> That's more of what I was trying to get at when I talked about lack of security.
Ah, That makes sense! I don’t think we’d really considered that deeply. Thank you for your comprehensive response.
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Ah, That makes sense! I don’t think we’d really considered that deeply. Thank you for your comprehensive response.
Do you mean as in auditable? Would you settle for source available for this use case? Sounds like you also value the ability to use it to self-host for free if something goes wrong, right?
My company makes a security and automation product that customers self-host (we do the deployment for them if they need, which typically they do except where you need to be cleared, then we train on a demo system and they do it themselves), but we don't make it open source because we think it's hard to capture the value in that case. As in: you can self-host valuable IP for free for commercial use under OSSL, and we get volume-discounted 5/seat/mo with SaaS if you really want to? We're scared people will just not pay.
I guess the jury is still out for us, but we used to have a OSS product with degraded quality, but we found it inefficient because customers would try to upgrade that rather than bothering with licensing, get stuck, then get fed up. So patient was a limited resource. So we remove the artificial limitations, but also make it non-open-source, but free for noncommercial use (governments, non-profits, etc, because they are either too big to close, or didn't have budget, but their adoption is good signal). So we won't do OSS in future for that product.
We make it source available, so it can be audited, and free to use non-commercially, but not free to self-host commercially (possible to, but you need to license it). We haven't gone the SaaS route because: 1) customers often want to use their own infra anyway, 2) customers have different customization needs, 3) we always thought about SaaS like 1000s of individual consumer accounts and we weren't sure that was the right fit, and 4) embarrassingly it's pretty complex to build the infra for SaaS especially without being sure there are customers for that.
Tho with the recession, we're considering adding SaaS. Our competitors often have SaaS offerings, and the pricing certainly can work at "developer prices" (5 a month or less, depending).
Exactly! Exactly! Great way to put it
I’ll check out this Newport guy today for a superiority hit. Thanks! :) ;p xx
A lot of unlicensed use goes on in undeveloped backwaters of the world but I don’t see that as affecting growth because those poor pirates don’t have the money to pay anyway.
As long as we keep up our current rate of sale and don’t hire more we’ll stay profitable and liquid, and I can make a good salary, but I what I really want is growth.
But I don’t want VC money. I don’t know what to do.
Do you have a GitHub or place where we can see more of your work? Thank you for laboring in obscurity until you produced this magnum opus masterpiece. This guy is example of why you should never give up. :) ;p xx ;p
Brandt Farm - Carroll, Ohio [0]
My info about naming it after the soviet refusal comes from this very interesting paper: https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106960270010... "French and Chinese Nuclear Weapons Testing"
So...
Wow, the Chinese do not forget a grudge: nicknamed their first nuclear device "596" for the date (June '59) that Soviet Khrushchev refused to give them a nuclear device prototype. They must have felt so entitled to one that they commemorated their achievement by naming symbolically to vanquish Khrushchev fatal insult of refusing to provide them with one. Interesting that it was not "their own achievement in building their own device" they celebrated, but rather their "victory" over someone who refused to help them in the way they felt entitled to. "Hell hath no fury like a Chinese scorned." I guess. Wow.
> I don't think it's purely a Chinese trait and I'm sure that there's plenty of similar "grudge" naming of things in other cultures (can't recall any of the top of my head though).
i don't think so. I think the Chinese take such entitlement to a new level. There's always obstacles in any project, but I don't see other national projects "defining themselves" or their successes by how they ended up beating those who refused to assist them. it's pretty twisted.
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Curifase
Celebrate the small wins find enjoyment in the process and motivate yourself with peptalk’s imagining how great it will be when you solve it, or how close you are. get a feel for the problem and believe that it has a solution. I just keep trying to get there, enjoy the uncertainty and the excitement of discovery.
Remember, you may be the first person to tred these paths. So don’t forget to stop to take it all in once in a while. Even if you’re not The first person to do so, you’re doing the first time you’ve been there, so still stop to take it all in because it’s important to you, and that makes it important.
