Thiel Urges U.S. Probe of Google's 'Seemingly Treasonous' Acts - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-15/thiel-urges-u-s-probe-of-google-s-seemingly-treasonous-acts <comment><USER2> This part is worth considering:

> Thiel, a Facebook Inc. board member, argued that the kind of AI developed by > DeepMind, which like Google is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., should be > thought of as a potential "military weapon." "We've been a lot more > dishonest about that in Silicon Valley than the nuclear physicists were in > the 1940s," he said in the opening speech at the National Conservatism > conference.

If one believes this to be true, then how you consider its use to be weaponized can dramatically alter one's view of both Google and Facebook.

If it's a weapon like strong encryption, then it is a defensive measure for the benefit of their users, as they are sheltered and made safe by its use.

If it's a weapon like any other, then its use is an attack upon those it tracks and analyzes, as they are made less private, more vulnerable, and easier to manipulate.

Somehow I don't think Thiel is arguing that Facebook is attacking American citizens, though.

<comment><USER3> Isn't he?

I mean, he started his talk[1] out by posing the question "Is Big Tech good for the U.S.?", which frankly seems like a question worth exploring - especially since the reflexive position of most everyone (e.g. those who post on HN) would be in the affirmative, and likely emphatically so. Being contrarian to a fault, I expect that there's _something_ Thiel thinks is under attack here. Be it more broad things like the general fraying of social and civil cohesion through social media use, or more specific things like Google's enabling of the Chinese surveillance apparatus, Thiel at least has a starting point in this argument. I can't find a video so I don't know what he actually said but below are some notes I found (that seem to mostly rehash what he's said in a bunch of other places, so he obviously seems to think it's an effective rhetorical payload).

[1] [https://medium.com/@bonniekavoussi/notes-from-peter- thiels-s...](https://medium.com/@bonniekavoussi/notes-from-peter-thiels- speech-at-the-national-conservatism-conference-on-july-14-2019-6a51b26b202)

<comment><USER4> I don't think he's really making a point about social cohesion here. It seems like what he's asking is "has the US captured Big Tech well enough to make sure the gains don't leak out to other countries?"

<comment><USER3> That's certainly a possibility, yes, though I think he'd index a lot more on explicitly defining what these "gains" actually are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I mean, he has a point. It's clear U.S. tech companies have become hugely susceptible to hiring foreign spies and the issue of foreign governments stealing IP is real. There was a very recent public case of Apple's autonomous driving unit stopping a Chinese engineer from leaving the country just as he was bound for China after detecting he had uploaded a bunch of code to a personal account. And most likely many more cases like that we've never heard of publicly.

<comment><USER6> 1\. Almost every tech company has been acutely aware of China stealing IP for decades now. It's not a new point.

2\. Where did Thiel make this point? Thiel does not make the point that the Chinese are stealing US IP. He makes the charged point that _Google executives_ (and somehow not Facebook executives) are Chinese agents. To that claim, I don't think he "has a point".

It's in very bad taste to me that Thiel would point this out, and claim the Valley "is getting a little bit of a bad conscience" when he sits on the board of the biggest troublemaker.

When Google leaks the personal data of millions of Americans, then maybe should Thiel start throwing stones.

<comment><USER3> >when he sits on the board of the biggest troublemaker.

Why is this some kind of detraction from his larger point? If he has a problem with how Facebook is being run - or has concerns with _their_ implementation of AI - then of course he'd want to retain his seat. How else would he influence the company?

<comment><USER7> I find it highly improbable that the board of Facebook would do anything besides act as yes-men to Zuckerberg and Sandberg who are making them boatloads of money.

<comment><USER8> The board has no power over zuck. Not enough anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Bloomberg goes a long way to avoid saying that Thiel was speaking at the _National Conservatism Conference_ , a conference with a very biased audience in mind.

Just look at the other speech titles like "The Nationalist Awakening". Can this be taken as anything but pure propaganda?

<comment><USER10> Do you have reason to disagree with any of the facts he presented?

<comment><USER11> You can't just throw around the word treason. More than Google Fb should be investigated.

<comment><USER10> I agree with both statements. But apparently you have no quarrel with the facts he presented.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The treasonous-ness seems like an exaggeration/distortion of [1].

> "The work that Google is doing in China is indirectly benefiting the Chinese > military," Marine General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of > Staff, said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

[1] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china- google/googles-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china- google/googles-..).

<comment><USER13> Fixed link [https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-china-google/googles- wor...](https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-china-google/googles-work-in- china-indirectly-benefiting-chinese-military-us-general-idUSL1N2110XF)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I once met Peter Thiel at an event and kindly asked him if he ever had a 'Robert Oppenheimer moment' with his investment in Palantir. Not surprisingly he diverted and did not provide an answer at all. His non-answer was most telling to me and made me think about his ethics. At least a certain level of reasoning or even PR spin about the positive effects would have been better than this. I left deeply unimpressed about our first and only encounter.

</comment><comment><USER15> Anyone who thinks Google executives are exfiltrating core IP to China clearly hasn't ever used Baidu, the leading Chinese search engine that makes Bing look good.

<comment><USER16> Microsoft and Apple do business in China, yet somehow it's Google that's apparently working with the Chinese. These people are honestly out of their mind.

<comment><USER17> ?

The logic is really not too complicated. China is using AI to spy on citizens -- Google is creating and freely publishing state of the art versions of this AI. It's pretty clear that there is a worry here.

<comment><USER18> Perhaps it is Linus Torvalds who is the real villain, making freely available a crucial piece of software that China is using to power its surveillance infrastructure. I say we put him to death for his treasonous actions against the free world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Probably worth noting that deliberately aiding the Chinese military is not treason in America right now because America and China aren't at war. It might be other things: unpatriotic, espionage, etc. But not treason itself. Even the Rosenbergs didn't get convicted of treason (America and the Soviet Union were not _actually_ at war. It was illegal to give nuclear secrets to the Soviets, but it wasn't treason.)

So generally whenever somebody in America mentions treason, they're being hyperbolic or misleading, or have themselves been mislead. Generally.

<comment><USER20> > So generally whenever somebody in America mentions treason, they're being > hyperbolic or misleading,

Some people simply don't need to understand the distinction between similarly used terms. In the end, prosecutors can file multiple charges but practically pick and choose based on a variety of factors.

<comment><USER21> Prosecutors in the US can't validly charge treason in all but the most extremely rare circumstances, though.

"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court."

(This comes straight from the Constitution, hence the weird capitalization and punctuation.)

The Supreme Court has clarified the definition above, and indeed, it can't apply where no actual assemblage of force against the US was being prepared or used by either the defendant or the enemy to which one is being accused of adhering and giving aid or comfort. Maayyybe the Supreme Court will extend this to cyberwarfare, but that's hard to predict and they certainly haven't yet.

Anyway, regardless, the two-witness requirement for every single overt act involved is a very high bar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If Google trade secrets are relevant for national security, non US governments shouldn't allow Google to operate without revealing those trade secrets to their intelligence agencies.

</comment><comment><USER23> Related story on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20439624](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20439624)

<comment><USER5> Why was that flagged?

<comment><USER24> I would assume because the Bloomberg article and Gizmodo article have rather different levels of bias, and that Bloomberg and Gizmodo have significantly different levels of credibility.

<comment><USER9> Bloomberg still hasn't explained why they published the hit piece on Supermicro/Apple that hasn't been proven or even followed up on.

I'd say they do have bias, but it's questionable which has more credibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Thiel is on Facebook's board. So he is on the board of a Google competitor and a company with atrocious morals.

Maybe he is just trying to take the heat off Facebook and send Congress in a different direction.

<comment><USER26> Seems more like a Palantir motivated position.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why was this flagged? By the way here is a link to recording [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JRyy2MM- rI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JRyy2MM-rI)

</comment><comment><USER28> Might this be informed from evidence he has knowledge about? After all he is very close to Palantir.

</comment><comment><USER29> Video of the Peter Thiel speech: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JRyy2MM- rI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JRyy2MM-rI)

</comment><comment><USER30> Really Thiel's frankly fascistic rhetoric is far more treasonous than even the absurd worst case of "Google gave access to literally all of their technical data to gain market entry". And here he is calling for abusing power to stifle dissent for exercising their rights of who they work with. What they and the nationalist bedwetter coalition forget is that the Military serves the Civilians. Not the other way around.

The whole accusation is recursive bullshit if not fractal bullshit on so many levels. Essentially anything can be considered weaponized. Not only would cars count but when it came out freeze dried food would count as 'weaponized' because of logistical advantages. US government's efforts at promoting cybersecurity have been pretenses to gain power while making it less secure.

<comment><USER31> > Really Thiel's frankly fascistic rhetoric is far more treasonous

How so?

<comment><USER32> Not OP, but I'm guessing in the same sense that communist activists used to (still are?) be considered treasonous. Like any active promotion and support against a free democracy and towards another means of organizing society, so fascism, dictatorship, feudal, communist, etc., could be seen as treasonous in a way.

<comment><USER31> I see, I was not aware that Thiel was "active promotion and support against a free democracy and towards another means of organizing society" \- if that is the case then I guess it would make sense to say he is treasonous. Seems like that would be a relevant tidbit of information to include in the article.

