We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/30/nationalise-google-facebook-amazon-data-monopoly-platform-public-interest <comment><USER2> I think a lot of the "oh my gosh nationalisation is such an awful idea" / "not in my free society" comments are missing the point.

I too believe nationalisation is a bad idea _in this case_ , but given the enormous reaction it would bring, can you imagine how awful the situation appears to be from the authors (any many other non-tech-bubble) peoples perspective to even contemplate such a thing? Let alone write an opinion piece in a national news paper. You can argue it is a bad idea all you like, but ultimately, Facebook Google and Amazon are building something that scares people. Scared people do stupid things.

If the tech bubble does not look at articles like this as symptoms of a growing scepticism, or a check on the implicit (and often abused) trust of their users, then the backlash is only going to grow. The tech bubble inhabitants will have only themselves to blame.

You can argue all you like about whether people are logically correct to fear the big three. What matters is that they are fearful, and how the bubble reacts to that.

<comment><USER3> You seem to be saying there's a high threshold for extreme opinions to be published in the Guardian, so the fact that someone wrote such an article suggests that there is a genuine problem that needs to be taken seriously. Guardian writers do not live inside a "bubble" and therefore, there is inherent merit to what they write.

I wonder how often you actually read the Guardian, which is famous for having wildly extreme opinion pieces, especially lately. It's basically the Breitbart of the left, a more or less constant stream of clickbait designed to make people angry and upset.

Just a few random headlines I got from clicking around just now:

"Who paid for the leave vote? Brexit should be halted until we know"

"The car has a chokehold on Britain. It's time to free ourselves: Our insanely inefficient transport system is in thrall to the metal god. Electric vehicles are not the answer"

"Ask Hadley: Why do older people hate millennials so much?"

"Men on the left are sexist. Labour needs to do more to fix it."

"Feminists don't hate men. But it wouldn't matter if we did."

... and in case you think asking the government to take control of internet companies is new idea from Guardian writers:

"The Guardian view on censoring the internet: necessary, but not easy"

"Internet regulation: is it time to rein in the tech giants?"

"The EU is right to take on Facebook, but mere fines don't protect us from tech giants"

I wouldn't exactly claim the Guardian floats above bubbles and groupthinks.

<comment><USER4> > It's basically the Breitbart of the left

Please. The Guardian is establishment liberal media. The opinions they publish aren't even that extreme. There are plenty of journals that are far more radical and much further to the left.

It's funny how conservative HN looks when posts like this appear.

<comment><USER3> The opinions they publish are fantastically extreme and often deeply offensive. The Guardian constantly pumps out honest to god racism, sexism and other deplorable viewpoints. The only reason you don't believe it's comparable to Breitbart is you haven't sat down and done an honest comparison.

My post simply lists out Guardian headlines for all to see. It originally had something like +15 points and now it's sitting at zero, apparently it touched a nerve with some people who can't stand the idea that the Guardian and Breitbart might be comparable.

Here are some more headlines from their opinion writers, just to disabuse anyone of the notion that the Guardian is somehow not a bastion of radical extremism. They hate white people, they hate democracy, they hate men, they hate voters, they hate tea and Thomas the Tank Engine. They make money out of peddling hatred.

"The budget should be less macho - how about it boys"

"Why do women lie more than men? Because we're nicer"

"The Whiteness Project will make you wince. Because white people can be rather awful"

"Sexists are scared of Mad Max because it's a call to dismantle patriarchies"

"Are you too white, rich, able-bodied and straight to be a feminist"

"Tea is a national disgrace: Britain's favourite beverage is a boring relic of our colonial past."

"The tyrannical world of Thomas the Tank Engine. Kids love this little dipstick of an engine ... but what a chilling isle Sodor is."

"What if men had periods? It's a question worth posing"

"Democracy is a religion that has failed the poor"

"The country is screwed, the electorate is evil, but here are nine reasons to be cheerful"

"The week in patriarchy: take a moment to step away for survival"

"Did you weep watching Wonder Woman? You weren't alone"

"Remember when men and women could be friends? Republicans don't"

"Why the mediocre male's days may be numbered"

etc etc.

<comment><USER5> Care to go through each headline and explain your issues with each? I don't see any extreme or unreasonable views in the list you've posted.

<comment><USER3> Seriously? I really shouldn't have to explain this. If you don't see any extreme or unreasonable views there, I hate to tell you this, but you're probably unreasonable and extreme yourself, without even realising it.

Just try a simple thought experiment: invert the genders or skin colours in the headlines and see how they sound.

"The Blackness Project will make you wince. Because black people can be really awful"

Does that not sound extremely racist to you?

"Why the mediocre woman's days may be numbered"

It's a statement of pure sexism. The article, in case you care, is about how much men suck. Try publishing the same article with men and women swapped around and see what your progressive Facebook friends think.

"The country is screwed, the electorate is evil, but here are nine reasons to be cheerful"

I don't think it is possible to make a more extreme statement than this. You can't go bigger than the entire country (short of going to the entire world I guess), and you can't go worse than "evil". So describing the entire voting population of an entire country as evil is pretty much the definition of extreme.

Note that thinking democracy is awful and ordinary people around you are evil has a historical correlation with murderous extremism. It's like the classical warning sign that someone may be about to do something really bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Actually, I think behind the nationalisation idea, which doesn't seem workable given the circumstances, there's an interesting thought: these companies are sitting on basic infrastructure so instead of treating them like other companies, perhaps we should treat them like utilities.

Note that this piece appears in The Guardian. I don't know how it works in the US, but I'm of the impression that in many European countries, basic infrastructure like energy or transportation or communication links is either very tightly regulated or owned by a non-profit organisation that in turn is owned by either the local consumers, the local authorities, or by the state.

DNS operates in this way, as far as I'm aware.

Can we move in this direction with things like search (Google) and personal publishing (Facebook)?

Perhaps if the tech community delivers the software, and the societies themselves start a serious discussion about it and delivered the users?

<comment><USER7> A simple solution is to treat these companies as telcos.

We could learn something from history. See e.g. the Mann-Elkins Act (1910), [1]. And the telecommunications acts, [2], [3].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann%E2%80%93Elkins_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann%E2%80%93Elkins_Act)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996)

<comment><USER8> What we should learn from history is that ICC regulation was crippling (nearly destroying the rail industry in the US: [http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/a-nation- der...](http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/a-nation-derailed)) and the county has been a lot better off since railroads, air freight, airlines, and yes telcos were deregulated.

That is not to say that we can't regulate things we care about (data privacy, competition, etc). But looking with rose-colored lenses at ICC regulation is foolish. It's the worst sort of regulatory regime: where government bureaucrats are in charge of approving/denying the rail ties that go in the ground and how much can be charged for a ride.

<comment><USER4> Definitely no bias in the take you linked...

Whatever you wanna say about how regulation worked out for trains in the US, the situation in the early era of US rail was not a good one. It was one of the worst monopolies we've seen and was terrible for the workers.

<comment><USER8> What bias? As far as I can tell, the author has no connection to the rail industry.[1] As to your other point, the fact that early rail monopolies were bad doesn't mean that ICC-style regulation was good. You can have labor protections, antitrust enforcement, and safety regulations without having the government be involved in deciding how much a trip from Chicago to Milwaukee should cost. There is a reason there was a _bipartisan_ effort to get rid of those regulatory regimes in the 1960s-1990s, and why Europe copied those reforms in the 1980s-2000s.

[1] If you're referring to the fact that the article appears in the American Conservative, merely being conservative is not a "bias." In any event, left- leaning organizations like the Brookings Institute have featured similar coverage: [https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-success-of-the- stagge...](https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-success-of-the-staggers- rail-act-of-1980).

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't call Brookings left-leaning. Centre-right or better neoliberal.

I agree with your points though, the rail situation in the US is awful. Good regulation is hard to do, especially in a place where regulators typically do not share the interests of the people they are in the service of.

I don't think Europe copying the reforms you mention is necessarily a good endorsement of them. The rail situation in (at least Western) Europe has also become quite bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I totally agree that Google, Facebook and Amazon have too much power and too little accountability.

However they're all global companies and as bad as they are, I trust all of them more than I trust the US government (I am not American). Can you even imagine how their business would work when these are state entities? You're no longer buying ad placements from a marketing company, you're buying them from the US government. You're no longer selling product through a third-party storefront, you're selling through the US government. Google and Facebook, two of the most important information gateways, are now controlled by the US Congress and Senate. All that information on people all over the world is now in the hands of the US government.

The very thought of this terrifies me.

<comment><USER10> If Google and Facebook were nationalized, why would they need to sell ads?

<comment><USER11> Same reason that BBC Worldwide does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Governments have broken up large companies in the past, and that works out pretty well. Why suggest nationalization over that? The article only mentions "huge economies of scale", but doesn't do a good job convincing me that there isn't room for broken up Amazons, Google's, etc.

On the other hand, nationalization is a terrible idea for so many reason. It also goes against the fabric of the American economonic system.

I know it's opinion, but hard to believe that the guardian published this with how poorly written it is.

<comment><USER13> Considering their irresponsible painting of Whatsapp's end-to-end encryption re-key scheme as a "backdoor", I no longer can be surprised by The Guardian's lack of editorial quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The author spends a long time talking about how companies are planning to make money (shocking news!) on AI, and then concludes with "What's the answer? Nationalization!"

But he forgot to ask the question he's trying to answer.

This article doesn't even make sense.

