FCC's comment system targeted by DDoS during filing period for net neutrality - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/08/the-fccs-comment-system-targeted-by-ddos-attacks-during-filing-period-for-net-neutrality/ <comment><USER2> Real confirmation of an attack would be a nice-to-have in this situation. I can see 3 probable realities:

1\. The sheer volume of commenters and responses took down the system. They cover it by saying a DDoS attack was the cause. 2\. They are intent on crippling Net Neutrality anyway, and either designed the system to insufficiently handle traffic and call it a DDos or even DDos themselves. 3\. Since there are groups with vested interest in removing net neutrality, and they have deep pockets, I can easily see a few groups moving to protect their interests. In other words, a legitimate DDoS attack.

All 3 seem equally likely to me, especially considering Ajit Pai's stance on NN. This is not encouraging as a citizen of the US.

<comment><USER3> John Oliver's video is #3 trending on YouTube right now. It specifically calls for people to write comments on that page. He even bought up a domain that points directly to the page. [http://gofccyourself.com](http://gofccyourself.com)

<comment><USER4> Citing the second paragraph of the posted article:

> "These were deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC's > comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host. > These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they > made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the > FCC."

<comment><USER5> And the official statement from the FCC,

> "Beginning on Sunday night at midnight, our analysis reveals that the FCC > was subject to multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDos). These > were deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC's comment > system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host. These > actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it > difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC. While > the comment system remained up and running the entire time, these DDoS > events tied up the servers and prevented them from responding to people > attempting to submit comments. We have worked with our commercial partners > to address this situation and will continue to monitor developments going > forward." [1]

Given that the FCC thinks "bulk commenting" via a spreadsheet is a proper solution to their website difficulties, I don't really believe in their ability to diagnose an issue as a DDoS. More likely, lots of people were trying to comment but couldn't.

[1] [http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2017...](http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2017/db0508/DOC-344764A1.pdf)

<comment><USER6> > _" While the comment system remained up and running the entire time, these > DDoS events tied up the servers and prevented them from responding to people > attempting to submit comments."_

...That doesn't sound like "up and running."

<comment><USER7> It sounds like weasel-speak for "the web service didn't crash", but our switch was completely saturated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if anyone else can confirm this somehow.

This seems like it would be great cover if you're trying to hide the fact that people a lot of people really dislike what you're doing and are complaining so much your system couldn't take the load. "Oh, it wasn't because lots of people were complaining.... it was a DDOS".

<comment><USER9> So what if it's an inside job? I mean, it'd be easy to cripple the server if you have network access/control.

<comment><USER10> Everyone knows a DDOS can't melt steel beams :P

<comment><USER11> Depends on whether or not the data center's A/C is working.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Are we sure it's not just a lot of people trying to complain at once? :)

(joke about they should have purchased fastlaneTM brand internet)

</comment><comment><USER13> Once again: We screwed up by not making this a campaign issue.

Many of the news stations here are affiliated with internet providers. The candidates both took money from the industry. No one was going to make this an issue, and we screwed up by not forcing it to be part of the conversation.

Of course we also let the election happen without a major conversation about fracking.

<comment><USER14> But Emails! Locker room talk!

I think this needs to be solved at the state-representative level anyways with legislation. This currently fickle flipping between administrations is bad for consumers and creates uncertainty in buisiness, which means they don't want to make long term investments. Why bother upgrading your wires for a long term profit if you are going to be regulated into the dust or if you are going to be more free to exploit monopoly power on your pricing? Just play wait-and-see forever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The FCC calls democracy DDoS.

<comment><USER16> I mean, civil disobedience is basically a physical DDoS against government.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I know for consumer complaints the FCC runs everything through Zendesk, so in theory there is a 3rd party who could verify any claims like this. I wonder if the there's a vendor doing hosting for the comments system as well.

</comment><comment><USER18> Maybe they had enough bandwidth, but it was QoS'd down for netflix

<comment><USER19> If the government wants fast lanes, it has to pay for Xfinity® CustomerReach™; it's how the market moves to fit the needs of consumers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Not that legitimate comments matter. This administration is going to do what the business community wants, period.

</comment><comment><USER21> Oh yeah, like these comments really matter this time around.

A certain sector of society elects Donald Trump, who appoints the new FCC chair, and they'll do whatever they want within legal possibilities. Do you really think the sector of society which most cares about this rule change will affect the outcome with comments? They will no more do so than scientists will affect the budget of the EPA with comments.

<comment><USER5> Trump is as much a politician as anyone. He's so worried about his rep, he's actually trying to build the wall.

If people are against this en masse -- he won't touch it. My guess is he backs down or takes a neutral stance, just like Wheeler did on net neutrality, and like Obama did on encryption.

I mean, you know behind the scenes they're trying like hell to get rid of net neutrality, but they can't do that in the face of a public outcry.

This is _one_ issue that is not red/blue. The hackery of Trump's campaign operated through the open internet, and I think the tech crowd on both sides of the aisle realize that removing net neutrality would just enrich the ISPs and would do nothing to improve our internet speeds or access to diverse content.

<comment><USER22> > If people are against this en masse -- he won't touch it. My guess is he > backs down or takes a neutral stance, just like Wheeler did on net > neutrality, and like Obama did on encryption.

Wheeler did not take a neutral stance. He was always for net neutrality. Some people were confused on that point because after the courts tossed out the Open Internet Order of 2010, Wheeler's first proposed replacement was weaker. In particular, it would have allowed paid "fast lanes".

It was weaker not because he preferred weaker net neutrality, but rather because he wanted to try to save net neutrality using the same legal authority that the 2010 order used, if he could. That would be very likely to survive further judicial scrutiny, and also not to draw to much Congressional ire.

But from the start he said he was open to reclassifying ISPs as Title II common carriers in order to make a new order that was stronger than the 2010. The public comments were overwhelmingly in favor of that, and that's what he went with.

People also get confused about Wheeler's intentions because he was once head of the main cable trade association, and later head of the main cellular/wireless trade association. What is often overlooked is that at those times, those industries were young, small, and trying to compete against big established players (broadcast networks in the case of cable, the big telephone companies in the case of cellular/wireless). Fighting for cable and wireless was the pro-consumer, pro-competition side at the time.

In Wheeler's own words:

Wheeler> You have to think about what I was lobbying for. The cable industry at that point in time was fighting being put out of business by this agency at the request of the broadcasters. Broadcasters wanted to shut down the cable companies. They didn't want to give them access to programming because they didn't want the content in the market, the competition in the market. And so I joined a crusade—we called it 'plant a flower in the vast wasteland'—to have choice for Americans in what they see on television.

See this interview if you want to understand Wheeler:

[https://arstechnica.com/business/2016/03/how-a-former- lobbyi...](https://arstechnica.com/business/2016/03/how-a-former-lobbyist- became-the-broadband-industrys-worst-nightmare/)

<comment><USER5> > Wheeler did not take a neutral stance.

I didn't mean to say he did. The president is the only one who can wait and see what the public thinks before speaking. Everyone else has to act in order to test the waters for the President.

