HN now comes with HTTPS? - mike-cardwell https://news.ycombinator.com/

<comment> mike-cardwell The Firefox addon HTTPS Finder just alerted me to the fact that there was an HTTPS version of the site at <https://news.ycombinator.com/> \- I tried it out, and it worked. Nice work.

EDIT: Session cookie needs to be set as "secure" and Strict-Transport-Security should be implemented in order to protect against certain attacks. End users can just add this HTTPS-Everywhere ruleset:

[https://raw.github.com/mikecardwell/https- everywhere/73241d1...](https://raw.github.com/mikecardwell/https- everywhere/73241d145b7bb8f62d9be2f713baafb622501fce/src/chrome/content/rules/YCombinator.xml)

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you elaborate please? What is this "HTTPS everywhere" and why do we need it?

<comment><USER2> Here's a silent Chrome version [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/flcpelgcagfhfoegek...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/flcpelgcagfhfoegekianiofphddckof)

<comment><USER3> Watch out, this extension does _not_ do what HTTPS-Everywhere does! With KB SSL Enforcer, your browser still hits the HTTP version before being redirected to the HTTPS version of the site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, now the HN effect will be less measurable, as traffic from HTTPS to HTTP doesn't pass a referrer.

(This just increases the incentive for sites to use HTTPS Everywhere, so they're not left out in the dark as to who is sending them traffic.)

</comment><comment><USER5> Nifty report of HN's HTTPS: [https://www.ssllabs.com/ssldb/analyze.html?d=news.ycombinato...](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssldb/analyze.html?d=news.ycombinator.com) Grade C it seems

<comment><USER6> These stupid grades kind of drive me nuts, but they really should disable SSL 2.0 and the export ciphers.

<comment><USER7> SSLab's grades are not stupid. They monitor how solid the SSL implementation is and what needs to be corrected to ensure higher security on the site.

Another useful tool is SSLScan, which for Hacker News shows that they are accepting of a very strange set of HTTPS cipher and MAC configurations.

SSLv2 should be turned off, as well as the majority of 40-bit and 56-bit ciphers. Their unusual preference of CAMELLIA-256-CBC is pretty amusing to me.

      Prefered Server Cipher(s):
        SSLv2  168 bits  DES-CBC3-MD5
        SSLv3  256 bits  DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA
        TLSv1  256 bits  DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA

Whaaaaat?

<comment><USER6> Agree to disagree on the grades, and agree to agree on SSLv2 and export ciphers.

(I have other complaints about the SSLabs grades, but I'm not getting into it here).

<comment><USER8> Why not? I understand you do not have infinite time but if you get the chance I would enjoy hearing your thoughts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Glad to see this trend. How about using https links in the RSS feeds, so that anyone coming in from their feedreader gets https by default?

</comment><comment><USER10> This is great. It would be even better if HN would use the Strict-Transport- Security header so that browser remember to prefer https instead of http for this site.

See [http://blog.sidstamm.com/2010/08/http-strict-transport- secur...](http://blog.sidstamm.com/2010/08/http-strict-transport-security- has.html)

<comment><USER6> If they were taking credit card numbers, STS would be worth the trouble; otherwise, it's not something I'd recommend going out of your way for.

For non- HTTPS- nerds: STS resolves the problem where your first contact with a site is via (insecure) HTTP, and a MITM makes all subsequent contacts lie to you about whether HTTPS is available. Since we've lasted many years without even _having_ HTTPS, I think we can all just look at the address bar carefully instead.

<comment> mike-cardwell That is not the only problem it solves. You can go to <https://news.ycombinator.com/>, but if you visit any other non-https website at the same time, somebody can MITM _that_ connection, and inject the following HTML into it:

      <img src="http://news.ycombinator.com/">

That will cause your browser to do a non-https request against news.ycombinator.com (unless STS is implemented), which in this particular case can leak the session cookie, because the session cookie hasn't had the "secure" flag set on it.

I'd say that it _is_ worth going out of your way for. If you're implementing HTTPS, it is only slightly more effort to implement STS as well. And it's definitely worth adding the secure flag to the cookie as well.

<comment><USER6> Not having the secure flag on a cookie (I didn't look, because I don't care about SSL on HN) is a vulnerability. STS doesn't totally fix that vulnerability.

STS: Nice to have. Most installed browsers don't even support it.

Cookie Secure flag: Must have. Every modern browser supports it to some extent.

You're entitled to your opinion about this stuff, but know that my opinion has been hardened by many many years doing appsec for financial services companies. I would _not_ doc a company for not having STS†, unless I was doing design/best practices review. I would doc _anybody_ for not setting the secure flag on cookies for an HTTPS site.

† _(ie: if you_ ask _me to doc stuff like STS and Clickjacking)_

<comment> mike-cardwell Thank you for acknowledging my right to an opinion, although I'm not sure why it was needed. I don't think your credentials put you in a better position to comment on this particular matter, but you're still entitled to your opinion anyway.

It takes very little effort to implement STS, and there are significant tangible benefits from doing so. For this reason alone, I would recommend that _all_ HTTPS sites use it. I acknowledge that using the "secure" flag with cookies provides a bigger benefit though.

<comment><USER6> Saying "you have a right to your opinion" sounds better than "I'm pretty sure you're just totally wrong about this", doesn't it? :)

HN doesn't have a framebuster either, but you didn't call them out on that. The security nerds we work with are far more likely to call us out for not hyperventilating about clickjacking than about HSTS, which, again, is not widely supported in the field to begin with.

There are _actual_ apparent problems with HN's HTTPS; it will for instance happily do SSLv2 with 40 bit RC4. Let's advocate for those fixes first.

<comment> mike-cardwell It's more passive-aggressive certainly. The SSL config does need tuning, and frame busters adding. That doesn't make STS any less important.

No modern browser is going to choose such a weak cipher, but because SSLv2 is enabled, a MITM can force it. The same MITM who can abuse the lack of STS.

<comment><USER6> The equivalence you're drawing between what a MITM can do with STS and what a MITM can do with SSLv2 is an objectively false one.

I think you've gone on tilt on this issue, so, feel free to the last word.

<comment> mike-cardwell I'd prefer if you could educate me on how I'm wrong? I was referring to the ability of a MITM to attack the initial negotiation with a downgrade attack on SSLv2. Modern browsers aren't susceptible to this unless I'm mistaken?

All modern browsers are susceptible to the other MITM attack I described though. Unless the website uses STS.

EDIT: It's worth noting that anybody using IE7+, FF2+, Opera, Chrome or Safari aren't affected be the weak ciphers, or by the existence of SSLv2, as their browsers will not negotiate a weak SSL connection. They are _all_ affected by the lack of STS though.

<comment><USER6> No, because IE7+, FF2+, Opera, and Safari don't support HSTS. New Firefox does, and Chrome does.

<comment> mike-cardwell Good catch. Although, when comparing an issue that affects no modern browser against an issue which affects all modern browsers, the issue which affects all modern browsers is perhaps a little more important.

And when there's a solution that is trivial to implement, and can fix the issue for two existing major modern browsers (probably more to come), it might not be a completely crazy idea to go ahead and implement it.

P.S. Thank you for graciously gifting me the final word

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thank you, RTM and PG!!

</comment><comment><USER12> Nice addition to HN. We also updated Chrome's Readable HN to work with HTTPS [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jpnbjaechgbbpokepg...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jpnbjaechgbbpokepgmdkhgjfmkmjecn) and if you would like to contribute <https://github.com/jorde/readable-hn>

</comment><comment><USER13> For some reason it's now impossible for me to connect over normal http:

        manila:pieter$ curl -I http://news.ycombinator.com
        curl: (52) Empty reply from server
        manila:pieter$ curl -I https://news.ycombinator.com
        HTTP/1.1 200 OK
        Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2011 15:09:27 GMT
        Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
        Cache-Control: private

<comment><USER14> When a single IP address can support multiple virtual hosts, probing port 443 for an SSL version of a domain is naive and may trigger an intrusion detection system (IDS). Sure, you may get a response (and even the same content), but that's no guarantee that _the domain you used_ is configured for SSL on the server. An IDS may flag the request as a potentially malicious probe and temporary block the IP address from accessing some resources. This can be extremely useful for blocking exploit attempts by drive-by bots that request by IP address alone. Of course, it would be strange to continue to allow access to the SSL resource as in your example, but maybe there's a reason for it (server admin has different goals than site admin, for example). Just one possible explanation. You might regain HTTP access if you stop hitting HTTPS for a while.

Edit: The CN in the cert is news.ycombinator.com, so it's unlikely my explanation is the cause (but still could be).

<comment> mike-cardwell Is it "naive", or is it totally harmless? I've been using HTTPS Finder, which probes for HTTPS versions of websites for quite a while now, without any noticeable negative effects. I'm sure sites out their exist which have this IDS configuration that you describe, but none of the ones I've visited do. As for the positives, I can't remember how many HTTPS versions of sites that it's alerted me to, but it's a _lot_

<comment><USER14> It's naive ("let's poke it with a stick and see what happens"), but should be mostly harmless with a properly configured IDS. You don't want to permanently blacklist legitimate users, just discourage malicious ones.

