Ethereum: the Yellow Paper [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://gavwood.com/Paper.pdf <comment><USER2> All right, forgive me for being negative but I can't take this project seriously.

[https://medium.com/p/4790bf5f7743](https://medium.com/p/4790bf5f7743)

>"Here are a few verticals where Ethereum could engender disruptive innovation:"

It's literally dripping with Silicon Valley Newspeak. This is the language of the serial entrepreneur, the one who is more interested in having his latest project acquired by a bigger fish for a hefty price than actually delivering a quality product.

Not to mention I'm so sick of everyone cramming "social" into everything. The "Social OS"? Yuck. I mean maybe I'm just jaded and cynical at 3am but Ethereum just seems so... phony.

<comment><USER3> I understand your sentiment, but I'd warn against judging the project based on one blog post by Ethereum's communications guy. There seems to be some serious crypto/engineering heft behind the project:

[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=428589.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=428589.0)

Note: I'm not involved with the project. Simply watching it with interest at this point.

<comment><USER4> I'm curious about the heft you're talking about. Is there any public cryptanalysis by any of the Ethereum folks? Any widely used software projects? Cryptographic protocols? (I don't say this to argue otherwise, but I wasn't aware of any particular track record there, and a quick google didn't turn it up— so I was surprised to see that being said... Most of the people I know are involved in it were responsible for non-technical things in Bitcoin space or more or less failed other altcoins)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Could someone explain the difference between: Ethereum, Ripple, and OpenTransactions?

<comment><USER6> One difference that I am aware of is that OpenTransactions uses the Bitcoin blockchain and the other two are supposed to have their own blockchain. But it's hard to get details of how these things are supposed to work.

<comment><USER7> OpenTransactions is currency agnostic and doesn't use Bitcoin blockchain in way that I'm familiar with.

It's essentially a open source exchange mechanism based on anonymous federated servers.

I don't see how it's hard to find out about how these things work since literally every one of them has it's own wiki, blog and forum.

<comment><USER6> If you are able to extract concrete, detailed information about these things from their wiki, blog and forum, congratulations. I can't. It all sounds pretty vague to me.

<comment><USER5> This exactly. I think part of the problem is that each of these projects has a corporate backer, Monetas, sponsoring Open Transaction is building a business around the platform. There is _some_ incentive to keep the best doco closed source. There is a slim to none chance that the only documentation Monetas is using is available publicly. I spent some time setting up an opentransactions server, but could never spend enough time/research to get a production server up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_fallacy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_fallacy)

"The problem with an informal fallacy often stems from a flaw in reasoning that renders the conclusion unpersuasive. In contrast to a formal fallacy of deduction, the error is not merely a flaw in logic."</comment>


The artificial morality of the robot warrior - <AUTHOR> http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/02/the_artificial.php

<comment><USER2> I don't buy it. This isn't sci-fi where we're in danger of our soldier robots developing consciousness and turning on their creators.

The robots are complex pieces of software, not any different from many other complex pieces of mission critical military or healthcare software that can lead to human deaths if it fails.

All we need is a hard-wired kill switch.

<comment><USER3> In the near future, I doubt the accidental deaths from military robots will exceed the accidental deaths from other pieces of military hardware.

Helicopter, plane, and jeep malfunctions kill people all the time. Not to mention human error! We already have control devices installed in aircraft (pilots) that accidentally bomb civilian weddings.

War is a messy business.

<comment><USER4> You have to account for the fact that there has been numerous IFF errors, including the US military firing on British troops. IIRC at the beginning of the Afghanistan invasion a British plane was shot down by the US because the IFF incorrectly identified the plane as hostile.

I don't see how when there's so many accidental deaths of soldiers and civilians, how any accidental firing of a robot would exceed this. I mean there's been ~95,000 civilian deaths and ~4500 military deaths in Iraq alone. Most of those civilian deaths wouldn't be reduced as they're the result of suicide attacks, however those 4500 coalition soldiers would _all_ have survived if they'd have been replaced with robots, in fact the military presence in Iraq could be ten-fold what it is with no protests of soldiers dying.

<comment><USER5> Not to mention that robots can run at a lower action level (right term?) than soldiers.

Soldier logic: "Is that a suicide bomber approaching the checkpoint? Holy shit I'm scared. Better not take the chance. BOMB!" [Shoots the possible suicide bomber.]

Robot logic: Possible bomb sighting! P(Bomber) = 0.6, 0 civilians in blast radius. Might as well take the chance, worst case he blows up himself and causes $50,000 property damage (dead robot).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The very ironic thing about all of this in my opinion is that if we were ever to truly succeed in creating a "moral" robot, it would throw down its arms and refuse to fight.

<comment><USER3> For some value of morality.</comment></comment>


Rejection Letter - <AUTHOR> http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/05/rejection-letter.html <comment><USER2> If "Zero Day: The story of MS17-010" is meant to be an accurate report of facts regarding MS17-010, then there is at least one inaccuracy in it:

> someone calling themselves "the Shadow Brokers" leaks a huge trove of > classified NSA documents to WikiLeaks, who in turn dump it on the internet.

Shadow Brokers didn't leak to Wikileaks. Shadow Brokers uploaded the trove of NSA documents to `mega.nz`, and someone else downloaded the trove to GitHub[1]. Wikileaks merely tweeted about this after it happened.[2]

 _Correction:_ As per well-sourced Wikipedia article[3], this was not the `mega.nz` leak, this was another subsequent one. The main point still stand: Wikileaks has nothing to do with publishing the MS17-010 vulnerability.

Would be nice to stop pushing the false narrative that Wikileaks was involved in that one NSA leak.

[1] [https://github.com/x0rz/EQGRP](https://github.com/x0rz/EQGRP)

[2] [https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/850783902616625152](https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/850783902616625152)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_Brokers#Fifth_Leak:...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_Brokers#Fifth_Leak:_.22Lost_in_Translation.22)

<comment><USER3> As someone who's somewhat neutral on the subject, it's amazing how much FUD I've noticed about Wikileaks.

<comment><USER4> It's generally people with an agenda to downplay something they've published, often by insinuating without evidence that the documents have been faked.

Wikileaks has problems, but they have a surprisingly good record for a small, amateur operation.

<comment><USER5> They used to have a very good position as an independent source of data but they have started editorialising with their releases and they certainly seem to take some political positions regarding their releases, which calls into question their impartiality. I am still a fan but not as much as I used to be.

<comment><USER6> You could say that but when it's impartiality to Russia or North Korea (not so much by Wikileaks, the MSM already covered that market) nobody gives a bleep, but when it's towards the USA it's suddenly questionable? Most of the world (including Wikileaks) is not the USA, and for them it's three external parties to look at from outside (and yes, hold a mirror to their own, if they're honest).

Yes RU/NK are doing worse things. But the USA just elected Trump. And unlike RU or NK, who sort of keep it to themselves, the USA's election spectacle has been broadcast on worldwide media, there was no escaping seeing the USA dig its way further down through rock-bottom every week, for over half a year. Everybody has been _made_ to look and the USA's gov doesn't really look good or even sane at all right now, from any outside point of view.

Just a question, are they going to let Trump rule for these whole four years? Or will someone say "ok enough's enough, this guy is crazy as fuck, let's get rid of him"? Surely, before it's too late? How does this process work? AFAIR Clinton got impeached for _way_ less than what Trump has already done on public record (not literally the same, but it's not far either, and frankly the other offenses--ignorance and stupidity in the light of global politics, not just a little, also not political-discourse "fake ignorance", he honestly doesn't seem to be aware of basic 20th century history facts--way worse from a political POV)

Sorry that's a bit off topic cause what you refer to is not really about Trump --much (it was about the elections a little, though). The point is, one of the largest powers in the world just put a crazy person in charge. Trump's probably not really dumb, no he's very _savvy_ , but the people should expect more from their political leaders. It's not supposed to be an easy job.

I get the feeling that complaints about Wikileaks' editorialising also just contains a lot of saying what it is, and people don't like to hear that when it's about them. Because they love America. Thing is, it's not really about them, so don't worry. It's not like the people got a lot of democratic choice in the matter. Could they have done more? Maybe but the system's big and complex and controlled by other parties than the people. Even before, when it was between Hillary or Trump, you gotta wonder, out of all the population, were these the two best candidates in the country?

<comment><USER7> > Yes RU/NK are doing worse things. But the USA just elected Trump

Funny you mention Trump. Trump wasn't involved in prism, Snowden, or Assange. The establishment that predates Trump is the real worry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Absolutely fabulous. Best part: "NSA hoard their knowledge of weaknesses in Microsoft Windows, a vitally important piece of their own nation's infrastructure, in case they'll come in handy againt some hypothetical future enemy. (I'm sorry, but this just won't wash; surely the good guys would prioritize protecting their own corporate infrastructure?"

Yep - way too implausible, even for hacker fiction.

Anyway, sounds like your book was Nostradamus-esque in depicting recent events. Maybe a bit too good :D

<comment><USER9> I'd say it's plenty possible. The mission of the NSA is collecting information and providing that information to the government and military. They are not in the business of defending infrastructure, whether public or private. It makes perfect sense that they would collect information about back doors they could use later against identified targets.

More about the NSA's mission here: [https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/press- room/statements/2013...](https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/press- room/statements/2013-08-09-the-nsa-story.shtml)

"NSA's mission is to help protect national security by providing policy makers and military commanders with the intelligence information they need to do their jobs."

