declan

>I took this twitter bird from https://www.iconfinder.com and it has license "Creative Commons (Attribution 3.0 Unported)"

First, Creative Commons licenses only deal with copyright, as far as I can recall, not trademark rights.

Second, you don't even know that whoever put it on iconfinder.com and released it under Creative Commons had the right to do so; they may have uploaded a copyrighted image that you are now unwittingly using, and unwitting use is no defense against liability.

Third, you are violating Twitter's guidelines, so as an ethical -- non-legal -- matter, you should stop.

Fourth, you're likely violating trademark law, which is designed to protect Twitter from having its official apps confused with others; yours looks like an official one.

Fifth, Twitter is likely a famous mark, meaning its trademarks are protected against dilution even if consumers aren't confused. Famous marks get extra trademark rights.

Sixth, it looks like your app relies on Twitter's API and would be worthless if you get cut off. So you should have a strong incentive not to piss them off.

Seventh, as a practical matter Twitter may not notice and send you a C&D immediately (or ever), but if you become big enough to notice, you may be liable for retroactive damages from the time of first infringing use.

It may be okay to use temporary icons as placeholders for apps in private alpha or beta, but it looks like yours is already in the app store. For example, I have a non-final icon for https://recent.io/ right now but have a contract with a designer to prepare a final one pre-launch and am iterating with her this week. You might want to do the same; look at previous HN threads about how to find designers.

>Snowden has never seen a successful decrypted RSA-1024 intercept. But he also believes that the good stuff is kept under wraps...

Here's a piece I wrote for CNET about RSA-1024: http://www.cnet.com/news/facebooks-outmoded-web-crypto-opens...

Quoting Eran Tromer, a Tel Aviv University CS prof who wrote his dissertation on custom code-breaking hardware: "Realistically, right now, breaking 1,024-bit RSA should be considered well within reach by leading nations, and marginally safe against other players."

And that was two years ago.

Huh. I implemented iOS and Android Facebook login for https://recent.io/ in a few days last month. (The login code itself wasn't that time-consuming but UX, debugging, etc. took longer.)

<stickfigure>: I like that idea! What areas have you tried?

You can get pretty rural pretty quickly west of I-280 in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, and of course Santa Cruz County further south. Head 10 minutes west of I-280 via Sand Hill Road, and you're at Skyline at Alice's restaurant, which marks the limit of the town of Woodside's boundary. Anything north, west, or southwest of that point is unincorporated.

As a practical matter if you're in a rural unincorporated area you're going to have to deal with septic tanks, and finding a place in the bay area where you can dig seven (and counting) different leach fields with possible space for expansion, not on >35% slopes, not near streams, etc. is going to be tricky. Further out you may have problems getting water; are you going to dig a well? How many GPM? Check out the problems that mutual water companies in the hills have had during previous droughts. On the other side of the ridge things are even worse; there's La Honda's rationing and talk of trucking in water: http://www.hmbreview.com/news/cuesta-la-honda-guild-keeps-ra...

On a more positive note, if you can get the structure and finance down, why not build a ~3000 ft^2 conventional house with external power/water/septic hookups? Those hookups are where you'd place your friends' tiny-homes-on-trailers. They wouldn't be permanent structures, so perhaps that would pass legal muster. Or buy 7 acres and subdivide? Again, I like your idea and wish you the best.

An update: I've found out that Strikingly (which has excellent customer service) will manually add SSL support to a domain purchased elsewhere if you ask them. But if you want SSL, it's probably still easier to buy a domain through them, though.

Everything you say is correct. But on the other side of the ledger, the later Box employees presumably received market-rate salaries, and I suspect that many of the 1,200 employees are salespeople who may well bring in more in commission than the average software engineer makes in salary.

