I Hope Yahoo Crushes Facebook  - <AUTHOR> http://blogmaverick.com/2012/03/13/i-hope-yahoo-crushes-facebook-in-its-patent-suit/ <comment><USER3> Why are people so upset with Yahoo? Apple is still incredibly popular with the tech crowd, I bet many of these blogs and comments were written with their hardware and software, and they are currently suing just about every phone manufacturer over patents?

Aside from the fact it's not a web thing, how is this different? Or is that difference somehow enough for people to choke down their bile and keep using apple products?

I originally was going to post something about banding together and boycotting Yahoo but then remember the HUGE apple fan group that lives here.

Apple is worse than Yahoo IMHO (considering this is like Yahoos first suit) and yet no one cares. So why do people care about this?

<comment><USER4> It's based on the crowd's judgement of merit and who is filing the lawsuit and why.

That is to say, Yahoo is viewed as non-innovative, and their action is viewed to be the result of a new CEO intent on aggressively finding pennies through any means including just by lawsuit. Meanwhile, most of Yahoo's team is apparently against this action.

So, it's the context. If you drop the context and equate Apple to Yahoo, then it's easier to arrive at: why is everybody upset when a company files a patent lawsuit.

I bet the same people upset about Yahoo also find Apple's lawsuits to be distasteful. Apple is viewed as a very innovative company, so they're given slack when it comes to suing over issues related to innovation.

<comment><USER5> The reality is Apple filed lawsuit on company that actually invented Mobile Phone (Motorola) about a silly design patent.

Facebook didn't invent anything.

In reality Apple should be the real bad guy in whole patent issue.

<comment><USER6> Are you trying to say the iPhone changed nothing? It wasn't an innovation and innovation stopped the day Motorola invented the "Mobile Phone"?

Sure, the iPhone is a mobile phone but it's no way any more similar to what Motorola invented than how similar Motorola's mobile phone is to the original landline phone.

<comment><USER7> But, for various legal and practical reasons, Apple isn't suing over the things that made the iPhone and the iPad innovative.

Instead, they're suing over ticky-tack nonsense that other people did before like:

\- "slide-to-unlock" (Neonode N1m)

\- clicking to call phone numbers they detect in text messages and email (Palm Treo among many, many examples - especially if you look at analogous desktop functionality like recognizing URLs in email that makes the concept obvious)

\- tablets that are black rectangles with rounded corners (Knight-Ridder concept tablet from 1994, the movie version of 2001, ...)

Perhaps if more people were aware of exactly what Apple was actually suing over they'd be less supportive.

<comment><USER8> All that prior art will certainly bubble to the surface during the trial process. There is a cottage industry around finding it - kind of like bounty hunting. See articleonepartners.com, a service that lets researchers be rewarded for invalidating litigious patents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> While I can't claim to speak with authority on this matter, a far more likely outcome would seem to be :

      1. Yahoo sues Facebook
      2. Facebook settles for some large-though-not-crippling amount of cash
      3. The public forgets and moves on, since no-one's actual day-to-day user experience is affected (and we collectively do lack a bit of an attention span)
      4 [epilogue]. Companies are further incentivized to leverage patents in the pursuit of financial gain

Of course, MC knows this, which is what I'm sure prompted this post to begin with.

</comment><comment><USER10> Here's how I explain the problem to my tech-impaired friends and loved ones:

In 2012, software patents don't cover solutions. Rather, they cover problems. Anyone creating a solution to that problem must pay licensing fees. This takes large amounts of money from the people actually solving problems and improving the world, and gives it to people who don't do anything to advance human progress. If the law isn't repaired, my fear is that other countries will far surpass the USA in our lifetime.

<comment><USER11> I also like to put it this way: software companies like to patent the application of well known tools and processes to be used for a specific problem domain.

My favorite example is glue. Everyone knows what glue is. However, has anyone used glue to hold itemX and itemY together? No? Patent!

<comment><USER8> Highly misleading. You should look into some patents and how they work, before you start spouting psuedo authoritative bullshit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The quickest surefire way to patent reform is by threatening Facebook users that they may have to go back to using Yahoo services. People will be revolting in the streets.

<comment><USER13> Exactly his point here. my.yahoo.com was innovative for its time, and patents are supposed to last 20 years, right? So according to the legal system in place, the public should use my.yahoo.com till around 2020.

I agree, what could really be any other purpose for patents? Is a judge going to say, 10 years into a patent, "well, our process thought this was novel 10 years ago, but it doesn't seem so novel to me now"?

The problem is that this 20-year term makes no sense in software, if the public wants to use the latest and greatest thing.

