Lost in Translation: Choujin X chapter 1
Fun fact, I was planning to do fan translations for Choujin X with a scan group until it could get a simulpub release, though I didn’t expect it to get one from the very first chapter lol. I’m happy though since it means everyone can read it right away and it doesn’t mess up my schedule.
So instead I’ll be making comparison notes between the EN and JP text to supplement the official translation. I’m not doing this because the official TL is bad (I actually think it’s pretty solid and I hope it will maintain this quality) but because it’s inevitable for something to be lost in translation, and it’s nice to have that additional context for theory crafting and whatnot.
If you want to read it on Twitter instead, the original thread is here, but this is the proofread and way more detailed version 😄
This translation isn’t wrong, but there’s an emphasis on それ (which is TLed as ‘it’) that connotes a stronger, “other, that thing” feeling that isn’t present here. The general idea behind this sentence is: That [becoming a Choujin] resembles more of a disease [than a transformation].
Ely talks like a tomboy, she uses rougher speech patterns and the pronoun オラ (ora), a derivative of the masculine 'ore'. But it's a bit old-fashioned (eg. すまなんだ) which makes sense considering her upbringing with her grandfather on a farm. Hence her country bumpkin speech pattern in English.
Not sure if I should use Ellie or Ely? Ellie makes more sense based on the kana, but Ishida explicitly called her Ely so I might stick with Ely for now... (also istg that blond guy with the huge chin is a reference, I've seen him somewhere)
Tokio, I know your teacher is annoying, but it's rude to call her that lol. This is basically the oppai equivalent of paisen (senpai backwards, it’s slangier). Similar thing actually happened with Ely describing her dream hubby as Goldilocks instead of blond; ‘kinpatsu’ (blond hair) was inverted to become ‘patsukin’, hence the translation as Goldilocks.
Kurohara Tokio (黒原トキオ) and Higashi Azuma (東アヅマ). Kurohara is a common surname, means 'black fields'. Tokio is in katakana, so it’s hard to say what kanji it could be. 'Toki' could be 時 (time) or 外喜 (outside + delight). The 'o' can be the common male name suffix 男 (boy).
But when I think of Tokio, I think of TK's song called 'tokio'. You can read the translated lyrics here. If these lyrics end up being relevant to Tokio's character development I will eat my shoe lol.
Higashi means 'east'. Azuma (which can also be romanized as Aduma, it’s a softer ‘zu’ sound which is why Tokio called Azuma ‘Aju’ earlier in the chapter before correcting himself) is an archaic form of ‘east’. So...this guy is literally East East. The Choujin X equivalent of Moon Moon 😂
Someone also informed me that Higashi Azuma is a station in Tokyo, though the kana are slightly different (アヅマ/あづま vs. あずま). They effectively sound the same though nowadays, if I have to be honest. It’s like comparing the difference between 애 and 에 in Korean.
Tbh this is minor, but worth mentioning just cause it changes the meaning a bit. Tokio is saying something more like, “Why are we even talking about this [the roly-polies] again?”
I think I heard people talking about how the official TL doesn’t match the original text, but personally I really like how this was translated! Sis is using the expression 「爪の垢を煎じて飲む」, which literally means “boiling the dirt under someone’s fingernails and drinking it”. By taking the dirt/grime under the fingernails of someone that you admire, and boiling it and drinking it like a tea, you can become more like them.
But because idioms don’t tend to directly translate well between languages, translators often have to adapt it so that the meaning still remains the same. In English the closest idiom we have to this is “rubbing off on someone.” The “holding hands” bit was added to replace the physical aspect of “taking the dirt from someone’s fingernails” and also contribute to Sis’s sassy and very informal way of speaking.
So Sis is saying in JP (ignoring her personal speech style for now):
You should take the dirt from under [Azuma's] fingernails and boil it so you can be more like him.
And now in ENG it becomes:
You guys should hold hands or something, then maybe he’ll rub off on you.
It now sounds natural in English, still carries the same meaning as the original text, and also suits the character’s speech pattern.
Moving on, in that same panel the literal TL of Tokio’s dialogue is, “Policeman Azuma got dispatched again today,” emphasizing Azuma’s heroic deeds along with his family connections to the police. Another thing I want to note is that this is the second time Azuma has been called 偉い (erai) so far - noble, and now great guy. I’ll just dump the general English definition of 偉い from Jisho here so you get the general idea:
Great; excellent; admirable; remarkable; distinguished; important; celebrated; famous; eminent
But you can tell from how people describe Azuma as 偉い that others look up to him, think he’s a great person and Mr. Perfect. Always being placed on a pedestal by others. (What are the odds this will affect his mentality after the Choujin serum?)
The meaning is still pretty much the same, but I’ll offer a slightly different perspective. Sis mentions that if she were Tokio, she’d burst from the [Azuma] complex. (Clearly Tokio and Azuma's relationship is gonna crack at some point)
Tokio mentions an idiom about hawks (taka) before recalling his childhood memory about vultures. Vultures are called 'hagewashi', but in the chapter it mentions they can also be called 'hagetaka' (buzzard/condor, literally bald hawk).