For the NSA to hand over information about identified back doors in Windows to Microsoft directly would be clearly outside this mission. That said, the NSA should have informed someone in the government of these back doors, at least in a general sense, so policy makers could have decided whether it would have been better to convey it to Microsoft or to let the NSA continue to keep them secret. Maybe they did. Who knows?

<comment><USER10> To the extent their mission doesn't involve making us more secure, why are my taxes paying for them? The NSA sounds like a swamp that needs draining, in the parlance of our times. They're breeding mosquitoes.

<comment><USER11> The argument is probably that it supports national security, which is good for your personal safety.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense to the author. Truth doesn't have anybody to answer to." – S. John Ross

</comment><comment><USER13> I still have vivid memories of, as a kid, stumbling upon this network of GeoCities pages about "Echelon" and how the US could read _all of the worlds email_ and search for trigger words - and how absurd and tinfoil-hat-y it was made to sound by the rest of the internet.

Having this memory absolutely changed the way I've been viewing NSA related leaks in the past few years.

<comment><USER14> For years, I added this header to my outgoing mail:

> X-Echelon-header: Al-Qaeda bomb Bin Laden decrypt terror CIA Enfopol

<comment><USER15> Why? What's the upside?

<comment><USER16> If you value the needles, increase the haystack...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > surely the good guys would prioritize protecting their own corporate > infrastructure?"

Let us not forget the used to be part of the NSA's mission. A part that was essentially abandoned early in the 21st century.

For example, the NSA required mysterious changes to be made to the DES s-box; many assumed at the time (as did I) that the agency wanted to weaken security, but it turned out, to quote Bruce Schneier, "It took the academic community two decades to figure out that the NSA 'tweaks' actually improved the security of DES."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard#NSA.2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard#NSA.27s_involvement_in_the_design)

</comment><comment><USER17> It's astonishing that Brunner was not only prescient about this event in The Shockwave Rider, but also predicted sophisticated high-tech terroristic attacks in Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up.

If you haven't read this trio of dystopian novels (you can read them in any order) you really should. Still mind blowing today.

(Admittedly he wrote them at a time, unlike today, when the US appeared to face an existential threat from terrorism. A threat that of course never materialized).

<comment><USER18> Of the three "The Sheep Look Up" was the most interesting to me. Read that and then read Benford's "Timescape". You won't be able to sleep for at least a week :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I usually like satire, but this felt too obvious. Subtlety is in my opinion a key part of good satire. Otherwise it feels too forced or too in-your-face.

But as the specialist external reader said: "Stross can clearly write workmanlike, commercial prose". I can definitely agree with that!

<comment><USER20> How do you satirize something subtly when the point is that real life is so outrageous that it beggars belief?

I like subtle satire too, but that doesn't mean it works in every instance.

<comment><USER21> Interesting, though, that the concepts expressed in this narrative, had they been written in 2010, and promptly rejected, might have provided all the more grist for the paranoia mill.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I found this explanation pretty convincing as to why there was such a dumb kill switch embedded in the malware:

"I believe they were trying to query an intentionally unregistered domain which would appear registered in certain sandbox environments, then once they see the domain responding, they know they're in a sandbox the malware exits to prevent further analysis"

From [https://www.malwaretech.com/2017/05/how-to-accidentally- stop...](https://www.malwaretech.com/2017/05/how-to-accidentally-stop-a- global-cyber-attacks.html)

<comment><USER23> Didn't it also have to respond to a http request though? Why not register the domain anyway and just leave it unhosted?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> A funny allusion: "E. S. Blofeld, Editorial Director" likely refers to "Ernst Blofeld," a villain from the James Bond novels.

<comment><USER25> Ernst _Stavro_ Blofeld.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It is funny to me no one ever talks about Mark Russinovich of Sysinternals fame and now reigning engineer of Azure cloud systems wrote a novel about such doomsday scenarios before the trend in the last 5 years or so.

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1250007305/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1250007305/)

That he wrote premier system introspection tools for Windows makes me think he must have been privy to the complexity of such things by colleagues discretely long before DREAD and SDLC fruits were born out in the Vista/7 era.

</comment><comment><USER27> " _ETERNALBLUE was part of a release of code that also gave us such interesting names as EDUCATEDSCHOLAR, ETERNALROMANCE, and ERRATICGOPHER. Oh to be a fly on the wall at the classified NSA committee meetings discussing the deployment of their weaponized ERRATIC GOPHER ..._ "

Any one know what the E means in code names? There's a list somewhere, but I can't remember where now.

<comment><USER28> I read somewhere that codename "namespaces" (aka starting letters) are assigned to agencies, but not sure if that applies to this sort of codename.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is fake, right? I'm pretty sure this is fake.

<comment><USER30> No, it is not _fake_. The article is _satire_ playing off of _true_ real-world current events.

<comment><USER31> Is it satirizing publishers?

It seemed more like a device for mocking people who are unwilling to consider conspiracy theories, but... Somehow it didn't feel like satire to me. Can't put a finger on why.

<comment><USER32> It is satirizing current events. The joke is that the story of the WannaCrypt ransomware attack is so full of improbable developments that, if it had been written as fiction, no publisher would accept it.

 _This has been another episode of the Hacker News Joke Explainer™_

<comment><USER25> That's the good thing about reality: it doesn't have to conform to plausible narrative norms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> You know that technical reviewer's past it. Thirty years ago he was planning world war three from bunkers underneath volcanos, and holding the world to ransom with diamond-encrusted lasers in space. Whereas last year all he could come up with was a grand scheme to become a multinational government IT contractor, while moonlighting a side business clearing derelict buildings for redevelopment.

</comment><comment><USER34> In case anyone else was wondering if ETERNALBLUE was a code name from the Laundry Files, here's the list: [http://thelaundryfiles.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Code_names](http://thelaundryfiles.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Code_names)

<comment><USER35> Here's the list you will find ETERNALBLUE on:

[http://electrospaces.blogspot.com/p/nsas-tao-division- codewo...](http://electrospaces.blogspot.com/p/nsas-tao-division- codewords.html?m=1)

<comment><USER34> Cool. The list above is from a fictional series called "The Laundry Files" by Charles Stross, the same author as the linked Antipope article/story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> > ... However, instead of helping Microsoft fix them, we are supposed to > believe that the NSA hoard their knowledge of weaknesses in Microsoft > Windows ...

> I'm sorry, this is just silly.

This only goes to show that reality doesn't have to make sense to a literature critic. Only novels do.

</comment><comment><USER10> _And in a matter of hours, the new malware, known as Wanna Decryptor, infects the entire British National Health Service, a Spanish cellphone company, FedEx, and over a third of a million computers whose owners had lazily failed to enable automatic security updates from Microsoft._

Besides the false association of TSB and Wikileaks that others have mentioned, I have a huge problem with this. Someone who gets kidnapped by pirates (The Shadow Brokers) while running from a press gang (Microsoft) is still a victim. Calling them "lazy" is an easy way to avoid the hard work of apportioning blame correctly.

A _hell_ of a lot of that blame goes to Microsoft themselves, for turning an important security update service into a marketing channel. Maybe Stross gets around to pointing that out, but I stopped reading there.

</comment><comment><USER37> > lazily failed to enable automatic security updates from Microsoft.

I hope the author knows that this isn't true. You don't just "lazily" not enable automatic updates. It's highly intentional.

</comment><comment><USER38> I must admit I agree with the publisher's review as a whole. What's the point in publishing a fiction hacked together so quickly that it can't withstand any artistic criticism?

Or was it an experiment aiming to show that fiction and documentary are two very different genres? Well than it was successful.

<comment><USER35> You may be aware of this by now, but there was no publisher. This is a short form dramatization of the events leading up to yesterday's Wanna Crypt attack.

The "criticism" was Stross imagining how absurd the truth of the whole situation played out and how if it was instead a work of fiction it wouldn't be well received for the reasons state in the work.</comment></comment>


Because everyone is a racist. - <AUTHOR> http://asymptotejournal.com/article.php?cat=Nonfiction&id=47

<comment><AUTHOR> a Swedish writer with immigrant roots writes an open letter to the swedish justice minister.</comment>


An Analysis of the CAs trusted by iOS 8.0 - <AUTHOR> http://karl.kornel.us/2014/09/an-analysis-of-the-cas-trusted-by-ios-8-0/?

<comment><USER2> This is a controversial opinion, but I am actually of the view that SSL is structurally unworkable against nation-state-level adversaries. There are too many dark corners and not enough eyes, and you can't dig your way out of complexity with a volunteer standards committee.

I am working on the problem (and by that I mean "it's in private beta"). Mobile is sort of a unique opportunity because a typical mobile app doesn't have the same interoperability requirements as the web more broadly.

However, it's hard to sell, which explains why nobody does it. First it's hard to sell commercially, which you really need if you want it audited by people who know what they're doing. But it's hard to even give it away, because nobody wants to be the test pilot when it comes to security.

Solving this requires a level of cooperation that we may not have as an industry right now. That may mean dark days ahead.

Email in profile, if you want to chat about it

<comment><USER3> > This is a controversial opinion, but I am actually of the view that SSL is > structurally unworkable against nation-state-level adversaries.

It's not a controversial opinion at all... it's a well known fact. Something that relies on you trusting corporations which are known to answer to their government's gag orders is broken from the get go.