<comment><USER14> No, because non-obviousness is judged according to the time in which the thing was invented. Was it non-obvious in 2000? If it was, its patent remains intact, even if it seem obvious now.

And I'll point out that novelty and non-obviousness are two different things in the context of patents. The majority of software patents seem to fail the latter the majority of the time. Novelty is more of a wash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Change is needed. However, its not going to come from our government.

Nor will it come from putting yet another sacrificial lamb on the pyre.

> If Yahoo were to be awarded 50 Billion Dollars from Facebook, I think > consumers may take notice. And don't think that 50B should be an > impossibility.

I don't think consumers would bat an eye. So long as facebook.com remains online, they won't care. If it goes offline, they'll migrate to Twitter, or back to MySpace, or Google. There is enough competition to Facebook right now that if they vanished overnight people wouldn't clamor for their return for very long.

> This is what patents are for, right ? To protect companies with original IP > from smarter, faster, aggressive companies who catch the imagination of > consumers and advertisers. What else could patents be for ?

At this point I suspect the author is just trolling. Nice job. It doesn't take much research to learn that patents were meant to encourage inventors to share the details of their inventions to Society, so that Society could benefit in X years instead of waiting X+delta years for the chance something gets reinvented and shared freely.

<comment><USER16> You are grossly underestimating the amount people would care if Facebook went offline. The world would freak out. People have memories of their lives tied up in the service with the combination of photos, friends, and messages. The pent up data generated over the years is truly meaningful.

<comment><USER15> Oh there would definitely be mourning of the lost data because people don't keep backups, but I really don't think it would last that long and I don't think the mourning would lead anywhere. When people don't even care that their loved ones die enough to donate to anti-death institutes, it's hard to imagine any major effects would happen if all their data disappeared.

<comment><USER17> > When people don't even care that their loved ones die enough to donate to > anti-death institutes

Err, what? Elaboration required.

<comment><USER18> Trolling, nothing to see here. Move along.

<comment><USER19> I think he's being sincere.

From <http://www.thejach.com/about#sum>

"Can you sum up your core views in a short package so I don't completely misrepresent you when reporting second-hand?

My real view is simple. I'm a transhumanist Singularitarian in the Good sense, or the Yudkowsky sense if you prefer. Anything that gets in the way of a positive Singularity is bad. [snip] Even though I'm an Anarchist you'll see me supporting national health care because there's a decent chance we'll get really long life this century and the less people who die the better."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly. - <USER2> Lincoln

</comment><comment><USER21> In software these days I feel like patents are analogous to chefs patenting cooking techniques and then running into the middle of another chef's dinner service and saying he can't use cream in his mashed potatoes because of the 'creamy mashed potatoes' patent #78.1 Maybe a decade or 2 ago there was more science involved in software but these days, it seems to fall more under the realm of craft - patents need not apply.

<comment><USER22> Well, recipes are patentable, so I'm not sure this example proves your point as much as you would like...

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> _It's the law of big numbers. When there are enough of anything issued, some good will be done._

Can we stop using the law of big numbers as an excuse for everything in the world? </pedantic>

</comment><comment><USER24> It's a win-win situation! The public hears lots of news stories about how stupid Yahoo's patents are, Facebook gets seriously motivated to use their warchest of money to help lobby for patent reform, and at worst, Facebook loses some cash (I'm NOT feeling sorry for them).

If I thought that Yahoo might come out of this with a new source of cash I'd be worried about the perverse incentives to misuse patents... but I don't see ANY way this works out for Yahoo.

<comment><USER25> The thing is, even if Facebook used all of their cash for lobbying against software patents, there are many more entrenched companies on the other side of the fence that have spent billions already on patents and will defend their investment and "competitive advantage". That's what Google realized and they bought Motorola.

<comment><USER26> Which is why I fear that Yahoo winning over Facebook wouldn't start a lobbying war against patents. But instead, Facebook would simply become one more in the list of patent supporters.

I think that it would be better if Yahoo loses remarkably. Such as that it becomes reference for future judges to take better caution with software patent lawsuits. Which would slowly "reform" the system, instead of a fast revolution with new legislation. One can hope.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> As Abraham Lincoln said, "The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly."

</comment><comment><USER28> The current patent system is broken. That does not imply that the right thing is to have no patent system; are we sure that the problem is with the idea instead of the implementation?

Can we talk about what an ideal system would look like instead of saying that what we have now is broken and therefore nothing can work? Isn't debugging broken systems what we're supposed to be good at here?

