Doom as a tool for system administration (1999) - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/ <comment><USER2>
      Certain processes are vital to the computer's operation and should not be
      killed. For example, after I took the screenshot of myself being attacked by
      csh, csh was shot by friendly fire from behind, possibly by tcsh or xv, and
      my session was abruptly terminated.

Haha, this is nuts :)

</comment><comment><USER3> If someone wants to try it out, a modern version is available here: [https://github.com/keymon/psdoom-ng](https://github.com/keymon/psdoom-ng).

I made a PKGBUILD of it for ArchLinux some time ago. You'll need freedoom or something else to have the game datas (yaourt -S psdoom-ng freedoom1; psdoom -iwad /usr/share/games/doom/freedm.wad).

<comment><USER4> Might be worth while if it lets you kill SystemD.

<comment><USER5> That would make a good boss battle.

<comment><USER6> Clearly the spider mastermind...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wondered what became of Dennis, the author. He got his PhD in 2004 and is now doing computer modeling of infections diseases. [http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/resume.html](http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/resume.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> And its follow-up:

[https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/after.html](https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/after.html)

<comment><USER8> And the paper, which that page links to:

[https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/papers/p152-chao.pdf](https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/papers/p152-chao.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I started thin Thinking about this all over again lately now that all the easy to mod minecraft clones are popping up, voxel.js or python minecraft in 500 lines for examples. In a minecraft environment it would look a bit less like a employee playing a game and the possibilities are really helpful if you think about them, virtual server rooms you can actually walk into, punch a rack and get a menu, actually punch a connection to take a node offline. Wouldn't mind a way to physically see memory and cpu usage of processes mapped to the size or color of objects in this type of environment either.

<comment><USER10> You could round it out with that 3D "Unix" file browser from Jurassic Park.

<comment><USER11> Aka fsn: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Awww, we played this on a projector at Systems '99 in Munich - probably the most important selling point for Debian, which we were promoting. (And 3 months later I discovered FreeBSD and never looked back, but such is life ;)

<comment><USER13> Mind elaborating what's good about FreeBSD compared to Debian/Linux. I've heard such statements before.

Btw, I think bloat of linux distros (huge number of similar packages with slight differences have to be installed just because e.g., out of two of the tools I need, one uses libxml and the other perl module XML::Parse, etc, etc) is a problem, which has made me think about minimal cohesive distro that has minimum duplication. Wondering if FreeBSD can help in that regard.

<comment><USER14> For one thing, it is a real UNIX in terms of lineage and not a clone.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds77e3aO9nA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds77e3aO9nA)

[http://www.informit.com/store/design-and-implementation- of-t...](http://www.informit.com/store/design-and-implementation-of-the- freebsd-operating-9780321968975)

<comment><USER15> Just why is being a "real" UNIX that important?

<comment><USER12> It is not at all important. Just ignore everyone who tries to lead you down that lane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This finally sounds like the user interface used in Jurassic Park, which I recall was actually a real thing. Which all in all is funny to me for unexplainable reasons.

<comment><AUTHOR>
        Fsn: an experimental application
             to view a file system in 3D

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

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11555327](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11555327)

<comment><USER17> These work on modern systems: [https://github.com/mcuelenaere/fsv](https://github.com/mcuelenaere/fsv) [https://github.com/3dfsb-dev/3dfsb](https://github.com/3dfsb-dev/3dfsb)

<comment><USER18> These attempts at 3D UIs never really caught on, but I wonder if they might make a comeback with VR.

<comment><USER19> I feel like they are more likely with Augmented Reality, which doesn't take over your entire visual environment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Very nice idea, it could be combined with an IPv4 Space visualization. I am working on it [https://github.com/fibo/netvision](https://github.com/fibo/netvision)

</comment><comment><USER21> related, admin your server with minecraft: [https://github.com/simplyianm/sysadmincraft](https://github.com/simplyianm/sysadmincraft)

<comment><USER22> Also, this: [https://github.com/docker/dockercraft](https://github.com/docker/dockercraft). Manage your docker containers in minecraft! (Arguably a much better fit for the block-based world!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This was originally on Slashdot in 1990's and has been on HN before.

<comment><USER24>
        1. Browse old Slashdot archives for their best links
        2. Post them to HN fifteen-twenty years later
        3. ???
        4. Profit!!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> "I beat Linux. The end process was hard."

</comment><comment><USER26> It would be cool to hack frotz + inform6 (now you can as is Artistic 2.0 license based) as an awesome psheudo shell and parser for system commands.

Think natural language for users. Heaven.

<comment><USER27> You are in a directory called 'home'. There are directories to the north, south and west. There are twenty files here. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

<comment><USER28> take files

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> That's what I call _gamification_.</comment>


Wired magazine is 56.2% fullpage ads - <AUTHOR> http://cli.gs/TTbLLT

<comment><USER2> Is this news? I mean, hasn't Wired /always/ been super ad heavy?

Hey, it has! <http://www.suck.com/daily/95/10/06/daily.html>

"We studied issue 3.09 (the one with Arnold Schwarzenegger on its cover) and were not surprised to discover that of its 206 pages, 90 were full page ads. (If you include 1/2's, 1/4's, and pull-outs the ratio jumps to a clean 50/50 split.)"

Further analysis of Wired's ad/content ratio was done by the Magazineer in January -- <http://magazineer.com/howto/26>

<comment><USER3> Ah, suck.com -- my favorite web 1.0 relic.

Filler was the best webcomic before webcomics were cool.

<http://www.suck.com/filler/archive/all.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've noticed the NYT has many more ads than it used to. My instincts tell me this is the death spasm of print. It means things are worse for the print media than even their current revenues suggest, because falling ad prices have been concealed by selling more ads. But they're going to run out of room for that soon.

<comment><USER5> Should we brainstorm saving the poor bastards? I'll start.

I would pay for content if:

1\. It is personalized to my area of interest. It should be narrow enough to avoid unrelated stuff, wide enough to cover particaulr area compeletely such that I never need to go read another source for the same area. It should be de-duped. I hate dups.

2\. All references and facts are properly attributed and cited. The moment I see "scientists found that 30% of..." I cancel my subscription without hesitation.

3\. Non-factual pieces (opinions) are from well-known experts. At least there should be a credibility trail behind those people.

4\. Content is peer reviewed. If there is a stretch somewhere, I want to know about it.

5\. Content is short and to the point. I have short attention span and not much time.

6\. Conflicts of interest and biases should be apparent.

For example Hardward Business Review is doing a reasonably god job on 2, 3, 6 and somtimes 5.

HN is pretty good with #1 (except dupes which are pretty bad).

<comment><USER4> Within YC we often brainstorm about the future of journalism, but it is more in the spirit of killing the existing players than saving them. History suggests that is the right way to frame the question. Companies as deeply entrenched in obsolete habits as most current print media companies tend not to survive major shifts like the arrival of the Internet.

So instead of asking "How do you fix the NYT?" I'd ask "How would you kill the NYT?" Notice how much more scope you have for new answers there. If you're trying to fix them, you're implicitly constrained to make something like a newspaper. If you're trying to kill them, all you have to do is make something their advertisers prefer; that could be practically anything.

<comment><USER6> "Within YC we often brainstorm about the future of journalism"

There's probably a good mailing list on this topic. It seems like all the most intelligent discussion on the net takes place on secret mailing lists. The problem is that to find out where this discussion is taking place you'd really have to email a bunch of wonkish j-school types.

(And if anyone knows where people are discussing this, send me a note.)

<comment><USER7> As a j-school graduate, I can promise you not much of interest is being said on the topic there.

Newspapers, according to my former classmates working at them and people I meet at industry events, seem to still be run by people over 45, who for the most part think they'll be able to sneak out the backdoor just before the whole thing falls apart.

As I said in another thread, I'm here in Chicago trying to figure out how to kill off the local papers. After months wasted spent working on features and design and stuff that doesn't really matter if you don't have a plan, I've started calling up companies that advertise in local neighborhood papers and meeting with them. Met with three on Thursday. I'm making this up as I go along but here's what I more or less was asking:

1\. Who are you trying to reach? 2\. How are you doing it now? 3\. What works well about that approach? 4\. What's not working well for you?

