Pahalial

I think the real story here is that he chose the 35% royalty rate over the 70% rate “because you can opt out of Kindle Lending.”

I understand that some people view disabling that feature as less of an anti-customer move than I do, but to hate it enough to waive half your royalties?

More likely it was in the midst of the mass-deletion later referred to - deleting 6 years' worth of email could certainly make gmail sluggish.

Stating that this "seems like something Apple would consider" is a far cry from what this blog post does: take one data point's worth of design value from an existing design for one user, extrapolate that to be one of the lead drivers of said design for all users.

I'm all for giving Apple's designs as much credit as possible, but it's still a far cry from even that to "wow this thing about the design I just noticed that works for me must have been something they considered for the populace at large."

This seems useful, yet awfully much like another step on the slow path to legitimizing 'poor taste'.

That's a bit harsh, so let me qualify it. I actually rather agree with the division inherent in this and think it will resound with people, but I honestly believe that this is yet another step towards turning our society into idiocracy. It's the slow legitimization of appreciation for content that we acknowledge as garbage but consume anyway. I firmly believe that there is inherent social value in this garbage content remaining quasi-taboo - a social pressure not to like such things. Sure, most people will watch some anyway, or play the latest mindless shooter, or what-have-you, but so long as it's understood that most people will mock you for publicly liking this, the norm does not drift towards mindlessness - you still need to consume some legitimately good content, even if only to have something to talk about.

I don't mean to attack the site; I think it's a great way to slice into the recommendations game, and I do think a lot of people will get value out of it, and it seems like it may well succeed. I simply am afraid it's a net negative for our society in the long run (then again, of course, not launching is hardly going to reverse such a trend.)

Edit: Make that symptomatic of a net negative. I've thought some more and this is only giving an online portal to express the shift I talk about above, which has already been happening aplenty.

This is an 'enterprise-friendly' feature - the appearance of thorough security ("all our data is stored with AES-256 encryption") with only a nominal increase in actual security.

Just think: there will be AWS accounts using this while their master AWS console account continues to have a single-dictionary-word password and no MFA. Truly the Cloud is the silver bullet to save us all from shoddy CIOs!

The story kind of smells. He harps on pitching it as an alternative to their flash-based player, but what was stopping him from using the same streams he's repackaged in iTunes (or music player of choice)?

All in all, I don't really approve of his repackaging of our public content for personal profit. If he'd had to build a service to scrape the flash audio and then made it accessible via regular streams, that would justify this app's existence and price, but as it stands I find myself mildly unsympathetic.

1080p video with sound only recently improved from "FM radio" quality - what a strange combination.

I was surprised he didn't mention two-way contacts integration. I met a new person yesterday on G+ first, then in person; later that day he emailed me a doc and I was surprised to find that his name/email had not been added to my contact list from circles. This is something the facebook messages/chat integration gets right, and Google needs to figure out how to answer it sooner rather than later.

This might be very related, actually - Dropbox just sent out an email announcing downtime for a move to a different data center.

Wow. I was prepared to denounce this as a fake, mouthpiece for LulzSec made to look like a hacking challenge (for the lulz), etc. A facebook page like this[1] is so laughably over the top.. But perhaps not:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ywUK2Jat5k

Now I just feel a bit sorry for him. A very fast lesson to not consider yourself "trained by the best in the world" or go around putting up $10k prizes like this without actually having a few crises under your belt.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/blackandberg

As usual, allow the smallest subset of functionality which still permits legitimate uses. In these cases they're relying on .htaccess files being allowed specific overrides - FileInfo and Options being the most powerful ones.

'AllowOverride AuthConfig Indexes' is generally relatively safe (in my humble experience) - i'd be scared to see an htshell like these with just those.

Twitter's API does not only service native (smartphone) apps. xAuth is always abysmal security; OAuth provides in some cases some increased security.

Previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2542370

Surprisingly good link. While we're discussing Heroku, does anyone have any deep[er] insights into the differences between Zookeeper and Doozer?

I was not at all suggesting the story was false; rather that Poulsen was further "interpreting" the story based on a prior "interpretation" by the New Statesman. [honest edit: I suppose this is a weak sentence. I really did not mean to imply any actual falsehood, rather two levels of the kind of linkbaity shift one finds all too often in online news.]