I've tried to come up with a reasonable patch for the current system:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3698637>

I'm sure that there are problems with it, but at least it's a starting point.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm no fan of patent lawsuits, but Apple had lawsuits ongoing with Microsoft when Jobs arrived and agreed to settle them in exchange for Microsoft making a sizeable investment in Apple. The rest is history, and no one seems to look back upon that in distaste.

The difference? Tech news cycles, including blogs and online papers, now report news 24/7 just like CNN/Fox, etc, and are pretty relentless.

Personally I don't understand why any of those patents were issued in the first place, and perhaps a start for reform would be to get people who have some experience working in the industry into the patent office.

</comment><comment><USER30> I can't make sense of the post; with the same reasoning, we should hope for the murder of a well-known celebrity so that we get better murder legislation.

<comment><USER31> I won't assess "better", but high profile trials do drive changes in legislation. From changes to kidnapping after the Lindbergh baby until the present day with "Caylee's Law", people need to have a stake (even a vicarious one) to really care about changing the law.

I think Cuban is right here, if you take away people's Facebook, they're going to want to know why, and they're going to be pissed when they find out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've read this line of reasoning many times, and it's like saying "Hitler needed to kill 6 million jews to that people would realize he's a bad guy".

No, the correct action would be to fix the system, not to cause a catastrophe so that "regular people" realize anything. Those who need to know already know.

I guess the author already knows that and uses this reasoning to prove a valid point, but I'm firmly against it, it's a fallacy.

Sorry for the Godwin.

</comment><comment><USER33> I really feel like this is a ploy to get a chunk of Facebook, just like they did to Google (<http://cnet.co/w7IaUn>). $50B? That equates to "X" amount of shares, which Y! would snap up in an instant.

For a company flailing in the water right now, this seems like a perfect play to get a good financial shot in the arm.

</comment><comment><USER34> I do not think Yahoo winning billions will make the public realize what is at stake. Those not in tech, don't really think deeply about our dated patent system. This will just result in more lawsuits just before companies IPO. Yahoo "crushing" FB won't change much, but we can hope it will.

</comment><comment><USER35> First of all, fuck patents. I'm in complete agreement about that (except for the bit where the author says that maybe they might be okay sometimes). I've long felt this way.

However, in the last year or two, I've become much more interested in more thorough change to the system in its entirety, for its own sake, not just because intellectual property law is stupid.

(Although you can use essentially capitalist economic logic to defeat the concept of intellectual property (meaning that capitalism and "free culture" (or whatever you want to call it) are not necessarily incompatible with each other), I don't think it will be possible (or desirable) to reform intellectual property law without also dismantling the state and (actually existing) capitalism. Or at the very least, the institution of wage labour, whereby nobody (at least by default) has access to food and shelter (the necessities of survival), because those things cost money, and people don't automatically have money, so just to be allowed to survive, they have to sell their labour. A living wage for everyone would make redundant the (invalid, anyway) argument that intellectual property rights are necessary so that creative people can earn a living, because "a living" won't mean "money" anymore.

(As an aside: I think intellectual property is a (failed) attempt by capitalism to deal with externalities, which it is unable to do in its unrestrained form. However, there are so many externalities, and if you were to try to fully take them all into account, you would probably end up with a fully managed economy, which seems to be the antithesis of what most capitalists want.))

So basically I'm coming at this from an anarchist perspective, and when I look at this stuff now I'm seeing things that I didn't see before I became an anarchist.

> Change is needed. However, its not going to come from our government. The > lobbyists have taken over. One of the symptoms of the illness patents have > caused the technology industry is the explosion of lobbyists pushing the > agenda of big patent portfolio holders. They are not going to let our > lawmakers give an inch.

It's not at all uncommon to read things like this, in fact it seems entirely uncontroversial. Governments seem to have lost all legitimacy a long time ago (did they ever have it?). People don't even seem particularly upset or angry about this, it seems just to be a fact of life.

> Rather than originating in Congress, its going to take a consumer uprising > to cause change. What better way to create a consumer uprising than to > financially cripple and possibly put out of business the largest social > network on the planet ?

So then this is what really baffles me. "Consumer" and "uprising" in the same sentence. Why is the most imaginative form of resistance that anybody who opposes intellectual property rights can come up with always just a boycott of the relevant corporations? Ask anybody in the radical environmental movement how much personal consumer choices have helped slow climate change or transition our culture to a sustainable way of living. They've done fuck all. Why does nobody ever say that we need to organise a strike, or riot in the streets, or ever do anything more radical and direct than alter our personal consumer choices? I'm not necessarily saying that a riot is the best way to change patent law, I'm just pointing out how there seems to be this underlying idea that "internet" activism/politics is completely separate from "real" activism/politics and that the idea of connecting the two doesn't seem to occur to most people (in either world).

