Transparent proxy server that works as a poor man's VPN - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle <comment><USER3> I love sshuttle. You can point it at any ssh server (that has python installed on it) and you don't need any special privileges on the remote end.

One problem is that it does _not_ support DNS tunneling if FreeBSD is your client.[1]

Item: we (rsync.net) would be _willing to pay_ for development that gets sshuttle to work properly and bulletproof on FreeBSD. In fact, we would be willing to pay for sshuttle development in general. Email us.[2]

Also, what is up with this new fork ... which speaks from the original authors point of view and, in fact, has his own personal notes cut and pasted into the README. In fact, the contact information is the original author - <USER2> Pennarun email@example.com - what's going on here ?

[1] No, the note about IPFIREWALL_FORWARD does not fix this problem.

[2] email@example.com

<comment><USER4> sshuttle is really cool, except both macs I've run it on would have weird system crashes while running it.

I ended up creating a proper VPN via a microtik router and have enjoyed the superior performance compared to sshuttle, though it was several orders of magnitude more effort to get going! sshuttle was almost too easy to get up and running :)

<comment><USER5> A python script should not be able to make your Mac crash (depending on what you mean by "weird system crash"). If it actually causes a hard crash, that likely either points to a weird hardware/software problem on your system, or it's a bug that Apple would like to know about if they don't already.

<comment><USER4> Using it consistently produced hard system freezes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You can also just use a SSH to set up a socks proxy as well.

[http://blog.jpatrick.io/tube-socks/](http://blog.jpatrick.io/tube-socks/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I see that this is a fork of a fork, what are the differences from the original?

</comment><comment><USER8> Just use Shadowsocks, unless you're on iOS, in which case use PPTP. These both work reliably for me, and with the latest versions of OSX.

If you need something more resistant to DPI, check out stunnel or obfsproxy as carriers for OpenVPN. Switch ports regularly as well. You needn't change server config to do this: just use iptables to forward stuff so your server's stunnel daemon is listening on hundreds of ports.

<comment><USER9> One of the primary use cases, as described on the main page linked, is for systems where you aren't an admin of the remote system, and thus can't use iptables as you describe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you want a poorer VPN, you can use socat [1] or n2n[2], which both works great!

1: [http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/doc/socat-tun.html](http://www.dest- unreach.org/socat/doc/socat-tun.html)

2: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N2n](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N2n)

</comment><comment><USER11> Been using this for years, can be a little weird at times but usually works fairly well, even on OS X.

<comment><USER12> Doesn't work on Yosemite!

<comment> X-Istence It does. It was updated a couple of months ago to use the new pfctl framework of -E/-X to enable/disable the firewall and uses the existing hooks in the firewall to automatically insert/remove rules as necessary.

I've used it extensively on Yosemite.

<comment><USER13> Using this fork on El Capitan now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I used this for a while in summer while I travelled to China, it worked shortly before the powerful GFW blocks it deadly, along with openvpn- over-443-port etc that I tried, which also failed soon after it's used for a short while.

<comment><USER15> The great firewall won't block tor bridges on port 80 or 443. I've been there a time or two and used it :D

<comment><USER14> it does, 443 still leaks pattens(e.g. packet length and when/how they're sent/received,etc), that GFW can detec and tell if it's a typical 443 or openvpn-over-443. also 80 has no security at all and I don't know what it can be used for this purpose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why not just use OpenVPN? It's just as simple (if not simpler) to setup and considerably more powerful.

An OpenVPN server can go from zero to done in under 5 minutes (for HN readers, less) with a Docker container: [https://github.com/kylemanna/github](https://github.com/kylemanna/github)

<comment> X-Istence That might work if you have root on the system you are connecting to, but in a lot of cases you might not. In a corporate scenario sshuttle has been life saver because it makes it simple to make networks behind a jump server look and feel like they are just a router hop away. This makes using stuff like VMWare easier since it usually requires direct access to the hosts on various different ports and makes it difficult to set up port forwarding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Absolutely will not in China, LOL

<comment><USER18> Works well.

... Only recently had issues during the parade using with the Linode IP range. DigitalOcean no problems.</comment></comment>


List of worthwhile DOS games - <AUTHOR> http://i2.wp.com/information2share.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/list-of-worthwhile-dos-games.jpg <comment><USER2> This is a great list. Little surprised Space Quest didn't make the cut.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why a graphic instead of some form of text/html etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> it's what i found via the 8-bit future tumblr. i didn't make this, i'm just sharing.

i was an Apple II user in the era of DOS, and went straight to macintosh. i therefore had little interaction with many of these games, at least on DOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> oh my god! haven't played games in some time but i was just reminded to boot up transporter tycoon when time permits...</comment>


Why Teenagers Are Fleeing Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/the-exchange/5-reasons-teenagers-are-fleeing-facebook-182756430.html <comment><USER2> Everyone is all concerned about how teenagers are fleeing Facebook, but they all fail to realize why teenagers will head back to Facebook. It was originally designed as the online version of College, a way to interact with new and old friends. When all these kids leave their high schools and head off to college where are they going to keep in touch with their old friends, Facebook. When they meet someone new in College where will they add this new friend, Facebook. Facebook is the initial meeting point for new friends and then once you become better friends it is then that you follow and add them on other social media sites. If Facebook sees a huge decline in College age students in the next few years then I will be worried about their future, but until then it doesn't matter what the teenagers do because when they begin to grow up, they will join the rest of society and use their Facebook. Teenagers are not the demographic to follow when understanding Facebook's fate.

Also, they are all leaving Facebook to use intagram, a Facebook owned company, or use snapshat which will die off in popularity in the coming years.

<comment><USER3> > _When all these kids leave their high schools and head off to college where > are they going to keep in touch with their old friends, Facebook._

If teenagers decide to congregate on a different social network, why would they stop using that and go back to facebook just because they go to college?

If you and your closest friends find a better place online to meet that doesn't suffer from facebook's "everybody's there and can see what you're doing" problem, why wouldn't you continue meeting there after high school?

<comment><USER4> Worrying about your parents being on the same social network as yourself ceases to be an issue when you become an adult yourself, and you no longer have to hide the fact that you were out partying when you were supposed to be studying at a friend's house. And as the GP notes, Facebook solves the problem that teens haven't yet had to confront - how do you catch up with your friends when you don't seem them several times a week?

In fact, the thing that has made Facebook such a phenomenon is not that _teens_ found it cool, but rather that the much larger older population found it useful. I would be willing to bet that teens don't even make up 10% of Facebook at this point in time. When adults stop posting and stop receiving notifications on Facebook, then Facebook has something to worry about. Until then, my money would be on teens gravitating back to Facebook as they get older, and being cool becomes less important than knowing that _all_ of your friends are contactable on Facebook.

<comment><USER5> Remember your Clay Christensen: The late majority follow the early adopters. In this case, this means where the teenagers move to, that is where the parents will eventually go. The writing has been on the wall for this for a few years now -- FB doesn't stand a chance to last out the decade.

<comment><USER4> Teenagers as a group are not trendsetters for other age groups, for example when did you ever see a Justin Bieber hairdo on anyone over the age of 17?

They are time rich and money poor, a situation that reverses as you get older. They live geographically close to most of their friends. This is mostly not true for adults, who tend to be time poor, wealthier than teenagers, and geographically separated from their friends. Because of this, looking to teenagers to understand what most people want from their social media does not seem like a particularly good idea to me.

<comment><USER6> _" when did you ever see a Justin Bieber hairdo on anyone over the age of 17?"_

Give it a few years...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Everyone seems concerned with teenagers fleeing facebook, but I've found that I have also been "fleeing" facebook. My time spent on the site has been diminishing—partly due to the fact that in my late 20s, so many of my friends are posting picture after picture of their children—and as my time spent on the site diminishes, I notice that stories I'd probably care have been squeezed out of the news feed, making the site less interesting and feeding into my distance.

I know I'll probably keep the account for reconnecting with old friends every few months or so, but I get the feeling that the way I use and think about facebook needs to shift for me to get any sort of value beyond occasionally checking in on people or requesting phone #'s when I happen to be in the same town.

<comment><USER8> "in my late 20s, so many of my friends are posting picture after picture of their children"

I'm older and I can't even imagine what it would be like if I had the amount of friends that younger people have and they all or even most posted pictures of their kids and every random event they attended. Even now with the amount that I do have (quite small by choice) it's to much.

Wait to those children of your friends start playing sports or are in school plays (I'm assuming by your age the children are quite young I guess.)

<comment><USER9> Facebook does a great job of filtering what it shows you.

I have lots of "friends" on Facebook, and once in a while I see a photo (usually of a major event) of a classmate I haven't seen in a long while and I didn't remember he was on my friends list.

My Facebook use is mostly to keep in touch with my family abroad, and we have a closed group. I usually don't post much to my broader "friends" list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > the granddaddy of all social networks—Facebook

Have people seriously forgotten what socialising on the internet was like before Facebook? There were social networks way before Facebook, and there will be other social networks after Facebook.

They might not be called "social networks" though, because just like the services themselves, the words we use to describe them change constantly as well. Culture changes constanty, after all.

<comment><USER11> How about the "not dead grandparent of all social networks"? Maybe Friendster and Six Degrees are the deceased great-grandparents, only seen in faded daguerreotypes.

<comment><USER12> It's more like... the social network. Everything else is in the perimeter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm curious; does anyone[1] experience a pressure to join a social network the same way I did in the earlier years of Facebook where all activities, conversations, and events were moved to that platform - and not using it rendered you a non-person?