Still, TLS is a great tool if you're not an enemy of the NSA. Security is a game of expectations, remember.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's sort of, but not really, what Safecurves means. The curves marked "not safe" are mostly not misuse-resistant. It's much easier to end up with security vulnerabilities working with them than with the curves Bernstein and Lange design, which are designed for performance and to be bulletproof in actual use.

(There is an idea in Safecurves of "rigidity", which is roughly the extent to which we can be sure that the curve parameters weren't chosen to somehow advantage their designers; the curves mentioned in this post are not particularly rigid. If you believe the NIST curves are all backdoored, then yes, you can't trust these curves).

</comment><comment><USER5> What's HN's attitude towards SafeCurves[1]? I know djb knows his stuff, but the very binary "safe" / "unsafe" breakdown seems a bit dubious. gmaxwell wrote a nice forum post[2] explaining why secp256k1 is safe for Bitcoin despite its inclusion in the unsafe curves list.

[1]: [http://safecurves.cr.yp.to/](http://safecurves.cr.yp.to/) [2]: [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=380482.msg4083612#ms...](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=380482.msg4083612#msg4083612)

<comment><USER6> It's a perfectly fine set of criteria for best practices in defining modern elliptic curves, imho.

Focus is on the simplicity of correct implementations, and on trying to avoid manipulatable variables.

However, I do not on balance think the NIST curves secp256r1 and secp384r1 are backdoored, and I've tried hard to look into it. The reason behind the incredible opacity surrounding their progeny appears to be Certicom IPR (at the time), although they did work with Jerry Solinas at the NSA and I do not feel comfortable ruling foul play out completely. The NSA certainly do really use them internally, but I'm not sure what conclusions we can really draw from that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Horrible, horrible security practice to stop the user from inspecting the certificates being used in Safari.

</comment><comment><USER8> Actually, there are _45_ CAs run by Symantec (!). TC TrustCenter and GeoTrust are both Symantec-owned.

</comment><comment><USER9> Many european ISP CAs are state-owned or managed, you might also want to add thoose to the goverment list.</comment>


It Looks Like Idera Is Gutting Travis CI Just a Few Weeks After Acquiring It - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/carmatrocity/status/1098538649908666368 <comment><USER2> Not too shocking, unfortunately, from discussion when the acquisition was annoucned ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251)), we knew that this was the kind of private equity firm that makes money by buying products with existing revenue streams, and then _not_ investing in them.

(And the corollary, laying off staff you don't need if you're not going to be investing in it).

This is kind of how private equity works.

It is sad, I had really liked travis as a product, I don't expect I will be able to continue to.

Travis is just _so easy_ to set up for my basic ruby gem and Rails app projects (I don't want to spend time on setting up CI, I just want it to be done), as well as free for open source -- none of it's competitors have seemed to give me that when I looked before.

Travis, by offering an absolutely brain-dead setup, and giving it away free to open source, really created a revolution in actually doing CI for open source, at least in ruby. Everyone's doing CI now, when few open source projects were before in ruby. That anyone offers free CI for open source at all is probably due to the need to compete with travis. I wonder if it'll stick around.</comment>


Protonet: secure, private, and beautiful cloud servers - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/protonet-yc-w16-runs-all-your-collaboration-tools-from-a-small-orange-box <comment><USER2> Seems to be in a similar space as [https://sandstorm.io/](https://sandstorm.io/)

Interesting to see this come out of Germany...Europeans seem to care a lot more about privacy than most Americans, which might make it harder for American companies in this space to get initial traction.

<comment><USER3> We've talked to sandstorm - we might even combine our forces ;).

<comment><USER4> Indeed, I (Sandstorm founder) would love to see Sandstorm running on Protonet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seems to be one of those HN posts with a lot of negativity and little constructive criticism.

I on the other hand immediately see a large niche market...lawyers/law firms. For example, here in Florida the Bar issued an ethics advisory opinion that deters lawyers from using cloud services altogether. The opinion calls out some cloud services by name, and specifically "noted a flurry of concern recently over Dropbox".

If you are interested in talking about the legal market send me a note.

<comment><USER3> That would be awesome! Should I contact you via the tickettitan form?

<comment><USER5> No sorry, that was my first successful tech exit. Send to firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> All the drawbacks of 'the cloud', along with all the drawbacks of on-premises, at a higher price point than either... what could go wrong?

You can buy a couple new conventional servers (or many more used) for the cost of this single point of failure appliance. Plus racks look cool and this looks like a knockoff Mac Pro.

<comment><USER7> "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

<comment><USER6> If you think this is the next iPod... I will gladly take that wager.

<comment><USER7> No of course not, it's a completely different market. My point was the product isn't deserving of a comment that dismisses it completly. People pay for turnkey solutions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love it. We had servers, then we had clouds, and now we have personal clouds. Uh, isn't that a server?

<comment><USER3> Exactly, I believe there's a clear cycle going on (mainframes - pc - clouds - personal clouds).

Fueled by:

\- moores law (massive compute power and storage at cheap prices) \- bandwidths growing \- new tools and devices that create constant streams of data (smartphones, collaborative & filesharing tools etc.) \- commoditization of our most-used online tools (see dropbox) \- a desire to have one integrated point of access/control

and a raising awareness of how important it is to own/control our data (caused in part by constant news coming out on hacks, data breaches and how basically data companies are the new oil companies)

Yes, it's a server :)

ps. I'm one of the founders

<comment><USER9> The article refers to 'private cloud', and you refer to 'personal clouds'. From reading the rest of the article, though, it appears this is a single on- premise server.

'Cloud' usually refers to some abstraction above the physical hardware layer, that allows you to not worry about the fate of a single physical computer. This seems to be the opposite of that.

What do you mean by 'cloud'?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting middle ground between old school high-upfront investment server rooms with IT guys on call, and new school IT infrastructure as a service.

Take the servers out of the rack in the dark room full of fragile equipment and tangled wires, color them orange, remove the blinking lights and crazy loud fans, and sit them on a desk and they don't seem so scary anymore. (The price is still a little bit scary).

Differentiators of privacy, usability, and good aesthetics have brought this company far - raising 1m on kickstarter, selling into hundreds of companies, and now securing a spot at YC. Still, networking is a very complex subject, and a lot of smart people get paid a lot of money to make sure it gets done right.

I'm rooting for Protonet to help us democratize networking and bring it further towards the power consumer/small business market. Shouldn't private control of one's own data be a basic right in this day and age?

<comment><USER3> "Shouldn't private control of one's own data be a basic right in this day and age?"

That's what's driving me (and us)! :) We need to regain control over our own data and become first class citizen in this digital age (and yes also in the monetary aspect of it). Our hypothesis is: if you make it beautiful, easy to use and fun & given a similar feature set, people will go with what gives them more individual freedom. So thank you - for rooting for us!! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why does everything have to be "beautiful"?

<comment><USER12> I think it's an awkward term used to differentiate hardware from beige boxes, following Apple. It feels very forced and near-meaningless in these contexts though. Reminds me of the startups with "Made with love" in their footers as though some early developer passion imbues the code with otherworldly power.

I find both offputting, but then the tactic hasn't really failed Apple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What is the difference between this and a standard NAS product, especially Synology with DMS which has pretty all the functionalities Protonet provides.

A small server with remote access that is.

</comment><comment><USER14> How come everyone is laying the smack down on these guys? Maybe encouraging guidance where things are ambiguous or the product offering doesn't seem fully thought out.

</comment><comment><USER15> Deployed safely inside your firewall, and accessible from anywhere.

What?

</comment><comment><USER16> I see everyone here complaining about the hardware, but isn't the real product here the hardware bundled _with_ the software(SOUL)?

</comment><comment><USER17> Once you take the servers out of the server room, you must make them _reasonably_ secure against physical access. Are these servers able to be physically locked, both to prevent opening and to secure it in place? Do they use full-disk encryption?

</comment><comment><USER18> I hope this product finds a market, but from the description it sounds like a simplified NAS with a few additional functions. What will you back up this device to- another one or a NAS? What's the point of calling it cloud anything then?

</comment><comment><USER19> What's if the device's local storage experiences hardware failure?

1\. Can you configure it to make backups?

2\. Can you configure it to replace data with low latency?

3\. If you have multiple, can they work together to increase availability or data durability?

<comment><USER3> The device comes with different raid levels - preconfigured and on-site support if anything happens.

1\. Making backups is really easy - the most simple way is a USB backup, additionally: offsite encrypted and using a second unit to be synched and ready as a cold standby unit.

2\. not sure what you mean by that.

3\. we're working on this - currently only the synching and cold standby scenario works and is often used by our customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> $3700 for a celeron with 8 gigs of RAM and 4TB storage? Is it gold plated?

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm not seeing any source code. Is any of it open source?

<comment><USER3> The source code is fully accessible on every unit. We're open sourcing the base system - parts of it have been rolled into:

[http://experimental-platform.io/](http://experimental-platform.io/)

<comment><USER22> >The source code is fully accessible on every unit.

So it is Open Source, because we get the source code with the compiled versions.

>We're open sourcing the base system

Uhh, wait, so now it isn't?

<comment><USER3> You get the full source code. The license is not an OS license though - that's what I meant. We're moving the base system to a OS license.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ouch. Even TechCrunch didn't give ProtoNet a writeup before the YC blog announced them. Good wishes to the founders. Hope things get better for you over there!

</comment><comment><USER14> I could see this (or something like it) being a useful development unit for Azure developers who run their own local development version of Azure.