When people criticize you, how do you feel? “Bad” is not an emotion, it helps to be more specific.
Do you feel the way you do way because you’re unhappy with your own performance and you wish it was better? Or because you’re unhappy with the other person’s unnecessary (or unkind) criticism of your innocent, honest mistake?
Or other reasons?
Often these kind of personal investigation questions can help. You may get clarity. Once you figure out clearly what’s there for you, try the same “why approach” on the other people involved, in your own head, without asking them. Why did they say what they said? and how did they feel at that moment? And why did they feel that?
If you find it hard to know a reason, try using your imagination.
Maybe there are insights that you will arrive via this process that will transform How are you see it, and that’ll help make everything seem better for you.
I hope you figure it out and get some peace. :)
DefGuard looks like a great way for average folks and small business to get quickly and easily secure in their infrastructure! Sounds like you value creating something really quality and putting it out there, making it free and open (even Open Source!) along the way, and also like you really want to provide as much value as you can for folks in the security space.
It's probably way too different an aspect of security to compare, and the different licenses are likely a big problem, but the values you express with Defguard resonate with what we're doing with BrowserBox open-source^0, and I bet it's the dumbest question you will see on this thread and I'm sure it will seem like a tacky promo so I'm sorry, but would it be a terrible idea to integrate BrowserBox open-source into your swiss-army knife?
In the article^0 where I discovered this (a, so far, interesting history of French and Chinese programs), I also found this part^1 interesting:
TN 75 Warhead
In 1984-1985 Defense Minister Paul Quiles tasked the CEA to design a miniaturized nuclear warhead for the MSBS M45 SLBM, a variant of the M4. In response, the CEA declared that it could 'achieve a warhead/ re-entry vehicle which is virtually invisible to radar' by 1994.15 The CEA launched the TN 75 warhead program, which was tested numerous times up until July 1991, when testing ceased. According to a report by the Defense Committee of the French National Assembly, 22 tests were conducted to develop the TN 75.
The TN 75 warhead is a miniaturized, hardened, thermonuclear warhead. A new coating material and a 'very precisely computed shape' are said to provide the TN 75 re-entry vehicle with 'a very high penetration' capability that also reduces the warhead signature. I? The warhead is much lighter than the current TN 71 (deployed on the M4B) 18 The TN 75 is in the natural progression towards warhead miniaturization, hardening, safety, and stealth, but the tight weight and volume constraints of this system forced design compromises that, when viewed from the prospect of a CTB, caused French officials to be concerned about the long-term reliability of the warhead. It is likely that the 1 October test conducted at Fangataufa, with a reported yield of 110 Kt, was probably a full-scale test of the TN 75.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36010490
1: French and Chinese Nuclear Weapons Testing, p. 46
I'm curious do you believe that extraterrestrial intelligence has visited planet Earth I think you can go a step further it hasn't just visited it's been here a long time and it's still here uh and it has a basically um you know people talk about the wow signal looking for extraterrestrial intelligence the wow signal is that people see it on an almost regular basis that's the communication that's already here and and that statement seems so incredible that it it's tough to believe right people hear that and maybe a lot of people here hear that and they don't believe it and so I'm curious if you had to assign a probability to that statement that you believe extraterrestrial intelligence has visited visited this planet what probability would you assign a hundred percent and that's not just my opinion I mean look um the National Defense appropriation Act passed last year signed by by Biden in uh December 30 pages of that is the establishment of an unidentified aerial phenomenon office the establishments of looking into the harm that's happened to an even number of the individuals going back to 1945 and looking at the disinformation and misinformation that has been uh basically articulated over the decades 12 U.S senators have signed on to a document that basically says we want the information the establishment of an office arrow in the Department of Defense has 25 people working in it right now and what's their what's their goal collecting the information across all over the uh all of the U.S department of intelligence sorry Department of Defense intelligence offices and Coalition of that into a uniform format for the very first time and provision of that then to Congress the creation of a whistleblowers program specifically that allows people from the from within who I'm going to say this who've been working on the reverse engineering programs reverse engineering of objects so that they can come in and break their Oaths but it's specifically just to talk to Congress and give that information in classified settings and that the most recent one that happened was just last weekend and it created quite a hornet's nest in Washington and and so let's just create kind of like a logical framework here so we started the top we say now there's 100 probability that extraterrestrial intelligence has visited Earth now we have to go down to why that statement may be true why you believe that statement is true what is the evidence and I think perhaps we all may have to read between the lines a little bit here you may not maybe divulge everything but in your opinion what do you believe to be the most compelling evidence to support that statement well I think the most compelling evidence is you just need to look at what your government is doing right now about it I mean just go and look at the number of uh