Unfortunately, there's no guarantee that an HTTPS site is identical to the corresponding HTTP site. In most web servers, each one has its own configuration, so it's best to visit SSL sites only when you've been explicitly directed to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As a side-effect HN has upgraded from HTTP 1.0 to HTTP 1.1.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is great, thanks PG! Only problem for me is that the theme i'm running will no longer work but that's okay, i'm sure they'll update.

<comment><USER17> Not sure what kind of theme you're using, but it broke the Greasemonkey script Hacker News OnePage for me. If you're using something like greasemonkey or stylish, you might have to go into the script and tell it to work on https, since the sites are whitelisted with only http. That should do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is it possible for HN to use Google's SPDY protocol for better performance?

<comment><USER19> Is this even supported by Chrome yet?

<comment><USER20> Yes. Many of Google's own sites like Gmail and Google Maps use SPDY in Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why do people want https on Hacker News?

<comment><USER22> IMHO any site that has a login form should use HTTPS.

<comment><USER23> Yep. For further explanation:

<http://codebutler.com/firesheep>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Seems like overkill to me.

<comment><USER25> I was at a conference recently and saw somebody start Firesheep -- HN profiles showed up. So the choices were: use HN on open wifi but risk having your session stolen, don't use HN, or connect to a VPN. The VPN is probably the smartest thing to do on an open wifi network, but it's nice to know that HN is now safe to use without it.

<comment><USER26> If you're going to a conference and you're using wifi there, please use a VPN. If you're going to a coffee shop and using wifi, if at all possible use a VPN.

By not using a VPN you're leaving yourself open to all manner of attacks (take for example the recent iOS SSL Cert validation issues as an example, but also consider the fact that an attacker could inject malicious content to attack your system over any HTTP traffic - or invalid HTTPS traffic if you make the connection).

At the very least you should use an SSH tunnel or some form of transport to protect all of your outbound traffic when in a hostile environment.</comment></comment></comment>


Judge throws out teen's murder conviction 70 years after his execution - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/12/17/judge-throws-out-teens-murder-conviction-70-years-after-his-execution/

<comment><USER2> Fortunately we've made some progress in terms of rights of the accused in the last 70 years. It's stories like these that provide strong arguments against the death penalty.

But the pendulum does swing the other way, to weekend furloughs for murderers sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.[1] That particular individual played a big role in the 1988 US Presidential election.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow.</comment>


FindALib: All Javascript Libraries In One Place - <AUTHOR> http://www.findalib.com/

<comment><USER2> Nice idea.

This could be updated to include a submission form where folks could submit javascript libraries to be included in the collection.</comment>


50 years of failed doomsday, eco-pocalyptic predictions - <AUTHOR> https://www.aei.org/publication/50-years-of-failed-doomsday-eco-pocalyptic-predictions-the-so-called-experts-are-0-41/ <comment><USER2> Focus on the worst mistakes of your opponents, and ignore their stronger arguments. Notably absent from that page is [http://berkeleyearth.org/global- temperatures-2017/](http://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperatures-2017/) and especially this graph: [http://berkeleyearth.org/wp- content/uploads/2018/01/Longterm...](http://berkeleyearth.org/wp- content/uploads/2018/01/LongtermTrend2017-1024x582.png)

But I'm sure if we focus hard enough on what they got wrong, we can ignore that for another decade or two.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's notable that the author selected articles written by non-scientists intended for consumption by general audiences. I encourage readers to question the author's intent as they read through his curated list of sensational articles and compare their content to scholarly articles published in authoritative scientific journals.</comment>


Oil Drop Navigates Complex Maze - <AUTHOR> http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2010/113/4 <comment><USER2> This bears a striking resemblance to the HN posting on antiobjects: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=981738>

(representing a pac-man game by having ghosts detect a "smell" of pac-man that diffuses through the maze)

<comment><USER3> This is of course the Ant Colony Optimization paper from 91 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Consider this: replace "acid gradient" in the experiment description with "air pressure": Imagine constructing a larger version of this maze from cardboard. A vacuum cleaner is placed at the exit of the maze. Sucking the air out of the maze creates a pressure gradient such that there is higher air pressure nearer the entrance and lower air pressure nearer the exit. This pressure gradient causes the ping pong ball to roll through the maze to exit.

This is a brilliant application of a novel idea BUT the physical process at work only seems miraculous because we do not deal with acid gradients every day. Consider: would the same claims that it "performs a computation" be as credible in the vacuum cleaner and air pressure version?

If any computation is being done, it is a search space being covered in parallel by billions of independent agents (the molecules of the medium). The movement of the water droplet (or ping pong ball!) merely serves to display the answer.

</comment><comment><USER5> His claims about np-completeness implies that his research needs to be seriously questioned.

<comment><USER6> The quote was: "Computers and mathematics could also benefit. Maze navigation can fall into a class of problems known as NP-complete, "which computers have a surprisingly hard time solving, as the effort to solve them goes up exponentially with the scale of the problem," says chemist Irv Epstein of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. "The kind of approach shown here with these mazes might be a very efficient approach to address this problem."

There are other cases of analog chemical processes beating out digital computations. But the reference to medicine also seems like a stretch - navigating a simple maze with a couple of acidic and basic chemicals seems very far away from a complex chemical hunting cancer in the human body.

<comment><USER7> Clearly, given varied acidic / basic areas in human bodies, this is not a "magic bullet" that'll _only_ target cancer cells. They're also not claiming that this is the case (though the wording is quite vague).

At best, it'll increase the concentration of a drug in the cancer (among other places) above that of a "plain" drug, which is an improvement, thus should be investigated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wait, so if this oil drop is solving an NP complete problem in N time, couldn't we map other NP complete problems onto a maze, and have the oil drop solve them for us?

<comment><USER9> Shortest path from one point to another in a graph is polynomial. Shortest path to all nodes is NP complete.

<comment><USER10> No, all-pairs shortest path problem is in P as well.

<comment><USER9> I spoke too loosely. Shortest path traversing all nodes is NP (traveling salesman). Obviously shortest path between each pair of nodes is going to be polynomial since the number of pairs is polynomial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hmm, could this be exploited in some way to find the longest path?

<comment><USER4> Actually your question perfectly illustrates the limitations of thinking of this as a computation device: I doubt it could be used to find the longest path, for the reason that whatever way the oil droplet responds at one intersection, it will employ the same type of response at the next.

The oil droplet is able to (usually) find the shortest path by always moving in the direction of higher acid content. Would you expect it to find the longest path by always going away from the higher acid content? That's wrong; that's not the longest path to the exit, it's the SHORTEST path back to the entrance!

OK, so how about the least acidic path that it hasn't already taken; i.e. not allow it to double back? Also wrong: that will lead it into the first blind alley that faces away from the exit, where it will be trapped.

So given that 1. We cannot use the highest acidic value as a criterion and 2. We cannot use the lowest acidic value as a criterion and 3. We cannot use the lowest acidic value not already visited, that leaves us with expecting the droplet to neither always take the most acidic exit from an intersection nor the least acidic. However, surely SOMETIMES the least acidic exit might be the longer path, and SOMETIMES the most acidic exit is. Then we are forced to conclude that the droplet must act differently at different times with the same stimulus!

That implies it has to maintain some kind of state, or memory. As the droplet is undifferentiated oil, it seems unlikely that it has a large enough state space to solve the longest path problem.</comment></comment>


A Look at the Internals of 'Tiered JIT Compilation' in .NET Core - <AUTHOR> http://www.mattwarren.org/2017/12/15/How-does-.NET-JIT-a-method-and-Tiered-Compilation/ <comment><USER2> I heard so many times that JVM is much better than CLR, especially in the JIT area (Hotspot?).

If it's true, do the new .NET Core internals, allow .NET Core to beat JVM? If not, are there any additional steps planned to beat JVM at last?

.NET ecosystem is much smaller than Java's (for instance all the Apache projects) and Linux + .NET Core happened too late to make up for it in my opinion. Hopefully, at least performance can be the point that can turn other people attention back towards C#/.NET.

<comment><USER3> > I heard so many times that JVM is much better than CLR, especially in the > JIT area (Hotspot?).

I wouldn't disagree with this (I work at Oracle on VM research), but I've been told by other people that Microsoft or at least the .NET just generally prefer a simpler approach, without profiling, dynamic compilation, deoptimisation, and other complexity the approach used by the JVM brings. It's much more what- you-see-is-what-you-get from their JIT, rather than the mind-binding things the JVM manages to do with some code, and maybe that makes life easier for their use cases.

I'm not sure they want to add the same kind of complexity that the JVM has, even if it did bring them some better performance. But as I say that's second hand conversations.

<comment><USER4> Are there standard benchmarks used to measure and compare the two approaches (jvm vs .net)?

<comment><USER5> Pinch of salt with all benchmarks, but "The Computer Language Benchmarks Game"?

[http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/csharp.html](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/csharp.html)

.NET does better in most of them, but falls down vs Java on Regex and k-nucleotide</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Maru OS – A complete desktop experience on a smartphone - <AUTHOR> https://maruos.com/#/ <comment><USER3> I'm wondering how secure it is.. According to [https://github.com/maruos/maruos/wiki/Tips](https://github.com/maruos/maruos/wiki/Tips), they start sshd up by default, listening on the local network, with the default user maru and password maru. That seems like a bit of a red flag and makes me wonder if it is the tip of the iceberg.