That said, it seems my Google-fu is weak; I did not turn up that link nor any kind of repeat-threatening of the Guardian. Thank you for the link. Frankly, I think that both the Wired article and the New Statesman piece could have benefited tremendously (newcomer credibility-wise) from including it.

Having now read the Vanity Fair piece, I'll retract my prior criticism of the New Statesman article. If anything, given that I've given Wikileaks a lot of my attention over the last several months, I'm not sure how this escaped my attention, but it puts a lot of things in a different light. I for one certainly thought the relationship between WL and its chosen newspapers was a lot more rosy.

Well, yes, that makes sense for a membership association like the Screen Actors Guild. Unfortunately, if Facebook wants to retain its real-name-only cachet, it simply can't afford to have too many stories like this pop up.

This story is particularly worrisome when you consider the amount of ID-verification that this account must have had on file after he already faxed them 3 pieces. What does it take to proof yourself from peremptory nullification if a driver's license, birth certificate and bar association license don't cut it?

Several people have already pointed out the tenuous situation between Kevin Poulsen and Wikileaks, so I won't retread old ground; that said, Poulsen is really just summarizing a piece from someone else in the new statesman: http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/david-allen-green/2011/05/...

I for one have never heard of The New Statesman before, but that doesn't necessarily mean much. Of particular interest to me was this (linkless) passing jibe: "but on the other hand they make routine legal threats, especially against the Guardian" - the only results I could find about this were also from the New Statesman, and actually seemed rather to pertain to a claimed case of libel about Assange. Not any actual legal action, mind, just a twitter update from @wikileaks. And no indication of a routine about it, just the one hit - very clearly not what was being implied by the paragraph in the original article.

So I for one will be taking this "The New Statesman" with as much of a grain of salt as I was ready to do to the Kevin Poulsen piece.

Edit for links:

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/david-allen-green/2011/02/...

http://twitter.com/#!/wikileaks/statuses/32867678527950848

But you can control the risk of exposure to keyloggers. You have zero control over risks to LastPass's infrastructure - which, as this blog post mentions, is a much juicier target than your passwords on their own.

All shortcomings of AV aside, as a Canadian who just watched a majority get in thanks to a combined 6,021 votes in some dozen marginal ridings, let me just say that I'm jealous of this referendum and I wish you the best.

Interesting that this is essentially all stemming from yet again a communication failure from AWS. Once they have a post-mortem and can explain the multi-AZ issue, we may have a better idea of whether multi-region spread is sufficient redundancy. Or they could completely fail to communicate enough information, and adequately wary customers will be left with no choice but to assume that regions are not sufficiently independent.

Wait and see it is...

You know, I really don't understand the rage around this case, or more specifically that it's supposedly all coming from people who otherwise love Dropbox.

So let's examine what you're (potentially) doing by forcing this issue and so on:

(1) Calling down a streisand effect on Dropbox. Perhaps you believe that code is meant to be free to such an extent that this is part of your goal, so, sure.

(2) They clearly have no intention of allowing DropShip to become a common use case. If your Streisand effect results in wide adoption by people who just latch onto your censorship angle, they will have to take rushed action to prevent further spread.

(3) This rushed action could be a technical solution (maybe challenge-response, as mentioned) or a banhammer once they have narrowed down the use signature for dropship.

--

(3a-technical) If it's the technical solution, as it was produced under rapid duress, is buggy. Suddenly, your beloved dropbox starts corrupting your files, or refusing to sync some in edge cases. Oops. Some [paying] users who never even heard about this 'censorship' issue notice this issue and take their business elsewhere, and of course it's less useful to you too as a tool until they fix it.

(3a-technical alternative) It's not a buggy fix because they're supercoders. Still, their team had to put in an ungodly week to make and stress-test the fix; congratulations on ruining their quality of life for a week while still losing dropship.

(3b-banhammer) Well, they figure out how to track people using dropship, and maybe institute a 3 strikes policy (2 emails, 1 ban.) So you stop using dropship after the first email, with a bit of simmering resentment at dropbox; still no dropship. Meanwhile, there are false positives because of course there are; this generates a second, far louder streisand effect, and dropbox again loses some paying customers.

