A woman's brain stimulator stopped working after her home struck by lightning - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/03/health/lightning-brain-implants.html <comment><USER2> I used to design these devices (deep brain stimulators).

As part of the design process for every FDA-regulated product, you are obliged to perform a risk analysis to judge the severity and probability of risks to a patient using your product.

One of the risks was "Exposed to a strong current that could destroy/disable the onboard electronics". The design mitigation was a fail safe shutdown.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like it worked well:

"Fortunately, when he and his colleagues checked the woman's implant, they found that it had not been damaged. A safety function designed by the manufacturer had taken its cue from the sudden current running through the house and caused the device to switch itself off, pre-empting any interference from the lightning. The programming was intact; the battery still had plenty of charge.

When they fired up the device, it worked perfectly, none the worse for the storm."

<comment><USER4> Seems like bad UX and/or user instruction, really; they should presumably have the device warn of this happening, and tell end users how to turn it back on. For a critical health device like this, having to visit the doctor to be told "have you tried turning it on and off again" doesn't seem ideal. What if it had been a pacemaker or something?

<comment><USER5> > they should presumably have the device warn of this happening

How? Shock your brain? It's an implant.

> What if it had been a pacemaker or something?

The same question stands. How do you make the device provide reasonable feedback? Make your heart skip a few beats? How exactly is a pacemaker going to warn a user about an error condition?

Given the circumstances, and the rarity of the error case, it sounds like the device switching itself off is the best course of action.

<comment><USER4> There's an external charger, per the article; it could presumably feed back to that when charging.

<comment><USER5> If the implant is shut off for safety reasons related to electrical issues, the last thing I'd want interacting with it in any way is the charger. Hell, we can't even get Macbooks that don't fry USB devices.

<comment><USER6> > _Hell, we can 't even get Macbooks that don't fry USB devices._

Not sure why you'd assume the mainboard and peripheral circuit design on MacBooks would be particularly good, they seem to make the same mistakes for years on end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The title is incorrect it seems. The stimulator detected a fault condition, and turned off. This is what it was designed to do, it was working just fine. it really ought to be something more like:

> A woman's brain stimulator turned off after her home was struck by > lightning.

</comment><comment><USER7> can the title be changed to implant?

I first read it as brain simulator, and was expecting a eulogy for her dead ai

<comment><USER8> When I read the title, I was expecting it to be a tongue-in-cheek futurist reference to a television.

<comment><USER9> I read it as "woman's brain simulator". I thought this was some crass misogynist onion article.

Either "a simulator of a woman's mind stopped working after lightning struck and blah blah shoes or something."

Or a "woman who had a simulator for a brain was struck by lightning and now something something shoes something."

The title really should be changed to implant. Even without misreading the word the title isn't great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > A safety function designed by the manufacturer had taken its cue from the > sudden current running through the house and caused the device to switch > itself off

The way this is worded seems as if the device knows what current runs through the _house_ wiring, through sensors in the house communicating with the device. Is that the case? Or do they simply mean the electromagnetic field of the lightning caused current in the implant?

<comment><USER11> The Medtronic device is designed to shut off if it thinks it is delivering enough current to go past a certain charge density in brain tissue (calculated/assumed)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Usually this happens when someone gets too close to a refrigerator; once in a Prius.

That the device survived a lightning strike is pretty awesome. I would MRI her head to make sure that there was no unintended ablation from the extra current through the implanted electrodes, however.

*edit - I guess she was not struck by lightning, but her house was.

<comment><USER12> An MRI with any metal effected by strong magnets in your body can be deadly. The least of your worries would be tearing the implant out through your skin. My lung doctor saved me from that when I was brought in unconscious in an emergency. My wife tells me he went down the hall at a full run... I have an ICD implanted.

<comment><USER13> I always assumed they run MRI patients through a metal detector first, seems like a sensible precaution to me.

<comment><USER14> They do, at least the one time I was in one (which was fMRI for a research study.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The nightmare scenario version of this is Michael Chrichton's _The Terminal Man_ (1972)

<comment><USER16> If I remember the book correctly, the device didn't malfunction, but was positively reinforcing the brain to cause more seizures by stimulating pleasure producing areas while disrupting the seizure.

<comment><USER15> Yes — a different and more elaborate scenario, really. I suppose I was just thinking of ways machines embedded in your brain can go wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> TFA is not about Hitachi Magic Wand personal massager :(</comment>


Why is the microbiome important in some animals but not others? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-is-the-microbiome-important-in-some-animals-but-not-others-20200414/ <comment><USER2> Since the headline is somewhat click-baity, the answer to "here's what it tells us":

Caterpillars, dragonflies, certain ants and other animals provide a way to investigate the potential disadvantages of long-lasting symbiotic relationships with live-in microbes; such disadvantages tend to be difficult to measure and test.

A microbiome might theoretically enable the caterpillars to manufacture additional important nutrients or go after more nutrient-dense vegetation, but the insects can make up for quality with quantity.

<comment><USER3> I've replaced the article title with the HTML doc title. Maybe that's less baity, although it doesn't answer the question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Quanta seems to have a particularly bad habit of implying a conclusion in the title and then not really getting to said conclusion in the article.

<comment><USER5> I can't remember the last time i saw a Quanta article here that wasn't completely vacuous. The headlines are great, though! Maybe they should get the headline writers to write the articles?

<comment><USER6> I liked their recent article on the Langlands program.

[https://www.quantamagazine.org/amazing-math-bridge- extended-...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/amazing-math-bridge-extended- beyond-fermats-last-theorem-20200406/)

<comment><USER5> The illustration there is great. But i think the article is pretty vacuous: it tells you that there is this bridge, but it doesn't explain what the bridge is. Which is understandable, because that's very complicated and deep, and this is a short article for a general audience.