Pretty basic stuff, right?

Here's what I'm learning so far:

1\. Small neighborhood businesses (think of 37Signals Italian restaurant analogy) are advertising in weekly neighborhood papers like this one: <http://www.hpherald.com/>

They're paying about $250-300 for a 4 inch square ad that runs in the paper and on the web....which is a static PDF (!) that gets updated once a week. A back of napkin calculation following a look through that paper leads me to believe they're selling 8-12k in ads in it each week.

The businesses tell me this tool is prohibitively expensive and don't like that you can't measure its results.

Now, I asked them what they'd rather have, and they tried to pitch me on some kind of online coupon setup, where people could print off coupons and the businesses pay me each month based on how many coupons they tally up. This seems like a suckers game.

But a few ideas I'm toying with that could be better for them:

1\. A daily neighborhood e-mail. They would be paying to reach X inboxes and could measure click-thru's using e-mail tools. Each e-mail would have a short article on something cool in the neighborhood, a la Daily Candy and extensive upcoming event listings (more on that below). Once you get enough of a subscriber base, then you start publishing the content to the web as well to rack in the pageviews and let readers connect.

2\. Stepping in as their go-to guy to manage their adwords/CPC campaigns. This would be a lot less fun, but is a direction worth considering. Some of these little restaurants could be well served from getting listed high for certain searches and getting optimized on Google Maps, for example.

Other observation that I'm still trying to make sense of:

The people I'm meeting with say they'd like a place to find neighborhood events.

As a guy who hangs out on Hacker News, I am aware of going.com, eventful.com, upcoming, craigslist and all manner of event sites. Yelp, The Onions new decider.com site, all sorts of people are doing them.

And yet these advertisers had never heard of any of them and the people at the community groups said they wanted a decent online neighborhood calendar.

Which got me thinking that maybe a Garysguide.org-style events site for neighborhood events could play well. Start with just a few neighborhoods with loud identities and own them, get known as the place to go to see what's happening in those hoods. Perhaps this would be the web-half of the daily newsletter.

Anyway, the future of journalism conversation is fascinating. I'd be interested in any suggestions or observations from the peanut gallery on here. As I said, I'm making this up as I go along. A network of cheap, scalable, interesting neighborhood event + news sites seems like something that might be attractive if you can pull in the local eyeballs.

Thoughts?

As for Wired's advertising/editorial ratio, FWIW I just asked my friends working at magazines about it and they say that the ideal ratio is 40% ads and 60% editorial. I'm looking around online for some backup on that front and not finding much to be honest, but that's what they're teaching at j-school on the subject. So Wired's probably hurting if they're over 50% ads.

<comment><USER8> _"... As I said in another thread, I'm here in Chicago trying to figure out how to kill off the local papers. ..."_

A good description of <http://www.everyblock.com/>

<comment><USER7> Mentioned below!

<comment><USER8> _"... A good description of<http://www.everyblock.com/> ... Mentioned below! ..."_

Thanks, didn't see that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oddly enough, I was reading my copy today and was thinking that I much prefer print ads to online ads. I actually enjoy bumping into things I would not normally see. My only gripe are the ads that try to disguise themselves as editorial material and have to have the word "Advertisement" on the top of the page. Online, I ignore ads and the ones I do notice are rarely interesting.

</comment><comment><USER10> So what we have in the first place is major corporations which are parts of even bigger conglomerates. Now, like any other corporation, they have a product which they sell to a market. The market is advertisers -- that is, other businesses. What keeps the media functioning is not the audience. They make money from their advertisers. And remember, we're talking about the elite media. So they're trying to sell a good product, a product which raises advertising rates. And ask your friends in the advertising industry. That means that they want to adjust their audience to the more elite and affluent audience. That raises advertising rates. So what you have is institutions, corporations, big corporations, that are selling relatively privileged audiences to other businesses.

Well, what point of view would you expect to come out of this? I mean without any further assumptions, what you'd predict is that what comes out is a picture of the world, a perception of the world, that satisfies the needs and the interests and the perceptions of the sellers, the buyers and the product.

Now there are many other factors that press in the same direction. If people try to enter the system who don't have that point of view they're likely to be excluded somewhere along the way. After all, no institution is going to happily design a mechanism to self-destruct. It's not the way institutions function. So they'll work to exclude or marginalize or eliminate dissenting voices or alternative perspectives and so on because they're dysfunctional, they're dysfunctional to the institution itself.

[http://www.archive.org/details/NoamChomskyNoamChomskyManufac...](http://www.archive.org/details/NoamChomskyNoamChomskyManufacturingConsent_0)

</comment><comment><USER11> Um, did anyone notice what month it is?

If you had a fixed advertising budget for the year, wouldn't you spend most of it in the November and December issues?

Almost every magazine and newspaper gets really fat at the end of the year.

</comment><comment><USER12> Coincidentally, our new issue of Wired arrived today and I suggested that they weren't at risk of going under so long as at least 50% of the magazine is ads. At least until people stop buying it because of that.

</comment><comment><USER13> Here's a pic of mine of the pages with ads on both sites in wired ripped out: <http://flickr.com/photos/ikirigin/2097211221/>

I'd like to do this with a scalpel to compare the height.

</comment><comment><USER14> _I don't have as much time as I used to, to do this, but I try to give the whole magazine a flip at least once, every month._

Blogger needs to take some time, to learn proper comma use, and then rethink this sentence.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, I went a little comma happy there. I fixed the sentence to read a little better.

<comment><USER14> On second read, my comment seems a bit snarky. No offense intended.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> On the news-stands that I've checked, the more "high-end" a woman's magazine is, the greater the percentage of ad content.

</comment><comment><USER16> The author noticed "after about a 3 month hiatus." If subscribers are not reading the magazine that is a pretty bad sign so why should we be surprised about all of the ads. I find it somewhat ironic that after 3 months of not making time to take a good look at the magazine the author is surprised that something has changed.

</comment><comment><USER17> not really surprised here, back in the day when it was a 1/4" thick, I use to rip out all the ads that were front and back, then start reading it.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder how long it's going to be before I start seeing ads in World of Warcraft or Eve... Never I hope...

</comment><comment><USER19> Christ why are submissions going through tiny url services?

<comment><AUTHOR> First time poster - didn't realize it was a big deal. Noted for future posts. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> In other news, Vogue magazine is 91% fullpage ads.</comment>


Cyropaedia of Xenophon: The Life of Cyrus The Great - <AUTHOR> http://www.iranchamber.com/history/xenophon/cyropaedia_xenophon_book1.php

<comment><USER2> Xenophon's "Persian Expedition" is one of my favorite books. It's _picaresque_ yet sincere in a way that few writers achieve.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. And the emotional payoff at the end is truly fantastic, especially for a non-fiction book.</comment></comment>


Apple vs. Google: Tech's Newest Rivalry? - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2009/tc2009084_007016.htm <comment><USER2> I think it's less a rivalry than a kind of surprised CYA response to the new administration's ramped-up FTC, FCC enforcement.

This made me laugh: "[Apple] relies more than any other tech company on so- called 'native code'…"

</comment><comment><USER3> Pretty interesting match-up really: ruthless efficiency versus individuality; process versus personality; open versus closed; workaday versus sublime; dauntingly powerful Borgian collective versus one man's vision.

<comment><USER4> How fickle are our tastes, and how brief our memories.

Not long ago, Google was roundly denounced as a privacy-invading censorious copyright enforcer extending its monopolistic tendrils into every aspect of our lives.

Then Apple started doing stupid crap with its mobile platform, and suddenly Google is truth and justice and freedom and puppies.

How long until it swings round again?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> webware vs fashionware

Nop, not a rivalry.</comment>


The future of undersea Internet cables: Are big tech companies forming a cartel? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.apnic.net/2019/04/03/the-future-of-undersea-internet-cables-are-big-tech-companies-forming-a-cartel/ <comment><USER2> Its not a cartel, Telecom is the cartel, its just plain cheaper and more reliable to do it yourself, at scale.

This should be played against the background of a lot of transit providers being consumed into the twin blackholes of GTT and Level3.

Dealing with them is a massive massive pain. They are almost always universally incompetent.

