New bill upgrades unauthorized Internet streaming to a felony - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/new-bill-upgrades-unauthorized-internet-streaming-to-a-felony.ars <comment><USER2> "Did you really think we want those laws observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with." ('Atlas Shrugged' 1957)

<comment><USER3> The fact that this law is being pursued in the interest of private corporations, namely the music and movie industries, makes the evil government conspiracy argument invalid.

This is about corrupt ineffective government, not evil mastermind government.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure the "evil government conspiracy" argument and the "evil corporations conspiracy" argument are mutually exclusive. In Atlas Shrugged (I know, it's terrible that I suggest anyone actually read that book, but bear with me) the problem is almost exactly as you observed: Some companies are able to write the law, and everyone else loses.

I've spent a fair amount of time around left/right libertarians and anarchists, and it bothers me that they spend so much time debating this. One side will say "The problem is the evil corporations," and the other will say "The problem is that the government has too much power," but the argument is pointless because they are both correct.

<comment><USER5> The thing is is that corporations and governments are composed of _individual humans_ and many times their interests are intertwined.

For instance, as anyone who's studied the financial crisis knows, there are plenty of people in the SEC who used to work for big wall street firms or got very cushy high paid wall street jobs after they leave the SEC. Thus, the wall street firms were not prosecuted for their possibly illegal practices during the financial crisis.

The government vs the private sector is just a false conflict to divert your attention away from the individual actors with lucrative ties to the entertainment industry in the public and private sector who are driving this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Making this a felony is beyond harsh. For reference, here are a few other crimes classified as felonies:

Murder, criminal sexual conduct, manslaughter, criminal vehicular homicide, assault, robbery (simple or aggravated), kidnapping, neglect or endangerment of a child, solicitation of juveniles, prostitution, arson, and burglary.

And, if these senators (and their media industry supporters) are successful, unauthorized streaming of 10 or more copyrighted works in a 180-day period.

You can't really argue that unauthorized streaming doesn't impact the entertainment industry negatively, but it should be obvious to everyone that the impact is not significant enough to make it a felony.

<comment><USER7> What really stands out here is prostitution. It's the only item on the list that punishes a consensual agreement between two adults. An agreement that doesn't affect anyone else in any meaningful way.

<comment><USER8> Prostitution isn't always "wholly" consensual; some women are forced into the profession.

<comment><USER7> When it's not consensual, it's a different crime and a wholly different matter in my view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is getting ridiculous. Under current U.S. law, felons cannot vote or carry guns; it isn't _just_ a matter of a disproportionate prison sentence and fine.

<comment><USER10> In principle, it sounds like a good idea to prevent those bad people from voting. But now you can see that this can actually be used as a political weapon, to keep those you disagree with from having a voice.

<comment><USER11> Or a gun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm reluctant to accept _any_ violation of copyright as anything more than a _civil_ issue.

</comment><comment><USER13> It seems like a bunch of laws are trying to get around the "safe harbor" clause of the DMCA. This directly threatens Google, I'd think Google would be interested in either buying up the music and movie companies or, a much cheaper option, buying politicians. Perhaps that's the slippery slope to an Evil Google, but there don't seem to be many options for stopping the insanity. They may not pass the bill this time or next time but they keep bringing this stuff up, I can't help but think if they paperclip it to the right other giant-bill-everyone-is-in-favor-for it'll be bound to pass eventually.

<comment><USER14> Perhaps a better route for google is to put their cash into a grassroots anti- lobbyist campaign.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Flagging, because the discussion is going nowhere, mainly because either almost no one is reading the article before commenting, or they are reading it but not understanding it.

To elaborate, unauthorized copying and distributing has long (decades) been a felony if you are doing it for commercial advantage or private financial gain, and in any 180-day period this involves copies worth more than $1000.

Look at the language Ars quotes. It talks about streaming a certain number of copies in any 180-day period, and puts a threshold ($2500 retail value or $5000 licenses) you have to meet in order to run afoul of the new provisions.

It sounds likely, based on the similarity to the existing felony provisions, that these new provisions fit in with those, and thus are only covering people who are doing illegal streaming AS A BUSINESS (and doing a good amount of business...if the retail value of a streaming move is $5, they have to have 500 customers over six months to hit the threshold). They are not nailing people who consume the streams (just as the felony copying and distribution provisions don't nail the customer).

</comment><comment><USER16> Is it just me, or has there been a flurry of internet-related legislation of late. With the PSN hack still fresh on their minds I wonder how much more legislation is yet to come. Between this, COICA and PROTECT IP, things are starting to look bleak.

Are there similar precedents when other disruptive technologies started eating into traditional markets (maybe the introduction of tapes or CDs, or the telegraph and radio)?

</comment><comment><USER17> Just think of it as a job creation measure - jail lots of people for unauthorized internet streaming, that way we'll build more private prisons and hire corrections officers to staff them.

<comment><USER4> We could just criminalize alcohol and tobacco (or start enforcing marijuana in the bay...) if we wanted to do that.

<comment><USER18> s/bay/state of California/

Sadly, it's true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The distinction between downloading and streaming can be considered odd from a technical standpoint, however I do think that it's much much easier to stream illegal content unknowingly than it is downloading it.

Basically, if you download an episode of a TV show for free, common sense would tend to say that something is fishy: you end up with a file on your drive forever. However, in the case of streaming, I feel like it's much less clear.

Two scenarios: I want to watch an episode of The Office, I google "The Office season 6 episode 3" and end up watching the episode with ads on Hulu. I can also pay a subscription to watch any episode I want.

I then want to watch an episode of Dexter and google "Dexter season 5 episode 3" and end up watching the episode on MegaVideo with ads (for MegaVideo, MegaUploader… mostly) and a daily limit that can be waived with a subscription.

The first one is legal, the second one is not but a non-savvy user couldn't really tell the difference. I don't really have a way to know that MegaVideo doesn't pay the copyright holders with the subscriptions and ads.

<comment><USER20> If my understanding is correct, Megavideo is the person streaming the video and you are the person watching the video, meaning Megavideo would be the one with the felony.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> At what point do we just call the US government what it really is, an oligarchy.

Republics actually represent the public at large not just the wealthy and connected.

</comment><comment><USER22> That's what I call a draconian law.

 _"Draconian is an adjective meaning great severity, that derives from Draco, an Athenian law scribe under whom small offences had heavy punishments."_

</comment><comment><USER23> Let's find the closest friends and relatives of these politicians who infringe any intellectual property rights in any way and then get them on record saying they'd readily see their own kindred hit with felony convictions.

Things like this come from people who don't understand why intellectual property was enshrined into law in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER24> Not that I support this in any way, but I can't quite comprehend the technical ignorance in legal circles that has lead them to distinguish between streaming and downloading in the first place.

<comment><USER25> The definition of downloading was written into law before streaming became widespread; likely, when the former was used to prosecute someone for streaming copyrighted material, the defense pointed out the inadequacy of the existing definition. There's a distinction in law between downloading in the sense of saving something to your hard disk and just having it in RAM. Obviously, if I go to your website and see something on my screen, I have 'downloaded' in some fashion, but if just passing through memory was considered a download then running a program or opening a file would be considered equivalent to making a copy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> "What are you in for?"

"Karaoke."

</comment><comment><USER27> How does this idea serve to protect the American people?

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm not worried. Ars Technica digs up _at least_ one of these scary bills going through Congress each year and nothing ever comes out of it. Our lawmakers may be in the pocket of big content, but they aren't stupid enough to pass something as draconian as this. The real things we need to worry about probably won't be as obviously draconian.

<comment><USER29> The repeated requests for that kind of law modification have effect of moving the _Overton window_ [0] in the direction of stiffer IP enforcement. Even if the bills fall flat one after another, they move the bounds of discussion towards heavy-handed IP rules. Preparing grounds for small, creeping changes.

\----

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window>

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> A bit sad. I can understand the desire to prohibit the streaming of copyrighted material, but taking infringement of any sort (especially streaming media) to a felony level is a bit ridiculous. This is just lobbyist nonsense. You're elected to protect the American people, so do it.

</comment><comment><USER31> Perspective: leading the US into an unnecessary war in Iraq, under what most reasonable people would say were trumped up claims and distorted logic, which then directly led to 3000+ American military deaths, and a multiple of that in Iraqi deaths..... Not a felony.

Streaming a video without authorization? Felony.

A woman claims a man (IMF chief Strauss today) forced her into some sex acts: mere accusation causes him to be led off a plane and put into a jail cell pending a full trial. _Before_ a fair trail, he's now in jail. Based on one person's accusation. (Which may or may not be legitimate, or may have been a honeypot setup, we don't know yet, and may never know.)

Several men and women claim a man (and his administration) did (the things I claimed in my first paragraph): neither Bush or Cheney or any other top leader ever spent time in jail to this day, nor even charged in the first place. (Libby doesn't count, he was charged with something else, a formality.)

What's broken here?

</comment><comment><USER32> Guys, it's a cheap trick. Introduce some ridiculous charges, hear the expected outrage, tune it down a bit to the levels they wanted.

</comment><comment><USER33> you americans seem to be under attack by the oligarchs, if you havent noticed yet

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure what to do about it. Voting doesn't do anything, and hoisting the red and black would only get me kidnapped or murdered.