Take the explanation of automorphic forms:

"On the other side of the bridge live objects called automorphic forms, which are akin to highly symmetric colorings of certain tilings. In the cases Wiles studied, the tiling might be something along the lines of M.C. Escher's famous tessellations of a disk with fish or angels and devils that get smaller near the boundary. In the broader Langlands universe, the tiling might instead fill a three-dimensional ball or some other higher-dimensional space."

Having read that, do you now actually know anything about automorphic forms? No. It goes on:

"Namely, for both Diophantine equations and automorphic forms, there's a natural way to generate an infinite sequence of numbers. [...] And for the kind of automorphic form that appears in the Langlands correspondence, you can compute an infinite list of numbers analogous to quantum energy levels."

What on earth does that mean?

This might well be the projection of the truth onto the low-dimensional space of ordinary language, but it ends up being word salad.

<comment><USER6> The idea of automorphic forms as analogous to symmetric colorings of a tesselation that shrinks on the boundary is a way more intuitive description than the mathematical definition of automorphic forms. So yes, I do feel like I know more about them from that definition versus the definition of invariance under subgroup action.

And for the second quote, I took it to mean that the subset of automorphic forms that map to Diophantine equations can be used to generate an infinite sequence that maps to quantum energy levels which I believe means maps to the number of electrons in the orbit of the nucleus (2, 8, 18,...) etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Although there are exceptions to this quote from Quanta, what I concluded is that I should continue eating burgers and steak! "Strictly herbivorous tree- dwelling ants were more likely to have an abundant microbiome, perhaps to make up for their protein-deficient diet; omnivorous and carnivorous ground- dwelling ants consumed more balanced meals and had negligible amounts of bacteria in their gut."

<comment><USER8> So, in case you aren't being facetious,

1\. different species foster different microbiomes, you're better off looking at studies of actual human dietary impact on gut bacteria: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6478664](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6478664)

2\. gut bacteria isn't necessarily bad (but having no gut bacteria _is_ bad)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> TLDR Scientists still don't understand exactly what gut microbiome do for animals and insects and why some are a lot more diverse than others.

<comment><USER10> Super TL;DR: We don't know yet

</comment></comment><comment> awinter-py shield bugs have an entire organ, distinct from the gut, that hosts bacteria which help them attack plants

[https://aem.asm.org/content/78/8/2648](https://aem.asm.org/content/78/8/2648)</comment>


No Support VPS Hosting - <AUTHOR> http://www.nosupportvpshosting.com/ <comment><USER2> I expect the cpu to be oversold as hell at that price... Also it's super old Xeon 5620 with openvz.

</comment><comment><USER3> I believe that if your main selling/advertising point is "absolute no support unmanaged vps hosting", your pricing should be more agressive, specially compared to battle proven competitors like Digital Ocean and specially Linode.

I have Linode and for about 20 bucks I can get a straight 4GBs of ram and almost the same amount of disk space (80GBs vs your 100GBs). with much more monthly network transfer allowance.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Oh whoops, should have mentioned I am and have never been affiliated with this service. I only posted this because I was a huge fan of [http://www.nosupportlinuxhosting.com/](http://www.nosupportlinuxhosting.com/), and I assumed the hn audience would respond more to the VPS offering. I think they may have changed a bit over the years, seems like the "no support = dirt cheap" may not be true anymore.

</comment><comment><USER4> _Dedicated_ servers for cheaper: [https://www.kimsufi.com](https://www.kimsufi.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm confused how the 2 vcore/13€ is directly comparable to 8/$15. But I'm also not sure if the site I posted oversells the cpu cores since it doesn't specifically say so.

<comment><USER5> Kimsufi doesn't sell virtual cores, it sells CPUs and not only CPUs but specific CPUs specified upfront.

"8 CPU" as advertised by the VPS host could mean literally anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Choices for OS: Ubuntu 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.04, 15.10, 16.04, Fedora 15, Debian 8.

If you love to play with fire, host with them.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you want cheap an good VPS go to [https://www.netcup.eu/](https://www.netcup.eu/). They even have cheap Root- Server.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is a terrible offer, very expensive for what you get.

</comment><comment> shaki-dora No SSL? That reeks of competence.

They also have a "submit ticket" page, apparently. So the "no support" doesn't even mean "no support".

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow, the VPS are hosted on "Server Grade Hardware", that's some great marketing.

</comment><comment><USER9> So far I have not been able to find a better offer than contabo.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, their offers look much better, thank you! I only posted this site because these guys used to have a lot of funny marketing stuff around the "no support". Their other site nosupportlinuxhosting.com still has a lot of it though.

Here's the link if anyone doesn't want to copy paste yours: [https://contabo.com/?show=vps](https://contabo.com/?show=vps)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What does the "no support" part mean?

<comment><USER11> That they don't offer a support service that answers your question on how to use FTP to upload your Joomla website.

In other words: they expect you to figure out how to fix a software related issue on your server.

<comment><USER8> That kind of support isn't offered by any VPS provider that's unmanaged. They don't call it "No Support", it's unmanaged.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Blatant ad, and not a very good one at that.

</comment><comment><USER13> lol @ non over sold memory. no one ever over sells memory, it's always CPU and network that gets over sold.</comment>


Tech firms seek to frustrate internet history log law - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-38068078 <comment><USER3> The logical end point, if you think it through, is scary for technology. There will be a battle for a time where legislators play cat and mouse with technology and privacy companies. But as each new hole appears, they'll invent new laws to close them off. This wouldn't be so bad except for the problem that encryption is math and short of making math illegal there will always be a hole. Factor in steganography and it just gets worse.