</comment><comment><USER15> > _For the briefest moment in March 2014, Facebook's dominance looked under > threat. Ello, amid much hype, presented itself as the non-corporate > alternative to Facebook._

Okay, this is a terrible opener. Ello never appeared to have any greater traction than as a hipster fad, much less posing a material threat to Facebook.

Also, you can not nationalise any of the companies listed, because they are not British nor of Commonwealth country origin. Perhaps we could _nationalize_ , but that's not really Trump's style.

<comment><USER16> When Ello first arrived, I saw it as a very welcome competitor to Twitter/Facebook, and was using it. The questions of "how will Ello make enough money to survive?" came up. I was one of the vocal supporters of a paid account, as I would gladly pay them $5 a month just to help them continue to exist. In the end they took money from VCs, at which point I promptly stopped using them.

I can't speak for anyone else, but their move to take VC money instead of my money is largely what killed their traction for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The sad thing is that I actually trust Google, Amazon and Facebook (maybe less the last two) more than I do the British government. Obviously that can change but at least these giants understand tech. Their response in the Snowdon leaks to being tapped was correct. The UK's response to any perceived threat is to question the validity of core technologies such as encryption.

Nationalisation of the big tech services by government would just lead to pointless tail chasing as the they learn in the slowest possible way that the internet can route around the blockades they wish to implement. Giving the government something like Facebook is akin to giving the reins to some unchecked righteous teen who thinks they know how to make it all "better".

</comment><comment><USER18> >We've only begun to grasp the problem, but in the past, natural monopolies like utilities and railways that enjoy huge economies of scale and serve the common good have been prime candidates for public ownership. The solution to our newfangled monopoly problem lies in this sort of age-old fix, updated for our digital age. It would mean taking back control over the internet and our digital infrastructure, instead of allowing them to be run in the pursuit of profit and power.

The article is a mishmash of sensationalism and trending buzzwords.

OK let's accept the argument that said companies are "too big". Why nationalize them? To nationalize a company you first have to ask the question _what are the consequences for the nation if company X increases prices /fails/stops offering services?_ If the answer is not _dire_ , you don't touch them

I'll buy that search is important, but what's the vital utility of google apart from that, e-mail and maps? Android? Facebook is a chat/opinion/vanity medium, are we really saying that losing facebook (or whatsapp or whatever) access is a national emergency? I can't buy the argument about "our data". Privacy is important and mishandling of personal data should be severely punished, but that's not an argument for letting the state operate those companies - that's an argument for better laws and enforcement.

And how do you nationalize a globally accessed service with limited physical national presence anyway? This is getting more silly by the minute

There are antitrust/competition laws in every capitalist country, if a company is too big just break it - it won't be the first time or the last. If you think a company mishandles or has privileged access to something it shouldn't (your citizen's data) just punish it and limit its access.

<comment><USER19> >Facebook is a chat/opinion/vanity medium, are we really saying that losing facebook (or whatsapp or whatever) access is a national emergency?

Not a direct answer, but this triggered me to wonder how many relations/connections would be lost because people have no other details of each other than what's on facebook.

<comment><USER18> Sadly that's true, but the blame for this single point of failure falls entirely on those people. In this day and age it's inexcusable not to have multiple ways to contact people you care about.

<comment><USER20> I don't think it's fair to individualize the problem in that way. Just like yesterday with our security thread, it's not reasonable to expect every individual to go to the extremes necessary to prevent data leakage. There's plenty of excuses and the one you're most likely to get is "I didn't think it was a problem" or maybe "I have a busy life, how can I be expected to do/know that?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wow this guy does not mention taxation and the huge advantage governments bestow upon large companies by making it possible to engineer taxes away, an opportunity much less open to small companies. Instead he wants a merger with the biggest responsibility-shirking enterprise of all: the state!

</comment><comment><USER22> Imagine there would only be only one car company where you could by good, affordable cars for some reason. Now image this car company would not be an American one. I'd say there were national regulations, taxations and tariffs in about zero seconds.

<comment><USER23> There are already national regulations and taxes that apply to Google, Facebook and Amazon. Hell, there's a story on the front page right now about that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Let's do a mental exercise: the US government decides to nationalize those 3 companies.

1) Buying them would require at least 30% over their market caps, so let's say $1.3T for Google, and $1.3T for Amazon and FB combined, which is about 2/3 of the entire US Gov budget, so there's no way the government is paying fair market price for this

2) Since the government isn't paying fair market price, it essentially needs to seize the shares by force and then go through the courts for years to fight it off. Millions loose hundreds of billions of dollars in their ETFs, and their retirement savings take a massive hit

3) Even if the government seizes the shares by force, there are very few actual assets owned by those 3 companies, most of the value is in data, systems, growth expectations, employees, etc.

4) With the government forcibly taking control of those companies, countries around the world would take action and either take control of the local subsidiaries or just detach them from the US company, everything starts breaking down

5) Employees quit em masse, there's nobody able to run the systems, the government either has to arrest employees and force them to work, or simply let all the systems go down one by one. Hiring new people won't make a difference, as the learning curve is massive, and you wouldn't even have access to the systems

6) The products offered by those companies quickly fail, and the former employees open new companies that offer similar products, the government wiped out trillions of dollars from the global economy, a massive economic colapse ensues

7) As the global economy crumbles, the author blames the companies and the employees for not being willing to work for a shitty government job in a gulag with no opportunity for innovation, and refuses to take responsability for his/her stupid idea.

It doesn't take a lot to understand how stupid this idea is. I usually don't like to call things stupid, but whoever came up with this idea put so little critical thinking behind it, that it isn't just bad, it's stupid.

</comment><comment><USER24> What a terrible idea.

It's also a terrible article, since the conclusion isn't supported by the rest of the article. It gets in to some things about these new large companies that have problematical aspects but just grazes by on what those problems are. I guess the evil can just be assumed?

Since the main problems haven't been clarified there's no way to argue about if or how nationalizing would help solve them.

Meanwhile nationalizing has some huge issues of its own which aren't even hinted at here... (1) do we want the government controlling the platforms for our scocial interactions, purchases, and information retrieval? (2) these are global companies so you'd have to break both the company and the platforms they run by political boundary. How is that not nonsensical? There are other issues, but I'll leave it at two fatal flaws for now.

As an alternative, why not regulate the problematical aspects of these companies? Let's figure out each one and determine a regulatory framework that lets us get to the root of the problem without stifling, and develop the regulations to drive it.

</comment><comment><USER25> Did he bother thinking about what Google, Facebook and Amazon thought of the idea? Google is the worldwide leader in search because they have an army of the world's brightest engineers working 24/7 on improving their algorithms... Why would those people continue working if you seize their company and tell them they're now public employees? If they wanted to be public employees, don't you think they'd be doing that already? We are, after all, talking about people who have their pick of pretty much any job they want. Google isn't a product that you can bottle up or store in a warehouse. It's made of people. People who might have other opinions.

</comment><comment><USER26> Most people seem to be evaluating this question on an egalitarian premise: what's best for the greatest number of people? On that premise, taking money from very wealthy people and giving it to others will always seems appealing (even though it destroys wealth).

But let's evaluate it from the premise of justice. By what principle can we remove control of these companies from those who created them? From those who have worked there and earned equity in them? From those who have invested in the public stock in order to fund growth and earn a return? By what principle can a government interfere with a private contract, one that has governed how a group of people work together for 15 or 20 years, and unilaterally break it?

The argument is that the companies have too much power. But what kind of power? Can they take money out of your paycheck without your permission? Can they prevent you from erecting a building on your property without their approval? Can they imprison you for failing to appear at a hearing?

There is a difference between government power and economic power. Government power is the power to compel, and it the source of the power is the army and the police, or, more bluntly, the gun.

Economic power is the power to create. The source of economic power is the value that is offered. Sometimes a business offers something so valuable that people shape their lives around its presence and start to take it for granted. These are the businesses we punish most.

Should we turn economic power into government power? The immediate implication is frightening. All three of these companies have well-staffed legal departments challenging the government's requests for private information about their users. Who will fight those requests when these companies are agencies of the executive office?

The long term implications are devastating. Who will create the next Facebook, Google, or Amazon with the prospect of working 20 years and having it taken by force, as punishment for succeeding too much?

And would a nationalized Google have created a self-driving car? Would a nationalized Amazon have invented AWS? Would a nationalized Facebook invest in high-speed internet for Africa? Nationalization destroys growth.

Economic growth follows economic freedom. The world has experimented many times, and the theory and the experiments agree—Venezuela is only the most recent tragic example. At the root of any other argument is a desire to redistribute wealth.

</comment><comment><USER27> Relevant is this quote from another link recently posted here on HN: [https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/08/when-it- comes...](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/08/when-it-comes-to- internet-privacy-be-very-afraid-analyst-suggests/)

"Europe has more stringent privacy regulations than the United States. In general, Americans tend to mistrust government and trust corporations. Europeans tend to trust government and mistrust corporations. The result is that there are more controls over government surveillance in the U.S. than in Europe. On the other hand, Europe constrains its corporations to a much greater degree than the U.S. does. U.S. law has a hands-off way of treating internet companies. Computerized systems, for example, are exempt from many normal product-liability laws. This was originally done out of the fear of stifling innovation."

</comment><comment><USER28> In my opinion, apart from Medicare, Infrastructure, Law enforcement, Defence, Prison System and a few other should be nationalized, not Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft etc.