<comment><USER32> Oh, I don't know if Thiel is or isn't. But the parent comment implied that he had Fascistic rhetoric. I don't really follow Thiel, so I can't confirm or deny if he's rhetoric is fascistic or not. If it were though, with his level of power and influence, it could be seen as a challenge to the US democracy.

Edit: After doing some quick research, there definitely seem to be evidence of support and active involvement in anti-democratic circles. Now to what extent I can't say. It is also unclear if it is intentional, as in, he could be accidentally promoting and contributing to those circles. But I found sections describing his beliefs that women suffrage was a mistake (because they tend to vote against his agenda), that monarchies aren't so bad and startups are a form of them, that democracy prevents libertarianism and are thus incompatible etc. Now, those could all be misquoted or out of context ofcourse. Even then though, he seems pretty open about the fact that he is not in agreement with the current democratic system and wishes to change it. It all feels a bit my way or the highway. Like since he hasn't been able to have people democratically agree with him and pass the laws and rules which he believes in, he started to look for other alternative means in order to achieve putting those laws and rules in place, which are anti-democratic and tend towards forceful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I interviewed with him once.

Got on the short list by telling the recruiter that "Palantir is a bunch of really smart guys run by a Bond villain". Not sure if that ever got back, but not being thrown out of the process tells me a lot about the company.

<comment><USER34> Doesn't it say as much about you that you were applying to work there?

<comment><USER33> If you think that's bad you should see the startup I'm trying to get funding for.

<comment><USER35> I'll take ya up on that. Show me?

<comment><USER33> Multipart project. It starts with artificial uteri to harvest neural stemcells, probably from rats, then gets worse.

If you have 500k to invest I can send you some of the preliminary results and the roadmap for the next few stages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Considering Thiel's other...business ventures, this is about as 'throwing a stone while living in a glass house' as it gets.

</comment><comment><USER37> It's hard to take anyone with such a cutthroat capitalist mindset as anything but the sum of their incentives. That goes for Thiel especially because he's promoted this as a strict political belief system.

</comment><comment><USER38> Is this Thiel speaking about treason as a New Zealand citizen or as a US citizen?

<comment><USER39> He is speaking as Merkel's boy :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Is he the new Joseph McCarthy ???. Instead of Slavic commies we now have to look for Asian commies behind every bush ???.

<comment><USER18> There was a time in San Francisco when everything was blamed on "Chinese steel" until we suddenly found out that Dyson Steel is from Ohio. Then there was deafening silence. Tribalism is a powerful drug.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Having canceled Project Maven and dropped out of competition for the DoD cloud contract on principle, Google continues to operate an AI center in Beijing. They host conferences with Chinese companies and research institutions who they tutor on the use of Google's ML tools.

How much of this knowledge (much of it focused on computer vision and image understanding) has been applied to China's surveillance program in Xinjiang, which has put over 1 million ethnic Uighurs in concentration camps? Why has Google continued to operate their China AI center, which aids and educates China's state-controlled enterprises, while refusing to work with the US government even on vanilla I.T. systems?

[0] [https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/2165209/google-shrugs- trad...](https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/2165209/google-shrugs-trade-war- shanghai-ai-event-says-partnering-china-talent)

<comment><USER42> It seems that you're using HN primarily for political/ideological/national battle. Would you please not? We ban accounts that do that because it destroys the curiosity this site is supposed to be far. Admittedly there's not much curiosity in a highly charged thread like this one, but there's a difference between accounts that lapse occasionally into this and accounts that primarily propagate it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Google certainly needs to be kept in check. We've been too trusting. It is obvious that their search engineers are not simply cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality.</comment>


Google pulls YouTube off the Amazon Echo Show - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/26/16371292/google-youtube-amazon-echo-show <comment><USER2> Given the shady tactics pulled by Amazon [1], [2] when it comes to Google products, this move seems totally fair.

[1] Promoting Amazon products while searching for "Google Home": [https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2/135-4089858-540885...](https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2/135-4089858-5408855?url=search- alias%3Daps&field-keywords=google+home)

[2] Not selling chromecast because it doesn't support Amazon video, which they themselves won't make available on chromecase

<comment><USER3> I agree, they are taking a lot of Google and are just trying to block them. Not mentioning forking Android and all other things related also.

Google is way too nice for amazon

<comment><USER4> Android is open source - what was wrong with them forking it?

Was Google wrong for forking WebKit?

<comment><USER3> Where are the changes of Amazon? You can still fork Chromium

<comment><USER4> [https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200203720)

<comment><USER3> I'm not quit sure that by providing an answer, you could remove any doubt.

While they are required by the license to opensource their code, this is perhaps the most user unfriendly method ( multiple builds per version per device, no code history, ... - it's a mess)

Here is Chromium as you requested:

\- [https://cs.chromium.org/](https://cs.chromium.org/)

Here's the source code: [https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/?sq](https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/?sq) Here's the git: [https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git](https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> YouTube has some fairly specific requirements that third-party clients must adhere to [1]. According to my recollection and Google's own revision history [2], this general form of the document dates to August 2016, since at the time I submitted it to HN [3], although no discussion ensued.

In that update, they reformulated their Terms of Service and instead published a series of documents focusing on various topics that third-party developers must uphold to be able to serve as a YouTube client. This means that, as an easy example, clients which omit Google's ads [5] are running afoul of these policies.

That being said, as with most ToS, YouTube reserves the right to terminate access to its API Services at any time [4].

[1] [https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/required- minimum...](https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/required-minimum- functionality) [2] [https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/revision- history](https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/revision-history) [3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12409825](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12409825) [4] [https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/api-services- ter...](https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/api-services-terms-of- service#termination) [5] [https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/developer- polici...](https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/developer- policies#i-additional-prohibitions)

</comment><comment><USER6> Something similar happened in the past where Google blocked Microsoft's YouTube app on Windows Phone.

The reason was that the only official way Google allowed for non iOS/Android clients was if they used the HTMl API. Microsoft decided they wanted native performance so they wrote their own client to YouTube instead of using the HTML API. Microsoft's YouTube didn't play advertisements, which obviously Google wasn't ok with. So after some back and forth Google just said "No".

I think Amazon probably made a similar mistake here.

<comment><USER7> > if they used the HTMl API

That's not enough to satisfy Google. Not at all. They have far-reaching rules about what you do with the HTML.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Fyi... a guess about the "terms of service" being violated:

Author wrote:

 _> , I'd guess Google very much wants features that it thinks are essential for YouTube's future growth included, stuff like subscriptions, next video recommendations, autoplay, and so on._

And similar excerpt from [https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/27/google-pulls- youtube-from-am...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/27/google-pulls-youtube-from- amazon-echo-show.html):

 _> The Echo Show had displayed YouTube videos without integral features, from video recommendations to channel subscriptions. _

For more context, the importance of the above "recommendation" features to Google in The Atlantic article and related HN thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14910125](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14910125)

</comment><comment><USER9> One more reason not to buy internet-enabled Things, as far as I'm concerned. I don't want my stuff held hostage by corporate disputes, regardless of who's "in the right" in a dispute.

Of course, there's the side issue of having an always-on voice-controlled computer hooked up to my LAN, but that's a different rant.

<comment><USER5> This kind of dispute existed long before IoT. For example, television channels routinely disappear from carriers like cable and satellite providers [1] as contract disputes go on longer and the existing contract expires. The disappearance of a channel is used as a tactic by the channel's owners to entice complaints by the carrier's customers to the carrier, hopefully convincing the carrier that it should try to get the channel back.

The reality of the situation is that many things these days are fundamentally services instead of objects, and services are subjects to Terms of Service, and can often morph into something else or entirely disappear subject to the provider's strategies or whims. Internet-enabled devices merely enable this business model, which can be advantageous (e.g. it's really hard to consume live content without some kind of live content delivery; or, stuff I upload into a particular cloud is stored durably and resiliently with nice uptime SLAs and I can frequently access it from other devices; or, this device actually gets security updates instead of running an ancient 5-year-old kernel vulnerability), but also detrimental to the end-user (e.g. sometimes stuff disappears from Netflix and never comes back; online services that get shut down; DRM services that get shut down such that playback rights can no longer be renewed, etc).

It seems to me that in your comment, Internet-enabled things are standing in for 'captive devices'. A Fire Stick, a Google Home, an Apple TV are tiny outposts of their host companies inside your house, connected through your LAN to their HQ. They're not actually yours in any meaningful sense. You can use them if you wish to take advantage of the services they provide, but those services are ephemeral and may be radically altered or entirely go away at any time, and the giant wall of text that we all click through warns us of that, even if we shrug and use it anyway because it gates features we really want.

[1] [https://consumerist.com/tag/blackouts/](https://consumerist.com/tag/blackouts/)

<comment><USER10> Yes, but the point is, if you just bring your laptop with you then you get a fully working experience without all this bullshit.

If I watch TV on my laptop, I don't have to worry about sticks and compatibility.

If I get my cooking videos on my laptop, I don't have to worry about compatibility.

If I listen to my audio on my laptop I don't have to worry about compatibility.

<comment><USER11> This is hardly about devices, though. This is about content.

Also, your laptop is still a device. It just so happens to be more compatible. Google could just as easily pull support for your laptop. It's highly unlikely for YouTube, but not for other services.

