Uber CEO and Pittsburgh Mayor Discussed Reducing State Fines, Emails Reveal - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/uber-ceo-and-pittsburgh-mayor-discussed-reducing-state-fines-emails-reveal <comment><USER2> I lived in the burgh for half a decade. What outsiders won't understand is that Pittsburgh's economy is trash. There's no hope. Yes, it's not poverty- stricken, but it's certainly not a place to grow or nurture a career. What Uber's ATC represents is the beginning of Pittsburgh's revitalization and sorely needed economic growth. The enemy of yinzers here is the regulatory capture of the Pennsylvania Utility Commission by the entrenched, terrible, pathetic taxi industry. I hope that PA gets its shit together for the burgh's sake.</comment>


AppDirect or Google App Marketplace? - <AUTHOR>

Looking at the end of the beta of or SaaS application, which soon will come soon, O have to think about payment options and marketing channels. We did not start of a lean and agile company like we read about everywhere, but this is rapidly changing now we found out who loves our product. This product market fit quest is not over at launch, it will only start all over again, but with a slightly more focus on business and enterprise, we should have iterations faster if needed.
A payment gateway and merchant account and thinking about how to get more users into out beta and future free trial options, got me thinking about the App Markets that now pop-up up everywhere. How would this benefit the Reedge.com Application?
Comparing apples with apples?
AppDirect and Google App Marketplace are a bit different, Google App Marketplace can be used for any application that integrates with existing Google API's so for example we could use Google Contacts for multi-user features in Reedge or add a integration with Google Analytics and that would be enough to enter in the Marketplace. AppDirect required a deeper integration including sign-on and billing. But When looking at Google App Marketplace as a more integrated option including Google Billing API and Google Checkout the two services actually are very similar.
How to pick? Market-size?
Well it's true everyone likes simple sign-up and sign-on so Twitter and Facebook integration could be an option. But Facebook Sign-On for a business and enterprise focused business does not make sense, so that leaves Twitter, OpenID and Google. Besides the ease of sign-up the market size is important with 2 million active businesses inside the Google App environment and 1.000 daily visitors of AppDirect you can see where I am going. Add the 24 available apps in AppDirect and 300 in Google App Marketplace, the 20% cut Google takes vs. the 35% AppDirect asks… the choice seems too easy.</p><p>
OK if Google App Marketplace it is… what would that involve?
Well going with the idea of Google App Marketplace involves some important changes. Single-Sign On, more integration with Google Contacts, Google Billing API (that's in beta) and a Google Adwords extension that we wanted, all need to move forward in our planning. So it's not final choice, but something that seems worth exploring.
Anyone thinking here in Ynews of entering that Google App Marketplace and interested in sharing there ideas and experiences of the impact it had on their business and application? <comment><USER2> Hi Denis,

Great post! Congratulations on transitioning out of beta! App Stores like Google, AppDirect, and AppExchange are a great way for you to reach new business customers. We think that being a part of multiple stores is a great approach - you don't have to pick just one!

That said, we're different from the Google Marketplace in a few respects:

1\. Free for Businesses. AppDirect is free for businesses and can be used by anyone in the organization. 2\. Multiple Stores. We power a growing network of App Stores for brands with existing trusted relationships to small businesses. You only have to integrate once and have access to Bell Canada and other markets to come. 3\. Multiple Rates. You can choose which Stores you want to be a part of. Each channel charges their own revenue share which will vary between channels from 15% to 40%. Bell does charge 35% but they are also contributing a huge traditional marketing budget.

We have been intentionally stealthy and are flattered that you discovered us considering we're still in private Alpha. In year one, we focused on getting our Application Network to market and we're excited to come out of Alpha in the coming months. We have a dedicated group of pilot users who love AppDirect and we're learning from their feedback to create a leading customer experience. We have also worked hard to streamline our on-boarding process to make it incredibly easy for Developers to integrate.

We would be happy to help you with OpenID, Oauth and other technologies needed for the Google Marketplace integration. We can work with you to get you integrated to both our network and the Google Marketplace in a few weeks. We're always here to help.

Cheers! Your friends at AppDirect firstname.lastname@example.com</comment>


Successful entrepreneurship 1 - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/successful-entrepreneurship-1

<comment><USER2> Slide #19: _Mike get's started on_

Correction: "Mike gets started on..."

Moral of the story: Do _not_ make easily-corrected spelling or grammar mistakes in your slide deck.

Bonus: If you hired me, nothing but flawlessly written English would go out under your company's banner.

<comment><USER3> Also "plan's fail in startups".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We use these two books for eRes, the student-run entrepreneur incubator here at the University of Michigan. They really compliment one another, and this presentation gives a good overview that ties the two together.

</comment><comment><USER5> I agree with the overall premise, but this presentation had one of the lowest information densities I've seen in a long while.

The point could have been relayed in 5 or less slides, not 100.

<comment><USER6> I don't know. Normally I agree but it gives this slideshow a certain charm in this case. Probably because it told more of a story than a slideshow.

Other than near the end, I thought it actually did a good job of emphasizing it's point. It just lacked that big revelatory surprise at the end to give it that bang.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am not sure I agree so much with the presentation, but the mocking of the "Stanford alumnus experienced exec" is worth it for the smile.

<comment><USER7> I think it's a good read from slide #29 on if just for being food for thought.

<comment><USER8> I too thought it was good "food for thought" but sometimes have concern about the "analysis paralysis" these sorts of things can create.

This might be required for larger investments and bigger projects, but sometimes there's just no substitute for just doing something.

 _FOR EXAMPLE_ look at AwesomenessReminders - I'm honestly flabbergasted that it's as successful as it is. He recently posted that he now has 750 paying customers, if each of them bough his minimum program and didn't renew that's something around $7500 (right?)

Who thinks that would have survived a multi round business plan customer segmentation / value proposition etc.. etc...

However - he simply had the idea, did it cheap and quick and it's turned out to be pretty sweet. I find that really inspirational.

Was a great example of the 'best case' scenario - but - there's still plenty of room for an 'elbow grease & just do it' solution.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A decentralized Internet identity system I'm working on. - <AUTHOR> http://nameblossom.org/akas/ <comment><USER2> I commend you on the cleanliness of your reference implementation. It looks to be a completely by the book rails application. Anyone could contribute I am sure.

This is in sharp contrast to the tent guys who for some reason rolled their own web framework in ruby, leading to a very messy codebase in my opinion.

But more on topic, I am having a bit of trouble understanding what this service is going to do. What is the usecase? I think I got this from it:

1\. A user wants an identity, so he registers at aka.nu (or other provider) and gets a nice url like tinco.aka.nu.

2\. The user uses this url as an openid url to create an account on stackoverflow.

3\. Stackoverflow gets information about the user by querying the url for meta information.

But.. this is exactly what openid does. I have an openid account at myopenid.com, and pointed me.tinco.nl to redirect to it. Now when you go to me.tinco.nl you see my public openid profile. And I log in to stackoverflow with me.tinco.nl as the identifier. And stackoverflow filled in some of the fields with information it got from myopenid.

What is your unique selling point?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your comment.

First off I should note that an aka _is_ an OpenID (see <http://paul-odin- openid-test.blogspot.com/2012/12/hey.html>) so all of the pros and cons of OpenID should in principle apply to akas. Akas just have a few constraints (a domain name served over HTTPS) and extras (the host-meta file metadata).

Here are a few circumstances where I think these additions could prove useful:

(1) Following akas. Given an OpenID like me.tinco.nl I don't think I can enter it into an app and keep track of what you're up to. The extra metadata allows an app to find your other profiles and subscribe to your activity. One of the features I was working on but didn't finish yet (there's some dormant code at <https://my.aka.nu/hub>) was to have the ability to subscribe to the host-meta file itself and automatically discover new additions and changes to your profile.

(2) Using your aka as a personal namespace. I'm hoping to add the ability to use create subdomains under your aka (for example a blog at blog.paul.aka.nu). Obviously you can do this already if you have your own domain name but it's generally viewed as an 'advanced' feature. Also there's no reason you can't use an aka as a domain for your email address. Incidentally this was the reason I originally bought aka.nu, as a demo domain for a simplified DNS administration tool I was working on.

(3) Authentication for non-browser apps. Let's say you've posted a photo somewhere and authorized access to me, paul.aka.nu. I could log in myself to wherever it's hosted using that as an OpenID, but what if I'm not using a browser to access it? My client can send you an assertion that it's accessing it under the authority of paul.aka.nu but you still need to go back to paul.aka.nu to verify it, which is where the extra metadata comes into play. (App.net has similar functionality: [http://developers.app.net/docs/authentication/identity- deleg...](http://developers.app.net/docs/authentication/identity-delegation/))

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How is this better than the decentralized Persona Identify solution that Mozilla's promoting: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Persona/Identity_Pr...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Persona/Identity_Provider_Overview)

<comment><USER4> It's not. We should be spending time implementing Persona rather than trying to come up with new identity solutions. Mozilla browserid/Persona is good enough or better than any other solution presented thus far, and has the best chance for adoption.

<comment><USER5> I cannot agree with this enough. I implemented BrowserID on one of my sites once, and never looked back. Now every new project uses BrowserID as the only way to log in.

It is superior to all other ways I've seen in usability, which is ultimately what counts, and integration takes all of two minutes, much less than traditional password auth. Plus, you don't even need to secure any passwords.

I really, really hope it catches on, and Google/Yahoo!/other mail providers start supporting it.

<comment><USER6> How does BrowserID work in the use case of a native mobile app?

<comment><USER5> Looks like it works like this:

<https://github.com/mozilla/browserid-ios>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> OpenID with host identifiers? You want to create a directory service? Why? Why have others failed on this?

