No Radical Changes in GNU Project - <AUTHOR> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2019-10/msg00005.html <comment><USER2> Excellent. This entire incident has been re-enforcing of how willing the media is to lie and how little people care when the lies support a narrative they believe in.

Here is what reporter Edward Ongweso Jr. wrote for Vice [1]:

> Early in the thread, Stallman insists that the "most plausible scenario" is > that Epstein's underage victims were "entirely willing" while being > trafficked.

Here is what Stallman actually wrote:

> We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she > presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced > by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from > most of his associates.

There is literally no way to read the previous sentence as Stallman arguing that Epstein's victims were entirely willing.

People like Edward Ongweso should be the ones losing their jobs, not Richard Stallman.

[1]: [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ne8b47/two-researchers- re...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ne8b47/two-researchers-resign-in- protest-over-mit-media-labs-ties-to-jeffrey-epstein)

<comment><USER3> See [https://se7en-site.neocities.org/articles/stallman.html](https://se7en- site.neocities.org/articles/stallman.html) for more details. It's really a disgrace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't want to get into the weeds discussing the ins and outs of the various things that have happened with RMS and the FSF. I have my own opinions on whether or not these moves were warranted. Separate from that I guess my largest worry is that this is another step on the road to a complete neutering of the Free Software movement, and the increasing corporate enclosure of the software commons.

The one thing I feel like everyone would have to agree on with RMS is that he was strident in his belief in the Free Software movement and refused to compromise in ways that initially seemed intransigent, and were later revealed to be prescient. I worry that both Gnu and the FSF will move more and more toward being co-opted by the corporate "open source" movement as people less obstinate that RMS take charge and let themselves and the "overton window" of Free Software be dragged further into the realm of captive corporatism.

Of course the counter to this is that retaining RMS as the leader alienates enough people to weaken the movement equally, and that may be true, I don't have a crystal ball. What I do know is that he published The Right to Read in 1997 and a year later we had the DMCA and things have only accelerated from there.

I guess we'll see where the road takes us, but as someone who remembers the excitement and energy that surrounded the web, linux, firefox etc etc, it feels like nowadays open source reigns supreme and it's all just a bunch of free work for corporations to scoop up, stick a web interface on (or containerize), and give back none of the same freedoms they make use of. I just hope we don't look back on this moment (from our locked down walled garden devices) as when the real decline of a _true_ free software commons started.

<comment><USER5> It's a complicated question, but I think the real decline of true free software commons was probably around the time cloud services proved so valuable. Cloud provides huge leverage to some end-users for getting to the goal of doing the thing they want to do with the software, and it utterly side-steps the Four Freedoms via the simple expedient of "You don't own the hardware the software runs on."

GNU hasn't had an answer to this besides "boycott it," which feels an awful lot like horse-riders suggesting we deal with the problems with cars by never owning or supporting ownership of them.

<comment><USER6> Well, AGPL was the answer to that issue, but it hasn't really done much. I think part of the impact was things like GitHub recommending the MIT license.

<comment><USER7> My understanding is that the AGPL is an answer to an older problem and didn't see the cloud coming. It addressed those running web-hosted GPL licensed applications who were side-stepping the viral aspect of the GPL by claiming that they were not "technically" distributing a binary by making the application available on the internet as an executing web app.

The AGPL requires those who create web applications derived from the AGPL (whether they're distributed as binaries or not) to make the code for their web applications available.

The AGPL does not address the cloud-hosting conundrum at all. This conundrum is where a cloud hosting company (e.g. Amazon AWS) can replicate the original author's service offering using the unmodified open source tool (wrapping it and interacting via API at most), and undercut the original author's business model. I.e., you can imagine a power user of some AGPL software competitively putting the software author's company out of business.

This is the reason for the recent licensing restrictions around ElasticSearch and MongoDB. The originating companies have had their hosted service revenue models undercut by Amazon AWS offerings that simply repackaged the software as part of their cloud offering.

Making the AGPL even stronger by adding in a viral API clause would pigeon hole AGPL software to only the most fringe ideological use-cases as everyone would be afraid to run AGPL software in a business context.

<comment><USER8> I don't think the AGPL actually cares about being able to undercut the original author's business model, as long as you're not just taking open source software, adding minimal value-add, then keeping that as a closed service.

<comment><USER9> The AGPL was really driven by the increasing prevalence of software being delivered in the form of a service. I don't recall much discussion of business models at the time but there was at least a school of thought that the GPL's protections of software freedom were being eroded because of service providers exploiting this "ASP loophole."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For context, I think it's an answer to this open letter from GNU developers: [https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/joint-statement-on-the-gnu- pr...](https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/joint-statement-on-the-gnu-project/)

<comment><USER11> > Stallman's behavior over the years has undermined a core value of the GNU > project: the empowerment of all computer users

The notion that empowered means shielded from opinions you might disagree with seems odd.

<comment><USER6> Contrast that with Ellen Degeneres responding to people dismayed that she sat next to George W. Bush during a game (warning, video in the tweet):

[https://twitter.com/TheEllenShow/status/1181395164499070976](https://twitter.com/TheEllenShow/status/1181395164499070976)

Basically, it's okay to be friends with people we disagree with (and really, we ought to).

<comment><USER12> We all have friends we disagree with, but Ellen deserves catching shit for palling around with a guy who started a war that killed nearly 5 thousand American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of civilians for absolutely nothing.

<comment><USER6> Americans started a war that killed nearly 5 thousand American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of civilians for absolutely nothing. We're all pretty much complicit. If there's any smaller group to be mad at, I'd say it's anybody who didn't oppose that course, but more likely, the U.S. military complex.

Ironically, she didn't catch flack for George being president of the Iraqi war, she caught flack for George's stance on LGBT issues when he was president.

<comment><USER13> Copy pasting the same comment over and over does not help make your point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well, good. An FSF without Stallman doesn't seem very relevant anymore, but GNU is still very important.

<comment><USER14> Any movement that depends on one person to thrive is already dead.

<comment><USER15> Are you saying that about the FSF? Certainly, Stallman was very important for the FSF, but there was an array of others who worked at various facets at times. Eben Moglen, for example, did a stand-up job and had great success helping the FSF, as did others. So, no, the FSF has not been about "one person".