> Wheeler's first proposed replacement was weaker. In particular, it would > have allowed paid "fast lanes".

Yeah, that's not net neutrality at all. Title II classification was good and overall Wheeler kept the internet open. But, fast lanes don't have any place in a neutral internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The site works just fine for me.

[http://www.gofccyourself.com](http://www.gofccyourself.com)

press the link "\+ Express"

I mean i have not posted anything as i am not a US citizen but the form loads and i can fill it in

<comment><USER24> There is a checkbox for International people. This could still potentially affect everyone outside of the US.

<comment><USER25> This is especially true for foreign companies that still rely on equal access tk US infrastructure for both serving domestic needs and routing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It may be due to John Oliver (again):

[http://tumblr.fightforthefuture.org/post/160454924113/fccs-c...](http://tumblr.fightforthefuture.org/post/160454924113/fccs- claim-that-site-was-hacked-during-john)

[https://www.techdirt.com/blog/netneutrality/articles/2017050...](https://www.techdirt.com/blog/netneutrality/articles/20170508/06200037314/john- oliver-net-neutrality-rant-has-crippled-fcc-website-second-time.shtml)

</comment><comment><USER27> So which ISP has a botnet under its control, I wonder?

<comment><USER28> Well, ISPs control firmware updates to any cable modem attached to their network, so... all of them?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Besides the ISPs and the Government (rather, the part that wants this), who has anything to gain by this?

<comment><USER30> If net neutrality goes away, then incumbent corporations with existing foothold and ISP partnerships may get a monopolistic-like advantage.

<comment><USER29> Ah, good point. I wasn't thinking about the Corps with existing partnerships.

<comment><USER31> It's also the corps with money: Pay for preferred treatment and raise the barrier to entry for any competitor. Given how Microsoft reacted when they saw their greatest enemy as "some kid in their garage brewing the next killer app", that's a very real concern.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Did someone happen to save the John Oliver original video? It shows "This video is not available" for me.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92vuuZt7wak](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92vuuZt7wak)

EDIT: was blocked in Canada, thanks NegatioN

<comment><USER33> That link is accessible from Norway at least. Maybe it's blocked in your region?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> In addition to complaining to the FCC individually, Mozilla is accepting signatures for an open letter:

[https://advocacy.mozilla.org/en-US/net- neutrality](https://advocacy.mozilla.org/en-US/net-neutrality)

</comment><comment><USER35> Still doesn't work. They can't even keep their site up, yet they want to dictate policy for the whole Internet. Am I the only one who finds that absurd and beyond fucked up?

EDIT: Site works, form submission doesn't. Doesn't sound like a DDoS to me.

</comment><comment><USER36> Instructions say select your state from the dropdown. State is tagged required. State dropdown is empty and wont let me proceed :) Tried again an hour later and it worked.

</comment><comment><USER37> Maybe this should never have been something implemented by mere regulation in the first place? The Commission generally disregards bulk comments that repeat the same boilerplate language, has done so for decades, and is looking for logical argument grounded in the law rather than emotional outbursts.

How about getting a bill passed in Congress providing for this? There were opportunities. There can be again in the future. Laws are harder to repeal compared to regulations.

Besides, I was there when the original ECFS was created. Events like this make me miss the days when paper filings were the norm. You had to think harder about what you were going to say compared to today's emails of rage provoked by a comedian. You had to reflect carefully way back when...prior to mid-1997, that is.</comment>


Tor: Directly connecting users from Turkey - hexa- https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-relay-country&start=2013-12-23&end=2014-03-23&country=tr&events=off After having censored the turkish people via DNS and thus restricting their access to Twitter everyone moved on to other DNS Services like Google Public DNS (220.127.116.11, 126.96.36.199) and OpenDNS. Earlier today an IP-Ban was issued and immediately Tor-Usage from Turkey starts rising. What a magnificent people. Keep on fighting! <comment><AUTHOR> It's amazing what humans beings will do for information. This reminds me of a time in 2007 where my friend was a teacher at an elementary school. The school blocked MySpace and Facebook to stop the students from visiting those sites. Somehow, the students figured out how to use proxies and get around the firewalls and what ended up happening is that the teachers were the only ones who couldn't figure out how to get around the firewalls. My friend came to me asking how the kids were getting around the firewall, but my explanation was over his head.

<comment><USER2> The solution I used to use in high school: add a period to the end of the domain name. E.g. "www.facebook.com" became "www.facebook.com.". Apparently, the last dot does nothing, but gets around almost all pattern matchings. Everyone I told was amazed, but it actually worked (and teachers/administration were clueless).

<comment><USER3> My favourite was that http was blocked, but https wasn't at my school. Easy peasy :)

<comment><USER4> I use that for a different trick at school. It gets around keyword filtering on search terms :)

<comment><USER5> This type of filtering made the EFF's HTTPSEverywhere common in my last school

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My biggest fear is once dictatorships/governments become aware of the ability to sidestep their bans, they'll begin blocking websites such as torproject.org. Keep in mind this traffic spike is because people who don't normally use Tor, started using it (i.e. they downloaded it). At that point I think we'll begin to see an arms race between the public and government which might finally bring us to decentralization of the Internet - or complete censorship.

<comment><USER7> Others could mirror Tor (more risky, yes, but better than nothing).

<comment> hexa- There already exists a mirror list at [https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/mirrors.html.en](https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/mirrors.html.en). Of course this is hard to come by, when the whole torproject website is being censored.

<comment><USER8> People can just look at the cached version of this page on Google over SSL, I doubt they will ban Google...

<comment><USER9> > In February 2006, Google made a significant concession to the Great Firewall > of China, in exchange for equipment installation on Chinese soil, by > blocking websites which the Chinese government deemed illegal.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Peo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China)

So I think they _would_ ban Google Search over this if they had to, but it sounds like Google would just hide it on Google.cn.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_Ch...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_China) is another interesting read, the first 6 URLs are Google products.

<comment><USER10> > the first 6 URLs are Google products

One of which is Google+, every cloud has a silver lining.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Doing my part by hosting a relay, and so can you!

[https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-relay- debian.html.en](https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-relay-debian.html.en)

<comment><USER12> Why don't you try hosting an exit relay? It would be fun.

<comment><USER11> I am. Have been for 9 months now and didn't have significant trouble.

<comment><USER13> I tried hosting an exit relay, even with limited outbound ports, and my VPS provider immediately received about 9 DMCA requested within 24 hours. I was able to email them the Tor boilerplate response and it went away, but I won't be trying that again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Freedom of speech. It always seem to be under attack.

I wonder though, do we have more or less freedom of speech over time? I tried to google those things, but I couldn't find the graph of freedomness over time.

(No, ancedotes don't count. Our perceptions can be skewed by media bias.)

<comment><USER15> I remember reading an article a couple weeks ago, I'm not sure where, but I think it was posted on HN, about democracy over time. While not the same, that's a good proxy for measuring freedom. It said that democracy reached a peak around 2000, and that it's declined a little since then, but much slower than it was increasing before then.

I think this article was either on The Atlantic, The Economist or BBC, if you want to go digging.