There's the pressure of "all the cool kids use it", and then there's the ostracism that comes with not using the platform.

There's "traction", and then there's _" Facebook traction"_.

[1]: Outside countries like China, Japan, South Korea that might have their own social media exclusive to Asia.

<comment><USER14> Whatsapp. It is now a fundamental piece of communication in my country. Without it, you can barely communicate. Texting (SMS) is dead. Phone calls are too intimate, the minutes too expensive. Everyone has data connectivity due to their smartphones. I resisted for a very long time but at some point you will HAVE to get yourself into it. Especially when you get frustrated looks when people cannot find you in their Whatsapp contact list.

<comment> k-mcgrady I've noticed the same thing. I find it strange though. Most people I know have smart phones on contracts and most smartphones come with unlimited SMS. Still these people prefer Whatsapp and Viber. I drives me nuts as I'd rather not send me communications through yet another company.

<comment><USER15> But SMS is also sent through a company(ies)

<comment> k-mcgrady With Whatsapp I'm sending my messages using data that's already going through my phone company. In other words why not use SMS? By using Whatapp I'm just adding a second company to the mix that doesn't need to be there.

<comment><USER15> Mostly because the sms exchanges between companies are worse than using data to access an internet based messaging service. They have wacky standards support (Group MMS?) and wildly overcharge you for sending 144 characters.

<comment><USER6> Who _doesn 't_ have unlimited SMS?

I mean that seriously, nobody in any of my social circles uses whatsapp. I honestly don't have a solid grasp on who exactly their core market is.

<comment><USER16> Do you know many 13 - 16 year olds?

> I honestly don't have a solid grasp on who exactly their core market is.

I'm guessing it's whoever was using blackberry messenger.

<comment><USER6> > _" Do you know many 13 - 16 year olds?"_

Admittedly no, but aren't most children on their parent's cellphone plans?

I would expect the cash strapped ones to be in their early twenties, but I'm not seeing that in practice.

I suspect the value in whatsapp is in something other than limitations of SMS, but I can't say what.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My wife quit Facebook. It was her primary method of interacting with people, primary connection, so it was hard to decide to disconnect.

Facebook made her feel like shit.

She's had a bad job or two before, and in the evening I needed to go on an hour long walk with her to help unwind from her job. Facebook upset her at that level.

Since she quit Facebook, she's been happier, feels better and has been more focused on herself.

I can only imagine teenagers have it worse.

Full disclosure it could be worse for her because we lost our baby this year and everyone else is having kids.

</comment><comment><USER18> Kids aren't going to converge on a platform their parents use. End of story. That's why FB was so 'in' when it first started. literally no one over 21.

<comment><USER19> And that's really the last word on the subject. It's done growing and unless they do some major branching out it's probably as profitable as it will ever be. Which is going to unfortunately traumatize a whole bunch of stockholders and sink a lot of other innocent tech stocks but when we look back it's probably going to seem pretty obvious that Facebook wasn't ever going to be the next Google or even the next LinkedIn. It's audience is too fickle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> And now they're all on instagram instead... Yeah, that purchase makes a lot more sense doesn't it?

</comment><comment><USER21> Social media sites have a distinct finite lifespan. I've seen _many_ come and go, all peaking with the same sense of "this is taking over and will last forever". Facebook is showing the exact same cycle, facing total burnout within 5 years. This is a good time to cash out, and a good time to build the next virtual venue.

</comment><comment><USER22> These are reasons _I_ left Facebook. Well, all but "parents" anyway. I was a parent before Facebook happened.

</comment><comment><USER23> One really good reason for adults to leave Facebook is it has become an HR magnet.

</comment><comment><USER24> I personally have been using Facebook more because of the ways I've structured my feed, i.e, I no longer follow friends, but instead follow thought leaders, specific companies/brands and other information sources. For me, Facebook would be even more valuable if it did a better job of understand who I am, what I want to see and when I want to see it. This would then be further impressive if Facebook did a better job of showing me new information based on my expressed interests.

</comment><comment><USER25> I am not too sure about this narrative in general, but let's assume it's true that teens are leaving FB and not coming back. As "The Ad Contrarian" notes frequently in his blog, _all the people with money are over 50_. So, it actually might be awesome for FB that they have so many of those folks. Our culture is obsessed with young people and for some reason thinks that's where the money is, but it's not.

<comment> mkr-hn Young people used to drive purchasing decisions. That might still be the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> When an article's main source is the author's son, you know you're in for a treat.

</comment><comment><USER27> Facebook is pretty tiresome, for many of the reasons already beaten to death here. It's also nothing new, there were "social networks" long before MySpace, rewind to the 90s and there was the uber-cool MindVox, the less cool and old people version the Well. Nothing new here.

What strikes me is the simple fact that it's kind of useless. I don't need endless status updates of people I don't really know, if I need to find my friends or share something with them, there's this new thing called a smartphone, it has my Contacts, I can share whatever I want with them and not spend my time staring at endless scrolling ads and the flotsam of people's lives.

</comment><comment><USER28> Everybody short FB now! On a more serious note - I can sense a trend rising in FB bashing, someone with better access than mine should check whether the investment banks and hedge funds are shorting FB in large volumes. This is the problem with public companies - there is always the stock market in the background and you can never tell whether bad news are true or just ordered by the shorting side.

</comment><comment><USER29>
        one of his biggest issues with Facebook is that "it's normal to be friends with people you don't know."

There was a time when the rules stated that you had to actually know the people on your friends list in real life... This was before FB went commercial...

This is one of the reasons why I deleted my FB account.

</comment><comment><USER30> > Teenagers, not surprisingly, are hip to corporate exploitation.

That's why they use Pintrest instead!

</comment><comment><USER31> About two years ago I overheard some preteen kids talking about them leaving Facebook when their parents joined and added them as friends. I'm guessing they don't want their parents too much involved in their social life.

</comment><comment><USER32> No offense, but the only people who care if Facebook is cool or not are other teenagers. They also think eating dinner with the family at 6 is not cool, honestly who cares.

<comment><USER33> No offense, but avoid a career in marketing.

<comment><USER32> I will avoid a career in maketing the targets tenagers with the same zeal that I would avoid the plague.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think the end of the article summed it up pretty well: the signal to noise ratio dropped too low. (even if teens wouldn't use the term signal to noise)

</comment><comment><USER35> When people leave Facebook, where do they go?

Is there a different social network that doesn't have these problems?

<comment><USER36> "When people leave Facebook, where do they go?"

Out?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> And so it begins ...

<comment><USER5> You're downvoted? Really? I expected more from HN.

Teenagers are the demographic that started FB. Everyone followed them. If they leave, everyone will eventually follow. It's nothing personal; it's just how this stuff works.

I recommend you read The Innovator's Dilemma by Clay Christensen which explains it all quite nicely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Says Yahoo!?!?

<comment><USER39> Watch out for ad hominem attacks here, they don't fit with the HN vibe. That being said, I get your point. Reading the article I thought it ridiculous to say tweens are leaving for Instagram, which is owned by Facebook (how do you leave a company but not leave a company?), and Tumblr, which is a Yahoo service.

I'm not entirely sure the author's sample size is large enough, either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This should not be on the front page. I can only assume that because the readership wants facebook to go down, they're happy to uplift any story that suggests that they are.

Look at this articles sources.

>"... you don't want their mom to yell at you," my 15-year-old son told me.

>My 17-year-old daughter told me about a friend with an aunt who routinely lurks around her niece's Facebook account.

>one of my daughter's high-school friends explained.

>or prompts to answer "questions about me." Renaud, a 19-year-old Facebook user at McGill University in Montreal (ok this one is reasonable)

>one of my son's friends emailed

>another of my daughter's friends complained.

I've got some problems with this article as well

1\. Parents. this was clearly written by an isolated one.

2\. Too much pointless stuff.

3\. Too many ads. It's like this was designed specifically so people would be click baited.

4\. It's Vapid. As if there is no substance to this article at all.

5\. Fake friends. (this one is a guess)

<comment><USER41> The secret, powerful cabal that decides which stories end up on the front page of Hacker News is going to be after you for exposing this. Quick! Run for safety! I'll hold them off as long as I can!

<comment><USER40> Interesting. You actually think this is worth material for HN?

Personally I felt bad about that comment, because it was shooting fish in a barrel, but it seems those fish needed to be shot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This is actually a big deal for Facebook. 20 years ago, no one would have really cared WHAT teenagers considered "hip". The reason was, teenagers had next to zero buying power. Teenagers were trying to act like "grownups". Now, take a look at any of your teenager friends/family. They're standing there in a mirror with a brand new iPhone and a Macbook Pro in the background. Now look at a picture with their moms and/or dads. Notice that much of the time, the adults are trying to dress like the kids. The kids now represent an enormous potential as the adults are just dying to hold on to their youth. For now it's wise for any company that wants to turn a huge impulse profit to pay attention to what the fickle teen generation is currently considering cool. Vine is a perfect example.

<comment><USER43> 20 years ago was 1993. Marketing obsession with teenagers predates 1993 by decades, and with good reason--brand impressions created by age 16 can last for life.

In earlier, healthier economic times, teenagers actually had buying power too because they could work minimum wage jobs without having to pay bills.