That said, however, with the circumstances surrounding the removal of RMS, the FSF can longer be trusted. This very different than "depending" on a single person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This might be a noob question but can someone explain me how mailing lists are used in software projects. I keep seeing these archived emails that are posted. Could someone fill me in?

<comment><USER17> Mailing lists are still the best async method for discussing meta issues with regards to a project, when the people who work on it span the globe.

Basically you post to the list if you have a meta issue and then everyone replies. It can get pretty tough to follow if you're using email, but most of these had (still have?) mail<->news gateways, so you could use a threaded Usenet reader to keep track of all the forks in the threads.

It's sort of a lost art with the news service being mostly gone and with threaded social media.

<comment><USER16> Thank you for your response. I have a better understanding now. How is spam dealt with? Do people get banned quickly? Also, who archives these emails. Do they automatically get archived for public viewing?

<comment><USER18> Most lists require you to subscribe before being able to post. Subscription involves the mailing-list software sending a cookie/none to your e-mail address for authentication. You can either reply directly to the message or, if the mailing-list software supports a web interface, follow an embedded link.

That simple step prevents most bulk spam. For technical lists you can also do things like limit messages to text/plain, reject binary attachments, etc. What little spam remains, if any, can be handled by simple filters. Manual moderation, where posts are queued waiting for approval, is rare but might be necessary if someone is maliciously trying to disrupt the list.

One of the oldest mailing-list archive-to-HTML processors is MHonArc ([https://www.mhonarc.org/](https://www.mhonarc.org/)). Most mailing-list software now supports this feature natively, but the organization of such archives (by date, thread, etc) and the look & feel seem to have been heavily influenced by MHonArc.

<comment><USER19> Manual moderation of the first 2-3 posts of a new user can go a long way to prevent spam.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This whole issue, it hurts. Why do we need lynch mobs to bring justice? That is precisely what we need courts of law for. Yet those are overburdened because lawyers and judges are expensive because law is complex.

It just makes me so sad. I'd like to learn the truth about this whole issue, and see justice served, but without an official and thorough situation it all remains hearsay and such.

<comment><USER21> It is amazing to see a plea for basic standards of justice being downvoted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Glad to see this. I don't want GNU to be rebranded into a mediocre open source project from radical free software symbols, and only someone who bites his fingers after scratching toes like Tux has the least possibility to appease corporations with those sugar-coated pills named "open source".

</comment><comment><USER23> So RMS resigned from the FSF and his role(s) at MIT, but he's still on with GNU?

<comment><USER24> According to [1], GNU isn't a legal entity.

[1] [http://wingolog.org/archives/2019/10/08/thoughts-on-rms- and-...](http://wingolog.org/archives/2019/10/08/thoughts-on-rms-and-gnu)

<comment><USER25> GNU (and I think the GNU Project) is trademarked so there is a legal entity that own the trademark. There is also the domain gnu.org which domain owner is a legal entity. There is the publisher who publish information on the site and distribute the copyrighted works, which depending on the law where the server is located may or may not also be a legal entity. Last we have the Free System Distribution Guidelines (GNU FSDG) which is maintained by the FSF Licensing and Compliance Lab, which I would assume is owned by FSF.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> marble-drink Hard to read, but we definitely need to make sure the GNU project stays in the right hands.

<comment><USER26> Why do you say it's hard to read? Because it's talking about the eventual need for succession?

<comment> marble-drink > I won't be here forever

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Good hopefully he can separate GNU from the FSF and get it under responsible stewardship.

<comment><USER27> I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say.

Do you feel the FSF is irresponsible? If not, what are you trying to say?

Can you share any specifics? What evidence do you have to back up your claims?

<comment><USER28> FSF fell for the hit piece.</comment></comment></comment>


Lessons on Java programing... - <AUTHOR> http://lurnq.com/explore-lessons/java-programing/

<comment><USER2> Just a quick note, the word 'programming' is spelled incorrectly both here on HN and about 22 times on your linked site.

</comment><comment><USER3> Site looks cool - looking forward to a js-dedicated section. Thanks for sharing.</comment>


How to Come Up with Profitable Business Ideas - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com/round-table/how-to-come-up-with-profitable-online-business-ideas <comment><USER2> For a B2B SaaS company, the easiest/most likely[1] algorithm to succeed[2]:

1) Be embedded in the industry for a while

2) Make lots of connections, build credibility

3) Build SaaS app to solve key pain point you experienced in #1

4) Sell to the folks you know from #2

5) For bonus points/de-risking: find 25 potential customers (from #2) and reach out to them and validate this idea (Jobs-to-be-Done). Get a handful of them to commit, even verbally, to buy this when you've got an MVP built.

[1] Clearly this is not the _only_ way to be successful, but "I have a random idea lemme build it" is a great way to be not successful

[2] Succeed = your business that makes enough revenue to support you and a reasonable lifestyle, equating (and/or eventually surpassing) what you would typically make at a W2 gig, from a diversity of customers and not trading your personal time for money.

<comment><USER3> This is exactly the recipe I used and sold a company for $10m. Also, I am a absolutely terrible programmer and v1 of the product, with which this recipe was executed, was full of copy pasted code, unhashed passwords, all of the hallmarks of terrible programming. I got to $100,000 revenue before a friend of mine joined who actually knew how to program and rewrote the whole thing (literally zero lines of my original code were preserved).

<comment><USER4> Can I ask a little more please?

How much of the company did you own when you sold it?

How did the sale happen - did someone just turn up and offer you money, or did you go find a buyer?

Was there negotiation from a higher price down to $10M?

Did they buy the entire company from you or just buy the software assets?

How long did the sale take from when the buyer turned up till money in your account?

How much money did you end up with after paying tax on the sale?

What did you do to celebrate?

What did you do next - another business, get a job, sit at home watching TV?

Would you have handled the sale process differently if you could do it again?

<comment><USER3> I made just over $1m because we raised a bunch of money for growth that didn't pan out. Because LOL California the money went straight into a house. I still have a mortgage and a day job.

<comment><USER5> And I guess the moral of the story - don't raise money if you got to $100k+ revenue alone by yourself?

<comment><USER3> Bigger lesson is to buy a house as soon as you can. I've made more money on paper living in this house than building the company.

I kind of needed to raise the money. The wheels were falling off the bus because the software was so bad and it needed to be professionally written. I should have raised less and sold sooner though.

