Gmail Will Warn If Message Is Not Authenticated/Encrypted - <AUTHOR> http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2016/02/making-email-safer-for-you-posted-by.html <comment><USER2> This sounds great but Google has been making it harder and harder to run your own mail server even for personal use. I think they would be happy of email servers were only run by a few large companies. They make it sound like they are doing the right thing but really they are bully the industry to do it their way. So many people have Gmail accounts that you can't run an email server that cannot send email to Google.

I've run my own email server for about 15 years. Every now and then I have to drop everything and implement some new technology that Gmail demands I have. Granted SPF, DMARC and TLS are all great technologies but I take issue with Google making the decision that everyone is going to switch, now and with out sufficient warning.

<comment><USER3> Now I can just get a free cert and turn on TLS. What's the problem, exactly?

Most people are not capable of running their own mail server. The convenience of services like Google, plus the risk of turning your mail box into a spam machine, vastly outweighs the downsides for most people.

<comment><USER4> > What's the problem, exactly?

> Most people are not capable of running their own mail server.

I think that is a big part of the problem. It should be relatively straightforward for someone who isn't a full-time email server administrator to setup a mail server correctly, but it's not. At least, it wasn't easy last time I tried it with Postfix and (iirc) Courier on Ubuntu. All the cryptography options are disabled by default and you have to spend a lot of time figuring out which ones should be turned on, where to stick the certificate files and how they should be formatted, how to get Courier and Postfix to talk to each other, etc...

Maybe there's an easy solution (besides "pay someone a monthly fee to manage this all for me") that I'm oblivious to, but it seemed like I was on a well- travelled path and it was a lot harder than it should have been.

<comment><USER5> If it helps, I recently rebuilt my mail server and changed from FreeBSD+qmail+Courier to Ubuntu+Postfix+Dovecot. In doing so, I used this series from Ars Technica:

[http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/how- to...](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/how-to-run-your- own-e-mail-server-with-your-own-domain-part-1/)

It shows how to set up SPF, DKIM, TLS, anti-spam filtering, Sieve, certificate-based authentication (I still haven't figured out how to do this with an iPhone), and so on. The only bolt-on it references but doesn't explore and I actually used is the Z-Push package to implement ActiveSync.

<comment><USER6> are you able to mail folks at google/live without going to spam? Genuinely curious.

<comment><USER5> Yes. I periodically test with various recipients and mail goes through without a hitch. The only difference I might have versus people starting out fresh is that the domains I host are relatively aged. The newest is two years old and the oldest is nineteen. I also made sure that DNS is set up properly, both forward and reverse, and especially for IPv6.

<comment><USER6> maybe my sin is hosting at linode - for a new recipient at either of the behemoths, I seem to have 50% chance of going to spam. Thanks for your comment.

<comment><USER7> I host with linode, and have had generally good results sending mail to gmail. They're definitely not the worst. Granted, I have had SPF enabled for about 10 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think as HNers, we're focusing too heavily on niche cases (like running your own email server). But, for general public who is still sharing their own (and more importantly, their clients') SSNs, passwords, and other very sensitive information on email, this may be the trigger that educates / trains them to be more careful. I am definitely looking at this as a positive.

<comment><USER9> With SSNs the problem is not in the fact that they are in an email, but the fact that they are sensitive information at all.

<comment><USER10> SSNs have become a complete joke.

Like why would I need to give my SSN to register for an account to take the GRE exam? And why would anyone ever make SSN an optional field? If its not required why would you ever ask for it?

[https://mygre.ets.org/greweb/createAcct/createAcctMain.jsp](https://mygre.ets.org/greweb/createAcct/createAcctMain.jsp)

<comment><USER11> > And why would anyone ever make SSN an optional field?

One reason might be that some states have laws on the books that prohibit requiring people to give you their SSN (unless you are actually required to collect it by some other law, of course).

> If its not required why would you ever ask for it?

All the answers to this are depressing. :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Other mailers should warn about Gmail, with "Your message was scanned for advertising purposes".

<comment><USER13> What about "Your message was categorized fir Bayesian spam filtering and may have contributed to eventual upstream rules" for all those installations that historically ran SpamAssassin?

If you're using Gmail or sending to a gmail address[1], you know what you are in for, and if you don't you should at least know that anything you send to someone else is no longer in your control and you have very little control over who sees it.

1: Google Apps for business accounts are not scanned for ads.

<comment><USER14> What alternatives do you suggest, besides running your own mail server? I'm in the invite list for Protonmail and have also used the infamous cock.li for informal stuff, but I was looking for something a bit more established, that I can count on long term stability. It's bad enough to switch email addresses once, to be switching every time a service goes kaput is unacceptable.

<comment><USER13> What do I suggest in lieu of Gmail or some other large provider that may scan your email? If it _really_ matters to you, your _only_ choice is to run your own mail server. If you don't control your endpoint, then I think no matter what you profess, you don't _really_ care. Personally I just use a combination of Gmail (because I don't care) and a POP/IMAP account at my local ISP (which is not free).

If you want free email, expect to pay in some other way. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

<comment><USER14> Obviously _every_ third-party service is trusted, that doesn't mean one "doesn't care". By your logic even a private mail server isn't enough, you'd have to use PGP. If you don't have any recommendations just say so.

<comment><USER13> > Obviously every third-party service is trusted, that doesn't mean one > "doesn't care".

No, I'm serious about this. I wasn't trying to be flippant. If you care enough about the integrity of your email content and it not being used to further a company's profit, the only way to be _sure_ of that, to the extent that you can (which may not be much), is to run your own mail server. If that seems like it's way too much trouble, I think a you should take a close look at your motives for wanting a gmail alternative. Is it about the integrity of your email, or sticking it to Google? If it's avoiding Google because they specifically cause you concern, that's fine, and there likely plenty of choices, but I'm not sure what they are (as I said, I just use Gmail because I don't care).

> By your logic even a private mail server isn't enough, you'd have to use > PGP.

Well, by my logic you have to do enough to make yourself comfortable. Depending on your reasons for avoiding some other companies that will be different things.

> If you don't have any recommendations just say so.

I don't have any recommendations for Gmail if you consider a good UI, responsively web based, and free as major components of that. If you are willing to give up one or more of those, there are options. The local ISP I mentioned is Sonic.net. By all accounts (including mine, I've worked there multiple times in the past), a great company, and with great EFF ratings. An email account there is not free though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cool, just spent 20 minutes getting a proper cert from let's encrypt, and setting postfix to opportunistically encrypt outgoing mail.

Used this service to make sure my setup is correct: [http://www.checktls.com/index.html](http://www.checktls.com/index.html)

Also, thunderbird apparently does not like Alternate Subject Name for smtp, but with Let's encrypt I can just issue a mail server-specific key.

</comment><comment><USER16> There's a lot of things that I question about Google, but forcing their Gmail customers to adopt more secure practices is worthy of praise. They are the biggest free email provider in the world, and they are owning up to a responsibility to ensure their users can work safely.

Those running their own email servers have a similiar responsibility to their own users, even if it's only themselves. You had time to set up the server in the first place, so you have time to make it work with TLS. Now that Let's Encrypt is here there's no excuse to be running an insecure email (or web) server.

</comment><comment><USER17> I have mixed feelings about this.

> _Not all affected email will necessarily be dangerous._

To me, it sounds like they're saying that _most_ of the "affected email" _WILL_ be dangerous -- just not _ALL_ of it -- and that's highly misleading, of course.

Overall, though, I think this will be a good thing if it pushes more organizations ("mail senders") to implement opportunistic encryption for incoming mail and SPF/DKIM signing for outgoing mail.

That seems to be what they're referring to; that is, sending to an MX host that doesn't support opportunistic encryption) and/or receiving mail that doesn't have a valid DKIM signature. Did anyone else understand this differently?

<comment> semi-extrinsic This will be popcorn time for those using Gmail for business.

I have a plugin in Thunderbird that shows the DKIM status of incoming email as gray/red/green, meaning no DKIM/DKIM invalid/DKIM valid. Most of the email I get from business accounts (usually on Exchange), including those from the company I work at, have no DKIM. (Yes, I've complained to the ITsec dept. They don't even have SPF set up...) Of the rest, surprisingly many have invalid DKIM sigs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> >If you receive a message that can't be authenticated, you'll see a question mark in place of the sender's profile photo, corporate logo, or avatar.

This makes it sound like I (the sender) can set the image displayed if I am using DKIM. Is that the case? Or is it only if I have DKIM and have a Google account with that email?

