Founder of Tor Freedom Hosting arrested in Ireland, awaiting extradition to USA - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/courts/fbi-bids-to-extradite-largest-childporn-dealer-on-planet-29469402.html <comment><USER2> Interesting. Freedom Hosting had been a target of Anonymous' Operation Darknet from the beginning--they're well-known for refusing to take down exploitative sites. Operation Darknet is, itself, a pretty interesting phenomenon: Anonymous hacks onion sites, then hands over user information to the FBI for investigation. Anonymous does what the FBI legally can't, and in exchange they're not prosecuted for it. I can't find the article now, but I recall reading an interview with an FBI agent in Wired or Ars or some such where he described the anons as "Internet Superheroes". (sic)

That, in and of itself, is kind of curious. Curiouser? One of the original Op Darknet principals was Sabu. You may remember him as the hacker the FBI rolled and got to bust up LulzSec. Sabu was turned by the FBI on June 7th, 2011.[1] Operation Darknet began several months later, in October, 2011.[2]

The obvious question, then, is this: Did the FBI use Sabu to entice Anons into attacking child porn networks, thereby evading the laws against them doing it themselves? Did they use the fact they turned a well-known hacktivist to help them deal with criminals they lacked the legal tools to go after? Is this arrest the culmination of those efforts?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabu_(hacktivist)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabu_\(hacktivist\))

[2] [http://www.informationweek.com/security/attacks/anonymous- at...](http://www.informationweek.com/security/attacks/anonymous-attacks- child-pornography-webs/231901499)

<comment><USER3> I'm interested in knowing how evidence obtained via Anonymous can be submitted in a court of law. When I did evidence collecting work as part of infosec work there are very strict criteria if the evidence is going to be used in a police case[1].

We have to sign off on everything and record how we obtained the information and have been told by a number of lawyers that in no way are we allowed to break the law when collecting evidence that could be forwarded to police or prosecutors.

Private detectives go through the same thing as well. If they are carrying out a private investigation for a corporate client they can't submit evidence that has been obtained illegally to be used at trial. For eg. you can submit evidence from public surveillance, but you can't submit anything that you obtain by hacking email accounts or placing a recording device on private property.

From what I understand, there are very very strict rules about both gathering evidence and then chain of custody. The person who collects the evidence has to sign off on it and then be prepared to testify in a court to back up what they found. I know for certain that this applies in the USA, UK and Australia.

I wonder how the FBI are able to use evidence collected by Anonymous, or if they just use that work as a basis for their own investigations which start from scratch. I can't imagine a judge would be impressed when told that key evidence was obtained via an illegal breakin perpetrated by a group of hackers.

Re: Sabu. I've read everything there is on that case and don't recall a reference to his handlers prompting him on Operation Darknet. The timing also doesn't seem to work - Sabu was taken offline last March while this arrest is the culmination of a 12-month investigation, which would suggest it started around 5 months after Sabu's work with the FBI was completed.

[1] Just a note - I was usually against prosecuting the defacement style hackers or guys who were just poking around for fun. In all my work i've only ever been involved in two cases where evidence I collected (IP addresses, email addresses etc.) ended up being used in an investigation and in both cases it was phishing attacks from Russia.

<comment><USER4> Interesting fact: How evidence was obtained is only important in the US. For example, in Austria where I live, it doesn't matter how the evidence was obtained.

In Austria, if someone illegally spies on you, the information they collect can be freely used in court. It is not important where the evidence comes from, it is only important if the evidence is credible or not.

This doesn't mean that the police can do whatever they want; if they torture someone, a potential confession would be worthless because it wouldn't be credible. And if the police used illegal means, that would bring about a separate trial (in theory).

But courts in Austria never have to pretend that some evidence doesn't exist.

<comment><USER5> >But courts in Austria never have to pretend that some evidence doesn't exist.

Those restrictions are important to safeguard people's rights. The US since its founding has always had a bias for protecting individual civil rights, in theory at least. I rather this way of doing things.

<comment><USER6> Presumption of innocence is not directly enshrined in the US constitution. Some local jurisdictions purposefully relax it for the sake of balance. (For example, it is done in places where it is seen as much too hard to convict for rape.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Slightly off-topic, but I never understood the obsession of legal enforcement with child pornography. Don't get me wrong, the idea of pre-pubescent children being exploited by pornographers horrifies me as much as anyone, but it always felt so ... random.

Maybe I'm wrong and the problem is a lot more widespread that I think it is, but I think that there are so many more crimes committed online. Yet, almost every time some morally righteous politician talks about regulating the Internet, he or she mentions "Child Pornography". I can see how the words would have the desired effect in a political speech, but is it really _THAT_ common a problem?