<comment><USER16> It was probably The Economist. Paired with an interesting experiment (for them) in their presentation of long-form essays.

[http://www.economist.com/news/essays/21596796-democracy- was-...](http://www.economist.com/news/essays/21596796-democracy-was-most- successful-political-idea-20th-century-why-has-it-run-trouble-and-what-can-be- do)

<comment><USER17> "Freedom score"? Really? Some number, representing "freedom", calculated from the US point of view - it's, how should I put it... Less than impartial. Not to mention method of calculating freedom.

<comment><USER15> It doesn't seem any less contrived than standard of living scores or happiness scores. It's obviously an imperfect metric, but while it might be useless for comparing the freedom of Germany and the US, it's perfectly adequate for comparing the freedom of the US and Croatia, or of Croatia and China. For the sake of calculating the overall freedom of the world over time, as in the case of the great-grandparent's question, it works as well as anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> the Turkish government will eventually figure out how to block Tor, and when that happens the users will need bridges.

You can help out by dedicating some spare resources to run as a relay + bridge, takes a minute to install and setup.

Share your bridge info to those who require it (not publically).

Example install + config:

[https://gist.github.com/nikcub/9722068](https://gist.github.com/nikcub/9722068)

<comment><USER19> Setting up a private bridge only helps if you have friends or family living living under an oppressive regime. Anyone who run an obfsproxy bridge will be helping the to alleviate the shortage of bridges.[1] The quickest and easiest way is to setup your free Amazon EC2 account with the Instructions at the Tor Cloud Project page[2]. It took me just a couple of minutes to install my free EC2 account. Another option is to donate money to pay for the bandwidth that Tor relay and exit nodes require.[3]

NOTE: A bridge is not the same as an exit node. Only exit nodes could possibly attract attention from authorities. If you are just running a bridge, you are only helping people circumvent government firewalls to join the Tor network. The default EC2 Tor Cloud images only run as a bridge.

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/tor- ca...](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/tor-calls-for- help-as-its-supply-of-bridges-falters/)

[2] [https://cloud.torproject.org/](https://cloud.torproject.org/)

[3] [https://blog.torproject.org/blog/support-tor-network- donate-...](https://blog.torproject.org/blog/support-tor-network-donate-exit- node-providers)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Thank you. I looked at other countries' graphs as well. India's [1] make no sense. Distorted sinusoidal wave?!

[1] [https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats- re...](https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-relay- country&country=in#userstats-relay-country)

<comment><USER21> Drops every Sunday¹. Employees of companies are using Tor to bypass company site blocks.

¹ [https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats- re...](https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-relay- country&start=2014-03-01&end=2014-03-11&country=in&events=off#userstats-relay- country)

<comment><USER22> No, I don't think so. Look at a bigger time frame:

[https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats- re...](https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-relay- country&start=2013-01-01&end=2014-03-23&country=in&events=off#userstats-relay- country)

There was a huge spike in Mid 2013, cause by a botnet that installed tor. Before there was almost not oscillation. After that there is quite a bit. I think there are many infected PCs at companies.

<comment><USER23> Do you still got a reference to news/blogs about that botnet install?

<comment><USER22> There is something form the official tor blog. [https://blog.torproject.org/blog/how-to-handle-millions- new-...](https://blog.torproject.org/blog/how-to-handle-millions-new-tor- clients)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's touching that people want and have the means to help the Turks continue to communicate thanks to Tor. But it's too bad that running a Tor exit node, due to what Tor is so commonly used for by nature of anonymity, is such a glaring liability[1] to the operator -- and, due to how easily and commonly Tor exit nodes can be used nefariously, a liability to the users[2].

Hopefully uProxy, slated to be released this summer, will address these issues effectively by incorporating a trust model[3] into facilitating circumvention through such censorship walls. Meanwhile, more and more https[4] would be helpful.

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/tor-operator- char...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/tor-operator-charged-for- child-porn-transmitted-over-his-servers/) [2] [http://cryptome.org/2014/01/spoiled- onions.pdf](http://cryptome.org/2014/01/spoiled-onions.pdf) [3] [https://www.asl19.org/en/know-more-about-uproxy-live-qa- with...](https://www.asl19.org/en/know-more-about-uproxy-live-qa-with-lucas- dixon-from-google-ideas/) [4] [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/staying- at-forefront-...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/staying-at-forefront- of-email-security.html)

</comment><comment><USER25> Also: "As the Turkish government's effort to ban use of Twitter continued Friday, the country's Internet users rushed to install apps such as Hotspot Shield, which had 270,000 downloads from Turkish users within 12 hours, according to David Gorodyansky, the company's chief executive."

I think Tor's a bit of an overkill. This message sent over Hotspot Shield from Vietnam because of my Facebook addiction (blocked on and off here)

<comment><USER26> Why and how is Tor an overkill? With Hotspot Shield, you are trusting them with everything you are doing. With Tor, there is no trust with a single server because it is decentralized.

<comment><USER27> Tor is certainly far more decentralized, but you seem to harbor a common misconception that Tor doesn't reuqire trust. The exit node of your circuit (the last hop before the "real" internet) handles your directly. At best, the destination of your packets is unencrypted, giving the exit node a narrow but pertinent view into your communications. At worst, the entire packet is unencrypted, and the exit node can manipulate it in whatever way it wishes, undetectably. This is why you must, must, must layer other encryption on top of Tor, ie, HTTPS. As they say at the Tor Project, "plaintext over Tor is still plaintext," except that you've attracted a lot attention to send it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Turkey's government is getting really good at turning molehills into mountains.

</comment><comment><USER29> A bit OT, but does anyone know what happened in Australia to cause this: [https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats- re...](https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-relay- country&start=2011-12-23&end=2014-03-23&country=au&events=off#userstats-relay- country)

<comment><USER30> There was a huge increase in global usage at that time: [https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats- re...](https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-relay- country&start=2011-12-23&end=2014-03-23&country=all)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Twitter yesterday, TOR tomorrow, what next FB and G+ and then what will they block to stem people speaking things about the Turkish government.

From what I understand the whole blocking twitter is due to the Turkish government not liking what is said about them on twitter. Now by their actions they have created more people saying things they will not like on many other platforms and with that, were will it end. Will they block of the entire internet or will they deal with the issues being raised about them in a constructive way beyond effectively gagging everybody as they are unable to put there hands over there ears.

Either way, this is a dangerous path they are taking and the fallout will be greater than the problem they perceive too be abating.

</comment><comment><USER7> More people should be working on making the P2P Twister a reality, sooner:

[https://github.com/iShift/twister-webkit](https://github.com/iShift/twister- webkit)

Centralized Twitter is too easy to stop/block by countries.

</comment><comment><USER32> What amazes me in this mess is how ignorant the government (and the people running it) about methods to overcome censorship. They are, basically, computer-illiterate. Really very illiterate.

After the Tunisian revolution, there were thoughts and plans by politicians to do censorship again. This was dismissed as politicians, officials and government finally recognized that censorship can be overcome no matter what they try. Religious complaining about "porn" and that stuff can ask their ISP for a traffic filter.

