Google is irresponsible, claims Fortnite's chief in bug row - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-45320672 <comment><USER2> Just to further underline why Google is a dick here: this is the issue tracking the vuln [https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/112630336](https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/112630336)

Timeline:

      8/15/2018: Google reports issue to Epic
      8/15/2018: Epic begins investigating
      8/15/2018: Epic confirms bug and begins working on fix
      8/16/2018: Epic is testing the fix
      8/16/2018: Epic begins deploying fix
      8/16/2018: Epic asks for full 90-day period to deploy and test the fix

      8/24/2018: Google finally replies: "now the patched version of Fortnite Installer has been available for 7 days we will proceed to unrestrict this issue in line with Google's standard disclosure practices"

They literally waited until the last minute to go, no, sorry, we're not waiting, it's full-disclosure time, :trollface:

Epic noted in the article that the game won't auto-update until the user runs it. So they clearly would have needed to inform users that didn't play regularly to get the update. However, _Epic could have notified its own users when they were ready,_ rather than Google outing them by default.

If Google had replied, like, 7 days earlier, and said "sorry we're not waiting", maybe Epic could have made different decisions, knowing they wouldn't get the time they requested. It's clear that Epic worked their asses off to churn out a patch. They could have announced within that time if this was properly coordinated.

Whether this was just Google being indifferent to a company's reputation, or an active attempt to penalize Epic for not forking over 30% of their revenue, is left up to the reader. But Google acting in the interest of users is not a defense here, because Google just ignored Epic and then fulldisc'd.

<comment><USER3> No, they didn't wait until the last minute. Read their description, it is the last two lines, they did warn Epic.

Here, I'll quote it for you:

> [NOTE: This bug is subject to a 90-day disclosure deadline. After 90 days > elapse or a patch has been made broadly available, the bug report - > including any comments and attachments - will become visible to the public.]

Google waited a full week after the patch has been made available then they disclosed it.

<comment><USER2> _" After 90 days elapse or a patch has been made broadly available"_

This incentivizes companies not to announce their patches, not to coordinate with Google, and to only update in secret, because as soon as they tell Google they have a patch, the clock runs down in 7 days, rather than 90. This is a dangerous policy.

<comment><USER3> No, it isn't.

Anyone can break apart the patch and figure out what was changed, meaning they can figure out the security issue and take advantage of it. At this point, both Epic and Google are at fault for not disclosing the details and warning people to update right away.

<comment><USER2> Epic is at fault, maybe, for not e-mailing Google every single day asking that they coordinate the announcement better. Google is at fault for not responding for 7 days and then disclosing, and is at fault for having a policy that makes announcing patches dangerous.

If you think people should be warned right away, Epic should have the right to notify its own users, and Google should have the basic decency to reply to a request to coordinate.

<comment><USER3> Nope, Google is not obligated to reply at all nor do they have any obligation to hold on these announcements. There are no faults for Google here. Their 90-day policy is just a courtesy call that comes with an exception, the moment a patch is made available, the disclosure will be made public. Google is not being paid nor asked by Epic to find reports, Epic has no rights to anything.

Google found the bug, they have the right to disclose it however they want. There are no legal standards anywhere that requires anyone to do anything with bug reports.

Epic doesn't have any rights here, it sucks but they're not entitled to anything. I hate this because I've experienced this from Google before (at work), I would love to have that right to hold up to 90 days before we can notify people but until there are legal standards, there is no right.

<comment><USER2> > Google is not obligated to reply at all

They have an ethical obligation. Security disclosures have major ethical concerns. If you're acting unethically, you are a dick.

Sure, Epic doesn't have any _rights_ here. But we don't need a _law_ to know people [and corporations] should not be dicks.

Google could have been more ethical by replying to the vendor after making their initial communication. They chose not to.

<comment><USER4> > They have an ethical obligation. Security disclosures have major ethical > concerns. If you're acting unethically, you are a dick.

You are correct in that Google has an ethical obligation; and they and met it by protecting all Android users. I would say that Google making this announcement lets all Android users know that its not safe to just randomly install apps on your phone. Yes, they allow it, but at the same time the public is genuinely ignorant of any type of security practices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd argue that Epic is irresponsible for putting users into this position to start with. All Google did was tell users that they need to update ASAP as they're ALREADY in a compromised position.

If there was no update/patch, I might side with Epic, but as soon as the fix was out and everyone needed to update, users needed to know the risks of inaction would inhibit. Not least of all because people may start reverse engineering the patch.

Epic has decided this is revenge for them not using Google Play, but if you look at Google's bug efforts historically, this has always been how they handled these issues. They've been highly consistent about it.

If Epic wants to keep serious security bugs under wraps in the future, maybe they shouldn't rely on unpaid third parties to audit their code.

PS - Google gave them 7 days from patch release, so most auto-updaters likely updated the installer.

<comment><USER6> They're both in the wrong. Epic for screwing it up and rushing rather than investing in security, and Google for trying to score PR points at the expense of their users. Google is being anti-secure here by not allowing the update to filter through the ecosystem.

<comment><USER5> > Google for trying to score PR points at the expense of their users.

Except this is how Google has always handled these bugs. The article even links to other examples involving other companies.

> Google is being anti-secure here by not allowing the update to filter > through the ecosystem.

Or pro-secure here by telling users to urgently update rather than doing nothing and hoping nobody spots the bug and starts exploiting it before users get lucky.

<comment><USER7> Well, it's not that there is nothing being done. You're distributing the patch.

You don't have to go yelling about the fact you're distributing a highly important security patch, that only draws the attention of the bad guys.

Wanting to distribute such patches as low profile is a valid choice and is not "doing nothing and waiting to people to exploit it".

<comment><USER8> If you are a hacker it is not improbable that you are keeping tabs on updates for high profile software like Fortnight. In that case, doing things "low- profike" gives bad actors an edge.

<comment><USER7> Even if you keep tabs on it, would you inspect every single update that comes out or would you rather inspect the ones labelled "security updates"?

Low-profile means what it says on the tin; make it sound so boring that hackers are less likely to attempt it.

Plus being low profile reduces exposure to people who only look for high profile stuff.

And _plus_ "not improbable" =!= "fact".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't blame Epic at all for avoiding the Play store. I find it patently unacceptable that two large tech companies now act as gatekeepers for software releases. Sure, it provides extra security, but at a heavy cost. Between Facebook, Google, and Apple the vast majority of the public's digital speech (software and written language) are filtered through large corporations with immense power and few regulations. This feels very, very scary to me.

It looks like the Fortnite APK is 1.88GB. I don't have familiarity with the Android platform, can you update via patches (over a full binary download)? If updates are anywhere near that size, a 7 day disclosure after patch is patently irresponsible (play store or not). This smells like a cheap PR play by Google.

<comment><USER10> I blame them. This is the world we live in. Google was nice enough not to lock down their ecosystem (like Apple), so in a way they're being sensitive to your concerns. Epic should not be punishing Google for being permissive. This way of distribution should be the exceptional case; for when Google is being unreasonable (eg. censorship), or for more advanced situations. This isn't the ideal, general purpose channel for releasing software. That's what the app store is for. Epic is putting their users at risk to save some bucks.

On a side note, I don't love Google's rules as I understand them. They seem to punish prompt action and honest communication in some cases (eg. this one). I think you should just get the 90 days if they're willing to allow it. Of course, this is always their call.

EDIT: Other users are saying the short deadline is because the public will be made aware of an exploit, due to existence of a patch. I did not think of that initially, but it does make sense

<comment><USER11> > to save some bucks.

Epic is also saving their users some bucks. I'm not so sure that users hate the tradeoff.

<comment><USER10> Hey, you're probably right. I'm not so sure the user should be making that decision though. Users would probably do away with strong passwords and automatic updates too, if they had the option. It's not their call, and shouldn't be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The only other thing I'd do here as Fortnite's Chief is to broadly make secure install infrastructure available to other indie developers. This would gain some goodwill and could turn into another revenue stream.

+1 points for turning this issue into more publicity.

<comment><USER5> > make secure install infrastructure available to other indie developers

Epic doesn't have "secure" install infrastructure, that's the whole crux of this issue.

<comment><USER13> Sure but they are a capable well-capitalized development organization. Such infrastructure is not an impossible technology; numerous open source implementations exist. Therefore they will have such infrastructure sometime in the next 6 months. When they have it, they can offer it as a service to other organizations whose interests are similarly opposed to Google's.

<comment><USER14> You're absolutely, completely right! Secure infrastructure is possible and numerous implementations exist.

Given how right you are, it's exceptionally odd that a capable well- capitalized development organization would not use such systems and manage such a basic mistake.

<comment><USER13> "Poor decision by management hoping to save some money" is not a rare event.

<comment><USER14> For that matter, neither is a poor decision made by engineers who think it's fun to reinvent wheels. Both have happened plenty in history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sorry, I'm with Google on this one. Epic chose to go off the reservation (so to speak) and created a giant security hole while doing it. Woops. This part of the article covers this:

> Google's disclosure rules state that it reveals details of bugs to the > public 90 days after reporting them to the developers responsible if they > have not been tackled, but only waits one week after a patch is made > "broadly available".

So Epic made a patch available and Google waited a week. But:

> ... [Time Sweeney] denied suggestions that the tech giant had acted in > users' interests by refusing to keep the matter private until mid-November.

The 90 days is for unaddressed bugs.

This is nothing more than an attempt by Epic to fix bad PR from a security vulnerability they introduced (which arguably at this nascent stage might reduce public confidence in their bypassing the Play Store) by trying to deflect it onto Google.