Where did that come from? Call me paranoid, but it feels like this term came out of an orchestrated propaganda campaign to scare uptight puritan Americans from the Evils of the Internet, similar to the propaganda movies we can see about marijuana in the sixties.[1]

        > The court also heard that a search of Mr Marques's computer revealed he had made inquires about how to get a visa and entry into Russia.

And it's valid to consider this suspicious? I've queried how to get entry into Russia before, I hope that didn't trigger any kind of alarm.

[1]: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bm2koyUqmU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bm2koyUqmU)

<comment><USER8> >Yet, almost every time some morally righteous politician talks about regulating the Internet, he or she mentions "Child Pornography". I can see how the words would have the desired effect in a political speech, but is it really THAT common a problem?

Yes, it is, but no, it isn't. I present, for your consideration, _the most depressing number in the world_ :

[http://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2FS0145-2134(96)00180-9](http://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2FS0145-2134\(96\)00180-9)

"female and male child sexual abuse prevalence estimates [...] were 14.5% and 7.2%"

That's one in seven girls, one in fourteen boys. CSA is quite honestly the most insane and awful aspect of Western society bar none. And _decades_ of crackdowns, teacher-initiated interventions, and, well, spying on every phone call in the country have failed to make a real difference.

So we target child pornography. We target child pornography because child sexual abuse is the biggest social problem in the modern era, and we don't know what else to do about it. I don't, honestly, know of any real evidence that there is much to be accomplished this way. Porn isn't correlated with rape and even though in this case there's no way that the porn could be made ethically it's a bit like stomping termites in a sinking boat.

The thinking is really that by damaging pedophiles' online support network they will be discouraged from engaging in such repulsive acts. Unfortunately, while I'd like to see it work, it doesn't make sense to me: people were raping children long before fiber optics got involved.

I don't really have a good answer. I hope this guy rots in jail.

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/NIH_child...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/NIH_child_sex_abuse_disorders_graph.svg)

<comment><USER9> > We target child pornography because child sexual abuse is the biggest social > problem in the modern era, and we don't know what else to do about it.

In other words, we're executing on the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician's_syllogism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician's_syllogism) :

1\. We must do something

2\. This is something

3\. Therefore, we must do this.

<comment><USER10> So your implication is that going after child pornography is a wasted effort ?

Because I would argue that sharing of child pornography encourages people to create it. In the same way every other discussion board encourages people to contribute content.

<comment><USER9> Like any other content industry, exploitative pornography (which includes child pornography, rape and forced bestiality pornography, hidden-camera pornography at brothels or stuck in toilets, etc.) has both a primary market and a secondary market. (I'm going to speak in these economic terms in the rest of this, because it's kind of disgusting to be more concrete.)

The original producers are part of the primary market, and only pay attention to the consumers that participate in the primary market. The secondary market --where open sharing of "used" content goes on--is ignored by the primary market.

The primary-market producers for exploitative pornography consist mainly of two types: individuals who film their own acts of exploitation to use _as currency in trade_ for the films of exploitation-acts of others; and professionals, usually members of a crime syndicate that has humman trafficking business, who sell their content on the black market in less reputable countries. In both of these cases, the produced works are _scarce goods_ : as few people will see them as can be managed.

 _Leaks_ to the secondary market are bad for the producers in the primary market; not only do they increase supply for the consumers in the primary market (and thereby drive down demand), but they also make it much more likely that law-enforcement will get their hands on the offending media, and be able to analyze it for clues to the individual or group's whereabouts, or just as proof in a trial. Thus, the producers in the primary market tend to enforce a loan-shark-like "you break my trust, I break your knuckles" policy on the redistribution of their content.

The incentives are basically just entirely missing for anyone in the primary market to specifically release content to the secondary market. Anyone who "just wants the attention" and releases multiple videos will soon be tracked down and arrested.

Picture it like someone who is manufacturing some form of illegal-but-sought- after drug, like MDMA. Have you ever heard of someone who _makes_ MDMA--not a redistributor, but an originator--giving away large quantities of it to people they don't know, just for the attention? That's just throwing away your assets, your safety, and your profitable business all at the same time, isn't it?

<comment><USER11> So if I could summarize that: Given that producing child pornography is illegal, making its _distribution_ illegal acts as a sort of de facto extraordinarily draconian copyright law in favor of the unlawful producers. Which increases the market incentive to violate the law against production because many of the non-producing "pirate" distributors are driven out of the distribution market by law enforcement, reducing competition and thereby increasing profitability for the producers.

<comment><USER9> No: "many of the non-producing 'pirate' distributors are driven out of the distribution market by law enforcement" is exactly the opposite of the case. Law-enforcement has the _smallest_ impact on the secondary-market distributors.

 _Producers_ , whose content get leaked to the secondary market, get caught by law-enforcement, because each video available to law-enforcement is one more piece of evidence that can be used to track and trap them.