</comment><comment><USER29> As a non-american, I'd be 100x times more scared of these giants being owned by the US gov. Actually I'd completely stop using the services of the two of them that I still use. I'll take a nice faceless profit driven shady corporation any time over a foreign government.

Heck, what freaks me out the most about Facebook is that they act very _unlike_ any of the classical profit driven corporations... which may mean they have other more dubious interest than "just profit". Profit-drivenness is in a sense "pure" and "fair"... when something is state owned/controlled it becomes infused with _ideologies_ and these are known to make people do way more stupid and cruel things that the thirst for more money (hint: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol-Pot and their followers where _not_ profit-driven!)

</comment><comment><USER30> Is this really leftism or a provocation? Either way it backfires by playing right into the simplistic right narrative of theft and jealousy and makes the left look like clueless out of touch jokers with no solutions for innovation and a weakness for ill thought sledge hammer constraints. It's a disgrace.

The bigger problem is significant gains in western democracy and liberalism are being watered down with serious issues around regulatory capture, surveillance and accountability growing. Or current systems, laws and legislation would have been dealing with some of the privacy and market problems caused by Google, Facebook and Amazon.

The EU is trying but it's not in the US interest to interfere with the growth of these companies for many reasons from surveillance to market domination so they will not meet legislation here.

</comment><comment><USER31> We'd do better by nationalizing Comcast and Verizon, tbh.

</comment><comment><USER32> Why doesn't the author mention Microsoft? Why hasn't anyone else mentioned Microsoft in the comments?

Mobile might be what people use most of the time. But for productivity, specialty applications (X-Ray software, billing, medical applications, scientific, tool software, video editing, 3d rendering, ATMs, cash registers) Windows dominates. There is a huge body of software that can not be used on mobile.

Bill Gates threatened to withdraw Windows from the market during the anti- trust trial. I assumed this would also include security patches and key registration. This would have threatened millions of businesses and government services. If you can have any argument against a tech company operating against the public interest you have to include Microsoft.

<comment><USER33> You should look at the Four Horsemen talk by Scott Galloway. Microsoft just doesn't possess the same power and market cap proportional to its age as these three companies. Note, Apple is also not mentioned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> As "googling" becomes the most common way most people obtain information, I believe we do need some means to provide for this need w/o private enterprise, and lots of new regulations to defend the users, e.g. in case of Facebook. Persons' private data has become an acceptable good traded silently behind the scenes. The industry needs to gain a means to maintain the quality of software, and basic software needs must be guaranteed by those who we appoint to furnish us roads, electricity and water. WRT nationalisation, well, nations are slowly becoming obsolete as globalisation progresses, and what is most apt instead is that we engineer a globally distributed system at least for search.

</comment><comment><USER35> "We need" \- Who are _WE_?

As far as I know, Google and Facebook helped and helping people in places where almost everything is nationalized - by providing alternative to local gov-controlled media by making the information and data available to anyone with internet connection.

As far as I know, users are sharing and storing their data and trusting those organizations, rather than their governments. The problem starts when governments try to enforce the providers to tap or provide records our of their data centers.

The internet is good as is, and improved every day, and will continue improving. We need no nationalization over here.

Not really, thanks, but no!

<comment><USER36> > The internet is good as is, and improved every day, and will continue > improving

You consider mass centralization and being almost exclusively under the control of a few massive companies an "improvement"?

<comment><USER35> This will evolve and changed over time I believe. But, we are certainly in a far better place than we were 2 decades ago regarding freedom of speech and information availability, aren't we?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> By "we" does he mean the UK? How do you nationalise a multinational?

<comment><USER38> I thought that was funny as well. If anyone's going to be nationalizing them, it'd be the US, and I'd wager that non-US residents would like that even less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> You know, there's this simplistic view about the left - that it's only interested in taking things that other people have created, forcibly, and redistributing them.

I wonder, where that simplistic view comes from.

</comment><comment><USER40> One fascinating question is _which_ country should be responsible for nationalizing them. According to the Snowden leaks, the US government is already more than happy to cooperate with FB and Google and alike to spy on non-US citizens; handing the private data to the US government bureaucracy appears to be not much of an improvement from a point of view of an EU citizen

Maybe these megaliths should be split according to the national boundaries, not unlike how the AT&T / Bell System was structured as a combination regional telephone companies.

</comment><comment><USER41> FB, Google, Amazon should be split on many levels. The companies, the datacenters, the data. Especially the user data. The new system should federated, like email and SMS, with account and user data portability.

There should be public access to the unique datasets these companies collected from user interactions - all done in a privacy conscious way, for the betterment of sciences and society.

We can't let this valuable, unique data (that only exists in the largest companies of their field) benefit only those companies. It's our data, ultimately.

</comment><comment><USER42> I share the sentiment that we are dealing with a new kind of companies that don't fit into our "capitalism 2.0" thinking but I wonder: where are those crazy and capable people trying to compete with them in a realistic way? Probably optimizing ads and investment models. Please don't mention blockchains as a solution to this problem.

I have some very raw ideas about this. For example, I really think that Google search engine is unique and its complexity almost almost irreproducible but back in 2013 I wrote[1] a small piece thinking about layered search engines where web sites, specially the top ranked ones, improve their local search, and subsequent layers improve the global searches. Local searches within a specific site are usually awful. I am thinking of these web sites sharing the search "parameters" so we can integrate these information along the different layers. I find many flaws in this thinking but it is good to start discussing different ideas.

[1] [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bKpAf08NQa7ChQnGQh-- YwdP...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bKpAf08NQa7ChQnGQh-- YwdPa6o_Uah3JIKsf8SHqsY/edit)

</comment><comment><USER43> I agree that advertising should be nationalised and Facebook is a particularly good target. Advertising makes capitalism more centralized; whoever has the biggest budget gets all the customers. Having worked for both big corporations and small companies in the tech industry, I'm certain that big corporations are less efficient overall; I think that they are successful in spite of their innefficiencies because of their advertising power.

Centralization reduces the number of people who have wealth (increases inequality); there are so few of these people and their money is in such high demand (and they have so much of it) that they are effectively incapable of investing it efficiently - Their investing bandwidth is all used up (they are spammed-out with investment opportunities). If wealth was more spread out, more people could be investors and they would have more time to really think through and consider opportunities and because they would have less money on an individual basis, they would be much more careful about their investment decisions.

</comment><comment><USER44> Lets assume it would be possible to nationalize Google, Facebook and Amazon.

But by whom? US government?

So a nation should run a global company in everyone's interest? Everyone as in the entire population of the world?

Why would I as a non-US-person use a US government system?

Should I then as a non-US-person have a say in how the US run these companies?

This does not make sense.

I guess next article from Guardian will be like 'We Need to build a global government'.

</comment><comment><USER45> I believe that the fact that the article doesn't compare the solution of nationalization with the prevalent alternative of breaking-up says all you need to know about the quality of the article.

Hell, it doesn't even _mention_ the alternative, even though it's the prevalent one.

</comment><comment><USER46> Not sure if that's the right path to take, but I definitely agree something need to be done to add further consumer protections. Many people have a large chunk of their lives tied up tightly into their ecosystems, with no simple way out.

I've been reflecting on the impact of oauth / openid during the last few years. For some people, losing your Facebook or Google account could mean ending up locked out of dozens, if not hundreds, of services! Haven't checked Facebook's TOS, but Google's TOS says they can shut down your account at any time. Considering the size and reach of both, I think they should be required to at least provide a reasonable migration period before fully closing down an end-user's account.

<comment><USER47> At a minimum you should be able to export your data for some period after account suspension. At the moment are there any cases where they summarily delete everything?

I've been thinking about automating a periodic export but not got round to it. I know they have APIs and services for this under the DLF project but I've not looked into it yet. Does anyone have experience with this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The scary thing is that you'll find conservatives are going to come on board with this, if you pay attention to ruminations recently. They're very concerned about censorship. I am as well, but I'm too libertarian to want the government to be the solution.

</comment><comment><USER49> [https://joinmastodon.org](https://joinmastodon.org)

<comment><USER50> Don't bother. It turned into yet another microblogging echo chamber with nothing but propaganda and RSS newsbot reposts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> The politics of this discussion is really interesting. I think this might be the only substantial policy topic where The (progressive leaning) Guardian and (fairly right-wing) Breitbart[1] both push roughly the same approach.

The thing both have in common is that they are media destinations, and are deadly afraid of the the power Google and Facebook have to direct traffic.

Not sure why Amazon is included in this though..

[1] [http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/07/28/report-steve- bannon...](http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/07/28/report-steve-bannon-wants- google-facebook-to-be-regulated-like-utilities/)

</comment><comment><USER52> Nationalizing said companies might sound like a good idea at first but one must wonder if this is indeed for the better.

In theory, we own the Govt. in a democracy but it's often realized that in practice, it is owned by whosoever can afford to lobby ignorant politicians, who often care neither for the profit of public industries, nor for their constituency composed of generic ignoramuses.

This seems reminiscent of how 'communism' came to indicate a crony- capitalistic system with a single worst crony possible - the state itself. I for one don't believe public ownership is the same as being owned by a state agency.

</comment><comment><USER53> You know who I trust less than Google, Facebook and Amazon? The U.S. government.

Also "nationalize". The author seems blissfully unaware of the existence of other countries where said services operator (about 200 of them!).

</comment><comment><USER54> If one considers the big three to have become a problem then there is a simple solution. One should just stop using them. Why bring politics into it? The users made them what they are, the users can undo it.

