Yeah, it's far from ideal, but in my experience its accuracy is better than most anything else readily available, including the official status pages maintained by most tech companies.
Yeah, and not only do you get to see if it's down or not (reddit infamously always says it's up even when there are issues), but you also get to see the raw data of reports. Ofttimes I've seen the trend go up and realized it's a very recent issue - even before downdetector itself recognizes it as such.
Human reading > DD reading >> "All our services are operational" when they're absolutely f--ing not.
It's fine in simpler cases but as we're seeing here, is absolutely useless at providing information on failures in complex systems. It appears that it was one network suffering issues but this was then reported as "EVERY MOBILE NETWORK IN THE UK IS DOWN" because people just go "I tried to make a call and it didn't connect". That could be anything from a single cell tower being hit by a truck to a nationwide power outage.
There are plenty of IoT devices that people want to execute commands on (anything remotely controlled, basically). Polling for commands on a periodic basis introduces lag into that process which is irritating. Furthermore, polling at a frequent interval can end up using a lot of power as well versus waiting in a receive-only mode for an incoming command.
The alternative to polling is unfortunately polling, which is what the article is about.
You can avoid polling for messages, but you have to send packets outbound regularly in order to maintain a NAT mapping & connection, so that the external side can send messages inward.
The latency is overcome this way, so latency is a solvable problem, but this need to constantly wake up a radio every <30s in order to keep a NAT session alive is a significant power draw.
In theory you might be able to avoid this with NAT-PMP / UPnP however their deployments are inconsistent and their server side implementations are extremely buggy.
I'm 24 years into my career now. I think you just get used to this after a while.
I've worked on several big (at the time) software products that our company built and shipped to customers for a while, that we have since abandoned. And in those cases, the entire organization within the company that owned the code was disbanded, so there was no one left to know about it or care about it. I'm not 100% certain but I strongly suspect that there is not a single copy left anywhere in the company of the code for those products - code that I worked on for years.
It's strange thinking that there is basically no trace left of something that I put years of professional work into, but I think it happens more than most people realize. I suppose it's no different than startups that fail and everything disappears.
I also think this is why so many software people end up enjoying hobbies that revolve around physical things, like woodworking or restoring old cars. Having some physical object that you can point to and say "I built that" is kind of nice compared to everything else you've done living on a flash chip somewhere.
Isn't the most likely outcome here that the city will simply stop allowing public access to the camera feeds?
This feels like it has the potential to be a "this is why we can't have nice things" outcome even though I don't think the app author is doing anything wrong.
What's the point of making a thing avilable to the public online if you're only going to pull it offline as soon as regular people start using it? I'm sure there are corporations and data brokers quietly collecting info on us using every scrap of publicly avilable data including traffic cams, but the moment regular folks start getting in on the fun and they post a pic of themselves being surveilled on twitter suddenly it's time to shut everything down?
If it's a problem as soon as the average American starts using something, it's probably better if those resources stop being made available period.
The data collection isn't even quiet. There's an entire cottage industry of companies that scrape these traffic cam feeds, store everything for x numbers of months in low-cost cloud vaults (e.g. glacier) and then offer lawyers/clients in traffic disputes access to footage that may have captured an accident for exorbitant rates. It's a remarkable little ecosystem of privatized mass surveillance.
You’re framing this like it’s a bad thing, but a video of an accident is pretty valuable to someone falsely accused of causing an accident, and in that case the people with the video aren’t the bad guy, the person lying about causing the accident is. Storing 50 million videos isn’t cheap. The rates seem reasonable considering the volume of data they store, most of which is useless, and the small number of customers in their target market - I see 1 hour blocks of video in NYC cost $250. That’s like 10 minutes of lawyer time, if you’re lucky, and totally reasonable and worth it to settle an accident dispute if the alternative is paying the other guy thousands. I might even speculate that the intended customer here is insurance companies and maybe not individual drivers. If so, insurance companies are well prepared to do their own cost/benefit price analysis. So… why do you think this is bad? And what surveillance uses are you worried about outside of car accidents? The cost of the videos means nobody is doing any “mass surveillance” here, that the vast majority of the video gets deleted unanalyzed and unwatched.
Probably damn near zero if you have time stamps. A couple one pixel blobs would do if all you're trying to prove is that some idiot got dead because they cut a garbage truck off and that the garbage truck didn't rear end them or, or some other simple "he said she said" situation like that
>but the moment regular folks start getting in on the fun and they post a pic of themselves being surveilled on twitter suddenly it's time to shut everything down?
There's a pretty big difference between using it for its intended purpose (ie. monitoring traffic), and the alleged behavior that the department of transportation was opposed to.
