The FBI Says How It 'Legally' Pinpointed Silk Road's Server - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/09/the-fbi-finally-says-how-it-legally-pinpointed-silk-roads-server/ <comment><AUTHOR> The theory I posted last year on Stack Exchange [0]:

> The above environment variables were being dumped in the source of the login > page on Silk Road. They contained the real IP address of the server.

notbad.gif.

Second - the FBI considering "fiddling" with "miscellaneous" input characters into the login page not illegal access is good - it means the next person charged under the CFAA for "exceeding authorization" by fuzzing will have a precedent to cite.

edit: To add a third point: If you are hosting a Tor hidden service, do it inside a virtual machine. Put it behind a gateway that acts as an isolating proxy. Clients/users should be doing the same as well as it protects against the malware attacks (even better freeze a VM snapshot and restore it each time you need it). Whonix[1] does this - although it is easy to setup yourself (I use OpenBSD as the gateway, much slimmer than Whonix and a whole lot less going on)

[0] [http://security.stackexchange.com/a/43280](http://security.stackexchange.com/a/43280)

[1] [http://www.whonix.org](http://www.whonix.org)

<comment><USER2> > If you are hosting a Tor hidden service, do it inside a virtual machine. Put > it behind a gateway that acts as an isolating proxy.

While this is good advice and will help you in the event of your server accidentally leaking debugging/config information, it won't help if someone is able to get the hidden service to make a network request. For example, if they can get it to send an email or check if a page is online, then that email will obviously go through the gateway. And obviously if someone gains arbitrary code execution, they can just Google "my IP" and see the externally facing IP.

Some other useful advice: if you're setting up a Tor hidden service, make sure the HTTP server only accepts requests from the Tor network. The FBI claims that when they put the $_SERVER['SERVER_ADDR'] IP in their browser they got the SR home page right on port 80, which is extremely poor security on SR's part. Someone running a distributed scan of all web servers on the Internet could have found it on their own within a few weeks or less. And in fact, this is becoming more common as a technique to identify origin servers hidden behind reverse proxies and CDNs.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is why you have it segmented:

> Put it behind a gateway that acts as an isolating proxy.

You don't NAT - you forward the port required through the gateway machine and to the virtual machine. Either terminate Tor on the gateway and forward the web port, or terminate Tor on the web server and forward the Tor traffic on the gateway.

In that case _nothing_ can request out from the web server. If your server needs to make requests, such as getting the latest bitcoin price - you do that on _another_ server and run a queue that will pull the data over.

<comment><USER3> That's correct. Most of _these guys_ are getting cauought because they didn't believe that will have to _eventually_ face an enemy with so many resources (FBI/NSA).

I believe that avoiding detection online can be done if you are very strict about your policies.

I don't believe DRP had the knowledge to understand and the how's and why's of a setup you're describe unlike skilled engineers[1] who design multi-layered approaches.

[1] [http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2014-04-09-tarsnap-no- heartb...](http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2014-04-09-tarsnap-no-heartbleed- here.html)

<comment><USER4>
      > they didn't believe that will have to eventually face an enemy with so many
      > resources (FBI/NSA).  I believe that avoiding detection online can be done
      > if you are very strict about your policies.

I think the NSA has sufficient resources and incentive to mount a sybil/correlation attack on the Tor network.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > they typed "miscellaneous" strings of characters into the login page's entry > fields

So this is legal when the FBI does it, but when someone else does essentially the same thing on an AT&T server it's identity fraud and conspiracy to access a computer without authorization

<comment><USER2> Assuming the FBI had a warrant, they had a right to do whatever they wanted to SR's server, no?

I think weev's sentence was utter bullshit, but you can't equate the two things. SR was a drug marketplace, AT&T is not. This is like arguing police shouldn't be able to pick the lock of your drug safehouse door because you aren't allowed to pick other people's locks.

<comment><USER6> That's the thing - the FBI didn't have a warrant. They're trying to argue that they should be allowed to use the information anyway, because it wasn't 'hacking,' it was 'entering miscellaneous strings.'

On a related note, why the hell didn't they get a warrant? I doubt it would have taken long.

<comment><USER2> That does change things, I agree.

However, to play devil's advocate a bit: the FBI essentially saw the output of the PHP call `print_r($_SERVER)`. The only thing that's actually sensitive in there is the server's IP address and hostname. This is not usually considered sensitive information. If it is to be believed that is as far as they went before getting a warrant (and I don't know if that's the case or not), then obtaining the IP address would allow them to actually serve a court order to the hosting provider. In that sense it could be seen as non-invasive and purely conducive to their investigation.

But I agree there should not be a double standard. I think what weev did was not illegal, and what the FBI did here was not illegal, personally.

<comment><USER7> I remember reading rumors that this happened to some random user when the site went a bit wrong and they posted the information to the SR forums. I think it then got deleted fast.

Could that have been the source of the ip leak?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This strongly suggests that anything hosted on Tor should be done through some sort of (ideally plug-n-play, hardened) NAT+hypervisor/container system such that the service itself can never, ever know its real external IP. Such a system could potentially also act as a legal defense in a situation such as this.

<comment><USER9> While this is certainly better than not doing so, if one is going to run such a hidden service in flagrant violation of the law, it seems prudent to take all feasible precautions--and maybe some unfeasible ones, too.

1) Run the HTTP server in a guest VM to reduce likelihood of hardware identifier leakage (hardware MACs, HD serials, DMI data, CPUID, etc.)

2) Physically separate HTTP server and Tor client, and restrict communication between them to a simple packetized high-speed serial interface.

2a) Consider an inline filter on this link that watches for private keys, etc. and kills communication upon detection, and adds random latency to packets to reduce bandwidth of timing channels.

2b) Physically isolate these systems as much as possible: power line filters, electro-optical couplers for the comm link, etc.

3) Stub out all Tor crypto operations to an HSM; keep the onion key and do all operations on the onion key on that HSM.

4) Make friends in the criminal underground, becasue you're probably going to prison eventually, anyway ;).

<comment><USER10> Honestly, I'm not so sure about (4). I feel like when I read about criminals that were captured, they all made avoidable mistakes. I have to wonder if there are, in fact, many criminals that are never captured because they are simply better at it.

<comment><USER9> Sure, but it only takes one avoidable mistake to bring it all crashing down. Want to bet the rest of your life on being perfect? In any case, it was a (half) joke.

But yes, it reminds me of the hilarity of FBI's characterization of PLA Unit 61398 as some super-scary 'master hackers': real 'master hackers' don't get caught.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Curious why they didn't include this description in the original indictment. I don't read a lot of indictment documents but pretty much all that I have laid out the steps law enforcement took to ascertain that a crime had taken place and that the person they were indicting was the person they believe committed that crime. I could them requesting that the description remain under seal to foil other poor server maintainers from protecting their identity but that isn't what happened here.

<comment><USER12> It wasn't an issue until it was raised by the defence.

<comment><USER11> Hmm refreshing my memory here, this [1] is the search warrant for SABU (of Anonymous) and the claim is that the FBI didn't need a warrant for Ulbricht (which is where this stuff would have been outlined). At least I can't find such a warrant with basic searching techniques. So I'm guessing had they gotten a warrant (does Iceland need such things?), they would have presumably said all of this in the warrant.

[1] [http://www.scribd.com/doc/197510285/a](http://www.scribd.com/doc/197510285/a)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Even if true it could be a parallel construction.

<comment><USER14> I don't think anyone here is even remotely doubting that this is anything BUT parallel construction.

<comment><USER15> While that may or may not be true (which is completely in the spirit of parallel construction, and it fscks with your mind), we ARE talking about the guy who registered an account to advertise his illegal drug marketplace using his personal email address. That part is fully visible and timestamped, and can not in any plausible way have been planted. With someone so full of himself, pretty much anything is possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The full docket of the USA v. Ulbricht case is available at:

[http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/20nlzy0uz/new-york- southern...](http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/20nlzy0uz/new-york-southern- district-court/usa-v-ulbricht/)

</comment><comment><USER17> I think that given the revelations of parallel reconstruction in general, the burden should be on the prosecution to prove that the NSA et al. were not involved. An illegal search/seizure could very well have been what gave the FBI the idea to find the IP address in this way.

Given that the NSA is able to collect most internet traffic, and they've been sharing info with other agencies, I would think that most evidence against any defendant could be thrown out. Yes, that would be ludicrous, and that's exactly why the NSA needs to be reformed.

<comment><USER18> > the burden should be on the prosecution to prove that the NSA et al. were > not involved

You can't prove a negative.

<comment><USER19> They should be obligated to testify to the truth under oath. It's not proof but gets their position into court records.

<comment><USER20> And they will. The trial isn't over. Somebody will get on the stand, be sworn in, and then explain the actions he took to reveal the server's IP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If the site was accessible through an IP, could scanning ports and looking for a particular item on the homepage have identified it?

<comment><USER22> Yep! Sounds like a pretty big problem. With 10,000 scanning processes taking 5/sec per IP, it'd take less than a month to scan all IPs. It should be easy for a powerful adversary to scale this up and finish in a day or two. It'd take more work if all ports need to be scanned, but restricting to just known hosting blocks could shave a bit off. As could eliminating well-known good sites from a first pass.

It would surprise me if the FBI isn't already doing this for all known onion sites, just to have the info around.

At any rate, sounds like a real basic Opsec101 failure on The Silk Road. Not that hidden services are that safe in the first place. The Tor folks have written about how hidden services are quite vulnerable to some attacks. Not something I'd want to rely on to save me from a 30 year sentence.