<comment><USER44> I was going to say something similar. The poster sounds like a young one, assuming things were different before he was born. Not so. For example, back in the 60's muscle cars were hugely important for auto makers and they were largely an object of teen lust. High schoolers and their cars used to be really important; young people's love affair with cars has waned in last couple decades. And teenagers have determined large amounts of adult (i.e, their parents) spending for long time, which has made them target of advertisers for just as long.

<comment><USER45> Marketing to teenagers definitely goes back decades, but not forever. I believe it is very much a post-WWII phenomenon.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Short Term Gimmicks are Killing the Country: Three Policy Fixes We Can Do Now - <AUTHOR> http://www.blindreason.org/2010/01/short-term-gimmicks-are-killing-country_25.html

<comment><USER2> So instead of the failed short-term gimmicks, we just have to try the author's short-term gimmicks?

<comment><USER3> Ah, but these are _long-term_ short-term gimmicks.

The first two, Energy independence and Cut Spending in a simplistic way, have been gimmicks since at least President Jimmy Carter in the late '70s. Modernize Infrastructure is also old, but I can't remember when it became a big ongoing theme like the first two.</comment></comment>


Owncloud has been forked into Nextcloud - <AUTHOR> https://nextcloud.com/about/ <comment><USER2> Let me tell you an anecdote about Owncloud. Once upon a time, I hosted an Owncloud instance for my family. I had a raid 5 system setup on an old Xserve with around 10 TB of usable space. I was really into learning about encryption at the time, so I figured it would be cool to encrypt all my families files on the server. I made sure that all my family members were properly educated about not forgetting their password, and then enabled the Encryption App[0] by following a tutorial. Everything went smoothly for about 6 months until I was updating Owncloud with a minor version upgrade, and then BAM; nobody (myself included) could decrypt any data on the server.

I posted around about it, trying to figure it, ripped apart the source code to the point where I found that manually decrypting the data was resulting in gibberish. All my backups were the encrypted data, so those didn't really help either.

I still don't know what happened to this day, but I've been eternally wary of personal fileservers ever since.

[0] [https://owncloud.org/blog/how-owncloud-uses-encryption-to- pr...](https://owncloud.org/blog/how-owncloud-uses-encryption-to-protect-your- data/)

<comment><USER3> I don't mean to belittle the severity of the bug you encountered -- but the root-cause of your problem was a lack of a backup. A large number of issues, some of them software bugs, many of them not, could lead to data loss.

It that vein, too, your RAID-5 system is/was a disaster waiting to happen, especially when you don't have a backup: [http://www.zdnet.com/article/raidfail-dont-use-raid-5-on- sma...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/raidfail-dont-use-raid-5-on-small- arrays/)

<comment><USER2> Do you back up the unencrypted data though? Regardless of the viability of the raid 5 system, the raid 5 wasn't what failed. It was the encryption.

It wouldn't have even been possible to backup the encrypted data without getting all my family members passwords too.

<comment><USER4> >>> Everything went smoothly for about 6 months until I was updating Owncloud with a minor version upgrade, and then BAM; nobody (myself included) could decrypt any data on the server.

> Do you back up the unencrypted data though? Regardless of the viability of > the raid 5 system, the raid 5 wasn't what failed. It was the encryption.

> It wouldn't have even been possible to backup the encrypted data without > getting all my family members passwords too.

You could have backed up the encrypted data (+owncloud metadata) in its encrypted form. Then, when you ran into the bug that corrupted the main copy of the encrypted data, you could have restored the old backup of the encrypted data and reverted to the last working version of Owncloud to access your data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like how OwnCloud was characterized on Bad Voltage (paraphrasing here): "It's as if someone a few years ago wrote down their definition of cloud and sent it back in time to 1996. Then a bunch of PHP developers in 1996 implemented it knowing nothing about what they were doing and then sent the code back to present day."

That's not to say I don't appreciate the fact that ownCloud exists, but I find it much harder to use, and the fact that it's written in PHP makes me not want to dig into it to fix.

<comment><USER6> Indeed I've been waiting for something like Owncloud for Django or Flask or something Pythonesque for a while.

I'd join in if there were a better Pythonista to start it than myself.

<comment><USER7> I actually wish that Owncloud would focus on file syncing and not on apps. Their app API feels like the wrong level of abstraction, more like you're building wordpress plugins than actual apps. I appreciate that it makes it easy for devs to get started, but can result in some terrible security holes and messy APIs. Something like Sandstorm is a much better way to separate apps and content and prevent security issues.

Owncloud's syncing clients for mac/win/linux are descended from mirall and are pretty good. I used Owncloud server for a while then built myself a lightweight replacement in node that uses the same sync API. (webdav)

<comment><USER5> I have been hearing good things about SyncThing, though it lacks an iOS client.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _You should have full control over your data. We help you achieve that: a > safe home for all your data. Secure, under your control and developed in an > open, transparent and trustworthy way. We are Nextcloud._

Why are we not in full control over our data with ownCloud anymore? What _really_ changed that made the founder and top contributors leave ownCloud?

<comment><USER9> That is on everyone's mind, my guess would be that somehow some party within ownCloud was pushing for a bigger separation of features between the FOSS core and the enterprise product. This goes against the founders ideals and they left. Similar to OpenOffice vs LibreOffice, in fact I was personally expecting this to happen and was betting on the name LibreCloud ;)

<comment><USER10> That would be my guess too. There was an oblique reference to this a while back in the blog post by ownCloud's founder when he announced his departure : [http://karlitschek.de/2016/04/big-changes-i-am-leaving- owncl...](http://karlitschek.de/2016/04/big-changes-i-am-leaving-owncloud-inc- today/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> stp-ip 9 of the top 10 contributors in addition to the project founder and the lead security engineer are pushing this effort. Good foundation to fork and support users.

Let's hope this brings the transparency, openness and community awareness owncloud/nextcloud always needed.

<comment><USER11> Why would they when they were (apparently) 90% of OwnCloud in the first place. What stopped them being open in the first place?

<comment> stp-ip They were 90% of the top contributors. The company had a lot more sales people. The devs don't control decisions of the company. Only the code and that's why I assume there was this fork.

<comment><USER11> Presumably they did control the company when they started. I don't know of a time when this complaint wasn't leveled against OwnCloud.

<comment> stp-ip Control can be taken and views/visions can be different. That's the great thing about open source. The community or even other participants can fork and continue their own vision. Projects shouldn't make a habit out of it so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It would be interesting to hear a bit more background for this forking. What does Nextcloud try to achieve that was not possible within the ownCloud project? Was this a clash of personalities as one of the ownCloud founders is among those jumping the ship?

<comment><USER13> [http://blog.jospoortvliet.com/2016/06/nextcloud-is- replacing...](http://blog.jospoortvliet.com/2016/06/nextcloud-is-replacing- owncloud.html)

>'why' is the question everybody has and I hope you understand I don't want to talk too much about that

Grow up, maybe, Jos?

This sounds to me like the usual and continuous splits inside OSS communities, but Jesus, I do miss the days when you had a detailed explanation as soon as somebody leaked the IRC logs!

<comment><USER14> You don't talk negative about other people, especially if you worked with them for a long time, and especially when it's not a matter of "they hid bodies of people they killed" but mere differences in opinion about how to do business. So no, this dirty laundry should _not_ be aired in public.

<comment><USER15> On the other hand, that specific thing is the entire reason for the fork existing, its drive and motivation.

It could be anything. "We feel own-cloud isn't libre enough", "We don't feel this direction is profitable", "We feel owncloud was too open", "I personally disliked one of the people there any wanted to sink the ship", etc etc (note: I am being a bit tongue in cheek here)

If its a reason I agree with, then migration makes sense, if its a reason I don't agree with, then obviously migration might not be a good idea. But no one knows what the driving motivation of nextcloud is! So its a bit more worry-causing then reassuring

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I used OwnCloud for a while and never had any problems with it, but it seemed like overkill for my use. I didn't have multiple users and I wasn't using it to share files with anyone -- just syncing files between my own devices.

I started using Sandstorm[0] for my personal server, and there's an app for it called Davros[1], which implements the OwnCloud protocol. It doesn't really do a good job of advertising that fact (not even mentioned in its description), but you can use the OwnCloud clients with Davros. It's been satisfying my file-syncing needs with no problems. Just be aware that it lacks versioning.

I'm excited to see what's coming for NextCloud, though.

[0] [https://sandstorm.io](https://sandstorm.io) [1] [https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/8aspz4sfjnp8u89000mh2v1xrdyx97...](https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/8aspz4sfjnp8u89000mh2v1xrdyx97ytn8hq71mdzv4p4d8n0n3h)

<comment><USER17> It's not an "owncloud protocol"... It's called WebDAV and it's a web standard[0], like HTTP.

[0][https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4918](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4918)

There are literally 100s and 100s of these tools... Nothing is special about OwnCloud, or Sandstorm, in this case, to support interoperability.

It's pretty obvious, IMO, that it supports WebDAV since "dav" is right there in the name.

<comment><USER18> To be fair, in order to work with the ownCloud client, Davros had to implement a few ownCloud-specific extensions. But basically, yes, it's WebDAV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I feel sad for ownCloud and Nextcloud. ownCloud has a brand and this fork dilutes it. It will be on everyone's mind especially since the founder has left to create a competitor. For Nextcloud, unless they can explicitly state why this fork exists, it's hard to side with them. What kind of ideological differences are we talking about? Sure, you don't need to throw around personal accusations or finger point but it would help to know what motivated this.