>Office of Legal Affairs recently sent a cease-and-desist letter to Morry Kolman, the artist behind the project, charging that the TCP "encourages pedestrians to violate NYC traffic rules and engage in dangerous behavior."
> There's a pretty big difference between using it for its intended purpose (ie. monitoring traffic), and the alleged behavior that the department of transportation was opposed to.
What's the point of having it public then? The department of transportation is already using that data for monitoring traffic so there's zero need for anyone else to replicate their work. The value in making that data public isn't so that Joe Average can track traffic volume over time just like the DoT is already doing. It's for transparency and so that the public can find new and innovative uses for the information our tax money is already being spent on gathering.
There's no point if we're not allowed to use that data in new ways and we don't need the kind of "transparency" that only applies as long as the public isn't looking.
If a specific use is actually dangerous then that can be dealt with on a case by case basis, and it's arguable that they were right to send a cease and desist letter to this website, but making the data itself unavailable over it would be an overreaction
> What's the point of having it public then? The department of transportation is already using that data for monitoring traffic so there's zero need for anyone else to replicate their work.
Personally I do find it useful to be able to glance at the NYC traffic cams as a supplement to traffic maps, not only because having an actual visual on the traffic can help me decide on a driving route better than red or green map lines or a routing algorithm I know will take me on an inferior path to “avoid” perceived traffic, but also because the cameras pick up other nearby stuff. I like to go on runs over the Brooklyn Bridge, but it’s so swarmed with tourists most of the time that I’ll check the DOT cameras so I can see if the pedestrian path is clear enough to run on without being clotheslined by a selfie stick.
I also spend a lot of time north of the city, and the state highway traffic cams are great for checking the plowing status during/after winter storms before setting off for a trip.
This seems to happen every time some stuffy SeriousAgency or SeriousCompany opens something up to the public. The public decides to use it in a way that they didn't think of, and they respond by clutching their pearls, panicking and shutting it down, instead of just going with it.
SeriousCompany: "Look how cool and in tune we are with the public, here's this resource that you can all use. High five! [...] Oh, wait, no, what you're doing is bad for our image... No, stop, we didn't mean for you to do... No, don't enjoy it that way... Wait, stop, we didn't think of that at all! Oh, god no you're using it to post Amogus Porn! SHUT IT DOWN!!!"
But sometimes SeriousCompany says "we'll provide this public resource so people can do X, Y, and Z", and then someone does A and gets a cease and desist?
It's an open resource, sure, but the provider of the resource can still set limits on its use, even after it's been available for some time. Often that includes things like "don't use our free resource to make yourself money".
That seems like an entirely reasonable request to me?
Something being freely available does not inherently grant you the right to use it however you'd like. It's pretty unhelpful to conflate the two things.
You’re conflating a license to use something granted without charge and something actually free to the public. Licenses come with terms, public resources only come with social pressures of fair use.
It is unfair for SeriousCompany to pretend that resources it releases to the public (usually as a PR move or to advertise a paid product) must flatter their motives and the narrow confines of what they envisioned the public might use them for. That is wishing a free resource had a license when it only has a social contract. If the provider could set limits, it would no longer be free.
I mean, a license to use something for free can still apply to something that is freely given? There's no conflation, since they're just different aspects of the same thing
And no, that's not unfair, that's absolutely within their rights, as the provider of said thing. What's unfair is willfully taking advantage of a free resource in ways that are explicitly against the reasons the provider is providing the thing in the first place. That's just place malice at that point.
After all, a license is just a social contact that can actually be enforced. I would argue the world would be a far better place if people didn't abuse the unenforceable nature of what you're calling "just a social contract".
> public decides to use it in a way that they didn't think of, and they respond by clutching their pearls, panicking and shutting it down, instead of just going with it
Because it prompts a serious question: why are taxpayers paying for this?
While you'll always find some people who don't think taxes should pay for anything ever in this case I think there's clear value in the DoT monitoring traffic volumes so the cameras already exist. It's not as if there's some huge cost for those camera feeds to be put online where the public can easily access them. The footage that those cameras capture already belongs to the taxpayers. They are a public record (although short lived since it doesn't look like the government is saving the footage). The taxpayers should have easy access to their own records and they should have the freedom to make use of those records.
> not as if there's some huge cost for those camera feeds to be put online
But there is a cost. If it’s not used by 90% of voters, and its trivially use is made known to 60% of them, you have the votes to reällocate those funds.
> footage that those cameras capture already belongs to the taxpayers. They are a public record (although short lived since it doesn't look like the government is saving the footage). The taxpayers should have easy access to their own records and they should have the freedom to make use of those records
They are a public record because we make them public. And taxpayers fund plenty of non-public information collection. That you wouldn’t vote for something doesn’t make it electoral impossible (nor even not good politics).
