.com/ <comment><USER2> Anyone else think the top of that page looks beautiful?

<comment><USER3> Yes, but they really geeked-out with the Tengwar in the upper left.

<comment><USER4> I don't think it is quite as "geeked-out" since the movies. I think an awful lot more people would now recognise the script (albeit having no idea what Tengwar is) - TeX itself is probably more "geeky" now :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The fact that they still haven't replaced the double-hyphen in the n00b banner with a proper en-dash is a painful irony on a site devoted to TeX.

This has the potential to be a very useful resource though. I hope it takes off.

<comment><USER6> They're fixing it. ( [http://meta.tex.stackexchange.com/questions/547/new- user-gre...](http://meta.tex.stackexchange.com/questions/547/new-user- greeting) ) Your comment here got mentioned in one of the comments there.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Pack – Your company's start-page - <AUTHOR> https://packhq.co <comment><USER2> Ahem. Soooooooo basically it's just a small app where you add the products your company is using and then...what? What's the point? I really don't see the benefit... Maybe you can tell?</comment>


Do we need crypto_memzero()? - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/779e2a/do_we_need_crypto_memzero/ <comment><USER2> Do we need seatbelts? You can also just keep out of accidents.</comment>


Ask HN: Need Founder-to-Founder Advice - <AUTHOR> New founder here, have early investment interest and looking to chat with other founders who have raised seed: re angel v seed funds. My startup: http://Vidd.ai<p>Would appreciate your thoughts, confidentiality respected! founder.vidd.ai at gmail <comment><USER2> Happy to help - we recently raised an angel.</comment>


Tell HN: Buenos Aires Meetup next Friday - <AUTHOR>

I'm a developer based in Buenos Aires. I'd like to meet more people living here who are into startups and technology, to see what we can hatch together.
When: Friday Sept 30, 8PM
Where: the Starbucks at Malabia 1720, Palermo, Ciudad de Buenos Aires.
Just in case, my email is email@example.com
See you there. <comment><USER2> Would love to go, but i have tickets to the Teatro Colón at that time (being wanting to go for years and there is a Wagner's opera this weekend), so it's going to be the next time for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome. I'm working at Areatres right behind that Starbucks!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Great! See you there.

</comment><comment><USER4> Will be there!</comment>


Ask HN: Feedback on our startup - http://12seconds.tv - <AUTHOR> http://12seconds.tv/
One of the things I've been working on for a while is bootstrapping a video status startup with a group of guys from Santa Cruz. Call it 'video twitter' or 'microvlogging'. 12seconds a service that lets you send 12 second video updates about your life, your status, what you're doing, or anything you'd like from your webcam or mobile phone. Your friends using 12seconds can follow you to receive your video updates, and we also integrate with twitter and a few other services (soon).
We're currently still in private invite mode, but I've got some invites to give if people are interested - just leave it in the comments and i'll try to accommodate as soon as I can.
I have a lot of respect the HN community and look forward to some great feedback, both positive and negative!
Note: we're running a bit slow this morning thanks to a techcrunch spike. We're working on it! <comment><USER2> This is interesting. Twitter limited the length of its posts (i believe) due to limitations in SMS and Texting. What you have done is to put a limitation on users just as a product differentiator (I believe).

This is actually more innovative than I believe you will probably be given credit for. Forcing people to be concise and get to the point, but now allowing for a new medium.

Nice work

</comment><comment><USER3> Let me give you some analysis:

\- Interesting concept, video is slowly gaining ground, so it seems like a natural evolution from Twitter. WITH that said, \- The design does need work - it's simple, which is good, but it's unappealing. \- Good front pitch on the site, but not great - it needs to be more interesting. \- You need to justify WHY I should take the extra time to hook up a webcam and record my 12 second snippet than just Tweet it - this seems like too much time for something as simple as a status update. Convince me this is a better method and just as easy and you'll get customers. \- Trot out the appealing people. We're a very physically-minded society, the cute girls and interesting guys will get you hits, maybe even a viral one. \- Great job on TechCrunch! I'll keep watch. And yes, I'd enjoy an invite (email@example.com)

</comment><comment><USER4> I think the logo needs a redesign. You can spend $200 and get a better design at <http://99designs.com>. Allow people automatically submit their video updates to their Twitter accounts. Talk to FriendFeed and add your service. Add width and height to the embed code. Can't say anything more because it is still in private. These are just my suggestions.

Overall, good job.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good feedback. We do tweet for you when you post if you want, you can set that up in your settings. Friendfeed integration would be great as well.

Thanks for the encouragement!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like the idea, the problem is if I owned this I have no idea where I'd go from here. To be honest, I don't want to sit there and watch 12 second clips from my friends on what's up so I'm trying to think of how this would keep me coming back after the initial fun factor is lost

I'm not bashing your site, it works great .. but I am just curious how it will pan out in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER6> It actually looked really interesting to me... I applied for one of the Tech Crunch invites earlier, but if you're passing them out here, even better ;) My email is in my profile page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Invitation should be in the mail - let me know if you don't receive it. Thanks for the interest!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hmmm... sounds like the next step would be to make a cross between twitter and tumblr (twimblr?) that lets one do micro video, audio, or text updates.

<comment><USER8> I think Pownce does this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd love an invite. my handle @ inzain.net

</comment><comment><USER10> Also requesting an invite. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER11> Invite please (email in profile).