<comment><USER3> Yeah that would be awesome! We actually have a very high powered version too that we just released:

\- 8 Core XEON \- 128 GB RAM \- up to 50TB of storage with 250GB SSD cache \- still passively cooled

[https://protonetinc.com/lp/protonet-launches-new-model- priva...](https://protonetinc.com/lp/protonet-launches-new-model-private- cloud-server-carla/)

edit: if you know anyone that'd like to try that setup - drop us a line - we'd love to help out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The __a Small Orange Box __immediately reminded me of A Small Orange hosting. Seems like a branding conflict.

</comment><comment><USER25> How is this different to something like Synology NAS, which is DSM 6.0 over most of those features already.

<comment><USER3> You should try our trial (just hit the button) - it's basically the same system that runs on the boxes and once you decide to buy one we can just provide it setup with everything you did online.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Sifting through & making sense of browsing history? - <AUTHOR>

I would like HN's recommendations for a browser plugin or something similar?
Here's my problem: Like most people, I browse a lot. I post some of the really interesting technology related links to HN, business related links to NewMogul(NM), and then there are other things I read that are interesting that I don't post or don't come under either HN or NM.
My history has a lot of great info, at least some of that would be useful to me in the future. Is there a good way to manage history? browsed links?
I could sift through history in Safari or FF, that would be cumbersome. I could bookmark everything or add it to delicious, that again is cumbersome. I started using InfoAxe, so that I can search through my history -- while that is a step better, it is less than ideal.
What do folks here recommend? Thanks! <comment><USER2> I always wanted to create an extension that would store history as a graph of traversal and not a list of visited URLs. The link is what makes the web powerful, I don't see why history doesn't share the same connected nature.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, I was planning on making something for Firefox that tracked my Wikipedia treks, because I wanted to keep track of pages I went to and when, but also how I ended up there. It'd be interesting to see but also good for preserving topics.

That being said I haven't even started it yet because I have so much on my plate :( Also had a plan to somehow enhance the way bookmarks are stored in FF, but I figured it was already covered by something like del.icio.us.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hi Prakash, this is Jonathan (from infoaxe).

Would it help if infoaxe tracked and made available to you all the urls you have shared with friends in the past? infoaxe offers ways to share content from your web memory (over email and to facebook) and we could archive and show this ordered by time or something similar.

Email me at firstname.lastname@example.com if you have other suggestions/questions. Thanks for trying out the alpha!

</comment><comment><USER5> Slogger

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/143>

Scrapbook

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/427>

Both are configurable. Not sure whether they would achieve what you want, but they are worth a look.

For myself, I use Scrapbook to save interesting pages for future perusal. This is very convenient, and it can help limit the growth of large numbers of open tabs and the resultant resource consumption and slowdown. Scrapbook also has integrated search.

Scrapbook can be set to save every page visited, and to save a bookmark rather than the entire page. I'm not sure whether the two can be combined.

HTH

P.S. Looks like Scrapbook is supporting Firefox 3, now. I'm still on 2 and so don't know how that support is going. Earlier lack of support was one (of several) compatibility issues that kept me back on 2.</comment>


Slavoj Žižek: ISIS Is a Disgrace to True Fundamentalism - <AUTHOR> http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/03/isis-is-a-disgrace-to-true-fundamentalism/

<comment><USER2> Sometimes, even with his tortured intellectualisms, Zizek finds some kernel of truth. What he says here is spot on. From their leader's Swiss watch, to their rampant need for social media validation, ISIS have just "iternalized our standards and measure themselves by them".

The problem is unlike the Western iGeneration, they can never see their faces mirrored in the screens; that future does not exist for them.</comment>


Benchmarking Top NoSQL Databases [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.datastax.com/wp-content/themes/datastax-2014-08/files/nosql_benchmarks_endpoint_april_2015.pdf

<comment><USER2> This link works: [http://www.datastax.com/apache-cassandra-leads-nosql- benchma...](http://www.datastax.com/apache-cassandra-leads-nosql-benchmark)

</comment><comment><USER3> Have these been independently verified? Datastax is great but Cassandra is still their main product.

<comment><USER4> Our perf team and our technical marketing team wrote a post about this specific benchmark. Hopefully Datastax will clarify. (I work at Couchbase but wasn't involved in this work.)

My personal opinion is that using a vendor benchmark to choose your data stack is like hiring a bodyguard based on their record in professional wrestling.

[http://blog.couchbase.com/leading-nosql-database-vendors- cou...](http://blog.couchbase.com/leading-nosql-database-vendors-couchbase- mongodb-and-datastax-lock-horns)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Link doesn't work, it sends to a 404 page</comment>


Haroopad – The Next Document processor based on Markdown - <AUTHOR> http://pad.haroopress.com/user.html <comment><USER2> I've been looking for a replacement to Mou for a while, and I'm excited to see Haroopad offering not only Markdown support but also a bunch of other features (especially MathJax and intelligent autocomplete). I'll definitely try it out.

</comment><comment><USER3> Am I the only one getting messed up character encodings?

[http://i.imgur.com/SeUXINA.png](http://i.imgur.com/SeUXINA.png)

<comment><USER4> not messed up, it's just written in Korean.

<comment><USER3> I see, now it makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Math doesn't show up in the viewer, which kind of defeats the point of allowing math markup... otherwise promising. [I'm on Windows 8.1]

<comment><USER5> After further examination, a number of the features claimed on the website seem to be missing (at least on Windows).

I don't get PDF export, math mode is not enabled by default (and enabling it breaks the super/subscript text-mode notation; they're apparently mutually exclusive), the social media embedding doesn't seem to work either (I tried embedding a youtube video and it just puts up a throbber). This shows a lot of promise, but is very broken right now.

Also, the preferences dialog is buried in the "File" menu ... which I don't think is a standard location on any platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Doesn't work on Ubuntu 14.04. Downloaded the .deb and clicking the icon doesn't do anything.

<comment><USER7> Maybe it's libudev.so.0 issue. You can get information about this issue. - [http://haroopad.userecho.com/topic/226287-linux- ubuntu-1304-...](http://haroopad.userecho.com/topic/226287-linux- ubuntu-1304-amd64-occur-error-shared-libraries/)</comment></comment>


dbeaver: Proposal for a Postgresql DB client - <AUTHOR> http://dbeaver.jkiss.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello - I haven't got any relation to this project but I feel that it needs to be more know to HN users because I've stumbled a lot of times on people requiring a good Postgresql Client (especially after the release of PgAdmin 4). I propose to try dbeaver. It is open source, works for other databases beyond Postgresql (but the main problem was with postgresql lacking a good client) and, imho is really great!</comment>


How eBay can save itself in 1 day - <AUTHOR> http://www.bradleyspencer.com/2009/how-ebay-can-save-itself-in-1-day/

<comment><USER2> How about you bid your "reservation price" and have no regrets? Simply bid the most you are willing to pay and then last minute bidders won't matter. That is the beauty of a second price auction.

<comment><USER3> That's one way, but it doesn't approximate real world "bidding".

I definitely think eBay would be better off with this feature implemented

<comment><USER2> Ebay does this bidding for you. Anytime you enter an auction, the price you are willing to pay should be independent of how everyone else in the room values the object. If your willingness to pay is a function of the last bid, then you probably should stick to fixed price sales.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't disagree. The best approach is to always put your maximum bid in. But human nature plays a big part in auctions, and I think ebay should note this.

It seems that most people, given 3 hours to think about and consider the regret they would feel if they didn't get what they are bidding on, would usually convince themselves to skip a coffee and add another five dollars to their bid.

you are totally right, but humans are far from rational.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I seem to remember that they used to have that feature (or was it some other auction site)?

While I hate the issue, too, there might be disadvantages for the buyer, too. For example if the auction gets extended for 3 hours with each bid, it might mean that you have to sit around forever monitoring the auction if you really want the item.

A better fix might be to allow sniping (automatic bidding in the last second).

The reason for last second bidding is to avoid the pitfalls of human psychology, I think. If you start earlier and outbid other people, they might get into a bidding frenzy and prices will be driven higher than what makes sense.

I suppose ebay outlaws sniping because they actually want that effect: the higher the bid, the more money ebay gets. Personally I would prefer to decide on one price and stick to it, so sniping would be perfect for me.

All in all I suspect that ebay tested the "prolong the auction" feature and found that not prolonging it somehow works better - or at least it used to work better.

<comment><USER5> > A better fix might be to allow sniping (automatic bidding in the last > second).

In a sense they have that already, since eBay is a (quasi) second-price auction.

<comment><USER4> What do you mean?

<comment><USER6> A true second-price auction is one where the bidders (secretly) inform the auctioneer of the maximum price they'd be willing to pay, and the bidder who nominates the highest price wins, but pays the price nominated by the second- highest bidder. This is done in an attempt to eliminate the "winner's curse" and encourage the bidders to nominate their true maximum price. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner%27s_curse>

eBay's proxy bidding system approximates a second-price auction because if everyone enters their true maximum, the person who nominates the highest value will pay (2nd-price + minimum-bid-increment).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are serious economists who look at these issues. The book Snipers, Shills, and Sharks, <http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8435.html> is a great summary of the research that includes this approach among a hundred others.

</comment><comment><USER8> eBay has heard this proposal at least a bajillion times before, including at least 3 for me. I don't know what their reason is for not doing it that way but it's been heavily considered and rejected.

<comment><USER9> > "I don't know what their reason is"

I want to know.