> the public is using it - isn't that why we pay for it?
For entertainment. I'm not saying it's a good reason. But I could absolutely see "why are we paying millions of dollars to fund someone's Tik Tok" play well in an election.
> What's the point of making a thing avilable to the public online if you're only going to pull it offline as soon as regular people start using it?
Regular people have been using it for decades, though? Scrolling through the comments here are plenty of people who have discovered and put these cameras to use in their daily lives.
Something being freely provided does not inherently grant consumers the right to do with it whatever they please. The producers, being the one freely providing the things, seem well within their rights to set limits on its usage, no? Sure, sometimes things are freely produced with the express point being that they can be used without limitations, but this isn't an inherent property of the thing being freely available.
I mean, why else do we have so many different open source licensing models?
> If it's a problem as soon as the average American starts using something, it's probably better if those resources stop being made available period.
Average American probably won't be using it.
This seems to be the hole in Kant's categorical imperative[0] - plenty of useful things fail the test of universality, because there isn't one class, or two classes, but three classes of people: those who find some use for a thing, those who don't and thus don't care, and then those who have no use for the thing but don't like it anyway. And in the past century or so, thanks to the role of mass media, that third class is ruling the world.
And so...
> but the moment regular folks start getting in on the fun and they post a pic of themselves being surveilled on twitter suddenly it's time to shut everything down?
Yes, it is. It's how this has been playing out time and again - once the attention seekers, and people with overactive imagination wrt. dystopias, and maybe the few with some actually reasonable objections join forces, it's better to shut the thing down as soon as possible, to minimize the amount of time your name can be found on the front pages of major newspapers. At that point, there's little hope to talk things out and perhaps rescue the project in some form - outraged public does not do calm or rational, and if you somehow survive the first couple days and the public still cares, you're destined to become a new ball in the political pinball machine. With your name or life on the line, it's usually much easier to cut your losses than to stand on principle, especially for something that's inconsequential in the grander scheme of things.
One by one, we're losing nice things - not as much because they're abused, but mostly because there's always some performative complainers ready to make a scene. We won't be getting nice things back until our cultural immunity catches up, until we inoculate ourselves against the whining.
[1] - Cardinal Richelieu's "Give me six lines", though the (apparently) more accurate version from https://history.stackexchange.com/a/28484 is even better: "with two lines of a man's handwriting, an accusation could be made against the most innocent, because the business can be interpreted in such a way, that one can easily find what one wishes." More boring than malevolent, and thus that much more real; it reads like a HN comment.
That is what happened to the local feed for the city I live in. Their mapping data was trash. I went through fixed the GPS, found the typical focalized center of frame, built a basic frontend, and then they shut it all down.
I found the dude that ran it and emailed back and forth with him for a few years. They made excuses about how it is an IT issue.
A bit tangential, but in Poland we also had such traffic cameras with public access (it wasn't a live feed, but a snapshot updated every minute or so). It was provided by a company which won a lot of tenders for IT infrastructure around roads (https://www.traxelektronik.pl/pogoda/kamery/).
What is interesting to me is that the public access to the cameras has been blocked a few months after the war in Ukraine started. For a few months I could watch the large convoys of equipment going towards Ukraine, and my personal theory is that so did the MoD of Russia. I haven't seen any reports about that, just my personal observation.
Would have been a good opportunity to inject misinformation after they noticed (assuming it's what happened)... Convoy passing by? Quick, splice in alternative footage that has equivalent traffic/weather conditions. (Or an infinite convoy to scare them)
Why does NYC even care? This tendency to govern in a controlling way is not just weird but plain unethical. I hope this goes viral and embarrasses them.
NYC government is peculiar, in that its size and scope is like a US state, but it also subsumes the functions of US cities and counties. The closest comparison in the US is probably LA County.
Thinking about it in terms of technology — during the pandemic the schools bought a million iPads. They also run a giant hospital system, the largest police and fire departments in the country, etc.
The net result is administration of a vast, sprawling (both horizontal and vertical) bureaucracy is complex, and the cogs in the wheel of that bureaucracy are simultaneously in your face and detached from reality. So you have a group of attorneys who see a threat in people posing in front of a camera.
You first paragraph raises some interesting points. It makes wonder if NYC police and fire is larger than that of some smaller countries in Europe, like Belgium or Netherlands. My guess: Yes!
Indeed, the NYPD has 33,000 officers and Belgium's armed forces have 24,000 serving plus 6000 reserve. They also have very similar budgets: $6b vs. €7b.
Agree in spirit, though again if it does go viral and they become embarrassed the most likely thing is they'd shut down public access to the cameras - which would be a lousy outcome for everyone.