The consumers in the primary market will get in trouble _with the producers_ for their leaking to the secondary market--much in the same way that Microsoft will get mad at you for leaking your company's Windows/Office MAK key. If a producer has only given copies of a video to five primary-market consumers, it's quite easy to figure out which of those consumers is responsible for the leak. The law doesn't have a good way to catch these people; but the producers do. (In a lot of cases, this amounts to literally being "in trouble with the mob.") Note that this knocks a consumer out of the _primary_ market--but _increases_ the amount of free content available in the secondary market. Since producers and consumers are taken out of the primary market in equal numbers when this happens, supply/demand stays constant.

The "pirate" re-distributors in the secondary market--the people these primary consumers leak _to_ \--don't care about any of this. They have no personal relationships with the primary market, and are not personally involved in it, other than in consuming and sharing the content produced there. They also don't have to share any personally-identifying details about themselves to participate in the secondary market (they can just be a TORified IP address, unlike the primary market which operates more through established contacts.)

However, by and large, the secondary market is overwhelmingly larger than the primary market--and so, when a Best Buy repair tech finds exploitative pornography on someone's hard disk, that person will likely be a member of the secondary market. Catching anyone from the primary market requires these social-engineering-based busts that you hear about--where someone infiltrates a primary market--precisely because there's no social "path" from the secondary market back into the primary market.

<comment><USER11> > _Producers_ , whose content get leaked to the secondary market, get caught > by law-enforcement, because each video available to law-enforcement is one > more piece of evidence that can be used to track and trap them.

It seems to me that the same materials (or even more) would be available for discovery by law enforcement in the secondary market if the secondary market (i.e. redistribution) didn't carry large criminal penalties.

> The consumers in the primary market will get in trouble for their leaking to > the secondary market--much in the same way that Microsoft will get mad at > you for leaking your company's Windows/Office MAK key--because, if a > producer has only given copies of a video to five primary-market consumers, > it's quite easy to figure out which of those consumers is responsible for > the leak.

The ability to punish leakers is somewhat irrelevant unless there is near 100% success in doing so and the secondary market is entirely eliminated, which seems implausible.

> Since producers and consumers are taken out of the primary market in equal > numbers when this happens, supply/demand stays constant.

Are you assuming a 1:1 relationship between suppliers and consumers for some reason?

> The "pirate" re-distributors in the secondary market--the people these > primary consumers leak to--don't care about any of this.

Regardless of whether they care, changing availability in the secondary market will affect demand in the primary market because would-be participants in the primary market may satisfy their demand in the secondary market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In other news oxygen has been banned from distribution due to child pornographers utilizing it while producing child pornography. Environmentalists across the world cry foul as vast swaths of forests are slashed and burned in an effort to control oxygen production.

Conservationists have been branded "supporters" of child pornography, and incidentally the logging industry has seen its largest growth _ever_ and jobs are plentiful.

<comment><USER13> [http://www.reddit.com/r/onions/comments/1jmrta/founder_of_th...](http://www.reddit.com/r/onions/comments/1jmrta/founder_of_the_freedom_hosting_arrested_held/cbge599)

TL;DR Your analogy is broken. Go fix.

Edit; Apparently the person in question was aware.

<comment><USER14> _Your_ analogy is shit. The circumstances under which a "getaway driver" can be charged are not nearly as generous as you make them to be. If you genuinely had nothing to do with the crime other than unwittingly being the getaway driver (say, if your job was transporting around many people at once... a bus driver), then you would not be held accountable.

Should bus drivers have to ensure they don't drive anyone committing crimes? Of course not, that is patently ridiculous.

Do yourself a favor and exercise a few brain cells before you blindly suck up bullshit reddit is spewing.

<comment><USER15> The allegation seems to be that he had actual knowledge of child porn being hosted on his service, and did nothing about it.

<comment><USER16> Actual knowledge meaning what, precisely? Had he seen it himself? Had a court told him it existed? Had someone he trusted told him it existed? Had someone he didn't trust told him it existed? Had an anonymous comment called him a pedo host without even specifying a domain?

<comment><USER14> Exactly, we don't know enough to make strong statements about this, though it is nevertheless clear that the analogy of the poster "calling out" the quality of another analogy is itself utter shit.

<comment><USER17> What can you do about content exiting your tor node? Ifit's external requests you can block certain targets etc... But what else besides shutting down?

<comment><USER15> This was a hosting service for onion sites, not a tor exit node.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Link came from a Reddit thread: [http://www.reddit.com/r/onions/comments/1jmrta/founder_of_th...](http://www.reddit.com/r/onions/comments/1jmrta/founder_of_the_freedom_hosting_arrested_held/)

This is a pretty big deal as lots of Tor hidden services were apparently hosted on Freedom Hosting, including TorMail.