</comment><comment><USER33> I guess what they are going to do when Turkish government will buy some advanced DPI hardware with SVM (Support Vector Machines) which is capable of blocking TOR

<comment><USER34> Doesn't TOR look like other encrypted traffic, specifically to avoid detection methods like this?

<comment><USER33> TOR is effectively blocked in China, the only way to use it there is to setup a private obfsproxy somewhere abroad, but I believe it's beyond an average user skills.

<comment><USER35> Do you happen to have a technical explanation for this? I don't think I understand how it is possible.

Edit: Ok, after reading a bit more, I think I understand. For anyone else looking for more info: [https://www.torproject.org/projects/obfsproxy.html.en](https://www.torproject.org/projects/obfsproxy.html.en)

<comment><USER36> About Tor in china: [https://blog.torproject.org/blog/how-to-read-our-china- usage...](https://blog.torproject.org/blog/how-to-read-our-china-usage-graphs)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It's still nowhere near its peak. I wonder what happened around Sep last year?

[https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats- re...](https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-relay- country&start=2013-06-23&end=2014-03-23&country=tr&events=off#userstats-relay- country)

<comment><USER38> Im from Turkey and I don't recall any particular move let alone this big. It was probably "deep web fad" or something about Tor.

Also, this peak also happens at other countries, alth. they vary by size. [https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats- re...](https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-relay- country&start=2013-06-23&end=2014-03-23&country=sg&events=off#userstats-relay- country) This is singapore, I have looked at others(uk etc.) and they are same too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I wonder if twitter alternatives have also become more popular in Turkey lately - it seems like if people are willing to setup Tor, they might also try App.net (you're of course loosing your network of followers, but your followers in Turkey can't see twitter anyway).

Of course then you can just block that other service as well.

</comment><comment><USER40> [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tor- flashprox...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tor-flashproxy- badge/) \- host a Tor bridge from Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER41> I hope my tor bridge relay is helping: Mar 23 13:44:08.000 [notice] Heartbeat: Tor's uptime is 9 days 17:59 hours, with 2 circuits open. I've sent 894.13 MB and received 1.04 GB.

</comment><comment><USER42> By the way, [https://mobile.twitter.com/](https://mobile.twitter.com/) is not blocked.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'd like to help, but without also facilitating paedos. Is there an easy way to limit my tor exits to Twitter and its subdomains? I.e., can I do the configuration in Tor rather than messing with routes/firewall on the OS?

<comment><USER43> Yes, it's really easy if you know what IPs and ports you want to allow. You can whitelist a handful of services in your torrc and reject all others by default. I've been running a mostly-relay node for years now with a few allowed exits, with never any trouble at all. Though, I don't think my node gets used as an exit node very often; whenever I've checked, it's just doing normal relaying, which is basically what I want/expect.

[https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#ExitPolicies](https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#ExitPolicies)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Just for kicks, does Twitter have an onion server?

<comment><USER7> I was wondering if Twitter is doing anything to help the people in Turkey circumvent the censorship there. They should, but so far I've heard nothing about it. Hosting an onion server and an exit relay could help.

<comment><USER45> Twitter provided a SMS based system to send tweets from users

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> what are they gaining of it, extra protests?

<comment><USER22> I wish i had your optimism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Too bad Twitter can't put a server at 184.108.40.206

<comment><USER47> I know you're joking because of the twitter 140 character limit but accessing twitter directly by IP address won't help much. The govt can easily block a specific IP. So knowing the IP helps when DNS is down but, in the long run, it's not too helpful when someone is trying to block a site.

<comment><USER48> Recently, people were getting around the ban by switching to Google's DNS. [http://jussiparikka.net/2014/03/21/google-dns-freedom- fight-...](http://jussiparikka.net/2014/03/21/google-dns-freedom- fight-8-8-8-8/) So it would have helped for a while anyway.</comment></comment></comment>


Relibc: C Library in Rust for Redox and Linux - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/redox-os/relibc <comment><USER2> Awesome! It looks like they have some tests in the directory -- I'd be curious whether they're able to re-use musl's test suite some. I had an experiment a while ago to incrementally port musl to rust while keeping the test suite passing: [https://github.com/anp/rusl](https://github.com/anp/rusl). Haven't put any time into it in a while, but I think matching musl's program-facing behavior is still a good idea.

</comment><comment><USER3> Also of interest is japaric's steed [1] -- a rust standard library (not a "C lib").

[1] [https://github.com/japaric/steed](https://github.com/japaric/steed)

<comment><USER4> I'm wondering if it was abandoned. It looks like it hasn't had commits in months.

<comment><USER5> Well, the "auto" branch saw a commit 20 days ago, and before that in January. But they mostly seem to be small changes to "unbreak stuff".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there a good guide on how to make libraries with C bindings in rust? I've been learning it for the past few days but without much of a use case. Fast libraries with a C API in a higher level language would be very useful though.

<comment><USER7> It's mostly straightforward, you just define with #[no_mangle] + extern fn ...

The Rust docs cover it in small detail[1]. FWIW you can do the same with JNI and have direct Java->Rust bindings. If you want to get really clever you can even parse the Rust AST(using syntex) to auto-generate java/headers(there may be libs to do this now, I haven't looked in a while).

What's nice about the C FFI is you can pretty much embed Rust anywhere, I've used it in C/C++, Java, C# and Python pretty easily.

[1] [https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/second- edition/ch19-01-unsafe...](https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/second- edition/ch19-01-unsafe-rust.html#calling-rust-functions-from-other-languages)

<comment><USER8> There's a tool called cbindgen ([https://github.com/eqrion/cbindgen](https://github.com/eqrion/cbindgen)) that generates header files from rust code . It's a bit experimental.

The reverse tool, bindgen ([https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/rust- bindgen/](https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/rust-bindgen/)) is more mature -- generates rust bindings from header files.

<comment><USER7> Oh yeah, I should have mentioned bindgen, it's fantastic!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If I understand correctly, that will eventually allow 100% pure Rust executables, and these executables will be easily redistributable and work on any distro (only the latter is currently possible with the MUSL target).

<comment><USER10> > these executables will be easily redistributable and work on any distro

While this _sounds_ amazing and I'm sure is very useful in various situations, I think encouraging a culture of distributing software in such a fashion is an incredibly bad idea. This is a big issue I have with the Go culture. Downloading a statically linked binary from some site and just _sticking it somewhere_ is extremely bad practise to encourage. The user will never get prompted to update it, vulnerabilities and bugs in the vendored libraries will never be addressed... the list of issues is endless.

Distributions are not really about _distribution_ , they're about _maintenance_.

<comment><USER11> > I think encouraging a culture of distributing software in such a fashion is > an incredibly bad idea

It isn't obvious to me how that is dramatically different from traditional package managers as far as the update process goes. Upgrading decencies seems like a generally active and involved process as far as most package managers I've seen go.

pip/apt/npm/go-get/glide/yum/nixos etc all require you to actively discover and upgrade your dependencies and I've never been prompted to upgrade a package from any of the programs (a few do ask if you actively engage special subcommands on CLI e.g apt list --upgrade). Unattended-upgrades might be close but you can really only enable that on security releases and most package managers don't have the resources to setup special distros (and fewer backport security fixes).