But this doesn't mean that technology wins. Rather, it makes the loss even worse, because it means the laws will ultimately have to be defined in reverse - rather than outlawing encryption, they will have to outlaw _inability to decrypt_. That is, it will be the end user's responsibility to ensure that authorities can decode data you transmit. Transmission of undecryptable data will be a crime, in and of itself.

Apart from the obvious dystopian consequences, this will impact progress in technology tremendously - suddenly it won't be possible to just invent a new data format or protocol any more. Doing so will put you at extreme risk of being interpreted as sending unauthorised encrypted data. So data formats will have to be registered - to send data in a new format you will first have to register a codec with the government and probably yourself have to be licensed. This will have a severe chilling effect on innovation. Software development, already dominated by tech behemoths, will become completely out of reach of small development teams simply because the regulatory burden is so high.

It's a depressing picture but given the trends of late I don't really see it going any other way. Only some extreme swing back towards individual rights over rights of the state will change its direction. But terrorism seems to have set in as a permanent tool for governments to grind away at individual rights.

<comment><USER4> The US has at least one mechanism against that: the first amendment. Content and format are both matters of speech, so the choice of format and the decision to broadcast noise as a statement are both protected.

I expect that will come under attack, but it's a very fundamental part of US law used unambiguously. So we might also see civil war 2 before they get that legally changed.

<comment><USER5> > the first amendment

It took great effort to get crypto even recognized under the first amendment -- the USGov kept insisting that source code was not speech. In the 1990s it was against the law to let foreign nationals have access to the source code to DES. If you had folks from overseas in your organization, technically you couldn't let them see the source for crypto in your product (e.g., you had to wall off pieces of your repositories, and many companies did).

We could see a return to this. Don't take it for granted.

<comment><USER6> This can be partially fixed by printing the code on a tshirt.

[https://www.wired.com/2000/08/court-to-address-decss-t- shirt...](https://www.wired.com/2000/08/court-to-address-decss-t-shirt/)

<comment><USER5> Or by printing it in a book. There's LOTS of reluctance to ban actual, physical books in the US (and plenty of reasons that any ban would be struck down).

That said, up to the mid 90s it was theoretically against the law to show a foreign national a printed-out copy of DES. Crazy. I think it was published in magazines . . .

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "To ensure they do not succeed, we do not comment publicly on the methods or capabilities available to the security and intelligence agencies."

Oh but you don't need to, because it's obvious. All my encrypted traffic to my overseas based VPN will be logged (legal). Then you'll demand my keys so that you can decrypt it. If I don't or can't comply then I will be - by definition - a criminal and potentially a terror suspect.

Which is why 'just use a VPN' is not really a satisfactory response to this kind of legislative landscape. Just doing so paints a target on you.

Which is not to say I don't appreciate the VPN providers stepping up, the more VPN users there are the more expensive it is to persecute them individually.

<comment><USER8> > All my encrypted traffic to my overseas based VPN will be logged (legal). > Then you'll demand my keys so that you can decrypt it.

If the VPN connection uses ephemeral keys (IIRC, at least IPSEC, SSH, and TLS 1.3 always use ephemeral keys, while older TLS uses them when possible), by then it's too late: the keys are gone.

<comment><USER9> You can imagine someone being locked up for this though. If you are required by law to decrypt your data, and you chose technology that does not allow this, then that's on you. To use an analogy, if you choose to ride a bike that doesn't have lights, and then get pulled over for riding without lights, the lack of lights is not a defense because you were required to have them in order to be on the road at night.

<comment><USER10> I can see one of those situations where you get held indefinitely because they obviously cannot charge you but don't want to let you go to a) prove a point and b) hopefully let the law "catch up" to this situation.

<comment><USER11> If "they" are going to hold you indefinitely and contramand the rule of law then it doesn't matter what the law says.

IIRC the UK government was defeated in the UK courts over extending the time a terrorism suspect could be held without charge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is it too late to return 2016? It's clearly defective.

How long until...

"Anexprogrammer was clearly a suspect individual. He used A&A, a UK ISP, widely considered sympathetic to terrorism under the thin guise of blogging about preserving privacy. The ISP has even provided information on how their users may circumvent the law and expressed the opinion it was a bad idea!

It gets steadily worse, Anexprogrammer often used a VPN, from an overseas company who made a feature of logging nothing, another technique widely used by terrorists to evade our beloved leader's protections. He even admitted to viewing online pornography, illegal in the UK, where performers appeared to be actually enjoying themselves.

He was also suspected of being a believer in climate change and is known to have signed a petition against fracking. The 20 year maximum security sentence for illegal circumvention of logging is considered lenient."

May the "one bad actor" that goes in there and gets the entire database please dump the histories of the politicians asap?

<comment><USER13> The MPs themselves are exempted from the IP bill.

(Although it's safe to assume GCHQ is still collecting everything on them.)

<comment><USER12> I should try and act surprised.

Think it's fairly certain plenty of them will end up in Sky's logging anyway. Backbenchers minor enough to be thrown under the bus though.

We need a response a bit more substantive than just joining Liberty or OpenRights.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In fact, it's already possibly (and easy) to obtain the un-anonymized browsing history of millions of people. I was part of a (journalistic) team that got their hands on a free sample from a company that offers "website traffic analytics", and which uses browser extensions as well as mobile apps as their main surveillance tools.