The kids call him names like "Hagetaka Tokio" and "Hageo". But Hagetaka Tokio only really works in JP cause Hagetaka kinda mimics his last name (Buzzard Tokio doesn't give the same vibe). Same with Hageo. Hage-o = Bald-o = Baldy.
I also think Buzzard was chosen over another name for a vulture like Condor because Buzzard can pass off as an insult.
I would have translated this as, “I wanted to be a lion too...” but this is just personal preference.
A continuation of the 「爪の垢を煎じて飲む」 expression Sis used earlier. Without the adapted idiom the exchange goes something like this:
Tokio: My sister said I should bring home the dirt from under your nails. Can I have some?
Azuma: ...huh? What for, that’s scary. No way.
Tokio: I have to boil it and drink it, apparently.
Azuma: Don’t even think about boiling or drinking it.
But since the 「爪の垢を煎じて飲む」 expression was modified to make it sound natural in English, it means this conversation has to be modified too.
JP: My sister said I should bring home the dirt from under your nails. Can I have some?
EN: My sister says we should hold hands...so I can be more like you. What do you think?
The “dirt from under your nails” part got adapted to “holding hands”, hence how the 1st line from Tokio becomes, “My sister says we should hold hands...so I can be more like you.” “Can I have some?” makes no sense now in this context now, so it was changed to “What do you think?” as a question to Azuma to keep the similar conversation flow going.
JP: ...huh? What for, that’s scary. No way.
EN: Huh? What’re you talking about? No thanks.
Azuma’s next line is similar enough to the JP text except for the removal of “scary”. I think the reason it was most likely removed is because leaving it as it is could be constituted as homophobic (2 boys holding hands, absolutely nothing scary about it as bible thumpers would like people to believe).
JP: I have to boil it and drink it, apparently.
EN: She said to hold hands so you’ll rub off on me.
Tokio’s response to that is explaining what he meant by his proposal. In the original text he lays out the latter half of the idiom (he doesn’t even realize it’s an expression, poor boy), and in English he does something similar by going into why his sister said they should hold hands (so Azuma can rub off on Tokio).
JP: Don’t even think about boiling or drinking it.
EN: C’mon. That’s not how things work.
Azuma’s then rebuts Tokio’s proposal as ridiculous. In the original text he drops a typical straight man response (don’t do *insert whatever ridiculous thing the idiot suggested*). But since Tokio’s proposal in English isn’t as preposterous, his rebuttal is toned down in response by telling him not to take it literally.
Ultimately, even though a lot of this dialogue was changed, I still think it was successful in maintaining the original’s intent. Tokio takes his sister’s sarcastic suggestion literally and brings it up to Azuma, who dismisses it as silly. It would be nice if we could keep the expression as it was in Japanese, but in instances like this where it’s played off of in multiple lines, that’s easier said than done.
軟体 isn’t an actual word, it’s made up of the kanji soft + body. So kinda like Elastigirl, but Flexi was chosen instead. It doesn’t sound 100% right, but I don’t think I could come up with anything better.
Replacing the しい in 楽しい with the C plus that elongated pronunciation makes Johnny sound even more like a stereotypical Yankee, which is why he sounds like that in English 😂
Random but I found it interesting how Azuma called Johnny a youkai (妖怪) instead of something like bakemono (化け物) or obake (お化け) since they’re shapeshifting monsters.
Tokio is worried that if he doesn't do something right now, he's going to lose his friendship with Azuma. The sentence is fine as it is though.
Azuma’s line can also be worded as, "No hard feelings, okay?"
Bestial = 獣化 (juuka) = beast+change = beast transformation
That’s it from me, if you have questions about the TL feel free to send an ask or reply to this post, I promise I’ll check my inbox more often this time 😂
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A (mild) defense of Zoom Inc.'s troubles
Let me start by quoting Citizenlab's report:
For those using Zoom to keep in touch with friends, hold social events, or organize courses or lectures that they might otherwise hold in a public or semi-public venue, our findings should not necessarily be concerning.
For those who have no choice but to use Zoom, including in contexts where secrets may be shared, we speculate that the browser plugin may have some marginally better security properties, as data transmission occurs over TLS.
Unfortunately a few hours later, on the same day, the web client was put under maintenance and thus disabled for the time being, hopefully not for long. update: the web client has been restored, multiple sources confirmed. Please enable join from your browser as a default setting.
Zoom probably didn't anticipate going from 0 to 100 (actually + 1126% of increased usage according to some estimates) in the span of a few weeks and the fact that their network hasn't melted down and rendered all calls impossible to make is a testament to the quality of the underlying technology.
As we all can imagine there are challenges in scaling that big that fast, but most of the problems that have been identified up until now don't really have much to do with scalability or reliability per se, but with questionable software design choices and bad privacy or marketing decisions made by the company.
To be fair, sometimes shortcuts seem a great idea when you're in the heat of the moment and have a booming product, but the more people use it, the higher the likelihood that these shortcuts will come back to haunt it. Also, Zoom devs are humans and like all humans, sometimes they just make bad decisions without malice. What worries me is how the company management, also entirely human AFAIK 😃, decided to handle the response, more on that later.