Also on the other side of the ledger, I could rewrite your comment to:

A founder at a tier 1 company might have millions of dollars in shares, but it'll go down quickly from there for everyone below the first tier. What about the founders at other companies who chose that route over safe, comfortable market-rate salaries and failed, or who received nothing after a down round with a high liquidation preference? Where's the WSJ article on them, and the thousands of others who are never written about when a handful of Silicon Valley companies a year go public? The ones who started a company, with their personal finances in the red, or under pressure from all sides, and helped it grow and succeed... and they walk away still not being able to afford a house in Mountain View, while early employees at Box or Facebook or Twitter pick out colors for their Ferraris?

This article was on the front page of the Wall Street Journal today. One thing that struck me when I read it this morning is that the headline is practically unrelated to the article: the word "rich" appears only in the article's 7th paragraph, and the bulk of the piece is pretty straightforward reporting on Box's fundraising efforts.

Box's market cap is approximately $2B. If the founders ended up with, say, $150M combined (the article says over $100M), it may be a relatively small slice -- but of a pretty big pie. I suspect 99.9999% of HN readers would be happy with the results that those two folks managed, and the fact that the company, in this post-Sarbox era, conducted a successful IPO. To put it in perspective, I'm not aware of a single YC-backed company that has had an IPO, though Dropbox seems a likely near-term candidate.

We're talking about two different things, really: You're saying that RMS was concerned about copy protection and locked-down devices in general back in 1997. That's true, and nobody has said anything to the contrary.

But RMS and the FSF didn't, as far as I remember, oppose the DMCA! It's not because they were in favor of it, but because few people in the tech community outside of the DFC were paying attention.

If you look at the FSF's web site a few weeks after the DMCA became law, it talks about the fixing the (bad) Communications Decency Act, fixing (bad) software patents, and fixing (bad) crypto laws, but it doesn't even mention the DMCA: https://web.archive.org/web/19981206082742/http://www.fsf.or...

BTW, late 1998 wasn't exactly exclusively Usenet/phone coordination days. Slashdot with its Your Rights Online section had launched a year before, and Wired had already been publishing its Netizen section, including my contributions, for about three years. EFF had been around for almost 10 years, and there was VTW, CDT, EPIC, ACLU, etc. also in the mix. Even my Politech mailing list.

We were there. I was there. We were indeed outgunned. But also the politicians voting for the DMCA's "anti-circumvention" language never intended it to be wielded against farmers with John Deere tractors.

Agreed that SSL should be included at least as an option; it's now gone beyond a nice-to-have feature.

The ClaimYourName site reminds me of Strikingly (a YC-funded company), which unfortunately still doesn't support SSL for domains purchased elsewhere: https://twitter.com/declanm/status/590313911271821312

>Everybody in tech with 2 brain cells predicted this.

Cite, please? Claiming, somewhat rudely, that was the case doesn't make it true.

If you were prescient enough to publicly criticize the anti-circumvention sections of the DMCA in 1996-1997, you were virtually alone. The lone voices of criticism I remember came from the American Library Association and American University's Peter Jaszi. By 2000 or so, sure, some people had realized the problems, but what I'm talking about is what happened before 1201 became law.

Here's one example: the DMCA was approved by both chambers of Congress and became law in October 1998. EFF's home page in October 1998 doesn't even mention the votes or the DMCA at all: https://web.archive.org/web/19981201054106/http://www2.eff.o...

Of course, the EFF has arguably done more than any other single group to fix DMCA 1201 since then. But, again, I'm talking about when the legislation was still in Congress.

The linked article is good as far as it goes, but it fails to take the next logical step and call for the simple repeal of the anti-circumvention section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

I was living in Washington, D.C. and following the DMCA when it became law in 1998 -- I can assure you that nobody expected sec. 1201 to morph into the creature it has become today. It was sold to Congress as a non-controversial way to implement a pair of (yawn) WIPO Copyright Treaties. The DMCA was approved unanimously in the Senate and by a process reserved for non-controversial legislation in the House; there was not even a recorded vote.