The data set contained the complete browsing history of almost 3 million German Internet users, and except for a few popular sites (like Facebook), no URL cleaning/anonymization was performed at all.

So here we have a single provider that is able to capture the browser traffic of 5 % of the population already, and is ready to disseminate this data to anyone who can pay the price (even giving out months of data for free). As there are dozens more companies that collect data using a variety of ways, it wouldn't be surprising to me if you could stitch these individual data sets together to get the traffic of > 50 % of all Internet users, without having any central point of data collection.

So although the government is a real threat to citizens privacy, unregulated private actors are much more dangerous in my opinion.

<comment><USER15> > So although the government is a real threat to citizens privacy

That's not privacy which is under threat any more. Say you visit a website of random content in January. Website goes out of business, someone else buys the domain and puts flagged content on it in September.

Now... how do you prove you were visiting a different site? Trigger an archive.org call on each and every site I visit? Dig up domain name changes? I've been dealing with DNS for 10+ years and I have no idea how to dig up historical domain owners, especially not with the hide options.

This goes way, way beyond privacy issues.

<comment><USER14> Concerning historical domain data, there are several vendors (e.g. Domaintools) that provide this kind of information, and domain registrar information usually contains the registration date for the domain, so proving it was a different site is possible.

You're absolutely right though that it's highly problematic if we use automated tools to analyze this kind of data, as many people can end up in the wrong category due to either flawed analysis methods or faulty data.

Again I'd say that currently the greater threat comes from private companies that will use this data to build "shady" rating systems which will affect the daily lives of many people, without giving these people a chance to verify or oppose the data being used against them.

<comment><USER15> Never before I protected private companies, but looking at the history if Europe, I fear governments more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The scariest line was this:

"Terrorists and serious criminals will always seek to avoid detection."

The fact that in the public eye they're going to be claiming they are doing this under terrorism, will give a lot of weight with non-technical people.

<comment><USER17> Right. It makes no sense.

"Let's bring in a law that logs everyone not seeking to avoid detection."

Any serious criminal/terrorist will use a VPN, disposable phones with end to end encrypted messaging, or pen and paper.

Any criminal/terrorist that doesn't take these measures shouldn't be a problem to prevent in the firstplace.

<comment><USER18> Yeah the weird thing is, despite being easy to circumvent these sort of measures are often very effective! So long as using a VPN requires any baseline of knowledge, technical skill and effort, I expect 90%+ of criminals won't do it.

I've been nursing a theory for a long time that modern society has an accidental saving grace. And that is, if you're competent, its usually better to just not commit crime. Think about it - any criminal can learn lockpicking today via the internet, but few do. Why? Because if you're capable of investing time and energy into honing a skill, you may as well do something above board. Don't break and enter - become a locksmith instead. Don't manage a team of criminals - become a manager at a company. It pays better. Its less risky. There's more services and social support available. _You won 't go to jail_. You can have friends who aren't criminals.

And because of that the people who are left committing the vast majority of crime do so in part because they're not good at long term planning. Which is something law enforcement takes complete advantage of. So, almost no petty criminals are going to know about VPNs. They aren't going to commit to a monthly subscription to a VPN provider. They won't set up a PP2P tunnel on their phone and laptop. Why? Again because if they knew to do that sort of stuff they could probably hold down a stable job in low level tech support.

Obviously there's exceptions to this, but the bread and butter of law enforcement isn't bank heists. Its someone who's drunk. Its someone who smashed a window and stole some money because they want to get high. Or stole a phone out of someone's hand and ran off with it. Or went out with the boys to beat someone up "who had it coming".

When the (then) Australian minister for communication introduced record keeping laws for ISPs he told people they can bypass it a number of ways. Lots of people were confused by that - but it makes sense. The aim isn't to record data from us, or from our community. They don't care about taxpayers who are gainfully employed. The point is to make it easier to catch that asshole who beat up his girlfriend then bragged about it to his friends on facebook.

And as a result, probably the most annoying thing we can do for law enforcement is introduce apps like Signal and the TOR browser. Stuff that makes it dead simple for _anyone_ to maintain their privacy - you just have to use a different messenger.

( __Edit __: Re-watched the interview where Turnbull described how to bypass the retention bill and he wasn 't as enthusiastic as I remember.)

<comment><USER19> I would argue that the notion of "crime" is typically biased by the observed criminal acts. For example, criminal theft is usually thought to be some form of robbery, including everything from bank robberies to residential break-ins. However, wage theft, consisting of employers illegally withholding wages, is more than 2.5 times larger than all robberies combined [1].

It isn't that smart criminals don't exist. Rather, smart criminals don't fit our mental image of "criminals", which makes it harder to target laws against it.

[1]: [http://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem- for...](http://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-forms-theft- workers/)

<comment><USER20> > Rather, smart criminals don't fit our mental image of "criminals", which > makes it harder to target laws against it

I would argue that it has nothing to do with the laws; they're breaking the same laws as everybody else. It's that our justice system, at least in the US, incentivizes law enforcement to focus on easier prey. Smart criminals will probably defend themselves in court and be more likely to be privy to the tricks that police use. It's much easier for them to just arrest a poor person and threaten to throw them in jail for months behind bail that they can't afford unless they plead guilty to something they obviously didn't do. Most poor people will just take the plea, because they can't afford to miss work and lose their job while they wait for their day in court. NYPD in particular are notorious for this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The problem with these systems is regardless of the efficacy, they are incredibly difficult to dismantle and easy to re-purpose with the stroke of a pen.

And these "tech-savvy" people are _dreaming_ if they think that access to VPN services from the UK will remain legal in the UK, esp. after a naughty person or two is shown to have used one to commission a crime. It won't happen quickly, but #include frog_boiling.h.