<comment><USER36> If everyone earns a living wage by default, the consequence might be too many people living off the work of others. It may not be sustainable.

Maybe in practice, it will, but it's bound to generate animosity by those who do sell their labor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Is it possible to create a business which can profit off of patent trolls? Like a patent troll bait company? I've read somewhere there is a lawyer who profits off spam using the small claim courts system, so maybe something along those lines is possible...

</comment><comment><USER38> I do hope he is speaking entirely about software patents rather than all patents in general.

There may be issues with non-software patents but under any system their problems are trivial in scope and solution space compared to software patents.

<comment><USER39> Even most modern "real" (non-software) patents don't seem to be useful for actually teaching people how to implement technologies, which was one of the major purposes of requiring the disclosure.

<comment><USER40> I'd argue the 20 year long patent law in place now is way too long for a publicly granted monopoly of production.

<comment><USER39> The possible exception being in regulated industries like pharma where it's entirely possible for a drug to take 15 years to develop and test. I think healthcare and pharma probably need to be treated differently, but even there, patents don't seem to be making the world a better place, at least not in the way they were originally intended.

<comment><USER40> If you used a patent at launch system, where you could only copyright / patent something going to market, you could avoid the corner case.

It is a good practice in general. You can only patent that that you can actively push to market in a reasonable time frame (even if it is in small quantities). Under a policy like that, drugs couldn't be issued patents until after they pass the FDA, but the FDA could internally have rules against letting someone else copy a design and pass it through faster.

I guess that would make copyright law easier at the expense of bureaucracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> It is interesting to note that a large number of us on HN who make a livelyhood from building software, are fully adverse to software patents. Patent lawyers on the other hand are quite happy with the status quo.

</comment><comment><USER42> Is he serious about consumers impacting government because they get mad about their favorite brand getting sued?

Consumers vote with their dollars - a massive change in spending habit would be required to impact congress. Voting consumers get a say in which congressman get to be bought off by lobbyists - not sure that helps. I'm not sure I get how anything would change unless executive branch saw risk of re- election (like what happened with PIPA/SOPA).

I've also wondered, since corporations are people with 1st amendment rights, how does a patent not infringe upon freedom of speech? Would love if there was some basis of judicial review that could effectively influence IP laws.

</comment><comment><USER39> I suspect this raises the value of the shell of Kodak, too (they have some imaging patents, although Apple is suing them for other imaging patents, perhaps defensively).

</comment><comment><USER43> "If Ifs and Buts Were Candy And Nuts, We'd All Have a Merry Christmas!" - Sheldon Cooper

</comment><comment><USER44> Someone should patent the patent creation process.

</comment><comment><USER45> Lets see if we can get some use out of this thread:

What countries DO NOT SUPPORT SOFTWARE PATENTS?

My probably guess if China..any others?

<comment><USER46> united states foreign policy supports software patents. a large amount of the united state's exports is in the form of intellectual property, and the US government is very aggressive in pushing foreign countries to enact US style intellectual property legislation.

sure, China and Russia can choose to ignore software patents, but if they do they're going to get hit with embargoes and tarriffs when they try to trade with the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> *He is being rhetorical

<comment><USER48> Sarcastic.

<comment><USER49> He's being literal. He hopes that Yahoo wins the patent fight so that Facebook's lobbyists and the public backlash hit the current patent process firmly in the groin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> This is the dumbest 100+ upvote link ever.</comment>


Who is accessing your Gmail account? - <AUTHOR> http://antoniocangiano.com/2010/06/15/who-is-accessing-your-gmail-account <comment><USER3> Am I missing something here? From their website, it looks pretty clear that Etacts advertises checking your e-mail to remind you to keep in touch with people. Just like I wouldn't be surprised that Mint.com accesses my bank account online, this is hardly as outrageous as he makes it seem. Also, wiping your computer or using 1Password isn't going to stop you from giving your password to random web apps...

<comment><USER4> I did specify that the IP address is not clearly associated with Etacts, though it turns out that it probably is them. However, that's not the point. My post is an an invitation of sorts to check one's Activity Window, plus my suggestions in terms of what steps can be taken when an intrusion is suspected. BTW, the tone of my post was not meant to be outrageous nor accusatory of Etacts.

> Also, wiping your computer or using 1Password isn't going to stop you from > giving your password to random web apps...