<comment><USER18> The article is indeed very confusing about the charges aginst that person. Is he directly actively involved in child porn or is he only the owner of a tor hosting site ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So wait. Is this guy actually a child pornographer, or does he simply run an anonymizing service which is incidentally used to distribute child porn? The first would appear to me to be just, the second would be a perversion of justice with a good pretext.

<comment><USER20> As far as we know it's the latter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If Freedom Hosting was compromised by the Feds, why is he still arrested? That points to his cooperation, when the alternative would be that the Feds did this themselves, but certainly thats not legal, now is it?

<comment><USER22> Not legal, haha. "Not legal" is a concept invented for the rest of the society and it means nothing to Feds. Source: NSA revelations.

<comment><USER23> So we're just gonna use that as a citation for everything now?

<comment><USER24> Yes, the NSA revelations have officially rendered all pretense at American jurispridence null and void. There is only Obama with his murder squads, which have been clearly established.

<comment><USER25> Are the murder squads under the same command structure as the death panels? Or are those two different departments?

<comment><USER24> They were separate, but now they're out of the same IRS office now due to sequestration.

<comment><USER26> I've seen them, they are not separate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Slightly off-topic. I often read about how non-americans are extradited to US for legal reasons. How often does US citizens get extradited to non-US countries? I honestly never read of any such incident.

<comment><USER28> The guy in the article has US citizenship though

<comment><USER29> And Irish citizenship, which means that for nearly all purposes, his US citizenship will be irrelevant to how he is treated under Irish law. Dual citizenship complications are more an issue in third countries. If you are a citizen of the country you happen to be in, that usually trumps everything else.

<comment><USER30> Unless Ireland values its US relationship more than its citizens.

<comment><USER31> It's up to the judiciary and not the government. And if he doesn't like the courts' decisions (presuming he goes to the supreme court) he can then take his case to Europe, afaik.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The article is vague on whether or not he made, or just distributed the videos. Will this open the doors to be able to catch the monsters abusing young children, or is this just a game of whack-a-mole?

<comment><USER33> Denying file hosting to abusers is valuable even if no abusers are caught. Impeding the ability to sell child porn makes it harder to make money off it, which reduces the impetus to create new material.

But yeah, the article is hideously vague. The Reddit link implies that the guy knowingly allowed kiddie-porn purveyors to host with him even after being alerted. If that's true, fuck 'im, let him rot. I'd like to get some more solid sources, though.

<comment><USER34> > Denying file hosting to abusers is valuable even if no abusers are caught.

Yeah. It works so well for drugs. They give out harsh punishments to the drug users to reduce the market for drugs.

This just raises the price and number of providers grows because with elevated price as a provider you can earn much more per unit and your risk and cost of providing unit haven't changed.

If they were actually serious about fighting child abuse they'd make distribution of child abuse photos legal, drive down the price of it to the bottom and use supple info to track the people who actually abuse children instead of the people who are just sick in the head in a way that makes them like looking at abused children.

<comment><USER35> I imagine the market for drugs is substantially larger than the market for child porn.

<comment><USER16> So the latter should be easier to crash?

<comment><USER35> Not at all, I don't support what happened in any way.

The parent comment was stating that making a resource scare only makes it more valuable... my point was that the market for child porn is so small that using the scarcity argument is not a great comparison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> When news papers write articles about legal matters, I wish they stop combining different terms and concept as if they were synonymous.

The title says he is a dealer. The subtitle says he is a facilitator. The text says he is a allegedly involved in distributing. Lastly, The warrant says he is a distributor and promoter.

Most of those are quotes, but it confuses the matter to the point of ridiculous. I _know_ what a distributor is. I can guess dealer is a synonym to it. Everything else is just wage hint of "wrongness" with no solid legal ground.

</comment><comment><USER37> So let me get this straight: someone defending freedom of speech is criminalized to the point where the US will use their political influence to hunt him down worldwide.

Land of the free indeed.

</comment><comment><USER38> Related Discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6154246](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6154246)

I was actually under the impression prior to seeing this that the TOR website used "freedom hosting" and was compromised. Nice to see this unintentional clarification.

</comment><comment><USER39> How did they ever determine he was in fact the owner of Freedom Hosting?

</comment><comment> cupcake-unicorn This is a terrible article - not enough background information. I'm assuming this has to do with some Tor exit node thing, like all the other people who get charged with this?

</comment><comment><USER40> is this actual Child porn offence OR is this, the TOR network is used for child porn (bullshit)?????

</comment><comment><USER41> Did they ascertain where the servers are located? Otherwise how can the US claim jurisdiction in lieu of Ireland?