<comment><USER18> "hoisting the red and black"?

Google doesn't help (suggests maybe resorting to piracy, but that wouldn't result in you getting kidnapped/murdered), so would you explain that idiom?

<comment><USER34> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_symbolism></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amazon introduces new service: Simple Notification Service - <AUTHOR> http://aws.amazon.com/sns/

<comment><AUTHOR> One of Amazon's SNS devs seems to be hanging around on reddit willing to answer questions about it.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bnn60/amazon_in...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bnn60/amazon_introduces_new_web_service_simple/)

</comment><comment><USER4> The email notification part is what I find to be very interesting. I haven't looked at how in-depth you can configure things with deliverability / message customization, but I'd have to believe it's very robust. If it can do what I think it does, did it just make SendGrid dead in the water?

ie- 2 dollars per 100k messages via Amazon vs. 80 per month for 50k messages on sendgrid.

<comment><USER5> Seeing as how EC2 IP addresses are being blocked by many spam blocking services*, I don't know that I'd want to depend on Amazon to ensure my emails are delivered. Sure I realize it's probably a different block of IPs, but I wonder how long before those get blocked too.

Source: <https://community.engineyard.com/faqs/questions/ssmtp>

<comment><USER6> Why couldn't SendGrid get blocked?

<comment><USER7> Let's say SendGrid did get blocked, despite their work to make sure they don't (they have more of vested interest than Amazon do).

If it was costing them serious business, presumably they would change their IPs, etc. Where as Amazon are unlikely to because sending email isn't their core business.

<comment><USER8> Hard to say. Amazon takes all their AWS products pretty seriously. I am sure they have thought through email deliverability. I wouldn't discount their solution just because their EC2 IPs have been blocked in the past for mass email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _no charges for the first 100,000 Notifications over HTTP and no charges for the first 1,000 Notifications over Email_

Their free notification limit is quite generous.

<comment><USER10> No, they'll bill you the data (e.g. messages you post to topics) transferred in from this June, then your first hits will not be free anymore. To quote from the page:

 _Data Transfer In will be $0.10 per GB after June 30, 2010._

<comment><USER11> Seems generous to me even with that info. I don't know the packet size/charge per notification but I have trouble imagining the scenario in which one goes from 0 notifications (today), to using up 100,000 free notifications, and then to using up so many notifications you care/notice $0.10 per GB - all by June/July

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can't tell you how long I've wanted something like this.

<comment><USER13> Can you tell us why? What's that makes this so useful? I can't really come up with many good use-cases for it...

<comment><USER14> Well for one, I think you could effectively run a PubSubHubbub server or subscriber node on top of this.

<comment><USER15> I had to google for "PubSubHubbub" because it sounded too ridiculous to exist in actual, physical reality. But it looks like a pretty cool project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _Future enhancements to Amazon SNS – such as notification delivery over SMS – will provide more protocol options and additional flexibility to mobile application developers._

Does anyone have an educated guess as to when the SMS transport option will be available? How long does it usually take Amazon to add a promised feature?

<comment><USER17> I'd say a couple months at least. If you look at past and present future enhancements listed for their other services (such as RDS replication, Windows reserved pricing, etc.) they've all spent many months in development after the point at which they were mentioned to customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This will be great once they add SMS as a transport (listed under upcoming features).

<comment><USER19> In the mean time, you can ask your users the phone number+provider, and use the providers own email to SMS gateways. [http://www.mutube.com/projects/open- email-to-sms/gateway-lis...](http://www.mutube.com/projects/open-email-to- sms/gateway-list/)

<comment><USER20> Unfortunately with that system when people change carriers they have to remember to notify you. (full disclosure: I work for Twilio but I have been trying different SMS techniques for years so this comment stems from that experience)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The ability to subscribe to notifications using SQS is a very cool feature. Adding the ability to listen for things is really the linchpin of asynchronous architecture (in my mind). This sure beats polling a queue.

<comment><USER22> From my understanding you still need to pool the SQS.

This new SNS service allows an application to push messages to various subscribers of a topic. Thus, if your SQS was subscribed to this topic, you could push a message to the SQS every time some action happens.

Then on the flip-side your SQS would still need to be processed by an EC2 server that polls the SQS.

From Amazon's FAQ:

"SQS" – Users can specify an SQS queue as the endpoint; Amazon SNS will enqueue a notification message to the specified queue (which subscribers can then process using SQS APIs such as ReceiveMessage, DeleteMessage, etc.)

The caveat here is of course if you have one of your end points be a HTTP/JSON API call and the EC2 server that is processing your SQS has a web server on it that will use the HTTP to trigger the polling process. But even in this situation, you're still doing a pull to dequeue the SQS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Read all the way to the bottom. A big caveat for now:

The following limitations are currently in place during the Amazon SNS beta: One hundred (100) topics per AWS account

<comment><USER24> The requirement of publishing to a topic and not to individuals could be a big limitation too. I'd love to use a service like this to handle all the one-off emails (billing receipt, individual notifications) within my web apps that only send to one person, and I want to use a 3rd party so I'm not supporting the email delivery side of things (keeping us out of spam boxes), but none of the email services around seem to offer what's needed for this, including Amazon SNS...

From my experience, just setting up a secure email server with reverse DNS, SPF and DKIM, and having a privacy policy that you actually practice, is just not enough to ensure ongoing reliable delivery rates from your own server. Doing all that, we would still blast out email invites to ~50-100 people at a time, and one or two recipients would always find it in their spam box. Not good. With non-technical users, that became an annoying support problem and decreased the perception of our reliability/quality in their eyes too.

<comment><USER24> I see mention of SendGrid, which looks like it might do this. Didn't see that in my prior research. Have I found a solution here folks?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> this is interesting, but I wasn't happy with SQS so i'd be wary before we started using something like this over a custom notification system on top of RabbitMQ.

we used SQS for a while but kept having problems with polling - <USER2> messages would reappear with alarming regularity (which to be fair is documented by Amazon as a design tradeoff due to the distributed nature of the queue) - but it really caused a hassle to build a system that could handle these duplicate messages, especially when there was a lot of work to be done per message.

<comment><USER26> I had the same problems with SQS and ended up using RabbitMQ and haven't had any problems. The main issue I saw with SQS was a couple seconds on unavailability every couple of days, enough that I had to start writing lots of client code to deal with it. RabbitMQ is rock solid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> No more DKIM for me? No more burnt VPS IP's?

<comment><USER28> Have you heard of Google Apps' Email? the free edition? for up to 100 domains (IIRC.)

<comment><USER27> I use it for my email. However, if I believe they take issue with sending lots of automated emails (e.g. signup verifications).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I would love to see support for HTTP long polling or web sockets, to allow this to be used for real time web apps.

<comment><USER30> My thoughts exactly. This is the one feature that could be very big.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Looks similar to messagepub.com and their message broadcasting, although with subscription verification, and groups, but minus twitter, google talk, AIM, etc. Will be interesting to do a comparison of similar services.

</comment><comment><USER31> Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) and Amazon SNS are both messaging services within AWS, which provide different benefits for developers. Amazon SNS allows applications to send time-critical messages to multiple subscribers through a push mechanism, eliminating the need to periodically check or poll for updates. Amazon SQS is a message queue service used by distributed applications to exchange messages through a polling model, and can be used to decouple sending and receiving components.

</comment><comment><USER32> Free for the first 100,000 Amazon SNS Requests per month - not bad. Also, $0.10 per gig transfered seems reasonable.

When Amazon released SQS I thought that everyone would use SQS, but in my limited experience with a small customer base, SQS is no where near as popular as using EC2s and S3. Interesting to see in a year how widely used SNS is.

</comment><comment><USER33> I completely block the AWS address space on my servers because it's a major source of malicious probes and constantly siphons bandwidth at no apparent benefit to me. It looks like I'll have to consider less draconian measures now, if this is a source of useful messages and not merely a giant spam machine.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unless you're just operating a personal network, that's a pretty blunt measure that you ought to revisit.

EC2 is certainly hosting legitimate business customers.

<comment><USER33> I'm just blocking originating connections from AWS on select servers. It's riskier in theory than in practice, as even the nonmalicious connections don't add much value. But you're right, I'm revisiting and will probably scale it back to just block web crawling, as no human activity seems to originate from that space.

<comment><USER34> I am using EC2 to proxy web surfing for iPhone users, so I hope not too many website are blocking all traffic from AWS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I couldn't see anywhere that the emails would be 'white label' - <USER3> appropriate to replace SendGrid.

It seems to me to be more geared up for machine-to-machine notificaiton, although granted that would make email a less efficient way of doing this instead of http

<comment><USER30> I think they are white label since there's no mention of it.

Only the email confirmation is likely to officially come from Amazon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> What format are they using for the HTTP push notifications? It says in the FAQ that "Subscribers specify a URL as part of the subscription registration; notifications will be delivered through an HTTP POST to the specified URL."

Is this PubSubHubBub?

<comment><USER10> Yeah, in its essence, the data flow is nearly the same as PuSH, that URL is named as _callback_ in PuSH.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> How does SNS differ from RSS and Common Alerting Protocol (CAP):

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

</comment><comment><USER37> This is a great way to send emails, what about receiving them, is there any option with amazon other than getting an ec2 instance and putting a postfix server (or other MTA) on it?