Then there are peering agreements. In the US its all a bit wonky, as it costs to do anything. As far as I'm aware there are no coop style internet exchanges, which means that peering is prohibitively expensive.

else where, in normal land, most places are coops, which means you pay a small fee and negotiate peering directly with other peers.

Given that with the concentration of traffic around 4/5 company's datacenters it makes perfect sense to tap directly into those.

Having a complete network under your control, with your QoS working globally right up to the last mile, is a worthy goal. Being <10ms away from 90% of your customers is worth the cost.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it's a bit far fetched to describe the current situation as a cartel. First, what is the function of a cartel? It's to coordinate supply to keep prices high. Do we really think that anything the content players have done so far would indicate any of them are trying to set pricing higher? Hardly. Second, the reason they are taking positions / building their own is that there isn't a business case to build these cables without them.

<comment><USER4> The industry as a whole has been trying to do this by attacking net neutrality. Things like metered plans create artificial scarcity and allow companies to increase the price of switching packets.

<comment><USER5> Dude, the ping i get on my facebook atlantic cable is like 2ms between here and the .eu shard.

What are you getting on that other link?!

Ssure they spy on all my stuff but look at that ping!

<comment><USER6> 2e-3s*3e8 m/s=6e5m. So no, you are not going to get 2ms transatlantic ping.

<comment><USER7> Light travels something like 30% slower in fibre optic cable than vacuum.

So would be more like 420 kilometres for 2ms.

<comment><USER8> And that's round trip, so ~200 km away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One benefit of all these Low Earth Orbit satellite megaconstellations is they can completely bypass terrestrial internet backbones. Starlink and Telesat LEO in particular. And (in principle) get _lower_ latency to servers on the other side of the planet due to the faster speed of light in vacuum vs glass (and perhaps a more direct route).

<comment><USER10> It's not just the faster speed in vacuum vs glass, but the route can be a lot more direct.

An undersea cable will go through (or around) all kinds of trenches or peaks because the sea bed isn't flat. And it needs to have some stress relief imperfect routing to handle shifting.

<comment><USER3> just remember the underlying unit economics of LEO vs fiber. A repeated system is generally thought to be capable of 40+Tbps / pair where as LEO might be good for gigabit at best.

<comment><USER9> I have no idea where you got that figure. GSO birds do can ~1Tbps already (EDIT: Viasat's birds, for instance: [https://corpblog.viasat.com/viasats- global-satellite-constel...](https://corpblog.viasat.com/viasats-global- satellite-constellation-well-on-its-way-to-completion/)). LEO is a factor of 50-100 closer. Inverse square law and all that means for the same aperture and power, you can get far better bandwidth.

<comment><USER11> GSO is very high orbit (22K miles) and therefor has much higher latency. The lower orbit (100-1K miles) constellations are lower bandwidth because of the high _angular_ speed of travel removes the ability to do directional (high powered) transmissions.

<comment><USER9> Incorrect. The LEO constellations use phased arrays (or similar) and are able to slew at whatever angular rate you could want as they are electronically steered. Both for the terminals and for the satellite side. Iridium has used phases arrays in its LEO constellation for decades now, and the newer constellations like OneWeb and Starlink use phases arrays on the terminal side as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't think this is a cartel. Big users of data decided "we don't want to pay the price that the owner of the cable is offering, so we'll just build our own." Then they built their own.

<comment><USER10> The issue with an over-build first approach to competition is visible with airlines. If you see that a particular handful of routes are highly priced, you can set up your own airline. But the incumbent can just drive you out of business with their other markets and bankrupt you.

Then nobody risks trying to take you on again.

It's nice that big users of data may be bigger than the telecoms, but when that isn't the case, the market fails when building your own links on a larger network of oligopolists.

<comment><USER8> Wait, where does this happen? The airline industry seems to have a high degree of competition and very good pricing for consumers. Which makes sense given that it isn't an industry conducive to natural monopolies. The cost to open a route isn't that high compared to the cost to operate the route, and the cost of operation scales with revenue from the route; there isn't much in the way of fixed capital required for a route.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> IMHO having more players in this market, which so far is dominated by state operated telcos and de-facto monopolists like AT&T is actually improving things. The more independently operating companies there are operating their own cables, the more room there is for free market to operate.

That being said, I do believe the notion of big corporations with pre-existing near monopolies on e.g. search or online retail with yearly revenues exceeding the gross national product of most nations on this planet, is not necessarily good for a free market. There have been some demands for some of these companies to be broken up and IMHO that would actually be a good thing. Calls for that are only going to get stronger.

<comment><USER14> > The more independently operating companies there are operating their own > cables, the more room there is for free market to operate.

> That being said, I do believe the notion of big corporations with pre- > existing near monopolies on e.g. search or online retail with yearly > revenues exceeding the gross national product of most nations on this > planet, is not necessarily good for a free market

To me, those two statements sound contradictory. Do you want a "free market" or don't you? If it's a free market, you have to expect that the organizations with the deepest pockets that stand to gain the most from larger internet pipes are going to be the ones to invest in it.

I'm _certainly_ no expert, but it seems to me that the more ideal situation would be that core infrastructure like the internet is driven primarily by public money. The obvious argument against that is maybe it won't grow as phenomenally fast as it has, but maybe we don't really need to be able to stream those 4K cat videos when, like you said, in doing so we're empowering for-profit organizations to grow larger than the GDP of many nations.

> There have been some demands for some of these companies to be broken up and > IMHO that would actually be a good thing.

At least we're in 100% agreement here!

<comment><USER13> They are not necessarily contradicting statements. Google and Amazon have near monopolies on another thing than fiber optic cables. Neither is trying to monopolize fiber optic cables. But of course them using their wealth and power as a near monopoly in their own fields to basically work around another near monopoly from telcos so they can create a cost advantage to re-enfore their own monopolies is kind of not really a free market any more. In the same way coercing city, state and country governments into giving them tax advantages also helps them compete unfairly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does it really matter if we have an excess of capacity when incumbents own the last mile and prevent open peering close to home and/or charge ridicious per mbit prices for transit or private peering. A little up the ladder for example you can already get HE in AUS [https://pop.he.net/?country=Australia](https://pop.he.net/?country=Australia) so think sub $1/mbit pricing but its all pointless* as 90% of the eyeball ISPs won't peer with them. *pointless is an exaggeration but doesn't help content providers or end users

</comment><comment><USER16> Forming a cartel?

Aren't they already a cartel, having divided the oceanic territories & protecting each other's vested interests?

</comment><comment><USER17> Obligatory reference to "Mother Earth Mother Board," one of the all-time best pieces of long-form tech writing, Neal Stephenson's gonzo journalism exploration of undersea cable laying.

"Our method was not exactly journalism nor tourism in the normal sense but what might be thought of as a new field of human endeavor called hacker tourism: travel to exotic locations in search of sights and sensations that only would be of interest to a geek."

[https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/](https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/)

<comment><USER18> Id also recommend Cryptonomicon by Stephenson. Undersea cables is a major subject in the novel. It also touches on many things that have become relevant today despite the book being written 1999 (cryptocurrency, encryption, etc). [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38897904](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38897904)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Doesn't matter we can nationalize their assets when the time is right

</comment><comment><USER20> I like this cable map [https://dev.networkatlas.com/](https://dev.networkatlas.com/)

</comment><comment><USER21> As soon as the monopoly will be in place, a decentralized multiple-media network based on a distributed privately handled network infrastructure will be already available. I am working on this problem since 2010, see PJON: [https://github.com/gioblu/PJON](https://github.com/gioblu/PJON)

<comment><USER22> And will that network include undersea cabling, satellites, or some equivalent means of global connection? I doubt it: these are all extraordinarily expensive. Even the cheapest approach imaginable - say, a series of network repeaters on rafts - is still quite expensive, not to mention incredibly brittle.

I'm all for distributed networks, local meshes, and other initiatives to reduce network hardware centralization. That said, these are not perfect substitutes for a global network. For instance: I'm based in Canada, and my work currently deals with digital service deployment in government. As part of that work, I occasionally need to refer to the UK's Government Digital Service (GDS) website. No amount of local network infrastructure can help me do that: I rely on the trans-Atlantic cables to access this.