<comment><USER4> Preetam here, founder and lead developer of Maru.

Thank you for all the critical feedback on security in this thread. Maru used to ship with sshd disabled [0] but it was enabled because of all the requests I was getting from users who wanted to run the system headless without needing an HDMI display and BT keyboard/mouse around to set sshd up. I assumed that users would change the default password after the initial login, but as many of you have pointed out, hope is not a strategy when it comes to security. I've opened up an issue [1] to fix this.

Please feel free to open up issues (or, even better, PRs!) at any time if you have further suggestions for improvement. It's thanks to feedback like this that Maru continues to move onwards and upwards.

[0]: [https://github.com/maruos/maruos/issues/22#issuecomment-2296...](https://github.com/maruos/maruos/issues/22#issuecomment-229692011) [1]: [https://github.com/maruos/maruos/issues/76](https://github.com/maruos/maruos/issues/76)

<comment><USER5> There's is a fundamental issue here that comes up with lots of small organizations around security: If your process for prioritizing work is based on which issues people complain about the most, you will never prioritize security issues until its too late. Security problems are never obvious until the horse bolts.

It is very easy to accidentally add egregious security vulnerabilities to products if you don't know what you're doing. In fact, accruing small security issues (like this SSH password problem) is the default state of the world.

As a user, _I_ pay the cost when products I use have bad security. If I get hacked via your product, it might be embarrassing for you, but its my device and my data that gets compromised. And because of that, I expect most small companies will not care about their product's security as much as I do as a consumer.

Of course, once a company grows large enough they'll hire a person or a team to look into their software security. At that point they'll fix all the obvious security issues. The database will gain a password. The root AWS account will stop being shared out amongst employees. Work laptops will have full disk encryption turned on to protect against theft, etc.

But until then, as a customer, I should be really nervous. How can you tell the secure products apart from the insecure ones? Well, one of the most obvious signs is that secure products will have already fixed the obvious mistakes. Things like connecting to backend services using unencrypted HTTP. Things like a backdoor-by-default SSH password published on the website.

That is why we (security wonks) make a big deal out of small security problems when they're obvious. They're a sign that nobody has even taken a look at the security situation, and for every obvious problem there's probably 10 more that aren't obvious. This issue might get fixed, but thats why your reply doesn't make me less nervous.

\---

And thats a shame, because your project seems super cool and I really want you to succeed! This has come across much more negative than I intended, and I'm more frustrated at the startup industry over this than I am frustrated with you or what you're doing. Hopefully you can get a security review done at some point to make sure there aren't any other simple problems that need to be dealt with. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes.

<comment><USER6> Well, if you see the issue where this was enabled, the author had it originally disabled for security reasons so it's not that he's unfamiliar with the reasons why one shouldn't have it enabled. He did it on request from a user while knowing the security risk so that means it's less likely that he's made mistakes so much as yielded to users. And the latter thing is a lot easier to solve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am really surprised that the "single computing / storage device" idea which can switch between different screens and input methods seamlessly (and maybe support plug-in CPUs) is just is not happening, though the concept here is a small step in that direction.

Having everything in the cloud seems to have made this somewhat redundant for most users, though I still hope one day I can carry all my data around, of course given proper encryption and backups and the ability to distinguish between safe and possibly monitored (public) displays/inputs.

Or maybe wireless displays are missing so that decision to quickly do a task with a mouse and keyboard leaves out the cable plugging aspect.

<comment><USER8> I just don't see the use case. For work, most people have a work computer and that's separate from their personal computer. Tons of people no longer have a computer at home, those that do are likely gamers, developers or artists that all have a huge archive of files they work with and require more power than a mobile device can supply. I wish these companies would stop trying and just make an open, mobile, general purpose computer for mobile use cases.

<comment><USER9> I don't have a separate computer. I only have one single computer for work and personal things. I use it heavily for both. If something happens to my computer and it goes down for a few days, I'm screwed.

I personally would love something like this. Just in case I need to get some work done off my phone. I do no want another computer.

<comment><USER10> Do you not keep old computers as you update?

Have you considered having a cheap chromebook backup or something?

<comment><USER11> What for, dust collection? I refurbish them and give them away - by the time I upgrade, the machines are still comparable to mid-low current ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _" What is the default sudo password in Maru Desktop?

"maru" is the default sudo password. When installing debian packages, you may need to enter "root" as a password_"

Oy.

<comment><USER13> Similar to Chromium OS, right?

<comment><USER12> Not when combined with "they start sshd up by default, listening on the local network, with the default user maru and password maru."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The fact that this spins up a Debian desktop when you're in desktop mode seems to make this a much more viable option than some of the previous attempts at this, which expected you to want to use only android apps on your desktop.

<comment><USER15> I'd love to have both, though. Debian apps for productivity, android apps for communications/games, side by side on the same screen with shared storage and maybe synchronized state. As it is, I have to manually sync state between the two devices which results in missed messages and inconsistent state.

<comment><USER16> So, it would be cool to have Debian as the base OS and Android running in a container. When in Phone mode, Android is front and center and when in Desktop mode, the base Debian host is. Could then still access the Android container.

If the UIs supported a seamless mode, that would be icing.

<comment><USER17> I'm concerned about driver support in Debian.

It's Android devices after all...

<comment><USER18> In the worst case you might have to run a kernel built for Android instead of the default debian kernel (e.g. lifted off the android OS for that type of device), depending on how it was packaged up. Hopefully those aren't built with certain useful features turned off.

For devices that support a vanilla android, I imagine the driver issue is already worked out and there would be no problem getting them to work in _a_ kernel that you can compile yourself, even if not the default debian kernel.

<comment><USER19> Like the halium project

[https://halium.org/](https://halium.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I love it!

I owned an Atrix with a lapdock, which was the first device to embrace this concept. Unfortunately, it was poorly handled by Motorola in the sense that you had to hack it to enable a full linux desktop, instead of what was basically a Chromebook.

What really made me give up on it was the fact that it never got updated, so you were stuck with Android 2. It was pretty useful even as a workstation and saved me as I used it exclusively for a couple of weeks, while my laptop needed repair.

I was already thinking about trying something like that again, by getting a phone that had hdmi output and i'll definetely take a shot on that! good luck to them!

<comment><USER21> I too had the Atrix, the Lapdock and the multimedia dock. It was a good device, just hampered by the lack of RAM, the dual core processor (which was a bit sluggish), and the hampered Linux desktop; I too hacked around with it to be able to install all manner of useful tools (compilers, editors, office packages) and it was useful. The Lapdock had a good screen and was conveniently incredibly thin. I did miss a backlit keyboard though.

In any case it was years ahead of its time.

Sold all the components individually though - I think someone used the Lapdock with a Raspberry Pi in the end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I find it amusing the promo shot shows it running on an Apple Thunderbolt display - which famously does not support HDMI input, only Thunderbolt - <USER2> which there is no MHL adapter.

<comment><USER23> Pretty sure this is incorrect, as I had an old DisplayPort Apple Display that I used with HDMI input, and from what I understand, the Thunderbolt displays also supported DisplayPort. Granted, the adapter was not cheap, but it did work.

<comment><USER22> The Thunderbolt displays do not work with Mini-DP connections despite sharing the same physical connector. The DisplayPort signals still need to be encapsulated in a true Thunderbolt connection, so they don't even work with pre-Thunderbolt (but still DisplayPort) Apple Macs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Maru is a new kind of computing experience."

Is it? This type of "All Your PC Are Belong To Phone" type of fads have been attempted (and so far, miserably failed) for many, many years now. Looking at the website, I see little reason why this should succeed where others have failed.

<comment><USER25> It's an OS for your phone that becomes a proper desktop OS if you plug in a monitor, mouse, keyboard etc.

I don't think this has been done before, or maybe I'm just hopelessly unaware?

Either way, I think it's quite interesting.

<comment><USER26> Motorola Atrix, Ubuntu Phone, Windows Phone 10 has Continuum. It's been tried before.

<comment><USER27> Yes, and it took around 20 years to go from the patent for the first underpinnings of applications for phones other than communication in the 1970s to Simon Personal Communicator in the early 90s, and then another 10-15 years for the first smart phones to emerge. If people gave up because it "had been tried before", we wouldn't have any of the technology we had (in fact, we would still be planting crops with wooden sticks because Thog got trampled trying to chase some wildebeest off of his early attempts at farming).

<comment><USER28> Nobody is denouncing it because it isn't new, they're just saying that they shouldn't claim it's a new kind of experience when it doesn't really seem like a new kind of experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Looks like Windows 10 Mobile Continuum. Even the types of apps being used in the screenshots echo Office being used in Continuum screenshots.

[https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/Continuum](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/Continuum)

<comment><USER30> The difference to me is that Continuum is still just a mobile OS that is scaled up. They even point that out in their promo material, it's a "desktop- like experience." Maru, while it looks very early in development, isn't a desktop-like experience. It's a desktop experience because it's running a desktop operating system.

<comment><USER31> Well, so is Continuum, technically. Windows Phone is its own SKU of Windows 10 but it's still Windows 10.

<comment><USER29> Yes. And with Windows 10 on ARM's x86 emulation functionality, I would not be surprised to see broader application support in future buildf of Continuum.