</comment><comment><USER42> this has info on what freedom hosting is, for those that are confused (click "continue...") - [http://kpvz7ki2v5agwt35.onion.to/wiki/index.php/Freedom_Host...](http://kpvz7ki2v5agwt35.onion.to/wiki/index.php/Freedom_Hosting)

</comment><comment><USER43> I wonder how/whether safe harbor will apply.

<comment><USER44> At this point, it doesn't matter anymore.

The US is going to do what the US is going to do. Whether or not he is guilty or innocent, the US will ensure that it is inconvenient for him to do _anything_ until such time as it is impossible for him to do anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Interesting how the Major Consensus Narrative changed making the USA an evil place for everyting related with freedom on the net.

</comment><comment><USER46> and thus, TOR comes to an end.

<comment><USER20> Not even close. Tor took a big hit, but it will recover.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> In the thread on the apparent code injection portion of this topic[1], I heavily suggested governments with the US at the least being responsible for the deed[2]. With a corporation like Endgame Systems being a probable contractor for the act[3].

Something I've brought up a few times with my commentary previously and mentioned by some here is governments using tactics they prosecute others for: "There are even target packs for democratic countries in Europe and other U.S. allies. Maui (product names tend toward alluring warm-weather locales) is a package of 25 zero-day exploits that runs clients $2.5 million a year."

Sometimes using the very tools made by those hunted, prosecuted, renditioned: "The Cayman botnet-analytics package gets you access to a database of Internet addresses, organization names, and worm types for hundreds of millions of infected computers, and costs $1.5 million."

How long can citizens of nations involved in enabling and hiring these mercenaries keep faith in the law of the land, let alone those tasked to uphold it? How long can the tiered system of the monitored/hunted/renditioned and the legally immune last, with the legally immune being paid by the former?

Stop attempting to code around this human issue. Please.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6154246](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6154246)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6154819](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6154819)

[3] [http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Endgame_Systems](http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Endgame_Systems)</comment>


Show HN: Journyal – travel journaling made simple - <AUTHOR> http://journyal.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone!

Journyal is a travel journal app I made during my free time as both a conscript and intern. I released it back in March to the iOS App Store.

Journyal keeps track of where you go, where you stop, and what you see, helping you to automatically record your travels, be it backpacking trips, hikes, overseas travel, or even food trails. Simply press start and take photos as you would along the way, and Journyal will help you compile everything into a photo journal that you can save to document your trips.

I appreciate any and all feedback, no matter how harsh! Building and releasing my own app to the app store has been an incredible learning experience, but I 'm beginning to truly understand that building something people actually want to use is a beast in and of itself, and this is something I want to learn about.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you finish what you start? - <AUTHOR>

After reading HN for months, I have a huge backlog of books, courses and articles to read.
Everyday I discover a new interesting book/course on the web/HN and I am tempted to take it but that means I gave less attention to the courses/books I am already taking.
I think in the last few months, I have taken lot of courses (Udacity, edX, coursera etc) but seldom I have gone past the 2nd or 3rd week lectures/assignments. Its same with books as well, I can't follow the book till the end.
I am sure I can't be the only person facing these issues, can you folks advice me on what to do? How do I tackle these issues?
Also, have you ever faced such problems? If so I would like to hear about your issues and how you overcame them.
Thanks <comment><USER2> One of the tricks is to have what you're doing - or what you're going to do - really small. This way you don't have enough time to become bored. For this approach to work, you need to be able to split meaningful projects into still somewhat meaningful, fun enough but small subprojects.

Another thing is that for many projects you're starting it understanding that you won't finish it - in one piece of time. You're going to start, progress, reflect on it, do some more - then put it on the shelf for a while. And this is ok. This allows you to actually boldly start projects which you know you won't finish - again, in one chunk. For example, I also took several courses on Coursera etc. and dropped then after a couple of weeks. But they are still high in my priorities - as soon as I can/want/return to the same subject of interest, I come back to the courses, reading the material, watching videos and even doing homework. This at least allows me, when taking that course second time (if I need to - usually I don't, the primary reason is knowledge, not the certificate) to feel right at home.

I'd say, don't throw away that list of ideas you developed while working on something - but check it, choose perhaps something out of it for the new list, may be you're still interested in some projects mentioned there.

And... you still have to be persistent at times. Don't worry - it's a source of great feeling when you actually finish something non-trivial - and only you know how hard it was, and you really learned things from that - and you know you're better because of that.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not very good at finishing projects, but I've gotten much better at finishing books. Here's what I do: I keep a spreadsheet with all of the books I've read. I record the number of pages per book and I calculate for the year how many pages I read a day on average. I only allow myself to add a book to the list if I finish it. This has definitely given me an incentive to finish books.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I used a similar approach when I was reading SICP. I decided that I would try to do two problems a day and I got really far (end of 3rd chapter) but at that time I felt I wasn't understanding things entirely. I also noticed that I had developed a tendency to search for a solution of the problem before even attempting to solve it (this was in case of hard problems). So, I stopped reading SICP because it such an amazing book and I didn't want to ruin the experience of it by ploughing through.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Structured procrastination tends to work very well for me. Whenever I have several things I want to do, I choose one as the Most Important Thing that absolutely must be done. This ensures that I'll finish everything else, while leaving the Most Important Thing incomplete.