Now, you could imagine mirroring the GDS website across a number of these local distributed networks, forming what is in essence a CDN under distributed ownership. That might help me right now, but: in a network monopoly world, how would you mirror content on an ongoing basis in the first place? Who would maintain such a mirror? How would you pay for the immense storage requirements? (Or, failing that, how would you decide which corner of the Internet to mirror?)

<comment><USER21> PJON Is done to leverage of whatever form of connectivity (wires, light pulses, radio waves, other protocols) even the internet. For now people implementing a PJON network generally hops through the internet when required.

Although, I have a great trust in the maker's and open-source community worldwide. As you can see a lot of people experimenting with electronics and building stuff have unveiled the truth behind the scams that we now call "consumer electronics products" and they are starting to build and buy open- hardware that runs open-software.

A privately built and maintained network infrastructure where communication is free and if required anonymous will be the next demand.

There is a large movement worldwide, many are doing so already, there is just a lack of standards and protocols designed around those requirements. PJON is an attempt to fill this gap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> _Between 2016 and 2020 about 100 new cables have been laid or planned. The primary reason for new cables is the demand for bandwidth. But it is difficult to pinpoint the source of this demand._

Memes i say. Memes.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's amazing to me that nobody ever mentions ocean plastic pollution when undersea cables come up.

<comment><USER25> Why would they? the percentage undersea cable makes up has to be insanely small.</comment></comment>


Two related puzzles, one not so hard, one hard - <AUTHOR> http://gcanyon.wordpress.com/2009/03/03/two-puzzles-and-a-meta-puzzle/

<comment><USER2> Answer to the easy one:

Each prisioner agrees that if the two other prisioners have the same color of skullcap, that he (pardon my sexism) will switch his switch to indicate that he has the other color. Assuming a random distribution of colors, this will work three out of four times.

<comment><USER3> Nice. Here's more detail, following my thought process:

On first glance, it seems that any prisoner would gain no information on seeing the other prisoner's caps. Therefore, it's just a 50/50 shot, so the best strategy for the prisoners is to pick one ahead of time who will flip his switch (and the others will not).

However, when you enumerate the possibilities (BBB, BBW, BWB, etc.), you can see that following frankus's strategy will provide a 3/4 chance of survival.

This apparent paradox goes away once you recognize that, in fact, seeing the 2 prisoners caps does, in fact, provide information to the 3rd prisoner. That information is not the color of the cap, but whether another may have flipped his switch.

For example, if I am a prisoner, and I see two black caps, there are two scenarios:

      - I'm wearing a white cap. If I don't flip the switch, we all die. If I do, we live.

      - I'm wearing a black cap. If I flip the switch, we die, but if I do not, we die anyway (since other prisoners incorrectly flipped the switch).</comment></comment>


Codd's 12 rules - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codd%27s_12_rules

<comment><USER2> Excellent and prescient reference.

</comment><comment><USER3> Since it starts with rule 0 it's actually 13 rules.</comment>


Apple to Allow Background Tasks on iPhone? - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2009/02/03/apple-to-allow-background-tasks-on-iphone/ <comment><USER2> Can we please stop submitting rumors?

This article has no information. We can speculate endlessly about what Apple is going to release, but it's not very useful. Let's wait and see.

</comment><comment><USER3> If this article is true, it really represents a mis-step or lack of focus for Apple. It's strange to see that in the wild like this.

On the other hand, getting the notification service right on the back end would likely have required a _lot_ of effort and cost. It's not surprising so much that the service was never delivered, moreso that it was announced at all.

If background tasks are allowed to run in the future, I'd anticipate Bad Things for battery life, one of the strategic weak spots for the iPhone.

<comment><USER4> Hopefully they will cap processor utilization of background apps so they still work without sucking power.

<comment><USER3> My experience with a Blackberry was that background data (polling, tcp keepalives) were the worst of the battery draining. Unfortunately that kind of stuff would work better with a notification API.

At one time UNIXes were all about time sharing and quotas. I think bringing some of that back (certainly with different controls and interfaces) would be beneficial.</comment></comment></comment>


Fluid Layout from Hicksdesign - <AUTHOR> http://hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/finally-a-fluid-hicksdesign

<comment><USER2> Bravo:

      Hello source code curious person from the INTERWEBS!
      What you're doing is (in my opinion) the BEST way to learn and advance, that is, viewing the source. It's how I learnt, and how I'm still learning.

      So go ahead, dig away and ask any questions. (see the contact page)

      Techniques used on this site are all in the public domain, but the unique combination of CSS and images are what make this site's design.

      Please don't steal wholesale, thats all I'm saying.

<comment><USER3> You missed the footer.

        The problem with natural selection is that there's no one to blame for the design of testicles

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Beautiful. This type of thing makes me actually _want_ to learn web design, which hasn't happened in a loooong time.

</comment><comment><USER5> This plays very nicely with zoom in / out on Firefox too.

<comment><USER6> Doesn't work very well in Safari: <http://cl.ly/1SFj>

(The font is a result of a Safari Extension that changes the default font to Helvetica Neue; it's not a rendering problem)

<comment><USER7> You've got a bug in your extension there. Doesn't happen on stock Safari 5, it works perfectly.

<comment><USER6> The extension just changes the font to Helvetica Neue. Here's a picture with the extension disabled: <http://cl.ly/1SJe>

<comment><USER8> I can't reproduce that in my Safari 5 either, so it doesn't seem to be a general problem with that browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Absolutely brilliant. Everyone needs to be designing this way.

In the late 90s as higher resolution monitors became prevalent users gained the ability to have more usable workspace. Unfortunately we saw greedy webdesigners simply grab more space and browsing the web remained a full screen experience. We should be able to tile multiple web browser windows but due to many websites' designs this isn't really possible.

Hopefully this is the start of a new trend in space saving options in web design.

</comment><comment><USER10> Nice, but is this particularly noteworthy?

Also, the hyperlinks are nasty - they lose their bold-ness when clicked, which reflows the text.

<comment><USER11> It shows a great knowledge of CSS that is not readily seen today on many, if any, websites.

I see no such unboldedness when said links are clicked. Regardless, not the point of the article at all.

<comment><USER12> Very nicely done indeed! Does it play nice with IE? (Can't test it because I don't have a Windows machine at home). CSS would be much more pleasant to work with if it was consistent across different browsers...

<comment><USER13> Not entirely sure, but it looks he uses some js to fix some things for IE8:

<!-- to help IE recognise the new HTML tags --> <!--[if lte IE 8]> <script src="/js/html5.js"></script> <script src="/js/css3-mediaqueries.js"></script><![endif]-->

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How does the layout change based on the width? I wish he talked a bit about the code he is using.

<comment><USER15> He's using CSS media queries, similar to what's being done here:

[http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2010/04/using-css-media- queries...](http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2010/04/using-css-media-queries- ipad.html)

Check out the code he uses to make this happen near the bottom of his main CSS file:

<http://hicksdesign.co.uk/css/layout.css>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think this is pretty cool. Are there any frameworks/tutorials out there to create interfaces like this?

<comment><USER17> He specifically mentions this A List Apart article in the post: <http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> AVC.com should do this. His new redesign lends itself perfectly to this type of implementation.

</comment><comment><USER19> rga.com has been doing this on their main site for a while now

<comment><USER20> They are using a JavaScript "resize" handler though, not pure CSS. And the layout is much less fluid (it seems to toggle between just two fixed widths).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Font look terrible with Chrome on windows, which is why fluid is so hard to pull off.

<comment><USER22> I'm reasonably sure that this wasn't submitted so you can critique the font choice. The font has not a damn thing to do with the fluid layout – I think? You could use freaking Verdana!</comment></comment>


Optimizing Elevators  - <AUTHOR> http://dan-nolan.com/how-i-would-optimize-the-elevators-in-our-office-building/

<comment><USER2> Indeed, I have often wondered at the fact that elevator movements in most (all?) locations appear to be basically un-optimized, when it would clearly not be difficult to do so.</comment>


Visualizing BMI's "Blind Spots" - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bodylabs.com/2015/01/29/visualizing-bmis-blind-spots/

<comment><USER2> BMI is a simplistic, general indicator of relative size, one of many, and it's main purpose is be more accurate than body weight alone. For the majority of people it's correct. Almost every time I hear someone complain about it, they use the same old tired excuses ("it's muscle!", "it doesn't take enough factors into account!", "I'm big boned!", etc).