</comment><comment><USER8> I have been working on a centralized identity system at <https://www.credport.org>, and a question that is always looming my mind is:

Can identity systems be designed? Can they be explicitly built or are they a by-product?

Arguably, the biggest (consumer) identity systems out there (Facebook, Twitter, Google) have not been designed to be identity systems but ultimately turned out so. The biggest designed and most open solution, OpenID, has seen very limited traction.

In many ways, the broad majority of consumers probably don't care much about the great (and awesome) implications of identity systems and what would be possible if people were to work together by having a broadly accepted identity system.

The way we are currently going about it is to always have these implications in mind, but work extremely hard to provide value to both consumers and producers outside that realm.

<comment><USER9> That's because people like you go out and reinvent the wheel and create yet another centralized platform instead of implementing an existing decentralized option. It's hubris. Facebook wants to manage my identity. Its no shocker that they don't implement an identity system that they don't control.

If you're not paying, you are the product. That includes your identity and that includes forcing others to go through them when they want your identity. That's annoying. Implement BrowaerID please.

<comment><USER8> It's always the same: <http://xkcd.com/927/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So I've always wondered, why is firstname.lastname@example.com only an email address, why isn't it just an everything address related to an specific user?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's in large part what WebFinger was created for, which I used as a model when developing this project: <http://hueniverse.com/webfinger/>

Gmail actually used to support it to a degree (it came along with Buzz) but in September I think they removed the host-meta file. WebFinger is still a big part of OStatus (which is what identi.ca is based on).

The main issue I have with WebFinger is that unless you have your own domain name, it's either tied to an e-mail service, or you get an identity that looks like an e-mail address but isn't. Gmail had it, then dropped it, and given Google+ I don't think they would have too much interest in bringing it back. OStatus acct: identifiers are a lot like e-mail addresses but I don't think they function as such.

Of course if you have your own domain you can make it so that isn't the case, but most people don't and if you try to create a free domain that makes it easy for people to do that sort of thing you basically end up with aka.nu anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> BrowserID. please.

<comment><USER9> No, please, keep reinventing the wheel, keep doing the same thing that everyone has been doing for the last two years. "We need a better way to do identity and auth!" "[here's a rehashed email-login system]" or "[here's a new identity management system I built instead of using an existing one. surely this one will take off!!!!!1111]"

<comment><USER11> Did you just troll yourself? Wtf.

<comment><USER9> No?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can you guys give me some advice on my resume? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for a trainee program as J-1 visa in US.
Can you guys give me some advice on my resume? There would be many grammatical errors, so please point them out.

    SUMMARY
    	3 years of experience in tough projects for financial institutions, which required high reliability and high performance and sometimes required over three hundreds working hours a month.
    	0.5 years of experience as a freelance web developer.

    EDUCATION
    	Bachelor of Economics, March 2011
    	XXXX University, Tokyo, Japan

    QUALIFICATIONS
    	Passed CMA (Chartered Member of the Securities Analysts Association of Japan) examinations, July 2009
    	3rd grade Certified Skilled Worker of Financial Planning, September 2008
    	Class-2 (Securities) Sales Representative, May 2008
    	Applied Information Technology Engineer, June 2009
    	TOEFL iBT Score 82, February 2009
    	Ordinary Vehicle License, May 2008
    	Ordinary Motorcycle License, March 2009

    AWARDS
    	Nikkei Stock League 2008 Nominated: XXXXXXX

    EXPERIENCE
    	Freelance
    		Financial Statements Visualizer site (XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX) | Dec 2014
    			Developed the entire application and deployed it to AWS.
    			Codes in JavaScript and Ruby on Rails. Web-scraping from a data source. The application running on AWS.
    		Bitcoin Exchange Platform site (XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX) | July 2014 - <USER2>
    			Registered a company, XXXXXXX Inc. (XXXXXXXXX), constructed development/stage/production environments, developed the entire application from an open source and deployed it. Still in beta.
    			Codes in HTML, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails. Web-scraping from a bank's website. The application running with bitcoind on AWS (EC2, S3, RDS, CloudWatch, Load Balancers, Auto Scaling), Nginx, Unicorn.
    		Line Sheet Maker site (XXXXXXXXXX) | Oct 2014
    			Selected frameworks and implemented a PDF generating engine.
    			Codes in Ruby on Rails (RSpec, Wicked PDF, Liquid) and JavaScript (jQuery)
    		Online Fashion Shopping site (XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX) | July 2014 – Sept 2014
    			Implemented tests, improved performance and fixed bugs.
    			Codes in Ruby on Rails (Spree, RSpec, capybara) and JavaScript (jQuery).

    	XXXXXXXX, Inc. (Company's name changed to XXXXXXXXXXX Inc. on Jan 2014), Tokyo, Japan
    		Enhancement of an inter-process messaging middleware to support UDP and the latest OSs | Mar 2014 – Jun 2014
    			Built compilation/testing/performance measurement environments and conducted acceptance tests.
    			Codes in C++. Environments are Windows and Linux.
    		Market-access Engine of Order Execution System of a bank and a securities company | Dec 2013 – Apr 2014
    			Implemented unit tests, conducted unit/integration tests and fixed bugs.
    			Codes in C++. Debugging with GDB. The engine is connected to Osaka Exchange with FIX protocol and to Reuters with RFA. The environment is Linux.
    		Order Management System for financial derivative products of a securities company | May 2013 – Nov 2013
    			Planned basic/detailed design specification, implemented requirements/unit tests, conducted integration testing, analyzed performance and tuned code/SQL/Oracle parameters. This project is enhancement development.
    			Codes in Java (JNI, Original distributed calculation framework, JasperReports, Hibernate) and C++(for financial products pricing libraries). Batches in WSH and PL/SQL.
    		Order Management System with distributed calculation for financial derivative products | Jan 2013 – Apr 2013
    			Constructed distributed calculation computing environment with 750 CPU cores, tuned OS/Oracle/JVM parameters, and surveyed performance between two different architectures to propose new architecture for YYY Securities Inc.
    			Codes in Java (Spring, Hibernate, GridGain, Original distributed calculation framework). Debugging with JDB. Environments are Windows Server and Oracle database. Analysis tools are jConsole, jdb, WSH, Windows Performance Monitor, Statspack.
    		Interfaces of Order Management System for financial derivative products of a bank | Apr 2012 – Dec 2012
    			Planned basic/detailed design specification, implemented interfaces/unit tests and conducted integration testing.
    			Codes in Java (Spring, Hibernate, JUnit, mockito, JasperReports). The application is connected to Reuteres with RFA and to others with HULFT.
    		Online Forex Trading System of a securities company (OTC and Exchange Broking) | Jun 2011 – Mar 2012
    			On call 24 hours for system troubleshooting, point of contact for clients, release engineering, bug fixes
    			Codes in Java (Struts, JSP, Hibernate, Velocity), JavaScript, HTML, bash. Operating tools are Nagios, MRTG, Linux, Windows Server, JP1.

    	Internships
    		XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Co., Ltd., Tokyo, Japan | Aug 2009
    			Surveyed two methods of calculating forward rate curves
    			Simulations in Excel VBA
    		XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Co., Ltd., Tokyo, Japan | Aug 2008
    			Planned requirements specification, implemented and gave demonstrations of a ERP package for Correspondence Course
    			Codes in Delphi
 <comment><USER3> This would pass as it is.

You may want to re-word this part. It makes sense as it is now, but it could sound better.

"Developed the entire application and deployed it to AWS.

      Codes in JavaScript and Ruby on Rails."

I would write..

Developed the entire application primarily using Javascript and Ruby on Rails and deployed it to AWS.

That is just an opinion. Your first one would work as well.</comment>


40+ awesome-looking tattoo designs for nerds and geeks - <AUTHOR> http://blogof.francescomugnai.com/2013/01/40-awesome-looking-tattoo-designs-for-nerds-and-geeks/ <comment><USER2> You know -- bell bottoms and loud polyester shirts were a fad for a few years. Looking back now it seems ridiculous. I think the same thing about tattoos, except you can take off the bell bottoms, and all that remains were some embarrassing faded photos.

"Tattoos" -- its like bell bottoms you can't take off.

</comment><comment><USER3> better hope your start-up pays off - so you can afford to get it removed in later life.</comment>


Quora Moves Beyond Writing to Curating - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20111219/quora-moves-beyond-writing-to-curating/

<comment><AUTHOR> I see that Hacker News readers mostly aren't talking up Quora.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3334791>

<comment><USER2> I like their weekly email newsletter. It is curated well for the best content. I don't use the service or visit their site.</comment></comment>


Mongoose 1.0 (async MongoDB ORM for Node.JS) is out - <AUTHOR> http://mongoosejs.com/

<comment><USER2> You, Nathan and Brian have done a great job with 1.0 -- Way to Go!!

What happens if a Middleware never calls done() ?

Does setter transformation happen upon set or upon save?

I am excited to see Mongoose evolve -- the Middleware concept is exciting.

Some minor feedback on the new site:

        Middleware are defined at the Schema level and are applied when the methods init (when a document is initialized with data from MongoDB), save (when a document or embedded document is saved).

I think you want to say something like "when the methods init or save are called", but the "are called" is missing from the above.

Then down a bit, you have "Serial Serial Middleware" and "Parallel Parallel Middleware"; not sure about the redundant first words.

The email address in the copyright notice is html-entities, but they are escaped: <email@example.com>

Final nitpick: the site is a little hard to read with the current background.

Overall, great work!!

</comment><comment><USER3> I love this project, congrats on reaching 1.0.

One question - do you have any plans to support replica sets, or can I currently specify a connection to a set of servers rather than one master? Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER4> MongooseJS is pretty cool. I have one question, though:

Why must you define models' schema when you're interacting with a schema-less database such as MongoDB?

