People generally caring about declaring img size attributes died out like 15 years ago. grumble
Declaring image sizes doesn't fit into the distributed model that is that is the rage these days, so I guess people don't care since it's so hard. At least it makes their ms/req numbers look great, nevermind that the experience for the actual users sucks.
Sure, but that only works so far. Even a european-style police force would eventually snap if they had to do 100 break-ins to combat ongoing crime if 99/100 calls were fake.
Surely if 99/100 calls were fake, that should reinforce the idea that a fake call is a possibility, and ensure that police are less likely to react with deadly force unless a threat is proven.
The same way telemarketers fake phone numbers. More surprising to me is that the deeper routing data (as in, the real source of the call, which the phone company necessarily has) is not available. I understand that you want to allow anonymous tips, but it would make sense that if the caller ID data is faked (i.e. the purported number's exchange doesn't match the source), then the data should be made immediately available.
Seems like a lot of people here really want VOIP to be anonymous/unregistered. You know, so that the nazis can't get you if they seize power. But they also seem loath to acknowledge this desire, particularly in this context.
You can specify the number you want to appear to be coming from when terminating a SIP connection, depending on where you're connecting to the network.
Edit: Ah, after reading more from that link you provided; the issue is stuck in your dysfunctional government.
I'm so confused right now.
Does the US not have a central agency that allocates phone numbers and operators? Does that agency not have the ability to shutdown operators who don't follow the rules?
You've broken the HN guidelines an extraordinary number of times in the past, and we cut you an extraordinary amount of slack. But the flamewars you've propagated over the last few days are serious vandalism on HN. I'm frankly shocked that you would continue to do that much damage here after we discussed this so many times.
Since giving you many benefits of the doubt has failed to persuade you to use this site as intended, I've banned your account.
Ah, well, Jingoism is an american word. I guess I just thougt the crowd here could agree that it's retarded to not have a political policy against fake VOIP numbers.
Thanks, but I somehow get the feeling that it's more about not wanting outsiders telling them how to solve problems they know they should have solved a long time ago by themselves.
I suspect that your feeling is incorrect - your word choice has significantly fallen out of favor for use in civilized discourse, at least in the United States. Beyond that it added very little to the discussion, which is often a reason for a down vote around these parts.
The level of overarching government control popular in Europe leads to people being killed by millions, rather than in ones and twos.
"not wanting outsiders telling them how to solve problems they know they should have solved a long time ago by themselves."
Perhaps we don't believe that people who were still running fascist slave states until the 1970s and communist slave states until the 1990s are in any kind of moral position to be lecturing us on our "problems".
Long story that I’m not fully familiar with short: the phone system suffers from the same trust issues that the internet does. That is, it wasn’t designed with things like adversarial users in mind.
EDIT: Am I incorrect in this statement? I'd love more feedback.
Right but in this case it was unproxied VoIP, right? It should be easy (in the sense of not requiring a forced universal protocol upgrade, I mean) to at least protect against this kind of attack — a caller from an LA IP claiming to be in Kansas.
There is another story happening in parallel to this where the Police arrested the wrong person based off the IP in use. IPs are just too ephemeral to trust for any form of location data.
Not to mention the caller chose to call a line which would normally not have a lot of need for those protections, in comparison to 911.
"IPs are just too ephemeral to trust for any form of location data"
That is just policy decision. It would, for example, be possible to declare that no single IP should be used for more than two customers during a single X hour block.
A policy decision by whom? Specifically, how do you do this when IP spaces are controlled by various unfriendly countries around the world? Politics aside, the required technical coordination would be a nightmare. We can barely handle BGP without conflicts as-is.
IPv4 space is also quite limited, and new devices are popping onto networks all the time. I'm not even sure a IP time window is feasible without a full move to IPv6 - something that policy makers have been trying to push on for years without success.
> Specifically, how do you do this when IP spaces are controlled by various unfriendly countries around the world
You begin a "911-certified program" that requires your local ISPs to register their IP ranges with some central authority. The rest is a bunch of detailed but solvable details.
Your idealism when it comes to making this seem more complicatated that it really is seems misplaced.
Your suggestion just isn't realistic when you look at how VoIP systems work in practice. What you usually have are SIP clients talking to SIP servers which then involve a bunch more servers and proxies and a slew of other protocols. SIP traffic from the endpoint and the associated RTP stream could be tunneled, often for very good reason. You can't prevent that with any kind of IP registration scheme because then the client can't roam which defeats the best reason to deploy VoIP in the first place. Providers are routing calls dynamically for reliability and cost reasons. Sometimes when you ask a server to terminate a call it just redirects it elsewhere. Even endpoints can arbitrarily redirect calls.
