skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It should be completely possible for them to not accept any software updates unless the phone is unlocked. They may not wish to do this for various reasons, but it is definitely technically possible.
This is step by step slippery slope fallacy.

You are not addressing the issue at hand. You are instead arguing that if we somehow don't take your side here, then there will never be another point at which we can argue the pros and cons of possible subsequent escalations or refusals.

Which is why it's a fallacy.
> I totally agree with Lennart on this one.

There's a certain rich irony that Lennart is being flogged for following the Unix tradition (root can do anything, including blow up their monitor with bad X configs); that his detractors are suggesting userland tools manage their hardware (normally the job of the kernel in a Unix system); that systemd ought to be expanded to manage hardware (after years of complaining it's too big), presumably by adding whitelisting capabilities and a database of known-good/known-bad UEFI implementations.

I guess at least it demonstrates how utterly unhinged some people become when his name is attached to anything.
While I agree that the NSA acted as intended, I wish to add with a moderately tangential discussion by saying that organizations ought not be viewed under the lens of their chartered purpose, but rather their function.

An organization's function is the set of all its capabilities. We should seek to define the purpose of a state entity by limiting its function via mechanism, rather than by hoping for good people to do the right thing. There is no reliable mechanism by which moral people bubble up to the top of power.

I feel glad today that the NSA acted in promotion of American interests, but I feel that is a incidental exercise of its many capabilities, and so my feelings are fickle.
perhaps report them on github issues?
https://github.com/facebook/draft-js/issues
British English (and American English?) sometimes uses stress to distinguish between nouns and verbs written the same way, eg. "record a record", "permit a permit", "present a present". It's possible that "buffalo a buffalo" should ideally have this difference, but buffalo is so rare as a verb that the difference has been lost.
I've seen very little discussion of the All Writs Act aspect of the situation. I agree that it's very important.
Doctors make up less than 9% of total health care spending. The idea that you're going to make a dent in spending by cutting doctor salaries further is insane.

They are the only fully knowledgable people in hospital, and because they are so overloaded they are making thousands of key decisions everyday in a rush. It's already conventional wisdom that you can't make nearly as much money as a doctor as you use to, and so the best and brightest students are skipping it for more lucrative fields. This damage will take decades to be undone, even if we were to raise salaries immediately, because of the long training.
Why Google Style Guide for C++ is a deal-breaker
Bill Gates sides with FBI over iPhone access issue
What about binding to the OCaml implementation at https://nqsb.io/ ?
True of an individual company or business unit and its major tech decisions, but businesses ultimately die. Thus we have a world where Cobol coexists with Node.js - companies saddled with old software never pay for a new system until it's "beyond too late". But a company with a greenfield project can come in and use whatever hot, hyped-up thing is out there, and it usually in their direct interest if it's free, because at that point they probably aren't terribly concerned about software quality.
This is really awesome-- At Nylas we've /also/ been building one for the past year to use in our email composer inside N1 (https://githbub.com/nylas/n1), with the additional constraint that it needs to support extension by third party plugins.

Building a nice declarative editing interface around an inherently mutable structure with an imperative API like the DOM (which can mutate state from under you, like focus) is a real challenge. Props to the team at facebook for this.
It is possible, with caveats. The user has to be able to decide whether to accept an update or not, and signal their assent or rejection with their password. And the software has to be open source, so that the user can inspect a proposed software update and decide whether it is malware or not (or let others inspect it and know they have the same thing). In practice this is imperfect, because trustworthy volunteers willing to audit software are scarce.
There's still the question whether or not government can compel a software company to weaken its own security policy.

That will have a significant impact on the future of the US tech industry, world innovation, and the advancement of the human race.
I don't think there are specific guidelines as to when you start calling something a candidate or not, although I personally wouldn't call a "hit" from a screen a "candidate". Everything I am working with is a natural product derivate, In fact, engineered to reduce tox of a compound that started off in late-stage preclinicals, so the odds of success are (qualitatively) higher to begin with.