<comment><USER32> I hope that can revive Windows Phone, or it'll be a wasted effort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I did a review of Maru OS last year: [https://lwn.net/Articles/684010/](https://lwn.net/Articles/684010/)

</comment><comment><USER34> Every time one of these is announced you know the people who worked on the Palm Foleo feel vindicated. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Foleo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Foleo)

</comment><comment><USER35> I've always wondered about this. I love the portability but limiting myself to the power of something that has to fit in my pocket feels... limiting. What if we just carried around our software and files and popped them into whatever computer we have on hand? I know they're pricey but M.2 SSDs are tiny, fast, and high in capacity. I can imagine a desktop (maybe even a big laptop) with an sd-card-reader-like slit where you pop the SSD in and boot in mere seconds. Your computing environment travels with you but can take advantage of whatever hardware you have.

It's not like you can use these phone-desktop solutions without a keyboard, mouse, dock, display, etc. anyway. You still need hardware.

As a proof of concept, I've been itching to get a few of those USB SATA toaster things and set them up at my desks. The only hitch is finding a laptop these days with a 2.5" bay that's easy to get to.

Would you use something like this?

<comment><USER36> I like your "just take the data with you" idea. I did something similar with a tiny (about the size of my thumbnail) USB stick about ten years ago, running Linux everywhere I could (and wasn't really supposed to!).

It was pretty slow though. These days though, read and write speeds (on USB 3) are over 10x faster. So even without the hardware changes you describe, it's already more than feasible :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Too bad my Nexus 5 just bit the dust a couple of weeks ago. I was surprised that this only works with the Nexus 5 though, since it's a pretty old phone. I was primarily using it to performance-test stuff on a low end phone. Maybe maruos does it for the same reason?

</comment><comment><USER38>
      Shared storage

      SD card data like camera photos and downloads are shared so you can coordinate your work seamlessly.

This might be confusing for some, given that the only devices supported right now are Nexus devices, which famously lack an SD slot.

<comment><USER39> It's confusing because Android phones have a SD card mount for the internal storage (and external SD cards are yet another SD card mount).

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> We spoke to the developer of Maru OS on yesterday's Late Night Linux podcast.

[http://latenightlinux.com/late-night-linux- episode-11/](http://latenightlinux.com/late-night-linux-episode-11/)

</comment><comment><USER41> > Maru Mobile is built on the latest Android Marshmallow.

Should we tell them?

<comment><USER42> It's factually correct though - it's not built on the latest version of Android, but the latest version of Marshmallow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I really wish this was a viable option, but the lack of active cooling (and mediocre passive cooling) for phones really makes the phone-as-desktop a non- starter for anything but light web browsing or text editing.

<comment><USER44> But if you think about it, the use case for almost 80% of the people out there that use laptops or desktops is for web browsing and office work (text editing etc) which phones should be able to handle well.

<comment><USER43> Think of any task that has ever caused your laptop fans to spin up, and cross that task off of what is possible on a phone-as-desktop list. No high definition video calls. No 1080p gaming. No fully functional IDEs (intellisense and interactive linting/compiling is computationally expensive). No high definition movies. Video/batch photo conversions are probably out, though may be possible at 1/10th speed.

The most successful tablet-laptop attempt thus far has active cooling simply so they don't have to throttle back performance.

It's possible that more energy efficient processors will come about and prove me wrong, but they've been working on the heat dissipation problem for decades now (yes, even in desktops/servers).

<comment><USER45> I can do hi-def video calls and video playback on my phone already; the video encode+decode is handled by dedicated hardware. Ditto for certain types of video conversions. Gaming is at 1080p, equivalent to PC games from perhaps 10 years ago.

This is with a mid-range phone from a couple years ago. I think you're being overly pessimistic.

<comment><USER17> A modern phone CPU is way closer to a modern desktop CPU than what most people think, due to the mobile-first (and power-efficiency-first) nature of most of the current CPUs in the market - in the detriment of pure performance. Power- efficiency matters more than pure single-threaded performance in both the mobile and server markets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> If you like this you might like: sentio.com

<comment><USER47> Web site currently down?

<comment><USER48> Hey, were you able to access? Site doesn't seem to be down from what I can tell. I'm part of the team at Sentio. Feel free to message me if you have any issues :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Is it running a Debian with XFCE when Desktop?

If not, is it able to use the Nix package manager or something like this?

<comment><USER50> Yes, it comes with Xfce and apt-get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This looks cool, but I'm wondering who the target market is for this.

To properly use it, you need:

1) An Android phone (easy to satisfy) that you're comfortable enough installing another OS on (so... a more technical user)

2) An HDMI monitor (which could actually be a TV)

3) A SlimPort USB-to-HDMI cable

4) A bluetooth mouse and bluetooth keyboard

5) No desktop (since using it and this seem to be mutually exclusive for most casual setups)

Most people don't have a bluetooth keyboard/mouse lying around, so the time/cost investment to set this up is not only just installing a new OS on your phone, but also buying hardware (keyboard, mouse, and potentially monitor if you don't already have a computer) [and potentially also waiting for it to arrive if you buy online]. And, after this investment, the target market seems to be people that'd be comfortable doing the above while _not_ also buying a desktop to go with it. So... either technical hobbyists/tinkerers and/or people that want a $50-100 machine (and are savvy enough to set it up).

I would _love_ to use something like this, but I move enough that it doesn't make sense to have a desktop (and, therefore, the same mostly applies to monitor+keyboard), and if I were to live in one place long enough to have a desktop, I'd just buy a desktop (because I likely wouldn't use it _and_ this). Am I just not the target market for something like this (even though it legitimately excites me)?

<comment><USER52> I was thinking that you do not necessarily need a mouse if you know your keyboard-fu well, but then realized that you could use the phone screen as a trackpad in place of a mouse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> As one of the backers for the doomed "Ubuntu Phone" kickstarter, this really looks like a great alternative. I will have to play around with it this weekend for sure.

<comment><USER54> Another interesting project is UBports.

[https://ubports.com/](https://ubports.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I think the most interesting question is, how do they handle the different interfaces between phone and desktop. A touchscreen needs a very different UI than a desktop with mouse and keyboard.

If I read that correctly, they are just ignoring the problem and share files on the phone between Android apps and programs running on Debian, which seems like it could work most of the time. (No idea if there is Blender for Android, but I am pretty sure there are .doc readers for Android.)

<comment><USER56> It looks like they run android when you are in "phone" mode, then when you connect it up to a monitor it boots Debian

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I don't get the negativity in the comments. Maru might be early and probably won't be the one, but this is definitely the future.

<comment><USER58> No, it isn't. These kinds of devices cover a very small but very vocal component of the computer user population, mostly bloggers, writers, i.e. people who's computers don't need shit in terms of power or storage. We hear from them constantly about how tablets are ending computers, laptops are ending desktops, phones are ending computers and it's all now and previously been nonsense.

For as many tasks that newer phones could likely take on, you are not drafting graphical work on an iPad Pro, you are not building 3D models for print or media on a frickin Samsung Galaxy and you are not simulating weather patterns and doing storm calculations on a goddamn Windows Phone. The desktop PC is not going anywhere and I don't mean to sound so angry but this constant narrative that is produced by tech media AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN that somehow these little, for lack of a better word, toys are going to replace the actual machinery behind the products so many consume is demonstrably false and irritating to read over and over.

<comment><USER59> > that somehow these little, for lack of a better word, toys are going to > replace the actual machinery behind the products so many consume is > demonstrably false

How old are you? I thought similar in the 1980's whenever I saw people tinkering with their toy PC's running DOS and Windows 3. They weren't going to replace MVS on an IBM mainframe, or VMS on a DEC, or VME on an ICL. The 'V' in those names stood for "virtual" \-- how could PC's replace that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> From the FAQ: Is Maru an app or does it replace my current Android OS? Maru is firmware for your device, so yes, it will replace your existing Android OS.

I wonder how this works: is Android a virtual machine within the Maru/Debian host? It would be very interesting to be able to use the underlying Linux networking, for example, to control the Android functionality.

<comment><USER61> More likely it's close to vice versa for driver reasons. Android owns everything, the debian stuff just runs in a chroot and it needs a few custom hacks to make display and input work nicely, which is why it's not the same as just running Termux or Linux Deploy on your phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Put it in a Cardboard with some type of virtual keyboard, and you've solved the looming laptop airplane ban.

<comment><USER63> Have keyboards been banned from the cabin too? If not, cardboard + a physical keyboard would do :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I always embrace change and appreciate all kinds of experiments, but I don't think you want the same thing on your phone and desktop.

I want different files on my desktop that I don't want on my phone—like accounting and tax stuff. I might want Skype on my PC, but not on my phone (because I can just call people), etc. etc.

iCloud and similar are a good balance, allowing you to have a shared virtual folder that you can browse on both your phone and desktop and is kept synchronized automatically. Google apps are great to keep things syncronized, too: contacts, passwords (iCloud or Google Chrome), etc.

I use macOS as a desktop OS and Android as a mobile OS, and I'm perfectly happy with using the right tool for the job which works well for what you need to do, instead of a security-nightmare OS and complicated mobile OS.

Just my two cents.