On a related note, this is a risk which many platform companies take. If you opensource your project completely, then anyone can fork it and take it ahead if the forker is a big or well known person. I think we got really lucky with iojs and node.

<comment><USER20> It's not a »risk which was taken«. ownCloud started out as a pure open source project and the company was formed later.

Having it under a free software license / open source is exactly so that the community can step in when there is a problem with the company.

Disclaimer: I am one of the people who left ownCloud for Nextcloud. Also one of the first contributors to the project when it was still very young, and the company didn't exist yet.

<comment><USER19> Yes, the risk was taken when the company was formed. I didn't mean that it was taken after the company was formed.

I am a long time ownCloud use. iirc, it was even announced on planetkde first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Boom. #Owncloud shutters after #Nextcloud announces itself. VC panic galore? Open wins! [https://owncloud.com/owncloud-statement-concerning- formation...](https://owncloud.com/owncloud-statement-concerning-formation- nextcloud-frank-karlitschek/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Having contributed a tiny bit to ownCloud, I enjoyed working with the people that now left to start Nextcloud. I think they were the more technical minded people on the team at ownCloud, compared to the sales persons of which there seem to be an awful lot.

Good luck!

<comment><USER20> Thank you, very cool to hear! :)

You are of course very welcome to contribute again – just check [https://github.com/nextcloud](https://github.com/nextcloud) or join us in IRC #nextcloud or #nextcloud-dev (freenode).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> A year ago I reviewed most of the popular "Self-hosted 'Cloud'" packages and found they all had pretty ugly history (security vulnerabilities in particular) and the technologies used didn't inspire confidence in the developers (when data security and integrity are on the table, PHP developers wouldn't be my first choice, nor any choice).

Are there any decent tools out there today or is it still the same situation?

<comment><USER23> Good questions! Note, that I'm affilated with Nextcloud so obviously a bit biased.

Only because a project is very transparent about security vulnerabilities does not necessarily mean it's inherently insecure. In fact, at ownCloud we found all critical vulnerabilities ourself and also run a successful bug bounty program. (for Nextcloud we are also considering one)

Check [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11821854](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11821854) for more insights.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have been using Seafile for 2 years now and I'm very happy with it.

<comment><USER25> While Seafile seems to work, the developers have been kinda sloppy both with licensing[1] and security[2]. The answers on both issues really make me question their integrity and ability to deliver a secure piece of software.

[1] [https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/issues/666](https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/issues/666)

[2] [https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/issues/350](https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/issues/350)

<comment><USER26> OwnCloud actually has security issues similar to what you cited in the second link. Their security track record isn't spectacular either.

[https://blog.hboeck.de/archives/880-Pwncloud-bad-crypto- in-t...](https://blog.hboeck.de/archives/880-Pwncloud-bad-crypto-in-the- Owncloud-encryption-module.html)

<comment><USER23> I'd like to point you to [https://statuscode.ch/2015/09/ownCloud-security- development-...](https://statuscode.ch/2015/09/ownCloud-security-development- over-the-years/) and make you aware of [https://seacloud.cc/group/3/wiki/security- records.md](https://seacloud.cc/group/3/wiki/security-records.md) and you should probably consider who reported the last critical vulnerability.

Only because a project is serious about actually publishing vulnerability data does not make it necessarily more insecure (or secure).

<comment><USER26> I agree. Just pointing out that the specific problem the above poster mentioned as a reason to choose OwnCloud also is similarly true of OwnCloud.

[https://blog.hboeck.de/archives/880-Pwncloud-bad-crypto- in-t...](https://blog.hboeck.de/archives/880-Pwncloud-bad-crypto-in-the- Owncloud-encryption-module.html)

<comment><USER23> The impact is a different one though. In that scenario pointed by Hanno somebody needs to have access to the storage which already requires some kind of previous gained access. What could be done by an attacker then is to infect EXE files or so.

In the case of Seafile one could simply change passwords of any user etc.

But yes, crypto is hard and I agree that the way we did it at ownCloud is far away from the best way. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This article sounds like someone in OwnCloud wanted to build a box and not a platform: [http://blog.jospoortvliet.com/2016/06/nextcloud-is- replacing...](http://blog.jospoortvliet.com/2016/06/nextcloud-is-replacing- owncloud.html)

Maybe NextCLoud is skunkworks: [http://mashable.com/2016/05/08/silicon-valley- recap-skunkwor...](http://mashable.com/2016/05/08/silicon-valley-recap- skunkworks/#YtS2jwIrKsq1)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm curious to hear if Nextcloud is going to be rewriting the iOS mobile client from scratch, since it's GPL and Owncloud owns the copyrights so is the only one who can relicense for Apple.

<comment><USER20> Most likely this is what needs to happen sooner or later. For now the existing iOS app can be used of course since it can connect to any ownCloud/Nextcloud server. Or any WebDAV app, for that matter cause we support open standards.

We will make sure though that this problem does not arise again since there will be a Nextcloud foundation which is in full control of the copyrights.

Disclaimer: I am the former designer of ownCloud and moved on to Nextcloud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've been using ownCloud for quite some time now with a handful of users and many clients across Windows, Android, Linux, and OS X without any issues. This is running in a FreeBSD jail.

I too wish it wasn't written in PHP as I'd be inclined to add features, but I haven't had any of the issues mentioned in this thread.

What is the reasoning behind this new fork again?

</comment><comment><USER29> Yeah, no shit! This is no surprise to me whatsoever. Owncloud has been stuck in a rut for a _long_ time! I'm assuming that taking 90% of the top contributors means they'll still be taking along a hefty amount of the politics, but maybe with a fresh outlook this project will become competitive again.

</comment><comment><USER30> Owncloud is NOT a backup solution, it is a remote access/sharing solution. At least one client syncing to an account on the Owncloud server should have an incremental backup solution. My personal setup is that my OSX clients backup to a Time Machine. Easy peasy. If I have a server-side failure, I keep motoring on, albeit without remote access/sharing until I get the server fixed. If I have a client-side failure, I can restore to a prior moment in time off the Time Machine or sync to a new client off of Owncloud depending on the nature of the failure.

</comment><comment><USER31> There's a related post at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11825815](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11825815).

</comment><comment><USER32> Reminds me of [http://lxr.free- electrons.com/source/Documentation/virtual/u...](http://lxr.free- electrons.com/source/Documentation/virtual/uml/UserModeLinux-HOWTO.txt)

</comment><comment><USER33> I implemented Owncloud in my workplace, but we had one problem that made us uninstall it and create our own solution in Dart, the problem was that when you share a file it doesn't preserve the file path extructure and that was very important for us.

<comment><USER34> extructure? why is that important?

<comment><USER33> *structure, becuase every folder has meaning, if they share the document "law_2016.pdf" that is in the folder "/Enterprise_1/documents/laws/info" the folder structure has information about the context of the file in this case, they now is a document of law of the Enterprise 1.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Seems like the code will be here: [https://github.com/nextcloud/server](https://github.com/nextcloud/server) (right now there's only an empty readme, committed 9h ago)

</comment><comment><USER36> After read the announcement I still can not figure out the reason to fork? I tried owncloud and found it uses a lot memory and then gave up on that.

</comment><comment><USER37> As an Open source project, how should you handle such a situation?</comment>


Things I want to do with NFC on my smart phone - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnet.com/8301-17918_1-57568998-85/6-things-i-want-to-do-with-nfc-smartphones-unlocked/ <comment><USER2> Re #1 - NFC doesn't have enough bandwidth for large file transfers, that's why a secondary mechanism like Bluetooth is used.

Sony came out with TransferJet for NFC-like fast transfers but so far it hasn't gotten traction.</comment>


Switch from Medium to your own blog automatically in minutes - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mathieudutour/medium-to-own-blog#medium-to-own-blog <comment><USER2> Interesting to see this again. This has been on the front page 3 days ago.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20060549](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20060549)

<comment><USER3> Because it is so good it should be posted again

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's easy to make a blog. It's very difficult to match the SEO results and network effect of Medium.

If you want people to see what you write, and you aren't already famous, Medium will put your content in front of more people than a self-run blog.

That is Medium's real competitive edge. It is hard to get your blog noticed. If you want to beat Medium, you need to beat them at that.

<comment><USER5> Are there many people who go to medium directly? I've only ever gone there because someone's linked to a post here or on Reddit. Which is something you could do for your own blog's post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Show HN discussion on this from 2 days back : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20060549](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20060549)

</comment><comment><USER7> Is adding new posts easy?

<comment><USER8> As with most static site generators, it's generally just a markdown file with some frontmatter metadata, but that's it.</comment></comment>


Russia will cut off US access to the International Space Station - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/13/5714462/russia-will-cut-off-us-access-to-the-international-space-station-over

<comment><USER2> Symbolic move only.

The USA wants to operate aboard ISS until 2024. They're currently contracted to use Soyuz for astronaut transfers until 2020. Russia is refusing to renew the contract past 2020.

However, Dragon version 2.0 should be flying by 2015 and crew-rated by 2017, and Boeing's CST-100 is due to fly unmanned in 2017 and possibly manned before the end of that year.

So the USA will have alternative ways of sending astronauts up to the ISS before the Russian embargo kicks in.</comment>


An American Citizen Was Forcibly Drafted Into the South Korean Army (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.allkpop.com/forum/threads/how-one-american-citizen-was-forcibly-drafted-into-the-south-korean-army.60174/ <comment><USER2> Unfortunate sequence of events: he turned out to be a Korean citizen which was the cause.