<comment><USER6> Unless you live in Japan where real estate depreciates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Business models of the companies with over $240k ARR:

\- outsourcing to humans

\- asset acquirement leverage

\- education

\- outsourcing to ai

\- event organizing

\- adding a missing feature to a platform

\- internet marketing saas

\- copied a website and added a missing feature

\- micro feedback as a service

Copying a website and adding a feature is great for someone who spends their time becoming a better software craftsperson.

Micro feedback as a service is a fascinating market I had never considered. Exceptional creativity there. Could be applied generally to many domains. PullRequest is doing code review as a service which is a great example of applying it to another specific domain.

Edit: formatting.

<comment><USER8> I'm a little confused. The companies from the post that dealt with feedback had far less than $240k ARR. Which "micro feedback" companies are you referring to?

<comment><USER9> I think SubmitHub

<comment><USER7> Exactly. SubmitHub states 55k/MRR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A interesting one Ive come across recently are technical founders that run a solutions company where a retired exec of a large company in a particular industry is an advisor/investor and assisting with leads.

Screams of corruption but in practice not really so. The exec knows there industry well, finds out where they struggle to find solutions, passes info down to the company. The company then creates specialised software to deal with it and joins a tender. As they have a trusted person on board it assists in getting in the door. Also the competition will usually not be very technically advanced.

Revenue streams are variable from rev-share to cost + maintenance. In a lot of cases the same solutions can be sold to others within the same vertical or outside it. Anecdotal but founders Ive met in this area seem far more successful than those on a more traditional VC / bootstrapping tract. Perhaps because a lot of the hard part of enterprise sales is solved by the advisor.

This may be an asia-specific style of business, not sure.

<comment><USER11> This is not exclusive to Asia. I know more individuals whom have found success doing this than attempting to sell software which is the result of a one-off idea.

It might seem rare in the States, but only because 1) the entrepreneurs heading these ventures do not want to give away profitable niches in the market and 2) they are not as fun to talk about as startups with lofty billion dollar goals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The main issue with going after random ideas, is that suddenly 3 months down the process of building some proof of concept, you lost so much of the initial thrill and focus (build B in order to build A, build C in order to build B, learn D in order to build C...) that you've eaten all the energy, end up burned out, depressed and browsing TC and sites like this one to reflect on what went wrong.

<comment><USER13> This is called Yak Shaving and happens all the time when building complex systems, especially by yourself. It's happened to me many times: you start out wanting to do "simple" thing X, and end up with a tree of task dependencies 20 layers deep. After spending a whole lot of time, all you have to show for your planned mansion is a pile of foundation.

<comment><USER14> But it's great, because once you have all that foundation you can quickly iterate on your top layer and quickly discover new pieces you are missing and must build before completion.

<comment><USER12> Except by the time you get there, you need to figure out how to make a living (bills don't suddenly disappear when you are in "sabbatical" mode.) Trust me, I am in this right now as we speak.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The reality of business is you don't have to be innovative. A lot of successful businesses are not even new ideas. Of course there is the whole concept of the first-mover advantage but in the world of SaaS there is plenty place for competition. Making a 30% improvement on one specific feature of a popular product or service can very well be a business on its own. I think a lot of people get held up on the idea that it's unethical to just steal an idea so they try and start something brand new. Innovative businesses are the riskiest.

<comment><USER16> "good entrepreneurs copy ideas, _great_ entrepreneurs steal ideas"

<comment><USER17> > "good entrepreneurs copy ideas, _great_ entrepreneurs steal ideas"

Worth mentioning that the original quote was "artists". There is a lot of valuable inspiration to be derived from other creative professions in this industry. "Measure twice, cut once" is one I've quoted a lot, originating from carpenters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Over 10 years I have had about half a dozen side enterprises whilst doing a very demanding full time job.

Several of these made money, most didn't. The best one was an ocr app which netted around usd 24k before the market got saturated.

It's very difficult to manage work with a side job and a family!

However, unexpected to me, the biggest benefit from these side gigs is that I am better at my day job. I have learnt new techniques and skills vs my peers. I am able to manage new situations better than others and make better predictions on outcomes. This has been the biggest benefit.

There's a lot to be said for companies that allow employees to officially pursue other (non conflicting) interests.

</comment><comment><USER19> It is amazing reading these tbh, always wanted to start a non-physical business, but the real world is always in the way.

Right now I sell spare parts salvaged from home appliances headed for scrap, it is surprisingly profitable, so much that 2 people can't keep up with it (having full time jobs, though). Selling to small repair shops and directly to end users. Would be a great full time business, but unless an investor is interested, it will take a while.

<comment> 52-6F-62 Others are questioning some of your choices around this so I thought I'd weigh in a little with my experience.

I never sold directly but I did work for a company earlier in my career that served high amp tractor trailer generators, power distribution equipment (later the department I ended up bootstrapping for them), lighting, and grip equipment to the film industry.

Early on my time there I was tasked with unloading and either stripping down or full on demolishing multiple 50 ft tractor trailers stacked to the ceiling loads of old stands (scrap metal), lamps (scrap metal, wiring, ceramic housings, aluminum housings, electronics), and high-amp ballasts for old Xenon and HMI lamps (a lot of electronics including some pretty hefty transformers. I have a stupid story about almost killing myself crippling a 20year old capacitor in one of those things...).

I worked on that for at least 60hrs a week for many weeks at not a great wage but they willingly paid me a lot of overtime to do it.

A lot of those parts weren't going into new products but repairing high value equipment that the longer it all lived the more profitable it was. They're probably still using some of that stuff.

I would have never thought to have started a business doing it though! I think most places are more willing to exploit young employees for it.

<comment><USER20> There's a huge market in repairing and retrofitting capital equipment. I've been working with someone doing just that for a while now as he gets his customers to validate the device I built.

Just like we'd use a bit of code to glue software utilities together, the same concept exists in hardware. Build simple interfaces to connect bits of hardware that were never designed to work together. A common, and cheap example are the USB to Serial converter dongles.

It's a great way to fix a 40 year-old machine that you can't get spare parts for: figure out a way to interface it to a more modern controller at a small fraction of the cost of a new machine.

<comment> 52-6F-62 I've definitely done it to interface with old scsi drives externally by cannibalizing old power supplies and connectors — and also because I was cheap... [read: poor].