</comment><comment><USER38> i would love to see this hook into apple's push notification service:

[http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/Netw...](http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/RemoteNotificationsPG/CommunicatingWIthAPS/CommunicatingWIthAPS.html)

too bad they don't use webhooks :(

<comment><USER39> Urban Airship has a similar service (even priced similarly): <http://urbanairship.com/> Their focus is specifically mobile apps, & they have nice sample code for iPhone/Android/Blackberry. Gets spendy faster than Amazon, but I've used it for personal stuff and it's really easy.

Ex.: I do a lot of database work recently, so when I kick off a 90min query, at the end I ping them with some JSON and my phone meows. (Meow! Stop drinking! Your query is done!)

<comment><USER40> I do this with notifo right now. It's quite useful. I've gotten Boxcar and messagepub to do the same thing for me, but I like notifo's UI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Was I the only one who mistook this for a framework to allow for text-message notifications?

</comment><comment><USER42> google wave (vision), anyone? [http://www.jasonkolb.com/weblog/2009/09/why- google-wave-is-t...](http://www.jasonkolb.com/weblog/2009/09/why-google-wave- is-the-coolest-thing-since-sliced-bread.html)

</comment><comment><USER43> This is great. Amazon is really putting out some great feature.

</comment><comment><USER44> It seems each user can only create 25 topics. That sucks.

</comment><comment><USER45> Perhaps Amazon SNS isn't the best name.

</comment><comment><USER46> This looks like a huge clone of <http://hook.io/>. Granted, Amazon's service appears to be much farther along, and is likely going to support higher loads, but the concepts are the same.

<comment><USER47> There's a limited set of ideas that are ready for development at the cusp of CS at a particular point in time.</comment></comment>


Hack.farm – A Hacker News Alternative - <AUTHOR> http://hack.farm

<comment><USER2> Color/good for mobile. Title text is too large. Can't scroll and from at the same time - it gets blury, scrolling is a big browse feature, makes you feel like you're doing something useful even if you're not really reading anything.</comment>


The Helsinki Killer Ball (1995) - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/1995/07/the-helsinki-killer-ball/ <comment><USER2> It was stolen - [https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Copper](https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Copper)

Related work of Markus Copper-

[https://www.hs.fi/kaupunki/art-2000006628463.html](https://www.hs.fi/kaupunki/art-2000006628463.html)

Helsinki police search for parts of a work of art that may contain explosives - "Three missing parts must be found and rendered harmless"

These are parts of the work of the late Finnish visual artist Markus Copper.</comment>


Iron Foundy: Cloud Foundry for .NET - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tier3.com/index.php/2011/12/tier-3-net-framework-cloud-foundry

<comment><USER2> In case you miss it, the link to the Iron Foundry site is shown towards the bottom of this post.

<http://www.ironfoundry.org/>

However, looks like their web developer needs to get off his rear and get the site finished. ;) About half of it is lorem ipsum type content.</comment>


Move over Angry Birds, Health and Wellbeing is the next Finnish tech revolution - <AUTHOR> http://www.thenordicweb.com/2014/03/11/move-angry-birds-health-wellness-next-finnish-tech-revolution-2/

<comment><USER2> And Banking - Am I the only one waiting for Holvi to open up for citizens outside Finland?</comment>


Americans aren't getting married, and researchers think porn may be to blame - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/12/21/americans-arent-getting-married-and-researchers-think-porn-is-part-of-the-problem/ <comment><USER2> Here's my random, unsolicited opinion:

I doubt porn is the cause. Porn might be a comorbidity (what I'd put my money on), or maybe a symptom (I doubt that, too), but the idea that it's the cause is pretty odd to me.

I think marriage is fundamentally an economic institution. People got married because it made economic sense. You needed a partner to rear children with, assuming you wanted children at all. There's all the stuff about love and companionship and all that, but there's no reason why we need to fixate on one particular arrangement. It was about partnerships of families.

I think marriage made a lot of sense in small towns. It makes sense for large, political dynasties, for the old wealthy, etc. It doesn't make so much sense for the young middle class today.

This is my rough, unvarnished opinion. Would love to hear criticisms, refinements, etc.

<comment><USER3> Porn is purely selfish pleasure. Thus, when a person is married, they're used to being selfish about their sexual pleasure, resulting in strife. And when people think about getting married, they realize that would require them to stop being so selfish, since marriages don't last unless you are willing to sacrifice your own desires in order to help your spouse.

So, porn is a cause, or at least, part of a cause.

As for marriage being an economic institution... Not really. Male and female are different. We think differently, our bodies are different, and so on. In most cases, those differences complement each other. So, marriage is the joining of two people into a partnership that lets them cover each others flaws.

<comment><USER4> > Porn is purely selfish pleasure.

Some couples watch porn together.You make it "a selfish pleasure" only if you want it "a selfish pleasure". And yes,women watch porn,like they buy dildos, though they might not be interested in "Bangbros like gonzo" ,but something with a higher production quality.

<comment><USER5> HBO's 'Game of Thrones' for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6>
      Marginal Effect on Marriage Probability
      Porn Site -0.6310
      Finance Site -0.5889
      News Site -0.5877
      Education Site -0.5823
      Health Site -0.5744
      Sports Site -0.5928
      Religious Site +0.5399

_A natural public policy option is web filtering. [...] If the results in this paper are correct, policies along these lines have the potential to reduce pornography usage and increase marital entry, with its attendant welfare improvements._

Is allowing only religious sites another natural policy option? Because that's what the data suggests too.

Edit:

Linked study: [http://ftp.iza.org/dp8679.pdf](http://ftp.iza.org/dp8679.pdf) \-- table data from PDF page 31 and quote from page 25.

</comment><comment><USER7> Yeah, because the fact that the average young American can barely support one person, let alone two + child, on a basic income can't have anything to do with the reduction in marriages...

<comment><USER8> Plus the expense of the ring, the wedding, the honeymoon. People put it off until it can be done 'right'.

<comment><USER9> An interesting trend in Greece, where due to the economic crisis many people can't afford to "properly" get married, is that it's become common to get a simple civil-ceremony marriage, with an intent to get a "real" marriage (church ceremony, reception, photos, etc.) sometime later. That may or may not eventually happen, but it seems universal that people at least theoretically consider it their plan (the civil paperwork-signing isn't culturally considered a "real" wedding). Not getting married at all is also increasingly common, but many people choose the in-between option of a legal marriage without the ceremony. The plus side is that you get the legal benefits even while waiting to plan the "real" wedding (things like medical visitation rights, joint property ownership, etc., become simpler).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Seems like someone needs to read this again: [http://xkcd.com/552/](http://xkcd.com/552/)

People consuming more porn is a more likely a symptom of what's going on rather than the cause. As whatever forces cause people to be less likely to get married it creates a larger market for porn that the industry is more than happy to supply in greater quantities.

What forces are causing people to be less likely to get married? I can speculate but I suspect it's highly multifaceted. I doubt there's one thing that's largely to blame but more of a death by a thousand papercuts kind of situation.

1\. Housing is a bigger commitment

2\. Job security is less available making buying real estate less attractive

3\. Expectations of what should happen once you get married aren't necessarily realistic

4\. Ending a marriage is highly speculative and non-negotiable (a judge says what goes and that's it) and can have lifelong or very long-lasting consequences financially

5\. There's a lot less societal pressure to get married to have kids from a moral perspective

6\. The economic incentive for a woman to get married so she can stay home to raise kids has largely disappeared as pay equality has largely arrived (so has the notion that it's what a woman should do). It's not 100% across the board but women don't work for 30% of what men do, meaning that marriage might only bring a marginal improvement in financial circumstances.

7\. Child support being completely unrelated to marriage means that women can choose not to settle for a man they once liked/loved but who isn't their ideal partner.

I'm not saying that any of these factors are good or bad or just or unjust. I suspect that there are 20 more factors that I couldn't think up in the last 10 minutes.

<comment><USER11> _1\. Housing is a bigger commitment_

Interestingly, this is a policy choice—and a bad one—foisted on us primarily by incumbent land owners who vote: [http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO) , rather than a law of nature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The thieving nature of the divorce and child support regulations in the USA are clearly unrelated.

<comment><USER9> Worries about child support aren't a particularly good reason to get married or not get married, because they apply iff you are a parent, regardless of marital status. If you get married and don't have kids, there is no issue of supporting kids. On the other hand, if you _don 't_ get married and _do_ have kids, you're still legally required to support them. The obligation to support isn't a consequence of marriage, but of being father or mother to a child. In fact a pretty large proportion of child-support cases that end up in court involve parents who were never married.

<comment><USER13> Still, the fear of having to pay child support could discourage people from having extended exclusive relationships, and those are generally a prerequisite to marriage.

<comment><USER14> Not having "extended, exclusive relationships" doesn't decrease the risk of having to pay child support. (Not having unprotected sex with people you aren't both married to and going to stay married to does, but, all other things being equal, avoiding "extended, exclusive relationships" seems to be more likely to increase that risk than decrease it.)

