You have to click on one of the links to find out what this actually does in addition to Cloudflare’s 1^4 DNS server:
> Enter our own WireGuard implementation called BoringTun. The WARP application uses BoringTun to encrypt all the traffic from your device and send it directly to Cloudflare’s edge, ensuring that no one in between is snooping on what you're doing. If the site you are visiting is already a Cloudflare customer, the content is immediately sent down to your device. With WARP+ we use Argo Smart Routing to devise the shortest path through our global network of data centers to reach whomever you are talking to.
> The absolute, invariable first rule in tech writing is to know your audience.
While that’s definitely true for tech writing generally, I feel it’s usually not the best advice for someone wanting to improve their technical writing.
Tech writing is first and for all “writing”. I feel that’s where a lot of people are struggling already: they may know vocabulary and grammar, but they have difficulties to write a well structured text. Even a single paragraph consisting of two or three sentences can be very hard for many people to actually think about. They may have been focusing on “shortcut” rules such as “maximum X words per sentence” or “maximum Y sentences per paragraph”. But those are more often than not a distraction to actually think about a logically structured text.
It’s important to have a narrative to guide the reader through the text, presenting new pieces of information in a logical sequence, and anticipating how a reader could misunderstand what you’re trying to say. For fiction writers, coming up with a narrative feels natural (even if it still can be hard). However, non-fiction writers may not even realise that they need some kind of narrative.
You do need to know your audience to anticipate how your reader could misunderstand your text, but I think it’s best to start practising by writing for yourself or someone like yourself. Write something about a topic you know pretty well, but do not master perfectly. Then, read what you’ve written one or two weeks later, and see if it still makes sense to you. If some parts seem confusing, try improving them.
You could do the same with texts written by someone else: whenever you think the text is confusing or unclear, try improving itself.
Do not just quickly add a word or sentence that specifically addresses your confusion, but take a step back and try to understand what caused the confusion. Try to really think about the order in which information is presented, whether that information is explained clearly, and whether all information in your text is necessary to understand the point you’re making.
It’s a bit ambiguous, but the Apple App Store guidelines seem to require you to be able to opt-out from marketing push notifications, while still keeping other notifications.
From guideline 4.5.4: “Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages. (..)” [0]
The developer/user experience guidelines also recommend to have a clear screen to opt-in and out of different types of notifications, and never to abuse privileges (e.g. send marketing notifications with a “time critical” flag to break through focus mode etc.).
I really hated Uber Eats when I thought they were abusing their notification privileges to send spam. But I recently found out that they do allow you to opt out of marketing notifications while still allowing order-related notifications (although they really are pushing it (pun intended) by sending at least two post-delivery notifications asking for tips and ratings, which could easily wait until I actually open the app again or at least be limited to just one delivery confirmation notification). Not sure if they are asking for clear opt-ins for new customers (they probably assumed opt-in based on some general consent I gave before this Apple policy came into effect).
App Store guidelines are only enforced when it's convenient for Apple. This clause has been routinely ignored and even Apple themselves broke it several times. There's no official way to report violations either.
> Also, subscribe to a channel, get recommended their entire repertoire of the last decade. I have stopped subscribing, and I'm actively unsubscribing from most channels except the very small ones that post twice a year and I don't want to miss.
I fear that there is a very big group (that is usually not on HN) that actually likes this. People who get absolutely hyped on some new channel and just have to watch everything on that channel. Not because it’s interesting content, but because for those few hours/days/weeks they feel that they “belong” to the community of that channel (even if they don’t meaningfully interact or discuss with the other people in that community or even the creator). This also gives them social status with friends. Then after a few hours/days/weeks, repeat the cycle (multiple cycles can run in parallel but not too much as it would affect your social status of being part of the hip cult-of-the-day). Obviously those people also watch stuff outside that channel, but they don’t mind being presented with videos of the same channel all the time, because again bragging rights that come with “oh I’ve really seen everything, look at this: seen it, seen it, …”).