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Another tip for finding business ideas: be good at ms excel and offer people with a non technical background your help with their existing spreadsheets. As far as I see it seven out of ten spreadsheets contain at least one idea for a simple saas product. Those spreadsheets have often been tailored to fulfill exactly the needs of a certain industry but the people who created them know they are far from perfect and are often willing to pay for a more convenient solution.

</comment><comment><USER22> These filtering options make me tear my hair out. Please don't use radio boxes... almost ever. Users are almost always interested in some but not all or none, and minimums / maximums. There is no way to see "everything that isn't free or advertising based", or "more than $4,000 / mo", which is probably what most people are interested in.

</comment><comment><USER23> I have pondering of an idea, which encourages local economy. Products, services or goods would be preferred of the local area. This is to allow visibility of local businesses and encourage spending locally. This also would provide jobs for the local people. Its frightening that globalised economy while beneficial takes jobs or sucks out of local economy. What do you think?

<comment><USER24> hey, me too!

<comment><USER25> me three

<comment><USER24> sir, what's your background? me ux/ui research and market research

<comment><USER23> programmer :)

<comment><USER26> me too. programmer. Love to work on SMB product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> So proud to be included in this. A lot of solopreneurs started with WordPress and moved to SaaS. I went the other way and still see so much opportunity in WordPress plugins, plugins-as-apps, and SaaS.

<comment><USER28> What about WordPress as a web app development tool for non-programmers ? Is it possible now ? Or could reasonable scale plugins will make it possible ?

<comment><USER27> Obviously, it depends on the app you're trying to make. But I recently worked with a founder who found a niche, used Gravity forms to collect data, Gravity view to display and export the data, (your basic CRUD in programming parlance) and this solved the basic needs of the problem.

I presented on this a couple years ago at a WordCamp, and am giving the updated version in a week at WordCamp Belfast. [https://wordpress.tv/2017/06/05/corey-maass-rapid-web-app- de...](https://wordpress.tv/2017/06/05/corey-maass-rapid-web-app-development- on-wordpress/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I will add make a product focused on the decision maker, not the needs of the business. Make their life easier, or make them look like a genius, and you will have a successful idea. Don't fall into the trap of making a product that saves the customer money, but makes life more difficult for the decision maker.

</comment><comment><USER30> I don't know about this but I have an interesting marketing idea. Pretend you're making a lot of money and go around talking to a lot of different people who might be interested in your product and saying what a successful business it is.

Simple truth is that any successful business person does not go around talking about how much money they make unless they have to because it just encourages other businesses to copy their features.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's kind of amazing how many ideas are framed in terms of a "problem" as though it is divorced from people. A good place to start for building _anything_ that people will want to pay for is Cindy Alvarez's book "Lean Customer Development".

<comment><USER32> Shout out to Cindy and her book. She is a former colleague and I'm a big fan of her work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> If you don't have a clue as where to start in finding a profitable idea:

Ramit Sethi had an interesting article a while back about finding profitable ideas. TLDR; look for reoccurring themes in the types of tasks/data/processes people are requesting in UpWork's marketplace (UpWork use to be oDesk).

Researching there has the built-in advantage that these are obviously things that people care enough about to pay money for, so that can serve as some preliminary validation.

[https://growthlab.com/how-i-validated-my-business-idea- using...](https://growthlab.com/how-i-validated-my-business-idea-using- upwork/)

[https://www.upwork.com/i/job-categories/](https://www.upwork.com/i/job- categories/)

<comment><USER34> Yes but they are not paying a lot of money. I think a lot of those upwork postings are from hobbiests, arbitragers and really tightass businesses.

<comment><USER35> I think he's suggesting finding a common need. You're not going to do the work on those sites for pocket change. You're going to create a solution then sell it Xtimes to multiple business who need it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I would strongly recommend watching Jason Cohen's presentation on MicroConf 2013 ([https://vimeo.com/74338272](https://vimeo.com/74338272)).

</comment><comment><USER37> TLDR; The most earnings are generated by software that solve problem for a niche of entrepreneurs/companies who don't have programming knowledge/programmers in house.

<comment><USER38> Interesting and possibly exceptional counter example here.

I worked for a product company and I was supposed to add a set of new features to the product.

The way the company was setup, we were able to setup demos/calls with existing customers quite quickly.

Two of the existing customers are industry giants and as I walked them through the demo, they were able to actually name the exact API calls I would have been using for the demo. And then one of them actually effectively said "take my money already and ship it"

I quite lieterally asked them if they had such fine grained information on what we were going to sell them, then why are they even bothering to buy from us ?

The answer was, getting a well packaged solution as a feature set in a product they are already using is far more useful for them than to have to spend time themselves writing ad-hoc/free-standing programs which do the same things even if they have the resources to do it themselves.

<comment><USER39> I'd add that by outsourcing it to you they've done two things:

1\. They've transformed a capex project to a single, monthly opex line item, and

2\. They've eliminated a host of risk management -- if anyone asks about any of a myriad of risk factors (password storage, gdpr, DoS attacks, whatever...) they don't say a word, they just point at you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> It's not the greatest sign that some of these great, profitable ideas go to 404 pages. Not all of these companies made it.

</comment><comment><USER41> The 'free eth' business is booming cuz twitter is too inept to ban domains that spam its site and ppl are too stupid to know better.

[https://medium.com/@robertyusert/there-are-free-ethreum- spam...](https://medium.com/@robertyusert/there-are-free-ethreum-spam-botnets- ravaging-twitter-68b25d12c2a)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is awesome! Here's a list of companies with over $240k/year in revenue:

[https://www.indiehackers.com/round-table/how-to-come-up- with...](https://www.indiehackers.com/round-table/how-to-come-up-with- profitable-online-business-ideas?revenue=20001%2B)

<comment><USER42> Huh? Isn't that just the same page?

<comment><USER7> It adds the filter of over 20k MRR.

<comment><USER42> Oh, that makes much more sense. Thanks! That's a very cool site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I have a bunch of app ideas if anyone wants to build one with me. I am a UX/UI designer, would need a developer (probably iOS or Android, but web would be helpful too). Reply with contact info if interested.

<comment><USER43> I should mention that I will be validating these ideas before proceeding so we are not building a junk app. Cheers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> If only the people who need certain functionality knew how to express themselves and to speak up, we wouldn't have to go through the messy and risky process of looking for business ideas all the time.

