skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just because it didn't effect you directly doesn't mean it wasn't a big deal. I'm in Nashville and was not effected, but I'm not writing it off as a non-event. The worrying thing is hacked IoT devices were militarized (just using this as a term, not saying this was a state actor, though it very well could have been.)

Imagine if the hack occurs again, but is more targeted towards things that aren't just minor annoyances, and maybe happens on election night in the U.S.; I mean just earlier this year a repo on a package manager being deleted caused mass failure across the world of applications. A targeted attack on certain assets or dependencies could be very bad indeed. I would argue that GitHub being effected was more important than the other consumer based services in this attack. This is the first of many similar attacks in the coming years.
Might as well put it in a Faraday cage then as it could be sending your precise location to the FBI...
Thanks for your civil response.

I mean soldiers know when they sign up that they might be required to do bad things. They agree to do those bad things to save themselves from poverty/unemployment/etc. I don't think that's right. They're using their own problems to justify creating worse problems for other people.

Not so general as "if you do bad things, you can't complain" but more like "If you do very bad things and kill people and get away with it, you can't complain about minor inconveniences like refinancing your house". Although they are separate issues, since soldiers aren't going to face justice for their crimes, why not look at their lost money as a kind of coincidental punishment?
> Now is a strange time to commit to spending billions on light rail. In multiple cities ridership is down even as more money has been spent on rail. Two examples are LA and DC.

That LA Times article was true for January, but the situation has started to reverse this year as more rail has been built. Scroll down to the bottom: https://www.metro.net/news/ridership-statistics/

Here's another more recent article: http://www.lamag.com/driver/expo-gold-line-extensions-turnin...
The article links to multiple studies, for example:

* Social Class, Contextualism, and Empathic Accuracy: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/21/11/1716

* Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086.full

* The Psychological Consequences of Money: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/314/5802/1154

* Social status modulates neural activity in the mentalizing network: https://keelyamuscatell.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/muscatel... (from NeuroImage)

* Noblesse Oblige? Social Status and Economic Inequality Maintenance among Politicians: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

* Having Less, Giving More: The Influence of Social Class on
Prosocial Behavior: http://www.krauslab.com/SESprosocialJPSP.2010.pdf (from J. Pers. Soc. Psych.)

* Class and Compassion: Socioeconomic Factors Predict Responses to Suffering: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4MZvkUMsuJ_dmtEZUxOaFJZaFU... (from Emotion)

I omitted the study in the Chronicle of Philanthropy from this list because I couldn't find the actual data.
I used to be a bartender and that makes me a good tipper I think knowing what they have to go through. Also I feel like giving back.
English is mandatory in nearly all casinos at poker tables it's the universal poker language even in defiantly French Quebec.
I'm trying to understand your position. Are you saying this is partially (or fully) the government's fault because they didn't regulate the IoT device market to force it to be open source? And if they had done so this attack could have been avoided?
IoT botnets are a problem because they're massively distributed. Even if a single device could only issue one request per second you'd just need to own more devices. There are millions and millions of vulnerable boxes out there, sometimes dozens in one home or office.
Business pick locations for a reason. Is Tacoma or Everett able to offer what Tacoma offers?

I suspect a lot of the issue here is that Seattle has explosively grown in the last few years because of Amazon. Amazon's growth has spurred other companies growth. The problem compounds and for those who don't get to walk to work there are not many solutions except for >60 min commutes.

Downtown living is ever more expensive and this type of transportation seems like it would give Seattle and surrounding an ability to get to and from work without using a car. This sounds positive to me.

I don't know enough context about this one but your concerns have made me curious to do more research.
Mirai kills the ssh server on the machines when it starts.
Which industries do nice people get promoted in?
> FAQ: CoDoNS Deployment:

> I am interested in running a CoDoNS node locally. Can I join the CoDoNS overlay? [...]

> [..] Please let us know that you want to join by email and we will give you an update on project status and when we expect to ship you a bootable CD.

My first thought is that this project must be quite old as sending programs through CD might be faster than sending them through the Internet.
Most compromises in things like this are going to be invisible almost by accident. Unless your light bulb is maxing out your upload for extended periods of time, or the police come knocking on your door when your light bulb does something very illegal and very loud, nobody is ever going to notice.
I live in an old-money, hard earned neighborhood. People are a marvel: Respectful, polite, kind and always willing to assist if they can.
I was expecting that to be a quote from a book or a story and was surprised that it wasn't. Good job, it's scarily plausible. Especially in the UK.
Militarized? You were as affected as I was which is not at all, don't you wonder if this is just mass media trying to incite bullshit?
With Trump and Hillary, the community on Chinese websites are increasingly disenchanted with democracy. One high-vote answer in Zhihu, or "the Chinese Quora", claims that this election cycle has been a "great educational experience for Chinese Nationalism and Marxism". You'd be surprised how popular Trump is in China, and how much they support their Government.
They were published this year. They'll be cited next year if they are useful. There's a 6-9 month delay between paper submission and publication.
Seriously wtf. Black bloc is hated by yuppie liberals the most.
Imagine if all those IP cameras, routers, NAT boxes and what-have-you had been designed with one simple policy: the internet port doesn't work until the user sets a password.