So is the pain really just not having a quick upgrade cli and is that dramatically different from going to a github page and getting the new URL for a new binary? Would something as simple as writing a script to list and download versions of binaries from github releases make this a non issue?

<comment><USER12> They don't require you to discover - they all have a clear and easy option to go and find updates automatically. Most of the system-level ones also have various schedulers & notifiers (both CLI and GUI) which are normally on by default for common distributions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How many security-critical bugs have been found in libc in the last ten years?

I know that in principle Rust is safer, but I am wondering it makes sense to re-implement code so heavily audited as libc.

Wouldn't it be better to redirect the effort to some other less audited code?

<comment><USER14> Lots: [https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability- list/vendor_id-72/p...](https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability- list/vendor_id-72/product_id-767/GNU-Glibc.html)

<comment><USER15> musl: [https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability- list/vendor_id-1685...](https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability- list/vendor_id-16859/Musl-libc.html)

Can't find separate listings for libc in FreeBSD, OpenBSD but the list is smaller than glibc if you check e.g., VuXML or [https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability- list/vendor_id-97/p...](https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability- list/vendor_id-97/product_id-163/Openbsd-Openbsd.html)

Looks like glibc is the worst sinner here.

<comment><USER14> More people study and use glibc, so I guess they find more bugs. On the other hand glibc has a larger code base. Anyway it's difficult to compare bug counts across projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder how they are going to handle testing. The tests directory seems pretty bare, surely there are some libc tests (written in C I guess) that can be directly imported?

<comment><AUTHOR> There has been discussion about leveraging parts of musl's test suite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Gonna go on a tangent here. I'm always curious about stuff like this. Everyone and their mother wants to replace C, but what's people's answer to it being a part of POSIX? I mean it's literally a part of the standards family, and no one seems to address this. I can never take aspiring C-replacements seriously because no one comes out and openly says, "This is how we replace C."

They're all really just claims that C is bad, and we shouldn't use it. Okay, well how do you replace it? Or was that never the goal to begin with and you just want me to use this language?

<comment><USER18> A rant I've wanted to do for a while:

We're at the point now where it would be useful to be able to express ABIs and FFI in a language-agnostic manner without resorting to C. C lacks the capability to describe fairly widespread functionality: things like fixed-size integer types [0], pointer lifetimes, arrays with lengths, functions with bound environments, variable arguments [1]. Keeping distinctions between binary strings and textual strings would be useful for languages, and tracking how to deallocate pointers would be beneficial as well. An ABI that allows systems with different GCs to pass GC information to each other would be amazing, if challenging.

Unfortunately, we're sort of in a catch-22. The multilingual interoperation has to go through C, because that's the only standard that exists. The people who write the standards look at the situation and see no reason to go beyond C because no one's proposing an alternative.

[0] Sort of. There is <stdint.h>, but C tends to fundamentally think in terms of char/short/int/long/long long, and there have been issues with trying to work out what [u]int64_t maps to.

[1] Not in C's broken sense of "there are more arguments after this point, but you get to guess how many." Rather, I'm thinking of a more Java sense of "here's the list of extra arguments the caller gave me."

<comment><USER19> What sort of properties would you consider a "textual string" to have that a "binary string" would lack?

Offhand I'd assume you mean some of the following, but I'm curious if /my/ assumption about your needs is correct and complete. (Also, note that some of these may be implied by values elsewhere in the specification, it isn't strictly a data structure.)

        * flag:isValidated
        * targetEncoding
        * flag:isNormalized
        * targetNormalization
        * lengthMemory (not including the implicit size of the type's metadata)
        * lengthCodepoints (distinct encoding elements)
        * length(Some word meaning complete display elements, but not the actual width, height, etc.)

Do you also need actual random access to individual codepoints/"full characters"? Or is the assumption that if such a scan is in progress the entire sequence or major parts of it are being fully-scanned?

What if, within a given function call*, the underlying storage could be referenced with zero-copying and substrings made? (On exiting that context they'd be copied if retained.)

It might be useful to have library iterators that split on say, a single given character, segments up to a maximum memory size of N (and scanning backwards for the last "full character" or at least complete rune).

Of course, I believe that, by /default/ a program should perform /binary/ interaction with files including standard in/out/err. If there is a process for converting such binary input/output it should assume and produce data in UTF-8 (in NFC normalization) (when converting to/from "text" types) as a default, which should be easy to globally over-ride or set specifically for a given open file (and change mid use).

Of course I don't normally need to care about the encoding of data directly; libraries with parsers and writers typically do that as well as other encoding/decoding for that format for me. Everything else tends to be copy / compare and do not change, or making filenames (mostly append bits of "should all be UTF-8").

Actual, hard core, manipulation of encoded streams seems far more like a composition editing issue (A specific editor where default input dialogs are insufficient) or something that underlying libraries need to worry about.

<comment><USER20> In practice, use cases don't justify strings precalculating their number of code points or grapheme clusters. Pixel width isn't a property of a string alone, since it depends on font and the container to render it in (for line breaks).

So a string should know its number of code units. Validity information should be part of the type system and not runtime flags. I.e. you have a different type for arbitrary bytes and for valid UTF-8. (See IDNA for why normalization guarantee in infra over time is problematic.)

<comment><USER19> Having thought about it you're probably right. That properly belongs on a different kind of wrapper around this data structure or ones like it. Maybe in that /specific/ and /rare/ use case it even makes sense to store the underlying data in a wide data structure; but my supposition is that handling it as a series of fragments (which would have a length in memory and in code- points sizes) would be the answer. If addressing in such a way replacement and other editing operations seem likely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There are many projects recently titled like "xxx in Rust" or "xxx in Go", rewriting an existing software, seems to be built not because there is a problem in the existing software, but without a clear reason.

For learning a new language, it can be a good practice. But if you hope the project to grow successfully I think there is no hope.

<comment><USER22> relibc is built to solve a problem in the existing software, namely newlib. It has a clear reason.

Redox is an opearting system. An operating system needs a C library. Redox used to use newlib, but developers found it unsatisfying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Once you've built this easy way out I fear it will turn into a crutch that stops new, pure rust apps from being written. Do you really want a C library in Redox?

<comment><USER24> There is tons of C software out there that depends on libc that is never going to be rewritten in Rust. Also think about interpreted languages like Python, Ruby, etc. I imagine they all depend on libc. The only real way for Redox to gain adoption is through cross platform compatibility.

<comment><USER25> Does the rust compiler depend on libc?

<comment><USER26> Presumably. Rust _programs_ certainly do.