<comment><AUTHOR> Having "invite issues" at the moment - I'll batch up all invite requests and send them out this evening. You can also hit me up at ben [at] 12seconds.tv if you're interested. Thanks for checking it out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Invite please, email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER13> Invite please :)

</comment><comment><USER14> invite please, email@example.com</comment>


Chromebook buyers were promised two years of free Verizon data, only got one - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/06/chromebook-buyers-were-promised-two-years-of-free-verizon-data-only-got-one/

<comment><USER2> Google now giving out $150 rebate. [http://blogs.computerworld.com/mobilewireless/24060/google-c...](http://blogs.computerworld.com/mobilewireless/24060/google- chromebook-data)</comment>


I was scammed by a celebrity influencer - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/i-was-scammed-by-a-celebrity-influencer-6612d61e1a9e <comment><USER2> Wow, great write up. Thanks a lot for taking the course and talking about it, perhaps it was because you went into it willing to burn $500 but many would stay silent.

I can't believe at the missed business opportunity here. It sounds like she could have easily pulled 7 figures from running those classes. Even if she hired a "business manager" of sorts for a cut to grow her lessons, it would have been a really financially rewarding endevour.

One thing that boggles the mind is how many people were not planning to request a refund! I couldn't imagine spending $500, not receiving what I paid for, and being okay with that.

Honestly, it still surprises me how much some Instagrammers make. A friend of mine runs a food IG (~3,000 followers local to the area) and pulls in 1-2 free meals a week, effectively funding the content creation costs. Another friend is in the ~40,000 follower range and gets paid something like $50-$200 + meals for each event -- you just go and book a time slot on their website.

Yet for me, IG feels so fake, but there are enough repeat advertisers that there must be real users out there who follow and purchase influencer recommendations.

<comment><USER3> >Yet for me, IG feels so fake

Its pay to play for sure. You don't get shown unless you are providing Facebook with money.

This is why the content feels fake. Only highly profitable instagrammers can afford to pay to promote.

<comment><USER4> What do you mean? My content constantly hits discover and I certainly haven't paid FB a penny.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So it sounds like the course actually did a pretty good job of teaching the author what a "celebrity influencer" does?

</comment><comment><USER6> These "influencers" and their instagram accounts are so cringeworthy. How can anyone live their life like this, constantly posing and putting on an image? This can't be healthy. I get the money making aspect and getting paid to do something like travel.. but at what point does posing for glamour shots take away the fun of enjoying the places you go? Why do people follow these people? I don't get it...

<comment><USER3> > but at what point does posing for glamour shots take away the fun of > enjoying the places you go? Why do people follow these people? I don't get > it...

That is exactly it, it becomes a job.

Its not really different than watching cable TV and hearing someone review a travel destination.

>This can't be healthy.

I think this is 'grass is greener on the other side' effect. What makes traveling and growing your influence unhealthy?

Its that we want this ideal lifestyle, and are jealous(?).

Whatever the case, most people are not making even 6 figures off their instagram accounts by just posting pictures. OP's article talked about offering an additional service.

<comment><USER7> > Its not really different than watching cable TV and hearing someone review a > travel destination.

Hmm. First video I looked at:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TOltq6OgR4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TOltq6OgR4)

After the "intro" \-- which isn't exactly like someone (who isn't Paris Hilton or Stefan Raab etc.) reviewing _anything_ in earnest -- it's just the usual half-coherent babbling most youtubers do. You don't fly a TV team to a destination and then just scratch your ass and drop sentences any random person interviewed on the street would say. That's not a "review", even for TV standards which are hardly anything to aspire to.

Youtube is much dumber than TV, just enter "game name review", and depending on the game most of it will be people playing a game, badly, sometimes without even talking, and when they talk, it's not a "review" at all, but " _hi guys, my dog is cute, I 'm bringing you the best reviews please subscribe, I'm about to review this game, okay I'm now reviewing this game, it's a game, it sucks and has many flaws but I enjoyed it, please leave a like, thanks for watching_".

The best are the people who cut out every breath they take, every moment they think (or maybe they just go blank, who knows), and then they still manage to say not a single thing in 15 minutes.

> What makes traveling and growing your influence unhealthy?

That was referring to "constantly posing and putting on an image". If that's so great, why do you have to rephrase it first?

And what is "growing your influence"? I see a lot of people with NO grip on themselves, what influence do they have? Isn't Alex Jones also having a healthy career by that same token? A bunch of "followers", "just growing influence". They must be providing value, because they "make 6 figures".

> Its that we want this ideal lifestyle, and are jealous(?).

Turning oneself into the equivalent of a Teletubbie? No, thanks.

When someone makes it clear they find it cringey and would not enjoy "being that", maybe first accept that that is actually so. When someone says "I hate this, why would anyone do this?", don't say "Don't you actually love it though? whatever the case may be.."

Seeing a lot of these personalities that are anything _but_ a personality, I think that's the main reason really, that they have no personality, no thoughts, but a long life to fill with that nothing. That makes people hyper, and people who are likewise lost cling to that bubbling nothing to distract them from the fear that sits squarely upon their neck as well. It's not driven by idiocy, fear drives the idiocy. Watching 99% of youtube to me is like watching a blob of water in an overheated pan gliding around on air. The question isn't where is it going, but what is it running from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> To be fair, the main lesson here is that you shouldn't be paying 500$ to an illusionist.