I'm not incautious with my password in the least. It's generally not hazardous to sign in with Google elsewhere, provided you trust the site. You can make an assessment of the risks and benefits of singing in through your Google account yourself on a site-by-site basis. If you have reason to believe that they've violated your trust or that a security breach has happened, you can revoke access (from that site) and change your password (or even decide to be paranoid and never login elsewhere again).

<comment><USER5> Changing my password that I've given to a website hardly qualifies as "revoking access". I have no problem using my Google Account as a login mechanism when it's through oAuth or xAuth or whatever Google is using these days for that pass through, but the Facebook give-us-your-login-temporarily style stuff is unacceptable.

<comment><USER4> Google actually gives you the ability to revoke access. It's under your Google account settings.

<comment><USER5> Not if you give your username and passwords to websites. I feel like you don't understand this distinction all up and down this thread...

Also, man, what is the point of DBANing your install? Is software that is no longer accessible to the OS or likely even any consumer level hardware going to magically log your keystrokes, I mean make you give your usernames and passwords to websites and then be surprised that they use them?

<comment><USER4> >Not if you give your username and passwords to websites. I feel like you don't understand this distinction all up and down this thread...

I've never given my username and password directly to websites, except for Etacts. For the other sites, I simply authorized them (through the Google interface) to access certain functionalities. Behind the scenes Google doesn't provide them with my password: [https://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer...](https://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=112802)

They also put such sites on a list of that is accessible from your account. You can remove sites from that list at any time.

> Also, man, what is the point of DBANing your install?

Yeah, that's sort of unrelated. I've been planning a clean install for a while.

> you give your usernames and passwords to websites and then be surprised that > they use them?

When THEY use them? No. When someone else does, yes.

Anyway, we have beaten this horse to death many times over.

<comment><USER5> You're giving your password to someone else. You don't magically get some guarantee that they are safe, that they won't be stolen etc. Yes, I know that oAuth perms can be revoked, that is the entire point and that's why it's dumb to give a site your credentials when better alternatives exist.

"I've never given my username and password directly to websites, except for Etacts." This is all about Etacts right? How do you expect someone to be accessing your account? You gave them your user and password. The point is, you hand out your username and password, it just makes you look silly to suggest that your account is being compromised by covert wifi sniffers (you _are_ using encryption right?), etc.

I still don't understand why you need to DBAN to do an OS reinstall unless you are just using the term DBAN loosely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why is it that everytime I click on the link, I get a file downloaded? I don't really want to open it.

<comment><USER4> My server is having problems.

<comment><USER7> Your problem is the page is being gzipped twice. (If you haven't already figured that out.)

<comment><USER4> Thanks. The pages were displaying correctly on my machine. However I think Super Cache compression was partially to blame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Google cache:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://antoniocangiano.com/2010/06/15/who- is-accessing-your-gmail-account/&hl=en&strip=0)

</comment><comment><USER9> If you're concerned enough about email privacy that you're going to wipe your computers for keyloggers, why in the world would you ever grant a SaaS access? That's just asking for trouble.

<comment><USER4> I trusted the SaaS applications I signed up with. One of them is used by the jQuery team, another one has just been acquired by Twitter, and the last one is a YC startup. I wasn't exactly tossing my password around. When evidence of a possible intrusion emerged, I revoked access (from those apps) and took steps to prevent a worst case scenario.

<comment><USER9> You gave your password to several companies and then freaked out when your account got accessed and assumed that someone camping outside your house must have cracked your WiFi connection and decided to wipe your computers while hardwired into your internet connection... I think Occam's razor applies here and the account was accessed by someone you gave the password to, though your paranoia is amusing.

It's pretty simple to keep someone out of your email, don't give anyone the password.

<comment><USER4> First, I'm not freaking out, nor am I paranoid. I clearly stated that I believe that the most likely explanation is to be found with the reputable applications I granted access to.

Of course if I suspect an intrusion, I'm going to ensure that proper action is taken to cover all of my bases. I was planning a cleanup of my laptop anyway, so I may as well do it now.

Don't read too much into my changing the password on a wired desktop. It was one of the computers at hand, so I went with the most secure option, however unlikely it may be to make a difference (doing so didn't require any extra effort on my part).

> It's pretty simple to keep someone out of your email, don't give anyone the > password.

This will be a moot point when Google will implement OAuth for IMAP.

PS: At this point, I believe it was a legitimate access by Etacts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I did a traceroute on the IP address he posted, and on all the websites he suspects. All signs point to etacts.

<http://pastebin.com/TSKYCW6B>

(also posted [EDIT: unsucessfully-attempted-to] this on the blog.)