</comment><comment><USER55> How can someone make this argument without considering broadband monopolies? Don't these limit our ability to even access content from the likes of Google, Facebook, or Amazon?

Why should "platform" monopolies be regarded as more important than ISP monopolies?

I'm not trying to say that there aren't platform monopolies. I just don't see the point in making them a higher focus when our ability to even _access_ these platforms is under threat by the current FCC.

</comment><comment><USER56> I am not opposed to public ownership of these companies per se. Letting them just go on uncontrolled does pose dangers we are just beginning to understand.

But given rhe massive surveillance and largely uncontrolled data hoarding our governments and their intelligence agencies have engaged in, I do not think handing control of Google, Facebook and so forth over to the (any) government is a good idea.

In the long run, we need to do something, bur I think we need to come up with a better idea.

</comment><comment><USER57> I doubt that it is possible to nationalize Facebook since it means that you no longer have a global user-base and creating inter-op between such complex systems is all but impossible especially when we have hundreds of countries. This means that any free actor with one system for the entire world will always provide a better experience, so as soon as you nationalize a service most users will migrate away from it making the whole thing moot.

</comment><comment><USER58> So currently, you have a choice _not_ to use google/fb/amazon. If they were to be nationalized (a truly silly idea), you may lose that choice.

<comment><USER47> This might look like a silly comment, but it really isn't. Let's say FB was nationalised. So now if you want to contact your local government office you do so through Facebook. The library service is accessed through FB. Drivers Licenses and professional certifications are linked to your FB profile as are medical and criminal records.

Government information and services would only be indexed in Google. Amazon would become a branch of the postal service and used to deliver passports and driving licenses. In practice you'd hardly be able to function without using them.

<comment><USER59> Don't know about other countries, but at least in Lithuania there are laws against such scenarios.

<comment><USER47> Sure, but in a scenario where the government was so interventionist and controlling that it nationalised a search engine, social engine and retailer how likely is it that such laws would stay on the books?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Never reading a Guardian story again, crypto-communists - no other word for them, pretty much every day some kind of idiotic leftist agenda is being pushed.

<comment><USER51> Steve Bannon proposed a fairly similar idea: [http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/07/28/report-steve- bannon...](http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/07/28/report-steve-bannon-wants- google-facebook-to-be-regulated-like-utilities/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> If the current state is 0, nationalization is 10. Maybe we should look for 5. Something like a law that requires customer generated content to be accessible via API, and allows customers to PERMANENTLY delete data they've generated, the code, and data can be subject to random audits. Companies will only be subject to the rules if their customer numbers are > x. Or something similar to that.

</comment><comment><USER62> Nationalization is probably too much, but indeed, these mega corporations lack accountability. Maybe we need a new kind of corporation, where users are voting stakeholders. It seems to me we, as users, gave up our personal information for too cheap. We underestimated (and still are underestimating) how much control over our lives we've given up in exchange for "free" services.

</comment><comment><USER63> What if we had tax brackets for corporations, as we do for individuals? Tie them to market share? As market share goes up, so does the tax rate.

</comment><comment><USER57> No, I don't want the people who are responsible for all of my data to also have the authority to put me in jail.

</comment><comment><USER64> That misses an even more important point:

At this point any kind of cloud environment should be considered public infrastructure. It is not so much about all these companies, it is more about being able to keep the things you bought after these services reach their inevitable deaths, as no company survives forever.

<comment><USER65> > At this point any kind of cloud environment should be considered public > infrastructure.

Why? Public infrastructure like sewer, or roads, is tightly coupled with the fact that it's close to impossible to gain physical land/space to build a second one. AWS/Azure on the other hand neither blocking you from accessing the land nor implemented any regulatory capture to prohibit you from building your own version of cloud infrastructure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Facebook in particular should really be governed by its users, whether that's indirectly under the public ownership of a democratic state, or directly through some built-in form of democratic governance. Nobody should have so much power without some form of accountability.

<comment><USER65> People had voted to give them this power, by signing up to use the services. They are free to leave any time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Flashback time, anybody remember when AIG insured multiple claims on the same pieces of property which were overvalued and unable to be paid for by an individual plebe's income, and got Congress to use everyone else's money to pay for this business practice by having the Treasury/Fed buy shares of AIG?

And then AIG used the surplus floated capital to give bonuses to the executives and traders, because that quarter happened to be awesome, numerically.

And then AIG was part of a lawsuit that sued the Treasury/Fed under the expropriation clause of the 5th Amendment because the value of the shares was not deemed correct?

Well. ultimately the Fed made like an 80 billion profit, 1/12th of what they make from annual tax collection, so if they keep that up maybe they won't even levy income taxes to fund the Federal Government's general operations anymore.

With that logic, nationalize all the things because I can't stand paying for the general operation of this plunder.

Partial sarcasm.

</comment><comment><USER67> I guess Netflix didn't make the cut - even though its the N in "FANG"... Maybe the hype around Netflix is overblown. After all, Google has Youtube and Amazon has Prime Video which probably give Netflix a run for its money.

</comment><comment><USER68> So the problem is that one big organization has all this data, and the solution is to put it all under the umbrella of a different organization?

How does that help unless we assume that government can do less bad stuff with it than a private organization?

</comment><comment><USER69> Why don't we just nationalize the compute power? There is a billion dollar barrier to entry to offer services like Youtube for free. Nobody is going to do it because they don't have a giant Ad company to subsidize it.

<comment><USER70> Why nationalize what we can distribute? There is no reason a future youtube has to be centralized and many good reasons that it shouldn't be.

<comment><USER41> I am amazed that there is no open source, distributed search engine to rival Google. We let Google get too much data about us. Search engine research has advanced a lot, we can use that.

<comment><USER71> "Search engine research has advanced a lot, we can use that."

A strong part of Google's search engine results is leveraging the data it has from Google Maps (including the almost unique Google Street View), actions tracked through the user's Google account, and proprietary image-recognition technologies. It's hard for another party to compete with that; Google hasn't been a mere web crawler in a long, long time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> We need [Trump]'s administration to run Google.

We need [Trump]'s administration to run Facebook.

We need [Trump]'s administration to run Amazon.

In 4 years, substitute your own -- no thanks.

No offense, Nick Srnicek, but please keep the authoritarianism on that side of the pond.

</comment><comment><USER73> Nationalizing doesn't mean the decisions won't be for the benefit of a single person, a single person can manipulate them regardless, and the people will support it.

</comment><comment><USER74> What would happen to those companies if nationalized? I'm pretty sure most googlers et Al don't want to be government employees and would quit immediately.

</comment><comment><USER75> Guardian just went full communist. Never go full communist.

</comment><comment><USER76> Or, I think the other way is more sensible or probably already in motion -- we need let Google, Facebook and Amazon govern.

</comment><comment><USER77> I think we should start small, from, say, nationalizing the authors' personal possessions and primary residence.

<comment><USER78> We're coming for your toothbrush, 0xbear.

<comment><USER77> μολὼν λαβέ :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> I never imagined I would support this position, but after seeing CloudFare CEO disabling a website just because he woke up in a bad mood, I fully support that any corporation should

\- either be not allowed to amass quasi-monopolistic power

\- or if they want/have to, they should be heavily regulated (eg. utilities) and not allowed to discriminate based on their "values"

</comment><comment><USER80> A further alternative - require that certain businesses that reach this level of monopolistic influence transition into some kind of Public Benefit Corporation.

I don't quite know what this would look like, but I'm thinking of some kind of framework where we develop controls and accountability mechanisms on a company-by-company basis.

</comment><comment><USER81> Who is John Galt? (I'm not a huge fan of the book, but it's so fitting here.)

</comment><comment><USER82> As someone who owns stocks of Google and Amazon, I'd like to compare the effect the title of this article had on me, to what a woman would feel if she stumbled upon an article titled "We need to legalize rape : here is why."

I'm all for free speech, but this guy is dancing on a thin line.

<comment><USER78> That's a really terrible comparison, and you should be ashamed of yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> which nation?

perhaps, instead, we need to tokenize them:

[https://blog.bigchaindb.com/tokenize-the- enterprise-23d51baf...](https://blog.bigchaindb.com/tokenize-the- enterprise-23d51bafb536)

</comment><comment><USER84> If you nationalise Google and Amazon, say good bye to innovation.

</comment><comment><USER85> We need to stop posting links to the Guardian.

</comment><comment><USER86> The answer is no.

</comment><comment><USER87> That's the _worst_ idea I've heard this week.

First of all, "Nationalizing" corporations is not something that free societies do.

Second, the effect of this would be to further stifle competition from smaller businesses. Which is also not something that free societies do.

I question the motives of the author.

<comment><USER88> You keep saying "not something that free societies do" as though that phrase in itself has meaning, but fail to explain why. From a socialist's pov putting a profitable industry in the domain of _everyone_ and sharing the profits is freeing capital from the few and providing an (more)equal share to all. It's not capitalism but that does not mean it isn't "freedom".

What is "freedom"? Market competition The way Amazon, Uber etc have been set up, using hundreds of millions in investment, able to operate against smaller competitors for literally years without breaking even until the opposition is crushed and consumers are herded into being customers... is that freedom? Maybe for the already established wealthy. For everyone else it's an unfair advantage. There is no freedom for the average Joe to start a publishing an distribution powerhouse

I agree it's a terrible idea to nationalize these companies, but citing 'freedom' as the reason why is not why it's a bad idea. It's a bad idea because it would lead to excessive bureaucracy, higher prices and is unlikely to benefit the competition much. It might help governments get those companies to pay some tax though.