<comment><USER27> The compiler does. Rust programs don't _inherently_ depend on libc; it's libstd that does. Build without the standard library, no libc required.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Give Me Your Traffic If You Can't Handle It - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/b039181955f0

<comment><USER2> Did you ever manage a high traffic site? Scaling certain sites might not be as easy as you think.</comment>


Apple copies famous Swiss railway clock in iOS 6 without asking. - <AUTHOR> http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/digital/mobil/Apple-kopiert-die-beruehmte-SBBUhr/story/26209939 Translation for those who don't read German: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tagesanzeiger.ch%2Fdigital%2Fmobil%2FApple-kopiert-die-beruehmte-SBBUhr%2Fstory%2F26209939 <comment><USER2> Is the "famous Swiss railway clock" copyrighted? Or patented? Or under any other kind of protection?

<comment><AUTHOR> According to the article the SBB (Swiss Federal Railways) is the exclusive rights holder of the clock design.</comment></comment>


Why don't more people accept paypal? - <AUTHOR>

I've written here before about the fact I can't use services such as AWS because I only have a maestro (switch) card which isn't reall accepted in the US and dn't have Visa or Mastercard.<p>So, my question is, why don't more people accept things like PayPal? <comment><USER2> Paypal is more demanding than most payment options about the prominence of their brand. They require, among other things, that you use their BIG, BRIGHT ORANGE Paypal button and that if you offer other payment options, the grouping needs to be "Paypal -or - The Rest," and not an arrangement where they're suggested as inferior (or even equal). They also pretty much require that part of the payments process happen on their own site.

All of that put together means that people serious about handling payments and maintaining their own experience for that process may opt not to go the Paypal route at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you really don't want to use a visa credit card, but the company requires it, you can get a visa gift card online. They can be used anywhere visa debit is accepted. [http://usa.visa.com/personal/cards/prepaid/visa_gift_card_or...](http://usa.visa.com/personal/cards/prepaid/visa_gift_card_order.jsp?view=Online) has a list of online retailers.

Edit: It looks like most of the sites certified by visa require bank accounts with the issuing bank, and it looks like all of the cards are physically shipped to you. You can get a virtual visa card number from a bunch of different websites though. And it looks like they can be use for recurring payments too. Though I've read that some websites check the card for the information on the actual billing address, so acceptance may vary.

</comment><comment><USER4> From the US point of view, if you can't even get a Mastercard or Visa, you're not trustworthy.

Here (US), my 2-year old daugther receives credit card offers in the mail. Imagine that.

<http://FairSoftware.net>: businesses for geeks

<comment><USER5> But if you're not in the US it's not straighforward to get a US card, which can be limiting, e.g. you can't use Mechanical Turk without a US card and address.

<comment><USER6> yeah, that's the idea. those sorts of people tend to think that any traffic originating outside of the US or EU or JP is fraudulent or criminal in nature.

That hasn't been my experience... I've personally had more trouble with USian spammers who claim the user signed up... and the user disagrees. (I've largely solved the problem by prohibiting bulk mail from my service entirely)

I've had plenty of customers who were intelligent, legitimate and profitable who came from outside of the 'first world'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> no idea. I only take paypal, 'cause I don't want to take the time to harden my billing system to the point where I'd trust it with other people's credit cards.

Some people complain about high fees and chargebacks, but I've had a merchant account before, and they have the same problems.</comment>


Devastating wheat fungus appears in Asia for first time - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/devastating-wheat-fungus-appears-in-asia-for-first-time-1.19820 <comment><USER2> _Wheat_ fungus, not yeast fungus.

<comment><USER3> Wheat Blast specifically.

I always worry about our monocultures because of things like (from the article): 15k hectares destroyed to try and contain the outbreak, and some sources claim that "Yield loss to this disease can be greater than 75% in severely affected fields."[0] which seems to me that if this spreads across Asia this could be a big problem.

[0][https://www.k-state.edu/wheatblast/about/](https://www.k-state.edu/wheatblast/about/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It has begun.

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

<comment><USER5> Interesting premise. I wonder if civilization would collapse, or if we'd be able to adapt our agriculture to more legumes and other vegetables quickly enough to avoid mass starvation.

<comment><USER6> The US plants more soy than wheat already so the adapting part would probably go OK. The bigger question would be the math about calories (it probably works out, meat production consumes a lot of calories).

I guess we could also plant lots of potatoes (which produce more calories/acre than soy).

<comment><USER7> Topsoil erosion would be a massive problem.

<comment><USER8> That's something you start worrying about after you make sure no one is likely to starve, it can most likely wait a couple of years.

<comment><USER7> Actually, it's something you worry about _now_ if you don't want people to starve.

<comment><USER8> This discussion is in the context of a sudden failure of a variety of crops, e.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Grass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Grass)

In that context, for a couple or so of years you don't worry about soil erosion, except to avoid a repeat of the Dust Bowl, you worry about people not starving. Before AKA "now", and after the emergency period, yes, you worry about it, as we do now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why does the article says "wheat fungus" but the HN title says "yeast fungus" ?

</comment><comment><USER10> LSD for the masses? :-)

<comment><USER11> You're thinking of rye.</comment></comment>


Sexual paranoia on campus: Laura Kipnis, the professor at the eye of the storm - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/02/unwanted-advances-on-campus-us-university-professor-laura-kipnis-interview <comment><USER2> This is most ridiculous. Writing opinion on something like this in what some consider bastions of free speech and then having some of the student body wanting to censor said speech is unbelievable.

It's understood sexual assault is an issue at campuses --focus on that. Focus on providing guidance to new arrivals, acceptable sexual behavior, etc. But to censor opinion on the subject in institutions of high learning is ridiculous. It's unfortunate that some faculty as well as student bodies have been complicit in the new baseline for what consists of harm --it's no longer bodily harm or physical assault but rather ideas and opinions --this is very sad. I can only think back to my days in Uni. What a strange unrecognizable world it has become.

<comment><USER3> At a graduate program right now, ~5 years after finishing undergrad. The evolution is absolutely astounding and, frankly, frightening. There's new "administrators" charged with, though not explicitly in their job title, policing language and, yes, thought on campus.

One of the most effective essays I've read on diagnosing the problem is this:

[http://thesmartset.com/free-speech-the-modern- campus/](http://thesmartset.com/free-speech-the-modern-campus/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder why some STEM universities not separate themselves from the whole social mafiosi bedlam.

I mean, the actual cause they claim to fight for or against, doesn't even come up anymore. Its all about testing social nukes. Yes, we can bundle together and silence that guys opinion (we never really read his book, or provided valid counter arguments), yes we can ostracize that woman for taking our claims apart in public. Is that all?

Los Alamos for the social media version of Lord of the Flys? Honestly, the first develop/her who welded a camera to a cellphone, did more against police violence against minorities, then three generations of social justice warriors combined. So why not close the talk-shops and force those hick-up-hikikomorito to actually work for social causes ? Write a Email-Correcter, that takes slang out of a business Email? Fight centralized identities, which put a face to everything on the web. Implement a fake news detector - filter the web for click bait, by replacing links to the original paper/blog post/cause. Your absence has been noted.

</comment><comment><USER5> There's got to be some way of predicting which people will transform themselves into the shittiest assholes, and put them all in the same shitty school, so that they can all burn it to the ground together, and we only sacrifice one worthless safety school, rather than 40 or 50 valuable institutions.