Even very lame passwords might be expected to reduce the effectiveness of this attack approach by an order of magnitude or two.
> Americans gave nearly $1 billion more to the approximately 3,000 victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks than they gave to victims of the South Asian tsunami three years later, even though the latter tragedy killed more than a quarter of a million people

Does anyone else find this conclusion unfair? I am not trying to down play what happened in Asia but American's uniting for their country isn't able to be compared to American's supporting crisis in other parts of the world. I suspect their conclusion is true but suggesting American's give less because of how much they donated to 9/11 versus a storm on the other side of the world isn't a fair comparison.
I meant "stupid shit" that's intended to be noticed. The equivalent to malware of olden days that would intentionally bluescreen your machine, display a stupid image or something. Brick devices, turn all lightbulbs into disco mode, replace video camera images with static or porn, de-auth all WLAN devices around...

But nowadays malware is less about "hijinks" and more about criminal enterprises that profit from staying hidden, so pressure on device owners and makers is going to have to come from somewhere else: ISPs, governments, ...
I agree with this. But research isn't everything. And there are at least some hints and signs that this person doesn't know how to get along with colleagues.

> I worked really hard to bring an exciting and rigorous operating systems class to UB.

Why did this effort require working "really hard"? Was it because of obstructionist, jealous, or stupid colleagues? Or people who wanted a boring and unrigourous course instead? Or were there perhaps legitimate reasons why others didn't want to change the existing course?

> I led a complete overhaul of our department’s undergraduate computer science curriculum. It includes two new exciting introductory programming courses that I spent a great deal of time designing.

Let me guess: the existing curriculum was terrible, boring, not at all rigorous, and there was no reason to keep any of it, and the author made sure everyone knew it. And why did the author have to spend a great deal of time? Because no one else in the department was capable of doing as good a job? Because nobody else could comprehend this grand vision?

Everything listed under "speaking out" gives me the same vibe. It doesn't seem to have crossed this person's mind that there are reasons why other people have different approaches to teaching, research, administration, hiring, etc., beyond others being obstructionist, brainwashed, or just stupid. I'm reminded of the parable reminding us [1] to not take down a fence until we have truly understood why the fence was erected in the first place.

And really... bringing a dog to work in violation of a clearly stated campus policy, repeatedly, even after having been warned, then encouraging a student petition and getting your name in a local paper about the incident? That's just asking for trouble.

(Full disclosure: I'm coming up for tenure myself, and one lesson it has taken me 5 years to understand is that people who disagree with me on campus aren't doing so out of spite, stupidity, or carelessness, they often just have different priorities than I do. Just because our department absolutely needs more resources to do a good job handling our rapidly growing student population, doesn't mean the college should make this a priority over other things.)

[1] http://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/
Can you please expand on this: People are nicer to you if you're a jerk?
There's a very strong argument to be made that regulation is the only way to improve this situation. A negative externality like this is unlikely to correct itself. Cheap manufacturers will continue to save money by cutting security features, and unaware or price-driven consumers will reinforce that behavior. What else can we do?

Note: this isn't something the US can solve. A lot of this traffic came from overseas. It's needs a coordinated response.
Such bullshit. They're shutting down, not because of any real lawsuit, but because of a threat of a lawsuit. Is this really what America is about?

It wasn't even a real threat of a lawsuit. It was an email from someone high up in the music industry. That's all it takes.

I love the United States, but fuck, it really disappoints me sometimes.
Things get crazier once you have one compromised hole-punched device that is behind your NAT/firewall too. You can end up in a situation where you have a local C2 server on your light bulb, controlling a sub-botnet of your fridge, washing machine, and wifi controlled doorbell. It's not unreasonable to think that this could compromise orders of magnitude more devices than the original botnet itself, considering how many things are just saved by their interface not being routable or accessible from the wider internet.

Something I've wondered is how much of an impact large botnets have on other systems they rely on. If you had a million compromised CPUs in a small geographic area suddenly jump from a low power state into doing a massive amount of work, could it cause localized brown outs? Some napkin math says probably not, but it's not something I've heard considered much before.
You mean Gb, right? Google fiber?
> 2) End the spiraling healthcare costs (adding a single payer would likely go a long way)

Obamacare was introduced just before the US healthcare system would go into the red (be a net cost for the government, as opposed to a source of income) and delayed that by creating new income for the government. This was not a coincidence.

