A Kernel Engineer at Microsoft's Answer to "What Do You Think about ReactOS?" - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/What-do-you-think-about-ReactOS/answer/Axel-Rietschin?share=1 <comment><USER2> Thanks for the link, o for a bunch of new followers on Quora today and was wondering why :)

There are lots of good answers in this thread. In particular, someone took the time to look at the code, and that person wrote it only took them minutes to find similarities that make my opinion difficult to dismiss.

About the lack of documentation, consider that only a tiny fraction of the kernel's internals surface in the DDK. All our internal headers have a .w extension and are littered with directives like begin_ntddk, end_ntddk (and many others), so a large number of structures and many fields inside existing structures are hidden or replaced by a generic reserved field.

Macros names, parameters, etc. never appears in the compiled code. It is highly improbable (I studied math, "impossible" is not a word lol), almost surely impossible that a clean-room reimplementation ends up using macros for the same things, let alone macros with the same or similar names.

Also, consider that optimizing compilers emit code that is extremely hard to follow even for us. Heck, the debugger, together with the PRIVATE symbols that has the name of all private symbols, and the actual source code, has a hard time to sync with the disassembly with the code when stepping through. While it is possible to write code that behaves similarly seen from outside, it is again implausible that the expression of this behavior results in code that looks nearly identical to the original. Consider that the name of local variables is never part of the binaries, only public symbols are. Also, consider that the compiler aggressively optimizes out variables to reduce memory accesses and holds values in CPU registers as much as possible, so those variables, while conceptually present, don't really exist as such in the disassembled code. How to explain that a reimplementation comes up with the same variables, declared in the same order, when those variables are optimized out by the compiler?

What about in-line functions, both explicit and auto-unlined by the compiler? How do you even know there was a function in the first place, and how do you invent a name that is identical to the name of said function in the original code?

Funnily, I had a conversation with a very seasoned kernel engineer (I report directly to him) about ReactOS and my Quora reply. He told me the team looked into ReactOS some time ago and reached the exact same conclusions: impossible.

In particular, this person distinctly remembers a hack he implemented (I'm not going to reveal any details, but suffice to say it was in response to some assertion by some 3rd parties that something Microsoft declared in a court of law as very difficult). He explained the hack to me in full details and, boy, hacky that was, and they found the same hack in ReactOS's code, except that the présumer authors of that "clean room" implementation probably have no idea regarding why the hack was there.

Finally, "clean room" takes another sense when one knows that Alex (yes) worked for Microsoft until spring 2019 at least, as a contractor for a company called Cloudbase Solutions SRL. His Microsoft email address was firstname.lastname@example.com. I don't know if he had access to the ntos code, or NTFS or anything else, but very close from home he was, for sure.

So to those who want to take my opinion to court, I say it's a "careful what you wish for" type of thing, but again I'm not a lawyer, and in other regards ReactOS aligns with a very old version of the NT kernel. It is possible (my opinion only) that Microsoft does does not care?

<comment><USER3> Do you think senior management at MS believes your comments are a good idea or at best benign? Or do you think all the details of your comments have just not yet fully reached VP level, legal, and PR?

I'm thinking they'd disapprove. That's just a guess, maybe they think it's fine and great. However, it may be worth at least considering another possibility.

Does your company want random technical employees, making non-technical statements, about how people are "ripping off" MS?

It's your job to raise the flag internally and help people understand up and down the chain, and across functional lines the context and perceived severity of the issue.

It's your job to write a blog post about how great your containers are architected. Not be a lone wolf, self appointed spokesperson using inflammatory language on issues with potential legal implications.

Please don't take this comment in the vein of you're just an engineer shut up and code, in fact you have a critical role as someone with domain expertise.

The point is when you stumble onto a high visibility cross-functional issue, I've found on sensitive topics many organizations seem to appreciate when someone reacts by coordinating, discussing, and facilitating a cross functional, unified response with one designated voice, that acts in the best interests the company.

<comment><USER4> I like this honesty and transparency, employers such as Microsoft encouraging it's employees to act in this way is a good thing.

Shutting down discussion behind lawyers and bland public statements should be discouraged.

<comment><USER5> We like it. But it can be actively harmful to the interests of the company. And its impossible for us to have the facts required to know if this is harmful. That's up to the company. So if they decide to fire employees who are spending their free time harming the company, we can't really get upset about that.

Its simply impossible to say, "no but this openness is good for the company" in an informed way. But we can certainly hope the company comes to this conclusion and encourages openness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In 2006 ReactOS halted all developments because of accusations like this. After a year long effort there was found to be no use of Microsoft source code in ReactOS. ([https://www.reactos.org/reset-reboot-restart-legal-issues- an...](https://www.reactos.org/reset-reboot-restart-legal-issues-and-long- road-03))

From what I understand a lot of the kernel work was done by clean-room reverse engineering. One person decompiles and documents the system and another re- implements given the documentation. I can easily see how this would result in identical structures and naming.

<comment><USER7> Is that really clean-room, though? (Note that "clean-room" is not a term in US copyright law, it's just a technique that certain people hope results in a work that is not a derivative of whatever they're reimplementing.)

If I learn a pop song, and sing it and accompany myself on the piano, and someone else transcribes it, then two things are true: first, of course it will result in identical melodies and chord progressions, and second, of course (it seems to me) this is a derivative work and there's no way you can say its copyright is independent. On the other hand, if I learn a pop song, and then teach the fundamentals of songwriting to someone, and they write a song with a I-V-vi-IV progression with angsty lyrics about an estranged lover, no matter how much it resembles existing pop songs in intent, there's a much stronger argument for independent invention.

A "clean-room" approach to determine a _specification_ where none exists is sound - e.g., if you're developing a driver for a piece of hardware which only has a proprietary driver, you can run the driver under instrumentation and see what it does, and then write your own driver that twiddles hardware in the same way but takes its own approach to implementation. A "clean-room" approach to determine _internals_ feels less sound to me: if you're disassembling the code to determine structure layout and naming, aren't you really just transforming the code into an overly-detailed natural language representation, then back into code?

(To be clear, I don't know if this is what ReactOS does/did, I just think that this "clean-room" defense doesn't hold super strongly, or in other words, that _if_ this is what ReactOS does/did, it can be true both that ReactOS believes they did a clean-room reimplementation and that it's an infringement of NT's copyrights, despite a lot of hard work by the ReactOS devs.)

<comment><USER8> Clean room re-implementations have stood up to many court challenges through the years, and are interoperability is explicitly permitted under things like the DMCA.

<comment><USER7> Yes, many clean-room reimplementations have stood up to court challenges. But many _non_ -clean-room reimplementations have stood up, too. My argument is that it's neither necessary nor sufficient, just loosely correlated, and clean-room is not inherently a defense. And in particular, my argument is that it matters whether the communication between the dirty and clean rooms is a specification of an interface, or a description of a reverse-engineered implementation.

And yes, interoperability is permitted - that's why I'm saying it seems fine to clean-room reimplement a driver to communicate with a specific device. You do not need to have the same internal structures and the same function names to achieve interoperability, and I think making that argument that the DMCA allows you to have the same internal code layout will be hard.

<comment><USER9> > _You do not need to have the same internal structures and the same function > names to achieve interoperability_

That might be the case for interoperability with a hardware device, but you probably do to make an operating system that's compatible with Windows software and drivers, considering how historically brazen developers are at abusing internal details of Windows. Consider virus scanners that happily patch internal data structures like the SSDT, or other programs that detour a bunch of API functions, then expect those functions to be called in a specific order when a different API function is called, or programs that just _reach into stack frames they don 't control_ and pluck out values[1]. (There are some other good ones in that link.) Windows takes pains to be compatible with insane programs like this, so you could argue that copying weird implementation details like this is necessary for interoperability.

[1]: [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031223-00/?p=41...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031223-00/?p=41373)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> ReactOS underwent a big audit years ago because people kept saying things like this, and AFAIK it's over and nothing exciting turned up.

[1] - [https://reactos.org/wiki/Audit](https://reactos.org/wiki/Audit)

<comment><USER11> The author of post, Axel Rietschin at Microsoft, should remove this post and publicly apologize for his baseless defamation of ReactOS ("like a baby mosquito on the back of an giant elephant") if he cannot give authoritative evidence to back his claims. There may be copyright issues in some subroutines, but calling the entire project "a ripoff of the Windows Research Kernel" is an extraordinary, arrogant claim. If you have extraordinary evidence, fair enough, otherwise you should STFU.

 _Update: my original comment was refering to the author 's original answer, which didn't give a single symbol name. But apparently, the author registered an HN comment and start giving more details than what has been said in the original answer, I need to stick to the facts so I'd say the credibility of the accusation is no longer 100% "baseless". Let's see what is going to be the evidence. _

<comment><USER2> It's my personal opinion and it's based on my lecture of ReactOS code at the time I downloaded it (circa when I wrote my reply on Quora). I think anyone who can read C code can reach similar conclusions just by eyeballing the code in ReactOS and the code from the leaked Research Kernel, that can be found for example on GitHub. As a matter fact, someone on this thread did just that and it did not take that person very long (just minutes) to find some of the similarities that I, for one, qualify as troubling. It should not be a problem for anyone to repeat the experiment, all code is available for download. So why not go ahead and see that code with your own eyes? I think it's highly improbable that a reimplementation of that magnitude came so close from the original in so many respects. I've been conducting interviews for years and screened some of the best and most promising future engineers coming from the best universities and I always ask the same coding questions. I was given many decent and correct answers, but never the actual implementation was similar to the level I can observe between ReactOS and the leaked Microsoft code. In fact every candidate wrote very different answers to the very same question, some even had very different approaches to the resolution of the same problems. I cannot explain how a team of people on a hyper-complex open source project can write nearly the same code - the source code looks very similar down to peculiar formatting idiosyncrasies - as a separate team of developers of the original closed-source project, just from observing the external behavior and/or reading the documentation, if available at all. I think this is impossible.

