Bill Gates Says Apple Should Unlock the San Bernardino iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/22/11096888/bill-gates-apple-fbi-iphone <comment><USER2> I guess Bill Gates doesn't care about customer privacy and making a modified iOS would open up a Pandora's Box that could be used as a tool to open up any iPhone and brute force the passcode.

Apple really values the customer's privacy and has the best encryption method for their iPhone and passcode function to set delays and erase the phone for too many bad guesses.

Satya Nadella hasn't voiced his opinion on this yet, but he retweeted an article that sided with Apple. He should protect Windows Phones as well from brute force passcode and a modified OS.

</comment><comment><USER3> Bill's greatest virtue was aways his fierce loyalty to Microsoft against its competition.</comment>


How much are developers making on the Windows App Store? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I believe it is far too early to be asking this question. Not only are there very few developers who have apps in the app store, but the platform was just released yesterday, so a tiny number of consumers have access to the app store.

I suspect we'll start seeing some numbers in about a month regarding Windows 8 installs, and then we'll start getting a very early idea of what percentage of consumers are downloading apps from the windows store.

I don't think it's a guarantee that windows users will download and pay for apps in the same way that in the early days of android, the store wasn't very lucrative, but I believe as android has improved and become the platform of choice for many, they are not comfortable paying for apps.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the better question might be who the exact audience will be for the Windows App Store? For example if it's going to be high end business users that might suggest doing certain apps. If it might be an older demographic that might also open some very specific doors as well. Another question to ask is how much will these users be willing to pay for an app?</comment>


Jaron Lanier Got Everything Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://readwrite.com/2013/03/13/jaron-lanier-got-everything-wrong

<comment><USER2> Sadly there's very little value in reading this article, insofar as it contains no useful insights or lessons but rather is simply an exercise in throwing stones at someone's life-work, and, near as I can tell, it comes from out of left field.

Mostly this article makes me feel bad for its author. He must have spent a non-trivial amount of time writing this piece, and it serves no end. I suppose I just can't fathom why it made him feel good to write it.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Lanier's strident warnings of giant mainframes run by a few to control the many missed so many critical trends that it now sounds like 1980s science- fiction. "

...except for the part where it's a pretty decent description of "cloud computing". What is a datacenter but a modern mainframe?</comment>


Locust – A modern load testing framework - <AUTHOR> http://locust.io/ <comment><USER2> Took a look at Locust before and did not find it as useful or generic as ApacheBench or Httperf (by HP). Locust felt a little too cutesy and high-level for most of the work I wanted to do - which was pretty simple.

Furthermore there were a lot of timing inaccuracies between the same test runs. It certainly could have been a fault in our code, but ab and Httperf seemed to give a lot more reliable and useful timing information. And they are just simpler to use. For one, not being browserbased can be nice when you are trying to iterate quickly.

Not trying to sell anyone against Locust, but at the least, I recommend you take a look at ab and Httperf to make sure you don't need something a whole lot simpler.

<comment><USER3> That isn't a very good comparison, because Locust's use-case is very different.

Locust is a tool/framework for writing code that simulates real user behaviour in a fairly realistic way. For example, it's very common to store state for each simulated user. Once you have written your "user behaviour code", you can then simulate a lot of simultaneous users by running it distributed across multiple machines, and hopefully get realistic load sent to you system.

If I wanted to just send a lot of requests/s to one or very few URL endpoints, I would also use something like ApacheBench, and I'm author of Locust.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Used it for some substantial loadtesting, loved it. It's real advantage compared to AB, siege, etc, is how easy it makes it to simulate real user interactions, not just mash on a few endpoints. Only flaw in my books is the crazy high ulimit you need for simulating high numbers of unique actors. The easy clustering mitigates this though.

</comment><comment><USER5> Shameless self promotion - I just wrote up a little doc [1] on using Locust and Kubernetes to run and scale distributed load tests along with some sample code [2].

I looked at JMeter and Gatling as alternatives but they were either a bit clunky (JMeter) or not distributed out of the box (Gatling). Late in the game I did discover Tsung (Erlang) but didn't get time to try it out - looks pretty powerful though.

[1] [https://cloud.google.com/solutions/distributed-load- testing-...](https://cloud.google.com/solutions/distributed-load-testing- using-kubernetes)

[2] [https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/distributed-load- test...](https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/distributed-load-testing- using-kubernetes)

<comment><USER6> Great writeup. It is so close to what we built at tradewave.net (except for Locust). I am glad I am not the only one that saw load testing using scalable containers. At some point, we will be going towards HFT and having a true load testing suite is handy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I used locust to supplement testing that third party was doing (they used some ibm product that I didn't have a license too).

I liked locust because it was easy to start using, but you write a decent amount of code if you have a complex application. I suggest using pyquery ([https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyquery](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyquery)) with it if you need to inspect any html, it was quite useful

</comment><comment><USER8> Locust is a great tool. We use it to loadtest our websites and even a single Mac can make huge traffic. If somebody is interested in a highly optimized Vagrant VM for loadtesting and Locust (it's possible through a VM, but not exorbitant high loadtesting) check out this url [https://github.com/PyBossa/loadtesting](https://github.com/PyBossa/loadtesting)

</comment><comment><USER9> My fave locust setup is spinning up aws instances to tests from time to time. I've created ansible automation to help on that ([https://github.com/gleicon/locust-swarm](https://github.com/gleicon/locust- swarm)) but it can be done manually. I still look on how to make it run casper.js tests but I think it would interfere with locust's performance.

</comment><comment><USER10> A bit tongue in cheek, but is a testimonial from someone at EA/Dice something you'd want to highlight? I know Battlefield 4 is almost two years old at this point, but man, I still have the scars from that game...

In all seriousness, definitely going to check this out, not enough load testing is done at the company I work for, plus I want to learn more python.

<comment><USER11> I have exactly the same point:) More python, balancing needs to be done, Battlefield 4.. ouuuuch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does it support testing a websocket app ?

<comment><USER3> Not out of the box. However, as long as it's "request/response based" it's quite simple to write and use a custom client. See: [http://docs.locust.io/en/latest/testing-other- systems.html](http://docs.locust.io/en/latest/testing-other-systems.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone know how it compares to Gatling ([http://gatling.io](http://gatling.io)) ?

<comment><USER14> I used Locust for a good long time around a year back, and here are some observations.

Locust is awesome to start with, and has master/slave for spawning multiple servers, great for testing real concurrency with large loads. Gatling doesn't have master/slave mode yet.

Main problems with Locust are:

* Lack of good presentation of results (compare Gatling and Locust results, and Locust is very primitive)

* Lack of Pipelines/Scenarios. This IMO was a big deal breaker for me. You can't say: "100% users hit the home screen, out of which 70% add a product, out of which 25% actually pay" etc. This is easily modeled with Gatling, and the same request session with same data falls through each scenario. I'm still following [https://github.com/locustio/locust/issues/171](https://github.com/locustio/locust/issues/171) though, but I don't think they have any idea of implementing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> So from what I understand this stands somewhere between as complex as Apache Bench and something as simple as Seige? I've had very little success with the former since its scripts are massive XML files and the clunky UI also doesn't help much.

As a python developer, I'm glad to see this and will surely give this a try shortly. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER16> I've been using siege for load testing. I'll give this a go at some point.

I don't use python as much as I'd like and this seems like a good work related use-case for me.

</comment><comment><USER17> I used it to test a Django app once. It's great because you can test the entire "flow" of an app, clicking on various forms.

</comment><comment><USER18> Does it provide graphical data representation or any kind of dashboard/intergation with graphite or something else?

</comment><comment><USER19> Do we have an equivalent for WS yet?</comment>


Ask HN: What wiki software does your company use for knowledge management? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Jive for internal documents, SalesForce's KB for customer-facing documents.

They're both terrible.

<comment><AUTHOR> why is that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> MediaWiki

<comment><AUTHOR> what do you like and dislike about it?

<comment><USER3> Like:

It's feature rich and powerful.

The syntax is familiar (to me) from editing Wikipedia

It's relatively easy to install / setup. Not totally pain-free, but nothing too hideous.

Dislike:

Not a big deal, but it's written in PHP, which is a language / ecosystem I'm not as familiar with. So if I wanted to hack on it myself, I'm less equipped to do that than if it were written in Java or Groovy or Python. But that's basically a nit-pick to be honest.</comment></comment></comment>


Google releases OnePass, a payment system for publishers - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/simple-way-for-publishers-to-manage.html <comment><USER2> Quite impeccable timing on Google's part, merely days after developers and publishers are up-in-arms over Apple's 30% cut for on-device content.

Well played Schmidt, well played.

<comment><USER3> I honestly think this is something Google mashed together overnight in response to Apple's annoucement.

Look at the page. It's just an informational landing page. no breakdown of the framework, pricing or any details, and once you click the signup button, you are put on a queue for a sales rep to contact you.

I love it though. It's a great case study for startups! I think they're gauging interest with this one, simple page.. and if enough people sign-up they will actually build it over the weekend.