Why would anyone care? Because unfortunately science has gone and proven common sense true in the form of correlation between being overweight/obese and higher health risks and lowered longevity. So while BMI may not have started as a health indicator, it's now linked as one.

Look, unless you are bodybuilding heavily or a professional/elite athlete, the BMI is probably pretty accurate. If you don't think it's good enough you can always do other measurements, such as body fat percentage or waist circumference, or hell, even get a blood panel done (cholesterol, glucose, etc). For example, my BMI was 26.3 at one point in time. My waist was also 40inches, and I was pinching 52mm on my belly, so yeah, BMI was spot on. Thankfully, weight loss is possible, and I'm down to a BMI of 21.4, along with improving my functional fitness greatly.</comment>


U.S. Cloud Act is raising concern about extraterritoriality - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-24/huawei-frightens-europe-s-data-protectors-america-does-too <comment><USER2> I think this CLOUD Act will basically force internationally operating US companies to split up into a US part and an EU part. This law makes it impossible for any company with access to personal data of EU citizens, to obey both US and EU law. The only solution seems to be to ensure that they are two different companies. The other option is to abandon the EU market.

What still surprises me is that nearly all of the major cloud companies are based in the US. Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Apple, all of them US companies. If ever a law is going to create some EU competitors, it's the Cloud Act.

The other option is that either the US or the EU is going to water down their law. I'd be really sad if it's the EU, because that would legitimise and strengthen other countries' extraterritorial grasp over non-citizens' data. Like China with Huawei.

<comment><USER3> > The only solution seems to be to ensure that they are two different > companies.

If the EU comany is a subsiduary of the US company, then it will have to follow its orders and won't really be separate.

Furthermore if people based in the USA have physical access to the servers located in the EU, then if the US government wants that data, it will probably be exfiltrated to the USA, regardless of what EU governments want.

The solution is for EU governments to have control over their own computing infrastructure. This obviously includes cloud computing and datacenters. But it also needs to include operating systems and chips, because otherwise the risk of a foreign power putting a backdoor in them is too great.

Ditto for all countries, of course.

<comment><USER4> Here lies humanity, they tried to do the same things 15 different ways and squandered their resources doing so.

(Not saying you're advocating for this, just that it is the current plan it seems)

<comment><USER3> > Here lies humanity, they tried to do the same things 15 different ways and > squandered their resources doing so.

Polities that don't retain control over their computing infrastructure will in the future have effectively ceded independence to others.

Because controlling the full stack from silicon to cloud services is expensive (fabs can cost c. $20 billion), this has geo-political implications: namely that in the future there will only be a small number of loci of independent power. The USA will be one, China another. Does Europe want to make itself a third, or will it be content to be subservient to others?

<comment><USER5> The EU won't be content with it, but they still won't do anything about it.

<comment><USER6> Why not?

Safe Harbour was shot down after the Schrems case.

Google and Facebook are being taken to task currently.

The huge fines for GDPR violations will come if the companies cited as in breach of the regulations fail to do what the EU asks.

The EU is doing a lot. Just because it can't act with immediacy it doesn't mean nothing is happening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As of today we have cloud offerings of for instance azure completely separate from the US companies due to this.

Here in Norway we can get the complete azure offering from a company called Evry using azure stack [1] and there is a data centre like this in Germany too at least that I know of, probably many more.

And sectors like government and banking are required to use them and not the parent companies offerings, especially if it contains PII.

If this goes on I suspect a lot of the revenue US tech companies see today will disappear even if (for now) most run the licensed version of azure stack and the like.

[1] [https://www.evry.com/en/what-we-do/key-services/evry- cloud-s...](https://www.evry.com/en/what-we-do/key-services/evry-cloud- services/the-cloud-is-now-local---evry-azure-stack/)

<comment><USER8> Outside of the government sector it seems like these laws are to make sure that the data is within legal jurisdiction, and has nothing to do with privacy.

<comment><USER7> Banking data is at least considered to be "important" enough to keep within the borders too, but privacy is important too in regards to GDPR. How do you prevent unauthorized access to the data (i.e. the US government) with the cloud act. Do you report those requests as a breech? There is really no difference between that and having the servers hacked in other ways.

<comment><USER8> Banking data is important because the police and tax authority wants to make sure they have access, privacy doesn't really come into play here. It's a nice side effect, though. It's the same with accounting data.

When it comes to GDPR it only talks about where and by who data is processed, it doens't really put any restriction on storage, except for some pretty vague (on purpose) requirements about data protection (read: encryption).

<comment><USER7> But if the US government access PII without authorization via the cloud act wouldn't it count as a data breech when it comes to GDPR?

<comment><USER8> Then they should be getting encrypted or pseudoanonymised data, if you are following the regulations.

For services like AWS you can argue that they should be able to get ahold of these encryption keys, but most data protection authorities seems to think this is good enough.

<comment><USER9> Encryption is useless when you store the keys on the same infrastucture. U.S may ask for keys as well.

Even if you would store the keys on a local service at some point your data will lie/transition decrypted on the remote hardware.

It's not a good idea at all to use hardware controlled by a hostile government regardless of what kind of encryption you plan to use.

<comment><USER10> >Encryption is useless when you store the keys on the same infrastucture. U.S may ask for keys as well.

Are you claiming HSM are unsafe?

>Even if you would store the keys on a local service at some point your data will lie/transition decrypted on the remote hardware.

Well no. You have TPM and HMS which should solve this problem sufficiently. Even hardware tokens for crypto e.g Nitrokey and/or yubikey should be sufficiently safe for most use cases.

>It's not a good idea at all to use hardware controlled by a hostile government regardless of what kind of encryption you plan to use.

It depends. You shouldn't host anything at any "hostile government", but who is the hostile government? Is this a hostile nation based on a threat model for your company? Or is this your personal opinion?

<comment><USER11> The cloud providers provide the access controls for the HSM. Why break the encryption when you can just come through the front door?

<comment><USER12> That's not how HSMs work or they would be totally useless.

Short of a hidden vulnerability or a manufacturing defect there's no "official" way to physically access data from the device without destroying it. And accessing the data the normal way still requires access the cloud provider doesn't have (a certificate password for example).

If we're talking hackers that could successfully hack an HSM, they don't really care about laws. And if we're talking about acting under some law, that law has to compel the owner of the password to give it up. Not the cloud provider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If complying with CLOUD act would infringe on EU citizens rights, is there any legal reason why EU regulator should not fine a company that is infringing EU laws?

We, Europeans, should follow our laws to their full extend and fine infringing companies with full power. No matter on whose request they break our laws. Be it Russians, Chinese, Australian or Americans.

<comment><USER14> I agree. Companies need to find a way to operate within the law, or not operate. Throwing your hands up and saying it's too hard is not an acceptable answer.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure how I feel about this argument in light of article 13 of the EU's new copyright directive. Legislators also have a responsibility to make laws that are reasonable and possible to obey.

It is possible for companies to obey the Cloud Act, but as far as I can see, only by choosing between operating in the US and operating in the EU. If that's considered unreasonable, then it's a bad law.

<comment><USER15> A company _choosing_ to operate in multiple jurisdictions with competing/contradicting laws does not put a requirement on lawmakers to make the laws more amenable to the company trying to satisfy both jurisdictions. If you take that path, consumers end up with little protection under the law.

Maybe the company should split up operations, or operate under licensing agreements with foreign companies rather than thwart the will of the people who they seek to fleece.

<comment><USER2> You're right, it's not the government's job to protect business models, particularly if they are considered harmful. A sensible government would probably want a healthy environment and market for companies to operate it, but exactly what that means is clearly something on which governments can radically disagree.

So I admit that the US is entirely within its rights to create a law that makes it impossible for cloud providers to simultaneously operate in the US and the EU.

It's still be sad though that the two major democratic power blocs in the world can't agree on something like this.

<comment><USER16> _You 're right, it's not the government's job to protect business models, particularly if they are considered harmful._

That's a convenient way to pass the buck, but the reality is that this is why we can't (any longer, lawfully) have nice things.

