skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Couldn't they use other methods to figure out the owner of the device? EMEI data? Pull the SIM? Get the serial number & figure out who bought it that way? Hell, if you got that much you could pretty easily get phone records & the like via warrant.

I feel like they just wanted what was on the phone, rather than who owned it.
I have seen this happen in London many times, each phase seems to last about 5 to 10 years.
Google's new domain hack
I want to say, as William Stein and John Hammersley have said in other replies, that there are people working on making things better. If you are reading this thinking that these things are big jobs and there is nothing you can do, think some more. Find something you are interested in, and pitch in. Sage, for example, is a great project that I'm sure any reader of this site could contribute to in some way.

For another example, I'm VP of the TeX Users Group http://www.tug.org. If you are looking for a project to work on, or just thinking to support the work of others on LuaTeX, or XeTeX, or LaTeX 3, or ConTeXt, etc. then come join us.
Realistically, would a satellite internet connection be prohibitively expensive for non-data-heavy browsing for a couple of weeks (meaning no Youtube, just programmer-work related Google/Wikipedia/StackOverflow, etc)?
Windows and Mac OS X have already to a certain extent, as they follow a hybrid model.

Same thing with your phone OS, given how their sandbox models work.

Only GNU/Linux and *BSD keep pushing the monolith UNIX kernel design.
That's pretty much the level of advice in the blog.

Astounding the author considers themselves a security professional.

Nice rant about Keynes at the end as well. I always find ranting about Keynes is an excellent way to keep hackers out.

I wonder how many customers Oracle is going to lose because of that piece?
Would that work against a determined opponent with physical access?

Unless the iPhone has some fairly high-grade encryption hardware I suspect you can just do fun things like copy the (encrypted) storage/key to brute-force it without the safety mechanisms kicking in.
The Lexer Hack
Unfortunately courts seem to not share your stance, it seems.
I didn't say equal time. If most experts in a field think X, then if you get 20 op-eds from random members of the field, you should get most supporting X. This can be confounded by one side being more vocal than the other, but the problem isn't that both sides are allowed to speak.

Let's say you're right, what decision rule do you propose for the NYT editors to decide when to exclude an opinion?
It's trivial.
Just Because It's Google Doesn't Mean It's Right
Not before there's a convenient gui with a nice collection of apps.
Study of Land Snails Suggests Earth May Have Lost 7% of Its Animal Species
In the Ben Bova Mars series they have strategically positioned piles of patches that get sucked up and stuck in the holes. Maybe you could accomplish something similar with a middle layer that was oversized and stuffed in between the outer edges...
Avcılar İlaçlama Şirketi, Avcılar İlaçlama Şirketi Şirketi
London is huge, City of London is just about a mile square and is probably bathed in surveillance.
Yeah, but why live there full time ?

I would love to be able go to a place where like-minded people come and live for a while (weeks, months), working on their projects, while surrounded by neighbours they can engage with and discuss interesting ideas, but also with cool events going on around the village.

A kind of a permanent 'boot camp' which you can visit at any time.

Some old forgotten village in the mountains, inhabited by programmers, sysadmins and designers (with family/ kids of course) , with fast Internet, night time parties with visiting DJs, cooking experiments, group sports, hiking in the mountins, fishing, camp fires; tech conferences in the village center with invited speakers, meetups and hacklabs.

:)
The problem is they don't.

It's pretty trivial to break orcaleSQL from a security standpoint. If and when you report a major issue, it'll be fixed in 2-3 years, and only the issue you outlined.

For example. I submit a bug concerning parsing, utf-8 backslash not working. Orcle will fix the bug for only that utf-8 code point, and not all other utf-8 points that also cause the bug. It'll also take them 1-2 releases and they may not back port it. 1
Introduction to Scaling Laws
Pretty cool idea, but I haven't seen enough of these movies to know how well it's working though.