As such I really don't understand the title of the post. The fact he was an American citizen had nothing to do with it. He might as well have been Egyptian, Irish or Chinese and it wouldn't have changed anything.

<comment><USER3> People, even dual citizens, are often under the mistaken impression that having another citizenship is a "get out of jail free" card for the obligations of the other one. This is very much not the case.

<comment><USER4> In many cases it is, so long as you stay away from the other jurisdiction.

In this case, though, it's not that he had such an impression. It's that he didn't _know_ he was a Korean citizen.

If draft is a social contract, what do you call a contract where one of the parties never consented to it and wasn't even aware that someone signed them up without their consent, and then the other party tries to enforce it?

<comment><USER2> Citizenship is not about consent. There might be situations where you can out of yours, but I don't think that means that everyone else consents. That said I don't agree with how it works.

<comment><USER4> Citizenship is at least opt-out in general. Some countries don't let you do it at all, and most make it complicated and expensive, but still. For adults, that's an option if you're unhappy with taxes, laws etc.

But if you're born a citizen in a country with conscription, then you're underage - and thus unable to opt-out on your own, even if you could somehow afford it - until you're 18. And then they hand you the summons.

<comment><USER5> > Citizenship is at least opt-out in general.

Only if you're able to obtain another citizenship. I don't think any country will allow renunciation if it leaves you stateless.

<comment><USER4> Most countries don't, but some do; USA is one of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have to wonder if there's something being left out of this article. My family was in very similar situations. Our family emigrated to the US from S. Korea. My little brother was in almost exactly the same situation as the guy in the article. He was born in the US and is a US citizen. My grandfather, in a fit of misplaced patriotism, registered my brother as being born in Korea so he could have Korean citizenship. Upon turning 18, the S.Korean military, of course, sent a draft notice. All it took to clear things up was for my brother to send proof of US birth and US citizenship. Problem solved, no big deal.

<comment><USER7> > sent a draft notice

Sent it where? They actually had your little brother's address in the U.s.?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Boris Johnson, the British politician, was born in New York to British parents. When years later he tried to change planes in Florida en route to Mexico they would not let him into the USA without an American passport, his UK one was no good if he was born in the USA. So he renounced his USA citizenship, which he never knew he had, at which point they demanded his tax returns for his life, including a large chunk of the capital gains money he made selling a house in England. He had to pay up too despite never having had any connection with the USA except his birth. My point is not that this stuff is right but that it does happen, even in the USA.

Mysteriously we are all democracies yet still prisoners of our governments and unable to free ourselves?

<comment><USER9> So how do we use Bitcoin to fix this?

<comment><USER10> with machine learning of course

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > _" It was only when Chun went to apply for a visa open to ethnic Korean > foreigners that he discovered he was a South Korean citizen."_

The above paragraph isn't very clear, but it implies that Chun was aware of his Korean citizenship before he flew into Korea? In fact, he consciously benefited from his Korean citizenship, by not go through the visa process? If that's the case, it would be eminently reasonable from the Koreans' perspective, that he should perform the obligations associated with citizenship. If I knew that I was a citizen of a country that has mandatory military service, I would really think twice before flying there.

</comment><comment><USER12> One of my best friends, the best man at my wedding, nearly had this happen to him. He was born and raised in Australia but had dual citizenship with Denmark. During a gap year after school before university, he travelled to Denmark for 12 months. He was surprised to find that he was being conscripted but managed to avoid this due to not being fluent in Danish. It seems that if this had of happened in South Korea then he would have been out of luck.

<comment> maze-le At least in Denmark you have the possibility to get over the border to germany or sweden and travel back -- trying to handle that matter from the Danish consulate in Australia. In South Korea, the only border is towards North Korea...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I knew a Canadian who managed to get drafted into the US military, for the Korean war I think, because he had a summer job as a young man in the US, and someone came in and said everyone needed to sign up for the draft so he did with everyone else. And he got drafted. Apparently after he went through boot camp, someone found out and I guess they were embarrassed, they didn't send him to war but they did keep him in the service! They kept him stateside for his commitment. And he didn't even get US citizenship out of it. Of course it never should have happened, but I made a mental note that this is the result of not taking bureaucracy seriously and just going with the flow.

</comment><comment><USER14> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXyn4ZOcZ54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXyn4ZOcZ54)

audio interview

</comment><comment><USER15> "American citizen" \-- so what? Dual citizenship is a thing. So is triple.

"Forcibly conscripted" \-- as opposed to voluntary conscription?

<comment><USER16> It's a bit more voluntary if they say "show up at X in Y days" instead of "you're coming with us".

<comment><USER15> Is it? I guess it depends on if at Y+1 days there's a warrant and between now and now+Y your passport at borders will trigger alarms and arrest.</comment></comment></comment>


Introducing OOM reporting: a new dimension to app quality - <AUTHOR> https://crashlytics.com/blog/introducing-oom-reporting <comment><USER2> HockeyApp has had this for quite some time - [https://support.hockeyapp.net/discussions/problems/45229-tra...](https://support.hockeyapp.net/discussions/problems/45229-tracking- fooms-booms)

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder what's the probability of this OOM event to be an actual OOM event. At least they could've told how often they're correct</comment>


How to Download a List of All Registered Domain Names - <AUTHOR> http://jordan-wright.com/blog/2015/09/30/how-to-download-a-list-of-all-registered-domain-names/ <comment><USER2> A couple of months ago I processed all metadata from the Common Crawl project for all indexed domain names. This was about 10TB of metadata and resulted in 26 million domain names. EC2 costs were only about 10$ to process this. If anyone is interested, let me know.

edit: available as torrent here: [https://all- certificates.s3.amazonaws.com/domainnames.gz?tor...](https://all- certificates.s3.amazonaws.com/domainnames.gz?torrent)

<comment><USER2> This was a fun Saturday afternoon project to do actually. I spawned a single c4.8xlarge (10 Gbit) instance in US-EAST-1 (next to where the Common Crawl Public Data Set lives in S3) and downloaded 10TB spread over 33k files in +/\- 30 simultaneous 'curl | ungzip | grep whatever-the-common-crawl-url-prefix- was' pipelines and got a solid 5Gbit transfer speed.

The bottleneck was userland CPU, so probably the gzip processes. Took about 5 hours. Cutting of the path and piping through sort and uniq took another hour or so.

The only costs were the price/hour of running the EC2 instance. Network costs were 0 as you're only transferring data to your instance.

<comment><USER3> In my experience, and I suppose depending on the data, I've found that grep is often the bottleneck for data pipeline tasks like you describe. The silver searcher ([https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher](https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher)) is, in my experience, about 10x faster than grep for tasks like pulling out fields from json files. It's changed my life.

pv (pipe viewer, [http://www.ivarch.com/programs/pv.shtml](http://www.ivarch.com/programs/pv.shtml)) and top are pretty handy to measure this kind of thing. You should be able to see exactly which process is using how much CPU, and what your throughput is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A warning about parsing zone files... the grammar is deceptively tricky.

While TLD registries will _probably_ provide you with files in a sane subset[0] of that specified in RFC 1035, there are a number of things that will _NOT_ work in general:

\- Splitting the file in to lines (paren-blocks and quoted strings can span lines, strings can contain ';' etc).

\- Splitting the file on whitespace (it's significant in column 1 and inside strings)

\- Applying a regex (you'll need lookahead for conditional matching and it'll get ugly fast)

Don't go down the road of assuming it's a simple delimited file.

A few references:

[https://www.nlnetlabs.nl/projects/nsd/documentation.html](https://www.nlnetlabs.nl/projects/nsd/documentation.html)

[http://www.verycomputer.com/96_5ad11cc47053d8b0_1.htm](http://www.verycomputer.com/96_5ad11cc47053d8b0_1.htm)

[0] See page 9 of [https://archive.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/zfa- strategy-p...](https://archive.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/zfa-strategy- paper-12may10-en.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Yep.

I use the BIND tool named-compilezone to canonicalize zone files, which allows me to apply simple regex parsing, because I can assume one record per line, all fields present, and no abbreviated names. Main disadvantage is it is not very fast.

<comment><USER4> It's probably slow because by default it does a bunch of DNS queries to foreign zones to see if your NS records etc are good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I had been downloading the zone file for .PK domains on daily bases until they blocked the zone transfers. Based on comparison of these daily zone files I managed to publish the statistics [1] and also broke the news about hacked .PK domains [2] which was picked up by all leading tech blogs and news agencies.

Currently, I cannot find a way to get the zone file even by officially requesting the registry manager.

[1]: [https://www.i.com.pk/pknic-domain-registration- statistics/](https://www.i.com.pk/pknic-domain-registration-statistics/)

[2]: [https://www.i.com.pk/110-pk-domains-managed-by- markmonitor-g...](https://www.i.com.pk/110-pk-domains-managed-by-markmonitor- got-hacked-by-turkish-hackers/)

</comment><comment><USER7> What if someone were to maintain an unofficial list with one domain per line, freely available as a daily torrent or served directly? Would there be a rights problem with mirroring and filtering ICANN data?

<comment><USER8> A lot of tlds don't provide zone files unless you are a registrar. They would probably not be happy if someone put those out to the pubic. For com and the likes they would probably not care as much.

The best public list of domains I have found is the Project Sonar DNS (ANY) scans. I don't know how they do it, but their scans are pretty complete, at least for.dk domains, which are the ones I use.