<comment><USER4> Well, they've been talking about it since September 2009: <http://goo.gl/zYSzH>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The payment side is powered by Google Checkout, so the fee structure smacks Apple around all over the place. The most expensive tier (under $3000 in monthly sales) is 2.9% + $0.30. The cheapest is 1.9% + $0.30.

<comment><USER6> They need to add other payment options then CreditCards to Google Checkout. Nobody uses CreditCards in Europe and it's kinda stupid that I can't even buy Apps on the Marketplace and have see if the vendor support direct purchase form their website via PayPal or something.

<comment><USER7> If not credit cards, then what do Europeans use?

<comment><USER8> Sane wire transfers, direct debit, and a multitude of other things. Credit cards are on the rise though.

<comment><USER9> On the other hand, even debit cards are usually called credit cards, at least in france (either that or "carte bleue" which is the french standard for these things).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Android dabbler/developer here.

I like how google is empowering their developers with different pricing strategies. Before it was plain vanilla, either you pay, or its free. Yes you can pay for an app and within 15 minutes ask for a refund, but I have trouble sending in a rebate, I know i'll forgot within those 15 minutes.

With these extra payment options, and from what I understand, easy charging system, having someone drop a dollar on content with few clicks or even being able to implement coupons for your content/application will be greatly appreciated. =)

<comment><USER11> As a consumer, I don't like the fact that now I will have to keep track of different way each website will charge me money.

<comment><USER12> Do you have the same trouble walking through a mall, dealing with the different pricing structures and mixture of cash & credit at stores?

I really don't think it's much different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One Pass "also offers payments in mobile apps, in instances where the mobile OS terms permit transactions to take place outside of the app market." Nice dig.

<comment><USER14> If you read the Android Market terms of service, you'll see that you're not allowed to use any payment processor except Google Checkout. The only exception is if Google Checkout isn't available in your country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> In the blog post they say it will be "Open". What do they mean by that? Open source? Open for everyone in the world? From what I can tell in the post, it's only available in some countries, and it's also only available with Google Checkout.

I'm not saying those are bad things, just wondering what it has to do with "Open". Unless of course Google is just continuing to use it as a buzzword.

<comment><USER16> Presumably it's something like 'can be used outside of a walled payment ecosystem like the app store'

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Doesn't this name clash with the Continental Airlines frequent flyer program name?

<comment><USER18> Are people really going to confuse a frequent flyer program and a payment system?

<comment><USER17> Perhaps not right now, but Google has already shown their interest in the flight information industry with their pending $700 million bid for ITA. Its not a stretch to assume that they may use this acquisition to provide a method to search-for and purchase airline tickets using their mobile payment system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The signup page is linking my to a generic Google help page.

<comment><USER20> And there's no demonstration of how it works in the video or in any images. It's as if some people at Google decided to react to Apple's recent bad press by putting up a web page and a blog post announcing a product without actually having built anything yet.

<comment><USER21> While I suspect One Pass is probably quite a bit from actual use by any publisher, this press release/the video has probably been in the works ever since the rumblings about Apple's subscription plans made the rounds. While not the most honest move, it is a brilliant PR coup.

<comment><USER22> > While not the most honest move, it is a brilliant PR coup.

You misspelled vaporware.

Apple announced something they're gonna roll out in the next rev. of iOS. Google put out a press release.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's not just in response to Apple, the timing is just fortuitous, O'Reilly's Tools of Change ( a publishing industry conference ) is on in New York this week and it was probably timed to coincide with that event.

</comment><comment><USER24> I had an urge to implement something similar while ago using OpenID. Since OpenID authentication has a handshake between a content website and an identity provider, it would provide the perfect channel for handling accounting. Paying to read an article would be as simple as logging in.

It is undeniable that Google has enough gravity as an identity provider to encourage publishers to adopt such a model.

I don't really see how to get people to pay for an article sight unseen, though. Familiarity with content by known authors may be enough for some.

</comment><comment><USER25> I bet it's killed or unpopular and neglected within four years.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is just a micropayment system from Google? Or am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER27> i wonder if you can use this as a generic web application paid subscription solution like a merchant + recurly (for example).

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if the customer service for OnePass payments will be as good as it is for Google Checkout.

I'm thinking of previous discussions such as:

 _Google Checkout Nightmare and the $126,000 phone call_ :

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1432107>

<comment><USER29> Is this sarcastic? (never used Google Checkout)

<comment><USER30> Hard to tell. Google Checkout's UX is generally very good, better than paypal, however it is simply unavailable in many (most?) countries.

EDIT: Oh he said customer service. Google's direct customer service is notoriously nonexistent.

<comment><USER31> They have support for lots of countries now: <http://goo.gl/I49QQ>.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Googling "Felsius" gives results for "F" - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/search?q=felsius <comment><USER2> Google does weird things with keyword expansion/collapse, as well as acronym collapse, that often lead to totally nonsensical results.

If you search for a set of words that are commonly associated with an acronym, it will also search for that acronym, but if that acronym has multiple meanings, you will end up getting results for the other meanings even though you searched for the fully expanded version.

An easy way to trigger this for demonstration purposes is to include an additional keyword associated with the other meaning of the acronym. For example, searching Google for _finite state machine atheism_ will return results instead for the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

<comment><USER3> Google and every other search engine rewrite queries. See eg.

[https://hughewilliams.com/2012/03/19/query-rewriting-in- sear...](https://hughewilliams.com/2012/03/19/query-rewriting-in-search- engines/)

[https://research.google.com/pubs/archive/36252.pdf](https://research.google.com/pubs/archive/36252.pdf)

<comment><USER2> And it's incredibly frustrating on a fairly regular basis and forces me to quote queries all the time because the search engine thinks it knows what I mean better than I do.</comment></comment></comment>


You can't split-test human experience You can't split test human experience - <AUTHOR> http://justinjackson.ca/split-human/ <comment><AUTHOR> Whoa, sorry about the double title. Nowhere near as cool as a double rainbow.</comment>


The reason that outsourcing software is so difficult - <AUTHOR> http://www.workingsoftware.com.au/page/The_reason_that_outsourcing_software_is_so_difficult

<comment><USER2> Also have a look at this: [http://www.quora.com/What-is-your-greatest-pain- point-with-o...](http://www.quora.com/What-is-your-greatest-pain-point-with- outsourcing-software-development)</comment>


Introducing the Uber SSH Certificate Authority - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/uber-security-privacy/introducing-the-uber-ssh-certificate-authority-4f840839c5cc#.9ykq2oizh <comment><USER2> The article said nothing on the market provided exactly what they needed whilst being compatible with their network...

But wouldn't BLESS [0], fit the bill?

[0] [https://github.com/Netflix/bless](https://github.com/Netflix/bless)</comment>


Open-source tutorial for building an Apple Watch app - <AUTHOR> http://www.crittercism.com/how-to-build-an-apple-watchkit-app

<comment><USER2> That's really cool. Thank you!

<comment><AUTHOR> Some of my first tutorials - glad you like it! :)</comment></comment>


New Twitter ads are similar to adwords - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitters_new_ads_are_smart_like_google_adwords.php

<comment><AUTHOR> Please change link to [http://blog.twitter.com/2011/07/timely-tweets-now- easier-to-...](http://blog.twitter.com/2011/07/timely-tweets-now-easier-to- see.html)</comment>


Snapchat Stories Search - <AUTHOR> https://www.snap.com/en-US/news/post/a-story-for-everything/ <comment><USER2> This morning at Facebook: Zuckerberg: "Well, what the f __ __are you guys waiting for?! "</comment>


Why hasn't the Year of the Linux Desktop happened yet? - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2017/12/19/why-hasnt-the-year-of-the-linux-desktop-happened-yet/ <comment><USER3> \- Poor backwards compatibility

\- Needlessly complex UI APIs (e.g. X Window System)

\- Fragmentation

\- Lack of a singular UI vision

\- Bad UI design, bad UX

\- Lack of accessibility support

\- Complex interfaces designed for 1% of users

I could go on...

The only successful UNIX interfaces dropped X Window, dropped most of the community's ideas and APIs, and started afresh. Look at Quartz (Apple), ChromeOS (Google), and Android (Google). They're much simpler at every layer, have a singular vision, and designed for normal users rather than by programmers for programmers.

But no doubt this thread will somehow find a way to blame Microsoft as is the tired song of the Linux community.

<comment><USER4> >>...designed for normal users rather than by programmers for programmers

This is the crux of the issue. The Linux ecosystem philosophy is rooted in choice. Normal users don't want and/or need that much choice.

Average Joe doesn't care what an operating system stands for, or how involved the developer community is, or how customization a system is. They need a spreadsheet/internet browser/email machine that can run some misc. business software, but most importantly they need something that just works.

For all of the benefits of using Linux, the one thing it has never nailed down is intuitiveness. Say what you want about the (many) flaws of Windows, but you can't deny that one of the easiest out-of-the-box-this-thing-just-works experiences. It's also the same experience every single time you use a Windows machine.

Try explaining the difference between Arch, Ubunutu, and Debian to a normal consumer and their eyes glaze over before you even begin.