And I get the desire to skip the 30% cut but if you're going to do that you're then responsible for the safety of a person's phone and data. At least be up to the task.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's not too surprising that Google's definition of "patched" is "rolled out to a small percentage of users" since that's essentially how it's worked on Android for years.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just want to make this clear, this is the standard disclosure policy of Google:

> [NOTE: This bug is subject to a 90-day disclosure deadline. After 90 days > elapse or a patch has been made broadly available, the bug report - > including any comments and attachments - will become visible to the public.]

Note the "or a patch has been made broadly available". 90 days policy almost never apply when there is a patch released.

It does not make sense to keep the vuln report hidden when a patch comes out, the act of the patch itself reveals the security issue for anyone who takes the time to check what it does.

<comment><USER17> This is exactly why epic didn't and shouldn't get the full 90 days -- users that haven't yet updated are more insecure with the patch out than before.

The only thing Google should have done better is make it clear to epic that they will lift it in 7 days, not the 90 that they asked for. Epic _could_ have known by looking at other incidents, but based on their request they obviously did not and Google should have corrected them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > creating an unnecessary risk for Android users in order to score cheap PR > points

This seems like an accurate take. Why else would google disclose the bug so quickly?

<comment><USER19> Google seems in the right here. The disclosure was in line with their policy and I'm sure it made management feel oh so good to burn Fortnite in public for their decision to forego distribution in the Play Store.

But here's my personal take. As a consumer I want my phones to run secure apps on secure operating systems. This has a cost obviously which is fair to pass on to developers.

It's clear to me, with all the rogue apps and crap in the Play Store that Google is not investing enough in managing app store content.

Fortnite won this battle but in my book Apple will win the war.

<comment><USER6> You mean google? You're right though, Google does a crap job auditing the playstore. It's ludicrous how they'll allow apps get access to everything on the phone without any kind of serious warning to the user.

My kids install all sorts of crap. I've warned them that all their texts and photos will end up on the internet because of it. Not highly probable, but certainly possible. Makes for a useful double check they're not texting anything silly.

<comment><USER20> >> It's clear to me, with all the rogue apps and crap in the Play Store that Google is not investing enough in managing app store content. >> >> Fortnite won this battle but in my book Apple will win the war.

> You mean google?

He's saying that Apple, is doing a much better job of "managing app store content" than Google, and so ultimately it doesn't matter if Fortnite or Apple wins this battle: they're fighting over a mound of rubble while Apple builds a castle.

<comment><USER21> > they're fighting over a mound of rubble while Apple builds a castle

It doesn't matter. Apple doesn't win in the end.

In the other Apple vs mound of rubble fight (Windows), Apple lost.

Android is doing the same thing. Android 4.0 was Windows 3.1 (first Android version to be "modern", IMO), Android 5.0 was Windows 95 (better UX). Android now just needs Windows XP to be stable enough (I'd argue Android 8.0 was that) and Windows 7 to cover the security aspects (most likely wide spread adoption of new Android permissions). But the writing is kind of on the wall, outside the US Android has majority market share and it's only going up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I side on Google on this one.

Want the profits? Then use them to actually make a safe product.

<comment><USER6> 7 days seems awfully short and not in the interest of users.

<comment><USER23> Seven days after the patch, not after disclosure with Epic.

Epic patched it on August 17th, Google waited 7 more days (as it is their usual practice) and then they went public.

Issue tracker makes more sense than the article IMO: [https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/112630336](https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/112630336)

I guess that usually seven days is more than enough for everyone to update to the latest version available on the Play store, however downloading a giant .apk file within seven days is an inconvenience for most users, which is why Epic requested 90.

<comment><USER24> Also, Playstore checks for you in the background for updates even if you don't use the app in question, the Fortnite launcher doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Aren't you allowed to use whatever payment service you want inside an Android app, and avoid Google's in-app payments? Then you avoid the cut to google. Or have I been violating the agreement for years...

<comment><USER26> You can only do this if the payment is not for digital goods obtained and used in the app. Otherwise, it's a violation of TOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Epic is happy to pay Apple a 30% tax, but does not want to do the same for Android? And when Google exposes vulnerabilities in their approach (which was totally predictable), they cry foul?

If anything, Google should just make sideloading of apps illegal and let companies like Epic face the legal risks if they try to bypass security for profit motives.

<comment><USER28> Don't you need to jailbreak to install a 3rd party app on apple?

<comment><USER29> Either that or a Mac and Xcode. It's practically impossible for most people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Google has effectively mandated everyone implement force-push software updating for all software everywhere, under their 7-day "this is a nice piece of software you've got here, I'd hate to see something bad happen to it" disclosure policy.

Google is throwing their weight around to dictate their philosophy on software to the entire industry. It's just good for us that it's debatable whether this particular edict is in everyone's interest, not just google's. Not all that reassuring about Alphabet in general, tho.

</comment><comment><USER31> Didn't Epic take this action (releasing without the protections of the play store) directly saying FU to Google? Isn't an act like that going to receive a response like Google did? I'm not questioning the morality of either side. Each action correlates exactly with the response.

</comment><comment><USER32> What is a bug row? Is that a British thing for bug report?

<comment><USER33> A row is a fight, though it's pronounced in a way I can't seem to type phonetically. But not like row of corn or row the boat.

<comment><USER34> Pronounced like in frown. Or like wow or how or the "low" in flower.

<comment><USER35> Rhymes with bough, not bow.

<comment><USER36> "bow" is an ambiguous spelling that indicates words with multiple pronunciations.

It can be pronounced like "grow" and like "how" (or "bough".)

<comment><USER35> Yes, that is correct.

Take a bow with your bow tie on.

Pile up a mow when you mow down your hay.

Have a row when the row is not straight.

Tie up the sow when you sow seeds.

That tow-headed man drives a tow truck.

(For additional fun, pronounce bough, cough, rough, and tough.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It's ironic that Epic is going to accuse anyone of being irresponsible. I got an alert from haveibeenpwned a while back showing that my login credentials from Epic were part of a leak, including my password in plaintext. It wasn't a password that shows up in public password dictionaries.

<comment><USER38> How do you know it wasn't your computer that got compromised?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> hmm admitting that a non GooglePLay store android app has a bug...that is an essential duty to ALL ANdroid users whether they use Google pLay Sotre to get apps or not.

The dick is Epic not Google

</comment><comment><USER40> Man, I had to read that headline like 10 times before it made sense. /r/titlegore

<comment><USER41> Same. Quotation marks are important, people!

<comment><USER42> Totally, I first that was is that even English.</comment></comment></comment>


A Social History of Jell-O - <AUTHOR> http://www.seriouseats.com/2015/08/history-of-jell-o-salad.html?Src=longreads

<comment><USER2> This does not cover the "Free" tactic that was used to make Jell-O actually penetrate the households.

That story can be read in the book "Free" by Chris Anderson: [http://www.amazon.com/Free-The-Future-Radical- Price/dp/14013...](http://www.amazon.com/Free-The-Future-Radical- Price/dp/1401322905) (pages 7-10, available in the book preview)</comment>


Khan Academy Board – So many awesome people, you are bound to do good - <AUTHOR> https://www.khanacademy.org/about/our-board <comment><USER2> What's up with the fawning headline? That actual page title is "Meet our leadership team".

I'm a huge fan of Khan Academy, but this isn't necessary.

<comment><USER3> They probably created this page to make their investors happy.</comment></comment>


Blockchain Governance: Programming Our Future - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@FEhrsam/blockchain-governance-programming-our-future-c3bfe30f2d74 <comment><AUTHOR> >> Governance is the most vital problem in the space. Other fundamental problems like scalability are arguably best approached by using governance to set the right incentives for people to solve them.

>>Yet little research has gone into governance and it feels poorly understood.</comment>


Privacy Group to Ask Supreme Court to Stop N.S.A.'s Phone Spying Program - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/08/us/privacy-group-to-ask-supreme-court-to-stop-nsas-phone-spying-program.html

<comment><USER2> "All of the current 11 judges, who serve seven-year terms, were appointed to the special court by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. ..."

So they're asking the Supreme Court to stop the spying program facilitated by the secret court, which is staffed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

<comment><USER3> I'm not a fan of Roberts, but so what?

Staffing the court is apparently part of his duty as Chief Justice, and as such does pose a conflict of interest with this case. Carrying out his job does not imply any point of view regarding the constitutionality or ethics of the spying program. He doesn't get to refuse to appoint judges as the law requires whatever his opinion. He only gets to judge things that are officially challenged in his court, and even then only after reviewing evidence and arguments from both sides.

<comment><USER2> Just doing his job, right? Are you seriously trying to imply that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, literally THE authority on interpreting the Constitution, as an American, has no connections and is powerless to influence the world in any way outside of the court cases placed before him? Think of it this way - if he felt what he was being asked to do was a violation of the Constitution, wouldn't his participation make him a co-conspirator to that crime?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As people who have been filing F.O.I.A requests for any personal information the NSA may have gained access to and stored without their permission will tell you: you won't succeed. I think the N.S.A spying program is here to stay, people eventually will give up complaining about it and move on with their lives which is what the Government is betting on will happen.

Considering the amount of money that has been undoubtedly spent on this spy program while the unemployment rate rises, taxes are increased, food and fuel keep on getting more expensive I doubt the Government will just give up control that easily especially when you're talking of potentially billions already being spent on this state of the art spying program.

All asking the Supreme court to prevent the N.S.A spying on phone calls will result in is getting yourself added to a priority N.S.A watchlist.

