BUGHUNTER

downvoting me does not change facts.

There are many sources, but you might get a good overview on this issue watching the documentary "Science under attack": http://www.denkmal-film.com/cms/index.php?page=presse-9

Another good example why you never want to use a web service company for important things. Hopefully they will open source their stuff after shutdown.

I wish I could filter out totally uninteresting threads in HN website that are disturbing my reading experience - is there any CSS hack / tool that adds a "don´t show this thread" button to HN discussion threads?

I can not sort by prize on the airbnb listings? Also I do not want to see the map, but can not find a way to disable the map.

has a very stupid limitation: can not run as a service. Programmer is struggling since years to implement this feature.

This is exactly the biggest problem that comes with commercial GMO plants. GMO companies are massively buying smaller seed producers and are actively reducing the food genpool, they are clearly out to control the global seed market - from a business perspective this absolutely makes sense.

For future generations this is a total catastrophe - reducing the available food genpool is is the maximal possible damage you could apply to the human kind.

This is not a theoretical scenario - india has lost big parts of it´s genpool for many food plants since the indian government is pushing gmo company products. The results are a complete disaster today, but this is just a foretaste what will happen on a global scale in a few years. Especially Africa, now beeing invaded by mega-industrial agro-projects backed by hedgefonds, will be hurt massively in the coming years.

Local seeds are of immeasurable value - it is conserved knowledge of hundreds, sometimes thousands of years that is deleted forever, when a variety disappears. This are not "failed experiments of nature" that vanish not able to survive the test of life - instead we are actively eradicating very good functioning and over a very long time optimized varieties, just because of some short-term experiment, that usually fails, and was only motivated by short-term profit-think.

GMOs are not "evil" or "good" - it´s the extremely short-sighted and brutally enforced business-model that translates the totally stupid short-term profit-think into very destructive consequences for global biodiversity.

The first problem in this field is to find information sources that are not involved in GMO biz - this is especially true for scientists.

It is a repeating marketing pattern to claim "scientists" are "pro gmo" - but many scientists are not pro gmo, nor "anti" gmo, they just do some research in this field and some of them come to results that are not validating monsanto or gmo industry claims.

see e.g. http://www.gmwatch.org/index.php/news/archive/2013/15156-ove...

It is not easy nowadays to do independent research, as the gmo companies are controlling the knowledge market heavily and there is a very high chance that you will be attacked and even lose your fundings or your job if your research might be interpreted as beeing "anti-gmo", no matter what your personal intentions about gmo are - this happened several times.

The "gmos are bad / good" discussion, however, becomes irrelevant looking at the business model of gmo companies - it is much easier to judge from that point of view.

"improve yields" is another myth. This is just marketing blah.

This is wrong. Actually costs for farmers are higher.

http://earthopensource.org/index.php/reports/gmo-myths-and-t...

To get knowledge about some basic facts please read at least

http://earthopensource.org/index.php/reports/gmo-myths-and-t...

if you want to understand better, take some time and dig into http://gmwatch.org

Somebody has to say it, as a sacrifice for the HN crowd I take the role of the DB:

It is unbelievable how many people that read "HN" - obviously considering themselves beeing "Hackers" - are not able to understand the basic requirements of a real hacker (TM) note taking app:

- it has to be open source - you do not want to hand over your personal notes to some unknown company and their decision making process, maybe they will just disappear or not support their product anymore.

- it has to have an open and good documented data format - you do not want your notes to disappear in an undocumented binary blob.

- if there is any way to sync data with other instances / machines, the sync server of course has to be open sourced and available for usage on your own server.

- of course some more functional things like versioning via git and it has to be lightning fast.

This is for the "cool hackers" that are STILL using services like dropbox, evernote or onenote. Learn it: these services are for uneducated people who did not understand anything. Please do not hurt the eyes of HN readers with advertising these anti-privacy services here, thanks!

"That's why we don't think the network will be taken over by child porn. You have to have someone accept what's on your node in order for them to pass your traffic around," he says. [1]

So instead of a guaranteed right to access information freely we make every mesh node a potential censor.

I do not want to depend on the likes or dislikes of mesh participants to be able to access or distribute information.

Here seems something fundamentally broken by design. I hope, I am misunderstanding the concept.