Ultimately none of the providers involved can know where either end of the call is. We can't even know their IP address for certain, let alone their physical location. What we have for 911 is a form where the customer declares their physical address and a disclaimer warning the customer that should they move then emergency calls will not be routed to the most appropriate call center and the operator will get the wrong address.
There's absolutely nothing we can do to prevent malicious people from abusing it. Any attempt to do so would result in honest users being unable to call for help in emergencies causing far more harm than the abuse we're trying to prevent.
You are not going to convince me, or anyone else who understand the tech, that this is a fundamentally unsolvable technical problem, I promise. It all boils down to compromises between regulation vs freedom, etc.
So, I do take issue when you say things like:
> There's absolutely nothing we can do to prevent malicious people from abusing it.
WRT "just get the government to do it" US federal legislation, specifically not that driven by "terrorism" or "protect the children" (and we don't want any legislation under either label) tends to take years to go from initial idea to law. That doesn't count the years which would be added for compliance. Or the charter and formation of the "central authority".
If we started today, we might get such a law in action sometime in the mid-2020's, at which point ISPs would have switched to IPv6 just to avoid the legislation. You know, maybe it would be a good idea after all /s
My "idealism" is probably better called "pessimism", and is based off a couple of decades watching well-meaning legislation be mangled beyond repair by politicians and corporations, at the city level.
People are complicated and irrational. People in politics are even more complicated and seemingly irrational, since even the best politicians have to balance the wants and needs of thousands of people and the businesses who employ those people. Politicians at the federal level are even more complicated, since they have 50 states, a number of territories, and gigantic corporations to consider.
Even influencing a completely honest political group to do what everyone agrees is the right thing takes a significant amount of time, money, and effort. And if we're honest, they aren't all completely devoted to their constituents, and won't agree that it's the right thing to do.
But then the question shifts to: maybe your country is too large to govern effectively - if you can't make changes like this quickly, something is wrong, I think.
Take any smart phone. No SIM card. Connect it to someone's wifi network, like a coffee shop. Now you can abuse 911 world wide in a completely untraceable manner.
What can possibly be done to prevent this that won't screw people desperately in need of help? It doesn't matter if your government is responsible for a town of 100 people or a country of 1.2 billion. It can't put an owner to each of the billions of smart phones floating around and that's not going to change any time soon.
I agree; it should be technically trival to implement this. All of my comments along the lines of this are wildly downvoted though; I'm not quite sure why. Maybe privacy cowboys?
Sure thing. Let me switch industries, learn a completely new skillset, and rise to a point of power where I can affect such widespread (cross-state and company) changes. Shouldn't take more than a few months.
Well, I do agree. I shouldn't take more than a few months to fix this. I don't live in the US, but I get the feeling something is terribly wrong with the way you're handling such a basic thing as a phone call, be it VOIP or not.
There probably are no intricate plans for the future on an executive level, besides having some smart people enjoy their work while building something that may or not be useful in the future, depending on a) how their effort, and b) the future turns out.
I bought some book of his in the late 90s and upon reading it kind of quickly realized he was pretty much a grade A douchebag. It was a shock, I remember. How could a douchebag be the creator of Dilbert?
Well, Google App Engine (both the standard/classic and flexible kinds) has been and still is pretty awesome for people who don't want to worry too much about SRE stuff but still not pay through the nose.
AWS Lambda just seemed like too much bureaucratic busywork for no good reason (ugh API Gateway...), last time I tried it out.
I guess it maybe appeals to "enterprise" type developers? Maybe it this way cause Werner Vogels is german and from an academic background? :-) I'm adventurous, because I write this knowing that even referring to national characteristics results in instant down votes here.
Just give me an endpoint where I can respond to HTTP requests and parse the URL path/parameters myself, thank you. That way I can keep it as simple or as complex as is needed, per situation. I just don't want to bother with your insanely over-engineered API of definining custom API requests.
Yeah I don't use the AWS much, how does this different from GAE? Hasn't GAE existed for a while already? I feel like it's always had it's uses, and it's very nice! But the revolution didn't happen five years ago, don't see why it would happen now.