<comment><USER22> VPN isn't even that good of a protection anymore when all countries the traffic goes through log it and cooperate.

VPN providers would have to introduce a random delay for their users, otherwise looking at all the exact times along the way gives a pretty good idea who accesses what.

<comment><USER23> Not if your VPN is outside the UK surely?

<comment><USER24> If things like the TPP are signed, doesn't really matter if you're in the UK or one of the signature countries, which is _almost_ all of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The most scary thing for me is that both political left and political right is nowadays for increasing surveillance - and there is no one in opposition.

Except probably for Pirate parties, which are mostly irrelevant.

<comment><USER26> The Liberal Democrats are against surveillance, and are the third biggest party in the UK.

<comment><USER27> The SNP are the third biggest UK party.

<comment><USER28> Or UKIP, if you consider the popular vote (to echo the current US situation)

edit: The Lib Dems are probably the 3rd largest party if you include local council seats

<comment><USER27> Yeah, one and two are obviously tory/labour, after that it gets confusing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23>
      > "Terrorists and serious criminals will always seek to avoid detection.

You mean like by using completely unencrypted SMS to plan terror attacks[0].

Also, "world-leading" my arse.

[0]: [https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151118/08474732854/after...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151118/08474732854/after- endless-demonization-encryption-police-find-paris-attackers-coordinated-via- unencrypted-sms.shtml)

<comment> Kepler-125c They're not looking for actual terrorists, otherwise the SMS's would have triggered a response. They're looking for people like Occupy Wall Street protesters, who actually pose a threat (ie. redistribution of wealth) to those in power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Can they amend their ToS so that anybody in the legislature or their immediate families has their account activity published publicly? :P

</comment><comment><USER30> Brian K. Vaughan's comic Private Eye [1] foreshadows what might happen if this dataset is breached. The premise is the digital cloud "bursts" \- all private data is suddenly dumped and searchable - forcing people to completely abandon their identities and assume new ones - changing their name, appearance, re- starting their careers, etc.

When you consider this in the context of technologies like Voco [2] and Face2Face [3] that can fabricate a speech or make a fake "hot mic" video from a public figure, it makes you wonder if we'll ever be able to prove things are __true__ in the future, and what the value of our identity is if it can be shattered beyond repair due to negligence from a third party. What do we do then? How do you cryptographically sign yourself?

[1] [http://panelsyndicate.com/comics/tpeye](http://panelsyndicate.com/comics/tpeye) [2] [http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37899902](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37899902) [3] [http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/~niessner/thies2016face.htm...](http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/~niessner/thies2016face.html)

<comment><USER31> > How do you cryptographically sign yourself?

Now that's a problem whose solution deserves a unicorn valuation

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Pardon my extreme language but Fuck! How on earth do bills like this come to pass without uproar widespread enough to quash it.

Shit like this seriously makes me want to give up on the internet and walk away from it despite it having been my lifeline and the foundation of my income since I was in my teens almost 30 years ago.

<comment><USER33> The reason such bills get proposed and passed is because, broadly speaking, they are popular with the electorate or at least not unpopular.

The reason they are not unpopular, the root problem, is because the downsides are perceived as theoretical and in the future whereas the upsides are seen as real and in the present. Put simply the arguments against look like this:

 _Oppose this bill because the government COULD abuse it and PROBABLY will abuse it in future_

i.e. it's all vague arguments about probabilities, and the arguments for it look like this:

 _Support this bill because it WILL help the fight against terrorists and paedos right now_

For better or worse the British government has a relatively high level of trust amongst the British people. There is no British constitution and we can now see how a minority of the population is trying to convince Parliament to override the results of an actual _referendum_ on the grounds that people are too stupid to rule themselves, so must be dictated to by small enclaves of their betters. That attitude is widespread, even if it is kind of dumb - <USER2> are just ordinary people too, after all, it's not like there's any filter on them beyond voting. But given that the governmental "elite" imposing its own morality and wisdom on the majority is practically a sexual turn-on for non- trivial numbers of voters, this kind of thing shouldn't surprise us.

We can and probably should argue that this trust is misplaced. There's plenty of evidence of that, along with the fact that surveillance is invariably paired with secrecy so it's hard for people to judge whether the government can be trusted to begin with. But that's why such bills happen.

The solution is probably not VPNs. Ultimately in a fight between internet technologists and lawmakers, sufficiently determined lawmakers will always win: China proves this. The UK's lawmakers may not be sufficiently determined but if they are the only solution is to continue making the argument to the electorate that the government cannot be trusted with such powers, and that they won't help fight terrorists and paedos anyway.

Pointing out that Trump now controls the NSA might be a good start.

<comment><USER32> I'm not sure if there's any truth to these anecdotes, quite probably not but I feel they're particularly poignant given the situation:

When the U.S. first decided to send man to the moon, they spent billions of dollars inventing a pen that would write in zero gravity. Meanwhile the Russians used a pencil.

Again with the race for hacking computers in the Russian Embassy to spy on the Russians, instead of spending billions of dollars securing their computers in a cyber arms race, they switched to typewriters.

I find the simplicity in their solutions to these problems remarkably satisfying.

It is this simplicity that calls me to just say fuck it, if you're going to act like that, I'm just not playing any more. I'll go do something else interesting that doesn't involve you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Assuming you can't block a VPN connection since business use them, how would this work? I assume at some point you simply ban HTTPS or non-public connections, or require government certs to be the only ones used (I think Turkey or some similar country is looking at this) so MITM can be done. Of course once you stick your foot into security, all the bad folks out there will take advantage, and their goes your financial industry and more. It's a stupid idea all around but the dolts in charge seem to either not care or don't understand. Also calling all of your citizens terrorists is a nice touch.