This is probably unrealistic, since one person's enjoyable experience is often in direct conflict with another's misery.

Maybe it just needs to to go down so that all the noisiest, most adversarial assholes, likely to compliment each other's misery land in the same place, make the most noise, and it looks like a huge, ridiculous disaster, but through this, 99% of everyone else's time at school goes smoothly, far far away from the well-isolated, planned demolition of losers.

Is this how wars start?

<comment><USER6> >There's got to be some way of predicting which people will transform themselves

It's predictable to a large degree. Between moral foundations ( Jonatan Haidt, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI1wQswRVaU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI1wQswRVaU) ) and hormone levels (IIRC Gad Saad, can't locate specific video right now, some example articles below) there is growing body of scientific research relating to how much moral and political alignment is function of our body and brain.

[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2015/08/05/politic...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2015/08/05/political- beliefs-genetic/) [http://www.unl.edu/polphyslab/polpsycharticle.pdf](http://www.unl.edu/polphyslab/polpsycharticle.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Just have to point out as Haidt says, predisposed does not mean predetermined. Our ability to control and choose our individual behavior is what distinguishes us from animals as a species.</comment></comment></comment>


MIT gurus use polyethylene to suck heat away from your next CPU - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/10/mit-gurus-use-polyethylene-to-suck-heat-away-from-your-next-cpu/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+weblogsinc%2Fengadget+%28Engadget%29 <comment><USER2> Hmm, conducting heat well in one direction and not conducting it well in the other.

Isn't it against thermodynamics?

I mean - make two containers connected by that material, if it works as it is described - temperature gradient between these containers will grow with time.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe a thermal transistor, thermal logic gates, and thermal memory, too: <http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24222/?a=f></comment>


EPA Official Accused of Helping Monsanto 'Kill' Cancer Study - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-14/monsanto-accused-of-ghost-writing-papers-on-roundup-cancer-risk <comment><USER2> Relevantish studies: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22331240](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22331240) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28185844](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28185844) [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1532045614...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1532045614001045)

And the worst one of all: [https://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/2016/Glyphosate_V_glycin...](https://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/2016/Glyphosate_V_glycine_analogue_2016.pdf)

So yeah, not only does it cause cancer, it causes a wide range of diseases: literally any one that can be caused by protein misassembly in ways that the body can't easily clear the protein (or if it does, the glyphosate can end up being reused instead of flushed out of your body) can be linked to this.

So, in around 5 years, if they come out with a study that Autism is caused by, or greatly enhanced by, glyphosate exposure in utero or during nursing (glyphosate concentrations are extremely high in breast milk in mothers exposed to the chemical), I will not be surprised whatsoever.

<comment><USER3> Paper 1: 'no cytotoxic effects at concentrations at or below 100 μM' \-- A non trivial amount.

(Sorry don't have the full text for the others)

And your 'worst one of all' is a joke of a paper. Its a review and begs the question that glycophosphate is substituting an amino acid.

Its presupposition that " Glyphosate is a glycine molecule with a methyl- phosphonyl group bound to the nitrogen atom. As an analogue of glycine, it can be expected to displace glycine at random points in the protein synthesis process, with unknown consequences.

Demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of the specificity of the ribosomes and enzymes/proteins in general.

Of course they have no actual evidence - say isolating glycophosphate substituted proteins? Fairly easy to do as normal proteins do not contain phosphorous, or it could be via C13 labeling of the what would be the glycine residue.

To say nothing that its quoting studies dosing the equivalent (10mg+/kg) of having a person do literal shots of herbicide.

Everything (except e-caprolactam, go figure) causes cancer, and most everything will kill you if you have enough of it. Hell the IARC has glycophosphate in the same category as red meat and drinking beverages warmer than 65C. They've also classified cell phones as 'possibly carcinogenic to humans'. [http://www.iarc.fr/en/media- centre/pr/2011/pdfs/pr208_E.pdf](http://www.iarc.fr/en/media- centre/pr/2011/pdfs/pr208_E.pdf)

<comment><USER4> It is really worth emphasizing just how bad the last paper ("the worst of all") is. It does not contain a single piece of actual data, there are no experiments there, only wild hypotheses.

There isn't a single piece of evidence in that paper, the authors simply assume that glyphosate can subvert one of the most important mechanisms in the cell and change any protein that contains glycine.

What kills this hypothesis entirely is that glyphosate is a glycine with a modification on the amino group. That is the part of the amino acid that is used to make the connection to the previous one in a protein. This kind of modification makes it impossible for it to be incorporated into a protein by a peptide bond.

The journal also does not seem trustworthy, it doesn't seem to be indexed in Pubmed, which is a very, very bad sign. Why would a scientist publish in a journal that none of their colleagues could easily find? In this area of science, every journal worth reading (and some more) are indexed in Pubmed. It also seems to only publish ~3 papers per issue.

<comment><USER2> The paper I linked to seems to be the 5th in a series of papers. The second one in this series I found on PubMed: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945755/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945755/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ignoring the question as to whether or not "killing the study" was nefarious or not, this is a great lesson on what you should and shouldn't say in emails.

I remember getting training a long time ago from my employer. If you're discussing anything remotely controversial, pick up the phone or walk to the person's office. _Don 't put it in an email_

Why? Because lawyers will find it and twist it however they want to make you look bad. Had a colleague annoy the hell out of you asking for something that didn't need to be done? Don't put "I deserve a medal for killing this study" in an email.

<comment><USER6> This is interesting because according to the article, he didn't write any emails about that. Some other guy said he said that in an email.

It'd be nice if someone could pull up an actual copy of the legal filings so we could all read about it, as we are hearing this fourth hand. We have an article referencing a legal filing referencing an email about what someone heard someone else say.

"If I can kill this I should get a medal," Rowland told a Monsanto regulatory affairs manager who recounted the conversation in an email to his colleagues, according to a court filing made public Tuesday

<comment><USER7> It's a pain in the ass to find filings on MDL cases on PACER but heres the email:

[http://i.imgur.com/iSjBfztr.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/iSjBfztr.jpg)

<comment><USER5> Wow! That's put the comments in an entirely different light (not surprised at all).

"We have enough to sustain our conclusions" \- I read that as, we have enough data, why are we doing yet another study?

"No coordination is going on, he wants to establish some" \- again, people are asking for an additional study without considering all the details

"I doubt Jess and EPA can kill this" \- the desire to kill the study is broader than just Jess, it's the EPA in general

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It never ceases to amaze me, how much controversy the name Monsanto stirs up.

The waters around this company are so murky, that it's less a question of _whether_ the company operates an unregulated extrajudicial campaign against public awareness of their wares and activity, but rather, what's their spend on it, and how deep do they go?

Food security is frighteningly politicized, to the point of bald militarization (see: Canada's maple syrup). Almost nothing would surprise me.

<comment><USER9> Well that would be my favourite conspiracy ever, considering the people running it must be the most incompetent evil scheming overlords ever.

If they're running an "unregulated extrajudicial campaign against public awareness", it is a spectacular failure, considering Monsanto is among the most-hated companies on the planet. Can we somehow get them hired by Syria's government?