<comment><USER5> For the "home of the brave" Americans sure don't sound a lot like it. People have fought a lot worse in the past, and Americans seem to be like "meh, I'm too bored to fight this". Good job, America.

But you're forgetting one thing. This is _not_ "how things will be", if you let it happen. Oh no. This is just but the very beginning. If you let it happen to you, things will become 10x, 100x worse in the future. And then even you, individually, will feel the oppression of the government. But let's see how you'll fight it then, without violence. At least right now there may be a chance to do it without any violence - you know, if you weren't too "bored" with it.

<comment><USER4> I guess I am basing my logic off of the occupy protests. The occupy protests got a lot of attention and even though they're still going on in some places, you don't really hear about them any more (not even on conspiracy theory peddling sites like Above Top Secret). The goal was to draw attention to big banks abusing their power and not changing their ways, a couple of years on and all of that protesting only briefly brought attention to the big banking system, but nothing changed. Some people moved money to credit unions, but the big banks like BoA are still around, the protests achieved nothing.

In many ways there are similarities between the occupy situation and the N.S.A secret spying program only people are protesting online and bugging their representatives most of which didn't even know about the program until it was publicly leaked.

I am a firm believer in standing up for something, especially when it's the Government wronging it's citizens, but I think this whole situation goes deeper than any public opinion truly can penetrate and change. I think the power in this situation like lays with other countries acting on what has been revealed, but most are too afraid to stand up to the US. It's times like these you realise why the US has one of the worlds best funded military regimes in the world because when SHTF who is truly going to stand up to the bigger military entity?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thank you, EPIC.

In vacuuming up and blindly storing all of the descriptive data about phone calls, I am impressed that the NSA and its superiors may have managed to carry out "unreasonable seizure" without "unreasonable search."

I'd be even more impressed to see an injunction against it.

</comment><comment><USER7> I shudder to think of what sort of horrible, wrongheaded response we'll get out of this from Antonin Scalia.

<comment><USER8> Don't be so quick to judge. He wrote a pretty good dissent on DNA collection.

[http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-207_d18e.pdf](http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-207_d18e.pdf)

[http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-06-13/opinions/39952...](http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-06-13/opinions/39952025_1_dna- sample-dna-collection-dna-test)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> From what i understand there is no actual documentation of Verizon handing over the records. And all employees are gaged and not allowed to reveal that this happend.

From discussion absent are the possible punishments if one disobeys FISA court order. What ground does it stand on?

</comment><comment><USER10> This is it, people. The last gasp of privacy.

<comment><USER11> Nonsense. Even after this seemingly decapitation of the concept of privacy, there is still minutiae and trivialities about privacy. For example, should all personal information be stored in a common encryption format mandated by the state?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am really curious how this would turn out.

</comment><comment><USER13> Maybe if people stop begging the government this wouldn't happen in the first place.

<comment><USER14> Technology, not policy, has always been what limits the degree of government surveillance.

Concerned private citizens need to start using technology too. They need to learn about encryption and products to protect their privacy.

Of course voice yourself to your government but don't expect them to roll over and say "Okay, we'll stop".</comment></comment>


The world's most influential languages - <AUTHOR> http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/reprints/weber/rep-weber.htm <comment><USER2> These ranking ignore the fact Spanish and Portuguese are much closer to each other than any other two languages in this top ten listing.

Although Spanish and Portuguese are now two separate unintelligible languages, they were virtually the same 800 years ago. Someone literate in one can easily learn the other; it's probably the same with fluency. Machine translation between them is probably _very_ accurate because of their relative closeness and the huge volume of sample data for _both_ languages. Also... Because of geopolitics, Brazil and the rest of Latin America can easily negotiate compromise agreements where they say "put the administrative center for this in Brazil and make Spanish the official language for it".

So perhaps there's more of a case to consider Spanish and Portuguese to be _one_ language for these rankings, than there is to lump all the unintelligible Arabic dialects (Morrocan, Egyptian, Levantine, Iraqi, and Gulf) into one language, or the unintelligible Chinese dialects (Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, Minbei, Minnan, Xiang, Gan) into one language.

<comment><USER3> Yes, as Portuguese I also have an issue with his bias for Brazilian Portuguese, as there are many more countries speaking the language.

\- Portugal

\- Brazil

\- Angola

\- Mozambique

\- Green Cape

\- Saint Thomas and Prince

\- Guine-Bissau

\- East-Timor

Probably a few others might still use some dialect of the language as well.

Actually Portuguese was the same as Galician not Spanish. Spanish is actually Castilian from Castile region. In 1516 Ferdinand II declared it as the official language of Spain, hence Spanish.

But you're right about the language similarities.

<comment><USER4> I spoke Brazilian Portuguese and even back then it was relatively hard for me to understand Portuguese the original due to pronounciation/accent differences (by relatively hard I mean I had to focus). I had less problems understanding Spanish, say, in Uruguay. To this day, although I forgot the language, I can easily spot a Brazilian in a crowd of talking people while it takes me a moment to recognize someone speaking European Portuguese.

> many more countries speaking the language.

maybe more, but not with 200 million people

<comment><USER5> Hah, that's something that always amazed me: I lived in Brazil for 7 years (coming from Argentina) and became fluent in Brazilian Portuguese in the process. Funnily enough, I don't have any problem _at all_ understanding most Portuguese people, whereas my wife wouldn't be able to understand half of what they said. How does _that_ work? :)

<comment><USER3> Having a few Brazilian friends, I would say they have some hard time getting our pronunciation, whereas foreigners seem to be more open minded, kind of.

I have lived this experience with French. I have less problems to understand French Canadian than my French friends.

<comment><USER4> American English is also easier to understand for most foreigners than some accents of English (and I mean only the ones from England).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What? The USA doesn't have an _official_ language (like in one recognized by government)?

That's news for me, and it's interesting to think on the implications. I'll point that next time an american complains to me on the web to "speak english".

<comment><USER7> There have been various attempts to make English the national language of the United States, but they have all failed, due in part to being perceived as vaguely racist or xenophobic. This is especially strange considering that virtually every other country does have an official language (or languages).

That said, you (and your potential interlocutors) will likely benefit from using the _lingua franca_ , which is currently English, whether or not you're exhorted to do so by an American.

<comment><USER8> > _This is especially strange considering that virtually every other country > does have an official language (or languages)_

My assumption for why it isn't strange is that most countries had an official language (whether at one point it was decreed, or if it just happened naturally) before a huge amount of immigration happened in the way that it has in America, i.e. that now there are huge numbers of Spanish speakers in a number of states.

<comment><USER9> That there are huge numbers of Spanish speakers in a number of states is not due to immigration. Most of these states spoke Spanish before they had an influx of English-speaking illegal immigrants. The English speakers (helped) split these states off from Mexico and made them join the USA. (Okay, the reason they spoke Spanish is due to the prior illegal immigration of Spanish conquistadors).

Which is why, in Silicon Valley, you have city names like San Jose, Santa Clara, Los Altos, Palo Alto, San Mateo, San Bruno, and San Francisco; and road names like Junipero Serra, San Antonio Road, and El Camino Real.

<comment><USER10> > That there are huge numbers of Spanish speakers in a number of states is not > due to immigration. Most of these states spoke Spanish before they had an > influx of English-speaking illegal immigrants. The English speakers (helped) > split these states off from Mexico and made them join the USA. (Okay, the > reason they spoke Spanish is due to the prior illegal immigration of Spanish > conquistadors).

The Spanish influence was largely via the Catholic Church. There's a whole chain of cities about a day's walk apart in CA, each with a mission.

That said, the Spanish weren't the only "invaders" for very long. Folks from other US states started showing up within a couple of decades. Spain made an official land-grab, extending from Mexico, but eventually lost a "war".

Also, even during the "Spanish" days, Spanish was only the language of those cities. The natives didn't switch, and there were a lot more of them (at that time).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is this a winner-takes-all, network effects situation? Are we going to see the entire world speaking English as at least a second language in the next 50-100 years?

<comment><USER12> The research the article talks about was done in 1990, so the dynamics as to the influence of top-spoken languages may well have changed.

Chinese is presently the most spoken language in the world (native and secondary speakers combined), so if you suspect the winner is going to be a winner in some 'network effects' situation, it might be Chinese. [1] Chinese also has a very strong internet presence. [2]

On a slightly unrelated note, what is interesting is that Hindustani, despite being one of the most spoken languages, has such little influence. Unlike for Chinese or Russian, there is relatively little resistance in it being completely dominated by English as the "business language" in the very areas that the language is native to.

[1]: Some schools in African countries, located near areas where there is Chinese involvement, are teaching Chinese: [http://igitur- archive.library.uu.nl/student-theses/2012-0601...](http://igitur- archive.library.uu.nl/student- theses/2012-0601-200602/A.Hoogenbosch%5B1%5D.pdf) \-- elsewhere in Americas and Europe there has also been a noticeable bump in people trying to pick up Chinese as their second language.

[2]: <http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm>

<comment><USER13> _Chinese is presently the most spoken language in the world (native and secondary speakers combined)_

It was a claim like this that motivated me to begin studying Chinese back in the 1970s. But if we are talking about one language community, all of whose members can genuinely converse with one another, today English just might have more speakers than (standard) Chinese has. Social science surveys by the Chinese government suggest that only just more than half of China's population is conversant in standard Chinese,

[http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...](http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838.htm)

and that squares with the experience of most travelers in China, and most Chinese-speaking people who know a lot of Chinese people outside of China, that there are still quite a few nationals of China who are not readily understood when they attempt to converse with other nationals of China.

