AI and the End of Truth - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/swlh/ai-and-the-end-of-truth-9a42675de18 <comment><USER2> This. This article touches on a number of the points I've made to friends in the last couple of years. I've had a growing sense of dread about what the world will look like when such tools become easy to obtain and produce powerful results. Every time I read a new research paper, I was both in awe at the pace at which things were moving, and scared that it looked like it would happen in the very near future.

We _will_ reach a point within the next decade or so in which photorealistic video of just about anything you want will be trivial to create. That will have enormous benefits to many people in a creative sense, but will usher in an era of disinformation the likes of which our world has never seen. As the article states, what we are seeing now truly is the tip of a very massive iceberg.

What terrified me most when I thought about it, is that I couldn't think of a way to stop the end of Truth from happening.

</comment><comment><USER3> The corollary to this is AI that can detect fake/fabricated items such as those this article describes. Software that can identify inconsistencies or artifacts indicative of unauthentic media.</comment>


CVE-2015-3459 – Hospira Lifecare PCA Infusion Pump - <AUTHOR> https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2015-3459 <comment><USER2> I worked for Hospira last year on the Plum A+ and 360 infusion pumps but not the PCA. I'm a little surprised such a blatant security hole wasn't caught, considering the magnitude of the regulatory environment we worked under. I'd never worked in that kind of environment before, and I left shortly after a successfully defended audit of our software development and tracking process and systems. (Although how successful is the development and tracking process if a year later this "bug" comes out?) My guess is that because we were beaten over the head day in and day out focusing on "if this software delivers the wrong medication the patient is probably going to die", and "if you make a mistake in the development process and in change tracking we can lose the ability to make these devices" that the idea of defending against malicious intent was de-emphasized/overlooked.

<comment><USER3> Question unrelated to the stupidity of supporting telnet as protocol on these devices- Did you guys use formal verification techniques? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification)

<comment><USER3> If some one would explain the down-voting to me, I'd love to understand... honestly

1\. My question was unrelated to the poor decision the OPs former employer made to use telnet.

2\. Formal verification the the gold standard in correctness often used for can't fail things like missiles and satellites.

<comment><USER4> Probably your tone. Half your post is you telling them they're stupid, and the other half is a patronizing link to very well-known concepts (implying they'd be stupid not to use them, except there are reasons why very few people actually do). It can read like the average know-it-all post plus gratuitous insults.

<comment><USER3> >Half your post is you telling them they're stupid

No I was saying my question was unrelated to a stupid decision their former employer made....

>and the other half is a patronizing link to very well-known concepts

The link was NOT for the benefit of the OP to whom I was asking a question, it was for reader here that might not know what I was referring too in the question.

<comment><USER4> _> I was saying my question was unrelated to a stupid decision their former employer made_

"Former employers" don't usually make decisions in a vacuum -- chances are that engineers were involved at some point, and if it wasn't OP maybe it was a colleague or even a friend. Engineers are as lazy as anyone else, and telnet is an easy protocol to support. Also "let's not talk about my opinion of X" is just a passive-aggressive way of stating your opinion without accepting a possible critique of it, which in itself is off-putting. If you really didn't want to talk about the subject, you wouldn't have mentioned it right away. The only safe use of "let's not talk about X" is as a way to move on _after_ a topic has been discussed and agreement could not be reached.

 _> The link was NOT for the benefit of the OP to whom I was asking a question, it was for reader_

that might as well be, but 1) both OP and HN readers will likely be familiar with the concept and/or can google it themselves, and 2) playing to the peanut gallery is patronizing in itself.

Note I'm not criticizing your positions, I'm just describing how your tone might come across as patronizing. And that's more than enough meta for a week, I think :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's the bad news: after spending a decade working in the medical device industry, I can say that security is not always a high priority in medical device designs.

I don't think the situation is likely to get better until the FDA starts requiring security audits as a condition of approval -- and for 510(k)s too, not just for PMAs.

<comment><USER6> > I can say that security is not always a high priority in medical device > designs.

Agreed. But it's because generally it's not (yet?) a problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is anyone else dissatisfied with the amount of information we get in many sec bug reports? Almost everytime I read a CVE or other vulnerability I find myself with more questions than answers. There's so little information given.

Is telnet on by default? Is this device normally plugged into a network, for how long? How common is this device? Has it been on the market for long?

Without this kind of information it's very difficult to assess risk, or otherwise form an opinion.

<comment><USER8> On the other hand, for potentially significant security holes, answering those questions would make attacking the devices easy. I imagine more detail will come out in a postmortem once the affected devices are updated. I may be overly optimistic, though..

<comment><USER9> I've got a full advisory written up. It is unclear if the vendor will patching the device. When I get that cleared up I'll have a full advisory for everyone. In the meantime if you need something answered urgently you can contact me directly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was thinking this is bad, but this thing is running a 2.4 kernel, so it's probably just a wired ethernet port on the back of the device. Limited but dangerous potential here.

Nope, it's a thousands times worse. This devices has WiFi. You don't even need to plug a cable in the back.

I can't find how the wireless is configured in their manual[1], but they clearly mention Wireless LAN.

[1]: [http://www.meql.com/Manuals/Abbott-Hospira-PCA-III-Mednet- Us...](http://www.meql.com/Manuals/Abbott-Hospira-PCA-III-Mednet-User- Manual.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER11> tl;dr - drug pump has no authentication on telnet port

This is the brochure page for this family of products ([http://www.hospira.com/en/products_and_services/infusion_pum...](http://www.hospira.com/en/products_and_services/infusion_pumps/Lifecare/)) and the one that stands out a mile is

\- Robust wireless capabilities enable remote drug library updates

the product itself (let's assume it's top notch medical hardware, I am afraid I cannot comment usefully) works fine, and has been battle tested and built by veterans. But the second they add network access they are hit by a double whammy ... Actually I have rewritten this three times, and really I can find no excuse for this. Selling to moronic sysadmins - "hey easy to use web front end with passwords or even client certs). I can only assume the argument runs like this

\- if we make it hard to do X over the network, and X does not happen, chances of someone dying are y%. If we bollox security, then X is sooo easy to do, and we just save y% of lives.

Now that is "tragedy of the commons" in sheeps clothing, but I can see it may be the only excuse you have

</comment><comment><USER12> This is completely unacceptable. There really should be more pentesting of medical gear and industrial control systems in general.

<comment><USER13> I'd argue that the very fact that it's physically possible to hack these sort of devices is a huge red flag.

There shouldn't be pentesting, because there shouldn't be anything to pentest.

Something like a medical device, you keep the outside communication part airgapped from anything that could cause harm. If that means you have to duplicate things, then it means you have to duplicate things.

<comment><USER14> Implantable devices typically _have_ to have a wireless interface of some sort. The alternative is to put a physical port on someone's body, which is a great way to cause infections.

<comment><USER13> So you have a wireless interface for the non-able-to-kill-you stuff.

But if you're having to change the code of something that's been implanted, you've _already_ done something horribly wrong.

<comment><USER15> For example, I _think_ pacemakers can set the range of acceptable heart rates by radio. So now, you have to have logic checking that it doesn't get set to 0. But what happens if there's a buffer overflow in that checking?

Edit: here's a paper demonstrating similar attacks: [http://www.secure- medicine.org/public/publications/icd-study...](http://www.secure- medicine.org/public/publications/icd-study.pdf)

<comment><USER13> See, that's an example of something that I do not think should be settable via radio. _Maybe_ inductive or sonic communication.

Alternatively, you have the software check the set range, but the hardware (or a second non-connected processor) also checks it separately to make sure it's sane anyways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Robust wireless capabilities enable remote drug library updates" [1]

What do they mean by 'robust'? You can rely on it to be there whenever you want to hack someone to death?

[1] [http://www.hospira.com/en/products_and_services/infusion_pum...](http://www.hospira.com/en/products_and_services/infusion_pumps/Lifecare/)

<comment><USER17> I mentally translate 'robust' to 'fancy' \-- the dictionary meaning I grew up with being so rarely used correctly now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So is the procurement process in medical organizations so feeble that nobody notices these, or is there such widespread apathy about this state of affairs that it all gets ignored, or is there some kind of culture of secrecy that results in even these life threatening cases to be kept quiet between the hospital and the equipment salesman?

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder how long it's going to be before we see state-level actors exploit these kinds of security holes.

To be sure, there are already a lot of ways to incapacitate or hurt someone. But abusing software bugs in a person's medical devices might be a less traceable way to disrupt their activity.

<comment><USER13> Why bother with medical devices? Just lock on their driver-side brakes when they're on the highway. Bonus: car accidents are common enough that it'd be unlikely to be noticed.

<comment><USER20> You'll have to be more subtle than that. A crash investigator is going to notice asymmetric skid patterns and brake disc damage.

<comment><USER21> For plausible deniability on extrajudicial actions, I thought "drug overdose" and "murder/suicide" were the preferred means.

That's assuming the agency committing the act doesn't have readily handy poisons that degrade within hours and are thus untraceable. Combine with car accident and you have a large mess to uncover, further decreasing likelihood of discovery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's essentially a device for automatic delivery of pain killers when the patient presses a button. Why on earth would such device even require network connectivity? They advertise "wireless capabilities for remote drug library update". But "wireless capability" is a whole new engineering domain, and the manufacturer seems to have failed to even begin to address it properly.

<comment><USER23> Just because you cannot envision a particular use case does not mean that it is not a valuable one. Fist off a large hospital will have drugs that are "formulary", meaning drugs doctors are allowed to prescribe and the in-house pharmacy fill. These lists need to be updated, imagine you have thousands of these pumps on premises. Now imagine you also have to do inventory management. Now imagine you have these pumps wired in with your nurse calling system (for when infusion is complete or the device is empty).