Edit: If someone had to run a hidden service, it might make sense to setup another onion site (on another Tor instance) and expose that on port 80, as part of misinformation tactic. Reading several incidents, it seems attackers will use circumstancial evidence to help narrow down the possibilities. By intentionally leaking things (like offhand comments about the weather, using reports from another city) one might be able to gain a few more bits of anonymity back. Of course someone doing such a thing wouldn't setup their illegal site on a public IP in the first place.

<comment><USER23> It's my understanding that _most_ OpSec failures are real basic OpSec 101 failures. Not because, faced with the question, it's hard to get it right - but because faced with so many questions it is hard to get _all_ of them right, and screwing one up is frequently enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I know a lot of "software" solutions are being discussed in this thread for greater anonymity, but I would personally simply opt for a more secure physical solution. Such as hosting the server somewhere that doesn't require you to give away any of your information.

I know this may sound silly, but there's tons of USB stick sized linux machines that you can plug virtually anywhere. I'm thinking of public spaces such as public wifis. The ToR address can be relayed to other locations if it ever gets breached. And ToR hidden services work great even if you're behind a firewall.

This seems a lot more sensitive than opting for a system where your name is somehow attached to a server.

<comment><USER25> How could you run a popular website via the upload pipe supplied by a public wifi? There's no way that's practical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> From /r/darknetmarkets (so grain of salt is needed):

> yeah it was about 6-9 months before it shut down if I remember correctly, it > was pretty highly upvoted and a lot of chatter about it on the SR forums. > though I think there were at least a few bugs that they had to shut down for > once they realized that their asses were on the line.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/2flnlp/fbi_s...](http://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/2flnlp/fbi_says_sr1_server_ip_located_via_errors_in/ckakq1v)

So yeah, apparently this was an actual bug.

<comment><USER20> But, but, but... "Even a rookie would know better, and DPR is no rookie."

[http://www.reddit.com/r/SilkRoad/comments/1dmznd/should_we_b...](http://www.reddit.com/r/SilkRoad/comments/1dmznd/should_we_be_worried_showing_on_login_page/c9s11v8)

<comment><USER15> Literally _everything_ about DPR screams rookie. From the fact that he had to ask around on public web forums to get Tor set up, to his PHP skillz.

I know this is in hindsight, but you had to be pretty deep in the reality distorsion field not to see this coming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Was that "Parallel construction" from the FBI to hide it's NSA source (intelligence laundering)?

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team- intel...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intelligence- laundering)

</comment><comment><USER28> "fiddling" with "miscellaneous" input characters could be confirmed with server logs. i wondering if the defence will pursue this.

</comment><comment><USER29> So fiddling with a website to obtain information not intended for you is legal now? Because if that's so then awesome. Tell Weev's lawyers.

<comment><USER30> I don't think laws apply retroactively.

<comment><USER29> That's not a new law. Just incosistent application.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Article says the FBI located the server by entering "miscellaneous" input into the Silk Road login page, which at some point disclosed an IP address. I wonder if they got the Web server to throw a 500 or similar error, that rendered some debug output?

</comment><comment><USER32> Parallel Construction

<comment><USER33> Does the Tor Browser allow you to access things on the Internet, because surely it shouldn't, therefore the Captcha should have failed to load for a high percentage of Internet users?

<comment><USER34> The Tor Browser will let you access things on the Internet... using Tor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Hmm...

[http://www.ehackingnews.com/2013/08/almost-half-of-tor- sites...](http://www.ehackingnews.com/2013/08/almost-half-of-tor-sites- compromised-by.html)

[http://www.wired.com/2013/09/freedom-hosting- fbi/](http://www.wired.com/2013/09/freedom-hosting-fbi/)

Somehow "fiddling with inputs" and "noticing an IP", while innocently phrased, sounds unlikely. It's just so hard to know whether this is parallel construction. The FBI's history with false testimony (i.e. COINTELPRO) is more than damning.

The 'not in the US, not subject to US law' is a common trick, and also a way both that the NSA skirts laws about monitoring US citizens (Snowden's leaked documents repeated showed how partners with the NSA regularly traded bulk information on US communications for their own), how the CIA and FBI are able to stop Americans and journalists abroad and how intelligence agencies can propagandize its own citizens while retaining plausible deniability.

The CIA is authorized to, and in fact in the past decade and a half heavily decided to, plant stories to international media wire drops that US journalists subscribe and use as a source of information. The CIA also works with partners overseas and private enterprises to engineer foreign stories that the US media will also follow and use for reports (Lincohn Group, Zarqawi PsyOp, etc). Inevitably some of the material released to the Voice of America and other international propaganda outlets make it back to the US Media.

Furthermore information is now able to be targeted in very sophisticated ways (i.e. MINERVA, USAID Cuba Twitter program) for the spread of ideas and support (or dissidence) via 'social contagions', all without ever having to directly propagandize any citizens. These sorts of programs are the ultimate and extreme irony of the Soft Power philosophy.

I find it unfortunate that the Constitution grants rights restricting search and seizure (and others) but that our representation does not recognize these rights, broadly 'de facto' recognize, as rights worth enforcing outside a strictly domestic interpretation. Are these "rights" or "Rights" if our representation allows and even encourages others to infringe on them?

</comment><comment><USER36> Bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is just the cover-story.

<comment><USER38> Prove it.

<comment><USER39> Sorry citizen, that's classified.</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook doesn't plan to take strong action against anti-vaccination posts - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-vaccine-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-9eae01a2-e6b2-4f4c-a48c-986bac665a2b.html <comment><USER2> This is the problem with "fact checking". It positions the platform as an authority. Now, any claim that isn't "debunked" by this "fact checking" gains a certain amount of credibility by comparison. The moral hazards are enormous, multiplied by the opaque behavior of Facebook's algorithm and again multiplied by its unprecedented reach in society.

<comment><USER3> What about things that Facebook does take down, like fraud and scams or misinformation about voting requirements? Is that problematic because it positions Facebook as an authority about those things? Should Facebook remove posts which claim an election date has been moved, or that if you reply with your bank account details you will get some free money?

<comment><USER4> Yes Facebook should handle all such takedowns itself instead of outsourcing it.

It's tempting to say they can take down things like fake election dates without causing any concern, and that's probably true. But there also isn't much that falls in that category, and people can still send such messages via other messaging platforms like WhatsApp, email, the web etc. So it may simply not be worth the slippery slope in the end.

<comment><USER3> Sending messages between individuals on WhatsApp isn't a remotely comparable problem to Facebook's algorithm actively spreading posts to a huge audience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You would hope that the custodian of the world's most popular communication platform would have a greater sense of obligation to the social responsibility that comes with it. Unfortunately we don't live in that world, and Zuckerberg continues choose dollars over lasting damage to the standards of discourse. He is the Murdoch of the 21st century, tearing at the social fabric in pursuit of profits and facilitating the spread of foreign disinformation if it increases engagement metrics.

<comment><USER6> >would have a greater sense of obligation to the social responsibility that comes with it

Maybe that's why he is largely hands-off when it comes to policing or shaping content? Not everyone agrees that the best way to manage an important communications platform is to shape the speech allowed on it.

<comment><USER5> Allowing anti-vaccination sentiment to proliferate on the platform is fairly unambiguously harmful to society, especially during a pandemic that may rely on a vaccine to escape. It appears to be choosing engagement, which drives clicks, page views and ad impressions over being a force for good and then dressing it up as free speech, when moderators selectively remove millions of other posts per day.

Social networks have proven themselves so powerful, it seems unlikely their ability to wreak havoc on society will remain unlegislated forever. One day social networks will be legally responsible for the content published, and we'll see an end to the laissez-faire attitude of allowing disinfo to spread unhindered.

<comment><USER7> I mean, by that logic, the US government allowing anti-vaccination sentiment to proliferate without legal/policy action (read: the First Amendment), is also "unambiguously harmful to society".

Except, the issue is way more nuanced than that. The reason this expression is enshrined as a protection in US jurisdiction is because we decide that free expression trumps every other social need — with the narrow exceptions as laid out in Brandenburg v Ohio (imminent lawless action).

To the extent that this is undesirable, if the political will to amend the Constitution is absent, then you'd also have a hard time convincing people that Facebook should not exercise the same principle.

<comment><USER5> My point is that true freedom of speech of already only partially possible on the platform owing to moderators selectively taking down millions of posts daily that violate the 'community guidelines'. Extending this to anti- vaccination rhetoric seems like a small expansion of existing policy, and addresses a problem causing real harm in society.

Cities are paying millions to stop outbreaks of previously defeated diseases like measles and counteract disinformation primarily being spread on social networks [1]. Should social networks not be somewhat culpable for their quantifiable externalities on society?

[1] [https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2019/09/us- measl...](https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2019/09/us-measles- cases-hit-1234-brooklyn-outbreak-called-over)

<comment><USER7> Right, and that's just as easily an argument in favor of _loosening_ the existing restrictions, not tightening them even further.

Epistemologically, where you come out on this all depends on which axiom you start from.

Also, there's a subtle difference between the existing guidelines and what you're proposing: the existing guidelines exist to maintain a positive experience directly for those consuming the platform (eg I don't want to see ISIS beheadings on FB). The new guidelines you're proposing exist solely to indirectly prevent others from seeing things you think they should not be seeing (eg I don't want my aunt to see this post). It's a very important distinction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Controversy breeds clicks and pageviews which drive advertising income. As long as that cycle does not get broken you can expect a lot more misery from that particular corner.