<comment><USER12> >and it's based on my lecture of ReactOS code at the time I downloaded it

It would be interesting to see if this statement comes back to bite you in court if the opposite accusation is ever made. That Windows kernel developers have been stealing from GPL code :)

<comment><USER13> Man, I thought the exact same thing. I must have stolen it from you. Sorry!

In all seriousness is this normal? I write and work on kernel drivers for the company I work for and have always gone out of my way to not view or interact with any code that remotely relates to the work I do (out side of what I coded). Our competitor even released their version of a block device snapshot driver and while I would be tempted to see how they did things I have avoided it every step of the way.

<comment><USER14> So, if a Microsoft kernel developer doesn't follow the practice of not reading kernel code with an incompatible license, does that mean we can assume they don't follow it generally? Can we assume they take code from the Linux kernel, violating the GPL?

<comment><USER15> Possible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Doesn't GPL actually offer a person a freedom to study the code? Isn't it a common phenomena of rewriting GPL Linux Driver into BSD Licensed driver which will be put into mainline *BSD?

I know the case of OpenBSD 'stealing' GPL code from broadcom linux driver, but it was done by a naive kernel developer who copy-pasted the code and the maintainer who didn't bother to check the authenticity of the code. But AFAIK no GPL driver writer has a problem with the driver being rewritten into BSD licence.

<comment><USER16> GPL is absolutely incompatible with BSD licensing. The license does not allow for one to "rewrite" the same code into a BSD licensed driver.

Of course one could clean room reverse engineer the GPL driver and then give the spec to someone else to implement and create a BSD driver, that would probably be ok.

<comment><USER17> Not exactly incompatible, as you can license something under both of them at once. But yes, you cannot relicense it without permission from the contributors; this is true for pretty much any license.

<comment><USER16> Right, of course the rights holder can license under anything they want. But no one else can take GPL code and relicense it under BSD. The same is not true the other way -- anyone can use BSD code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting, but I'd really like it if they actually pointed out some examples. There may in fact be stolen source code or at least it is possible some stolen source code was referenced in ReactOS - there's virtually no way to prove that it didn't happen - but one human's observation could be very flawed and represent a view extrapolated from a small subset of stolen code. How much of the code could they have possibly read?

It's also worth noting that large portions of ReactOS come from Wine and I'm sure those portions have plenty of internal NT structures too.

The bits about NT not being documented are bordering silly, though. The lack of documentation has certainly never stopped anyone. Stardock for example does some very interesting and very undocumented things, as do many (most?) DRM and obfuscation engines.

Personally, I think that if ReactOS has really stolen substantial amounts of code, then it genuinely didn't pay off and probably was not that useful.

<comment><USER19> I was curious, and since the author of this answer provided links to what they called leaks [1], it's not difficult to download both the leak and ReactOS source [2] and look for similarities. So, out of curiosity, that's what I did.

I started poking at some source files at random in ntoskernel, and it only took a minute to get some "hits" from the ReactOS source:

        $ rg InitializeContextThread
        ./ntoskrnl/ke/thrdobj.c:872:        KiInitializeContextThread(Thread,
        ./ntoskrnl/ke/powerpc/thrdini.c:53:KiInitializeContextThread(IN PKTHREAD Thread,
        ./ntoskrnl/ke/i386/thrdini.c:92:KiInitializeContextThread(IN PKTHREAD Thread,
        ./ntoskrnl/ke/amd64/thrdini.c:36:KiInitializeContextThread(IN PKTHREAD Thread,
        ./ntoskrnl/ke/arm/thrdini.c:53:KiInitializeContextThread(IN PKTHREAD Thread,
        ./ntoskrnl/include/internal/ke.h:464:KiInitializeContextThread(

        $ rg NpxFrame
        ./ntoskrnl/ke/i386/v86vdm.c:473:    PFX_SAVE_AREA NpxFrame;
        ./ntoskrnl/ke/i386/v86vdm.c:480:    NpxFrame = &StackFrame->NpxArea;
        ./ntoskrnl/ke/i386/v86vdm.c:481:    ASSERT((ULONG_PTR)NpxFrame % 16 == 0);
        ./ntoskrnl/ke/i386/v86vdm.c:485:    RtlCopyMemory(KiGetThreadNpxArea(Thread), NpxFrame, sizeof(FX_SAVE_AREA));
        ./ntoskrnl/ke/i386/v86vdm.c:510:    PFX_SAVE_AREA NpxFrame = &StackFrame->NpxArea;
        ./ntoskrnl/ke/i386/v86vdm.c:512:    ASSERT((ULONG_PTR)NpxFrame % 16 == 0);
        ./ntoskrnl/ke/i386/v86vdm.c:551:    RtlCopyMemory(NpxFrame, V86Frame->ThreadStack, sizeof(FX_SAVE_AREA));

Now that said, I have no idea what I'm looking for, or if this is significant. But since we have the source for both, it seems we can do better than speculate w/r/t how much code is similar between them. I know that does not prove copying but I think the author's point can't be blindly dismissed.

[1] [https://github.com/Zer0Mem0ry/ntoskrnl](https://github.com/Zer0Mem0ry/ntoskrnl)

[2] [https://sourceforge.net/projects/reactos/files/ReactOS/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/reactos/files/ReactOS/)

<comment><USER18> I do not wish to view the leaked copies of Windows source code, unfortunately. It does have potential legal ramifications, in the United States. If someone who doesn't care can attempt to audit it, that would be absolutely great.

That said, KiInitializeContextThread isn't 'secret' enough to not appear, it is a well-known bit of internals. Here you can find some docs about it on Microsoft's own website, albeit I have no idea if this is present anywhere on there anymore.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20151214014944/http://www.micros...](https://web.archive.org/web/20151214014944/http://www.microsoft.com/mspress/books/sampchap/4354a.aspx)

<comment><USER20> If Microsoft cared, they wouldn't be hosting that on their very own servers.

GitHub belongs to Microsoft. They could pull that down at any time just because they feel like it. But they haven't. That's a pretty solid sign that there's not any legal consequence to viewing it.

<comment><USER21> Well, my paranoid 99% says that they could keep it online on purpose so that all people viewing it fall in a legal disadvantage position. Removing that code would achieve nothing in secrecy today compared to the legal leverage they can get tomorrow by keeping it online.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Comments like these are eerily similar to what Microsoft had been saying for years about Linux - at best they had been infringing on patents but I seem to also recall accusations of the kernel containing proprietary Windows source code. This is just one individuals opinion but I would be really interested in seeing them provide more specifics - especially given the amount of MS source that has leaked/been open sourced over the years.

<comment><USER23> I don't recall accusations of Linux using Windows code, but these accusations (especially the "one has only to eyeball the code to see it was stolen") are reminiscent of the SCO troll-case, which was (indirectly but very likely intentionally) financially backed by Microsoft.

Without specific proof demonstrating that there is no way one could have come to write that code from publicly available information they are just FUD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Fascinating thread. You don't often see this kind of thing discussed openly.

One personal experience: years ago I worked on a project where I had the task (I will not go into why..) of re-implementing some tricky, non-documented functionality for which I had the source code for another implementation available to study, but also the goal to make it hard to prove from inspection of the code I wrote that it had been inspired by said original code. So in essence, I had the task we postulate the ReactOS developers had, if they indeed were using leaked ntoskrnl source as a reference. Ok, so when I had that task I did things like re-order the declaration of variables; change variable names; think of ways to refactor such that logic was split over a different number of functions; and on and on. Basically: I did a bunch of things designed to NOT permit the kind of "ah ha! : these things are the same" analysis that we see here. You might call this "derivation obfuscation".

So I'm a bit confused: either the ah ha analysis is flawed; or the RactOS devs just didn't care about being found out, right? Because if they had wanted to, it wouldn't have been hard to obscure, at least to some degree, that they were deriving their code from MS's original source.

<comment><USER25> When you've read and understood some piece of code, you're more prone to replicate it, even without realizing it. And ReactOS developers have obviously some extensive experience with Windows API, and it should be not suprise that any attempt to rewrite Windows will fall into the same trap.

I'm not saying that their code is "clean" or is a "rip-off". Obviously, I don't have a clue about it. Maybe they were just lazy and they did not care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The basics are available in the windows driver development kit.

Many internal symbol and function names are available with debug symbols that have been released by Microsoft over the years.

Lots of undocumented internals you can learn about from this book: [https://amzn.to/2XHhSFF](https://amzn.to/2XHhSFF)

If the book doesn't match what you see (which isn't _that_ often), then you just single-step and see what's happening.

</comment><comment><USER27> Someone should get Alex Ionescu's take. He both used to be _the_ kernel guy of ReactOS, and he some wrote chapters in Windows Internals, some of Microsoft's deepest official public documentation.

<comment><USER28> Yeah, it seems like the guy answering here has no idea what he's talking about. Alex has a blog where he basically says that he'd spend the days writing Windows Internals and the nights reverse engineering the kernel.

<comment><USER29> So... doesn't that confirm what he's saying? How could you possibly "clean room reverse engineer" while you certainly are not in a clean room?

<comment><USER27> The guy in the article is talking about variable names from the source. You wouldn't get that from Alex's style of reversing.

<comment><USER30> I assume that writing about Windows internals requires knowledge of said internals? Or do you think he never had access to the source code and has never seen anything, not even ideas of algorithms?