Edit: usually you pick the drug from a list on the interface when programming it. I'm not familiar with this pump but I've used many like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't think we have any of our equipment in the OR networked other than commo devices; phones, video, et. al. I do know of some dental tools that use bluetooth to sync drills with a nurses cell so they can change the settings for the docs but 'hacking' that wouldn't lead to any unrecoverable harm... unless, of course, you could turn the drill on via blue tooth

</comment><comment><USER25> Of all the bad things that can happen to a patient connected to an infusion pump, being hacked is way way down the list.

</comment><comment><USER26> Not that this isn't a nasty security hole, but I should hope that this sort of equipment is firewalled at least.

<comment><USER27> > Not that this isn't a nasty security hole, but I should hope that this sort > of equipment is firewalled at least.

Won't do you much good if an attacker makes an open Wifi point with the same SSID as the hospital's network.

<comment><USER28> >Won't do you much good if an attacker makes an open Wifi point with the same SSID as the hospital's network.

For that to work the hospital's SSID would have to be open as well. And if that were the case, faking the SSID would be a complete waste of time because you could just connect to it yourself.

<comment><USER18> You vastly overestimate the difficulty of spoofing a password-protected wifi network.

Even without that, acquiring access credentials is hardly rocket science. (eg. grab one of these pumps or any other wifi device lying around and read the password over the ethernet/serial port)

<comment><USER28> I don't think you understand how wpa works. It's not like the client just sends a password. A shared key is mutual authentication. If putting up a network with a target ssid leaked data, WiFi would be completely broken.

<comment><USER18> [http://www.renderlab.net/projects/WPA- tables/](http://www.renderlab.net/projects/WPA-tables/)

wifi security is a pretty soft layer of additional security and definitely should be considered cheaply penetrable for purpouses of defense.

But like I said you can just harvest the PSK off a device without cracking anything. An unprotected shared secret on all nodes is not very secret at all.

<comment><USER28> A link to some precomputed tables doesn't mean anything. Wpa2 AES CCMP with a long shared secret is effectively unbreakable. I have not seen any research on academia or industry that comes close.

Care to share some? If not, please stop spreading misinformation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Was anyone else reminded of that 'Homeland' episode?</comment>


Heyzap founder story: Q1-Q2 2009 - <AUTHOR> http://www.immadsnewworld.com/2009/07/heyzap-story-q1-q2-2009.html

<comment><USER2> Misspelled my name :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Corrected. I didn't have Internet at the time and forgot to check :)</comment></comment>


John Resig on Advanced Javascript to Improve Your Webapp - <AUTHOR> http://carsonified.com/blog/dev/john-resig-on-advanced-javascript-to-improve-your-web-app/

<comment><USER2> There's some very useful tips here, thanks for the link !</comment>


The math of media bosses who told Deadspin to 'stick to sports' doesn't add up - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2019-11-01/deadspin-stick-to-sports-bad-math <comment><USER2> I am largely confused about this whole discussion. Why are we trying to figure out if the Deadspin bosses are justified in whether they want their writers to write about sports related things?

This isn't about free speech. Each one of the writers has the ability to write to their own blog, to tweet whatever they want. This is about some writers insisting that a company pays them money to write about whatever the writers want, instead of writing about what the people who are paying them want. That seems fine if the company agrees. I think some companies make that work, might even be a good idea. But if the company doesn't agree, well, I mean that's ok too, right? And the writers can quit if they don't like it (as they appear to have done), and good for them if they can achieve their vision elsewhere.

I think it would be wrong if the management was asking them to deceive people, or break laws. But presumably writing about sports is not abhorrent to any of the writers. Why all of a sudden did it become noble to tell your boss that they can't tell you what to do at work, for work related activities?

Am I a freedom fighter if I tell my boss that I'm not going to code that thing they want to get out the door next week, I have a pet project that I really like, and then me and all my other co-workers go on strike when I can't do that?

<comment><USER3> Management can tell employees to do whatever they want, but employees can also tell management to shove it and quit. What's wrong with that?

<comment><USER4> Nothing whatsoever. I believe the GP is just scratching their head in confusion as to why this is such a story, because, as you both point out, it shouldn't be.

I suspect this story has such legs because it is about the media. There is nothing the media likes to talk about more than itself, particularly when it is about front-liners defying execs.

<comment><USER5> > Nothing whatsoever. I believe the GP is just scratching their head in > confusion as to why this is such a story, because, as you both point out, it > shouldn't be.

Because of the aspect of this that GP is ignoring: there's a third-party in all of this who are the ones making a lot of the noise about it: _the audience_.

Deadspin built a dedicated following among readers who very much enjoyed their eclectic, not just sports focus (as somewhat born out by this analysis showing that the non-sports content performs at least as well as, if not ouright outperforming, the sports content).

The writers, and long-serving editor Barry Petchesky, are very much aware of this, and a lot of the noise about the "stick to sports" mandate is just how _idiotic_ this is, given that it erases the very differentiating quality that keeps the Deadspin audience coming to Deadspin, and not SBNation, or ESPN, or BarstoolSports, or the million other competitors.

This isn't so much "Bosses mandated X, and entitled employees just don't want to do X" as "Out-of-touch new Bosses mandated X, and employees rightly pointed out that this was going to kneecap the business, and then quit rather than circle their way down the drain"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm surprised commenters here seem to be siding with management when:

* They only bought the site about a year ago.

* They've replaced a number of women/minority executives with white, male, nepotism hires.

* The editorial mandate to "stick to sports" violates the CBA with the GMG Union, which prohibits the owners from having editorial say.

* There have been numerous complaints from both writers and commenters on the site about the decline in the quality of the content since the takeover.

* About a week ago, obnoxious, auto-playing, with-sound video ads starting covering every article, and the comments in every section complained about them. The writers made a post asking for feedback, which management removed and only then said "stick to sports".

I mean really, it just takes a quick look at the comment section of any article to see how mad the commenters have been about this issue. Oh wait, management removed the comments on Deadspin (and no other kinja site). They also drove away some of the most popular writers on the site, like Drew Magary, and that's where the complaints about the decline in quality come from. The whole thing has just been incompetent mismanagement for a long time, and as a long-time reader, has been one of the biggest bummers since Joystiq was shuttered.

<comment><USER7> Editorial independence is section VIII in CBA [pdf]: [https://www.wgaeast.org/wp- content/uploads/sites/4/2019/04/G...](https://www.wgaeast.org/wp- content/uploads/sites/4/2019/04/GMG-Agreement-2019-2022.pdf)

This is what makes the situation special. It's in the contract.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> OK. Leaving aside that the whole article kind of smells of self-justification over the approach of the LA Times itself to reporting actual news vs. opinion, there's a mathematical issue here. If Deadspin were relatively unpopular with sports fans, their non-sports content would naturally be relatively popular due to it's general audience appeal. And even if this weren't true, most fans care about their particular sport, meaning that the non-sports articles will by the same logic have better viewership even if they are less popular with every given segment of the Deadspin audience. Thus, the content can be "well received" without actually building the site's target audience(s), the targeted audience(s) for which their advertisers pay an (assumed) premium.

<comment><USER5> > the targeted audience(s) for which their advertisers pay an (assumed) > premium.

Online advertising does not work this way, and has not for years. Advertisers bid on the right to show users an ad, per ad, based on all of the surveilled data known about that user. Deadspin will get the best bid price per-user regardless of what demographic the winning advertiser was targeting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> G/O Media has several brands that already do woke journalism. How many do they need for this? How many concentrate on sports exclusively? To use a sports metaphore, it's about zone coverage.

As I said on prior posts... Deadspin should stick to sports for the same reason Pizza Hut doesn't sell Tacos. Coverage across brand identities. Even if Tacos may make more money than Pizza in aggregate, they aren't there to sell Tacos.

In the end, it doesn't matter if Deadspin may individually make a little more money. How much less are they making by effectively turning away potential fans of sports by bringing in stories on identity politics? The population is roughly 1/3 left, 1/3 centrist and 1/3 right. As it stands they are alienating 1/3 to 2/3 of their potential audience.

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately choice of example. Pizza Hut does sell tacos.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yum!_Brands](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yum!_Brands)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=joint+pizza+hut+taco+bell&tb...](https://www.google.com/search?q=joint+pizza+hut+taco+bell&tbm=isch)

As does Jack-in-the-Box

[https://www.jackinthebox.com/food/taco-and-sides/two- tacos](https://www.jackinthebox.com/food/taco-and-sides/two-tacos)

<comment><USER11> Huh? The claim "Pizza Hut doesn't sell tacos because that is what the Taco Bell brand is for" is supported, not undermined, by the fact that Pizza Hut locations use explicit Taco Bell branding when they decide they want to sell tacos in addition to pizza.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The reason this is a story is that it's calling out the bullshit reasoning of management, not that management doesn't have a right to decide the content of their media properties. Many of us have sat through meetings with leadership who are endlessly rationalizing their decisions with crappy data, and felt the frustration that comes with being able to see through the half-truths. This article is interesting because they did some research and called their bluff with actual numbers.

<comment><USER13> Welcome to the 21st century where you can have valid reasons but face the endless threat of bad press and litigation for giving them. Almost every manager and CEO I know is afraid to give constructive feedback in employee reviews. The fact that they came up with some bs explanation with holes isn't news to me. Imagine what the press would be if they said "I told them to do their f'n job 5x and they didn't"

<comment><USER14> > Welcome to the 21st century where you can have valid reasons but face the > endless threat of bad press and litigation for giving them

These are both strong indicators that the reasons are not valid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This whole thing could be turned into a great opportunity to start a sister website for content not related to sports.