<comment><USER19> Gmail uses an associated Google+ profile for authenticated emails, so you need both for it to work going forward, I presume. To get started, check [https://www.google.com/business/](https://www.google.com/business/)

Outlook uses Facebook and Twitter, if you have these contacts integrated. Yahoo does this too: [http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/04/smart-contact-cards- arrive-...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/04/smart-contact-cards-arrive-in- yahoo-mail-featuring-automatically-updated-contact-info-and-links-to-social- profiles/)

There really should be some kind of standard or mail header though. :) Come to think of it, services could support a vcard mime-type attachment, perhaps? Except that likely wouldn't support URLs to profile photos... Maybe we've identified a missing feature of DKIM? ;-)

<comment><USER20>
      > There really should be some kind of standard or mail header though. :)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Face](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Face)

<comment><USER21> X-Image-URL is neat - but how do we trust it? Ensure the header is DKIM signed?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interesting. I'm wondering if they also warn Gmail users if a mailserver has TLS enabled with a self-signed certificate. Because i think many mailservers actually support TLS but do ignore certificate verification, because of the self-signed certificates.

</comment><comment><USER23> Unfortunately, this is the sort of a change that's a red herring for any actual improvements to email security.

The use of unencrypted or encrypted link to the receiving email provider's MX server doesn't change all that much in terms of who can read the email: it's still sitting in plaintext on the recipient's server (as well as the sender's server), and the group of actors who can sniff traffic on the backbone like that is probably just as easily able to get it from the servers.

The authentication feature is even worse. The problem of spam and phishing isn't that email claims to be from firstname.lastname@example.com, it's that email claims to be from "Big Bank" <firstname.lastname@example.com>. It's been noted before that spammers tend to be the most aggressive at uptaking new "anti-spam" technologies like SPF and DKIM, and this sort of validation feature seems like a prime vehicle for exploitation by spammers.

<comment><USER24> You're arguing that we shouldn't do anything, instead of taking a step in the right direction. Email is an old ecosystem, so it's not possible to make big improvements all at once.

<comment><USER23> I'm not arguing that we shouldn't do anything. I'm arguing that the presentation of the data is at best meaningless and at worst downright harmful.

DKIM authentication is in no way an attestation that it was sent by its sender. Furthermore, from what I can tell, more damage is caused by spoofing that works on the "I use a very similar name which is hard to see the difference" level (e.g., animenewsnetwork.com versus animenewssnetwork.com). Finding and testing solutions to that problem is something that doesn't require changing or deploying anything to new to the ecosystem, and it would arguably bring more benefit than deploying end-to-end encryption.

<comment><USER25> > I'm not arguing that we shouldn't do anything. I'm arguing that the > presentation of the data is at best meaningless and at worst downright > harmful.

What do you think should be done to make progress that's better than Google's proposal? Personally I think encouraging all senders to adopt DKIM, transport layer TLS, DMARC, SPF, etc. by displaying auth results from those protocols in the UI is a good first step. It's similar to the push for HTTPS on the web.

> DKIM authentication is in no way an attestation that it was sent by its > sender.

Google didn't mention DKIM in the blog post we're discussing. Are you referring to a related effort? The blog post was about encryption in transit with TLS.

> I'm arguing that the presentation of the data is at best meaningless and at > worst downright harmful.

Google's DKIM solution is as close as one can reasonably get given modern technology. If I send a DKIM-signed email from example.com that passes validation, then it means the following is true: I sent an email through a server managed by the domain owner, that had access to the DKIM key and chose to sign my email. It's not authenticating a person, but it's authenticating that the domain's mail servers sent the message. The attestation is at the domain level, not the sender level. This attestation is still useful though: if the domain owner did not want to allow you to send email from email@example.com, then it would not accept that email from you or DKIM sign it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Good initiative. Question is; what does the TLS icon indicate; is it just opportunistic TLS, or do they do any verification? What, if so? Some private consortium where only members can get a "green lock"?

What's the next step? Do they have DANE [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS- based_Authentication_of_Na...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS- based_Authentication_of_Named_Entities) in mind, or some other initiative to get verified encryption such as "TES" [https://openbit.eu/projekte/trusted- internet-services/](https://openbit.eu/projekte/trusted-internet-services/)

<comment><USER27> DANE comes with its own complications: it means you need DNSSEC, and that's a bit of a pain to set up at the best of times, especially with there being no way to currently automating DS/DNSKEY record updates to maintain the trust chain.

There have been some mutterings in the IETF ProvReg WG on ways of allowing registrants some ability to automate the process, but it's still early days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> In my opinion, you should just behave like your emails are public record.

This is the best way of approaching that technology.

<comment><USER29> That's what I do as email is more akin to a postcard than a letter. If that makes someone uncomfortable, then they should choose another medium.

<comment><USER30> This is what GMail is doing: making sure that sending an email is like sending a letter (instead of a postcard). TLS email is not 100% secure (private, authenticated, etc), but not 100% insecure either.

Verifying TLS for email is an easy step in making email a bit less insecure, and it requires no intervention from users. If you need something secure, then yes, go for GnuPG or other forms of end-to-end encryption (if only I could name a few).

<comment><USER31> When I saw the HN headline, I thought they were going to start enforcing the PGP encryption. I think I had a small medical event...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> There are really good, albeit few, alternatives:

Fastmail ([https://www.fastmail.com/](https://www.fastmail.com/))

Tutanota ([https://tutanota.com/](https://tutanota.com/))

Riseup ([https://help.riseup.net/](https://help.riseup.net/))

<comment><USER33> +1 for fastmail. I've been using them for the past few years to host my 'other' main e-mail (the one I've had since 1994) and it's been a delight.

<comment><USER34> +1 for fastmail, here, too. Amazing service, really good communication during rare downtime, contributes heavily to open-source/community, decent prices, can heavily customize filters/etc, and as far as I'm aware, probably the most mainstream email provider that won't give into the NSA.

<comment><USER35> I'm sure that Australian Federal Police and Victoria law enforcement would be able to exercise search warrants on Fastmail's servers if they needed to.

Since you're in Tennessee (and thus a U.S. Person), you're actually ineligible for collection under FAA 702. Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo, etc. would actually be the safest place for your information.

Of course that assumes that you believe the NSA follows U.S. law. If you don't have that assumption, that also implies that the NSA wouldn't respect Australian sovereignty enough to keep it from infiltrating Fastmail's servers.

I'm saying this to illustrate that there's no silver bullet for secure transmission and storage of information.

<comment><USER36> > I'm sure that Australian Federal Police and Victoria law enforcement would > be able to exercise search warrants on Fastmail's servers if they needed to.

Nobody is arguing against search warrants. People are concerned about _warrantless_ searches.

<comment><USER35> Nobody in this thread mentioned warrants. It appears that all the posters here care about the disclosure of their information, full stop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> meh. This doesn't seem very interesting. What would be really interesting is gmail support for public key encryption. They're perfectly positioned to roll out a user-friendly key management system.

<comment><USER38> Yep surprised they haven't rolled one out yet. Ideally placed.

<comment><USER39> And by ideally placed, you mean for the NSA, right?

I'd never put any GPG keys of mine in an American cloud provider. That sort of voids the entire point of it.

<comment><USER40> Why do you believe non-American cloud providers aren't compromised?

<comment><USER41> In the short run, they're simply a smaller and more diverse attack surface. There's pretty valid "security through obscurity" reasoning to apply here (though that is, of course, not a train of thought one should bet the whole farm upon).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> For anyone wishing to run their own mail server, check out Mail-in-a-Box[0]. It's relatively easy to set up, comes with a nice Web GUI and they recently added support for automatic provisioning of TLS certificates with Let's Encrypt.

[0] [https://mailinabox.email/](https://mailinabox.email/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'll tell you what I want: I want Google to help identify non-DKIM-compliant forwarders. As the operator of (yes, I know) a vanity e-mail domain with DKIM, SPF, and DMARC records, I have no problem sending mail to gmail directly; in fact, my outgoing mail uses postmark, so I'm not even directly responsible for my sending reputation.

BUT! It drives me crazy that many of my recipients get e-mail at hosts (schools, mostly) that forward the e-mail with differences (encoding changes, subject changes, etc.) that invalidate the DKIM signature. Since they're forwards, the SPF check is going to fail, too, so the end result is that google shoves it into a spam folder.

I claim that google definitely has the data to be able to identify these bad forwarders--heck, even mail sent _from gmail_ to these hosts will presumably fail DKIM checks on the way back into google--and I'd love to see them contact these domains, or even publish a list of known bad forwarders, so that I can push them to make changes.

</comment><comment><USER43> I'm glad that companies are starting to display warnings about insecurity. It used to be that the insecurity was only advertised if something that was supposed to be secure was broken. However not having any security in the first place is often worse. I would like to see this trend continue and start warning everyone about systems that aren't secure.

</comment><comment><USER44> I like this idea but worry novices won't understand what a red flag (lock) really means and only assume the worst.

<comment><USER41> I think that's the point---they should assume the worst.

It's part of a general trend of moving the needle from "Internet services are insecure and if you really want to send something secure, you should be sure your channel is encrypted" to "These channels should always be secure; if they're not, here's a big red flag to warn you that they are not."

See also the process of bypassing the "This site is insecure" alarm interstitials in Chrome and Firefox these days for sites with bad secure TLS credentials. The frog has been boiling from "We warn the user with a tiny icon they'll probably ignore" to "Users have to know secret words or convoluted config flows to bypass this inescapable error panel."

