larrysalibra

This silly signing ceremony shows the fragility of a centralized trust model. If bitcoin/blockchain succeeds this hopefully will be relegated to the history books.

Torture isn't conducted to improve the ability of the victim to recall information but as a negotiating tactic. I'll give you what you want: to stop being tortured, if you tell me what I want to know.

Hi HN!

I'm the one NYT quoted in this article.

The creepy thing about this is that it does this while ignoring the user's location privacy settings and even if users are using a VPN or roaming (ie. data hits the Internet in user's home country instead of in China).

There are more details about how I tested this at the Hong Kong/China border on my blog: https://www.larrysalibra.com/how-apple-censors-news-in-china...

Yeah - wide variety of content that's well-indexed. Any better suggestions?

If they're storing credit cards they're doing something wrong.

It really depends on your target customer. If you're selling one off to businesses with POs/invoices like directory wizards apparently is, your customers don't want long payment terms, and your invoices values are high (> $x000) then credit cards probably don't make sense.

It's silly to pretend checks, wire transfers, and dwolla don't have costs. You're asking the customer to pay a month or two earlier than they would credit cards - many businesses will then ask for net 30 terms (or 60 or 90!). If you're providing terms, you have to run an accounts receivable department and make sure customers pay on time. You're also now in the position of tying up your own working capital providing vendor financing. With credit cards, these things are included in the price.

Another key distribution system is to use a key-value blockchain store based naming model such as Blockchain ID (formerly Passcard, Onename).

https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack/wiki/Blockchain-ID-...

You use the user's username (key) to look up their profile which is either stored in the blockchain or "snapshotted" to the blockchain so that it is tamperproof. You can store the PGP (or OTR or<insert your favorite public key here>) public key fingerprint in the profile.

Wow that's a great post! Puts into words the thought process I've gone through many times before.

Would be even better if your site had some TLS love! ;-)

Thanks for sharing!

The problems the author describes aren't limited to just hackathons. Developer-entrepreneurs are constantly bombarded with requests for free labor from idea people. Don't code for free!

This is similar to the complaint you hear from startups in Hong Kong: it's hard to find funding because all wealthy people in Hong Kong made their wealth in real estate.

If the content is already encrypted & signed (like imessage & app store content) there is little to be gained by using TLS and a performance cost particularly in latency on unreliable connections (mobile, packet loss, etc).

Did you take a look at the data that's being sent? Are photos encrypted and signed in transport like Apple claims?

The author makes interesting points. Level of complexity of implementing QoS Internet wide makes me think we won't see this soon.

Thanks! I think part of the vision for this technology is that since primary key for people's identity (or identities!) to tie to together parts of their identity across different platforms and services.

Google, Facebook, etc have tried to do this before, but it never works because their business concerns always get in the way of the technology.

Imagine Facebook agreeing to make Google Accounts their primary key for their userbase. It wouldnt even happen over Zuck's cold dead body - would be a horrible business decision.

Passcard is in the blockchain and the only ownership is people owning their identities, so anyone can build on it...just like I built Nametiles!

Not at all. Apologies for leaving that impression!

Want more people to call bullshit when people in government use lazy arguments as an excuse to compromise privacy of citizens.

"But if there's encryption, my job is more work" arguments from NSA, CIA, FBI, military, etc, exactly like this are a huge threat to civil liberties & freedom.

Poster could set up a reverse proxy to support apps that couldn't be updated to HTTPS in less time than it took to write his github issue post:

https://github.com/WhiteHouse/https/issues/107#issuecomment-...

They removed the link tracking! https://github.com/Ourinternet/website/issues/1#issuecomment...

XMPP is great for what it was designed for. It doesn't work well with mobile, high packet loss & high latency connections. XMPP is talkative and bandwidth intensive - bad for limited data/battery applications. It also wasn't designed for today's 1 person multiple devices reality. Most XMPP servers let you log in multiple times but messages don't sync between clients and sometimes get delivered to the client the user isnt currently in front of.

Also, sending files over XMPP has pretty much always sucked - there are a bunch of incompatible ways to do it and it's always been hit and miss depending on which client your chat partner was using, network topography, etc.

More from the project: https://core.telegram.org/techfaq#q-why-did-you-go-for-a-cus...

Update: Bitstamp CEO finally commented: https://twitter.com/nejc_kodric/status/552033583486230529

I don't agree with creating barriers to entry, because in the end it makes everyone worse off, but agree with your analysis - most programmers don't understand that a game is being played let alone how to play it. Thanks for commenting!

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8809829

I've never had anyone before suggest I have the power to walk the United States to its doom. I am both humbled and honored! Thank you!

The companies that are able to get the best deal, get the 10 programmers, the other companies hire less than ideal programmers. The benefits of their skills accrue to the 10 superstar programmers who make a fortune (at the expense of the investors in the companies that didn't get them) and go on to self-fund their own companies. More people in USA are attracted to programming as a profession (instead of banking, medicine, etc) because they see how well they can do if they're good, increasing the future supply of great developers.

This is how it works now (except for H1B).

What PG suggests is that in this situation, the benefits should accrue to the investors in the other companies - which just serves to concentrate wealth.

He's concerned HE and HIS industry will lose their tech lead because some superstar programmers end up getting paid millions a year (like top bankers) and become independently wealthy without bringing PG et al along for the ride.

Re argument #2 who cares what country "leads the world"? I don't want to see individual programmers taken advantage of at the expense of VCs (or other groups) and told "but its for the greater good of the country"

Re argument #3 they don't have average higher costs -> see many articles on h1-b abuse http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2008-10-08/high-rate-of-...

Thanks for the shout out! Automated testing is great...the more you can automate, the better! For the things you can't automate, Pay4Bugs (https://www.pay4bugs.com) helps you get lots of human eyes searching for problems in your product quickly and for minimal cost.

Great points! Another great benefit of being outside of SFO/NYC is it's easier to avoid a lot of the time wasting hype and distraction.

And unlike keybase's "it's complicated so it must be good" proofs, onename's proofs are easy -> add a pointer from your onename namespace to your social media property and a pointer back to onename to prove you own it. No need to generate signatures that break when anything changes.

https://onename.io/larry https://keybase.io/larry