I mean, they already got the publicity about it, right? They can even play a "by the writers" angle.

</comment><comment><USER16> No mention of RPM? I have a site with a variety of topics and political pages have worse RPM than almost all other topics.

</comment><comment><USER17> So unfair! If only a sports publication left it's writers alone to wander off onto non-sports related politics[1], ignoring the publisher's plan & repeatedly digressing from the job they were hired to do, the world would be a better place.

[1]: [https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/dont-doubt-what-you-saw- wi...](https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/dont-doubt-what-you-saw-with-your- own-eyes-1831931203)

<comment><USER18> Read their top ten most visited stories list [1] and tell me how many of those are 'sticking to sports.' You don't just get to assume reality...data is a thing and can be used to evaluate statements of what is true.

[1] [https://deadspin.com/the-top-10-most-visited-deadspin- storie...](https://deadspin.com/the-top-10-most-visited-deadspin-stories-of- the-deadspi-5438483)

(A year I arbitrarily picked because it was on top of google)

<comment><USER19> The new owners took over this year. Not 2010. They paid for the acquisition and it's for THEM to decide what editorial direction the publication should take, not the journalists. Frankly, I personally don't want politics and culture in everything I read and that can be a feature, not a bug.

<comment><USER18> Given the multiple areas of content it would perhaps be better to look at the writers and the tone and the perspective of irreverence as the feature and, in fact, the the value. We are about to find out what is the true asset of deadspin...the name and the sports articles of the writers and their broad interests. If nothing it'll be an interesting experiment.

You may not want a product, but if you bought the company that makes it, successfully, and tell them to suddenly produce something else you may well end up look like a stupid investor.

<comment><USER19> I'm going to bet they saw an established brand and audience but a company that needed to be turned around in a number of ways, and I bet it didn't make money before.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lessons from the awkward life and death of the Segway - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-15/rip-segway-the-dorky-grandfather-of-micromobility <comment><USER2> The segway failed because of product market fit.

As a product it was very interesting, but it had pitfalls. It wasn't exactly clear where to store it. The people who saw it all had houses and garages, but for the everyday user in the city hard to figure out where you would put it after each use. Even bicycles are challenging to store in NYC, which is why Citibike is interesting.

The second problem and much larger was the price point. If you want something to succeed you have to price it so that you can gain mass appeal. The $5,000-10,000 price point is a dead zone. As consumers we almost never spend this amount of money.

We spend hundreds of dollars all the time.

We spend a thousand or two thousand dollars infrequently, but we do it. Computers, vacations, some furniture.

But when you get to $5,000+ that is a price we pay very rarely. It is actually more common to find something more expensive, such as $10,000+ for a car, then to find $5,000. As a result it was hard to figure out where that price fit in.

Also, no one thought of subsidizing the cost. With the iPhone, it's expensive, but you have the carrier to subsidize the cost and more importantly create a monthly payment plan. If you could at least convert $5,000 to some sort of monthly fee that would help.

So what they really failed at is distribution. In fact if they planned around distribution they could have actually jumped on the entire citibike, jump, etc market before it ever existed.

It would also mean that customers wouldn't need to pay $5,000 out of pocket and instead could pay per use or a monthly fee.

Often people discount distribution when it comes to product market fit and failures.

Lastly, riding a bicycle is rather awkward. Think about learning it as a kid. It's counter intuitive. A bike can't stand on it's own, you have to pedal to go, if you stop it falls over. Though it is extremely unintuitive, it is cheap, you can try it, it has a culture, and is a rite of passage. So we learn this behavior even though it doesn't make sense.

The Segway is also counterintuitive in some ways. Looking at people riding them, never gives you a sense of confidence. There are also plenty of videos of people falling off of them, similar to bicycles.

But with a much higher starting point you aren't really tempted to try it, or even have access to one to test it out to see if it becomes intuitive or not.

Lastly, our cities aren't designed for this type of commute. People drive, they can take the subway, but the number of people that commute outside of that on bicycles is small in the US. In Europe like in Amsterdam, the Segway takes up more space in a lane than a comparable bicycle, so it really wasn't an improvement. And since Americans aren't used to bicycles they though oh wow this is great! Europeans were like for $50-$150 one time I can have a bike that lasts forever, doesn't require charging, takes up less space, and I already own it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oil prices are the other key. Around the year 2000, some thought we were at or near peak oil. If oil prices had risen above $200/barrel in the '00s, the Segway might have made its way in the market.

It's a bit like the Chevy Volt, a car that I see criticized on HN and elsewhere occasionally. It was conceived of at a time when future oil prices were uncertain, and, if they'd remained sustainably high, it would have been a huge hit. But Americans have short memories and don't actually care much about the environment, so it was a relative flop.

<comment><USER3> The Volt owners I have talked to all loved their car. I think Chevy has messed this up by not marketing the car.

<comment><USER4> I wonder why they didn't just create a Volt brand alongside Cadillac and all their others. Then to make the next Hummer an EV seems like a misguided recycle of the brand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was too young to buy into the hype when the Segway was released in 2001. I will never forget the first time I rode one though, I thought it was the most incredibly fun and cool thing. I ended up saving every penny earned from two summer jobs to finally buy one my last year of high school.

It actually ended up being the perfect vehicle for living off campus at university, as I learned first hand watching my friends and roommates struggle with all kinds of other forms of transportation. Cars needed to be parked in expensive and crowded garages, bikes were stolen all the time and uncomfortable to ride in the desert summer (in southern Arizona), busses were unreliable, etc.

The Segway was actually totally rideable in extreme heat as opposed to riding a bike. Something about being vertical made the breeze totally counteract the heat. Obviously the no physical exertion helped with the sweatiness as well.

<comment><USER6> What kept the Segway from getting stolen like a bike?

Did anyone use motorized bikes?

<comment><USER5> It has a really good security system built in. When activated, it "locks" the wheels by applying reverse torque in whichever direction you attempt to drag it. The key is also a small device that communicates with the Segway cryptographically (pretty impressive for the early 2000's!).

But mostly I think it's because it was really heavy and perhaps novel enough. Nobody ever messed with it, even though the city I was living in was pretty bad in terms of crime rates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Check out electric unicycles (EUCs). The Segway is alive and well. Minus one of the wheels and the silly handle.

<comment><USER8> I ride mine almost every day and it's amazing. Everyone wants to ask about it, and I just tell them it's a Segway minus a wheel and a handle. For just $1.5k you can get a uni that will travel up to 60 miles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's a throughline the author would like us to follow: the fate of the Segway might end up being the fate of Lime/Jump/Bird/etc. This might be true, but a major reason Segway failed was the price tag. $5,000-$10,000 (the price of a Segway) is how much a solid 200-500cc motorcycle would run you.

Scooters look kind of silly, too, but they at least won't break the bank.

</comment><comment><USER10> _Segway's current owner, Beijing-based Ninebot, says the PT sales were hampered by the vehicles' sheer unkillability: "We have seen an over- saturation of the market for Segway PTs," the company said in a statement. "They are an extremely durable vehicle, with many that are 10 years or older still on the road." The Segway PT made up less than 1.5 percent of the company's revenue last year._

Should there be some sort of subsidy for 'things that last'? Or 'year beyond average lifespan that thing is still in use'?

It feels like companies will actively try to avoid making durable things if there isn't.

<comment><USER11> This is why products are starting to turn into subscriptions.

When you bought Adobe Photoshop, you never needed to update it.

Likewise, if you buy a Honda or other well-engineered car, you'll be able to get a decade or more out of it.

Thinkpads used to last forever and were user upgradable.

Tesla is introducing micro-payments and unlockables. I think other auto makers will follow suit.

Why can't farmers repair their own John Deere equipment that they "own"?

Everything is turning into recurring revenue.

<comment><USER12> By the sound of it, BMW is planning micropaymemts and subscriptions as well, with one example given in the original article being heated seats you only subscribe to in winter months.

<comment><USER13> I'm waiting for the day when I can buy a toaster and get subscriptions on toasting modes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It seems like the ultimate lesson of the Segway is not to over-hype your product. I recall reading quotes from people who had seen the device back when it was just (IIRC) "It" and they said things like "cities will be redesigned around this new invention." When it came out people were unsurprisingly let down and the jokes began.

<comment><USER15> I can't help but think that they almost had it now that I see Lime Bird Uber scooters on every block. Close but no cigar.

<comment><USER16> Uber and Lime didn't create the electric scooter, they created the sharing/distribution model. Segway created the vehicle but failed at the distributing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _"Segway will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy," Kamen asserted. Steve Jobs thought the product would be just as important as the PC, while venture capitalist John Doerr predicted that Segway Inc. would be the fastest company in history to make $1 billion in sales._

After that much hype, of course it was a disappointment. If it had been pitched as a mini version of small electric industrial carts, such as the ones seen in big industrial plants, no one would have been excited about it, but it would have been a minor seller.

This is the second article about the Segway which mentions its durability as a minus.

<comment><USER18> I think there is an interesting generalization to be made here: major innovations cannot be introduced to the market by raising billions to fund aggressive marketing push campaigns. Only minor innovations can follow this route to market, and it's still risky.