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Agari is on a mission to eliminate email as a channel for cyber attacks and enable businesses and consumers to interact safely.

Create your free DMARC record here: [https://app.agari.com/dmarc/record_creator](https://app.agari.com/dmarc/record_creator)

Here is a webinar with Steve Jones, Executive Director of DMARC.org, John Rae- Grant of Google and Mike Jones, Agari Director of Product Management talking about email authentication. [https://www.agari.com/project/webinar-the- authenticated-emai...](https://www.agari.com/project/webinar-the- authenticated-email-world/)

</comment><comment><USER46> I wish someone made a better (non-SMTP) messaging standard which is secure, efficient, easier to understand/implement and without a clutter of all legacy stuff (and hopefully with a decent reference implementation!). Spams would still remain, but at least that would free us from worrying about the transportation layer security. (But then we might need to reinvent something like DNS on the way, so maybe that's why that no one is trying this.)

</comment><comment><USER47> Will encryption via self-signed certs be accepted?

</comment><comment><USER48> How disappointing, when I read the headline I thought Google was supporting PGP signing and encryption of emails. They could easily do so in their web and mobile clients, keeping emails safe from prying eyes.

Though that would also prevent analysis of emails for ad targeting, so they'd have to do it as some sort of paid project.

</comment><comment><USER49> Its great that Google wants all the lines carrying data from their servers to be secure and tamper proof. It would be interesting to see if they ever support end to end encryption which would lock them out of scanning the data as well.

<comment><USER50> Then how would searching your mail work? That breaks the product on a fundamental level and makes it worse than all competing products for all but a few users with specific needs. The existing end-to-end browser extension is a reasonable compromise.

<comment><USER49> It would work in the same way as opening any encrypted mailbox works. Your password is used as the key to decrypt your mailbox when you login. The same key could also be used to search the email.

Right now they're already telling you that they scan every email. So yeah, you would have to trust them that they do in-fact discard they keys and don't allow decryption in other scenarios. But large companies with tons of cash to lose if they're sued, will rarely blatantly lie about what they're doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Want to run your own mail server with TLS, SPF and DKIM? Check out sovereign on github. Makes it easier and includes a lot of other useful stuff such as your own calendar and contacts server.

</comment><comment><USER52> question about this: if i send mail to my IMAP or POP server over TLS, it may still travel to various spots on the journey to its final destination unencrypted using SMTP, right?

<comment><USER2> It's what the email server that you are making the IMAP or POP connection to does next that matters. If you send mail to a Gmail account it should make a TLS connection to Google's servers directly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Support PGP already!

<comment><USER41> How? ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Great news!

</comment><comment><USER55> I'm gettin tired of seeing 'mail is hard'. No, it's not. You need to learn it, and there are a lot of knobs and buttons, indeed, but it's not hard, especially not with the plethora of tutorials around.

Sysadmining was never that easy and was never intended to be done by the general public by clicking on a few 'continue' buttons and as the web is evolving, so is mail. Deal with it.

</comment><comment><USER56> This is interesting but as pointed out by other comments there is great danger of Gmail abusing their position to make life harder for small email providers.

I would be more positive towards this if they gave precise, technical details of their notion of "supporting TLS" and "being authenticated", ideally with a service allowing me to test easily whether my mail server is fine according to them (rather than having to sign up for Gmail to test it).

</comment><comment><USER57> I wonder how long it will be before Google fully cuts Gmail off from the outside world, much like how they turned gchat from a member of the federated xmpp/jabber ecosystem into hangouts and cut it off from the everyone else.

I guess if nothing else, it would probably reduce spam!</comment>


Phone in sick: it's a small act of rebellion against wage slavery - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/21/phone-in-sick-its-a-small-act-of-rebellion-against-wage-slavery <comment><USER2> Somebody must've felt well enough to come to work at Houseman's, no? And like a lot of rebellions, this one comes with collateral damage, to the day of the employees who decided to suck it up and come on in.</comment>


Tesla now worth more than GM, making it the most valuable U.S. automaker - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/04/tesla-now-worth-more-than-gm-making-it-the-most-valuable-u-s-automaker/ <comment><USER2> Tesla CEO Elon Musk is clearly the greatest salesman in tech right now, and eager investors are rushing to purchase TSLA stock in anticipation of greater riches to come. The money pouring into their corporate coffers will be extremely useful as they ramp up for Model 3 production. I'll probably jump back in after they start paying a dividend, but I'm not holding my breath.</comment>


Apple losing its supply chain mojo is a major threat - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2017-10-23/apple-losing-its-supply-chain-mojo-is-a-major-threat <comment><USER2> If there's anything I'm worried about it's not the supply chain, that's Tim Cook's speciality. We had similar stories about jet black iPhone 7's last year. There's always something.

But please get iOS 11 back to iOS 10 in terms of battery performance because I'm afraid the .1 release this year is not even the one you should go for if you're conservative with upgrades.

We don't need a yearly release anymore, we need solid upgrades for both macOS and the mobile OS's. Just release when it's ready.

<comment><USER3> And AirPods, which continue to be limited supply.

<comment><USER4> Really? Just bought some in at the Covent Garden Apple Store London on Saturday. Saw plenty at the Palo Alto Apple store yesterday. Two weeks ago, at the Aix-en-Provence Apple store, saw plenty there as well.

Who wants Air Pods and can't get them? I decided to buy mine and they are amazing.

<comment><USER5> You seem to have embarked on a world-wide tour of Apple retail stores... What keeps bringing you in?

<comment><USER6> The store is almost always in a high traffic neighborhood you're likely to visit. If walking by, why not walk in? They're usually interesting from an architectural design perspective, at least compared to the Hollister store next door.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This looked suspiciously like a premature verdict with lots of assumptions based on Apple not doing what an analyst says they should do, but there's no doubt that Apple's in a tough spot.

They had to offer an expensive phone to get new technology out the door at a reduced scale from a usual iPhone release, but now they're stuck with only one supplier who can make quality displays (and of course that supplier is also their main competition in phone hardware), and if the rumblings about the Face ID hardware being hard to make reliably in quantities are true, this could be an epic supply problem (for a company that knows well how painful epic supply problems are).

And if people really are holding off on an iPhone 8 in hopes of an X, whew. The good news for Apple is it's highly unlikely someone would go to Android just because the X is hard to find.

</comment><comment><USER8> Not being able to produce your incredibly high profit margin product fast enough to meet demand is an okay problem to have, as long as it doesn't persist. AirPods were back ordered for most of a year, but now they're stocked in stores.

<comment><USER9> I don't know, if I were an Apple investor (I'm not) I might be kind of pissed that supposed supply chain geniuses missed out on billions in potential sales because of entirely foreseeable and avoidable difficulties. Are regular employees whose screw ups cost their employer massive sums given a second chance? Why do we hold executives to a lower standard of performance than those below them?

<comment><USER10> > I might be kind of pissed that supposed supply chain geniuses missed out on > billions in potential sales because of entirely foreseeable and avoidable > difficulties.

Do you think someone else at Apple would have done a better job at getting 3rd party companies to manufacturer their parts faster? Sometimes, things take a while because they take a while, and burning through managers looking for someone who can roll out babies in 6 months instead of 9 just means you burned through all of your good managers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not related to supply chain, but when my current iPhone 6s is paid off I will probably look for 6s Plus. The lack of headphone jack really is a deal killer for me...I have no desire to complicate my life by carrying, charging, and managing multiple pieces of kit.

The "but it makes the iPhone water resistant" is weak argument that even if true, could've had a simple manufacturing solution (ie. no need to have the bore go straight into body of phone where electronics are, have the bore cylinder sealed with only wiring running to logic board).

Tim Cook, much like Steve Balmer, is a brilliant operations guy that can make minute adjustments to product lineup to produce all sorts of incremental once- off sales. However, they both lacked a fundamental "product vision" that resulted in tactical gains and strategic losses. Apple once again needs a product visionary.

<comment><USER12> This is where the legend of Steve Jobs is validated. To see the progressive decline in quality of hardware, software, and overall experience leads one to believe that yes indeed it was Jobs responsible for what we came to know as apple quality. It's sad it's happenig. Like a slow mo accident. While they're focused on selling iCloud my phone storage is magically filling up even when I delete gigs of data and load nothing more.

<comment><USER11> To be honest, I didn't even watch the last product launch. I almost thought it was a mistake when I checked the website later that day and saw both 8 and X iPhones? What a way to confuse your market.

Right now on apple.com you can buy the SE, 6, 7, 8, and X from their website. Talk about a cluttered, friction inducing decision.

<comment><USER13> And this is likely the reason for the reportedly low sales of the 8. I was surprised when they announced both at the fall event as it seemed obvious the X would cannibalize sales of the 8.

The iPhone is already a expensive premium phone, why bother with incremental changes of the 8 when the cool and shiny X is right around the corner.