<comment><USER65> It's not the same thing -- the phone runs Android for phone-mode use, and "Peek under the hood and you'll find rock-stable Debian Linux" for the desktop mode.

<comment><USER64> I assume it's the same files and app..? Otherwise I don't get the point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> We are trying to do a similar thing with the Elite X3, not sure whether it's one of our big sellers...

<comment><USER10> Who is "we" and what's stopping you from asking your sales team for the numbers?

<comment><USER67> Per GP's profile, HP; internal siloing and bureaucracy, would be my bet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> I have a nexdock; an HDMI screen, bluetooth keyboard + trackpad, webcam, USB hub, and battery - with no CPU. It's intended to work with continuum/handover compatible phones, compute sticks, or raspberry pi like devices. Something like MaruOS would be an even better option in my mind.

And yet, then I think why would I bother carrying a laptop-minus-cpu plus a phone with desktop ability when I could just do what I currently do and carry a phone and a full laptop? I can see this brings a bit of flexibility, and my files/config would always be on my person, etc. But we have global and close- enough-to ubiquitous internet now - isn't that sufficient or even better?

I guess I just don't get the use case. Or maybe I get the use case(s) but not the business case.

</comment><comment><USER69> I want this on my iPhone so badly. iOS when standalone, Mac OS when plugged into a display.

</comment><comment> real-hacker I was interested in the merging of desktop and mobile OS many years ago. I don't understand why Apple/MS/Google didn't pursue this, is it technically challenging? or is this just not "something people want"?

<comment><USER70> Well, Microsoft did try really hard, it was called "continuum", but the fall of windows mobile brought that dream to an end.

The other company that tried was Ubuntu, their effort was called Unity if I'm correct. That was axed recently as they needed to focus on profit-making parts of the company. Also, I don't think any mainstream ubuntu phone with unity was ever released.

Finally, Apple's strategy is clearly different, they see iOS and macOS as clearly different beasts, and will probably never try to directly merge the two. Data-sharing is the way to go for them.

<comment><USER36> I had a dream once where I was holding an iPhone, and every time I looked away and back again, it would be one form factor bigger (iPhone -> iPad -> MacBook). That was a really cool dream.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> What is the real benefit?

\- If I use it on the go, I need an external screen and keyboard. I'd rather carry a laptop or just the keyboard und use the tiny screen (possible with stock android already). And if you are somewhere with a screen, there is probably also a machine at which you could boot some live distro.

\- files are "in sync" between desktop and mobile. But the few file-types I open on my phone can just as well be synced over the internet (mostly just txt and a pdf every now and than).

\- less expensive (but a desktop that beats a phone is probably also cheap to get)

If there was a really cheap laptop dock for it it might make sense for me, otherwise I don't get it.

</comment><comment><USER72> What's the reason all of these start with very specific phones? Assuming you have a rooted phone running recent Android, what is the blocker for having something like this running? Why only Nexus devices?

</comment><comment><USER73> I am honestly disappointed this is not a thing yet.

Years ago Canonical demoed Ubuntu for Android ([http://musho.tk/l/666778c3](http://musho.tk/l/666778c3)) which was freaking cool.

Most phones nowadays have means to connect to displays and keyboard/mices. We have cores, speed and ram.

WHY ISN'T THIS A THING YET?

I have seen banks hand out expensive ThinkPads to people to basically use Internet Explorer and Outlook, plus company phones and stuff.

My speculation is that whomever gets this thing right first is going to make a metric fu __ton of money.

</comment><comment><USER23> So, with the recent discussion about banning laptops on flights form Europe into the US, I was wondering about something like this. A way to still have a computer but in something the size of your phone. Not just a phone OS, but a full desktop OS. Obviously the small screen size is an issue, but I wonder how that could be handled. Possibly from the airlines with some form of display input for a screen on the back of the seat? Not sure, really. Either way, interesting stuff.

</comment><comment><USER74> I like the idea, the biggest benefit is of course the "all in one" deal - seems a waste to have to tether your phone to your laptop, or get a laptop with a SIM slot (and all the costs that go with it)

I'd like to see: 1\. The source code 2\. Support for newer devices (might go hand in hand with 1) 3\. Support for wireless HDMI adapters, having to carry no cables at all would be very neat, although I guess this needs a power supply to last for any useful amount of time

</comment><comment><USER75> Maybe this is the answer to the impending cabin baggage laptop ban.

Carry a keyboard and screen in your hold bag, the phone with your data and applications in your pocket.

<comment><USER76> I keep hearing people say that technology can't solve political problems. This has never been more true than in this case.

Instead of contriving ridiculously convoluted solutions to a non-problem we could simply stop electing politicians who propose implementing ludicrous airport security theatre.

<comment><USER77> I agree, but... which ones would those be again? And are they generally electable based on on other platform planks?

THe problem here is that most of the public believes that security theater is real security. Unless that changes, most politicians will espouse their "firm positions on security" in order to help them get elected.

THe ones who "get it" tend to be in the independent/libertarian camps (last I looked) - and they don't get a whole lot of public support.

<comment><USER76> Therein lies the rub, doesn't it? The first thing to do is convince people that voting independent or libertarian (or for that matter for an outsider candidate such as Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party primaries) isn't un- American or unpatriotic or whatever weird notions people have about not voting mainstream but their democratic right and an absolutely reasonable thing to do (perhaps the only reasonable thing in today's political environment).

I think it can be done. If you think of another notorious modern two-party system neither of the UK's dominant parties today existed before the 19th century. Given how fast opinions spread these days it should be possible to bring about significant change in a matter of years rather than decades. Think about how quickly movements like the Pirate Party became successful in some countries. That they declined just as quickly again in most of these countries can be mostly attributed to their own stupidity rather than systems that are inherently averse to change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> This is an amazing idea. Right now my laptop is my PC, I want my phone to be my PC, but I don't want to use android. I want MacOS

</comment><comment><USER79> I don't use a smartphone, and the only smartphone-ish device I have (iPod touch) I only even bought because some things won't even run on PC anymore. This is successfully selling me on getting a high-end android phone, something I never thought I would do. I'm always looking for ways to reduce the amount of space my office setup takes.

</comment><comment><USER80> Windows mobile has had a similar feature for a while, but you know, windows. I've thought for a while that this is ultimately the way computing is moving - single device that fits in your pocket. I love my laptop, but there is no substituting the portability of a smart phone that seamlessly syncs with panels at home and at work.

<comment><USER45> On the other hand, although I love my phone's portability, there's no substituting a few hundred watts of processing power and a few terabytes of storage in a decent desktop.

<comment><USER11> Sure. But I have my phone anywhere, and peripherals are ubiquitous. My beefy silicone devices...not.

<comment><USER45> I guess that's my point, in a way. I've got my phone everywhere, but its utility is inherently limited by its power. My beefier machines are powerful, but inherently mobility-limited by their form factors. Plugging the phone into a dock or something increases its I/O abilities, but doesn't give it the extra benefits that make the non-portable computers useful.

> and peripherals are ubiquitous.

I'm not sure what you're specifically thinking of, with that. I know that I've got many more PC peripherals than phone ones.

<comment><USER11> I mean "I can take my phone most places and expect to find both a HDMI-capable display and Bluetooth input devices." Of course, I don't expect massive computing power - but even as a thin client to more powerful machines, this would suffice; and always having a netbook in your pocket is also useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I really hope all phone OSs go this direction. I love my laptop(s) and they're great for doing serious work, but sometime when I'm, say, composing an email on my phone and it starts getting long, I'd love to be able to plug in to a monitor and keyboard and keep going.

</comment><comment><USER81> OK, Android is very close to a phone, Google might be able to support wireless keyboard/mouse plus a hdmi-screen out of box easily one day? Replacing the whole firmware is a bit intrusive for me at the moment.

<comment><USER81> I mean very close to a PC...

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> I think this may be the future of computing, but not yet. A high-end phone may have the computing power to replace simple desktop systems, but connectors to the peripherals haven't been standardized yet.

<comment><USER83> With USB-C this shouldn't be a problem whatsoever. In fact, the peripherals largely already exist. Given the driver support, these should just work "out of the box" with an up-to-date linux kernel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> Does anybody know what's the difference between this and Samsung dex?

</comment><comment><USER85> I don't get the fuzz but i have a galaxy s3 with omnirom and usb keyboard and mouse work out of the box. Also bootstrapping debian is easely done. Connect it to a monitor and your good to go.

</comment><comment><USER86> A single board computer e.g. RaspberryPi is a "phone" and a "PC". No need for baseband, a computer that the user does not control. RPi: Boot a variety of OS.

</comment><comment><USER87> Hey, that's cool ;) IMO, this approach is the most innovative idea on how to merge mobile and desktop experiences. I expect other companies following the same approach.

</comment><comment><USER88> I have a portable air conditioner that I throw my Z5 compact into when I'm tethering. I assume you would need to do the same with this to get good performance.

</comment><comment><USER89> So is it still only for Nexus 5x?

This can now be achieved on the Samsung Galaxy S8 with the accompanying dock. It's global, rolled out to anywhere you can buy a Samsung S8.

<comment><USER90> Nexus 5, sadly not 5X

<comment><USER4> Very early alpha available for the 5X on the forum: [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/maru-os- dev/U9EpPQ0SFb0/4MIe...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/maru-os- dev/U9EpPQ0SFb0/4MIelzz9FwAJ)

<comment><USER91> The 5X doesn't have HDMI out, does it?

