This article reminds of me of this game that demonstrates how difficult it is to operate a horse:
http://www.foddy.net/CLOP.html (enabling flash required)
The problem with this scheme is that if database storing the salted hashed passwords is compromised, then an attacker can easily log in as any user. In a more standard setup, the attacker needs to send a valid password to log in, which is hard to reverse from the salted hashed password stored server-side. In this scheme, the attacker no longer needs to know the password, as they can just make a client that sends the compromised server hash salted with the random salt requested by the server.
Minor nitpick: it's actually the U that makes it not actually stock. Owning Restricted Stock counts as being a shareholder, but Restricted Stock Units aren't Restricted Stock.
We're definitely working on adding additional ways to authenticate. Right now, we're using Google because that's something most people have. We're trying to make a much easier user experience than Google Groups, so that's why you'd want to use ZeroMailer.
It's a good point that there is a big difference between Internet communications and real life, and we're trying hard to address that difference.
There are a lot of nonverbal cues that you pick up in real life, and you pick up more of these with video than just with text or audio.
There are times when it's polite to knock, like if the office door is closed. If the door is open, or you're working in an open office, coworkers can generally just come and say hi. Working face to face is often best, but it's not possible for some people, and we're trying to enable some part of the working face to face experience for those people.
I know that it's hard to buy that auto-answering will help you be more efficient when working together, but together with automatic status detection, it works well for a lot of our early users. If you're ever in the situation where you want to work face to face with someone, but can't, then give us a try, and if it doesn't work for you, let us know why, and we'll try to build something that does.
The SmartStatus is actually fully configurable, so you can choose which applications/websites you appear red/yellow/green for. So if you set Hacker News and your IDE to the same color, then your coworkers won't be able to tell :-)
Ah, thank you! For some reason, reading "Fully Customizable" on the site I didn't understand it as such. Is it possible to set (until chosen otherwise) uniformly to red/yellow/green? As in, to override the SmartStatus and use it as run of the mill IM applications without losing the settings?
Right now, you can manually set your status to either Online or Unavailable. If you're unavailable, then people can't initiate video connections with you, and your status is gray. If you set your status to Online, then people can chat you and your colored status is determined by which application/website you have in the foreground. The application/website to color mapping is something you can configure yourself, but right now it's not possible to force yourself to a particular color for a period of time, although that's a great idea that we can implement in a coming release.
This is awesome! It's like Omegle, except where you only talk to Hacker News readers. Hacker News readers are much more interesting to talk to anyway :-)
Sorry about the registration/login problems you and a lot of our other users have been seeing. We've been running into a few issues with logging in and our video servers that we didn't find in testing before because of the load from all the HN traffic. We're working as quickly as possible to resolve those.