It's also strange to me how they offer two new phones with different feature sets. Usually when Apple introduces a new device with a controversial change (e.g. USB-C only on the 2016 MacBook Pro), they don't offer a updated device without that change. It can be perceived as a lack of faith in the new product.

<comment><USER14> This year seems to have been about price increases across the range of products. The iPhone X is more expensive, and a lot more expensive than previous premium iPhones if you get sensible amounts of storage.

The base model of the MacBook Pro is about the same price as the one in 2016, but it has 128GB rather than 256GB of storage. The 256GB model is now a couple hundred dollars more expensive than last years.

Who else is able to _increase_ prices in technology? In spite of the complaints about their products, for people who think they are good enough and don't think what competitors have to offer is good enough (in terms of frustrations rather than in terms of features/price) there aren't alternatives, and Apple has a lot of pricing power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think the reasons the new phones aren't selling is that:

\- Anyone who already has a 6S or later can save money by not buying a new phone. Before this year, the way phone contracts worked is that you were paying for a new phone whether you bought one or not, so it would never make sense not to buy one.

\- No B71 or 4x4 MIMO support, meaning that next year's phones are going to be the ones you actually want, whereas these phones don't really offer any advantages over the 6S.

So unless you dropped your phone or something anyway, I don't really see any compelling reason to upgrade.

<comment><USER16> > No B71 or 4x4 MIMO support

I'm not sure a statistically relevant number of people care or even know about those technologies.

<comment><USER15> Doesn't matter. If Tim Cook had come on stage and said that the phones this year were going to get much better reception, and data speeds would be much faster, then the phones would be selling. But instead the pitch was that the graphics chip was 30% better or whatever, which no one cares about.

Just wait until next year, we'll see more sales after these features are added.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This article is badly written and tangential. It starts off with weak monthly sales charts of TSMC, Hon Hai and Largan Precision before turning to say well the issue is OLED and Samsung. The same arguments are made again towards the end of article.

Shortage of OLED has been a known variable for a long time. Back in 2010, I bought a cheap ZTE phone released in UK as Orange San Francisco. Because of the OLED shortage, the phone had two variations in UK - the OLED one and TFT one. People had to look for special serial numbers to get the OLED model.

</comment><comment><USER18> "Major threat"?

<comment><USER19> This is just another cycle in the routine where an analyst predicts a dire outcome for Apple to put some pressure on the share price, so the trading desk can swoop in for the inevitable pop when the doom-and-gloom prediction turns out to be completely wrong. Everyone knows that the name of the game is betting against these dumb reports.

<comment><USER20> You would make a great Finance reporter or even an economist.</comment></comment></comment>


Do you print source code? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3201703/do-you-print-your-source-code

<comment><USER2> Not for the last, gosh, probably 15 years. Editors are just too good these days. Listings would show me less than Visual Studio, Emacs, whatever. Colorization, collapse/expand, dead-simple search for "i don't care if it is before or after where i am in the source file, find me function flap, like now".

And I think stuff printed out would look kind of funny, no?</comment>


Obama Sued by Rand Paul Over Phone Surveillance Program - T-A http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-12/obama-sued-by-rand-paul-over-surveillance-as-challenges-grow-1-.html <comment><AUTHOR> Take a look at the comments section if you want to see political tribalism at its best.

> I thought Bush orchestrated the Patriot Act... who knew..?

> Regardless of your opinion of the surveillance, you gotta see this as a > cynical political move. Bet he wouldn't sue a Republican president. Isn't > good enough to disagree with Obama - a candidate has to demonstrate outrage > with him to gain cred with the base.

Everything is right vs left to some people. There is no discussion of the consequences of this action, just name-calling an unsubstantiated claims. I hate discussing politics because the cognitive dissonance and mental gymnastics required to fully support Republicans or Democrats makes my head hurt.

<comment><USER2> That is the main problem I see with modern politics. It basically becomes "stereotypes of the left versus stereotypes of the right". A friend of a friend told me that he didn't see Gay marriage being outlawed in many states as a civil rights issue. I said I did. At this point, he asked "so you're a democrat?" I said "not really, I don't think of myself as associated with either party" and his answer was, no joke, "well how can I understand why you believe what you do without knowing what party you're in?" as if every Democrats brain is connected to one thought center and the same with Republicans. The strawmen that come out of this are utterly insane. "well you think what Christie did with closing the bridge and putting lives in danger was bad? What about Benghazi?!?!" as if you had to be on team Benghazi is bad or team Christie closing the bridge was bad and there were no other options. It's incredibly depressing really.

<comment><USER3> This is exactly the problem. We could be having deep, analytical discussions about the principles and philosophies that form the basis of our political convictions. Instead, our conversations are tainted by partisanship.

<comment><USER4> I'm sorry. We're busy training the next generation of knowledge workers. Things like "how to construct a cogent argument based upon a reasoned moral framework" or "how to distill essential points and deduce the original line of reasoning from a long-form essay" are artsy fartsy humanities unnecessary to getting a paycheck in the real world.

<comment><USER3> Haha if that's the case, then we're all going to end up like drones. We'll only be able to do what we're told and we won't be able to think for ourselves. We'll never be able to think deeply about issues, because hey -- that's useless! That won't get me a paycheck!

Innovation is inherently interdisciplinary. If we aren't exposed to different ways of thought, we won't be able to approach problems from the variety of different perspectives that are both necessary and key to creative problem solving.

<comment><USER5> Innovation can be interdisciplinary, but my suspicion is that specialization leads to more of it. That's not saying that all political innovation benefits society equally and we need more political scientists and politicians. At some point we need to start solving more problems outside the realm of politics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The complaint - [https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1017524-rand-paul- co...](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1017524-rand-paul- complaint.html)

What's frustrating is that I had to search through 5 articles/blog posts to find it. Why do media outlets post articles on any lawsuit without a link to the complaint?

<comment><USER7> Because they don't want you clicking out of their site. Why give away those page views?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I dislike politics in general because, really, it's all just a giant reality tv show. I lost faith when I was in high school, actually, because President Bush stood on national television and said that they couldn't find any weapons in Afghanistan and that was proof that they were there. And nobody, or at least nobody that I had exposure to, thought that was the stupidest thing they had ever heard.

Since then, I've seen politicians vote on a law and then admit to not having read it. I've seen politicians simply not go to work because they don't want to not vote, but they also don't want to vote. And then I've seen filibustering.

While there are several laws that I disagree with that have been killed by a filibuster, I think it's entirely disgraceful that there is a tactic which can prevent a popular bill from becoming law simply because someone else decides to be an asshole for 17 hours.

And the whole voting on a bill without reading it? I think anyone caught doing that should spend the rest of their life in prison, period.

These guys are master manipulators, most or all of them are ivy league educated, top of their class, cut-throat business men and attorneys. And yet people think these are the guys that should be running a country.

The whole thing, start to finish, is a farce and it's appalling to watch.

<comment><USER8> My father is a lobbyist in DC and he calls it "Hollywood with ugly people."

Sounds about right.

<comment><USER9> That's the joke about DC in Hollywood, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My two minutes of internet research says that this is going to get tossed. A President can't be sued for actions taken as President, but can be sued for personal actions.

A Daily Beast article mentions this: [http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/30/can- bachman...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/30/can-bachmann- really-sue-king-obama.html)

<comment><USER11> Minor nitpick, a president can be sued, however they have the right to refuse to be sued.

<comment><USER12> What would that imply for this case then? Assuming President Obama refuses to be sued, does that throw the case out? Or does the case still proceed with the other defendants? Can all the other defendants refuse to be sued as well?

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure gizmo686 is referring to "executive privilege". Clinton tried to invoke it during the whole Lewinsky thing and was told that it doesn't apply to personal stuff.

(This is entirely from me reading Wikipedia earlier today.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> More political theater from Rand Paul. If only he was as transparent to the average voter.

<comment><USER14> Would a similar suit by Pelosi also be theater to you?

<comment><USER15> It depends. Filing a lawsuit against Obama is political theater regardless of who does it simply because he is immune from civil lawsuits for actions relating to his job.

However, suing everyone and anyone else (as Paul seems to have done), isn't.

So what Paul has done is a little political theater and a little practical. If Polosi had done the same thing, the result would be the same.

As a legislator though, it seems the far more practical way of ending phone surveillance would be to draft a bill making it explicitly illegal.

<comment><USER16> There is already a law that makes it illegal: the fourth amendment, further backed by extensive case law.

And the Fourth Amendment was intended for _exactly_ this case. One of the last actions of the English which precipitated the American revolution was a general warrant issued in a secret court in England which gave English soldiers authority to search any American's home at any time without any reason for suspicion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Good stuff, but it kind of bothers me that so much focus is put on the _phone_ surveillance program, when I find the surveillance of private Internet communications so much more damaging, especially since they are also the _future_ of all communications.