Whether you like it or not, if you consume media that you didn't create, this affects you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Maybe it's time for a net neutrality requirement for market dominant services such as YouTube. If a user has access to content, then the user is allowed to request that content via the agent of their choice. Thus, what hardware to use to watch YouTube would be the consumer's choice.

<comment><USER13> ...and then I can watch Amazon Prime on my Chromecast.

<comment><USER14> Amazon always wanted this (the fire sticks are a loss for them), but Google does not allow you to cast to Chromecast without having Play Services installed, Google doesn't allow Amazon to use Play Services on Kindle without removing all competing Amazon apps, and Amazon won't enable chromecast in their apps only for some users.

<comment><USER13> "Amazon won't enable chromecast in their apps only for some users"

Some? You mean, "All Certified Android users"?

There's what, a billion devices like that?

<comment><USER14> Which would basically be giving the middle finger to people who bought Amazon's own products.

Remember, Chromecast used to work on Kindle apps until Google banned that.

<comment><USER13> ...probably because Amazon purposefully stopped Amazon Prime Video from working on Chromecast.

<comment><USER14> No, because Google made the Chromecast library require Google Play Services.

At the same time, Netflix also stopped supporting Chromecast on many devices, as did many other services. If you always had devices with Google Play Services, you'd never notice, but if you didn't, it was quite an annoying change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Considering that Google Home is completely black holed on Amazon, this kind of response only seems fair.

<comment><USER16> All Google-branded products are blacklisted on Amazon. If you search for "Chromecast", your results will be Fire Sticks and then knockoff Chromecasts called "Anycast".

<comment><USER14> Not at all, many Google oroducts are available, and easily found. The Nexus devices, for example.

But Google refuses to provide a way for Amazon to support Chromecast from all devices (including Kindles), so Amazon obviously had to make their own solution.

<comment><USER16> >The Nexus devices

So you can buy used or refurbished phones from some third party retailer, great, but you cannot buy a Pixel or Chromecast or Google Home.

Also, is it _Google_ preventing Amazon from getting Prime onto their devices? I've always been under the impression this was Amazon's choice, as it helps them move more Fire sticks.

<comment><USER14> > So you can buy used or refurbished phones from some third party retailer, > great, but you cannot buy a Pixel or Chromecast or Google Home.

New nexus devices are still for sale.

> Also, is it Google preventing Amazon from getting Prime onto their devices? > I've always been under the impression this was Amazon's choice, as it helps > them move more Fire sticks.

Correct, Google requires Play Services nowadays for Chromecast. Amazon Prime Video and Netflix both used to support Chromecast on Kindle devices and elsewhere, Google disabled that functionality, and Amazon removed it elsewhere. Fire sticks are sold at a loss.

<comment><USER4> _Correct, Google requires Play Services nowadays for Chromecast._

How does that explain ChromeCast support for third party IOS apps?

<comment><USER14> Google has a separate, proprietary, obfuscated, binary for iOS.

Amazon can't exactly use this on their Kindle devices.

<comment><USER4> Good point. I remember Marco Arment said he wouldn't add ChromeCast support to OverCast because he wasn't comfortable adding a third party binary blob to his code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If the result here is cast support for Amazon video and YouTube working again, I'll take it. It's not like Amazon isn't doing the same thing.

<comment><USER18> This fight started with Google. Google gates off their Android apps solely to manufacturers which agree to all of Google's demands on control of Android devices, things like the default search settings, which apps are preinstalled, etc. In order to comply with Google's terms, Amazon would've literally had to preinstall Google Play Books on their Kindles.

This issue is the subject of the EU's next antitrust case expected to be settled this year.

Amazon then in return chose to not sell Google products which were intentionally blocked from supporting Kindle products, which is why they won't sell the Chromecast, for instance.

<comment><USER19> From the consumer perspective, Amazon being forced to preinstall Google Play Books on their Kindles sounds like a good thing, it only increases competition for the actual content.

<comment><USER20> Which consumer has 2 thumbs and would rather have as little bloat pre- installed due to weird business requirements as possible? This guy!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Am I the only one who thinks Amazon Alexa is overrated?

The only three voice features I use are:

\- Set the timer to 10 minutes (mostly pasta)

\- Wake me in 1 hour (for a nap)

\- How is the weather today?

That's it and and I don't have a home which is connected to my phone like most out there.

I think voice control only makes sense for commands where you don't need further interactions with the system, like watching a result on a screen or when driving a car. Then it's ok, otherwise I can't imagine any voice driven killer app.

<comment><USER22> It is overrated. I also just use Spotify/Google Play Music and what you listed above.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This shows how important competition is.

If YT wasn't the only silo with our videos, then Google wouldn't be able to play this trick.

<comment><USER24> there are competitors though, DTube (I'm affiliated), Vid.me, Vimeo

<comment><USER25> Vimeo is the only one in that list I've even heard of

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > _Amazon's implementation of YouTube on the Echo Show violates our terms of > service, creating a broken user experience._

Does anyone know what specific terms Amazon is allegedly violating?

<comment><USER27> I think it was mentioned elsewhere in the thread, but the Echo Show was not implementing YouTube features such as subscriptions, next video recommendations, autoplay, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This may be a bit off topic, but one of the extensions I loved was forced to be unpublished from Chrome Store. Its called Streamus and it plays audio of a Youtube video in the background and it was really good!

Email Communications from Google: [https://imgur.com/15gaOf6](https://imgur.com/15gaOf6) HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9873255](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9873255)

I wish this extension existed still when I can legally not watch a video with Youtube RED.

</comment><comment><USER29> @dang: Can you update the URL to the canonical url, not the Google AMP one?

</comment><comment><USER30> Google has been acting all Gates era microsofty lately.

<comment><USER31> I was thinking Balmer but I'll take it

<comment><USER30> I could be mistaken, but I thought Gates was the one who set the standard for hyper aggressive anti competitive tactics.

<comment><USER32> I think Gates has rehabilitated his image a little, but he was a pretty ruthless business man. He completely destroyed Netscape using the windows monopoly.

<comment><USER33> It's not popular to voice this, but some of Netscape's fall was due to self- inflicted wounds. In the end, they'd piled a package together called Netscaoe Communicator and it had become a bloated and buggy mess.

They weren't alone in these regards, but they took it to new levels and QA was seemingly nonexistent. IIRC, even Opera went so far as to have an email client and newsgroups reader included.

Netscape had both the email client and newsgroup reader, it also had a web authoring tool, conferencing software, Netcaster (which I never did figure out what it did), and a calendar. Heck, I think it even had other feature... It had all of those in what was theoretically a browser at a time when computers typically had RAM with double digit values in MB.

Microsoft certainly didn't help, but I'm not sure that they _really_ destroyed it.

<comment><USER34> I think the communicator thing came after Microsoft had already had Netscape in its sights. In response to Microsoft going after their browser with their monopoly, Netscape expanded their server offerings from web server to include other stuff that competed with Microsoft's BackOffice and they did Communicator to almost be a groupware suite. While Communicator may not have helped, the Netscape ship was already on fire for Microsoft attacks at that point.

<comment><USER33> Oh, Microsoft certainly helped sink them, but I'm of the opinion that Netscape was gleefully poking holes in their ship at the same time.

I never did figure out what Communicator actually was meant to do. Someone likened it to ActiveScript (I think that's what it was called, IE's proprietary scripting stuff that required hosting on Windows).

I was largely an Opera user back then. I still am, but that leads to a long off-topic conversation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why do people keep focusing on which company to blame. It's not a Amazon VS Google issue. It's a Tech-Company VS Consumer problem.

If you give me a shitty experience because you want to dominate the world, well too bad, I'm opting out. I couldn't care less who's fault it is, I am the customer, I am right, and if you want to earn my money it's your duty to deliver me a great experience.

<comment><USER11> I wouldn't say it's their duty. If you're not paying them, they don't owe you anything. If you are paying them, they only owe you what they promised.

However, your sentiment is correct since it is a two-way street. You don't owe them your time or money when they make stupid decisions. You just cut ties with them and they lose out.

<comment><USER10> Yes, I pay $900 for a "smart tv" that locks me into their shitty apps. I buy an echo show and am now in the middle of some war. If you bought an iPod you were locked in to their store.

fuck these devices. I'm not paying for less freedom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Sounds anticompetitive to me.

<comment><USER36> About as anticompetitive as Amazon refusing to list Chromecast and Google Home devices, blocking installation of Prime Video on Android TV devices and several other customer hostile actions this spat has resulted in.

Thanks to walled gardens, we're now pretty much stuck in a shitty situation noone else can fix.

<comment><USER37> One of those players has a virtual monopoly on internet videos by subsidizing a money losing service with the virtual monopoly on search revenues.

The other is a store that has lots and lots of competition.

<comment><USER38> Is YouTube a money loser? Their revenues are estimated to be around $10 billion. Surely their expenses can't be that high.

<comment><USER39> According to Eli the Computer Guy, it is something like:

YouTube costs: $6.3 billion per year

YouTube revenue: $4 billion

So they are losing $2.3 billion per year.

Eli the Computer Guy made a lot of waves around a year ago because his account was both incorrectly flagged for a "Community Strike" and his appeal was incorrectly dismissed which effectively left his channel dead in the water and he announced he was quitting. After outrage, a human finally stepped in and fixed the mess. Then later that year, his account was deleted by Google in the middle of a live stream without any explanation. (It was later restored, without explanation.)