It's particularly hypocritical in this case that the EU itself is a facilitator of its member states' security services getting access to personal data in ways that would otherwise clearly violate its own privacy laws, yet it objects strenuously when other countries do exactly the same thing. There is no principled ethical argument at stake here. It's all about who has the power and everyone trying to grab more of it than they're really entitled to, instead of acting like grown-ups, recognising the limits of their own authority, and collaborating with others in areas of genuine mutual interest when there is wider international agreement on certain principles.

Perhaps we need another exercise in shutting everything down, to show how much the general public and the businesses in each place stand to lose if this chest-thumping carries on. Just choose a random week and then firewall off every US-based social network in Europe, fine any US-based financial services businesses that do any sort of data processing of EU individuals, and so on. And then a few years later, once the inept politicians have been replaced and when the catastrophic economic damage caused in just that one week has started to heal, maybe we can get back to a more sensible approach to the whole issue of international relations in the age of global communications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I hope this bites US cloud service providers _hard_. They need a strong blowback against their cowardly support for the Cloud Act in the US.

Microsoft, for instance, was suing the US government over its abusive NSL- enabled _secret data requests_ , which made up almost _half_ of the data requests the gov was making to Microsoft.

But then Microsoft decided to drop the lawsuit and support the Cloud Act, which may have taken the actions of the US government from the shadows and into the light (somewhat), but it didn't really change the outcome of those actions. I imagine Microsoft and other cloud providers supported it because it gave them more legal cover. Well hopefully they'll live to regret that mistake with the EU blowback now.

I also think it's just a matter of time (a year?) until the Privacy Shield will be invalidated by the top EU court, and then a new much stricter agreement will have to be made that will make all but impossible data transfers to the US.

The EC is also to blame in this whole thing, because _for some reason_ they decided to once again compromise with the US government on the type of EU-US data exchange deals they were making (which somehow always seem to go one way, from the EU to the US), because they gave the US gov the benefit of the doubt and thought the US gov would act in "good faith." Hopefully by now they've realized their error in thinking that.

</comment><comment><USER18> Just look at the new HoloLens: It uses the cloud in order to analyze the objects in front of you at your office, your house or whatever on real time.

Combine that with this with companies like Apple tracking your pulse in your clock(that gives them knowledge about your deep emotions an activities on real time).

Add companies like Google that track your phone, your car(with the maps abilities) on real time.

Add to this companies that track what your friends are doing on real time: [https://www.apertus.org/facebook](https://www.apertus.org/facebook)

This gives the US secret services more control over people than Stasi had. With the difference that they control all the people in the world. Too much power with so small oversight.

<comment><USER19> > Apple tracking your pulse in your phone(that gives them knowledge about your > deep emotions an activities on real time).

Health data is encrypted to a point where Apple can't read it:

[https://www.apple.com/business/site/docs/iOS_Security_Guide....](https://www.apple.com/business/site/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf)

> Health data can be stored in iCloud. When configured for iCloud storage, > Health data is synced between devices and secured by encryption that > protects the data both in transit and at rest. H

<comment><USER20> > Health data is encrypted to a point where Apple can't read it

Apple controls the encryption keys and the underlying OS. If the user is not in control of the encryption, then it's nothing more than a pinky-promise that they won't peek at your data, for example, if a new management team takes over tomorrow.

<comment><USER21> For many people this is a reasonable risk. If they pulled something like that it would start a huge legal battle, and it would seriously harm their reputation. I suspect that pushing out a change of this sort would also require a system update, which you could always delay until it's been carefully vetted by others.

At least with Apple you can maintain a fairly small chain of trust, since they have greater control over their hardware. Being in control of the encryption keys is unlikely to protect you from hardware backdoors or state-sponsored attacks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ok, so there should be reciprocal European law: any company operating in the EU must provide access to the EU authorities (all countries) any data managed by it and stored in any country in the world (so including US data stored in the US), otherwise it would get big fines or interdiction to operate in the EU. (PS: I don't want that, it should work like extradition but with real reciprocity)

</comment><comment><USER23> Is there a good European cloud provider?

<comment><USER24> Scaleway and Hetzner come to mind, although I have no idea how good they are.

<comment><USER25> I use Scaleway to host a personal Nextcloud [1] instance. I haven't had any issues with them thus far and their instances are pretty darn cheap.

[1] [https://nextcloud.com/about/](https://nextcloud.com/about/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This reminds me of the crypto wars, except this time around it's the privacy wars. We didn't win the crypto wars for nothing, all we have to do is make use of it and we can win this again.

</comment><comment><USER27> Suppose I, operating in the US, rent some physical storage space in Europe from a European storage company, and then ship a box of documents to them and tell them to put them in my rented storage space.

I don't think there is any serious doubt that a US court or US law enforcement with a warrant would be able to order me to contact the storage company and tell them to ship the box back to me.

The European country the storage unit is in would not see this as some attempt at exercising extraterritorial jurisdiction. To them, it is just a routine interaction between me and a service provider I am using in Europe. That my motive for asking for my box back was to satisfy a court order rather than because I actually wanted to use my documents is irrelevant.

(This works both ways. A French court ordering a French company that had stored physical documents to retrieve those documents would not raise issues in the US if the French company was using a US document archiving service to hold them).

I don't see why there should be any difference between my physical documents that I keep in a box in a Paris storage unit, and my electronic documents that I keep on an Amazon server in the Paris AWS region.

<comment><USER28> In your example, the US court is ordering _you_ to request the documents. There's no question that the US court has jurisdiction over you.

What about this variation over your example: instead of contacting you, the US court bypasses you and asks directly the European storage company. This is much more questionable, since a US court shouldn't have jurisdiction over an European company.

<comment><USER29> Funnily enough, in the GDPR equivalent (you, a EU resident, hire a company in the US to store a box for you) the EU bypasses you and requires the storage company to have an effective security guard and fire suppression system...

<comment><USER6> The difference is that in this case the US considers itself the owner of all data on US and Eu citizens alike.

The EU merely says that you cannot store Eu citizens data without the necessary safeguards in place and permissions asked.

This is a very different issue in my view. The US has an inflated sense of entitlement, whereas the EU is being protective and inhibiting of data collection on its citizens by foreign organisations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Nationalism/Sovereignty vs Globalisn/OneWorldOrder.

In the past we occasionally had rounds of "harmonization" where countries agree on one set of laws, as with copyright. We'll see what the future holds.

</comment><comment><USER31> What happens if say EU were to pass a law that no data stored in EU data centered be shared with non-EU countries ? In such case no company can obey both laws. How will this be handled ?

<comment><USER32> Actually, the EU privacy laws already forbid loads of data being stored in countries where the privacy of that data might not be maintained.

When the US was ruled as not trustworthy enough, the Privacy Shield agreement was quickly thrown together. That's currently why some sensitive information about European citizens is allowed to be stored on US soil.

However, acts like these (Cloud act, PATRIOT act, etc.) make me, as a European, very uncomfortable. I hope the EU will take action against the US. Russia and China already have regulations that certain information can only be stored inside their own country's borders and MS Outlook still works fine; there's no need for the EU to just take crap like this without putting up a fight.</comment></comment>


Revisiting ADHD and Ritalin - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-ritalin-q-a-20110515,0,2543006.story

<comment><USER2> The lead quote: "Of the 10 former patients who talked to me, maybe only two still seemed to be significantly bothered by problems of ADHD."

So we're basing our survey on 10 former patients who would talk to the doc.

<comment><AUTHOR> He also helpfully points out that his patients likely come from a much higher income level than the patients studied by Russell Barkley.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Impress – Open Source Ghost Theme - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/zsherman/Impress

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, I thought I'd release this theme for anyone who wants to use it on their ghost blog – just got mine set up and am loving it. This baby works particularly well on mobile. Here's a demo on my blog: [http://www.zach.sh/](http://www.zach.sh/)</comment>


Google +1 And The Rise of Social SEO - <AUTHOR> http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-1-and-the-rise-of-social-seo <comment><USER2> Yet another Search Engine Optimization technique?</comment>


Dropbox-Hosted Websites - <AUTHOR> http://brace.io/ <comment><USER2> How is this different than backlift - [https://www.backlift.com](https://www.backlift.com) is already doing the same thing.