Last but not least: the media piled up on them quite extensively and some security flaws (except maybe "zoombombing") aren't an inherent problem for those meetings that would otherwise be held in public if we weren't quarantined even though the extent of the problem with user generated content is that its severity differs case by case and here there would be millions of cases (each Zoom call) to analyze.
Zoom is used by everyone: individuals, institutions, therapists, teachers, doctors, religious and secular organizations, goverment officials and even heads of state.
Zoom, as of April 1st 2020, halted all feature development and vowed to fix privacy and security issues over the following 90 days.
What went wrong is also a cautionary tale about the importance of implementing secure practices and caring about users privacy from day one because at the scale they are now it's quite understandable they are trying to put out fires left and right.
What is or was wrong it with
TLDR; Zoom has numerous known security holes. Some of those have since been fixed, some haven't.
The company also made (and in some cases, still makes) questionable decisions related to privacy.
(I'm going to use the past tense where I reasonably verified the issue has been fixed)
Zoom has a security issue in its "waiting room" feature. The issue is currently unknown as the security researchers correctly disclosed it only to Zoom Inc. granting them time to get it fixed lest it gets in the hands of malicious actors. Security researchers are advising people to use passwords and not the waiting room feature.
Recordings are easily findable on the web: Zoom saves recordings with a guessable name pattern, thus it's quite trivial to find them if they are uploaded to the open web. Search engines are literally built to find public data on the web. Again, "security through obscurity" is not a good practice if the content is sensible, and it was: the Washington Post was able to watch other people's therapy sessions and elementary school online classes by scanning the web (!!!!!).
The ID of a meeting room is numeric, which means that people can guess it (manually or with scripts) and thus, being openness the default, people can hijack meetings, thus "zoombombing". The meeting ID has 9 to 11 digits, not even "obscured". Security researchers did actually find meetings and with scripts had up to 14% of a success rate guessing correct meetings URLs.
Recurring Zoom meetings links can be found: they also contain info of the meeting organizer and whatever info the organizers disclosed as topic or description. Security researchers found meetings of large banks, government contractors and other companies.
Screensharing by any participant is on by default, which means that people can stream whatever they want without oversight. Very handy for private and regulated meetings, not great if meetings rooms are open by default.
File transfer is on by default: don't think this needs explaining in an app where a meeting is public. You can literally send to dozens or hundreds of people malware hoping at least one of them will click on it.
The app has too many settings: I went through the configuration panel on both the app and the web version (before it was disabled) and I didn't understand half of the options and got bored after a few minutes (minutes!!!). As we all know as creators of sofware the default matters (most users don't even look at apps settings), and by default you should respect the user's privacy and be secure, otherwise hell can break loose when enough people come knocking with the receipts.
The company lied about being end to end encrypted, that's it. They said they use end to end encryption (e2e) but they don't. They also own decryption keys for what is encrypted on the wire, which is definitely not *end to end encryption. *FYI: true end to end encryption means that only the participants in a communication exchange can actually see the data in the clear. Not the company providing the service, not any goverment, not anyone except who's invited.
Zoom uses weakish encryption: even though the service is not e2e encrypted, calls don't travel in the clear on the transport network. They are encrypted using a central encrypting server which holds the keys. The issue is that they use a single AES 128 bit key in ECB mode which is definitely deprecated and has security holes. Security researchers were able to decrypt video and audio frames from "encrypted" calls.
Zoom encryption and security protocols are not independently audited, which means that they most certainly contain flaws. We all know how hard is to pull off encryption done correctly, I can't imagine how hard it is to do it with video, audio, text and generic media. "Roll your own encryption" is 99.99% of the time a bad idea, it's monumentally bad in this instance. As Bruce Scheiner wrote:
I'm okay with AES-128, but using ECB (electronic codebook) mode indicates that there is no one at the company who knows anything about cryptography.
Zoom encryption keys are occasionally on servers under the jurisdiction of the Chinese goverment: under Chinese law the goverment of China can require companies to disclose their encryption keys and tools for oversight. This has happened also if all participants were outside the country. Likely a data routing problem (Zoom tries to keep calls local to the participants) but not reassuring nonetheless. Also makes me thing of sci fi scenario in which governments or attackers decrypt all of these calls and use facial recognition to create mass surveillance tools. 👀
The company sent data to Facebook unbeknownst to users: this is probably quite common in apps that embed the Facebook SDK without tweaking it (and it only applied to the iOS app which might mean it was truly unintentional), but it's not great anyway. Facebook already knows a lot about users (both those using it and those who don't). It has been fixed since discovery.
Zoom's privacy policy was all encompassing. Basically it stated that all personal data (including recordings, chats and uploaded files) could be shared with third parties. It has been since amended.
Zoom allowed hosts to monitor participant's attention. This is 1984-the-book kind of stuff 😱. It was removed since discovery, on April 1st.
The app bypassed the usual installation process. This was probably done to be friendler to the user in the very common scenario in which a user gets a link, doesn't have the app on their computer and wants to be in the videocall as fast as possible. It's exactly what malware does. It has been fixed since the discovery.