<comment><USER89> >From a socialist's pov putting a profitable industry in the domain of _everyone_ and sharing the profits is freeing capital from the few and providing an (more)equal share to all. It's not capitalism but that does not mean it isn't "freedom".

I don't believe all ideologies and their definitions need to be given equal respect. Socialists shouldn't get to just redefine "freedom" to mean a government monopoly running major industries, by outlawing private citizens from owning productive enterprises in those industries, and have everyone else accept their definitions as equally valid as a classical liberal's.

Think about it practically for a moment: what is the government going to do when private citizens in another country fire up thousands of servers and begin providing web services to the people within the government's jurisdiction? Put up a firewall? Start raiding anyone running a relay node that bypasses the firewall? How is that congruent with any reasonable definition of freedom?

We can pretend that we're frameless and judging all perspectives as equally valid, but in actuality that will never happen, as it would make any sort of meaningful communication impossible. Someone could argue war is peace, slavery is freedom, etc, and there would be no way to reject their statements as unequivocally wrong. We would be uttering words to each other that mean completely different things to different people, because we would no longer follow the basic convention of language, which is that the widely observed and long established definition trumps the unorthodox one.

<comment><USER10> The whole point is that these companies are inherently resistant to competition. Nationalization doesn't require limiting access to any other service or restricting competition in any way.

<comment><USER47> In which case there is no need to nationalise, because by definition if another competitor can be created then the government can create one itself.

All nationalising would do is give the government a leg-up in having an existing user base. In practice government inertia would lead to the service atrophying and becoming outdated and overburdened with bureaucratic controls and costs. Page & Brin, Bezos and Zuckerberg (or someone new) would each raise capital, start their own competing services and in a few years time we'd be back where we started.

This whole idea is so utterly misconceived and pointless it blows my mind how many people here are trying to justify or defend it. Unless you actively regulated to prohibit competing private services, it would be doomed from he start and if such regulation was enforced - literally banning other search engines including Bing, banning other social networks, banning any other online retail businesses, the lurch towards dystopianism would create a very different world to the one we live in. Even China hadn't come even close to anything like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> Nah.

Just rip them apart and start going after them for anti-trust reasons. Instead of going after Apple for harming consumers with their ebook BS (actually, in addition to) go after Amazons monopoly on the space.</comment>


Open Knowledge Maps – A visual interface to the world's scientific knowledge - <AUTHOR> http://openknowledgemaps.org/ <comment><USER2> Interesting idea.

I created a map with the keyword "information". A few odd categories returned:

\- Scientific publishing, Metacognition, Dogs

\- Twitter, Nutrition, Socioeconomic aspects of health

\- Graphs, Quality of life

(EDIT: formatting)

</comment><comment><USER3> How do they maintain a useful number of and a high quality for links for each node, without the scalability problems of a human editor?

When I've thought about systems like this one, I always get stuck on that problem. If you automatically create every link between nodes, you end up with terrible signal-to-noise for the user; even 50 links (I'm guessing at a threshhold) seems too many to read through in order to find the one you want, and too many for the user to conceptualize. Imagine how many links there are to nodes like evolution or relativity.

The solutions I can think of:

* Categorize links, so the user can narrow their search

* Rate links by value? Relevance? How do you do this without a human editor?

* Efficient user-created filters for links

* Directional links: e.g., Many nodes may link to relativity, but relativity links to only a few

* Expert human editor, who can identify valuable links, but that wouldn't seem to scale

* Crowd-sourced links, but I would expect quality and signal-to-noise to be too low for serious research

IME, for serious research, nothing automated approaches the value of a professional reference librarian.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for your comments! The idea is to turn this into a collaborative effort further down the line, involving librarians and the other communities participating in the organisation and exploration of scientific knowledge. Read the full vision here: [https://science20.wordpress.com/2016/05/11/its- time-to-chang...](https://science20.wordpress.com/2016/05/11/its-time-to- change-the-way-we-discover-research/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Title seems pretty inaccurate.

I searched "computer", and it came up with some strange results. Poking around a bit, it says it's based on "PLOS", which after jumping through that link and poking around some more it seems to be mostly for biology/medical related fields of research.

<comment><USER6> Yes, Open Knowledge Maps is currently in the beta and only queries against PLOS which, as you have correctly stated, covers mostly BioMedical topics. But this will hopefully change in the near future and we will be able to cover more fields of research.

We have also currently deployed a simpler algorithm due to performance issues on our server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is all very cool, but I'm having trouble figuring out what the visualization actually means. I'm assuming that overlapping bubbles have more in common, but how is that calculated? Just mousing over the bubbles doesn't reveal any immediate connections or shared papers.

<comment><USER6> The position of the papers and the clusters (bubbles) are determined with NLP techniques based on the fulltexts of the papers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Ancient Greek Medicine" got me data about Slavs, Italians, Point Mutation, and Neurotransmitters, but nothing about Ancient Greece?

</comment><comment><USER9> This is exactly what I'm building! Awesome

<comment><USER4> Drop us a line, maybe we can join forces!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What's up with the fake progress bar?

</comment><comment><USER4> Should work again now, please check!

</comment><comment><USER11> The search time :(

</comment><comment><USER12> it did not work</comment>


SpaceX's Explosion Reverberates Across Space, Satellite and Telecom Industries - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/05/business/spacexs-explosion-reverberates-across-space-satellite-and-telecom-industries.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> Compare the failure rate of SpaceX, or indeed the launch industry in general, to the failure rate of large IT projects. Any large IT organization should be jealous of SpaceX's incredible reliability!</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone else notice the lack of spam recently? - m-watson In both my gmail and Microsoft exchange email I have been getting close to no spam over the last week and a half or so. I usually get a few spam or spam-ish emails in both accounts every day but recently none. It seems odd that it timed up with a lot of places slowly (or quickly) shutting down and having people stay home. Just wondering if other people have seen this happening. <comment><AUTHOR> I don't really get spam, but the ssh brute forcing bots all seemed to just stop a few days back. I've never seen that before.

[Edit] Scratch that, a few of them started back up today.

<comment> m-watson Yea you made me just go check a bunch of my logs too. I still had the normal brute force level at least for the last few days. Still strange though.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I'm a developer with an app idea, but no design skills. - <AUTHOR> I have an idea for a mobile app and have actually started coding it for Android--targeting hi-res large-display phones first with ICS+ just to keep my initial market small enough. I started writing code thinking that I'm only after an MVP so using the built-in Holo UI shouldn't matter, but now I feel that it's too simple and ugly that no one would be interested to try it out. My problem is, I have absolutely no design skills. I can use Photoshop and read tutorials to accomplish a thing or two, but I don't know where to get the perspective for my app's design--what colors it should have, how the icons should look, how the backgrounds will be textured, how the components will be arranged in the screen, etc.<p>Is there any online resource I can look at to maybe get some inspiration and advice? I really have no idea how to approach this problem and how to choose an app design. <comment><USER2> I'm not much of a designer, but one thing I've picked up from watching folks build convincing designs is that it's really an iterative process. The first crack at it might be just passable, but as you learn and implement new things, you can come up with a fairly compelling design. In fact, the first step should just be some ugly, pencil-drawn wireframes.

I think the first and most important thing to get right is making sure you're solving the user's problem. Create user stories, and try to really put yourself in the shoes of the user. Training yourself to think like someone who is non-technical and perhaps a casual app user is often the most difficult step, but once you do that, it's almost like programming the experience and walking them through the app. Make the workflow as intuitive as possible ("don't make me think" principle), then worry about polish.

Some useful resources that I've found useful and that might serve you well:

<http://bootstrappingdesign.com/> <http://designforhackers.com/> <http://hackdesign.org/>

Keep in mind I'm pretty green as well, but I hope this helps. Hopefully some more experienced folks can chime in and call my b.s.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for recommending "Design for Hackers!" (I wrote it)

I think your advice is good. So much design is really about thinking. If you have a clear picture of what the experience is like for your user, and can create some wireframes or pencil sketches based upon that, then it makes the following steps much easier.

<comment><USER2> Awesome to have you respond on this thread... by "more experienced folk," I didn't realize I'd get the author of one of the books I recommended to comment here. Your writings and talks have helped me get a better understanding of design, even if I'm still a complete noob. Thanks!

<comment><USER3> Awesome to hear all of that. I'm so glad that it's been helpful. That's why I do it, after all!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are some very rudimentary resources here: <http://developer.android.com/design/downloads/index.html> and guides can be found within that stack.

The best advise I can give you is keep it as simple as possible. You don't need a logo, a stellar design, etc. Just build a clean interface that adhere's to the standards and you'll be fine.

People, especially initially, care far more about it solving a problem than how it looks doing so. Just make sure it's usable and you'll be find.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've found some pretty amazing templates/themes while doing iOS development. Between that and emulating apps I like, I do OK.

</comment><comment><USER6> I remember a YC funded company targeting precisely people like you, basically a design marketplace.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think I should spend money on the design yet though, because this would be the app's first iteration and a lot of things will change later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can't you buy a template for a couple dollars?</comment>


Love Zombies? Thank the Public Domain - <AUTHOR> https://blog.archive.org/2020/02/24/love-zombies-thank-the-public-domain/ <comment><USER2> imo copyright should last 30 years from creation. Thats plenty of time to make a profit and it also allows things to fall in to public domain while they are still culturally relevant. Currently anything made within your lifetime will not be public until well after you have died which is a shame. It would be great if all of the past content which is now slipping in to irrelevancy could be revived by the public domain.