[https://scans.io/study/sonar.fdns](https://scans.io/study/sonar.fdns)

<comment><USER9> It's quite slow to download from that site, I guess there are a lot of HN readers consuming their bandwidth :)

<comment><USER8> Their download speeds are often bad sadly, they really should provide a torrent. But it's free and they have some really interesting datasets, so it's worth the wait.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> FWIW, a TLD zone file does not contain every registered domain name, just those with DNS records. There is typically a good amount of domain names registered but without records, for reasons such as reserved names, malicious content takedowns, etc.

<comment><USER11> Exactly. The title "How to Download a List of All Registered Domain Names" is not correct.

For example in .com .net if a registrar puts a domain "on hold" that pulls it from the zone file. As such it will not appear in any zone file download. This is in fact a way for a company to keep a domain under wraps. As such:

register domain name (in .com )

pull the name servers

The name won't be in any zone file. And will be off the radar until it has nameservers or until someone guesses to see if it's been registered.

(Note other registries work differently (or the same) the above is specific to .com and .net)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Now someone just needs to train an NN to recognize botnets and spam domains.

<comment><USER13> _cough_ [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10352001](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10352001) _cough_

we're in the process of getting all the zone files we can to reduce the amount of DNS requests we have to do, but the real kicker is whois databases, for example AFNIC asks for 10K€ to get access to a copy of the database...

<comment><USER12> Oh I missed that. You're doing good work there!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting, thanks for the pointer.

I've wondered about this previously as I run my own blacklists for $work's mail servers, thinking about how I could slightly "penalize" brand new domain names and such, correlating "spammy" domains with certain nameservers and such.

<comment><USER15> There's a DNSBL for that:

[http://support-intelligence.com/dob/](http://support-intelligence.com/dob/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This list would be useful for my attempt for a list of parked/squatted domains..

</comment><comment><USER17> would it be easier to download a list of available domains?

<comment><USER18> No. The list of available domains is the list of all possible domains less the list of registered domains. The list of registered domains is vastly smaller than the list of possible domains. The list of available domains would mostly consist of junk nobody would be interested in.

</comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell What about CCTLDs?

<comment><USER19> They available from a third party source such as [http://domains- index.com/](http://domains-index.com/)

<comment> mike-cardwell Yeah. My point was, he wrote an article titled "How to Download a List of All Registered Domain Names", and then didn't even mention the existence of cctlds. Which is like writing an article titled "How to learn how to speak every language", and then pretending there are only 10 languages in existence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think its sad how closed this data is.

<comment><USER18> There are very good reasons for this data being closed, not least of which is that allowing zone transfer by arbitrary individuals is an excellent way of allowing your DNS server to be DOS'd.

<comment><USER20> How is that achieved with read only access to the list of registered domains?

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure what you mean. Do you know what a zone transfer is? If you wanted to get a list of the domains and records published in a nameserver, you would perform a zone transfer. Because that can amount to quite a bit of information being transferred, if a nameserver allows unrestricted zone transfers, that's a vector for a denial of service attack against that nameserver.

If you're a domain registry, your zone files are _huge_. Allowing arbitrary zone transfers could potentially put massive sustained strain on their DNS infrastructure. And thus because only a very small number of nameservers _really_ need to be able to perform zone transfers against their nameservers, they're better off locking down the ability.

If you're running your own nameservers, then it's still worth locking down zone transfers for similar reasons. At the very least, it gives you a degree of defence in depth as you're giving attackers less of an opportunity to gather information on the structure of your network. If they could simply do a zone transfer to find out all the names in a given zone, then they don't have to do more costly brute force enumeration to guess at the hosts in the zone.

Take a read of this for why, if you run your own nameservers, you shouldn't allow arbitrary zone transfers: [http://www.iodigitalsec.com/dns-zone- transfer-axfr-vulnerabi...](http://www.iodigitalsec.com/dns-zone-transfer- axfr-vulnerability/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What is Instacart really charging?  the breakdown - <AUTHOR> https://np.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/5xj47l/ever_what_instacart_is_really_charging_you_in/ <comment><USER2> Instacart and some of these other apps charge a LOT of money, so they go to pretty great lengths to hide the amount they are actually charging. Instacart is being especially clever by raising the price of the item then charging an additional service fee and delivery fee with, apparently, surge pricing. It also isn't clear how much of any of this goes to the actual person doing the work, so you still need to tip around 20%.

For me, this isn't just about whether it is "worth it" to not have to shop for groceries, but also whether there is a much cheaper option available through either your grocery store or a non-Instacart personal shopper.

It boggles my mind that people are paying this much for the privilege of being able to use an app rather than having to interact a bit more with an actual human being.

<comment><USER3> Several of my friends have raved about Instacart recently, saying the convenience and time savings are well worth the meager delivery fees. Normally I'm not that into such services. However, I desperately needed groceries yesterday, but I was feeling sick and didn't want to get out of the house. So I decided to give it a try.

I got on the site as a first-time user and entered my zip code. From a list of stores around the area, I pointed it to a grocery store in my neighborhood. Then I started searching for items.

When I saw the prices on the Instacart list, I did a double-take. Turns out there _is_ a margin, and it is _at least_ 20%, if not much more. The reason I noticed this is because I shop at that store every week and am very familiar with the prices of the items I was browsing. Keep in mind I was browsing around 11 am, with a delivery window of 2-3pm, so it wasn't (or shouldn't have been) subject to surge pricing either.

And like you say, the exact margin is hidden, and even the fact that they do have a margin isn't explicitly stated anywhere that I could see. So if I wasn't familiar with the prices at that specific store, I may have just gone with it.

This lack of transparency (and in fact I can go one step further and claim it is purposeful obfuscation) immediately eliminated all my trust in Instacart. I closed the window without completing my order. I have since received three emails from them (in 24 hours) reminding me that I have an incomplete order. Suffice it to say, I have no intention of logging back in, ever.

<comment><USER4> > Turns out there is a margin, and it is at least 20%, if not much more.

This is not true. In some stores Instacart offers the same as in-store prices, other it does not.

The same is true of anything one buys on Amazon. Low-cost items that ship with Prime shipping are usually marked up a bit, but I order from Amazon (and Instacart) in spite of this because of the convenience offered.

You can pick a basket of goods in Instacart where the percentage is high, but there are many other baskets where the percentage is low.

<comment><USER3> Maybe it is based on store. I don't know - and _that 's the problem_. Like I said, Instacart (as far as I could tell at a glance) doesn't make the information easily available. That's the problem.

I did some casual searching and discovered that they supposedly have page ([https://www.instacart.com/store/prices](https://www.instacart.com/store/prices)) where they list their markups per store, but it doesn't work for me.

<comment><USER5> Why is this such a big deal? It's not like safeway tells you what markup they are charging.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've never used Instacart but it seems to be a weird thing to outrage over, when apparently you are told the final payment upfront, and you know you are ordering from a premium service that is fundamentally a luxury offering. And I'd expect most people to have some basic ballpark idea of how much everyday groceries cost.

Does this person also expect businesses to disclose their profit margins before he's comfortable doing business with them? Ever bought a bottle of water at a stadium? We're looking at several 100 percents of markup there.

<comment><USER7> While some people do get outraged by high margins, the main issue I see here is that they _do_ pretend to publish their markup, but it's widely out of whack with reality. 63% may technically fit into "15%+", but it's highly misleading. They should just remove it.

<comment><USER8> Exactly. It is like saying this item only cost a few dollars. When in reality it is a $100,000. I didn't lie but it is surely misleading.

<comment><USER9> Wow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Many comments saying something to the effect of "$140 for $80 worth of groceries? Robbery!"

What's $80 worth of groceries? It's what you're willing to pay $80 for. The grocery store is marking up the food from their suppliers, is that a rip off? Grocery stores in urban areas charge more than in rural areas, rip off? When there's only 1 small store in an area (food deserts) they charge 10-30% more - an outrage?

This is great information to have and a benefit to consumers that they know the difference, but if Instacart gives you a price and you pay it then that's a fair price by definition. It's not an outrage in any way.

<comment><USER11> The outrage is that they are intentionally obfuscating the cost of using their service. It's not unreasonable at all to want to know how much more using their service costs than if I were to go shopping myself; that's how I can do the cost evaluation of whether it's worth it for me to spend that extra money to save me the time of a shopping trip.

Information is critical for driving free markets. Instacart is pulling some sleazy shenanigans, sending them down a path pretty similar to where Uber has ended up. I don't make it a habit of patronizing businesses that use deceptive pricing practices to try to rip me off.

<comment><USER10> The price of their service was $140 for the groceries the customer selected. Hard stop. The grocery store doesn't tell you what the underlying cost of their food was, nobody does that. It's not a requirement.

Now it could be something consumers DEMAND which would give a competitor an advantage if they did it (see Everlane with their transparent pricing) but it's not unethical or sleazy not to disclose the underlying costs of your goods.

<comment> brown9-2 It seems unethical for a company to tell you "our markup for this grocery store is 15%+" when in reality it was ~50%.

<comment><USER12> Is it unethical for stores to advertise "savings up to 50%" and have most items not be on sale for 50%?

<comment> brown9-2 The difference here is that shoppers in that store can see the final price and actual savings before purchasing. Can you do the same with Instacart?

<comment><USER12> > Can you do the same with Instacart?

Instacart shows you the final price. The price they paid for the goods is immaterial - you're choosing the convenience of not having to write your own delivery app, recruiting employees, or set up payment.