That "Angie" whoever she is, is just a fraud. She's not actually delivering any value. Whatever she's pretending to earn could be all fake (it's honestly not that difficult to fake these "perfect" photos and definitely doesn't require to be a millionaire), and even if it's real now, she's gonna be the first one to get the door the second this social media/bullshit media bubble pops and brands realise it's not worth it.

You want to make money? There are plenty of career paths that will make you good money by delivering actual value to your customers. Bragging on Instagram and getting virtual internet points isn't one of them.

<comment><USER9> I am not really an Instagram person, but I don't think you're right here. I think the value provided by Instagram today is basically that of glossy fashion and style magazines in the decades of yore. Some people like to look at pretty photos of pretty people wearing pretty things.

<comment><USER10> Except there were maybe 20 of those magazines where as now the barrier to entry is so easy that there's 20 million kids making these sorts of photos.

<comment><USER9> So? The same happened with text on the internet. Now everybody's a publisher. That seems like a good thing to me.

<comment><USER8> The problem here is that there's a limited pool of consumers (and thus money) for this content.

It used to be that the aforementioned magazines were sufficient to fill that gap of the market; as a result they were making decent money, could put out decent content that people were happy with and didn't have to resort to scammy behaviour to make profit.

Nowadays the floodgates are open and everyone is a wannabe "influencer" except the pool of consumers & money remained the same, so they now have to resort to less than acceptable techniques to try and make money, and this article is one of the possible outcomes.

Text on the internet has the same problem by the way - there's now a shit ton of garbage content written only to gain clicks and attention without actually delivering any value to the reader.

<comment><USER9> Sure?

I agree that free distribution and approximately infinite supply have been a problem for many content businesses that based their businesses on scarcity. But as far as I can tell the topic here is whether Instagram content is valuable. It is. Many valuable things can be hard to monetize. E.g., air.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think it's quite the stretch to describe someone as a celebrity just because they have 800k instagram followers. And yeah, that site is full of scammers with high follower counts.

I own a couple of nice names and constantly have people with million+ followers messaging me trying to scam me for them.

<comment><USER11> Well if you have 500 people willing to pay $500 for a course I would call you a celebrity. Not because of the number of followers, but because of the value of those followers.

<comment><USER12> She's just tapping a market with a huge demand and no one offering any "supply."

There are no university courses for "instagram star" so if you're the charlatan who is promising fame and fortune for the low low price of $500, there are plenty of people willing to hop on board. If anything I would say 500 people is really low.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Don't think of it as having been scammed, but moreso that you paid your $500 tuition to the school of life. You won't make that mistake again.

What honestly shocks me is the "aw shucks" attitude in the email from Teachable. I get that they're sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place, and they did issue as many refunds as they could, but to turn to students and say "we've paid out the remaining amount of money... so sorry about that!" is like rubbing salt into the wound.

If she moved to a custom payment gateway, they probably know what it is, and that gateway ought to know about the scam she's pulling. After all, they have an incentive to keep these bad actors from using their systems.

<comment><USER4> The key lesson here is to always pay everything with a credit card.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd be willing to bet the majority of IG accounts with 10k+ followers don't provide any real value outside of pretty pictures.

<comment><USER15> If you're a hot, white, blonde female, those are all the qualifications you need for thousands upon thousands of followers, assuming you are active on the platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Quite arguably the job of an 'influencer' is to scam people.

<comment><USER3> This affects me daily.

I run a popular website that has saved hundreds of thousands of people money and time. Its been cool, but I lose about 1-3k/yr.

Often people tell me to run ads, or put affiliate links, or whatever.

The issue becomes, I wouldn't be saving people money.

The entire purpose of Efficiency Is Everything is to help people. If I'm shilling some crappy mutual fund or promoting an expensive protein shake- I failed my purpose.

/rant, but I do not think I will be profitable unless I contradict my original purpose.

<comment><USER16> I dont think adding a couple unobtrusive ads would impact saving people time or money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's a response here: [https://www.instagram.com/p/BrTnd_wBblI/](https://www.instagram.com/p/BrTnd_wBblI/)

<comment><USER18> It has sociopath written all over it... then again, sociopathy is likely the reason she's followed by so many people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't know, I have a hard time finding sympathy for this.

I've paid many thousands of dollars towards courses to get my degree from a top university and most of them were awful. As with any university, there's of course no way to get a refund or make any public complaints that would yield an outcome.

</comment><comment><USER20> File a chargeback with your credit card conpany. Encourage others to do the same.

</comment><comment><USER21> Why would someone pay for this with a debit card?

Pay with a credit card, then you are at least protected if anything goes wrong.

<comment><USER8> Why can't you chargeback with a debit card? I've done it multiple times successfully.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> "Celebrity", "influencer", "/r/nottheonion" \- this is reaching unthinkable levels of absurdity... Developers of "/r/outside" should nerf gains from those side-quests...

</comment><comment><USER3> As I've read more about this topic, what if the lady was going through a divorce + busy?

I know that doesnt absolve from responsibilities, but I cannot imagine that experience.

<comment><USER23> Is this sarcasm?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Dont people know that most of these "followers" are fake accounts created from some third world digital slave labor company?

<comment><USER8> You're grossly over-estimating the average intelligence (and willingness to actually stop and think for a minute) of those accounts' target markets.