<comment><USER20> If only you knew how to communicate with those people _in their own language_ , you wouldn't have to go through the messy and risky process of looking for business ideas all the time.

People who need stuff say it all the time. You know what happens when non- technical people say, "I need xxx" on a developer forum?

\- They're told "just google it"

\- They're told (implicitly) that they're stupid.

\- Devs pretend not to understand what they are asking for because it isn't phrased _exactly_ how they'd like to see it expressed.

I've made money from simply hanging out on certain forums, listening to what people want and then approaching them politely to offer a simple solution, asking questions along the way. It ain't rocket surgery, people!

<comment><USER44> Still, it's the opposite of what you'd want. Instead of those people asking if you could help them, you have to go out and find forums where people might need your help. Imagine that doctors had to find patients like that. In fact, perhaps I should start a consultation hour for people in need of IT solutions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> These are fun/interesting to browse through.

Finding pain points is perhaps the easiest way to get business ideas. But as always, ideas are only a starting point, the implementation is what matters.

</comment><comment><USER46> For startup founder, just master the concept of leverage.

The opportunity exists in the business world because when companies become successful is when collective leadership becomes most focused on maintaining success. Usually, leadership tends to see more risk in the downside of the current plan and than upside in taking on new things.

Few things companies doing regularly:

1\. View a temporary trend as a competitive advantage. 2\. Focus on building reputational momentum. 3\. Believe it's easy to span across generations. 4\. Love being right. 5\. Love the new idea, not new way of thinking.

Being right and staying right is totally different. Doing well reduces the incentive to explore other ideas, especially when those ideas conflict with your proven business model.

The idea is not important as thinking. And knowing how your idea evolving is more important to have a good idea. Because you will realize how to generate your own point of view.

Usually, the traditional Business Thinking Process is:

Dissect the dominant business model in your industry. How big is the remaining market? Find a way to get in.

Instead, in order to master and beat the odds, you should just totally ignore "the market things" and think about:

What's the business model other people can't/hard to clone? What's the opportunity cost of building it? What's your advantage to build that business?

First, why can you ignore the market? Because Which market does not depend on you, it's on the user. You're not in the market you think you're in – you're in the market your users think you're in. Most failed companies made the wrong "Awesome product" by choosing the wrong market and following the wrong standard.

If your business fits in a market design by someone else, your dead. Pepsi never catches Coke. Bing never catches Google. The real question is can you design a market that you can dominate.

Second, market-size is not important at all. Numbers are about the past if you wanna create new things, you need to focus on what's the one that can't be copied and people don't know they need it yet.

If you thinking about market-size, the market you are talking about is old and full of competitors. Market means buyers not a customer segment or existing category.

So. Igore competition.

Create your own category.

Original post([https://github.com/functionalflow/brains/blob/master/_posts/...](https://github.com/functionalflow/brains/blob/master/_posts/2018-04-12-strategy- to-master-theodds.md))

<comment><USER47> What products have you built following this philosophy?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I have a small business building training data sets for neural networks. Struggling, not very sure anymore.

<comment><USER49> Maybe you're early. Can you PM me your MVP? This is a problem I will be encountering soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Another risky way to setup an extra income source is to invest capital setting up blockchain services that give rewards.

<comment><USER50> Mention anything about working with blockchains on HN and you get downvoted. I'm not sure how this place became so close-minded, or if HN was always this way and I changed.

A side project is risk. It's time and money that you invest into something. Working with chains requires technical and engineering solutions. You can build dapps, tokens, chain integrations, or just set up some mining/nodes.

<comment><USER51> My guess is that the hype is over and nobody cares about blockchain anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Step 1) create value Step 2) make sure cost of creating value < value created Step 3) profit

<comment><USER53> These are primarily SaaS businesses. You missed the "grind" step.

<comment><USER54> Startup opportunity? Grind as a Service? (GaaS). Not kidding, although the acronym might make it seem so.

I mean, paying a middleman (the GaaSer) to do something better / more cost- effectively than you (aka any SaaS startup founder) can (if it is an area they can specialize in, and so achieve economies of scale). SaaS's (and other cos.) already use many SaaS's anyway - at least some of them do, I've read. It's like why we pay e-commerce companie like Amazon, rather than scouting for each item we want to buy at separate vendors or vendor's sites.

<comment><USER55> Isn't that's either: a consultant if you get paid in money, or a co-founder if you get paid in a share of the product.

<comment><USER54> I was somewhat speculating, hence the 2 question marks in my comment. But to make it more clear: I don't think that it needs to be only either a consultant or a co-founder. I was thinking (maybe an unconventional approach, I know) of a GaaS company that has studied and has experience with, and then specializes in removing the obstacles (of the 'grind' \- word from original comment I replied to) that startups commonly have trouble with. Could be with customer acquisition or customer retention or other areas, and they provide this as a service. In fact I would not be surprised if there already are companies doing this - there probably are. At least for different aspects of marketing I know there are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Oh is the news not out? Ideas are a dime a dozen. Ideas aren't the problem. Execution.

<comment><USER57> Ideas can be a problem. Like the guy selling disposable SMS. Sure to land themselves in legal trouble.

<comment><USER58> How so?

<comment><USER59> Because the disposable SMS are probably being used for illegal activity and it is illegal to support illegal activity?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Syria Turned Off the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cloudflare.com/how-syria-turned-off-the-internet <comment><USER3> I love these highly technical blog posts on recent events by cloudflare.

Keep up the good work guys.

[1] [http://blog.cloudflare.com/why-google-went-offline-today- and...](http://blog.cloudflare.com/why-google-went-offline-today-and-a-bit- about)

<comment><USER4> I swear I just thought the same thing to myself.. Very concisely written, but it's written both _interesting_ and _well_. Not to mention it's always welcome to see large companies like this share vital information with the public [+1 internet points for CloudFlare] :)

I wonder if it would be possible to hack into these "wall" routers from inside the country (or I suppose outside), but something tells me probably not (I doubt they would even be ping-able, but maybe through other attack vectors [like other internal computers]...). Seriously, I can't imagine how enraged I would be if someone decided to simply block the Internet.

<comment><USER5> Since BGP is sent over TCP, the routers are definitely pingable. You know how when you run traceroute you see a bunch of IPs between you and your destination? Routers like these are those hops.