<comment><USER9> "Controversy breeds clicks and pageviews which drive advertising income."

I really wish Americans would wake up to this, and realize that Facebook, and news media in general, are breeding grounds for our division.

<comment><USER10> We are a culture who loves "reality" tv shows and all the made up drama that goes with it. Facebook just feeds right into that.

<comment><USER11> By "we" you mean Homo Sapiens, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I always had a sentiment that "thought policing" by blocking people's posts just reinforces all the bad stuff that happens there. It will reinforce the idea that something is controlling the speech or information (conspiracy theorists rejoice) and the reaction would be to build even bigger misinformation echo chambers, at least this is anecdata I observe in my feeds.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth." Marcus Aurelius

We need to stop trying to enforce "the truth" to other people. Just let people talk and have different opinions. That includes letting people having conservative values, because lately this thought police is getting out of control.

<comment><USER14> As The Daily Show once put it, "you are entitled to your opinion; you are not entitled to your own set of facts".

<comment><USER11> Epistemology is harder than that.

If a government body declares that there is no risk of human->human transmission of COVID-19, am I not entitled to evaluate other evidence and conclude that this statement of fact is incorrect?

> Based on the preliminary information from the Chinese investigation team, no > evidence of significant human-to-human transmission and no health care > worker infections have been reported.

[https://www.who.int/csr/don/05-january-2020-pneumonia-of- unk...](https://www.who.int/csr/don/05-january-2020-pneumonia-of-unkown-cause- china/en/)

<comment><USER14> No, see, that's a great example of incorrectly mixing the two up on your part. Nothing in that statement can fairly be read as "there is no risk of human->human transmission of COVID-19".

Fact: On Jan 5, 2020, the _WHO_ had "no evidence of significant human-to-human transmission".

You can hold the _opinion_ that they should've been more aggressive about the potential of that changing. You can hold the _opinion_ that the WHO should figure out a way to rely less on member nations accurately reporting information to them. As the statement notes, much was unknown to the WHO at that point:

> There is limited information to determine the overall risk of this reported > cluster...

<comment><USER11> > Nothing in that statement can fairly be read as "there is no risk of > human->human transmission of COVID-19".

So you'd like to be 'entitled to your own set of facts' about how to summarise that WHO post because I am a fallible human, correct?

Would you say that Facebook are composed of infallible humans who never misinterpret the results of dense scientific papers? Or can the human judgement they exercise on complex topics be mistaken?

<comment><USER14> > So you'd like to be 'entitled to your own set of facts' about how to > summarise that WHO post because I am a fallible human, correct?

It is simply not _factual_ that that statement states "there is no risk of human->human transmission of COVID-19". It _explicitly_ states otherwise, in fact.

> There is limited information to determine the overall risk of this reported > cluster...

<comment><USER11> And your choice to believe the webpage over me is an (entirely reasonable and wise) exercise in human judgement based on other evidence you have access to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Every day that passes, I worry more and more that we've naively entrusted too much to Zuckerberg to do what's "right."

I look forward to whatever platform can figure out how to provide a viable alternative and thrive.

<comment><USER16> "We" didn't entrust him. The users -- those blind, piteous, sorrowful, clearly-very-bored people -- trust him.

What's the use of worrying about him, or them? Just quit the site!

p.s. also hi Brian! chance encounter..

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Don't use Facebook but I don't want any of the social media platforms performing any censorship beyond the legally mandated type (ie pirated material illegal porn etc)

<comment><USER18> Even the darkest corner of the internet, 8chan, has more strict rules than that

<comment><USER17> Interested to hear what rules these are

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As with almost everything these days, this topic is NOT black and white despite what initial comments say. Take a look at the vaccine for the 1976 swine flu outbreak. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_swine_flu_outbreak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_swine_flu_outbreak)

A comment here already says that expressing concern over a vaccine is basically misinformation. I'm sorry but expressing concern about a vaccine that is developed in about 1 year, which is a record 1/10th of the time it normally takes is completely fair, as there can be serious consequences that you don't know about for a while.

And I say this as someone who is vaccinated for everything, even optional vaccines, and has vaccinated for everything when going to Asia etc.

<comment><USER20> See that is a fact check; if someone were to state "The 1976 swine flu vaccine was unsafe", that's a fact. If someone has the belief "The Covid-19 vaccine has not been tested adequately", that too is a fact - and the manufacturers have issued a joint statement saying they would not risk releasing an unsafe vaccine either.

But the fearmongering? The "Vaccines cause autism" claim (which is massively insulting, for one because it implies that people would rather have their kids be dead than autistic)? The misinformation about the contents and risks of vaccines? That needs to be tackled. Those are non-factual or disproportionate claims that are putting millions at risk.

My girlfriend initially made the conscious decision not to have her son vaccinated (for various reasons not related to the current anti-vax trend) but had to have it done later on because so many others refused to vaccinate their kids. She wanted to rely on herd immunity but the anti-vaxxers made that unlikely.

<comment><USER21> > "The Covid-19 vaccine has not been tested adequately," that too is a fact

That is very much NOT a fact. "Adequately" is entirely subjective. It is a subjective threshold that might be informed by other facts, but that doesn't make it a fact.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> ' "It's true that partisan content often has kind of a higher percent of people ... engaging with it, commenting on it, liking it," Zuckerberg told Axios. '

Hmm, no vested interests there for sure! /s

</comment><comment><USER23> Is this anti-vaxx in general, or specific concerns about a coronavirus vaccine?

Because there's a world of difference between repeating a debunked claim about vaccines causing autism or the idea that all vaccines are unsafe and saying you had a bad reaction to a specific vaccine or have concerns about an unproven vaccines development process.

</comment><comment><USER24> The way I read this:

1\. Trump is pushing for a vaccine to be authorized before Election Day.

2\. Democrats are saying a vaccine before Election Day should not be trusted.

3\. A simple anti-vaxx detection algorithm would identify Democrats as anti- vaxxers

4\. Zuckerberg either wants Facebook to stay out of this controversy, or he's siding with the Democrats.

<comment><USER25> The way i read it is america's politics are a dangerous clusterfuck

<comment><USER26> Currently, there is a clamping operation occurring on all topics in the US. Media clamps to the left or right extreme, and both extremes are completely nutty. Those extremes at least used to be vaguely rational, or at least they somewhat managed to balance one another out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What if it's anti-covid-vaccine misinformation?

</comment><comment><USER28> Facebook has already taken strong action against people who believe you should not vaccinate your child.

It is almost impossible to find anti-vax groups on Facebook in their search feature. They won't surface them at all.

Even if you type in the direct phrase sometimes.

You have to have a direct link to the anti-vax group.

That is a form of censorship.

<comment><USER29> I don't use Facebook but my understanding was that in general it's tougher to do broad searches like that as they want you to be connected via social graph first. could be wrong here though.

At any rate, what's wrong with censorship in online media? It's been my experience that basically every platform lacking censorship turns into a cesspool of bigotry and misinformation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Not surprised as Facebook is a cesspool of anti-5G and anti-vaxxer.

</comment><comment><USER31> I get my flu vaccine every year. That said, I agree with Zuck.

I want to live in a world where we're forced to teach our kids critical thinking skills than in a world that relies on controlling the flow of information. Let's have articles about making critical thinking a required school class as is with English, math, US history, etc. Than Zuck is not blocking this or that.

<comment><USER32> Attractive and somewhat lazy ideological opinion. The world is so complicated and the group most susceptible to conspiracy theories in most cases also happens to have the least access to the type of education that prioritizes critical thinking.

<comment><USER33> Then we should prioritize teaching critical thinking, and not what to think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> "If someone is pointing out a case where a vaccine caused harm or that they're worried about it — you know, that's a difficult thing to say from my perspective that you shouldn't be allowed to express at all."

Where I'm from, we call that misinformation.

<comment><USER35> The front page of the NYT today is about AstraZeneca halting their trials because of a patient's adverse reaction to the vaccine.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/09/world/covid-19-coronaviru...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/09/world/covid-19-coronavirus.html)

<comment><USER36> This article is practically misinformation in itself, and the body of the text confirms it:

"The event is being investigated by an independent committee, and it is too early to conclude the specific diagnosis."

Here is an article from another newspaper, about the same thing: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/09/oxford- univers...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/09/oxford-university- astrazeneca-covid-vaccine-trial-put-on-hold-due-to-adverse-reaction-in- participant)

The headline is: "Oxford University Covid vaccine trial put on hold due to possible adverse reaction in participant"

Compared to NYT's "Covid-19 Live Updates: Vaccine Trial Is Halted After Patient's Adverse Reaction"

Notice the difference between the two of them?

<comment><USER37> Which word do you have an issue with in the NYT headline, 'reaction'? As in, the 'adversity' faced by this patient may not in fact be a 'reaction' to the vaccine?

<comment><USER38> The use of "on hold" in the guardian headline clearly conveys a temporary pause or an interruption.