<comment><USER3> I think its fair that renewals would be allowed beyond that, but that the cost of doing so should increase on an exponential scale. That way the value of keeping a thing copyrighted would eventually be eclipsed by its value as a public property, fulfilling the social contract of limited protection in exchange for eventual public ownership.

<comment><USER4> That probably makes copyright renewals cost-effective for corporations making millions but not so for an author getting a nice $5k/yr annuity. (Or pick your numbers. But making cost a decision point for renewal definitely favors the big guys.)

<comment><USER5> Have the fee be based time but scale with profits. So that author making 5k/year's fees may only would only have the fee increase by a few hundred per renewal whereas a company making 500k/year would see their fees go up by a few thousand per renewal etc. As an example.

<comment><USER6> Then you kick off an arms race where regulators are constantly fighting to keep up with increasingly sophisticated money laundering techniques to obscure how valuable an IP actually is. A lot of money would be siphoned off by lawyers just so they can fight back to a stalemate.

Why make it complicated? Just let works fall into the public domain after a couple decades.

<comment><USER7> Indeed, the one thing that can't be manipulated by dubious actors is time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I find it fascinating that prior to the Copyright Act of 1976, any work without the correct copyright notice would automatically enter the public domain.

In this case, it's interesting to see how the incentives for preventing such a mistake are skewed. It was the responsibility of the distributor to ensure the correct copyright notice, but they stood to gain when they didn't (and reportedly[1] kept all of the profits).

[1] [https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2011/10/10/how-a- copyright-m...](https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2011/10/10/how-a-copyright- mistake-created-the-modern-zombie/)

<comment><USER4> What you're describing is the basic argument against orphan works legislature of various types. Disney won't forget to renew. But lots of individual authors and their estates will and the big corporations will sweep in and profit.

Not saying I endorse that view--especially with reasonably long protections prior to renewal--but that's the argument.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I did an exam in European and International Copyright Law in college even though I studied Computer Science. Based on my knowledge this whole story about forgetting the copyright logo and entering the publich domain sounds like a myth/fictional.

Copyright of movies covers the video frames but it does not cover the concept of the story. The only part that could be protected are maybe fictional names of characters, cities and maybe special breeds. But the movie does not even mention the word zombie. So anyone would have been able to use the word zombie freely. The general concept of someone dead coming back alive is not protected by copyright simply because general concepts are not protected.

Even if somehow the movie was called ZOMBIE and they copyrighted and patent it, others would have been able to do movies/comics/books WITHOUT using the word zombie.

In the Walking Dead, zombies are called walkers so they would have got around the zombie patent by calling zombies something else.

<comment><USER8> Also Shawn of the dead is a parody and copyright has a special section to allow parody/satire of other works if it's clear they are not the original work but are a parody of it.

<comment><USER8> To sum up I think more than a failure on copyright notice it was a failure in BRANDING. Branding requires special names. Terminator can be easily protected but if the movie was called Rising of the robots it would have not been possible to protect it. BRANDING is an important way to create a moat of defence around the product. Others can copy the product but not the branding

<comment><USER9> I'm not even sure that Terminator can be so easily protected. [0]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminators_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terminators_\(film\))

<comment><USER8> Yes indeed is very difficult to protect names without trademark them. That's why many startups/companies invent completely new names (ex Google). Once you trademark them it's easier to protecte them than a word that was already existing in the English language like terminator.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I know a lot of artists and musicians (I work with them every day) and for considerable amount of them Copyright is absolutely NOT about money, it's about values. The work of art is a part of a creator which is at the same part separated but lacks its own will, so it's natural for the creator to wish some control over said part's faith.

They don't want their work to be used in ads, printed on cheap paper with atrocious covers, being used in a political context, heard in hold music or in elevators, and the list goes on and on.

I'm conmpletely split up on the issue. I'm pro-pirating when it comes to academia papers and textbooks, pro-copyleft, anti-streaming, wholeheartedly support freedom of information, and all of that, but I deeply respect the notions mentioned in the first part of my post and I don't know what would be a sound combination of these views.

<comment><USER11> Most of the arguments for long copyright terms apply to creative work by one or a few named individuals.

Perhaps a start would be to slash copyright terms on works created by businesses. Companies would try to game this but the problems don't seem insurmountable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The mouse has caused a creative dark age with it's aggressive legal pursual of the extension of copyright. Every time the original mickey mouse cartoon approaches public domain copyright gets more mutated and unwieldy. Shameful.

</comment><comment><USER13> I love zombies and I don't really want to watch old movies.

What are you guys list of best zombie movies? I've watched a ton in the emule days but unfortunately don't know the name of most of these.

My favorite weirdly is not a true zombie movie but a parody called shaun of the dead.

Anyway I hope I'm starting a thread of good zombie movies :)

<comment><USER14> _Juan of the Dead_ , if you can stand subtitles.

EDIT: While looking up the trailer, I noticed another one that looks, well...unique. It's named _Fido_ from 2006.

<comment><USER13> Fido is interesting! It was novel enough to watch it if you like zombie movies, not the movie of the year though :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Funny</comment>


OOM relation to vm.swappiness=0 in new kernel - <AUTHOR> http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2014/04/28/oom-relation-vm-swappiness0-new-kernel/

<comment><USER2> Two observations:

First, setting vm.swappiness to 0 does not have the beneficial impact that people say it does, and yet it's religious dogma to set it that way on MySQL servers. To my knowledge there has never been a single article published that clearly demonstrates its benefit under a controlled test. The evidence of any benefit is anecdotal at best.

Second, you can easily exclude any process from being killed by the kernel's OOM killer: "echo -17 > /proc/PID/oom_adj"

<comment><USER3> > Second, you can easily exclude any process from being killed by the kernel's > OOM killer: "echo -17 > /proc/PID/oom_adj"

Doing such with a large memory process is a sure way to cause a server to shut down and reboot when it runs out of memory. OOM killer is bad to large memory processes, but the alternative is worse.

Ideally you don't want to swap, you definitely don't want to preemptively swap, but even swapping is better than rebooting a server.

<comment><USER2> I don't know about "definitely." Swap death is often worse than a reboot because (a) response latency goes through the roof, effectively making the service down anyway, and (b) you probably can't log in anyway because of I/O saturation (ssh, shell etc. could well be swapped out).

<comment><USER4> Indeed. I've had zLinux boxes using VDISKs for swap that get it to the terrible state where the VDISK can sustain swapping at a high enough rate that Oracle will be able to accept and maintain connections, but not do any work. The application attached to the database is unable to see this as a failure and flop over to the other node in the RAC.

<comment><USER5> Sounds like underspecified failure conditions. Rarely are they as clean as, "I am dying, poof!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks like a bug. The kernel shouldn't raise OOM if there's swap available, the swappiness=0 should just make it not swap unless absolutely necessary. From my interpretation of the commit, it's supposed to improve the implementation in this respect. Quote:

"avoid swapping out pages of important process or process groups while there is a reasonable amount of pagecache on RAM so that we can satisfy our customers' requirements."

But apparently it's deciding to not swap even when there isn't RAM available, failing to allocate, and not falling back to swap.

It's also possible the bug is only in the redhat kernel, due to the correctness of this commit depending on some other commit not backported.

<comment><USER7> I think thats a matter of taste. Not saying i'm disagreeing with you, but I can see the reasoning behind not swapping when you set swappiness to 0.

Looking at the patch, it looks like swapiness=1 now does what the old 0 did. Would that not cover your use cass?

<comment><USER6> "Looking at the patch, it looks like swapiness=1 now does what the old 0 did."

Yeah, it seems, but the commit message, in my incomplete understanding, contradicts what you're saying. Also, I wouldn't feel so confident making claims about what the changes do, not without looking at the context and at least some understanding of that code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What is the page doing with that code display? As soon as you click into it or select text inside (just like that, because you tend to do that while reading), it unexpectedly changes into some kind of plain text view and it seems you need to reload to get it back.

<comment><USER8> looks like it's switching to copy-friendly presentation, so that code can be copied without line numbers (?).

I'm able to toggle between plain text and syntax highlighting via the '<>' icon @ the top of the code blocks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Talking about OOM: why is it that the only negotiation protocol between the kernel and userland is to hard-kill the userland processes when out of memory. I wish there was some sort of soft-OOM where the application would get notice and be given a bit of advance to free memory.

</comment><comment><USER10> Important news, thank you. I don't expect to see things that directly impact my servers here, but it's a welcome surprise.

</comment><comment><USER11> IMHO, RHEL kernels should never be considered stable or production-ready. Sadly, support contracts sometimes require their use.

<comment><USER2> On what basis is your opinion founded? Most of the top websites in the world use RHEL or one of its brethren (aside from Google).

<comment><USER11> Yeah, and they use it mainly due to support contracts and industry certifications. Doesn't make it a good idea.

They used to release RHEL kernels with hundreds of patches that could be applied in line, or removed/fixed individually. Now they keep one tree that they manage privately and release only the fully-patched source, without any documentation about what's changed or why. Your only hope of figuring out what has been changed or getting help in fixing it is to pay for support, or browse the commits at Oracle's RedPatch ([https://oss.oracle.com/git/?p=redpatch.git](https://oss.oracle.com/git/?p=redpatch.git)). Basically, a RHEL kernel is an obscure product designed to make them money.