<comment><USER10> Maybe they simply don't give a damn, because they realize general population is not their target market, and so it doesn't matter what regular people think of them?

<comment><USER11> And yet as an agricultural company, almost every person on earth is touched by their products or intellectual property. Regular people don't care but 7 billion potential and unaware users of their products might...

<comment><USER10> The question is - does "7 billion potential and unaware users" becoming aware affects their bottom-line? If it doesn't, then they probably won't care.

I'm not saying it is good, but that's how things work. That's e.g. why boycotts generally don't work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yet another nail in my personal " _Why are agencies tasked with protecting human health even allowed to be lobbied in the first place?_ " coffin...

<comment><USER13> Because lobbying is an ambiguous term. Everything is lobbying, and nothing is lobbying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone have a link to the actual court filing so we can see the document they reference? Is this an email found during discovery or something else?

> "If I can kill this I should get a medal," Rowland told a Monsanto > regulatory affairs manager who recounted the conversation in an email to his > colleagues, according to a court filing made public Tuesday

> The case is In re: Roundup Products Liability Litigation, MDL 2741, U.S. > District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).

<comment><USER6> Update -

mikeyouse found the email here: [http://i.imgur.com/iSjBfztr.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/iSjBfztr.jpg)

His comment saying that got autokilled for duplicating his other comment linking to it.

Here's a quick transcription I made of the email:

===

Hey- cc'ing Jen

So...Jess called me out of the blue this morning:

"We have enough to sustain our conclusions. Don't need gene tox or epi. The only thing is the cheminova study with the sarcoma in mice- we have that study now and its conclusions are irrelevant (bc at limit dose...?) I am the chair of the CARC and my folks are running this process for glyphosate in reg review. I have called a CARC meeting in June..."

Also, Jess called to ask for a contact name at ATSDR. I passed on Jesslyn's email. He told me no coordination is going on and he wanted to establish some saying "If I can kill this I should get a medal". However, don't get your hopes up, I doubt EPA and Jess can kill this; but it's good to know they are going to actually make the effort now to coordinate due to our pressing and their shared concern that ATSDR is consistent in its conclusions w EPA.

      Dan Jenkins
      U.S. Agency Lead

      Regulatory Affairs
      Monsasnto Company
      1300 I St., NW
      Suite 450 East
      Washington, DC 20005

      Office: 202-383-2851
      Cell: 571-732-6575

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the assist -- Didn't realize dupes would be deleted if they were in different comment trees.

<comment><USER6> No problem, thank you for digging up the info. Yes, it will auto-kill identical comments no matter where they are and those with showdead will see [dupe] [dead]

I didn't want your info to get lost because getting the original source is far more interesting to me than a 4th hand account of what happened.

<comment><USER7> I found a better source for the docs, they're in the exhibits portion at the top of this page:

[https://usrtk.org/pesticides/mdl-monsanto-glyphosate- cancer-...](https://usrtk.org/pesticides/mdl-monsanto-glyphosate-cancer-case- key-documents-analysis/)

Makes sense that I couldn't find them on PACER too, turns out that discovery docs aren't posted publicly unless provided by one of the parties (in this case the plaintiffs supplied them).

The email series in question starts at page 99 of this PDF:

[https://usrtk.org/wp- content/uploads/2017/03/JessRowlandseri...](https://usrtk.org/wp- content/uploads/2017/03/JessRowlandseries.pdf)

<comment><USER6> Much appreciated! It's so hard to get direct access to information like this these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Roundup" isn't just for farmers. I deployed around 35 x 5 ml of the stuff in 5l of water here, at home (UK) two days ago. I took care to only spray in the early evening after bees and most other insects had buggered off but probably some woodlice ("jiggers" I think, in en_US) might have suffered.

I threat the stuff as a nasty poison but had no idea that it might be carcinogenic.

<comment><USER15> for whatever it's worth--we call woodlice "roly-poly's" in the US. which now sounds silly typing out. jiggers are far scarier parasitic creatures.

<comment><USER16> Ah! I didn't know what either "jigger" or "woodlice" referred to until I read your comment. I actually always used to call them "pill bugs", although I'm not sure if that's something that others call or just a name I learned from my family.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's no surprise when corrupt regulators cozy with industry are ineffective. It's not that regulation is bad, it's the nuance of having sensible and effective authority, legislation and enforcement that is desperately needed to properly regulate chemicals as and how they are used in many industries.

This is almost as bad as Monsanto guy offered to drink glyphosate and then refused to drink it. [https://youtu.be/ovKw6YjqSfM](https://youtu.be/ovKw6YjqSfM)

<comment><USER18> And safe is a relative term. something might be safe ingested in trace amounts, or with contact to the skin. But drinking a whole glass of it? that is a different story.

<comment><USER19> The poison is in the dose; the LD50 for glyphosate is in the neighborhood of 5 g / kg, which amounts to around a quarter liter of pure glyphosate for a 50kg subject. You want to stay orders of magnitude below the LD50, for obvious reasons.

"How much can you safely drink?" depends heavily on the concentration. A cup of pure, or even the most concentrated form the sell in stores, might do it. Or might not. Once you dilute it for application - usually gallons of water to the tablespoon of concentrate - a cup becomes significantly less threatening.

<comment><USER20> The problem with that approach is that it is just about acute lethality and does not consider long-term effects from prolonged exposure that are hard to measure.

Further it ignores interactions with other chemicals that are also in use, something that we know is pretty common from medications.

Especially with endocrine disruptors there is also the effect that several chemicals might work in the same direction, where a safe dose of one chemical might be harmless but safe doses of 10 chemicals combined might not be safe anymore.

<comment><USER19> Well, no, but when the question is "will you drink a cup of this?" a good question is "will this kill me outright?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The evidence offered that glyphosate causes cancer is not very credible, though.

<comment><USER22> How are we supposed to verify that statement if the study was killed?

<comment><USER23> Because _lots_ of people have studied glyphosate. We're not dependent on the EPA for this.

<comment><USER24> We sort of are.... since they are the regulating body with authority in this area.

<comment><USER25> They are _one_ regulating body with _jurisdiction in the US._ There are other (less biased) research groups, and plenty of other countries with organizations equivalent to the EPA.

<comment><USER2> I actually agree with this. If, say, Canada or Europe or Australia banned it and banned importation of any goods exposed to it, Monsanto would be forced to seriously rethink their options.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Presumably Trump will appoint for former Monsanto CEO to run the EPA?

<comment><USER27> Please don't post unsubstantive comments about partisan topics. Those are flamebait.

<comment><USER28> It's flamebait and it is partisan but reality is actually worse so possibly it is substantive?

<comment><USER27> An interesting thought, but I guess partisan flamebait is enough for a please don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Keep in mind that regulatory agencies exist to protect corporations by giving them immunity from product liability lawsuits.

Just like California's labeling everything as a known carcinogen has nothing to do with protecting consumers but only serves the purposes of making corporations more immune from liability because they have duly warned you in compliance with the law that their products are harmful.</comment>