skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ransomware is a different scenario. With ransomware, if you have no backups and absolutely need your files back, paying the ransom is the only sane option. Of course, this can easily be prevented by taking frequent backups.

With a DDoS, there are almost no advantages to paying the ransom. Much better to spend the money on DDoS mitigation instead, to help now and in the future.

Also, the FBI wasn't making an official statement. It was just an off-hand remark from an agent, recommending technically ignorant people who desperately want their files back to pay the ransom.
Would Republika Srpska be considered one?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration

They're just mapping the english sounds into cuniform. It's not a translation.
Of course. That's what any clever criminal would do, if they pay up once chances are they'll pay up again. My ISP was hit like this a few months ago and sent out an email outlining the situation to their customers before the second wave began to give us a heads up and very clearly stated they had absolutely no intention of paying whatever would happen and that's the only acceptable stance and I as their customer fully supported them in this decision and would have left if they had decided otherwise.

Props to cloudflare for standing by to help out in that particular instance, absolutely fantastic.
Different shark. Once there is blood in the water there'll be more.
From my experience the only way to keep an external team engaged is to visit and to work with them. The longer, the better. During that time find out who are the best people to work with and make sure these folks stay on the project when you are away. Make a visit every 4-6 weeks and stay for at least 1 week.
It looks like a transliteration. Seems like they are using Cuneiform syllables to represent English. Quote from the webiste:

"We take the letters from your message and transliterate by syllable, as nearly as we can, into cuneiform."
Q for Canadian startups with US sub/operations
[This story](http://www.espressocapital.com/2014/09/26/sred-audit-nightmare-true-story/) prompts my question. I know the companies involved - all pros, no cheap corner-cutting - so it's a bit concerning.

I'd love to hear some stories on what has/hasn't worked for Canadian startups that ended up with US-incorporations as well. CCPC can be a really valuable thing to hold onto, but if the risks are too high, better to know now than later.

This an issue for us in a 3-6 month window. Right now our thoughts are to keep the US and Canadian sides separate - no corporate cross-ownership - and have dollars move back and forth with a licensing agreement (ie, Canadian corp develops, benefits from SR&ED and IRAP, then licenses the software (usage and IP rights) to the US corp).

Anybody?
Dnstwist: Domain name permutation engine
ISIS doesn't have an Air Force; they can't really defend the desert they don't occupy event if it's terrorist with little strategic importance.

Had the maps shown ISIS with more territory someone might suggest a psychoigical effort was being made to scare people into supporting a more direct conflict with ISIS.

I do think it would be interesting to know how journalists draw these maps though.
Social connection has such a big impact on physical health (isolation is more deadly than obesity).[0]

In my experience it is becoming harder and harder to form relationships, and one of the factors seems to be our housing choices[1].

[0]http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou...

[1]http://www.vox.com/2015/10/28/9622920/housing-adult-friendsh...
It might be benefiting the world in a way already - those who want western businesses in their area may decide to not require them to bribe so hard.
Quite a few companies do pay ransoms that is not unusual

In fact is 100% of people never paid a ransom the attacks would not be funded

Publicly speaking about paying ransoms is very unusual.
SEEKING WORK - REMOTE ONLY

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More info about me:

https://github.com/SystemZ

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https://angel.co/michal-frackiewicz

hello at systemz dot pl
Babylonian business cards?
Runbox have also been under DDoS ransom too [1], although they appear to have handled it well because I haven't noticed any down time.

1: https://blog.runbox.com/2015/11/ddos-attacks-on-runbox/
"What is certain is that Raymond – who once claimed Iranian terrorists were out to get him –"
What about Ruby without Rails... without web? I know Ruby is used in Puppet and Chef, but I am curious as to what other software is written in it. It seems that because of Rails, Ruby is only seen in web development (as opposed to Python, which is used in many domains).
The State of Cyber Security and the Approaching Inflection Point
OK, so we had this big news fit over how cured meats are bad because something something nitrosamines something colorectal cancer.

As far as I am aware, the same compounds are present in e.g. vinegar-pickled cucumbers and can lead to esophageal cancers. That appears completely lacking from the discussion in this article, though perhaps the purely-bacterially-fermented vegetables result in different compounds.

Does anyone have any recent information about the relative risks of the nitrosamines present in pickled vegetables vs e.g. bacon? If bacon is in the hazard category of "causes cancer", aren't also pickled vegetables?
The real horrors behind America’s most popular meat
I am disappointed. I opened this article expecting a myriad of MOVs and JMPs, PEEKS and POKEs, &s and *s, <s and +s, DOs and GO TOs. These are all languages that borrow a lot from each other, and as such look mostly the same. We need some variety in here, some zing. Give some FORTRAN IV, some COBOL, some BASIC even, and it could be interesting, especially if you add in how to do it with raw io; sysfs is ugly and boring.
My condolences. My 2 year old daughter was recently diagnosed with Leukemia as well, it's a horrible message to get and I wish your family well.