<comment><USER4> Ah, sorry, I meant _now_ , in the current state. I wonder if they just shut them down (the routers), or blocked all incoming connections from the outside...

<comment><USER6> Probably the simplest thing to do would be to just shut off the ports leading to external networks at the physical layer using management commands. They'd not be pingable from the outside, naturally, and it'd look like a cable cut (until you start doing TDR on the cable anyway), but they could bring it back online quickly once the powers that be choose to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That is a frickin' awesome video. Does anyone know what tool that is, I think I want it running on my status displays.

For those who are wondering your edge router (or border router) "advertises" that it can route to a particular subnet. That information propagates around and packets find there way there. So someone in Syria told all of their border routers to stop advertising routes to Syria's IP blocks. Now the fun thing you can do is since they aren't advertising those routes, if you are sitting in a data center somewhere and have peering access and a ASIN id you can advertise those routes and all of Syria's traffic will start heading your way :-) Of course if that monitoring tool is still running it will have all these lines suddenly running off the screen toward your data center.

The traffic that is actually _in_ Syria can't get out. So its not like you could snoop on Syria or anything.

<comment><USER8> The tool is <http://bgplay.routeviews.org/>

<comment><USER9> For those trying this tool the IP prefix is 188.8.131.52/18.

29/11/2012 10:20 to 10:30.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This tells us nothing about how it was turned off, only that the routes were withdrawn from the global routing table. Which isn't "how" it was turned off, by why it's stopped working.

There's some guesses in here, but the title is rather misleading. No one still knows why these routes are no longer being advertised, only that they're not.

<comment><USER11> Kind of muddles up why and how, but it's quite clear that someone made a call to the state ISP, and then someone went around reconfiguring the routers to drop all the published routes into Syria.

<comment><USER12> Or the state coordinated to take down the physical lines at the same time.

Which I think is more likely, considering the relatively few points of failure.

<comment><USER13> In the past, netsweeper has been one of the tools employed by governments looking to accomplish incidents like these.

[http://thenextweb.com/me/2011/06/07/this-company-is- helping-...](http://thenextweb.com/me/2011/06/07/this-company-is-helping-..). [http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1218965-- guelph-t...](http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1218965--guelph-t..).

They have previously been used by Egypt to close down their internet. I have no insight into how this particular incident was accomplished, but this sort of software is where I'd start looking.

<comment><USER13> At one point when I was looking to see what was available in the job market, I saw a posting that I was a suitable fit for with their organization (netsweeper). It got me curious, being tangentially aware of their organization and content filtering focus. Their perspective was very contrary to my own, and I was interested in having the opportunity to have them pitch what they did to me. I hadn't really had the chance to talk face to face with what I considered to be an "evil" organization before. Maybe it was unethical for me to waste their time, when I didn't have the intention of working for them, I don't know.

The interview itself was interesting. The technical tests etc were relatively trivial, mostly stuff you'd expect about load balancing and responsiveness (as would be required for routing software). But more than half of the interview was them pitching the company to me -- they're quite aware of the reservations people might have about working for a company whose direction is to suppress free speech.

Their basic pitch was that they believed all 1st world governments would have internet filtering technologies in place in the near future -- that governments would legislate the use of it to stop the proliferation of things like child pornography, and eliminate the zombie-computer defence -- that if there were child porn on your computer, you went and got it.

We talked a little about the technical challenges of instantly shutting down the internet of an entire country, like Egypt, but they more or less blamed that on "improper configuration" of settings. At one point in the interview, the interviewer told me that you have to believe that the people that make the weapons aren't the ones firing the guns, and that dangerous tools can be used for good, but that yes, there were nights in which he cried himself to sleep.

Super interesting interview.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This doesn't necessarily explain HOW the network was taken down but, it does highlight the conflicting evidence between a "terrorist" style fire-sale attack, and a state-imposed outage to limit communications between dissidents.

Unfortunately, non of these hosting companies want to give an alternative to HOW to bring the network back up...

Anonymous seems to be the only group oriented at actually helping the citizens of the nation of Syria regain communication via alternative methods such as TCP/IP over HAM radio, and satellite links, personal wireless mesh networks using WiFi on mobile devices.

Everyone can bitch about HOW to take DOWN a nations internet but, it takes real humanitarians & 1337geeks to consider & implement HOW to bring a nations communications infrastructure back UP.

So, what are you waiting for...

HELP.

<comment><USER11> Syrians can still dial an international number and get online via modem. So you are better off sending money to aid organisations to pay the phone bill.

<comment><USER15> It was posted that international calling has also been disabled, as well as cellular I believe. Unfortunately, I can't locate the source.

It is the same source in which it stated that the data center that handled the BGP routes was being held by 6 remaining techs whose current location is now unknown.

I wish I could find the link as it proves much of what the OP posted. Not to mention I would love to see someone repair one, let alone four cables in fifteen minutes. Heck, I bet it may take more than fifteen minutes to cut one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is probably the best explanation of the Syrian outage I have ever seen. Cloudfare are exceptionally good at explaining things like this and even included a video of the Syrian traffic slowly dropping off. Expect those "cut" cables to miraculously be repaired shortly.

<comment><USER17> This isn't a good explanation of anything.

<comment><USER16> Would you care to embellish us all with your expertise then? I'd love a link to your blog post explaining the outage. This isn't Reddit, it's Hacker News and on HN if you dispute something you have to at the very least lightly back it up.

Maybe you're right, what would a company who was voted Most Innovative Network & Internet Technology Company of 2011 & again in 2012 by the Wall Street Journal know about networking and how Internet traffic is routed, right? The very fact they even embedded a video showing the traffic dropping off in the blog post I think proves they know a thing or two about network traffic, they provide content delivery and domain name server services to a lot of happy customers after all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My wife's first thought when she heard about Syria's lack of internet was that the sitting government is about to start a nasty offensive.

This was a good read and informative. One question, though.

> When the outage happened, the BGP routes to Syrian IP space were all > simultaneously withdrawn from all of Syria's upstream providers.

Does withdrawn mean not advertised or was a message sent out saying these routes are no longer available?

<comment><USER19> Once a route is withdrawn (either from the router going offline, a cable being cut, or someone adjusting the routing tables) upstream peers will drop the path very quickly (typically in seconds).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> There are a few really baseless, attack-y comments on the original post. I wonder if they're some kind of Syrian social media reactionary force.