Zoom shares your contact info to everyone within certain email domains. What happened was that thousands of users whose emails belonged to a Dutch email provider where pooled together and their personal info shared with each other.
The app let Windows users click on anything resembling a link. Basically you could automatically open a file on a shared drive sending your network credentials to an attacker. It has been fixed.
Zoom sent your contact data to Linkedin. In some situations, if they could match you to a Linkedin Profile somehow, they did, without telling you and sharing your Linkedin data to other people. This feature has since been removed on April 1st.
0 day vulnerabilities leading to hardware take over were discovered. The likelihood of those happening was very low (the vulnerability window span the length of the installation process and just that). Fixed as well on April 1st.
Records of private messages with the host are available in the export. This is not a huge problem in theory as the export doesn't contain private messages between other participants than those with the host.
Zoom tracks lots of data about its users and has many third party trackers on its website. This to me feels like a very intentional choice. Part of those were amended when the new privacy policy was published the other day.
What has happened in the "aftermath"
So far:
Privacy and advocacy groups started to notice
Class actions are starting to mount
The US government and the FBI have started to notice 👀
NASA, SpaceX and other companies moved away from Zoom
New York City has banned Zoom from its schools
Conclusions
I'm sure you've noticed how this article doesn't talk at all about alternatives. The question of alternatives really depends on what the users requirements are and if the entire globe is your users, then it's hard to evaluate on the spot. It also takes a lot of time to evaluate all options and I think it'll take a few days before deeply researched articles about pros and cons of the alternatives start to appear. You also need a group of people distributed all over the world for thorough testing of each app.
Let's also not forget that we mostly felt okay with Zoom until tens of millions of people started using it overnight and it got on experts's radars. Alternatives might be just as flawed, simply less popular right now.
Trust in the company is important so I do understand why regular people are rushing to find alternatives.
I'm also not a tech columnist nor a security expert, so I can't claim "X is better than Zoom for everything and for everyone".
I'll see if I can find a reasonably well done comparison of alternatives in the next few days with what I think should be generic requirements: great video and audio call performance, secure by default with indipendently reviewed encryption and protocols, and absolutely no adtech on all of this sensible data (which wouldn't be possible anyway if they had e2e, though technically you can still sell metadata about users...).
Echoing other people's sentiments I read online: Apple is sitting on a gold mine if they open Facetime, get it audited and make sure their e2e encryption has no "backdoors".
I'm leaving last a long list of links, with some excerpts, which is what I've read to write this summary.
Media (and other sources) coverage (in chronological order)
Although there are past issues (like the "open web server" debacle from 2019), I've focused only on recent media coverage from March-April 2020.
20200317 - (Techcrunch) - Beware of ‘ZoomBombing’: screensharing filth to video calls
20200326 - (Motherboard, Vice) - Zoom iOS App Sends Data to Facebook Even if You Don’t Have a Facebook Account
20200330 - (Doc Searls, digital privacy expert) - Zoom’s new privacy policy:
There will be no need for Zoom to disambiguate services and websites if neither is involved with adtech at all. And Zoom will be in a much better position to trumpet their commitment to privacy.
That said, this privacy policy rewrite is a big help. So thank you, Zoom, for listening.
20200331 - (Motherboard, Vice) - Zoom Faces Class Action Lawsuit for Sharing Data with Facebook
20200401 - (Motherboard, Vice) - Zoom is Leaking Peoples' Email Addresses and Photos to Strangers:
"I was shocked by this! I subscribed (with an alias, fortunately) and I saw 995 people unknown to me with their names, images and mail addresses."
"I just had a look at the free for private use version of Zoom and registered with my private email. I now got 1000 names, email addresses and even pictures of people in the company Directory. Is this intentional?"
20200401 - (webrtcH4cKS, WebRTC technologists) - Does your video call have End-to-End Encryption? Probably not...:
So yes, Zoom does not have end-to-end encryption. Quite often, WebRTC doesn’t either – not yet at least. If you are using a WebRTC service check their terms of service and privacy policy and make sure that you understand what they are saying about this. Hopefully we will see this change soon as WebRTC Insertable Streams matures.
20200402 - (Fight for the future, digital rights group) - New campaign calls for Zoom to (actually) implement end to end encryption to keep people safe:
Digital rights group Fight for the Future, known for organizing massive online protests for net neutrality and Internet privacy, has launched a new campaign calling for video conferencing service Zoom to implement default end-to-end encryption on all video, audio, and chat content.
20200402 - (Steven Bellovin, security researcher and professor) - Zoom Security: The Good, the Bad, and the Business Model:
There is, though, a class of problems that worries me: security shortcuts in the name of convenience or usability. Consider the first widely known flaw in Zoom: a design decision that allowed “any website to forcibly join a user to a Zoom call, with their video camera activated, without the user's permission.” Why did it work that way? It was intended as a feature
I'm optimistic that things are heading in the right direction. Still, it's the shortcuts that worry me the most. Those aren't just problems that they can fix, they make me fear for the attitudes of the development team towards security. I'm not convinced that they get it—and that's bad. Fixing that is going to require a CISO office with real power, as well as enough education to make sure that the CISO doesn't have to exercise that power very often. They also need a privacy officer, again with real power; many of their older design decisions seriously impact privacy.