<comment><USER13> I suspect it does, given that the likelihood of conceiving a child (from protected or unprotected sex), as well as the likelihood of a female knowing who the father of her child is, increase as relationships become longer and more exclusive.

<comment><USER14> Exclusivity isn't inherently symmetrical, neither is the interval between different relationships. The effect you are referring to doesn't come from whether the relationship is exclusive _on your side_ , or from whether it is long term, but from whether it is exclusive _on the other side_ , and whether there is a long gap before/after the other partner's previous/next relationship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Really? From my perspective people can't afford marriage, a kid, house, cars, and ultimately a divorce. Man it would be nice to just have $3k for a wedding ring, I could pay off a fraction of my debt! Oh! Wedding reception costs? Fuck that, I need to finance a good car that gets excellent mpg! OH, child support laws? Yeah I had an older brother that had his wallet raped for 14 years of his life. He's now looking at houses, hopefully his current wife doesn't divorce him with the kids they have. :P

<comment><USER16> Usury. Not long ago one high school educated American working a factory shift could support a wife and four kids. His large, hand crafted home is now found in the gentrified corner of town, which today's blue collars couldn't dream of buying a piece of. Today's "middle class" typically live in a chicken-wire- and-stucco tract home built by economic refugees rather than craftsmen, lease to own a $40,000 sedan, and dream of one day paying off their education debt before their medical bills start to pile up after mid-life. Marriage has been, like every other thing in America, reduced to a question of economic efficiency.

But hey, there's always Bing Crosby this time of year to evoke an America that was more than a place to make money.

<comment><USER17> You can still have that large hand crafted home if you don't expect to live in the middle of San Francisco or Boston. There are gorgeous houses within two hour's drive of me that cost five figures.

I can't afford my parent's house. But when they bought it, it was surrounded by peach fields, not bustling metro America with top schools.

To me, it is like bemoaning how your Grandma was able to afford a house in Beverly Hills in 1920, but you can't today. How unfair the economy, how cruel the world! Except Beverly Hills wasn't Movie Star City in 1920.

My take is that our nation's appetite for coveted, increasingly scarce real estate has silently grown without our realizing it. Not one of my friends today would consider moving to a house surrounded by orchards.

<comment><USER18> Right idea, different trend: The boomer generation coincided with the suburban boom, with its emphasis on car culture and mass produced goods. But the sheen of an industrially produced life has worn off, to a large extent: Long commutes and the expense of owning and regularly driving a car don't look as good as they used to. We're seeing a massive move back into the cities, contrary to the (white) flight from the cities in the sixties and seventies. And this means higher real estate prices.

<comment><USER17> Either way though, it means we live in very different times than even as recently as our parents, which makes "what my parents could afford" a poor rubric. We are looking to live very different places than they were.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Porn is one of many causes, but not a clinching cause. It is all economy.

1\. In 1970's highschool graduated were able to raise families on a single salary, could afford a home, a couple of cars.

2\. The above situation does not exist anymore. Have you seen graduates from places like UC Irvine, working at Enterprise car rental?

3\. Yes, there are jobs for students graduated from top schools like HYP, Stanford, MIT. For others, it is either a tech job or a job like that.

4\. Wherever there are jobs, there the cost of living, raising a family is a darn expensive. Imagine Silicon valley for instance: if you are just a software engineer, you can't afford raising a family here, unless you and your spouse slave away at work and in commutes. Then add day care costs, mortgages, etc. It is a stressful situation.

5\. For many in the middle income bracket, the future is bleak: you can't guarantee that your kids gonna have same economic opportunity as you have.

<comment><USER20> You may be familiar with the "Old Economy Steven" meme:

[http://www.quickmeme.com/Old-Economy- Steven/page/1/](http://www.quickmeme.com/Old-Economy-Steven/page/1/)

Bloomberg: What the Economy Has Done to the Family (some shocking statistics) - Nov 10, 2014

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-10/how-the-bad- economy...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-10/how-the-bad-economy- breaks-up-families.html)

"Is a college degree worth the cost? You decide."

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

And see this 8-minute video, comparing the 1970s economy (and how it shaped the lives and choices of young adults) with the economy of the 2010s:

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

More about that:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/2m7xp1/bloomberg_w...](http://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/2m7xp1/bloomberg_what_the_economy_has_done_to_the_family/)

</comment></comment><comment> wes-k Been with my partner almost 10 years (I'm 29). We most likely will never get married. We feel we don't need it and plus, the institution from an equal rights point of view is fairly troubling. Even today's traditional wedding is filled with male / female imbalances, not to mention gay marriage is still not universal. I'm also happy to keep a few extra thousand in my hands instead of De Beers.

<comment><USER21> That will be nice for now until one of you decide to move on for greener pastures. Lonely old age may also follow...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'd have never noticed. A large amount of the people my age (25-35) that I work with are married, most of my friends are married, both of my brothers (younger than I) are married, and I myself was even engaged for a few years.

<comment><USER13> It is reasonable to expect that marriage rates could drop significantly while there still remains a large number of people who observe most of their peers getting married.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > _" The natural reaction might be to dismiss the findings as confirmations of > an obviousness: that men who are married tend to look at porn less > frequently precisely because they are married._

 _The researchers, while careful to say that their findings fall short of being conclusive, insist that the relationship between the two also "likely runs in the direction that we assert."

The reason, Malcolm explains, is likely tied to the relationship between marriage and sexual gratification...."_

Hmm. Seems to be a pretty massive gap in their logic path. In reply to the very real possibility that married men simply view less porn, they quickly spun to the reasons they suspect porn _could_ lead to men not getting married.

It also "likely" runs in the direction we assert and here is a likely reason that it might?

C'mon guys.

</comment><comment><USER24> Marriage in the USA peaked in 1958. Please see the chart here:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/opinion/sunday/the-real- re...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason- richer-people-marry.html)

Marriage peaked the same year that male participation in the wage economy peaked. It was also the peak year of the baby boom. It was also the peak year for the wage-to-rent ratio (average rent was only 22% of average wage, versus 32% now). It was also the peak year for wages for males under the age of 25. (Average male wage began to decline in 1973, but the average wage for young males has been declining since the recession of 1959.)

Internet porn was not the problem in 1959, or 1969, or 1979, though the marriage rate, and the birth rate, plummeted during those years. But it is possible that the sexual revolution played a role. Barbara Ehrenreich has a fantastic book on the subject "The Hearts Of Men":

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Hearts-Men-American- Commitment/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Hearts-Men-American- Commitment/dp/0385176155)

Although the marriage rate is now back down to levels last seen in the late 1800s, there is clearly a big difference in people's sexual practice. 41% of all the children in the USA are now born outside of wedlock. The number is comparable to London in the early 1700s (see Will and Ariel Durant's book "The Age Of Voltaire" where they quote the Bishop Of London, in 1719, estimating 50% of all couples with children in London were not married. This was at a time when the English government had decided to suppress marriage among the poor by raising the price of a marriage license to something only the middle and upper classes could afford, thus turning marriage into the ultimate status symbol.)

Marriage has once again become a status symbol. The poor raise children without the benefit of marriage, while the (shrunken) middle and upper classes enjoy the prestige of marriage.

The suppression of marriage in the 21st century is less easy to identify than in 1719, because back then it was an explicit policy of the government, whereas now marriage licenses are cheap. But marriage is a commitment to make things work over the long term, and without a stable job no one can reasonably make long term commitments, nor does anyone want to rush into a marriage that they know will fail, so the poor are left going through life without the benefits of marriage (or you could restate this as: "the poor are left going through life without the benefits of financial stability, which limits their ability to make the long-term commitments necessary to make a marriage work.")

</comment><comment><USER25> Anyone thinks they might be holding off because of insane laws? Getting kicked out of your own house (that you bought with your own money) as if it's a given. Getting ruined by divorce, or losing half your stuff as if it's so natural.

I've read an article a while back. The cheapest divorces are those of billionaires, the most expensive ones are those of artists and athletes who married without a prenup. Who were naïve enough to think that in the case of divorce, they'd be the same as when they first met, and they'd treat each other with the same respect and love.

Looking at the state of things, the question to ask is How can anyone get married in the U.S.?

</comment><comment><USER26> Does this study examine the difference between people who are in long term non married relationships and those who are not?

Does porn cause people in relationships not to convert those relationships into marriages or does porn cause people to be less likely to enter a relationship at all?

</comment><comment><USER27> I rarely hear the alternative explanation that speaks most to me: marriage as an institution is currently a segregated privilege. I do not want to participate, lest I lend it some small sliver of legitimacy.

Where are the articles talking about the people who don't get married because they no longer need a plausible cover for their sexuality? Or because they are creating loving non-traditional families? Or those like me who empathize with those who are disallowed from participating?

(These are not rhetorical questions, if you know of such research going on I would like to read it!)

I suppose it's easier to blame the newfangled interwebs and kids these days, rather than talk about the very real social changes that are taking place.

</comment><comment><USER28> [http://www.thelocal.de/20140117/dating-in-berlin- unwilling-t...](http://www.thelocal.de/20140117/dating-in-berlin-unwilling-to- commit-single)

Look up exact same articles for Japan, China, S Korea, anywhere. We work more with less social time, prefer independence and marriage expectations are too high so short-term obligation free hookup services like Tinder are preferred to maintaining a relationship.