The use of "halted" in the NYT headline commonly means stop or end.

halted; halting; halts Definition of halt

(Entry 1 of 4)

intransitive verb

1 : to cease marching or journeying

2 : discontinue, terminate the project halted for lack of funds

transitive verb

1 : to bring to a stop the strike halted subways and buses

2 : to cause the discontinuance of : end halt hostilities

[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/halt](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/halt)

on hold in American English

1\. in a period or state of interruption or delay the countdown was on hold

2\. in a state of interruption in a telephone call, as during a transfer to another line I was on hold for five minutes

[https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/on-h...](https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/on- hold)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Huawei Just Copied the iPhone–Down to the Last Screw - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2016/05/huawei-iphone-screws-ifixit/?mbid=psocial_qz <comment><USER2> Since the Wired page doesn't work with ad blockers, here's an archived link: [http://archive.is/TU5ev](http://archive.is/TU5ev)

The article is more about the planned obsolescence of the iPhone (and by extension the down-to-the-last-screw-copy of it), btw.</comment>


500 Startups Demo Day Winter 2011 - Live - <AUTHOR> http://www.livestream.com/500startups?demodayspring2012

<comment><USER2> Because the video page doesn't give any info, here is the blurb...

 _Wed, Jan 25 from 12-4pm and Thurs, Jan 26 from 5-9pm.

500 Startups Demo Day is an invite-only showing for our 3rd batch (Fall/Winter 2011) of accelerator companies. This event is primarily for accredited investors, 500 Startups Mentors & Advisors.

To find out more about the companies visit: <http://500.co/accelerator/accelerator-startups/> _

source:<http://plancast.com/p/92pv/500-startups-demo-day-jan-2012>

</comment><comment><USER3> I always love watching this, I'm sorry I missed the first half. Is there a mailing list where I can sign up to be notified in advance of when these streams are?

<comment><USER4> <https://twitter.com/#!/500> is the best resource. I think they gave out notice a few hours ahead of time. They do two days of identical pitches though, so you can just watch again tomorrow in theory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great lineup of startups. Good luck to everyone!

</comment><comment><USER6> Any opinions on which startups I should look out for?</comment>


Ask HN: Optimizing Site Load Times (Pingdom Help) - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
What with all the recent hubbub about Google taking site load times into consideration and all, I've been using Pingdom to analyze my site and need some help understanding the results.
Example link: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/?url=http://neosmart.net/forums//&id=2230361
According to them, the portion of the bar that is yellow is the time between "start" and "connect" and the portion of the bar that is green is the time between "connect" and "first byte" with the blue section being the actual transfer time (time between "first byte" and "last byte").
Unfortunately, they don't seem to explain what actually happens in each stage, so I have no idea what I'm supposed to be trying to optimize. My working assumption is that the first section of the bar is "network-level" time (time for the packet to reach an open port??), the second section is the "software-layer" delay (for the request to be processed by the webserver), and the 3rd part is pure transfer time?
I need to know if changing anything software-side (w/ regards to the webserver stack itself) will improve the first section of the bar, or if that delay is purely due to the overhead of running the webserver in a virtual machine. <comment><USER2> If your site is slow look at the logs and see if your server is paging memory.

Also you might want to configure your Apache server for maximimum performance.

Here is a link about optimizing Apache 2.2.3 if that helps: [http://cloudservers.rackspacecloud.com/index.php/Configuring...](http://cloudservers.rackspacecloud.com/index.php/Configuring_Apache_for_Maximum_Performance)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm actually on nginx - I'm fairly certain it is configured correctly.</comment></comment>


Girls Who Code expands across the US  - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/us/2013/01/24/girls-who-code-expands-across-the-us-with-summer-programs-in-detroit-san-jose-and-miami/ Girls Who Code is set to expand its female-oriented tech education program to Detroit, Miami and San Jose thanks to $435,000 in funding from Knight Foundation. Good stuff. <comment><USER2> Maybe a bit tagent, but a comment to the article claims that stackoverflow.com is a men favored place, and thus there is a need to have a female exclusive place where female coders can ask questions and get answers.

Could someone explain this to me? I know that stackoverflow actually has less female participants than software industry in general, but any causes is eluding me. Are there just a number of hidden stories out there about all the sexist comments being made (have not seen any story, or any such comment while using the site), or are question made by females being singled out and left unanswered? We hear constantly about the evils done in IRC rooms , and we hear about conferences/work places where females don't get respected when they got similar amount of experience as to their men co-workers. Do either of those exist on stackoverflow, and if not, why is stackoverflow not gender equal in participants?

<comment><USER3> Hi, a woman programmer here. I asked a question on StackOverflow once while first learning Python, and got a pretty mean answer. I called the guy out on my blog, of course: [http://natashatherobot.com/hey-dude-you-dont-have-to-be- mean...](http://natashatherobot.com/hey-dude-you-dont-have-to-be-mean-to-be- helpful/).

Before asking the question, I never posted on StackOverflow before, because I expected a mean answer, and that's exactly what happened. StackOverflow is not a very safe place for asking questions. It's a place where guys go to show off how much smarter they are than you. Most of StackOverflow questions start with "I'm a noob at this..." - that's because people, even guys, feel the need to pre-qualify the question by proving that they're not complete idiots despite not knowing the answer.

Asking a question is a vulnerable thing. You are admitting in public that you don't know something. It's really hard to participate when you know the very same public you're trying to get help from will turn around and critique you.

<comment><USER4> The supposed mean part of the answer:

        Learn to write Python code properly according to the style guide – PEP-8 filter highlights only bad code and in your case the whole file is badly written.

I am a male. This does not strike me as mean. I'm thinking now though... are you maybe just an emotionally sensitive person? The response is maybe bluntly put, but it is probably sincere and hastily said. Which makes it easier to construe it non-personally -- it's just a guy on the Internet who said it, he probably doesn't even know your gender. And you know what -- as weird as it may sound, I _wish_ I had received this kind of criticism when I was younger. Too often I was showered with positive comments that I became afraid of non- positive criticism to the point that I stopped taking risks that would endanger my reputation or feelings. It took me some time to learn to just take all criticism and make the best of it: detach the person-element, and just take from it what is truly useful to me, but I'm glad I did.

Edit: I'm thinking 'are you maybe just an emotionally sensitive person' may have come off as offensive? Sorry if it did, I'm not sure how else to phrase it, you probably know what I mean here.

<comment><USER5> >Edit: I'm thinking 'are you maybe just an emotionally sensitive person' may have come off as offensive? Sorry if it did, I'm not sure how else to phrase it, you probably know what I mean here.

I think it is more to do with familiarity of the culture of compute Q/A sites. My dad recently was looking around the internet for a solution to his computers overheating problem . He remarked to me about how rude everyone on the internet forums he looked at was (he did not post, just read existing threads). As someone who has used this type of site for a long time, I look at the answers and see valuable information relevant to the question asked. But, I can see how someone not familiar with the culture would find it rude or offensive.

Looking at this case in particular, the question was "Every time I save my code in Sublime Text 2, all of the lines end up highlighted as seen below. It's pretty annoying, and I would love to disable it, but I'm not sure what triggered it in the first place or what to Google. Any ideas?"

And the full response was: "The cause is SublimeLinter plug-in and its PEP-8 filter

<https://github.com/SublimeLinter/SublimeLinter>

Your code does not conform PEP-8 style guide:

<http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/>

Learn to write Python code properly according to the style guide – PEP-8 filter highlights only bad code and in your case the whole file is badly written."

Looking at it as someone fammilar with the culture, I see: A statement of the cause. Links to the technical resources relevent to the problem.

The 'mean' part of the answer starts "Learn to write Python code properly according to the style guide", Which I read as advice saying, you should learn to write Python code following the style guide (which is both good advice (in my opinion), and directly relevent to the problem being discussed).

The rest of the answer reads: "PEP-8 filter highlights only bad code and in your case the whole file is badly written." I read this answer as a concise description of the problem ' PEP-8 highlights bad code, and your whole file is bad by its standards [because it does not conform to the style guide]'

Again, this is all coming from the perspective of someone familiar with the culture. The problem isn't so much that SO (and simmilar sites) is unwelcoming to women, than it is that they are unwelcoming to new people. The problem is that we want consise answers, and writing consise, non-offensive answers is difficult and time consuming. So, as a culture, we evolved to view such answers as non-offensive.

EDIT: as an aside, the original answer has since be edited to be less offensive, and offer more explanation as to why learning PEP-8 style is a good idea. Personally, I would prefer getting the original answer as it is easier to read and parse out the important info.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I tell all of my friends who program and sometimes talk about "oh, maybe I should do side project Y and.or learn technology X" and who happen to have young daughters - "Dude, you want an interesting challenge - I suggest teach your daughter how to code - use Squeak, Alice3D."

Usually - they are like "The IT industry is doomed.. or I don't want my daughter to be a coder.. or she doesn't want to learn how to code.. or (worse) my wife would never want that(! _egads_!)".

And I retort (as nicely as possible): "Even if they don't become coders, they will learn how to problem solve, how to better think, how to analyze. Make a game together! Don't even start with code, start with pieces of paper"

The goal is not for them to be coders but to bond with them and teach them a useful skill that isn't necessarily about a livelihood (like fathers teaching sons fishing)"

<comment><USER7> Computer Engineering and Computer Science were just declared two of the ten highest paying majors in the US.

Software is everywhere and in everything.

How can you friends ever think the software industry is doomed?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm worried that there could be a focus on compairing if stuff is less than three.

