skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From an Infosec perspective this is terrifying, not simply because of the amount of data, but how difficult it is to scrub. Most people/businesses know that they need to scrub the hard drives from computers before donating/surplussing. Doing the same with copiers is a nightmare.

This is why I'd recommend all businesses use some kind of secure disposal service to get rid of old equipment. Hopefully the businesses that specialize in this field will add copiers to the list of items they scrub.
I think there's some irony in only allowing comments with FB connect.
wow I learned something today. I've been using foxit forever and you just made me feel like a douchebag because when people ask, I always recommend it.

Indeed, I've been using the same old version for a long time.
For those who are stuck with existing svn repositories, git-svn is also worth a look. I've started using it a little while ago and so far find it an excellent way to get some more git usage in my workflow.
Short-term storage is useful for things like being able to make 5 photocopies of a document--- old copiers would have to literally run the copier across the document 5 times to do so. Now they're more like scanner->printer, so they scan once and print 5 times. They don't delete it immediately after the job either, because many copiers support convenience features like "ok, 2 more copies of that last document please". It does seem like they could delete once N more documents have been printed in between, though.
Success? Being first to execute the idea in a strong fashion first. However, there are now a considerable number of competitors, and I don't see many potential barriers to entry.
Don't worry, it's not "every" page like the journalist sId, it's only the last 20,000. Somehow, I don't think that will make anyone feel better.

It's "every" by any normal definition, particularly in this context.
For reference, Mike Chambers is the principal product manager for the Adobe Flash platform. You can read this as Adobe's officialish reaction on this whole debate.
I chose to cull facebook instead. No regrets.
1 billion dollars for a developer team who uses certain language? Wouldn't it be cheaper just to hire the team?
i'd quite curious about this, myself.

the answer is also necessary to figure out how many images are probably being stored. if the copier is just keeping them for debugging reasons (which would explain why nobody knows they're there), then they could very well be highly compressed 72dpi images.
C language inventor Ken Thompson not allowed to checkin code in C at Google
This must be part of their recruitment drive[1]. I guess something like this is necessary when it's so hard to get excited about your company's products.[2]

[1]http://www.red-gate.com/careers/free_ipad.htm
[2]http://www.red-gate.com/products/index.htm
Was Unity advertised by Apple? I don't think it was so where is the loss?
I'd say it's not mutually exclusive. The sudden ability to take out those whom your government feels is "doing wrong" without being concerned about potential collateral damage is a new thing indeed. It makes war more palatable, less like the atrocities you describe above. That said, access to this kind of small, accurate technology considerably lowers the threshold between deciding to kill someone, and implementing that decision. At least I like to assume that the probability of wide spread collateral damage makes the decision harder to make.

The problem lies in the fact that "both sides" will eventually have this technology, and that the notion of "doing wrong" is unfortunately subjective.
Apple and Adobe's  25 year history
It's not just copiers. Most office printers these days contain their own servers, with hard drives for the spool. It would be just as simple to analyze the drive from one of them and grab whatever's left.

And there you'd just be dealing with PS and PCL, probably, rather than some weird proprietary image format that you might get on a copier's drive.
Correlation =/= causation. So many leaps are being made here.

> One study of 60 healthy young adults (in their 20s and 30s) found that the fatter members of the group had significantly lower gray-matter densities in several brain regions, including those involved in the perception of taste and the regulation of eating behavior.

Maybe the lower gray-matter density, particularly in the "perception of taste and the regulation of eating behavior" areas, predisposes them to being overweight, rather than the extra weight causing brain shrinkage. You'd have to do a longitudinal study to be able to make a case for causation...
The Apple number is very different if you don't count people working in their retail stores.
Brain-Training Products Useless in Study
Frozen Synapse- built for overly analytical gamers
FTC Cracking down on Bloggers?
His analysis is valid, altho as you say they are no doubt riding the wave of FMA. However, conceptually simple as it is, there are barriers to entry: 1) reaching out to and signing up sufficient numbers of retailers to make the service worthwhile. 2) Capturing mindshare away from Groupons lead 3) the infrastructure required to run a service like this. Ok basically it just comes down to cash, but I reckon you would need a lot to take on Groupon, and then well - suddenly it's something of a risk.
I don't like the causal relationship expressed in the title of this article. What the data they describe in the article suggests is that increased risks for dementia and obesity are linked. But the title has the typical, "If you're not working out you're HURTING YOUR BRAIN." That, it seems, is not yet researched enough to be conclusive (nor is it really germane to the article).

Yet another case of "Good Article, Bad Headline."