My county has traffic cameras available online, though it's only static images updated once a minute or so. It's not that great but I still appreciate it, especially during winter weather. Every now and then if the weather seems bad I check the cameras to see what the roads look like before I head out. It's not a big deal, but I'd be a little annoyed if they took away public access because someone was trying to make some sort of statement or game out of them.
This is an opportunity for bullshitters (in a "bullshit jobs" sense) to be seen as "doing something" and get pats on the back without significant effort - at least less effort than doing other, actually valuable things.
I think we're in agreement. The "that's why we can't have nice things" argument happens at the end when traffic cams' public access is taken away because some clever soul found a novel use for the publicly available information (i.e. taking selfies), and the authorities were put out by it. So, public information gets locked down on spurious grounds, and the same clever soul is wrongly blamed for it. That's not fair, but someone will say ".. and that's why we can't have nice things", and others will say "yeah. that guy ruined it for everyone".
It's a bad argument as it ends up putting the blame on the wrong party.
But in these cases, it is the "clever soul" who's to blame, especially if they cannot be legally restricted from being "clever".
Like I said in another part of this thread: we should not be confounding "freely available" with "free to use without limitation". The various forms of open source licensing are testament to this concept: some things are indeed freely offered; others stipulate that you can't use them to make money without also offering your source code freely, etc. In both cases, the code is offered freely, but in the latter case, you're not legally allowed to use it without limitation.
Public information is often taken down because it can't be limited in such ways, and it relies on an honor system of sorts. Once people stop being honorable, there is no other choice but to take the resource away. The fault there absolutely rests with the individuals that have violated the implicit honor system.
This "clever soul" is trying to monetize this work, and encouraging others to do the same, which is pretty sketch.
It's pretty clear that the providers of a key piece of their endeavor aren't happy with them using the public infrastructure in this way. Is it not dishonorable to go against someone's wishes when they're providing something charitable?
When the public infrastructure is cameras that are constantly broadcasting the people nearby, and the use is saving a frame when you're one of the people nearby, no I do not see that as dishonorable. The intent of the provider only goes so far when it comes to super straightforward uses. And it's not a burden on the system. And if anything, now they're getting permission to take photos of that person in that moment (which is nice even if they don't personally make recordings of the broadcast).
I think the provider's concern is that a) it will become a burden on the system if this usage becomes widespread, and b) it encourages people to engage in risky behavior in order to have their image captured on one of these cameras.
Both of these are valid arguments, which you seem to discount out of hand, as if the provider's concerns are inherently invalid.
Let me flip the question: should anyone who captures an image of you in a public setting be free to monetize your likeness? If you are arguing that the provider's concerns and wishes are irrelevant, would that not also apply to every person who leaves the privacy of their own homes? That they, too, would have absolutely no say in how their likeness in public settings is used?
I feel like we've already established a precedent that yes, you should have some say in how your likeness is used, even when it's captured in settings where you are freely putting it on display in public.
Why does this not apply to other resources that are just as freely given?
The idea that it might become a burden seems unrealistic to me.
And banning pictures is a bad way to keep people out of traffic.
As to your flip... it really doesn't make sense to me. This art project gives people control of their own images! The city is trying to stop them from controlling their own images.
Saying the provider's wishes don't matter (which is a pretty strong exaggeration of what I said) does not even resemble saying the subject's wishes don't matter.
It seems like you intentionally missed my point: when you're in public, you are the provider of some non-trivial amount of data. There is no distinction between subject and provider in that case.
To follow your logic in that case is to argue that you should have no control over how your likeness is used once you provide it to the public by simply being in public.
This is nonsense. The provider of the information being collected should generally have some say in how that data is used; and if we want a respectful and kind society, we should respect those wishes so long as they are not unreasonable.
It is not unreasonable for NYCDOT to ask that people not use their traffic cameras to take selfies. Encouraging people to flout those wishes, even in the name of "art", is to encourage a society that does not respect other people's wishes.
I think we should draw a distinction between information provided on purpose or not. And other distinctions based on who is in the information. So I see your point now, but I think the calculation goes differently because my argument is not nearly that simple nor entirely focused on that specific aspect.
You have control over your likeness because it's your likeness. If you provide someone else's likeness, you deserve much less control. If they want to control it, you deserve even less.
> The provider of the information being collected should generally have some say in how that data is used; and if we want a respectful and kind society, we should respect those wishes so long as they are not unreasonable.
I'd give a lot more leeway for going against the wishes of the provider in particular. I don't think they should get a very privileged position. It's not burdening them, and it's not their personal information. They can ask but I don't think polite society requires agreeing in this case. It's nice of them to be worried about other people's safety but it's a pretty minor safety issue and the person walking around is the one who gets to make the decisions about their own safety.