(Seems a bit similar to some other demographic that is extremely into watching sports…)
There's nothing wrong with old content per-se. A true crime channel, for example, can have a lot of old content that's still interesting to watch. And thing for science and comedy. No need for any strange community feelings or bragging rights.
Now, this doesn't make sense for all types of content, of course, but definitely for some.
YouTube actually makes it quite hard to "completely watch" a channel; there's some channels that I just "discovered" and published interesting content over the years and ideally I'd just like to start at the start and watch stuff from their backlog that looks interesting. But with the stupid non-pagination "infinite scroll" it's pretty hard.
This recently happened to me. I discovered someone's channel and it turned out to be a gold mine of content that I had somehow never heard of. I didn't even have to subscribe and it would recommend me banger videos from the guy.
This was indeed a very deliberate choice by Google, and they have been blogging about it since at least 2011[0]. There are quite some blog posts by Google and others discussing the evolution in online maps from the high contrast design focused on roads and cities, to more “fluid” designs where there is a bit more room to show buildings, forests, waterways and other landmarks that are more suited for exploration rather than navigation.
> where there is a bit more room to show buildings, forests, [...]
? What forests and what buildings, though?
The 2009 - 2011 changes are fine, I guess (indeed I don't need the roads that prominently as they were in the 2009 examples), but at some point beyond that they did jump the shark somewhat with their changes.
My personal pet peeve is that at zoom level 14, all distinction between built-up areas and non-built up areas [1] disappears and you're looking at just one indistinct mess of hazy streets on a grey back background and you can't even really tell the shape of a city from looking at that.
Individual buildings only come in at zoom level 17, by which point you're already quite zoomed in, and forests remain stubbornly hidden.
Google has the somewhat better POI integration and traffic information, but when I want to actually look at a map for orienting myself or getting a feel for an area, I much prefer Openstreetmap's style.
[1] At least where I live, the further distinction between forests and non-forested open spaces is rather rudimentary – a few random areas of fields and other open spaces are correctly shown in some sort of ochre at zoom level ≤ 13, but large areas are simply all drawn in green regardless of whether they're actually forests or not.
This is pretty common in Europe. This may be different because regulation is usually a lot more flexible here regarding car lights (e.g. adaptive headlights) than in the US (although I understand the US is catching up, and there are obviously some areas where the EU has been more strict in terms of daytime lighting and side visibility, mostly for safety reasons).
Most German cars will flash the brake lights when you push the brakes hard, and they will also automatically turn on hazard lights if you brake hard to a (near) full stop (assuming you were going some minimum speed of 50 or 70 km/h).
ABS stepping in is not a requirement as far as I could tell (had this a few times when erring on the side of caution when the light turned yellow). Not requiring ABS makes sense because even if you’re driving on proper roads and your recent German car has great tires and brakes and doesn’t need ABS to decelerate quickly, the truck behind you probably still needs a bit more time and early warning to avoid a collision.
I think it’s actually the kind of simplistic analysis you are referring to that got us into this mess. If we would have put a bit more belief in the epidemic models and acted accordingly from the beginning, we would be a lot better off right now.
But even now, two years into the pandemic, the “people” and policy still seem to be unable to take any action until we see very widespread disastrous effects that were predicted weeks or months in advance. Even now, people still don’t care about an increase from 10 to 20 cases (or any other metric) and won’t take action until they see cases going from 1,000 to 2,000.
Remember the ridicule Merkel faced when she told journalists in summer 2020 that models showed that Germany would see a huge second wave by fall? That just seemed completely nuts to those journalists at the time given the very low number of cases at the time, even if there was already exponential growth again at that moment.
I certainly remember how the first death toll estimation by neil fergusson were off by (at least) an order of magnitude, and completely changed european countries attitudes from being careful to being hysterical.