<comment><USER3> Or [http://droppages.com/](http://droppages.com/) or [http://www.site44.com/](http://www.site44.com/) or [http://www.kissr.com/](http://www.kissr.com/)

<comment><USER4> [http://pancake.io](http://pancake.io) as well.

<comment><USER5> ...and [http://paperplane.io](http://paperplane.io)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> UVB-76 The demo video talks about files being copied to a 'network of servers' to provide load balancing, so does this tool really produce 'Dropbox hosted' websites, or does it just use Dropbox as a mechanism for transferring files between the user and what amounts to a web host?

If it's the latter, why even bother with Dropbox as a middle man?

<comment><USER6> It looks like the main use of Dropbox is just as a mechanism to upload to their service. To be fair, this is a lot easier for an end user to deal with than something like FTP, SFTP, and especially git.

<comment><USER7> This.

Nothing is more easier than just drag n' drop few files into a folder.

There are tons of static-generators in Ruby/Python/Nodejs/whatever, but none has the simplicity of Dropbox publishing.

Think of it, dropbox as a versioned storage for Markdown source files, third party platform to publish full-fledged rendered HTML with analytics, sitemap, feeds, mobile views, pdf/json/xml formats, etc. This _is_ how should cloud platforms work.

Need collaboration or external contributors? Just invite your friends on Dropbox!

<comment><USER8> In theory, gvfs with FTP is that convenient. The problem is that it's a little, shall we say... "quirky".

<comment><USER7> You can't gvfs in iOS/Android/Windows/OS X

And FTP port is not as ubiquitous as 80/443

Your FTP server availability is always worse than Dropbox's EC2 cloud.

FTP has account/mask/chmod/filename encoding problems

You have to backup your data on server and resolve file name conflicts in some odd way.

The list goes on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great idea and awesome landing page -- sat through the introductory video and was really impressed with the simplicity and ease of the idea.

Also - would you like to say anything about PHP/scripting support? I saw some PHP files in the folder that was copied during the demo vid, was wondering about support for that

<comment> why-el Given that they said they are pushing your files to their servers for load balancing, they will mostly likely add support for dynamic stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Surely Dropbox itself will offer metered web hosting from DB folders soon enough. Google Drive already touts itself as a web host, despite not publishing official limits.

<comment><USER11> Indeed. Amazon S3 has had this capability for some time.

Maybe Dropbox will just acquire the one that becomes most popular? Let the market pick a winner, then buy it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So there are a handful of other services doing this same basic concept (see other comment), and none of them seem to have a story about how this scales past a single developer: sure, you can share the Dropbox folder and all work in the same place, but on something like a website with common CSS files and other centralized assets it seems like that would rapidly become unmanageable.

<comment><USER13> I think the market for these types of services is not multi-person dev teams. Instead, this is for your solo freelancer who doesn't want to deal with the hassle of hosting and where git is overkill.

<comment><USER14> Shameless plug: Solving high-quality web site production (for a multi-person dev team, including non-developer personas such as designers, content writers, reviewers, translators, etc.) is actually part of a new project I'm working on ([http://grow.io](http://grow.io)). If you (or any other reader) has an immediate need for this type of product/app, I'd love to talk to you to learn more about your requirements (and share more about my project).

<comment><USER15> My problem might only be my current company, but large scale systems development tools are a mess. There isn't a better method than Office to track large sets of requirements, timing, and assets for a good view of project status.

I guess what I'm saying is I wish someone tackled the organizational issue for product management of large systems in my domain (encompasses software, hardware, mechanical) other than IBM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone know what API call they are using to create the auto-sync relationship?

From my review of the Dropbox API they seem to support this push in their iOS and Android SDKs but for web-based SDK it appears you can only poll their API for changes. But clearly there's an event-based push going on here. Any thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER17> So, it saves you the extra click to upload via SFTP? I really am not sure I get the point. Are they targeting people who are confused and befuddled by normal file synchronization?

<comment><USER18> That's not very convenient, even for power users. My blog runs on a custom CMS I wrote, yet it was enough of a pain that I eventually added Dropbox integration. This setup has the added advantage that all the state is always in Dropbox, backed up, and I can set up as many read-only mirrors that autosync as I want:

[http://www.stavros.io/posts/this-blog-is-dropbox- enabled/](http://www.stavros.io/posts/this-blog-is-dropbox-enabled/)

[http://mirror.stavros.io/posts/this-blog-is-dropbox- enabled/](http://mirror.stavros.io/posts/this-blog-is-dropbox-enabled/)

<comment><USER19> just mount an ssh folder on your local machine...

<comment><USER18> This is a dynamic CMS, the content is markdown files, and it's hosted on GAE. Plus, I don't like the latency SSH has when saving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm totally confused (once again something on HN makes me feel like an idiot). Doesn't Dropbox already give everyone free hosting? Dropbox has been hosting my website, on their dime, for quite a while already ([http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/41075/brentnoorda/index.h...](http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/41075/brentnoorda/index.html)). So, um... What?

<comment><USER21> Just a quick heads up using Dropbox as web hosting - Google and the rest won't ever index your site as the domain has a deny-all robots.txt

[http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/robots.txt](http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/robots.txt)

<comment><USER20> I hadn't thought about the indexing problem. So I moved all my pages to github.io, which google does index. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Brace is the new way to host websites

This website needs to get over itself before I'll pay any attention to it.

<comment><USER23> You were _this_ offended by a cheap little marketing quote? What do you suggest?

 _Brace is kinda like 50~ other services, we just have a nice UI and are easier to understand. Check it out!_

<comment><USER22> No, not offended. I just assumed there was pomposity involved in the decision to use this quote.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Anyone has any experience reaching quota limits on Dropbox, GH-Pages etc? Would you feel comfortable hosting a very high traffic site (or even a smaller site that gets Reddited occasionally) there?

<comment><USER25> Looks like they don't host it on dropbox. They use dropbox like an FTP replacement.

<comment><USER24> got it. thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can't you do the same thing with Github pages?

<comment><USER27> Yes, you can. The thing is that Github is still intimidating for a lot of people. They can use this as a simpler alternative.

<comment><USER28> If someone put a simple UI in front of github pages, I think they'd have a winner...

<comment><USER29> It's been something like 2 years of me saying that. I even considered starting my own github competitor just do have this single feature as a difference... but somehow I feel it wouldn't be enough for people to switch.

<comment><USER28> I don't think you could get people to switch. But if you build a familiar UI, that publishes to github, I'd use it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why would I use this and not GitHub Pages?

<comment> why-el Not everyone is familiar with/wants to set up git or github for mac. Remember that git users are a tiny minority among those who have or want a static site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Not sure what the advantage of this is. I guess just simplicity and easy DNS setup?

</comment><comment><USER32> The value add on this doesn't seem very high... it can be useful in limited circumstances.

<comment><USER33> I agree.

Scenarios where you need extremely simplified website access are unlikely to be those where you need well distributed hosting.</comment></comment>


One Million Concurrent TCP connections - <AUTHOR> http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2011/09/one-million/ <comment><USER2> I remember reading around 2002-2004 about a sysadmin managing a very large "supernode" p2p server who was able to fine-tune its Linux kernel, and to recompile an optimized version of the p2p app (to allocate data structures as small as possible for each client) to support up to one million concurrent TCP connections. It wasn't a test system, it was a production server routinely reaching this many connection at its daily peak.

If it was possible in 2002-2004, I am not impressed that it is still possible in 2011.

One of the optimizations was to reduce the per-connection TCP buffers (net.ipv4.tcp_{mem,rmem,wmem}) to only allocate one physical memory page (4kB) per client, so that one million concurrent TCP connections would only need 4GB RAM. His machine had barely more than 4GB RAM (6 or 8? can't remember), which was _a lot of RAM_ at the time.

I cannot find a link to my story though...

<comment><USER3> Agree with this being underwhelming. Maybe they'll hire someone who understands that Erlang is using kqueue to make this possible.

Running netstat|grep like this on a high concurrency server takes a long time to run. I've never found a faster way to get real-time stats on our busy servers and would be interested if anyone else has.