Eli, talking as business entrepreneur, has talked a lot about the problems of YouTube as a platform. He frequently does business analysis and goes over numbers.

He has also broken down their cost structure, and yes, their expenses can really be that high. In addition to the massive number of videos that get uploaded every minute, they must also make multiple encodings of each one, and then all that needs to be mirrored to all the CDNs. (He was trying to figure out if he could do self-hosting...he felt if he just needed to make downloadable video files you watch offline, it can be done cheaply, but for streaming convenience, that's where things get expensive.)

Eli also quoted Susan Wojcicki stating that they still see YouTube as in the investment stage, which means they still are pumping money into it with no expectation that it's going to turn a profit anytime soon.

<comment><USER38> $4 billion is the lowest estimate I've seen anywhere. Most analysts guess it's about twice that based on what they pay out in ad rev share.

And yes - Wojcicki did say they are still investing in YouTube. Specifically she was talking about adding VR functionality.

YouTube is probably profitable.

<comment><USER39> I've never seen anybody who's made a serious attempt to look at the numbers claim YouTube is profitable. All say the opposite.

Some random examples:

CBS Marketwatch: [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/4-reasons-youtube-still- doesnt-...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/4-reasons-youtube-still-doesnt-make- a-profit/)

Business Insider: [http://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-still-doesnt-make- goo...](http://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-still-doesnt-make-google-any- money-2015-2)

Motley Fool: [https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/03/01/youtube- is...](https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/03/01/youtube-isnt- profitable-so-what-should-google-inc.aspx)

And none of these include this year's Adpocolypse.

<comment><USER38> Those are all from 2015 where the weren't profitable. Look for something more recent.

[http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn- google-y...](http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-google- youtube-20161027-story.html)

[http://fortune.com/2017/04/27/alphabet-earnings-up-as-ads- su...](http://fortune.com/2017/04/27/alphabet-earnings-up-as-ads-surge-on- youtube-and-mobile-devices/)

[https://seekingalpha.com/article/4096345-google-youtubes- pot...](https://seekingalpha.com/article/4096345-google-youtubes-potential- exponential-growth-hidden-plain-sight)

[https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2017/0129/How-YouTube- and...](https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2017/0129/How-YouTube-and-mobile- search-drove-revenue-for-Google-s-parent-company)

[https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/youtube-will- earn-9bn...](https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/youtube-will-earn-9bn-in- revenue-this-year-towering-over-spotify/)

[http://variety.com/2017/digital/news/google-youtube- alphabet...](http://variety.com/2017/digital/news/google-youtube- alphabet-q1-2017-1202401702/)

Even if YouTube isn't profitable today (and I think they are), the growth indicates they will be soon.

> And none of these include this year's Adpocolypse.

That's true. That could be interesting for sure. The Variety link talks about it a little bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> They stopped supporting it on Wii consoles also. Yeah old tech I guess but I still use one for Netflix, Amazon Prime, and until recently YouTube.

My guess would be it's harder to monitize when they don't have access to all the other stuff they can track in a browser or phone app.

<comment><USER41> In particular after they launched Youtube Red...

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Looks like Google has not forgiven Amazon for pulling the chromecast's off of their store!

</comment><comment><USER23> How do they detect that it's Echo? Can't Amazon send a different user-agent string?

<comment><USER18> Well, Amazon is likely using Google's YouTube API. When you use the API, you have to have an API key registered with Google and send all of your API requests with it. Google likely just banned the key, and given the potential for legal action, no corporation is going to try and "trick" Google by registering a different API key, spoofing their identity, etc., particularly since it's high profile and very easy to identify that Amazon has done something of the sort.

<comment><USER23> Ok. Can't they just run a browser inside the Echo? (So that the YT API is not used).

PS: One more reason not to depend on APIs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sounds like YouTube is due for an effective competitor. I see plenty of free porn sites offering reliable quality video streaming, so I don't know what we're waiting for.

</comment><comment><USER43> This is pretty lame because it's quite fun to ask for a video to be played.

</comment><comment><USER44> The story is actually on the verge.yay amp links.

</comment><comment><USER45> Do people over 30 actually use YouTube? I see my younger colleagues on there a lot, but be yet to find anything that was worth my time unless it broke copyright laws.

<comment><USER46> I would recommend checking out the channel "Primitive Technology". It is a good example of quality YouTube content.

<comment><USER47> Yeah, I was about to recommend this as well. There's a ton of good content, it's just weird with how hard it is to discover sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Canonical link: [https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/26/16371292/google- youtube-a...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/26/16371292/google-youtube- amazon-echo-show)

First-party AMP link: [https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2017/9/26/16371292/goo...](https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2017/9/26/16371292/google- youtube-amazon-echo-show)

As-submitted link: [https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2017/9/26/16371292/google- youtube-amazon-echo-show)</comment>


An illustrated guide to the internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.thingist.com/t/item/2926/

<comment><AUTHOR> I ended up cutting off the part about net neutrality (it was getting pretty long [this was originally all one long comic], but I'll probably submit that when I post it.

I made this because I was repeating myself a _lot_ when talking to people about net neutrality. The question about "well can't we just start our own ISP?" comes up a lot. I figured that this illustrated the concept of _what_ an ISP is pretty effectively, and I'll probably link people to it in the future if I'm explaining it.

This might not be appropriate for HN, but hopefully a couple of people will find it useful.</comment>


Cheap Solar Power - <AUTHOR> http://www.keith.seas.harvard.edu/blog-1/cheapsolarpower <comment><USER2> The storage problem remains. It's really expensive to store energy at the single house scale.</comment>


Bitcoin block #300000 was just mined today - <AUTHOR> https://blockchain.info/block-index/402444/000000000000000082ccf8f1557c5d40b21edabb18d2d691cfbf87118bac7254

<comment><USER2> Not sure of the significance: [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Blocks#How_many_blocks_are_there....](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Blocks#How_many_blocks_are_there.3F)

        What is the maximum number of blocks?

        There is no maximum number, blocks just keep getting
        added to the end of the chain at an average rate of
        one every 10 minutes.

        Even when all 21 million coins have been generated?

        Yes. The blocks are for proving that transactions
        existed at a particular time. Transactions will
        still occur once all the coins have been generated,
        so blocks will still be created as long as people
        are trading Bitcoins.

<comment><USER3> Well, I guess it's a continuation of Bitcoin mining being ahead of schedule. Discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5780861](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5780861) and since that article is dead, here's another one [http://www.dailydot.com/business/bitcoin-mining-55-years- ahe...](http://www.dailydot.com/business/bitcoin-mining-55-years-ahead- schedule/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there something notable about this block like a change in mining reward?

With a relatively controlled block rate of 6/hour, can't we predict when almost any block will be mined?

<comment><USER5> The long term averages are showing slightly more than 6 per hour. Over the short term the spacing between blocks varies pretty wildly. I sure would not want to rely on a clock powered by Bitcoin block times :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not into Bitcoin. So could someone explain the significance of this to us laymen?

</comment><comment><USER7> How did this manage to get to the frontpage? Wasn't there some rule that would punish articles with bitcoin? Did pg change ranking rules again?</comment>


Python Python Python Python 3 Comes to Wallaroo (for Stream Processing) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.wallaroolabs.com/2018/11/python-python-python-python-3-comes-to-wallaroo/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm an engineer at Wallaroo labs. I've done a lot of work on our Python API and I wrote the blog post. If you want to discuss stream processing, or Python, or Pony (the language that the core of Wallaroo is written in), I'd be happy to do it here.</comment>


Google says there are now 10^12 unique URLs. I am proud to announce the 2nd trillion. - <AUTHOR> http://ianab.com/trillion/

<comment><USER2> I worked on a web crawler once before.. you've got no idea how annoying these kinds of websites are to detect.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_trap>

.. although I'm sure they've got some smart people working on it at Google.

<comment><USER3> You detect them like Unix detects a symlink loop: it punts on the problem and just errors after 8 symlink traversals.

The equivalent is a crawl depth limit, which could be a hard limit (dumb) or a function of page-rank (smart) and the trustworthiness of the inbound link (smarter) and also the data quality & diversity of the traversed pages (best).

There are very good reasons why Googlebot seems to hit you from one IP at a time -- it's a long-running thread that is making all sorts of decisions about your site as it crawls.

<comment><USER4> Google has indexed 38 so far: [http://www.google.com.au/search?q=site%3Aianab.com%2Ftrillio...](http://www.google.com.au/search?q=site%3Aianab.com%2Ftrillion%2F)

Tackling the _data quality & diversity of the traversed pages (best)_:

Producing English text with the 40 bits, by driving a generative grammar or a markov/travesty generator, would make it harder for Google to detect that the pages are auto-generated. It's unlikely to infer the function f(URL) -> text (or even to attempt it), but would limit the recursion for the other reasons you mention.

(guessing) sites like hackernews are indexed primarily by recursion (few direct inbound links to specific stories).