<comment><USER35> Ironically I access my VPN to the UK so I can access geo-restriced UK websites while I am out of the country.

Blocking it would indeed mandate blocking HTTPS, my OpenVPN piggybacks on port 143 on my UK server (though I guess DPI could spot it too).

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Apart from VPNs I can see the rise of plugins like this:

[https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/](https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/)

Purpose of such tools is to add noise and obfuscate the traffic.

</comment><comment><USER37> A majority wont care since it has nothing to do with Britain got Talent or Goglebox

A minority will be pushed to use proxies and vpn's which will flag them for closer examination

Everything is going according to plan so...

<comment> Kepler-125c Don't give up... the internet will always fight back one way or another. Maybe you can be a part of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> How is this surveillance system supposed to work? Logging DNS requests? How feasible would it be to get everyone to look up every domain on the Internet and DDOS this surveillance system?

<comment><USER39> There doesn't seem to be a technical definition of an 'Internet Connection Record', but from the factsheet[1], they:

"are records of the internet services that have been accessed by a device. They would include, for example, a record of the fact that a smartphone had accessed a particular social media website at a particular time."

and:

"ICRs do not provide a full internet browsing history. The ICRs do not reveal every web page that a person visited or any action carried out on that web page."

How this will work in practice is anyones guess at the moment - every time I think of something short of logging every packet header sent/received in the UK (which leads to a staggering amount of data needing to be logged), I think of things that would slip though (and therefore wouldn't fulfil the first statement)...

[1] [https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...](https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/473745/Factsheet- Internet_Connection_Records.pdf)

<comment><USER33> HTTP Host headers, IP addresses and HTTPS hostname negotiation headers are sufficient to meet that requirement without a doubt.

<comment><USER39> That'd work fine for HTTP(S) data, I suspect the data capture would have to be done at the IP level by default, with per-protocol filters on top to capture additional data. Which is going to add complexity to the data capture equipment, plus an ongoing maintenance cost to keep on top of new/updated protocols.

I can't see the current government accepting the possibility that the Internet Bad Guys(tm) could just use a different protocol and avoid all logging.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> semi-extrinsic The thing I don't get about the UK is that they have very pervasive surveillance set up both online and in the real world, yet anyone can buy a mobile phone and a prepaid SIM at some random Tesco's and pay with cash without giving their name or ID.

Why do they keep allowing this? Other countries have always required presenting ID to buy a SIM. It's a surveillance measure that's presumably quite effective, but also far less invasive than this law and others.

<comment><USER26> The UK rejected requiring identity to purchase a phone since that just means criminals steal a phone, when they know they'll need good anonymity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Bullies are cowards. That lesson from school is generally true for bullies in real world too.

Government is just that coward bully. True that US government's tyranny has been rise year on year under leadership of presidents of all political stripes and yet it has meant zilch for either their political goals states good objectives.

All the recent wars by US government have been massive and spectacular failures, fight against terrorism has only created far more threats, people's approval of drug legalization is all time high, gays are safest they have ever been and it is easiest to get almost any kind of gun illegally than in past.

Politicians are very eager to control you life but they are so incompetent with that power that eventually it would not matter. The only problem I see that increasing government spending which will slow down US economy.

<comment><USER41> You know this article is about the UK, not the US, right? By and large I agree with you, but its not the United States that passed this into law.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> The storage vendors must have a hell of a party these days.

</comment><comment><USER43> "Terrorists and serious criminals will always seek to avoid detection."

And normal people too, assholes.

</comment><comment><USER44> One option is to hide your internet history, the other is to automate it (including signing up for and logging in to sites you don't necessarily visit) so that your machine is logging 24/7 and your small portion gets lost in the haystack

<comment><USER45> > your small portion gets lost in the haystack

This is not a good security method in this day and age.

It is cheap to watch and alert on everything.

<comment> Kepler-125c This is not true, for instance say you're an oppressive government and have a method to decrypt encryption type X (https, E2E encryption or what-have-you). There's only so many times you can use your decryption alg for evil purposes before someone leaks that you have it. Https is infinitely better than http, E2E encryption is infinitely better than nothing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Features like "You are currently logged in from 5 different devices" are event log-driven.

Unfortunately, this level of security and consumer protection is only found in top-tier online services.

Service providers can spin this "compliance" measure into a "benefit" for their customers/users. The net result, more users will disable or report rogue sessions.

</comment><comment><USER47> Won't these attempts to "frustrate" just result in even more draconian laws?

</comment><comment><USER48> Having visited England recently, despite the surveillance engine being prepped in the US, the contrast of the extent and the lack of rights and legal means in the UK to protect the people from bad laws like this was palpable. So look at it this way, at least you don't live there.

If we keep headed in the same direction though it won't be long before we forget all the reasons for the American Revolution and let the globalists convince us to rejoin the empire _cough_ the commonwealth again.

Of course, any American who advocates for such a thing is traitorous, and should have the full weight of the law brought down on them.

I don't know, maybe I'm crazy and I'm the only one who thinks oaths mean anything these days.

I will say this though, beware the Rhodesians and their round tables.

<comment><USER49> Seems doubtful that the founding fathers and revolutionists thought their "oaths" to the crown meant much either.

I don't want to join any empire, but I would advocate for globalism, which I don't believe is the same thing as imperialism.

I guess I may just be one of those treacherous Americans though.