20200402 - (Krebs on Security, security expert) - ‘War Dialing’ Tool Exposes Zoom’s Password Problems:
according to data gathered by a new automated Zoom meeting discovery tool dubbed “zWarDial,” a crazy number of meetings at major corporations are not being protected by a password.
Lo said zWarDial evades Zoom’s attempts to block automated meeting scans by routing the searches through multiple proxies in Tor, a free and open-source software that lets users browse the Web anonymously.
“Having a password enabled on the meeting is the only thing that defeats it,” he said.
Lo shared the output of one day’s worth of zWarDial scanning, which revealed information about nearly 2,400 upcoming or recurring Zoom meetings. That information included the link needed to join each meeting; the date and time of the meeting; the name of the meeting organizer; and any information supplied by the meeting organizer about the topic of the meeting.
20200402 - (Reuters) - Elon Musk's SpaceX bans Zoom over privacy concerns -memo:
In an email dated March 28, SpaceX told employees that all access to Zoom had been disabled with immediate effect.
20200403 - (NYTimes) - ‘Zoombombing’ Becomes a Dangerous Organized Effort:
Zoom raiders often employ shocking imagery, racial epithets and profanity to derail video conferences.
Harassers have begun to leverage every feature of Zoom’s platform for abuse. They have used the app’s custom background feature to project a GIF of a person drinking to participants in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and its annotation feature to write racist messages in a meeting of the American Jewish Committee in Paris.
The frequency and reach of the incidents on Zoom prompted the F.B.I. to issue a warning on Tuesday, singling out the app
20200403 - (TidBITS) - Every Zoom Security and Privacy Flaw So Far, and What You Can Do to Protect Yourself:
As detailed as this article is, I fear that this list of problems and choices will be far from the last we hear about Zoom’s security and privacy troubles. In fact, while writing and editing this article over the last 48 hours, we had to add six additional exploits, design-choice errors, and privacy concerns.
Zoom has gone into what’s known as “technical debt.” The company’s developers made a lot of poor decisions in the past, which are likely difficult and costly to fix. The longer it takes Zoom to address the core problems, the harder and more costly future fixes will be, as additional code is built upon that weak foundation.
20200403 - (Washington Post) - Thousands of Zoom video calls left exposed on open Web:
Videos viewed by The Washington Post included one-on-one therapy sessions; a training orientation for workers doing telehealth calls that included people’s names and phone numbers; small-business meetings that included private company financial statements; and elementary school classes, in which children’s faces, voices and personal details were exposed.
20200403 - (Citizenlab) - Move Fast & Roll Your Own Crypto: A Quick Look at the Confidentiality of Zoom Meetings:
Until a few weeks ago, it would have been uncommon for high stakes business negotiations, high level diplomacy, political strategy conferences, and cabinet meetings to be conducted over platforms whose security properties are unknown.
Zoom has not publicly disclosed information such as statistics of requests for data by governments, and what Zoom has done in response to these requests. Zoom’s policies concerning notifications to users over breaches or the handing-over of data to governments are also unknown
During our analysis, we also identified a security issue with Zoom’s Waiting Room feature. Assessing that the issue presented a risk to users, we have initiated a responsible vulnerability disclosure process with Zoom. We are not currently providing public information about the issue to prevent it from being abused.
As a result of these troubling security issues, we discourage the use of Zoom at this time for use cases that require strong privacy and confidentiality
For those who have no choice but to use Zoom, including in contexts where secrets may be shared, we speculate that the browser plugin may have some marginally better security properties, as data transmission occurs over TLS.
In the meantime, we advise Zoom users who desire confidentiality to not use Zoom Waiting Rooms. Instead, we encourage users to use Zoom’s password feature, which appears to offer a higher level of confidentiality than waiting rooms
20200403 - (Politico) - Multiple state AGs looking into Zoom’s privacy practices
20200403 - (Bruce Scheiner, legendary security researcher) - Security and Privacy Implications of Zoom:
Privacy first: Zoom spies on its users for personal profit. It seems to have cleaned this up somewhat since everyone started paying attention, but it still does it.
I'm sure lots more of these bad security decisions, sloppy coding mistakes, and random software vulnerabilities are coming.
But it gets worse. Zoom's encryption is awful. First, the company claims that it offers end-to-end encryption, but it doesn't. It only provides link encryption, which means everything is unencrypted on the company's servers.
20200404 - (Steven Bellovin, security researcher and professor) - Zoom Cryptography and Authentication Problems:
When companies roll their own crypto, I expect it to have flaws. I don't expect those flaws to be errors I'd find unacceptable in an introductory undergraduate class, but that's what happened here.
20200404 - (Chalkbeat, organization related to American schools) - NYC forbids schools from using Zoom for remote learning due to privacy and security concerns:
Instead, the guidance says, schools should switch to Microsoft Teams “as soon as possible,” which the education department suggests has similar functionality and is more secure.