<comment><USER5> So, if anyone from the Mongoose team is around, please correct me if I'm wrong - but defining a model's schema helps mostly in scenarios where you would typecast or otherwise transform attributes.

It's more about helping you easily use data that's retrieved from the DB more than about defining a schema.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> and another question - is it possible to index embedded document fields? When I query for a single embedded document, does mongoose return only this single document, or the whole parent document with all embedded documents is returned beforehand?

</comment><comment><USER6> how do I do upserts with Mongoose?

</comment><comment><USER7> booyah!!</comment>


Ask HN: Is the SAP API free to use? - <AUTHOR> I am new to programming, but already have an idea for a project. Therefore i need to have access to the SAP API of an ERP machine to get the IDOCS (an IDOC is like a xml file). If i want to do so, do i need to get a permit from the SAP company or can anybody use SAP's API for free? Thank you very much in advance <comment><USER2> I haven't worked with SAP systems for a long time, so things may have changed. All the manuals are copyrighted and the API was only available to "partners" under very strict licensing conditions.

If you are truly keen on your idea, it might be simpler to work with one of the many SAP Partners. You should also gain some essential programming skills if that is the career path you are choosing.</comment>


Architecture diagram of how AWS can be incorporated into a (any) startup? - <AUTHOR>

Can someone share an architecture diagram of how AWS can be incorporated into a (any) startup? <comment><USER2> The AWS website has all the informations you need. The <http://aws.amazon.com/architecture/> section provides 5 diagrams :

==> Web Application Hosting : [http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/architecturecenter/AWS_...](http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/architecturecenter/AWS_ac_ra_web_01.pdf)

==> Content and Media Serving : [http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/architecturecenter/AWS_...](http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/architecturecenter/AWS_ac_ra_media_02.pdf)

==> Batch Processing : [http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/architecturecenter/AWS_...](http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/architecturecenter/AWS_ac_ra_batch_03.pdf)

==> Fault tolerance and High Availability : [http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/architecturecenter/AWS_...](http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/architecturecenter/AWS_ac_ra_ftha_04.pdf)

==> Large Scale Processing and Huge Data sets : [http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/architecturecenter/AWS_...](http://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/architecturecenter/AWS_ac_ra_largescale_05.pdf)

These are the main usages a startup can make of AWS. Of course, depending on your core business, you will need to focus on specific parts.</comment>


My dad got scammed for $3k worth of gift cards - <AUTHOR> https://thehustle.co/phone-scam-gift-cards/ <comment><USER2> A lot of failures here:

1) Caller-ID spoofing. It straight out should not be possible to spoof government phone numbers, 911, etc. My Android has "Scam Likely" show up when a scammer calls (I believe this is part of the STIR/SHAKEN protocol), this should be expedited, expanded, and improved upon.

2) Someone should not be able to buy $3000 of Target gift cards without doing a lot of explaining. Personal experience: The grocery store I go to; the registers will straight out refuse to ring up above $500 of gift cards, you have to use the Customer Service desk where their agents grill you (and I do mean _grill_ you, their default mode seems to be "You're being scammed", especially if you're on the phone with someone).

3) If I buy gift cards in New York, there's zero reason someone in Bangalore, India should immediately be able to redeem those gift cards. Perhaps Target could should spend some of their data collection techniques on this instead of trying to figure out if your daughter is pregnant so they can send you maternity coupons.

4) Is there a reason unused gift cards bought within a certain amount of time shouldn't be refundable?

<comment><USER3> The whole gift card game is a big scam.

Between lost cards, the obvious money laundering and tax avoidance grifts, etc, it's a pretty absurd instrument.

<comment><USER4> I'm familiar with a story of an ecommerce site that offered a discount on digitally delivered gift cards to encourage holiday gifting. But they didn't think to prevent people from buying more gift cards with those gift cards.

<comment> ux-app Sorry, i must be slow, what's the scam here? If I buy a $10 gift card with a $10 gift card, aren't we just swapping $10?

<comment><USER5> It's the discount. E.g.: $10 buys you a $12 gift card .. buys you a $14.4 gift card... ad infinitum

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've told both of my parents--in their 70s--that I will never, under any circumstances, ever call them for money and that any call they might ever receive claiming to be me asking for money or asking for it on my behalf is guaranteed to be a scam.

Yet it still happened that, during the exact week my family was on a Caribbean cruise that included a stop in Mexico[0], scammers targeted both of my parents' mobile phone numbers insisting that they were alternatively Mexican authorities demanding bail money for me or that they were my spouse sobbing over the phone that I'd been in a tragic boating accident and needed money for the hospital.

This was before international roaming was included with my mobile phone plan so when I got back to port a few days later I turned on my phone that morning to several voicemails from my parents, starting out panicky then realizing what was going on then positively jovial at how they'd played the scammers along for almost a full day.

They didn't send any money but both of them said it was incredibly difficult to keep what I'd told them in mind because "what if it _really was_ you needing help?"

0 - We think the scammers got the information off of the Facebook pages of one of our related family members who posted publicly about "being envious of [my name tagged] going to Cozumel" next week and then trolling linked family members for people who appeared older.

<comment><USER7> I also warn my mother not to think she's clever and talk back to the scammers. "Don't tell them off" I tell her. Just hang up. Say nothing.

> then realizing what was going on then positively jovial at how they'd played > the scammers along for almost a full day.

...because once they realize they're talking to an old lady, they may realize the "kidnapping" story may not work, but a call verifying something for a Stimulus check might (for example).

Just hang up. You won't outwit them.

<comment><USER8> I love talking to them because it's time they aren't talking to someone else. My goal is to waste their time, not "outwit" them.

I'd like to think that if enough people did this they wouldn't make any money.

<comment><USER9> There are a few Twitch streamers doing this. I saw one that had a VM set up with all sorts of fuckery built-in to mess with them.

<comment><USER10> Yeah one guy has sound effects (such as driving for going to the store to buy the gift cards) and voice modification set up.

There was a video that he kept the scammer on the phone for 6+ hrs then at the end when he was giving them the apple cards was "confused" and redeemed $20000 dollars onto "her" "own" account to send them a computer all on a vm where they could watch her putting in the cards codes and go through the checkout but the control software "was broken" so they couldn't interfere.

edit: Youtuber/twitch streamer is mentioned below, Kitboga

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > My dad is not a gullible man. He grew up low-income at the border of > Brooklyn and Queens, where street smarts were a survival mechanism. A > 30-year career teaching high school students trained him to sniff out > bullshit from a mile away.

Your dad _was_ not a gullible man.

My dad was a very aggressive and assertive person throughout his life, didn't trust anyone, lived through some very hard times like post-war Italy where apparently even the feral cats vanished for lack of food.

Then in retirement it's like everything experienced which conditioned him to be that way just faded away. His edge dulled substantially.

The last time I traveled with him we were approached by someone on the streets of Palermo who was obviously (to me) sizing us up. Within minutes of talking with this total stranger my dad had revealed where both his money and passport were kept on his person. I had to abruptly intervene and remove us from the situation by insisting we enter the restaurant we happened to be passing. When I explained to him what had just transpired, he was in complete disbelief at how easily he had been tricked. The whole thing surprised me because my dad was the one objecting to our exploring the south of Italy the entire trip because of the crime and poverty!

Even with him _expecting_ we were going to have such problems he didn't catch it. A previous version of my father would have not only seen it coming, he likely would have escalated it with violence, he's a gruff old Italian sailor. This was like taking candy from a child.

It's incredible how much people change in old age.

<comment><USER12> In regards to this topic, the "gullible" line of thought misses the forest for the trees, because it still operates in the mode of "it was your personal responsibility [to not be scammed], and if you were, it is because you were gullible." This means the elderly are particularly vulnerable, as per your account, but it also means that there's less inclination to push for change and protection against scams like this from the general public in America. (I feel that in other cultures, such as Japan, the elderly tend to be regarded with respect for their wisdom rather than derision of their "regressing" minds).

My anecdotal story to the contrary of yours: I have a friend who graduated from a top 10 US college a few years ago and couldn't find a job. Right when they were desperately filing for applications and feeling very worried about their future (as recent college graduates are wont to do), this person received a call from 911 that fell exactly into this class:

>Impersonations of government employees accounted for ~60% of these cases.

The "911" was from the local police department of the city where they lived. The person was told that a warrant for their arrest has been issued - that 3 years before, there was a particular document to be filed with the IRS that had to declare all scholarship money awarded for a particular scholarship, and according to their documents, that document is three years overdue and has already incurred $700 in fines. The amount of time elapsed since the due date warranted x many jail days without immediate payment, and a mark on the criminal record... additionally, since this involves defrauding the government, their freshly minted university degree was about to be revoked.

My friend is an immigrant. They didn't know that university degrees couldn't be revoked, nor that no such thing as "government vouchers" bought from a grocery store existed (this was the trick - when the person arrives looking for the vouchers at Target or Office Depot, the agent on the phone says that some gift card can be an acceptable form of payment instead).

I took note of this scam both because of how elaborate it was, how _believable_ it was (especially to someone less than familiar with the US government), how the person on the "911" call used psychological tactics to continue to make this vulnerable person more and more panicked about their future particularly at a time when they were already financially insecure. My friend was not gullible. But my friend did fear repercussions from the US government enough to completely fall for this scam.

<comment><USER13> This worked because you can actually buy government revenue vouchers or stamps to pay for official fees or transactions in many countries. I could definitely see this being believable to someone coming from a country where this is a thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you aren't already familiar, check out Kitboga: [https://www.twitch.tv/kitboga](https://www.twitch.tv/kitboga)

He live streams calling scammers that are running exactly these sorts of scams, tries to tie them up for as long as possible, wasting their time. It's super educational as well, showing how these scammers try various tactics to keep people afraid.