The primary reason RHEL kernels aren't stable is the bug this thread is about. There is no valid reason to backport a change to swappiness behavior into a 'stable' kernel. The whole idea behind 'stable' is _it works, so don 't change it_. But RHEL has other ideas.

RHEL kernels are more likely to contain security holes than a vanilla kernel of the same version, partially due to the backporting of new or changing functionality. They also don't get as much testing and scrutiny as the vanilla tree. Besides internal testing, changes that aren't included in stock linux kernels are introduced into Fedora for their users to beta-test. Over time we've seen plenty of security holes make it into otherwise 'stable' RHEL kernels and tools by RHEL backports. It's usually a feature they're importing that brings along with it additional attack surface, or introduces a hole in pre-existing functionality.

It's also a big pain in the ass to get a RHEL kernel to support something a normal kernel would support, due to the major changes. You also have to modify whatever patches you want to apply on top of RHEL since most people create patches targeting the vanilla tree and not RHEL. In general if you have a problem with the RHEL kernel you have a lot better chance of success by throwing it out and downloading a vanilla kernel.

At this point RHEL's kernel is a nightmare hybrid of changes going into a tree that nobody else uses because they've moved to 3.x trees for new enterprise releases. Between vanilla 2.6.32 and RHEL's 2.6.32-431 there are 9144 files changed, 3,563,927 insertions, 699,721 deletions. The diff is 45MB compressed. The RHEL sources are 102 megabytes larger than the vanilla source. And in case anyone asks, no, this swappiness change was _not_ introduced into the vanilla kernel's long-term support tree (which is still maintained for this same kernel version). ([http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/2.6.32-stable.html](http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/2.6.32-stable.html))

<comment><USER2> I get what you're saying, but none of this (except for your contention about introducing security issues via backported patches) has anything to do with its _reliability_, which is what most people would interpret "stability" or "production readiness" to mean.

As for your specific contention about the stability or security of backported patches -- can you provide a citation that RHEL kernels have any more fixes per year than, say, Ubuntu kernels? (Which BTW have their own backported patches.)

<comment><USER11> The posted article is about a backported feature that changed expected behavior and killed mysql processes. That is literally instability introduced by a backported patch. The security/stability problems in backported features speak for themselves; you don't get bugs in features that don't exist.

I'm not making an argument about who has more changes. RHEL just has bad changes. Bad because they're changing expected functionality. Bad because they're introducing unnecessary features. Bad because they increase exposure to security and stability bugs. Bad because their changes aren't documented publicly. Bad because they keep trying to support an antiquated platform that every other enterprise has moved on from. Bad because it's much more difficult to modify, and includes less support for modern hardware (unless it's patched in, again increasing problems). Bad because they have less testing and review. Bad because it creates vendor lock-in. I can't actually think of a single good reason to use a RHEL kernel, other than the vendor-locked-in support contracts and industry certifications that use RHEL as a standard.

<comment><USER2> I respectfully disagree that you can come to such a conclusion from a single example (especially since this change was also introduced into the mainline). I think the benefits of RHEL, including its excellent record of long-term support, outweigh minor occasional trip-ups like this.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Automated Timekeeping for Lawyers – Feedback Needed - <AUTHOR> We have launched Probilly.com and our tool automates email, calendar and document time tracking very precisely.
We will release a Chrome plugin to track browser behavior and phone integrations asap.
Can somebody tell us how to bring this closer to lawyers? We are checking the tools that are in the market and they suck but have a lot of consultants to push.
Feedback for the tool or on selling strategies wanted!
Thanks everybody!
Feel free to reach out for any questions or requests.
Best Ben <comment><USER2> None of the lawyers I know use Chrome and use whatever their corporate IT provides for them (IE/Edge/FF/Safari). Most also don't use Macs.

You're also going to need to provide some "proof" that you don't leak privileged information, not sure exactly how you do that.

<comment><USER2> Pinged one of my lawyer friends, their response:

How is this different than intapp?

Everyone just uses a spreadsheet anyways, maybe target solo practicioners who need better billing.

<comment><AUTHOR> -> Intapp: We're creating a customer profile and matching your activity from email, calendar, word, phone into that. So you as a lawyer can just check what happened and approve. I hope Intapp is not that far. :) Our hook is that we really deeply integrated into O365 and use that information to pull other information from Android (Beta) for instance. So the idea is, that you just work for a month, open our app and see what happened in detail.

->target: We're at this point targeting anyone and see who responds. :) We go responses across the board, because of that we are not sure where to focus at this point.

Thanks man!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> There was a company in Portland that did the same using alexa skills. The company folded after two years (and after raising money).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, as far as I know, they automated the time entry process. So you need to track your time manually and can push it in your DB (CLio was it?) with voice. Means you have to sit and say: 1) Alexa for Client A please create a time entry. 2) What do you want 3) Please add an entry about an email i read 4) ok how much time 5) it was 5 minutes 6) what was the topic?

....

Maybe I am overly dramatic, but we capture the time automatically and you just need to say yes. :)

Do you know more about why they failed? Am I wrong?

Thx!!!

<comment><USER3> There was a blog that I read with the founder. I am not sure how they worked.

The problem with this kind of product is that there are competing with pen and pencil (or the other way that lawyer track their time), so it is hard to change habits.

<comment><AUTHOR> Remember where? Can you find the link maybe?

Thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Charlie Munger: Investing in AI [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6kNl5it9L4&list=PLrAXtmErZgOeTplq3WVIwlGn8dC9lbjy3 <comment><USER2> I don't know anyone who has found Watson even a tiny bit useful. I've seen demo projects done but results are always very underwhelming and the whole thing is just an IBM meat grinder marketing funnel.

<comment><USER3> Watson is a sham marketing term. There is no "Watson", it's a constellation of consulting services and fragments of rotting software that no one wants to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Something of a nitpick, but just because it took me really quite an extremely long time to figure out what he meant:

The line should be "we're so short _on_ the real thing". As quoted, it sounds like he's trying to say we're short of an achievement (e.g. achieving actual general AI).

He does erroneously say what's quoted though, so the title isn't incorrect, but perhaps they should have [sic]ed it; he says "short o' the real thing" but I don't think "o'" has ever been short for "on".

<comment><USER5> 'Short of' has at least two meanings:

1) Lacking in quantity (e.g. "I'm short of money this month").

2) Not having reached some point on a continuum (e.g. "He stopped short of claiming to be _best_ singer in the world.").

<comment><USER4> Wiktionary confirms your first definition (2nd definition at [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/short_of](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/short_of) \- wiki's 1st and 3rd definitions seem like the same thing in my mind) but other dictionaries don't seem to support this (OED only has wiki's 3rd listed) and I've certainly never encountered it before now. Odd.

I would say I'm short _on_ money this month.

Etymologically my thinking was that it comes from "to fall short of" \- e.g. to be too short to reach a point. Fitting your 2nd definition.

<comment><USER5> See #1 on this page:

[https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/thesaurus/short_of](https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/thesaurus/short_of)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can we get a 2016 tag please? This is from May 2016 interview on CNBC:

[https://www.cnbc.com/video/2016/05/02/munger-gates-on- future...](https://www.cnbc.com/video/2016/05/02/munger-gates-on-future-of- ai.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm going to be _that guy_ today - can we get a non-clickbait title?

<comment><USER8> I don't think this is clickbait, since the entire point of the video is the one quote. However, I do think the entire post is useless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Be assured Mr. Munger, there are now millions of smart, hard working with perfect GPAs and degrees slaves, so with enough hours of work of these slaves, you will be able to get the real thing, so you can lay off enough slaves, make higher profits easier and become even richer.</comment>


Seeking - How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting - <AUTHOR> http://slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2224932

<comment><USER2> My brain must be off because I hate the latter two.

<comment><USER3> Same, but why I keep coming back to HN for these irrelevant stories I don't know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "[Brian Knutson] has consistently found that the pictures inside our skulls show that the possibility of a payoff is much more stimulating than actually getting one."

There's evolutionary motivation to stop and smell the roses. Who knew? (Or at least to walk a little slower past them.)

</comment><comment><USER5> This is the type of information you can use to good effect for making your website stickier.

At the same time, you need to be careful to make sure you don't abuse the power you gain from these techniques.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hm. This probably applies more to HN then to Google.</comment>


You cannot have at-least-once broadcast - <AUTHOR> http://250bpm.com/blog:61

<comment><USER2> While I understand the intent, I feel that is much less rigorous than the 2 problems mentioned ("You Cannot Have Exactly-Once Delivery", and CAP), both deal with the fact the network is unreliable and _only_ that - even if you had unlimited RAM and disk, the two proofs would still hold.

Here a possible solution is proposed " _Send the message to Bob even if Carol is offline and store the message to Carol for later delivery._ ", and is really just handwaved away by saying no one has unlimited disk space (or a 24/7 ops team) (also doesn't Amazon sort of solve this problem?). I'm sure that is a practical limitation, but for the sake of building reliable systems I'm unsure its strong one.

If thats the case, then one could also argue Raft also isn't linearizable, because the replicated log file could get really large and no one has unlimited disk space.

<comment><USER3> It's just silly. You can't have any delivery to anyone, because if they're offline your message buffer might get too large for your disk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The argument is a bit ridiculous - simple logging of all messages sent also requires the same storage, and that is commonly done whenever each individual message and it's delivery is considered important.