One thing we try to remember is that those five year cohorts lack all the advances in the previous half decade. The five year survival percentage could have improved dramatically!
"Isn't that just implying that most energy is artificially cheap, relative to its externalities?"

Yes it is. But if you're going to charge 'real' price (even assuming you can), people with the least disposable income will have to pay disproportionally more for their energy, which is a a basic need in 2015. Plus it would cause ripple effects that are impossible to predict. So the prudent way of mitigating this is with targeted policies, like building efficiency. It's a political decision. Of course one might say 'we should charge everything at the full rate and let the market sort it out', which is a fine position (one I personally lean towards, for as much as that matters) but it's irrelevant to the fact that there are many groups that don't agree. So what we have now is a system with many groups pushing in various directions, and 'patches' for situations where that causes unwanted effects that all parties can agree on (well, a majority can agree on) should be mitigated somehow.

"Why can I own two new homes with 8' ceilings and heat them both(even if I don't live at one for 90% of the time), but I can't own one new home with 12' ceilings?"

So to come back to the issue at hand, I can also buy a 10MW heater, put it outside in my garden and have it 'waste' energy 24/7. We don't have laws against that (afaik). But our policies rely partly on the assumption of economically rational actors, which to a degree and in the aggregate is the empirically verified reality.

In other words, for ever policy I'm sure one can think of 100 ways to stay within the law yet violate the spirit of the policy. That's just the nature of governance, and it works fine in the vast majority of cases. Law is not a closed rule-based system like computers are, and that's fine.

(actually that last part is up for debate; even Montesquieu (who was the guy to come up with the original theory of 'balance of three powers') was of the opinion that perfect law should be just that, and that judges should do nothing but apply rigid rules to facts. But that's getting way more off topic than is reasonable...)
Just as a small FYI. After looking at the site it isn't really clear to me what the platform does or who would want to use it specifically. Would highly recommend addressing both of those problems on the homepage preferably when you get a chance.
"23kg (50lb) of sardines for bait, 700 hooks, miles of line"

"Without bait or fish hooks, Alvarenga invented a daring strategy to catch fish. "

I am confused these statements are contradictory, did I miss something.
We dont have caps here in Japan. There is a lot more people in a lot smaller area, and i dont have issues with my connection.

I also get 2gb/s. Pretty happy im not being gouged by those conpabies over there.
Clickbait based on what some anonymous guy said to ESR on IRC....
Speaking from my experiences in Shenzhen, so may be different in other cities (then again, Shenzhen is just next to Hong Kong, so it may be even worse up north) - and this feeds into your 1), 2) and 5):

Nobody here speaks English.

And I don't mean it like in typical Western way of "frankly, you must see that my language skills are indeed not suitably developed for this conversation" not speaking English. They'll roll their eyes if you say "hello" or "thank you" to them; you can sometimes get to be translated by a 9 years old (apparently they have English in schools now, or something - but I'm not sure). Even in tech companies people barely know any English - they know the work-related vocabulary, but forget talking about anything other than the job.

So, learn their language or find someone who you trust who can speak it.
Even a modern OpenWRT distribution still fits in 4MB of flash if you leave out the web interface and only include the basic features.
There's a wealth of eccentric but traditional culture that stretches from the rural south to the end of Appalachia. Unfortunately it's fairly unknown to most people, but it is kept alive mostly by collectors of 78 rpm discs of traditional American folk (most of which come from places Grant lives in). It is certainly very interesting.
"facing" as in accused but not yet convicted? The DUI is a big deal in that you should stop doing that but not a big with respect to employment except maybe in jobs requiring you to drive. As for the assault, wait till it plays out if its not resolved yet. A good lawyer can probably plea this down to a lesser charge and most employers wouldn't care as long as it isn't a pattern, i.e. if you actually have a long "rap sheet".
I think cryptolocker actually decrypted the FS after the ransom was paid. So sometimes it works.

Actually, it makes no sense to not follow through because that is their business model.
What's the alternative? Go for it!

You might not be able to do work requiring a government security clearance or at companies that do a background check, but I'm sure you could get freelance, contract work and apply at small companies.

Lots of places don't even have a formal employment form and just hire based on your resume and interview.

Once you show you're an asset and make a positive contribution you won't have an issue.

I would be honest about it if asked but I wouldn't advertise it either. If they do have an employment form asking about it check the box and give an explanation.

Polish your skills and be sharp in interviews!

Good luck.
If you're in Seattle, have you looked at software engineering positions at the UW? You can find plenty of interesting problems to work on, with world-class peers in the faculty and students.
Friendly reminder this is the blog of Philip Greenspun, who has strongly held views about alimony.
You blew my mind. Not in a good way, but still.