<comment><USER15> There's also Jim Browning (not his real name)- [https://www.youtube.com/c/JimBrowning/videos](https://www.youtube.com/c/JimBrowning/videos)

Although his practices are more... grey hat, he's managed to successfully shutdown whole companies. He provided content for a BBC documentary too: [https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000fzx2](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000fzx2)

Even though he regularly sends information to authorities, it is very rare that they will do anything.

<comment><USER16> One thing that I enjoy about Browning's videos is that he often will be proactive in helping victims. Sometimes he will catch scammers in the middle of scamming others and either call the victim to educate them about what is happening, sabotage the scam by reversing what the scammers are doing on their computer, or just refunding the funds with the scammers' own systems.

He might not be as "fun" and whacky as some of the other baiters, but it his videos can be quite interesting. He will sometimes figure out the hierarchy and layout of their company and network, their physical locations, business fronts, etc so that he can methodically take down the company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you're in a store and see someone acting odd with gift cards, it's ok to say something and try to help out.

I recently encountered an elderly woman fiddling with some purchased gift cards (at CVS) while talking to someone on her cell phone. They threatened to disconnect her power immediately if she didn't pay for a new meter immediately. Luckily I convinced her to not share the numbers and hang up on the scammer. It took her a while to even trust me. Poor woman had no idea who to trust. I had her call the local utility who was super patient explaining the situation and consoling her.

</comment><comment><USER18> > "My dad is not a gullible man."

This article attempts to blame Target a couple of times for not doing enough. But this guy was also sitting in another store's parking lot, Safeway, reading off gift card codes to the "DEA."

No matter how smart you think your loved ones are, placing scrutiny on the stores the scammers have chosen (especially as a journalist) is going to do little except to add purchasing restrictions for everyone. A 17-year-old minimum wage cashier isn't going to save your dad, it's the last place to look to combat these "psychological tactics."

<comment><USER19> There's a reason these scammers choose gift cards as their preferred way to get your money: gift cards have become the easiest way to move large amounts of money while minimizing the chances of getting caught.

Every other business that deals with the transfer of money (banks, for example) is expected to put strong measures in place to make sure that the money is traceable and that they're not helping criminals. Why shouldn't large companies like Target be held to a similar standard?

Moreover, the incentives here are very worrying. Yes this guy got scammed out of $3k, but Target also got $3k in revenue. Without some sort of penalty/punishment, Target is incentivized to do the bare minimum to minimize their PR exposure (which they can do by saying "we take this very seriously and have adopted some new policies" but not really acting on it) but to otherwise allow this to keep happening. As the prevalence of these gift card scams has skyrocketed, so have gift card sales for these large companies.

<comment><USER20> From what I understand, a retail store doesn't make any profit selling gift cards for other stores.

The Safeway in this story didn't make any money off of that $2k purchase of Target cards and it could've saved/boosted its reputation if it had some better protective measures in place. It also means that maybe people who would've spent money at Safeway now can't because they've lost several thousand dollars.

<comment><USER21> > From what I understand, a retail store doesn't make any profit selling gift > cards for other stores.

That seems dubious, considering they dedicate precious shelf and display space to selling them. Accounting can get crazy in the real world, but clearly they have a motive to move these things. The cards are on the shelf because the cards make money for the store, somehow.

<comment><USER22> I know that I have a lot of gift cards that go unused for months, or never used at all. Probably a lot of profit in interest on holding all the money and keeping anything not claimed after a few years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Anthony-G Excellent article – particularly for showing how powerful the limbic system is and how it can completely overwhelm the neocortex (logical, rational part of the brain) – a phenomenon referred to as _amygdala hijack_ [1]. The article shows anyone could fall victim to such a scam – not just those who are stupid and/or greedy. I was also struck by how the article detailed – in addition to the monetary loss – the longer-term emotional consequences of being deceived by scammers.

> My dad had received robocalls in the past and ignored them. But this one was > different: it was a real, authoritative person on the line who knew his full > name and address.

Earlier, the article reported that scammers get this personal information from data brokers and it struck me that this is a reason why people should care about privacy and who they trust with their personal data. This data could end up being used against them – or their loved ones.

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amygdala_hijack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amygdala_hijack)

<comment><USER23> > Earlier, the article reported that scammers get this personal information > from data brokers and it struck me that this is a reason why people should > care about privacy and who they trust with their personal data. This data > could end up being used against them – or their loved ones.

This is a key point worth mentioning in any "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" discussions about online tracking and the dangers of giving away private information to websites, big or small. Once the data is out there, it's available to any company with deep enough pockets to purchase it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> My 84 year old mother got a message from the State of New York saying she had unclaimed funds and should fill out a form to claim them. She quite reasonably assumed this was a scam and ignored it. A few months later she mentioned it, and my brother who was familiar with the actual process looked on the website, saw that she did have unclaimed funds, and he filled out the form. Turns out the initial message was completely legit. There was a brokerage account which had fallen through the cracks when her own mother had died, and she got a check for ~$20,000.

<comment><USER25> This ^^^ is a big part of the problem right here --- legitimate messages from government authorities are so totally non-credible that it makes the scammers' jobs super easy.

Same is true of banks and such. A few months ago, I got a mortgage, and I was totally blown away by how much profoundly suspicious shit that was actually legit happened. Like, I'd get calls from totally random new people from the mortgage company, no warning by anyone who I actually knew that this new person was calling, often from their personal cellphones---and it would turn out that the call was totally legit, and I actually was supposed to send more sensitive financial documents to this random new person. Totally bonkers.

<comment><USER26> I feel like some kind of PGP authentication system would be very useful for private government to citizen communications. It would require some training on users parts however.

<comment><USER27> The problem is that governments, banks etc. don't and can't credibly commit to doing the right thing. E.g. banks in my previous company are furious because just when they'd finally managed to convince most people to never open a link from a text message, the government sent out a text message with a link to a COVID-19 information page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This happened to my elderly neighbor last week. The scammers claimed to be from Apple, ran a fake script, did the whole jig and dance, and demanded immediate payment. She lost $8,000. These scammers are relentless and abusive. They're still harassing her even 1 week later.

I'm shocked that Target just simply allows people to purchase so much in gift cards all at once. I'm even more shocked that banks and transaction processors don't mark this as suspicious or fraudulent.

But this isn't just a function of irresponsible companies. The elderly are overwhelmed by technology, and it's too difficult to know what's real and what isn't. After the scam, my neighbor had a near panic attack when she received an innocuous Google security checkup email. How was she supposed to know it was authentic or not?

<comment><USER29> About the purchase of large amounts of gift cards; it's not as uncommon as you'd think. I worked at a grocery store customer service office and it wasn't uncommon to have people buy thousands of dollars in gift cards as giveaways or prizes for events. No questions asked, really. The store was very eager to pocket that money.

There should certainly be more checks and balances around that. Perhaps a personal limit, and requiring a registered business to be the purchaser above that. Or perhaps a redemption system.

But the incentive is not there for the stores. It's of course better to sell gift cards than the equal amount of merchandise for them

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> i said this once before and it bears repeating...

Ask HN: How do you protect your parents from tech scammers?

simple... they call me first.

if there is one thing i have _never_ done to my parents, or _anyone_ for that matter, is make fun of them if they call me and ask me for my professional opinion in tech matters. this has extended to situations when they think the situation is shoddy like they are being taken in a scam. i think _this_ is the single reason why my parents have never fell victim to scams. i feel that _most_ parents, or elderly people for that matter, fall victim cause they feel pressure from both ends... the first being the scammers themselves, the second being scared to ask _anyone_ if the situation is legit for fear of being made fun of.

_noone_ should feel scared of being ridicule when asking any question regarding their safety or well-being.

<comment><USER31> Yup. My sister too.

I had a text from her when I woke up the other day, she'd bought a new phone and now the company was asking weird questions.

I figure for sure it's a scam and I phoned her immediately. But I gradually realised it's actually not what I thought. I normally buy phones by just... buying a phone, like a cheeseburger or a T-shirt, cash or card. But she's got a new phone on contract, so that's a credit deal and the questions they're asking, though prying, are credit agency ID confirm questions. Where you've lived, photo of a passport, stuff like that. The firm seems legit, they're not new to the business, they have a relationship to a Credit Reference Agency that I've worked with before, so it's probably fine.

She seems reassured that I'd actually thought through why this might be OK, and so long as her new iPhone shows up in the next few days all is good, otherwise I guess I need to walk her through anti-fraud processes in case somebody got all that as precursor to taking out credit in her name.

With my mother I got a call from her one day because her PC was literally screaming. She'd clicked a link or visited a web site or something and now it was constantly loudly demanding she phone the scammers and give them money to "unlock" it. She'd had the peace of mind to instead walk into another room and call me. I talked her through switching it off, bringing it up in safe mode and forgetting the (hijacked) default page on the browser. Relatively simple scam, but I expect it's effective on too many people.

<comment><USER32> Non-scam related story, but my mother called me once panicked, saying the computer is on fire and she's worried it will burn. It took me some time to understand what she meant by the computer is on fire. I had Linux installed on her PC, I think Xubuntu, and it's running xscreensaver by default. xscreensaver logo looks like a computer on fire. My mother thought that she has to react quickly otherwise the PC will burn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I feel bad for the victims. It's almost always the elderly and they're relentlessly pursued over the phone. You basically have to remove their phones, or remove their capability to ruin their finances. I imagine that day is coming quite soon for my in-laws.

<comment><USER34> I agree. My friend got scammed with a variation of the gift card scam. The main difference in his case, fear was not exploited, but rather the search of an amazing deal ( $100 for a new ipad or something like that ).

I probed a little bit since I was curious how he perceived it and he effectively said the idea of getting a deal took the best of him.