<comment><USER10> My guess is, they have tried it and it does not work. People don't want to wait around 3 hours to see if they successfully bought something, they want to get confirmation asap.

<comment><USER11> I know auction sites which set a smaller increment (5-10mins). I do wonder, why eBay hasn't tried it. 3 hours does seem too long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This would make eBay more complicated. I suspect that eBay will be slowly overtaken by _less_ complicated rivals.

And dude, just bid your max price and then calmly await the verdict. I sure as hell don't want to have to watch nervously over a continuously extending date of purchase.

</comment><comment><USER13> Ebay still has auctions? I thought it all went Buy It Now years ago.

</comment><comment><USER14> New Zealand's eBay clone - trademe.co.nz - has auto-extend for auctions where a bid was just received.. The auto-extend is only 5 minutes though.

This doesn't eliminate last minute bidders though - rather it just extends the period of the 'last minute bidding war' till someone gives up.

So. Its good idea, but you don't want a 3 hour auto-extend - 3 minutes would be better. 3 hours, as suggested, would probably mean many auctions would not end for weeks and weeks and would likely frustrate the heck out of bidders and sellers alike.

<comment><AUTHOR> Shit. Thats cool. Ok, five minutes is more than fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Another fix would be if the exact ending time would not be published. Just something like "This auctions ends in the next 20 minutes".

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> eBay just holds it's "ending time" as some sort of holy grail. I really have no idea why.

Even if this was just a feature that sellers could opt for (for five bucks more or so), I think it would make a world of difference.</comment>


Responsibility Deflected, the CLOUD Act Passes - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/responsibility-deflected-cloud-act-passes <comment><USER2> > _This bill is the CLOUD Act. It was never reviewed or marked up by any > committee in either the House or the Senate. It never received a hearing. It > was robbed of a stand-alone floor vote because Congressional leadership > decided, behind closed doors, to attach this un-vetted, unrelated data bill > to the $1.3 trillion government spending bill. Congress has a professional > responsibility to listen to the American people's concerns, to represent > their constituents, and to debate the merits and concerns of this proposal > amongst themselves, and this week, they failed._

The 4th amendment is gone and it wasn't terrorists that killed it, it was fear and representatives of the people that don't represent people that killed it.

These freedoms were given up on page 2,232 of a budget bill with no debate.

History will not be kind to this time or everyone that lived during this backslide. Freedoms are hard to win, we are giving them up easily.

As an aside, these 'pro-business' representatives just made US cloud products less valuable to foreign companies/countries and US competitors.

When will people realize that surveillance can be abused and it is usually for political or corporate espionage, has nothing to do with making anyone more secure or safe.

Business plans, data and ideas are going to be a top target to theft as they can get to it through a fake or associated threat, have some rogue actor email or send info in, extract all business data and information.

<comment><USER3> Yup. No secret, once recorded, stays secret forever and the surveillance state's expansion is making it worse. It'll just be a bigger pot to steal and no one bothers to pay for security because they don't have to.

Equifax made money off its security breach ffs.

<comment><USER4> >Equifax made money off its security breach ffs.

Source?

<comment><USER3> Operating revenue for "U.S. Information Solutions" is up $29 million over 2016 for the period right after the breach in 2017.

\+ various third parties (i.e. the one linked to) have said its likely they made money off the breach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Of course we lost. The people always lose. I stopped using cloud services without end to end encryption, except email/sms, years ago, soon after Snowden's revelations. I simply don't see any other solution. I just wish more people cared, that we could do a real boycott and hurt some companies. A few corporations going out of business would be a miniscule price to pay for privacy. Not enough will ever care though. It's sad but true. Convenience trumps everything.

</comment><comment><USER6> This could be an excellent use of the Presidential veto. Whatever your political leanings, omnibus bills are a terrible outcome of the false left right paradigm. Everybody gets to toss in the stuff they "want" to support but know their constituents do not.

EFF: You wrote pages about it, but failed to mention the president still needs to sign it. It's a pretty glaring omission...

<comment><USER7> Except Trump probably supports the CLOUD Act.

<comment><USER8> The Administration has backed the push for it (in part, to resolve an ongoing legal dispute with Microsoft, who also supports it), so it's pretty hard (though given Trump's other rapid reversals, not impossible) to see Trump causing a shutdown by vetoing the omnibus spending bill over it's inclusion.

<comment><USER9> >>Microsoft, who also supports it

proving once again the Microsoft does not care about the privacy of their users, and their lawsuit fighting this was not them standing up for their users as they claimed but instead was them pushing for a liability shield that would prevent users from using them

This should be the end of CLOUD services... Self Host or no Host should be the motto of the day

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So, here's a question. I'm a small self-hoster, US-based. If the "London police" come calling asking for my data, what repercussions do I face if I just say "No"?

<comment><USER11> The UK government can compel you to give them whatever they want by indirectly acting via the US Govt. They will pressure the US Govt the US Govt will act on you. So even though on paper they can't directly act against you, rest assured, they can. Lets pretend that the US government would not comply with requests to compel you to give them something, you can still be sued or otherwise acted upon in such a way that you would have to expend time / resources to fend off the request / lawsuit or whatever. So to say that the UK Govt can't do anything to you because you don't have any assets there or don't want to go there is kind of silly IMO.

<comment><USER12> This is incorrect. The US government has no interest in turning over their citizens to the UK government. The UK government is unlikely to sue a US citizen in US court to assert their jurisdiction.

The most the UK government would probably do is issue a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty request with the US government, who would then go get a warrant and serve that on you, which you would have to respond to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > London investigators want the private Slack messages of a Londoner they > suspect of bank fraud. The London police could go directly to Slack, a U.S. > company, to request and collect those messages. The London police would not > necessarily need prior judicial review for this request. The London police > would not be required to notify U.S. law enforcement about this request. The > London police would not need a probable cause warrant for this collection.

Is the implication that before the CLOUD Act, if London police wanted to ask a US company for information they had to notify US law enforcement?

Sure, if they wanted to _force_ a US company to give them information they would have to get the US legal system involved, but as far as I am aware US law enforcement is not a gatekeeper over foreign access to talk to US entities, at least when those foreigners are not from countries that the US restricts contact with in general.

</comment><comment><USER14> Well, I guess the erosion of our most basic rights is in fact happening. Ugh, makes me sick to my stomach.

<comment><USER15> To be fair, the erosion of our basic rights has been happening for a _long_ time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am certainly no supporter of the CLOUD act but the examples given on OP are not convincing to me. What would prevent Slack from notifying all parties of the request (the Londoner and her friends)? As well I'd expect that there are barriers in UK which would require a warrant to get the data.

<comment><USER17> From [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/02/cloud-act-dangerous- ex...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/02/cloud-act-dangerous-expansion- police-snooping-cross-border-data)

 _" The legislation still:

\- Includes a weak standard for review that does not rise to the protections of the warrant requirement under the 4th Amendment.

\- Fails to require foreign law enforcement to seek individualized and prior judicial review.

\- Grants real-time access and interception to foreign law enforcement without requiring the heightened warrant standards that U.S. police have to adhere to under the Wiretap Act.

\- Fails to place adequate limits on the category and severity of crimes for this type of agreement.

\- Fails to require notice on any level – to the person targeted, to the country where the person resides, and to the country where the data is stored."_

<comment><USER16> I've seen that. However the London police may require a warrant under _UK_ law, nevertheless. And Slack _may_ notify, nevertheless.

I think EFF could come up with better examples. At least, most of these examples are not threatening for US persons. I'd think better examples would involve what US LEO can do unwarranted. In that case people may be inclined to exert more pressure on their representatives.

The law is bad but I think it could be painted in worse light.

<comment><USER18> > At least, most of these examples are not threatening for US persons.

As a german, I'm so fucking fed up with this attitude. "Leader of the free world" my ass.

Seriously, the US population needs to stop thinking only about what concerns the US population and acknowledge the fact that a lot of US law regarding the internet is actually also affecting the rest of the world. Stop treating non- US people as something which does not need to have at least the same level of protection.

Either fight for the right to have privacy regardless of where a person is coming from or don't fight at all.

Just standing there saying "ah, it's fine, it protects US persons." and then bragging about the US being a fine country and protecting the rest of the world is just... I don't have words for it.

<comment><USER16> I am from Germany. I have no say in the matter. That's the reason why I would like EFF come up with better examples to make people who have at least some influence (such as calling their representative) engaged. If its not their problem, they won't.

I think this legislation at odds at least with upcoming GDPR if not with existing regulations in some EU members. It will be interesting to see how this pans out.

<comment><USER18> Well, I guess I misunderstood you then, sorry for that. My point still stands though, only not meant for you :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I guess we learned nothing from the 20th century. While our country, at least used to, pride itself and base it's image upon excoriating unjust governmental overreach abroad (East Germany), it has become exactly what it once bemoaned.

<comment><USER8> No, our government _still_ prides itself on excoriating unjust governmental overreach abroad.

Of course, that's often a good distraction from unjust governmental overreach at home. But if you think that wasn't just as true at the Cold War time you point to, you are sadly mistaken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hopefully with all these recent transgressions against digital rights we will see the emergence of some hybrid of Zeronet, TOR, I2P, IPFS, BitTorrent, etc... All these technologies have some serious usability/UX problems. We need something so easy to use and so ubiquitous that it will make nations feel like Metallica going up against Napster.

<comment><USER21> From my perspective this is a legislative issue and not a technology problem. The solution here is still to participate in democracy and preserve our rights.