When you walk into a book store, do you demand to see the book price broken down into manufacturer's price, store rent, employee pay, and store profit and complain when the difference between the manufacturer's price and the retail price is too high?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you rely on a lot of service companies like Uber & Instacart, appified dry- cleaning and maid service then it may actually be cheaper for you to hire someone for 8 hours a day to do your chores.

This guy ended up paying $70 for a single grocery trip, do that and take Uber twice a day, and you're verging on "I can hire personal staff" territory.

<comment><USER14> _> it may actually be cheaper for you to hire someone for 8 hours a day to do your chores._

Whatever math calculation one does, it has to factor in the hassle of becoming an "employer" which is a complication that most consumers don't want. E.g. If you pay someone more than $36 a week[1], a law-abiding tax payer would have to file a W2 to the IRS reporting the income. (Yes yes, most parents don't actually file W2 for their neighborhood babysitter but that's technically "tax evasion".)

You can legally circumvent the W2/employer relationship by using an agency and that staffing firm becomes the "employer of record." However, there's no such thing as a free lunch and that agency has its own 50% to 100% markup on the personal assistant's hourly rate. This gets right back into Instacart pricing territory or even exceeds it.

Without any survey data, I'm guessing that there's a huge market of customers willing to pay Instacart profit margins instead of becoming an "a W2 employer" or paying 3rd-party agency.

[1] [http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2013/04/...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2013/04/07/nanny- tax-domestic-help-irs/2045517/)

<comment><USER13> As an employer, W2 forms aren't terrible hard to fill out and I don't know why everyone seems so scared of them.

People have had this viewpoint that filing taxes is 'hard', but recent improvements have made it 100% electronic and really cut down on the effort needed to compile it legally.

And then of course, no one would pay a babysitter a W2. You'd count them as a 1099, but not need to file till they made more than 10,000 a year.

What's more interesting is having an _actual_ employee though who can do nannying, picking up dry cleaning, and all of the other personal chores you just put off or have apps do. They're your personal assistant, and honestly if filing taxes is a hassle for you, you can have them fill out the forms because what else are assistants for?

<comment><USER14> _> As an employer, W2 forms aren't terrible hard to fill out _

You're taking my example too literally. The "W2 filing" is shorthand for all the extra legal complications such as withholding taxes, paying employer's portion of Social Security, Medicare, and any state mandated payments such as worker's comp, etc. All of that is a big leap of complexity compared to just pushing a few buttons on an iPhone and getting a service-on-demand.

 _> And then of course, no one would pay a babysitter a W2. You'd count them as a 1099, _

Unless the IRS (or even the babysitter) wants to reclassify the relationship as W2 instead of 1099.[1] Now the consumer owes back taxes (and possibly penalties) which is more complicated (and more expensive) than using a phone app.

 _> What's more interesting is having an actual employee _

Sure but probably 95%+ of consumers who want to periodically use Instacart / Uber / Blue Apron / etc do not want jump to the next level of complexity with an _actual_ employer+employee relationship. The threshold for inflicting that bureaucracy on oneself is high. Lastly, the extra employee taxes a consumer would have to pay makes the W2 relationship more expensive than a naive calculation would suggest.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/14/your-money/contract- worke...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/14/your-money/contract-worker-or- employee-tax-liability-rests-on-the-difference.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Initial post removed, here's the imgur link to the receipt that was accidentally left in the bag and screenshots of the instacart list.

[https://imgur.com/a/r6KGn](https://imgur.com/a/r6KGn)

<comment><USER16> Highway robbery

<comment><USER15> wellll, I'd wondered how instacart worked, when my nearby nice grocery store got bought by safeway. Originally I thought it was just the delivery fee, and I felt like the delivery people couldn't possibly be getting a living wage out of the work.

Here at least I can see that instacart gets enough revenue to probably be sustainable and pay someone a reasonable wage for doing the actual work of going to the grocery store on my behalf.

That said, I've just been finding great small grocery markets in the outer sunset to shop at. I'm lucky to live in a place where I can walk to a number of excellent small markets, so I just do that instead of paying for grocery delivery.

<comment><USER17> I'd love to hear about some great small groceries in the outer sunset. Please share!

<comment><USER15> Assuming you mean the Outer Sunset of San Francisco:

Noriega Produce Mart (gus's, but I love that it's NPM) has almost everything I need, except the meat / fish selection is pretty low. Noriega and 43rd(ish).

Other Avenues (judah and 41st-ish) is a worker-owned cooperative. They don't carry meat at all, but they have a great bulk food selection.

Both have excellent produce selections and a surprising amount of useful dry goods - with the exception of meat / fish, the only real pull to Andronico's was the parking lot.

I went to Guerra Quality Meats for the first time last weekend, and it was pretty great as a butcher, and had some fish selection. They're at taraval and 15th. I'm considering going back to marin sun farms for their CSA meat boxes. There's also a fish seller going in at irving and 42nd (or so) where the old cajun restaurant was. That's a long-term thing, though, since it's been "coming soon" for a while.

There's a couple great Asian markets up on irving - sunset super at 25th and irving is really great, although a tad overwhelming at times. They've got a _lot_ of meat and fish.

No grocery store in the area is as _cheap_ as going to safeway and shopping frugally (or quite as satisfying as Berkeley Bowl, but since I don't go to the east bay often anymore, it's hard to justify a really long drive to the grocery store), but these places sell high-quality organic food and other good brands of dry goods (I can get both king arthur and antimo caputo flours for my breads and pizzas, respectively, at NPM) and are local stores rather than chains, so I'm willing to pay the premium to support them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> When buying commodity items like most produce but in particular packaged goods, there's still an unsolved problem of "how much should I be paying for this?" and oftentimes I see even unit prices which are straight up miscalculated.

The problem seems compounded when shopping for this stuff online, when each individual item is so cheap, it takes too many clicks to realize how badly you are being ripped off.

I find even when grocery shopping online through a store's own site the prices are inflated over in-store. It compounds the anxiety over someone else picking low quality/old stock to the point where I won't grocery shop online as much as would really like to optimize the process.

I also find the menu system and scrolling lists of items an incredibly frustrating way to pick out the right gallon of milk.

I think the underlying fact is that it's extremely expensive for Instacart to provide their service.

I think an automated / lights out grocery store where you order through an app and drive by on the way home to pickup the food would be an order of magnitude more efficient. But you have to build the warehouse (like Amazon does) to allow robots to fill the order.

If you're paying for the overhead of food to be stocked on shelves nicely enough for picky customers to look at it, and then only _after_ that point are you filling an online order, that's hugely wasteful.

<comment><USER19> It depends a lot on how many online orders you are filling.

In a lot of areas there wouldn't be the population density to support a pickup only location, but it's easy for an existing store to implement pickup and delivery services. A locally owned store here has done it using Rosie: [https://www.rosieapp.com/](https://www.rosieapp.com/)

<comment><USER18> Eventually the only option will be pickup only. It's the simple evolution of removing as much of the (human) cost as possible.

Of course it seems crazy to make the claim today that people won't o inside a store to pick their own groceries. About as crazy at it will seem to people then, that we used to do exactly that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Breaking news: business charges margin above cost of goods to support employees and make profit.

We don't ask Walmart to disclose the prices it pays to its suppliers. Why care about Instacart's suppliers?

</comment><comment><USER21> I think the reason why people are outraged is because Instacart already has a service and delivery fee. You would assume that the fees is where they're making the money.

In grocery stores, etc. there isn't a service fee, so it's expected that the prices are marked up. In Instacart, there is already a service fee, but the prices are also marked up.

</comment><comment><USER22> $150 for $80 worth of groceries, wow.

<comment><USER19> Another way to look at it is that it is $150 of groceries.

I'm sure not going to be using a service with such a high mark up, but I can see how someone with a high income might be willing to spend extra for the convenience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This may be a confusing thing, I suspect Instacart may get volume discount from stores for bringing the extra business.

So this markup may be based on discounted cost instacart pays, not necessarily what YOU would pay at the store.

Still think it's a crazy premium, but I enjoy grocery shopping.

<comment> brown9-2 Can you explain further? Because this makes no sense on its face. If they get a discount on what the grocery store charges, then the final price after their markup should be closer to the store's price, not further.

<comment><USER24> His insinuation is that the "Instacart receipt" that the customer received is the discounted one that reflects the bulk discount. If an individual went to the store and got the same list of items, it would be more expensive, so the markup wasn't $140 - $80 but more like $140 - $100.

I have no idea if that's true or not..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Do people really expect corporations to be ethical and not make the most money possible given the circumstances? It sounds like many people expect to leave corporations to their own whims while at the same time expecting them to be fair, self-correcting, and a benefit to society. Sounds pretty delusional to me. That's like sitting each day staring at the computer for years on end and expecting a finished program to emerge while having done nothing. Maybe that's why this business model is exactly the same as that of supermarkets that offer delivery direct to consumers (in the US), down the opaque pricing.

</comment><comment><USER26> I used to shop on instacart but the lack of transparency made me switch back to going-to-the-store shopping. Started using prime now for about 2 months and love how much more transparent it is about its costs. They charge the same as the store and add a default $5 tip as suggested tip. Wish instacart would get their shit together. Delivery business is a growing market and would love to have multiple great providers. Also feel for instacart since it was so much early to the game than all of its current competitors.