<comment><USER31> You can get knowledge of the internals and ideas of the algorithms from reverse engineering the released Windows binaries

<comment><USER30> Do you believe _that_ is what Microsoft employees do while writing Windows Internals? I have serious trouble believing it. I'm not saying that it's not possible, just that it might not be the case there and these facts seem to confirm it.

<comment><USER32> Alex Ionescu wasn't a Microsoft employee, though.

<comment><USER30> I'm not so sure, maybe he was a contractor if that's what you mean (I don't see any real difference). He had a @microsoft.com e-mail address, which is a pretty clear indicator of being on the inside.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > Many internal data structures and internal functions, not exported anywhere > and not part of the public symbols

I remember reading that even inside Microsoft, internal structures had to remain backwards-compatible because external, "very important" programs relied on them (violating the public API of course). I can't remember the source, unfortunately.

Now it would be interesting which aspects _can_ affect compatibility and thus be part of a normal reverse engineering on the ReactOS side. For example, C usually does not remember structure names after compilation -- but "usually" is not always and depends on compilers, macros, and whatever somebody invented. The most interesting findings would of course be names that have absolutely no effect post-compilation AND were never published.

> If any of the presumed authors wants to chime in and explain the > similitudes, I'm happy to change my mind, but be ready to answer some though > questions about the origins your coding and naming styles, and all the > design choices that you made and why you ended up architecting and writing > things the way you say you did ;-)

On the internet, the burden of proof is on the accused.

<comment><USER34> "Many internal structures" that Axel believes are private and available only for MS employees, are actually published in the Internet, for example [1] [2]

[1] [https://www.nirsoft.net/kernel_struct/vista/index.html](https://www.nirsoft.net/kernel_struct/vista/index.html)

[2] [http://msdn.mirt.net/](http://msdn.mirt.net/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Hello from ReactOS team!

We don't use the leaked code from MS,

We don't use Windows Research Kernel,

We thank you for the PR campaign you have stared 'pro bono' for our project! ;D

<comment><USER36> Why would you call it a PR campaign if it wasn't favoring you? Just curious.

<comment><USER37> because a lot of people probably just learned about ReactOS as a result of this controversy. "There's no such thing as bad press." -someone

<comment><USER38> The controversy is just unverifiable claims from a Microsoft employee. ReactOS comes out looking pretty good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It's hard to know what specifically he means to have been copied. But it would not surprise me if a lot of "impossibly" identical structure member names have been published as ntoskrnl.pdb (kernel debug symbols).

I have also seen some pretty good reverse engineering of nt native APIs out there.

</comment><comment><USER40> Alex Ionescu - Reversing Without Reversing [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2D9ExVc0G10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2D9ExVc0G10)

</comment><comment><USER41> The MS guy says there was no public NT internals doc. However many people refer to _VAX /VMS Internals and Data Structures_ as being very similar. Both were architected by DNC.

<comment><USER8> Its bullshit too, there is not much public by MS but there is plenty of third party work done on documenting it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> >If any of the presumed authors wants to chime in and explain the similitudes, I'm happy to change my mind, but be ready to answer some though questions about the origins your coding and naming styles, and all the design choices that you made and why you ended up architecting and writing things the way you say you did ;-)

Can you taste the power-trip?

</comment><comment><USER43> It would be interesting to see this engineer's statements tested in court. Microsoft are highly motivated to protect their source code so there would have to be a reason why they haven't. ReactOS is definitely NOT a mosquito to an elephant in violation terms if this engineers comments have validity. I'm thinking patents, copyrights etc.

The fact that Microsoft haven't acted for all this time is by itself evidence that could be interesting to present.

Contrast this with another chunk of law in trademarks where ignoring use and not challenging it strengthens someone elses laches defense.

(Usual disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer so these words are likely just words assembled by 400000 chimps for bananas)

<comment><USER44> I find the attitude more interesting.. on one side we have Linux embedded in Windows, more Linux VMs on Azure than Windows Server, MS employees proudly brandishing shirts with 'I heart Linux' and 'I heart OSS' and on the other side we have Windows Kernal developers saying their ideas were stolen.

Maybe it's a sign of the relationship between Azure and Windows teams?

<comment><USER45> I interned at Microsoft in late 2000's. The sales engineers had an "anti oss" budget. Many of these guys still work at Microsoft today, now "hearts" open source and linux...

<comment><USER46> They have no choice, Linux already won big time on the server, so the only way was to embrace it in a way that would bring them money. And they succeeded big time. Now most young developers don't remember all the dirty tactics used year after year by MS to kill all competition, whether commercial or open source.

<comment><USER47> Also consider the amount of people leaving and joining Microsoft since than as well as the possibility that lots of the old people a) didn't like everything Microsoft did back then and b) are capable of changing and developing over the years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I always heard that ReactOS had an ultra-strict vetting process, where no one who had ever so much as been within spitting distance of Redmond at some point in their life was allowed to touch the code, to support their claim of a clean-room implementation in case Microsoft ever decided to make a fuss about it. Seems like a lot of pointless effort if they actually did use leaks or university kernel releases. So either this guy is mistaken, my info about ReactOS is bad, or the project is run by people very ignorant of the law.

<comment><USER39> I heard WINE has a rule like that but ReactOS does not.

But I also heard they borrow some code from WINE.

<comment><USER27> ReactOS had the same process.

<comment><USER39> I thought I remember reading on an FAQ a long time ago that they don't mind such contributions. Can't find it now. Could be wrong.

I myself am ex msft so that's why I was curious. I have not contributed to any of these though.

Edit: found it.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20110707221707/http://www.reacto...](https://web.archive.org/web/20110707221707/http://www.reactos.org/en/dev_legalreview.html)

Section on tainted developers says: _" Tainted Developers". There is a legal theory that is occasionally cited in the context of producing a work-alike implementation of a published copyrighted work. ... It is the position of the Project that this theory is invalid for a number of reasons. As a general rule, there is no reason that a developer who has seen non-free code cannot write logically similar code for ReactOS._ Then talks about disclosure of NDAs.

I read that as: if you worked at MS, disclose your NDA, but it doesn't automatically forbid your contribution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> For MS's WSL, according to their devs, they only allowed themselves to read the documentation (external API). They didn't allow themselves to look at the code. Different case but also a form of reverse engineering.

It's the "internal data structures, macros" stuff that is problematic.

<comment><USER50> They looked at syscall surface primarily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Honestly I always thought that that was an open secret of ReactOS. How else are you gonna achieve binary compatibility with a closed source OS. Of course there's symbols but those only get you so far.

<comment><USER34> The information about many internal "undocumented" structures is actually documented on third-party sites. And if there are structures that are really not documented anywhere then you don't have to reimplement them because no developer is using them and they are not necessary for compatibility.

<comment><USER51> So you're using their "leaked" or reverse engineered information? That's just IP theft with extra steps.

<comment><USER34> If this is made to ensure compatibility with programs using those undocumented structures then it is a different thing. They become a part of API.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> What goes around, comes around. Stealing code is on Microsoft records, as a simple "Microsoft admits stealing code" search shows. One can only wonder how much code the company stole that did not come to public knowledge.

[https://www.computerworld.com/article/2522017/microsoft- admi...](https://www.computerworld.com/article/2522017/microsoft-admits-plurk- code-was-stolen.html)

<comment><USER53> Also many of the .wav files in Windows 98SE were edited with a pirated version of Sony's Soundforge, the metadata in the media files contained the Soundforge cracker's name.

<comment><AUTHOR> These .wav files might be made by person who works under Microsoft contract, not necessarily directly employed by Microsoft.

<comment><USER54> Which, of course, makes it perfectly acceptable?

<comment><USER55> No, but if Microsoft asked for wav files, and a contractor delivered them, is Microsoft at fault if the contractor used a pirated editing software?

<comment><USER56> Liable? I hope so. And then they can pass the buck on.

<comment><USER55> Why would Microsoft be liable?

Do you check if your butcher has illegally bought his knife? Should you be liable, if so?

<comment><USER56> Hmm... you may be right. But on the other hand, is the steak licensed and copyrighted?

<comment><USER55> It's not, but metaphors and analogies only go so far :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I have always been confused as to what level of reverse engineering is legally acceptable in this case. Is having a sneak peak at one of the win32 dlls with IDA or Radare allowed? Or, are you expected to re-invent the wheel based on documentation and observed behaviour? In the case of the former, how can it be conclusively legally proven that it was not reverse engineered (from machine code)?

<comment><USER58> In the U.S. it is perfectly legal to reverse anything that you obtained legally.

<comment><USER59> Not if you agree to an EULA that explicitly prohibits it. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd#Blizzard_takedown_demand...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd#Blizzard_takedown_demand_and_lawsuit)

And [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowers_v._Baystate_Technologie...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowers_v._Baystate_Technologies,_Inc).

Note that pretty much any EULA I've seen in the past 10 years has had an anti reverse engineering clause.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I appreciate the insider perspective (though I am definitely not qualified to assess these claims.) Unfortunately, it might be hard to prove these claims either way since it sounds like they have plenty of plausible deniability to fall back on.

What I will say is: I hope Axel's post doesn't negatively effect his career. We've all seen how controversial opinions and politically incorrect behavior have ended peoples employment in the past, and I honestly think its a ridiculous over-reaction.

I can't help but wonder if some of the answers here are driven by emotional, anti-MS sentiment. Some people seem way too invested, lmao. Just get some pop corn and see if anything interesting turns up. It might turn out to be a good history lesson.

<comment><USER61> Axel is a windows kernel developer, he has his pick of the job market. Microsoft alone is probably happy to cover him in dobloons just to stick around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> A rant that reads very much in the style of Open Letter to Hobbyists[1]. Typical MS.