I hope this isn't another excuse for thin people to lord their genetic predispositions and life choices over thick people. That's very tiresome.
"Putting this study into the context of the overall research, it does make us more cautious about concluding that there are general cognitive benefits to brain training games or entertainment video games. Benefits are likely to be closely related to the specific tasks involved in training, and not transfer to unrelated tasks."

This submitted blog post has a good discussion of what various research studies have shown, with links to those studies, besides the study most recently reported in news channels.
The article is not just saying fat != healthy. There are some good comments to takeaway about how fat affects the brain, e.g.:

" Fat cells also secrete substances that cause inflammation; chronic inflammation of the brain, which is often found in the obese, impairs learning and memory and is also a feature of Alzheimer’s."
The #1 reason as he states is their crystal clear value proposition. Expanding on that - because it's so clear you can see how effective their advertising campaigns are.

They built a huge following just sticking "Get 50% off Sushi in [your city]" ads all over facebook, and have continued with that level of simplicity.

When an advertising campaign delivers that message on the banner ad, it's shooting fish in a barrel to convert those users through the lead form, backend process.
FYI, this is the only content in the article related to iPad.

"You once said Steve Jobs could see the next big thing. Do you like the iPad?"

It's okay. The scenarios aren't that clear. But it's good looking. [Steve Jobs] does good design, and [the iPad] is absolutely a good example of that.
Live in New Hampshire: no state income taxes.
McAfee quarantines svchost.exe on millions of WinXP machines worldwide
Reading the story, it sounds like they are removed from the file system, but not securely erased.
"In 2008, Sharp commissioned a survey on copier security that found 60 percent of Americans "don't know" that copiers store images on a hard drive. Sharp tried to warn consumers about the simple act of copying."

Does anyone remember this warning? I certainly heard nothing about this; and while I knew there had to be a hard drive in there to temporarily store the image, there was no reason to expect that it would store images permanently. Of course Americans "don't know" that copiers store images like that; how would we? Who had ever, EVER told us?
Agreed. When I worked at a fabless semi company, we compared ourselves to other fabless semi companies using this metric, and given similar levels of vertical integration, it's not a bad metric. Using it to compare a hedge fund and a fast food chain is indeed absurd.
Apparently, Groupon is not the first to execute the idea. Mercata is the failed Groupon of the late ’90s. Paul Allen has invested around $90 million in it. Why it failed? One of the analyst said this in the interview below. "But like many ideas that have been tried, execution turned out to be a problem. I don't think the category is necessarily dead, but may resurface in different clothing."

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017-250529.html
Your point is grossly biased. You are equating the handful of people whose communications were included in the leak with the authors of (according to the article) at least 900 (papers that support the "consensus".

Given that the IPCC AR4 WG1 report that talks about the scientific basis for climate change is based on of order 1000 citations for each of the 10 chapters, I think you are significantly underestimating the body of science underlying the conclusions of the IPCC report. To think that one research group could significantly bias this, you must think they are powerful indeed.

You are also equating them talking about doing something with it actually happening. People talk about doing stuff all the time, so unless you can show evidence that a) they actually tried to act on their statements and b) were in a position to exclude papers from the body of scientific literature, I find no reason to think that the body of published studies is systematically biased.

Furthermore, the statements can also be interpreted as attempting (perhaps overzealously) to exclude shoddy science, not furthering a personal vendetta.
Good point, I don't know all the details, where any of the third party stuffs being cut out initially advertised?
As I said, they lose the money because that ad space isn't being sold to a paying party.

Let's say you own a baseball stadium and a bar. You decide that you want to put an ad for your bar in the baseball stadium - it will drive business to your bar where you'll make money. Let's say that it drives $1,000 worth of business to your bar every day. That's hard to measure, but assume you can measure it. Someone comes along and says that they'll pay you $10,000 per day to put an ad for their competing bar in that spot. You calculate that that ad isn't worth $10,000/day to you - even taking into consideration natural business to your bar which might now be drawn to a competitor. So, your bar loses the $1,000 per day that the ad drives there plus you determine that you'd lose another $5,000 per day from business that would naturally go to your bar, but is now driven to your competitor. You'll sell them the ad. Why would you sell them the ad? Because you make money.

If you decide to keep your own ad, you have to justify $10,000/day in expense. It drives $1,000 in business and a competitor's ad would lose you $5,000 in business for a total of $6,000. It doesn't make business sense.

In order to want to keep your own ad in that space, you have to believe that you're gaining more than you would by accepting cash from your competitor. In this scenario, you aren't - you'd be losing $4,000 per day. But if you determine that the ad drives $11,000 worth of business to your bar, then you'd be willing to "pay" that $10,000 for the ad. So, your bar pays your baseball stadium $10,000 per day for the ad and the profits of the bar go up even with that expense. However, if the bar becomes less profitable "paying" for that ad, it's better to sell it to the competitor.

