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It seems that HN now automatically applies a -1 to my posts. Add this to the cowardly slowban and I'm done with this site: The users have gotten stupider, the administrators are halfwits (I'm talking about you, dang), and its utility is gone.

While this seems to be a battle of anecdotes, everyone I know who owns a smartphone uses it as their primary non-work email device, Facebook device, browsing device, LinkedIn device, etc. Many home personal computers no longer get turned on. It isn't a cell "phone" as much as it's simply a portal computing device.

If they're taking over Paypal accounts or stealing credit card numbers, it can be as simple as buying a lot of capacity at the various VPN provider. We know from the attack on Tor that they had many thousands of google compute instances, and the same may be true on the many, many other providers.

Maybe HNers are bored, or shallow

There are certain times of the day when thin content makes a strong showing on HN. Normally that isn't Friday @ 9am, though, so a little surprising to see this. Perhaps it appeals to the "be a better you!" noise that appears following each New Year.

As an unrelated aside, I'm currently suffering under a slow-ban, presumably imposed by dang. A slowban, for those who don't know, is when HN becomes oppressively slow. It is a comically cowardly, ignorant means of suppression, and it helps lead to an HN where a "write your goals" Facebook-style post tops HN.

Indeed, the post you replied to is not based in actual reality. The entire foundation of the adblock industry was an aggressive attention-war plied by the ad business, where soon webpages were an armed conflict of aggressive ads each imposing even more of a tax.

No one expected the cure to be worse than the disease. I couldn't believe it somewhat recently when I had to use an older laptop to find that simply running Chrome was completely untenable if ABP was installed.

Resource conservation is one of the primary justifications that people cite for why they block ads: many ads have high level of animation, auto-play videos, and so on, that it lags down the experience, especially when a single page has a number of them competing for your attention.

I would be surprised if many would agree with accepting a performance hit for what ostensibly is your browser doing much less.

I'm starting to realize that quite a few on HN actually have no idea what happened during this period (too young?), and at this point they're just going by what they read on Reddit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council...

Iraq's cat and mouse game with the UN, which was a condition of the ceasefire from GW I, had been going on for years. The UN had passed resolution after resolution authorizing force, any of which gave the US -- if they even decided that they wanted its mandate -- the legal right to remove Saddam. Yes, when it was apparent the US had had enough, Iraq started complying, but it was too late for the US administration. Tough, but this notion that it was all cooperation and the US just wanted a fight is pure absurdity, and has absolutely no basis in actual reality.

But it does appear in the black/white simplified story that so many tell.

This thread hilariously earned me a glorious slowban. Hacker News literally descends into yet another conspiracy site.

However why don't you contrast your comment with mine. Are you actually countering anything I've said?

No, you actually aren't. But somehow in these sorts of black/white discussions people think they can find one sort-of thing and then say "aha". Hardly.

Evading? How in the...

I'm sorry, acting emotionally offended by reality (and hurling spurious and misplaced claims like "kinder garden excuses") is the domain of the rank imbecile, and has absolutely no place on HN. This sounds hostile, but quite honestly you should take it as such - your reply is outrageous nonsense. It is a crime against any reasonable discourse.

And FWIW, "my government" is the Canadian government. But remarkably I have an ability to see the world as a complex gradient of shades, where there is no simple right, no simple wrong, and where people who pretend that they are should be mocked into silence.

You should read up on it more.

Firstly, what the British government did or didn't do is not really relevant to conversations about the US government.

Secondly, even if the UK government were at all relevant to this conversation, telling someone to "read up" when providing information that doesn't remotely contradict what they're replying to is terribly boorish behavior. Note that I didn't say that the government had compelling evidence -- I said that they read the tea leaves and got the impression that there were WMDs. Yes, this overriding belief will make intelligence that might be a collage of coincidental and second-hand things perhaps seem more consequential than they should have been. But regardless, the overarching belief was that Iraq legitimately had a WMD program and stockpiles, courtesy of the Saddam regime trying to convince everyone that such was exactly the case.

This isn't some lowbrow conspiracy site, and I don't expect the participants to have the sort of superficial, facile understanding of world events that you've so evidently demonstrated. If reality makes you "pissed", you should stick to gentler pastures that conform with your worldview.

I don't think the US should have invaded Iraq for purely pragmatic and financial reasons. That does nothing to change the actual complex, convoluted reality that led to the decisions that were made, and then the long and fruitless, but very intense, search for WMDs after the attack.

The common narrative is that the US contrived the whole thing to justify an attack. This is how that unfortunate situation gets used to explain all sorts of nefarious conspiracies.

But they really, honestly had reason to believe that Iraq had WMDs (yes there were doubters and skeptics, and of course they get the bulk of the attention after the fact, but many actually believed it).