I think I agree that there's a distinction to be made between information provided on purpose (or for a purpose) and not. However, I think I come to the opposite conclusion: information provided on purpose should have stronger guarantees in favor of the provider's wishes, because purpose implies intent, and intent requires effort to turn into action.
Your likeness, on the other hand, is freely given to all observers, at no real cost or effort to yourself. You just are, and it is. In fact, you touch on this when you talk about "burden" on the provider.
NYCDOT might not be providing their personal information, but effort and cost is required to maintain this infrastructure, and I think the effort begets respect, at the very least.
While I agree that someone should always have some level of input into how their likeness is used, because it truly is no burden on them to provide it, I think respectively less weight should be given to it. I think the best effort should still be given to respecting a person's wishes when it comes to their likeness, of course, but perhaps comparatively less than when someone intentionally shares something that took effort to create.
So it appears in fact I agree with your logic, but have somehow arrived at the opposite conclusion. Perhaps because I consider "burden" more broadly than just the marginal effort of supporting an additional viewer of a camera feed?
The impact on their server is barely anything. Itty bitty fractions of a penny. So the amount we need to respect their wishes specifically for burden reasons is negligible.
Control over your own likeness is not "burden", but it's important too, and in this situation I would say it's orders of magnitude more impactful and important than the server costs of a few seconds of viewing.
> Perhaps because I consider "burden" more broadly than just the marginal effort of supporting an additional viewer of a camera feed?
The reason they set it up is not for selfies, so I think the marginal cost of selfies is the right metric. But even if we look at total burden to set up the system, that's divided over a ton of users, so the person taking a selfie is still looking at a minuscule fraction of it.
> The impact on their server is barely anything. Itty bitty fractions of a penny. So the amount we need to respect their wishes specifically for burden reasons is negligible.
I don't think you can amortize "burden" across the number of consumers like that. If you want to take that approach, then you also seem to be arguing that the more people who see you in public, the less your likeness is worth--but I think empirically the opposite is true.
> Control over your own likeness is not "burden", but it's important too, and in this situation I would say it's orders of magnitude more impactful and important than the server costs of a few seconds of viewing.
But, why? If the marginal cost of someone taking a picture of you is next to nothing, why is control over that more impactful and important than server costs, for the same duration of viewing? If the marginal burden of someone viewing your likeness is approximately 0, and you're weighting the producer's preferences by that marginal cost (below), does that also not imply that the more people who see your likeness, the less your wish for control over your own likeness matters?
> The reason they set it up is not for selfies, so I think the marginal cost of selfies is the right metric. But even if we look at total burden to set up the system, that's divided over a ton of users, so the person taking a selfie is still looking at a minuscule fraction of it.
Again, I think this is the wrong way of weighting it. I think the preferences in general are an indivisible quantity, and the same regardless of the number of people must decide whether or not to respect those preferences. It's a preference, and each potential consumer must decide for themselves whether or not to respect those preferences. Having more consumers does not "cheapen" the weight of a producer's preferences for the next marginal consumer.
A model in which you weight preferences by marginal burden subsequently cheapens all preferences based on the number of potential consumers of the thing you're sharing. This makes no sense, and empirically--as in the case of "control over your own likeness"--more consumers seems to make that preference even more important. By amortizing the weight of preferences across the pool of potential consumers, you're essentially arguing that if your likeness were to be made available to everyone, for free, your own preferences regarding control of your likeness would become irrelevant.
I don't necessarily think that all preferences are equal, but I also bias towards weighing everyone's preferences as worth respecting, unless there's a compelling reason to assign more or less weight to those preferences. For example, when preferences are legally protected or morally aligned, I tend to weight them more; while preferences that are simply asinine or I consider to be immoral are similarly downweighted. I don't feel like this is a radical viewpoint, though?
Use of likeness does not have a negligible marginal cost. Every use matters. So I don't think my argument breaks down the way you're suggesting.
> I don't necessarily think that all preferences are equal, but I also bias towards weighing everyone's preferences as worth respecting, unless there's a compelling reason to assign more or less weight to those preferences. For example, when preferences are legally protected or morally aligned, I tend to weight them more; while preferences that are simply asinine or I consider to be immoral are similarly downweighted. I don't feel like this is a radical viewpoint, though?
When there is a public broadcast, I think the right to watch it should automatically be bundled with the right to take pictures of it. At least as far as the rights of the entity making the broadcast go. So I do find the disconnect somewhat asinine. And when someone is just showing me factual content, I don't particularly care about their preferences as a default, just their burden.