<comment><USER3> _(guessing) sites like hackernews are indexed primarily by recursion (few direct inbound links to specific stories)._

Correct. Notice that it is difficult to find old HN comments on Google, since after a while there are no short paths from the home page to them. In practice & all else being equal (quality, length, spamminess, speed, age, uniqueness, PR, etc), the maximum depth a page can afford to have is about 6 or 7.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://ianab.com/trillion/1099377140735.html>

<comment><USER6> <http://ianab.com/trillion/1099510313975.html>

<comment><USER7> <http://ianab.com/trillion/370743989334.html>

<comment><USER8> <http://ianab.com/trillion/892949752285.html>

<comment><USER9> <http://ianab.com/trillion/658144902297.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I submitted <http://ianab.com/trillion/0.html> to <http://www.google.com/addurl/> and <http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx>

Please log requests from the Google and Microsoft bots and let us know how long it takes the respective bots to figure out that every page is the same :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://pastebin.com/m54b7d354>

Looks like it just hit a bunch of links from the first page.

<comment><USER10> So it looks like Google grabbed about 40 links before giving up? I wonder what a good "score" is? At first, I'd guess less is better, but too few might be running the risk of throwing out potentially good pages. Too many, and the bot is just wasting effort. The 40 score could vary as well based on parallel conditions assuming many bot instances are sharing a task pool. Be sure to post the Microsoft results if/when they crawl you.

<comment><USER11> Looks like it hit all of the links on the first page (there are 8x5 boxes = 40) and didn't find anything interesting, so it didn't crawl any deeper. If the second-level pages had more interesting/unique content, I bet it would've kept going.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> They actually did explicitly say that this measurement ignores URL's which are non-unique enough or of insignificant worth as best that they could determine. But ah well, I guess it's just for fun.

</comment><comment><USER13> Hilariously clever, and very easy to create with something like Django's regex urls.

<comment><USER5> ^trillion/(?P<number>[\d]{1,13}).html$

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So, if the number modulo 13 is 0, a taunt, "Maybe you could try drawing something," shows up. Any other easter eggs?

<comment><USER15> <http://ianab.com/trillion/1000000000000.html> ("I think you win something... ") <http://ianab.com/trillion/00000000000000.html> (sort of an easter egg)

<comment><USER16> If you go past a trillion, they give you a free bonus page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I guess this goes to show how this metric is useless on it's own but if you compare with other previous years then you can understand how far the web as evolved.

</comment><comment><USER16> <http://ianab.com/trillion/344940631126.html>

Do all the URLs leave snarky messages?

<comment><USER18> No.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Let's play pong <http://ianab.com/trillion/547597778686.html>

</comment><comment><USER20> Ok, funny, but Google has indexed only 40 of the pages. Where is the rest?! huh

<comment><USER21> the red spiders that work the gears of google got bored after 40 i guess

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> <http://ianab.com/trillion/840689566653.html>

UFO :D</comment>


16 year old arrested for DDOS attack on MasterCard in The Hague, The Netherlands - <AUTHOR> http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=nl&tl=en&u=http://www.nrc.nl/binnenland/article2648033.ece/16-jarige_opgepakt_voor_cyberaanval_op_MasterCard&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.com&twu=1&usg=ALkJrhj4avUDZchGTFq4083zux8gLS_o4w The original version in Dutch: http://www.nrc.nl/binnenland/article2648033.ece/16-jarige_opgepakt_voor_cyberaanval_op_MasterCard <comment><USER2> dutchie here, a slightly more readable version:

"Rotterdam, December 9th. The police has arrested in the night of Wednesday to Thursday a 16 year old boy who apparently was involved in the cyber attacks by WikiLeaks sympathizers on amongst others Mastercard and PayPal. This has been announced by the office of the public prosecutor.

WikiLeaks sympathisers have started these attacks after the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in Great Brittain. With these so-called DDoS attacks hackers want to take revenge on companies that no longer process funds transfers to WikiLeaks. The High Tech Crime Team of the dutch national police had started an investigation after it became clear that these attacks originate in the Netherlands, according to the office of the public prosecutor.

Besides Mastercard and PayPal the websites of VISA, the Swedish public prosecutor, the swiss Post Bank have been subjected to attacks as well. The actions of the WikiLeaks sympathisers are carried out under the code name 'PayBack'.

The young suspect from The Hague has been interrogated on Thursday and has confessed that he committed attacks on MasterCard and VISA. Police have confiscated computers and data carriers. On Friday he will have to appear in front of a judge in Rotterdam. According to the justice department the boy is part of a group of hackers.

The investigation in to this group is still running, according to the public prosecutor. It is not clear whether other suspects are also in the Netherlands or abroad. The justice department does not rule out more arrests.

A spokesperson for the public prosecutors office has announced that the justice department will act against those that are actually performing these attacks. People that just make their computer available are committing a felony but are not taken in to account in the current investigation."

</comment><comment><USER3> Good. This may not be a popular opinion, but I've been waiting for these kids to get punished. Just because they are script kiddies doesn't mean they aren't fully aware of their actions and the impact those actions can have.

I see them all over mainstream sites posting comments "as" Anonymous and I can't help but wonder how ignorant or just plain stupid these people are. They can and will find out who uses these tools and you can bet Visa and Mastercard will use their enormous resources to make sure there is reparation or payback.

<comment><USER4> It's a form of civil disobedience, and hopefully people can organize legal and material support for those arrested.

<comment><USER5> Willingness to accept the punishment that the law dictates is what separates civil disobedience from... well, from regular old disobedience, I guess.

<comment><USER6> Willingness to accept punishment and taking steps to mitigate that punishment are two different things.

<comment><USER5> Indeed; it's important that those steps be honest and in good faith, however. (Unless the court system happens to be what they're protesting against, of course.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One thing they always forget to address: was this guy a botnet owner using his zombie computer swarm or did he just download the LOIC and filled the fields as the guide instructed?

It might be a crime anyway, but calling him a "hacker" instead of saying that he downloaded a program and clicked a button make people think in very different ways.

</comment><comment><USER8> If Copyright trolls do it it's no problem, if a 16 year old does it it's a crime... can it get uglier than this?

<comment><USER9> Maybe it's the fact that it was a company vs a bunch of individuals... Perhaps Anonymous should incorporate.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> FYI original article in Dutch: [http://www.nrc.nl/binnenland/article2648033.ece/16-jarige_op...](http://www.nrc.nl/binnenland/article2648033.ece/16-jarige_opgepakt_voor_cyberaanval_op_MasterCard)

</comment><comment><USER10> Probability of this kid being the ringleader as opposed to just a script kiddie who get caught?

<comment><AUTHOR> According to the article, the police tries to focus on the active organizers. Not sure how they distinguish passive and active help though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Den Haag (dutch) or The Hague (english)

<comment><AUTHOR> My apologies. Title is corrected. Thanks for pointing out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The RIAA tried this tactic. It didn't stop anyone from pirating music.

<comment><USER13> They're very different. This is _properly_ illegal.

<comment><USER14> This is true, but why would that impact the effectiveness of the tactic?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Now another 19 year old arrested <http://bit.ly/grstDw>

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm calling shenanigans, and at any rate if it's true it's certainly a corner case. an interrogation and confession? just like that? something hinky is going on with this story.

<comment><USER2> Yes, sure. Because if you haul 16 year olds in to a real life sized police station and start asking pointed questions after doing what they probably figured was a nice prank they're going to clam up and ask for their lawyer, instead of becoming blubbering children.

Please, you can bet that (a) it's true, (b) that it's not a corner case (c) that he really confessed and (d) that there is nothing hinky at all.

Grown ups tend to fall apart after an hour or two in a cell if they've never been there before, imagine the effect on a 16 year old kid.

<comment><USER17> This will (hopefully) remain one of those things I always wonder about. Just how long would I last?

<comment><USER2> I've been in jail for several hours on a charge of tax evasion (long story short: I drove a car with foreign plates in to the Netherlands which was not yet fit for road approval, it was insured and otherwise ok), it did not make me suicidal (though they did take my shoelaces out of my shoes) but I was ready to do murder by the time I got out.

It had the exact opposite effect on me than what it does on most people apparently, I was ready to be reasonable at the time of being arrested but by the time they let me out of the holding cell they had lost each and every bit of credibility and respect with me that they ever had.

It was clearly a load of bull, they knew, I knew it, so I wanted to file charges and before you could say 'wow' I was escorted back out on to the street with a 'don't do that again' warning.

They would not even let me back in to file those charges.

Now, what a longer time in a prison cell would do to me I could not tell you but anger at this injustice is the only thing that still stands out after all these years (2 decades).

<comment><USER18> This reminds me of the last time i was in Athens. I took a picture of the US embassy and spent 5 hours in a cell. The fact that I am a Greek American with American citizenship meant nothing. The government has a way of making reasonable people unreasonable...

<comment><AUTHOR> When I was in New York, the police stopped me from taking a picture of the Federal Reserve Building. They than gave me an info brochure with on the front a picture from the same angle. Only in America my friend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So the Netherlands are going to arrest Mastercard for violating the will of its customers right?</comment>


Senator Feinstein Says We Should Censor the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150402/15274630528/fbi-uncovers-another-its-own-plots-senator-feinstein-responds-saying-we-should-censor-internet.shtml

<comment><USER2> With regards to security and privacy, Feinstein is a hypocrite, scab of puss and utter filth.</comment>


Amazon Quits China Market - <AUTHOR> https://pandaily.com/amazon-quits-china-market-another-u-s-e-commerce-giant-failing-in-china/ <comment><USER2> As a person have actually used TaoBao, JD, and Amazon.cn, I can tell Amazon.cn was far behind them on both execution and product variety. I only have a vague impression of China's rules imposed on business, if they did, for sure Amazon was screwed so badly it didn't move a single inch over the past few years. Literally done nothing at all to compete. I'm not surprised they gave up.