Aside from defectors and people trying to lie their way to something, add that Saddam himself wanted the world (particularly Iran) to think that the Iraq government had WMDs. Iraq believed that having WMDs was a good defense (a good example since then is North Korea), so they tried to play the middle ground where they could seem to have WMDs hidden away, and could act as if they had that ace in the hole, but they would play along with UN inspectors just enough to try to avoid an attack, adding just enough mystery to the whole thing that there were open doubts. Intelligence is tough when the person you're trying to prove is doing something is also trying to convince you that they're doing something.

The game of chicken didn't turn out well. But the recurring narrative that innocent Iraq was all along say no no no look where you want and the US invented the situation is historical revisionism.

I tried in the Halton area (West of Toronto) and had about 40 things from a single individual in Hamilton who continually posted far right conspiracy type things. I suppose this is the issue with the network effect -- right now it looks pretty pathetic in this area.

But the idea is solid. The Internet went global, but really a lot of the activity now is making it local again.

I'm surprised there haven't been kickstarters for little robotic bug killers yet. The processors and sensors are getting powerful enough, and within the right power band, that the premise of having a stabby little anti-bug device (a small roomba that kills) is within reach.

Of course, then we'll make them larger. And larger. And eventually it will spell our doom.

Yet they behave like Microsoft, or IBM, or HP. And those are unquestionably technology businesses.

http://www.businessinsider.com/bank-it-spending-2012-12

The banking system functions largely on the choice, application and integration of technology, and banking is more of a technology business than just about any other. And let's be fair here - Schwab is not a bank, and even among investment firms is an outlier with the noted bad practices.

I mean, Obama has straight up said that he plans to attack NK.

He said absolutely no such thing, and it is rather incredible if people think this. The US has warned that they will respond, which will end up being a complaint in the UN.

Just to be clear, North Korea regularly warns the US of nuclear annihilation, imminent attacks, and so on...and people think the thing that will put the US over the top is a minor Sony hack?

But you don't have to see proof, and it is no one's burden to convince you. The US is not trying to prosecute North Korea in court. This isn't an amendments issue. And despite the ridiculous recurring claims, the US is not using this as a context of war.

"NK which wants to be included in the investigation"

It is incredible that people are actually falling for this. North Korea said "let us in on the investigation or we will attack you". Who is going to say yes to this, even if one were so naive as to think the request were truthful (which it most certainly is not). It amazingly achieved its goal, however.

Not only does this pdf contain zero information, there is no reason for it to be in PDF format.

I have to imagine that the few people who voted it up thus far did so while avoiding actually loading a PDF, but assuming that it has some substance: I mean...it's a PDF. Surely it must be full of rich graphics and charts, right? Nope, several paragraphs of text.

They can say that it shows the threat that the US has from other countries on a hacking front

There have been attacks on the US government IT infrastructure. Stolen designs and files from military contractors. Attacks on energy and distribution systems. Attacks on the banking system.

On the grand hierarchy of attacks, this is really, really low. I mean, given the severity and regularity of attacks against things that really, really matter, no the US certainly didn't need this to justify anything. The concern is very real, and significantly more important than some Sony Entertainment emails or movie leaks.

As peeters said, most organizations rely upon the historical volume of emails to operate effectively. This isn't a simple solution.

Add that a narrative around this story is that the hackers "spear phished" an IT admin. This is incredibly difficult to defend against for any organization (seriously -- for all of the browbeating against Sony on here -- it's all so simple -- I would argue that there are zero organizations that would withstand a concerted, targeted attack. Most would fall in a day). Not only did they purportedly co-opt a privileged account, they then sat on it for months.

Over months they could have changed policies, retrieved backups, and on and on.

When blaming Sony, everyone needs to remember that Snowden, a Dell contractor working at the NSA with limited access, took the King's Ransom from what is assumed to be the pinnacle of computer security and awareness.

"What I remember is a well-argued article pointing to many parts of the hack that would seem to disqualify North Korea"

That article was a classic case of "assume the end result, and then make everything you've heard...including indirect, second-hand rumors, fit the mold you've set". You probably saw that "analysis" on here, and it was quite soundly destroyed as being largely ignorant.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8766411

But it went with them because it fits the case.

Further the whole "that bad English doesn't fit how I think bad English should look" is...well it's preposterous. The article also uses a ridiculous email exchange which could be anyone as proof -- again, fitting the mold.

There is literally nothing in that, beyond some person's subjective take on how a person might mangle English (this is one of those classic claims that assumes some grand conspiracy...but that the conspirators were too dumb to get the basic stuff right), that is based upon legitimate analysis.