</comment><comment><USER11> At least the Gmail access overview is a nice feature, far from being universal for all webmail providers. Every provider should have it.

<comment><USER12> They've also recently added suspicious activity alerts depending of geographic regions which I though was a nice touch: [http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/detecting- suspicious-a...](http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/detecting-suspicious- account-activity.html)

<comment><USER13> A very nice touch. About a month ago, I got an alert that my account had been accessed from China... Never would have known I was at risk otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting, I had a look at the tool after reading this and have activity from the same IP address mentioned in the article.

Update: I have also Etacts with enabled access. I had completely forgotten about them.

<comment><USER4> I'm afraid this is common. We better find out what the heck is going on with that IP. I've enquired with Slicehost about it, and we'll see if they get back to us.

<comment><USER15> I have the SliceHost ip in the list of recent activity too. Let's find out.

<comment><USER4> It's confirmed, it was Etacts. I will post a follow-up as soon as I manage to make the site run smoothly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This was Etacts. We responded to Antonio's support email this morning within a few minutes of its arrival to let him know the IP address in question belongs to us. We are talking about ways now to prevent this type of confusion from happening in the future.

</comment><comment><USER17> So after you are giving you email password to external websites you need to watch the Gmail Account Activity for suspicious access?

<comment><USER4> Correct. That's a reasonable thing to do. You sign up with a service you trust because it's convenient and useful to you (e.g., Etacts), and then you make sure that your trust isn't abused.

You do the same with your credit card whenever you purchased from a site or in a store. You trust them, but then verify that you are not being screwed over.

<comment><USER17> Actually the correct thing would be not to give your email password to 3rd party website especially if you know will panic afterwards for every strange IP you'll see in your logs.

The credit card comparison doesn't really make sense as credit cards were especially designed to be used the way we use them.

Email accounts haven't been designed to be used in such a fashion as to allow 3rd party applications access them. Especially not the kind of email services where you don't have access to the server / firewall. What Google is providing is a nice thing but you only get the see the last 10 entries or so. What happens when you go on vacation ? What happens if you use some other email provider ?

My point is that the main conclusion of your blog post should be about how you control this but how you should avoid doing this in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For the last week or so, I've had a bunch of "Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:" emails, for email that was apparently sent from my gmail account - I assumed that someone started using my return address for their spam. At about that time, gmail asked me to sign in with a CAPTCHA - <USER2> assumed that google had just added that.

I use an older (faster) version of gmail on my (slower) netbook, which doesn't have the "account activity" link. After reading this article, I switched versions and checked: 6 days ago, there was an alert about an access from China with this IP: 188.8.131.52

The emails in question have stopped for the last couple of days. It seems that google automatically detected and solved the problem, without me even being aware of it. Good google.

<comment><USER19> Did you check your 'sent' folder, by any chance? If there are copies of the emails there, then most likely they simply accessed your account directly with your password - which is much more concerning (albeit easy to fix by changing all your passwords)

<comment><USER18> Whoa, thanks, I should thought of that! They sent one on the day of the access (10 June).

There are 17 other potential ones, but I had moved them to my spam folder, so I can't tell where they came from originally. Looking closer, the first email in each chain seems to come from my account, but they are spread over several days, not just the day of the access.

Unfortunately, they could have potentially accessed any other services whose "forgotten password" emails go to this one, and then deleted the replies. But it looks like an automated spam attack.

When I realized today, I now logged out all other users (there didn't seem to be any) and changed my password. Maybe I should check all my linked accounts.

 _EDIT_ The header of their email has:

        Received: from PC-201004061503 ([22.214.171.124])

Where that IP is the hacker's IP. Comparing with mail I've sent, the Received line includes my IP and "with HTTP". So it looks like they weren't using the web interface, but some direct one (IMAP? POP3?). If they're a spammer, it would be automated. BTW their emails all had the same content, most of them with the subject " 请在这里编辑主题...", which I'm guessing is "buy viagra" in Chinese.

<comment><USER20> No, it says "write subject here".

<comment><USER18> thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The site is down. Summary, anyone?

<comment><USER4> It should be back up and running soon. You'd think 1GB of RAM would be enough to handle a few thousand hits to serve a static page.

EDIT: The server is still having issues.

<comment><USER21> Hello, fellow Apache user! You may wish to look into Nginx. My Japanese toilet seat practically has enough memory on it to serve all my business needs.

One of these days I have to migrate all of my Apache-hosted Wordpress blogs to Nginx.