<comment><USER18> I'm not certain because I'm definitely not a legal expert, but I think this might be because there is more legal precedent that warrant-less phone monitoring is illegal compared to warrant-less IP traffic monitoring. Would anyone with a better understanding of surveillance law care to comment?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Very thankful we have a few good men like Rand still in politics.

<comment><USER20> Please. There is nothing good about Rand.

He is just cynically trying to stoke the libertarian base.

<comment><USER21> I think the desire to not be spied upon without warrant goes beyond the libertarian base.

<comment><USER22> So this is just broad-based empty pandering, then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady Why is the lawsuit against Obama? Shouldn't it be against the USG or the part of the government that passed the law (or against the NSA for the data collection)? It seems strange to sue an individual politician, president or not.

<comment><USER16> The lawsuit is against Obama because the actions were taken by the executive branch, Obama is the President, and the President _is_ the executive branch.

<comment><USER23> And that is why this is such a preposterous idea. You can't actually sue the President for things he does as the President. If it were for private actions taken as a private citizen that would be different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Clapper (defendant) is in my opinion the most disgusting dirtbag that perfectly represent the broken state of our political system and its rotting that we are currently funcion in.

This piece of trash lied to the Congress (something that hundred of thousands of people commit a jailtime in this moment as i write this) and further explained himself as "i choose the least truthful statement". Well, it wasn't up to him to decide whether he should tell the truth or not, he was answeing to rightfully appointed commision.

Imagine a society you live in where people you pay salaries for (public servant) choose to lie in your face and perfectly get away with it.

This banana republic approach that a cocroach like Clapper can personally decide whether or not he will tell the truth, and not being punished in any way for blunt lies, but rater praised and kept on his post, perfectly summarize the rotten system we live under, where all three branches merge into one and someone like Clapper can call another dirtbag named Holter and asked him not to press charges so life can just abrubtly go on...

</comment><comment><USER25> What about the Narus program which collects a major portion of the Internet traffic without any warrant and probable cause? Do they claim it's also legal?

</comment><comment><USER26> I thought the supreme court ruled once that a sitting president could not be sued.

Because I vaguely remember some people wanted to sue Bush and were not allowed.</comment>


Ask HN: Twitter or blog? - <AUTHOR>

After I left my job I want to be more social and be more active on Github, so and also try to think of some fun projects to do while looking for some freelancing gigs to still earn some money. My question is should I use twitter or should I start a blog for just telling things I work on, new technologies I experiment with and other things that I find interesting? <comment><USER2> That depends. Can you say what you have to say in 140 characters?

<comment><AUTHOR> just random stuff regarding what I do and what projects I make and other stuff and how is everything for me in the land of freedom and freelancing

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Do both: long-form blog posts on cool topics, tweets on what piques your interest now. There's no mutual exclusion here.</comment>


Show HN: I build djit.su during the coronavirus lockdowns – a new code editor - <AUTHOR> TL;DR: During the coronavirus lockdowns I built a new kind of code editor - a notebook-like development environment inspired by the awesome teachings of Bret Victor. Check it out: https://djit.su
Quick backstory: I've always wanted to create a different kind of code editor that encompasses several aspects of what I consider programming. I think it's started somewhere around the time Bret Victor had his famous talk - it blew my mind, seeing how he develops the game in real-time modifying variable and functions as he goes.
About three months ago, as the corona lockdowns hit, the company I just recently started working at collapsed due to lack of funding. I started working on a thing. It began when I finished with my ObservableHQ Coronavirus Stats (https://observablehq.com/@elisk/coronavirus-stats) and wanted to extend the table with more features.
Today I finally shipped what I consider truly first functional version of djit.su — a rudimentary yet-to-be-fully-defined tool that I designed in my mind for almost a decade, prototyped at least four different times in the last five years, and finally get to play with for the first time after building it for the past 3 months.
I've created a quick reference example for how to update the cell value from the react component - check it out here: https://djit.su/dBqYwddyuP42QRe — it might serve you as a good point to get an idea how to interact with djit.su as the documentation is non-existing at this point.
Any and all comments, suggestions, and recommendations are welcome. <comment><USER2> There really should be a way to view the home page or some about page without logging in. This is normally a hard stop for me. I was curious enough to create a login because of this article [https://medium.com/@danielblank/djitsu-the-problem-with- web-...](https://medium.com/@danielblank/djitsu-the-problem-with-web- development-and-what-to-do-about-it-2c1925b0c2b1). The article mentions that is open source. Can you share the a link to the repo?

</comment><comment><USER3> More info here: [https://medium.com/@danielblank/djitsu-the-problem-with- web-...](https://medium.com/@danielblank/djitsu-the-problem-with-web- development-and-what-to-do-about-it-2c1925b0c2b1)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Subreddit for djit.su: [https://reddit.com/r/djitsu/](https://reddit.com/r/djitsu/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Why do I have to login in order to just see the editor?</comment>


Ask HN: Alternative to Codecademy model? - <AUTHOR>

Teaching code by deconstructing an existing app and going in reverse.
Does that make sense?
It is somewhat like the difference in learning/teaching language that is described here: http://www.youtube.com/user/PimsleurApproach?v=u-ZCNIHYQ1M&feature=pyv&ad=10586951585&kw=pimsleur
What do you think? <comment><USER2> I think its an excellent idea. But,Codecademy tries to teach to people who have never programmed before. Yours makes more sense if the target is someone who already has experience in programming, and is introduced to a new technology.</comment>


World's Biggest Bribe Scandal - <AUTHOR> http://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2016/the-bribe-factory/day-1/getting-the-story.html <comment><USER2> Related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11388542](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11388542)

</comment><comment><USER3> I will be amazed if anyone is prosecuted for this, even more so if this impedes the practice in anyway.</comment>


The Simple Magic of Consistent Hashing (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.paperplanes.de/2011/12/9/the-magic-of-consistent-hashing.html <comment><AUTHOR> In an earlier thread about Stephen Wolfram's contributions to a recent movie, a user commented that the alien circle-grams looked similar to how diagrams of consistent hashing turn out [0]. I had never heard of the concept, so I went looking and was surprised by its simplicity and elegance.

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12942021](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12942021)</comment>


The Siege of Herbalife (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2015/09/09/the-siege-of-herbalife/ <comment><USER2> Good. I hope he is successful in taking them down. I know too many people who've wasted $$ falling prey to these MLM scams.

I know an emergency room physician who stopped working as an MD to sell Arbonne products (another MLM like herbalife that sells makeup and diet shakes) after getting roped into it by a nurse we worked with. Now she is in the nurse's "downline." Utter waste of an education.

<comment><USER3> When my wife and I were under severe financial pressure in the early years of our marriage, her father spent several hours subjecting us (well, her in particular) to an intense sales pitch about how much money we'd make selling Melaleuca ([https://www.melaleuca.com](https://www.melaleuca.com)), a MLM he was involved with.

My wife was insisting we sign his contracts, because it would be so easy to recruit only X people (I think it was 3 or 5, I can't quite remember) where X was the minimum number of recruits needed for you to earn your "passive income" from their sales.

I had to take her aside, and write a short Python program to show that after seven generations of recruitment, the entirety of our country would be selling Melaleuca to each other.

I still bear a grudge against her Dad for targeting us during a very vulnerable time.

<comment><USER4> A python program is kind of overkill for this.

<comment><USER3> It's a very easy Python script to write, and I wanted her to see the numbers get larger and larger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting article...lots of up-votes, but few weighing in... I'll give it a go...

Money is at stake for one side..a stock has been publicly shorted...

Money, and a "way of life" created, for many, by an organizational structure (MLM), is at stake for Herbalife, to include it's financial managers, distributors and customers...

I can only respond by sharing my own personal experiences with MLMs...

I've never been approached by anyone that I suspected was knowingly, or unknowingly, involved in an MLM-type business that was selling a product I couldn't live without...and in many cases the "peddlers" had obviously been coached to tout benefits that I firmly believed didn't exist, or weren't possible...

This to include lotions, juices, air purifiers, supplements, etc...you name it...

In this specific case I can say the same...I try to go with the best available evidence whenever I can...

I've never seen any evidence that a normal healthy person derives significant benefit from supplements of any kind...vitamins, herbs, juice extracts, whatever...

I'm wary of "snake oil" to a fault...if you aren't well seek medical advice...buying something from a salesman is possibly one of the worst things you can do if you're concerned about your health...spend that money getting yourself checked out...

The question for me is not whether Herbalife offers any kind of a health benefit to consumers, or an economic benefit to those involved in it's distribution network...

The question to be answered is whether or not a "whistle-blower" should ethically be allowed to profit, substantially, from blowing that whistle...

<comment><USER6> > The question to be answered is whether or not a "whistle-blower" should > ethically be allowed to profit, substantially, from blowing that whistle

If they're an external party then I don't think it really matters.

<comment><USER5> Your comment raises the question: if a substantial profit is involved is a claimant still "impartial", "neutral", "unbiased"...?