Who's responsible for any damages? What happens if one of the combatants dies? Or falls awkwardly and won't ever be able to walk in a normal fashion? Can you hand in a notice at your place of employment, saying "So, I had to fist-fight a random dude and broke my hand, can't come in for 2 weeks minimum"?

Sorry. That is insane.
Remotely Exploitable Java Zero Day Exploits Through Deserialization
Unfortunate that the sensationalist title and coming from venturebeat means this article won't likely get much upvotes.

The 'advice' the author gives is good advice, though I don't think he is really talking to the CEOs of Unicorns, and if he things he is, he's probably deluding himself. I'm not sure anybody has got themselves into a Unicorn position and isn't aware of the basics of running their business.

Having said that, I'm sure there are many up-and-comers who have started to have some success and are just getting into the hiring mode and maybe are looking at the actions of unicorns to drive their growth, and therefore looking to copy 'what works'. Hopefully some of the points the author makes here will help these businesses from making mistakes which could take them down in the future.

Really, he's just written about being smart about business and not getting caught up in tall the drama.
I was surprised that the presence and importance of teaching the arts in school wasn't mentioned given Paul's background. Aside from the inherent benefit of learning art for art's sake, it requires self-discipline and relentless self critique. No artist thinks they will just be "ok", they want to be the best. I think this type of self-driven pursuit would benefit any young person on their path towards a startup.
well said
I am an overseas entrepreneur in China. I don't consider this article to be very informative.

If people invest money they shouldn't, without due diligence in environments they don't understand with partners they don't know, that doesn't reflect as much on the environment as the investor.

China is very welcoming to foreign investment. Once you have done the paperwork, you can basically stay indefinitely on a work-related visa for a small minimum investment. The total required money in real terms was only 30,000USD a few years ago. I'd be interested to hear if there's any another country with such a dynamic economy and physically safe environment, great food and range of climatic conditions that welcomes people from around the world for such a small personal investment? Sure, China has its issues, many of which such as an immature and ill-documented financial system, utility issues, poor internet connectivity and a weak courts system affect business, but openness to investment is not one of them.

There is no distinction made in the article between the WFOE ("woofie") or wholly foreign-owned enterprise and the JV or joint venture. Instead, an alarmist view is painted of total ruin lurking around the corner for all foreign-involved businesses. (The sums I refer to above are for a personal WFOE: no need for a local partner.)

Everybody knows the courts are oversubscribed, slow and corrupt. This results in different ways to solve problems, including less willingness to extend trust to strangers, the frequent writing off of bad debt, and in some rare situations corrupt regulator-based vindictive ingress, violence, kidnapping and so forth. (Most of the time things are not ugly though, and incidence of violence is extremely low across all of society, not just business. Much lower than the west in my experience.) Because of this situation with the courts, very often contracts are worthless (simply ignored). Cash is king. If you don't trust an employee (eg. sales manager who stole USD$60k in the text), don't give them access to funds. This is business 101, and is in no way unique to China. Why should a Sales Manager control your bank account, anyway? Why should you allow client payment direct to untrusted employees by theft-prone cash? This is just an example of management naivety - no inkling of common sense.

While I am still sometimes amazed at the uselessness of contracts here (I've experienced the "signed the contract? paid the rent? now pay double!" thing personally... solved with a mutually acceptable outcome - I moved out quickly and received a full refund), mostly it's just about learning how to deal with an unfamiliar business environment.

Overheads are often low, potential profits are often large, and we're allowed to come here and do business despite being foreigners. It's not always a walk in the park (frustration and "bad China days" are certain), but overall China's environment is not bad. Given the low regulatory threshold, taxation and overheads, it's really more of a land of opportunity than the west. In a western context, I never could have afforded myself the experience in business that China gave me.
Companies like Ciena make line rate encryption cards that protect links. Not cheap, but not outrageously expensive for that level of gear.
Yes it'unstable, it's Beta.
Mysql/poatgre/sqlite3 are expected to work. So if you have problem, that's bug, please report it.

You may need to modify blog.scm to specify your DB passwd to make it work.
I'll write a tutorial to show how to play it like Rails/Django.

Artanis is still young, but anyway, we are on the way.
The TL;DR

Java Deserialization can be used to construct arbitrary Java objects, which combined with popular libraries such as Apache Commons Collections, Spring or Groovy can result in arbitrary code execution on the server providing deserialization.

Java app servers often provide automatic deserialization of Java objects passed as cookies, or provide protocol or admin ports (typically built on RMI or JMX) that can be used to trigger exploits. This includes Jenkins' remote CLI service; Cloudbees have provided a security vulnerability warning about this.