Influence of a language depends on a lot more than just raw number of speakers. Sometime way back in the early 1980s, the Xerox company did an estimate of language influence weighted by the per-capita domestic product of persons speaking various languages, which of course boosts the ranking of English (and also of Japanese, at that time) as compared to Chinese.

Looking at what happened to Russian (my apologies to the authors of the first couple comments posted here), I would actually expect the influence of Chinese to decline by 2050, while the influence of English, both from the core strengths of the "inner circle" English-speaking countries (Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand) and the outer circle of countries where English is co-official, and from the unparalleled use of English as a worldwide interlanguage. When someone from Korea meets someone from Japan while both are in Taiwan, either might speak the language of the other, and I have seen that done both ways, but when they want to include a local person in the conversation, unless they really are in Taiwan as students of Chinese, they will likely resort to English to speak to one another. And so it goes with all kinds of unlikely combinations of ethnic groups in all kinds of places all over the world.

I am not at all ethnocentric about my sole native language, General American English, and I am second to none in urging Americans to acquire other languages for additional international understanding, but every mash-up of language groups that happens day by day in today's world is likely to accelerate the spread of English and to increase its influence.

<comment><USER12> > _It was a claim like this that motivated me to begin studying Chinese back > in the 1970s._

Back in 1970s, interesting! Some questions, if you don't mind:

1) The Chinese language seems to be the odd duck in that it demands significantly more time to get a good grip of it. I've read a number of blogs where the language-learner in the end regrets having spent time learning Chinese[1], (something I seldom see for other languages). My question for you: if you had to decide at this point, in this day and age, would you go ahead and spend the time learning Chinese?

2) What interesting employment opportunity can be expected do you think, after having learned Chinese? I've read over and over again that every big Chinese company has strong ties to the Chinese gov't, and that no foreigner has ever been able to successfully pull it off (a good example is Zuckerburg -- even though the guy himself speaks a bit of Mandarin and has a Chinese girlfriend). Does that pretty much rule out entrepreneurial success in China for foreigners?

[1]: [http://thelinguafranca.wordpress.com/2008/05/27/why-you- shou...](http://thelinguafranca.wordpress.com/2008/05/27/why-you-shouldnt- learn-chinese/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Indonesian/Malay is spoken by around 268 million people. It is sometimes rated as the sixth most widely spoken language in the world, yet George Weber barely mentions it.

Indonesia itself has 237 million people, of which almost 100% speak Indonesian/Malay.

The Indonesian/Malay language is a huge gaping hole in George Weber's research.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_numb...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers#Indonesian.2FMalay_estimates_.28total_number_of_speakers.29)

</comment><comment><USER15> Спасибо за статью. Печально, что русский язык не входит в десятку наиболее используемых языков в Internet.

<comment><USER16> Просто начните холодная война снова :D

<comment> guard-of-terra Sorry to ruin a joke, but this sentence is not valid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Fig. 3 lowest estimate for # of English speakers is < 300M? What?

Current population of the Anglosphere (Australia / Canada / New Zealand / United Kingdom / United States) = 435M; I'll eat my hat if <75% of the population of these countries speak English. That's saying nothing of all the other Europeans, Indians, Chinese, Africans, and Latinos that speak English. Like the Dutch don't also speak English!?

What the hell was that estimator smoking?

Hell, the max estimate there (~500M) is probably closer to a reasonable minimum.

<comment><USER18> The figures in the article are from 20 years ago. Back then, populations were smaller and many countries were just ramping-up English education for students.

<comment><USER17> I didn't catch that, thanks. Curiosity killed the cat, so:

Population of Anglosphere in 1992: 364M... <300M speakers still seems very low even 20 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "It should be a sobering thought, however, to any triumphalist impulse that in 100 AD Latin looked set to dominate its slice of the world forever."

The winner of the "Top Language of 100 AD" should go to Chinese circa 100 A.D.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Xenic>

The following languages are heavily influenced by written chinese:

Korean <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja>

Japanese <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji>

Vietnamese <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_language>

As well as a variety of other languages (though the regions where they are from are now considered part of China):

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#Other_langua...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#Other_languages)

Moderately influenced:

Mongolian <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_language>

Thai <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_language>

Here is a picture of Han China and Roman Empire circa 100 A.D.

[http://www.roman-empire.net/maps/empire/extent/rome-china- co...](http://www.roman-empire.net/maps/empire/extent/rome-china- comparison.html)

Written Chinese still dominate its slice of the world.

While not all chinese are conversant with Standard Mandarin, (I am not), almost all of them can read and write chinese.

<comment><USER20> You can make a similar list for Latin though; the Romance languages are (by definition) descended from it; that's Spanish, French, Italian and Portugese, and English and German are heavily influenced by it. That's a significant majority of the score of the top ten languages from the article, so you can argue that by their standards Latin is more significant, even though it's no longer really a living language in its own right.

<comment><USER19> Good point; I thought the article missed out on analysis about indirect influence by a language through influencing neighbouring languages. Would've been nice have read about Latin's influence on other languages rather than have it being a mere footnote.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder about the credibility of this article given that it talks about "Chinese" as if it were a single language. There are many spoken languages in China (most notably Mandarin and Cantonese). They share a common written form but if you're talking about the "most influential language" surely the spoken languages should count for something.

<comment><USER22> Where do you draw the line? Is Latin American Spanish separate enough from Spain's Spanish? Is French different from Canadian French? American vs British English?

Even southern US English vs northern US English? Being from the north and visiting the south regularly I can attest that its very difficult to understand the 'deep locals', granted its sort of a French-English creole.

Northern German vs Southern German? I was in Munich for Oktoberfest 4 years ago and I was surprised to find Bavarians speaking to northern Germans in English most of the time. They told me they couldn't understand each other and hated each others accents so using English was easier.

It seems extremely difficult to determine and relatively arbitrary where the distinction between 'explicit' languages is made.

<comment><USER23> The various languages in China do not begin to even approach anything like mutual intelligibility. They are not dialects but separate languages, much in the way Spanish and Romanian are different languages even though they both started as Latin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Strange that they didn't include quantity and quality of media available in a given language, unless it's somehow covered under "Socio-literary prestige" (which is never precisely defined). This metric may be English's biggest source of influence.

</comment><comment><USER24> Looking at the advances in machine translation and speech recognition in the last 10 years, how long before fluency in English becomes irrelevant?

If any English that you hear, see, or read is instantly and perfectly translated to your native language, and vice versa, then all languages get equal footing. (Except perhaps for some primitive languages.)

<comment><USER25> Perfect translation is going to be hard. For an everyday most common 5,000 words that may be ok but anything outside of that would require the invention of many new words when English likely already has them. They don't really mean anything in English either - for example "quantum mechanics" are just two words, and have to be learned even for English speakers. When coming from another language you may as well use whatever words others are already using. You can see that happening when other language speakers adopt English words.

There are other factors - English speakers readily adopt words from other languages as needed. This makes it a lot easier to expand. Compare with the Académie française: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise>

Look at what people all over the world are constantly bombarded with - Hollywood's output is shown (and popular) everywhere. As are words like Coca- Cola, McDonalds, Nike and Apple. Even Bollywood is including increasing amounts of English in its output. Popular entertainers in various countries have also taken to singing some or all of their songs in English.

Look at generating input. There is a bias to a reasonably small number of symbols. A 500 key keyboard isn't practical (although variations exist). Having many modes and switching amongst them isn't that pleasant either. We already see people dropping case from English where is it mostly cosmetic. (Of course voice recognition is always around the corner but isn't practical in many environments and has always been around the corner.)

It is acceptable to speak English "badly" - did I tell you about the time that: the mat cat sat upon? I've heard from speakers of other languages that just getting the gender wrong in a sentence is enough to make it extremely hard to understand.

My prediction is that the number of speakers of English as a second language will continue to climb since it is the most friction free way of communicating in many circumstances, and that will rapidly lead to their kids adopting it as a first language. Heck all the people I know who have a non-English language as their first language have their kids speaking English as their first language.

TLDR: English makes a very good lowest common denominator

<comment><USER26> There needs to be an international version of English designed so that it is simple to learn. For instance: one sound = one letter and all verbs conjugate the same.

<comment><USER25> You would enjoy Bill Bryson's book Mother Tongue. At one point (several hundred years ago) English was going through a period of simplification and rationalization but it was also during that period that dictionaries, newspapers etc become popular. Consequently some words had already become consistent and some hadn't and we are somewhat stuck with poor timing. [http://www.amazon.com/The-Mother-Tongue-English- That/dp/0380...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Mother-Tongue-English- That/dp/0380715430)

Esperanto is an attempt at a equal international language for all. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto>

Because English and English speakers are happy to adapt and change, the simplification is happening. Look at text messaging where superfluous extra words and letters get dropped, as does case. Even Hollywood is careful to keep language simple in their popular movies aimed at a worldwide audience.

<comment><USER26> Thank you for the recommendations. How do you think English speaker would respond to a version of English which had changes like: Each sound had its own letter and all spelling was phonetic?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I find Fig. 13. (Rise and fall of major languages: the historical dimension) quite interesting.</comment>


Side project: Weekly Design Patterns - <AUTHOR> http://weeklydesignpatterns.com/

<comment><USER2> Any examples you could show us?</comment>


How to Hire a Great Web Designer, With Y Combinator's Garry Tan - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2011/03/27/how-to-hire-a-great-web-designer/

<comment><USER2> Another big issue: Respect. If you don't respect the design process, or designers, don't ever expect to hire a good designer.