Just kidding, I think it's a great thing that females are getting a new role model in the tech field because talent should decide if you will become a programmer and not ancient role models.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly, we should be way past the stereotypes that crippled society for ages. Programming is for everyone, initiatives like this one are a good step in that direction.</comment></comment>


YC rejection emails are out! - <AUTHOR> "We're sorry to say we couldn't accept your proposal for funding. Please don't take it personally, because most of the proposals we rejected, we rejected for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of the applicants.  For example, we were very reluctant to accept proposals with only one founder, because we think starting a startup is too much work for one person.  We also had a higher threshold for applicants who were still in school, groups where one or more members planned to keep their current jobs, and groups that couldn't all move to California.  We rejected a lot of proposals simply because we couldn't understand them, or didn't understand the problem domain well enough to judge them, or because the project seemed too big to start on only three months of funding.  Sometimes we even rejected good ideas, because another group proposed the same idea and seemed further along.
We realize this process is fraught with error. It's practically certain that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups.  If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email telling us about it; we want to learn from our mistakes.
Thanks,
Y Combinator Staff" <comment><USER2> Also, be grateful you weren't this guy. <http://distilled.wordpress.com/2006/02/23/ycombinator/> I think they got an interview for the round after, not sure if they got in from there.

<comment><USER3> This is terrible. I had no idea this had happened till now. I am so sorry. If I had known we'd accidentally sent these people an invitation to interview, we would have just gone ahead and interviewed them.

As far as I am concerned, this is the worst mistake YC has ever made, and we will try never to let this happen again.

<comment><USER4> None of my business, Paul, but you might want to contact the guy and apologize. That had to suck big time.

<comment><USER5> Oh, please. Shit happens.

<comment><USER4> Sure does. And when it happens to your users, you'd better be able to do some scooping real quick. But like I said, not my call.

<comment><USER5> Sheesh. An administrative error.

Hate to sour this little love-in, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks to all of the Y Combinator Staff for taking the time to read our application. I wish those who made it through best of luck with the interviews. To everyone who didn't, I'm going to keep going, I hope you will also!

<comment><USER7> Ditto the thanks to the YC Staff for going through the slush pile. Best of luck to those who got invited to Boston.

We didn't make the cut, so we're incorporating within the week, cementing our partnership with a 3rd team member (Columbia biz school prof), and immediately seeking funds from more conventional (although more dilutive) sources. We are also looking for one more hacker to join us. We can pay $5k for sure (possibly more depending on alternative funding) + equity for Jan-Mar in Palo Alto area. We're building a collaborative investing system that's quite different than the ones out there, and we have team members with deep domain expertise.

<comment><USER8> We're in a similar position. Could you mention sites you found useful for info on incorporation?

Thankyou

<comment><USER7> We're going with an ex-Cooley Godward lawyer for our incorporation. It's more expensive but in the big scheme of things, we think it's better to get this done right and have someone experienced to handle equity arrangements and contracts.

There are other YC threads on incorporation. For general information, Wikipedia is pretty good :) [<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_>(business)]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's a hard email to swallow, but I'm going to continue my work. I was excited at the idea to be a part of Y-Combinator; it's tough to entertain the idea of pursuing your product with the support of peers and successful people. Then realize you're not going to have a chance to WOW Y-Combinator at the interviews in November, nor will you be there in January to love the three months. I know my idea is great and I can make it happen, call me if you want to join in - you have my number.

</comment><comment><USER10> I kind of take it like a diss from a girl.

I just want to find a hotter girl with bigger, better assets and make sure that one girl that didn't give me a chance see's that she really lost out. Maybe even send her a nice sex tape.

<comment><USER11> Technically, it was a diss from a girl. ;)

Nah, a diss is personal. There's nothing personal about this.

<comment><USER12> Also, nobody has said diss in about a decade. Or in hacker terms, nobody has said diss since people wrote web apps in Perl.

<comment><USER10> I am from Florida, 'diss' still works here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We got that e-mail, but I promptly replied that they sent us the wrong one. Still waiting for the Boston invite. ;)

Will be interesting to see who got the invite and goes through to the 3 months. Does any one document this?

Congrats to all who made it!

R.

</comment><comment><USER14> What is important is that YCombinator has already built a community even by rejecting most of applicants.

Don't loose a chance to network, cooperate and succeed, we all are in a great team over here!

</comment><comment><USER4> Well that was fun.

Back to coding.

</comment><comment><USER2> last cycle's thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11496>

</comment><comment><USER15> Good thing they're finally out. I've been driving myself crazy for the past week. (no dice here)

Frankly, now that the worry and anxiety is over, I can now focus my leftover time on building my idea.

<comment><USER16> Gooooooo fish!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Congrats to all who got an interview! Make it count, because once you interview that is your only chance...

</comment><comment><USER18> Congrats to all those who made it. For those who didn't, it's time to work even harder.

</comment><comment><USER19> I haven't received anything yet. Should I be happy, sad, or just confused?

<comment><USER20> There were a recent post telling to put the e-mail address on the profile (click up right on your nickname after logging in). If not you'll receive no answer.

<comment><USER19> I did that earlier today, shortly after the post went up. Thank you though. I'll contact YC about it.</comment></comment></comment>


CVE-2016-6210: Opensshd user enumeration - <AUTHOR> http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2016/Jul/51 <comment><USER2> You shouldn't be allowing password authentication in ssh in the first place.

<comment><USER3> To add to that, sshd should never be exposed directly on the internet. There are a myriad of ways to hide it. Port-knocking, poor-mans port-knocking using iptables and xt_recent, Ostiary server/client, firewall to specific networks, just to name a few.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > This issue was reported to OPENSSH developer group and they have sent a > patch ( don't know if patch was released yet). (thanks to 'dtucker () zip > com au' for his quick reply and fix suggestion).

Is this another incident of pre-mature announcement? I expect a patch TO BE MADE AVAILABLE before someone disclose this vulnerability. Or any kind of vulnerability, to be exact.

<comment><USER5> Not everyone agrees

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Kind of interesting but I think installing fail2ban will reduce the severity quite a bit. However it still allows an attacker to figure out if a username is valid or not (just not mass enumerate all the users).

I guess this is just information leakage due to a timing attack.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is this an old bug? 2013 ... [https://www.devconsole.info/?p=341](https://www.devconsole.info/?p=341)

</comment><comment><USER8> I tested the PoC on a lot of different ssh servers and couldn't see any consistency at all in the times. Not sure how to exploit this.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is enumeration the right word here? You can't get a list of users, you can check whether a given user is valid.

<comment><USER10> Maybe another term would be better, but it is in common use (example: [https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Testing_for_Account_Enumerat...](https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Testing_for_Account_Enumeration_and_Guessable_User_Account_\(OTG- IDENT-004\))), possibly because usernames aren't meant to be resistant to brute force.

<comment><USER11> > because usernames aren't meant to be resistant to brute force

Any particular reason for saying this? User/account/email enumeration usually involve brute force AFAIK, so lack of resistance would leave a system vulnerable to such attacks.

<comment><USER10> Usernames are low-entropy human-readable identifiers. If you're getting at login rate limiting and other best practices regarding how things _should_ be: right! That's why it's a term for a vulnerability.

<comment><USER11> You're right - I thought you were referring to an authentication system's resistance against username enumeration (rather than the actual username). Thanks for clarifying!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Will you be going out (movies, restaurants, etc.) once the pandemic is over? - <AUTHOR> I personally miss going out and about and cannot wait to hit my favorite restaurants and venues once this is over. <comment><USER2> Nope.

Already worked from home.

Didn't really go out in public much before the pandemic, other than a biweekly grocery run.

I can make a better meal, spiced to my particular tastes better than any restaurant. I have enough books, movies, and games at home to fill a lifetime with entertainment (not even counting the internet). Friends have been scattered to the wind for decades -- phone calls and messaging are sufficient.

The wilderness is still open, so my solo backcountry hiking has remained unchanged...

If anything, I've been taken by surprise to find that people find going into public a necessity for their mental health instead of a detriment.

</comment><comment><USER3> At some point in the next six months, I'm going start ignoring restrictions on dining and most other extreme restrictions. I will have to, both for my own sanity and because more other people will have started doing also, for their sanity.

I hope, that this will be at the point that quarantining, testing, contact- tracing, and so-forth will have driven the infection down rate down to a very low level. And I'm hoping it won't be after the infection and fatalities have reached a maximum level due a premature opening up.

And I'm also hoping it will not be at a point where the state has reduced the infection rate by quarantining but has done nothing else and so left the rate to shoot up again when people indeed can't stand the situation anymore. However this later option sadly seems most likely given the idiocy, confusion and bureaucratic paralysis that seems to prevail so far.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you are young and healthy, you have a good chance of surviving COVID19 and the next coronavirus. I am not as healthy and cannot take that risk.

</comment><comment><USER5> Here's how a 15-year-old asked me: If the fatality rate is 1% ([https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099\(20\)30244-9/fulltext)), how many jelly beans would you eat from a bowl of 100 jelly beans when one of them _will_ kill you?

What if you're craving jelly beans? Or are indifferent? Or don't like them?

What if it's 1/100 subway rides, or times you use an ATM, or days at the office? How many times would you do it with a 1/100 chance of a quick and miserable death, plus becoming a spreader until you have symptoms?

Maybe you are personally at lower risk. Or maybe you are not. How sure are you?

I will wait for the vaccine.

</comment><comment><USER6> Once I've been either vaccinated or confirmed to have antibodies, sure. But the last thing I want on my conscience is the idea that I could have been responsible for spreading it (or starting a spread) to someone who ended up dying from it. Doesn't matter how bored I am now. No film, no meal is worth that.

</comment><comment><USER7> Define "over."</comment>


Sliding airline seats speed up boarding and departing planes - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/sliding-airline-seats-speed-up-boarding-departing-planes-2016-6 <comment><AUTHOR> Everybody wins.