<comment><USER5> > It's also the same experience every single time you use a Windows machine.

Recently I helped a small company migrate their PCs from Windows 7 to Windows 10. Trust me, it is not the _same experience_ at all for the end users. They (the users) will get used to the new interface and way of interacting with the OS not because it is more _intuitive_ but because they will use it and gain experience with it.

<comment><USER6> I will never get used to have ads being displayed in the OS or to have random junk apps appearing in my start menu every couple of months.

Microsoft sabotaged their main platform. It would have a major opportunity for other OS.

<comment><USER7> That actually doesn't happen. You make it sound like there are straight up random ads. You install Windows 10 and there are shortcuts to popular Windows store apps that you can right click and remove. Not any different than installing, it was either Fedora or Debian, I think Fedora, and getting 'ads' for apps.

<comment><USER8> Yeah not straight up random ads, just promotions for random apps, auto installing some random games, random promotions in notification area and then OneDrive and Office 365 ads in File Explorer. Totally and honestly like in Debian and Fedora I swear.

-

[https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/17/14956540/microsoft- window...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/17/14956540/microsoft- windows-10-ads-taskbar-file-explorer)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm sure this might be an unpopular opinion here, but my experience has been that when you do normal business collaboration - WebEx, etc. - in Linux, you spend more time fighting to make things work than you do actually working. Chrome and the proliferation of webapps has helped this somewhat, but it always ends up being _something_.

Scott Lowe did a pretty interesting series of blog posts [1] on it and ultimately ended up back on a Mac because it just killed his productivity and called it "death by a thousand cuts". This mirrors my experience. I want to be on Linux and there's a lot to love, but it's just not..stable? evolved? polished? (not sure what the right word is) enough to be a daily driver for most non-development oriented people.

[1] [https://blog.scottlowe.org/2017/10/25/linux-migration- wrap-u...](https://blog.scottlowe.org/2017/10/25/linux-migration-wrap-up/)

<comment><USER10> Anecdotally I see the same.

One of the developers at a client uses Ubuntu desktop (I use macOS). The issues at her end with voip calls have been crazy. We've been through Skype, Discord and now Slack. Nothing has been reliable.

Edit, because I'm sick of "i can save the reputation of Linux" responses:

Its never a network issue its never even a _protocol_ issue. Its a "application detects no input from microphone" issue.

So please stop telling me how its everything except a shitty desktop experience.

<comment><USER11> Try Telegram, Linphone or a WebRTC service. Skype is truly bad on linux but Discord served me and my friends well so, check your developer's internet connection.

<comment><USER10> Internet connection doesnt affect her microphone.

<comment><USER12> But a lousy internet connection will certainly make VOIP unreliable.

I would ditto the recomendation to try SIP-based or web-based VOIP. I've never had an issue on Linux. Haven't used Skype, Discord, or Slack, so can't comment there.

<comment><USER10> Maybe you misunderstood.

The problem isnt that the quality is poor. The problem is that the client application fails to recognise microphone input.

The calls are fine _if_ it works, but when it doesn't its a one way call.

Again: this whole thread is why linux on desktop is a fucking fantasy. Any problem and the mere idea that its because of unreliable software is avoided like a hooker with an eye patch, lest people have to recognise "yeah this shit just doesn't work well"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's a tough time for desktops generally. If the question had been "when will be the year of mass market GUI linux?" then it would have happened already with Android.

The author lists all the reasons traditional desktop linux failed and keeps failing, but the short form of the argument can be summed up like this:

Linus Torvalds, who knows a bit about Linux, also makes his own desktop app (perhaps not as famous as the kernel and git), a scuba log app. He would _like_ to release the damn thing built for Mac, Windows and Linux. But can he? Of course not. He releases it compiled for Windows and Mac, and then as source for Linux.

Linux on the desktop might succeed when Linux _has_ a desktop. As in, at the OS level, a developer can make assumptions about how the clipboard, resolution scaling, sound, notifications, application install/uninstall etc works. Until then, no.

<comment><USER14> The trouble is "Linux" isn't a desktop OS. Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE are desktop OSes. They're separate OSes even if they are related.

There is hope however. Modern application containers like Flatpak aim to bridge the differences between Linux OSes by being self contained.

<comment><USER13> Right. And that's exactly the problem. Another problem is that ALL those desktop distributions chose application (package) managers that are ill suited to desktop. You don't want shared libraries for desktop. That might be good for server (central patching, fairly stable environment once set up).

On desktop you need to be able to install and uninstall apps by the dozen every week and never ever worry that your "system" can't run the app, or that the app will ruin it for some other app. This requires duplicating libs or statically compiling. However package systems tend to dislike packages that include a private copy of 100 libs. That's broken.

Flatpak is exactly what's needed. And it needs to grow to encompass APIs on the same level as Windows and OS X (e.g good notification apis, dpi change events for multi monitor across all window managers etc etc). Modern desktop APIs are pretty intricate on win/mac, so Linux needs to catch up. The problem with catching up is that design by committee is never quick to drop old cruft, unite on standards etc. This is why I think Mozilla, Valve, Google etc has a better chance of making _the_ successful Linux desktop, than the OSS community has. Just like the OSS community won't ever make a AAA game.

<comment><USER10> macOS and Windows have shared libraries.

Packaging third party libraries with your binary is just going to lead to a race to see which fucks a user first: running out of disk space or that one app with an unpatched TLS library that allows RCE for an attacker.

<comment><USER13> Exactly. And yet for 99% I'd desktop use I'll rather buy disks and risk security holes, than suffer shared library hell. I have been screwed by library compatibility hell 100 times for every time I suffered a disk space issue or a vulnerability issue. At the end of the day if it's a hard requirement that you want to be able to just run binary packages that were created by idiots - then the smartphone app model is the only viable one.

It's important that components that _do_ have significant attack surface such as TLS are provided and patched by the OS.

The shared libraries of e.g windows come in pretty well defined tiers. Things that the OS provides, various optional runtimes that must or _can_ be shared such as msvcrt and then there is not much else. No app is going to install a "system wide" image decoder or other utility lib (In the past, it was a thing to dump a dll into the OS folder, often overwriting older ones, which is where the term "DLL hell" comes from. Luckily that doesn't happen these days).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is kind of the "last mile" problem with open-source software. The last few bits of bug fixing and documentation and - most especially - <USER2> polish can be unpleasant. Developers who started a project because of an interest in its core problem domain generally don't want to do those kinds of chores. Sometimes it's because they lack the specific skills to do them well, and don't want to invest lots of time learning how to do something that's still medium reward (at best) for them. Sometimes it's because they just don't want to even if they have the skills, because some other much more interesting problem beckons. They have to be paid to go that last mile.

In the case of web apps, developers get paid to go the last mile - either by an employer or via the market. In the case of Linux server software they also get paid; in this case a Red Hat salary is the most common form. For Linux desktop software, very few get paid. Not nearly enough. OpenOffice/LibreOffice in particular needs and has always needed a _ton_ of work, and almost nobody's paying for it. So it has always been a total tire fire. Random crashes, which then leave a document in a "needs recovery" state permanently no matter how many times it has already been recovered. Formatting and conversion glitches. Features and options that are hard to use even if you can find them among the smoldering dung-pile of other features and options that nobody anywhere has used for years. Staggering memory abuse bogging down the whole system. I'm sure the devs (at least some of them) would love to fix these things, but it's going to be really hard work - often more political than technical in nature - and nobody's paying them enough to go through that misery so they do more rewarding things instead. The result is software that will _always_ lag behind its proprietary competitors in terms of appeal to users - far enough behind that people will actually pay for the difference.

If you want to compete effectively in a market, somebody has to be paid for crossing that last mile, and that means somebody has to do the paying. Nobody is.

<comment><USER16> This. I tried every major Linux distro recently, and every one had really basic problems. For example, Ubuntu and Mint don't let you configure the mouse wheel scroll speed. There are hacks but none work reliably. Do all Ubuntu users really scroll web pages incredibly slowly?

And then there are the missing apps. Want a really good, free git GUI client? Sorry, not on Linux. It's git FFS, Linux should have great dev tools. Same with file managers.

I used to be an Amiga user, I'm a C developer and like tinkering. But I also want something that just works for the basics. Sad to say but Windows, for all its faults, does work. Visual Studio does work. And all the open source apps I use like Kicad are on Windows.

I really want to move to Linux, but it's too much work to make it work. These days I have better things to do with my computer.

<comment><USER17> > For example, Ubuntu and Mint don't let you configure the mouse wheel scroll > speed.

Since both are Debian derivatives, I imagine that both include synclient(1). No, it's not a GUI — but that's better, because you can just put the right command into your login scripts, and you _know_ that it'll execute, and never get deleted because a desktop environment decided to change its config file format.

> Want a really good, free git GUI client? Sorry, not on Linux.

Magit is awesome.

> Sad to say but Windows, for all its faults, does work.

I have a couple of Windows machines, and I don't feel that they work. Swallowed keystrokes & clicks, ads — no thank you!