<comment><USER22> " You may wish to look into Nginx"

I second this. For years I tried to tame the beast that is Apache. After switching to nginx I could not be happier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> _I verified that there were no messages sent on my behalf._

How can this be verified, given that sent messages can be deleted as well?

</comment><comment><USER24> Is it just me or does Gmail only show you the past 24 hours of activity?</comment>


Comparing Mongo DB and Couch DB - <AUTHOR> http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Comparing+Mongo+DB+and+Couch+DB <comment><USER2> I'm a little biased, being a pretty heavy CouchDB user, but it seems like Mongo is claiming that their auto-sharding is the defining reason to use Mongo. The forthcoming release of Couchbase 2.0 is going to have the same type of functionality, with buckets distributed across the cluster rather than required replication of the full dataset. Couchbase 3.0 should (if I remember correctly) have the functionality for both the key/value store and for view results.

<comment><USER3> And BigCouch has sharding too (edited to add: for data _and_ views)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here are two relevant posts from a startup that migrated from CouchDB to MongoDB:

<http://seancoates.com/blogs/gimme-bar-no-longer-on-couchdb>

<http://seancoates.com/blogs/gimme-bar-on-mongodb>

<comment><USER5> I don't see how these posts are relevant for a general purpose comparison. It is one use case which doesn't fit CouchDB. Such articles give users a wrong impression. Fact is that MongoDB doesn't fit this use case either. Good solutions handle the following graph separate from the main implementation using specialized graph databases.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Basically I think this is pointing to mongo for replacing traditional website databases and couch for only special cases. Do you guys think this is fair? I haven't spent too much time with either but I'm a little bit suspicious because this is from mongodb.

Anybody know of any other direct comparisons between these?

<comment><USER3> For my part (and I'm biased) a database that doesn't consider durability paramount shouldn't be considered a database at all.

<comment><USER6> It seemed a bit dishonest seeing benchmarks that showed how MongoDB beats CouchDB in write-performance tests when there was no acknowledgement of write requests comming back to the client.

Not saying that MongoDB wouldn't be faster with full commits turn on, it is just that their design decision to pick that as the default and calling their product a 'database' seemed very strange at best, and dishonest at worst.

<comment><USER7> For the record: we (MongoDB) have a policy of not posting official Benchmarks. Could you clarify what benchmarks you are referring to that were posted and "dishonest"?

The only benchmarks we have ever done have been for internal testing comparisons between different versions.

The "Benchmarks" page on our site clarifies this policy: <http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Benchmarks>

Previously there were several third party benchmarks on this page, which we recently took down to stand firmer on our benchmark policy. In the interest of full disclosure however, you may examine the page history to verify that we have always clarified these as unaffiliated third party sourced.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm new to both (and noSQL in general), first heard about CouchDB a week or two ago. Would Couch be a good fit for building a logging system, or is there something else I should look into?

<comment><USER2> Absolutely it would be great for logging. Assuming that you don't need atomicity for your logs (eg, I want to see that log line reflect in my reports _right_ _now_) Couch is a perfect way to dump a huge amount of data really quickly. For reporting, the map/reduce system of Couch is a great fit. There's an initial learning curve -- as with anything, really -- but you'll find that Couch would be a great way to get logged data (which can be pretty unstructured) and report on it easily and quickly.

<comment><USER9> no, it wouldn't. It would be a horrible fit, imo. You don't need versioning info for logging, and the extra compacting of the database is another aspect, since with logging heavy applications you will write all the time...

I love CouchDB but i definitely wouldn't use it for logging.

<comment><USER2> You don't need to worry about the versioning for a document that you never update. You can just blast the logfiles into the database and not worry about conflicts. Similarly, database compaction is really the biggest concern when you're updating documents, not just dumping new ones into the database. I would expect a very linear growth for a logging app.

<comment><USER10> The problem doesn't come with the inserts, it comes with the deletes, where CouchDB will keep some metadata and stubs around to support its replication use cases. In a pure logging setup this is perhaps less than ideal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am a fan of both and decide from case to case which one to use. Both are under heavy development. I am often surprised about new features when checking the newest versions.