<comment><USER92> Nope, it doesn't. No hardware video out support at all AFAIK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> Why is it built on Marshmallow instead of Nougat?

<comment><USER48> Something like this takes a while to build. They likely started before Nougat was released.

<comment><USER4> Preetam, lead dev here: Correct! Maru started on Lollipop actually and moved to Marshmallow with the 0.3 release. It can be a PITA to port upwards to a new Android version if there are significant changes in the internal system APIs (these are open to rapid change between major versions of Android, unlike the stable app-facing framework APIs). Anyways, hoping to move to Nougat before too long...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> I'd love this if it worked on my phone, but it seems like it doesn't work on any device other than Nexus

</comment><comment><USER95> Cool idea, I just don't think we're ready yet.

If a cable has to be used, i'd prefer it to be a single USB-C, which also charges the phone while plugged in and being a desktop. Possibly to a dock with a keyboard/mouse/monitor and other ports.

ARM processors have made some insane progress over the recent years, maybe in another 4-6 from now they will actually be quick enough to really make this a solid experience.

</comment><comment><USER96> Is it fair to call it an OS? My feeling it's simply Android with some customization and/or apps.

</comment><comment><USER97> I truly believe personal computing will evolve in this direction

</comment><comment><USER98> Can this be used with a wired keyboard and mouse on most phones?

<comment><USER4> Right now no, since Maru uses SlimPort for streaming the desktop to your display. SlimPort eats up the USB pins that you would need for connecting up a wired keyboard/mouse via USB-OTG [0]. Wired keyboard/mouse will become possible when we support other methods for display streaming in the future like wireless.

[0] [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/maru- os/rsSpHZ0DIJA/mEfp_J9M...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/maru- os/rsSpHZ0DIJA/mEfp_J9MCwAJ)

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> So this is kind of like Microsoft's Continuum for Android

<comment><USER100> ...And kind of Samsung DeX.

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> Why aren't Apple or Google doing something like this?

<comment><USER102> My guess is that Apple doesn't want it to impead on desktop sales. An all in one device wouldn't be a good idea from a sales stand point. Ubuntu attempted this and I have gathered that it isn't exactly easy to support it. Some apps are built specifically for touch screens and making them work on a desktop computer with out for thought could be difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> Gotta wonder if this is the end game for Apple. MacBook Air that's basically a battery, screen and peripherals holster for the 2020 iPhone 12, all running via USB-C. I'd buy it.

</comment><comment><USER104> Maru == (Windows Continuum || Google Fuchsia)

</comment><comment><USER105> Support for Pixel anytime?

</comment><comment><USER106> I think it might succeed because it's built on Android with Android apps.

</comment><comment><USER107> the future, once smartphones become a lot more powerful.

</comment><comment><USER108> > See title

Looks cool.

> Android

Pass.

<comment><USER91> What would you base it on?

Mainline Linux is possible on the 2013 Nexus 7, but you might fry your flash if one of the parameters is wrong.

<comment><USER108> Idk, but Android isn't the way to go

Probably would need to make a custom OS. I'd probably base it on BSD

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER109> I never asked for this.

<comment><USER110> we only wake you up for the important meetings

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> If you have a monitor, mouse, and keyboard, you may was well have a computer. Seriously, if you have a laptop-like enclosure for all those things to make them portable, adding a SoC to make it a PC is what, $20-$40 to be on par with this in terms of compute? And last I checked, it's still not The Year Of The Linux Desktop. This is gonna crash and burn.

<comment><USER15> You don't get the value proposition. This isn't for cost saving, it's for time saving and organization.

Here's where we are today: If I spend any significant amount of time away from one of my devices (phone, laptop, desktop), it piles up with dozens of notifications. Even with cloud based apps, there's no shared state. So when I get back to a device, I have to clear away all the notifications, assuming that they must have appeared on the other device at some point. And if I change a password on my laptop, because of one of the dozens of data breaches that have happened this month, I have to retrieve my new password out of my password manager and re-login on my phone. At any given point, 2 or 3 apps on my phone are in a "logged out" state because I use them primarily on one of my computers, so i'm actually not getting all my notifications everywhere, and I miss some of them.

Also, even with google drive, not every file on my computer is immediately available on my phone and vice versa. So if I need access to a file on the go, there's a good chance it won't be there.

I don't expect this to solve all these problems, but I'm looking forward to a day when I don't have to carry my laptop everywhere I go.

<comment><USER111> Your post makes me wonder if this constant back and forth switching is actually conducive to productivity.</comment></comment></comment>


WikiLeaks' New Guccifer 2.0 Leaks Reveal Obama Sold Off Public Offices to Donors - <AUTHOR> http://observer.com/2016/09/wikileaks-guccifer-2-0-obama-sold-off-public-offices-to-donors/ <comment><USER2> From the article, it doesn't appear there were any new revelations in the documents at all, just an internally-produced summary of information that was already public (ie, the past political donations of various appointees).

Am I missing something?

<comment><AUTHOR> The main thing is the pay-to-play donations for appointment of government positions.

For example, Julius Genachowski, donated just under $3.5 million to the DNC and OFA, and in exchange was appointed chairman of the FCC by Obama in 2009.

I don't believe this was well known before these leaks.

I still have yet to go through all the data, but supposedly theres a lot of data having to do with the data structure of how the DNC moved data around. This includes voter data, which was possibly used to manipulate the primaries in favor of Clinton and away from Sanders.

More analysis is needed at this point, and it is likely more info will be revealed as people sift through everything.

<comment><USER3> From his Wikipedia page:

Genachowski was on the staffs of the Select Committee investigating the Iran- Contra Affair and then U.S. Representative Chuck Schumer.[10] In 1994 FCC Chairman Reed Hundt hired him as a senior legal advisor; he was chief counsel 1996-1997.[11]

For Senator Barack Obama's 2008 Presidential Campaign, Genachowski was Chairperson of the Technology, Media and Telecommunications Policy Working Group, which created the Obama Technology and Innovation Plan.[15] He also advised and guided the Campaign's innovative use of technology and the Internet for grassroots engagement and participation.

After the November election, he co-led the Technology, Innovation, and Government Reform Group for President-Elect Obama's Transition Team.[16] On January 12, 2009, several news outlets reported that Genachowski would be President-Elect Obama's choice to head the FCC. This was confirmed by a press release on March 3, 2009.[17]

This isn't just some rando who donated money and got an appointment for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is this for real? It seems like this should be a massive scandal.

<comment><USER5> The media will down play this. Blame it on Russia to try to detract attention from the content as always, but yes, it is very likely real.

<comment><USER6> With all the Democrat related leaks there is definitely some organization doing a concerted effort against them. The really strange thing is that they haven't seemed to stumble upon anything actually illegal yet. Also, because you generally appoint people who agree with your politics it would be weird if none of the people you had appointed had ever donated large sums of money to you. What would be more of a story is if they could pick out normal donations from any actually sold positions</comment></comment></comment>


'Superbugs' found breeding in sewage plants - bra-ket http://news.rice.edu/2013/12/16/superbugs-found-breeding-in-sewage-plants/

<comment><AUTHOR> Whenever I read a story like this (there have been dozens lately), I simply don't have the background to determine how big of a problem this is going to be. Are these bugs antibiotic resistant just to current antibiotics? Is the only reason we have nothing that currently kills them is because it's not profitable for research into fighting them? Basically, what I'd love to know is are we on the cusp of a new Black Plague type of scenario with antibiotic resistant bugs or is it simply a problem that we haven't been working on?

I read somewhere a while back that no one has really been focusing on new forms of antibiotics because the old ones worked, and it's not profitable for pharmaceuticals to research it, as it's the type of drug a person takes for a limited time only (aka non-chronic) so the profit potential is much lower than say AIDS medication. Not sure how much truth there is to that however...

<comment><USER2> _" what I'd love to know is are we on the cusp of a new Black Plague type of scenario with antibiotic resistant bugs or is it simply a problem that we haven't been working on?"_

The answer to the first question is: quite possibly, but with something like tuberculosis instead of the plague. Less immediately scary, but more harmful: resistant forms of more common bacteria will create serious risks when undergoing any sort of surgical procedure. We could get back to the days when your biggest risk of surgery was dying from infection afterward.

The answer to you second question is: no, we haven't really been working on it. But the big problem is that we can't just invent new classes of antibiotics overnight. If one of these strains takes off, things will get a lot worse before they get better.

<comment><USER3> Could UV light be used at waste plants and hospitals to help prevent this kind of bacteria from spreading?

<comment><USER2> Yes, UV light would be more effective than chlorination at killing most of this stuff. But, you know...good luck convincing people to add expensive UV systems to their sewage effluent.

<comment><USER4> Apparently there is anyway movement to UV, as it is safer than handling/dealing with chlorine (at least, this is what someone tells me about the industry in the US).

<comment><USER2> UV is certainly easier to deploy than chlorine gas (a UV leak won't poison everyone in the room via gas inhalation), but it's still dangerous at the scales used to sterilize large quantities of water.