<comment><USER18> > because you can just put the right command into your login scripts, and you > know that it'll execute, and never get deleted because a desktop environment > decided to change its config file format.

You just lost 99% of the userbase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> From the article:

> Of course what happened here was that Steve Jobs returned to Apple and we > suddenly had MacOSX come onto the scene taking at least some air out of the > Linux Desktop space.

I really agree with that: if every engineer I know who uses a Mac "because Bash" would use Linux instead, we would have arrived at a decent Linux desktop market-share by now. Kudos Apple.

In saying that, as a desktop Linux user I really don't mind being part of a small user community. I would never switch to MacOSX as it is not (fully) open source, and Windows is nice for running Steam for gaming.

<comment><USER20> > Of course what happened here was that Steve Jobs returned to Apple and we > suddenly had MacOSX come onto the scene taking at least some air out of the > Linux Desktop space.

That might have been the case 10 years ago, but it isn't now. Desktop OS dissatisfaction is at an all time high in both the Windows and Apple camps, among both users and developers. If a linux distro got its act together it could steal the show. But, to do that would require an overhaul to linux similar to what Next did to create NextStep.

<comment><USER19> Good point, and I agree there is room for a disruption, as right now it's all pretty bland with regards to innovation in the desktop space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> These articles tend to focus on the technical reasons Linux has not been adopted, and I think it is worth also exploring the business issues (I think Linux desktops are mature enough technically that most average users can use it just as easily as Windows).

How many computers ship with Linux installed from major distributors (i.e. places where the average consumer or business would buy from)? Dell has one model but you have to look hard to find it. Most consumers and businesses think of the desktop world as having two options: windows or mac, with windows as the default. No one is out there marketing and selling Linux desktop machines. That's why they aren't out there.

The one exception is ChromeOS. It has actually taken off and is widely used in schools (and anecdotally at least becoming a popular option for people to install for their kids or parents). ChromeOS is heavily marketed by Google, and there are lots of Chromebooks marketed and sold by major distributors.

I don't consider it a true "Linux Desktop" because it isn't a full-featured OS, but the adoption nonetheless provides a contrasting case study that demonstrates the importance of marketing and distribution that the full- featured desktops lack.

</comment><comment><USER22> I've been using a Linux desktop for years (much to my wife's disapproval). I don't believe any of these things are a the biggest reason.

Let's look a Linux success stories

1) Android. Perhaps this single biggest example of Linux success.

2) Internet of Things, Raspberry Pi, micro PCs. Linux runs the generic micro PC appliances fairly well.

3) Chromebooks. Not a big market but a decent alternative to Macs and Windows mini laptops.

In summary I would say its consumer market adoption. As mentioned already the desktop is suffering. It's the appetite of the market that is going to drive adoption. The Linux desktop still hasn't reach a critical mass that it can replace a Windows or Mac with the consumer not noticing. Once you reach that point that an average consumer will not notice a difference then you will see a big push.

I believe Google has a big chance to make this happen. If they can get their Google SaaS office suite seamless and adopted universally than I can see Linux making a big push into laptops and notebook devices.

<comment><AUTHOR> Android is all about Java, Google could replace Linux by *BSD or their future Fucshia and hardly anyone would notice.

ChromeBooks are all about ChromeOS, that is what average Joe and Jane buy them. For a web browser manager experience. They couldn't care less how their browser instances are managed.

IoT is by definition not a desktop.

<comment><USER23> Not so easy I guess, as most drivers are either in the kernel, or provided as blobs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I feel like Ubuntu had the opportunity to help the Linux desktop gain more traction. However, they got side tracked from helping to polish existing open source projects and started messing about reimplementing low-level wheels all over the place.

I don't think a Linux desktop would have rivalled MS but it could have made more gains than it has.

</comment><comment><USER24> Obviously, there's polish, which is undeniably lacking in every corner of the linux desktop experience.

But even if it were polished, I think the phantom linux desktop is just another manifestation of a programmer looking at instagram and thinking, "what's the big deal? I could make this"

Sure, I have no doubt, but it's missing the other 90% of the magic that gets a significant slice of the population on board. It's more than checking the appropriate boxes. It requires much more effort, and requires much more of a centralized figure, than checking the boxes.

This is why, among technical people, who _do_ only require that something checks boxes, linux on the server is a smash hit.

</comment><comment><USER6> As a non-IT professional, I do not see the reasons why I did not switch personally despite being increasing uncomfortable with Windows 10 and thinking that I will need to do that one day.

1\. Poor driver support (it is mentioned last but I think it's a major problem). It is a lottery to know if you install linux on a laptop which functionality will work or not. Even on a dell laptop that came with linux pre-installed I ended up with some functionalities not working correctly.

2\. Non self-discoverability of the OS. Outside of very basic tasks, you very quickly end up writing command lines, much earlier than on Windows that gives you a UI for quite sophisticated things. People who code every day don't realise how difficult it is for someone who never coded to get into it. It is the same for someone who doesn't use CLI extensively. There is so much to learn before being to do simple things that I can do in a few clicks on windows that this is a heavy investment. An investment I will probably do one day but that I do not have the brain/time budget to make in the short term. I appreciate the power of being able to do everything with command line (and to automate everything). However don't underestimate the friction it creates when you need to do something like 3-10 times a year, not often to learn the command by heart but often to be seriously annoyed every time you do it and spend a disproportionate amount of time. Not a problem for linux sysadmins who do that all day. But if the target is 10% market share, it needs to be usable by more than sysadmins.

</comment><comment><USER25> I see a lot of people discussing technical shortcomings and problems with user experience, and I think these are all missing the point a bit. Constantly changing APIs, inconsistent GUI paradigms, these are all side effects of the key feature of the Linux desktop experience: freedom. Anyone who wants to can write a window manager / Wayland compositor / GUI toolkit / terminal emulator / command shell that does things completely differently. Maybe a lot of this stuff is terrible, but some of it is brilliant in a way that lines up beautifully with how I want to use my computer.

The market for freedom on the desktop isn't huge. Freedom is challenging and it's not worth the effort for most users. They have better things to do than to fight with bad network drivers. For them, the cost of buying new hardware every other year when planned obsolescence hits is worth not having to fight it. But for some of us, freedom is worth the effort. I bought a netbook in 2011 that I love and still use. If it weren't for Linux, I would have had to replace it in 2013 when Windows bogged down to the point of uselessness.

Why does Linux have to take over the world to succeed? It's a success if it's there for those of us who want it.

</comment><comment><USER26> This might be implicitly covered under "In the first 10 years of Desktop linux there was no doubt that Microsoft was working hard to try to nip any sign of Desktop Linux gaining any kind of foothold or momentum," but I think the biggest answer is path dependence: [https://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/paths.html](https://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/paths.html) and network effects. Once most people used MS DOS and then Windows, it was easiest for most other people to do so too. Activation energy in switching is hard, and a strong ecosystem begets a stronger ecosystem.

In many domains, there's an early period of fermentation and experimentation. Famously, there were hundreds of American car companies around the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Today there are three and prior to Tesla the the last successful one was founded decades ago. And it remains to be seen if Tesla is in it for the long term.

In phones, we have Apple and Android and that's likely it. Path dependence.

Lots of people are excited about AR/VR because those fields seem relatively open. But if they turn out to be important, they too are likely to have two big players.

</comment><comment><USER27> For me it's pretty simple; as a front-end developer who needs to run Photoshop, the latest, and in a stable way (Wine is not stable nor does it run the latest Photoshop on Linux) I had two choices, none of which were Linux. Windows and MacOS, now since I don't really do any gaming, but I do need Bash and Windows design decisions are questionable at best, the fact that you can't turn off updates without command-line hacking or other absurd stuff (and that updates often break drivers) I decided to go with a Mac. It's not perfect, of course, nothing is, but I'm happy and I don't see myself ever going on Linux because

\- Poor app ecosystem

\- You tell me "Use GIMP", but with virtually no PSD support I say no and tell that to all the designers that hand me out PSD-s to cut and they will tell you that's never happening

\- Poor design decisions

\- Poor driver support

\- I don't want to hack in the command-line a full day to set up the thing, like I've so far had to do when trying to use Linux

Of course, this is all subjective and I by no means am talking for everyone else, but I'm quite sure my issues with Linux align with someone else's here as well.

</comment><comment><USER28> What is missing is that on the Linux desktop it does not simply "just work". You may not feel it anymore after you used Linux for a while. But if you leave Linux for a year or two and come back you will see tons of small things that are outright broken or where you need to fiddle with them to get them to work.

</comment><comment><USER29> The best (most productive, least off-the-wall) I can do year after year seems to be to run an XFCE desktop. But its not polished (although the icon set got refreshed recently which is nice.)

Poor UX for me seems to boil down to off-the-wall or geek fad UX decisions the major desktop managers make with every new version that drive me back to XFCE. Linux vendors, please focus on productivity and less on glitz/chasing the unified mobile & desktop UX dragon. Please?!