<comment><USER3> Never used _z.cn_ but saw a few neighbours ordering from them in Shenzhen. Probably recent tech books in English I guess. I did try AWS in China and it was _absolutely shocking_. Clearly they never prioritized China and the inevitable happened. I run a business in China, it's not easy but it's interesting.

<comment><USER4> AWS in China is not run by AWS:

"To provide the best experience for customers in China and to comply with China's legal and regulatory requirements, AWS has collaborated with China local partners with proper telecom licenses for delivering cloud services. The service operator and provider for AWS China (Beijing) Region based out of Beijing and adjacent areas is Beijing Sinnet Technology Co., Ltd. (Sinnet), and the service operator and provider for AWS (Ningxia) Region based out of Ningxia is Ningxia Western Cloud Data Technology Co., Ltd. (NWCD)."

[https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/about- aws/china/](https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/about-aws/china/)

<comment><USER5> As an active user of AWS China, let me tell you that don't take those words at face value. AWS China business actually is growing really fast for past several years.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, which words do you mean?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The discussion in this thread shows how blind people are about China's development. They are pointing fingers to the Chinese government partly because they simply cannot imagine how much better the China competitors are. The US do have some advantages in the IT industry, but that advantage is getting slimmer and slimmer. In fact, in so many ways, people in China are enjoying much better services from the internet companies than people in the US. But people in the US simply cannot see it, and cannot believe it. For ordinary people, I don't blame them. But most of people on HN are from this industry, and they are the same! This just makes me speechless.

<comment><USER7> The China competitors are better because they are actively helped by the government while foreign companies are not, and in this case actively suppressed.

Competition only works when the market is fair. Perhaps Amazon could not make as good of an offering but their marketshare was 15% 10 years ago and China is a large, homogenous, and modernized population like the US which is perfect for Amazon's scale strategy. It's a hard sell to say that a trillion-dollar company does not have the resources and talent to do what the people in the next building can.

<comment><USER8> As opposed to US companies that are certainly not helped in any way by the US government

<comment><USER7> Sure, but definitely not to that extent, competitors are certainly not suppressed in the same way, and it's irrelevant to the discussion of why Amazon left China.

<comment><USER9> Bombadier literally was ended by the US government

<comment><USER7> Do you mean Bombardier? The aviation company with $16B in revenue and 65k employees? Looks like there was a tariff imposed on one of their models due to a complaint by Boeing but was overturned 4 months later in Jan 2018.

If this is the company you're talking about, can you describe what you mean by "literally was ended"?

<comment><USER9> Without the Airbus deal for the C-Series Bombardier was basically in bankruptcy exactly because of those tariffs. It felt like quite a targeted attempt to, as you put it, suppress competitors.

<comment><USER10> Maybe so, but that's quite different from "literally ended."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Amazon has literally won everywhere else in the world. But in China they were slow at execution? Does this read right to you? Or maybe there is a regulatory angle which no one is talking about because...China.

<comment><USER12> > Amazon has literally won everywhere else in the world

I've mentioned it in another comment, too, but Amazon is not present in my Eastern European country (Romania), where Alibaba beats them by a large margin (even though they're also not officially launched here). I've just done a quick search and it seems Amazon is not winning it in Russia either, nor in Ukraine, to say nothing of India. As such, to say that they are winning "everywhere else in the world" is not really true, they're only winning in North America and some Western European countries (too lazy to search what really happens in South America or Africa).

<comment><USER13> I'm a Romanian. What do you mean Alibaba is beating Amazon in România?

I'd say that's hyperbole. Neither of them are present here and if I were to guess judging by my own experience, I'd say that Amazon is still more popular.

Do you have hard numbers?

Of course neither of them hold a candle to the local eMag, but that's only natural.

<comment><USER12> It's hard to get hard numbers on this but in my circle of acquaintances "you can find it on Alibaba" and variations of this has become almost like a noun, like "I'm going to make a Xerox (i.e. a photocopy) of this paper". I've never heard anything similar concerning Amazon. My acquaintances are mostly non/tech people, 25 to 35 years of age, from Bucharest. Emag is of course a totally different beast but I had chose to ignore it because it didn't directly concerned the article.

Slightly OT, I'm also curious how come no analyst is mentioning FB marketplace as a competitor to Amazon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What's with these comments that Amazon couldn't win in China because they didn't play well by Chinese rules? The article paints a pretty compelling picture that the issue is that Amazon couldn't compete well with local companies. If they were that bad at competing, they wouldn't need conflict with the government to fail, failure would be a natural effect of being unable to keep up with local competition.

<comment><USER15> Probably a combination of a few things: 1) Western audience of HN that have only witnessed the dominance of Amazon so have a hard time imagining a better competitor. 2) Ongoing negativity towards china in this area. Put the two together, and China must be cheating for Amazon to not win.

I think most people underestimate how difficult it is to compete on local turf (even without political handicaps). In fact it may very well be that Alibaba and JD are in fact the better services and would be dominating in the west if not for the same home turf advantage.

<comment><USER16> More like home turf nuances.

China domestic shipping relies on very low paid workers working very long hours. On top of that, Amazon have already established their delivery infrastructure in a much more expensive environment. It would be tough for JD/Taobao to break in at this point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is why I don't get why companies--tech giants in particular--kowtow to China in the hopes of getting access to the Chinese market. It will never happen. At least, it won't be open access. You'll have to play by Chinese rules (ie integration with the Great Firewall, storing data in China, probably integration with social credit and so on). Worse, there might be (basically forced) "IP transfer". Even after all that, the government will make sure that you don't dominate any market. There'll be a Chinese version for that.

There is absolutely zero point in trying to mollify the Chinese government.

<comment><USER18> Perhaps you didn't read the article. This has nothing to with government interference. Local players in China are very strong with likes of Alibaba doing massive shopping festivals that easily rivals Thanksgiving. Two day delivery is China is considered slow and nothing to be proud about. On the top of this, it looks there were control issues where leaders at Amazon.cn weren't empowered to make decisions. I actually would rather ask reverse question: why Alibaba etc aren't bigger in US or Europe given their far more aggressive take on offering huge catelog at lower prices with ultrafast delivery.

<comment><USER19> The entire Chinese economy has to do with government interference. The scales are absolutely tipped in favor of Chinese companies.

<comment><USER20> I wouldn't think that is a bad thing per se. Countries who can consume and produce within themselves are going to succeed more than those who primarily import / export. If I were the Chines government I'd want to keep Amazon out as well.

<comment><USER21> >Countries who can consume and produce within themselves are going to succeed more than those who primarily import / export

Citation heavily needed for that claim.

<comment><USER22> Take the natural experiment of the Korean peninsula. Who would prefer to live in the (relatively) free-trading, cosmopolitan hellhole of South Korea when they could live in the utopian autarky of North Korea?

<comment><USER23> He wasn't arguing for autarky, but having an industrial base.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's hard to compete against government sponsored monopolies inside China. There's also a huge nationalism sentiment brewing in China and distrust growing for western companies and nationals from other countries.

It's sort of hard to wrap your head around these concepts as a westerner, because we start form two different places of thinking; in China, the government is your way of life, as long as it doesn't interfere with your daily life. The constructs of intellectual property, property rights, etc aren't present

<comment><USER25> It's hard to compete when you're not competitive.

Amazon still runs AWS in China with a Chinese partner. This is just Amazon.cn being unable to compete with local alternatives like Taobao.

What you're saying isn't wrong but I don't think it's particularly relevant to this situation.

<comment><USER24> What about Uber and DiDi?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Purely as an outsider looking at the regular China tech posts with interest over the years, it feels like there's a common thread, where US tech giants look at the Chinese market and rub their hands with glee, expecting to simply place an office there and integrate as they do everywhere else, only to find an existing ecosystem they seemingly have no knowledge of - and instead of studying that ecosystem and improving their product globally they bow out when China doesn't seem to be as "easy" as first thought.

Obviously, this is a gross over-simplification of the situation, but it feels weird that FAANG-size tech companies seem to all be making the same mistakes by embedding their services into a packed marketplace and being arrogent enough to expect to beat pre-existing competition. Outsiders may claim (and rightfully so) that China has a bias towards Chinese companies, but this bias doesn't seem to be the reson why the likes of Amazon and Google fail in China.

</comment><comment><USER6> I am so sad to see how the comments under this post manifest. People just blindly pointing fingers to the big evil Chinese government for the failure, without any evidence whatsoever. I get it, failures are hard. But you can face it and learn to be responsible for it. All grownups do that. I think American are transitioning from a bunch of doers to a bunch of whiners.

<comment><USER27> Do you deny that the Chinese government makes it extremely difficult for US companies to operate there?

<comment><USER28> And that must be why Microsoft, Nike, Starbucks etc. failed so miserably, right?

And could you explain how exactly the Chinese gov made things difficult for Amazon?

Seriously this whole thread is just amazing, tragic and downright sad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Amazon's model has been a "central place for everything". Culturally, China seems to be more open to having ten million places to get their specific things they need. Having a central online store is not a big deal for them.

<comment><USER30> Do they have the equivalent to a shopping mall that allows them to easily find smaller online stores?