The bigger problem than either is that AFAIK, few places bother to sterilize their effluent. I'm not even sure if San Francisco bothers to do that, actually...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One would hope that antibiotic resistant bacteria would be outcompeted in sewage by other bacteria with more mundane selection pressures.

Alternatively, the sewage actually has residual antibiotics in it. A cursory Google indicates this may be the case. They ought to be removed from the sewage by treatment.

<comment><USER6> There's more than just antibiotics in wastewater, google for studies relating to the feminization of fish due to the residual levels of anti depressants in wastewater. The processes used determine what gets removed from the water. Most facilities use aerobic breeding zones, forcing extremely high volumes of air into the water to allow from friendly microbes that actually end up doing most of the real work digesting the waste. Microbes don't eat everything, so expecting them to eat the all of the unwanted products in the sewage is not going to happen. To get everything, you would need first research to identify bugs that eat the particular thing your wanted disposed of, and then a new zone at treatment plants for that process. Its real easy to say yeah they should remove this, but when you get into the details to understand why its not happening you begin to see this is a massive undertaking.

<comment><USER7> Um, it isn't anti-depressants that are feminizing fish. That doesn't even make sense. It is synthetic estrogens, ie pee from women taking birth control pills. Also a few other things, bisphenol A, and certain types of natural and synthetic steroids that are byproducts of agricultural run-off and cattle farming.

[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100729122332.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100729122332.htm)

<comment><USER6> Thank your for the correction, I always make at least one mistake before I've had coffee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So... not only can some bacteria develop this immunity, they can transfer it to other bacteria? (kinda like a torrent isn't it?) That's so cool (albeit very dangerous for us).

Though if you look at it this way: Bacteria have been researching on vaccines against anti-biotics in their built-in genetic labs. And when a group of them finally had a break through, they started distributing it pretty fast!

Looks like they're doing a better job of research and knowledge dissemination than us... Still think it's ok for journals to hinder sharing of knowledge by taxing it and thus increasing the cost of research??

<comment><USER9> > Still think it's ok for journals to hinder sharing of knowledge by taxing it > and thus increasing the cost of research??

What the hell does that have to do with anything?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Beta-lactamases are now pretty much everywhere, but the difference with NDM-1 is that it's not inhibited by the standard defence against beta-lactamases, clavulanic acid.

With these plasmid being traded around out in the wild, the fear is that we might soon see all beta-lactams become useless, like penicillin is now.

<comment><USER11> Interseting. Btw... should triclosan and similar be regulated / limited?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well that's it.

No more playing in the sewage for me.

<comment><USER13> or drinking the water that's released from the sewage plant after treatment, or eating the food grown with the solid waste as fertiliser.

<comment><USER14> That last is actually something of a real concern.

Farmers use manure (non-composted, hence, unsterilized) for fertilizer, but new regulations in the US require many months (I think as many as nine) between manure application and harvesting for food crops. For most crops this is sufficiently long that it makes manure untenable as a fertilizer.

There _are_ alternatives, exclusive of chemical fertilizers, including compost (which is sterilized by the heat). However these have higher costs, which is what it all comes down to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have this notion of sewage plant workers: they NEVER get sick while working over multi-year/decade periods at the plant. It's all anecdotal, because it was from a quote in an article, and you don't know if the guy was telling the truth, but it stuck with me for some reason. Who makes a claim like that and then connects it to working at a sewage treatment plant? I think originally I read about it in a NY Times article about the sewage treatment plant workers' union a few years back but I currently can't find it.

</comment><comment><USER16> I was surprised to find this in wikipedia [1]:

        A strain of bacteria, or any microorganism that causes illness or has a superficial resemblance to an insect or bug

I think it's quite confusing to call bacteria, bug. But I'm not a native speaker. Is this common usage?

1: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug)

</comment><comment><USER17> When fusion power comes online (20 years hopefully?) could we simply boil all of this sewage?

Is the idea of near unlimited electricity a pipe-dream or do we have a chance of it becoming a reality in the near future?

Isn't there a possibility that the bacterial will eventually evolve into something that is resistant to UV radiation treatment?

<comment><USER18> I don't think there is any indication that fusion power plants would produce electricity that is much cheaper than current methods - fuel (uranium) costs are a relatively small part of the cost of operating a fission plant (16%-28%) and fusion plants look like they will be very complex engineering systems so the capex costs are still going to be pretty high (look at ITER and that won't even try to generate electricity).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plan...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants#Uranium_costs)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER)

I guess you could expose your sewage directly to the neutron flux of a fusion reactor.... :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Couldn't this be fixed with some high powered UV lights? (Though I recall some interaction between sunlight & drinking water)

And wouldn't flouride/chlorine kill it?

</comment><comment><USER20> Assuming that you live in a city and you're a tad paranoid about all these stuff. What practical advice could be given? What could we do in an individual level?

</comment><comment><USER21> one thing to note is, that a superbug's ability to resist multiple drugs, also can mean that due to its complex structure, its similar to a well written computer virus like Flame.

Meaning, on contact with human body, or other living animals, how it would react is still a matter about which very less is known, and very less is written.

On the bright side, compare it to the recent comet, which was touted to be the "Comet of the Year/Decade" for its expected brightness, if it survived the sun. Well it didn't, and we have a dud! So, compare that to human body, and superbug interaction. What will happen... is yet to be known .

</comment><comment><USER22> We should send some of this stuff to Mars.

<comment><USER23> then all those antibiotics on Mars will be useless. Victory!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Surely the NSA will protect us from these too.

<comment><USER25> Not unless these superbugs are online.

BTW, as your karma should show you, HN has no sense of humor.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: If you were a small yoga studio, what would you pivot to? - <AUTHOR> I help out at a few yoga studios and I am worried.
They started streaming online classes and trying to charge a fraction of what they usually charged for classes and that is not working out.
We put on a live streaming class this morning and asked for a donation of $5, I made the payment experience seamless, and the streaming video quality was great.
We only received a single $5 donation... from about 20 students who practiced... which is a decent number for our smaller studio.
Worst of all we now find ourselves in direct competition with hundreds of other much more professional online yoga/fitness streaming services. Like yyoga who only charges $8/mo for hundreds of pre-recorded yoga classes. Or glo.com who charges $18/mo for thousands of pre-recorded classes of all kinds.
The studio owner has negotiated the studio's rent to be cut in half for the next 2 months which is great!
However, the studio wasn't profitable to begin with, and the owner is being forced to eat 100% of that rental cost out of her own pocket.
Yoga teachers are not employees, so at least up here in Canada, there is no help from the federal government to give money to yoga studios to subsidize employee wages.
That's another discussion in itself, yoga teachers should definitely be employees with full health benefits imho but they're not and here we are.
Case in point... we have a group of 10 yoga teachers all teaching for free, a small staff of energy exchanges who work for free and are currently helping setup the online streaming classes, and a studio owner who is left footing 100% of the bill for rent... with the occasional $5 donation being thrown her way.
This is not sustainable.
The teachers will get tired of it eventually, and the owner simply can't afford to shell out the entire $2,000 check she will be getting from the government (that is meant to cover her food and living expenses) paying rent on the studio building.
What would you do? <comment><USER2> I would think about:

A. Close the studio to stop the rent bleed. That, as others have said, is the landlord's problem. Seek legal advice to do it right.

B. Focus on the online content space but partner with teachers to share profits. Teachers are unemployed too without the studio.

C. Focus on live classes. People are home and as social creatures we crave social connections. Innovate. Maybe have users all join a multi-way Facetime or other live session video. This lets teachers and students connect and can help with coaching and social interaction.

D. Market. Market. Market. Use social. Connect with current customers and explain what you want to offer. Give away short classes to draw people in.

E. Maybe take a small loan (not sure what government programs you can access) and help employ some great teachers as partners in all this virtual fun. Maybe seek a grant.

F. Learn from all this and make a course on how to take a studio (yoga and beyond) boldly into these uncharted waters. Charge for this content as it will be a valuable business strategy guide to other studios.

G. Seek out health care companies, hospitals, fire stations, police, etc. All of which are on duty and stressed as hell. Yoga can help. This fight needs to be managed for the long run. Keeping first responders in good physical and mental shape is vital.

H. Following ALL medical guidelines & Gov rules etc. MAYBE offer a very widely spaced yoga program outside in a park for less than the allowed group size. Get some wireless speakers and space em out. Draw on the ground to ensure more-than-very-safe spacing. Social experience at a distance. I am NOT/NOT advocating a big (or even medium) group thing there. Follow! all! regulations! And then triple the separation. Zero chit chat after class. Mamaste & go your separate ways. Give free slots to some doctors/nurses to keep it even safer and benefit awesome medical professionals!

And good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you kindly for that long list of well thought out suggestions!

I will read and really think about each one more thoroughly in the morning.

Have a great night!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So here are some suggestions:

First of all, you can close the studio. I am not sure what is the legal structure of the company and if there are any personal guarantees, but this is not a regular situation. I.e. if you do not have customers, how do you suppose to pay your rent.

If not:

1\. Try to offer 1-1 remote sessions. You might get more than 5$.

2\. Go behind your regular customers. For example, try to go after companies that are operational and would like to offer Yoga to their overwork staff - e.g. warehouse employees, Hospitals etc. They might be able to charge your lessons on some sort of relief fund.