Also, I can't pin exactly why I think this is, but linux desktop managers always feel bolted on rather than integral to the experience - it doesn't strike me as valued by the operating system vendor as much as the underlying kernel. Maybe its an inconsistent frame rate thing or trackpad funkiness on my underpowered HP laptop that has me so negative on the Linux feel.

</comment><comment><USER30> It's Office, silly. LibreOffice is, in a vacuum, a fine collection of software, but stacked up against the juggernaut of the MS Office suite, it can't compare. They're continually playing catch-up, since their mandate is to be compatible with Office, with a fraction of the resources, and always having to react to maintain compatibility. Likewise, businesses run on Outlook and Exchange, to an overwhelming degree; most of the serious competitors have faded away at this point - even five years ago, there were still a lot of Domino shops, but IBM has divested their software divisions, and essentially made that stack abandonware, and so everyone under the sun is moving to Office 365.

</comment><comment><USER31> For me its lack of desktop applications that may or may not work on the linux distro I decide to use. I the lack of "it just works" is a huge problem. I own a mac, and if I see an application supports apple I can be fairly certain it works with my machine (hopefully my OS version) and it will be easy to install and run.

Its fragmentation (so many distos...) that makes the app sales market quite small so businesses can't (won't) make a go of making desktop apps.

Use linux servers everyday, its the desktop experience which was never really polished.

I do want my next notebook to be a linux box though..

</comment><comment><USER32> I know this is controversial and you can call me crazy but, Microsoft is doing a pretty damn good job at bringing Linux to the desktop.

Here me out for a second. Let's ignore how Windows 10 spies on you and other side topics.

The real situation is this:

You're a developer who wants to run various Unix / Linux tools. This could be anything from simple tools like grep, to entire development stacks (ruby, python, postgresql, etc.). It could even be graphical tools like Sublime Text.

For that, you could just install any flavor of Linux but it's never that simple.

Often times with web development you're also dealing with images, so now you need a nice image editor. Sure GIMP exists, but it's not in the same league as Photoshop, sorry. Sure, you could run a Windows VM inside of Linux but it's also not as simple as that too.

A lot of us do other things with our computer besides web development. This varies from person to person. Personally I like to play games on occasion and a lot of games won't run on Linux, don't work with Wine and run terribly bad inside of a VM. Dual booting is also an awful user experience.

Perhaps you're interested in creating videos too, or record podcasts, etc.. The audio and video tools on Linux are just no where near tools like Camtasia and Screenflow. Unlike GIMP, there really isn't even a suitable audio or video solution on Linux, and audio requires extremely low latency so you can't run Camtasia in a VM. Dual booting also isn't an option because what if you want to record Linux based web development videos?

Anyways, all of this is solved by Windows right now with the Windows Subsystem for Linux. I can happily play games, record videos, process audio, run Photoshop and do full time Linux based web development (with Docker too) all from a single computer running Windows 10. No VMs or dual booting required, and it's really fast.

If anyone is curious, here's how you can set all of that up: [https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/using-wsl-and-mobaxterm-to- cr...](https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/using-wsl-and-mobaxterm-to-create-a- linux-dev-environment-on-windows)

<comment><USER33> Except that it's not actually Linux, it's the Linux userland.

Finally the year of GNU on the Desktop?

<comment><USER32> Yep, but for most web / app development use cases that's really all you need.

For me, I'm more interested in what I can do with the computer I purchased. WSL on Windows 10 gives me the ability to feel like I'm running both Windows and Linux together.

If I could choose to run native Linux I would, but right now that's impossible because Linux alone isn't suitable for the programs I run.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Why do we even expect Linux to have a dominant share of the desktop market? Most computers are sold with Windows and most people don't care about what OS they run. Not all people need a decent command line, the ability to easily install and update software, a rich set of easily accessible language interpreters and compilers, and an environment that is similar to the servers most the internet runs on. Among those who would have an advantage from having that, Linux and macOS are already the dominant OSs.

</comment><comment><USER35> > Canonical business model not working out

Well, failing to deliver a good product didn't really help neither their business model, nor the Year of the Linux Desktop.

Polishing and repackaging existing software seems like a successful strategy, but it can never make the Linux Desktop happen. On the other hand throwing it all away and starting from scratch can, but needs exceptionally right people to achieve. As far as I know no company like this exists today.

</comment><comment><USER36> Well, GNOME 3's lack of consistency and complete disregard for established UX practices didn't help. Client side decorations are annoying and hurt discoverability. Just give me a normal menubar and toolbar without fancy animations and buttons that aren't the size of a postage stamps. GNOME 2 and Windows XP/7 were the pinnacle of usable interfaces. It's all been downhill from there.

</comment><comment><USER37> I switched from Linux (KDE) to Mac about 5 years ago, with some attempts to switch back.

I recently got a laptop with Windows for some gaming for the kids, and I feel Windows is actually less polished than Linux with KDE. Restarts, weird issues with multiple users, sudden switches between Modern UI and something that looks the same as the Windows 2000 I last used.

I really wonder when Windows will be usable enough for home users...

</comment><comment><USER38> Because Linux is a kernel? It's just one piece in an ecosystem.

It would make more sense to ask why the Year of Gnome Desktop hasn't happened. And the answer is easy if you compare the budget that Apple or Microsoft has to create an integrated environment. Even with free helping hands, I bet that RedHat is nowhere near the number of bodies that big corp can throw at it.

</comment><comment><USER39> The experience is dismal, even basic crap still doesn't work. I installed mint a couple of months ago (clean install), right after booting, the mouse doesn't work. THE PS2 MOUSE DOESN'T WORK!!!

It's fine for servers, but for a desktop, you have to be masochistic to want to use it, unless the only thing you use it for is to build software.

</comment><comment><USER40> In my 20s and 30s I loved an OS I could hack around in and play with. Now I just want my freaking email to work and the computer not to blow up every time there is an upgrade. Most people are like that. Linux on desktop is neat and all but not compelling as an alternative to "works well enough" for non-tech obsessives.

</comment><comment><USER41> Terrible UX.

<comment><USER42> Not anymore.

GNOME on Fedora is more consistent and polished than Windows 10.

<comment><USER43> Unfortunately GNOME and consistency never went together.

From time to time I revisit the GNOME dektop to assess if it's a viable alternative to my KDE.

What I still see is random, incoherent apps, meshed together, with the worst possible default values set, for each one of them.

Also the idea that half-baked and ultimately broken extensions, could provide basic functionality that should already be present in the first place, didn't do them any favors. Even the plugin/extension installation mechanism is broken!!

The general lack of configurability doesn't help either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> [http://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.th...](http://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html)

</comment><comment><USER45> \- Ubuntu's approach was too fragmented + insular.

\- Microsoft is pushing hard in the consumer space.</comment>


With help from MIT, Akamai sues competitor - <AUTHOR> http://www.universalhub.com/2010/help-mit-akamai-sues-competitor

<comment><USER2> Here's the first patent they're complaining about: [http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...](http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7693959.PN.&OS=PN/7693959&RS=PN/7693959)

So basically they patented the concept of www.customerdomain.com.cdndomain.com. How asinine is that.

I spend $35K/month with akamai and already have a meeting with Contendo setup for monday. Just forwarded this link along to my akamai rep with a snarky note.

</comment><comment><USER3> Akamai needs to wake up and realize that their technology hasn't been a big differentiator for a few years now and change their pricing to reflect that.</comment>


Kaleidoscope - File comparison for Mac released - <AUTHOR> http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com/

<comment><USER2> If you're using a Webkit browser, notice the app icon over time.

They use these images for that effect in CSS:

<http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com/static/img/ks_color.png> , <http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com/static/img/ks_shading.png> , <http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com/static/img/ks_mask.png>

Lack of merge support is a deal-breaker for me. I was so hopeful because that's the #1 most requested feature in their other app, Versions.

<comment><USER3> Good catch :-) I hoped somebody would notice it...

We know about merging. One step at a time...

<comment><USER2> I know you won't answer this, but do you think it will come to Kaleidoscope faster than it's come to Versions? (how long has Versions been out? 2 years?) Or, when it comes to Kaleidoscope, will you use that functionality in Versions?

<comment><USER4> Versions has barely been updated since launch.

<comment><USER5> Obvious solution: Stop using SVN. Versions is a great app, but it's long since time to move on.

That said, Kaleidoscope is pretty neat! :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Absolutely beautiful UI, icon and website… but it doesn't do merge resolution. This is practically all I use opendiff (Filemerge) for, so it's useless for me. Add it, and my €29 are yours in a heartbeat — I tend to do lots of merges, and I find this is one of the very few cases where a proper desktop app can make the job so much easier than a command-line tool like vimdiff/emacs. And let's face it, Filemerge is pretty horrid… having to quit the entire app to move onto the next conflict and watch as it spews SIMBL errors over your terminal is hardly ideal.

<comment><USER7> Man, no merge capabilities is a bummer. I was rooting through the menu items and help viewer in vain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sofa sort of has a slow track record for releasing updates. They tend to just fizzle out.

Anyone remember Disco? They released one version and a few small updates, people bought it, they HAVE NEVER DONE ANYTHING ELSE TO IT.