</comment><comment><USER27> I just used Amazon Prime Now for the first time. As a long time Instacart user in the main target demographic, I just don't see how they can compete. The delivery fees are already rolled into my existing Prime account. On top of that most prices are actually _lower_ than the stores, rather than marked up.

The issue all comes down to scale. Automated robot warehouses and delivery vans are far more efficient than individual drivers searching through grocery stores.

<comment><USER28> The main problem is that Amazon Prime Now isn't available everywhere

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wonder how transparent they have to be legally, and who decides that. Saying your fees are 10%+ and having it be 60% seems highly misleading. Then again I saw a TV commercial that advertised free shipping and handling for a fee. I guess if no one notices and no one can force them to be reasonable, you can do just about anything.

</comment><comment><USER30> I do wonder which People are too busy to shop but won't pay 50 USD per hour for the shopping premium?

<comment><USER27> There are plenty of people for whom $50 is a pretty good deal to save an hour of time. Whether that will scale is another question entirely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Wow, I knew there would be a markup but that is way more than I expected.

</comment><comment><USER32> When i worked in UAE (United Arab Emirates) grocery delivery was like magic: you can just call any grocery shop to bring food to your flat and they bring it to you in a few minutes. Delivery was performed by cashier - he just take required items and bring in in a bag to you. So simple, so cost-effective and so useful. I wonder if anyone is done something like this at scale?

</comment><comment><USER33> Does Instacart ramp it over time? I've only used it once and there was no markup at all.

</comment><comment><USER34> My housekeeper here in Thailand costs about $290 a month and fetches groceries for my household daily, so this makes me feel quite lucky.

</comment><comment><USER35> is this markup present for items advertised as same in store prices?

</comment><comment><USER36> Come on dude, can't you add the 43% on the title ? Why do you have to make it clickbait?

<comment><USER37> I make it 63%, including the "service fee" and delivery fee but not the taxes or tip.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which PAID VPN do you trust the most and recommend? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> That's easy. Trust no one.

Rent a cheap VPS and install a VPN server with e.g. Wireguard yourself. This one line installer also exist for OpenVPN:

[https://github.com/l-n-s/wireguard- install](https://github.com/l-n-s/wireguard-install)

Also don't forget firewall rules and automatic security updates in your VPS.

<comment><USER3> You meant to say "That's easy. Trust any Virtual Private Server (VPS) provider instead"

<comment><USER2> Yep. My assumption is that paid VPNs are basically honeypots for bundling people together who think this is safer. A good target to recognize/attack many VPN users by one entity (the VPS provider as attack vector, see NordVPN). It starts with Netflix and ends with state authorities. If you use a VPS both won't have you immediately as VPN user on the radar. But there is also the question for what reason you do VPN... securing connection or thinking you get more anonymity (VPS is bad at the later one of course)

<comment><USER3> You've just put your trust in the VPS provider, you haven't "trusted no one".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like mullvad.</comment>


Real time image animation in opencv using first order model - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/anandpawara/Real_Time_Image_Animation <comment><USER2> I'm a huge fan of this kind of practice, where the code for a paper is all located in a single public repository with build instructions, along with directions for how to cite it. Obviously, it's a little tough to do with some more data-intensive sources (besides GH hosting limits, no one really wants to download 100G of data if they're just trying to clone a repository), but this kind of thing sets a high standard for reproducibility of published results.

<comment><USER3> > but this kind of thing sets a high standard for reproducibility of published > results.

I think making the code available is good, but I think we should be careful how we use the term "reproducibility". Pulling your repo and running it had better give the same results, but it's not the same sort of thing as building my own experimental setup according to a paper's specification. The latter gives more room for variability such that successful replication speaks more strongly to the robustness of the result, and also puts human brain power next to each step of the process in a way where weirdness might be noticed.

Replication should probably involve reimplementation, if it's to carry its traditional weight. In the event that we fail to replicate, though, having the source code for both versions is likely to be hugely informative.

<comment><USER4> I think this is a fair point, but in my experience, having a concrete replica that people can start from (and compare to the paper) can make a year's difference in speeding up progress.

Many times, I've read a paper, thought something was great, and then implemented the paper and failed to reproduce the author's results. In the cases where I've been able to compare my implementation to a reference on github, I often find the paper doesn't match the code, or a subtle data processing step was left out. Having a replica (a commit hash and a pointed to versioned input data) can often make a huge difference in time.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I'm certainly not saying it isn't advisable or even important. I'm just saying it's not the same thing as replication.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm working with same model, but in a real-time pipeline developed with GStreamer, Rust and PyTorch:

[https://twitter.com/rozgo/status/1255961525187235842](https://twitter.com/rozgo/status/1255961525187235842)

Live motion transfer test with crappy webcam:

[https://youtu.be/QVRpstP5Qws](https://youtu.be/QVRpstP5Qws)

<comment><USER6> Nice. I want to try something like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very cool, reminds me of Avatarify, which is also based upon the First Order Model work:

[https://github.com/alievk/avatarify](https://github.com/alievk/avatarify)

<comment><USER8> It looks the same, even the same images. I can only get 3fps from avatar that's with CUDA, is this one faster?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Pretty cool. Reminds me of [https://github.com/yemount/pose- animator](https://github.com/yemount/pose-animator)

I would use it if there was a JavaScript port.

</comment><comment><USER10> How can it generate teeth that look like they fit the picture ???

<comment><USER5> This model is trained with short clips of human speech. There is enough statistical information to "guess" how to fill the gap created by opened lips. I'm still amazed how it conserves temporal coherence (what it looks like from frame to frame).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is no one else deeply afraid of this future?

<comment><USER12> Provenance and chain of custody is everything. It's always been important, but now its critical. Any audio or video without a solid chain of custody is now suspect. Anonymous leaks are worthless as anything can be faked by almost anyone with a PC.

Old and busted: "pic or it didn't happen."

New hotness: "in person witness or it didn't happen."

<comment><USER13> Do I smell a blockchain application?

<comment><USER12> Cue 10 ICOs for AuthenticityCoin type things, most of which just exit scam and the rest of which don't actually work.

The real security hole for forgery is at the point of injection. Tracking a forgery along with a block chain doesn't prove it's not a forgery.

One thought is a camera sensor that cryptographically signs (watermarks) photos or video frames _on the sensor_ before they are touched by anything else. It's not perfect since a highly sophisticated adversary could get the secret key out of the chip, but it could definitely make it quite a bit harder to fake photos. Nothing is ever perfectly secure. All security amounts to increasing the work function for violating a control to some decent margin above the payoff you get from breaking the control.

I could see certified watermarking camera sensors being used by journalists, politicians, governments, police, etc.

<comment><USER14> This is a start. It can even be done steganographically, embedded in the picture in a non-visual way, which is robust against compression and "social media laundering" (term of art for uploading then downloading from social media).

The problem is people just don't care. See "cheap fakes" like slowing down a video of Pelosi and claiming she's drunk. People actually believe that garbage. No amount of fancy math can fix that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Looks like the file mentioned in this step

> gdown --id 1wCzJP1XJNB04vEORZvPjNz6drkXm5AUK

Is no longer accessible (too many downloads in too short a time)

Edit: For anyone else with the same problem, the file in question is "vox- cpk.pth.tar" which can be found in various places on the internet.

</comment><comment><USER16> The google colab version is not really real-time, is that correct? It loads pre-recorded video. I guess that is because it is not easy to add realtime feed from camera into browser notebook or what are the limitations there?

</comment><comment><USER17> The paper & final models don't to justice for detailed outputs though, but this is still a great model for datasets with no annotations per se.

</comment><comment><USER18> does anyone know if using this tool to generate a music video of famous pictures singing a song would violate any copyrights? it seems like a fun exercise.

</comment><comment><USER19> very neat! You can crop and convert to mp4 using ffmpeg: ffmpeg -i test.avi -filter:v "crop=250:250:260:0" out.mp4

</comment><comment><USER20> one of the authors is at snap. inquiring minds want to know: will this soon be available in snap camera?

</comment><comment><USER21> Really cool, but I hoped to see C++ code for OpenCV, not python</comment>


Show HN: Your cryptocurrency is destroying the environment. Offset it - <AUTHOR> http://cryptooffset.club/ <comment> 52-6F-62 While I appreciate your apparent motivation and message here, Oliver, I'm sure that others beside myself would like there to be _some_ attempt at insight into how you generate the number of kilograms of carbon generated according to your calculator, as well as the very important question of:

How do I know that I am sending my money to a legitimate mission to plant trees. You reference the World Land Trust, but I don't see any request for Bitcoin on their website. The address appears to be brand new, and I can only assume is yours. [https://blockchain.info/address/1GqUcWivNngEzgoC1VRBz6Knhw9t...](https://blockchain.info/address/1GqUcWivNngEzgoC1VRBz6Knhw9tpSBGr8)

There is no process. There needs to be one. Some people might even more gladly give if they can be assigned a fiat value for their contribution for tax purposes, but even besides that there is simply no confirmation that the money would ever get to be put to work planting trees.

And of course, the glaring logical problem, that the effort to gather Bitcoin for this purpose will only heap piles upon the cost its trying to offset...

Maybe a better mission would be to try and partner with an exchange and the charity in order to ask people to donate a portion of any profit they see in selling off any cryptocurrencies, and take the value in fiat on the way, then all of the above issues could be mitigated.

You have to understand, there are so many scams out there, that the seeming lack of process ("Just send money to this address") doesn't instil one with confidence.

</comment><comment><USER2> LOL</comment>