The difference is that Lambda is a) way more annoying to use, b) gets way more coverage, because developers are locked into the AWS ecosystem and often don't pay the bills.
Intrigued by this I visited https://www.shadertoy.com/. There does seem to be a thriving community there.
Problem is, the browse pages have a 4x3 grid of live WebGL previews (rather than e.g. static images) of the shadertoys.
On my home desktop pc (win10, i4790k@4Ghz, GTX1070, 24 GB) running Chrome this means that inevitably, on page one or two, at least one of the shadertoys will use so much GPU computation that it starves out all other functionality, like being able to switch tabs etc.
I've tried to bring this point up in the past as well. All they would need to do is add an MP4 rendering job to replace those with video. Although the transcoding would be quite expensive, I'm sure IQ could set up a donation system.
I don't think this project needs more money; they need people who give a shit. (There's a setting that makes the site functional, but you have to register to get to it? What?)
I'm not affiliated with ShaderToy, though I love it. Would you mind clarifying all three of those points? What does giving a shit mean, do they need volunteers to work on the site? And are you sure they don't need money? $700 / month isn't much; having run a lower profile website myself, I'd be surprised if $700 even covers server costs, and it definitely doesn't pay anyone for their time. And what is this setting that makes the site functional? I want that.
But yeah, to clarify: What they primarily need is someone who gives a shit about the site being functional, secondarily money to cover operating costs. Before the first need is covered, just blindly giving some loose group money seems like it would have a high potential of going to waste.
You just convinced me to donate. ;) ShaderToy is free. I'll have to donate for a while just to cover the value I've already gotten from it, and it is a gold mine of share & remix techniques. It seems a bit cynical to call donating to ShaderToy "blindly giving some loose group money", and to just assume the money would be wasted. Since ShaderToy exists, and since it is pretty awesome, and since I know who made it, and since they have a Patreon account asking for money, I assume it will be used towards making more of the awesomeness they already made, improving the experience of the site, and I assume the money won't go to waste, the potential for that seems fairly low to me. Anyway, if it's not your thing, definitely don't use it and don't donate. But do have a happy new year, Cheers!
Using Firefox instead seems to help. Loading the grid pages is still super slow and rendering is broken, but at least you can use the rest of the browser/other tabs.
I'm trying to code shadergif https://shadergif.com to fix this but of course, the only community I have yet is "me" and I don't have all shadertoy features. I render gifs and preview videos to avoid spamming GPUs.
The code is open source so anyone who wants new features can actually code it (after all, it's a coder community, why not let it code the tool that shadertoy is).
Guess: it was perpetuated because lots of tech people hated him and what he did to the industry and to computing progress in general.
He has since gotten way, way better PR handling though. Just look at the way Reddit absolutely adores him nowadays (he's done lots of very carefully managed AMAs). Heck, even on HN there's enough young people who have no idea how much this one individual repressed computing progress over 1-2 decades through market abuse.
Here's one example of many of how the pro billg PR is done:
Another guess: He actually said it and a few people heard it, but when he said it was before everything in the universe was constantly being recorded, photographed, and pushed to the internet, so there's not necessarily a record of it.
Back then, you could just deny something happened, and often get away with it because you weren't being surveilled 24 hours a day.
It's like when someone very knowledgeable about a subject posts information on Wikipedia. Even if they were there first hand; even if they were personally involved with the event; even if they wrote magazine articles about it and did radio interviews about it, and it was covered by television — if it happened before 2000, it'll get erased from Wikipedia by someone on the other side of the planet because there's not a web link or an ancient library book to cite for "proof."
It's a bit distressing, in away, how hard it is to access information from before like year 2007. Most of it is locked up in government reference libraries and you generally have to bonafide "researcher" to even access physical copies of publications. Oh, and it's not allowed to make copies of the material.
I’m a child of the eighties, I grew up in the nineties, I remember waiting in line for my boxed copy of Windows 95 one August night in 1995, I remember ruling at Microsoft’s antitrust case (as related in WIRED), I remember how Slashdot featured an icon of Bill Gates with Borg add-one, but... I absolutely love the guy now and wish he would run for President (I am not American, just terrified).
You seem to have a pretty prominent chip on your shoulder regarding Bill Gates.
Gates has donated billions of dollars of his fortune to charity and he's largely credited for having eradicated malaria through these efforts in multiple countries.
It's hard to find a good reason to dislike someone like that.