The whole purpose of Obamacare was to make healthcare less expensive for the government, by putting more of the burden on the population, without being a new tax. It is very far from an accident that healthcare costs have spiraled.

But Obamacare only delayed the government budget drain until somewhere between 2018 and 2020 according to the congressional budget office. So "Obamacare 2" is coming in the next president's term, don't worry. It might even have single payer, as obviously raising costs is not a compelling public message.

But it must raise costs. There's no other option. It must raise costs to get back into balance, as the US government has borrowed massively from the healthcare system and is in no position to pay back any of it, so it cannot be allowed to have more outflows than inflows. The consequences would be too great. Well, actually, unlike most of the rest of the world the US could choose to defund the military to a significant extent and actually get a few more years of healthcare out of it (but we'd be talking 10-20% budget loss for the military at least, and as you point out that would rob more than a few young people of economic opportunity). But it would only delay matters, it can't solve them.

What can you do ? Nothing really. Too few people paying into a system with too many dependents. More kids was the answer, but obviously those would have had to have been born 20-25 years ago. Right now, more kids would only put more load on the system for the first few decades. Massively opening up immigration could work in theory, but if Europe is any indication, it won't.

Of course, all of this is assuming there won't be an economic crisis, and at this point, we're overdue one.
It looks like he also flipped classrooms and was active within the department service-wise. That's a pretty crazy decision not to tenure him from the outside.
AT&T just acquired BATMAN for USD 80B
West-coaster here. Twitter unreacheable, Github unreacheable, Box unreacheable, Soundcloud unreacheable (I'm a musician, saw a friend's band's big song premiere go stale). Tons more. Just because you didn't feel it doesn't mean others didn't.
I was just saying to a friend yesterday that this would be a great policy. I think it would go a long way.

But the problem remains that these devices, more often than not just don't get updated. So in a year or two, there will probably be a handful of exploitable issues that won't ever get patched...
5th amendment loophole: fingerprint != passcode
> All university departments are filled with miserable gossips.

They are also filled with people who think their own vision and priorities for the intro programming course, operating systems course, networking course, "entire" undergrad curriculum, department and college resource allocation, and campus dog policy, are obviously the only correct and rational choice, and anyone who disagrees is a miserable gossip.
My concern is that China will use the scoring to make moral judgments about citizens. Yes, we have credit scores and DMV scores and some of us wind up on white lists (PreCheck) or black lists (No-Fly) for air travel.

But determining business risk is different from determining whether someone is a moral or immoral person, and then using that subjectivity to control the population. It's value to the regime is in that subjectivity: If you threaten my political aspirations, I'll score you as immoral, report your transgressions on the nightly news and toss you in prison to be reprogrammed.

The US separates church and state to prevent this.
They weren't even threatened. A lawyer didn't write the email. They just got spooked and decided to quit. You can't fix this problem with anything other than "changing the climate of the music industry" as they wrote in their letter. You're going to need a lot more than a new legal service to fix this.

If you want to make money and have an impact, do goddamn anything but try to do it through or with, or anything around music. You can make money, or have an impact, but fuck you if you try to do both. The music industry and the world Hacker News was birthed in are at complete 180 degree odds with each other.
> Why did this effort require working "really hard"? Was it because of obstructionist, jealous, or stupid colleagues?

I was one of the students at UB while this took place. It took a lot of effort, partially because the rewriting involved a lot of student feedback and there was also a massive e-mail discussion (accidentally?) sent to the entire computer science undergraduate mailing list of one of the senior faculty chastizing a more junior faculty over how student feedback was used in remaking the program.

I can't say for anything else (including the dog situation, since I know other faculty in other departments also bring their pets to school), but I know there was some severe and public obstruction from senior faculty to more junior faculty going on during the remaking.
No kidding. 'Recent DNS Attacks' mentions 2007 in the description. I wonder if it's still active.
I don't understand the mentality where if anyone dares shares their opinion about a former place of employment that has anything remotely negative about the place, that it is looked upon as poor form. It's ridiculous and takes away power from employees and those looking for work. We should openly talk about our experiences in places we work.

Wouldn't it be an unfortunate thing, for someone to get hired into a place that has toxicity in it, when simply warning others may have prevented it? We should side with having empathy for our peers and colleagues, not for our employers and organizations.

In general, this post is mostly positive. It's a reflection on his time there. Does it contain some criticisms? Yes, but to say that he should just shut up, take the beating, and move on is tragic.