One problem I kept having is that the focus would get stuck in a different point than the one I'm trying to move. Sometimes the focus would be on a point that wasn't even the last point I moved.
You're not the first one to think of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenge%E2%80%93response_spa...
"trampling on peoples' civil rights"

Now who's posting claptrap? The judge issued a warrant with perfectly valid cause. He could have (and likely did) issue warrants to search their homes, cars, offices or even conduct autopsies. But heaven forbid they see your Instagram. Due process was not violated.
> those two particular examples are very easy to explain

Explanations do not affect intuition at all, it's too primal to listen to any reason. Even despite the fact that everybody heard this explanation from the elementary school, watching this in action is still mind-blowing. Check it out yourself [1], and answer honestly - was your intuition puzzled by what you've seen?

[1] http://www.iflscience.com/physics/dropping-bowling-ball-and-...
The point is that they shouldn't be able to unlock the product once ownership has been transferred.
Android Studio 1.3 Now Available
> The fourth amendment was not written with strong encryption in mind

The fourth amendment, and other constitutional issues, were discussed via encrypted mail. It's not like strong encryption (strong in the sense of 'beyond contemporary cryptanalysis', just as the cryptography we have today is maybe not secure against future developments, e.g. quantum computing) was an unknown concept 200 years ago. Indeed, a derivative of a device Thomas Jefferson used for the purpose was used by the US Army in the first part of the 20th century.
Last day to vote for the DevOps Dozen Vote for the movers and shakers now
The NYT is allowed to publish propaganda like anyone else and they shouldn't be "ashamed" for doing so. Every side has a right to publish their opinion.

That said, it is pretty clear from the disclaimers, this is in fact propaganda and should be given as much weight as such [i.e. none]
Mozilla provides Aurora and Nightly for Android. They're just not on the Play Store, but you can download them from their website.

https://nightly.mozilla.org/

not really an issue on Android due to Android's own app sandboxing

A malicious add-on could still steal all your passwords.
Ask HN: We Buy Your Failed SAAS Startups – 5,000 to 50,000 USD
I'll keep this short. We run a marketing agency of 60+ people in the Philippines called Clicklabs(dot)Ventures. We're looking to buy startups who likely failed because of poor marketing. Please contact me here or via my email in my profile.
Just anecdotally, many people I know never really used "LOL" unless we were being sarcastic. It always reminded me of the early/mid 90's when "The Internet!" started getting a lot of press and there were articles all over the place (in print, natch) about how to talk in "internet speak".

They'd list all of these abbreviations like "LOL" and "ROFL" among others that struck us, as likely dickish teenagers who considered ourselves savvy due to having used BBSes and IRS, like a signifier of "AOL-speak" used by the inexperienced noobs who learned about "The Internet!" from a magazine article.

Probably an unfair assessment and not really flattering considering we had only been using this stuff since the mid/late 1980s at best, but such is the folly of youth ;) Still, I never really lost that association of "LOL" with the annoyance I felt back at age 17 or 18 when "AOL kiddies" started showing up on IRC and MUDs.
Everyone involved in this op-ed piece, and the NY Times, can go fuck themselves. I will continue to encrypt my device.
Disclaimer: cross-posted from the original post, but the irony is absolutely beautiful and is a stern lesson to everyone who might think the same way as Oracle.

[1]> Oracle has told people to stop using @Veracode to test their AppSec. They already got AppSec covered [picture of JS injection attack in the blog post]

[1]: https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/631056841670135808
Ten people, not ten researchers, but that would be towards the upper limit. Point is, $20M is nothing to sneer at, even for a billion dollar hedge fund.
Signing != Reviewing.
A Brief Intro to HTML
It's not that simple I don't think.

How much of my private information, as kept by government or private organizations, are stored in Oracle databases that are less secure because of their boneheaded stance on this?

People have all sorts of reasons for choosing Oracle solutions. I am not in a position to influence all those people, even when their choices affect me directly.
> Is anyone doing this?

Yes... also in Spain there's this place named Ca La Fou: https://calafou.org/en

Ca La Fou is an ambitious ‘eco-industrial postcapitalist colony’, a day’s cycle outside barcelona. The group first visited this site in october 2010, and only moved here in july 2011. The enormous space was bought as a housing cooperative by the group with a loan from an ecological bank and support from a wider network.