If you've noticed that most designers are either not good, or flaky, chances are the problem is you and not the designers.

Topics to avoid: How engineers contribute to the valuation of a company but everyone else detracts, how great 99 designs is, how HTML/CSS is "for people who can't program," and my favorite: How easy design is, and how you're only hiring because you don't personally have time for it.

When you say stuff like this, it's not really professional for us to get loud and try to correct you. It's also not really professional for us to slowly back away, and then run full speed as soon as you turn your head. But that's what we end up doing.

<comment><USER3> What about: How hard design is, and how you're hiring because you don't personally have time to be good at it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good read. In fact I added my name to Garry Tan's list, and was contacted by a YC company a couple weeks back. But they were looking to get their site designed and coded for under $1k…

I think that shows that not everybody practices what they preach, and a lot of startups still consider design like a secondary expense, and not like a major differentiator that needs sufficient funding.

<comment><USER5> 1k?! That's crazy talk. Totally agree with you. Side note: I'm looking for a designer now for a new web app I'm launching late Spring/Early summer. Well funded. If you're interested in learning more about the project shoot me an email at turnbullalexander at gmail dot com.

Cheers,

Alex Turnbull

about me: <http://about.me/alexturnbull>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Mashable's _thing_ is social media and how amazing it is and how amazing it will be for you and your business and how it'll make you rich, yet here in this article:

> Mashable: When you come across a web designer with a trendy-looking > portfolio and a slew of social media profiles, does that send certain > signals to you? If so, are those signals mostly positive, negative or > neutral?

> Tan: I focus on the portfolio and the work they've done. Most everything > else related to how much they use social media is not really an indicator.

I find this _ironic_ I guess, they're completely disproving the entire premise of their blog.

<comment><USER7> They might have been fishing for a different answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A post on how to pick a backend dev (eg what questions to ask) would be just as, if not more, interesting :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Is there any chance YC will make the directory publicly available?</comment>


Can I erase sensitive data on an old hard drive with Neodymium Magnets? - <AUTHOR> https://www.kjmagnetics.com/blog.asp?p=hard-drive-destruction <comment><USER2> Here's my anecdote: In 2006, while sitting at my desk playing a video on the hard disk drive of my Thinkpad T22, I held a single neodymium magnet (harvested from an old hard disk drive) about 6 inches from the left side of the unit (where the ~40GB-ish Travelstar 2.5" PATA disk was located). The video froze, Windows XP blue-screened, and the hard disk drive started emitting a ~10Khz whine. I jerked my hand away from the PC immediately when the whine started.

BIOS would no longer detect the disk on that machine, or any other I tried it on (on both USB-to-PATA and honest-to-goodness motherboard PATA controllers). The drive spun up but made a repeated ticking sound (I assume seeking back and forth looking for servo tracks).

I sent the drive to Kroll Ontrack (because, stupidly, I had billing data that wasn't backed-up on the drive). The report I received back indicated that 80% of the drive's sectors were unreadable.

As an aside: The data I was looking for was ASCII text and Kroll Ontrack was completely unhelpful in just sending me a bitstream image of the drive so I could grovel thru looking for data I needed. Being plain ASCII, their "file carving" tools didn't locate any of the data. (They sent me a "preview" of the data they'd located, and while it got lots of Microsoft Office-format files, it didn't have any ASCII text files). I offered them a 3x multiple of the rate they asked for file-level recovery to simply send me the bitstream image of the disk that they'd already made. They wouldn't do it, and wouldn't even let me pay to talk to somebody who understood what I was saying. I ended up taking a major loss on the billing data I destroyed. I'll never recommend them to anybody.

I won't ever play with neodymium magnets around spinning rust media again.

<comment><USER3> From 6 inches away? Unless this was a hockey-puck sized magnet I'm calling it a coincidence.

> (harvested from an old hard disk drive)

Okay, this is making even less sense. "Hard drive magnets", in a drive, are millimeters from the spinning platters. I refuse to believe that the same magnet, moved 6 inches _away_ from the computer caused catastrophic damage.

<comment><USER2> I will definitely concede that the 6" number may be an incorrect memory. It certainly may have been closer, but it wasn't right on top of the unit.

If it was a coincidence it was certainly well-timed. I don't have the Thinkpad anymore, but I do still have some 2.5" PATA drives. It might be interesting to test this and make a video.

Here's a picture of the magnet in question (it holds stuff to my refrigerator now), w/ a penny for scale: [http://mx02.wellbury.com/misc/20171203-Magnet_of_doom.jpg](http://mx02.wellbury.com/misc/20171203-Magnet_of_doom.jpg)

This magnet was pulled from a Micropolis 9GB SCA-II 3.5" low-profile drive dating from roughly 1998 (I had a crap-ton of these drives and, as they died, I pulled their magnets, so I have a bunch of these). These particular magnets will stick to each other thru my 3" thick butcher block table. They are physically larger (substantially thicker) than the ones I've pulled from newer drives.

Edit:

I assume that the data and servo tracks written to the drive are done so in the presence of the magnetic flux of the magnets supporting the voice coil. I always just assumed that adding a substantial new source of magnetic flux (the magnet in my hand) either induced a current or magnetized some component in the drive.

<comment><USER4> >> They are physically larger (substantially thicker) than the ones I've pulled from newer drives.

Not really, they look very close in size to current Enterprise Drives ([https://imgur.com/2HjuuKM](https://imgur.com/2HjuuKM)), Of course I have removed the Metal backing plate from mine

Now consumer drives do have smaller magnets (that is one way to save cost)

Here is a photo of the 4 styles of magnets I still personally have, the smaller magnets are either out of consumer drives and 2.5in drives manufactured in the last 7 years [https://imgur.com/59XjVPm](https://imgur.com/59XjVPm)

And just for fun a small assortment of my collection because why not

[https://imgur.com/bW6ycRI](https://imgur.com/bW6ycRI)

<comment><USER2> I've only had the opportunity to tear down a few consumer drives in the last few years. I haven't seen inside an enterprise-class drive in a few years. (I've stopped dealing with hardware directly for my Customers, and I haven't purchased much hardware for personal use over the last few years.)

I've found scavenged hard drive magnets to be very useful for odd jobs. One served several years holding up the fallen head-liner over the drivers seat in one of my crappier cars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you want to get rid of a harddrive with sensitive data I would first suggest that one gets familiar with the thought of not being able to sell it as used.

Personally for my drives, I use Boot and Nuke to erase the drive three times, first with zeroes, then with random data, then with zeroes again. After that I disassemble the drive, put a strong magnet over each platter, shredder the drive into almost powder, burn the pieces in a fire and then throw away the leftovers. Probably overkill but I want to be certain.

<comment><USER6> Normally you'd want to throw the remains into a volcano but I guess if you feel safe just throwing it away then you do you.

<comment><USER7> You jest, but jackass security people would probably be dissatisfied that your PII might be accessible to some alien race when after the earth explodes in 5 billion years and some remanent of data is somehow recoverable from an asteroid made of cooled lava.

I recall one datacenter consolidation project where the hard drives from decommissioned servers were zapped with a degaussing device, shredded, and then somebody signed off that they were dumped in a furnace somewhere. (At some ridiculous expense)

Meanwhile, the normal operation bins of drives that were in little blue bins for collection where just picked up and moved by the moving men, and are probably still in some closet in the new facility!

<comment><USER8> I failed an audit once because the inspection team managed to recover data from the information encoded on the event horizon of a nearby black hole.

Can't be too careful nowadays.

<comment><USER9> Another good worker screwed by the holographic principle.

Edit: wow... that joke went badly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I worked in the HDD industry, doing signal processing for a few years. HDDs are pretty much magical. It's insane how delicate, yet robust it all is.

But to put things into perspective with some numbers, the write heads on a modern HDD use somewhere on the order of 50 mA of current. That may sound like a reasonable amount until you consider that the magnetic field [flux] is condensed down to a 60 x 20 nm area. It usually takes a little over 1 Tesla to flip the magnet.

I have been out of the Industry for a little bit now, but things are moving towards a magnetic substrate that has a smaller grain size (allowing smaller bits at a similar SNR) but a coercivity well over 3T at room temperature.

<comment><USER11> > HDDs are pretty much magical. It's insane how delicate, yet robust it all > is.

Absolutely. It's bloody amazing how my laptop has a device with finger-sized actuators that read/write bit cells that are about as small as couple-year-old semiconductor feature sizes -- and that can survive mistreatment that one doesn't usually associate with micromanipulators.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hard disks are surprisingly hard to destroy on-demand. There was a DEF CON 23 talk [1] exploring ways to quickly wipe your servers in situ using physical methods.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bpX8YvNg6Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bpX8YvNg6Y)

<comment><USER13> I instantly though it was this (hilarious) one instead: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M73USsXHdc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M73USsXHdc)

<comment><USER14> They should have used a plasma torch. Legal, relatively easy to contain too (just put a water bed below it).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Just encrypt each and every one of your drives.

It makes their end of life that much easier.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think magnets could compromise the read/write head, or other electronic on the drive. So why not just mulch the drive with a grinding service?

If you're looking to reuse the drive, use one of the NIST SP 800-88 Revision 1 recommendations. It lists the methods in the preferred order. Ideally the drive supports ATA crypto secure erase, where it just wipes the DEK and KEK, poof, in effect the crypto encoded form of you data can no longer be turned into plain text. You can mimic this with software FDE (Bitlocker, LUKS/dm- crypt, Filevault). Fast.