How will putting the government on the defensive result in better lawmaking? That's exactly the situation we are in now. Lawmakers are afraid of technology and make ill advised laws to try and control it.

<comment><USER22> >implying they listen to us and not the people who have money

you should know better than that by now, come on. vote, do whatever. i sure do. but until you're disrupting things, they won't listen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What are our legislative options now? Let's assume we're already exhausting all technical options.

<comment><USER24> When the legislative branch screws up, it's on one of the others to keep it in check. Usually the judicial. This will be fought in the courts once a defendant is incentivized enough to spend the money to do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > This bill is the CLOUD Act. It was never reviewed or marked up by any > committee in either the House or the Senate. It never received a hearing. It > was robbed of a stand-alone floor vote because Congressional leadership > decided, behind closed doors, to attach this un-vetted, unrelated data bill > to the $1.3 trillion government spending bill.

And this, gentlemen, is why you NEVER trust a government. Any government.</comment>


Unfunny April Fool's Joke from the Magic Lantern Developers - <AUTHOR> http://kukuruku.co/hub/it/unfunny-april-fools-joke-from-the-magic-lantern-developers <comment><USER2> Well this is depressing. I was always meaning to install ML, now I'm not sure I can trust the developer for doing something so stupid and not feeling and contrition for it.

Is al3x also g3gg0?

      so a warning to everyone being pranked yesterday:
      you are not prepared for serious shooting with magic
      lantern, if this was a real problem to you.

      why?

      if you use ML for business make sure a failure, no matter if serious issues or not so serious (like yesterday) wont get you in trouble!

      - take ML-free backup-cards with you
      - make yourself confident with rescue procedures and how to temporary disable ML
      - ML, especially "latest" versions can introduce troublesome behavior

      yes, its cool that ML is being used in a lot of serious stuff. we really love that.
      but we expect users to be prepared for the moment when ML is going nuts for some reason.

      this day will come.

[http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=14850.msg14...](http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=14850.msg143985#msg143985)

There is also a picture in that thread (scroll up).

<comment><USER3> If anything, this gives you good reasons to trust these guys. Many people have installed and are relying on ML without reading the warranty warnings. At least they're pushing you to use good practices that stand you in good stead with _any other dev and their product out there_.

<comment><USER4> There are warranty warnings on any open source platform. I wonder what would happen if an open source database would decide to do this on april 1st :)

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure how enforceable a warranty disclaimer is when it comes to software that maliciously alerts the user to a permanent and irrecoverable hardware error.

<comment><USER3> maliciously?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> At first I thought this was blown out of proportion, but the developer's comments are infuriating. When an issue was filed, the response was "can you post a video?" rather than "sorry, it's a joke – roll back for a fix". Even the official explanation is just the developer complaining about users being frustrated: [https://bitbucket.org/hudson/magic- lantern/issue/2235/5dmk2-...](https://bitbucket.org/hudson/magic- lantern/issue/2235/5dmk2-bricked-urgent-please#comment-17120450)

<comment><USER7> Magic Lantern is _designed_ to be as simple as possible - you stick a file on a memory card and that's it. ML is 'marketed' as something that 'just works'. The developer needs to understand that the people who'll use it are, essentially, IT newbies who won't always understand the need for backups, understand what a roll back is, and won't follow instructions. That means they won't necessarily understand the fix, and they will believe a message that says their camera is bricked.

None of that means he shouldn't have played a joke on the users, but it definitely means he ought to have thought it through more. And, as you say, he should have had a much better response to people's understandably somewhat panicked reaction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Definitely not a classy move; perhaps it would've been better to do it immediately on boot-up, with an error message like FOOLS_FAULT, and after a few seconds pop up a dialog that makes the "error" go away.

"Your camera is now bricked" isn't exactly the message I'd like to send to my users.

</comment><comment><USER9> While, as a developer, I love adding some easter eggs, I think this kind of joke is not funny and tarnishes the open source community reputation.

An easter egg should make the user smiles and make him/her feels good and that the developer cares about the software. That one is just mean.

While I can understand the developer making an error in not thinking it through and making the joke, the handling of the case on the forum should have been "I make a stupid joke, sorry, I'll make a fix right away, just rollback for now".

To the people saying it's free software and the user is entitled to nothing, I'll just ask: "Is it the world you want?" a world where there is no trust and only the fear of being sued for money?

</comment><comment><USER10> Am I terrible for actually getting quite a chuckle reading this?

<comment><USER3> I thought it was good and had a chuckle myself.

<comment><USER11> "yes, its cool that ML is being used in a lot of serious stuff. we really love that. but we expect users to be prepared for the moment when ML is going nuts for some reason. this day will come."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In some way, it's a lesson to not uncritically install whatever on your own devices.

I install custom firmware on my Wi-Fi routers, my smartphone etc., never really thought about how it would affect me if it were to get bricked in the process.

</comment><comment><USER13> No, no one should be surprised that a nightly build had problems.

Yes, users should know what they are getting into.

No, the developer has no obligation to be held to a higher standard of reliability.

Yes, the developer can really do whatever they want.

With all that said, can we at least agree that this shows _extremely_ poor judgment from an engineering and product sense? Not only is this a terrible way to achieve user trust, but it also doesn't make any users feel good. As a user, why would I want to use a product that wants to make a fool out of me and throw wrenches in a core feature for chuckles?

</comment><comment><USER14> I remember a similar April's fools joke at one of my old workplace. This was the late 80s. Well, one morning, when I booted up my computer, it echoed out a message like "your computer has a virus" or something similar. The message was also showing up on a number of other computers. It caused panic and confusion in my workplace. It was a small company and computer knowledge was lacking. We shut all the computer off and called in some computer specialist to checkout the problem. It turned out that someone has modified autoexec.bat to echo the string out as an April's fools joke. Well, the manager was not happy and it caused the company a bit of money to recover. I think the person who did it was given a dismissal warning.

</comment><comment><USER15> A good natured "prank" is something you play on your friends, something they will laugh about instantly after it happened. When you make other people's misery the butt of your joke you're not being funny you're just being an asshole. It's little different from what a bully does.

</comment><comment><USER16> Am I the only one that finds it weird that the tm_mday field in the tm struct is the only one that starts from 1?

I understand it doesn't make much sense to have tm_mday start from 0, but then again even 3 as April seems weird, maybe they should all start at 1.

[http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908775/xsh/time.h.ht...](http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908775/xsh/time.h.html)

<comment><USER17> tm_mon and tm_wday are 0-based because the expectation was you'll probably be using than as an index in a lookup table to get a month name (e.g., "Jan", "Feb", ...) or day name (e.g., "Sun", "Mon", ...).

For day of month, we don't have special names for them. We just use the day number. So tm_mday directly contains the day number.

<comment><USER16> That's right, but what about tm_yday then?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Posting from a new account, as this is apparently so controversial it will probably get me shadowbanned.

Seriously, just how humorless and gullible do you have to be to not understand that this was an April Fools' joke?

First, BSoDs are specific to Windows OSes. OK, fair enough, non-tech people might not know this. But...

"Take a photo of a calendar, focusing on today's date."

If after reading this line you still don't understand that this is a joke, I feel sorry for you.

The "rand() % 1000 == 13" probably causes the "BSoD" every time for the OP because the RNG is not properly seeded, which is the real problem here.

I don't condone this joke or the developers' response, but I'm not going to blame them for anything either. The negativity in this thread, however...

<comment><USER19> This is cruelty, not humor. Look at this from the perspective of a different profession:

Why is it a problem if I'm a doctor and I put a non-lethal poison into every few flu shuts on April 1st? Because April Fools.

This is how people who don't program view this sort of thing. You can say that you feel sorry for them, but, in reality, you lose, because they'll never trust you again. And they shouldn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Indeed, that's not funny.

But I was born in 1974, and I have never actually seen or heard a funny April Fool's joke in my entire life.

<comment><USER21> Then you will love Hacker News.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Holy %$! that's bad.

If you're paid to take photos, roll up to a gig with all the gear you tested yesterday, and get this...good god.

<comment><USER23> If you're paid to take photos, you shouldn't be installing the latest nightly build of some free software on your camera.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Picture of the April Fool's prank: [http://m.imgur.com/BeHi1H9](http://m.imgur.com/BeHi1H9)

<comment><USER25> This is actually pretty funny. I mean, how can you _not_ realize this is a joke?

<comment><USER23> It sounds legit up until the part where you're supposed to take a picture of todays date on a calendar

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> not in the slightest bit funny - al3x is a total idiot, and g3gg0's stupid defensive answer makes it even worse.

</comment><comment><USER27> Why would anyone even write a bsod() function? That's tempting fate.

<comment><USER28> You need SOME code to display debug info or at least a message when the processor encounters an unrecoverable exception. Otherwise all crashes would just freeze the system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I dislike the implication that any April Fools joke can be funny.

</comment><comment><USER30> Totally not cool! Everyone knows April Fool's pranks have to end at noon...

</comment><comment><USER31> That's a fucked up move..

</comment><comment><USER32> Demand a refund!

Get over it. Seems pretty funny to me.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is hilarious to me and I won't apologize for saying that.

</comment><comment><USER34> LOL, looks like they made a fool out of you.

1st rule: be prepared fro April 1st 2nd rule: you cannot expect anything from free software on the internet, it is free after all

</comment><comment><USER35> The first line on ML: "Magic Lantern is a free firmware addon for Canon EOS DSLR cameras that adds a host of features to assist photographers and videographers."