CloudFlare, if you have access to their data, what's interesting about them?

</comment><comment><USER15> I have a few questions not knowing all that much about BGP other than thinking of it in terms of a higher level DNS system for IP routing.

What gives Syria the authority to do this? What gives anyone authority to do this? What prevents malicious routing?. Could they route all traffic to 22.214.171.124 and overwhelm another network? If it's ICANN, can they come in and revoke control and give it to a third party intermediary?

It has been rumored a small staff of 6 stayed trying to keep the routes up. Their current status is not known. I understand in those cases no intermediary would help. But from a pragmatic standpoint, I'm curious.

While I understand this goes against the "rules" but if I have a DNS server and the roots drop a zone, and I don't agree, I can add it back in. As a local user I could add to etc/hosts like in the old days.

The above assumes I had a large user base like openDNS or google pDNS to be effective. Can the same be done with BGP? Can major broadband providers decide to ignore the dropped routes and send traffic along?

I understand Syria would just toggle off some other "switch" and terminate core routers but it would at least send a tiny message of sorts.

How are they stopping satellite access?

How are they stopping cellular based access?

Is there any form of TCP over Ham radio? TCP over laser? USB over carrier pigeon (seriously)? What are the bare bones options here for getting data in and out and where is that closest point of access?

No one has put in long range wifi links of the 20 mile line of site type, or is that still too short a distance to get a few users online?

What about dialup?

If CloudFront can see this much traffic, they must be doing pretty well. What is the point of Facebook, reddit, and many others using CDN's and Amazon and such when they could probably half their hardware and push the rest to ClouFront. Or is CloudFront really only best for static sites that are hit hard and need lots if bandwidth. Dynamic sites would still bottleneck at the database/drive/physical/etc layer?

Thanks. Sorry if these are rudimentary questions. I haven't even met that many people who have had BGP access. I'm going to go look up what the format files look like now, just out of curiosity.

<comment><USER21>
      > Can major broadband providers decide to ignore the
      > dropped routes and send traffic along?

IIRC, each router makes it's own decisions. Take the following route:

      A - B - C - <USER2>

Assuming that there are no published routes to Syria, if node A tries to send a packet to Syria, the only node that can force a packet onto the Syrian routers is node C. If node B decides to ignore the lack of a published route and forwards the packet to node C, then node C will just drop it (possibly sending an error response back). Even if the node C forces data over the Syrian connection, the Syrian routers won't act on it.

This is my understanding of how it works.

      > How are they stopping satellite access?

Presumably very few Syrians have satellite access. If they are from a Syrian provider, then it's pretty easy to cut them off. If they are with a foreign provider, not so much. On the other hand, if you were in Syria when they Internet was shutdown, you would probably be very secretive about your foreign satellite access. If only because men with guns might have something to say about it.

      > How are they stopping cellular based access?

Presumably because the state can go to the cell providers and shut them down. What is Syria's cellular data infrastructure like?

      > Is there any form of TCP over Ham radio?

There are ways of getting Internet over HAM radio, but this probably runs up against the same friction as a foreign satellite connection. Especially since the equipment would be more conspicuous.

      > TCP over laser?

Really?

      > USB over carrier pigeon (seriously)?

USB is a client-server protocol. It probably wouldn't do too well over a carrier pigeon.

      > What are the bare bones options here for getting data in and
      > out and where is that closest point of access?

Probably a directional antenna pointed over the border to a line-of-sight receiving station.

<comment><USER22>
      > What is Syria's cellular data infrastructure like?

Well, there are 2 cellular providers. One is completely state owned and called "Syriatel" and the other is MTN(<http://www.mtn.com/>). Though MTN is extremely heavily regulated by the state.

Also, Syria enforces a web filter(similar though not as sophisticated as china's) which also affects browsing over the cellular data network. So even cellular providers eventually go through some choke point which is state-owned so that the filter can be applied.

In other words, if the state wants to cut off internet, cell isn't going to save you.

      > USB is a client-server protocol. It probably wouldn't do too well over a carrier pigeon.

I think he meant literally sending a USB thumbdrive via a carrier pigeon. See this: [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8007897/Carrier-p...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8007897/Carrier- pigeons-are-faster-than-rural-broadband.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> They mention that there are four cables "connecting Syria to the Internet."

OK, I'm curious! How do they know? How many cables connect, say, Brazil to "the Internet?"

Is this publicly available somewhere?

<comment><USER13> [http://nicolasrapp.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/07/world_map_...](http://nicolasrapp.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/07/world_map_05_DARK.jpg)

<comment><USER24> That's a very cool map! I see it is part of a larger article that ran in Fortune magazine back in July 2012:

<http://nicolasrapp.com/?p=1180>

Good find!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> They've been blocking traffic in Syria to numerous social networking and email/voip sites since the revolution began, and nulling cell towers in every area where there are protests. This hasn't hampered the free syrian army or activists as since last year they've been passing sdcards to the border of lebanon, jordan, iraq and turkey and uploading their videos wirelessly from there. The FSA is running two border crossing with turkey anyways.

This seems to be like some sort of incompetence, more like they tried to set up some sort of spying choke point and it massively failed. ask nokia-siemens, they helped iran set up their chokepoint, most likely some infosec whitehats with zero ethics are currently flying out there to assist in the holocaust, er I mean rebellion put down, by working with Assad to get the tubes back up.

It only hurts Assad to keep the tubes out, his loyal base needs to buy their louis vuitton bags off alibaba to keep their minds off the constant public shooting of protesters and shelling of entire cities full of "terrorists"

<comment><USER22> Well, Syria already does have a spying chokepoint in place. It's had it for years(at least since late 2010 when I was there). They have something similar to China's in that it also does filtering. Also, at some point when I was there around may~june 2011 when this was all starting up they seriously started messing with https stuff conducting MITM on facebook and what not.

Also, no, having the internet cut off absolutely does not hurt Assad. Syria is very sectarian in nature. In other words your loyal base absolutely does not correlate with what services you provide, only what religion/sect/tribe people are.

The rebellion didn't happen because people suddenly started hating Bashar el Assad, it happened because those same people have hated this regime for at least the past 40 years. In 1982, Hafez, the guy who established the regime put down an earlier rebellion that had gone on for something like 3 years by completely destroying entire sections of cities(and pretty much all of Hama) and killing, by conservative estimates, at least 10,000 people. This was during a time when the USSR still existed and where such things within its sphere of influence were par for the course, which is why no international response happened at the time.