<comment><USER2> Is it better than other loading schemes?

[https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_05_06.htm...](https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_05_06.html)

Probably it can help, but I've got the impression that it's not the narrowness of the corridor that is the main obstacle to a fast loading.

Also, notice that as soon as the middle seat is used, the seats take again their normal space. If you don't load the plane from the back, the corridor will revert to its narrow width very quickly, long before a significant proportion of passengers have loaded.

Since one of the fastest loading scheme is to load from the back, but in alternate modulo 3 rows, the seats would take the whole space before 1/3+1/9 = 44.4...% is loaded.

<comment><AUTHOR> Narrowness of the corridor is a huge factor. You can't pass people as they are lifting their bags or moving slowly. But a wheelchair could go down aisles this wide.

And this innovation is really independent of what loading scheme you use. Whoever wants to sit on the middle or aisle seat can wait on the aisle seat before it is moved into its final position before sitting in the seat of their choice.</comment></comment></comment>


Google Said to Plan Separating Photo Service From Google+ - k-mcgrady http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-01/google-said-to-plan-separating-photo-service-from-google-.html <comment><AUTHOR> I'm a photographer, and I was a HEAVY user (and paying customer) of Picasaweb when it existed, from the day it was launched.

When they pushed everything into G+ it enraged me. They took away the nice, fast, minimal, grid-view albums and gave us a heavy social-network wrapped mess. They turned a powerful Flickr competitor into a "pretty" and feature- poor share-with-your-friends site.

It was embarassing to link to albums to my clients because it was basically me linking to a Facebook-style social network rather than a photo site. Throw in the "realname" bullshit so I couldn't use an alias for my photography, and blam... instant enraged ex-customer running CLI scripts to systematically wipe my 10 years of Picasaweb usage (you can't bulk delete on Picasaweb).

I was upset when they killed Reader, but I got over it. I was upset when they forced G+ onto YouTube, but I got over it (I just don't log in for YouTube now). I never got over them destroying the only semi-decent Flickr competitor that exists, all in the name of "OMGSOCIAL". I was a huge Google fanboy who now goes out of my way to avoid anything/everything they do, thanks to their G+ push.

I've since moved on to being not-so-happy Flickr user (the lesser of evils currently, for bulk photo hosting and album management).

For what it's worth, with people saying there's too many photo hosting sites... I still can't find ANY that are as good as Picasaweb or old-Flickr were. Easy bulk management of photos/albums and their metadata like tags/titles/descriptions/locations. Albums within albums. A _SIMPLE_ UI that is friendly to non-tech-savvy clients/friends visiting. Minimal fluff. Lightroom integration. Etc etc.

</rant>

<comment><USER2> You may want to try SmugMug [1]. Easy bulk mangement, simple to upload to using the Lightroom plugin, private galleries if you need them for clients. Even sell prints etc. The iPad app for viewing your own photos was good too.

I was happy with them but in the end went with hosting my own Koken [2] powered site. Its a blog/cms aimed at photographers, but you host it yourself. Again pretty to use with bulk management and Lightroom plugin for uploading.

[1][http://www.smugmug.com/](http://www.smugmug.com/)

[2][http://koken.me/](http://koken.me/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I've got Smugmug and 500px profiles that I'm playing with. I quite like Smugmug so far.

I've been hearing a lot about Koken and am going to try it out soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> And once they've rolled that back to Picasa we have a hope of returning to pre-Hangouts as well.

It's telling that all the major tech companies now instil a sort of dread with each product update, where you just know it's going to be somehow worse. This used to be dismissable as fear of change, but they've all been responsible for enough forced upon the unwilling public messes in the last two years it feels utterly justified.

How I yearn for a time when updates actually improved things for end users. Seems like such a naive idea these days.

<comment><USER4> I still miss native software. Google used to make some great Windows software back in the days of Talk.

Even today, the Talk program requires about 5MB of ram with half a dozen conversations open.

When you compare that to Hangouts in a Browser, you have 400MB of Chrome that has to run, then 100-200MB of Hangouts that runs depending on how many conversations you have open, and how long its been since you cleared out the perpetual Chrome memory leak machine. I mean I get that Google wants to build an operating system out of a Tootsie Roll pop amount of layers of javascript but that doesn't mean I have to appreciate it

5MB... to 500MB. For a roughly identical service (I'd call it inferior because they still, STILL can't handle presence indication and away messages correctly in Hangouts, but Hangouts in Gmail does have some other features like easter eggs or w/e)

<comment><USER5> I've come to understand where Hangout's come from, and to appreciate its features. I say this as a longtime Jabber fan (yes, despite the XML- bloatishness that people complain about).

Hangouts is a more-featureful answer to the likes of Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger and Line. The global population has strongly switched to mobile chat apps. What does "online/away" mean when you can check your phone anytime, whether in the office, on the toilet, having lunch or dinner, etc? Sure, you might not be immediately able or willing to respond, but so what? Do you know anyone nowadays who actually expects an immediate response from a text message? Hangouts provides one discreet but useful feature previous chat systems didn't : did you ever notice the position of your correspondent's icon in the chat stream? That's how far they've read.

My main issue with Hangouts is that the delivery-reliability on mobile is poor. I've had messages arrive minutes, hours, up to half a day after it was purportedly sent. At least I know my correspondent hasn't seen it from the aforementioned icon feature... It happens often enough that I use Line whenever I want any guarantee of delivery on my/their phone. Despite the poor performance of _that_ app...

Hangouts also provides a free and seamless way to do voice and video chat. It may seem common now, but prior to it only Skype was doing as good a job, and Skype didn't provide the group-video feature for free! Google had long before provided protocol spec and open-source libraries to implement this in other Jabber clients. The pickup was dismal, so it's understandable if Google decided to forge ahead alone with their own technological developments.

As for why they've abandoned the light GChat desktop app in favour of the Chrome-integrated plugin... Vanishly few people (at the scale of Google's users) care about that, and it provides Google the guarantee that their users are running the latest version of the app. The latter is an incredibly powerful incentive, because it means they can expect feature and bugfix rollout to happen quickly, and not worry about legacy support. If you've ever developed a long-lived distributed app, you know how tempting that would be...

I remain deeply disappointed that Google won't open the protocol, because it means users like us with the will and the means to build alternative implementations can't do so. I don't know what the state of reverse- engineering is for the protocol, but I figure that, being built on protobufs and with the fast-rollout mentioned above, this isn't a viable hope, unlike previous chat systems that had to support legacy versions of their protocol for a long time.

I keep powerlessly hoping that someday Google, or some other mobile chat provider, will open up their protocol for technical users to get crazy with. In the meantime, welcome to the post-Jabber world and here's your Koolaid.

<comment><USER6> It feels heartwarming and at the same time depressing to read this, which is point-perfect what I've been feeling ever since the release of Hangouts.

I too cross my fingers for the protocol to one day be opened up and properly specced up. I... I don't have much hope for it. I don't know. Google is usually pretty good on that front, but the hangouts team seems to be in its own bubble (please anyone prove me wrong for the love of entropy).

Jabber is perfect until it's not. I feel really bad about that. Maybe I let some things affect me too much, but the state of jabber today is something that truly haunts me. Messaging, communication, those things are some of the best and most important (at the scale of humanity) benefits the internet has brought us. And they are being closed down :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I just had the greatest idea about the name - it's a bit obscure and not many people have heard of it but they could call it "Picasa"!

</comment><comment><USER8> If you're operating in the consumer photo space you should read my blog post on why we left it in 2012.

[https://medium.com/@jmathai/hello-2014-goodbye-consumer- phot...](https://medium.com/@jmathai/hello-2014-goodbye-consumer-photo- internet-service-b1234eaf75b)

<comment><USER9> Nice post :) Yeah, I think the biggest misconception about the photo space, seeing how many of us cropped up at the same time, is that you can spend enough time on product rather than the hard tech stuff to make a dent in the world. We're 3 years in and _just now_ starting to release the product stuff we're excited about because the tech challenges are so real.

Anyway, you all did an amazing job and I'm glad you shared this post. Never saw it back when you first posted it.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for doing Picturelife! Saw it in one of the comment threads here and have been using it since.

Love the custom S3 backing especially and the speed you guys move at (Lightroom support and Android updates came out so fast) as well as your amazing support (don't know how Amy puts up with me)!

Just recommended you to a friend in fact :)

The only thing I'd change at the moment would be to make a Cloud backend API so that customers can plug in Dropbox, Google Drive, Box.net etc. with something simple like a URL, separating storage from display etc.

Oh and it'd nice to have the option to pay you $2 or $3 since I'm using S3 :)

<comment><USER8>
      The only thing I'd change at the moment would be to make
      a Cloud backend API so that customers can plug in
      Dropbox, Google Drive, Box.net etc. with something simple
      like a URL, separating storage from display etc.

For what it's worth, that's specifically what our differentiation was with OpenPhoto/Trovebox (we support about 7 storage services along with being open source[1]). We've moved on from the consumer space because there didn't seem to be a large enough market for that specifically; separating data storage from application logic.

You can see our Kickstarter from 3 years back[2].

I asked in another post how offering custom S3 buckets was working out for PictureLife. Curious if someone else found a market for that.

[1] [https://github.com/photo/frontend](https://github.com/photo/frontend)

[2] [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jmathai/openphoto-a- pho...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jmathai/openphoto-a-photo- service-for-your-s3-or-dropbox-a)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Oh yes please. It makes no sense to bind a photo product with a social platform. I mean you can make them talk to each other, for sure, but for now it's more like photo won't function normally without G+.