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

</comment><comment><USER63> Why would any paying customer use ReactOS over windows? There is no support (security patches automatically supplied ETC). Windows 10 is evergreen and new feature appear quite often. Microsoft loses exactly zero dollars a year because of ReactOS. People who don't want to pay for windows just pirate it. Those who do pay, get it buldled with a computer or laptop that they purchase, or are corporations who need support. ReactOS will always be a tinkerers hobby... Did they steal code? Did they reverse engineer so good that it looks like they stole code? Who cares really... Not Microsoft. Why would they?

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > Why would any paying customer use ReactOS over windows? [...] Windows 10 is > evergreen and new feature appear quite often.

Yes, exactly. Windows likes to update. Some of us want a simple system to run Windows programs/drivers that just works and doesn't demand you upgrade constantly to the latest version with all-new features that you don't have any use for. Granted, *nix+WINE is usually better for this, but there may be times when ReactOS is the better option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> While I haven't given it a test drive yet, I'm quite excited about ReactOS. I grew up on Windows, but have been in a state of disappointment for the last decade while I watched Microsoft slowly mutilate or let rot so many of the things I like about it.

I hope by the time I have to give up Windows 7, ReactOS will have a viable alternative - or that it and the rest of the market will have forced MS to get its act together. Maybe give me the Windows 11 I really want.

<comment><USER65> > I hope by the time I have to give up Windows 7, ReactOS will have a viable > alternative

Speaking as someone who has followed ReactOS from the very beginning - don't hold your breath. Their pace of development is absolutely glacial and very basic things still aren't working.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Why reverse engineer? The Windows code has been available via shared source license since nearly 20 years....

<comment><USER61> That license does not allow to repackage the system, rebrand it, or resell it, afaik.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I took a quick look at the structure of the WRK and ReactOS, as the MS developer suggested.

I can see what he means.

The first thing we observe is that the directory structure is basically identical. Yes, NT kernel subsystems are identified with short codes like "Ke" or "Ex". It's plausible that someone with a lot of NT knowledge would end up creating top level directories with these exact names, as is true of the WRK. But it seems kind of unlikely: the Wine sources do not show this pattern.

If we look at the Kernel Executive (Ke) subtree, we can see that there is a thing called a "Balance Set Manager". Both source trees define it in a file called balmgr.c - not only the location of the file but also the file name is identical.

[https://github.com/Zer0Mem0ry/ntoskrnl/blob/master/Ke/balmgr...](https://github.com/Zer0Mem0ry/ntoskrnl/blob/master/Ke/balmgr.c) [https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/master/ntoskrnl/ke/b...](https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/master/ntoskrnl/ke/balmgr.c)

It appears from the module description that the "balance set manager" is an optimisation of some sort related to reducing memory usage. Is this really something that needs a reimplementation with identical function prototypes?

Looking at the code of the identically named KeBalanceSetManager function, we can see that not only is the function prototype identical, but the order in which it does things is also identical. First it changes a thread priority, then it schedules a periodic timer callback.

Some of the local variables in these functions have identical names: PeriodTimer, DueTime, WaitObjects. Yes, these are obvious names. It's not a smoking gun. But it's not looking good.

Finally we discover that the ReactOS Balance Manager does .... nothing. It enters a loop which starts out by doing a wait for an event (fine, it's inherent to the task), and then switches on the result. But the code in the arms of the switch are commented out (the commented out code does a subset of the stuff in the NT code). The loop does nothing, just sits blocking in a loop forever. Why does this code in ReactOS exist if it does nothing?

It's the same story for the other big function in this file, KiScanReadyQueues. The code is virtually identical, line for line, with minor formatting and occasional trivial naming differences. Even the assertions are identical.

I'm not alleging anything specific or illegal, just comparing a small part of both codebases. However given what I've just seen, I wouldn't touch ReactOS with a barge pole. The Microsoft guy's complaint is entirely understandable.

<comment><USER34> Just wanted to comment that Googling "KeBalanceSetManager" gives this article [1] among others (the article mentions the leaked source code but it doesn't contain the code itself, just the description). Many internal function names were leaked with debugging symbols, and some people were reverse engineering those functions (for example, people who deal with malware).

The similarity in code can be explained by reverse engineering. For example, constant names in switch are different (TimerExpiration vs STATUS_WAIT_0).

> Why does this code in ReactOS exist if it does nothing?

Maybe because there is software that relies on the existence of this thread?

Regarding assertions and local variable names and same declaration oder, I don't know where they come from. That looks suspicious.

[1] [https://github.com/bowlofstew/rootkit.com/blob/master/90210/...](https://github.com/bowlofstew/rootkit.com/blob/master/90210/phide2/phide2.doc#L49)

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> When I discovered ReactOS, I was passionate about it, I always downloaded the latest version available in order to test it in VirtualBox. But then, I noticed that the project was evolving so slowly, that it could never catch up his delay from Windows.

</comment><comment><USER69> Microsoft has made great strides in opening up some of their code lately and the focus seems to be more and more on Online services. I hope one day, sooner or later, they go all in and open source Windows. That would be a great day.

</comment><comment><USER70> Alex Ionescu on this subject: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceQ6kT1ZMrk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceQ6kT1ZMrk)

</comment><comment><USER71> Aren't there tools that are used to catch code plagiarism? I am curious what results you would get if you used them on both ReactOS and the NT kernel.

</comment><comment><USER72> I have been following the ReactOS debate long before Microsoft's Axel Rietschin wrote in Quora that ReactOS is "a ripoff of the Windows Research Kernel…"

My experience goes back to the days when I was using Lifeboat Associates' distribution of Tim Paterson's 86-DOS and before that Gary Kildall's CP/M on S-100 machines and that was before Bill Gates purchased 86-DOS from Paterson for a pittance which he then used as the basis of MS-DOS. It was the unfairness of that deal that has made me extremely wary or Microsoft ever since—it was wariness past decades since then have taught me was the right stance to take.

I would also point out I have no direct allegiance to ReactOS per se except that I've tested it on multiple occasions and found it quite unsatisfactory (unfortunately), in fact over the years I've dubbed it "The Going Nowhere OS".

I have no comment about whether ReactOS is a 'ripoff' of Windows or not as I'm not acquainted with the facts. I would suggest however that Axel Rietschin use the word "ripoff" with great care given that he's working for Microsoft—he should take heed of the old quip about "glasshouses" and "stones". I would however excuse his exuberance if he's young enough to be a victim of air- brushed history which large corporations are so good at creating.

The key issue that everyone has essentially missed is why this seemingly foolhardy attempt to recreate Windows was attempted in the first place and I'd suggest that it has its roots in the failure of government to uphold existing US Antitrust Law which has a long history back to the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. Especially from the Reagan era onward, administrations have failed spectacularly to stop the growth of digital-era monopolies let alone extend Antitrust Law with much-needed extensions that befit the digital era. (It's been clear for years that not only should Antitrust Law be modernized for the digital era but also the changes must be of a degree of sophistication that will make them effective rather than just being a paper tiger).

I don't have the time here to develop all the arguments and go into all the ins and outs about why Microsoft and its Windows monopoly happened and why ultimately the monopoly is a disaster for both users and computing generally so I'll attempt to use a crude analogy to illustrate my point.

Let's pretend that in the 1800s a potential railroad owner had managed to patent the standard rail gauge but either because of ineffective patent law or that government failed to police existing law the patent owner was not obliged to license the technology to his competitors for reasonable fees (or that he refused to issue licenses altogether).

He now has an effective monopoly and investors say whoopee and they invest sufficient capital to build a dozen railroads that span the US from east to west which are sufficiently separated north to south to cover 90% of the country.

In the meantime, his competitors complain to Congress and Congress realizes the error its ways and changes the law to force the patent owner to license the technology for reasonable rates. Meantime, the monopoly has been effective so his competitors are unable to raise the funds as investors believe that the ROI on the remaining 10% will be too small and thus the venture is too risky an investment—especially given the huge initial cost to get the project started (an amount that was fine for the patent owner who had the whole country at his disposal but far too risky for latecomers). The outcome: the monopoly remains in place and the final 10% of the country remains unserved.

Now consider the case when Congress doesn't amend the patent law and 10% of the country still wants its railroad coverage. Anarchy breaks out and each little town defies the law and builds local railways in defiance. In the grand schema of railroad coverage of the US, this hardly matters but many are mighty pissed off that their government has let them down. One of the consequences is that once law-abiding citizens lose respect for laws and law-makers and ultimately the rule of law generally.

When the law breaks down either through existing law being not enforced or through inadequate law—especially when the reason for government taking no action is because of the effective lobbying of monopolists—then you cannot blame the citizenry for taking the law into its own hands (after all, government governs only by content of the citizenry as Thoreau aptly explains in his famous 1848 essay "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience").

You only have to look around you at the world today to know "ethics" and "government" are incongruous words and have been on a collision course for decades. In these circumstances I can only encourage the ReactOS team to continue what they are doing and damn the consequences. (As it seems to me things will only get worse before we come to our senses, so let's get it over with.)

</comment><comment><USER73> > baby mosquito on giant elephant...

As far as most *nix and open source users are concerned, Microsoft has been a dead, rotting elephant with flies all over it for a long time and someone urgently needs to clean that up. Looks like someone wants a little attention.

</comment><comment><USER38> The evidence of the Microsoft employee boils down to "our secret code that only we can see totally shows react OS ripped us off. We cant show you it but believe us guys".

I wasn't born yesterday

<comment><USER74> To be fair he did say you could compare with the leaked versions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Took me a few reads to parse that title. How about something like "A Kernel Engineer from Microsoft Answers: "What Do You Think About ReactOS?""

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right, sorry I am not good in English.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> This thing is odd, because most companies I've worked for have pretty strong bans on making statements like this outside of official channels.