If you define a major innovation as one that will have to challenge the established habits; then first and foremost, diffusion of a major innovation requires time, not money. To be understood, desired and finally accepted by the market/society. That's why all major innovations I can think of started from very niche applications, and then patiently won neighboring niches, one after the other, slowly improving in the process, till they eventually became mainstream, sometime after several decades. This diffusion process generally spans over the lifetime of several companies. One example here: automobiles, around which our cities were ultimately redesigned.

It's difficult to rewrite history, but had Segway started small as you suggested … it may have been more successful in the long run, as a concept and maybe as a company. To really change the world with some major innovation, starting small and targeting niche applications is the way to go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Instead of becoming a mass-market last-mile mover, the Segway became a > slapstick prop in aughties comedies.

That GOB, always on his Segway.

[https://i.imgur.com/PVKh2Hd.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/PVKh2Hd.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER20> So why did the price never come down?

</comment><comment><USER21> Clive Sinclair's electric car is calling you...</comment>


The first P in PHP stands for PHP - <AUTHOR> http://php.net/manual/en/faq.general.php#faq.general.acronym

<comment><USER2> I always thought it standed for Pretty Hellish of a Programming language.</comment>


Recursive Discussion: A new way to debate - <AUTHOR> http://exploringbothsides.weebly.com/musings.html

<comment><USER2> _I propose a discussion system, where the rules are strictly enforced meaning on breaking them some number of times, after several warnings you are ejected from the discussion._

This seems to be a step backwards; instead of educating the debaters on a fluid congress of debate, it sets up hurdles and penalizes offenders. Ultimately, I think the recursive method of argument will result in cyclical hashes of thought, without the finality of debate providing an impetus for resolution.

</comment><comment><USER3> If we're genuinely concerned about problem solving, why not use the scientific method? Define the issues to be resolved, then each party proposes their hypothesis. Then a moderator, who knows the issues ahead of time (and has information along with statistics about the subject), can keep the "testing/experimenting" phase on track. Maybe even a whiteboard with notes so we can keep track of what each party proposed while allowing us the ability to make revisions.</comment>


Tracking the Owner of Kickass Torrents – Schneier on Security - e-sushi https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/07/tracking_the_ow.html <comment><AUTHOR> He put his real name and email address in the WHOIS entry for one of the domains. Anyone with an internet connection could've tracked him down.

The proof they collected by connecting the IP to Facebook is a bit more advanced (although not complicated if you have a court order), but it appears that he didn't take any measures to hide his identity.

I thought that using a (non-US based) VPN and fake data for domains is the least you'd do if you run a website that could cause trouble. And accepting bitcoins is nice but not anonymous if you register the wallet with the apple ID that you use everywhere else as well..

<comment><USER2> Agreed, but beware hindsight bias.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't see that as a case of hindsight bias. I was expecting that every owner of a torrent site pays domains and hosting with bitcoins and always uses VPNs if not even TOR for work that could be logged somewhere (e.g. emails using a large provider).

Had it just been this one Apple purchase or a Facebook visit then I'd agree, there's always something you'll miss and it's much easier to point this out afterwards. But it appears that he didn't use a single method to hide his identity.

On the other hand, perhaps he thought that living in the Ukraine would give him enough protection against US agents.

<comment><USER3> It's crazy how torrent site owners are criminalised. Eg Oink who got raided and his site shut down, then found not guilty more than 2 years later, with his amazing community stomped into the ground by the copyright police. He did nothing wrong, nothing was illegal, yet they used their power to kill it.

<comment><USER4> He probably has the legal recourse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As someone that lives a largely anonymous life, not that I'm engaged in anything that would interest law enforcement, bullet proof operational security is impossible, and at some point mistakes happen. If you think it's easy, it's not.

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

Yes, putting your name in a Whois record is stupid, but just because that's what was publicly disclosed doesn't mean that's how they found him.

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

</comment><comment><USER6> Comment gold!

 _The irony is that it was actually buying something online from Apple instead of pirating it that got him caught._

<comment><USER7> > _The irony is that it was actually buying something online from Apple > instead of pirating it that got him caught._

I dunno ... this gets repeated a lot because it is the official version of events but I am by default skeptical of such claims in operations like these as the authorities are fully incentivized to hide sources and methods.

Edit: I just read down a bit further in the discussion and _nxzero_ holds a similar and well expressed view.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I expected Schneier to have some insight into this story but the blog posting just quotes an article from Engadget and links to another one from techdirt. And those are articles from the time when the site went down two months ago, nothing new either.

<comment><USER9> Nothing insightful here. Bad opsec, as usual.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The second article linked from Schneier's post says the owner of KAT "gets the Megaupload treatment".

I think the first article is much closer to being correct - KAT is like The Pirate Bay as it "facilitates" copyright infringement. I still find it wrong that linking to other content can be deemed criminal (both in the case of trackers and that there are public resources you can't legally link to).

<comment><USER11> Google results contain torrents, so it can be difficult to make a difference with Kickass Torrents. Google can even detect if a file is a torrent or not and if it infringes copyright material with hashes and audio/video recognition.

<comment><USER12> > if it infringes copyright material with hashes and audio/video recognition.

which they already do with youtube

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Of note, the DHS agent responsible for this case was the same guy who was the DHS case agent for the Silk Road investigation. I guess he is their go-to 'high profile Internet investigations' guy.

<comment><USER5> Yes, same DHS agent, his father is a federal judge in Chicago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's pretty Kafkaesque that a "Department of Homeland Security" investigates citizens who run simple torrent trackers.

I just can't get used to this terminology.

<comment><USER15> Enforcing copyright under the excuse of "homeland security" is a subsidy to the media cartels.

/* Regulatory capture sucks.*/

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can someone really stay anonymous online nowadays?

Recently I have been too paranoid to even use the same throwaway account because doxing has almost become an automated process. For example if you have a reddit account you can summarize your comment history with: [http://www.snoopsnoo.com/](http://www.snoopsnoo.com/).

Note I am not even considering the case of people with privileged information. The people who run HN certainly already know who I am since I didn't bother to clean up before switching accounts.

But I think it will be an inevitable certainty for you to be automatically deanonymized with just speech/thought patterns from comments alone. For example if you google for the phrase I just used, "inevitable certainty", they are only ~7000 search results. And now that I think about it, it is a really weird way to say it but it also a phrase I have used before.

If I'd kept using weird phrasings or kept making consistent grammatical errors like that, it will eventually be enough to build a fingerprint based on my vocabulary, understanding of grammatical rules, beliefs, timezone, etc. The more I talk the more information I am giving away for people or just machine learning algorithms to cross reference and link together my anonymous and real accounts. See this post for a real example (but limited to just the bitcoin subreddit instead of across the internet): [https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3hf5z7/determining...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3hf5z7/determining_manipulation_via_sock_puppet_accounts/)

If you __need __to stay anonymous, don 't interact with the world...

</comment><comment><USER17> It looks more like he didn't attempt to cover his tracks as all. Pretty much a non-story.</comment>


Why "Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools" is must read for CS students. - <AUTHOR>

Why "Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools" (aka Dragon Book) is must read for CS students. How can knowledge from this book will be useful for the one who is not interested in compiler design. <comment><USER2> Are you asking why you should understand compilers?

Here is the answer:

[http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer- food...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm reading it right now.</comment>


Incompatibilities Between  ISO C and ISO C++ - <AUTHOR> http://david.tribble.com/text/cdiffs.htm

<comment><USER2> Tribble is an uber geek, marvel at his output:

<http://david.tribble.com/letters.html>

A classic USENETer, and an stickler for minute truths.</comment>


OpenSSD – Open-Source Solid State Drive (SSD) - <AUTHOR> http://www.openssd-project.org/wiki/The_OpenSSD_Project <comment><USER2> Seems like the project might be dead. It was based on a controller chip from a company Indilinx [0] that went bankrupt and was sold off to Toshiba.

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

<comment><USER3> last commit 5 years ago: [https://github.com/openssd/openssd](https://github.com/openssd/openssd) yes, looks dead

Edit: seems like they went from openssd-project.org to openssd.io in 2017, so the github project is the old one. Not sure if there is any new one. Maybe [https://github.com/Cosmos-OpenSSD/Cosmos-plus- OpenSSD](https://github.com/Cosmos-OpenSSD/Cosmos-plus-OpenSSD) ?

<comment><USER4> Yep, that newer repo has a presentation in the doc folder detailing 3 generations of the hardware for research use, they moved to FPGA later: [https://github.com/Cosmos-OpenSSD/Cosmos-plus- OpenSSD/blob/m...](https://github.com/Cosmos-OpenSSD/Cosmos-plus- OpenSSD/blob/master/doc/Cosmos%2B%20OpenSSD%202017%20Tutorial.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It will be hard to build a reliable SSD without access to the NDA documentation from the NAND manufacturers. The datasheets you see online are only the basic information.

<comment><USER6> I don't know what you mean, but I use (and SW-integrate) NAND chips all the time and complete datasheets and application notes are available for most known brands.

For example:

google _micron nand filetype:pdf_

Or

[https://media.digikey.com/pdf/Data%20Sheets/Micron%20Technol...](https://media.digikey.com/pdf/Data%20Sheets/Micron%20Technology%20Inc%20PDFs/MT29FxG08xAA.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Try looking for the datasheets on any modern high-capacity 3D NAND of the sort used in SSDs. What you've linked to is an ancient part with 1/32 the capacity of the smallest NAND that can be found in any recent SSD.

<comment><USER6> Yes, the linked one is the first PDF I've found. I know the commercial NANDs found in newest SSD may not be available, because it's probably that the SSD is using a custom chip design. Perhaps the chip is listed somewhere in a website, but unavailable for purchase (for mere mortals like us or those doing an open source SSD). In any case, those chips won't be available for an open source SSD.