<comment><USER48> The monarchy had repeatedly violated the patriots (uncodified) constitutional rights, their common law rights, and their natural rights. The legal debate became the American Revolution, and America won. Furthermore, many of the sons of liberty had never signed or taken oaths of allegiance to the monarchy.

Some of them did take oaths of allegiance though, so you actually touch upon a very interesting subject that I think would be worth having a more nuanced conversation about. So thanks for spurring me to think further on the matter.

So far, the main thing I can think of is that part of the oaths of allegiance include duty, not just to the monarch but to the laws which create that monarch, therefor I find the view of the The European Court of Human Rights retrospectively insightful in that it ruled that the oath of allegiance to a reigning monarch is "reasonably viewed as an affirmation of loyalty to the constitutional principles which support... the workings of representative democracy in the respondent State."

Now, if you want to advocate against the constitution, as long as it is just speech, that is legal (as long as you are simply a citizen and haven't taken an oath), but I would agree it is treacherous, but not traitorous or treasonous. The second speech becomes action, particularly to assist a foreign entity in that venture though, it does become treason. I highly disagree with the sedition laws which violate the first amendment and have been so harshly abused even in the modern era, so I am ignoring those for the sake of conversation.

You said you "don't want to join any empire, but I would advocate for globalism, which I don't believe is the same thing as imperialism." I would simply say I think you are wrong and provably so on this point, in that the current trend of globalism is indeed an imperial globalism.

That being said, I will admit that I have often had the conversation about the utopic version of globalism, but it is important to differentiate between that imagined ideal which I think you might be referring to, and the reality of the current global geo-political movement of globalism (which is quite different from the _economic fact_ of globalism, which I don't think is up for dispute).

If you want, I am willing to expand on the more technical reasons I think that current global is imperial globalism.

I wish I could edit my gp comment, because I was obviously wrong to say : "Of course, any American who advocates for such a thing is traitorous, "

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> > "Terrorists and serious criminals will always seek to avoid detection."

So, if you don't want the government to see your thoughts, you're a criminal.

<comment><USER51> No, that's confusing A->B with B->A. All dogs are mammals, but not all mammals are dogs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> > The Investigatory Powers Bill provides law enforcement and the security and > intelligence agencies with the powers they need to protect the UK and its > citizens from terrorists and serious criminals.

But how it is going to protect the UK from funny criminals?</comment>


Ask HN: Best Weather API's? - <AUTHOR>

I am looking for a decent weather API, preferably free/not too expensive that doesn't require attribution. Any recommendations?<p>Ps. I will probably need to do quite a lot of API requests in the near future when my app launches. <comment><USER2> Check out [http://openweathermap.org/API](http://openweathermap.org/API) or [https://www.mashape.com/explore?query=weather](https://www.mashape.com/explore?query=weather)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've heard good things about forecast.io (and the actual website is great). I know that there are some legitimate news websites that use it.

[https://developer.forecast.io/](https://developer.forecast.io/)</comment>


Selling Umbrellas In A Synagogue - <AUTHOR> http://danshipper.com/selling-umbrellas-in-a-synagogue#

<comment><USER2> Curiously, traditional (Orthodox) Jews cannot use umbrellas on the Sabbath Day. [http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Are_orthodox_Jews_allowed_to_use_a...](http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Are_orthodox_Jews_allowed_to_use_an_umbrella_on_the_sabbath)

<comment><USER3> If you read the whole paragraph, you see that the answer is yes, umbrellas are permitted, when basic qualifications at met.

<comment><USER4> I was raised as an Orthodox Jew, but have gone off the derech (I no longer believes in Judaism and do not practice it anymore) an Orthodox is not supposed to use (and carry) money on the Shabbat, or even supposed to carry umbrellas, even inside an eruv[1] for those who believes in its validity (The Jewish law is not a monolithic concept, it's basically discussed to interpretations which the majority agrees).

It's common to see religious people going to the synagogue in raincoats in the Shabbat in neighbourhoods with a large Jewish community.

Anyway, this is not the point of the article.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruv>

EDIT: The guy can sell umbrellas in the religious services in other days which are not holidays or shabbats, there are three religious services each day, the maariv, the shacharit and the mincha.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The guys selling umbrellas on the street are not creating a brand -- they're direct response advertising. As you mentioned, they're anonymous and disappear when you don't need them.

Brand is different. I don't turn on the TV when I'm ready to eat fast food, drink a beer, or buy a car. But McDonald's, Budweiser, and Ford all advertise on TV so that I'll remember them when I do.

Promoted searches and tweets work more like display/brand ads than direct response, where advertisers associate themselves with certain accounts and keywords. I think we'll see more innovation in this space as they figure it out, but I do agree that treating Twitter advertising like Google advertising is going to lead to disappointment.

</comment><comment><USER6> I haven't used Twitter's ad platform at all (I honestly don't have much to advertise).

But is this pricing universal? $50 for 130 clicks, aka $0.39 per click? That seems like an exorbitant price for a click with unknown and probably low intent.

A CPC of $0.39, a CPM of $32.70!!!

I'm not an online marketing expert - is this realistic?

<comment><USER7> Pricing largely depends on audience quality and product margin (and a million small things...), so there is no 'right amount' only what's right for your business.

To give you an idea of range, in my marketing life I have sold low margin products in low quality audiences paying as little as $0.01 CPC. But for some high margin products in targeted environments I have paid in excess of $100 per click.

It is worth understanding this environment if any peeps are building something that monitises from advertising.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great post. And a good point. But there are some exceptions to this.