As long as the storage requirements are bounded by number of messages times number of recipients times some reasonable constant, it _is_ perfectly feasible to assume that you will have sufficient storage; the storage requirements are finite and predictable, and it's only a matter of your choice and priorities.

Acknowledging that doing X will require Y petabytes of storage and cost Z dollars may mean that you won't do it, but it's very, very different from stating that it's impossible.

</comment><comment><USER5> Also the earth could be demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, so you can't even have at-least-once delivery to a single recipient.

It's amazing how much you can get done without perfect guarantees though.</comment>


Early Stage Startups and The Dangers of Whale Hunting - <AUTHOR> http://blog.salestie.com/2011/03/early-stage-startups-and-the-dangers-of-whale-hunting/

<comment><USER2> An interesting twist on Whale Hunting is shown by A Smart Bear ([http://blog.asmartbear.com/how-to-get-customers-who-love- you...](http://blog.asmartbear.com/how-to-get-customers-who-love-you-even- when-you-screw-up.html)) where having a passionate manager in that company DID work really well.

I think it's ironic that some people go into startups because the oppressive weight and slow movements of big business, and then go straight back to chasing those customers. Surely it's better to start chasing smaller, more mobile teams who likely have more vocal staff, more buying power and less reliance on bullying.</comment>


Steve Jobs on "Internet startups" - <AUTHOR>

"The problem with the Internet startup craze isn't that too many people are starting companies; it's that too many people aren't sticking with it. That's somewhat understandable, because there are many moments that are filled with despair and agony, when you have to fire people and cancel things and deal with very difficult situations. That's when you find out who you are and what your values are.<p>"So when these people sell out, even though they get fabulously rich, they're gypping themselves out of one of the potentially most rewarding experiences of their unfolding lives. Without it, they may never know their values or how to keep their new-found wealth in perspective." [Fortune, Jan. 24, 2000] <comment><AUTHOR> Steve Jobs' Message To Internet Startups

Luck- Jobs believed that the longer time you spend developing a product or company, the luckier you become. Asked by Fortune Magazine (in 2000) what he thought of the younger generation of internet startups, Jobs' response was

        It's hard to tell with these Internet startups if they're really interested in building companies or if they're just interested in the money. I can tell you, though: if they don't really build a company, they won't luck into it. That's because it's so hard that if you don't have a passion, you'll give up. There were times in the first two years when we could have given up and sold Apple, and it probably would've died.

Steal great ideas - "We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas," said Jobs in a 1996 PBS Documentary, Triumph of the Nerds. In fact, in Michael Malone's, Infinite Loop: How Apple, The World's Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane, it was after a visit to Xerox in the summer of 1973, when a programmer from Apple laid the foundation for the Macintosh.

In a 2005 Stanford commencement speech, he said this about change-

        Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown of your inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.</comment>


ES6 Starter Kit - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mjstahl/es6-starter-kit <comment><AUTHOR> I got tired of having to remember how I set a project up each time, so I figured I would turn it in to its own repo.

It is opinionated and doesn't cover every need, but I figured this would save some time for others making their way into ES6.

Feel free to offer any feedback or pull requests.</comment>


Dallas Siren Hack Done by Radio, Not Computer – Dallas Observer - <AUTHOR> http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/dallas-siren-hack-done-by-radio-not-computer-9358087 <comment><AUTHOR> "By hijacking the signal going into the transmitter, the hacker seemingly managed to trigger all of the sirens at once."

This sentence doesn't make sense, more than likely they figured out the system needed to trigger the sirens and broadcast it to trigger them. Reminds me of the old days when all it would take to hack a radio stations remote broadcast or a drive-thru order was an opened up vhf/uhf ham radio.</comment>


Predictable, passphrase-derived PGP keys - <AUTHOR> https://nullprogram.com/blog/2019/07/10/ <comment> ryan-c This is a bad idea because if you can generate your key from a passphrase, everyone else in the world can do so also. This tool "helpfully" tags all keys it generates (via timestamp = 0) to announce the potential vulnerability.

Yes, this implementation uses the user id as a salt to prevent lookup tables from being built.

Yes, this implementation uses aggressive KDF settings to deter this sort of attack.

People are still really bad at choosing passwords and passphrases. They often pick phrases from obscure, but public, sources, thinking they're clever.

When the "let's derive asymmetric keys from a passphrase" idea was applied to cryptocurrencies the results were catastrophically bad. I gave a talk at DEFCON about this four years ago:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foil0hzl4Pg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foil0hzl4Pg)

There are some marginally valid use cases for keys that can be memorized, but for those cases, tools should offer opinionated passphrase generation tools that make it impractical to pick a bad passphrase. A simple way to do this would be to require that e.g. the first x bits (10 to 16 probably?) of sha256(passphrase) are zero, and bundle a tool that takes in a wordlist, an output passphrase strength, and user provided entropy (to be combined with system entropy for users who don't trust the system csprng), and spit out a compliant diceware-style passphrase.

</comment><comment><USER2> >Fun fact: Two different primary keys can have the same subkey. Anyone could even bind any of your subkeys to their primary key! They only need to sign the public key! Though, of course, they couldn't actually use your key since they'd lack the secret key. It would just be really confusing, and could, perhaps in certain situations, even cause some OpenPGP clients to malfunction.

Can't wait for the next time someone clogs up the SKS system and tells us that GPG is terrible and the PGP ecosystem is essentially in a state of eternal trashfire, only to be told by the GPG wizards that everything is fine and working as intended, it will be fixed anyway by that one guy that volunteered on the mailing list to do it, they assure us.

Man, where would we be without the people that defend GPG? Possibly in a world with easy-to-use mail cryptography solutions but who wants that?

Otherwise this was a very interesting blogpost, I should probably upgrade my GPG keys at some point, considering they primar keys have been floating unencrypted into various public spaces.

<comment><USER3> I don't think anyone complains about the format of PGP encrypted files or signatures. The protocol itself is just fine. All the exploits are in the key distribution or presentation layer.

e-fail is good example of a presentation failure. It has very little to do with PGP or GPG itself, but instead failures to adequately separate the output.

You have a few choices for key distribution.

1\. A walled garden like keybase. 2\. A distributed trust model like the web of trust. 3\. A bunch of web servers with no proof the key has not been tampered with.

All of them have benefits and flaws.

<comment><USER4> 4\. DNS (sort of a walled garden, yes)

5\. Adding a fingerprint to all e-mails you send out (people online you never met/meet only know you by your online behavior anyway) so cross-checking a few mailing list archives the user posted to in the last few years should be enough. This is most useful if you are subscribed and can be thus sure that the archive was not manipulated.

<comment><USER5> > 4\. DNS (sort of a walled garden, yes)

IMHO, Web Key Directory is a better option here. It has all benefits of DNS but none of the drawbacks (DNS has plain text queries etc.)

<comment><USER4> Very nice.

Both DNS and WKD are real-time, and modifiable by an attacker. There's no trail of trust/history. It may be good for discovery, but trusting the key requires more.

I guess that it's better to have multiple independent ways to validate ownership of a key after you discover it. Cross-check various methods that require different levels of access, to see if something is fishy.

Anyway, I'm off to implement wkd. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is awesome work. My team implemented something similar but more powerful, a PGP packet library: [https://github.com/summitto/pgp-packet- library](https://github.com/summitto/pgp-packet-library)

We were looking for a solution like this but with more flexibility and power. Using our library you can generate PGP keys using any key derivation mechanism for a large variety of key types!

</comment><comment><USER7> I personally find Diceware passwords unfriendly, so I made my own passphrase generator: [https://rmmh.github.io/abbrase/](https://rmmh.github.io/abbrase/) (has an offline mode too)

Here's two sentences picked from a batch of 32 for a 120 bit security factor that I think the average person could memorize with a few minutes of effort:

know why rod signifies eight nodes

middle crude tissue clearly said Sultan</comment>


Ask HN: Review my latest web app - BoostCam - <AUTHOR> http://www.boostcam.com/?utm_campaign=news.ycombinator

<comment><USER2> not sure if I like that logo, doesn't really work with the niche you are in. You need to spice it up...I dunno, maybe replace one of the Os with a camera.

can't say anything about the actual process, since the camera screen doesn't load for me

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't really do much about the design right now. I'm not a very talented graphic designer. If this starts to catch on, I'll find someone to help me out there.

Check out the help page if you're having problems getting your camera to work. If you're still having problems, let me know.</comment></comment>


The Negative Influence of Games: An Autobiographical Essay - <AUTHOR> http://nightmaremode.net/2012/12/the-negative-influence-of-games-an-autobiographical-essay-24380/

<comment><AUTHOR> Note: I didn't write the article in the OP and I think the author has things backwards.

<comment><USER2> I have noted this and will respond appropriately</comment></comment>


Curated by choice: New design for HN proposal - <AUTHOR> http://popalg.org/curated-by-choice-part-1

<comment><USER2> I'm not reading that until you stop obscuring it with Facebook and Twitter icons. <http://i.imgur.com/ZYuHd.png>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry. Fixed it.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a startup where users code review for karma? - <AUTHOR>

Sorta like Stack Overflow but not for question.<p>I constantly find myself wanting opinions on a public interface and on how other developers would like it to be instead. <comment><USER2> [http://codereview.stackexchange.com/](http://codereview.stackexchange.com/)

<comment><USER3> And specifically: [http://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/api](http://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/api)</comment></comment>