politicians and this is interesting on both sides of the aisle who have come together and signed off on this statement I mean I was involved last year with putting together some of the wording of that uh of that uh the ndaa which was passed into law so I mean so what are they basing their opinions on they're basing their opinions on the dozens of individuals who in one manner or another have come forward and talked to them in classified settings so that's the first thing then my personal experiences with the individuals who are who well the one person who actually was involved with collecting a lot of that original information uh and then my experience with people who frankly I know have worked or are working on the reverse engineering programs okay so let's let's take one step back reverse engineering programs of downed craft now the first question that people will ask is well if they're so freaking Advanced why are they why are they crashing because what's crashing is not actual living things I mean if you I use this example a lot if you wanted to study a tribe of cannibals in the middle of the Amazon are you going to go yourself and show up in the middle of the of the tribe and not hopefully become dinner on the other side of it so if you're an advanced intelligence you know I don't think we're all that advanced frankly um you're not going to basically put your your uh life and limb at risk by coming here so mostly what you're seeing here are either drones or some sort of advanced AI or whatever it is I mean look we're we're already we're already dealing with a an alien intelligence in our own emails right our own uh you know chat GPT Etc we don't even know what it's doing so imagine if you were a million years ahead of us uh how do you how do you have a dialogue with something like that or what is it that could possibly do yeah and I'm glad I'm glad that we've got some people here to witness these statements I think they're very consequential and so we start with now 100 probability of extraterrestrial intelligence we go to evidence we now talk about down craft we see the the government moving in a certain direction presumably the downcraft is made of some material presumably we could test that material I know you've done a little bit of work firsthand you have seen some material do you want to talk about that a little bit right well um you know so what is it that you hope to discover out of a material so let's just go back I mean just briefly uh and and why would you want to do it in the first place so basically a grain of silicon you know back in the 50s or 60s changed our entire culture and world right I mean so something as small as that the discovery of what you could accomplish with a little piece of germanium uh doped with the right uh elements changed our understanding now so we have multiple simultaneous sensor systems that have seen these objects go from 50 feet above the water to up to 14 miles and then back in less than a second all right I mean that's just a truth the U.S government has confirmed that these kinds of measurements have done now they're very careful what they say they say well we have no evidence of E.T well because you know no ET is going to come walking in here and say hello right but um if you read between the lines on the flip side of it it does stuff that we can't do we know that the Russians and the Chinese are not doing and so if you can go from zero to five thousand miles an hour and take a a right turn and not end up squished like a bug on the windscreen on the other side if they have windscreens uh then what is the physics that accomplishes that so what that tells you is that we need to rethink our physics first of all to say that well you know we saw birds fly so it took us 3000 years we figured out how to fly but now we see these things doing this so what is it that that lets us do so I know some of the physicists on the inside who work at some of these big defense corporations who basically oh well here's how you tweak even general relativity to accomplish that but then you say well how much energy is needed to do it well more than the whole nuclear output of the planet per day per movement so you start to backtrack and you say okay well who could do that well we can't will we be able to do it in a thousand years but if we had a piece of any of this let's say it's a thousand uh uh revolutions ahead of us or a million revolutions ahead of us even a tiny piece of knowledge from that could revolutionize what it is that we're doing I'm always I'm always looking for the opportunity I look at the at the upside of this I'm not worried about them coming and you know raiding us or yeah taking our women and children uh that's not my concern my concern is how do we use it yeah yeah and and I'm curious do you have confidence that you us collectively will have material literal physical material to evaluate to analyze yes 100 I'm 100 again it's there it's there it's I mean I can say this I I was working with a group about seven eight years ago and I literally got within a few weeks of gaining access to one of the um one of the objects and when the people who didn't want us to gain access to it found out about it they pulled some bureaucratic administrative tricks and snatched it away it's wild and and so so now we have you Dr Nolan making this bold statement you are well positioned to make this statement now maybe we get into like some fun let's like feel comfortable hypothesizing a little bit as to what is happening like what what is it right like nobody's gonna hold you to this right now maybe we go down from 100 probability to now we're speculating right okay now let's speculate together what what do you think it is right so to to do that I'll start with kind of a mantra I've had for the last while so you know individual experiences of what people see is an anecdote but an anecdote doesn't convince a scientist what's a convinces what is it that convinces a scientist data right what doesn't convince scientists a conclusion so really the objective here and what has allowed me to actually talk to some of my scientist colleagues who first said ...