The thirty permanent collective members work at a slow pace but have achieved a great deal by making the space livible and have already built a number of functioning workshops. These include:

- An impressive hacklab where broken computers are recycled into new ones

- A collaborative car workshop where engines are fixed to run with vegetable oil

- A Ukelele workshop

- A chemistry lab where soap is made from recycled vegetable oil mixed with caustic soda, (and sometimes recycled animal fat)

- A chicken-run and chick creche.

https://www.ecotopiabiketour.net/2012/an-introduction-to-ca-...
It won't be too long before the cycle reverses.

Once the majority of people can work remotely, and network infrastructure is accessible in these areas they will instantly become desirable replacing suburbs and leaving the cities for the young, free and single.
"They weren't real vulnerabilities, because we knew about them!"
The point is, the murders might be solved if they had access to the phone's data.
The challenge with comparing genomes is that you can't just do edit distance using a naive substitution table. It has to be probabilistic and contextual (for it to be scientifically useful), because genome sequences are actually sampled estimates of the true genome sequence. You have to tolerate errors, and when you do that, the exploration space gets huge.

Instead of aligning two genomes this way, people normally start with a very well calibrated and fairly accurate reference sequence, then align to that structure probabilistically, and "call the joint variants".

This is actually far more interesting that doing the raw hard problems that computer scientists love to talk about theoretically. One of the reasons it's so interesting is that different genomes differ by operations that are much more complex than simple edit distance- for example, large regions can be excised, and placed, in reverse order, in completely other parts of the genome. Trying to use a DP edit distance calculation to detecet those is futile.

http://bcb.io/2014/10/07/joint-calling/
Yes. The Firefox viewer sits on top of the JavaScript sandbox, which is the same sandbox that has to withstand attacks from pretty much everything on the internet and has been very hardened over the years (same for other browsers).

Ironically it had a vulnerability last week, but that's ONE and that's why it got so much attention. Adobe Reader and similar have had hundreds.
I really only have experience with the RDBMS product but I'd say it's more like the doctor presribing an expensive but highly effective drug for which there is no generic that is quite as good.

Oracle's database is very good. If you really need it, there is no substitute. But that said, kind of like a F1 race car, you probably don't need it (unless you own an F1 race team).
> Now, on behalf of crime victims the world over, we are asking whether this encryption is truly worth the cost.

Yes, yes it is.

This is an EMBARRASSINGLY sad excuse for journalism. NYT should be ashamed for publishing such crap.
Indeed, they have good marketing :). Don't get me wrong, I think Azul and its C4 GC is very nice. However, beyond some absolute best case on smallish heaps, I do not see it hitting guaranteed 20 micros on large server heaps. Also, Azul sacrifices some throughput in favor of minimizing GC latency, which is fine as most things need tradeoffs but should be mentioned (G1 also has lower throughput than parallel due to heavier write barriers).
Individuals aren't in control over their on-line experience if their browser settings (search etc) are taken over by malware.

I think the average HN reader should go out there once and look at the typical household PC. Bring eye bleach.
HTC phone stored unencrypted fingerprints
I wonder if the guy who was killed said the same thing.
Fair enough, I guess. I don't agree.
What a bully! Reminds of someone at work, especially with this line: "I do not need you to analyze the code since we already do that, it’s our job to do that, we are pretty good at it".

This makes me want to climb the empire state building, beat my chest like a gorrilla, and yell "Let me do what I know best!"
Ah, nice. Even so, I still have issues with this:

- Special version of the software

- Can't run my own version of AMO
Do you test your extension against pre-release versions of Firefox? That's kinda what they're for.
This article is a load of bull, as other people have indicated. There's almost certainly a backdoor built into these devices, and that backdoor isn't something that will get trotted out for something as "trivial" as the poor killing each other. The government can already access these data, they're just looking to escalate their level of intrusiveness by making a political case for decentralization of the backdoor exploitation.