3\. Ask companies that move remotely if they can introduce remote Yoga as part of their remote schedule. I.e. as a way to keep the team engaged. Companies are usually more willing to pay than consumers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Those are some really great suggestions, thank you for those! I will pitch them to the owner ASAP!

<comment><USER3> Sure. Good luck !

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Me? I'd look into breaking the rent contract, or at least "suspending" it. That's supposed to be a thing, at least in the US (though I have no information on _how_ or even _whether_ it actually works). But, basically, "Hey, owner, I can't pay you the rent while this is going on, because I don't have any customers. You can sue me, and I can declare bankruptcy. Or I can just not pay you until things get back to normal, and when they do, you've got a customer for your space again."

Note well: This is not legal advice. It's probably worth asking them, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the same suggestion I just made to one of the owners.

If the government is literally blocking you from opening the door to customers, the building is worthless for the time being, and she shouldn't be expected to pay anything for it imho.

This is more her landlords problem than it is her problem imho.

The landlord's government has declared that their land is not allowed to be frequented by customers for the time being.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also just a thought - consider offering online training classes to prospective yoga instructors. Maybe you can attract a more well-known yoga teacher in this regard, which will increase the attraction. You can charge people to learn from a popular yoga master (unsure of the industry terms in this space so I'll stick with 'yoga master'). Hope you continue to navigate through this tough situation!</comment>


Privacy Lawsuit Targets Net Giants Over 'Zombie' Cookies - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/zombie-cookies-lawsuit/

<comment><AUTHOR> Adobe voiced their position on this back in Feb:

Adobe condemns cookie respawning in comments to FTC [http://www.research- live.com/news/analytics/adobe-condemns-c...](http://www.research- live.com/news/analytics/adobe-condemns-cookie-respawning-in-comments-to- ftc/4001985.article)</comment>


We reduced our vendor.js from 210kb to 16kb in about five minutes of work - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/ben/we-reduced-our-vendorjs-from-210kb-to-16kb-in-about-five-minutes-of-work-and-ten-lines-of-code-1ole <comment><USER2> kb or kB?</comment>


Congratulations Women, Judge Rules the US Military Should Draft You Too - <AUTHOR> http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2019/february/25/congratulations-women-judge-rules-the-us-military-should-draft-you-too/ <comment><USER2> IANAL. Speculation follows.

It's a Federal district judge. I don't think this decision means anything yet. The Selective Service can certainly appeal this to the circuit court, and if they lose there, to the Supreme Court.

But the Selective Service might not _want_ to appeal it. (My analysis of their motivations: Twice as many people if we need them. But twice as much paperwork even if we don't.) They might just carry this out. At that point, somebody (outside the Southern District of Texas) is going to sue to stop this, and this decision won't be binding precedent. That appeal can also go all the way to the Supreme Court.

I suspect that someone on each side will keep suing until the Supreme Court finally rules on this. I suspect that will be five to ten years.

</comment><comment><USER3> Gender issues are a convenient way to double productive output and, apparently, double forced military enrolment. Mindless work for everyone; the right to live and die for someone else's interests.

<comment><USER4> > double forced military enrolment.

2×0 is still 0.

<comment><USER5> Hmm, I didn't know that I wasn't required by law to sign up for the draft as soon as I turned 18 as a ~30 year old male from the United States.... /s

<comment><USER4> Signing up for selective service isn't military enrollment. It's preregistration for potential future compelled enrollment, for which no current legal authority even exists.

The US has no conscription, or even a legal framework for conscription. It has a vestigial legacy framework preserved so that it could, in principal, bring up a system of conscription slightly more quickly than starting from a standing start if it ever adopted law authorizing it again, along with nearly half a century of deliberately constructing the military in a way which does not rely on and is not particularly adaptable to conscript service.

<comment><USER6> was something dismantled after vietnam?

<comment><USER4> > was something dismantled after vietnam?

Yes, the law authorizing the draft expired in June 1973, after a strategy was developed and a policy decision made to pursue it to meet military needs without conscription.

Enforcement of the _registration_ requirement that expired in the 1970s but was reactivated in 1980 without any actual _draft_ law was discontinued by agreement between Selective Service and DoJ in 1988, but no actual prosecutions were pursued after 1986, and compliance has always been low (even with the stick of student loans, which gets lots of people heading to college registered, those who register are unlikely to update address when they move while registered.)

So: we no longer (for 45 years) have a law authorizing conscription.

We no longer (for 30 years) even pretend to have enforcement of the law requiring registration in case we decide we need conscription and pass a law authorizing it.

And we no longer (for more than the 30 years of non-enforcement, really, but even moreso after that) have much compliance with the law requiring registration in case we decide we need conscription and pass a law authorizing it.

Everything that happens around Selective Service registration requirements absent changes in all that is purely symbolic ritual with no real substance.

<comment><USER2> So this is just legal theater? That seems plausible... right up until it isn't. If the time ever comes when things are dire enough that we need the draft, this precedent will be sitting there... if it stands. (As I said elsewhere, this story/circus won't be over until the Supreme Court decides one way or the other.)

<comment><USER4> > If the time ever comes when things are dire enough that we need the draft

...the material facts will be substantially different, which means that this case, would quite plausibly, not be controlling.

And, in any case, this only deals with registration requirements, not gender differentiation in any hypothetical draft law. (The fact that draft registration doesn't do much of anything substantive makes it a lot harder to make the case that there is sufficient service to an important government interest to overcome the presumptive invalidity of gender discrimination; it's pretty much, in effect today, just an added administrative burden to men in qualifying for college loans.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19242191](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19242191).

</comment><comment><USER8> Hope this lessens the appetite for war.

<comment><USER9> Of course it won't. During the draft, mostly the poor and minorities get drafted. The decision makers don't care about the people who get drafted.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/opinion/vietnam- draft.htm...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/opinion/vietnam-draft.html)

<comment><USER4> > During the draft, mostly the poor and minorities get drafted

That that was true, or at least the extent to which it was true, was something which distinguished the limited, exception-heavy Vietnam-era draft from prior uses of conscription in the US.</comment></comment></comment>


NASA will text you whenever the International Space Station passes overhead - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/11/nasa-will-text-you-whenever-the-international-space-station-passes-overhead/

<comment><USER2> I'd love to see some discussion on this, but with several previous submissions, none has been forthcoming:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4734657>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4747851>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4747856>

Or use TwISSt: <https://twitter.com/twisst>

<comment><USER3> I used to call my friends to look up to see it fly by. One friend got everyone working at his restaurant on the roof to see it. It looks like a star crawling across the sky for about a minute. It's not visually spectacular if you don't know what you're looking at.

I would definitely suggest signing up to get text notifications on this. Call your friends to step outside for a minute to see it too. "HEADS UP!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Check out the ISS Detector. It notifies you when the International Space Station is visible to you with the naked eye based on your location, IIS location, and weather conditions. [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.runar.issd...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.runar.issdetector&hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER2> I use this one:

[http://esa.heavens- above.com/PassSummary.aspx?satid=25544...](http://esa.heavens- above.com/PassSummary.aspx?satid=25544&lat=XXXX&lng=YYYY&alt=0&tz=GMT)

with the latitude and longitude inserted in the obvious places.

</comment><comment><USER5> There's an iOS app called GoSatWatch which will notify you when the ISS (or any satellite) passes by your location. Your location can be configured manually or by GPS, so you get the benefit of receiving relevant notifications when away from home. Apps like GoSatWatch will also tell you where in the sky the ISS will be, so you know _where_ to look.

SpaceWeather has been doing text notifications for a long time (<http://spaceweathertext.com/>), albeit at a monthly cost. They've been doing it for a few years, I think. I'm not positive, because I haven't used their text service.

</comment><comment><USER6> This website can show you the schedule of the ISS and many other satellites ten days in advance: <http://www.heavens-above.com>

<comment><USER7> Which seems to be throwing errors when you try to adjust your location.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's generally fun to observe. When I've seen ISS, it has been around sunset. It is a readily discernible point of light, in my memory brighter than Venus and certainly brighter than any star, that moves from horizon to horizon in only about 4 minutes ("faster than a speeding plane"), even less time considering trees, buildings, and hills.

Because of the speed, it is helpful to know what place on the horizon the overpass will start at, in addition to the precise time.

<comment><AUTHOR> It sounds like I should still be able to see it even in an urban area (e.g. San Francisco), is that correct?

I didn't know it passed by that quickly though. I guess I'll see how well NASA's texting service works out then.

<comment><USER9> Yes, I can see it from San Francisco with no problem!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I use <http://lookup.liekens.net/> to use its GCalendar subscription for local flyovers. I've only had it up a couple weeks but its not exactly been clear skies in Seattle.

</comment><comment><USER11> Very good app for this is Android SatTrack. It also shows the Iridium Flares.

</comment><comment><USER9> I get these notifications from TWISST and they're very useful, giving information about location, path, and brightness: <http://twisst.nl/>

</comment><comment><USER12> This is very cool and something I am very much looking forward to. What's even great is that it is available in my country. Good things never are.

</comment><comment><USER13> Unfortunately, my city is not available as an option. They should have a location select using Google Maps or something.

</comment><comment><USER14> Signing up just to say that NASA regularly texts me.</comment>