I have friends who spend pretty much their entire lives on FB and Insta and they would swallow anything from there... last time one was surprised when I told her a watch she saw advertised on FB with a huge discount (300£ to like around 39£) was never at 300£ in the first place.</comment></comment>


U.S. Is Often Unsure About Who Will Die in Drone Strikes - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/world/asia/drone-strikes-reveal-uncomfortable-truth-us-is-often-unsure-about-who-will-die.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> I'm mostly depressed that the President only apologizes to the families and promises an investigation when it's American and Italian innocents who were killed. Hundreds of innocent Pakistanis, Afghans, Iraqis, Yemenis, and Somalis have been killed by US drones. And only the worst of those cases has even a mention been made of any review of policy or procedure.

In summary: :(

<comment><USER3> Just to drive home the point further, if it's a US citizen who gets killed, but that US citizen has an Arab name, no apology is apparently needed[0].

Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was a 16-year-old American boy, eating dinner at a restaurant in Yemen while searching for his father. Nobody denies that he was completely innocent, and even the US government simply says he was "in the wrong place at the wrong time"[1].

You'll also notice that the media oftentimes use the euphemism "US-born" to refer to people like al-Awlaki and his father, but refer to Weinstein as American.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdulrahman_al- Awlaki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdulrahman_al-Awlaki)

[1] We can also question why that place was "the wrong place", since (A) we're not at war with Yemen, and (B) the target of the drone strikes (his father) was also a US citizen who had never been convicted of any crime, but that's a separate matter, since it's not analogous to this incident.

<comment><USER4> >if it's a US citizen who gets killed, but that US citizen has an Arab name, no apology is apparently needed

It helps if they are the son of a "senior talent-recruiter and motivator who was involved in planning terrorist operations for the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda"

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al- Awlaki](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reminds me of the, TOM THE DANCING BUG: "Hello! You've Been Targeted For a Drone Assassination!" cartoon.

[http://boingboing.net/2012/03/14/tom-the-dancing-bug- hello.h...](http://boingboing.net/2012/03/14/tom-the-dancing-bug-hello.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Why do people single out drones? It's not like it would be different if there were a pilot in the thing. I guess it's just good old FUD.

<comment><USER7> Because they're concerned that the lack of a pilot, and thus, pilot risk, means the US is more willing to order attacks, since there is no political risk to themselves should something be shot down?

Because they're concerned with the change in warfare this heralds, that we're moving to using technologies that explicitly and autonomously target civilian areas, and deciding who 'enemy combatants' are based on presidential mandate, rather than military engagements, thus setting a terrible precedent for future wars (i.e., if we ever were to find ourselves at war with another country, or even not at war, just that one of our citizens did something against a country, and that country decided to use drones to attack civilian sites, claiming they were attacking enemy combatants, what recourse would we have on the international stage)?

Because they're concerned not so much with drones, but with the precedent set by presidentially ordered assassination, and through means known to cause collateral damage (unlike most alleged assassination attempts prior)?

Because the entire policy has led to intense fear in the areas we're flying drones over; not only are we now inspiring terror in our attempt to find and kill terrorists (...), but we're hurting our chances at winning over 'hearts and minds' and such, and likely raising up a generation in these countries that hates and fears us.

<comment><USER6> They're not autonomous. They're piloted by a person. There's very little difference between looking at the screen in the cockpit to know when to drop the bomb, and looking at the screen in the control room.

<comment><USER7> Sorry, I should have been clearer. Yes, it is not truly autonomous, but the mindset of many of those interviewed in the areas we are conducting attacks is basically "death can come down from on high at any moment from clear blue skies". They're not viewing it as "soldiers sometimes come into our village and shoot at suspected terrorists and there are sometimes civilian casualties".

And the tendency is to keep moving to that; even now it's only 'soldier vs civilian' by technicality; as soon as we can replace the soldier at the viewscreen with an algorithm, we likely will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It seems strange to someone who is not living in the US or Israel how people can just say as this author does "By most accounts, hundreds of dangerous militants have, indeed, been killed by drones, including some high-ranking Qaeda figures."

It's as though the only thing that bothers the majority is that a terrorist didn't die but someone else. There is a clear divide from the rest of the world which still finds it strange to kill someone without declaring war or having a clear reason. And from the tone of this article i wonder if that divide isn't a lot further than i thought.

The idea of killing someone just because we think they are a threat... sounds like a sci-fi novel to the rest of us.

<comment><USER9> >The idea of killing someone just because we think they are a threat... sounds like a sci-fi novel to the rest of us.

Not really a sci-fi novel. We've had all this before in a time and place called the Third Reich. Different methods, different Undesirables, same propaganda, same evil mass murdering government military apparatus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Of course they don't know, there isn't even a declared war with congressional debate.

And just like the NSA scandals, the TSA nonense, etc, etc, the public will yawn and then forget about it a week later.

</comment><comment><USER11> I cant criticize U.S. military policy while I sit in a temperature controlled office and write CRUD software.

The only thing I can criticize is the technology that makes it so hard for these guys to do their jobs. If Youtube can deliver 4K cat videos then the military with its $500 Billion per year budget should be able to deliver half decent videos.

</comment><comment><USER12> There was hundreds of hours of surveillance before this strike. But no sign of the hostages. Guess they didn't let them outside.