That said, frankly its probably not a big deal because reactos, has been pretty clear about making a best case effort to avoid this kind of problem and solving it when it happens. Hiring 3rd party IP review companies to compare their code with the illegitimate windows drops is probably fairly inexpensive (given how much I seen paid during acquisitions I've been involved in) and something I imagine they have done. Its the kind of thing I might even expect that having a dialog with the right people at MS might go a long way to helping reactos avoid infringement. Heck it wouldn't surprise me if MS would fund something like this.

OTOH, it might take a more premium review service to assure compliance. I spent some time reverse engineering win2k, reading the native api book, and various other books full of windows reverse engineering documentation at the turn of the century for a driver project I was working on that hooked into some unusual parts of the OS.

NT has some wonderful documentation available which paints all the broad strokes, combined with Microsoft's own docs/samples/symbols/checked builds/etc and the fact that large parts of the OS seem to be written fairly well (and seemingly avoid a lot of spaghetti) doesn't lot of black box areas. NT also does a fine job with very verbose and descriptive variable and function names (unlike large parts of linux written to conform to 80 columns where frequently the solution to overrunning the column has been to name things very tersely).

So its not surprising that there are directory structure similarities. The natural thing to do is put subsystems in their own directories and nest them logically with the over arching architecture. Big swaths of the code are likely fairly similar as they fill out particular structures mostly with public field names, or even in the cases of non public fields the verbose NT naming convention would lend a reasonably high probability of name collisions in the undocumented parts.

Finally, if anything the two black binders full of internal secrets actually seem a bit weak. Looking at the long untouched part of my bookshelf with NT documentation, I have probably two feet of books not published by MS that are either entirely dedicated to reverse engineering, or are targeted towards driver writers looking to expand upon the official microsoft documentation. Including a black binder about half the size of the pictured one with various magazine articles, internet articles, etc I printed and bound during that two and a half years of my life.

Lastly, given I've spun up reactos a few times in a VM, I don't think MS has anything to worry about. I would love an opensource win2k clone, but its frankly no where near done. Some thing work really well, but many things simply don't work at all, or the thing crashes. Last time I ran it, the image ate itself. I'm also guessing more than 1/2 the work is being done by the wine project as they re-implement the userspace side of things, the core NT kernel simply wasn't that big in the win2k timeframe. If reactos had 1% of the developer effort that the linux kernel+core subsystems (systemd, dbus, etc) gets it would be a near perfect clone by now. After all MS wrote the thing in 5 years? (Cutler joined MS in '88, and NT 3.1 was released in '93).

</comment><comment><USER12> I know this is only tangentially related, but could you verify the famous HN post by an anonymous Windows kernel developer explaining why Windows is so much slower than Linux

[http://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows- kernel-w...](http://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-we- are-slower-than-other-oper/)

It's one of the most insightful posts I've seen on this site, and if true, would certainly help to explain why Windows is so much worse than other operating systems :)

<comment><USER77> Interesting read, but I think the author is somewhat jaded.

> We fill headcount with nine-to-five-with-kids types,

What is wrong with having a life outside of work? Or children and responsibilities? Does anyone believe these make for worse engineers? It's not even legal for companies to force parents out of their workforce.

<comment> streb-lo He later clarified:

> P.S. I have no problem with family people, and want to retract the offhand > comment I made about them. I work with many awesome colleagues who happen to > have children at home. What I really meant to say is that I don't like > people who see what we do as more of a job than a passion, and it feels like > we have a lot of these people these days. Maybe everyone does, though, or > maybe I'm just completely wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Nasty article

<comment><USER79> Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> I tried ReactOS recently. Got a BSOD trying to eject a CD. Lost interest.

<comment><USER81> Well at least they implemented Microsoft's best known feature (The BSOD).

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> > like a baby mosquito on the back of an giant elephant.

As far as most *nix users are concerned Microsoft has been more like a dead rotting elephant covered with flies for a long time and someone needs to cleanup that mess. The engineers there should really take a look outside their bubble about how other competent developers think of their software.

</comment><comment><USER82> The researcher is unable to name any data structure in the source file. If -- as he claims -- it's littered with them, this should be easy to prove.

His shock that this could be a clean room implementation would be meaningful, except that the WINE project has successfully clean-room reverse engineered much of the Win32 API (including private stuff) by observing how programs use them. Literally no one wants to read Microsoft code anyway; knowing them, it's probably horrendous.

<comment><USER83> Just a tip - if you want to make statements and have people take you seriously, stick to facts and don't add stupid things like:

> Literally no one wants to read Microsoft code anyway; knowing them, it's > probably horrendous.

This added NOTHING to your previous statement, and only served to make me think your acting as a troll and actually worked against everything else you had previously said.

<comment><USER42> > don't add stupid things like

Don't use the word "stupid" when another, less self-righteous word suffices.

<comment><USER83> Stupid: having or showing a great lack of intelligence or common sense.

I stand by my choice of descriptor for that sentence.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Barclays and Halifax are misguided and unethical for disallowing rooted phones - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/paul_furley/status/554631054611730432

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd be interested to know what other software professionals think of this.

I believe policies like Halifax's and Barclays' nudge us towards a world of software jaildom - and I don't think this is the direction we should aim for.

Paul</comment>


What Happens Now That China Won't Take U.S. Recycling - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china-has-stopped-accepting-our-trash/584131/ <comment><USER4> The garbage disposal problem, of which recycling is a subset, is due to a lack of back pressure in the consumption system.

From the perspective of production, disposal is an externality. From the perspective of the consumer, disposal is an annoyance that they typically don't have enough buyer power individually to push back on to producers.

Society has come up one workaround: social conscience, the green movement, so that shame can be used to attack brands, aggregating buying power to push back on producers. It doesn't work brilliantly with everyone - some people are allergic to the ritualistic, moralizing pseudo-religious aspects of the movement.

Politics has come up with another: WEEE: the EU Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive. This is an attempt to tax goods by incorporating the cost of disposal into the purchase price. While the green movement was necessary to provide political will, it's much better than a directly shaming approach - the closer the cost of disposal can be pushed to the producer, tightening the feedback loop, the more likely economic incentives will work.

Continuing to push the problem upstream into production is the long term answer. If you try and increase costs at point of disposal, consumers are simply incentivized to cheat, or pay people to cheat on their behalf. The whole exporting of rubbish to China wheeze was one big cheat. The costs have to be loaded at the point of purchase, and producers ultimately made responsible for costs of disposal.

<comment><USER5> Yes!

And it's not just economic costs. It's "lifestyle", more or less. So a few decades ago, all beer bottles were the same size and shape. You took your empties back to the store, and got paid for them. Distributors bought them from stores, and manufacturers from distributors. So they got reused until they broke.

Maybe 40 years ago, some regional US beer makers still did this. Maybe some still do. I saw this 10-20 years ago in Mexico, for both beer and soda bottles. And it was also pretty common for wine bottles.

But now? Now my wife buys French yogurt in tiny glass bottles. Tiny _heavy_ glass bottles. We could save them, but they're really too small for anything but liquor. And who wants to drink from old yogurt containers, in any case?

in the late 60s and 70s, a crucial aspect of the food coop movement was buying bulk stuff, and using your own containers. In Mexico, old-style milk stores often didn't provide containers. And if they did, it was plastic bags. Handling a 2L plastic bag of milk is quite the experience.

I can't imagine how the US could go back to bulk distribution and reusable containers. Or, for that matter, how we could undo suburbanization. But there are limits to externalities, and we are hitting them.

<comment><USER6> They still do the glass bottle returns in Mexico.

<comment><USER7> They still do it in the US also, but you'll pay about 4x more for your milk. You can often find milk on sale for $1.99/gallon (it's a "loss leader" for supermarkets) while a half gallon in a returnable glass bottle will be $3.50 or $4.00 not including the bottle deposit.

<comment><USER8> A store in the UK (sainsburys) briefly experimented with selling milk in bags. You bought a big jug which the top-up bag clipped into. Ostensibly it reduced plastic waste. Pretty sure it was cheaper than buying bottles. It never really caught on though and they canned it.

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/greenerliving/7307719...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/greenerliving/7307719/Milk- in-a-bag-at-Sainsburys.html)

<comment><USER9> Bagged milk is still big in Canada (at least a decade ago)

<comment><USER10> Confirmed, milk is sold in 1l bags and has been all my life.

<comment><USER11> They're 1.33l.

A company once tried the usual "Let's reduce the size of the package and nobody will notice" shenanigan and made 1L bags, but it was blatantly obvious when it didn't fit the plastic jug anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _If we can somehow figure out how to better sort recycling, some U.S. markets for plastics and paper may emerge._

The technology exists and is in production. Here's a new 90 ton per hour recycling plant, from Bulk Handling Systems, in California.[1] This is a good video to watch to see the whole process. Some of the separation is done with the usual air separators, vibrators, and screens. Optical sorters controlling air jets do some of the separation. This plant has no manual pickers; it uses AI vision controlled robots for the hard separation stations. This is not a prototype; it's a big production plant.

Separating different plastics can be done with near infrared multispectral imaging. Here's a TOMRA sorter doing that in a real plant.[2] That's from 2015.

Finally, here's a big plant in LA which takes in plastic bottles and puts out clean plastic pellets ready for injection molding into new bottles.[3]

China is still accepting US plastics for recycling. It just has to be sorted down to 0.5% contamination, and that's being checked. The standard used to be 1.5%, it wasn't really enforced, and 5% contamination was not uncommon. US recyclers have to upgrade their facilities to the point that there's no manual picking required on the output.