"Opportunities to get backing for war are rare, and so there is good reason to think that the government would try to capitalize on them."..."USS Maine, anyone?"..."Queue an invasion of North Korea."

Literally quite literally doesn't mean what you apparently think it means.

And the general conspiratorial narrative is that the US is trying to blame a blameless North Korea to achieve...something. Not sure what.

Many well-known security professionals

...who are pandering to a crowd, and based upon essentially no information at all, but just the same sort of "I think" gut feeling notions that we see on HN. While there should always be questions about government honesty, it's rather incredible how far people will reach to find to clutch onto something that backs whatever their initial knee-jerk opinion was, seen throughout the comments here.

Quite a few comments are among the "they're making this up to go to war", which is simply incredible: Are people so far out of the loop on world players or current events? The US in no universe will launch a military action against a rogue, shells-pointed-at-Seoul, nuclear armed nation because they hacked Sony. That premise alone is simply absurd.

Is the US trying to isolate North Korea? They're already completely isolated. I mean...do people understand the situation North Korea is in, and the complete lack of tools to deal with this? The US gains literally nothing pointing the finger at North Korea.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/18/world/asia/north-korea-hacker-...

North Korea is suspected in a number of similar attacks. Because really, what is anyone going to do? Attack them? They have nukes. Isolate them? They can't possible be more isolated. Sanction them?

As an aside, the regular threat of using nuclear weapons is an act of extreme violence, and I doubt North Korea's neighbors treat it so flippantly. The threat is unlikely, but extremely real.

There is no MO regarding an attack from a country like North Korea. That country says bombastic things with regularity, and has seemingly little concern for blowback. How a country like Israel or the United States might do an attack like this has no relevance to what North Korea might do, whether directly or through a hired proxy.

The Interview was never mentioned by the hackers until after the media starting running with the story

North Korea threatened war over this movie - http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-28014069

Now again, North Korea's words are kind of cheap, but they were talking about as big as you can get before this hack, and then specifically warned Sony to "obey" them. We have absolutely no idea what communications happened between the group and Sony and then law enforcement, so the whole what the media reported angle seems rather spurious. Sony/Law Enforcement, people who know more than us, seem to believe it was related to the movie.

In fact, if anything, the following quote indicates an insider is just as likely to be the source

The common narrative in discounting any involvement of North Korea is that they're too famished and uneducated to perform such an operation. Your angle is that the attack isn't sophisticated enough?

The evolving story is that a single IT worker with significant right grants was targeted by the group, and once that single user was exploited, their privileges were used to compromise the network. If you have the privileges of a superuser, your attack doesn't need to be sophisticated.

And ultimately this is exactly how I would expect these sort of attacks to go, especially when hitting targets in free and open nations. Why go through the trouble and effort of trying to winnow in from the outside when you can just exploit the kink or vulnerabilities of individual people -- who you can now discover via LinkedIn -- and then work your magic from the "inside". Sending out a group policy to disable all security software is a couple of lines. This "virus" seemed to be a simple efficiency measure, as with those rights they could do pretty much everything, though mass malice would probably be too labor intensive minus some helpful tools.

The defense against this is of course that even admins should have limits on their access and flags on their activities. Of course, the admins are the ones who normally implement this, so...

Except when wine tasters can't distinguish between red wine and white wine with food coloring

This oft referenced study took oenology students and asked them to use adjectives to describe the odors of the wine. The only wines tested were white...and white with food coloring. It is unfortunate that red wine wasn't actually tested, as it would provide an interesting contrast, nor was taste actually tested at all. So as is all that you can go on is that given what appears to be a red wine, students who presumably have motives other than being entirely straightforward use red wine-type terminology.

It is an interesting study, but is not quite the trump card that so many think it is.

Further, it's a little silly how people are taking products with minor taste differences (most beers, wines, ryes, etc, are made with almost identical processes, yielding close to identical results), and then presuming to claim that the same applies to things that are dramatically different. That someone couldn't tell the expensive wine from the table wine does not prove that someone can't tell a beef burger from a veggie burger.

That's a bit of an extrapolation though, isn't it? Many people simply run VMs that connects to some arbitrary pgsql instance, which might happen to be on RDS if they want to simplify the management of that.

Those VMs can absolutely run almost anywhere, and they can connect to just about any instance of pgsql. I heavily use many services on AWS, but can quite literally move the entirety of it to my own servers, Google, Azure, or elsewhere in very short notice. People can choose to use some of the more unique services, but that is not related to RDS.

I don't personally get the RDS value proposition, but how does it lead to vendor lock-in, much less severe vendor lock-in? I don't believe there is really any lock-in whatsoever -- backup your database and move it wherever you want, whether you're running the pgsql, Mysql, or SQL Server variants of RDS.