</comment><comment><USER13> In other news, water is wet...

</comment><comment><USER14> Terrorists are unsure who will die when they set off bombs in shopping centers and street cafes.

<comment><USER2> I like to think my government has higher moral values than terrorists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder what happens when a non-US entity flies a plane to kill US citiz ..

At least OBL had a valid reason ( for ppl who don't know this - he did it as a revenge to what israel was doing in Lebanon ). Killing civilians without reason is genocide and history will judge US appropriately.

<comment><USER16> While it is tempting to hope that at some point the US will disengage and let the world fend for itself it is not in the interest of anyone except ISIS, Russia and possibly China. I would personally love to see Putin haranguing Europe.

<comment><USER17> There is no reason to go from one extreme - the 'cops of the word' to quote Ochs - to extreme isolationism on the other. There are many stages in between.

FWIW, I believe many residents of Okinawa Prefecture would be interested in having US military off of their island, should the US withdraw. Should we do that, I suspect Japan would quickly develop nuclear weapons.

I also strongly believe many in Latin America would prefer a strict isolationist policy by the US. Many remember how the US supported right-wing authoritarian regimes in the 1970s and 1980s, don't want the US meddling in their country, and have little to fear from Eurasian threats.

<comment><USER16> No it won't happen. Europe being America's hand puppet is the cornerstone of US power.

<comment><USER17> You said it wasn't in the interest of anyone, other than ISIS, Russia, and China, for the US to withdraw.

I pointed out some other examples of people who probably would like the US out of the international stage.

Your reply here makes it sound either like you didn't understand your original point - the hope that the US might withdraw - or that you believe the only people who are relevant are the US and those the US considers to be its opposition.

I am certain there are people in Bolivia who would like the US to stop protecting US business interests in that country, and who will not be negatively affected by possible growth in Russian, Chinese, or ISIS power should the US become the isolationist state you says was "tempting to hope".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


HTML5 Doctor - <AUTHOR> http://html5doctor.com/

<comment><USER2> Interesting, I didn't know about the <NSFW> element.

<comment><USER3> Might want to check out the date when that was put up...</comment></comment>


The $78-Trillion Free Lunch – If Borders Were Open - <AUTHOR> http://worldif.economist.com/article/13532/78-trillion-free-lunch <comment><USER2> *

I reiterate a former reply to this exact article.

I am unbribed. I suspect this is an example of Troll Science for economists.

1\. The question becomes: if it is economical then why isn't it the case from the start. Why do nations exist? Why do they have borders?

What of the question posed by a famous economist: why do corporations exist? Why not a market filled with nothing but traders? The answer isn't obvious but there is an answer. Perhaps free movement has similar invisible overheads that are being conveniently ignored.

2\. Ignoring what I've said above for a moment. Let us suppose that free movement made us richer. Then nations would be competing, offering incentives to all.

They do not. Only to a tiny percentage of the population with obviously valuable skills or assets. That implies that there is a very high price before externalities are sufficiently alleviated. It at least means governments think that is so for whatever reason.

3\. Within nations we have rich and poor zipcodes. It is true that workers from poor neighbourhoods travel to richer ones for work, it is basic time/money arbitrage. Yet few people think of installing poorer workers in richer neighbourhoods as a means to improve the economy. Why is that?</comment>


LuaJIT 2.0 intellectual property disclosure (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2009-11/msg00089.html <comment> david-given NaN tagging is really neat --- in LuaJIT, all values are stored as doubles; pointers are encoded as a NaN with the pointer part embedded in the NaN data field (you get about 50 bits to play with).

The beauty is that NaNs propagate; you can perform a complex numeric operation on them, and then test the result once while you're finished. If it's a NaN, then you know that one of the operands must have been a NaN and you escape back to the JIT for more analysis. If it's not... then it worked, and you just continue. And testing for a NaN is cheap.

<comment><USER2> NaN tagging exists since the dawn of time. CDC 6600 had reserved NaN mantissa bits... in 1963! The IEEE floating point standard just carried on these features. Many lisp implementation used NaN for packing data in the 80's/90's. Google for: lisp nan tagged data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> LuaJIT is great, and with the real fast and easy to use FFI it makes you design, prototype, test, and write real applications dealing with lots of "C" libraries much much easier.

I think the only real drawback, and maybe its being worked on (haven't checked the project in several months) is the internal memory limit of the lua heap (has to be below the first addressable 4GB's).

</comment><comment><USER4> For those of us who are disbarred from looking at, or researching, IP: this is a statement by the owner placing this IP into the equivalent of the US public domain, or its equivalent in your state. The code is under MIT license. The author, obviously, doesn't indemnify you. If you're unfamiliar with the genius of the FFI in Lua, or Mike Pall's JIT/VM wizardry, it is well worth looking at.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is Lua easier to optimize than Javascript? Is impressive how fast LuaJIT is for being a one man show.

<comment><USER6> Yes. While they have very similar semantics, Lua is just simpler. (ES6 though goes way beyond and is probably quite a bit harder to optimize simply because of having much more surface area.)

Of course, most of LuaJIT is applicable to JS as well. Mike Pall simply implemented it _better_ than whole teams at Google and Mozilla. Yeah. Dude's pretty smart.

<comment><USER7> As smart as Mike Pall is, it isn't just that he's some crazy genius. Lua lacks a mutable prototype chain which can really spoil javascript performance and optimizability.