This is federal law as buggy and outdated code, which is badly in need of refactoring. I wrote about a proposed law to defang the DMCA back in 2003, once some of the 1201 problems became clear: http://news.cnet.com/Congress-mulls-revisions-to-DMCA/2100-1... But because of the influence of the copyright lobby, no amendments have ever succeeded.

I wrote more about a better way to approach 1201 and, more broadly, federal DRM policy in this law review article here: http://mccullagh.org/misc/articles/michigan.state.drm.0605.p...

While letting people know about John Deere's comments to the Copyright Office is great, the only reason the Copyright Office has a role here is that 1201 authorizes them to set exemptions. But why should we have to beg the Feds for exemptions when the underlying logic of 1201 is suspect?

At the very least 1201 deserves to be debated in Congress with an understanding of what it actually does and how it affects modern technology. When it was introduced 18 years ago, nobody could have known, and that debate has never happened.

Putting a smiley face on it doesn't mean you're right. :)

Under federal law Sergey and Larry and Eric can each give a maximum of $2,600 to any federal candidate, $5,000 to a PAC, or $32,400 to a national party committee. This is not "millions of dollars." And, again, the unsupported and false allegation of "paying off candidates" is chemtrail-istic. HN deserves better.

Source: http://www.fec.gov/pages/brochures/contriblimits.shtml

>The only tech event I strongly recommend attending is LAUNCH Festival by Jason Calacanis.

Agreed. It's very well done. Also note that Jason has been very critical of the "pay to pitch" phenomenon: http://www.businessinsider.com/my-latest-war-angels-who-char...

<zaroth>: I'm not sure why you were downvoted, so have an upvote.

Not saying I entirely agree with you -- calling it a "tax" is incendiary and no more accurate than saying "why do we need to pay a 10% tax to grocery stores or Amazon?" -- but your broader point is an interesting one.

I'm pessimistic about this application of p2p discovery in the short term, but in the longer term (>7 years) you may well be right. The short/medium-term problem, and this goes back to 1990s discussions among cypherpunks about anonymous reputation systems, is that those "honest reviews" are attractive targets for gaming.

> Ben Edelman, whose done a damn good job over the years not only watching Google

Ben Edelman is a smart fellow; I've known him for 15 years or so. But he is a paid Microsoft consultant and advisor. Perhaps he's right on some of these points, but I also suspect that if Microsoft would stop writing him checks very quickly if he suddenly started declaring that Google's actions benefited consumers.

You might as well quote a paid Democratic party consultant doing a "damn good job over the years" describing how evil those dastardly Republicans are.

Those are individuals choosing to donate money, not Google. As I said above, any corporation is prohibited from donating even $0.01 to any candidate for federal office.

> campaign contributions made by Google to the Congressional representatives...

Sigh. It is illegal for Google, like any other company, U.S. or foreign, to donate even $0.01 to any "congressional representative" (by that I take it you mean candidate for federal office or a current federal office-holder).

Google has never done so, and nobody, except you, has ever accused the company of doing so. Not only is this a slur, is the FUD equivalent of chemtrails, and it has no place on HN.

Source: "The law also prohibits contributions from corporations and labor unions. This prohibition applies to any incorporated organization, profit or nonprofit." http://www.fec.gov/pages/brochures/citizens.shtml#prohibited

You might be interested in a classic (well, pre-Microsoft antitrust) book written by a professor who has specialized in antitrust law. I've interviewed him a few times. Excerpt:

"Professor Armentano thoroughly researches the classic cases in antitrust law and demonstrates a surprising gap between the stated aims of antitrust law and what it actually accomplishes in the real world. Instead of protecting competition, Professor Armentano finds, antitrust law actually protects certain politically-favored competitors. This is an essential work for anyone wishing to understand the limitations and problems of contemporary antitrust actions." http://www.amazon.com/Antitrust-Monopoly-Anatomy-Independent...

>What would be a viable way for Google to fix this that doesn't hurt users?