Or, "external" to the proceedings, as your choice of terms suggests...?

I don't have the answer....still thinking about this one!

You make a good point...

<comment><USER7> The hope is that a company's fate isn't decided by the claimant. Of course the claimant is biased, that's what would have motivated them to take this position in the first place.

The ultimate decision should be reached by an unbiased third party or parties, in this case the FTC / the market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You have to wonder that something bigger is going on behind the scenes. George Soros was invested in Herbalife at the time this article was published. In November he exited his position.

Carl Icahn is an investor in Herbalife. Bill Ackman has been trying to destroy it.

Are these investment tycoons waging some kind of proxy war against each other?

<comment><USER9> It certainly came across to me that Icahn and Soros were investing _against_ Ackman, rather than _for_ Herbalife. Moreover, they almost appear to have 'won' \- without further investigation, from this article it sounds like Icahn's investment gave a stable floor to the stock price (despite several subsequent sizable fluctuations), and without that Ackman's activism may well have driven Herbalife much further down.

(I doubt he would have driven it out of business entirely - at some price it would have become a very juicy acquisition target for private equity.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I live in China you do see a lot of Herbalife and Amway stuff here. It's the oldest trick in the book ... 1.4 billion people with a relative educational deficit and a huge social pressure to get rich quick ... a social system favoring small transactions among friends and family ... widespread appreciation of 'foreign' products as status items ... a fertile recruiting grounds for MLMs. Circa 2005 I went for a blind massage and the masseur began with "The American Amway company..."

</comment><comment><USER11> Funny, from this page: [http://catalog.herbalife.com/Catalog/en-US/Core- Products/Cor...](http://catalog.herbalife.com/Catalog/en-US/Core- Products/Core-Products/Formula-1-Healthy-Meal-Nutritional-Shake-Mix)

I click on "BBB Accredited Business" link which leads to a BBB page that states: "THIS BUSINESS IS NOT BBB ACCREDITED"

I click on the "Direct Selling Association" Link, which brings up a 404.

<comment><USER9> I'm guessing the people who do your level of research probably aren't the target market for Herbalife distributors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> John Hempton, who is mentioned in the article, has an awesome, frank blog at [http://brontecapital.blogspot.com](http://brontecapital.blogspot.com). Of course he's often 'talking his book', but he's always well researched and (I think) surprisingly open for a hedge fund manager about what he's thinking.

</comment><comment><USER9> It sounds to me like Ackman has made the right bet, just ten years too late. I remember researching Herbalife a lot back in 2002, off the back of these excellent articles by Rob Cockerham [1], and it definitely appeared as immoral as the Amway businesses I'd researched at the time as well.

I don't fully 'believe' the figures presented by Herbalife in this report, about returns, purchasers from outside the network etc. BUT it certainly seems that the business model and culture has dramatically shifted under Michael Johnson.

Had Ackman shorted this in 2002 not 2012 [2], I suspect his accusations would have stuck and he may well have prompted the FTC to improve their MLM guidelines. He may ultimately do us all a _disservice_ by making all anti-MLM activists appear to be arrogant and greedy.

[1] [http://www.cockeyed.com/workfromhome/workfromhome.html](http://www.cockeyed.com/workfromhome/workfromhome.html)

[2] Which wasn't an option, because 1) it was privately held at that time (or thereabouts), and 2) Ackman was recovering from his previous fund's collapse.

<comment><USER13> Go read John Hempton's articles on Bronte Capital's website. For example:

[http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2015/06/herbalife-very- lon...](http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2015/06/herbalife-very-long- post.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The question posed by this article is unfair, because it labels Ackman as a regulator. He has absolutely no regulatory authority, and if you want to claim that his money allows him to act as one, then what of all of the money put behind Herbalife by billionaire investors? Are they regulators propping up a company?

There was an investigation into Herbalife because there are legitimate questions about its business practices that Ackman drew attention to through his research. If he were a regulator, then his massive bet would have fared far better than it has.

</comment><comment><USER15> Weird situation. Being from southern California, I've been asked to join Herbalife a few times but each time turned it down since it wasn't a good fit for me (I'm not interested in sales).

However the people and company were always straight-forward about how it worked, so I never felt they were "shady" as the guy in the article accuses. On the other hand, I didn't know what to make of it completely.

<comment><USER16> I think Ackman would argue it's only the top management and insiders who are shady, and only they who make significant money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's an interesting saga. I haven't researched it much so here's my gut take from reading the story and remembering earlier discussions...

(Sadly) I think supplements and questionable weight loss products are a real market and will be bought in the future even without any scientific backing. Which makes me weary of Ackman's bet. It seems like Herbalife has actually changed stuff quite a bit and could very well just be selling to people if they changed distribution to direct sales. They are selling snakeoil (imo) but they still seem to sell to real consumers at the end of the line and don't stock stuff in warehouses.

Since this is the crux of the argument from my point of view I wonder why he didn't conduct any large sample survey before mounting the attack. It seems like a good step 0 to gather data on one of your major arguments but in fact...

""" "Surveys are notoriously unreliable," he responds. There's no substitute for seeing the distributors' actual retail records, he insists. """

That doesn't sound convincing at all.

</comment><comment><USER18> If I had the money of Ackman, I'm not sure I'd spend it for the purpose of destroying a company, even if I was sure it was fraudulent. There are so many ways it can go sideways, and a hundred more could rise in its place too, so what's the point besides the quick profit? Yeah, it's all about money, but the bigger picture would frighten me.

As a private party, I'm not a regulator. I'm not the authorities. I'm not going to go play financial Batman just because I think the normal authorities aren't getting it done. I'll raise noise about the issue if I really care about it, sure. I'll testify findings in court. But bet money on it? The optics look horrible. All my ideas and findings suddenly become suspect and the question is whether I care about what's right or about making money at the expense of what I perceive to be weak targets.

Let me make money in ways where my approach is above reproach and I'm not questioned about my motives. Why put my efforts and money towards something where I could get my name tarnished?

Or Ackman doesn't think this way because he's one of the so-called masters of the universe and his resulting ego has put him on another level?

<comment><USER4> Ackman is trying to make more money. If he does good in destroying a bad company all the better, but that's not his primary mission.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Companies engaging in MLM strategies often offers superior quality, beneficial products. I personally use one on occasions just because I know it works really well for what I need.

However MLM as a marketing strategy especially sprinkled with "business opportunity" hype is as close to scam as it can be without crossing the barrier.

Tons of people are misleaded into false expectations of making living just by finding candidates and signing them up.

While I see mr. Ackman's efforts nothing more than ego- [and possibly boredom] driven personal quest, the MLM industry needs to be forced into full and very clear disclosure of "business opportunity" fragment. These promises are clearly misleading and grossly overhyped.

</comment><comment><USER20> I built a large social networking mlm for a client. The coding was fun but it left me feeling bad. It is catching people when they are desperate. I do not really believe in limiting a lot by law but people cannot protect themselves when they are down.

</comment><comment><USER21> I want to ask another question. I have tried Herbalife and I feel that the product is but I do not like their MLM system.

Is there any product like herbalife but without the MLM part.

</comment><comment><USER22> _Is he right about Herbalife being a pyramid scheme?_

Is this really a question requiring an answer?

<comment><USER16> Yup, various court cases depend on it.

It was ruled that it was one [http://mynewsla.com/business/2015/05/15/15m-settlement- appro...](http://mynewsla.com/business/2015/05/15/15m-settlement-approved-in- herbalife-pyramid-scheme-lawsuit/)

then that it wasn't [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-herbalife-lawsuit- idUSKCN0...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-herbalife-lawsuit- idUSKCN0Q321B20150729)</comment></comment>


Introducing Realm React Native - <AUTHOR> https://realm.io/news/introducing-realm-react-native/ <comment><USER2> I think this is a very exciting match for both eco systems. I look forward to seeing where it will go.

</comment><comment><USER3> Congrats to the team. We've been really happy trying it out. It's a drop-in replacement for the standard flux pattern.

</comment><comment><USER4> What about PhoneGap? Seems weird to support React Native but not PhoneGap.

<comment><USER5> Hi, Tim from Realm here. We actually rely on a custom C++ core, which means we have to support each JavaScript engine separately. We completed support for JavaScriptCore first, which React Native uses on both iOS & Android. To support PhoneGap / Cordova we'd need to support V8, which will be close to as much work as supporting JSC in the first place. We're looking forward to getting it done though! [https://github.com/realm/realm- js/issues/261](https://github.com/realm/realm-js/issues/261) Beyond that we were quite excited about the architectural decisions behind React Native and the emerging community around it, so we figured it'd be a good place to start that lined up very well with our own goals!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you are interested in React Native and Couchbase Lite, here's a tutorial for Android [1] and notes for iOS [2]

[1] [http://blog.couchbase.com/2015/november/getting-started- with...](http://blog.couchbase.com/2015/november/getting-started-with-react- native-android-and-couchbase-lite)

[2] [https://gist.github.com/jchris/3c32524577deff3d69aa](https://gist.github.com/jchris/3c32524577deff3d69aa)

</comment><comment><USER7> Awesome news, thanks for showing support for RN!