As far as I can tell you can't something like:

Array.prototype[0] = 5;

and make [] the same as [5].

There's a lot of edge cases in javascript that make its optimization much more complicated than lua's.

<comment><USER8> You can create a prototype chain in Lua by associating an object with a metatable that has an __index metamethod. If the table that __index references has a metatable itself, the chain continues.

[http://www.lua.org/pil/13.4.1.html](http://www.lua.org/pil/13.4.1.html)

Importantly, `tbl[key]` only consults `__index` if `key` isn't actually a key in `tbl`, so keys in derived objects override keys up the prototype chain.

<comment> david-given Also in Lua you can change the prototype of constructed objects, by just calling setmetatable() on them again; while in Javascript you can't --- once the object's been constructed, that's it.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7015693/how-to-set-the- pr...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7015693/how-to-set-the-prototype-of- a-javascript-object-that-has-already-been-instantiat)

I ran into this a little while back while trying to port some Lua code to Javascript. It was very annoying.

<comment><USER9> > while in Javascript you can't --- once the object's been constructed, that's > it.

ES2015 standardised the read/write __proto__ attribute (which most browsers had implemented for a long time), and added a #setPrototypeOf call. The _first answer_ of your link notes exactly that.

<comment> david-given It's added as an _optional_ feature, as the first sentence of that answer describes:

> ...the answer below is no longer accurate. _proto_ is being added to > ecmascript6 as "normative optional" which means it isn't required to be > implemented...

It can't always be polyfilled, either, which makes the feature effectively useless. I'm not even sure why they added it as such a half-hearted feature to ES6; I suspect politics (Brendon Eich appears to have been dead set against having mutable protos for years).

<comment><USER9> > It's added as an optional feature

Fuck's sake mate, Object.setPrototypeOf is _not_ optional (and __proto__ is only optional for non-browser environments).

> It can't always be polyfilled, either, which makes the feature effectively > useless.

That's breathtaking dishonesty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is an interesting summary of the technology used in LuaJIT.

<comment><USER10> Even more valuable when you consider that Pall has stepped down as head of LuaJIT dev and handed off maintainership to others.

<comment><USER11> He's still head. He hasn't found a suitable replacement yet.

<comment><USER10> Oh interesting. I heard that CloudFlare was going to take over, but that may just have been about "we will handle paying the salary of the right person once they are found".

<comment><USER12> The current situation is that 2.1 (currently in beta) is finished with Mike on the board, and after that Mike is "out".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As somebody writting a VM that is simular to LuaJit as a hobby project, I have read this document over and over again. There are so many interesting ideas and approches.</comment>


Supreme Court to Review Sarbanes-Oxley Law - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/30808044 <comment><USER2> I went to the supreme court's website to research this further (<http://www.supremecourtus.gov>). Honestly I expected more from the U.S. Supreme Court's website. The site looks terrible and the search is abysmal. I would think that a query for "sarbanes", "sarbanes oxley", or "sarbanse-oxley" would turn up SOMETHING if the court was to address such a landmark law. Search can make or break a site!

<comment><USER3> Er.. it's not like these folks will be going out of business soon. There is a large existing infrastucture (non-free) in companies like lexis-nexus.

<comment><USER2> True. It just seems that their website should be a little more usable given who they are and the amount and nature of information they need to disseminate.</comment></comment></comment>


Twitter search visualization tool - <AUTHOR> http://twittermap.appspot.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I just wrote this application to visualize generic twitter searches on a google map. I'd love any feedback that you can offer.</comment>


The Secret Language of Tennis Champions (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/6/secret-codes/the-secret-language-of-tennis-champions

<comment><USER2> The article skips over a point that strikes me as very interesting: they're identical twins, but one is right-handed and one is left-handed. I wonder how that happens?

<comment><USER3> I grew up playing soccer with two twins, Brennan and Evan, one was left footed and one was right footed. Consequently, they played left and right midfielders (they were also both tall and lanky, good distance runners). They were an incredible duo and easily switched the ball across the field to each other.

They continued playing soccer competitively and played on the best state club team. I ended up at the same Uni where they were roommates and majored in the same things, took the same classes, joined the same fraternity, etc.

Unfortunately I didn't know them well enough to know if they had any sort of twin language or anything, but I wouldn't be at all surprised. I rarely saw them apart.</comment></comment>


JS MythBusters – An optimization handbook from a high level point of view - <AUTHOR> http://mythbusters.js.org/ <comment><USER2> One of the defining thing about MythBusters was that they'd take a myth, build an experiment with at least some notion of control, and then carry it out, so you can actually see the results.

Instead this site seems to be "regurgitate myths". e.g. [http://mythbusters.js.org/workflow/boolean- conditions.html](http://mythbusters.js.org/workflow/boolean-conditions.html)

"Avoid using >= and <= unless necessary. It's faster to use a simpler comparison." There's a trivial code example, and then absolutely no evidence to support the claim. No benchmarks, nothing.

<comment><USER3> I'm extremely skeptical of that claim, too. As far as I can tell SpiderMonkey for example will emit practically exactly the same code for >= and <= as other comparisons. In loop optimization SpiderMonkey will actually sometimes rewrite eg. `x < y` as `x + 1 <= y` to put linear inequalities into a standard form for analysis [0].