</comment><comment><USER5> 1\. While you have an active project, write down each potential project/course on a piece of paper.

2\. When you finish a project, you can pick a new one. Pick the one you most want to do from the list. Throw away the list and get a new piece of paper.

3\. Go to 1.

</comment><comment><USER6> Because information is so much easily accessible in our days, many people are facing your problem. The only way to finish something is to stick with it. That means saying No to other things that might distract you in the meantime.

Good luck and have fun!

</comment><comment><USER7> Have the same problem as you. I tend to just force myself to stay away from new opportunities and first finish what I am doing. Sadly this doesn't work so well for side-projects.

</comment><comment><USER8> I simply dont give myself a hard time about unfinished projects/books/anything. Sometimes I just cant do it. Move on.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you use a CDN for your API delivery needs? - <AUTHOR> Usually CDN is used for static content without doubt but I want to know if people use it for their apis
Specifically because:
  - Rate Limiting is involved
  - Token Checking/Basic Auth is somehow involved et
If you do use a CDN let me know which one is used <comment><USER2> Using a CDN for an API is also a good idea if the CDN allows large content uploads to be faster than commodity/cloud hosting. Cloudfront speeds up uploads to S3 in some circumstances on some networks (looking at you FIOS), because in some cases Cloudfront edge locations have direct connections to the various S3 regions instead of going over the commodity internet. This is why Cloudfront charges 0.02 a gig for uploads.

Furthermore, using a CDN in this way may be a good idea because you don't have to worry about front end server noise/internet traffic. Cloudfront does have a good record of keeping up to date with SSL, and other various upgrades. By using Cloudfront's behavior rules I can have some requests go to backend servers via an ELB, others go to S3 and still others to go to other places. The end user has no idea, the simply see the same URL that they always do. It is nice to have everything all neatly wrapped under one URL structure and not to have to worry about DNS or cross domain antics.

And if I wanted to do access control I can easily use Cloudfront's support for signed requests[1]. That way if a request comes into to a particular URL path I can require that it be signed or not. Hence eliminating requests to resource intensive parts of the application.

[1] - [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Developer...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/private- content-signed-urls-overview.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. This is very helpful</comment></comment>


WannaCry ransomware bitcoins move from online wallets - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40811972 <comment><USER2> So basically what I read from this thread is that the fraudulently acquired bitcoins will go through a mixer or tumbler in order to cover the transaction tracks. The tumbler/mixer will take a small fee for this service. Then the perpetrators will be able to cash out in a number of different ways.

In this case how will the tumbler/mixer not be punished by authorities. Since because they take a cut of the illegally acquired funds they can now become an accessory to the misdeeds.

<comment><USER3> if I'd had a tumbler, my number one priority would be to add code to detect those coins and keep them (redirect to my wallets after the mix).

it's not like the owners will be able to complain. not even in forums to lower your cred.

<comment><USER4> the owners of the coins will complain, they will do so on forums where they can do so anonymously and the credibility/trust of the mixer is called into question. (These tend to be forums where the users are in need of bitcoin mixing services e.g darknet markets or hackign forums) These mixing operations work on trust, as long as they are trusted people will use them, one too many stories about missing coins and it will be seen as a scam and avoided.

<comment><USER5> If you were starting a rival bitcoin tumbler, would it be a good idea to disparage your competition as thieves? What evidence would you need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wondered about this. Yes, you may have stolen some bitcoin from people but you can't do anything with it. It's all traceable through the blockchain.

You can't buy anything directly with it because as soon as you receive the goods the police will force the person who provided the goods to you to give away your details.\

You can't take it out into your bank account because that will also identify you.

So - a bitcoin mixer would seem your best bet, but even then it just makes it "more difficult" to trace. Not sure I'd want to risk many years in prison on that.

<comment><USER7> First of all, it's not really traceable. You can sell them on LocalBitcoins, and an outside observer will never know - all you see is coins moving from A to B.

Second of all, you can mix them with other coins, which instantly crushes all hopes of traceability.

Example: Imagine you have wallets A (clean) and B (stolen) with 1 BTC each. You put them both into wallet C, and then you split it again equally into X and Y. Where is the stolen money now?

And then there are altcoin exchanges.

<comment><USER8> The holder of C could potentially be prosecuted for receiving stolen property, under AML laws, or as a co-conspirator in the original theft.

<comment><USER9> If you replace bitcoin with cash, by your logic I'd be arrested for selling a thief an apple if he paid for it with stolen cash.