Big cities are dealing with this. Smaller communities have problems, because they don't have enough volume for the newer equipment and don't generate enough material to find buyers.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=254&v=4FpsH_ETT7...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=254&v=4FpsH_ETT7c) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0OZ7Mlmkvk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0OZ7Mlmkvk) [3] [https://www.kcet.org/shows/socal-connected/carbonlite- inside...](https://www.kcet.org/shows/socal-connected/carbonlite-inside-the- worlds-largest-plastic-bottle-recycling-plant-0) [4] [https://www.wastedive.com/news/china-contamination- standard-...](https://www.wastedive.com/news/china-contamination-standard- MRFs/519659/)

<comment><USER11> The optical scanners sometimes can't read black plastics.

It just absorbs IR.

We should discourage them.

The scanners are cool since they're analyzing the plastic itself; not reading codes.

[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/restaurants-coffee- pl...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/restaurants-coffee-plastic- takeout-balzacs-1.4600160)

<comment><USER11> > We should discourage them

By that, I mean discourage the black plastics, not the optical scanners!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's important to understand the issue that recycling is meant to address. It's cost of landfills, not shortage of materials.

The obvious (but not workable) answer is to just charge the actual cost of disposing material in landfills. But this doesn't work because it encourages illegal dumping and littering.

So, I can see two solutions:

(1) Some process that converts bulk garbage into something that takes up less space. Incineration and pyrolysis are like this. Maybe you get some useful energy or gases out of it, but the main point is to reduce the cost of disposal. But this would have to be cheap and clean, a tall order.

(2) A tax on all manufactured goods, based on their disposal footprint, that subsidizes the landfills. Since this tax is already paid it can't be avoided by illegal dumping.

<comment><USER14> So basically the argument I had with my dad (conservative blue collar) a couple years ago when he argued "No we're not going to pay $2/mo for recycling bins, this whole recycling thing is just a scam for the trash companies to skim money." Me: "Blah blah blah rainforests, blah blah blah manufacturing waste to produce, etc." I guess he was right?

<comment><USER15> I live in a capital of an EU country. City mandates recycle bins and garbage segregation due to EU laws, same City collects trash from all bins using same trucks and proceeds to dump it all in one big hole in the ground ~100km away while paying hefty fines. Its been like this ever since we got recycle bins.

<comment><USER16> Does this happen to be a city in the south of Italy?

<comment><USER17> What EU country has a capital in the south of Italy? The Kingdom of Two Sicilies?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Even in San Francisco, Reed kept pointing out items that aren't easily > recyclable but that keep showing up at the Recology plant: soy-sauce packets > and pizza boxes

This is funny, because I was just at SFO yesterday where I got Sushi while waiting for my flight, and was confused by the lack of garbage receptacle. There was a "cans/bottles" recycling bin and a compost bin. A sign announced "Don't worry, everything you purchased in the food court is either recyclable or compostable!" There's no way the soy packets were either recyclable or compostable. (Not to mention the plastic tray with metallic-looking designs on it, and the foil bag of wasabi peas.) So there's a fair amount of institutional negligence going on.

<comment><USER19> What's the issue with pizza boxes?

<comment><USER20> They're often soaked in grease. My community won't accept them for recycling either.

<comment><USER21> Mine tells me to put them in the compost bin.

Still teaching the family though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> No one cares because the perceived cost is zero. Burning your recycling just externalizes the cost to the environment. If I lived in one of those cities, I'd encourage the city to increase disposal fees so they can do it properly. If people are too poor to pay the fees, then add a sales tax on wastefully packaged products to subsidize disposal fees for low income earners. If business can earn more profit or increase volume by using better packaging, then they'll do so.

<comment><USER23> >If people are too poor to pay the fees, then add a sales tax on wastefully packaged products to subsidize disposal fees for low income earners

That just punishes the low income people again.

Taxes on goods disproportionately affect poor people because the tax is a larger portion of your purchasing power the lower your income is.

A rich person, or even a middle class person, isn't going to be put out of their habits by a couple of cents.

<comment><USER24> And because the percentage of income one spends for "packaged products" is gets lower the richer you get (and gets capped), the rich can just put aside a "pollute as much as I like" percentage of their income just for not having to care about recycling.

<comment><USER25> Being rich implies being able to consume more. That's the difference between rich and not rich.

<comment><USER24> No, that's a trailer park idea of the rich.

Being rich implies more wealth and power, which is different than consumption, and that is the actual difference between rich and not rich.

Rich people can and do consume more, but, unless you're some kind of gaudy nouveaux into bling or Saudi oil heir, there's only so much you can spend on the kind of "packaged products" we're discussing (and clothes, foods, gadgets, and so on) as part of your everyday life.

Rich will buy a fancier car (or cars), a nicer house (or houses), etc, but those are long term anyway, and can even be investments in themselves. They don't get new "packaged products" in any substantial number more than middle class people.

[https://slate.com/business/2013/01/yacht-economics-rich- peop...](https://slate.com/business/2013/01/yacht-economics-rich-people-don-t- consume-very-much.html)

<comment><USER25> It's the same definition, being able to consume more means having the power to consume more.

A bigger home, traveling further, fancier cars, are all more polluting than a few "package products". I would bet an accurate tracking of externalities (especially due to extra fuel usage due to extra travel), rich people wouldn't just be able to ignore it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So basically, recycling is a lie. Most stuff can't really be recycled except at great cost. Who perpetuated this lie to begin with I wonder, was it just to get us to keep buying stuff?

<comment><USER27> I would like to know if there is any progress to be made in just "stabilizing" plastics in large quantities.

Is it a worthwhile research goal to find a cheap method of transforming post- consumer plastics into an inert, large-scale form (the size of a tractor trailer) that is long-term stable and doesn't offgas?

Is reusability really necessary?

<comment><USER28> Not exactly what you're asking for, but similar goals: [https://preciousplastic.com/](https://preciousplastic.com/)

<comment><USER27> really interesting. i had no idea such a movement existed. they make it look simple and easy.

<comment><USER27> this guy is already producing a 9KG "upcycled plastic brick" which apparently can be used in construction

[https://bazar.preciousplastic.com/en/listings/687199-upcycle...](https://bazar.preciousplastic.com/en/listings/687199-upcycled- plastic-bricks)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> If we look back 2, 3000 years ago, disposal was a problem already. We can see how people discarded things even when they were relatively expensive. Example all the different strata at the Troy/Troja site.

It's hardly a modern problem. But in modern times we have added complications of sheer volume, toxicity, and lack of biodegradability.

<comment><USER24> > _If we look back 2, 3000 years ago, disposal was a problem already_

Disposal is a problem since the dawn of time in the general since (you need to dispose waste somewhere, even if you're an amoeba), but it's misleading to call it a problem anywhere close to today's sense back 3000 years ago.

It wasn't even close in neither quantity, nor quality.

<comment><USER29> I already acknowledge that. My point is being expensive doesn't make people dispose any less. If they are not useful they don't get reused repurposed or recycled.

Given thd volume and unprofitability we can only find ways to process them to get rid of them. Those things which have value will be recycled, etc.

<comment><USER30> >My point is being expensive doesn't make people dispose any less.

Factually wrong. If I can now afford 1 unit instead of the 2 I used to per month, I will discard the packaging of 1.

If prices of goods packaged in shitty packaging rises enough, people will opt for other options. This isn't a fantastical idea, it's what has happened historically. See for example what happened every time in every country that decided to force buyers to pay for plastic bags.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Maybe this is a blessing in disguise so we're focused more on recycling from the start, not as an after-the-fact. Companies like Apple (and others) have been inching us towards this notion of disposable electronics. Once we can no longer simply "dispose" of things, perhaps it will push companies and governments to look at making things more environmentally responsible from the start.

<comment><USER32> It could be a blessing in disguise if recycling is considered appropriately. Reduce, reuse, recycle, dispose, in that order of priority.

Without that it is very difficult to claim, with any credibility at all, being environmentally responsible.

I'm not optimistic.

<comment><USER33> My mother, in her 80s, occasionally says they didn't need recycling when she was young because things were not disposable in the same way they are now. They were also pretty broke and so much more likely to "make do" than they were to buy something new. The lack of choice and diversity of goods back then probably also played a huge role in this. Not saying we should go back to that but we can learn from it.

<comment><USER34> She's got a point with respect to durable items. In the last century it was uncommon to throw something out just because it had a crack or tear... minor repairs were the norm. Now we throw out perfectly good phones when the battery gets worn out and it isn't fashionable to replace them. We've gotten (a bit) better at reducing wasteful packaging but much worse regarding the longevity of what's inside the package. Also, world population growth isn't helping the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The article doesn't mention Plastic China [1] the documentary that in some ways really prompted China to make this change.

1 - [https://www.plasticchina.org/](https://www.plasticchina.org/)

<comment><USER36> > "They can split the atom, but they can't recycle plastic?"

I think this was a quote from that documentary, it was either posted here or on reddit previously (I'm not complaining, it was fascinating) – that quote, by a worker in a Chinese recycling plant to the owner of the plant, after being told Americans can't handle plastic, has stuck with me for some reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've always thought recycling is a bit of a sham, designed primarily to provide some feel-good busywork for people who are concerned about environmental impact of using bad packaging, but not enough to change their habits.

<comment><USER38> I agree up until the last part. Habits aren't formed in a vacuum. Corporations sell products in bad packaging and for most people most of the time there is no reasonable way to avoid purchasing products in that form. The only way to change the situation is to legislate. A tax on packaging seems most pragmatic. Unfortunately, pragmatism would go against the prevailing dogmatic faith in the free market being the solution to all problems and so we do nothing.

<comment><USER39> Another way would be to make garbage collection "pay as you go", for example by charging for collection bags.

This is closer to "free market spirit", but creates a huge incentive to dump the garbage into the nearest river...