20200404 - (Techcrunch) - Zoom admits some calls were routed through China by mistake:
Zoom said in February that “rapidly added capacity” to its Chinese regions to handle demand was also put on an international whitelist of backup data centers, which meant non-Chinese users were in some cases connected to Chinese servers when data centers in other regions were unavailable
http://damianfallon.blogspot.com/2020/04/a-semi-technical-explainer-of-all-known.html
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Hey /r/Entrepreneur! Its Rich, maker of Failory, where I publish interviews with entrepreneurs. Today I published an interview with Michael Ojo, founder of WURA, the Netflix for Nollywood. TL;DRWURA: On-demand video platform for African and Nollywood moviesIdea: Came from living on his parent's couchDevelopment: Non-technical founder. He set up WordPress and hired a PHP programmerMarketing: Facebook Ads ($35,000), YouTube page, SEO, and a mailing listCause of failure: Big competitor (YouTube) and Cash Flow Learn why you should not try to run someone else’s race!Hi Mike! What's your background, and what are you currently working on?I’m Mike, 28 years old based in Atlanta GA. I was born and raised in Lagos Nigeria, moved to the US when I was 12 years old and I fell in love with the computer from an early age. I started simple coding in High school and that would later lead to my career now as a web developer/ internet entrepreneur.WURA started as a pet project, and for 2 years it really was that. My family and I loved to watch our native African/Nollywood movies and we generally had access to those movies on YouTube, except they were all over the place. You had to search and dig through the dirt to find a good quality movie. WURA was a way for me to curate a playlist of titles so to speak. It was an on-demand video platform we one came and built their own playlist of high-quality titles that were readily available. It wasn’t until I had some cash in the bank though that I started thinking about the project more like a business. My other businesses took off and I had the capital to turn it into a legitimate business. And that I did, hired a team of 10 with myself included. And we put together a nice platform to watch movies on your pc and mobile devices. For a monthly fee of $3.99, a user had access to hundreds of new titles (movies and TV shows) both in English and other local dialects.My main task was to oversee everything. I was the owner but I was also part of a team of 9 other incredible people. What motivated you to start WURA?When I started WURA in 2013, I was actually just recovering from a failed startup the year before. My background is in web development but I consider myself more as a project manager as I rarely get hands-on anymore with my projects. Between 2008 and 2012 I was in the flash gaming business and I ran a successful network of gaming websites, up until early 2012. Several events happened that year that shut down about 80% of my business. First was Google Panda update or Penguin, whichever it was, I lost my Search engine rankings and that alone completely decapitated my business. Also, by this time smartphones had already taken over the market so many gamers that would typically come on the site to play games now go to their mobile phones. And in my efforts to transition to mobile games and join the trend, I essentially lost about $21,000 to a sham game developer on Elance (be very careful when using freelancers for big projects).Long story short, by the time the year was over, I went from making $75k a year to barely making ends meet. I shut down the servers, sold my car, cleaned out my apartment, and moved back in with my parents. As an entrepreneur, your best insurance policy is mom and dad because when things go south (and they will at some point) you at least have a place to lay your head and try to recoup.And so, it was a few months after living on my parent 's couch that the idea of WURA came about. When you live on the couch, you tend to consume a lot of TV and online videos. At least that was the case for me. When I kept watching these movies on YouTube, that’s when the idea came to me. Also, it helped that I saw another person (IROKO TV) running with the same Idea. Later that year Iroko went on to raise $8 million. And I thought for sure there is a big opportunity here. How did you build it?Again, when I first started, it was more of a side project because of my current situation at the time. I had to work a fulltime consulting job. But while I could, I initially set up a WordPress website and I remember using the WordPress theme ‘detube’. I made a list of features I wanted to add to the site to make it more usable and easier for users to find titles or build their own playlist. I played around with it by myself for a few months, and then towards the end of the year (2013), I was able to find a buyer to liquidate what was left of my gaming business. I got about $49,000 from that sale, and with the additional income from my day job, I felt I had enough to get serious about WURA.So, I did, and the first person I hired was a PHP programmer/coder, and we started adding that list of features to the site. Then I began reaching out to Nollywood producers and movie makers to acquire titles for a licensing feeSome of the major obstacles I faced were dealing with the West African business ecosystem, also having to transact with people thousands of miles away came with its own challenges. Sometimes hard drives would get lost in shipment or sometimes I get the hard drives and it has the wrong content in it. And this wasn’t something you can just drive to the store and return. It would cost $100-$150 to ship hard drives back and forth. And internet connection there, is not strong enough to send very large files through the cloud. So, to reduce risks, I had producers send me hard drives first that contained several movies. Then from there, we chose 3-5 titles that we really wanted. Over time, that saved a lot of money and headacheAt the time I was building WURA, I also had a successful entertainment blog that brought in enough revenue for me to continue funding the project. I went on to hire a team of 9 people, designers, writers, editor etc. and my programmer was also brought in full time. Hired a mobile developer as well. So, I had a legitimate business. Had the people, invested thousands in acquiring new titles. All was left was launching and executing with the right marketing plan. Or so I thought. Which were your marketing strategies to grow your business?For marketing, we had a Facebook and YouTube page, did some SEO, built a mailing list through the site, and I reached out to several startup and entertainment blogs to get our name out there. We also offered promotions and free trial periods to get people in the door.We spent about $35,000 on Facebook alone, that helped get some signups both free and paid, also increased our mailing list. The blog outreach helped build some link juice for SEO for the most part. A mailing list was effective in converting free users to paid.Facebook was a terrible investment. For 2 reasons:Although we gained a lot of new users that signed up through Facebook (and we had a 1 click Facebook signup button on the site), we could not email those users our newsletters because Facebook apparently hides users original email addresses and gives them a Facebook email instead; for example