</comment><comment><USER8> It's too bad that Realm's core technology isn't open source, it would be interesting to see what other immutable databases (e.g. Datomic) would do with the ideas they've come up with. Also grafting Datascript onto Realm for a datalog competitor to sqlite would be sweet.

</comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know the actual queries that are used in the benchmark comparison?

<comment><USER5> There's a link in the caption to the code: [https://github.com/realm/realm- js/tree/master/examples/React...](https://github.com/realm/realm- js/tree/master/examples/ReactNativeBenchmarks)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is this usable with electron / nodewebkit apps ?

<comment><USER11> Not out of the box at the moment. But it would technically be possible to do. Feel free to post a suggestion to [https://github.com/realm/realm- js/issues](https://github.com/realm/realm-js/issues) so we can see the interest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> can it be used as a simple key/value store?

<comment><USER12> Patrick from Realm here. Realm _can_ be used as a key-value store using our primary keys but at the moment it does expect a fixed schema (all of the keys can be optional though). It'd be trivial for us to relax that requirement and we do have dynamic APIs that allows this on Swift/Objective-C/Java. That said, there's a lot more Realm can do that a K/V store can't such as query efficiently on arbitrary properties, link objects in a graph, and more. Does that answer your question?

<comment><USER9> Yes -- is there a doc about the graph semantics?

<comment><USER5> You can add any object as a property of another object, and access them via dot notation: [https://realm.io/docs/react-native/latest/#object- properties](https://realm.io/docs/react-native/latest/#object-properties)

You can probably find some more advanced examples in our Swift docs [https://realm.io/docs/swift/latest/#relationships](https://realm.io/docs/swift/latest/#relationships)

We're barely scratching the surface of this in our query language, which is heavily NSPredicate-inspired, but we might add more OpenCypher-ish features in the future. (And we'd greatly appreciate concrete use-cases or anything else you can share in a GitHub issue to help us prioritize development) [https://github.com/realm/realm-js/issues](https://github.com/realm/realm- js/issues)

<comment><USER9> Sounds interesting!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you manage logging in a large application? - <AUTHOR> We have a large angular web application that has grown into a big mess of console.log() output and it's now unmanageable.<p>What are some good strategies to do this? Ideally we want to be able to turn logging for components on/off at run-time (during development). <comment><USER2> Not too sure about Angular / JS, but instead of console.log() I'd use something that you can determine a log level for i.e. console.error / console.info / console.debug.

Then you can determine what to ship out to a logging tool like logstash/logdna based on the environment.

Edit: Something like this [https://www.scalyr.com/blog/getting-started- angular-logging/](https://www.scalyr.com/blog/getting-started-angular- logging/)

</comment><comment><USER3> We're working on a Web SDK for Bugfender, but unfortunately it'll still take a couple of months to finish and test properly, before we can release it.

On our platforms page we have a subscription to get notified once a new platform is supported: [https://bugfender.com/platforms/](https://bugfender.com/platforms/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm using Application Insights, but our tool is very Microsoft-centric.

Standard recommendation like mister_hn said is Elastic stack, Logstash and Kibana or Grafana.

In a course, I also saw recommended Zipkin and Jaeger.

</comment><comment><USER5> Rely on logstash/Elastic stack, especially if logs are massive

<comment><USER6> Same here, you'd be amazed what can be done with smart searches</comment></comment>


The History of Python: From List Comprehensions to Generator Expressions - <AUTHOR> http://python-history.blogspot.com/2010/06/from-list-comprehensions-to-generator.html <comment><USER2> List and generator comprehensions are such enjoyable features of the language. Really looking forward to set and dictionary comprehensions. Alas, if only python 3 adoption were not bound to take years.</comment>


Photography's Blue Period - <AUTHOR> http://hyperallergic.com/272915/photographys-blue-period-gets-its-first-major-show-in-the-us/ <comment><USER2> The style is fascinating; it has a certain aesthetic that I just love about it.

This reminds me so much of the cover on one of Momus' early albums, _The Poison Boyfriend_ (1987): [http://assets.catawiki.nl/assets/2015/1/27/4/4/7/447f5dba-a6...](http://assets.catawiki.nl/assets/2015/1/27/4/4/7/447f5dba-a63d-11e4-8ad4-5452c33a505b.jpg)

This was part of the same photoshoot: [http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y296/imomus/more/nickat27.j...](http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y296/imomus/more/nickat27.jpg)

I was reminded of this because it's arguably the cover that drew me to that album and by extension the rest of Momus' work.

</comment><comment><USER3> Was fully expecting an article about instagram filters.

<comment><USER4> I was expecting something about the tobacco haze!

<comment><USER5> For anyone who is wondering:

[http://petapixel.com/2015/10/15/why-old-sports-photos- often-...](http://petapixel.com/2015/10/15/why-old-sports-photos-often-have-a- blue-haze/)</comment></comment></comment>


Vietnamese girl travels to 25 countries with US $700 - <AUTHOR> http://english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/society/48289/vietnamese-girl-travels-to-25-countries-with-us-700.html

<comment><USER2> This article is a little short on details on how she accomplished this, which is what I'd be most interested in. Couchsurfing means that she saved a ton of money, but it's only one of three major expenses (besides food and transportation).

\-- Did she work legally in those other countries? \-- What were her main modes of transportation between countries?

And because I'm a cynic...

\-- How many of her new "friends" were simply men looking to take advantage of her?

</comment><comment><USER3> This is almost fascinating, but the article is short on details.

I really want to know how she got across borders; did she need visas? How did she choose which country to go to?</comment>


Does Object Recognition Work for Everyone? - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.02659 <comment><USER2> I believe this kind of works is very important. Ore ML systems are biased in so many way that discovering them can provide many insights about how they work and how improve them.</comment>


Why improving kernel security is important - <AUTHOR> https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/38158.html <comment><USER2> Perhaps the promotion of SELinux and its integration in some major distros is impeding the adoption of more practical kernel security measures like AppArmor or grsecurity. At least that's what Chris Siebenmann, a long-time sysadmin for the University of Toronto's CS department, thinks.

[https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SELinuxWhyICa...](https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SELinuxWhyICare)

What I don't like about SELinux is that it doesn't integrate easily with existing tools. It requires special filesystem attributes, and tools like ls and cp have to be modified to support it. Third-party tools like Ansible also have to go out of their way to support SELinux. It seems to me that AppArmor and grsecurity don't have that problem nearly as much.

<comment><USER3> I feel like what SELinux is missing is an extra layer of abstraction for the configuration, to make it easier for humans to work with.

The "Just disable SELinux!" sysadmin answer strikes me as coming from the same place as "Just disable IPv6!" and "Just disable PulseAudio!" \- a lot of sysadmins don't like having to learn new things. I've done sysadmin work for about 20 years now, and I don't share that view - learning new things is a necessity in this line of work. You either learn a new thing you can apply in your work, or you find out it's not a good solution and now you have an informed opinion on why it's not good.

You mention AppArmor as a "more practical security measure" being held back by SELinux. But Chris's blog post states that they disable that too. In essence, his argument seems to be "I don't really care about all this security stuff, I just want it to work the same way it always has". I understand the viewpoint, but that's not the way to progress.

<comment><USER4> > PulseAudio

I abhor PulseAudio, because it just doesn't work as smoothly as JACK or ALSA. Sometimes learning a new thing isn't necessary, as the old ways of doing something still hold.

I agree with the BSD way of doing this: force it on the users and try and help them come to terms with your changes. If there's a revolt and/or it's too much work for you, revert. Otherwise your entire ecosystem is safer.

<comment><USER3> In my experience, most of the problems people have with PulseAudio come down to buggy ALSA drivers not handling buffer resizing correctly. Adding tsched=0 as a module option "fixes" that by making them not export the buggy interfaces. The result is much the same as playing directly through ALSA.

The reason PulseAudio wants to use these interfaces is that it has to make a tradeoff between CPU utilization+battery usage versus low latency. If you use ALSA directly, the first application to open the device controls the size of your buffer. The first client was a music player requesting a large buffer? Then your SIP client will get high-latency audio. PulseAudio tries to fix this by dynamically resizing the buffer.

I'm sure there's actual issues with PulseAudio, but somehow most of the problems I see people complain about lie further down the stack.

Of course, discussion of pulseaudio is rather off-topic here, it was just one more example of how "just shut down the new thing!" is often easier than diagnosing the actual problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Currently, most users of computers running Linux own those computers, but do not have root access to those computers, because they are cellphones running Android. Instead, Samsung, Google, HTC, and random human rights abusers like Hacking Team have root access to them. Those users can currently obtain root access to their own computers only because of vulnerabilities in the kernels, hardware, and occasionally applications being used.