[1] http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929294.500-meshnet-a...

There seem to be a lot of discussions going on inside each of these projects. There should be some central hub for research and exchange ;)

Disconnected knowledge-islands with people not knowing about already existing solutions to problems they are trying to solve seems to be one downside of scattered communities.

Decentralization is needed for private communication, but there are downsides - creating x parallel nets will not help in finding each others - the knowledge evolution of the internet is driven by the desire of the human brain to connect all available information.

Imagine the NSA decided to create an open and freely available API to the centralized information they have collected - good-minded people certainly will extract useful knowledge from that data, possibly world-changing new ways of thinking about everything could be the results.

The human brain wants this central intelligence (the real one, not the agency) to solve the evolutionary problems we are confronted with today - it must be seen as an ironical evidence of this need that the first biggest data collections that might be useful for all humans on this planet are collected exclusively by paranoid psychopaths to have better tools for control and oppression.

But even if misused, it does happen - the human brain wants to connect. It will not be happy with decentralized knowledge - it is the reason, why the internet exists and it will not want to go back.

This does not mean that decentralized networks are a bad thing in itself (as I said before, needed for private talk urgently!), but it means that we need some information harvesting entity that makes it easy to connect.

It is not only marketing what makes google and facebook so successful - it is the biological meta-programming of our brains that make us want to use these possibilities to connect to the global information pool.

The global brain is the destination - of course it should be untouchable by insane sadist that want to control our life. This evolutionary force will lead to social changes - it does already.

Re-Decentralizing the internet, from this point of view, only postpones the real challenge: build technical and social systems, that can not be misused or at least make it easier to detect and eliminate misuse - we have already concepts for this, we need to apply. Real-life IDS will warn you if you consume fake information or are following the wrong leaders (or if you are following at all). Real-life social SIEM will prevent a group of people misusing the system just for their own profits. Most probably "profit" will be an ancient word that will be remembered only with shame, like being confronted with the primitive life of our ancestors, that were living in caves.

Decentralization will not rescue us from our duty to expand participation.

I can not see what I am looking for there, sorry. The Tent protocol certainly is interesting, but I was asking for an open place where it is possible to share / exchange / collect and extract knowledge and experiences about decentralized social network software.

I was hoping for an open, easily available information source that can be followed.

What are the best channels to follow discussions on decentralized social networks? I see too many alternatives coming up and it is getting too time-consuming to follow all of them. Friendica (BTW this one is missing on the list in wiki), Buddycloud, Diaspora, to name just a few - where do they coordinate their efforts and how can an interested developer follow discussions of these projects?

Also it would be interesting to exchange experiences made with these new apps, so that not every developer has to check every network, what is not possible in one life - the already existing listings of alternatives are of great value, but a more systematic approach in collective knowledge gathering and exchange would be even better.

Hey, that´s what the internet was built for, wasn´t it? Still does no software for this exist? :)

ZoL looks pretty good - unfortunately if you want Samba on ZoL, of course with snapshots and ACLs, you will have problems, as ACL mapping is not implemented, if I understood things well. That is a real pitty, ZFS is great, Samba is great, Linux is great and having these three things working smoothly together without having to spend weeks of research on how to get it running would help many admins to finally get away from commercial clown & bloat systems. However, the groundwork is done and if we are lucky in 2014 the Linux + Samba4 + ZFS dreamteam will be available as a stable replacement.

This was not meant to look smart, I refuse to compete and do not feel the motivation to position myself, I speak freely here - please do not apply a ratrace-like competitive mindset, this is misunderstanding me. I just was really interested in the question, if the spof is not seen by anybody.

Of course I am willing to help - the problem is desribed clearly in the first point of the author: they are generating one "projectfile" - whatever this looks like, it is a reduction of many to one. The distribution of 1500 git repos with n-thousands of files is relying on one single file - there is no technical need for that, in fact it eliminates the power of distributed repos by reducing reliance into the presence and integrity of one single text file.

The author writes about the process of this file beeing corrupted and triggering a random repo killing process - the incident is a good bad example for what can happen if you anticipate the antipattern of making one out of many.

Building redundant systems you always try to achieve the opposite - make many out of one, to eliminate the spof. You can not scale infinitely with this, because in the end we are living on just one planet.