</comment><comment><USER11> \--dur</comment>


Ask HN: A new submission dead on arrival? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I just tried to submit a new post from Guillermo Rauch's blog - 'A String is not an Error'[1] - but it was immediately dead.
Any ideas why?
Edit: Here is the post in case anyone can or will unkill it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3383346.
Thanks.
[1] http://www.devthought.com/2011/12/22/a-string-is-not-an-error/ <comment><USER2> There is a published list from pg 1026 days ago of sites that are systematically banned from HN.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=499044>

But I don't see the site www.devthought.com there when I look for it.</comment>


Ask HN: Has Anyone Completed "Writing a Compiler in Go" by Thorsten Ball - <AUTHOR> Has anyone gone through the book: https://compilerbook.com/ cover to cover? Reviews? <comment><USER2> I'm not sure you've seen it's in Amazon, has a few (good) reviews there: [https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/cr/3982016118/ref=mw_dp_cr](https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/cr/3982016118/ref=mw_dp_cr)</comment>


After the Paris terrorist attack EU seeks to restrict legal firearms - <AUTHOR> https://www.change.org/p/council-of-the-european-union-eu-you-cannot-stop-terrorism-by-restricting-legal-gun-ownership <comment><USER2> Because the terrorists had their AK-47s legally. Wouldn't it just be easier to put up a sign "no entry to terrorists"? Then they'd have to just shrug and go away.

(Assuming that criminals are law-abiding. Ahem.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Well of course they are. Everyone knows that shotguns purchased in stores are much more dangerous than AK-47s purchased from a smuggler in a back alley.

</comment><comment><USER4> Do people really have to use firearms for self-defense? Is it that crucial? Can't they just use non-lethal stuff?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just to get an impression: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_at_the_Summer_Olympic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_at_the_Summer_Olympics)

Don't make the assumption that everything air-powered is nonlethal. Indeed in history we find: "In the late 1700's, powerful pneumatic guns even found their way into the ranks of the military. The Austrian Army had an entire regiment armed with .44 caliber repeating air rifles. All surviving accounts indicate that the Austrians used those airguns with deadly effectiveness against Napoleon's army. So feared, any Austrian soldier captured with an air rifle was summarily executed as an assassin!" ([http://www.airguns.net/general_airgun_history.php](http://www.airguns.net/general_airgun_history.php))

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yay another thread where people argue over gun laws. 2 comments in and already one sarcastic response.</comment>


Kids in India Are Sparking Urban Planning Changes by Mapping Slums - <AUTHOR> http://www.citylab.com/tech/2015/02/kids-are-sparking-urban-planning-changes-by-mapping-their-slums/385636/

<comment><USER2> This book by James Scott has a very interesting perspective on the mapping of unmapped cities. The TL;DR is that an unmapped or unmappable city can't be managed from afar. In an unmapped city you must go there to manage it, in a mapped city you can sit at a desk a thousand miles away and know who's paid their taxes, etc. Paradoxically the act of mapping helps both outside help and outside exploitation.

[http://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain- Condition/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain- Condition/dp/0300078153/)

<comment><USER3> This also engenders a "Sim City" kind of urban planning that keeps commercial spaces or jobs very far away from homes and makes it impractical to not own a car (simply necessary for survival).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It looks like they're building legends on these maps. I wonder if the legends are standardized. It'd be cool if whoever is reviewing these, or someone involved in the process, could scan them in and make a public repository.

<comment><USER5> There is an effort to make this process a bit easier using OpenStreetMap & Field Papers ([http://fieldpapers.org/](http://fieldpapers.org/)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Inspiring.

First the idea of mapping slums and making stakeholders aware (even though they are already) whenever they sit to plan. Secondly the idea of using children who will foresee the future they want to live into.

"The value of child-led mapping, however, is not restricted to dreaming of a modern cricket pitch or other public utilities (although that's evidently important)."

</comment><comment><USER7> Proud of these kids. It would be great if a local representative could help with uploading some of the data. I believe there can be a lot of restoration aid provided from many of us in helping with this process.

</comment><comment><USER8> Meanwhile, kids in Britain are sparking urban planning changes by slapping mums :(

(Not entirely joking; I wonder if it's media bias, or are kids in less-well- off countries like this _really_ so much more motivated to create and improve, where ours slack off and vandalise?)

<comment><USER9> It should be noted that the UK has 5% of the population of India, so by sheer size of the population alone, they should have 20x the number of motivated kids, all else being equal.

<comment><USER10> Also, I think India has a younger population so that 20x may be higher, though I don't know by how much.

<comment><USER11> [https://www.google.com/search?q=india+population+by+age](https://www.google.com/search?q=india+population+by+age)

41.1% is younger than eighteen

47.9% is younger than twenty one

This is as of 2001 so I'd imagine the population is a little older now...

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6911544.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6911544.stm) via [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India) > by 2030, India's dependency ratio should be just over 0.4

off topic but if the age disparity pays dividends in a few decades, will it not cause headaches in a few more decades unless we're able to automate most jobs by then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Those are some really well organised maps, kudos to them.</comment>