But they also say it's adequate to use the other kinds of secure erase, because other than firmware bugs/exploits it's the only way to erase sectors not assigned an LBA, e.g. sectors that once had an LBA, had data written to them, but subsequently failed overwrite and the LBA remapped to a reserve sector, leaving data on a sector that cannot be overwritten via SATA commands.

</comment><comment><USER13> Here are few experiments with a 6 inch neodymium magnet with few devices:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yEu2R1gYSs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yEu2R1gYSs)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l-6qWaZpVQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l-6qWaZpVQ)

</comment><comment><USER17> HIPAA - regulated health data requires physical destruction of retired hard drives. Usually this is done in sight of a video camera. The operator shows the drive's serial number to the camera and then drops it into the grinder.

CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) can require proof of destruction. That video does it.

<comment><USER18> so secure, guess nobody heard of $100 label printers

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is exactly how I got out of a final project in middle school. Wiped my HDD with a Neodymium magnet right before the deadline and claimed my computer was "broken"... Of course this wasn't done for highly paranoid reasons where I needed to ensure the data was _really_ all gone, but funny story nonetheless. People are more sympathetic when they think a computer "randomly" stopped working.

<comment><USER20> Alas, such a strategy will not work at universities local to me (UK). They _specifically_ exclude computer malfunction as grounds for extenuating circumstances.

<comment><USER19> This was back in like 2005 or something too...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Thermite, both fun _and_ effective.

<comment><USER22> My old Yubikey was in between layers of explosives here: [https://youtu.be/XYOZEPr3Jzw](https://youtu.be/XYOZEPr3Jzw)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> No. You need to cast it into the fires of Mordor. Or something similar.

<comment><USER24> Something similar is indeed the right answer here. You have to take the material above its curie temperature ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curie_temperature](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curie_temperature)) and then according to physics all preexisting magnetic information is lost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> There are techniques used to recover previously erased information on HDDs. These techniques have been available since the 90's. The best way to make it unrecoverable is to melt the disks by the use of whatever techniques you have available, including ox-acetylene torches (the favoured method for the company at the time I was working for them), putting into a furnace (as suggest by others here), etc.

The problem with erasure is that there is residual amounts of magnetic fields that can be picked up by the right equipment. In the day, it was reported that they had success with recovery of information that had been overwritten by 8 - 10 times. It just took a lot of patience to do so. Those who want to recover this information will have that patience.

<comment><USER18> These techniques are theoretical from the time HDDs needed a user low level format(think RLL controller in your XT), and even then a myth nobody ever demonstrated in practice.

</comment></comment><comment> mark-r Is it really necessary to overwrite the data multiple times to erase it? With the densities provided by today's hard drives, the techniques you used to be able to use to get partially erased data are routinely used by the disk drive itself for normal reads.

<comment><USER26> What's your threat model? Data must not be recoverable for at least the next X years, or data must not be recoverable within any future time frame, no exceptions?

For the former, you're absolutely right. For the latter, multiple-pass overwrite provides greater assurance than single pass. Following that up with physical destruction of the platters provides further assurance.

<comment><USER27> Why even bother with overwriting the data if you're just going to physically destroy the platters and/or heat them beyond their curie point anyway?

<comment><USER26> Timeliness, usually. Destruction is usually a batch job so if you care about risk of data exposure in the time lag between being able to wipe the drive (usually an online, relatively low-hassle activity) and destroying the drive, wiping is worthwhile.

Again, thread modelling is crucial. There may be no point wiping!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> When I had a few old hard drives to dispose of I drilled several holes in each one, through the case and platters, then filled them with water and left them outside for a few days so that anything that might rust would do so.

</comment><comment><USER29> even if you drill a hole in the drive, data can still be recovered from it. anything that leaves large pieces of drive intact really isnt ideal. over the years i had collected dozens of platters from both myself and other people. for some reason, when i was younger i was obsessed with collecting hard drive magnets and also smart enough to understand that i probably shouldnt throw the platters away. so a few years ago i decided it was time to destroy all of these annoying platters that i have to worry about misplacing. i naturally assumed that it was going to be easy to find some kind of service, shredding or wiping, for hard drives or hard drive platters. there were no good options. so i tried smashing the platters into small pieces, and this worked for some of the thinner laptop hdd platters. one strong hit would break them into millions of tiny pieces. but most of them just bent or dented. and to thoroughly bend and dent the whole surface of all the platters would be super annoying. so i decided i should just melt them -- they are made of aluminum which has a low melting point. it was surprisingly easy. just get an old coffee can or better yet a stainless steel gas cylinder or even a ceramic crucible. they arent too expensive as far as i know. i used a can. then just surround the can with some bricks for insulation and apply a normal blow torch. set the torch down so it blows into the void between your vessel and the brick jacket. after the platters are melted you can even cast them into something, like a belt buckle. its all a bit silly, but it does feel nice to know that it is literally impossible for anyone to ever know what was on those platters.

<comment><USER30> You don't even need to melt them. Just reaching the Curie point should be enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Even if the test would have succeeded, this is a bad idea.

With a magnetic swipe card that you demagnetize so it is no longer read successfully, you may well be able to recover the information using a better reader.

Depending on drive age the same may be possible using a hard drive.

The best option for modern drives is still to use software to wipe the drive and if reuse is not required destroy the reading mechanism and platters.

<comment><USER32> I won't say it's completely impossible, but modern HDD read heads are already close to our technical limit, and the signal they get is so noisy as to require extensive processing.

There definitely was a period where labs could recover data this way, but I think it's passed.

<comment><USER33> Hard drives automatically remap bad sectors, so even if you overwrite 100% of the accessible data, you may still have left pieces of data in remapped sectors that weren't overwritten. If your drive supports the SECURITY ERASE feature, then it should overwrite those blocks too.

Though if you really want to sell or give your drive to someone else, the best thing to do is to use full disk encryption from the beginning, then there will be no plain text data on the drive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> For quickly destroying hard drives, drive big nails through the entire case in several places. Restoration is at least very manual and annoying, in many cases not worth the effort.

If you need more security, building a simple furnace isn't too hard:

[http://eecue.com/c/driveslag](http://eecue.com/c/driveslag)

<comment><USER35> You don't need to go that fancy. Just use a small steel drum, with holes punched around the bottom, sitting on bricks. Burn dry hardwood, plus occasional chunks of paraffin. Everything burns off, except for the steel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Best method is to use LUKs and then wipe the master key. Luks has a forensic stretching technique to take a 32 byte master key and stretch it to 1 MiB, such that loss of a single bit means the original key is unrecoverable.

That really helps you wipe things like SSDs which can copy and migrate data, and make it hard to be certain you destroyed a sector

<comment><USER37> > such that loss of a single bit means the original key is unrecoverable

That can't be right (I don't know anything about this though). If you control the data (with a non-interactive non-destructive decryption process), a loss of a single bit just means you have to test two possible keys. In terms of brute forcing, the security is the same per number of bits lost. The benefit of using a large key would be that if you lose a certain _fraction_ of your key (say 10%), then that would correspond to more bits (as long as you erase 128 or more bits you'd be fine).

Also beware of key stretching, use it only when absolutely necessary. Key stretching doesn't modify the ratio of work necessary for your encryption/decryption vs the work necessary for brute forcing -- i.e. it doesn't improve the security factor. You're essentially doing an economic defense vs a mathematical one, and hoping that computers won't improve and your attacker isn't willing to spend much relative to what you spent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> A friend uses a saws-all (or something of that ilk) and cuts them in half. I'm figuring on taking my old drives to him for that treatment. I don't want to resell them and have a casual snooper recover my data, and I'm not of enough interest for anyone to piece the halves together.

<comment><USER39> What's the risk from simply writing over the drives with zeros, and sticking them in the electronics recycling?

I don't think anything I or my employer has would be worth the effort to recover.

<comment><USER40> This is what NIST says about it[1]:

        Advancing technology has created a situation that has altered previously held best practices
        regarding magnetic disk type storage media. Basically the change in track density and the
        related changes in the storage medium have created a situation where the acts of clearing and
        purging the media have converged. That is, for ATA disk drives manufactured after 2001
        (over 15 GB) clearing by overwriting the media once is adequate to protect the media from
        both keyboard and laboratory attack.

That's an elaborate way of saying that zeroing a healthy modern disk is sufficient. No need to break out the crucible or jackhammers. If you _really_ need to indulge your paranoia then use some wiping system that does multiple overwrites with random data. It's not necessary, but at least you won't put your eye out.

[1] [http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/SP/nistspecialpublic...](http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/SP/nistspecialpublication800-88.pdf)

If the device isn't healthy and can't zero all of the media then you will need to resort to physical destruction.

<comment><USER41> Yep. You can over write it once with zeroes (or random) and you are done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> A ferromagnetic cage such as a hard drive enclosure can shield against magnetic fields pretty well. The field lines are concentrated in the enclosure and mostly avoid the inside. I would imagine you need to open the drive up to have much effect.

<comment><USER43> TFA said specifically that they could tell that the larger magnets were imposing a field inside the drive itself, and they could tell it was so because they could hear sounds coming from inside the drive. They presumed that the sounds were generated by deflection of the discs under the magnetic field. Therefore it is evident that the field is penetrating through the outer case.

They surmise that it was the higher coercive ty of modern drive plates that causes them to be resistive to reprogramming bits with a static magnetic field.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I normally unsubscribe from junk mail and advertising from e-commerce sites, KJ Magnetics is one of the few exceptions. I always look forward to their emails and blog entries.