<comment><USER35> At this point I just assume that any deal that looks too good to be true probably is.

There's been a few times where I've found out after the fact that the deal really was real, but I'd rather miss out on a good deal than get scammed.

<comment><USER36> All phone solicitation is scammy, I think the government should advertise that to old people.

<comment><USER35> For sure. I was mostly referring to online "deals" with my comment, but it definitely applies to phone solicitation, too.

I personally ignore almost any phone call from unknown numbers these days because so many are scammy or robocalls. I figure that if anyone really needs me, they'll leave a message.

<comment><USER36> I keep on getting robocalls from a Chinese scam for more than 1 to 2 years now. I don't understand Chinese but asked a friend to translate and it's obviously a scam aimed at older chinese expats. They always leave the same message. Im surprised it still works after all this time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is an experience my parents experience on a regular basis. Unfortunately, my father, who used to be very tech savvy - worked for Control Data for all of his career - is suffering from mild dementia and my mother doesn't know up from down on the computer. My father still loves to sit at his computer putzing around but too often gets sucked into some kind of infomercial / scam. As an additional example, we were recently charged over $1800 of overage fees when my dad kept backing up his entire harddrive to a cloud service not really knowing what he was doing.

It has gotten to the point where they really need me to assist them with all most everything related to managing their computers. Unfortunately I am 1000 miles away so we struggle on the phone to get things sorted out.

What recommendations do people have for being able to remotely manage windows machines. I am on windows 10 and they are still using w7. I'd like to be able to remote into their machine with admin rights so I can manage software, finances, etc.

thanks for any advice.

<comment><USER38> VNC. Put a server on their computer and through a VPN you can safely do and show them what you meant.

Or switch them to Linux. For browsing/mail it's perfect. And if they want to have Windows games then make a separate partition where they play there and cut access to internet for that Windows installation.

<comment><USER39> > Or switch them to Linux. For browsing/mail it's perfect.

My dad switched to Xubuntu a few years ago and has been singing praise of it ever since. It's a pretty straight forward desktop environment that isn't prone to frequent radical changes like some other DEs. I think it's an ideal DE for somebody with basic browsing/mail requirements.

<comment><USER40> Seconding this. Literally 99% of what many old people need to do with a computer can be accomplished with xubuntu/xfce desktop environment (which is now a traditionally comfortable GUI similar to windows 98/2000), and inside a browser like Firefox. Install ublock origin and a few other common sense plugins.

<comment><USER37> Thanks. This makes a lot of sense. Hopefully they will go for it. Next time I'm down in the Bay Area I will definitely try converting them and it sounds like it might be the best solution for me to be able to remotely assist with their computing needs. With the aging demographic in this country, I'd imagine there is some real opportunity for someone to create more tools to help those of us looking for solutions to help our parents navigate their safe computing / IT needs remotely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I noticed the last time I tried to buy a PSN gift card at CVS (which I do because I don't trust Sony to store my credit card information), the terminal actually flashed a warning about gift card scams.

It's sad that this has become so common as to actually need these kind of warnings. I understand if you're paying a ransomware threat and _know_ that the guy on the other end of the line is a scumbag, but, I can't imagine how someone gets fooled into thinking the FBI/IRS/other three-letter agency would accept iTunes gift cards as tender, much less demand it.

<comment><USER42> Tbf when you are sending a Western Union transfer, the form that you fill out has a very specific warning, in bold, saying that WU is commonly used for scams and to never ever send any money to someone you don't know. I imagine the effectiveness of these warnings is near zero.

<comment><USER40> Anecdotally the WU customer service agents (usually at third party check cashing/money service places that) are much, much less suspicious of questioning people on money transfers when the ethnic appearance of the person matches the destination. Since sending money to family members and friends is one of the most common uses of WU. For instance a person who looks south asian sending money to Pakistan. Or a person who looks Filipino sending money to some small town in Palawan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think a solution to this is for all the giftcards to add a delay of one week in order to cash in the points. This way the scammed would be able to get some money back once they realize it was a scam.

<comment><USER43> Or even 24 hours. It seems like a lot of people get off the phone and immediately realize they've been scammed.

...I'm curious about how many people however, are totally fooled by the scammer--everything is very realistic up to a point--but then get to the part about paying the IRS in...iTunes gift cards. "Like, what?...[click]". 90 percent? 10 percent? Maybe no one.

<comment><USER36> We are talking about seniors who get scammed here, it looks like it's not as obvious to them

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This seems like as good a place as any to discuss. What steps have you taken to protect your parents from these and other scams? I'm looking for both technological and non-technological ideas and any info on what has or hasn't worked.

<comment><USER45> I've told my parents and in-laws (mid 70s) two things (they're cognitively with-it as far as mid-70s people go, I don't know what advice would work for people who are losing their mental faculties). The things I told them are:

1) Gift card = scam. Always, 100% of the time. No government agency and no legitimate company will ask for payment via gift cards, ever. My in-laws nearly got scammed by "Apple support" calling to say their router had been hacked and was being used for illegal activity and that they needed to pay using iTunes gift cards to have "Apple support" "clean out their router".

2) Nothing is immediately urgent. Unless someone is dying in front of you, the problem can be solved later. Banks, government bureaucracies, lawsuits, etc all work via snail mail and lawyers and paperwork, not by calling you up and telling you you're going to jail and are going to lose all your money unless you do something immediately.

<comment><USER46> This is great, and I'll add:

3) Never, ever, ever tell anyone anything if they contacted you. If it's the bank calling, or the government, or insurance, or the power company, or anyone else, say "Thanks, I'll call you back". Hang up the phone, wait an hour then find the phone number yourself (look on your bank card or whatever) and initiate contact with the company.

Same goes for emails. DON'T click links in emails. Delete the email. Wait an hour or two then research the phone number to call and initiate contact.

I will never even have a phone conversation with someone that called me (other than friends, of course)

<comment><USER47> You could just use thunderbird as your email client and don't click the links in the emails. No 2 hour wait required.

Unless you are in England I don't believe they can hold up your line for minutes after you hang up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Target was too lazy to check all the gift cards to see if they were redeemed when he called them. 4 out of 6 weren't. That's outrageous. Target should be on the hook for any unredeemed cards from the time he called to report the scam.

BTW: I recommend Maria Konnikova's book "The Confidence Game"

[https://www.amazon.com/Confidence-Game-Fall-Every- Time/dp/01...](https://www.amazon.com/Confidence-Game-Fall-Every- Time/dp/0143109871)

</comment><comment><USER48> My friend's 68 year old mother lost $118,000 to a similar scam: [https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/local/consumer-alert- ocean...](https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/local/consumer-alert-oceanside- woman-loses-119k-in-gift-card-scam/509-7478ed04-28c6-44a1-9488-adaed158e646)

Fortunately, her daughter was able to recoup the funds from the banks.

<comment><USER49> Unreal. What is the thought process through which one thinks it is perfectly fine and reasonable to buy 6 figures in gift cards from a department store.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Retail stores make tons of money on gift cards - specifically, when people don't use the balance or lose them. See [https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/10/3-billion-of-gift-cards- go-u...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/10/3-billion-of-gift-cards-go-unused- each-year-dont-let-them-go-to-waste.html). It's like the stores are essentially minting their own money at this point. They have zero incentive to put "checks and balances" in place, unless they start losing money on it from some king of federal penalties tied to cases like the one in the article.

</comment><comment><USER51> Whether you're dealing with actual law enforcement or someone pretending, the procedure is the same: Say nothing, tell your lawyer and wait patiently to be arrested. Assuming it's real, it's the action of a court, and court proceedings are routine, slow, procedural, and consist of paperwork. And somebody has to show up physically with a warrant. For chrissakes, make them work a little for it. If they can cow you without even getting up from their chair, you're making it too easy. This just happens to deflect scammers too.

</comment><comment><USER52> What kinds of people are running these scams? Are they just normal Indians that think they are playing "Robin Hood" with the rich Americans? I would like to see "a day in the life of an Indian scammer"... are these scammers poor and/or desperate? Are they desensitized psychopaths? Are they mainly teenagers who think it is a game? Are they adults who are fully aware of how criminal their acts are?

<comment><USER53> There's a great episode of the podcast "Reply All" which digs into some of these questions: [https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply- all/6nh3wk/](https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/6nh3wk/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> After an aunt of mine got scammed just like this, but to a lower tune of money, I got so sick of this happening to vulnerable people. I went ahead and made an app and put it on her phone.

The other apps and services out there operate on a blacklist model. They block calls they know to be bad. My app turns that around and operates on a whitelist model.

That being said, I had to help my aunt out some in getting it working, but now I am confident that she won't be scammed again.

Despite all the normal warnings we give our elders, in the heat of the moment, the scammers know how to take advantage of them. The best thing is to not allow them to ring their phone.

If anyone cares, my app is in the app stores, and available 100% free for basic usage.

[https://apps.apple.com/us/app/robostopper-block-spam- calls/i...](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/robostopper-block-spam- calls/id1468855457)

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.codeheadla...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.codeheadlabs.robostopper)

<comment><USER55> I know on iOS you can just block any calls from contacts that are not in your list. It's pretty easy. My phone just won't ring. They'll be sent to voice mail instead. In my voice mail greeting, it says that I won't listen to the voice mail, and if they're trying to get in touch with me, hang up and text me.

<comment><USER54> Yeah, that is great that iOS did that! They released that last summer I think.

There are times that you do want anyone to call you, or you don't even want unknown callers to leave a voicemail.

My friend's mother would freak out with every little thing always, including the voicemails from robotic voices saying their SSN will be invalid unless they call back at some weird number.