<comment><USER31> That's how Taobao worked from day 1

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> In online retail, shipping speed and selection are what entice customers. I'd argue that the UX and promotion landscape are moot past a certain point.

Fast shipping and selection comes down to infrastructure. China is spread out, this means each FC must carry more stock on average, and you need more FCs per person to reduce shipping time.

Markets like Japan and small EU countries are juicy targets for this reason (which is why you see so much investment there).

And then there's 'regulatory challenges'

Each FC requires large amount land, development, and employees. These types of projects require a high level of cooperation of the government to be worth the investment.

This doesn't pair well with a government that is notoriously unwelcoming to foreign business.

<comment><USER28> This is at least a more reasonable take on the matter than those pointing fingers at the big, evil Chinese government without any clue what they're talking about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> They are quitting the B2C e-commerce market, not the B2B market. B2C is an area where China is in many cases more advanced than the US, especially when it comes to mobile apps. US is more web app centric and China is more mobile app centric. China has really good apps like WeChat for which there doesn't exist an equivalent in the US.

Also it does look like Amazon in general is putting more resources into it's higher margin businesses (eg AWS and Echo) than e-commerce.

</comment><comment><USER34> Should be obvious... Amazon has become a peddler of goods manufactured in China, at inflated prices. Why would they pay more for the things they can get cheaper locally?

</comment><comment><USER35> Amazon is being smart.

They know the Chinese will steal every bit of IP/Technology they can, and then once they've extracted all the juice they'll create market conditions that make it impossible for the foreign company to remain successful.

China has been running this program on everyone since they started with the Communist/Open market concept. It's just amazing that companies still haven't caught on. The lure of big money blinds the greedy.

<comment><USER36> Some people always have a myriad of excuses to cover up what appears to be simply a failure to stay competitive in a highly competitive market.

Learn to read the article next time.

<comment><USER37> this guy has a clear anti-China bias

got into it with him on another post

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This has nothing to do with communications or product development. China will not let a non-Chinese company ever gain top position in any sector. That's how the government works. And yes the article is bullshit because this same government won't allow any negative press about their actions either. These Pandaily journalists will have a very hard time if they actually wrote about the real environment there.

<comment><USER38> While the evidence in this case seems to be against this statement (Amazon indeed offered worse service than competitors) I think it is otherwise valid. Chinese are really driven to become the world's superpower number 1 and give no quarter to Western companies trying to establish themselves in China.

So the big dilemma is, do we let them? Or more precisely, do we as the outside world let Chinese stifle all the foreign companies in their own market while their own companies operate freely in those foreign countries? It smells really a lot of mercantilism, and the Chinese culture of copy-catting freely doesn't help. It seems like the Western countries in particular have become too soft for Chinese tactics, and are too afraid to act against China. This at least has been my perception.

<comment><USER39> > Chinese culture of copy-catting freely doesn't help.

The problem with that, is that it's a vicious circle. Innovation is the foundation for future innovations. It builds on itself. It lays the groundwork and foundation for what comes next. By leapfrogging and cheating its way to the top (or near the top) they are sacrificing that crucial infrastructure for future discoveries and innovations.

China _has_ to copy & steal IPs because it simply doesn't have the culture to compete. They're one of the least innovative countries on Earth, year after year. And the only way to change that is by allowing its citizens to think creatively, outside the box -- to be able to challenge authority. But China doesn't want that; they want conforming little worker bees who follow the party line.

<comment><USER40> This is just wrong. By many measures, China is one of the most innovative countries on earth. Take scientific citations for example: [https://www.natureindex.com/news-blog/chinas-citations- catch...](https://www.natureindex.com/news-blog/chinas-citations-catching-up)

<comment> mellow-lake-day How much of those are legitimate though? There have been cases of fraud and falsifying information.

"Since 2012, the country has retracted more scientific papers because of faked peer reviews than all other countries and territories put together,..."

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/13/world/asia/china- science-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/13/world/asia/china-science- fraud-scandals.html)

<comment><USER41> Given that the Nature Index only measures top quality publications, China's contribution to science is second only to the US's.

[https://www.natureindex.com/annual- tables/2018/country/all](https://www.natureindex.com/annual- tables/2018/country/all)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Amazon is out of China not because of CCP but capitalism. If you ever bought stuff from Amazon.cn you would know what I am talking about.

</comment><comment><USER43> > Liu also bought items on Amazon.cn only to find disappointment, as it took > him two days to receive them. "How could they call that two-day delivery," > Liu said.

What is he saying?

<comment><USER44> I was just about to re-quote this. If you have lived in China before you would understand and agree that two days (the Amazon Prime gold standard) is considered too slow in China.

<comment><USER45> But if you're lived in China and used JD or other delivery companies, you have to agree that the delivery fee is insanely cheap for same-day delivery, and that this gig work seems on borrowed time, the costs are going to increase, and the question is, will JD be able to keep this up?

Amazon is using proven multi-decade logistics companies for delivery, so it's pretty certain their internal cost structures are rational.

How much are the JD trucks and delivery guys being paid? How above board is JD's finances? What are they getting from the governments? Perhaps it's just another WebVAN.

These things are never quite clear in China, transparency and public audits are not present.

<comment><USER31> Alibaba outsourced logistics to a big extend. There is their own Cainiao, but it is just a franchise front for small delivery companies.

They pay market rate, and that's nothing unreal when most Chinese live in densely built up apartment blocks (a big difference from USA)

<comment><USER45> The density only partially helps, because there is still an overhead in even a single delivery that has to be paid. I'll give you an example, 饿了吗 will deliver food for 5-10 RMBdelivery fee in Shanghai. I would often order say, 生煎包 for 8 RMB and pay 5RMB delivery. A guy on a delivery bike would take like 15-30 minutes to deliver, and I often noticed they only delivered one order in my condo (his bike had nothing else in the basket), and just getting from the street to my condo's door, ringing the phone, and having me buzz him up the elevator would consume 5-10 minutes of his time getting in/out of the place and back to his next delivery.

Shanghai minimum wage is 2500 RMB/mo. So in order to make minimum wage, this guy would need to make 500 orders in 30 days, or 16 deliveries per day. In an 8 hour day, could he pick up and make 16 deliveries? Sure, but it's tight, and obviously at some point, they have to pay the delivery guys more.

And they have, but in order for O2O players to pay more to the delivery people, they've ended up charging more to the restaurants, and so the restaurants have then ended up raising the prices on the menus displayed.

So this indicates that the current O2O system in China wasn't stable. Despite massive revenues, the heavy competition, discounts, and artificially low introductory fees, and ease of switching, doesn't give me confidence their current structure will work.

And 饿了吗's logistics seem pretty chaotic to me and no different than Postmates or Doordash in the US. I rarely saw delivery bikes loaded down with multiple orders, because 15-30 minute delivery windows pretty much dictate a point-to- point delivery, rather than a hub and spokes model.

<comment><USER31> The lunch delivery market is not what I meant, but more conventional ecommerce. I know for sure that in that market, companies do make break even.

In Russia, we had same day delivery even in very first eCommerce site back in nineties, and even e-groceries. That was just much a much smaller market, and the fact that 90% of country's economy was in Moscow back then was helping.

China today is not much different with 5 megacities making 90% of eCommerce trade volume.

Are stationed in China?

<comment><USER45> Not currently, but I've lived there long enough to partake in its O2O/e-commerce/wechat lifestyle :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Another non-Chinese giant being driven out of the Chinese market by Chinese leadership. Of course its their country and their rules.

<comment><USER47> It doesn't prevent American companies from handing over all of their tech IP to China (the one that wasn't already stolen) and attempt to do their bidding at every step.

So it's win-win for China -- there's another (American firm) sucker born every minute looking to "enter the huge Chinese market", and the Chinese gov is taking full advantage of that (ultimately) hopeless dream.

<comment><USER48> It seems to be previous generation tech though

<comment><USER49> Which is still a better starting point than nothing.

On one hand it sucks that China is abusing its position in the global market, but on the other hand I am really not shedding any tears for greedy corporate America getting screwed for once.

<comment><USER50> Sadly, it's not just greedy "corpo 'merka" getting screwed. Plenty of scrappy software startups with stars in their eyes have services and products that would really improve Chinese lives, but can't or won't operate in-country because it is entirely too much risk.

<comment><USER51> my impression is that this is exactly what China wants. what do they have to gain from allowing american companies into their market without some hurdles? it is far more beneficial to china to encourage local business development.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sending newsletters as if they were for a friend - <AUTHOR> https://www.supercreative.design/blog/newsletter <comment><AUTHOR> I wrote this article because I felt like spam every time I wanted to send a newsletter. But they're the best way to build 1-to-1 ongoing relationships with hundreds of people, simultaneously. So I tried to find the best newsletters I could and understand what was good about them. Hope it helps someone here!</comment>


Apple's iOS 4 hardware encryption has been cracked - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/apples-ios-4-hardware-encryption-has-been-cracked-20110525/

<comment><USER2> The encryption hasn't quite been cracked. This tool is just brute-forcing the passcode, which by default is 4 digits long, so it wouldn't take that long to brute-force that anyways.

Also, the tool seems to perform an online attack with the phone connected, which means that Apple will be able to stop this from going on.

Seing that only an online attack can be done hints at the fact that the key derivation method that turns the 4 digit passcode into the AES key isn't known (yet).