Soon I should put hands on a design with a 2Tb Micron NAND from 2014 (MT29F256G08 _something_ ). The PDF is behind a simple user registration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Their 2017 PDF presentation has good info re: their current state:

[https://github.com/Cosmos-OpenSSD/Cosmos-plus- OpenSSD/blob/m...](https://github.com/Cosmos-OpenSSD/Cosmos-plus- OpenSSD/blob/master/doc/Cosmos%2B%20OpenSSD%202017%20Tutorial.pdf)

Page 10 shows the 3 generations of OpenSSD they've been developing. They're on the 3rd gen now (marked 2016), which is FPGA based, says it support a subset of NVMe, and mentions a 2TB max capacity.

Might be interesting to actually do stuff with. :)

<comment><USER9> They are using Xilinx Zenq 7000 series which also have ARM core and memory controller along the FPGA core, think all major electronic parts sellers are selling them and not expensive part. Interesting project non the less

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Newer link: [https://web.archive.org/web/20190119042227/http://openssd.io...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190119042227/http://openssd.io/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Noble effort though the project looks dormant.

</comment><comment><USER12> Traffic budget exceeded apparently, but this seems to be the wiki: [http://www.openssd-project.org/wiki/The_OpenSSD_Project](http://www.openssd- project.org/wiki/The_OpenSSD_Project)

</comment><comment><USER13> This link currently redirects to what appears to be a Korean-language website showing a "page not available" error.

<comment><USER13> See [https://imgur.com/a/Ff3xcWV](https://imgur.com/a/Ff3xcWV)

<comment><USER14> Korean here. It says "maximum daily traffic limit reached" by the web hosting service. Another Slashdot Effect: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 503\. Hacker news effect?</comment>


Colobot: Gold Edition (GPL of Original Colobot Game) - <AUTHOR> https://colobot.info/ <comment><USER2> Site is down, but they've got a github project for everything

[https://github.com/colobot](https://github.com/colobot) [https://github.com/colobot/colobot](https://github.com/colobot/colobot)

And a wikipedia article to help too, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colobot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colobot)

<comment><USER3> Hope that they will release some stable version & binary builds as soon, as possible</comment></comment>


Ask YC: What mail server do you use? - <AUTHOR>

We are using google apps to host our email services and got our application to send emails out using gmail servers. The limitation to this approach is that we can send only 500 emails per day.<p>What are you guys using to send emails? Are you hosting an email server yourselves? <comment><USER2> Postfix - easy to setup & better security model than sendmail.

</comment><comment><USER3> Dreamhost hosts my mailbox. I have a nice setup that runs server-side where SpamAssassin automatically trains CRM114 and the two check each others' results and make sure they don't produce opposite conclusive answers. I use mutt as an MUA and Postfix as an MTA, with DynDNS's outbound mailhop service to get around the firewalls imposed by various lame ISPs.

</comment><comment><USER4> google apps myself, I haven't hit the limit. Just create more users and append a # (noreply1,noreply2) to the end of them. I thought I read that was google's answer for when your breaking the limit.

Question for you, what are the limitation, besides this, you've had with google apps mail servers?

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right, that's what google suggests to do if you hit the 500 emails limit. Using a queue is another option...

I didn't find any other limitations to using google apps.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the reply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I currently run a mail server for a client, though I rarely use it for my own purposes. It's Exim.

</comment><comment><USER6> Postfix (managed by Virtualmin and Webmin, of course).

</comment><comment><USER7> For outgoing mail, I use the IIS SMTP service. For incoming postfix + courier is great, but people are making noise about exchange (ugh).

</comment><comment><USER8> I've got a somewhat related question: If a bunch of guys that were used to Exchange and the internal calendaring/syncing with phones/etc. left, and wanted to break their MS bonds and embrace oss, what would they use? Basically - is their a compelling alternative that would still work with Blackberry?

</comment><comment><USER9> Free gmail for own domain

</comment><comment><USER10> I use courier right now. But I've migrated from courier to dovecot for pop3/imap, and I'm planning to migrate from courier to postfix for smtp. Courier is just too limited.

</comment><comment><USER11> Three separate Postfix instances running on the same server, albeit bound to separate IP addresses and tweaked for their particular use.

</comment><comment><USER12> Google Docs - Free version (Gmail with own domain)

</comment><comment><USER13> webmail.us, the best.

<comment><USER14> webmail.us is extremely well run, despite their enterprisey web page. I would recommend them very highly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Curently writting my own in Erlang ... again ...

</comment><comment><USER16> can't go wrong with postfix

</comment><comment><USER17> qmail

</comment><comment><USER18> Some registrars also offer e-mail service, like GoDaddy. It's much cheaper than webmail.us but you don't get as much storage.</comment>


Cycle 2016 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@willmoyer/cycle-2016-d4bcbdad497c#.kedc6n1el <comment><USER2> Pretty solid writeup, critiquing all of the three current frontrunners (Trump, Sanders, Clinton).

The part on Trump I especially appreciate--he's a hell of a lot more in-tune with America than anybody seems to want to admit. He's kinda the president we deserve, and congratulations to everyone for getting things this far. :(</comment>


Kitty 0.17 – GPU-accelerated terminal emulator - <AUTHOR> https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/changelog.html#id1 <comment><USER2> Not to be confused with Kitty[0], a Putty fork. Also a terminal emulator!

[0] [http://www.9bis.net/kitty/#!index.md](http://www.9bis.net/kitty/#!index.md)

<comment><USER3> The relevant Github issue is also quite memorable: [https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/9#issuecomment-41...](https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/9#issuecomment-418566309)

I wonder if the author might be willing to reconsider. He should have newfound appreciation for how annoying name collisions can be.

<comment><USER4> Ah, so he kept his attitude from back when he refused to fix security vulnerabilities in Calibre.

Good to know. I'll keep avoiding his software.

<comment><USER5> I can't think of anything more petty or pathetic then taking the side of a mob that demands an open source developer change the name of the software he makes in his free time.

People talk about entitlement in games but here you are not even paying or even having a pretense of sponsoring.

Just gross.

<comment><USER4> I don't even particularly care if he changes the name or not. If he makes decisions on the basis of spiting as many people as possible, he reveals himself to be a foolish and irresponsible individual. Unfortunately it's not even the first such incident, and as far as I can see, he learned nothing from the last one. That is a perfectly valid reason to avoid his software. What am I supposed to do, send all my life's savings to a project that I have no reason to expect will deliver quality?

("Criticising me for punching your face really shows your entitlement. You don't pay me to choose whom I punch in the face. You have no right to tell me how I spend my free time!")

Also, mobs occasionally have a point. The opposite of the 'five billion flies' fallacy is still a fallacy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Btw, if the author (Kovid Goyal) reads this: You really should update your homepage ([https://kovidgoyal.net/](https://kovidgoyal.net/)). It gives me a warning:

> W A R N I N G! Your browser is not supported by this site.I cannot guarantee > that things will work as they should. Consider downloading either Mozilla > >=1.4 or Internet Explorer >= 6

And it states:

> It has been tested on Internet Explorer 6 and Mozilla 1.4.

I was not quite sure if this was a joke, or if the homepage was really not updated for such a long time (it says "Created by Kovid Goyal © 2003").

Anyway, for minimal work, I think you can simply remove the warning, and this statement about IE6/Mozilla 1.4, because as far as I can see, everything works fine.

Edit: Ah, in the 2018 thread, someone noticed the same thing: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17924093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17924093)

<comment><USER7> Looking at the rest of the website, I think it fits with its theme... I don't think it's been majorly updated at all since 2003.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Kitty is good but the only issue I have is the use of custom terminfo xterm- kitty. This means things break when ssh'ing to older Linux until you copy the terminfo manually. On BSDs it doesn't work as there is no terminfo support.

<comment><USER9> It really should not be "xterm-" _anything_. This is another misnomer.

* [http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/TERM.xml#MIS-...](http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/TERM.xml#MIS-CONFIGURATION)

* [https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.faq.html#other_vers...](https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.faq.html#other_versions-id)

The correct terminal type, per Dickey terminfo, is "kitty". (The PuTTY variant KiTTY is apparently also "putty".) And the terminfo database lends itself both to copying individual records and to having extra records in one's home directory.

* [https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.ti.html#tic-ki...](https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.ti.html#tic-kitty)

* [https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.ti.html#tic-pu...](https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.ti.html#tic-putty)

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the insight :) I have always had a bit of 'why do I gotta know _that_ ' thing going on with terminfo, console and friends - this is making me want to dig a bit deeper!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like kitty because it has ligature support. I haven't found many terminal emulators in the Gentoo repository that have both ligature support and are DE- independent. That's pretty much the main reason I use kitty.

</comment><comment><USER11> Been using kitty for a bit, I essentially wanted to be able to render emojis in nvim. I haven't really thought about it since installing which is a good sign.

</comment><comment><USER12> I really like kitty, but I always wonder how people can live without a scrollbar or smooth scrolling in general. Unfortunately that's a dealbreaker for me.

<comment><USER13> I use tmux in kitty. I rarely have to scroll and when I do, I can certainely do without smooth scrolling. Usually I just use tmux to search and jump through the output.

I was a heavy terminal user already but running macOS at work and linux at home, I got really annoyed by having to memorize different shortcuts. So I just gave up and started using tmux. Now, no matter what platform I am on, the behaviour is pretty much the same. I just use Kitty because it performs really well.