So my friend got the app on her mother's phone and set it to the strictest mode, and her mom hasn't freaked out anymore. This only works because she uses her phone for talking with family members and a few doctor offices.

<comment><USER55> My mom is the same way, she has really bad anxiety and things just really bother her or she obsesses over them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> How about not redeeming gift cards for 24 hours?

Basically gift cards are unspendable the same day they are purchased, giving people q day to cancel.

I would think most legitimate gift cards are not spent the same day they are purchased.

<comment><USER25> this seems like a very sensible idea, and easy to implement via legislation--- make the companies liable for all losses if they violate

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Dad got taken for $300 from the fake "Microsoft Support" people. And then had to pay a local firm to fix & remove all the stuff they changed when he allowed them remote access.

He was a smart man. But as he got older he would lose patience with websites and just click on anything .. ANYTHING to get the popups to go away. Which had the inevitable result.

This is despite me telling him not to do that. And if his computer started acting up, just mail it to me and I'd reload it for him. But he didn't want to "be a bother" and his pride meant he would refuse to admit to himself that he had been taken.

Talk to your parents, be patient and explain it's not a bother, that everyone eventually gets affected by the scammers. And that you're more than willing to help them.

</comment><comment><USER58> I feel like it would help a lot to require cashiers or gift cards give warnings, something like, "gift cards should be bought for people you know and not as payment." Sort of like the "Don't drink and drive" at liquor stores.

There are no legitimate businesses that take gift card payments. Even trading/buying gift cards locally is risky because one could take a picture of the gift card and use the code before the buyer.

<comment><USER59> _I feel like it would help a lot to require cashiers or gift cards give warnings, something like, "gift cards should be bought for people you know and not as payment."_

Apple does this at its stores. I bought a gift card there just before the pandemic, and the clerk read me disclaimer text about scammers and gift cards, and then I had to sign the statement on his iPhone before I could pay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Psychology aside, I find it really difficult to understand how someone rationalizes to themselves the idea that some government official calling them wants gift cards to pay their fine, or restitution, or any other legitimate payment. I mean, I wish I could pay my taxes in gift cards---you can often buy them at a discount!

Maybe they convince themselves that the supposed law enforcement officer is actually asking for a bribe?

<comment><USER60> For many immigrants, it seems quite probable that they came from countries where bribery is totally normal every day behavior, so it is plausible that it might not be much of a stretch for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> [https://egbg.home.xs4all.nl/counterscript.html](https://egbg.home.xs4all.nl/counterscript.html) has a decent resource on how to handle these kinds of calls (if you choose to engage at all). One should really have a printout ready to use at all times.

</comment><comment><USER24> When I read about these scams, I always wonder how do the scammers justify this to themselves? I can't believe there are that many true sociopaths completely lacking in empathy. And I believe no one is the bad guy in their own narrative. Do they convince themselves that they're not really harming "rich people who don't need all that money" or that their own situations are so extreme that they "need" to steal for their own survival. Or they just don't think of stealing as an act with any moral weight.

Or possibly I just have too sanguine view of humanity.

<comment><USER15> > I always wonder how do the scammers justify this to themselves

Scammers rarely work alone.

For most, it's just a job. One that pays decently well. In most cases the companies(yes, companies) involved maintain the appearances of a normal call center, with sales targets and everything.

One such scam company was even providing Japanese language training, so they could target a market that's less disputed.

<comment><USER62> Indeed, and commission sales is a heck of a drug. If you need money, and a company is paying you to sell people a product... you may find yourself selling products you don't really believe in in a call center, where you know the person buying isn't really getting a good deal. Only a tiny step further to actively trying to take their money for a nice bump in your commission check.

Add that your scam call center employee might have family to feed, and suddenly scamming the rich senior's retirement fund seems like a minor transgression...

<comment><USER15> You do have to have a skewed moral compass – to the point that they will continue the scam even if the learn the victim has disabilities.

But not as skewed as the ones running the whole operation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> I could see myself falling for something like this up to the point I was asked to buy gift cards. I feel like that would set off all the BS detectors in my head.

I rarely answer my phone if it's a number I don't know (if it's important it will come in the mail or they will leave a message) and always call back a number I lookup online to handle things like CC Fraud calls.

I'm not trying to pretend the manipulation isn't effective or say this person should have seen through the scam but I just cant see myself buying gift cards and reading them out over the phone to a "government agent" no matter how much info they had on me.

I would love to listen to a successful scam phone call (not one where the person being scammed is trolling them but a real case of getting scammed) to better understand this.

</comment><comment><USER64> I know it is difficult for older/elderly/less tech savvy people but we have to keep trying to educate whoever we can.

First, if someone asks you to make ANY payment through Gift cards, assume it is a scam and move on. Hang up. Even if tehy are claiming that you son/daughter just had an accident or was arrested.

If you do get someone to tell you that your family member is arrested/in an accident and needs immediately help, tell them to txt you the address of where they are and you will take care of the rest. Hang up then.

The Govt. never calls and asks for money on phone. They do call sometimes but will always send paper mail when it comes to money matters.

If you are not sure, hang up and call back yourself after checking the legit number online through the main website. Never call a number that is from your voicemail etc.

</comment><comment><USER65> Just like the post office asks if your package contains anything hazardous, and the liquor store asks to see ID, you shouldn't be able to buy a gift card without being asked, "Did someone you've never met tell you to do this?"

</comment><comment><USER66> My question is how was he even able to do spend that much in one day? did he spread it out over several accounts or something? Or did he pay cash he had under his mattresses?

I have all my accounts locked down to a reasonable daily spending limit (far lower than $3,000) , if I have a large expense then I have to call my credit union or credit card company to to a temporarily increase on that spending limit.

Also why do people still answer unknown numbers. I NEVER answer a number that is not in my phone already. If I don't know you, you can leave a message and I might call you back maybe (unlikely)

</comment><comment><USER55> I'm a big fan of kitboga, he's got a twitch and youtube channel. The scammers constantly ask for gift cards. It's amazing to listen to, especially when you think about the vulnerable segments of our population who fall for these scams.

There's websites where you can buy "used" gift cards and I wonder how many of these are cards from scammers that are now turning them over for cash.

</comment><comment><USER67> I want to the script on how to convince a rational thinking person that paying the government in Target gift cards is a thing. That's nuts.

<comment><USER68> Its not that people are dumb, they usually target the elderly. Senility is a real thing that can happen to anyone no matter how smart they were when they were young.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> If you're in the mood to watch something pretty sad, check this out: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1Bu034pGdc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1Bu034pGdc) \- This group goes around scam busting, in this instance they end up at the house of an old lady who has been scammed, it's pretty crazy.

</comment><comment><USER70> People want to believe.

I got a voice mail from the IRS literally days after I got a letter from them. It was hard not to panic, and google the number.. Then

I get chinese phone scam voicemails all the time. Its clever because I can't understand them, but if I was a Chinese speaker, it would seem like it was for me.

I like to think I'm savy, but these tales serve as a cautionary guide..

<comment><USER71> My solution is to never answer or listen to voicemails from unknown numbers.

The system works, except when my kids are at school and my paranoia makes me assume every call is about them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Seems like the FTC or some other government agency could save a lot of people a lot of heartache with a PSA targeted at elderly people. Commercials during daytime TV basically saying no one will ever legitimately call you and ask you to buy gift cards as a method of payment.

</comment><comment><USER73> > My dad is not a gullible man

I don't think you get to say that anymore. It is hard to judge the people we know correctly, but of the many steps, thinking the government would want payment immediately in gift cards must be the biggest gullible jump.

<comment><USER74> > thinking the government would want payment immediately in gift cards

But this is not what happened.

<comment><USER73> > According to Grubbs, there was only one way out: my dad had to convert the > money to "government certified gift vouchers," or gift cards.

Yes it is.

<comment><USER74> My understanding is that the father was paying off a corrupt individual agent, not making payment to any government agency.

<comment><USER75> Isn't that just as ridiculous of a notion? A DEA agent shaking down an identify theft victim for Target gift cards, calling from a government phone? It's a hell of a yarn, no matter how you read it.

<comment><USER76> No? You're saying that someone shouldn't have believed that one kind of scam was happening, because only the _other_ kind of scam is real. That's a _much_ more subtle distinction than just "payment in gift cards is a scam". It also doesn't seem like a thing that can really be supported with definitive evidence or authoritative decree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The font on the sign warning about gift card scams seems pretty small. Given that most of the targets of these sort of scams are people who likely need reading glasses, these signs and the font should be bigger.

<comment><USER77> I know some stores also put the warnings on the credit card machine you got to accept too. I know CVS does this, not sure others but people probably just tap away. I think they do that even if paying with cash, not sure...

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't understand how someone could believe a federal agent wanted to be paid in target gift cards. Why would any official, for any reason, request gift cards as payment?

Cognitive decline must surely play a role here.

</comment><comment><USER78> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CsEuJNSnh8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CsEuJNSnh8)

This is a nice and simple scammer-time-waster script.

</comment><comment><USER79> Support people like Jim Browning who identified and goes after scammers, and Kitboga who, although more show, eats there time and does there tactics.

</comment><comment><USER80> What still escapes me, even after reading the article:

What dots do you need to connect to feel it is totally neccessary to buy gift- cards for the FBI?

</comment><comment><USER81> Was rudely interupted half-way through the article. Shame i wasnt allowed to finish reading it due to overlays upon overlays.

</comment><comment><USER82> "My dad is not a gullible man" -yes he is. who would think a law enforcement agency would want target gift cards?

</comment><comment><USER83> Why don't we just ban gift cards? They're a scam by themselves, anyway.

</comment><comment><USER84> Someone called me this morning impersonating the financial investigations unit of the 'Bank of Canada'. Literally. I hung up immediately and called back, it was a spoofed number.