</comment><comment><USER29> I attended a talk where porn and video games were cited as candidates for explaining the surprisingly low crime rate during the last economic downturn.

I mention this without value connotation since, while low crime is "obviously" good, society may also have benefited from stronger displays of discontent in the long-term.

</comment><comment><USER30> The Researchers of the Study miss the obvious...its hard to find an optimal oportunity to "jack it" when your wife is constantly there, breathing down your neck. Marriage leads to total loss of individual privacy, which is needed to properly enjoy Porn ;-)

</comment><comment><USER31> Isn't this just as simple as the US catching up to Europe? Average marriage age throughout northern Europe is 30+, often when a couple decides they are ready for children.

</comment><comment><USER32> Because only men look at porn. Crap article.

</comment><comment><USER33> Correlation is not causation and they have no plausible mechanism beyond old- style stereotypes of human sexuality.

</comment><comment><USER34> It's not porn. Porn has been around for a long time.

It's the information. People now know more and they see that marriage is heavily stacked against males and against higher earners. We also have a ridiculous situation when prenups get thrown out by judges.

People just don't see that many benefits in marriage. And what are they exactly? I can only think of four:

* Slightly lower taxes

* Visitation rights

* Ability to make medical decisions about the spouse when the spouse can't

* Spousal testimonial privilege and privileged communication

<comment><USER20> Regarding lower taxes, another commenter linked to this:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The decrease in marriage in today's generations stems from the increase in failed marriages of the Boomer generation. Many of today's eligible Gen-X'ers and Millennials come from broken homes.

<comment><USER35> You really believe that just because their parents failed the children decided not to try for themselves? Perhaps it has more to do with seeing how their parents failed. Specifically since the article is geared towards men, maybe it speaks towards a generation (or few) of boys watching the system screw their fathers over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Being young myself (early 30s) most of my male friends are terrified of marriage because their parents are all mostly divorced and its ugly.

Men now see marriage as a huge risk, if your wife decides she doesnt like you any more she takes at least 50% of your assets and if you have children its very unlikely the state will give you custody and you will be on the hook for child support if you cant pay (because you get a worse job etc) you will go to debtors prison.

</comment><comment><USER37> The reality is women won't marry low status men and men don't really want the burden of having to support a wife and child without any income. It's really about money/status, in a status obsessed society.

</comment><comment><USER38> It never ceases to amaze me how sophisticated people are at demonizing porn.

<comment><USER39> Demonizing? They're saying porn discourages people from marriage. We call that a win-win where I'm from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> If a woman can be replaced with (essentially) Youtube.com , then, she isn't offering much is she?

Something tells me the article is not right in blaming porn.

</comment><comment><USER35> I live with a girl and have no intentions of classifying that relationship through the state. This article is a joke. Check out the MGTOW movement if you're interested in the real reason guys are refusing to get married.</comment>


Carl Bildt: The truth about refugees in Sweden - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2017/02/24/the-truth-about-refugees-in-sweden/?utm_term=.eff3b1b79791 <comment><USER2> Asylum seekers are now 2-3% is Swedens population. If the US did the same thing that would mean 10 million people. (Israel, next door, has taken in zero)

The people coming in now are completely different from Balkan refugees, Persians and Lebanese. In the case of the Balkan refugees, they were European. And the Persians were fleeing from an Islamic theocracy - they didn't share their values. Ironically, it was a women of Christian Lebanese descent who was murdered by these new arrivals: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Alexandra_Mezher](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Alexandra_Mezher)

Bildt mentions Spotify and Minecraft, but the new arrivals are making a different use of modern technology: [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/sweden-facebook- gang...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/sweden-facebook-gang-rape- live-streamed-men-court-a7548371.html)

Carl Bildt has his head in the sand. Look at these most-wanted pictures from Sweden and Denmark: [https://www.interpol.int/notice/search/wanted/(RequestingCou...](https://www.interpol.int/notice/search/wanted/\(RequestingCountry\)/290/\(current_age_maxi\)/100/\(search\)/1)

[https://www.interpol.int/notice/search/wanted/(RequestingCou...](https://www.interpol.int/notice/search/wanted/\(RequestingCountry\)/157/\(current_age_maxi\)/100/\(search\)/1)

Try not to notice any patterns, since that would be crimethink.

<comment><USER3> What pattern special to Sweden or Denmark do you see in your Interpol links?

<comment><USER4> I do not believe they are specific to these countries. I had a look at France (where I am from) and that are no Jean-Marc Duponts.

This is a metric like others, with its shortcomings but it has its use. I would be honestly delighted to see a competitive one about, say, volunteering in pediatric hospitals showing that there are no Jean-Marcs but rather plenty of Mohameds. The positive metrics, so to speak. One which is neutral (do not volunteering in the streets for instance whet you need to be "alike" in order to be accepted) but something truly showing integration. I do volunteer work and, sadly, do not see such trend.

<comment><USER2> Mono-ethnic modern states have high levels of altruism and 'civil society' \- Japan, Finland etc. Multi-cultural societies don't since there is less trust and more us-vs-them mentality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Americans pointing fingers at Sweden is bizarre in light of any actual data because Sweden is a very successful society in terms of economy, crime rate etc. ("Sure, we have a beam in our eye, but did you hear what happened last night to the guy with the mote in his eye...")

I get the impression that Sweden is a favorite target of the alt-right because it's a formerly homogenous white and culturally monolithic country, the kind that white nationalists see as an ideal. Now that Sweden has a major refugee population, they await its impending collapse (despite any economic evidence so far).

<comment><USER6> I doubt that there would be a catastrophic collapse in any sort but instead a gradual boiling that we don't identify because we refuse to thoroughly look, where it either spirals into a harsh, violent reaction on behalf of the population or a shift in demographics that's only noticeable ten years later and then we wonder where all the blondes went. Sex crime is intertwined with shame, more so when race is involved. The UK had a pedophilia scandal stewing for years: [https://www.amazon.com/Easy-Meat-Britains-Grooming- Scandal/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Easy-Meat-Britains-Grooming- Scandal/dp/1943003068/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> People might wonder why Swedish politicians produce these absurd head-in-the- sand articles, but the truth is that Sweden has an extremely conformist political culture.

Recently an artist was imprisoned for 6 months and had some of his artwork destroyed for going against this groupthink: [http://www.thelocal.se/20140821/swedish-artist-jailed-for- ra...](http://www.thelocal.se/20140821/swedish-artist-jailed-for-race-hate- pictures)

There are plenty of groups whose job it is to make sure you lose your job if you don't go along with the orthodoxy : [https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/the-rise-of-swedens- far-l...](https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/the-rise-of-swedens-far-left- militants)

</comment><comment><USER7> It is almost as if the presence of the word 'truth' in a political context has the same value as the presence of the term 'democratic' in the name of a country - Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, German Democratic Republic, etc.

Which is a shame as it is possible to say a few things which have the ring of truth about them concerning the 'migrant crisis' in Sweden. Instead of writing a long diatribe I'll just link to a video made by someone calling himself 'an angry foreigner' ('en arg blatte' in Swedish, the last word is a derogative term for foreigner) someone who came to Sweden in one of the previous waves of refugees during the Balkan wars.

[https://youtu.be/y1_viPSD-bY](https://youtu.be/y1_viPSD-bY)

<comment><USER8> You could just use the words "democrat" and "republican". It's funny when you think 5 seconds about what those words mean.

The democrats are about as interested in what the people would decide as the republicans are in letting every state do things for themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Its seems a bit political that the total number of Syrian refugees are not mentioned in the article to contrast with the total number of Balkan refuges (and, to be even more fair in comparing numbers, we might include people from neighboring countries to get a similar land size.)

In my rough understanding, we talking about 100,000 refugees from the Balkans that came between 1991 and 2001 vs around 300,000 refugees from Syrian and neighboring countries for the time period 2011->2016.

<comment><USER8> On the contrary, he is probably quite aware. Immigration's advantages already come with tiny numbers of immigrants, whereas most problems caused by immigration get caused by large sudden influxes of immigrants.

So he's taking a tiny bit of immigration to illustrate that an influx at over 6 times won't generate any problems (I think you underestimate the difference. It's actually about 10x)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the hypocrisy reaches its climax when Mr Trump talks about fighting the fake news, yet uses a story from Fox News as his source in one of his speeches.

He makes our (Swedens) prime minister look like a pro.

<comment><USER11> Swedens prime minister is in fact a professional (he is getting paid for what he does). But when it comes to "pro" in the sense of "knowing what they are doing", Trump makes everybody look like a pro, compared to himself.

<comment><USER12> Trump does seem like a fool, and yet he won the election despite the RNC, Hillary (who outspent him 2 to 1), and a hostile media.

<comment><USER13> I'm honestly not sure why you write "hostile media". Anecdotally, and empirically, Trump got huge mentions and proportion of news time from all the media entities. Sure, some was unfavorable, but on balance, he came out way ahead.

<comment><USER12> I'd say most of the coverage was negative, the kind of scandals that have brought down many other candidates.

Somehow, in Trump's case, there was no such thing as bad publicity.