<comment><USER14> FYI you can configure mouse wheel (or in my case just trackpad) scrolling in tmux [1], I've had this configured for years and it's worked really well for me.

[1] [https://web.archive.org/web/20180821055830/http://www.joehan...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180821055830/http://www.joehanchoi.com/quick- fixes-for-tmux-2-1-on-osx/#enablingmousesupport)

<comment><USER13> Unfortunately, that breaks scrolling in VIM, which I also use. I do use scrolling with the track pad in VIM sometimes and I care more about that than scrolling in my terminal.

Maybe I should try re-enabling it again. It's been a while. Maybe tmux or VIM fixed this.

<comment><USER15> I think this is fixed. I'm using tmux and vim with mouse scroll enabled for both and haven't experienced any issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How does this compare to Alacritty on Linux? I've been pretty happy with Alacritty for the past few years but I'm always interested in trying new things.

<comment><USER17> Alacritty is inspired by kitty; kitty being GPU accelerated (and alacritty also being GPU accelerated).

The major difference between them is that alacritty is written in rust (and has a really nice config that auto-reloads) and kitty is written in C with a smattering of python.

<comment><USER18> I think Alacritty was first. At least it became popular first.

<comment><USER17> Seems you are right, I always assumed alacritty was derived from the ideas in kitty (and hence the name being similar)

first commit in alacritty: Sun Feb 21 08:15:41 2016 -0800

first commit in kitty: Fri Oct 14 12:33:27 2016 +0530

<comment><USER19> The names are similar because they both do a wordplay on TTY (teletypewriter)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've recently made a switch to Kitty from iterm2. I couldn't suffer general slowness and visible lag when using vim or nvim anymore. Various solutions and workarounds provided only minimal relief. With kitty the performance improvement was dramatic. Configuration is more involved (config file), but I've managed to set everything up as I'm used to in short time. I'm happy so far, but ymmv

<comment><USER21> Similar situation here. At some point opening/closing tabs got really slow for me in iterm2 and I couldn't find a way around it. With kitty it's pretty much instant and for me worth the lack of other features.

Also, a whole lot of it is written in Python and I actually contributed smaller changes in pull requests. It feels good to be able to just change things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've been using Kitty with Xonsh shell on Qtile dekstop and Qutebrowser browser for over a year now. What a time to be a Python dev!

</comment><comment><USER23> I really like how kitty addresses the weird compatibility issues of bce [1] by providing a facility to just do character cell property modifications in an efficient and correct way [2].

I wish ncurses were more eager to adopt descriptions of innovations in terminal emulator design.

[1] [https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/160#issuecomment-...](https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/160#issuecomment-346470545)

[2] [https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/protocol- extensions.html#ext...](https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/protocol- extensions.html#ext-styles)

<comment><USER9> The problem with BCE is largely that it does not fit with the paradigms of ncurses and terminfo, not that it is problematic in itself. This is alas true of a large number of terminal things, from function keys through "cursor addressing mode" to erasure, whose ncurses/terminfo abstractions do not fit the actual ways that these work.

On both real (DEC) terminals and terminal emulators, background colour erase is _settable_ off and on, with DECECM; so a full-screen application can set the behaviour and _know_ what the colour is going to be, leading to more efficient screen redraws. The ncurses/terminfo model, in contrast, is that the behaviour is _fixed_ on or off, and a boolean (named bce) in the database tells softwares which it is for any given terminal type.

In reality, it is the paradigms of ncurses and terminfo that are the problems here.

* [http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/TERM.xml#MEAN...](http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/guide/commands/TERM.xml#MEANING)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> On Mac at least, kitty seems to be the best terminal option. It's fast/low latency, has no font rendering issues, and fully supports ligatures (iterm2, alacritty, all have issues in my experience). It also works well with tmux.

</comment><comment><USER25> Hmm. I tried it and I'm trying to find reasons why this is better than Apple's default Terminal.app?

It's obviously better than iterm2, but Apple's built-in terminal is actually rather fast.

<comment> dh-g Depends on your usage but terminal.app is quite a bit slower then iterm2's metal renderer or Alacritty (probably kitty as well but I haven't used it).

<comment><USER26> "Slower" is not a metric. Latency is, though, and Terminal.app is a top contender (and rips iterm2 to shreds, even in throughput, not that throughput matters in practice).

Please stop spreading cargo cult information dating from 10.4 days. Terminal.app has been great ever since 10.6.

[https://danluu.com/term-latency/](https://danluu.com/term-latency/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Kitty has the best intersection of performance, platform support, and features i have found. It's not without warts, and doesn't support windows (yet) but one can dream.

</comment><comment><USER28> How can I tell if this is interesting to me without actually compiling and running it? Are there any screenshots or videos? Any benchmarks?

<comment><USER29> Using Ubuntu I was only a `sudo apt install` away from running it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The standout feature Kitty has for me is keeping its config in a regular text file, so like all my other basic tools it can be configured from my dotfiles repo and a simple setup script. So much simpler then fussing with iTerm's plist.

</comment><comment><USER31> A discussion from 2 years ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17915829](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17915829)

</comment><comment><USER29> Testing it now.

I have to learn a few new shortcuts, but I am quite satisfied so far, it does all things I want in a terminal that Alacritty did not, like tabs and transparency.

</comment><comment><USER32> With due respect - this sounds like the terminal emulator equivalent of a ricer car: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner)

"fast"? What, terminal emulation is slow now? Needs hardware acceleration? Be serious.

A graphical terminal emulator should use underlying graphical environment features/libraries for things like hardware-assisted rendering.

<comment><USER28> Not just terminals. So much software is unbearably slow today. Definitely terminals. The only terminal I can really stand is xterm with bitmap fonts.

[https://danluu.com/term-latency/](https://danluu.com/term-latency/)

> A graphical terminal emulator should use underlying graphical environment > features/libraries for things like hardware-assisted rendering.

I've mostly done OpenGL recently, and I think xterm (which is fast) is an exception in that it uses just X11 primitives, but I also know that some font frawing APIs are very slow. GDI is what I have in mind mostly. So using Hardware more directly (i.e. OpenGL) might be not the worst idea.

<comment><USER32> Wow, those graphs are mind-blowing!

But it sounds like what should really be written is a fast, hardware-backed, low-latency but limited-feature graphics library.

Then have your terminal use that. I still say that direct awareness of the hardware is _way_ too much coupling.

<comment><USER28> OpenGL is actually pretty high-level. I don't know how much detail of the hardware it lets you get - probably mostly through hardware-specific extensions. The most basic usage is really hardware oblivious. There are many even more high-level toolkits on top of that, such as Qt. But if you need some flexibility and performance, using OpenGL is probably your best bet.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, plus hardware accelerated font rendering isn't trivial.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wireless attacks on aircraft instrument landing systems - <AUTHOR> https://blog.acolyer.org/2019/09/27/wireless-attacks-on-aircraft-instrument-landing-systems/ <comment><USER2> Their test setup isn't realistic at all and looks more like a way to make the article sound interesting. Several big errors:

\- They are testing a handheld radio that receives a single SDR signal. In reality a plane has two separate radios (different antenna locations) receiving a signal from a powerful antenna array at the end of the runway, that you try to squeeze your SDR signal in between. So the real attack is far different from their test setup, because you're going to have several conflicting signals instead of only one that they calculate in the test.

\- If you overpower the real signal, which needs a really strong transmitter, the monitoring equipment at the airport will easily detect it. That alerts the tower and they will not allow a plane to use the approach. This monitoring is even in place in simple en-route navigation beacons (VORs)

\- They claim to be able to make a plane land short of the runway, but every ILS approach has an altitude check by the pilots that's independent of the ILS signal. It works by checking the altitude based on air pressure (not spoofable) at a specific location (based on a system separate from ILS, usually DME or GPS) to the altitude at which the ILS puts the plane. If the two don't match, the pilots will break-off the approach. That check is not a nice to have, if you skip it at a flight-test (every 6 months) you would fail.

\- Their calculation needs to know where the plane really is. That's easy to pull from the API of X-Plane (the hobby computer game they use as their simulator) but you don't know in the real world, unless you can see the plane. If you can see the plane, the pilots can see the runway and they're not going to be flying a CAT II or CAT III approach.

They also claim that no system exists to counteract this, but aircraft GPS systems all have mandatory error checking. If you fake a GPS signal, the receiver will compare it to the other signals and either ignore the fake signal (just like it will ignore a faulty satellite) or if not possible to calculate a correct position refuse to fly the approach.

Another alternative already available for years is MLS (microwave landing system), that has a digital signal to tell the plane its position relative to the runway. You cannot fake that without making it obvious to the receiver that you have two conflicting signals and again refusing to fly the approach.

A DoS attack on airplane landing systems is absolutely possible by jamming either ILS, MLS or GPS signals. But making an airliner land next to the runway is really not as easy as this article makes it sound.

<comment><USER3> I agree with your analysis here minus one nit:

> Their calculation needs to know where the plane really is [...] but you > don't know in the real world

ADS-B Out from the aircraft will give you a pretty good idea where the aircraft is. Whether it's accurate enough for this attack is hard to know without doing some research, but it does transmit position.

<comment><USER2> True, but it's a delayed position so I'm not sure it would help you create a signal that combines correctly with the original accurately enough.

<comment><USER4> It is delayed by at most 1 second plus the update rate of the GPS (about 0.1 seconds), and gives current heading and speed. WAAS receivers are accurate to a few meters. For a plane following an instrument approach to intercept the ILS, it would be trivial to predict their real-time position given the information available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The authors miss the simple defense of the air traffic controller politely asking the pilot where the heck they think they're going and a quick exchange that would result in all flights diverted and the FCC chasing down the van (or fleet of vans) with big radio transmitters and antennas.