>Extensive pharmacological testing in cultured cells and animals is much, much harder.

And that's why I'm contracting CROs for those parts. I guess technically that's "taking out of the garage", but I never said the whole thing is being done in the garage!
Doesn't modern C++, with smart pointers, auto, and the rest, cover most of the same ground rust does, and isn't the Rust community somewhat toxic, with activists pushing "Codes of Conduct" and other non-technical agendas?
GNU C Library 2.23 released
Gujarati Wedding Cards – Gujarati Kankotri – IndianWeddingCards
Here's an interesting question, even though I myself don't know the societal welfare impacts of trading.

Suppose for a moment the value traders create is real. Like the trader making $X a year also creates $X of value (like a farmer that works hard/smart to plant 10 times the number of potatoes as his neighbor). How would that make you feel? Would we accept that that was even possible?
Creating+Animated+GIFs+with+ImageMagick+&+ffmpeg
Stop calling them ad blockers
Good Old Days
I can kind of see the logic. It's certainly possible for an adult to learn to speak another language indistinguishably from a native speaker, but in practice there's a surprisingly large gap between that and a person who can speak fluently on complex subjects with no fear of being misunderstood, but makes occasional minor errors--or even usages which are grammatically correct, but sound stilted--that betray them as non-native.

There's a big jump between 99.9% and 100%, is what I'm saying, and if you want a really professional translation job, you're not going to settle for 99.9%. And the thing is, you can't tell the difference between 99.9% fluent and 100% fluent without being 100% fluent. So if you want to be sure you're getting 100% fluency, a native speaker is your best bet.
My content blocker disables them on my iPad
Ok, a few question for someone who has been a bit too depressed to follow the latest evolutions since the Snowden revelations:

- If the NSA approached Apple to ask for the same, would it be legal for Apple to talk about it? To refuse it?

- Hasn't the NSA already done that?

- Would the Chinese government allow a non-backdoored iPhone on their market?

I am sorry but I really do not see any reason to believe that Apple's devices are not already rooted to the core. This one FBI issue seems to be a perfect PR occasion.
good site! thanks
If you aren't from the USA you are a terrorist by definition.
Self-hosted, server side MathJax using Node and Docker
There is a lot of public funding of FLOSS software through universities. Unfortunately, the funding model doesn't work well for big projects or projects lasting more than a few years. A lot of great stuff is developed using public funds and then abandoned when the developer graduates.
Yeah, that'd be the "minor problem" I mentioned. Their shared hosting is great for $10/month, but my site eventually grew out of it. Their dedicated servers were out of my price range so I never tried them.

I currently use OVH for dedicated servers. Low prices (starting at $70/mo), unlimited bandwidth use (most other hosts charge for bandwidth above a certain amount), DDoS protection as a standard feature (most hosts just threaten to kick you out when you get DDoSed or make you pay $15,000/mo for DDoS protection), and they've only been down once in the past few years I've used them:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10494475

(And they automatically refunded me for that incident; didn't even make me open a support ticket or anything!)

I don't want to sound like a shill but I (and others I know) tried a few hosts before settling on OVH and OVH has just been so much better in every way than any other host I've tried...

On the other hand, if you're looking for a really cheap dedicated server, Oplink has a $35/mo dedicated server: https://www.oplink.net/dedicated.html

I used to use Oplink and still like them, but they were one of those hosts that kicked me off for getting DDoSed (related: if you run a popular game, expect to get DDoSed).
Google pulls the plug on Google Compare
Please do, I really dislike these shady companies. The only way to stop them is to have them reported.