I'm what you'd call a "super casual" twitter user. That is to say, I don't really use it other than for occasional real-time updates on things (After the NYC-area earthquake last year, Twitter was the first place I went to see what was up. And during the debates this year, I had fun following along with #debate.)

I can't be alone. And in those (rather specific, yes I know) cases, there is some opportunity for advertising, because just like when I use Google, I was searching for something, and to the OPs point, more open to buying that umbrella.

(For example, if a fact-checking group like PoliFact were advertising for me to follow them during my #debate search and "get real-time fact-checking", that's something I'd have totally subscribed to. Meanwhile I found them through sorting through the tweets instead.)

So I suppose it boils down to the same thing as with Google -- I don't really want to see ads when I'm reading Gmail, but I certainly don't mind them when I'm searching. Twitter could focus on promoted tweets / accounts during searches and I don't think they'd have the umbrella-in-a-synagogue problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a really interesting point. I think Twitter search is one area where the product is grossly lacking. And you're right, targeting ads in the search area would definitely capture intent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great post Dan!

Not sure I completely agree, though. If you're talking to people who are socializing, eating lox, and talking about how nice the weather is...coming in trying to sell an umbrella is interruptive at best.

If, however, you find a bunch of people huddled under a bus stop because they dont' have umbrella's, and are all waiting for the rain to stop....then coming in trying to sell an umbrella is genius.

It's all about targeting correctly. If a bunch of people are on Twitter complaining about how their new Ford is having alternator problems, and you run a mechanic shop that specializes in fixing them on the cheap, then you're providing value. Right?

I think it just has to do with how advertisers approach this, and how good of a job they do in crafting their copy, and their target demographic. Let's hope for our sake (and theirs), that they spend a real amount of time focused on that problem and don't mess it up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Completely agree with you. The basic point of the article is that advertisers have to be sensitive to the context shift between selling things on Google and selling things on Twitter.

It's possible to create a successful marketing campaign on Twitter, but it probably looks very different than a successful one on Adwords.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Twitter could work as a way to engage in a conversation. For instance, if I tweet about going shopping for clothing, I wouldn't mind if Old Navy tweeted a coupon at me. That's much more complicated but if they could figure something like that out, the ads would be much more useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's interesting. It's a fine line though. I think I'd get annoyed pretty quickly if after every tweet I was solicited for something.

I've been thinking about a real-world analogue for these types of social communities (e.g. synagogues) that actually makes money. The only one I can come up with is something like a fraternity. You pay dues, and have a local chapter that's also part of a larger national organization.

I'm not a giant fan, but it's very similar to the App.net model. Obviously you don't see massive scale, but you do get money without interfering with the social dynamic. Interestingly, the very fact that it costs money may make it more appealing to join. Curious to see where that goes.

<comment><USER11> Both fraternities and synagogues are examples of non-profit organizations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "You go to services every Saturday."

Funny that you would use "Goldsteins" as an example. As you probably know there is a Goldsteins Funeral Home in Philly. And your example is dead on to how people in the funeral business operate. They belong and attend. But here's the thing. In order for Goldstein to get the burial business (or service, whatever) they have to continue to attend social functions lest they are forgotten. All the time (similar to your example "every saturday". Otherwise, while they do have a benefit from a memorable name (so someone might be more likely to call when seeing their other advertising) if they are not in front of people regularly (and willing to take the time and effort) they aren't going to get the benefit.

</comment><comment><USER13> Other ads that are not intent based:

TV commericals

Billboards

Print ads

Ads on the sidelines of sports games

Viral marketing

etc etc etc

Comparing Twitter or Facebook ads to Google ads may not be a clear win, but we've been doing that kind of advertising for much longer. The key is for the advertiser to figure out what kind of ads belong on a service (with the company's help), and for the company to find the best way to track the influence those ads have.

</comment><comment><USER14> "The upshot of it is that Twitter allows you to build those relationships in a scalable way."

Having the same tweet be pushed to 1000+ people is not building relationships in any meaningful manner though. Sending a personalized tweet to 1000 different people is though, but then that wouldn't be scalable.

</comment><comment><USER15> tl;dr: most feedback on twitter ads assume it is intent driven (i.e. google adwords), when in most cases it is not.

IMO, it's the root of many social companies struggle to monetize with ads. We've been spoiled the last while because we knew what people were looking for, and could promote directly against that. In some ways, social ads are a step backwards from this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. In some ways social ads are a step back from that, but only because you establish contact with your customers much before they have needs that you can satisfy. So the time to first sale is a lot longer.

But I think, on the flip side, the relationships you develop with them are a lot stronger and a lot more powerful. The problem is, it's very hard to back that up empirically because it's a lot more complicated than just measuring CTR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Fantastic! I enjoyed your article Dan. That's a very helpful way of considering the twitter ecosystem.</comment>


Ask HN: Former salesman stole company property, what to do? - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys,
A former salesman for my company was asked to return a tablet and 3G dongle that was provided with his contract. He failed to do so, claiming it was lost in the post. He then said he would cover the costs when he got paid in June. He has not done so and now does not reply to communications.
What should I do now? <comment><USER2> Small claims court, or hire a lawyer to write a nasty letter and hope he gets scared into keeping his word, or just drop it and move on.

I'd go with small claims court. But that's just me.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you are in the USA, there is a document you can file with your local sheriff's office. If properly completed, deputies will track down the person, serve a warrant to search business and home, and recover the items.

It would be better to just let the salesperson know you plan to file this form, and ask them to make you whole. Because the deputies may seize and search ALL the computers at the residence, then determine what is stolen. They may find drugs/guns/illegal porn during the search and they will prosecute.

</comment><comment><USER4> Just let it go.</comment>