We need better controls over calling, source numbers etc..

<comment><USER85> Don't call back. Sometimes it's _not_ a spoofed number – and if it's the scammers' _actual_ number, you're calling back the scammers. Look up the number online (preferably after a 1–2 hour wait, because sometimes they can keep your phone connected after you hang up, so new calls just go straight to them).

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> Greet post, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER87> Happened to me twice in the past couple of weeks (minus the "being scammed" part). Once claiming to be from the CRA (Canadian's IRS), and once obvious fake impersonating the IRS on a text app. In both case, the initial message was a text-to-speech intro which claim to be followed up to an "agent"... I guess to filter out the large amount of people hanging the call.

</comment><comment><USER88> Shout-out to scambaiters like Kitboga, ScammerRevolts, Jim Browning and Lewis's Tech. you can find their videos on YouTube. jim browning recently closed down one of the scam call centers with the help of Karl Rock (popular vloger in India) and ofc Indian police. they also arrested the owner.

</comment><comment><USER89> These people are from India who say they are from IRS and usually target seniors.

</comment><comment><USER90> Shoot the scammers

</comment><comment><USER91> Leveraging these sorts of "I or someone in proximity to me did something dumb" stories into clicks/likes/virtue points just rubs me the wrong way. If I want to hear about how your grandma got phone scammed by Nigerian princes or how your coworker fell off a ladder because he neglected to follow safety proceure I want to hear it from someone with relevant professional experience and qualifications on the matter, not some internet rando who's looking to pimp out others misfortune for clicks. IMO that just adds insult to injury.

And since I know this is an unwelcome opinion here would anyone care to tell me why I'm so wrong or why they disagree?</comment>


China Mobile and Apple Bring iPhone to China Mobile's 4G & 3G Networks - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/12/22China-Mobile-Apple-Bring-iPhone-to-China-Mobiles-4G-3G-Networks-on-January-17-2014.html

<comment><USER2> Here's the most important sentence:

        China Mobile is the world's largest mobile
        services provider by network scale and
        subscriber base, serving over 760 million
        customers.

The NYT has some more context, too: [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/23/technology/apple-and- china...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/23/technology/apple-and-china-mobile- sign-iphone-deal.html)

<comment><USER3> ... and like 80% of its subscribers are GPRS or EDGE users.

<comment><USER4> If that's true, the remaining 20% is about as large as half the US population.

<comment><USER3> For the remaining 3G users, 80% are likely TD-SCDMA disguised as land line telephones.

It's a Chinese thing, where you pay for a "fixed line" telephone set, but no need for actual wires to your home. Communication were done via wireless TD- SCDMA.

<comment><USER5> > via wireless TD-SCDMA.

Or EDGE.

Actually there are two or three such phones in my office.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Slightly off topic but this line made me chuckle:

        iPhone 5s, the most forward-thinking smartphone in the world
        and iPhone 5c, the most colorful iPhone yet

I guess that's a PR problem you have to deal with when you release the best of your efforts alongside a lower cost version!

<comment><USER7> When I bought a new car a while ago, my mom asked what color it was (black) and my dad asked what kind it was (g37). Some people don't really care how fast it is if its pretty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if this was timed precisely so they could meet demand in the rest of the world for Christmas. With that rush obviously ending on Christmas day, they start taking orders for China Mobile on that day.

<comment><USER9> Or maybe it has more to do with Chinese New Year then with Western holidays.

<comment><USER8> Quite possible. I am not well versed in Chinese holidays, but from an American perspective the timing implies they wanted to meet Christmas demand before adding in such a large market. Thanks for your perspective though, I guess I have a little learning to do.

<comment><USER10> Christmas has been adopted in China as one of the country's largest retail holidays (obviously with no religious affiliation), so I'm sure demand for the iPhone is very strong during Christmas in China as well. It seems likely that the timing is designed around CNY but w/ the new Chinese consumerism, demand is likely very strong throughout the year.

<comment><USER11> This is clearly timed for CNY, like the iPhone 4 release was. January is China's largest retail season as there is a lot of gift buying for the early February golden week when everyone goes back to see their family.

But go to the Apple store any night and its extremely crowded. Its like IKEA but a lot more packed since the space is much smaller.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One tiny problem with this is that there is no 4G service is currently available in china. China mobile also does not run a standard 3G network they run a proprietary 3G network standard that only chinese phones made for their network can run on, it looks like the 4G is going to be proprietary also, 4G/TD-LTE and 3G/TD-SCDMA. I dont know how they are going to be ready to have 3G and 4G ready for the iphone by the end of this year. So this means those iphones to be sold by china mobile will be using the proprietary 3g and 4g standard that cant be used outside of china. Many customers who travel will be very upset when they realize their iphone data network wont work outside of china

<comment><USER13> Both TD-SCDMA and TD-LTE are standardised by 3GPP, just like WCDMA and FD-LTE. So they are not proprietary standards.

<comment><USER11> TD-SCDMA are incredibly unstable technologies, or China mobile has implemented them poorly; I'll take 3G on China Unicom anyday over CMCC's 3G.

The problem with these home grown "standards" is that no one else uses them and they never get the international support they need to become stable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Mobile phone numbers cannot be ported from one mobile network in China to another.* Therefore, people are extremely reluctant to switch networks. Otherwise Apple fans would have all switched to China Unicom long ago.

Several of my friends use iPhones on China Mobile. They don't get 3G data speeds because China Mobile uses a different 3G standard, supported only by specific handsets. There are lots of Android-based choices.

* except for some very limited trials, none of which have been in tier 1 cities AFAIK

<comment><USER15> Related question: In China, how annoying is it to switch numbers?

In America, nearly everything I have is linked to my email address, not phone number. I recently had to change phone numbers and it was a quick task -- just emailed all my friends & family I had a new number and that was that. (changing emails, on the other-hand, would be extremely time-consuming)

Are things not so email-linked in China? (I've noticed that a lot of services there, (even free wifi!!) are connected to mobile numbers, not email address).

<comment><USER14> It's really annoying, for the reasons you mentioned.

Apart from banks and online shopping sites, many offline loyalty programs (restaurants, massage, beauty ...) use mobile number as a unique identifier.

Having said that, I've noticed over the last few months that people I meet are more likely to request/offer a WeChat (威信) username than a phone number. Businesses are embracing WeChat for marketing-related activity, but I don't yet see any indication that WeChat will become the primary mechanism for transactional notices.

<comment><USER15> Thanks.

BTW, the Hanzi are 微信 :)

<comment><USER14> Oops. Too late to edit now :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wonder what the structure of that deal is? China mobile held out this long so they wanted something or we're not willing to give up what Apple asked for.

<comment><USER11> Or vice versa. Unicom was killing China Mobile at the high end since it had iPhone and China mobile didn't. Even China Telecom had iPhone for crying out loud!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Could this announcement have had any influence on the allegations about evasi0n's decision to "rush their jailbreak" or however you read that drama [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6951647](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6951647)

<comment><USER18> Seems unlikely, given it's been brewing for months (years?). China Mobile had already started selling iPhones a few weeks ago, with in store displays. Far more likely that someone was about to leak the jailbreak without the stuff they were (allegedly) paid to add, which would completely devalue/derail their own deal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> ...and any apps that government doesn't like will be cens^h^h^h^hbanned.

<comment><USER20> Could you name some apps in the US apple store that the US government would care about banning?

<comment><USER21> "The New York Times"</comment></comment></comment>


WikiLeaks published rape victims' names, credit cards, medical data - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/new-report-highlights-wikileaks-publication-of-private-info/ <comment><USER2> Of course they did.

WikiLeaks is done. Instead of being a transparency organization they now have an agenda, which means nothing they put out can be trusted.

I'm ashamed to have donated to WikiLeaks in the past.</comment>


Inside One of America's Last Pencil Factories - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/magazine/inside-one-of-americas-last-pencil-factories.html <comment><USER2> One really charming bit: They make one color of pastel pencils each week to keep the colors from cross contaminating. Maria, who works on the pastel pencil line, does her nails to match the color they will be making and picks shirts to match too. There's a picture of her hands and that week's pastel extrusions in the article.

</comment><comment><USER3> My daughter just quoted this Spike Milligan poem to me last night :

      "Said Hamlet to Ophelia,
      I'll draw a sketch of thee.
      What kind of pencil shall I use?
      2B or not 2B?"

</comment><comment><USER4> I couldn't help but think of the wonderful essay "I, Pencil" [1], and how no one person knows how to make a pencil.

[1]: [http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html](http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html)

<comment><USER5> that's a nicely written story but none of it is really true. You can make a straightforward pencil manually with a little effort. It's all documented, because this stuff was figured out and documented hundreds of years ago. Having a degree in chemistry or physics helps, but it's not necessary.

<comment><USER6> _> You can make a straightforward pencil manually_

You're inadvertently moving the goal posts. A "straightforward pencil" isn't what that 1958 essay is about. It's talking about the modern manufactured pencils[1] commonly used in schools.

It's very unlikely that a single person on Earth knows how to make such pencils from raw materials. The person who knows where to find graphite and how to mine for it will not be the same person who knows how to formulate the paint. Neither of them knows how to chop down raw trees and make small hexagon shaped tubes to hold the pencil lead. Then there's the steel or brass ring coupling the eraser to the the wood. There's also the chemistry and materials science to make the synthetic rubber for the eraser. No single person on the planet knows how to make that type of pencil.

[1] [https://www.google.com/search?q=no+2+school+pencil&source=ln...](https://www.google.com/search?q=no+2+school+pencil&source=lnms&tbm=isch)

<comment><USER5> I take a very different view (similar to the guy who made a toaster from materials mined from the earth): as a maker, with a PhD in biophysics, I can learn how to do all those things and, through an incredibly tedious process, reproduce what they've done. For pencils, that's pretty easy. Graphite mining, paint formulation, wood sourcing and processing, ferrule production and application, rubber polymer manufacture and application- those are all straightforward industrial things that a well-educated person can learn to do with a combination of the Internet and a good university library.