</comment><comment><USER45> I think I'd rather store the data on a gbde encrypted disk and simply toss it when I'm done. Then I know the data can't be read.

</comment><comment><USER46> An angle grinder through the drive, repeatedly, may or may not be the most effective mechanism, but the sparks sure are pretty.

</comment><comment><USER47> take it apart, screw the platters to railroad ties. use belt sander on platter. flip the platters over. repeat. burn sandpaper.

take a hammer to platters to seriously deform them and throw them in the trash.

not recoverable, imo.

</comment><comment><USER48> Microwave ovens do wonders.

</comment><comment><USER49> HDD's are shielded with mu-metal: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu- metal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu-metal)</comment>


Steve Yegge on GROK - Stanford Seminar - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTJs-0EInW8

<comment><USER2> The ambition of this project is just amazing. I wonder how close they are to pulling it off.</comment>


Podcast – Rise of Educreators with John Danner - <AUTHOR> https://anchor.fm/dashboard/episode/ehheup <comment><AUTHOR> I think anyone invested in the future of education and learning should check this out. John shares multiple insights from his journey from advertising to education, to how he things education is changing in a post COVID world</comment>


Auto refresh HN with style - <AUTHOR> http://blog.johnnygannon.net/post/19508534399/auto-refresh-hn-with-style

<comment><USER2> F5 works for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome idea. Congratulations!</comment>


Show HN: create, share, explore database patterns - <AUTHOR> https://web.archive.org/web/20160408103107/http://dbpatterns.com/ <comment><USER2> The original URL was [http://dbpatterns.com/](http://dbpatterns.com/), which no longer points to the right content, so we replaced it with an archive.org copy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, very clean UI, great work.

On a related note, if anybody is looking for a mature source but with a substantially worse UI, I've been referencing the Library of Free Data Models [1] for years.

[1] <http://www.databaseanswers.org/data_models/>

<comment><USER4> This is a great resource!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A great interface, but I see one huge omission - a place to discuss or comment the patterns. A pattern doesn't live in vacuum, it is good under certain circumstances and bad in others. So the pattern is only valuable to me if it comes with an explanation of what it's trying to achieve and why it looks the way it does. Link it up to Stackoverflow or at least throw in some basic commenting function and this would be a useful tool.

<comment><USER4> this. The db pattern repository is a great idea but there must be a place to discuss or at least be able to list pro and cons, intended usage, and pitfalls.

Just providing a schema and a name for the pattern is a way to get started, but it doesn't tell me why this pattern is a good fit for what I'm trying to achieve.

</comment></comment><comment> martin-adams Nice idea but needs a comment system. For example, I know a pattern like this has problems: <http://dbpatterns.com/show/5072096089cbad6a389867c7/>

Change the price of a product then calculate last months revenue.

I'd also like to see a brief about what the pattern is trying to solve and why it is the way it is. I've used patterns for sortable hierarchical categories before which is more complex than a parent/position relationship. That would take a bit of explaining with regards to querying, sorting, inserting, removing records.

But all in all, I like it. Nice clean UI and can see it growing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback. I'm thinking about comment functionality for each entity on the pattern.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Any plans for NoSQL patterns? I'd be happy to share some useful schemas for column stores like Cassandra.

<comment><USER7> I'd love to see something like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you are looking for good books on data modeling patterns, I recommend these:

David Hay's _Enterprise Model Patterns_ (and his earlier ones). This is a beast of a book, but has some great patterns. <http://www.amazon.com/dp/1935504053/>

Len Silverston's _Data Model Resource Book_ Vols. 1, 2, 3. Good case studies by industry in the last 2 books. <http://www.amazon.com/dp/0471380237/>

Michael Blaha's _Patterns of Data Modeling_ . This one has some interesting temporal, graph, and tree models. <http://www.amazon.com/dp/1439819890/>

Martin Fowler's _Analysis Patterns_. This one skims some of the other patterns, but gives accounting a solid treatment. <http://www.amazon.com/dp/0201895420/>

They are all well-rated on Amazon and I have read them and they are all very good. A few are available on Safari too.

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks good; it'd be great to have a SQL generation feature which will allow you to generate scripts from the design surface.

<comment><USER10> It would be cool to have sample SQL queries for certain common inquiries and some more complex ones. How to find all articles tagged as "programming"? What about all articles that have both "programming" and "timesaving" tags? What's the average amount of time between a friend request being sent and accepted?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great idea and nice design. If anything, I can find it useful as a starting point. But it would be good to put some requirements behind the designs. Meaning here is what was required designed to allow us expand this or that direction, etc.

</comment><comment><USER12> Suggestion: support sign in with GitHub. It's really easy to do (they have a very clean oauth implementation) and would fit your target audience well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for suggestion. I will implement as soon as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Site went down while I was using it, however, this could be very interesting (coming from a database noob). Definitely will keep my eye on the site as long as it's up ;P

EDIT: Noticed you also use jsPlumb. How was your experience with that and did you ever consider other options? I had a few smaller projects that used jsPlumb, but it seemed pretty limiting once my diagrams needed a little more functionality.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, i'm sorry. It's HN effect.

jsPlumb is cool, but the API is terrible. I don't like. I will rewrite all the connections.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I used <http://dbdsgnr.appspot.com/> for something like this. It has sql export and it supports a few database engines. If it would allow better forking it would be awesome.

</comment><comment><USER15> I like the idea. Would love to have authenticated with my GitHub account.

</comment><comment><USER16> It looks cool, but I don't see the utility just yet. Are there patterns that are very useful, but difficult to come up with just by following one of the normal forms?

<comment><USER17> I think it's useful for other people to make sure what they're doing alines with convention. For instance, I had no idea about the Library of Free Data Models linked further down the page, so most of the model logic I'm unsure of has been confirmed via Stackoverflow posts. Sometimes, it can be hard to find the exact situation I'm looking for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very impressive. Of course, some sort of SQL export would be very helpful (I couldn't find one before it went down, if there is one).

</comment><comment><USER19> I should be able to start creating a pattern without having to register. Ask me for that if I want to save.

</comment><comment><USER20> Nice work! I've noticed in Friendship model that some ids are strings...

</comment><comment><USER21> Site is down at the moment. Maybe this is a demonstration of the "Crash and burn under load, even though it worked so well when nobody else was using it" database pattern? I run into that pattern way too often, i.e. more than zero times.

</comment><comment><USER22> can't even get to the site, but the idea sounds good, will definately check back in a day or two, once the load on the servers goes back to normal.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I did not anticipate this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> What is tastypie?

<comment><USER24> <https://github.com/toastdriven/django-tastypie>

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> this is definitely cool</comment>


Orgo - <AUTHOR> http://www.pwanson.com/orgo/ <comment><USER2> I was confused by the name, then I was more confused by the page. This is like the last time I read up on Urbit.</comment>


Ask HN: When do you know it's time to pivot? - <AUTHOR> I've been working on my startup for just over 12 months now and I've invested quite a bit of capital and I'm at a point where I'm not sure if I should continue building it out or pivot. It's a marketplace web-app and I've been able to sign-up 5 vendors on the supply side which took 3 months (but I chalk it up to not being that great at sales). And haven't done much demand side marketing yet as I've been focused on product and want to build organic SEO rather than spend $ on SEM. Anyways, it's been a really long and expensive ride and without getting feedback from demand side users it's tough/discouraging at times.<p>I'd like to hear from successful founders who have found product market fit when and how they knew it was working. <comment> grif-fin According to the 'The Lean Startup' by Eric Ries in simple over view of when to pivot:

"If the company is making good progress toward the ideal, that means it's learning appropriately and using that learning effectively, in which case it makes sense to continue. If not, the management team eventually must conclude that its current product strategy is flawed and needs a serious change. When a company pivots, it starts the process all over again, reestablishing a new baseline and then tuning the engine from there. The sign of a successful pivot is that these engine-tuning activities are more productive after the pivot than before."

</comment><comment><USER2> So basically you have a market place but few or no customers to pay you, or your suppliers? Organic SEO is fine, if it's happening, but if it's not, you need to make it happen. If you have demand customers, reach out to a sample of them individually, and ask them what brought them there, and for any suggestions for you to consider that would make you easier for them to recommend to friends/colleagues.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think you should pivot if you find that what you assumed of your customers is no longer true.

From what I read here that may not be the case, and looks like it is probably a matter of sales/marketing.

Also two sides markets are hard

Just my 2c</comment>


New to Web Applications, which language should I start with? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Good lord. What a way to start a silly thread.

Pick an Open Source application you find useful and would enjoy enhancing, and learn whatever language it is written in. If you're new to the field (you haven't mentioned whether you're a proficient developer in other areas, or if you really mean "new to development"). In either case, you don't have to knowledge at this point to determine the "best" language for your goals, so start with the one that will be the most fun and productive for you today. That means starting with an existing application.

In the end, they're all pretty similar, and the skills you learn with PHP, or Perl, or Python, or Ruby, or Java will serve you well when you begin to learn how you think about development problems and find the language that suits that way of thinking.

</comment><comment><USER3> At some point, no matter what else you do, you'll end up needing either flash or javascript: Flash/AJAX are the only current solutions for creating highly interactive websites. Javascript is a relatively friendly language, so I would start with it.

You will also need another language for dealing with the backend of the website, I personally would avoid PHP, I don't enjoy writing in it compared to other existing choices. That said, it is almost certainly the most widely used technology (calling it the Java of the web wouldn't be an entirely unfounded comparison). Personally I have really loved the Django framework, which is done in Python. I am fairly biased though, so take that with a grain of salt.