On a side note when I'm contacted like this, typically from people trying to sell B2B services sometimes I amuse myself by replying "I'll talk if you tell me where you got my email". They never say. I also leave customised emails to a catch-all domain for some sites and occasionally see these data leaks but it is surprisingly rare.
Well for us, European citizens, the shock is not that the NSA tries, it is that it succeeds. And that our officials are surprised to learn about the attempts.
If you are a native speaker, rarely. Otherwise, all the freaking times (for the first ten years or so).

E.g., consider the difference between a "cool guy" and a "cool attitude". If you think about it, they describe almost totally opposite situations.

Or consider "No, it's cool." After all, "it's hot" means the temperature is high.
Have you? It isn't pretty when printed from Chrome or Firefox.

https://imgur.com/JCHfEjy
You're thinking about too many things and lumping them all under the same narrative, that people are apathetic.

Plenty of people still care about things, and the fact that you can come up with this list shows you do too.

Sometimes people just need to hear something said in a different way, and sometimes you just can't reach them. It's okay if some people don't hear you. If any people do become more informed because of your message then you have succeeded.
Maybe you should send a request to the "magic" service.
GPS Hacking
loving this! helps me stay in the terminal
ha ha, I did that basically with bitcoin.
Bill Gates isn't that naive. He is siding with the FBI because he doesn't want to side with Apple.
A Crowdfunding Disruptor, the Minti Market Is Open for Business
This could be possible if at setup time the user was asked to create their own key, which any update would have to be signed with. This would then unburden Apple of having the "master key" needed to sign software updates, but would create an extra hoop for users to jump through to update their phone. I'm sure we've all experienced putting off a necessary update to software because of the inconvenience it would cause. Imagine millions of iPhones becoming vulnerable overnight because of mass user laziness.
> mounting efivars read-only by default seems like a completely reasonable thing to do, even absent this particular hardware issue.

It's perfectly reasonable to ro mount efivars. But doing so must not be the workaround to fix an security issue (and yes, this is a security issue) in (certain implementations of)(U)EFI. Just to make clear why this is an security issue: Security rests of three pillars:

- availability
- confidentiality
- authenticity

Rendering a system unusable (DoS-ing it) it an attack on availability. And speaking of security, if the goal is sabotage and causing large financial damages, then being able to permanently brick a system in case of a privilege escalation (there's nothing stopping UID=0 from remounting rw efivars) is pretty bad; and no, the implemented fixes in the efivars kernel code don't help, because an attacker can still mount a custom kernel module which will talk to the respective efivars code directly circumventing sanity checks (or directly talk to (U)EFI without using the efivars code).
ObjectVision was a data entry/forms tool for Windows, a precursor to Delphi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ObjectVision
It's a useful exercise analyzing the actual function of the NSA and comparing it against its charter. Is the NSA doing its chartered job? How well? Is it being effective? Does it have too much actual power?

It certain doesn't seem as if it has effective oversight in this matter, based on comments from congresspeople as to the level of information they are given.

In this instance, it seems as if the NSA is doing their job. In other instances... doesn't seem like it.
http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/39999.html -- lock to the owner's signing key, not the manufacturer's.
This is also a brute force attack. The terrorist had a four-digit passcode. They're going to try 0000-9999 and find the one that works. They just need Apple to disable the software that wipes the device after ten bad passcode attempts.

Everything that you've read about a "backdoor" or a "key" is totally uninformed commentary on the matter. The intarwebz are outraged (outraged!), but they don't even understand the debate.
In general, is it smart to update glibc on your machine?
So would it be okay for the FBI to have to bring the phone to Apple?
They could involve third parties in signing updates and if a device receives an update that isn't disseminated to all third parties it doesn't accept it. That way apple couldn't dispatch custom/backdoored updates to individual devices without revealing that they did it.
No but you can get away with pretending to be an idiot. Or forgetful.
Easy. Since iOS software must be signed by Apple they could simply hard code a check for a specific device ID, and immediately exit if it doesn't match. Then they sign that specific binary.
What exactly does this mean?
Is that the real reason? Isn't it more that it just didn't get enough traction?