A much harder thing woudl be to reproduce a modern quantum physics lab- I don't think any one person could master all the techniques required to do that from raw materials. Too much tech stack to walk u.

<comment><USER6> _> I take a very different view (similar to the guy who made a toaster from materials mined from the earth)_

Sure, you _can_ take a different view but that doesn't change the truth of the essay. Citing an experimental toaster is repeating the same mischaracterization in your previous comment. The essay is not about making "any usable pencil" or "any toaster".

It seems like you want the _" I, Pencil"_ essay to be something other than what it is. You want a MacGyver[1] themed essay but instead, got an unwanted essay about the cooperation required to make a simple _manufactured_ object.

 _> I can learn [...] a well-educated person can learn [...]_

The essay isn't about what a single person can _learn_. Instead, it highlights the counterintuitive point that no single person with the complete knowledge _exists_.

 _> A much harder thing woudl be to reproduce a modern quantum physics lab_

Yes, things like silicon computer chips, communications satellites orbiting Earth, and particle accelerators are much harder but it misses the poetry of the essay. We already have intuitive sense that no single person knows how to build advanced technology projects. The author deliberately chose something that looked deceptively "simple" and dissected how much coordination in society it takes to make it. The "hidden" complexity is high enough to exceed the knowledge of a single person.

Take just the wood of the pencil. I'd have to chop trees. I don't even know how to make an ax tool to chop the tree. Sure, I guess I could learn how to make an ax -- which means I guess I could learn how to smelt steel... which means I have to learn... and so on. The groove channel in the wood to hold the lead?!? Another series of rabbit holes of learning to manufacture that cut. Glue? Again, the learning is not impossible (given enough time). It still doesn't change the fact that no single person knows it all. I suppose I could make _a_ thing that people might call a "a pencil" in a few days... but to replicate _that_ specific "Number 2 hexagon painted pencil with a synthetic rubber eraser"?!? That would take me a lifetime of learning. Most of the learning time is spent learning how to reinvent tools that make other tools that are several steps removed from the final assembly of the pencil.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGyver#Plot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGyver#Plot)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great photographs: it's really difficult to make a good photo of a black subject against a black background. The first three images in the photo essay ---in particular the third---show that, with skill, it can be done.

<comment><USER8> Most of this comes down to putting the camera on a tripod, then using a button that keeps the shutter open for a long period of time. Drop the ISO way down and then hold it open for 0.5s. Features like that aren't really available in smartphone form, and it felt like a loss.

Lighting is just as important, of course, but you can achieve some interesting effects just by giving light more time to enter a physically stable camera.

EDIT: I changed my mind. If you look at the photos carefully, you can see most of the effect is from a fill light behind the camera. If that light source doesn't exist, no amount of holding the shutter open will make it seem like it does.

<comment><USER9> > If you look at the photos carefully, you can see most of the effect is from > a fill light behind the camera.

Yeah, I was going to say what's really going on here is the photographer has a nice big soft box behind the camera (or maybe even just a diffuser on an on- camera flash). That way all of the flat surfaces facing the camera show pleasant highlights and then the dark areas define the edges of those.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Ferrules — the metal bands that cinch around the bases of erasers — are > loaded onto a conveyor and sent to a tipping machine.

I always wondered what these were called.

<comment><USER11> Just to give you another use for the word:

The metal bit that holds paintbrush bristles to the handle holds the same name.

<comment><USER12> Um, that's not "another use for the word" : it is in fact the exact same use as all the other examples. Perhaps you meant "another place where a ferrule is used".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's weird, just mentioning non-mechanical pencils brings me back to how coveted Dixon Ticonderoga pencils were when I was in grade school. The Crayola of pencils, standing out in a sea of Roseart.

<comment><USER3> On a slightly different note - does anyone have any suggestions for a good pencil _sharpener_?

The screwed-into-a-tabletop ones we used to have at school in the 80's and 90's were great, with the crank and rotating blades. Was easy to make razor- sharp pencil points.

At home, with my kids, we only have those common cheapo sharpeners with a single angled razor blade. They sort-of work, poorly.

With those it's too easy for the pencil point to break off, often the planed curl of wood will snap at the boundary between the two wooden halves of the pencil. It's not smooth, and very hard to get a nice sharp point with them.

<comment><USER14> > _The screwed-into-a-tabletop ones we used to have at school in the 80's and > 90's were great, with the crank and rotating blades. Was easy to make razor- > sharp pencil points._

Then get one of those?

X-ACTO KS Manual Pencil Sharpener: [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00006IEDY/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_zPGw...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00006IEDY/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_zPGwAbBA2SXPX)

$7.91.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ezequiel-garzon Dear native English speakers: Does the following excerpt make sense to you? "Packing graphite, which is the consistency of sand, ..." I would have expected "which _has_ the consistency of sand". Thanks!

<comment><USER15> This native speaker thinks you have a point. The "consistency" is a property possessed by the graphite, thus "has". The "is" suggests that graphite is to be directly equated with consistency.

Comparatives are always tricky in English, but consider:

"Ball bearings, which have the smoothness of plate glass, ..."

You would not put "are" for "have" in the above. You can generate a lot of similar examples.

<comment><USER16> I agree with your smoothness example, but with consistency both "has" and "is" are common. Usage seems to vary by specific object and context.

One example where almost all authors go with "is": there are thousands of recipes saying to heat butter until it "is" a particular consistency, versus only a handful saying to heat it until it "has" a particular consistency. Compare [https://www.google.com/search?q=%22until+the+butter+is+the+c...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22until+the+butter+is+the+consistency%22) vs. [https://www.google.com/search?q=%22until+the+butter+has+the+...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22until+the+butter+has+the+consistency%22).

<comment><USER15> Nice examples. It would take more of a grammar nut than I am (and I read Garner's book cover to cover) to untangle it. I'm not able to detect any relevant search terms, either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is there any real use for high quality wooden pencils beyond nostalgia? A leadholder (a.k.a. clutch pencil) gives you the same flexibility and control with more consistent balance as you sharpen it. Cheap wooden pencils still have some use because they're the cheapest erasable writing implement, but the cost is unlikely to be competitive if they're made in America.

<comment><USER18> Not really. I don't know anyone who use clutch pencil so I am not sure how it compared to wooden /mechanical pencils. Regardless, pen seems more dominant now in school.

I was born in the early 90s, so both wooden pencils and mechanical pencils meant a lot to me. I still have two pencil lead left in my right palm because I accidentally stabbed my hands when I was a kid - pretty sure most of us who have used pencils regularly back then had experienced this.

Eraser was also a big deal to me and my classmates. I owned regular plain erasers, fruit-flavor erasers, and animal-shape erasers before. But I preferred the slightly expensive Japanese brand called "Sakurafoam eraser" [1].

I am not sure when our future generations will stop writing by hand completely, but eventually pen and pencil will see the fate as scribe and Chinese brush pen which are uncommon now.

[1]: [https://imgur.com/a/g30c9](https://imgur.com/a/g30c9)

<comment><USER19> ... did you say fruit _flavoured_ eraser???

<comment><USER2> Fruit _scented_ anyway. You weren't really supposed to eat them, although I can't speak for GP. (I used to eat match heads when I was a kid, so I can hardly criticize anyone's eating habits.)

You can still get them, for example the Lil Juicies:

[https://www.ooly.com/lil-juicies-fruit-scented-erasers- set-o...](https://www.ooly.com/lil-juicies-fruit-scented-erasers-set-of-6/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For anyone interested in rekindling a passion for pencils, I would highly recommend checking out the Erasable podcast [0]. A podcast about pencils sounds impossibly dull but somehow it works.

[0]: [http://www.erasable.us/](http://www.erasable.us/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Totally fascinating. Reminds me of this NYT piece about an artisanal pencil shop: [https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/05/21/fashion/a-pencil- shop-...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/05/21/fashion/a-pencil-shop-for- texting-the-old-fashioned-way.html)

<comment><USER22> Damn, now I want that IBM pencil!

[https://i.imgur.com/BFUL4I6.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/BFUL4I6.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Too funny, this article was written by Sam Anderson, the comedy partner of David Rees, author of How to Sharpen Pencils, [http://www.artisanalpencilsharpening.com/](http://www.artisanalpencilsharpening.com/).

</comment><comment><USER24> > Pastel extrusions, used for colored pencils, are laid by hand onto grooved > wooden boards, where they will dry before being placed in pencil slats.

It blows my mind that they do this manually... I wonder how often, if at all, they update their production line.

</comment><comment><USER25> As soon as I remembered pencils had graphite in them (duh) I was reminded of this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YBwDNfOaxU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YBwDNfOaxU)

</comment><comment><USER26> Those photos are absolutely gorgeous. If anyone's hoping for TLDR, the article is mostly incredible photos: go take a look.

</comment><comment><USER27> If you ever wondered how to sharpen a pencil?

[https://www.mhpbooks.com/books/how-to-sharpen- pencils/](https://www.mhpbooks.com/books/how-to-sharpen-pencils/)

<comment><USER23> The author of the article and this book write and perform comedy together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I am intrigued that they are made of cedar. I thought pencils were made of tulipwood which is poplar. Maybe just in Europe. I wonder what kind of cedar, guessing it's western red cedar?

</comment><comment><USER29> I bought 2 packs of their cedar pencils. Very nice quality pencil that don't disintergrate in your sharpener.

</comment><comment><USER30> What will happen to pen plotters and other cool geekery once all pencils are gone ?!</comment>