Wirecutter is owned by the New York Times Company and explicitly says they don’t get paid by manufacturers (except through affiliate links to Amazon) and recommendations are purely based on editorial testing. NYTCo really can’t afford to lie about editorial independence, particularly for something that’s not even their core business.
Quote from their site:
> We work with total editorial independence. That means nothing appears on the site as a recommendation unless our writers and editors have deemed it the best through our rigorous reporting and testing.
Looks like an interesting project! But I feel like you are asking your users to put a lot of confidence in you to take everything you’re saying for granted. I’m not implying bad faith here, but privacy conscious people typically like to see a bit more detail and evidence of security, rather than general claims/statements.
For example, some things I’m wondering about and would like to know before considering giving the app a try:
* how exactly are you handling encryption? How do you avoid leakage of encryption keys/pass phrases through iOS device backups or other cases where your iOS account could be compromised?
* what does “end to end encryption” mean in this case? There is no sharing feature as far as I can tell, so it’s not about e2e encrypted communications. I assume in this case e2e means continuous encryption at all times (on device and remote) except when the user actually uses the app.
* how do you handle metadata? What’s the trade-off between ease of use (quickly finding photos or scrolling through my full photo collection) and encryption/security?
* how credible is a business model of €5/year/user for something that seems to require quite a bit of work to keep secure? Even if there’s no storage/server cost because you use iCloud storage, there’s still a substantial developer cost to have feature parity with similar photo storage apps and keep up with ever-changing App Store requirements and security developments.
Hope this helps to find out what your (potential) users care about and whether you could improve communication/marketing on those points :-)
Thank you for your feedback and for your detailed and interesting questions.
How exactly are you handling encryption?
We don't require an account, your encryption keys are derivated from your password and nevers leave your device, also we have zero knowledge about user password. If the user will forget his password, we won't be able to restore/recover his access, this is one of the side effects of our security model. I want to add that we plan to open-source our encryption key management.
What does “end to end encryption” mean in this case?
You absolutely right, in our case e2e means continuous encryption at all times. If you will back up your data on your iCloud your files will always be encrypted, in other words, your photos and videos are always encrypted except when you are using the app. In fact, even when you are using the app, will be decrypted only the requested file, and just some metadata like thumbnails are fully decrypted.
How do you handle metadata?
We only use the minimum necessary metadata, to ensure the best user experience. For example, when users add photos or videos we generate internally a thumbnail that is smaller and faster to decrypt.
How credible is a business model of €5/year/user for something that seems to require quite a bit of work to keep secure?
We are new in the market, and we need to compete with other big players that have more reviews and users. This is a great opportunity to subscribe
I hope I have answered all your questions if you have any other just let me know, I will be happy to answer them.
> Accessing material that has been deemed illegal enough to be the subject of a country-wide block is generally going to be a criminal offense.
That’s not the issue discussed here, I think. We’re not talking about someone circumventing censorship in their own country (which is obviously illegal in your own country).
What we’re talking about here are IP-based country filters imposed by websites such as Netflix or BBC iPlayer, restricting visitors from certain countries to access all or certain content. Circumventing that filter by using a VPN (thereby masquerading as someone in a “permitted visitor country”) is obviously going to be a breach of the terms & conditions of that website and/or license conditions of content made available. But the argument apparently raised by LinkedIn in this case is that this is also a criminal offence of gaining unauthorised access to systems (I.e. legalspeak for what’s colloquially referred to as “hacking”), which would likely lead to (more severe) prosecution and punishment.
> Enter our own WireGuard implementation called BoringTun. The WARP application uses BoringTun to encrypt all the traffic from your device and send it directly to Cloudflare’s edge, ensuring that no one in between is snooping on what you're doing. If the site you are visiting is already a Cloudflare customer, the content is immediately sent down to your device. With WARP+ we use Argo Smart Routing to devise the shortest path through our global network of data centers to reach whomever you are talking to.
[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/warp-for-desktop/