They also recommend using `let` and `const` over `var` for performance reasons in the "Scope" section, but I have to ask whether they benchmarked that at all. Engines may grow to take advantage of these signals over time for further optimization, but at the moment many ES6 features incur a performance penalty just because the code behind them is less mature. I don't know specifically about `let`/`const` but I'd be pleasantly surprised to learn that they _boost_ performance anywhere yet.

[0] [https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla- central/source/js/src/jit/Io...](https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla- central/source/js/src/jit/IonAnalysis.cpp#3061-3120)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure how this can be called "mythbusters" when it doesn't provide evidence for how some optimizations are better than others. Seems likely to produce more myths rather than debunk them.

<comment><USER5> Good point. It's the exact opposite of mythbusting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some of these suggestions are good but some caveats: \- Lookup tables- while lookup tables are great, engines might sometimes convert switch statements to lookup tables too- Chakra does this when it's advantageous to do so \- Try- catch- this seems like v8 specific advice. Chakra definitely does optimize functions with try-catch in it, and I think SpiderMonkey does too \- Freeing memory- setting the reference to null does not necessarily free the memory- it just makes it likelier to get collected when the Garbage Collector runs

Disclaimer: MSFT employee, Engineer on Chakra

<comment><USER7> > Try-catch- this seems like v8 specific advice. Chakra definitely does > optimize functions with try-catch in it, and I think SpiderMonkey does too

[http://gs.statcounter.com/](http://gs.statcounter.com/) certainly suggests that specifically optimizing for Chrome/V8 will benefit the majority of users (58% not including mobile, 50% including mobile). As with all statistics, take with a grain of salt.

<comment><USER8> Also keep in mind that 50% of users as a whole may not equate to 50% of _your_ users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > from a high level point of view

Many of the examples I looked at were very granular and specific, but didn't have much explanation. Does high level point of view really mean brief and without elaboration?

From a high level on JS optimization I would like to see more emphasis on which considerations are most likely to have the biggest impact on my code. Throwing everything in together as if they were all equal seems like it may be missing the point.

<comment><USER10> That was my take, too. It says "from a high level point of view", but the _very first optimization_ was about using the != operator vs the >= operator in certain conditionals. I'm struggling to think of anything more _low_ -level than that, in JS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think this is not well researched enough. There doesn't appear to be any thought put into optimization vs. readability, and when the optimization improves enough speed to justify the poor readability.

<comment><USER12> The domain name, js.org, seems to lend more credibility then it should.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How many of these optimizations are just limited to V8?

I swear I've heard somewhere that the try/catch limitation is specific to V8, and that other engines don't have that problem. Am I mistaken?

EDIT: Also, this page is very difficult to read. I have a laptop with a great screen and the lack of contrast is annoying.

<comment><USER14> The styling definitely needs more contrast. The comments on the code examples are nearly impossible for me to read without highlighting them. Looking at the styling, comments are set to rgb(51,51,51) which is nowhere near enough contrast between the black background.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This handbook assumes that JS execution really is your bottleneck and not network, DOM, what not. I doubt this is the case in the majority of applications, so following these tips might be even counterproductive as they sometimes come at the cost of readability.

</comment><comment><USER16> Some of these performance tips are just not believable without _some_ kind of justification. I'm to believe that garbage collection can't work if you use delete? That seems pretty silly.

<comment><USER3> This one actually seems fair to me. They're not saying that GC won't kick in on the value the deleted property used to point to, but rather that using `delete` on a property can be more expensive than you need if you're just trying to let the GC know something can be cleaned up. This is because optimized JIT code and caches guard on the structure of objects that pass through them, and changing that structure (eg. deleting a property) will lead to deoptimizations / tossing away some of that code.

On SpiderMonkey, deleting a property that isn't the last one that was defined may incur a "dictionary mode" conversion [0]. This means the information describing each object property, which is usually immutable and shared between similar objects, will be copied one-by-one into a unique chain owned by the particular object instance. This can only happen once per object instance, however, and subsequent usages of `delete` on its properties will be less expensive -- but still more expensive than simply setting property values to `null`. I believe something similar happens with V8's "hidden classes" mechanism.

[0] [https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla- central/source/js/src/vm/Sha...](https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla- central/source/js/src/vm/Shape.cpp#961-970)

<comment><USER16> I'm not saying it's not true. I don't know enough deep javascript magic to make that claim. It just didn't _sound_ true, given that they've provided no supporting information or even a plausible-sounding explanation of why one way is better than another way.

If the entire site were rewritten using this level of detail plus benchmarks, it would be 10x more useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > high level point of view

> Avoid using >= and <= unless necessary

Is this an elaborate troll?</comment>


Check It Out – An Node.js Git Checkout CLI Tool - <AUTHOR> https://checkit.club/ <comment><USER2> This should have been titled "I've never heard of bash completion also it's nodejs"</comment>


The problem isn't just Cambridge Analytica or FB, it's "surveillance capitalism" - <AUTHOR> https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/jennifer-cobbe/problem-isn-t-just-cambridge-analytica-or-even-facebook-it-s-surveillance-capitali <comment><USER2> Here is how I think about surveillance.

Suppose your boss decides they want to run a quiet experiment on you.

They tell you to install an employee clock-in app on your personal phone and that you will be paid for your commute time if the app runs in the background.

Access to GPS, other sensors, etc. are required to install.