[email protected] and because of this, when we send out a newsletter, those to the Facebook domain would bounce back. FYI: about 70% of WURA total users were Facebook users. We later found this out but we had already spent thousands of dollars to get all those users.Facebook algorithm sucks! Every time Facebook changes its algorithm, those with public Facebook pages suffer. After spending all that money and getting all the thousands of followers to our Facebook page, we realized that those followers were almost useless because anytime we made a post, we were only reaching about 3% of our entire followers. Which were the causes of WURA failure?The main cause of failure for WURA was YouTube. Probably with some mistakes and carelessness on my part as well, but YouTube was the ultimate giant that rendered the business model unsustainable. Sadly, I didn’t realize this fact until much later on.Remember when I said that I thought there was a big opportunity once I found out IROKO TV raised $8 million? Apparently, hundreds of others thought the same, particularly the movie producers. So, the same guys we paid a fee to license their contents went behind our backs and flooded YouTube with the same titles and much more. This basically erased whatever monetary value the movie titles had.I considered WURA more of a service than just a movie or video site. But it is extremely hard to sell that service to anyone if their ultimate goal is to watch a movie and that movie is already available somewhere else for free. And not just somewhere else, but YouTube, which was and still is the most recognized name in online videos.That said I had some responsibility for the failure of WURA as well. For one, I focused way too much on the product itself, that I misjudged the market. And in focusing on the product, I made way too may alterations and customizations. I also licensed way too many more titles than I should have. My marketing strategy was backward. I should have had a marketing plan and execution in place before even launching the product. I’d assumed that guys like Iroko had already proven the concept that I just need to gain some of that market share. Wrong!When it was all said and done, I started to realize that the business may not hold due to the trend I was seeing on YouTube, literally every day I would see a new channel pop up showing the same titles that we carry. Although ours were in much greater quality and high definition, still didn’t matter.I naively stayed in the game and hoped for a different outcome or tried a different approach at may be changing the type of content we carried, but even if that were to be successful, I was already running out of cash by this point. Ultimately, I let everyone go and shut down once I ran out of my entire life savings.And for a while there I still left the site online and gained new users daily. I recently just completely shut down the site/server and many of the online social pages. It took about 2 years for me to get there; shut down completely. That’s the emotional attachment and pain many of us entrepreneurs deal with. But sometimes you just have to let go. Which were your biggest mistakes and challenges you had to overcome?I wouldn’t say there was a particular BIG mistake or mistakes. I think I had a lot of small things that added up and here I’ll list them.I went too fast and should have taken more time.Should have vetted producers and movie titles much better. Looking back, I spent 3-4 times more than I should have spent on licensing.I moved from New York to California. This was actually one of my biggest mistakes. I had a track record and a stable group of people and connection in NY that would have helped me grow even further. Moving to Los Angeles California, I knew no one and emotional that was bad. Also, California is not business friendly. I paid so much in fees and taxes that I swore to never go back there.I had no exit strategy. As someone who is extremely passionate about what they’re doing, this is the last advice I would give anyone. But having gone through my experience with WURA, I believe that if you’re going to build anything that will cost you north of $100,000, best to have an exit plan. And that could be knowing when to stop or stopping after you’ve invested X amount of dollars of your own money. Which were your expenses? Did you achieve some revenue? In the end, how much money did you lose?Expenses were mainly:Titles - $100,000 totalEmployees - $9,000/monthlyServer - $1200/monthlyEquipment/production - $20,000 totalMarketing - $40,000WURA made roughly $3,800 per month in revenue. I lost at least $250,000 in cash investment alone. If you had to start over, what would you do differently?There are a few things:I focused too much on the product and didn’t pay much attention to the market.My Marketing strategy should have come before product launch.Facebook was not the right platform to use as primary advertising.I had way too much money. Looking back, I wish I didn’t have as much money to spend because I would have been much more disciplined with my execution and not invest in useless things. I actually made a video discussing this here.Doing business with Nigerians can be a headache. And it’s not because of the people you’re doing business with, it’s the infrastructure there. Simple transactions to send and receive money can be a mile walk.I made some business decisions based on gut feeling rather than use facts and research. Those later came to bite me.Lastly, I would caution myself to take my time and not try and run someone else’s race. Looking back