<comment><USER13> I'd say most of Trump's coverage was pretty positive, despite him undeniably getting involved in scandals that would have brought down any other candidate. The disabled reporter mockery alone would have torpedoed every other candidate.

Somehow, in Trump's case, the media was able to find a false equivalent in some other candidate every single time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That Fox News's 'Swedish defence advisor' is also named Bildt must be completely coincidental.

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/26/fox-news- nils-...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/26/fox-news-nils-bildt- swedish-defence-advisor-unknown-to-countrys-military-officials)

</comment><comment><USER3> "I suspect that his [President Trump] actual knowledge of the issue is extremely limited. If it were not for the massive turmoil that could ensue, I would urge him to skip one of his golfing weekends and come to us and see for himself."

</comment><comment><USER15> Yet almost every weekend somebody is getting shot in Malmø, in one area of the city the police gets rocks thrown at them by organized groups of youth when they show up.

<comment><USER16> According to this Infowars article [1] (not the most unbiased source, but if they fudge their numbers I would expect them to exagerate) there were 11 murders in Malmø in 2016. For a city of almost 300,000 people that is about 3.7 murders per 100,000 people. As a point of reference, in 2016, NYC had a homicide rate of 3.91, LA 7.25, Chicago 28.0 per 100,000 [2]. Those are big cities, so one would expect the crime rate to be higher.

Anyway, your statement that almost every weekend somebody is shot in Malmø was incorrect for 2016.

[1] [http://www.infowars.com/culturally-enriched-malmo-sweden- is-...](http://www.infowars.com/culturally-enriched-malmo-sweden-is-the-most- dangerous-city-in-western-europe/)

[2] [http://www.newsday.com/news/new-york/nyc-homicide-stats- comp...](http://www.newsday.com/news/new-york/nyc-homicide-stats-comparable- to-60s-other-crimes-down-as-well-1.12858407)

<comment><USER7> It is better to compare the murder rate in Malmö to that in Copenhagen, the 'city across the bridge' in Denmark, as both used to share the same "Scandinavian" culture. For those who do not know, Copenhagen is about three times the size of Malmö, the two cities are connected together by a bridge over the 'Öresund' (called the 'Öresund bridge'). Copenhagen has a much lower crime rate than Malmö and - related - a much lower murder rate. The numbers are [1 - Swedish article]:

       City       Murder rate

       Malmö      3.4
       Paris      1.8
       London     1.3
       Copenhagen 1.1
       Berlin     1.0

The comparison with Chicago is clearly off, but that goes for more or less all of Europe. The highest murder rate in Europe is to be found in Tirana, the capital of Albania, with 6.7 murders per 100.000. The highest in the world seems to be found in Caracas, Venezuela, at 120 murders per 100.000.

So Malmö is no Chicago and Europe is no United States of America. But, also, Malmö is no Scandinavia.

<comment><USER16> Thanks for the extra statistics. Can you add a link to the article? It seems to be missing...

<comment><USER7> Yes, I forgot the add the link - that's what you get when you reply to stuff while waiting for the welder to cool down so I can use it again... Here it is:

[1] [http://www.friatider.se/malm-farligast-i- norden](http://www.friatider.se/malm-farligast-i-norden)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Chrome extension that intercepts all form submissions on all websites - <AUTHOR> https://blog.asdfx.us/ <comment><USER2> I changed the Chromium browser (as a masters project) to intercept suspicious extension actions like inserting elements etc and to alert users of what the extension is attempting to do. Using this proof-of-concept browser would have helped you debug your ad injection problem!

[https://cypher.codes/writing/intercepting-suspicious- chrome-...](https://cypher.codes/writing/intercepting-suspicious-chrome- extension-actions)

\- Note: my project specifically tries to protect users from Facebook hijacking and ad injection attacks - the two most common attacks on the CWS!

<comment><USER3> Thanks for this! (Also, you have the coolest last name)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Related story...

I once worked on a price comparison plugin and Firefox is very strict about what your plugins are allowed to do. They review each one and have some strict rules: like you can't load and execute Javascript from the web.

Most of our competitors just sent every URL you visited to their server. We wanted to be better than that since that is an obvious privacy issue.

So we made all our plugins (IE, FF, Chrome) download a whitelist (regex array) of shopping domains our search engine supported and it would only make API calls to our server if it matched that list AND you were on a product page.

Had the added benefit of reducing our server load too.

The server still gets a list of every page you visit on eCommerce sites but better than on all sites.

<comment><USER5> Which extensions send every URL you visit to remote servers?

<comment><USER4> Too many

<comment><USER5> Examples?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not sure what the fuss is here, the permission is literally called "Read and change all your data on the websites that you visit". It should be obvious what it can do.

<comment><USER7> Seems like there should be some additional protection in the extensions API, if there is not already. "Read and change all your data on the websites that you visit" vs. "And send it somewhere over the web" are two separate layers of permission.

Footnote: I can't visit the page. Blocked by corporate.

<comment><USER8> Since extensions can inject arbitrary js, there isn't really a way to be that granular.

You could, for example, exfiltrate data by injecting an image tag with some extra url parameters on the url. Doesn't have to be xhr or websockets.

<comment><USER9> I don't see why that couldn't be sandboxed.

"Send and receive data from anywhere on the internet"

Image doesn't load if you don't accept. Same goes for any tag or function that accesses external URI's.

<comment><USER10> If the extension has permission to manipulate webpages, then the extension could inject code (or an image element, etc) into any open webpage to make the webpage do the request for it.

<comment><USER9> That wouldn't affect it any differently than non-injected code. No external URI loading would occur from code sourced from an extension.

<comment><USER10> What happens if an extension injects a script tag into the page with code to wait a second and then add an image element into the page? The code would be running outside of the extension's isolated world as normal code within the page. (There's many ways like this to trigger code to be evaled through the DOM API, and a lot of extensions depend on the ability to do this so they can interact with the page's javascript values.) The system could be made to remember that code spawned from an element inserted by the extension is still associated with the extension and its permissions, but then there's a lot of possible interactions that can get hairy from there.

If we assume that any code parsed from eval (and equivalent functions) inherits the association of the code eval was called from, then if the webpage defines a function like this:

        function runAfterOneSecond(fn) {
          setTimeout(fn, 1000);
        }

Then the extension can inject a script tag that calls runAfterOneSecond but passes it a string (which setTimeout evals internally) that contains code to inject an image. If that eval'd code is supposed to retain the association with the extension, then that would have to be tracked through the string. Do all strings now require an association field? What if the page code creates a new string based on that string? Does that new string get the association too? What if two strings associated with different extensions are combined? Do the associations get combined so that any code created from the string (or created from anything created from that string transitively) has the union of all of their security limitations?

If instead of tracking the associations of values, you tracked whether the extension was on the call stack at the time of code being parsed, then you're out of luck there too. Imagine a page with the code `eval(getCode())`: if the extension overrode the getCode() function, then it could get the page to eval whatever it wanted. Certain popular web frameworks often eval code from the DOM (think inline templates), so it would be easy to write a more generic attack to have the extension stick some code into the DOM formatted in the specific way that the web framework recognizes so that it will eval and run it later.

And even if you did manage to successfully restrict extensions from network requests, you'd end up with an extension that can't ever add elements to the page or manipulate elements that reference any external content. You couldn't make an extension for previewing an image on link hover. You could only add a button with an icon on it if that icon was an inline data uri. You probably couldn't reuse classnames from the page's css that referenced a remote background image or font. I would expect that nearly all page-interacting extensions would request the network permission just so they could get anything done. Chrome probably wouldn't spell out that permission in the permissions dialog (instead grouping it into the "Extension can read and change your data on all sites you visit" line) because of how common it was. ... And then they probably wouldn't go through the huge amount of effort and redesigns to support that permission in the first place.

<comment><USER9> I don't know enough about the chromium security model to validate your assumptions. I'm speaking more as an API, this is what it _should_ do.

Presumably the implementation would have a mechanism for tracking injected code and treating modified code as suspect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I only heard about this a few week ago and I thought I was up-do-date on internet security. It may be obvious to others, I had no idea an extnetion could do this. This means it can steal you login like phishing but without a spoof URL. I now disable all extensions when logging into important websites

<comment><USER12> Another thing you could do is use incognito mode, which disables extensions by default.

[http://www.tomsguide.com/faq/id-2384484/enable-disable- chrom...](http://www.tomsguide.com/faq/id-2384484/enable-disable-chrome- extensions-incognito-mode.html)

<comment><USER11> the problem with incognito is that it does not always clear the cookies when you close it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Did you report the malicious extension? Its still available from the Chrome store.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is not new. In fact, I'd estimate 20% of all popular plugins know all the websites you're visited, Google searches you're doing, etc: [https://www.howtogeek.com/180175/warning-your-browser- extens...](https://www.howtogeek.com/180175/warning-your-browser-extensions- are-spying-on-you/)

It's how SimilarWeb and other clickstream companies get their data. They claim it's harmless, but they have the ability to know everything you've inputted, and all the secure URL's you've visited (aka that intranet page with all your company salaries or passwords that you think nobody on the web knows about)

<comment><USER15> "Chrome Extensions - AKA Total Absence of Privacy" Detectify's blog post about the subject, mentions Similar web as well.