MATLAB has cashed in and they don't have a free version. Octave isn't eating their lunch.

And it's not like the C/C++ guys made a ton of cashmoney - so "just make it free" isn't generally a viable business model
Bill Gates sides with FBI on demand for Apple backdoor to shooter's iPhone
Presumably you could set up to automatically sign anything signed by Apple, if that tradeoff suits you.
This would be a good step forward, but maybe not enough.

For example, they could be forced to first publish an update to all devices (through the third parties) which disables the third-party-checks. Then, they could be forced to put the backdoor on individual devices.
Additional quotes:

Not all is lost. We continue to investigate the addition of types to V8. And in fact, typing may bring some of the benefits of strong mode for lower cost.

...probably have us readjust our design goals. In particular, we no longer believe that requiring type soundness _by default_ can ever work successfully in JavaScript.
"can we implement all security functionality in hardware/burn it into the silicon? Or accomplish the same ends by some other means?"

Yes. The software could be burnt into PROM (which is unchangeable) or one could even create a custom ROM chip, and if necessary contain hardware or code that checksums the ROM.

However, a company doing that must be willing to run the risk that there is a bug in that unchangeable software/hardware and then either tell their customers that they are screwed, or that they can get a free replacement phone. It also may lengthen development cycles, as you cannot, at last minute, order your factory to open a million boxes and update that part of the firmware anymore.

Alternatively, a fully open phone would allow customers to inspect updates and reject them or perhaps even to partially reject them (partial rejection would prevent the case where users want a feature, but only can get it by accepting weaker security). That requires a 100% open phone (hard- and software) and enough knowledgeable people willing to invest time in looking at the code.
Here you go: http://www.apple.com/customer-letter/answers/
Glances – An Eye on your system
What request for evidence can you imagine that doesn't involve some work? It always involves some, maybe even a lot. They're not trying to get Apple to write a whole new OS despite how Apple is trying to spin it.
> still awfully secure

I believe they were just sloppy:

http://abcnews.go.com/US/san-bernardino-shooters-apple-id-pa...

"San Bernardino Shooter's iCloud Password Changed While iPhone was in Government Possession"

The information wasn't "awfully" secured.
That part is exactly the same as what they've done 70-some times previously. They didn't make some FBI agent sit there and tap out 0000 through 9999...they installed a piece of software to do it quickly. The software was signed with their key so that it would install on an iPhone.

The only difference is that this time the software they install would also have to turn off the delete-after-ten-attempts thing.

(You're probably having a hard time with this because the debate sounds absoultely ridiculous when the facts are laid out plainly. Totally understandable. The technical debate is absolutely ridiculous. The legal debate is the only one that matters, but it's not technical at all.)
Yeah cancan was revived by Cancancan :)
Security and usability are always going to be on a spectrum.

Even in the San Bernadino case, if the FBI hadn't changed the user's iCloud password, just bringing the phone to a trusted WiFi network would have caused it to automatically back itself up to the cloud. Even assuming the phone were completely 100% locked down perfectly, as long as you're sending backups to Apple that aren't encrypted, you're putting the data one subpoena away from the FBI (or from a hacker who breaks into Apple).

So say you don't use iCloud, or Apple starts a service where the backup is encrypted by your password. Your password needs to be really strong for this to work, and Apple needs to use something like bcrypt or better to hash it, but say they do that as well, and you have an long random password.

Then you can put a chip on the phone that refuses to ever be updated, and that implements the password lockout logic (try 10 bad PINs and it wipes the key). What they're asking Apple to do now would simple be impossible.

But you're allowing iOS itself to be updated, right? So if, for instance, you're discovered to be a terrorist, Apple could push a patch to the main OS that simply grabs the key after you've unlocked the phone and sends it to them. No more need for the secure chip; just decrypt the flash directly.

Or easier, the patched OS could just slowly upload all the data on the phone to a backup server whether or not the user opted in to such a backup plan.