<comment><USER40> The obvious answer is to levy hefty fine for dumping so that expected loss is higher than collection bag fee. Source: I live in collection bag fee jurisdiction.

<comment><USER39> So how does it work for you?

My biggest fear is that the cost of enforcement will greatly outweigh possible benefits.

In this sense taxing the "supply" side is much easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The answer is to put the burden of recycling back on the manufacturer, and add a refundable cost to packaging on purchase.

Businesses have zero incentive make products easy to recycle.

If I recall, the only recycling success stories involve aluminum, glass, and perhaps paper. These are relatively easy to recycle, yet even these required financial incentives.

</comment><comment><USER42> >Plastic clamshell containers are difficult to recycle because the material they're made of is so flimsy—but it's hard to find berries not sold in those containers, even at most farmers' markets.

Yes, but it's easy to find farmers grateful to take them back for reuse. Same with those green plastic open baskets. Plastic produce bags can be brought back in a shopping bag for reuse by ourselves.

+1 for farmer's markets.

</comment><comment><USER17> Whenever we're talking about mass transit, or communications, or trains, or pretty much any other piece of infrastructure, there are always lots of people saying that America can't do things like Europe does because it's huge, everything is dispersed, there are enormous low-density stretches, etc.

Where are all those people when the subject turns to garbage infrastructure? If you have so much empty space, take some of it and make a huge landfill! Put it in a desert or something. Make some hills out of garbage.

There's precedent, too. When the US government needed to test nuclear weapons, they got a big honking piece of desert and nuked it. When they needed an area with very low RF interference for some spy stuff, they found some low-density place and banned radios there. When they need to test artillery, desert again.

</comment><comment><USER43> I'd bet one of the most immediate consequences is a lot less plastic winds up in the oceans. We know just a few rivers and cities account for nearly all ocean plastic, and I'd assume several of these are major routes for imported plastics.

<comment><USER44> Yeah I watched a documentary on what happens to the imported 'recycled' plastic, and stuff was blowing away in the wind, burning, kids were picking thru it by hand, etc. I'm not surprised that China would want to put a damper on the whole thing.

<comment><USER43> I bet I watched the same documentary, and I was overjoyed when China banned imports. The US and most western countries have spent a ton of money upgrading garbage dumps to have moisture barriers, large fences, and other containment features, and the plastic is much safer there than in the oceans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> To solve the problem: stop making the packaging/garbage.

It's not solved by working out what to do with all the packaging/garbage, it's solved by stopping making it.

"Recycling" is the distraction/sleight of hand that the packaging industry uses to make you feel OK with the infinite spew of garbage it creates. Finally China has shown the lie of recycling.

In your kitchen, if the water tap is gushing water onto the floor, you don't spend all your time focusing on how to mop up the water, you turn off the tap. Same thing.

</comment><comment><USER46> I guess this might be an unpopular opinion, but I've never seen hard numbers proving that recycling is actually necessary. I am curious, what would be the consequences of simply digging big holes and burying all our rubbish? I understand that some of it generates greenhouse gasses, so that might have to be dealt with separately. But for general inert waste, is it that bad to just stick it in the ground?

<comment><USER47> In 1990, A. Clark Wiseman from Gonzaga calculated that if we dug a landfill 100 yards deep and put in all trash generated in the US for the next millennium, it would fit in a square area of land 35 miles on each side (assuming of course levels of consumption and disposal from the time). By point of comparison, replacing all existing energy sources with solar and wind power would require orders of magnitude more acreage. I'm not sure if most New Yorkers have ever seen a place like e.g. Nevada, but I'm not exactly worried about the amount of land needed for landfills.

New technologies allow landfill operators to extract some of the waste and use it for industrial purposes (particularly methane, with potent greenhouse emissions, albeit relatively short-lived). It also remains true that some forms of recycling - paper, cardboard and metals like aluminum or steel - <USER2> still cost effective, provided that the public stops trying to recycle their pizza boxes. I've often wondered if environmental policy would be better served by focusing on sorting high-quality, cost-effective recyclables into recycling plants and putting everything else into the landfill.

IMO, recycling has ceased being about - or perhaps never was about - <USER3> efficiency or ecological health, and is mostly a cheap way for people to feel like they're doing the right thing. I have become somewhat skeptical about recycling, and even I feel the shame of being a heretic against pathos-laden gospel first preached in grade school for failing to throw a plastic bottle into the recycling bin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Perhaps, in the near long term, this is good news? Now wasteful America can't avoid the results of its ways? Up til now, it's been out of sight, out of mind. Sure, recycling plastic feels good. But less plastic - a petroleum byproduct - period would be noticeably better.

Perhaps, once the price of disposal goes up (and landfills are NIMBY) then root problem will finally be addressed? Perhaps, there is finally hope?

</comment><comment><USER49> The whole point was that we were supposed to be recycling, not using more fossil fuels to ship it all back overseas to be possibly just burned or buried anyways. And at best the recycled material is shipped yet again overseas back to us in the form of new products. The best thing that's come from all this is that we finally know what actually happens to all that 'recycled' material.

<comment><USER50> My understanding was that our trade deficit with China meant that we had to send more shipping containers back to China and we filled them with relatively light recycling waste instead of simply sending them back empty. It was basically free transportation.

But maybe that's not be true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> There are endless 'convenience' obscenities built into the consumer interface that could easily be eliminated through legislation. Many 'solutions' were invented up to a century ago, then discarded over the years (for convience/profit).

Example: boxes of bottled water sold in separate plastic containers. Replacement: go to a water distributor with a 5-gallon re-useable container. 'Inconvenient' to the consumer? Tough bounce.

Milk bottles ... soda bottles ...

Example: Grocery stores used to pack groceries into boxes products were shipped in. 'Want plastic or paper?' NEITHER. Consumer may choose to bring in/rent re-useable crates.

And so on. There are -endless- working solutions that will eliminate the massive costs of creating all of this waste and of disposing of it. WE have let this happen, and WE deserved the consequences.

<comment><USER52> _Example: boxes of bottled water sold in separate plastic containers. Replacement: go to a water distributor with a 5-gallon re-useable container. 'Inconvenient' to the consumer? Tough bounce._

Or maybe just raise the quality of tap water

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> California could raise a tax, let's call it a "CRV" tax for container redemption value, and then use it to subsidize curbside pickup of pre-sorted recycling.

Seriously though, at the current 5-20 cents per container crv tax, how can recycling in California not be profitable for the state?

Where is that money going?!?

<comment><USER27> much of it goes to individuals who collect and sort the materials and bring them to recycling centers for a cash reward.

a lot of times, these individuals collect the materials from big blue bins consumers have carefully filled and placed at the curbside near their residences.

another place the money goes is to people in Arizona who gather plastics in that state and truck it across the border to cash in on California's generous recycling rewards program.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> > Then there's the challenge of educating people about what can and can't be > recycled

I have never lived anywhere where the local council has made any remote effort to do this properly. Surely they'll list a few common items that can and can't be recycled - like maybe 10 things. But people come into contact with a _vast_ array of different items. 10 doesn't cut it.

They mention wire coat hangers - why can't they be recycled? I would have thought since they are metal they could easily be magnetically separated and melted down with all the other metal. No recycling box says whether or not you can recycle wire coat hangers so you just have to guess.

</comment><comment><USER55> Cardboard/paper can go to EU and South America. Electronics can get mixed in with ore worst case. Best solution w electronics is grinding and separating them in house and reselling to rare earth refiners.

</comment><comment><USER6> What about the idea of everyone having their own cup and water bottle that they take everywhere. If you want the drink to go and forget your cup, buy a new one at a high price or have it there.

</comment><comment><USER56> What about plasma incinerators?

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

<comment><USER57> I've wondered about this as well, I guess in land-constrained locations this could be advantageous, but AFAIK they are not energy-positive on their output.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> There is hope for being able to recycle most plastic: [https://purecycletech.com/](https://purecycletech.com/)

</comment><comment><USER59> Alot of my Immediate family works for one of the largest trash pickup, dump, and recycling facilities in the Midwest you're kidding yourself if you think that recycling is keeping stuff out of the dump when they get overloaded with too much recycling which is about every 3 days everything goes to the dump most plastics go to the dump only about 10% of a really gets recycled.

</comment><comment><USER60> Producers have to be made responsible for disposal. Perhaps a tax on the weight and type of material of the packaging minus recovered and reused materials.

</comment><comment><USER61> It seems like the key is to get people to feel good about throwing things in the trash? There should be campaigns to "keep our recycling clean" and "when in doubt, throw it out".

Treating recycling as a moral issue may actually be making things worse, to the extent that encourages people to think that putting more stuff in the recycling bin is better.

</comment><comment><USER62> Plastic: A real problem as burning it releases estrogens (more formally 'endocrine disrupters') into the air. However $1 bottle deposit and glass bottles seems entirely viable to me. Maybe a bit of an adjustment, but a hundred times smarter than burning.

Papers: As far as I know this can just biodegrade. Compostable, no?

</comment><comment><USER63> I think it would be a fascinating problem use some combination of AI/robots/etc to design a hugely effective way to sort garbage. Even better if it was possible to do an army of tiny robots that would just go out and fetch all the garbage etc.

</comment><comment><USER64> Off topic, but isn't it amazing that shipping garbage across many oceans is profitable?

</comment><comment><USER65> Has anyone run across something that would work at the individual home level? A machine that sorts and cleans the plastic into small bales in your garage. Maybe something similar for paper and aluminum?

</comment><comment><USER12> Maybe the US should have high tariffs on packaging materials to prevent their importation and force domestic manufacture.