Versions is in the same boat. I doubt there will be a 2.0 release of it either.

<comment><USER9> Same with Versions indeed. I asked for some really simple improvements. All were promised more than a year ago. None appeared in any update.

<comment><USER8> I hope they can turn around this trend. They make great stuff.

I liked Disco a lot and it helped me out. Then it stopped.

So I wrote my own, getting ready to release soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The title doesn't really give you much to go on, but the app is incredibly well done. It diffs all kinds of binary image formats like PNG, JPG or even PSD.

Oh, and the product website is amazingly beautiful too.

<comment><USER11> Personally, I found the super-fast "shake"-like effect when you click what you think is a link to be very distracting. It also breaks "back", you need to hunt for and learn to use the "Top" button in the top _right_ corner of those pages.

<comment><USER12> It's not a shake effect, but a scroll effect (jQ scroll-to plug-in). The appearance of shake occurs because the scroll rate is higher than your browser can render smoothly.

The site uses a paginated, single-page model with sections styled with significant design differences for each "page". When clicking a link (they're not actually links [boooo!]), a JS scroll event is triggered. Some relatively straight-forward tweaks could fix this.

The author uses span tags to wrap elements that act like links. A far more appropriate markup would use an anchor tag with a fragment identifier (#fragment-id). The span tags that are currently in use use class names to identify the "location" of the target. This is, again, poor form. A URL is the tool for specifying location, and URLs are linked using the anchor tag.

HTML Excerpt 1:

 Text Scope
Compare text and source code.

Change to:

 Text Scope
Compare text and source code.

JS Excerpt 1:

$(".scroll_to_text").click(function() {$.scrollTo($("#text").position().top-40, 300)});

Change to:

$("#text").click(function(event) {$.scrollTo($("body").position().top, 300);event.preventDefault();});

I'm a novice HTML/Javascript guy at best, so the code above may not function correctly in production, but I'm certain that the principle is appropriate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Amazing website design, love the attention to design that quality mac apps get in comparison to windows ones.

<comment><USER14> Beyond Compare 3 -- which I'm a _really_ happy user of -- seems to be much more powerful. For example, it can actually merge files. And there's clearly been a ton of attention paid to its design.

<comment><USER15> Beyond Compare is amazing. The only app I miss from Windows. If you are on Windows, and haven't used it, you are missing out.

<comment><USER16> Beyond compare if fantastic. If you miss it that much then you can run it nicely under Wine/Darwine/Crossover etc. I've been using Deltawalker on the Mac which is nice if a little brittle sometimes. It sucks hugely for FTP/SFTP compares though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's just for text files, but opendiff is a pretty nice GUI diff that gets quietly installed as part of the Developer Tools package on OS X:

<http://data.agaric.com/node/1101>

</comment><comment><USER18> It's a beautiful application, the one thing it does that Emacs can't is the binary image diffing - a cool feature! If I were a designer I would buy that in a heart beat...

</comment><comment><USER19> I use Araxis Merge. It's expensive but it's hands-down, the best merge / diff utility I've ever used. All the rest look and feel like toys in comparison.

<comment><USER20> I use Araxis as well. Cross platform too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Seems nice. Although, just makes me wish Beyond Compare was available on the Mac as a native app.

<comment><USER22> +1

I tested a lot of compare utilities for Mac and finally settled on running a virtual box with Windows on it so I can run BeyondCompare. This app looks promising, though. For me, a killer missing feature is the folder compare view.

<comment><USER21> Yeah the only thing that found that is close for Mac is Changes - <http://connectedflow.com/changes/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Expensive. Is it really that much better than Apple's FileMerge?

</comment><comment><USER23> these are from the same guys that made Versions (<http://www.versionsapp.com>), the subversion app for mac

<comment><USER24> Yes, the Subversion app that _still_ doesn't provide a merge capability despite users' requests for it year after year.

Kaleidoscope does look beautiful (not unlike Versions), but given Sofa's track record I wouldn't hold out much hope for support after the initial release.

<comment><USER9> I switched to Cornerstone. Not that I use SVN that much anymore .. but some clients still do. Cornerstone is much more pragmatic about features. Like drag and drop simply works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does anybody remember the original Kalediscope for Macs. It was awesome for a different look other than Mac OS defaults. I suppose it went away with the classic OS.

<comment><USER26> Yeah that was really cool :)

I vividly remember the Scherzo theme; who could erase that memory? ;)

We emailed Greg and Arlo (authors of the classic Kaleidoscope) to see if they were cool with us repurposing the name and they were, you'll find their names in our app's About window.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> And it even comes with a command-line tool...amazing.

I really like seeing developers put in this kind of effort. Maybe Apple will choose to package it with a future version of Xcode. :)

</comment><comment><USER28> The website design is so beautiful and visually striking that even if I don't have a strong need for Kaleidoscope, it really makes me want to try it.

</comment><comment><USER29> It actually won't work for me at all. `git difftool` does not exist anywhere, and I can't even pipe a normal diff to it like `git diff HEAD | ksdiff`

<comment><USER30> I've been using `git difftool` and `ksdiff` for more than half a year now and it works perfectly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I absolutely love the use of the scroll effect. It feels very smooth and natural (Chrome).

</comment><comment><USER32> Crashes on startup for me - hopefully they'll get the stack trace I sent.

</comment><comment><USER33> Why did DynDNS say this was a phishing website?

<comment><USER34> Yep. We had the same problem. I had to use a different Internet connection to download it.

(I assumed it's not actually a phishing website based on the comments posted here by users I respect.)</comment></comment>


What are all of Amazon's web services and what do they do? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/What-are-all-of-Amazons-web-services-and-what-do-they-do

<comment><USER2> This question sounds like crowdsourcing your research rather than doing the legwork up front, saying "Here's what I found:" and asking if there have been any gaps. It's the kind of question one might pay a virtual assistant in a developing country to answer for you, only people seem to be willing to do someone else's gruntwork for free.

<comment><USER3> It's especially lazy when Amazon has already compiled a list: <http://aws.amazon.com/products/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had heard of all of those except for HPC - which I'd probably never use anyway. But I bet if you showed this list to a 'normal' person they'd be shocked to discover that Amazon does more than sell books. As we found out last week, Amazon is really becoming an 'essential service' for the internet, much like electricity. If you want to do a fun thought experiment, think about what would happen if Amazon went bankrupt and shut everything down tomorrow, with no notice (unlikely but it could happen)...

<comment><USER5> Amazon Marketplace sellers would be upset, and EBS/S3 users who didn't back up data outside the cloud would have some work ahead of them. Aside from that, it wouldn't be doomsday for very many people. Amazon's not really an exclusive provider of anything they do. Consumers will buy from another store, AWS users will spin up VPS instances somewhere else, CDN users can go back to Akamai, Payments users will swap the button for PayPal or Google Checkout instead, etc.

<comment><USER6> By that definition, it seems like no services are critical online, as there is always _some_ alternative. The reality is that doing all the changes you mentioned could literally cost some companies many months or even years of time.

<comment><USER5> I find that unlikely. AWS hasn't been a major provider for that long. They weren't PCIDSS certified until just 5 months ago, so no big companies were even doing ecommerce independently on their platform yet.

If it took a year to build your service on AWS products, it shouldn't take years to do it again with another provider now that you've done it before. A server is a server, whatever you've programmed to run on those virtual servers will run on identical virtual servers at another company. It's only the parts of your system that interact with Amazon's APIs, and your human systems/policies, that have to be reworked.

And if you're big enough that your systems take years to build, you have a disaster plan already. If Amazon blinked out of existence tomorrow, Netflix wouldn't be standing there with _no idea_ what they'd do to get back online.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was about to agree with everyone about this being a lazy question, but now I feel like an idiot because I never knew Amazon offered "AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)" (<http://aws.amazon.com/iam/>), which is a godsend.

What's a shame is that right now there isn't a web-based GUI for this service yet, and the boto Python module's IAM support is currently undocumented, but at least the code is there. A bit of code reading to get it up and running.

<comment><USER8> AWS Management Console support for AWS IAM: [http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/05/identity-and-access- manag...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/05/identity-and-access-management- console-support.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Do Marketplace Web Services not count? <https://developer.amazonservices.com/>

<comment><USER10> Maybe also the Product Advertising API: [https://affiliate- program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/deta...](https://affiliate- program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/detail/main.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great list!</comment>


Ask HN: Name my e-commerce startup - B-Scan

HNers, Today is very hard with domain names :) I searched for hundreds of variations without success. So I will be grateful if you could help.
About startup: In short - SaaS e-commerce platform. Mix between Shopify, Chargify (great names!) and PayPal with social and mobile components.
Domain name wishes: short & cute (like those 2 above). Requirement for domain: .com extension, domain is available or cheap :)
Thanks, B-Scan <comment><AUTHOR> I named my company on the first day that I sat down to write an outline of the business plan. Having written my thoughts about what the business would be in Microsoft Word, I had to save the file to my desktop and name it. I gave no thought of the business name, I just named the doc with the first thing that came to me - a working title that I intended to change later. But the name never changed because it was unique and top of mind. It stuck.