The rebellion happened now because of a perceived weakness in the regime's freedom to act(no USSR anymore, much more US influence in the area, weak(er) dictator) and because of perceived international support for similar things happening in Arab nations. That's it. So if the internet in any way helps the FSA get international support by exposing atrocities committed against civilians by the government then you can bet it's in the government's best interest to shut it down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Distance between Cyprus and Syria is < 200km. How much money would it take to setup a wireless link between the two? Wikipedia tells me it's possible (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Range_WiFi#Italy>)

<comment><USER27> I guess the cost of securing your 'bridgehead' would dwarf any cost associated with the actual link technology. And then, what did you achieved? You have your packages going back and forth, but how will you distribute the connection? Will you hijack the presumably uncooperative ISP's network, or just use sneakernet? If you choose the last, then you might as well ferry the information via boats. (Not saying that's easy, just it seems easier.)

<comment><USER28> This is actually a great application for UAVs, and I think there is some DOD and/or DOS money to do it (not for Syria specifically, but the general application.)

<comment><USER25> Syria would blow it out of the sky. They also are targeting all satellite signals in their borders with mortar shelling. That's how all those French journalists got owned, they turned on the cameras, set up the uplink and 30 seconds later bam here's a face full of explosive censorship enjoy. They simply locked on to the signal and shelled it not caring who was there.

They've also been targeting wireless uplinks across borders and adhoc cell towers. Syria levelled an entire apartment building full of kids in Turkey to destroy a suspected adhoc cell tower they claimed was being used by "terrorists". This is serious business, no piratebay UAV drone solution is going to work. Mesh networking is also certain death, any building with a mesh router on it is going to have all its inhabitants dragged out of their apartments and shot in the street so they've been using good old walkie talkies and bouncing signals all over the place to confuse the syrian army, and in most cases simply stealing Syrian army comsec devices and pretending to be them talking in slight code with each other to avoid suspicion. Al Jazeera ran a story with some smugglers who used gps disabled cellphones but changed the IMEI every couple of hours to avoid being found

<comment><USER28> They would be more able to go after terrestrial radio and L-band portable satellite systems (e.g. Thuraya DSL, thuraya sat modems, various forms of BGAN/RBGAN/etc., which is what journalists tend to use) than Ka or Ku band satellite.

I haven't kept up on Syria or Libya (I wasted 2003-2010 on this stuff in Iraq/Afgh/etc., and am trying to do a "normal" tech startup now), but while I think Syria (and Libya) had better European gear than Iraq or the Taliban, it isn't on par with the US, UK/FR/DE, RU, CN, etc. It's basically "good commercial equipment designed for law enforcement", which is very heavily cellphone focused.

The #1 vulnerability with satellite systems remains "operator assistance to the adversary", or "network configured in a way which relays location data of connected terminals to everyone in the footprint", both of which can be addressed if you control the network.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Since Google has also confirmed that Syria is offline now, we should spread the word about the telecomix dialup project: <http://dialup.telecomix.org/>

How could the information on that page be spread within Syria? SMS, MMS, Phone, Fax, Mail?

<comment><USER30> after telecomix published probably dangerous and incriminating traffic data, I feel extremely uneasy about their competence and especially about routing any kind of information through them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Great post, too bad the comments section is already full of syrian trolls trying to derail the subject from freedom of speech to some bullshit conspiracy from "the empire" against syria.

Guess they still give access to those who are _loyal_...

<comment><USER32> It's probably not syrians but Russian/Chinese who are worried about having yet another ally switch over to camp USA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Its great to know how, but here is why: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H40EsEVU1Wk> NSFW/NSFL

Apparently, bombing people turns out to be bad PR when they tweet about it.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't know enough about markets to find the answer to this. Does Syris have a "stock market" or some form of electronic exchange? I would imagine if they have money they do.

Did those routes stay up? If not, what are the repercussions of that going to be come open time? Or any foreign trade, anything that relies on network time, etc. the list is pretty large for services that need Internet at least infrequently in order to keep basic services up.

I can't imagine how many deaths there would be in the USA if this happened. All those televisions stop working, that's gotta be a few million heart attacks right there.

<comment><USER22> The only form of stock exchange in Syria is the Damascus Securities Exchange. And that's it. Syria is pretty much a Socialist nation. Under Bashar it had been slowly moving toward a more capitalistic model but that was pretty much just crony capitalism full of corruption and the state still pretty much running everything even though it was supposedly private.

So no, no markets in Syria.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Easy way to shut off your internet connection. Quit paying the bill. ;)

Does the government have to pay for those lines? Or is that handled by some other entity?

</comment><comment><USER35> I wonder what caused them to do that. It doesn't seem like the regime's been pulling any punches so far, and the various YouTube evidence etc didn't seem to cause any increase in outside pressure. Why do it now?

<comment> brown9-2 Perhaps things are about to get even worse and the regime wants to eliminate a source for news getting out of the country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I would imagine that some traffic could get through via modems, or does no-one use them anymore?

<comment><USER37> You'd need to dial through to ISPs outside of Syria, and it would be fairly easy to disable international calling (probably easier than cutting the internet off, in fact). Satellite is really one of the few ways to get internet access, as you're only reliant on power. Not cheap, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> What happened to Hillary Clinton's giant wi-fi airplane?

</comment><comment><USER17> "Our thoughts are with the Syrian people and we hope connectivity, and peace, will be quickly restored."

Err... well, that's great. I'm glad that this information free blog post pimping your services ended with your sincere token of solidarity with the Syrian people.

For an article with real information from people who actually understand what a network is, go here: <http://www.renesys.com/blog/2012/11/syria-off-the- air.shtml>

(Yes, I'm a little annoyed. But that's just because a lot of companies are submitting their "informative" blog posts on HN while really it's just more pimping of said service.)

<comment><USER39> How is the article that you are promoting as an alternative any different, from your perspective?

As far as I can tell, both blogs are run by companies in the network infrastructure space. The chief difference appears to be that CloudFlare bothered to express any solidarity at all.

<comment><USER40> That.

.. but its true his link has less pimping and is more of a tl;dr; than a "oh we rock because we can read a bgp table" ;-)</comment></comment></comment>