However, unneccessarily making one out of many is the wrongest thing you could do building a backup or code distribution system. This antipattern still exists in many places and should be eliminated.

This is not about filesystem corruption etc. - the reason for the destruction was one single project file. Do not do this. It is not critical for a backup system if it takes long time to scan a filesystem for existing folders over and over again. A backup system is not a web app, where it might be a good thing to do one out of many (aka as caching in this case), but a backup system does not need this reduction.

Ok, the elephant error is still unseen in the room - so I give you some more hints: nobody has written about this error until now - it is still there and danger of total destruction also is still there, because the single root of evil was not destroyed. You still do not see it?

The git issue (if it can be reproduced and validated as true) is an interesting aspect of the story.

For admins there is another interesting one: they artificially generate an extremely vulnerable spof - and after this desaster hey are still doing it.

Can you see the mistake?

Hint: if you have many things, why do you make it one thing?

This is a very filigree artpiece of satire, really nice!

Looks like a way to translate Banksy graffiti into the code world, including the obligatory post to HN.

It is one of the seldom pieces that many people will never detect as ironic, because they are caught in the cage of their limited mindset of "obey" and "follow the masses".

Very refreshing, thank you very much for making my day!

Is this bound to latex or is there something like formatting plugins? Can the latex formatting be easily exchanged to handle markdown or a wiki style markup or anythig else?

A realtime frontend with a modular pandoc + git backend could finally solve many online editing pains.

I do not understand, why they are overcomplicating things so much - why isn´t there just ONE rails framework? Issues with backwards compatibility vs. new features? Or what was causing this "forks"? In three years, will there be six rails versions?

This is like http://amon.cx/ - isn´t it?

wow, 215 comments for now - and I can not find the word censorship... have no time reading, what people are actually discussing here, but if the word censorship is missing, something goes wrong.

Privacy-friendly (as far as it can go) builds of available OS browsers is the way to go.

There are simple things, like changing the default settings for cookies, that do not require rebuild of course, and more involved things like making the browsers emit less information (panopticlick) on every request.

It is obvious, that it might break some things, which should then be possible to change by the user. E.g. not sending out installed fonts and screensize and tons of other info about your system might break some websites - webmasters should learn to ask friendly for that data, not expecting it.

This is not about engineering a new browser, but about privacy aware defaults for software distribution.

The biggest success of such a project would be that browser distributors will change their default distribution to maximum privacy. Obviously some of them will never do it - what will be a good thing as people will better learn about the differences.

Another big success would be that users will learn about their natural right to be asked before a browser sends out any information that is not absolutely needed to view a webpage.

I know that this is only a small piece in the puzzle, but browsers are still not privacy aware by default atm. it would be interesting to see what happens next.

Firefox certainly is one of the top targets for such a project, as Mozilla browser defaults are not acceptable for a project that wants to teach you about your online rights on first browser start. Transforming Firefox into a browser that actually delivers what Mozilla promises, will give a good discussion point for changing their distribution policy.

There is, btw., a similar project for chrome, Iron - but the panopticlick results for iron are still not perfect - minimizin the emitted information to only the neccessary bits is still ahead also for this browser.

Please note: a discussion about "destroying jobs in the ad industry" or "destroying the internet at all" is absurd in this context. If advertisers want to collect data, they must ask me to agree. It is good for the internet future, if only business models survive, that people agree to support.

I consider it relevant, otherwise I would not haved asked.

Would you like to cooperate on this? I was thinking about this a long time ago, but I am full of other things to do and need some people to help me with that.

I am no startup-millionair, so please do not expect money, but if we build a small team that delivers, we will find supporters, I am sure. Please contact me at bughunter at riseup dot net.

Besides a certain feeling about the company, do you have any hard facts that might give some suggestions about ghostery not beeing trustworthy?

If you do not agree to send them data (config wizard first checkbox I think), is there still data sent to them?

Feelings are ok, but keep them for your friends and family. We need facts here, so please deliver.

Firefox is NOT privacy-friendly. The default settings save cookies forever and there is no blocking of any tracking code by default - you are spreading misinformation declaring FF as "privacy-friendly". Another big problem is the fingerprintable request firefox generates - FF developers do not seem to see privacy as a concern.