He'll have no problem finding employment.
I just finished watching it myself, after having seen it mentioned in your comment. I found it profoundly heavy-handed, and, unlike pretty much every other episode of the series I've seen so far, I didn't enjoy it at all.
>>Robert D’Andrea, a retired Army major and Iraq veteran, was told to return a $20,000 bonus he received in 2008 because auditors could not find a copy of the contract he says he signed.

>>We’d be more than happy to absolve these people of their debts. We just can’t do it. We’d be breaking the law.

- Stop quoting laws at us. We carry weapons
Hm. In investigating, I saw that Comcast's intended merger was with TWC, which makes a difference (as both are infrastructure companies).
What about a special set of bytes that are standardized that all IOT machines should send in every request. Some sort of IS_IOT signature. That way if there's a huge influx, all messages containing the signature could be filtered.
They talked about this in the article

"But it is beginning to seem that the problem isn’t that the kind of people who wind up on the pleasant side of inequality suffer from some moral disability that gives them a market edge. The problem is caused by the inequality itself: It triggers a chemical reaction in the privileged few. It tilts their brains."
When modeming into the university unix system, I really enjoyed being able to type `sz file` and bam the file is on my local machine, with progress meter and everything.

So I wrote rzh, "receive zmodem here". Navigate to where you want to receive files, run rzh (which gives you a subshell) then ssh anywhere. Bounce through six machines if you want. When you sz a file, rzh will receive it.

https://github.com/bronson/rzh

Haven't touched it much in a decade, alas.
What does church have to do with this? We can throw people in jail for "corruption"
> > relevant individuals
Israeli self-driving car startup Oryx raises $17M Series A for non-LiDAR
More so than apes though?
It was really crazy in the department too, at least among undergraduate students. His lab is very well known as a great place to learn about the development of mobile devices, which is basically not offered in any courses and difficult to be formally educated in otherwise.
Objectively, a tragedy that killed 83 times as many people is deserving of at least the same funding as a local tragedy, I would hope.

That said, locality bias is a strong thing, and to some degree what makes us human. I don't find it to be critical, merely descriptive of the way people work.
I was in the northern suburbs of Chicago and wasn't able to access GitHub .
All western reporting about Sesame Credit has focused on privacy. Has there been any objective analysis on projected economic impact of the system?
If routers weren't such a crapshot security wise as well, they'd be a great integration point.

Most better routers nowadays can already isolate devices from the internet/whitelist specific domains (family filter functions) and offer VPNs from the outside. From a technology perspective that's most of the pieces you need. Make a better UPnP implementation with user confirmation, make it easier to configure and everybody can get their devices nicely isolated-but-accessible.
Credit ratings are about how risky it is to lend you money, not where you are allowed to live, drive, and work.
Hi, although I'm new here and all of you have been teaching here for 20 years on average, let me tell you why everything you have done with the curriculum is terrible and should be completely rewritten in my style. And of course, I'll have to do all of this myself, since you are all incompetent. And I better teach the first round myself too, because I can't trust you with that either.

So yes, there is a difference between not pissing off people on the committee and "obedience".
>Not at all the case with IoT

Why? The rest of your comment doesn't address that.

>See Bruce Schneier's recent article on the matter, where he makes the case that government regulation is the only feasible remedy at this point

He also doesn't explain why. He literally writes:

>>In fact, the software used to attack Krebs was simple and amateurish. What this attack demonstrates is that the economics of the IoT mean that it will remain insecure unless government steps in to fix the problem. This is a market failure that can't get fixed on its own.

Why does it demonstrate that? "Neither the seller nor the buyer care" can also be applied to traditional botnets using computers - if the botnet is clever enough to not make any noise. He "justifies" the "sellers don't care" part with:

>>they're now selling newer and better models, and the original buyers only cared about price and features.

... again the same for smartphones or laptops. And furthermore, what regulation he proposes to solve this? I mean, he presents the issue as being:

>>The security of our computers and phones also comes from the fact that we replace them regularly. We buy new laptops every few years. We get new phones even more frequently. This isn't true for all of the embedded IoT systems. They last for years, even decades. We might buy a new DVR every five or ten years. We replace our refrigerator every 25 years. We replace our thermostat approximately never.

Would he suggest that the companies selling these devices be obliged to push security patches? The same companies that he wrote could not even afford testing?:

>>Companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google spend a lot of time testing their code before it's released, and quickly patch vulnerabilities when they're discovered. Those companies can support such teams because those companies make a huge amount of money, either directly or indirectly, from their software­ -- and, in part, compete on its security. This isn't true of embedded systems like digital video recorders or home routers.

...

I have read "government is the only solution" at least 6 times in that short article, without exaggeration. Looks a lot like fearmongering and propaganda to me.