now maybe I was sucked into WURA because someone else seems to be doing well with the same concept. Perhaps it was their idea and product to launch, and not mine, to begin with. Which are your favorite entrepreneurial resources?There are many:Websites: Youtube – YouTube is the best go-to place to learn just about anything. I’ve learned more for my career on YouTube than I did 20 years going to schoolBooks: Traction - A startup guide to getting customers - I recommend this book to any entrepreneur or startup founder who is looking to launch a product. So many key nuggets that teach you the right steps to take about your marketing strategy.Tools: Google Analytics, WordPress, Google Webmaster Tool - These are the best 3 tools for any webmaster or business with an online presence. The best part is they are all free to use.Podcasts: The School of Greatness - This is a great podcast for entrepreneurs and anyone who is interested in self-growth and mental wellness. Where can we go to learn more?You can visit my blog, or check my YouTube channel! Original interview published in https://www.failory.com/interview/wura
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tl;dr Had a great first date and before we would snap and text all of the time. After our amazing first date, there were a few brief texts initiated by me and he did not respond in a timely manner or one that continues the convo. He didn't respond to snaps and let the streak die. Am I overthinking or is he trying to ghost me? He seemed into me.BACKGROUND I matched with this guy on tinder a few weeks back and wasn't really into him (fyi he's 20M I'm 18F). I left him on read a lot (on Snapchat) until one night where we just snapped for hours until like 3 am. He wanted a first date, but we were both in the midst of finals and I didn't want to get distracted so I told him we could get together after finals (we also established that it was not a hookup and that we both have the 3rd date rule at least).Throughout this period of time, we are constantly Snapchatting and texting, simultaneously. He would always be the first one up and to bed, so he would always text me "good morning" and "good night" as well as snap me those messages too. Consistently, without fault, he would do this (we have the red heart on Snapchat, which if you don't know, means that we have been each other's #1 best friend for two weeks + we had a streak). Also, he would always ask how I'm doing or what I was up to and he even admitted he missed me without having met me which he said was strange. We had an ongoing "you're cute" no "you're cuter" no "you're cutest" kinda thing and it's really gushy and sweet. Basically, he showed plenty of interest and seemed genuinely into me, not just "I wanna get in your pants" into me.Fast forward to our date, I drive to see him (he's a few cities over) and I get to his house and it starts off great. We instantly have chemistry and I'm completely myself. He drove us to go bowling, paid, and we had a fun game. Then he lets me choose dinner and again he pays and he initiates hand holding while driving and walking. We get back to his place and I meet his parents and we go upstairs to cuddle. We make out a little bit and get to like (2.5 base?) and just talk. Until, we're both tired and I have curfew so I head home, but we spent a good 6+ hours together.We talked about his school and I asked him about his tinder experience, as I've only met up with one guy a few times and that was pretty much my dating experience (but it was a big deal). He said that he had gone on multiple tinder dates and one of them was a relationship. We talked about our exes (which may not be the best conversation, in retrospect) but we had talked about it before as well. He also mentioned--which was extremely surprising to me--that he had deleted his tinder account and recently stopped talking to all of the girls from tinder (like 4 or 5). He was also changing his idea of 3rd date rule to after 1st date. This is where I'm upfront about my boundaries and told him I couldn't have sex with anybody unless I'm in an exclusive bf/gf relationship bc I get attached. He then says like "oh the 2nd or 3rd date." When I left he gave kissed me while I was putting on my shoes and when I left through the door, it was cute and unexpected.He seemed really into me and we had an amazing time. Great chemistry and we can openly communicate (maybe too much). I can be pretty intense sometimes bc I have a strong personality and I'm also a weird (which he mentioned). He mentioned in one of our earlier conversations that he would only ghost after a first date if I was a bridge troll and he doubted it'll happen.SITUATION He texted me to drive safe and when I got home I told him that it was sweet and thanked him for a great date. He said it was super fun with a smiley face and we went to bed. I texted him the next morning good morning and he responds 2 hours later saying hi and that it was so late." I follow up a few hours later (as I fell asleep) and asked him what he was doing and then waiting until nighttime to ask again. I sent him a streak snap, a hello snap, and a good morning snap. He opened all of them and didn't respond as well as saw my story. He let the streak die. He finally responded as I was going to bed and said sorry bc he was bad at responding when he was out. Which I can say is true, bc he didn't respond to anybody when we were together and he said he had accidentally left friends on read for 24 hours. He also mentioned he'd rather leave somebody on read than give a bad response. And he said he was dogsitting over break and I think his friends are coming home too.FINALLY So I'm concerned bc it's just really out of character and I think the date went really well. Did I move too fast, send the wrong signals? I'm totally interested and idk if it's coming off as I'm not. I want to continue this and see where it goes, but I don't think I should text him first again. If he's really interested, he'd find a way, right? Why wouldn't he be texting me after the first date? Is it normal? Is it bc we spent practically a 1/4 of a day together so he thinks it's cool to not talk? Is there somebody else? Is he not interested? Am I crazy and overthinking? (probably). I really don't know, I'm new to dating (clearly) and am an overthinker by nature, so I don't know. What should I do? (If you made it this far, I applaud you because this is a long-ass post). via /r/dating_advice
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