Assuming that any of Google's business practices needs to be "fixed" (a claim that's debatable and has been rejected by U.S. FedGov), you've put your finger on the difference between the U.S. and Euro regulatory approaches.

The European approach is more inclined to protect competitors that complain about a rival -- in this case Yelp, Microsoft, etc. are doing that. Note protecting competitors from rivals is not the same as protecting competition; in fact, having bureaucrats cripple some firms and favor others can reduce competition and injects politics and lobbying and who-golfs-with-the-commissioner into the process. It also can lead to bizarre results like the lack of a reasonably viable way to "fix" things.

The U.S. approach toward dominant firm behavior (well, since the 1970s) has been different. It focuses on intervening when there's consumer harm, or at least tries to. If consumers are not harmed, the logic goes, there is likely no reason for the Feds to intervene. This is why the FTC did not proceed with its case against Google. U.S. law also emphasizes economic analysis, which stands a better chance of grounding the analysis in marketplace reality.

A colleague and I wrote about the different EU vs. US antitrust approaches here: http://news.cnet.com/Intel-probe-highlights-EU-U.S.-regulati...

Note Microsoft enlisted U.S. politicians in its attempt to fend off broad EU antitrust actions; here's my article from 2004: http://news.cnet.com/U.S.-politicos-fire-at-EUs-Microsoft-ru... Google doesn't seem to have the same depth of congressional outreach, especially among Rs predisposed to be skeptical of antitrust actions.

Yup. I wrote about this for CNET in 2013:

http://www.cnet.com/news/how-web-mail-providers-leave-door-o... "A survey of top mail providers shows that Google is alone in using strong encryption, known as SMTP-TLS... Facebook, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and AOL Mail do not accept incoming e-mail in SMTP-TLS encrypted form..."

I hope things have improved since. (Some enterprising journalist might want to do a followup.)

There was Cygnus Solutions, which I believe maintained GNU software (debugger, binutils) and contributed large parts of gcc. Cygnus was bought by Red Hat for $674M in 1999.

HN folks may recognize EFF board member John Gilmore as the founder.

A few thoughts based on my experience, which included being subpoenaed by the U.S. Department of Justice while I was at Wired. We filed a motion to quash, which was unsuccessful, so I was forced to take the stand. I posted the docs here: http://mccullagh.org/subpoena/

So, the thoughts:

* I would refuse to testify against my former employer unless I were subpoenaed. Even then, I may move to quash the subpoena (this may be different in your case, of course).

* Being subpoenaed could include depositions and travel and courtroom testimony and rescheduled evidentiary hearings because the judge has a murder trial that's running long -- it could take weeks of your life. This is not an hourlong process. Also, everyone else involved in this process is going to be paid for their time; who pays for yours? Do you even want, ethically speaking, to be paid for your time? Remember the "major law firm" does not work for you and does not have your best interests at heart; their interests may be opposed to yours. To protect yourself you could hire your own attorney, who isn't going to work for free.

* If your former employer has an active fanbase and strongly and convincingly denies your allegations, you could be attacked by name, and your family members dragged into this, online and via social media.

* There are innumerable laws and regulations, some of them rather nuts, and at least one employee at every large company may have innocently violated one of them at some point. Do the laws you believe your ex-employer violated punish behavior that you personally believe should be illegal (malum in se vs. malum prohibitum)? And did management know about and approve these illegal actions, or was it a rogue employee at fault? If the answer to either question is "no," you may want to drop this.

* Now that you've been contacted by a law firm, you could be subpoenaed even if you do not respond and try to drop this.

* If you believe your former employer has institutionally engaged in actions that are illegal and unethical, you have other options beyond testifying. You could write up your experiences and post them publicly, anonymously if necessary.

>This is what I hate about apps and services using phone numbers as primary credentials. Phone numbers can and do change, so they're nowhere near as stable as e.g. a simple email address.

Well put. I can think of a half-dozen phone numbers I used to have that have presumably been reused. Though even email addresses can be reused: Yahoo announced in 2013 it was doing this.