> Use of likeness does not have a negligible marginal cost. Every use matters. So I don't think my argument breaks down the way you're suggesting.
But now you're just making an arbitrary distinction? That seems suspicious.
> When there is a public broadcast, I think the right to watch it should automatically be bundled with the right to take pictures of it.
You might, but there are numerous cases where this is illegal, which means the legal system disagrees with you. You might disagree with the legal system, but that does not give you the right to disregard it.
> And when someone is just showing me factual content, I don't particularly care about their preferences as a default, just their burden.
Your likeness is also "just factual content", so by this logic, no one should care about any of your preferences regarding it. Your only way to resolve this contradiction is apparently to arbitrarily define the things where you think preferences should matter as "not having marginal cost".
The only thing you've made clear with this line of reasoning is that you feel free to disregard anyone's preferences if they're inconvenient to you.
> But now you're just making an arbitrary distinction? That seems suspicious.
Maybe? I don't think it's very arbitrary.
> You might, but there are numerous cases where this is illegal, which means the legal system disagrees with you.
Situations like what? Time-shifting is very well established as legal.
> Your likeness is also "just factual content",
No it's not. There are moral rights and privacy rights involved.
> Your only way to resolve this contradiction is apparently to arbitrarily define the things where you think preferences should matter as "not having marginal cost".
I said it does have marginal cost. After you brought up how a server request in this situation pretty much doesn't.
> The only thing you've made clear with this line of reasoning is that you feel free to disregard anyone's preferences if they're inconvenient to you.
It's hard for me to believe you wrote this description of my argument in good faith. I have never even looked at these cameras, and if someone else's right to their own likeness got in the way of my own projects I would respect that right a lot. My own convenience has absolutely nothing to do with my argument. This is all about principles.
But, for a lot of things, we have to exist in the gap between ethics and law. If someone, with access to ostensibly public NYCDOT information, uses it for "dishonorable" (not illegal) purposes, the DOT has three choices: legislate its use, remove it completely, or ignore the issue. Whatever they do, with the exception of the ignore option, will result in the vilification of our clever soul. That person did not make any of the decisions that caused the removal of the previously accessible public information. They just had a thing, they used it, and something happened. Could that have been foreseen? Maybe, but marginal. Guaranteed? Probably not at all. I just don't think that blame is fair. Let the NYCDOT do what it'll do and the rest of us can replot our courses if necessary.
OSS libraries, released to the web or wherever, have the same set of choices; and the authors can do as they please. It's their stuff, and their right entirely. But, blaming someone who acted "dishonorably" and resulted in a novel set of legal restrictions on an OSS library doesn't seem right either.
If someone took an open source library that had a restrictive license, and used it in violation of that license, if it can be proven that they did so with the intention of ignoring the license, they can be held accountable. In this case, even if they were ignorant of the license, they can still be held accountable. We can definitely assign blame to these people, and more so in the case of the one doing it with malicious intent.
So why is the same not true of these cameras? Especially if now this person has been informed that their usage is against the wishes of the provider; even if it's questionable whether or not the initial usage is "dishonorable", once the provider's intentions have been made clear, if the "clever soul" persists, it's not out of malice, which is definitely dishonorable.
Intentionally violating someone's expressed preferences is often legal, but I think it's almost uniformly seen as a negative (i.e. dishonorable) thing. Except in the most extreme cases, where someone's preferences are generally considered unreasonable, we have good reason to treat those who ignore preferences as untrustworthy or unjust.
So there exists a fourth option: NYCDOT makes a plain request that this kind of usage stop, and then rely on people to honor those wishes. This is like basic social reciprocity, so I'm constantly amazed by how many people argue that we shouldn't engage in it. At the end of the day, that's what you're saying we should do: be fine with people who are asked to stop, and who respond with "no, you can't make me". It's not unreasonable that NYCDOT ask that their cameras not be used to gain people likes or viewers or money; but it does strike me as unreasonable to applaud people who intentionally ignore (and even flout!) the lack of enforceability of that ask.
You, too? Fortunately, disabling those doesn't disable the severe weather alerts, and those have worked well for me, most recently in that July tornado.
Yeah I share the same experience in IL, I turned my Amber Alerts off after being woken up by one at around 2am for some incident at the far end of the state 350 miles away. Like you say though, the weather alerts have worked pretty well for me, too.
Did Sable give up ALL its patents, or only the patents involved in the Cloudflare case? The picture of the document refers to the "Sable Patents", which I would suspect are defined in the context of the court case and therefore are only the ones relevant to that case?
I read it as “giving up the patents in the portfolio that they acquired from that other company in 2006”.