Try tapping into a stream of consciousness (meaning, don't over think things) and write a list of words. Or, ask some relative who is not tech savvy to tell you the first words that come to their mind (my mom is good for this).

Lastly, in my second startup (circa 1999), we hired a naming consultant for big $$ and the one take away was: Brand names pretty much don't matter. Nike may have sounded dumb the first time people heard it, but folks remembered it AFTER they tried their shoes. Intel sounds like a spy organization. Microsoft sounds like something for scientists, yet it is a consumer brand now. The bottom line: Don't freak out to much on the name.

<comment> B-Scan I made something like that also, but the problem is my name is local. I have e-commerce.ccTLD/e-store.ccTLD meaning in my language. That is great, but I looking at global name for my biz.

I like the bottom line, the product and all around it (sales, marketing) is what is important.

Thanks, B-Scan

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Try using <http://impossibility.org/> \- a domain name generator.

It was posted on HN a few weeks ago. There's some surprisingly good domains available from it.

<comment> B-Scan Tnx. Will do. That + Wordoid looks promising!

<comment><USER2> You're welcome. Best of luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> B-Scan UPDATE:

Thank you all for your comments. I tried all the methods/services.

Biggest luck I had with Wordoid. After few thousands of variations I came with 50 .com names.

When I tried they real availability it was about 30 free names. I guess that Wordoid just pings domains or have some long cache for whois. However, in sign of appreciation I used affiliate link.

So final name is: shopeful.com. I hope that "e" in the middle will be ok.

<comment><USER3> I prefer shopinella (or shoppinella) - or shopinelli

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Have you tried <http://wordoid.com>?

<comment> B-Scan I didn't. Nice find. Thank you. Will try something.

<comment><USER4> Let us know when you decide on something. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Having searched for mine (zookshop.com) for weeks, I sincerely wish you good luck.

Also, you will notice at some point that 99% of \d{1,4}shop.com is registered in China and parked. What's up with that?

<comment> B-Scan Yeah, I already saw many parked domains like that :(

Thx. Btw ZookShop looks nice!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a little more complex but more powerful. <http://lingzini.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> transactt.com pockettrip.com cashmatt.com wellwallet.com popwol.com (popular wallet) dolwol.com groovepay.com stashfit.com traypay.com cashelli.com cashpoke.com paypoke.com cashspoke.com pocketpoke.com wolstreet.com

<comment> B-Scan Thank you for concrete names! It's appreciated. My favs from here are groovepay.com and cashelli.com. But main focus of my startup are shops (sorry, you couldn't know that).</comment></comment>


A newly updated index ranks English proficiency around the world - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/12/04/where-are-the-worlds-best-english-speakers <comment><USER3> Highlights and comments:

> These results are not comprehensive, however. Nor are they representative. > EF's index is based on the results of a free online test taken by 2.3m > volunteers in 100 countries. Only people with an internet connection and > time and willingness to take a test are included in the sample...

I almost stopped reading at this point.

> Such biases aside, the EF's index produces results that are interesting...

I was taught that in scientific research one should never claim that her/his own research is interesting, not least because it's something that's up to the audience to decide.

> ... interesting, if not entirely scientific.

At least they are honest about it not being entirely scientific.

> This correlates with another factor: EF repeatedly finds that English skills > are highly correlated with connections and openness to the rest of the > world.

Openness...? By what measure?

Edit: typo.

<comment><USER4> I would take "openness", as typed in an Economist article, to mean something like "[a country/government that] does not snuff out opinions contrary to that of the government, sometimes by disappearing, sending to concentration camps, and/or murdering contrarians". Or something like that.

Also, I wish people would stop doing such mental gymnastics just to complain - your comment is effectively attempting to amplify the shortcomings of the study _that are pointed out in the article you are quoting_ by then quoting them and adding slightly snarky commentary. Why? The author does a fine job framing what the study actually accomplishes, in their opinion, and then assessing its utility.

On that same note, The Economist article is a commentary on the study and not written by the authors of the actual study. So when The Economist says the results are "interesting" that is not Education First (the company behind the study) claiming their own results are interesting... it is an audience member doing so. Please be accurate if you are going to nitpick so aggressively.

The fact is the article does provide interesting commentary on the outcome of a vast and interesting survey while clearly acknowledging the interesting issues with the data.

<comment><USER3> > On that same note, The Economist article is a commentary on the study and > not written by the authors of the actual study.

You are right, I completely missed that point when I commented and that is now an embarrassing mistake that I can only learn from and remind me to be more accurate in the future.

> Also, I wish people would stop doing such mental gymnastics just to complain > - your comment is effectively attempting to amplify the shortcomings of the > study that are pointed out in the article you are quoting by then quoting > them and adding slightly snarky commentary.

I wasn't "attempting" to amplify those shortcomings, I was indeed amplifying those shortcomings.

Once you have acknowledged that there isn't sufficient evidence to make any solid conclusions then the only logical next step is to get more evidence to support or refute your hypothesis instead of coming up with "interesting" commentary.

It's not like the article is asking for help to get evidence to substantiate the study, or tries to give the reader any valuable, fact-based insights. So the fact that the author acknowledges that the study is "not entirely scientific" in multiple paragraphs, then proceed to use a misleading title and come up with conjectures to make the study seem more interesting/increase its value is a huge red flag to me.

Edit: typo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Look how Europe corresponds with this map of which countries dub foreign language TV shows and Movies versus which ones use subtitles.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/59zyal/map_of_europ...](https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/59zyal/map_of_european_countries_who_are_dubbing_foreign/)

<comment><USER6> Correlation for sure. Causation? Maybe in part. The cost of dubbing is very much higher that subtitling. So dubbing was only used when the target market was large enough. Larger language groups are more robust against cultural imperialism due to a more significant internal cultural market. Even science, which has universaly adopted English in Europe, was still written in French and German in their respective countries right up to the 1980s.

<comment><USER7> Is the term cultural imperialism even appropriate here? Cultural adoption might be less loaded.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Article is based off [https://www.ef.com/__/~/media/centralefcom/epi/downloads/ful...](https://www.ef.com/__/~/media/centralefcom/epi/downloads/full- reports/v9/ef-epi-2019-english.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> I am surprised to find Germany that high in the rank. Outside of large international cities, and particularly in former DDR lands in my experience it is not that good.

Among my neighbours, in an area of Eastern Berlin, far from gentrified places only 1-2 out of 10 adults between 30 and 50 years old can speak English fluently, half can somehow communicate.

<comment><USER10> My experience as well. I visited a client in Berlin this summer. Pretty much everyone at work spoke perfect English and there were even workplace conversations in English between German native speakers, for the benefit of their international coworkers. All the usual touristy places in West Berlin were pretty much the same.

I stayed in Pankow though, which is a residential area of East Berlin, and I literally wasn't able to communicate a word in English. There wasn't much sympathy or patience to be seen when I was trying to speak German either, only annoyance. Which surprised me somehow - I remember living in Denmark people were both supportive and amused when I attempted to communicate in their language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting that countries where English is an official language scores lower than countries where it isn't, like Singapore, Malaysia, and South Africa.

The full report had a list of cities though, where Kuala Lumpur scored higher than Malaysia, so that's an interesting phenomenon how it's a city thing rather than a country thing.

<comment><USER12> As others have mentioned, English is an official language in Singapore and South Africa.

As for Malaysia, English is not an "official language" however it is an official language in one state, and it is still an important language in government - particularly in the judiciary, where many cases are still conducted and judgements written in English. More importantly, it's the primary language in most larger private-sector businesses particularly in cities like KL where Malay is less dominant.

\---

edit: unless we're interpreting you wrong, and you mean that you're surprised that Northern Europeans do better than some Commonwealth countries - <USER2> the obvious massive bias issues with this "study" as a whole, I'd remember that Europe has higher quality education in general than the poorer Commonwealth countries.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, sorry, I should have flipped the is and isn't so the examples followed the right one...

And you're probably right that the bias in the study skews the results.

Another possible angle is how you measure "correct" English. American English and British English are technically two separate languages with separate rules. Should you measure the correctness of a Singaporean against either of those? Or should you measure them against some Singaporean English standard instead?

<comment><USER12> FWIW, the Singaporean government actively tries to encourage "Good English" rather than Singlish, much to the dismay of many.

The Malaysian government doesn't do quite the same type of attempts at social engineering as the Singaporeans, so you don't see quite as many official denunciations of Manglish.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Since this is based off tests does it stipulate whether there is a diffrence in reading, listening and writing comprehension vs ability to speak? There are many countries where written English is exceptional, but when it comes to conversation, it's lacking.

</comment><comment><USER14> Amusing German anecdote: my German son went from German school in California (English was taught by native-speaking, non-german-speaking teachers with a California teaching license, and of course spoken outside school) to Germany (English was taught by a native English speaker who spoke no German (moved with her husband to Germany)). What subjects was he behind in when he arrived? English.

Coincidentally his English teacher his last year in California and when he got to Germany were both Australian.