That's the distinction. Is it money or is it a fenced good?

If I'm receiving currency (be it real money or bitcoin), I'm not going to think about where it came from. It's fungible.

<comment><USER10> Physical dollars each have a unique serial number - aren't these sometimes used to track criminals as they spend stolen funds? Or is that just a Hollywood exaggeration?

<comment><USER11> I think it's only useful if you know which serial numbers were stolen, for example if you give specific range of serial numbers as a ransom payment.

<comment><USER12> When I worked as a bank teller briefly, we had this planned out. There was a stack of bills (usually 10s, but it was kind of random) that we were only to give out if we were actively being robbed. They were indistinguishable from regular currency to avoid suspicion, but the serial numbers were recorded for tracking purposes.

This was in a small town bank, and I'm sure that larger banks have more sophisticated policies. I'm curious to know if ATMs have any similar features.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was an author of one of the first papers examining bitcoin's lack of anonymity.

People understand things a lot more now, but from this thread, in my opinion people still don't 'get it'.

The traceability issue is not magically removed by mixing - at least not in steady state, once the system matures.

To see this, consider a future where a single large exchange, lets call it Xchange, has substantial market share - (maybe like Coinbase). Let's assume they are a respectable company regulated by the laws of the USA, and that law enforcement tells them they have to comply with existing laws on stolen property.

Some company Bobcorp has $10M of bitcoins stolen, and pays someone to follow the coins. If those coins ever show up in the Xchange's addresses, Bobcorp is going to call the police and file suit to recover them.

Obviously there aren't literal coins in bitcoin, but Bobcorp is going to go to court and explain their block chain analysis to the judge, and the judge is maybe going to ask Xchange where the coins come from. And that'll be an interesting court case. But it seems unlikely the judge will be persuaded by ideological arguments about how this not-really-fungible currency should be treated as if we all pretend its fungible, and will instead be asking Xchange for its KYC records about the customer that lodged the coins.

Now, here's the important bit: the above doesn't have to actually play out. All that has to happen is that Xchange starts worrying about the above playing out, and starts getting a tiny bit wary about accepting funds that come from reported thefts - starts seeing them as a tiny bit riskier, a tiny bit more likely to end up in court, than other bitcoin.

Once any non-trivial amount of entities start thinking like this, (and it seems obvious they will - I would if I was running any business; but imagine the most conservative bank who eventually reluctantly participates in the maturing ecosystem) then the 'stolen' coins instantly become worth less than obviously clean ones.

And as soon as you live in that world, what happens mixers?

Suddenly you run the risk of putting in your good clean coins, into the mixer, because you care about privacy, and getting back tainted coins, implicitly worth less.

Suddenly mixers become a lot less useful.

It seems inevitable to me that if bitcoin continues to grow that this is how things will play out. It's still a super interesting system but, like I've been saying for years, it's got a ton of downsides around anonymity and privacy, and in steady state may be the perfect Orwellian currency rather than the perfect cypherpunk one, and I don't think mixers make this go away.

<comment><USER14> That is an extremely interesting point of view, thank you for sharing. Another thought: say some criminals pass their money through a mixer and like in the scenario you described, it's deemed worthless to any exchanges/payment processors because it's "dirty". Does this mean that, say they were feeling sour they couldn't book a hotel on Booking.com, could they potentially taint any public wallet address by sending tiny amounts of bitcoin from their tainted wallet to them? Can a user prevent/block coins being transferred to their account in the blockchain? If your prediction comes through, this could spell a disaster for Bitcoin because potentially every wallet could be tainted and thus all coins traced back to criminal activity.

As a side note, it's interesting to think that those "dirty" coins/wallets will be destined to circle around the black markets forever.

<comment><USER13> You've got to imagine that in a future world this priced proportionally to the level of taint; addresses are devalued proportional to the degree of taint, maybe with some premium for completely clean addresses.

I'm not saying a centralized system will enforce this, just it seems like a natural consequence that will emerge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Via www.shapeshift.io Zeurich to monero, terms broken, authorities aware and in hot pursuit presumably.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-03/wannacry-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-03/wannacry- linked-bitcoin-wallets-have-been-emptied-analysts-say)

</comment><comment><USER16> They just need to write a new ransomware that forces their victims to launder their bitcoins for them /s

</comment><comment><USER17> Coinbase seems like a competent partner in cashing out stolen money.

[1] [https://www.law111.com/coinbase-faces-possible-liability- in-...](https://www.law111.com/coinbase-faces-possible-liability-in-recent- class-action-lawsuit)

</comment><comment><USER4> I imagine that these were moved to allow the holder to be able to restore the wallet in a Bitcoin Cash (BCH) wallet and acquire another bunch of coins.