If you guys are really into the idea of an extendable virtualized browser API, an extendable browser that you can hack on, and customize programmatically fully (including all the browser UI, the so-called “chrome”), then my BrowserBox project might be for you.^0^1^2
That open extendable browser is actually my vision of BrowserBox and I think it’s a really powerful thing. For example: I imagine being able to create an "extension store" using the more powerful set of APIs enabled by this (compared to the more limited APIs available to regular browser extensions). Similar to the idea you related where bookmarks is a module--which is something we've wanted to do for a long time--but not sure about the API contours!
The other ideas you talk about are all great, too: a UI that can be fully customized (vertical tabs!) or even tree tabs / history. Or all kinds of crazy things. Browser UIs are pretty uninnovative mostly, but a fully customizable UI could really open that up.
Modules ideas (that in some sense we've been exploring at Dosyago over the last few years, through DiskerNet, client projects, GraderJS and so on):
- web scraping / automation script builder
- vim shell
- vertical tabs UI
- bookmarks
- public / shared bookmarks
- full text searchable bookmarks (DiskerNet)
- NodeJS shell (GraderJS)
And I think BrowserBox may have the right model for that extensibility (maybe not totally right but the idea of: instead of using a WebView tag you’re using the much more extensible and powerful set of APIs for browser instrumentation and automation in other words, the "remote debugging protocol" APIs) to create the surface of extensibility. And our company has already built the the application with the browser UI at the front, and the instrumented browser engine at back to enable that building out an API. Our system is already a fully functional browser: with multiple tabs, back/forward history, but no other modules!
The main modules we have built so far have been: web scraping / automation script building for clients. We've experimented with other modules, but the majority of the work we need to do is around carving out the contours of that API. What surface do we provide in order to make modules really great? That's the key question and one we are looking for help answering.
Having that API for the browser to allow like a modules type thing is something that’s been on our plans for a long amount of time we always thought it was a good idea, but we’ve never been sure if there was much demand for it. Like you say here this Nyxt project really highlights the fact that this is something that really is a good idea or at least it seems like it and definitely people seem like they want it. There's still a lot of problems with this approach, but I believe they all have achievable solutions!
While our project may not be as technically elegant as using lisp, but I think it has the prosaic advantage of: having a simple client/server architecture (browser UI at the front, instrumented engine at the back); using a highly extensible set of powerful API‘s that are on essentially standard track with the WebDriver specifications (making, at least in theory, the future ability to swap out the browser engine between Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or whatever else that supports WebDriver); and I think most importantly--it’s written in JavaScript, Node.JS, HTML, CSS--greatly widening the field of potential contributors
I’m encouraged today by this project and the thread you have started to push our BrowserBox project more in this direction and I would like to encourage people to come on and check it out and because of that we are opening up our projects today to contributions. I think there's a lot of work to do and we can't do it alone!
0: https://github.com/dosyago/BrowserBox