<comment><USER6> Are their systems accurate enough to identify an aircraft being 15m off the centerline of the runway? Take the incident at SFO a few years ago where an aircraft nearly landed on the taxiway - it was only detected by a pilot on the ground (on the taxi way) saying the approaching aircraft looks off course.

[https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/11/sfo-near-miss-air- can...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/11/sfo-near-miss-air-canada- flight-got-extremely-close-to-planes-on-taxiway/)

<comment><USER7> 15m laterally is still well within the obstacle protected zone and would put the nosewheel onto pavement on most ILS-served runways (and probably all common airline ILS runways). It would take a small sidestep at 200' AGL to put the offside main gear onto pavement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article fails to mention ILS integrity monitoring systems. They are mandatory for Cat II and Cat III operations.

ILS degradation is a well-known risk and concerns are mostly associated with environmental effects like signal reflections from other aircraft or airport vehicles. 1979 FAA report "Far Field Monitor for Instrument Landing Systems" explores the issue in depth: [https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a079663.pdf](https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a079663.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> > _even supporting cryptographic authentication on ILS signals would still > leave systems vulnerable to record and replay attacks_

Not necessarily? It should be possible to encode at least a timestamp so that a replay wouldn't work; or even implement a challenge-response so that each plane has their own signal? Not trivial of course but possible...?

<comment><USER10> The normal defence against replay attacks is to use a framecounter rather than a timestamp.

Either way, there are normal crypto techniques to resolve this issue.

<comment><USER11> Out of curiosity: airplane receives the broadcasted properly signed packets with frame counter included. How does it know if the antenna broadcasting is the official one or one replaying the official at 2 miles south of the normal glideslope?

<comment><USER12> > * How does it know if the antenna broadcasting is the official one or one > replaying the official at 2 miles south of the normal glideslope?*

With multipole antennas, one can use MLat to determine where the signal came from:

* [http://www.multilateration.com/surveillance/multilateration....](http://www.multilateration.com/surveillance/multilateration.html)

* [http://www.navcanada.ca/EN/products-and-services/Pages/on-bo...](http://www.navcanada.ca/EN/products-and-services/Pages/on-board-operational-initiatives-mlat.aspx)

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

If the signal was received on the antenna pointing forward, then the signal probably came from where you're headed; if it came from an antenna off to the side, then someone may be spoofing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It is an interesting vulnerablity.

But the one advantage of ILS against such attacks is that each site is separate and to try this at scale would require lots of co-conspirators. It's not similar to a GPS or other system-wide exploit. Also, I guess you would need a highly directional antenna setup to be able to track a plane and overwhelm the legitimate ILS signal (i.e. why is that weird van parked here).

Attempt this at even one airport and you'd have law enforcement / FAA on you very quickly with a penalty of getting sent to federal ass-pounding prison for tampering with life-critical navigation systems.

<comment><USER2> This. And also, the article claims:

> Commercial flights typically fly CAT II or CAT III approaches.

That's not true at all. We fly by far the most CAT I approaches, or visual with the navigation instruments only as a backup.

To be allowed do a CAT II or CAT III approach, the ground environment needs to be managed differently by air traffic control. They will monitor and keep completely empty a big area around the ILS transmitters and the runway. Specifically to avoid any interference with the signals.

Not even official airport cars are allowed in while doing CAT II or III operations. So anyone that would want to transmit something nefarious would be standing in an empty grass and asphalt area that is actively monitored by ATC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> THIS is exactly what I'm talking about when I created my RadioInstigator tablet.

[https://hackaday.com/2019/06/05/mobile-sigint-hacking-on- a-c...](https://hackaday.com/2019/06/05/mobile-sigint-hacking-on-a-civilians- budget/)

Radio in all its forms has been considered a "safe" way to send and receive digital data. That was only because attacking signals was traditionally only in the hands of nation-states. The hardware and know-how was erudite and tremendously expensive. That quaint idea is no longer true.

Locally, our city is installing IoT water monitors that chirp out consumption every 1/2-1h. A simple replay attack could cause peoples' water bills to go in excess of $30k. Our power meters are similar.

The tornado siren alert structures also sit on 400MHz spectrum, and are trivial to remotely trigger with no way to turn off. The system was built to trust any radio signal that it understands, full stop.

So seeing that planes are also attackable this way is obvious to me. Of course the authentication/authorization/auditing/encryption/signature part of the stack cost money, so was not included.

What do we do? Well, _We_ (royal) fix the grid in all places to do things right. Individually, be wary and very careful in the radios you put in your vicinity.

</comment><comment><USER15> A man was charged for jamming mobile phones signal while driving[0], so it's not hard for the authority to find the perpetrator.

[0] [https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/1/5672762/man- faces-48000-fi...](https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/1/5672762/man- faces-48000-fine-for-driving-with-cellphone-jammer)

</comment><comment><USER5> There is already a replacement for ILS developed and in use at a couple of big US airports and some international ones.

It consists mostly of a GPS station at an airport that broadcasts error corrections to aircraft who then use their corrected, satellite sourced GPS location data to land.

[https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/at...](https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ato/service_units/techops/navservices/gnss/faq/laas/)

<comment><USER16> The article ends with:

> Are there any easily deployable defences?

> No.

> All of the backup systems, including GPS, fail to provide sufficient > security guarantees, and even supporting cryptographic authentication on ILS > signals would still leave systems vulnerable to record and replay attacks.

So seems solving with GPS is not enough.

<comment><USER5> But those claims are not backed by anything.

Neither "sufficient security guarantees" or how GPS systems fail to meet them is written anywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is going against ILS systems, but the world is changing.

GPS WAAS is allowing approaches to minimums to almost any airport, even ones that do not have an ILS.

[https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/at...](https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ato/service_units/techops/navservices/gnss/library/factsheets/media/WAAS_QFSheets.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER18> You may find this interesting [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXv1j3GbgLk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXv1j3GbgLk) in particular about the bleed of ATSB data from virtual world into real world.

It's a semi-hypothetical Defcon presentation on insecure wireless communications directly with the aircraft.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is basically the plot of Die Hard 2 (1990), where bad guys take over the instrument landing system and make a plane crash on landing. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Hard_2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Hard_2)

<comment><USER20> Sort of, you can see a real 747 pilot discuss the many inaccuracies (not that Die Hard intends to be a pseudo-documentary) here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqLbUF-2nWk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqLbUF-2nWk)

The most important thing the movie doesn't do that would happen in real life is, when there's any problem everybody diverts to their alternate, even including people queued up already to land. "Huh, they had some kind of problem, guess we should go to... uh... Baltimore? Find that for me and I'll let them know". Nobody's going to hang about waiting to see if they can get killed by terrorists.

But yes, they also recalibrate the height wrong in the movie to kill a 747 full of passengers and that wouldn't work either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "Activate the instrument landing system but recalibrate sea level minus 200 feet."

</comment><comment><USER22> This does not strike me as ethical disclosure. It would, as the author himself describes it, take a redesign of every craft, before making this research public would be safe.

He put a smiley face by the suggestion to use a drone transmitter FFS.

<comment><USER23> Well it's not "Ethical disclosure" but it's not like how ILS works is a big mystery or that pilots blindingly follow ILS with no other backups or guidance systems.

<comment><USER6> I'm interested to know if the test pilot in their simulator knew this was going to happen or not. I'm thinking if they knew the risk (which this disclosure provides) they may have been more aware and have seen there was a problem.

I can't imagine a pilot not being able to spot being off course, even by a small amount, given pilots are able to land large aircraft by visual aids only (however commercial pilots don't do it often).

<comment><USER2> We land visually all the time. Especially in the US it is super common to be cleared for a visual approach, because it increases the runway capacity (can fly closer together if you can see the plane ahead and follow them).

You would have the ILS (or GPS based approach) as a backup on your screens to verify. If what you see out the window does not match the systems, you stop the approach, climb, take some time to "debug" and then try again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> this should NOT be publicized. hundreds of people's lives are at risk and there are no workarounds for GA</comment>


Seattle 2.0 Startup Index for May 2009 - <AUTHOR> http://www.seattle20.com/startup-index.aspx

<comment><AUTHOR> bet you didn't know Seattle has more than 300 startups!</comment>


YouTube says it has 'no obligation' to host anyone's video - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/11/20955864/youtube-terms-of-service-update-terminations-children-content-ftc <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21503851](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21503851)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21502162](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21502162)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21500325](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21500325)

</comment><comment><USER3> Do they really need to make that explicit in the terms of service? I thought it was obvious that I didn't have the right to make Google/YouTube pay for hosting and serving a video just because I created it.

Or could this be a prelude to a culling of videos starting in the first quarter of next year? I would say that now is the time for a wannabe competitor to YouTube to get ready to step into the breech but if I'm not mistaken, YouTube has never made money despite YouTube's attempts to sell advertising content. I could see a future where it's going to cost (not much, but more than zero) to host and serve videos on YouTube.

<comment><USER4> > I would say that now is the time for a wannabe competitor to YouTube

Yes, but how does the new upstart try to get traction from under an avalanche of useful shills that will start to smear them as "NaziTube"?

Edit/Addendum: Do you honestly think a new upstart would enjoy an "understanding press" in their "growing-pains years" like our current incumbents did?

<comment><USER5> I do. Media _love_ an underdog story, especially when the underdog is taking on the companies that are costing them revenue.