If there's a lot of data (tons of photographs, for instance), they could even have the phone wait until it detects a known wireless access point to trigger the backup. The FBI could then arrange for that access point to be active near you and your device, and it could connect and upload to a server sitting in the FBI van nearby.

Also keep in mind that just about every release of iOS was designed to be impossible to jailbreak. And it seems that iOS 9 can still be jailbroken. This is typically done using an OS vulnerability that's exploited; the FBI/NSA could easily use those approaches to hack your phone (though all would require an already unlocked device, so they'd probably need to get you to run something via social engineering, but some of the hacks only require you to click on a specially crafted link on a web site...).

Finally, remember what I said about security and usability? Yeah, now if you forget your password and need it to be reset, you no only lose the data on your phone, but all of your backups. Oops. All of that and you're still not protected from a coordinated attack.

It's great for Apple to do whatever they can to resist giving the government the keys to everyone's privacy, because that can be abused. But it's safest to consider anything you typed into a computer or phone to be something that might get posted publicly.
Under Obama's order. Please, let's make sure we assign credit where it's due.
I can't see this kind of language used for technical documentation or at any kind of tech workplace. There are already nuances with current languages. This would be terrible.
I suspect he may have meant the 'requiring all games to be licensed' thing, since a lot of older systems and home computers let pretty much anyone make games if they figured out how to get them working.

Or maybe the centralised content censorship thing. Nintendo waa pretty infamous for that in the olden days, and it may have been the inspiration for sometimes rather insane guidelines for modern day app stores and the likes.
How about a simpler rule like "no updates will install unless the phone is unlocked"? Such a rule would make discussion in the San Bernardino case moot. In response, the government would have to outlaw this practice and force device makers to retain the ability to push updates to a locked phone.
Hm, I don't think some of the things we're working on are easy to implement on top of Draft, but I've only browsed the (very good) documentation so far. Perhaps I'm wrong.

For a first, I'm not clear on how you would write a custom renderer against the data structure (we try to do this for Mobiledoc [0], and it has helped contributors). It seems straight ahead to derive looking at it in a debugger, but I would love to see a link to the docs on it in case I've missed them.

As for cards, we've worked hard to make sure cursors work well around cards, and around atoms. There aren't any demos of "Custom Block Components" [1] in readonly mode, but based on the inability to place a cursor after a "Code Block" with arrows when it is last, I think Mobiledoc might be a bit more robust at this date.

But conceptually custom block components are very similar to Mobiledoc cards [2]. Block based rich content with an object payload. We provide a non-block construct called "atoms" that are inline as well, for things like `@mentions` in text.

This is really neat stuff, but yup, we've been playing around with similar ideas for a few months! Happy to see so much life in the editor world again.

[0]: https://github.com/bustlelabs/mobiledoc-kit/blob/master/MOBI...

[1]: http://facebook.github.io/draft-js/docs/advanced-topics-bloc...

[2]: https://github.com/bustlelabs/mobiledoc-kit/blob/master/CARD...

[edit] looks like http://facebook.github.io/draft-js/docs/api-reference-data-c... serializes the abstract of a Draft into something persistable, and potentially renderable.
IMO -- Better is to just write better tools for plain olde ANSI-C. We can build tools to check C as well as any other. Let's just not waste time on building further complexity into our toolset and look at building toolkits and best practice at the very flexible level of abstraction that Plain olde C provides. With the right tools and expertise, we can improve the world without the never ending whiz bang rewrite.
I worked for Optiver (largest marketmaker in Europe) between 2007 and 2010. We hired grads for trader positions all the time.

Optiver even sponsored the mathematic, physics and cs study association for students in Leiden for the longest time. Trying to win over students before they graduated.

https://www.deleidscheflesch.nl/p/optiver

Competitors did this too. Really nothing new here.
You can provide C bindings for you Rust library.