Read it again: it is free. If you really need QoS, pay someone to develop and code review the firmware. I am not being a troll, some people just have so much self-entitlement on something that is free.

<comment><USER36> Well; it really depends on your jurisdiction, but you should know that there is such a thing as consumer protection and tort liability --yes, even for things you get for free, like FOSS. See for instance [1,2].

Also, in the specific case of FOSS, this kind of jackass-ery might soon come to an end anyway if/when the EU and UK follows through with their (relatively) recent moves to introduce stronger software liability provisions (eg [3]).

[1] [http://www.ifross.org/en/what-legal-standard-liability- and-w...](http://www.ifross.org/en/what-legal-standard-liability-and-warranty- germany)

[2] [http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/21st_cen...](http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Course_Pages/21st_century_issues/21st_century_law/open_source_legal_01.htm#D.%20TORT%20LIABILITYclayton)

[3] [http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/workspace/analysts- warn-[3]](http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/workspace/analysts-warn-\[3\]) vendors-on-software-liability-7284

<comment><USER35> All these articles only mentioned the possibility of liability. [1] most probably translated from German, and I cannot really understand what the translated text means, so I have no comment.

[2]: It doesn't say for sure one will be liable "it is difficult to determine with any certainty: (1) whether open source software licenses will be enforceable, (2) whether open source software copyright will be valid, or (3) whether open source software licenses will subject developers to tort liability." [3] is more on vendor, which quite specifically on transaction that carries monetary value. It is debatable if one still be regarded as vendor even if he doesn't sell stuff. I will give the article benefit of doubt.

Truth be told, the first successful litigation basically will turn off most contributors: no one can be sure their codes are totally bug-free. Even if that person totally wants to do good.</comment></comment></comment>


Ice cream sandwich SDK available now - <AUTHOR> http://developer.android.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm also getting push-install of ICS updates such as Music right now. Version 4.0 of Android looks impressive so far - a _lot_ of UI and admin improvements I had wanted for a long while.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The full details: <http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-4.0-highlights.html></comment>


Discovery of the decade? Injection 'could cure Alzheimer's in minutes' - <AUTHOR> http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/health/article3603996.ece?a=3603996

<comment><USER2> For the work I do in lab (testing anti-inflammatory drugs in _in vitro_ neural models) I did some research into etanercept when the first paper was published.

Etanercept works roughly by cleaning up that TNF-alpha which is plaqued around in Alzheimer's. It was FDA approved as an arthritis drug which (and I don't fully understand this part) allows doctors to attempt novel treatments using it without much further FDA approval.

Etanercept really does appear to cure the symptoms of Alzheimer's, _quickly_. The real issues are long-term effects for this sort of treatment and whether cleaning up the TNF-alpha actually does anything for fixing the causes of Alzheimer's.

<comment><USER3> This is Enbrel

Safety After a number of studies and reports of adverse reactions in patients receiving anti-TNF alpha therapy (including serious and sometimes fatal blood disorders, infections, rare reports of lymphoma and solid tissue cancers, rare reports of serious liver injury, and rare reports of demyelinating central nervous system disorders), rare reports of congestive heart failure, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a warning to doctors appearing in the respective product labeling of these drugs instructing them to screen and monitor potential patients more carefully. [7]

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Look at this MRI of a Alzheimer's patient before onset (right), and after onset (left).

[http://www.urmc.rochester.edu/neuroslides/slides/slide193.jp...](http://www.urmc.rochester.edu/neuroslides/slides/slide193.jpg)

It looks like there is PHYSICAL damage done to the brain-- there is actualy missing brain matter; as you can see, the sinuses have enlarged in size.

How can this injection reverse that? I call false until they publish something.

<comment><USER2> They _did_ publish something. I can't link the actual documents, but if you have access to the journals it's:

Tobinick E, Gross H: _Rapid cognitive improvement in Alzheimer's disease following perispinal etanercept administration_. J Neuroinflammation 2008, 5.

There's also a commentary paper,

Griffin, W. Sue T.: _Perispinal etanercept: Potential as an Alzheimer therapeutic_. J Neuroinflammation 2008, 5.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hoping its true but having a hard time believing it. Is neurological damage even reversible?

<comment><USER6> I understood it to be something like a protein plaque that forms in the brain. The plaque shows up in cross sections looking like tar -- it's surprising the brain can function at all, having been altered that much.

Which makes it all the weirder that this treatment targets inflammation, allegedly. If the drug instantly melted the plaque, opening up the old synapses again, I could believe that. Maybe it does. Medical companies don't always understand exactly _why_ their product works before starting trials.

Also noteworthy: it says a few patients have been on the treatment for several months, implying that the effect might be temporary. No mention of habituation, a la L-DOPA.

<comment><USER4> Pharmaceutical companies sometimes even release medications without knowing why they work.

Kind of like Isotretinoin, which says in the prescriber's pamphlet, "The exact mechanism of action of isotretinoin is not currently understood."

Made me feel really great to be taking something that is "not currently understood," though approved as safe by the FDA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For some reason the first image that came to mind when reading this was the "experimental" treatments in the last Resident Evil (where the old guy seems fine after receiving some shot and is able to operate the camera, only to go crazy a couple of minutes later and kill the two doctors).

I wouldn't have expected the cure for Alzheimer's to be something that is effective within minutes.

<comment><USER5> _I wouldn't have expected the cure for Alzheimer's to be something that is effective within minutes._

Hence the reason for some of my skepticism. How can you even diagnose it that fast?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why did Google Manifesto article mysteriously disappear from HN? - <AUTHOR> I clicked on the front page article from HN, read it, and when I hit the back button to HN, it was gone. The article seemed reasonable, however, I'm not sure if it was accurate or not. Was it removed because of inaccuracies or because it provided support for the Google Manifesto or...what? <comment><USER2> Several of the submissions got flagged for whatever reason.

There were multiple threads though and the most active had 2000+ comments before it got killed (which is extremely high as far as HN submissions go).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For reference, this is the article: [https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/no-the-google- manif...](https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/no-the-google-manifesto- isnt-sexist-or-anti-diversity-its-science/article35903359/)

<comment><USER3> A lot of these articles get flagged right now, the specific one actually had a big discussion yesterday already: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14968626](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14968626)

<comment><AUTHOR> Gotcha, thanks! Would've expected to just have it redirect the permalink to the existing thread rather than just load an empty page.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure that I understand your comment, but you can go to

[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=franl](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=franl)

and enable showdead to see the [dead] threads. Warning: There is a lot of crap in the [dead] threads.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just meant that if a thread was killed because there's already an active discussion for it, I would've expected to be redirected to the active thread (rather than a blank page). Thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I Asked a similar question recently:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14967819](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14967819)

<comment><USER2> Which got flagged too. I'd say this google flagging is contagious ;)

If the topic is that touchy, I guess I'll abstain from making Google diversity-jokes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Look at the HN guidelines. Most of the Google talk recently has been "off topic".

<comment><USER7> More "redundant" than "off-topic."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Anything humanizing james is being flagged heavily.

</comment><comment><USER9> HN articles should be interesting or relevant.</comment>


Slideas Is a (Visual) Markdown Presentations Editor for Mac - <AUTHOR> https://www.slideas.app/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've just released a new Mac App that may interest you. It is a Markdown Presentations Editor. To have an idea of what it is, imagine Ulysses and Keynote have a baby. It is called Slideas ([https://www.slideas.app/](https://www.slideas.app/))

You can use the app from the outline to the final presentation.

It has all the features we can expect from a decent presentation application: \- Multiple themes, palettes and layouts \- Various types of content: basic markdown but also graphs, diagrams, vector icons, math, ... \- Presenter mode, PDF export

I keep the list sort because it is better to see it in action: \- Video: [https://vimeo.com/385002379](https://vimeo.com/385002379)</comment>


Companies that help people vanish - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200903-the-companies-that-help-people-vanish <comment><USER2> The article isn't really clear on the mechanics of this.

Are they changing their names and starting over entirely?

Or are they just moving and the company helps them establish themselves in a way where their name isn't likely to appear as easily and Japan has some mix of legal / personal norms that allow this to happen / them to remain hidden?

<comment><USER3> Do other countries not have laws that allow people to remain hidden?

I remember this case from Finland. Police were asking for clues about a man named Janne after he had been missing for a week and a half. Some days later the police announced that they had been in contact with the man and that he was alive. However, he did not want to have his current location revealed and the police obeyed that.

"People in Finland have the right to disappear. If a person wants to remain hidden, there's nothing the police can do about that" they said. The only thing they were able to tell his family was that he was still alive.

<comment><USER4> > "People in Finland have the right to disappear.

Really? In most European countries there is a requirement to register your home address with the state. See [https://www.norden.org/en/info- norden/notifying-move-and-pop...](https://www.norden.org/en/info- norden/notifying-move-and-population-registration-finland)

So you can hide your location from family but you do not have a general right to hide from the state. The same applies in all the Nordic countries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> BBC have been running some very bleak articles about japan recently. This was from a few weeks ago (private agents that will seduce your wife/husband so you can divorce them)

[https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200731-the- saboteurs-...](https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200731-the-saboteurs- you-can-hire-to-end-your-relationship)

<comment><USER6> When something doesn't make any sense, it's usually because of the government. This would fall into that category.

<comment><USER4> Government is often a reflection of society.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are many valid reasons for yonige(night run away) or johatsu(literally evaporation) in Japan, but there are pernicious side effects.