</comment><comment><USER27> maybe it's time for more plasphalt

[https://www.dot.state.pa.us/public/Bureaus/design/SEMP/FACTS...](https://www.dot.state.pa.us/public/Bureaus/design/SEMP/FACTS/Plasphalt%20District%205-0.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER66> We should only allow fully recycled plastic everywhere. Completely outlaw single-use plastic that can't be easily recycled.

Everything else should be compostable. Everything else should have a fee associated with disposal. Things with dangerous chemicals like batteries, etc should have high amounts of returnable deposits.

Yes, it's going to be expensive but it's worth it.

</comment><comment><USER67> It seems to me that landfill prices ought to be baked into the price of products sold.

</comment><comment><USER68> This is one of those things that should be viewed as a long term opportunity rather than a short term problem.

The worst solution would be to just find another country to send the garbage. The best solution would be new technologies locally which would allow us to deal with garbage.

</comment><comment><USER69> I'm hoping innovation happens.

</comment><comment><USER70> Just dump all the _sorted_ garbage in _sorted_ landfills. Recycling may become economical again at some point. In any event, future technology will deal with it better.

<comment><USER71> I assume you are joking, but I liked the joke. (If it's not a joke, it's horrifying).

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Got the robots on it

</comment><comment><USER73> We consume too much. Driving out of my development on trash day shows me this. Bags and bags, boxes, loads of trash for a home of 4 people. Two adults, two children. I wonder what they're going through?

<comment><USER74> its almost as if the invisible hand is encouraging us to be wasteful, to encourage growth, rather than efficient as we were all taught in primary school.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> I too heard the 99PI episode that cited this article.

<comment><USER76> Not only is your snark unnecessary, this article came out March 5 - after that episode.</comment></comment>


Are Business Schools to Blame?  - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/how-to-fix-business-schools/2009/03/are-business-schools-to-blame.html <comment><USER2> "Society implicitly trusted MBAs to do no harm when it allowed financial markets to operate in a relatively unregulated fashion--but its faith has been betrayed."

Should we trust a Dean who thinks we have a relatively unregulated market? The markets, especially financial and real estate are highly regulated. How is he to teach ethics of capitalism when he views markets as not a _right_ , but something society _allows_?</comment>


Show HN: Flight search to max. accr. mileage at best price (for frequent flyers) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bunainternational.com/demo-0.1.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The demo page is primarily for potential users to provide feedback on the features before building, and it's a bit sloppy but should illustrate what it's all about. Feedback is very welcome!</comment>


Twitter Co-Founders Want to Help Unlock Human Potential With New App - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2011/08/23/lift-obvious-cor/

<comment><USER2> ... Maybe I'm a foul person? But they should really redesign that logo.</comment>


Innovative (crazy?) Android barcode + alarm clock app (Free + Open Source) - <AUTHOR> http://www.havchr.net/mr/

<comment><USER2> There's always another off button.. taking out the battery :D</comment>


Finnish study: Smoking and drinking coffee might prevent Parkinson's disease - <AUTHOR> http://www.metropolitan.fi/entry/study-smoking-and-drinking-coffee-might-prevent-parkinsons-disea <comment><USER2> There is a much cleaner, and safer drug that can reduce the chance of developing Parkinson's, and that is Deprenyl [1].

> Deprenyl protects the nigrostriatal dopaminergic neurons against selective > neurotoxins (6-hydroxydopamine, MPTP, DSP-4) [2]

We know that environmental insults like solvent inhalation and most likely agricultural pesticides contribute to the loss of dopamine neurons in Parkinson's, it seems like Deprenyl has the ability to protect against the damage of some of these, as well as the effect of aging [3].

> These results suggest that (-)-deprenyl and related compounds may protect > neurons from apoptosis and be applicable to delay the deterioration of > neurons during advancing ageing and in neurodegenerative disorders. [3]

I myself take deprenyl, or its newer cousin azilect for this purpose. It also has the benefit of increasing dopamine and it's a much lower impact focus drug than psychostimulants like amphetamines.

[1] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3123604](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3123604)

[2] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7669938](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7669938)

[3] [http://www.selegiline.com/apop.html](http://www.selegiline.com/apop.html)

<comment><USER3> are you doing this as a preventative measure? do you have a history of Parkinsons in your family or something?

<comment><USER2> Yes, completely preventive. I have two family members who developed it in their 70's.

I am 30.

 __Update because I can 't reply re: self-experimenting:

Deprenyl is an incredibly well researched molecule, with a great safety profile. We also have a lot of reason to suspect amphetamines like adderall are neurotoxic to dopamine neurons, and hence my fervent belief that deprenyl should be a first line treatment for those wishing for enhanced focus, and amphetamines should be reserved for tougher cases.

<comment><USER4> Since you're only in your 30's, wouldn't it be better to help raise money and awareness for a cure rather than experiment on your body?

[https://www.michaeljfox.org](https://www.michaeljfox.org)

30-40 years is a lot of time for research.

Andy Grove is another famous person with the disease who's working hard to find treatments:

[http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/0128/070.html](http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/0128/070.html)

<comment><USER5> You can _both_ fund further research _and_ apply the research that's already been done. In fact, if you're not going to apply the already existing research, what's the point of funding more? Are you going to apply the new research but not the current research?

And prevention is much cheaper than cure.

<comment><USER4> Well, there's no guarantee that it will do anything. Over 30 years, taking a supplement may lead to other problems, or it may become less effective when you really need it.

Personally, I'd probably wait until my early 50's. Hopefully, at the very least, in 20 years, they'll be able to detect and monitor the effects on the body with more precision.

At the very least, billions more in research will have been done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> other research ("Parkinson disease and smoking revisited")

" Objective: To assess whether being able to quit smoking is an early marker of Parkinson disease (PD) onset rather than tobacco being "neuroprotective," we analyzed information about ease of quitting and nicotine substitute use.

Methods: For this case-control study, we identified 1,808 patients with PD diagnosed between 1996 and 2009 from Danish registries, matched 1,876 population controls on sex and year of birth, and collected lifestyle information. We estimated odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals with logistic regression adjusting for matching factors and confounders.

Results: Fewer patients with PD than controls ever established a smoking habit. Among former smokers, those with greater difficulty quitting or using nicotine substitutes were less likely to develop PD, with the risk being lowest among those reporting "extremely difficult to quit" compared with "easy to quit." Nicotine substitute usage was strongly associated with quitting difficulty and duration of smoking, i.e., most strongly among current smokers, followed by former smokers who had used nicotine substitutes, and less strongly among former smokers who never used substitutes.

Conclusions: Our data support the notion that patients with PD are able to quit smoking more easily than controls. These findings are compatible with a decreased responsiveness to nicotine during the prodromal phase of PD. We propose that ease of smoking cessation is an aspect of premanifest PD similar to olfactory dysfunction, REM sleep disorders, or constipation and suggests that the apparent "neuroprotective" effect of smoking observed in epidemiologic studies is due to reverse causation.

"

[http://www.neurology.org/content/early/2014/09/12/WNL.000000...](http://www.neurology.org/content/early/2014/09/12/WNL.0000000000000879.short)

</comment><comment><USER7> The abstract reads "Nicotine addiction negatively correlates the changes of developing Parkinson's disease". I'm not a fan of the wording of the HW title to make it sound like smoking could be a good habit.

<comment><USER8> Seriously, I agree! Why not just take nicotine supplements in safe amounts?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe smoking kills you before the Parkinson's can get started? What age does it kick in for most people?

<comment> at-fates-hands Most people are diagnosed around 60. Anybody who gets it before 50 has a form that is considered "Young Onset PD"

source: [http://www.parkinson.org/Parkinson-s-Disease/Young-Onset- Par...](http://www.parkinson.org/Parkinson-s-Disease/Young-Onset-Parkinsons)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think it's kind of irresponsible to release a study like this to the popular press, especially this early before all of the correlations and causitive factors have been worked out. I remember a similar deal hitting the pop-sci press back in the 90s with regards to smoking supposedly preventing Alzheimers (that I believe was later disproven).

ah, yeah, here it is: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8437692](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8437692)

Half of my extended family completely ignored the part on "The 'dose-response' pattern showed the greatest risk reduction among those who smoked least" (if it ever got mentioned at all), and used it as an excuse to keep smoking for, well, as long as it took for everyone to forget the meme and go back to smoking Because Freedums!

Ok, nevermind, I guess they never needed an excuse to begin with.

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't know about drinking coffee, but could the correlation with smoking just be because smokers die earlier than average, and hence never get the time to develop Parkinson's?

<comment><USER12> Even smokers don't die that young, on average.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There are other means of administering nicotine (as well as other beneficial effects): [http://www.gwern.net/Nicotine](http://www.gwern.net/Nicotine)

</comment><comment><USER14> "The exact cause behind the phenomena is unknown at this point."

Dopamine.

<comment><USER15> That's the symptom, not the cause.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting. My Grandfather is 100% Finnish. He never smoked. And now he has Parkinson's.

Anecdotal, I know :)

</comment><comment><USER17> Does anyone smoke coffee? I usually don't go any further than just smelling.

<comment><USER18> It's a _very_ dark roast.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> So what does this mean? It's either senile and healthy or smart, but dying? Damn, son.

<comment><USER19> Thankfully, there are ways to ingest caffeine and nicotine that don't involve smoking coffee grounds or tobacco leaves. Drinking coffee or using transdermal or vaporized nicotine solution could offer the benefits without the health risks of inhaling tars and the carcinogenic products of combustion.

<comment><USER20> But the correlation is between smoking and drinking coffee, not receiving a certain amount of nicotine and caffeine. Indeed, the linked abstract talks about gut biome - it's unlikely that a nicotine patch on your thigh is going to affect your gut biome in the same way actual smoke in your throat is.</comment></comment></comment>