There's no trivial way of protecting against this attack other than deleting some classes from various libraries; however, given their ubiquity in other application servers this may provide nearly impossible to do.
Will you ever annotate/comment the source? It seems really interesting that the little amount of code can produce such a long work. Would love to learn how it all fits together. Will also have to look at the docs and figure out what's happening...
Just let them pass the legislation. Any media company actually trying to enforce their "rights" will promptly die.
There is no assumption. There is just "A if-and-only-if B" where A and B are both true and therefore by definition the whole statement is true.
> News organizations are actually pretty careful to not bombard us with constant photos of dead children

They probably should. They censor all the hard foreign political stuff to not effect public sentiment. They give you just enough to keep you on their program.
I wonder how foreigners get in to open restaurants. I am not sure if you can just come in and open a restaurant in the US if you are not a legal immigrant. Legal immigration into China is a lot harder. Legal immigration into China is a lot harder

Actually unlike in the US, it's very easy here. You register a wholly foreign owned company, get a visa connected to that, and you're sorted. Total cost can be as low as ~USD$30,000. Total time expenditure, perhaps 3 months these days. Of course, that will also require paying rent on a property, and thus you would typically spend a little more time scouting for a suitable location.
> ... Morality requires we keep a people impoverished because they have the bad luck to live on a landscape their readership finds aesthetically pleasing

You should really watch this documentary[1], about morality, richness, mining corporations and the local people. Maybe you'll know better next time you make such a generalizing remark.

[1] http://www.whypoverty.net/video/stealing-africa/
Nothing in this article showed any evidence that it's an Apple front other than the fact that Apple is interested in cars and has a lot of money. There are quite a few companies that have a lot of money, and consortia could also pool a lot. While it might make some sense for them to do something like this, it'd be nice to see real journalism....
If you actually care about the data, it does nothing. It only guarantees that the front door is encrypted.

With the number of cloud anti spam and archive companies out there, you have no idea what happens between those providers and the mail servers.
The name of the company is Faraday? Can't they be any more original than that? It sounds like someone copied the naming scheme from Tesla.
Gotta make the prediction fast so you can look good if it's true and people forget if you're wrong.
With hardware acceleration, my quad core laptop can encrypt faster than 20gbps.

Without it, it can still encrypt at at 4gbps.

I was going to suggest you could place a couple servers at each end, but you only need one low end server.

Anyone offering expensive solutions is doing you a disservice.
Unfortunate reality of housing shortage in SF. Most of these things people turn a blind eye towards such as an 89 year old lady paying $700 to sleep in a closet.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/03/prop-f/
That's a really great idea - thanks so much for sharing!
As mentioned in the article, he tossed almost everything overboard to make the boat more stable in the waves.
Like Packard's own company.
I think search is broken. People receive millions of results without meaning while they only read through the first 10-15 titles.

I believe there still is opportunity for new players. You don't need to deliver millions of results, just the 15 links that are really valuable and rich.
The problem with inter-governmental cooperation is that it can very quickly degenerate into cartelization, which limits the ability of the people to select a 'good' place to live (as their options become homogenized).
This is such a great answer - thanks for the advice. I'll definitely follow the 5 minute rule!! :)
If the article's speculation is correct, having a "derivative" name is a good idea for a front company. It gets you the opposite of attention; it's eminently forgettable.
We started by offering an e-commerce solution although we are adding products like crazy there's 30+ million chemicals/products in science. This is another reason we built out labspend which has a different backend. We are seeing labs paying different amounts at the same school. Stanford we are able to find 10-20% savings at times, but there are in a good place compared to start ups.

Sorry about the Lean More buttons not working and will get those up to date soon. Feel free to shoot me email if you have a specific question (sean@p212121.com).
Yes the article was being specific though in the things they threw overboard, I guess you can just deduce what the author intended. Good story though.
The only thing worse than paying a ransom is publicly announcing you've paid a ransom.
You could pre-translate, but Gozer would probably still laugh at you because they use Old Persian cuneiform, not Sumerian. You might also risk your message exceeding 140 characters post-translation.
Chicken Scheme is a specific Scheme implementation, Common Lisp is a language with three dozen implementations.

Free CL from day zero: CMUCL. CMUCL originates in Spice Lisp (1980), from before Common Lisp. CMUCL has spawned commercial and free variants (SBCL).
Free: CLISP, 1987. Free: GCL, 1994.

Still, Chicken Scheme is great! Though I prefer CL.
Just going to repeat this again

> Incorporation papers filed with the California secretary of state's office links Faraday to a Chinese media company operated by Jia Yueting, an entrepreneur who founded Leshi Internet Information & Technology.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3307660/Myste...

Oh wait maybe that Chinese dude works for Apple....

> Apple is Hitler, says Chinese CEO
http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/27/8298999/apple-hitler-china...