The privacy policy tells you that your privacy is important to your boss, and that your data will only be used for analytics purposes and will only be processed by third parties for viewing and juicy gossip purposes.

Your boss then can see in real time on his laptop what shops you go to, what time you go to sleep, what worknights per month you go to a bar. Where you go on your weekends.

If this feels a bit bad, then it shows your data has value to you.

(Replace boss with -coworker, -aquaintance, -online corporation(s)... )

<comment><USER3> I believe what we should be developing instead is the software that provably generates semi-random paths and inputs to the phone's accelerator API that fake your true location.

<comment><USER4> that possibly could be easily detectable... it might be better to have hardware switches that would allow you to disable all sensors individually whenever you want some privacy... there are many sensors on my phone that I never need but possibly could leak some information, yet I can't disable them... Also, I just installed an app on my phone that didn't require any permissions, yet the company was able to send me a text message... Android permissions suck a lot, still.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can anyone give me an idea of how valuable a person's personal information really is? I know companies are willing to spend a lot of money on this data, but I'm not yet convinced that that's rational. What are some examples of attempts to measure, for instance, the amount of advertising power gained by mining personal data? Does it turn out to be very lucrative? Or is it just trying to get an edge on the competition in an advertising race-to-the-bottom?

<comment><USER6> > Can anyone give me an idea of how valuable a person's personal information > really is?

Rough lower bound: Alphabet's market cap is around 900 Billion, FB's market cap is around 500 Billion. Both of their businesses are driven by selling ads based on people's personal information. There are around 7 Billion people on the planet. That's about $200/person for everyone on the planet.

<comment><USER7> It's more than that. I went out for dinner earlier, and if they had just given me random food, there's a good chance I wouldn't have eaten there again, but I gave them my personal data so they were able to prepare a meal targeted specifically to my preferences.

I actually wasn't very comfortable with the information I had given them. I went to a shoe store right after, and the salesman was like "Is there anything I can help you find?"

I told him "Yes, but I'm not going to say, I've had it with giving up my personal data so you surveillance capitalists can make money off of me."

The shoe salesman directed me to the athletic shoes, which he knew were popular based on past user data he had aggregated, but that wasn't even what I was there for, I wanted dress shoes. What an idiot that guy was.

All these capitalists requiring us to give up our data just so they know what to sell us. The world has gone haywire, I say.

<comment><USER8> You're really clutching at straws with this one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is no legitimate use for so much surveillance. I dare anyone to prove me wrong by listing 3 reasons.

I've been asking myself where's the red line? It's useful for businesses to know how many people are passing by their shop, how many enter the door, how many daily purchases are there. They have NO business in recognizing people as return customers unless the aim is to provide BETTER service.

Online surveillance is automation of profiling with aim of extracting more money. Detecting price-sensitivity, insecurities, cognitive biases. Totally anti consumer.

</comment><comment><USER10> The word "capitalism" is totally redundant and rather shows the authors bias.

> 'Surveillance capitalism' was the term coined in 2015 by Harvard academic > Shoshanna Zuboff to describe this large-scale surveillance and modification > of human behaviour for profit.

'Advertising capitalism' was the term coined in 2018 by dandare to describe this large-scale advertising and modification of human behaviour for profit.

'Fashion capitalism' was the term coined in 2018 by dandare to describe this large-scale fashion industry and modification of human behaviour for profit.

'Tourism capitalism' was the term coined in 2018 by dandare to describe this large-scale tourism industry and modification of human behaviour for profit.

...

</comment><comment><USER11> I still fail to see how all of this is a problem when people give out their data VOLUNTARILY?

<comment><USER12> Because they don't know they're giving out their data voluntarily, or don't understand the repercussions.

In some idealized notion or legal fiction everyone might at all times be perfectly aware what they're signing up to, the reality is much messier.

Virtually no one reads the fine print, because it's obfuscated. If you have bad eyesight and are not computer literate (a good portion of the population) you will most likely not even be able to read the TOS on the average webpage. Most people have no idea what "cookies" are, or what "GDPR" means. Even if they did, there's a huge opportunity cost to doing so. [1]

Then there's network effects.

When enough people do something, it becomes a norm. I have been _required_ by many state institutions to go through private networks whenever I need to administer something online. Yes, ones that use tracking, because they have some private/public agreement. Likewise, if everyone around a person uses Facebook, and they use it to organize their social life, then they will expect that person to do the same -- it's collectively cheaper for them than it's expensive for the individual.

I've been surprised by the amount of times I've gotten texts "oh you aren't coming"? To some event I never even heard about, because apparently everything goes through Facebook nowadays. "My cell? Just search me on Facebook."

[1] [http://techland.time.com/2012/03/06/youd-need-76-work- days-t...](http://techland.time.com/2012/03/06/youd-need-76-work-days-to-read- all-your-privacy-policies-each-year/)

<comment><USER11> Don't confuse tracking cookies with people opening social profiles on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Twitter posting their lives on the internet publicly in written, audio and visual formats. It is false to say that people don't know they're giving out their data when they're consciously doing so.

<comment><USER12> > It is false to say that people don't know they're giving out their data when > they're consciously doing so.

That's missing the point, it's about the data they're _unconsciously_ giving out. For example, my parents did not know that their Android phone could silently track their location. And even the stuff they do consciously put out often comes with strings attached.</comment></comment></comment></comment>