All that being said, outside big cities I haven't really encountered anyone in Germany with strong English.

<comment><USER15> There are German schools in the US?

<comment><USER14> Sure, and not all are subsidized by the German government. Just as there are French, Japanese, even Swedish schools in various countries all over the world. There are "international" (English as language of instruction, sometimes foreign funded) schools and universities around the world too.

Some are used by business people moved over for a couple of years concerned that their kids won't be able to pass the exams etc if they get out of the "home" system (though I figure if you're only visiting for a couple of years why not sample the local system..though in California that's pretty dire). The other reason is the opposite: the kids are integrated to be able to do things like little league or whatever but need to get some "home" education so they'll be able to move back.

If you live in Palo Alto there are even _two_ German ones close by: one just across the north border in Menlo Park and one immediately south in Mountain View.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've always intuitively felt that the Dutch were the best non-native English speakers out there, it's nice to see this confirmed with data.

Not surprisingly the areas with native Germanic languages do the best in this survey.

<comment><USER17> A long time ago, before Analogue Terrestrial TV (OTA) was replaced by Digital broadcasts in the UK, I was visiting a friend in Amsterdam. I was surprised to discover that she was watching BBC television. The signal was strong enough to be received in Amsterdam, and I often wonder if this is why the Dutch are historically better at English because they watched so many British TV shows.

<comment><USER6> In Belgium, a country that got an early lead in cable coverage, there were antennas at the North Coast specifically placed for receiving the BBC broadcasts and feeding it into the analog cable system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The variance is non-neglectable. In China, for example, English proficiency is WAY higher in huge cities (say, Shanghai) than in the countryside!

</comment><comment><USER19> Yeah right. I was in Beijing last week, how in the world is China ranked alongside India in terms of English proficiency? I could hardly find anyone even at the Beijing Capital airport to speak a coherent English sentence, let alone grammatically correct.

</comment><comment><USER20> What is up with the gray countries? I spent 2 weeks in Iceland and everyone I met was absolutely fluent in English (strangely they all sounded like Americans - I expected them to have English accents for some reason). It should be marked as high or higher.

<comment><USER21> Gray appears to be countries which primarily speak English (e.g. US, UK) and countries that weren't able to get data (e.g. North Korea)

<comment><USER22> Really weird choice of colors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> In Europe DACH and Scandinavia are understandable, Portugal and Poland are outliers (here we are serving in your low cost centers).

</comment><comment><USER24> Yes! We Dutch are the bestest in English!</comment>


Ban programmers not functions (about memcpy_s) [2009] - <AUTHOR> http://sigttou.com/ban-programmers-not-functions

<comment><USER2> When I first learned C one of the things that a lot of professors hammered into me was that C doesn't care.

Writing good C meant really understand what was going on underneath. All the functions were meant to be powerful. You want to shoot yourself in the foot? C lets you do that.

Banning functions? To me that sounds ridiculous. That is why you wrap functions with another layer of abstraction. If you want a garbage collector then you should probably wrap your malloc calls. Same idea.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if it says something about MS's corporate culture, particularly putting process over people.</comment>


Water hammer - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_hammer

<comment><USER2> This is why your pipes go bang in the walls!

When you're working with and/or designing these systems all of this is expected. In any modern country there's literally hundreds of regulations that must be followed for steam plants and other systems of the like that prevent this. The really interesting thing is because we've been using these types of "solutions" long before electronics, there are mandated multiple mechanical safety mechanisms to prevent catastrophic failure in them.

The sad fact is that this is really less of a "black hat" hack and almost always directly related to someone failing to follow safety regulations either in design or implementation. The cost of mandated safety devices seem to be more than the cost for bribes to the inspectors.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Discovered via [https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-15/materials/us-15-Larsen-R...](https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-15/materials/us-15-Larsen- Remote-Physical-Damage-101-Bread-And-Butter-Attacks.pdf)</comment>


Brexit – Facts of Life and Death - <AUTHOR> http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/10/facts-of-life-and-death.html <comment><USER2> This is perhaps the stupidest and most hysterical thing I've ever read on Stross's blog. I don't think I need to explain why Brexit is not going to lead to the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Potato_Failure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Potato_Failure) and a million deaths from starvation.</comment>


CIA bought an encryption company and used it to spy on clients and countries - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/cia-secretly-bought-encryption-company-crypto-ag-spy-countries-report-2020-2 <comment><USER2> Original Washington Post article discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22297963](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22297963)

</comment><comment><USER3> The same could happen with Threema. As much as I like and want to trust Threema, but the story could be repeated, even if I think, that it is not used by governments or military large-scale.

Essentially every closed source crypto application isn't trustworthy. Same is true for operating systems.

<comment><USER4> Exactly my first thought. I like Threema and one of the reasons I was an early adopter is that the founder worked on m0n0wall before, an OSS firewall that I used for a long time, in contrast to it being just some guy I never heard of. It made me accept the closed source nature. Another big factor was that I indeed consider Switzerland to be a more trustworthy/neutral party in general when it comes to global politics, but this obviously doesn't have to apply to every single individual in that country.

<comment> _-___________-_ Why use Threema when there are alternatives that are not closed-source? You had to begin to use Threema, which presumably carries the same difficulty as beginning to use something which isn't as questionable.

<comment><USER5> A big plus for me was the option of using it without mapping the user account to a phone number, something that e.g. Signal doesn't allow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The free world needs to realise that no matter what systems of enormous value to the world we build, others will attempt to usurp that power for their own needs.

It happens with all technology. The reason is, all technology can be weaponised.

Some simple facts .. The institutions covered by Crypto AG's technology products, were attempting to maintain their own secrecy. They were, thus, usurped by their own technology - and the CIA merely exploited this fact.

This case with the CIA directly addresses the lynchpin in the military- industrial-surveillance states' armour - the ability to keep secrets.

From a certain perspective, one might say that .. the Vaticans .. inability to keep secrets is a blessing and a curse. This is also true of many of the other clients. Would that we had access to all the things the CIA knows, as a world people, mmm..

These groups weaponised their own technology, against themselves, by using it to keep secrets. It also happens to be the spooks' biggest weakness too: the light of truth melts any and all justification for these peoples existence, and it whither them.

Let us try a thought experiment: If the Vatican applied its vast resources to providing a "Peoples Internet" a la Starlink, instead of using its billions to hide heinous secrets, would the technology of communication have been so easily weaponised?

All secrets are weapons, because you cannot have a secret without technology - and all technology can be weaponised.

So this is a foot-bullet on the part of Crypto AG, the Vatican et al., and a big win for the CIA - because it means these institutions will now be making _more_ commitment, alas not less - to the keeping of secrets.

</comment><comment> jo-m A lot of this has been known for 25 years: [https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-9088423.html](https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-9088423.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Is this why US export encryption had to be 40 bits? To push countries to a vendor that was compromised?

</comment><comment><USER8> Is the leak coming from wikileaks? I've heard Assange will soon go to trial. I was still wondering about that "dead's man switch", although I'm not sure it will activate if he get convicted.

<comment> _-___________-_ I read about this quite a while ago, and while it's a revelation, it doesn't seem big enough to be Assange's dead man's switch. Most people are just going to shrug at this.

<comment><USER6> I have heard it from the crypto cognoscenti circles I know, that this is the calm before the storm and that there will be many, many more leaks to come during the actual trial period.

The idea is to point out to the world that Julian isn't the only leaker.

This terrifies the spook establishment, and they are therefore preparing for their own campaign of controlled releases, designed to dull the general publics' appetite for the subject.

I mean, this is all conjecture and hearsay, but it sure is an interesting time to be watching the show. I do believe we are seeing a cyberwar, like legitimately, underneath all the battle reports ..</comment></comment></comment>


Empire Files: NSA Whistleblower: Government Collecting Everything You Do - <AUTHOR> http://mediaroots.org/empire-files-nsa-whistleblower-government-collecting-everything-you-do/ <comment><USER2> NISS is probably NIST.

> But what about people who want to protect their privacy?

> BB: Then you invent your own encryption. And don't pass it through [NISS?] > because then the NSA will have it. So, you don't use anything publicly > because they've already got that.

> AM: The encryption methodologies that are available now – the NSA was > involved in constructing themselves.

> BB: They also know the algorithms, all of them, they have the software for > it. Because it has to run through NISS to do testing. They do the testing > and then they approve it for public use.

> So, I say, 'hey, if you're talking to your little community, make your own > encryption.' You're not doing this publicly, we're just doing it amongst > ourselves. That would cause them a real problem.

So Bill Binney's recommendation is not to publish your crypto? Security by obscurity? You have to be pretty good at it though.

South African underground did exactly that not to get caught.

</comment><comment> Pick-A-Hill2019 (Quote from article - Bill Binney ex-technical director of the NSA) "That's the point. This is a totalitarian based slide. This is where we're going. I think they've done it by basically generating fear in the population. The fear that something's going to happen unless they do this. When in fact we knew that was a fraud from the beginning. You don't have to give up any privacy to have security."</comment>