The real advice I'd give about the backend language/framework you start using is to use the one you'll enjoy using the most. Later on you'll end up learning a number of other frameworks anyway, so you might as well chose the one you want to work in, especially because you'll be spending a lot of time teething on it. After you learn one, picking up others will be much easier (most web frameworks use the same model-view-controller design).

</comment><comment><USER4> Javascript.

Beyond that, what language(s) you should learn depend on what you already know, what sort of application you're planning to write, what sort of deployment options you need and what sort of tools you want to use in developing your app.

The last point is one of the most important; the framework you use for your web app matters more than the language. Personally, I like Common Lisp with TBNL, CL-WHO and CLSQL - the combination originally used to develop reddit.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think it really depends on your goals. If you are planning on working for someone else, I would say go with either PHP, Ruby, or Python. Those seem to have the most opportunities. If you plan on creating your own app, then perhaps it would be wise to look into the less common but perhaps more powerful languages like Smalltalk (for Seaside) or Common Lisp.

</comment><comment><USER6> PDP11 assembler running on an emulator

</comment><comment><USER7> What do you know already?

</comment><comment><USER8> HTML first. Then some SQL. Then some JavaScript. Then BRL (never PHP if you have a choice). Then more SQL. Then more JavaScript.

</comment><comment><USER9> Rails or Flex

</comment><comment><USER10> Java :-)

</comment><comment><USER11> PHP

<comment><USER12> Since you said "web applications", and not just web in general, I will assume you know some HTML.

Although I am not a huge fan of PHP, I think it is probably the best language to begin with for a few reasons:

\- Tonnes of resources for learning - the language is not difficult to start with, and there are plenty of tutorials and books aimed at beginners.

\- For a web language, it is pretty much as powerful as you need it to be.

\- It is probably the most common web-based programming language.

\- You can find a server to host your site for very cheap, and download the software to set up your own development server for free.

\- PHP is taken seriously as a language, and powers some of the largest sites on the internet (Digg, Facebook, Wikipedia)

The downsides are that it does not encourage good coding practices and it is easy to write an insecure script, but this is true in any language or framework until you know what you are doing.</comment></comment>


How Compaq Cloned IBM and Created an Empire - <AUTHOR> http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/05/the-incredible-true-story-behind-amcs-halt-and-catch-fire-how-compaq-cloned-ibm-and-created-an-empire/ <comment><USER2> When you see this, and then open source you realize how giving people access to your platform, to being able for them to be part and to drive the product is what it makes it the winner combo. Although I'm not sure that's the case anymore; android, apple and qualcomm they all seem to roll on the wheels of "never a copy of it".

<comment><USER3> It's tricky: an open ecosystem often wins, but there are certain abuses that cannot be eradicated in an open system, and if your system becomes open you will not be able to make a profit from it.

<comment><USER4> I respectfully disagree. Red Hat has been able to make a profit from Linux's dominance of the server ecosystem. I'm not sure what abuses you mean, but the existence of CentOS (a nearly direct clone) has not wiped out Red Hat. The malware situation for closed vs open ecosystems would be a separate discussion.

<comment><USER5> People who use CentOS are more likely to pay for Red Hat out of familiarity with the OS. It's better for Red Hat if people choose CentOS over Debian or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd love to see the parallel universe where Commodore never collapsed and the Amiga kept growing in popularity and power, and Steve Jobs never left Apple and got to push NeXTSTEP in a big way before Windows 95 came on the scene, and where Sir Clive stayed at Sinclair Computers making ever more successful portables...

2016 in that universe is probably a very different world, with lots of different types of devices with different strengths, and a much stronger focus on cross-platform protocols.

<comment><USER7> > Steve Jobs never left Apple and got to push NeXTSTEP in a big way

That seems like a contradiction, unless nextstep was a internal project at Apple he took with him when he left.

<comment><USER6> I mean NeXTSTEP could have been developed at Apple, and launched as a Macintosh operating system. I'm not well versed in the exact history, but a UNIX-based, object-oriented, multitasking OS released under Apple's marketing may have gotten a lot more exposure + press, and being released several years before Windows 95 it would have stolen some of Microsoft's thunder.

<comment><USER8> NeXTSTEP lives on as OS X to this day :) Even the base class in every API is called "NSObject" :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Those first Compaq portables were bullet proof.

The IBM luggables were huge and unreliable. They had 2 full height 5 1/4 inch floppy drives, no hard drive, a 4.5MHz 8086, and something like an 8 inch amber screen that you could barely read. Basically, IBM put a bunch of parts they didn't know what to do with into a product and tried to sell it. The only way they could really sell them was to captive audiences like students, like at some engineering schools.

</comment><comment><USER10> My first computer was a Compaq Deskpro Portable. It had a 5 1/4" floppy drive, a 40 MB hard drive and ran DOS 3.1 IIRC. I even wrote a custom autoexec.bat file so it booted into a fancy menu of common applications (like Volkswriter and BASICA). I still have the computer but am afraid to boot it up now, since the last time I turned it on it actually booted but smoke came out of the vent.

<comment><USER11> You sir, need a variac. Slowly apply that 110v/220v to your machine.

<comment><USER12> I disagree ... older PCs are much less tolerant to changes to the input voltage. A "simulated brown-out" might kill it completely. Electrolytic capacitors are probably to blame for the smoke - they definitely fail with age. The good news is that you can probably replace them since everything was through-hole back then (as opposed to surface mount).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The amazing thing was how Compaq beat IBM to market with a PC using the 386. Not surprising since they could move faster because they were a scrappy startup unlike IBM. Compaq also didn't come up with their own bus standards like MCA.

</comment><comment><USER14> Thinking about it, it seems to be around 1991 before they were forced to do things like cutting R&D. This would have been probably be a good time for Intel to buy it.

</comment><comment><USER15> There's a great show on Netflix that's a fictional retelling of the engineers reverse engineering the BIOS for their first IBM clones. Highly stylized, but (I've only seen the first season) a fun watch.

"Halt and Catch Fire" \- [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/)

<comment><USER16> There was an instruction set parody circulated around the mainframe world in the 1980s (at least) entitled "Name That Instruction Set!" which claimed to be new opcodes for the alleged upcoming Osborne II. It included, among others:

HCF - Halt and Catch Fire

IIB - Ignore Interrupt and Branch

PIL - Perform Infinite Loop

etc.

I can't find an exact copy, but this appears to be somewhat of a superset:

[http://www.physics.ohio- state.edu/~bcd/humor/instruction.set...](http://www.physics.ohio- state.edu/~bcd/humor/instruction.set.html)

Another:

[http://www.softpanorama.org/Lang/Asmorama/humor.shtml](http://www.softpanorama.org/Lang/Asmorama/humor.shtml)

<comment><USER17> Of course, for IBM PowerPC there was the (real!) assembly instruction _EIEIO_ which meant: Enforce In-Order Execution of I/O. [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enforce_In- order_Execution_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enforce_In- order_Execution_of_I/O)

<comment><USER18> "I would suggest re-naming "rmbdd()". I _assume_ that "dd" stands for "data dependent", but quite frankly, "rmbdd" looks like the standard IBM "we lost every vowel ever invented" kind of assembly lanaguage to me.

I'm sure that having programmed PPC assembly language, you find it very natural (IBM motto: "We found five vowels hiding in a corner, and we used them _all_ for the 'eieio' instruction so that we wouldn't have to use them anywhere else")."

\-- Linus Torvalds, LKML ([http://ozlabs.org/~rusty/linux.conf.au-2004-emails.txt](http://ozlabs.org/~rusty/linux.conf.au-2004-emails.txt))</comment></comment></comment></comment>


TechCrunch Not Attending Launch Conference - <AUTHOR> http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2011/02/is_techcrunch_b.php

<comment><USER2> So, this is basically all speculation based on the fact that no Techcrunch writer has applied for press credentials? How does this compare to other conferences?

It seems to me that Arrington doesn't really give a damn after getting acquired, and Calacanis is fanning the flames to create controversy/get attention.

The other explanation is that AOL acquired TechCrunch in part for the lucrative and growing conference business, and is putting pressure on its writers to play down the importance of a direct competitor. Again, no facts, just conjecture.

I don't know enough about Arrington to pass judgment, but I'm instinctively wary of any piece that tries to frame any controversy as a black and white battle of good vs. evil.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why does the paragraph repeat three times? Is there no one proofreading this before hitting submit?

</comment><comment> mkr-hn "If there are no TechCrunch writers registered then clearly Mr Arrington is deliberately boycotting the conference and that means he is also likely to be adding to his Enemies List, the companies and people that have supported Launch. This means people such as Dave McClure, Chris Sacca, Kevin Rose, George Zachery and others, are on that list. "

\----

That's quite a bit to infer and assert. There are too many other possible explanations for the most damning to rise to the top so easily.

</comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone have contact information for Jason? I'd love to get a hold of him.

<comment><USER5> Go into the bathroom, turn off all the lights, light a candle, repeat the phrase "bloody mary" thirteen times, and he'll appear for you.

Or, you can just email him at the address listed on his website, <http://calacanis.com/>, which is email@example.com ;-)

<comment><USER4> No dice on the first one, so I tried your second method and had success. Thanks for the tip!</comment></comment></comment>


Among Gen Y, some are abandoning Facebook for Google+ - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2011/07/22/google-plus-gen-y/

<comment><USER2> Hell, even some of us _Boomers_ are...</comment>