For example, it's quite silly to have Google+ as the first item in navigation view on the Photo apps on Android. Whenever I want to see my photo, I want the photo features, not social features. I will only want to touch the Google+ when I want to share it, but it's not the thing I want to do all the times.

<comment><USER12> I guess... aside from hoarding photos, the only other things I want to do with them is improve them and share them. And I've never seen any other site do that as well as G+. (Except Everpix, at least for hoarding and sharing.)

G+'s circles make it really easy for me to define exactly who sees which photos, and the auto-awesome stuff really is pretty gorgeous. You'd prefer a dumb drive like S3 to free enhancement and easy sharing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think Google has some ego issues entangled with its web services and social networks (well, whatever now remains of it). It tries to do it right, but not when everyone (including almost all its users) ask/request them to, but when most probably it's too late.

I am wary of Facebook like it's plague and I honestly believe it is, but truth to be told, I am more wary of Google services and its recent Google+ integration madness. At times I see I've an account there and I don't see how it got created and how to delete it. I recently deleted a YouTube account which was created "automatically" from my Gmail account (which "already" had a Google+ account) and it was publicly sharing all my YouTube likes, after exchanging few emails from Google staff, now I've told Disconnect/Ghostery to not let YoutTube portal any of my Google accounts, but I guess that's not possible on Android.

It's been years since I have written a Google Play (apps) review, or wrote an YouTube comment. I've been trying to move my chat to a jabber based service (I've an sdf.org account) but for some reason my GTalk friends find difficulty to connect to me. So, I'll definitely not be interested in any new Google services because I don't think when they will "integrate" it with something else or when they will shut it down "to focus on more focussed products".

Besides, I would rather put my money into a services which does, more or less, only that business and charges appropriate amount of money for that.

rant ends and tl;dr:

Google just pushed me away with their G+ craziness and saying that its web services are social networks are a mess is an understatement.

</comment><comment><USER14> Yesterday I got a survey on the Google Opinion Rewards app[1] asking if I'd be comfortable using a service called Google Photo Vault on my phone.

[1] [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.paidtasks)

</comment><comment><USER9> Very smart move by Google here. People don't trust Google+ as a repository for photos because it's inherently a social product and with social products there is always some confusion about privacy.

As a standalone product they can focus on making the best product for photos vs fitting photos into a failed social platform.

<comment><USER15> It may be a good move, but calling it 'Very Smart' seems like giving them too much credit given that it's really just returning to what everyone else does after the disaster of Google+

<comment><USER9> Fair enough. So perhaps not smart, but brave? When you have a lot invested in something like Google+ a smart call can be tough to make.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady If this happens Google+ is dead. Photos seems to be the main good thing people have to say about it.

<comment><USER15> People have been saying Google+ is dead since it launched.

<comment><USER16> And they've been right! ob Swingers quote: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuInkEF_dQg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuInkEF_dQg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Related: Recently Google has been sending me cheery messages about something called Albums that it compiles for me out of the photos I take with my Android phone's camera. The feature is as creepy as it's all over the place.

I think the titles come from my Google Calendar, and the photos are put together by date. Albums mix activities that happen over the same time period, like photos of my daughter before a trip in the same album as the mundane, banal and, at times, painful photographs I took of my father's flat and personal effects while documenting some paperwork I had to do during such trip, which was just after he died.

Thanks for the happy memories, Google! Now please tell me how to turn the feature off!

<comment><USER18> You realize you can choose/remove pictures as well as edit and add captions?

(And yes, it can be turned off. I think it goes along with AutoAwesome)

For me this is one of a few data points that proves there are still real googlers around :-) Now if they would just bring back desktop search and web clips (I think it analyzed every rss linked from every web page I read and figured out what kind of news I was interested in. More practically speaking: it was magic in a good way. )

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I really wish Google could come up with a good overarching strategy for their products and stick with it for a long time. I'm losing track of how all the different services relate to each other.

<comment><USER20> They did! "Make everything a subsite of Google Plus." But it didn't work out so well. Be careful what you wish for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Argh. You guys, I don't get the hate. As someone else pointed out, if G+ dies, all we're left with it Facebook... and for what it's worth, G+ is far and away my favorite social network of all time. Between circles and auto-awesome, the only way for it to improve is if G+ can poach some of the celebrities and news sources from Twitter.

As it is, G+ is an absolutely fantastic feed from my favorite news sources, sorted into relevant subject-matter circles. It hasn't gained the mainstream adoption of Facebook, but that can be spun as a feature rather than a bug -- way more HN-style discussion, way fewer babies and gun nuts.

G+ Photos is by far the strongest aspect of G+, and spinning it off may spell doom for the network. I really hope not. Photo sharing and social networks go together like peanut butter and jelly, and Google's done a great job of keeping everything private unless explicitly ordered otherwise. (At least in G+... not so much in Buzz or whatever.)

<comment><USER21> Should we conclude that complaining about Google products is quite acceptable on HN, but liking them is not? The downvotes given to parent are hard to understand otherwise.

<comment><USER16> Naw, my G+ complaints got downvoted too. I'm guessing HN is rather conflicted on this topic.

It's fun watching posts bounce up an down as pro-G+ and anti-G+ readers roll through.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I really really have a hard time understanding the google+ hate around here.

Yes, I can understand the issue with the real names policy that hit youtube.

Yes, I can understand the issue with hangouts.

But why oh why do so many people also want the entirely voluntarily google+ social network to crash and burn leaving us with Facebook?

<comment><USER22> 'voluntary'? That's rich. Google+ is the most rammed-down-your-throat product _ever_ on the web.

<comment><USER18> You are upvoted even though I think you misread my opinion.

I wrote specifically about the "social network" part of it. Maybe I was a bit unclear but I meant the part where you can sort people into circles and share stuff with them. And I still think adding people to groups and sharing stuff with them are is voluntary?

The implementation of a common identity across Googles properties? That seemed to have been a smart idea mismanaged badly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The story is sourced to "people with knowledge of the matter." In the same piece Google goes own the record saying "over here in our darkroom, we're always developing new ways for people to snap, share and say cheese." It reads almost like a comedy on sanctioned leaks.

</comment><comment><USER24> I enabled photo sync over wifi only and never enable wifi on my phone. Somehow Google+ magically decided to sync 10GB of my private photos to Google+ Photos over my LTE connection. I'll never be sure how many copies of my photos exist now or who has them.

<comment><USER25> What's more annoying on my Nexus is that I can auto-sync Gmail (push) and that seems to enable photo sync. I cannot have one without the other!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is welcome news. I've been reluctantly moving everything over to Google (it's love-hate - Google really makes great web products), including canceling Dropbox and using Drive. Drive is good, but the Google+ photo thing is confusing. I like the UI and it's functionally but could care less about Google+ itself. Speaking of which, does Google photos have an auto-upload feature on phones?

<comment><USER27> Yes, it has auto-upload: [https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1647509](https://support.google.com/plus/answer/1647509)

<comment><USER26> Thanks. I must be confused, does this only add it to Google+, or a Drive folder as well?

<comment><USER28> It adds it to Google+ Photos. It consumes the space which Google Drive provides, but you can't browse the photos from Google Drive. (Side Note: If you upload below a resolution of 2048px, it doesn't count against your storage space.)

Also, Google+ offered this for every Android device long before Apple's iCloud backup, Dropbox Uploads, or even Microsoft's OneDrive auto-backup.

Since most people get confused and avoid the feature, I think it makes sense for them to create a separate product called Google Photos which has nothing to do with social.

<comment><USER29> Auto Upload definitely sounds very scary the first time you're prompted about it. Most people fear that every photo they take will automatically be publicly shared on Google+ (which isn't the case; it's uploaded to Google+ Photos as a private document that "only you" can see) and go out of their way to make sure it's off.

I've found the feature convenient and look at most of my pictures that way. It's a bummer when I have to connect my phone via USB cable and pull stuff off that way now (especially since Android is now MTP access only, but let's not go down that road...).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Photos are one of the few (only?) good things that they got mostly right in G+ and which I use pretty extensively.

Business-wise this is the correct move except drop the ridiculous name "Google+ Photos"? Focus on adding great new features to the photo sharing parts & then slowly grow the social aspects depending on what catches on.

And for the love of all that is good SIMPLIFY the fre*%n navigation & menus.

</comment><comment><USER31> If the point is to attract users who haven't joined Google+ (likely because they don't want another Facebook-shaped social network), why in the world would they keep "Google+" in the name?

I'd be surprised if this were anything other than an Instagram and/or Snapchat clone, with a Google+ login, but with a stream and friends-list distinct from Google+.

</comment><comment><USER32> Great, what about separating the video service next ? All other issues aside it's kinda creepy when they want to know your real name (due to real names policy) when you want to watch a video tagged as 18+ only (because for that you need to log in).

<comment><USER33> FYI Google recently reversed it's decision on real names: [http://www.zdnet.com/google-reverses-real-names- policy-70000...](http://www.zdnet.com/google-reverses-real-names- policy-7000031642/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Now, lets talk about when google is going to shut google+ down?

<comment><USER35> Hopefully they won't. It's a good service; just doesn't have to be the center of the Google universe.

<comment><USER36> It really should stay the "identity" part of Google services. Having a separate login for 12 different services offered by the same company is stupid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Apple got it right back when Jobs iLife. Separate apps that did one thing well.