[https://labs.detectify.com/2015/11/19/chrome-extensions- aka-...](https://labs.detectify.com/2015/11/19/chrome-extensions-aka-total- absence-of-privacy/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> So malware. You wrote some malware.

<comment><USER17> I think you mean development tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Great demonstration. You could probably just as easily listen for blur on form fields and be even more dangerous.

</comment><comment><USER19> I never install browser extensions because it is difficult to check what they are doing and many of them require access to all sites. Users should check who wrote the extension and whether they trust the author.

</comment><comment><USER20> That's why I login into my bank or other important accounts in incongnito mode, where, I make sure extensions stay disabled.

</comment><comment><USER11> Does not work for blockchain.info but does for reddit, hackernews, and facebook</comment>


Chinas 12th Five-Year-Plan (2011-2015) - <AUTHOR> http://minus.com/m86tUhzPS#1

<comment><AUTHOR> Reading through the 13 pages program reveals what the Chinese government is focusing on. Somehow I find this interesting as we see the leaderless 99% protests around the world and the Chinese government promising to do the same on a regulatory level.</comment>


Cheerp 1.1 – C++ for the Web with fast startup times, dynamic memory - <AUTHOR> http://leaningtech.com/cheerp/blog/2015/06/17/Cheerp-1.1/ <comment><USER2> I'm not convinced this is the correct way to solve the problem of porting C++ to web.

AFAIK emscripten can grow heap now and the security implications seem irrelevant to me (you're still inside of a managed memory pool you're not going to do anything that JS code can't do already) - maybe it can allow for more XSS opportunities but I'm not a security expert, seems to me there are much easier ways to do XSS than exploiting bugs in compiled C++ code.

While allocating heap objects trough JS objects might allow VM to reduce fragmentation it's going to put big pressure on the GC (which is a big downside).

With WebAssembly coming up this approach will get even worse in terms of performance

<comment><USER3> I think the point about security is that a C++ program compiled to use a virtual memory array in javascript could be subverted (to do something the programmer and user did not intend) with a buffer overflow etc. the same way a C++ program compiled and running natively could be subverted. With this translation-to-js-objects kind of transpiling, the result is more like java - less arbitrary code execution, more "unhandled exception".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if it would be worthwhile to use Cheerp's approach to compile C++ to Dex bytecode for Android. Given that ART compiles Dex bytecode ahead of time to native code, what would performance be like? Yes, Android has the NDK, but apparently working with that is quite painful. And compiling C++ code to Dex bytecode would reduce package sizes, since it would no longer be necessary to ship binaries for ARM and x86, in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm certainly ignorant on this, but why are we stuck with JavaScript? Seems like such a huge crutch, something people have been working to fix, or avoid, yet here we are still with it. Doesn't it make more sense to adopt the ffi model to gain access to things like sockets, files, canvas that the browser or even OS provides access to; similar to how you would program for mobile native apps. I don't understand the hold up of why we are stuck in this situation.

<comment><USER6> I'd say most of this is due to the issue of adoption. You can come up with a standard for native code, but if you can only run it in one browser that's basically useless. Even if all browser suddenly implemented some new native standard, then all existing browser instances that can't/won't be updated can't access your new shiny website.

Another issue is that native code, assuming that it's secure, is still not portable across different architectures. So you still end up having to have some sort of VM anyway to ensure portability.

That's basically where asm.js comes in. It's a static subset of javascript that allows it to be compiled, it becomes a VM. But since it is javascript, it will work on all existing browsers, they don't need to support a new standard. It'll just be slower.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Could this compile to Google's NativeClient? And how much faster would it be then?

</comment><comment><USER8> This is cool, but the website is not very accessible: I found it really hard to read a dark grey font on a black background.

</comment><comment><USER9> Wouldn't it make more sense to improve Emscripten's huge TypedArray array so it can grow and shrink, or be chunked. Or maybe even implement a "virtual" TypedArray that you can just allocate as the full size of virtual memory.

<comment><USER6> I wonder why it's an issue to allocate 2GB of zeros anyway. With virtual memory, it should all map to the same zeroed page until they get written. And With transparent huge page support, it should only allocate few such pages until they get written.

<comment><USER10> Because many browsers are still 32 bit even in 64 bit systems. That means they get 2GB of virtual space in total. And frequently they don't have 256 MB of aligned and continuous virtual memory (and I suffered the pain of trying to develop a web application that uses 128 MB for months, in the end we ditched the C++ part).

<comment><USER6> That's fair, I guess. Although I thought browsers like chrome run every window in a different process, thus each has their own virtual memory.

I guess the browsers should specialize on very large typed arrays, because with asm.js etc they will most likely be very sparse (e.g. allocate 2gb of zeros, use 50mb).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks great, what is the biggest difference/advantage in comparison to emscripten?

<comment><USER2> Maybe scroll down to "How is Cheerp different from Emscripten?" ?

<comment><USER12> Note though that the blogpost is 5 months old, and the comparison is out of date. For example, as also noted in other comments, Emscripten can handle memory as either

1\. Singleton fixed typed array (what most users use; the fastest)

2\. Singleton growable typed array (aka asm.js memory growth; still not optimized in all browsers, though)

3\. Split memory, in which each chunk of memory can be allocated separately, which allows fully dynamic memory usage the way C and C++ do natively (allocating and freeing pages to the OS), [https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki/Split- Memory](https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki/Split-Memory) (but the flexibility makes it harder for JS engines to optimize)</comment></comment></comment>


How to Avoid Distractions and Start the Right Company - <AUTHOR> https://www.atrium.co/blog/sam-altman-start-the-right-company/?hn <comment><USER2> I honestly do not gain anything from articles like this. They are so abstract that when it comes down to an actual actionable information - it doesn't apply anymore. It is sort of like reading one of those fluffy "How to become a millionaire" advice books. Nothing of substance comes out of it and they do not work for me.

I recently watched Sam Altman's MIT lecture [1] on Youtube about startup advice for hard tech companies. It was such a waste of time.

Instead, I find it much more informative and educational to read and watch stories about how a specific company was formed. Each story is unique and the just goes to show that each startup has unique challenges. There is so much to learn from these stories and their mistakes. For example, watch the SolidWorks founder presenting at Harvard about their initial marketing/pricing phase [2]. It is absolutely fascinating.

Reading generalized abstract fluff bothers me.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7HyWFJMAxg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7HyWFJMAxg) [2] [https://youtu.be/t-EaWM8miHw](https://youtu.be/t-EaWM8miHw)

<comment><USER3> All his stuff are fluff pieces, it's like listening to a pitch coach. I have no idea why people see him as an authoritative figure in this space, when all he had was 1 failed start up.

<comment><USER4> I know it's not his fault per se, but YC has had a horrible track record since he joined, too.

<comment><USER5> Do you think it would have been any different if pg was in charge? I don't.

I think it's rather that the 'low hanging fruit' are all gone. The whole mood has changed. It's become harder. Notice for example that YC places a lot of importance on growth when evaluating applicants, I think in early stages you could've had practically zero users of your product and they would have considered you -- now, not so much.

Secondly, there hasn't been enough time to see what his track record really is, we'll need a few years to really see.

<comment><USER6> They are just part of the signaling echo chamber now. No gutsy calls. When I started reading HN in 2010, it was all information about early stage tech. PG was saying that founders can lead companies all the way and that founders should have the power.

Now they do... YC is just an average investor now with more scale. The next gutsy call or intuition is simply not there with the current team.

HN is a news site and I enjoy it for that, but the community has been moved to a private network and the current YC team is more focused on looking good than doing anything innovative.

<comment><USER7> What is the name of the private network?

<comment><USER8> It's called BookFace, and is a private social network-style platform for YC alumni.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The annoying pop-up over the content appeared just as I started reading "beware the distractions" so I closed the tab. Good advice.

<comment><USER10> Wait a second, you don't want more of this "high quality", "totally-not- retread", "seriously-not-trying-to-get-you-to-sign-up-for-our-lawfirm" content that Sam Altman assures us is as much of a must-read as Paul Graham's essays? What is wrong with you!?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Altman's on point here: don't follow a trend, focus on solving problems. And choose something hard. When money is growing on trees, pick a major problem with a huge upside should you solve it. Startups are hard; at least make it have a chance of being really worthwhile.

— Someone who picked a small problem.

<comment><USER12> Where it gets difficult to answer the very real internal almost contemplative question of 'am I solving a hard problem?' is when one looks at the history of fluffy rhetoric used by companies solving seemingly easy problems, making it impossible to convince them or their supporters they aren't solving something hard. For example, a website with photo sharing and a forum like feature called a newsfeed claims to be connecting everyone. Can't fault them for having audacious goals, I guess, but then it makes it harder to know how to approach one's own hard problems. What's the MVP for a product that attacks world hunger, cancer, or energy scarcity, for example?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I always feel bad when I see startups come from a rich guy chasing fame or increasing the family wealth, they have a great and vital tool (money) but not a problem to solve nor an edge in the industry they are attacking. Kind of ironic, but hey throwing money to random ideas at least generates jobs and moves the economy.