<comment><USER4> Actually I would run ss over the netstat for such high concurrency connection as netstat hits /proc/net/tcp and it's quite slow. However, you need to have the tcp_diag module loaded otherwise it falls back to /proc/net/tcp.

<comment> X-Istence You may not have read the entire article, but he clearly explains that their tech stack is FreeBSD + Erlang not Linux + Erlang.

There is no /proc/net/tcp on FreeBSD. Hell, there is no /proc unless it is specifically mounted by the administrator, but tools certainly don't use it to get data.

<comment><USER4> I read it, I just presume people most users are linux based in here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The WhatsApp guys are very sharp ex-Yahoo guys who've had tremendous experience with scaling systems. Rick Reed is fairly legendary. Yahoo was a long time FreeBSD shop, so it's not surprising they went with that.

I hope they publish how they did it - in fact let me drop them an email and see if I can convince them to do so.

<comment><USER6> _Yahoo was a long time FreeBSD shop_

FWIW, Yahoo still uses FreeBSD extensively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's been done before. Here is an article using Erlang and Linux.

[http://www.metabrew.com/article/a-million-user-comet- applica...](http://www.metabrew.com/article/a-million-user-comet-application- with-mochiweb-part-1)

Part 3 is my favorite. [http://www.metabrew.com/article/a-million-user-comet- applica...](http://www.metabrew.com/article/a-million-user-comet-application- with-mochiweb-part-3)

<comment><USER8> This article series is kind of a Bible to me. It's not going to solve all of your problems, for sure, depending on yer stack, and setting yourself up for a forkbomb isn't the wisest in all situations, but it's got a lot of good advice & is pretty good about providing you a "Okay, tweak these parameters and then try to break it" baseline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Technical details would be interesting. Until then, here's Urban Airship's post from last year on 500k connections on Linux:

[http://urbanairship.com/blog/2010/09/29/linux-kernel- tuning-...](http://urbanairship.com/blog/2010/09/29/linux-kernel-tuning- for-c500k/)

</comment><comment><USER10> OK, you hooked me with the title. But "FreeBSD + Erlang" was kind of a dissatisfying reason for how you achieved it. Would love to hear more details! How far we've come since <http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html>

<comment><USER11> They could have done it using C, Ruby, Python, or any other language. kqueue is what makes FreeBSD (and OSX) awesome at concurrency.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kqueue>

<comment><USER12> How does kqueue compare to epoll on Linux? I've written C code using kqueue on OpenBSD and OS X, but have only used epoll via libev (and not at especially high load). I thought the big change came from trading level- for edge- triggered nonblocking IO, but maybe the kqueue implementation is superior for sockets somehow?

The main advantage Erlang has over C/Python/Ruby/etc. is that asynchronous IO is the default _throughout all its libraries_ , and it has a novel technique for handling errors. Its asynchronous design is ultimately about fault tolerance, not raw speed. Also, it can automatically and intelligently handle a lot of asynchronous control flow that node.js makes you manage by hand (which is so 70s!).

You can make event-driven asynchronous systems pretty smoothly in languages with first class coroutines/continuations (like Lua and Scheme), but most libraries aren't written with that use case in mind. Erlang's pervasive immutability also makes actual parallelism easier.

With that many connections, another big issue is space usage -- keeping buffers, object overhead, etc. low per connection. Some languages fare far, far better than others here.

<comment><USER13> Yes I would say kqueue, the interface, is superior to epoll. Kqueue allows one to batch modify watcher states and to retrieve watcher states in a single system call. With epoll, you have to call a system call for every modification. Kqueue also allows one to watch for things like filesystem changes and process state changes, epoll is limited to socket/pipe I/O only. It's a shame that Linux doesn't support kqueue.

But as awesome as kqueue is, OS X apparently broke it: [http://pod.tst.eu/http://cvs.schmorp.de/libev/ev.pod#OS_X_AN...](http://pod.tst.eu/http://cvs.schmorp.de/libev/ev.pod#OS_X_AND_DARWIN_BUGS)

<comment><USER14> IIRC, kqueue can be told to read the whole http-request before letting client know there's data to read.

<comment><USER15> That's actually accept_filter(9). The man page for freebsd has a interesting info:

        The accept filter concept was pioneered by David Filo at Yahoo! and
        refined to be a loadable module system by Alfred Perlstein.

The closest you can get by using kqueue is to set a low water mark, so that a read event is only returned when there's enough data ready.

<comment><USER14> Ah, that's it! Thanks for finding it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This may be a dumb question (I'm not a networks guy) but how do you maintain so many connections with just 65535 ports? Can you have more than one connection per port?

<comment><USER17> The server generally only ever uses _one_ port, no matter how many clients are connected. It is the tuple of (client IP, client port, server IP, server port) that must be unique for each TCP connection - so the limit of 65535 ports is only relevant for how many connections a _single_ client can make to a single server.

<comment><USER18> I believe this is incorrect. The server usually listen on one port, but everytime it does an accept, a different random port is used, and the client start talking to the server on that new port.

<comment><USER17> This is a surprisingly common misconception. When you accept, you get a new _socket_. but it is on the same local port. You can readily see this by running 'netstat' on a busy server.

<comment><USER18> Just checked it and you're right. I believed I had encoutered the behaviour I described but I do not remember in which context. Anyway glad I learned something!

<comment><USER19> FTP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> They beat me to it! I've only gotten to 500k on EC2, however i believe there's some trickery in their firewalls / NAT which is holding me back... If anyone's interested in the gory details, see: <http://splinter.com.au/tag/comet>

<comment><USER21> Curious about what you've seen from the EC2 networking gear that's holding you back? Firewall not letting more connections through?

<comment><USER20> Well, at the moment i can't pin it down to EC2, but it's the only thing i can imagine it'd be. The network/cpu/memory usage is all healthy, and there's nothing in the kernel log, so that's what i'm guessing is the cause. Although i may be wrong.

<comment><USER22> We've observed the bottleneck to be an upper limit on packets/sec for a given instance type. On an m1.large this is about 100k/sec. I believe it's due to the virtual NIC just not being fast enough to handle high traffic loads.

The rightscale folks found the same thing:

[http://blog.rightscale.com/2010/04/01/benchmarking-load- bala...](http://blog.rightscale.com/2010/04/01/benchmarking-load-balancers-in- the-cloud/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> In absolute numbers - wow, that's impressive.

It was several years ago, but I've done my share of high-concurrency stuff under Linux and the highest I got to was about 200K connections - at which point the single-threaded server bottlenecked at its disk I/O.

The main issue is not the actual connection count, it's what the per-socket OS overhead is (so not exhaust non-swappable kernel memory), how many sockets are concurrently _active_ (have an inbound or outbound data queued) and if the application can handle all the events that epoll/kqueue report. This is not a rocket science by any means, and the kernel is relatively easy to fine-tune even when the actual load is present.

</comment><comment><USER24> I would be curious about the hardware used, it can make it much more or less impressive. I have done a test with 1 million concurrent tcp connections using java (mina) on an Ubuntu system... but it had 64 gb of ram. It kept running for weeks under the load which I felt pretty good about.

</comment><comment><USER11> What is the kernel structure overhead (in bytes) per connection on FreeBSD?

</comment><comment><USER25> Good work. On Imsy (www.imsy.com) we hope to achieve the same with Node.js on EC2. Presently the numbers are smaller (in 100K range).. but looks like it will scale smoothly till 1 million.

<comment><USER26> It's hard to say that something is going to scale smoothly up an order of magnitude until you're there. 900K requests is a lot of room for things to go wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> How much ram does this single server have, what about its cores?

</comment><comment><USER8> A. That is AWESOME. Props, guys! B. Just how long did it take for that netstat to return? ;)

<comment><USER28> FWIW, netstat isn't fun to use. conntrack is better, or cat /proc/net/ip_conntrack

<comment><USER29> They're on FreeBSD. conntrack is a Linux utility.

<comment><USER28> ah ok I see...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> How would kqueue compare to Windows's IO completion ports in terms of performance?

</comment><comment><USER31> Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

<comment><USER32> Not many can, but some fortunate enough to actually need this stuff.</comment></comment>