I think most people are angry he put a lot of businesses out of business by bundling IE with Windows to put Netscape and other companies out of business that did web browsers.
Microsoft made their own version of Java that almost killed Sun. I think it was J++ and later J# and then Microsoft made C# to replace it.
The original DOS was CP/M that Seattle Software and Microsoft made their DOS do CP/M API calls and a program to convert CP/M programs to DOS. At the time this was not illegal, ECT. Microsoft did Basic, Fortran, Cobol without getting a license for them for 8 bit Pcs.
Those are just a few examples, mostly unethical but not criminal in 1970s and 1980s. By 1999 the DOJ investigated Microsoft.
Also Apple fans claim Microsoft ripped off the Macintosh with Windows and tried to put Apple out of business.
To people like Gates there are good and bad things, and people only know the good things and ignore the bad things because Microsoft built their own industry, ect.
I never liked Bill Gates when I was a power user in the nineties and early 2000s but it really is amazing that one could offset his contribution to disease eradication and his philanthropy generally with some aggravation about his business’ tactics and nebulous what-ifs about what might have happened if he had not been on the scene or had behaved differently. (Moore’s Law would did it’s thing anyway, whether he was there or not, and even with him there, Microsoft’s stranglehold on the desktop market relented anyway.) Do you really think the annoyance of a free browser warrants indicting his post-business career?
>Microsoft’s stranglehold on the desktop market relented anyway
Hardly. Market share is still roughly 85% Windows, 15% Mac, and fuck-all % Linux, which is reflected in the level of support provided for applications, games, hardware etc. Even disregarding compatibility, MacOS is not a straightforward alternative as it only runs on Apple hardware, which is very expensive and only offers a narrow range of opinionated designs.
Just noting that this comment first only talked about the browser bundling antitrust thing, and then, after I commented, completely morphed into something else.
I’m not really sure what you are referring to because I have not edited any of my comments, but this one probably closely resembles another one I made further up and therefore might give you the impression that there had been some ’morphing’ involved.
Hello, I have also lost karma points on this subject. I also feel that Microsoft had a very negative effect on the progress of computer science during many years but it is very difficult to convince other generations. There were many positive and negative effects. To grasp the global effect, you need to have lived all the progress of the previous years before Microsoft and you need to have followed all the commercials fights to eradicate concurrence (dr dos, stacker, borland c++, ...).
The main thing I remember from the era of Gates Is Literally Satan was the browser wars, and how awful it was that Internet Explorer was both free and tightly integrated into the operating system.
Dishonest comparison is dishonest. I'm pretty confident it's actually possible to uninstall Safari, and that macOS will continue to work.
Besides, the integration with the operating system isn't the problem. It's the integration with the only operating system. It isn't monopoly abuse if you don't have a monopoly.
If not Bill then Bob. At least he's doing some good in the world with that cash instead of hoarding it for him and his family. If it weren't for him, how long would have malaria persisted?
I think his primary motivation is so simple.. he wants people to like him.
Many, many people disliked him after his predatory business days. This is the perfect way to a) keep doing interesting work, b) getting people to like him again, c) get some personal karma.
I can quite easily see the appeal of this.
Also; I'm a big fan of his current work. I loved how my country (Sweden) matched a very large billg foundation program funding the other year; I think he's way better equipped with handling that money than my government's idealistic but fumbling people.
I just think we shouldn't forget his past just because he's turned into modern day santa. We should learn from history...
I’m not American but I wish he would decide that the situation there warrants ’philantropy’ and would this casually pour a billion or so into getting himself the Democratic nomination and the presidential election just for the sake of ousting Trump I’m a Battle Of The Billionaires (alleged, in Trump’s case).
> I think his primary motivation is so simple.. he wants people to like him.
Yeah, you definitely have something against him, don't you?
I don't really care what his motives are, I just look at the results of his contributions and there is no doubt in my mind he will be remembered as someone who was instrumental in saving millions of lives and advancing our civilization.
> Many, many people disliked him after his predatory business days.
I profoundly disliked him as well back in the days, especially since I was a hard code Amiga fan.
As opposed to you, I have changed my opinion based on additional data.
> Yeah, you definitely have something against him, don't you?
Well, yeah.
I think we'd be at least 5 years further into the future in terms of software than we currently are, possible 10, unless he hadn't abused the markets so gravely.
> How old are you? Let me just guess; not old enough to have experienced living/working in tech while Bill was doing his thing
Please no ad hominem attacks, focus on what I said, not how old I am.