Still not very clear to me either. Probably intentional, since CF seems to want to send the message that “mess with us and in the end you’ll give up all your patents somehow”
At this point, now that the SpaceX alternative has been officially acknowledged, I really don't see how anyone at NASA would be comfortable risking the return on Starliner. If they do and it fails and the astronauts die, everyone will be (rightly) outraged that a viable rescue plan was available and not used. It could become an existential crisis for NASA.
My belief is that the fact that they're publicly "considering" the SpaceX plan means that they've probably already decided to do that and what we're seeing in the media right now is NASA just letting everyone get used to the idea before they formally commit to it.
> My belief is that the fact that they're publicly "considering" the SpaceX plan means that they've probably already decided to do that and what we're seeing in the media right now is NASA just letting everyone get used to the idea before they formally commit to it.
The messaging from NASA has slowly shifted from "They're returning on Starliner" to "They're returning on Starliner, and we're considering contingencies" to "We'll make a decision whether they return on Starliner or Crew Dragon".
It does kind of seem like NASA is giving Boeing as much time as they can to try to pull a rabbit out of a hat, with the understanding that if they don't deliver, that the Astronauts are going back on Crew Dragon.
I gather that they're also worried that the Dragon option turns into another can of worms due to a risk that an automated return of the Starliner could result in bricking the ISS's docking port. Something about how they removed the automated docking/undocking software from Starliner for the crewed mission, for reasons I'm guessing I could not begin to fathom.
It isn't that they removed autonomous undocking. IIRC autonomous docking/undocking were part of the requirements for the commercial crew program. Starliner even did attempt an autonomous docking to the station.
The issue is that of fault handling. If the software detects a malfunction when a crew is onboard, the best option is to switch to manual control. But if a crew is not onboard, the craft should handle the failure on its own in the safest possible way.
So, what happened is that they loaded in software which expects the crew to be available. Now, obviously with thruster malfunctions already happening, they can't assume that a fault won't be detected after undocking, so they have to switch the software over to the configuration where it can no longer rely on the crew as a fallback.
Right, but “switch the configuration” isn’t trivial, they’re estimating something like 4+ weeks of work. IIRC it’s essentially equivalent to reflashing the whole thing and revalidating the install was correct.
I agree, what I'm trying to emphasize is that the current software is able to undock autonomously, it isn't able to handle failures autonomously. Many people seem to be thinking that Starliner had been capable of autonomous docking/undocking and the functionality had been removed for seemingly no legitimate reason. But, if we understand that autonomous undocking is present, but autonomous error handling is not, the engineering reason becomes obvious, that when you have a crew available, they're the better option for error handling than the software.
I'm not trying to make the excuse that's going around about how they don't need to change the software, just the configuration. It's absurd that they need 4 weeks for this change when switching from manual to automatic fault handling should be a basic safety contingency (it'd be necessary if the crew had become incapacitated for any reason).
I'm still not convinced this is sound engineering? Shipping two different versions of the software, instead of having some sort of switch you can flip, seems sub-optimal precisely because it increases your exposure to risks like this where you're less able to adapt to unforeseen circumstances because as soon as you wander off the happy path you're in completely uncharted waters. This feels more to me like yet another example of Boeing cutting corners without the benefit of a full understanding of the implications of the decision because their left, right, top, bottom, front, back, charm and strange hands all have no idea what the others are doing.
> Shipping two different versions of the software, instead of having some sort of switch you can flip, seems sub-optimal precisely
Someone on X was saying that NASA's definition of "flight software" includes config files. So it isn't actually the code that needs to be changed, just the config.
I think the need for 4 weeks for a config change is the requirement to test the new config in a simulator (against a long list of scenarios) and have it reviewed and approved by various engineering teams, both Boeing and NASA. Plus likely some margin added.
> NASA just letting everyone get used to the idea before they formally commit to it
Or NASA caving to outside pressure to look, relook, and look once more for any possible way to make a Starliner return possible. Likely the same pressure that called for Starliner in the first place.
I wonder if the astronauts themselves get some say in this. What if they decide, since it is their lives, that they're not getting into the starliner, even if NASA decides the risk is acceptable?
At the end of the day NASA administrators can't actually force the astronauts into Starliner. Clearly they get some say in it if they're willing to push hard enough.
I'm sure if they have opinions they would share them with NASA and probably their families, and of course if it comes out that NASA ignored their concerns and they perished that would be pretty bad.
However, I imagine that part of becoming an astronaut means that you really have to get comfortable with trusting others to make critical, ultimately life-affecting decisions on your behalf all the time. So perhaps their mindset is more of "we trust that all the smart people on the ground are doing their best to make the safest decision for us, and we'll go with what you say".