I'm really running out of "if they can do this bad thing, we'll be super fucked" because they've been able to get clearance to do or keep doing more and more invasive surveillance over the years. If local PDs can crack into our phones at will (and they are already there via stingrays and their airplane equivalents) we are going to be in for a bad time. Remember how petty and disgruntled the cops are? Now they've got the metadata and content data of your communications because you said the wrong thing at a traffic stop. That's assuming they aren't owning you from the moment your phone connects to the tower. "Exigent circumstances require it" and all.
Literally speaking, you are correct, but I believe the insinuation was that Apple and Google still control the devices apart from encryption. And really, that's true; both Apple and Google have the ability to add or remove apps, remotely lock/wipe the device, and possibly eavesdrop on communications to and from the device. The carrier also has some measure of control; they can blacklist the IMEI so the device can't be used on their service, effectively forcing the owner to change providers, and they also possibly can eavesdrop on communications.

However, it seems the article author is under the assumption that Apple and Google still "own" the devices and are just leasing them to the user, which would imply that the companies should retain the ability to decrypt them at will. However, the user is the one who ultimately owns the device, and Apple and Google have started respecting that level of ownership by going hands-off with encryption and allowing the owner to choose whether to encrypt and who has access.

All of that said, I'd be surprised to learn there isn't some sort of limited back door, probably in the baseband.
No, she's utterly ignorant of contract law:

Privity is a doctrine in English contract law that covers the relationship between parties to a contract and other parties or agents. At its most basic level, the rule is that a contract can neither give rights to, nor impose obligations on, anyone who is not a party to the original agreement, i.e. a "third party".
What's wrong with paying rent to someone in another country? There's the argument that the money doesn't come back into the local economy, but in this case it clearly does - they bought the house by paying a local seller.
There are ways around that still http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/19/iphone-bruteforce-pin/

In this case they cut the power to the device before it can write to memory the failed attempt (IIRC) allowing them to keep trying over and over (with a small delay for the phone to restart every 9 tries).
That is the web archive. It has nothing to do with HN.
A minute of silence for the first spatial member of the plantae kingdom killed so many miles far away from home in such horrible lab accident.

"Ground control to major Tomato"

"Ground control to major Tomato"

"Absorb your pellets and put your helmet on..."

We'll miss you so much, little Latisha 'Redleaf' Stemstrong.
Their users?

I'm not sure what you're asking. It's trivial to remove the block for open source contributors, and in fact Iceweasel etc likely won't have it.

But for people who download Windows binaries (or get automatically updated) it's a godsend.
I'm sorry but this article is not only stupid beyond belief, it was written by the same prosecutor who prosecuted the Sergey Aleynikov case, obviously a zealous idiot. It shows he knows nothing about encryption ... or the law for that matter. This is a matter of civil liberties. Dead people were once alive and had civil liberties. But instead, this case is the exception rather than the rule. In every other case where authorities could not search the phone, justice was served (it's called the 4th Amendment, something Vance knows nothing about).

To have rights, you accept the slight increase in criminality that comes along with that. My right not to be unlawfully searched does indeed let some criminals get away because the cops can't search them. My right to privacy does indeed let some people get away with murder because the cops can't search my phone. That's the price and risk I take to have any civil liberties at all. Of course, someone like Vance who wants to remove civil liberties altogether (from this article), cannot possibly be expected to understand such an idea.
Yes, but all other things equal, wouldn't you rather know what's in there?

Sun had an open bug database, it was glorious. That got snapped shut after purchase.
How to make millionaire dating sites work for you?
They seem to have changed some since I knew them, though they were certainly willing to stand up for themselves. I think that when I left Ohio (almost half a century ago), I had heard of "cis" only in reference to Cisalpine Gaul, and of gender only in reference to nouns, pronouns, and adjectives.
Your argument is weak if you think this has happened only once and will rarely happen again.
I think this is the biggest point taxi companies fail to grasp. I NEVER consider taxis. I would sooner walk than take a taxi. Uber doesn't have the same grody, sketchy perception that taxis do. I have never had to call Uber on an Uber driver, while it seems like I nearly ALWAYS had to threaten to call the cab company on the cabbie ("Cash only", taking some idiotic route, etc). It is WAY too much work to get a ride home from a taxi.
I'd be up for solving that with a web app. Drop me an email if you want to chat about it.
The article characterizing his resignation as forced or him being fired does not make it true.
Nearly all cruise ships currently charge for Internet access by the minute, not the bit, and throughput can vary widely. Typical prices start around $1/minute and with bulk minute purchases, may get down to $0.30/min.