Loans and leases in Japan most often require a guarantor. If the primary loan holder disappears, the guarantor is stuck having to repay the loan or pay out the remainder of the lease agreement.

I personally know a family devastated when they found themselves on the hook paying out a loan for a close friend they had known from childhood while trying to build their own business.

<comment><USER8> I've heard of a similar situation as well. It's a common saying here to never become somebody's hoshonin (guarantor), no matter who it is you're helping out.

<comment><USER9> It's common saying everywhere.

If the person needs a guarantor, it means that they cannot afford the loan.

Even if they have the best of intentions, life may happen (people die before their time for many reasons), they can get caught up with the wrong crowd and fall out of (financial) grace, a bad partner can get them to "drop this life and move away" (ignoring obligations), and you can end with a damaging debt.

<comment><USER10> In Japan you need guarantors even for mundane things like renting an apartment. This is particularly difficult for immigrants if they don't know anybody and their employer won't sponsor them.

<comment><USER11> That seems excessively prohibitive to personal growth.

<comment><USER12> On the other hand it makes lending easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I love to get a quote on the cost of disappearing. Maybe I'm not ready yet but it would be nice to hear my options so that I would have a clear plan should that option ever become necessary. Haha

<comment><USER14> Don't do it ... there is another article floating around the internets about a guy who specializes in finding people who disappear. And apparently his successrate is well above 80% (from memory). Most people are just not that great at leaving their live behind and will leave traces by calling family or accessing old online accounts.

<comment><USER15> Would you happen to have a link? Google has become terrible useless for me for finding specific things based on few keywords.

<comment><USER16> I'm trying to find the link but I remember reading an article on HN about how nigh impossible it is to fake your own death. Not sure if that was what the parent was talking about. Here's one I found:

[https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/inside-the-world-of- inve...](https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/inside-the-world-of- investigators-who-know-youve-faked-your-death)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20862618](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20862618)

<comment><USER17> There's a massive problem with false positive bias. If someone fakes their own death successfully, no one will ever know

<comment><USER18> For this reason it's always funny to me when people say "criminals are always caught in the end", "crime doesn't pay", etc. How would they know?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is it just me, or does Japan have more of these subcultures like "jouhatsu" and "hikikomori" simply because they give the behavior a name? There are people who do this everywhere but it seems like it's exoticized when Japanese. Or are these extreme behaviors actually more common in Japan?

<comment><USER20> I'm sure it's (as you say) exoticized or named because it's Japan. I mean over here we have similar things; we have shut-ins but we call them neckbeards, hoarders, recluses or just "people in their parents basement"; we have people that vanish but we've memed them with the "still waiting for dad to return from the gas station for cigarettes 15 years ago", we have "friends for hire" but they're called prostitutes or e-girls, and we have suicide but it's people jumping off bridges instead of hanging themselves in a bamboo forest.

A lot of Japanese things are romanticized by using their Japanese monikers but when you zoom out, it's the same problems, different setting.

<comment><USER21> There's definitely a bit of nihonjin-ron / idea of Japanese uniqueness. But some ideas can't be generalised that easily. For example prostitutes exist, but these are different than friend / family rentals or maid cafes. (Even if the concept on some level has the same roots) They seem to come from different needs.

But I'd totally read a deep dive into similarities/differences between western shut-ins and hokikomori. I don't understand differences here either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I feel like this should be more common. People kill themselves to escape their lives, but they should vanish and start again instead.

<comment><USER23> The problem with that is that you still bring yourself with you. ...all the guilt, the addiction, the wasted years, the mental illness, the anger issues. Most people would end up back where they started.

...maybe if there was a way to reset your brain in the process.

<comment><USER24> "No matter where you go, there you are."

The intent of telling me this when I was impressionable was the opposite of what I received. I understand that "you bring your problems with you", but at the time I received "don't bother travelling because it's the same shit in a different place". So I've not been the globe-trotter my sibling has been. Night and Day.

The only regret here is that the original intent got flipped from the giving to the receiving. Be careful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This sounds something straight out of a Murakami novel!

</comment><comment><USER4> Reminds me of Reggie Perrin. See The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/fallandriseofreginaldperrin/inde...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/fallandriseofreginaldperrin/index.shtml)

</comment><comment><USER26> Call Ed at Best Quality Vacuum. (505) 842-4205.

5 stars, would use again.

<comment><USER20> Ask for a dust filter for a Hoover Max Extract® Pressure Pro™ Model 60.

<comment><USER27> I had one of those, but it cost millions of dollars to replace the dust filters. It's almost as bad a scam as Epson ink.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > [in Japan] Privacy is fiercely protected: missing people can freely withdraw > money from ATMs without being flagged, and their family members can't access > security videos that might have captured their loved one on the run.

In general, does this fiercely protected privacy culture extend to online? No surveillance capitalism in Japan?

<comment> GuB-42 It doesn't look like there is anything preventing data collection here. Banks will obviously know you are withdrawing money, and Google will know if you are logged into your account.

The big thing is that the legal system won't help you if you want to track someone. You can't file a missing person report and expect police to investigate and private companies to hand you data.

<comment><USER17> Is there a country where this is NOT true?

If you file a lawsuit against someone in Japan, is it really true that they can't be served or subpoenaed?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wonder how techniques like these will far in our increasingly present (but still not universal) world of tying one's identity to their biometric details, especially their face in not just formal ID documents but also corporate digital visual registries (Facebook being just one example)

</comment><comment><USER30> Ensure the surface is clean and dry; sand it smooth with 100 grain paper, or 300 if stained. Apply the first two thin coats using a natural brush (or synthetic for water based varnishes), following the grain of the wood. "Tip off" to improve and even the finish whilst the surface is still wet. Leave for a day, then sand lightly and evenly with 350 grain paper before applying an additional coat. Allow several weeks for full curing before use.

For best results, work in a dust, fibre, and debris-free low humidity space with fume extraction as ventilation rather than open windows.

</comment><comment><USER31> Wow. Just like Breaking Bad. I wonder if something like this is possible in the US?

<comment><USER32> Indeed it is. [https://inteltechniques.com](https://inteltechniques.com) has a podcast on OSINT/privacy run by a guy who performs this service to make people disappear as best as possible (within realm of the law). His clients are mainly celebs, execs and domestic abuse victims.

It is very difficult and expensive, as for full protection you need to register LLCs and legal trusts for many things like home ownership. Additionally because we live in a surveillance capitalism dystopia, one little mistake can ruin everything and cause you to start over.

<comment><USER5> Unless you're going to live as a near hermit or change country I wonder how effective all of this is in the long run without plastic surgery.

If you wander in front of someone taking a photo that ends up on facebook, or socialise with people who post things on social media or someone from your home town sees you and mentions it to someone else. I think I'd always be looking over my shoulder

<comment><USER33> You are correct. Unless you pay for everything in cash or through a company front, it is extremely difficult to stay off the identity grid. Changing countries raises the bar, changing to a non-OECD nation raises it further, but you give up certain benefits of access to an advanced tech tree in exchange.

In the US I helped a female relative obscure her trail somewhat from a stalker when she sold her residence and moved states. She could not get classified under the domestic violence identity protection program of her state until she suffered physical abuse of some kind recorded by the police. There was "only" police report of the stalker arriving outside her front door in a doorman- guarded complex, with security footage of him banging on her door for ~10 hours. Twice (after that, the complex security knew him by sight and threw him out the next three times before he gave up). So be aware that most of these types of programs across the US are reactive and not proactive.

With enough money and patience, a lot of everyday people can be eventually found unless they submerge themselves into a highly-insular community. However, above a certain threshhold of money and effort, I believe the advantage accrues to the hider instead of the seeker, even with nation-state resources at the seeker's fingertips. I believe it is far more time-efficient for the seeker to burrow their way into the hider's network of contacts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The page is currently unavailable. Would anyone know of a mirror?

<comment><USER35> two;

\- [https://archive.is/EOdnb](https://archive.is/EOdnb)

\- [https://web.archive.org/web/20200907025727/https://www.bbc.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200907025727/https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200903-the- companies-that-help-people-vanish)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I know the French Foreign Legion used to/may still give out passports and many regular army and SS troops from Nazi Germany took this up as a way to restart their lives. For all intents and purposes, this could work too.</comment>


Letter to 'that boy with the glasses' reaches recipient in Ireland - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/11748310/Letter-to-that-boy-with-the-glasses-reaches-recipient-in-Ireland.html

<comment><USER2> Consider this in terms of anonymisation. Eight items (NB: not bits) of information were sufficient to identify an individual among 7.3 billion in the world.

Or the several millions in Ireland.</comment>


Google Patents Public Datasets: connecting public, paid, and private patent data - <AUTHOR> https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2017/10/google-patents-public-datasets-connecting-public-paid-and-private-patent-data <comment><AUTHOR> This is a huge deal for anyone working in this space:

"Patent information accessibility is critical for examining new patents, informing public policy decisions, managing corporate investment in intellectual property, and promoting future scientific innovation. The growing number of available patent data sources means researchers often spend more time downloading, parsing, loading, syncing and managing local databases than conducting analysis. With these new datasets, researchers and companies can access the data they need from multiple sources in one place, thus spending more time on analysis than data preparation."</comment>


How I wrote an iPhone app in less than 24 hours thanks to my yearly review - <AUTHOR> http://afitnerd.com/2012/03/19/code-small-ftw-monday/

<comment><USER2> Nice!</comment>