-

In summary: sure, open-source code is meant to be free. But your actions don't exist in a vacuum. At the end of the day, Dropbox is clearly not going to tolerate dropship on its network. Consider whether you would rather keep using dropbox as it is, or shoehorn yourself into basically open war on dropbox unless you can dropship on it.

(Tangentially: it was a neat enough hack, but it still doesn't seem any functionally different than sharing public URLs for the file, with the only differences being that you circumvent the bandwidth limits - again, congrats on fighting the TOS of a service you supposedly love.)

Dropbox has bandwidth limits on /Public URLs, particularly low for free accounts. This wholly circumvents that, and I suspect that's the real reason Arash asked for a takedown, not so much the loose association with piracy.

The piece is specifically positioned as a retort to a somewhat sensationalist O'Reilly piece, and in that context it's perhaps decent. But this headline alone on HN is at least as sensationalist - redefining "your phone is tracking your movements between cell towers with a general accuracy of 2km or less" to "your phone is not recording your moves" is just newspeak.

Argue that the accuracy makes the data less usable for nefarious purposes, or argue the (much more pertinent to my mind) point that your carrier already has high-accuracy historical info and this really just puts similar historical info in your hands as well, point out that law enforcement can easily get the carrier info without ever even touching your iDevice, but don't try to claim that this is not recording location info attached to you.

$6.50, not 30-40: http://us.blizzard.com/store/search.xml?q=authenticator - this omits the free apps for most smartphones.

As far as peer support, honestly, there's almost no peer support. There is a strong first-line of FAQs and automated systems (regularly ensuring secondary contact information is accurate, well-defined systems for lost authentication devices,etc) and well-trained second-tier tech support.

There are enough third-party auth providers now that would be well able to provide the entire support chain for the banks. In fact, Gemalto has built for this: http://www.gemalto.com/financial/ebanking/

It's only retreading old ground if the resolution is public knowledge. As mentioned elsewhere in this topic, RIM has never given any info as to what the final result of all that pressure was - I do think it's legitimate to ask essentially whether blackberry usage in those countries is compromised.

There's an existing day-old post about this still on the front page, albeit with a less descriptive title: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2434057

I had much the same reaction, but no, this is very odd. Red Hat has no aversion to contributing to Free Software and possibly forking it to create a supported branch. Why would they push through with Ceylon rather than do this with Scala? I must be missing something that is arguably a clear advantage. I'll blame the QCon presentation refusing to load, but if someone could fill me in that would be appreciated.

Tangential, but a commenter brings up the empty map in Georgia. A quick search turns up this would-be explanation from over two years ago: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/where-is-georgia-on-g...

I'd be very curious to see an updated reason given - I don't think Google moves quite slowly enough for "we're just not happy with the quality of the data quite yet" to hold any water 2.5 years after they first claim so.

What? How does this.. what? You seem to contradict yourself: you admit he is spreading knowledge of the governments' misbehavior (and that this is a laudable thing) and then.. question mark?

Upon 5th reread: are you actually accusing him of falsely accusing others of cowardice for self-aggrandizement because these 'others' (aka: us) are not spreading the word of governmental misbehavior fast enough?

I seriously can't see any other statement in your comment, and it seems like even the anti-Jacob sentiment I quote above died after the third sentence - I'm just trying to string a single thought through the whole comment. Please clarify.

I guess I mostly disagree with the "very likely to annoy somebody who prefers Windows" statement. I love Windows as a desktop OS, and am typing this on it right now. Nonetheless, my love for it is really irrelevant when I'm developing for Ubuntu Lucid. I guess I feel strongly about this because I've actually been the sole guy in a small shop sticking to Windows while all my colleagues were on Ubuntu (which was the target OS.) I tried to justify it to myself for as long as I could, and frankly at the end of it there was simply no good reason to be on a different platform than the target. It caused me no end of headaches and wasted dev time - although part of this was because I was pulling from a repo shared with ubuntu devs, it was mostly that the target was ubuntu.

TL;DR: If an interviewee two years ago had seen that I was on Windows, turned us down, and cited my Windows development as the reason for their refusal, I would probably have switched to ubuntu six months sooner and saved myself (and the company) upwards of 100 hours of dev troubleshooting. So it's hard to view the raw "You're on Windows developing for UNIX. Just what?" as worse than "I'm not a Windows developer, sorry."