This is starting to change, with some now offering unlimited connectivity for ~$15-30/day.
> The fourth amendment was not written with strong encryption in mind

I don't necessarily see why that must have been the case when the bill of rights was authored. For as long as language has existed, human beings have possessed the ability to encrypt sensitive communications without needing a computer to do it for them.
I recall approximately no one making that argument. That isn't to say there aren't terrible misuses of XML (the database within a database notion that, while sometimes necessary, is every beginner's mistake), but you're juxtaposing an absurd invention that isn't actually real at all. XML filled a role.
I'd rather they hire a qualified person who understands the issue to prevent any side, including the side I don't agree with. They failed at that miserably in this case and the previous poster was right: they should be ashamed of publishing this garbage. More like shit, really.
That's $4B for construction and $1.5B for operating costs over 25-30 years. Let's say 25 years to be conservative. So $220M/year.

It's expected to produce 150B liters/year. That's $0.00146/L or $0.0055/gal.

Imagine switching to solar doubles the ongoing cost. This is conservative since solar isn't that much more expensive and there are costs other than electricity, but lets go with it. Then the cost goes up to $280M/year and we're talking $0.007/gal.

That's really very cheap.
>prohibitively

Yup. According to http://www.groundcontrol.com/IsatHub.htm and http://www.groundcontrol.com/BGAN_rate_plans.htm 50mb will cost you around $400. (Just a quick search but when I researched this a little more in depth a few years ago prices weren't too different from that). + the modem which is ~$2000 IIRC.

Of course this is if you would buy the data for yourself. Though quiet a few ships have sat internet installed. The data rates are usually pretty low so it's good enough for email but not for surfing bloated websites like Stackoverflow or Google.

And then there's the alternative of 3G/4G GSM when you're near the shore.
Glad to see there is a market out there for this. I applied to the YC Fellows program and pitched my idea as 'uber for nurses'. And here I was thinking that I was coming up with a groundbreaking idea...haha.

I'm interested to see how this shakes out. The delivery method for healthcare is a mess for everyone involved. I think we go back to house calls within 10 years.
And if we could see inside people's minds crime could be solved as well. Your parent's comment is spot on, nothing has changed at all, just now the police can blame murders they have no intention of solving on Apple/Google.
Why is it not so crazy to pay $600K for an item of no value, simply to be allowed to provide a service?

It is not a credential, so it can't be compared to the cost of a degree or similar in other fields.

It is not and has never been awarded based on merit. The first were given to those who happened to be taxi drivers/owners at a time when taxi service providers when the same convinced the municipal government to limit their competition.
One solution could be to move encryption to OS-level libraries in such a way that you could tap into traffic before it's encrypted for debugging.
Millionaire Match App
The info on the phone could indicate who he spoke to last and potentially who he met with when he was killed.
Idea seems cool. I have two concerns. One I feel this de-focuses me.

Few questions:

How many movies list do you have? I mean this will able to let me know that there are few movies which this site might not be showing.
OpenSSH 6.8 and 6.9 incorrectly set TTYs to be world-writable. Local attackers may be able to write arbitrary messages to logged-in users

That seems like a pretty significant "oops" to have gone unnoticed for two releases?
This doesn't seem like a particularly interesting release. A few fixes. A few defaults changed. Am I missing something?
The Cyber-Insider: Mystery Money Manager Arrested in Hacking
Lenovo Launches New P50 and P70 Mobile Workstations with First Mobile Xeon Chips