</comment><comment><USER38> Picasa? No! Google+! Hm maybe not. Picasa again?</comment>


Fastest Pick and Place Robot and LEGO Version of It - <AUTHOR> http://www.industrialcontroldesignline.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=215801599&cid=NL_icdl

<comment><USER2> The article pops up an advertisment that you have to view first.

Bad form. Because the original article has very little text. I suggest that you simply watch the videos on YouTube itself:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHuDvVa7mkw&eurl=http%3A%...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHuDvVa7mkw&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eindustrialcontroldesignline%2Ecom%2FshowArticle%2Ejhtml%3FarticleID%3D215801599%26cid%3DNL%5Ficdl&feature=player_embedded)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoXCn4Gh_HA&eurl=http%3A%...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoXCn4Gh_HA&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eindustrialcontroldesignline%2Ecom%2FshowArticle%2Ejhtml%3FarticleID%3D215801599%26cid%3DNL%5Ficdl&feature=player_embedded)

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't this more accurately called a Delta Robot?

<comment><AUTHOR> That is the form. Pick and place is the function.</comment></comment>


The antibiotic industry is broken - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/05/04/the-antibiotic-industry-is-broken <comment><USER2> Resistant strains rarely come from antibiotics use on humans. Antibiotics abuse in agriculture is what brings rise to superbugs. No better way to develop them than billions of Petri dishes born every year and badly administered end of the line antibiotics.

<comment><USER3> Antibiotics have a side effect of drastically increasing growth in certain livestock. Unless it's heavily regulated, it will continue to be used. When consumers can do is buying the significantly more expensive meat options that are antibiotic free, or simply buy less meat.

<comment><USER4> Does it also work on humans? Does taking a lot of antibiotics since birth makes a human stronger and taller?

I've never seen bodybuilders taking antibiotics for size tho tho heard of plenty of steroid and protein/testosterone stuff.

But I know some chicken farmers in my neighborhood who double the chicken size with antibiotics.

<comment><USER5> > Does it also work on humans? Does taking a lot of antibiotics since birth > makes a human stronger and taller?

Quite possibly. It will also bugger up your immune system maturation spectacularly. That doesn't matter so much for animals destined for the slaughterhouse, but it does for you because viruses aren't affected by antibiotics.

<comment><USER4> But what if we consume those chickens, isn't that antibiotic somehow going to end up inside us sooner or later?

And that will indirectly influence our size?

Is there any pattern of size gain/growth in humans since we started using antibiotics on farm animals?

One thing always have been mysterious to me is that growth/size is attributed to nutrition/genes/workout but I know some villages (more like distant tribes with no connection to modern world) who practise old style farming and heading livestock without any modern methods and they've plenty to eat but still they've not gotten taller or bigger. They've sheeps, goats, chickens, plenty of fruits and grains in their diet, lots of physical work but no size gain.

And if the person from the same tribes comes to the US as a kid, you can see them get taller/bigger then their siblings back home. So it can't be their genetic limit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well, people shouldn't be buying antibiotics without a doctors note.

Doctors shouldn't be prescribing antibiotics unless there is a big real need.

Problem solved.

In Germany they do this. No doctor ever prescribes antibiotics. I've used to hate this fact, as most of adults "I NEED TO WORK!!!!11". Here in Germany they are a bit more open to people being sick and staying at home, but some companies are pushing the boundaries, such as, Amazon have some bullying system for people who call in sick, etc. But overall, 500% better than the US?

For instance, at the moment now I'm sick and I've been sick for like almost a month and they don't give me Antibiotics. Back in Brazil, where I've lived, they would just give me it and I would be "healthy" again in 2 days or less.

It is a complex problem. To be honest, most of the usage is probably because people don't want to be sick for too many days, as this is terrible in this sick career ladder where if you don't take antibiotics and is sick for a few weeks, and your peers take it and also put some ritalin on top, you have no chance to compete.

Maybe governments & institutions should control MUCH MORE drugs which are clearly being abused just for the sake of making people rat racing. This creates a very unfair field for whoever do the right thing, which is staying at home and letting the body do what it should.

But this can only be changed if people find it important, for politicians that live off your taxes, they would rather help you to work to death.

<comment><USER7> > Well, people shouldn't be buying antibiotics without a doctors note.

Why? It's not rocket science, and it's not like this is a complex decision that you couldn't adequately make after 15 of Internet searching.

The fake mystique imparted on general practitioner doctors is a toxic force for bad in the world.

> Doctors shouldn't be prescribing antibiotics unless there is a big real > need.

The doctor doesn't know if there is a "big real need", and in fact cannot.

The doctor is just running off a standard checklist for one of among 50 almost exactly alike cases during his workday.

<comment><USER8> _> Why? It's not rocket science, and it's not like this is a complex decision that you couldn't adequately make after 15 of Internet searching._

If you've got a tonsillitis (one of the most common reasons for getting antibiotics), how to you find out whether it's the bacterial or the viral type?

<comment><USER7> Presumably, by getting a bacterial test. That's done in a lab and isn't a doctor's job.

<comment><USER9> Don't need a lab test for this one, there's a swipe test to determine if it's viral or bacterial.

Source: had about 40 or more in my life, was prone to tonsilitis for ages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://outline.com/KKTLmL](https://outline.com/KKTLmL)

</comment><comment><USER11> My relatives would rush to buy the "anti-inflammatory" medicines - Cephalosporins plus some traditional Chinese medicines - whenever they have sign of a cold, which seemed to occur quite often for them. And it's a popular belief.

</comment><comment><USER12> Would widespread use of synthetic meat solve the antibiotics issue (as well as help with global warming)? I have only researched synthetic meat a little bit and am wondering if anyone has more concrete information and opinions.

</comment><comment><USER13> Here is another factor to consider that I think many are overlooking: our steadily increasing RF-exposure may be altering the growth rate and antibiotic susceptibility of bacteria and other microorganisms.

I don't think many are considering this possibility, and I don't like what I find. It seems RF-radiation, even at non-thermal exposure levels, is able to both alter the growth rate and antibiotic interaction of microorganisms.

"Extremely High Frequency Electromagnetic Radiation Enforces Bacterial Effects of Inhibitors and Antibiotics":

[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51408122_Extremely_...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51408122_Extremely_High_Frequency_Electromagnetic_Radiation_Enforces_Bacterial_Effects_of_Inhibitors_and_Antibiotics)

"Evaluation of the Effect of Radiofrequency Radiation Emitted From Wi-Fi Router and Mobile Phone Simulator on the Antibacterial Susceptibility of Pathogenic Bacteria Listeria monocytogenes and Escherichia coli":

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5298474/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5298474/)

"Effect of radio-frequency electromagnetic radiation on physiological features of Saccharomyces cerevisiae strain UCM Y-517":

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15456218](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15456218)

"Preliminary results on the non-thermal effects of 200-350 GHz radiation on the growth rate of S. cerevisiae cells in microcolonies":

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12452574](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12452574)

<comment><USER14> That study which mentions routers and wifi seems questionably controlled - increased exposure time decreasing inhibition radius? I would expect that from just time passing would do that - it only mentions the radius shrinking not shrinking at a faster rate. To be frank that sounds like a high school level procedure error.

Plus even if taken at face value they admit they only notice the effects on certain strains at certain phases.

<comment><USER13> Even if it is on certain strains, it means we need to consider what it means on a larger scale. What other strains? What other frequencies?

By not considering the possible implications of this interaction, IF TRUE, you may be overlooking something important which needs further study.

Or I hope you are not suggesting we just cross our fingers, forget about it, and _hope_ these were all just "high school level errors"?</comment></comment></comment>


ABC chooses Status.net instead of Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/ca/2010/10/05/abc-news-chooses-status-net-over-twitter/?awesm=tnw.to_16rf4&utm_content=twitter-publisher-main&utm_medium=tnw.to-twitter&utm_source=direct-tnw.to

<comment><USER2> If a non-user navigates to Status.net, you get an "Access denied" message in red. How adorable.</comment>


First Four Episodes of "Game of Thrones" Leaked Online - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/jaimieetkin/game-of-thrones-season-5-leaked-online

<comment><USER2> I would love it if HBO adopted Netflix' model. I hate getting it doled out bit by bit. Let us binge watch and get on with things.</comment>


Microsoft, Apple being asked to explain higher music & game prices in Australia - Suraj-Sun http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/it-giants-in-price-probe-20120428-1xs16.html

<comment><AUTHOR> well, should Europe demand same prices as US too? the price for many things in Europe is the same as in US numerically, just in a difference currency ;) EUR instead of USD.

Companies charges whatever they feel like they can get away with. Its called free market.

You want them to lower the price - stop buying.

<comment><USER2> I think you're missing the point, and yes, you should be demanding lower pricing if that's really the case.

Parallel importation of a whole variety of goods is actually illegal in Australia, so it's not really a "free market" (there's no such thing anywhere, by the way -- every country in the world has protectionist policies in play) as retailers can't buy the same product from anywhere.

And as for "stop buying" -- people already are. Everyone in AU buys video games, DVDs/Bluray, books, etc from the UK because they're so much cheaper and they get free shipping. Retailers are losing a lot of money to sites based overseas because of this.

These same retailers are trying to persuade the government to levy further taxes on items bought overseas for personal use at the border so they can protect their ridiculous pricing here.

TL:DR; the situation is a lot more complicated than "free market" and "stop buying". Parliamentary inquiry into the matter is warranted.</comment></comment>