</comment><comment><USER18> Then, didn't the fork give the guy a number of Bitcoin Cash coins?

<comment><USER19> With the same wallet address so it's traceable the same way on different blockchain.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you think of my destressing project, Weight Nudge? - <AUTHOR> http://www.weightnudge.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I should clarify but I don't like editing titles. I wrote WeightNudge to relieve some personal stress; it does not help other people "destress". The project I've been working on full-time suddenly became depressing, as it forced me to remember some people who died. I dropped the project for a few days and wrote this as a temporary escape.</comment>


Your "Financial Shock" Wealth - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/your-financial-shock-wealth-4845e6dc1d2f <comment><AUTHOR> Yonatan Zunger has been cooking over the question of wealth, inequality, and the ability to come up with financial resources on short notice for some time -- I can recall antecedents of this discussion from a year or more back.

His analysis is absolutely brilliant, and the synthesis with a ratchet of ever-spreading poverty helps tremendously in understanding this dynamic.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've turned up the original discussion that seems to have morphed in to the current essay:

[https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/iJ6JgvCP...](https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/iJ6JgvCPfJT)</comment>


The psychology of Google Wave - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17955-innovation-the-psychology-of-google-wave.html <comment><USER2> Ah,

The problem is that nothing I've seen about Wave indicates that it really addresses the _real_ challenges that email has raised.

 __Challenge: email invites the user to put in too much text and factual information into their communication knowing too little of psychological/social context that the receiver will get.

Talking face-to-face lets a person judge what to _say and not say_ based on the state of the other person. The phone is poorer than this but still works better than Internet chat. The old personal letter worked better than email only because it forced the person to spend time thinking about the context of their communication.

Wave gives a "context" but there's little indication that this context gives a solid, social foundation for saying and not saying. Instead, it sounds like chat and worse than chat - the context each communicator is made aware of is the previous text rather than the feelings of each person. And so, like forum threads, the pressure will always be there to _get the last word_.

<comment><USER3> Is that the only real challenge, raised by email, that comes to mind? I can think of another one right away: the protocol allows people to send me messages as if they have come from someone else.

Another one: people can send me emails that I cannot reply to. ("Thank you, kind sir, for offering me some Tadalafil, but you can exclude me on any future offers.")

By my reckoning, Wave addresses both of those challenges pretty well.

I've noticed that not even talking face-to-face will guarantee that a given participant will judge what to say or not to say. I've known several people over the course of my life who seemed to be born with a missing mechanism that allowed them to sense, from nonverbal cues, when it's time to terminate an interaction.

<comment><USER2> Those are more logistical challenges to email and could be changed with technical means. What I mentioned earlier is more social and inherent to email - and moreover, Wave actually would make these problems worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sadly meatless article.

I recently created a Wave account, and the real "psychology of Wave" is that the people who created it don't understand the reasoning behind all the different types of communication people use, and so they decided that it'd be dandy to mash them all together with -- horrors! -- live typing.

It's worse than IM, because of the live typing (not an option!), the fact that people can see your mistakes, and you have to click the damn "Done" button every time.

Not to mention, your replies don't necessarily end up at the bottom. I experienced a situation where I was continuing my thread of thinking, and the other person replied to one of my previous points. I could no longer add a message at the end of the conversation, it always replied to their last message. So message B was above message A.

It's worse than email, for many of the same reasons.

It, in theory, could be better for document collaboration, but the interface is clearly designed with IM/chat in mind (even though it's badly implemented), and so it's impossible to use it to create documents. There are many competitors to it for document creation that work better, more fluidly, and with less hassle. (SubEthaEdit, Bespin, etc.)

IM, email, and other media are used because of their inherent differences. Asynchronicity has enormous usefulness, it's not just a relic of "inferior protocols" as Google engineers seem to think. Having multiple channels for different types and flavors of communication, too, is a GOOD thing.

Sadly, it's clear that they had no ethnographers, "design thinkers," or even a person who "gets people" on the team. Their UI widgets may be pretty and make sense in their incredibly narrow context (the mouseover stuff is nice), but sadly, the whole ecosystem is simply not fit for survival.

Too bad.

I can think of 15 or 20 ways that they could REALLY improve communication on the web, if only they had "people people" on their teams.

<comment><USER3> I think it's important to draw a distinction between Wave the protocol and Wave the browser-based client implementation.

The problems that you mention seem to be specific to the web client (having to click the 'done' button, where replies show up).

The concept & protocol doesn't seem to be related to those usability issues. I do agree that, if they have any "design thinkers" working on this, it isn't showing through, though!

<comment><USER4> I've heard that about the protocol. Since I have no intention of building anything with it, I'll allow that it might be good. But the proof will be in the pudding!

I'm really sad that the Wave app is so bad. I think we all expect better from Google (reasonably or otherwise).</comment></comment></comment>