When another department of the same logically-owned company does something for another department, it isn't free. If Google's search gives Gmail a freebie ad, search is losing money. So, the gain in money for Gmail must be greater than the amount that search is losing by not selling that ad to a competitor. Therefore, from an internal accounting perspective, it makes sense for Gmail to bid on the "email" keyword just like everyone else as part of their marketing budget. If they're the top bidder, they get the spot. If they aren't, they don't.
New Hampshire has residency requirements which make this impractical. South Dakota is the easiest place to establish "residency" for expat purposes.
I have been sent a handful of these spammy emails. I would not be so concerned if they did not start out with a straight up lie. The emails I see always have something like, "Did you get the email I sent you last? Please confirm your speaking arrangement below."

The first time I got one I searched high and low for the "previous email" and it did not exist. I knew then to google it and that is where it was confirmed as spam in like 2006. And did I mention I am not a CIO...
I think this is cool, but profit per employee would be more interesting.
"Learning to write a poem is a lot like learning to throw a ball. In both cases, mastering a skill requires practice"

I don't disagree, but I think due to our evolutionary history one requires significantly less practice than the other.
Google needs ITA.

The one place where Google is getting spanked by Bing is in travel search. Bing travel is IMHO hands down the best fare search engine out there, and I travel a lot. http://matrix.itasoftware.com site comes in second place for me, even though it looks like crap.

It has some insanely useful tools for a mileage runner such as myself. For instance, ITA has a domain specific language that you can use to search for fares. What I use it all the time for, is to find the cheapest fare between two cities on a single airline over the course of the next month.
http://www.xero.com/ http://www.crazyegg.com/

It may not be the most beautiful, but http://www.salesforce.com/ works extremely well for its application.
Isn't it ethically questionable for the manufacturers to know about the issue (as they admit in the article), but to charge extra for software to address it? At the very least, shouldn't encryption or the mentioned erase utility be sold with the machine, with the buyer having the option to opt out if they don't want it?
Do you think they'll also spend top dollar to "buy teams" that are good at other languages? Kind of a ridiculous concept - surely if the gains of Lisp were actual, Google would just pay their employees to learn and use Lisp.
Unexpected conclusion: Photocopying your rear end counts as pro-privacy activism.
The headline of the HN article is a bit misleading.

"using a forensic software program available for free on the Internet, he ran a scan - downloading tens of thousands of documents in less than 12 hours."

Since he had to use special software to extract the files, it looks like the software deletes the files, but not securely. Basically, it uses 'rm' instead of 'scrub'.

As explained below, storing scanned pages temporarily is good when photocopying (or faxing) multiple pages.

Also, the creator of the software mentioned (securely wipes photocopier harddrives) is a very smart marketer. The article is basically an advertisement for his software, "INFOSWEEP," and he's the one who showed the journalist this vulnerability in the first place.
This is a brilliant idea from Google's perspective. The travel industry is very very profitable, and a lot of the travel shopping process is basically the hunt for information - tell me where I can stay, how much, give me options, etc. This is a problem Google could really optimize.
It says in the article that he had to use forensic / recovery software to extract the images from the drive. That suggests to me that they were deleted, just not overwritten.

It's just like "deleting" a file off of your desktop PC; it's unlinked, but the data is still physically present on the drive platters until it happens to be overwritten, unless you make a special effort to overwrite it -- and most applications don't do that.

I'm not sure that it's really a flaw in the copier design, because they're not intentionally retaining the images any more than your PC is intentionally designed to retain Word documents that you "delete" without overwriting.

The problem is that many users are unaware that a modern photocopier even contains a hard drive ... they are probably oblivious of the fact that modern copiers have little in common with the traditional photostatic machines they grew up with, except that they're faster and don't smell as much. Manufacturers need to better educate buyers (or lessees) about the machines they're using, and perhaps make hard drives more accessible so that when they're sold, they can have the drives removed and destroyed first.
Curious to know how they compensate for windage? Elevation is easy to calculate, but at non-trivial ranges wind becomes a major factor in ballistics.

Also: why are there not soldier-portable computer-guided sniper rifles? Deploy spotter + servo-driven rifle platform, dial in windage, designate target with laser or via screen, point, click, boom.
Every valuation metric requires context. Like sparky said, you can't compare two different types of businesses the same way. In retail, you want razor thin margins. In software you want very high margins. In capital intensive businesses like factories, you want lots of debt. In software businesses you want no debt.