Given this very bad situation, I would argue that improving kernel security is at best ambiguously beneficial and possibly actively harmful to users. Maybe we should wait to improve kernel security — probably by switching to a different kernel — until we have somehow managed to escape this very dangerous situation in which people do not have root on their own computers.

<comment><USER6> This is a pointless philosophical debate: leaving kernel bugs unfixed will not make Android a more open platform. That problem needs to be fixed at the vendor level but there's no reason to make the rest of the Linux-using world less secure while waiting for that to happen, to say nothing of the likely much greater number of Android users who will see those exploits used by malware.

<comment><USER5> This is as far from a pointless philosophical debate as it could possibly be. We are discussing whether people should be able, _in practice_ , to get root on their own phones. Leaving kernel bugs unfixed is the way that happens today. When people get root on their phones, they can then uninstall the malware _that is already installed on the phone when they buy it_.

At this point, Android user-owners are the vast majority of the Linux-using world, and indeed the computer-using world. Their needs and interests would outweigh those of everyone else if they were actually in opposition.

<comment><USER7> It is philosophically pointless, as you are arguing from an untenable position: if you don't trust your system provider, you shouldn't trust your system. Leaving kernel bugs unfixed does not make your system any more trustworthy.

From a practical point of view, it's a different matter: the exploits may allow you to regain some control over an untrusted device. But you still have the fundamental disparity of you trying to gain (software) control over an untrusted (hardware) device. That makes it a pointless philosophical debate regardless of practical use.

<comment><USER5> Oh, I hadn't thought of that interpretation of "pointless philosophical debate". You're right: considered as a purely philosophical debate, it's pointless. But considered as a debate over what practical measures to improve our contingent human reality in the face of non-ideal and poorly understood circumstances, it's far from pointless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "The number of people using Linux systems is increasing every day, and many of these users depend on the security of these systems in critical ways. It's vital that we do what we can to avoid their trust being misplaced."

This, a thousand times over. Security and privacy concerns are ultimately among the make-or-break points of any major platform, and Linux needs to pass this with flying colors, especially as it grows ever closer to the ordinary user who is finally considering replacing Windows.

<comment><USER9> Even without the point about more users wanting to replace Windows with a Linux distro, it makes harder to argue that "ATMs should run Linux instead of Windows", if Linux is falling behind in security. Also, ATMs should probably run OpenBSD.

<comment><USER10> Mainly, the PC inside ATM should not do anything remotely security critical. PC-based ATM platforms are actually designed around compartmentalization and in ideal case the PC should only draw UI on screen, handle some subset of input events and route encrypted messages between other components of the ATM (whether it's implemented in this way in actual deployments is another issue).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You can follow some of the security work the kernel community is doing via the kernel hardening mailing list: [https://lwn.net/Articles/663361/](https://lwn.net/Articles/663361/)

</comment><comment><USER12> > So they took advantage of the fact that many Android devices shipped a > kernel with a flawed copy_from_user() implementation that allowed them to > copy arbitrary userspace data over arbitrary kernel code, thus allowing them > to disable SELinux.

If the problem was on the flawed copy_from_user() so why is he talking about improving the kernel the manufacturer was at fault for tampering with the safety?

>If we could trust userspace applications, we wouldn't need SELinux.

I won't argue that SELinux is a bad solution to our security problems and that a cleaner kernel-native solution would be better. But the very fact that we are still having this([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10537268](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10537268) ) discussion shows that we haven't yet agreed upon a definite solutions for the code isolation problem. Docker container model is definitely a much better approach for limiting system calls, but is anyone seriously considering integrating docker to the kernel source code?

Another problem is that, while may have a lot of proposals for the problems, implementations(like Grsecurity) and even have a satisfactory number of developers, we have only so many trusted reviewers to audit that code, so we will always lose one or another.

Furthermore, I'd like to note that with neither shellshock nor heartbleed was a kernel was the problem, in fact I don't even remember the last CVE related to the kernel that I've seen. So is the kernel security as horrible as the recent uproar seems to warrant?

Finally we need to be honest with our selves here. Most problems with security that we face today are not directly related to the software that we run, it's related to how e build, ship and evaluate our software. We don't have a security focused mindset in the corporate world, security does not add to the product value to the average user, so we end up shipping code with obvious security flaws. As a tech savvy community we cannot just pretend that security is everybody else's fault.

All that said I don't think we should turn a blind eye to the security limitations of the kernel, but I don't think that the kind of narrow minded discussion that have been floating around the problem will improve anything.

<comment><USER13> >So they took advantage of the fact that many Android devices shipped a kernel with a flawed copy_from_user() implementation that allowed them to copy arbitrary userspace data over arbitrary kernel code, thus allowing them to disable SELinux.

Why is it even possible to disable SELinux at runtime? That should be a compile time option. Either you want the added security, or you don't. It's useless if someone can turn it off.

It required a flawed copy_from_user() implementation, which is now fixed. That's just not the only bug in the Linux kernel, there will be new ones. New ones that may or may not allow a attacker to disable SELinux. The problem is that it is modifiable.

Earlier today there was the story about OpenBSDs pledge(). One of the basic ideas of pledge is that you can't turn it off.

<comment><USER14> _Why is it even possible to disable SELinux at runtime?_

Because policy configuration happens from userspace. And it doesn't really matter if root users are disabling it, or just doing the equivalent of `chmod -R 777 *` without technically "disabling" it.

<comment><USER15> No. Because bugs.

If you can write to arbitrary kernel memory you can do anything you like. Disable selinux; write funny messages to the console - it's all yours for the taking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Contrarian stance here: if kernel security is important, the game is over, the attacker has root; they are running code on your server and you've lost because of one of the innumerable issues that the attacker knows that you don't. Restated, the kernel is defined to be insecure; now play the game. :-)

Design wise, the principle I've adopted is that each server is running an application set; when one of those applications is compromised, the server is _immediately_ rooted, game over, all applications in the set are compromised and the attacker controls those resources and the server. In general, the layer of security I am looking for to control server rooting is an application's security, preceded by network level security. Separation of security regions (domains, whatever you want to call them) is accomplished by having different ephemeral servers; exploitation of one region not rachetable to the next region unless it's prespecified that way.

<comment><USER17> > If kernel security is important, the game is over, the attacker has root

No - one of the primary mechanisms attackers use to gain root is to exploit kernel vulnerabilities.

<comment><USER16> Right.... if you're relying on the kernel to protect you, you're dead in the water as it is, today. So the reasonable defense is to _assume_ the kernel security doesn't exist.

<comment><USER17> The reasonable long-term defence is to improve kernel security.

<comment><USER16> Honestly...no. I don't think so.Security is much too much of a cat and mouse game at this level, where you're specifically fixing things to deal with attacks. There will always be another vulnerability, another bad coding practice that someone comes in through. It's not provably secure (it's in C and has le five zillion config options; among other things); it's not secure by design (wasn't designed for security); it's not even secure by effort (Linus is not a religious fanatic about security).

So the sane approach until a fully redesigned system comes by is to assume that it only provides a _thin_ layer in the defense game and partition access levels and security controls appropriately.

<comment><USER17> I don't want to sound overly hostile here, but have you actually read the post? Many (if not most) kernel bugs _can_ be mitigated with existing technology, and there's ongoing research that will bring this down even further. There are certainly scenarios where assuming that any level of compromise may be significantly deeper than you imagined is the correct response, but that's not a supportable response in the majority of cases.

Looking at it another way - if application security is important, the game is over, the attacker has already got in via the network. We're bad at writing applications, so we shouldn't expose them to the internet.

<comment><USER18> All of the above. Do the best you can at network security, and try to get better. Do the best you can at application security, and try to get better. Do the best you can at kernel security, and try to get better. And do the best you can at intrusion detection, and try to get better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The name-calling referenced in this article also influenced a talk by Theo de Raadt on a new security feature for OpenBSD:

[http://www.openbsd.org/papers/hackfest2015-pledge/mgp00003.h...](http://www.openbsd.org/papers/hackfest2015-pledge/mgp00003.html)

<comment><USER20> What name calling? And how is that related?

<comment><USER4> The image is of a plastic masturbating monkey, probably in reference to Linus Torvalds. They call him "Loudmouth Linus" because he reportedly called them names, and reference the recent WaPo article.

Look, honestly? What BSDs are doing is great for those who want to take advantage of it. The mitigations they are adding will probably eventually be merged into the Linux kernel. And if not, unless users stop using Linux, Linux will exist without them.

And thus, I think this is an immature reaction to having a pull request refused. This is many things, beginning with "not nice."

The BSDs have their own stuff, the Linux users have theirs. Dunno what the hubbub is about.

<comment><USER21> > They call him "Loudmouth Linus" because he reportedly called them names, and > reference the recent WaPo article.

He did call the OpenBSD folks that: [http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/706950](http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/706950)

<comment><USER4> Huh. Masturbating monkeys.

Well, I guess he had that one coming, then. Forget everything I said :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>