If I were one of them stuck up there, though, I'd probably want to get on a video call with the Boeing engineers and look them in the eyes, show them pictures of my family, and ask if they are confident their vehicle will bring me home safely.
NASA chose to give 2/3rds of the funding to ULA, and seemed pretty reluctant to include SpaceX - it seemed like they were forced to at the time.
They mismanaged the space shuttle, racking up huge costs on a vehicle that put people's lives at risk, while lying to congress and everyone else about how reliable it was. Feynman's report is a good read. Here's an HN thread.
I hope you're right, but at the same time it would be quite sad if this is all theatrics to preserve the feelings of Boeing fanboys (how do those still exist?)
They exist because “real engineering” is something people think ex-software people can’t do. And because some people have a reflexive dislike of Elon Musk.
This is real engineering, folks. By the experienced real engineers at Boeing. Not the idiots at SpaceX whose stuff keeps blowing up.
> NASA is an executive agency, the President doesn’t like the head of SpaceX
NASA is a huge fan of SpaceX. Look at the Artemis programme and the amount of technology risk concentrated with them. They’d similarly defer to SpaceX if Crew Dragon had an issue.
NASA certainly is deeply entwined with SpaceX, but that relationship predates the Biden/Elon animosity.
Biden has the authority to say that he’s not going to give Elon this gloating opportunity ahead of the election.
Biden also has the authority to make SpaceX catch a seal, strap it to a board, and make it listen to rocket noise through headphones to see if it becomes distressed.
Biden can also fire every right-leaning defence contractor. SpaceX is the darling child of American aerospace. If your media diet is saying anything to the contrary that’s the carrier signal.
Unfortunately, a couple astronauts dying isn't an existential crisis for NASA, especially considering their incompetence in the years after the WW2 German rocket scientists died off.
The people making this decision are not 5 year olds. They're not "letting everyone get used to the idea." That may be a nice side benefit of their decision process but the driver is crew safety and data on thruster performance. If they find a rationale for the failures that makes them confident in Starliner they'll use it. That's what the delay is about, not "letting everyone get used to the idea."
I would like to believe you, unfortunately previous events show that decisions are not driven primarily by crew safety and data on thruster performance. Politics plays heavily in most decisions.
(e.g., the Shuttle was sold to Congress as a multipurpose vehicle that could support military, scientific, and commercial missions. However, the need to gain political support led to compromises in its design, particularly the decision to make it a reusable vehicle with an orbiter that could carry large payloads, which led to safety issues. The political drive for cost-effectiveness also led to the program being underfunded, contributing to the Challenger disaster in 1986.
The 'Journey to Mars' program was designed to sustain NASA's long-term goals but lacked a clear timeline, partly due to political hesitance to commit to a specific date or strategy that might not align with subsequent administrations' priorities. The program was influenced by political leaders' desires to show progress in space exploration while avoiding the high costs and risks associated with a definitive Mars mission plan.)
In PR terms they are managing the Overton window. As a strategy it is sometimes called gradualism or incrementalism.
Five-year-olds do not use this technique, they do what they want when they want to with no regard for their public image, which is what you are stating NASA will do.
I don't see why NASA would need to manage any "Overton window." NASA loses very little if they decide to send the astronauts back on SpaceX. At worst, and this is very possible, Boeing uses this as an excuse to just ax Starliner, and NASA would be left without a secondary crew vehicle, but they won't lose funding, and their image would probably only go up since they would have made a choice in the interest of safety.
Boeing, on the other hand, stands to suffer a lot of PR and financial damage should NASA make that decision. They have an interest in managing this window. They've been lobbying NASA and tweeted something about how confident they are in Starliner, but they appear to really be on the backfoot.
The whole point is that NASA isn't "letting people get used to the idea." It's really no skin off NASA's back if they send them home on Starliner.
SQLite being released in the public domain has to be up there as one of the greatest gifts ever given to the global software development community. I'd love to know what led to the licensing decision. The wide-open rights to use it however you see fit have undoubtedly enabled countless applications to exist that otherwise would have been very, very difficult to create - especially mobile apps.
Whatever money Dr. Hipp makes from SQLite it is surely not enough relative to the value that it has provided to millions of people.
Only $1 more than the original Pico, that's an absolute steal. Although the Pico2 doesn't have PSRAM onboard so there's room for higher end RP235x boards above it.
Make one in an Arduino Uno form factor and double the price and they'd make a killing :-)
I try to dissuade n00bs from starting their arduino journey with the ancient AVR-based devices, but a lot of the peripherals expect to plug into an Uno.
Well there's the UNO-R4 Renasas I suppose, but this would be much cooler indeed. There's also the 2040 Connect in the Nano form factor with the extra IMU.
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