Building tools in-house, like cassandra, would be considered a distraction at most public companies. Expensive efforts that are not within the business's core competency are signs that the organization may be making bad investment decisions or they are bloated and trying to keep employees busy.

In fb's case, their core competency is information, so building better information management tools is part of their core competency and they have the talent on staff to do it.

If GM or Walmart spent employee brain power on something like cassandra, they'd be blasted by the shareholders for re-inventing a wheel that is already good enough.
And guess what? Food companies know that too.
U.S. Expat Taxes Drive Americans to Give Up Citizenship
I posted this too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1282231 HN seems to inconsistently find dupes.
"It is meant for small teams who are adopting Git for the first time, and want to get started quickly with a familiar setup before exploring Git's many new possibilities."

"Work will proceed broadly as with any centralised VCS..."

Those two sentences had led me to believe that the article was telling you to use git the same way you would use a VCS tool. Which Linus would be opposed to. The whole point is that git allows you to change your behavior (work on branches for weeks at a time before checking back in, not have to be afraid of screwing up the repository with a small commit, etc.). If it doesn't change your behavior, there's not much point.

Of course, I think the article is more of a gateway introduction to git, to introduce you to it in a non-threatening way hoping it will change your behavior later. Linus just doesn't have much patience for that sort of thing. He will call you stupid and ugly for not doing it his way.

"So, I'm not saying, I am not going to force you to switch over to decentralized, I'm just going to call you ugly and stupid. That's the deal." - Linus
"The other side" seems to push a number of arguments from the hypothesis that the greenhouse effect violates fundamental physics (it doesn't, no serious scientist would argue that no matter how much they disagree with the IPCC conclusions) to disagreeing on whether the increase in CO2 is driven by warming climate instead of the other way to arguing about the specific numbers of projected radiative forcing and climate sensitivity.

But you are correct. If the official IPCC estimate is that the increased radiative forcing due to greenhouse gases is [+2.07 - +2.53] W/m^2, are you "disagreeing with the consensus" if you think it's +2.06? What if it's +1.5? The real world is not binary, it's a matter of degree.

Edit: For a list of things that people disagree on, you can look at the "How to talk to a climate sceptic" post, which regardless of whether you believe the responses or not is a pretty comprehensive list: http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2008/07/how_to_talk_to...
What I am finding really absurd about this whole thing is, the photocopier companies knew about this (obviously), and a number actually had services/software available to wipe the drives - but failed utterly in actually telling anyone who might care about them.

My gf works at a hospital and there are many panties in a twist about this right now. She contacted one of their major photocopier providers and asked about what happened to the ones they had on lease that were returned in the last few years. "Oh, they were sold, or scrapped, or given away... couldn't really tell you for certain though." So the obvious question: "Did you wipe the drives first?" "A: No, that wasn't included in our contract with you." - because nobody knew about this 'feature' when the contracts were written!

Massive fail both security wise and from the sales side on missing easy upselling. Very likely any hospital or police dept would gladly have paid for these services had they know it was necessary.
Lots of manufacturers charge extra for various security options, on all sorts of hardware and software. We can go back and forth all day on the "ethics" of it, but it's pretty standard practice.

And Sharp's add-on module might not be required if the copiers were treated like the computers that they are; it would be perfectly fine to just remove the hard drives when the units are being sold at their EOL, as I suspect most healthcare and government facilities do with their old PCs.
I'm surprised it's only 60%!
This, actually, was the first thing that came to mind:

http://www.eff.org/issues/printers
IAds Secret Sauce: How Apple's Recipe Will Cause a Paradigm Shift
That "access road" could be a parallel local train.
In general, you can't really scrub a hard drive. No company in their right mind should ever let an old computer go out the door with a hard drive in it. Hard drives should be destroyed. I recommend something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQYPCPB1g3o
Here's the problem with saying that
a.) retailers as barrier to entry -
I don't buy retailers alone as a barrier, given retailers are likely to only do one or two promotions at great cost to themselves, other articles have talked about this issue.

b.) Mindshare as barrier to entry --
I don't buy the mindshare argument when the a strength, as noted in the article is the urgency, the deal (the store is the brand that matters -- probably as much as the conduit if not more). Beyond that, mindshare is primiarly money invested into viral loop on facebook/myspace and brand ads.

c.) Infrastructure? Um, it's just lead generation -- I see the larger infrastructure as outward bound direct sales to merchants. (sites like leapfish.com have sustainable conversion rates on outward bound telephone sales to merchants -- online are they important ? well...)

There are already huge investors knocking off the idea, and as for the cash issue, the article talks about the "negative working capital" needed.
����� �������� ����� �� ������� ������ ������