<comment><USER14> Throwing money at unworkable ideas makes the world worse, because it employs people that could be working on good ideas instead. For example, Theranos was a tragedy not because investors lost money (it's part of the deal) but because hundreds of smart scientists and engineers spent years working on something that went nowhere. All that talent directed elsewhere could have built something great.

<comment><USER15> The 'unworkable ideas' can typically only be determined in hindsight. Pushing the cutting edge will always result in some paths that lead to nowhere.

Theranos was a good idea, the tragedy was rampant fraud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A lot of sama hate in this thread for some reason, but the criticisms just come off as petty.

It's a less than 1000 word article giving a 30,000 ft ariel overview of making a startup. Not sure what people expected. If you have 10 years experience in graphic design, you are probably not going to find much of interest in a 1000 word article titled "Getting started in graphic design." Deal with it.

And everyone seems very glib to point out that his startup "failed," but I am not sure how that is relevant here. He's the president of Y Combinator and last time I checked they are doing fine. In art and science, some of the most accomplished figures are lousy teachers and vice versa. Any reason why this would be different in business?

</comment><comment><USER17> Broadly disagree with ALL the points, except for the first one.

IMO this happens with a LOT of standard advice regarding startups. The problem is that there are as many ways to do a startup as there are founders and its too tempting for VC's to infer 'wisdom' from their immediate samples.

I suspect that this happens because as an observer its extremely hard to distinguish causation from correlation. Also, it seems that VC's tend to view 'emergent' success in terms of their own work ethics.

Sam's not the only one though. Paul Graham did this too with his two founder rule for startups.

<comment><USER14> From an investor point of view, correlation can be good enough. If startups with property X are measurably more likely to succeed, it doesn't matter whether X causes success or if X is caused by some other property Y of the startup that causes success but isn't easy to determine in an interview.

In your example, X = "has multiple founders", Y = "first founder is not impossible to work with". Clearly Y causes success, but X is easier for investors to determine.

From a founder point of view, you want to focus mainly on the real causes of success rather than appearances, but give some thought to appearances. Customers are far more influenced by appearances than investors (because they have less time to dig in), so when you devote time to appearances you should think mainly about customers. Customers tend to be skeptical of one-man shows.

<comment><USER17> The concern is that Sam is offering this advice for founders not investors - and many would lap it up given the authority he has and make suboptimal decisions about their startup.

I think YC is probably HEAVILY influenced by appearance. Wrestle with the data little bit, check all the right boxes, prep that video, get some intros and your YC MBA is set.

Customers largely couldnt care less about one-man shows and even if in any specific case they do, it is very easy to 'look' like a company on the internet or in real life.

Amazon has always been a one-man show - but maybe thats why they never made money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> 50 likes and 2 comments over an hour seems like too little engagement to be second on the list. Are posts about Sam effectively sticked on HN? Is there any more information on how the front page works?

<comment><USER19> I'm a simple man: I see something by Sam Altman, I upvote and read it. I suspect many folks on HN (you know, being on a YC site) are the same.

This, and HN simply working based on an upvote algorithm, seems much more plausible than there being some kind of conspiracy to amplify Sam's posts.

<comment><USER18> I never for a second suggested it was a conspiracy, I'm not entirely sure where you got that idea from. I merely asked was there information about weighing his posts and posts about him higher.

<comment><USER19> Fair enough... sorry for taking your post uncharitably. To me that's a bit of a conspiracy, as it would be kind of dishonest to weigh his posts higher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Something doesn't quite sit right with me about #5 "Think Bigger" and the example that a recruit might think "So what? Your company is just another enterprise software startup."

To me there are a lot of interesting opportunities in solving problems, that might initially seem mundane or tedious but could turn into successful, profitable businesses. #5 seems to sort of go against some of the sentiment in PG's article Shelp Blindness ( [http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html) ).

I suppose I might attempt to re-state #5 thusly: "The difficult and seemingly tedious work done in the early stages might show a path to providing solutions larger problems 1..n"

I'd like to be able to recruit people who are interested in a that journey more so than the end-state.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Distractions are everywhere, and one of the most insidious things in startups. Once you become a founder there is lots of "fun" stuff to do: go to conferences, have coffee meetings with important people, etc.

The discipline is to be able to say "No". To be honest it is still a skill I feel I haven't mastered yet, 7+ companies later :)

I recommend reading Essentialism, by Greg McKeown.

</comment><comment><USER21> slightly offtopic, but startup related:

why Sam Altman would post on atrium.co website?

when checking their services, they provide incorporating and other legal services,

is it more custom legal service than clerky.com? any idea about pricing?

I'm looking to incorporate but slightly more complex than clerky standard templates

<comment><USER22> Atrium is a YC alum

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I keep seeing Sam Altman tied to clickbaity 'How-to' articles, but never managed to apply any of the lessons to start and grow a _successful_ company himself. Obviously from his position now, he has a lot of insights into what other companies do, so It'd be great to see factual data from his insights, rather than top-down advice that he wasn't able to apply to his own career.</comment>


Finally we can stop pretending that itunes helps the music industry - <AUTHOR> http://www.asymco.com/2011/07/13/itunes-app-total-downloads-finally-overtook-song-downloads/

<comment><USER2> Needless editorializing in the title, that isn't mentioned at all by the article. (In case the article's title is changed, it's currently "Finally we can stop pretending that itunes helps the music industry").</comment>


Show HN: Neural network OCR in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mateogianolio/ocr <comment><AUTHOR> Made this roughly a year ago (see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9652913](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9652913)).

Originally I let the neural net output a charcode array (either 4 or 8 bits, depending on if the output was a number or a character) which could then be converted into the corresponding character. In short, this improved performance and decreased accuracy. I ended up switching back to standard mapping (index of maximum probability is the best guess), which requires an output layer the same size as the amount of characters one wants to recognize.

Posted it here again because the demand for this kind of tool still seems to be quite high and there is no FOSS alternative that I know of.

If you have questions or suggestions, let me know!</comment>


Ask HN: Is your company responding rationally to the Corona Virus threat? - <AUTHOR> My wife's company, based in SF, has their President based in Dallas, Texas. He's saying that he doesn't want to shut the office in SF down until there are 1,000 cases being reported in SF. I think this is a huge mistake due to the fact that many in SF must take public transportation (BART ewww), and it scares me given I'm a bit older than the rest of you. What do y'all think? <comment><USER2> Very early on, WFH guidance world wide, no visitors to any offices, all interviews made 100% remote, all business travel cancelled, all offsites cancelled, specific offices closed based on high risk areas and/or people having/potentially having it.

The '1000' seems a bit silly and arbitrary tbh...

</comment><comment><USER3> Define rationally... my country's officials (Sweden) sees it differently than my bosses.

International travel is canceled, hand disinfectants everywhere, some key personnel was split between our 2 large offices, WFH was and is still a valid option for many, big assemblies and meeting all canceled or broken down to smaller audiences.

</comment><comment><USER4> Very rational.

I am in Romania. We have about 40 cases as of today country-wide. About a week ago we were all told to stay home at the slighest symptons or having travelled.

A big conference set to take place was cancelled already about two weeks ago and all business travel has been suspended for the last two weeks.

Yesterday we were all told to not come to the office unless absolutely necessary. So, we're all working from home until we hear otherwise.

Not a big deal for most of us. The local branch is relatively small (<100 people) and consists of mostly software engineers. We communicate daily with other branches around the world, so working remotely has never really been a problem.

Company also pays for private healthcare and we all received flu shots two months ago on company costs. Not that those help against COVID-19, but hey, it's something.

</comment><comment><USER5> I live in Algiers, Algeria. We have about 20 declared cases in the country.

As a company, we didn't want to take a risk, especially that we don't know much about this so we're working from home.. We send employees home if they're tired or have the flu, or a headache and we're not going to be reckless with this, especially that some employees take the train/bus/subway.

We used to have regular business meetings in Paris, and we stopped that, too.

</comment><comment><USER6> When the infection first made news, the management brought it up earlier, canceled all business flights, bought masks and antiseptic for everyone here. The office isn't accessible with public transport.

We're still coming to office, bosses gossip about COVID-19 daily (we literally added updates to the about menu on our app). But it's still in control where I live, only around 129 cases nationwide, supposedly slowing down.

</comment><comment><USER7> Your wife's company president only needs to know about 1 successful lawsuit against an employer for putting a company's profit interests before the safety of its employees. That kind of news is going to make bigger waves than the Corona Virus itself.

<comment><USER3> I suppose that as long as he is following government/official organizations recommendations then he should be fine

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> For the most part. Travel restrictions, no conferences, WFH preparations, etc. From a policy standpoint, we're alright. Have we considered what to do if our offshore contractors get quarantined and can't WFH? Not so much.</comment>


Getting through spam filters - <AUTHOR>

Any of you have any advice on getting through spam filters when emailing your users? I know Return Path helps improve the success rate but not sure how much they charge. <comment><USER2> Don't overdo it with HTML. Sure make it look nice but you need to be sure you have content in there. Use complete sentences and avoid the spamwords, even in gest.

There's no one way to avoid spam filters, even big corporations have issues getting emails into inboxes. There are some ISPs who block emails based on many they receive from an address in a period of time, but that's just something you have to deal with and figure out when it comes to sending out bulk emails.</comment>