But if it matters to you, I wrote my first lines of code in 1979 on an Apple ][ and I've lived through the exact same times you did.
I find little point in speculating on what could have happened that didn't, I focus on reality and what people have actually achieved in their life time.
It wasn't an attack (heck, wtf, I was just asking your age, maybe stop over-dramatizing?); I was trying to find out if you had some sort of personal experience or was just parroting the newer reddit hivemind.
What you did is the text book definition of an ad hominem attack: undermining someone's argument by attacking their character instead of addressing what they said.
Ah.. I guess that explains why they moved my city's fire station from the city center to something closer to the nearby major highway. (Europe/Sweden though.)
Don't worry, to a first approximation we can say that no firefighter on a fireground has ever had to make that calculation. It's semi-handy to know in terms of things like this:
5" supply hose holds about a gallon per foot of water when charged, and water weighs just a little more than 8 lbs per gallon, so a charged 100' section of 5" supply hose weighs over 800 lbs. So make sure you have the hose where you want it before charging it, because it's damn hard to move afterwards and the like.
In terms of doing math on the fireground, at least in a structural fire scenario (wildland firefighting has some other concerns) the single biggest one is usually flow-rate. That is, a crew has stretched a 200' pre-connected 2" attack line, and wants to go in flowing 200 gpm to attack the fire. As the engineer, what pressure do you configure on that discharge to give them their 200 gpm? Here's the kicker though... almost nobody sits there thinking "Well, the friction loss per foot of 2" hose at 200 gpm is x, multiply x by 200, assume a desired pressure of 100 psi at the nozzle, blah, blah, blah.". No, instead somebody precomputed the common configurations, wrote them on an index card, laminated it, and taped it to the pump panel. Plus the engineer probably has the really common ones memorized anyway, and/or has figured out a heuristic that's "good enough".
Speaking from experience, it's primarily due to 'tradition.' All of your combi-nozzles and rate control valves are rated and marked in GPM (Gallons per minute) and hose is purchased and stored as 50' sections. NFPA specifications for the hose required on a first due engine are in feet.
A department can't decide to use metric alone. The entire industry first would need to support at the minimum both standards.
Many of those deaths will have happened regardless of the response.
In some sense, across 300 million people, even 3000 is close enough to zero (there's more than 2.5 million total deaths each year in the US). That doesn't mean that improving fire response isn't important, but it might not be a very good place to look for incremental improvements in mortality.
I agree. I've never been on a fireground and had someone yell, "We lost the house because you didn't divide by 12!" Fireground math is a very rough science. Every engine in our district has pre calculated charts for every cross lay and discharge so you aren't doing the math on scene. Additionally, once you deploy line you have a radio and can ask the engineer to increase or decrease pressure with no math required.
A much bigger issue is the lack of recruitment and volunteerism in the American fire service. People simultaneously don't want to increase property taxes to fund career departments and they also don't want to volunteer. Communities can't have it both ways. Lack of staffing is a far greater risk than whether I'm dividing by 10 or 12.
I agree with @maxerickson, I'd bet that that number is approximately 0. The reasons people perish from fires rarely if ever have anything to do with a math mistake on something like this.
If they were taught in a US school for the last 40 years they were taught metric. If they were enlisted at any point in the last 30 years they were taught, and used, metric. If they can't handle the metric system then they probably aren't that good at math and are just using rote memorizations.
"A 100m length of 1cm hose is charged with water. How many liters (1 dm³) of water are in that length of hose?"
That problem is still no fun to do in your head. If it's important to do frequently, it's not hard to memorize the constant for "1 ft of 1 in-diameter hose = X gallons" and then multiply as appropriate.
Actually, it's trivial to do in your head. 100 * 100 cubic centimeters of water = 10 liters. Times pi/4 to correct for the circular cross section, so approx. 8 liters.
That is.. bad, particularly since the presumed context here is about fire emergencies where speed is of the essence. Any extra steps will add delays and/or opportunities for potentially disastrous mistakes.
The original problem requires plenty of conversions (to cubic inches) and memorization of infrequently used constants (how many cubic inches in a gallon?).
If imperial isn’t your thing, doing it in metric is easier, at least it was for me.
Declaring image sizes doesn't fit into the distributed model that is that is the rage these days, so I guess people don't care since it's so hard. At least it makes their ms/req numbers look great, nevermind that the experience for the actual users sucks.