From a HN app/service-development perspective, all of these approaches have tradeoffs. Facebook login gives you a scoped unique ID with a low probability of reuse (perhaps zero, I can't recall what the docs say), but some folks don't like logging in with FB or don't have a FB account at all.

Let me try to offer a correction or at least a clarification. :)

First, you didn't quote this key section of Google's TOS: "You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours." That's a significant limitation.

Second, Apple's TOS is nearly word-for-word identical to the portion you excerpted above:

"By submitting or posting such Content on areas of the Service that are accessible by the public or other users with whom you consent to share such Content, you grant Apple a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Service solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available, without any compensation or obligation to you" (https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/icloud/en/term...)

Third, the general TOS has to be read in concert with the privacy policy and any product-specific privacy/TOS. Those exist for Google+, not sure about photos.

Fourth, there's no evidence Google is doing what you suggest (ad targeting, etc.). What is happening is shared endorsements: https://support.google.com/plus/answer/3403513?hl=en&p=plus_... But note Apple has plenty of leeway to do what it wants: "Apple reserves the right at any time to modify this Agreement and to impose new or additional terms or conditions..."

To actually read and understand a TOS/privacy policy takes some time -- so this isn't a comprehensive response. But maybe it helps...

Has anyone had the opportunity to compare Xamarin with Corona SDK?

Corona SDK is free and builds to Android/Windows/iOS with cross-platform wrappers available for what Corona has chosen to wrap, which can be different for each platform.

You don't get access to native UI elements. Instead, Corona offers OpenGL-based replacements (which may or may not be sufficient). You can also pay for Corona Enterprise and write your own platform-specific wrappers around native objects.

CNET.com and Download.com are both part of CBS Interactive (CNET Networks was a publicly traded company and was bought by CBS in 2008).

I worked at CBS Interactive when the Download.com installer/adware controversy erupted: http://insecure.org/news/download-com-fiasco.html

As you might expect, it was controversial inside the company as well. I guess things haven't changed after I left.

>By my count we now have, in no particular order...

There's also Corona SDK, which uses lua and OpenGL. Write once, build for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 8. UI performance is quite good. Supposedly building Mac and Windows desktop apps is coming soon, but HTML5 support was announced a year ago and has not yet happened.

The free version of Corona SDK supports only a subset of the native APIs (albeit an extensive subset that's probably sufficient for 95% of uses). If you want the full set, you have to pay $1,000+ a year for Corona Enterprise and implement your own os-specific glue logic.

Ah, you're right. Thanks! Here's a story that describes the problem (and an unsuccessful ice bath attempt):

http://www.motortrend.com/roadtests/oneyear/alternative/1404... I coincidentally spoke with a Tesla engineer and explained what had happened. "What you need to do is put the car in something like a big meat locker," he suggested. "Cool it way down first."

I've been an Apple user since the IIe days, and I remember the tiny, vulnerable niche company it was very well. But as you say:

"Apple now twice as big as world's second-largest company, ExxonMobil" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnol...

On the performance point, you're quite right on 0-60 speeds. Electric motors, all-wheel drive, and smart launch control will give you excellent times.

On a track, though, where weight and handling matter so much, I wonder what the performance would be. The Tesla Model S (Performance Model) and the Tesla Roadster have essentially the same lap time around Laguna Seca as a humble VW Golf and Ford Focus -- and all four are comfortably beaten by a $30K Subaru WRX STi. Source: http://my.teslamotors.com/forum/forums/model-s-laguna-seca-l...

Now that was likely not the P85D, but that model's extra performance will be offset by the extra 300lbs and curb weight of approximately 5000(!) lbs. It may be helped by a more even front/rear weight distribution and AWD. (I admit I've spent the last three days on the track at Laguna Seca, so I may be overly fixated on lap times...)

This is not to take away from Tesla's remarkable accomplishments in such a short time. The P85D is an amazing car.