I'd say that you are (still) pretty save if you use the longer password instead of the passcode and as long as the tool requires the phone to be connected, we can count on Apple patching the issue.

It's funny how these articles always talk about having "cracked the AES encryption" when all they do is brute-forcing a password.

<comment><USER3> This is why I'm happy that Android has some interesting password entry mechanisms that only exist for the iPhone in the jailbreak arena.

Apple really needs to embrace a non-PIN style password and make a way to login that's not a pain in the ass. A friend has an iPhone with a 9-character pass.. it's secure but impossible to use since it takes about 10 seconds to unlock each time... if the user can't be bothered to put a master password because it's not usable to do so, then it almost doesn't matter if there's hardware encryption anyway.

Compared with Google, Apple's views on security are weak. It's like comparing Google's "customer support" to Apple's... demonstrably weaker.

<comment><USER4> How many swipes are required to unlock your Android phone? Is there an upper limit? Also, how many hot spots are there on the screen (I assume it's not a free-hand gesture...)?

<comment><USER5> The swipie unlock that every Android phone I've seen in practice could be represented as a four digit number (actually less, since there's no zero and no repeats IIRC). The only difference I can see between a swipe and a digit is you hold your thumb down and it looks more futuristic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> X-Istence I don't think that this is brute-forcing the passcode at all, rather I think it is brute-forcing another method to locking the iPhone, namely that of iTunes...

iTunes has a special file on your computer that when you plug in your phone will allow it to start syncing data to and from your phone (including making backups) without requiring you to unlock it.

What I believe they are doing is actually brute-forcing the required entry code for that. Once you get that code (and there is no limit to how many times you can try) you get full access to the phone, including that bit-for-bit copy they are talking about.

Apparently the key space is small enough that it is easy enough to brute- force.

In that case it doesn't matter what kind of protection you use, whether it is the pass code lock, or the alphanumeric that they introduced on the iPhone 4 (IIRC).

Note that all of this is speculation, I have no inside knowledge, but that is how _I_ would go about attacking the iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER6> So... you can use brute force to break encryption? Is that news? It doesn't sound like there was any security hole in the implementation or a leaked cryptographic key, so in what sense is the encryption "cracked"?

<comment><USER7> I think it is more that someone is now selling a purpose-built software solution to brute force iPhones, that governments and other interested parties can buy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seems to me that the maxim 'put nothing on the internet that you don't want exposed' should be applied to cell phones as well. Given the decreasing protection provided by the courts, this sort of tool will be used more and more often. Those who talk of unreasonable search and seizure need to pay attention to today's realities.

<comment><USER9>
         put nothing on the internet that you don't want exposed

IMHO, it's not the exposure I'm worried about, but the discrimination that follows. Getting drunk at a party and posting pictures on Facebook should not be grounds for you getting rejected at an interview.

Also, talking about exposure, companies that found/asked for my social security number or home address, then exposed it on the Internet, should not be surprised when I sue them for huge amounts of money (I'm doing it right now and the only question is how much money I can win).

<comment><USER10> "Getting drunk at a party and posting pictures on Facebook should not be grounds for you getting rejected at an interview."

I agree with the OP - If you don't want to be discriminated against, keep it off the internet, or it can be used against you.

The only exceptions that I can think of would be those aspects that are considered "protected" - I'm in the rather liberal (but at-will-employment) California, so that includes (at last count, they've probably added more, "age (if over 35), ancestry, color, race, sex (gender), religion, national origin, marital status, physical or mental disability, medical condition, or sexual orientation." - Everything else is fair game. And certainly, drunk pictures of you on facebook would fall within the realm that an employer might reasonably discriminate against you.

If you don't want it used against you, don't place it on the internet, despite the level of protection/encryption/privacy policy you think you have protecting you. The elcomsofts of the world are likely to make your private information less so more quickly than you would think.

<comment><USER11> On that matter, I had a list of bad practices in HR that cause most of the problems here: [http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2082332&cid=358...](http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2082332&cid=35811494)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It would seem that this "crack" could simply be circumvented by using an alphanumeric password and/or setting the iPhone to shred its crypto key after 10 consecutive password failures. Obviously, neither of these are standard features, but both are available.

<comment><USER13> I guess that by " _neither of these are standard features_ " you mean "not on by default". It's two clicks in settings to turn these on.

<comment><USER14> Or two clicks for your corporate sysadmin to _force_ it :-)

<comment><USER15> Yay. Exchange policies + toddlers = fun times

This is why I don't sync my phone to my work email. It's just not worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why does the iPhone talk to anything on the data port without entering the passcode first?

It seems like this is reading the encrypted data and then brute forcing it, but there's no need to give access to even the 'secure' data without asking the user to enter the passcode. Then you can check for 10 incorrect codes and wipe the device if necessary. (I believe this is how the Blackberry handles things)

</comment><comment><USER16> Will this also work if one has his iPhone set to delete its crypto keys after 10 failed attempts?

</comment><comment><USER17> I was under the impression that not all user data is encrypted on an iOS 4 device, mainly just the user data of apps from Apple that are included with the device.

Does Apple's iOS provide for encryption of all user data? Or is it the case that the app's developer has to avail himself of an API to make this happen?

<comment><USER3> Correct, although Apple does provide an API to use the hardware encryption. Most apps do NOT use it.

If you're paranoid, you can make most data reasonably secure by using the built-in apps and apps like StashPro (which does use the hardware crypto API). This includes putting a decent length password, which is also hard to use.

Full-device encryption backed by hardware would be really great. IIRC, that's not possible on either iOS or Android right now (not sure about other platforms).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does it mean anything for the Ipad 2 Jailbreak ? I'm confused... It seems the encryption keys are in the chip in these Ipads, so I wonder if this article means that they could get the keys from the hardware ? If so, how is it related to an OS in particular ?

</comment><comment><USER19> Hopefully Remote Wipe will still work by shedding the keys altogether.

<comment><USER20> Remote wipe wouldn't work if network access was disabled.

<comment><USER19> Of course, I meant, hopefully a successful remote wipe will prevent this method from working. (A number of things could go wrong, including no signal, MobileMe being down, etc.)</comment></comment></comment>


Netflix Joins MPAA, Leaves the Internet Association - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2019/01/22/netflix-joins-mpaa/ <comment><USER2> So, they joined the dark side. They've been drifting there for a while and this just seals their direction toward those DRM lobby thugs.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if this means a shift in Netflix's easy going on DRM, stuff like account sharing with your neighbour, etc.

In the early days Microsoft was also really lax with copy protection enforcement. That was until they had created a good monopoly. That's when they starting cracking down on illegal Windows, Office, etc installations with online activation and such.

</comment><comment><USER4> In other news, you are no longer allowed to refuse tracking by Engadget/Oath's 'trusted' partners such as Amazon and Google. No thanks.</comment>


Ask HN: Why Dropbox iOS app needs my location to upload files? - <AUTHOR>

Really, I never understood this. Anyone care to explain—or know? <comment><USER2> It is apple's fault. Location permission is required to access your photo library.

<comment><USER3> I guess that makes sense - pictures can have geolocation data. Still could improve the messaging for the permission to explain that. Maybe say "Dropbox wants to access your location and photo library".

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, EXIF + geoloc data is a good reason. Combined to my previous reply on the statement that it's Apple's "fault".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> ask dropbox?</comment>


Derek Sivers: There are always more than two options - <AUTHOR> http://sivers.org/options <comment><USER2> _Go into work 2 hours early, but spend the first 2 hours just setting up your new company. Use lunch breaks and downtime as well. Do this until the income from the new company is 50% of your salary, then quit._

I would _really_ recommend _not_ doing this. Anything you do using employer resources is employer property and can cause major headaches for you down the road.

<comment><USER3> He said it was an option. He didn't say it was necessarily a good one.

<comment><USER2> It is bad in a totally different way than his other patently silly ones (become a tour guide in NZ) though because it's not obvious what's wrong with it unless you know how IP is attributed and the marginal utility of working in your employer's office vs a starbucks down the street is not worth risking all of your IP.

The risks with going to NZ and becoming a tour guide are much more obvious.

That is why that option is particularly pernicious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> a-priori "One choice is no choice, two choices is a dilemma, three choices is a good start." -- Dr. Richard Bandler (?)

(I immediately remembered this quote and tried to track down its source; I'm not sure if he's the original source, and he's not where I heard it from.)

<comment><USER4> Interesting! Thanks for finding and posting that. I'd never seen that before. It must have been something I heard years ago and it's been sitting in my head so long I thought it was mine. :-)

<comment> a-priori It's a great quote. I think it even applies to political systems.

I just remembered where I originally found that quote: I read it in _Manage It!_ , published by The Pragmatic Programmers, citing _The Secrets of Consulting_ by Gerald Weinberg.

 _It must have been something I heard years ago and it's been sitting in my head so long I thought it was mine._

It happens. That effect even has a name. It's called Cryptomnesia. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Siver's writing is so good you only need to read the title to benefit.

<comment><USER6> Or so atrocious, he doesn't add anything more than what the title says.

I don't really believe that - he's one of the best people I've had (albeit limited) correspondence with. There really ARE more than two options. Your point is well-made :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> option_count = f(scenario_perspective)

</comment><comment><USER8> Best illustration ever :-)</comment>