I suspect the "NaziTube" nicknames (did this happen somewhere? Or is it more of a hypothetical example) are because upstarts don't have the resources to ensure Nazi videos are blocked. Thus, they become a breeding ground for that pernicious type of scum that has been evicted from the larger, better resourced, systems.

<comment><USER6> Forget the nazi shit for a minute: I doubt a youtube competitor upstart could get away with the sort of flagrant widespread copyright violation that was once common on youtube. Youtube itself got away with that for a few years, but can that stunt be replicated? I doubt it.

<comment><USER5> Good point. OTOH, there wasn't as much amateur digital content back then -- pretty much anything I wanted to watch was owned by a larger company. Nowadays, hobbyists and retirees and all kinds of people own the rights to content that I would want to see.

The environment has changed a lot, and it might not be a prerequisite to copy YT's growth model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think we need a good YouTube alternative. Sure, there are lots of them out there. But one people actually use. YouTube is the best place to find so many things: creator videos, music, clips from TV shows, and years and years of videos to build up an immense library.

Any YouTube alternative needs to take one of these niche areas and pick at it.

<comment><USER8> After the spamming-emotes-got-your-gmail-deleted controversy, which is absolutely outrageous and indefensible, I've heard a lot of people interested in doing this.

I'm also very close to making some sort of self-hosted Twitch type thing. A lot of streamers are getting caught up in Twitch's bullshit policies. Someone I follow wore their workout clothes on stream after they finished a workout and wanted to make their normal stream time. Twitch banned her for 30 days because that's supposedly inappropriate. I think it's time to cut them out of the loop and make streaming decentralized. The type of bandwidth and compute power you need to distribute 5Mbps video to a couple thousand viewers is easily in the reach of individuals now. (10Gbps connections to the Internet can be had on the order of $1000.)

All you need is some software to run it all and a standard way of paying the streamers across the decentralized network. Probably a good application for cryptocurrency. People are crazy about their favorite streamers, and would probably be willing to learn how to use something other than a credit card to subscribe. Emotes are already decentralized with things like BTTV and FFZ. So it could work. I just don't see how I would personally make any money, so I haven't pursued it much. But the days of requiring some megacorp like Google or Amazon to be able to distribute video are over -- this area is ripe for disruption.

But I think as much as content creators love to hate on their platform, they do love the free audience. A lot of people got their start when "the algorithm" finally recognized them, and they turned their hobby into a day job. I'm not sure it could ever work with a centralized gateway that collects metadata and suggests new creators to users. But maybe it's OK if we put the money and the servers in the hands of the creators, and let discovery be an additional bonus. And maybe running that could be profitable; you get a $1 commission for sending a new subscriber their way.

I dunno, just some random thoughts... but this all sounds more and more reasonable every day. People lost access to their email for chatting in a streamer's chat. That's CRAZY.

<comment><USER9> I think workout clothes depends on what it is. Wearing a sports bra is surely different from wearing a T-shirt. Before we assume malicious intent by twitch it should be worth specifying what streamer was wearing.

<comment><USER10> Nudity is one thing, but nobody should be enforcing dress codes which are only applied to women.

<comment><USER8> Exactly.

Here is a summary of the situation: [https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/overwatch-streamer- hit...](https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/overwatch-streamer-hits-back- twitch-lingerie-stream-warning-1025117)

I don't think Fareeha was out of line. I've watched people stream Overwatch from their pool, and Twitch didn't mind at all even though the (male) streamer was completely topless.

It's very arbitrary and unfair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The root issue here is that the thing people want-- a video hosting site that is free, preserves uploads forever (by contrast with Twitch, which has limited VOD support), has few to no ads, and doesn't algorithmically police copyright-- is just impossible. It can't be operated at a profit. Google is in a better position than anyone to leverage YouTube into profitability-- they have an ad network to take advantage of all the viewership data they get, they own so much fiber and control so much network traffic that they can leverage better rates on bandwidth costs, and they have the expertise of cloud-scale operations-- and they still can't do it: by all accounts YouTube has never made money. And if Google can't, no one can.

People who think that this policy change is going to lead to some kind of exodus to a YouTube competitor are fooling themselves. There's no one else in the game and there never will be; it's economically impossible.

<comment><USER12> Google also gets the ability to leverage wasted search assets for YT. YT's video long tail is very low IOPs workload.

Search on the other hand is high IOPs.

As you scale out your HDD storage fleet its great to have the benefit of putting a Low IOPs high storage with a High IOPs low storage.

<comment><USER11> This is interesting. Do you know for sure that YouTube actually runs on literally the same disks as the Google search index? Because I used to work for Bing and they definitely did not let any other services share hardware with the search hotpath. Serving search results was a case where every millisecond counted (even delays below the threshold of perception caused a stat-sig drop in revenue), and so even suggesting that the index should share disks with e.g. OneDrive would've gotten you laughed out of the room.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just as content creators are not obliged to host on YouTube.

<comment><USER14> Sure, but just try to find an audience without it.

<comment><USER15> As long as you're not driven by profit motive you can wait for the audience to find you.

<comment><USER16> Even if you aren't driven by profit, it's pretty sad to spend time to create content and only have a handful of people see it.

<comment><USER17> Sure, but that's the story for most artists. Doesn't mean everyone's work should be showcased at The Louvre.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> They never did.

<comment><USER19> Now their content providers needs to realise, they have no obligation to host their content there.

<comment><USER20> Peertube ftw!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I agree with others in this thread, we should have more options for where to watch user created content.

With that in mind, can someone at Netflix please figure out a way to enable user created content?

Your customer base is ready for this. You don't need to focus exclusively on creating your own content. You've got the tech in place to support it. Many popular channels on Youtube would be right at home on Netflix. Take a note from Amazon, you don't need to be a book store when you can do much more.

</comment><comment><USER22> I also have no obligation to watch their ads.

</comment><comment><USER23> Sadly the internet is a highly privatized place. Entities like YouTube must curate their content at least to the degree that they do not violate law or fail to make a profit. It would be nice if we had the data equivalent of the post office. That is to say, a service that is completely content neutral and bears no legal liability for anything transmitted across it.

<comment><USER24> I just realized an equivalent of a public library but for user-submitted videos would actually be amazing.

With the same privacy protections that come with checking out a book from the library, the concept of it running at a cost, and the first amendment protecting the content of the website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Then YouTube is a publisher and should not be subject to the DMCA safe harbor provision.

</comment><comment><USER26> Well I am not a big fan of Google, but sounds about right to me. They are a private company, thus are allowed to select which content exists on their platform.

<comment><USER27> And society has no obligation to give Youtube/Alphabet indemnification for the content they present to users. If Youtube wants to curate their content more power to them. And people can pressure their representatives to update the DMCA to strip safe harbor provisions from service providers who don't allow unpopular but legal speech on their platform. There's no reason a social media site should be allowed to make hundreds of millions of dollars in inkind donations to their preferred political party.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Why isn't YouTube charging for membership yet? The way I see it, if they simply charged all of their users $7.99/month to use the service they could eliminate a lot of their problems.

I mean we pay for Netflix, for HBO, for HULU... why not for YouTube? I would rather pay for the service then see/hear about all the creators backlash from their policies. Policies that seem to be derived from the fact that YouTube needs to make money, just a thought anyhow.

<comment><USER29> They do. I pay $10/mo for YouTube Premium and it literally pays for itself because otherwise I'd be watching at least an hour of unskippable ads per month.

<comment><USER30> UBlock origin eliminates all ads all the time. Since installing I've not had to look at, or hear an advertisement.

<comment><USER16> Except the ones that the creators speak or insert themselves.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Web Development: How to? - <AUTHOR>

Hello,
I am a Hobby programmer. I am using Ubuntu since 2 years. I am quite good at C programming. I have written C programs & objdump'ed them to study how the internal works (This is just to let you know that I work hard, though programming is not the thing that I love the most. Its among those things that i hate the least & I wish to make a career out of it).
Recently, I have started learning Web Development & wish to make a career out of it. I studied HTML/CSS & learning Javascript now. I think I will do PHP once I am done with Javascript. There are a lot of brilliant Web Dev's out here, so I would like to take your advice, as in am I going the right way. Is there any other technology/language that I should learn? am I on a correct path to learn Web Development?
Thank You very much in advance. <comment><USER2> Everything you're doing so far is right. The most important thing is to think of something you've always wanted and make it. As mentioned by jameswyse, you might want to check out Node.js so you can use the same language on the front and backend.

I'm not really a fan of PHP, so I'm quite biased on the subject, but I think learning a different web framework (rails, etc) over PHP would be in your best interest.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for you time. I will surely give Node.js a try.

<comment><USER3> I recently switched to node.js after working with PHP for years. I did learn to appreciate a few things the apache+php combination does by itself.. but there is no way I would go back to PHP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like you're on the right track! I've found the best way to learn something new is to just dive right in, Do you have a personal project to start off with?

Just a suggestion but you might want to look in to Node.js (a server-side JS environment) instead of PHP, at least at first. That way you can avoid learning PHP and focus on getting those essential JavaScript skills.

<comment><USER5> PHP might not be a good language to use, but it will learn you a about the "low" level stuff. Web frameworks tend to hide many details for you, which might be a disadvantage when you are learning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My approach was to take something I already made or knew well how to do and apply it to the web. That way you aren't struggling with solving an unfamiliar problem but mainly concentrating on how to best implement it with your new tools. For me it was creating an event calendar I had done previously in xBase. I know the logic and it was suitably complex enough to be a good programming exercise as well as a good workout for the layout aspects of web development.

So find something in C that you know well than you can develop on the web, start with that.</comment>