skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is a security flaw; it's probably not a backdoor.

The flaw is as follows: I'm trying to send you a message, but your phone is offline and lost. When you get a new phone, your key has changed, but WhatsApp will deliver my message before informing me of the key change. This applies also to calls and such (which shouldn't be "delivered" if the other person is offline).

Why could this be bad? WhatsApp could exploit it as follows (maybe under orders from the govt.):

1) Make it seem like a user lost their phone.

2) Wait for a message to be delivered to the user's account.

3) Bring the user back online with a new key (generated by WhatsApp themselves).

4) Read the "encrypted" message.

It's a real vulnerability in the protocol, but the severity depends on your threat model. As I said above, this might be an acceptable trade off for messaging, but not for things like calls, where if the user is offline you don't want the call to go through anyway. All this has been pointed out clearly by the student who discovered it.
Guardian did good, now it will stirr things up. Now, even if WhatsAppers will disable retransmission, the amount of flame on the topic will ensure that they are labelled as backdoored until the end of days.

WhatsApp, please go down
I couldn't remember if Bashir was modified at a planet inside the federation or not so I just kept it to Earth for safety.
"Laying Down Glasses", heck, I could use a set of those. There might be the revival of a product idea here...
They should have just said something like "100 feet (about 30m)", since that's what the actual court order is. I get that a science-oriented publication would have a convention of converting to MKS units, but in this case I think it was excessive.
As someone who lives in South Florida it's bad enough we have to deal with Rick Scott denying rising sea tides in his own back yard.

Now we're up against a POTUS who denies the disaster we will face in twenty years yet owns property in the afflicted area (North Miami Beach - Trump Towers). As I watch the city raise the sidewalks and roads by a foot I'm astounded. I've lived here for three years and since I got here every major roadway has been under construction - installing pumps to return flood water back to the bay. When I first arrived, you couldn't cross the street without steeping ankle deep into water and it's getting better. But pumps were only installed in key areas that affected the Mayor's and his friends' commercial properties.

I cannot buy property here because to do so would be a huge mistake considering what is now beach front will be underwater unless something is done about it.
Don't confuse innovation with what is nowadays called "streamlining".
This has nothing to do with Trump or the election though. Mankind is screwing up in general and having some text on whitehouse site is not going to change it.

Look at the startup scene. It's all about convenience (ignoring the massive amount of wasted resources), social media is all about endless narcissism and then we have everything handed out free by mining your data. All this is not going to change. All this mindless self-gratifying churn is what worsens the climate.
An AI example that isn't that artificial or intelligent
Hope so. I guess last exodus was in 2012 when top people like Marissa Mayer and her reports got poached.
I've been a bit interested in this, basically an attempt to bring some of the nice things of the Erlang/OTP platform to CL:

http://mr.gy/blog/erlangen-intro.html
Came here to say this. Fantastic book for self-learners.
Both Panda and Penguin were machine learning, and definitely had externally perceptible shifts. But, you're right, perhaps they've figured out how to do that with less disruption.

Edit: I wonder if Amit changed his tune regarding machine learning, at least for his new space.
Tri-Alpha Fusion spending $500M to develop commercial fusion by 2027
> We also agree that Signal is a more secure alternative.

Signal is only a more secure alternative in _some_ threat models. The most obvious counterexample is that, in some contexts, using WhatsApp marks you as a person who owns a smartphone, while using Signal marks you as a dissident. There are other contexts where losing messages while not being actively attacked (not even just due to this design decision; Signal ultimately just does not have as reliable infrastructure as WhatsApp) is more dangerous than WhatsApp's resend behavior.
Binaries which have a client-server architecture certainly are.

Is the claim the full WhatsApp stack is open to regular indepedent third party security audits from multiple firms?
The reason I don't recommend it is that it clearly has not future. It is not deprecated or killed, but it is kind of frozen. Will continue to be supported but no new investment there. it missed the train, and this train is going places, so you really want to be on it.

Yes, Cloud Services and VMs are two different things, however, Azure's IaaS was built on top of this concept up until when they migrated to ARM and VMs.
The way it used to be, was that Cloud Services was Microsoft's PaaS, and when they introduced IaaS (Yes Azure had PaaS first), they built it on top of cloud services. So essentially IaaS built on top of PaaS. Most people would expect it to work the other way around, and so that's exactly what they did with the new stuff - They invested heavily in re-doing the entire IaaS stack, and then built PaaS components on top of it.
Regarding ARM, VMs, the new stuff- We call it 'new' to differentiate from the 'classic' stuff, but it shouldn't be considered as such. It is old enough, stable enough and it the recommended way to do stuff on Azure.

If you are doing just IaaS - there's no question there. Use the ARM model.
Cloud Services did have nice features mostly for programming model, and code deploy, but there are ways to do that with ARM as well.
There is not a single direct replacement to Cloud Services, and it makes the transition harder. this is because the new model has different architecture and layering of the stack.
If you are looking for these features, I recommend looking at a PaaS framework in the new stack like Service Fabric.
My head hurts, it seems that a chunk of the sky fell and conked me in the noggin.
The US’s Stance on Surveillance Needs a Hard Reset
Tim Sweeney to Be Honored at 2017 Game Developers Choice Awards
"Most of the time in GC is spent performing a depth-first search over marked objects that we call draining."

It's a term we use in our code to refer to that depth-first search.
Dev Team Interactions: Accountability and Blame
Whitehouse.gov was archived to https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ at noon. It looks like they've done a reasonable job with redirects from old URLs to the archives sites. (Hopefully forever)

Not quite the mantra of 'Cool URLs don't change', but a reasonable compromise for making something that the non-technical public can understand.
CorelCAD 2017 Crack with Keygen Free Download for (Windows and Mac)
First it should be understood that even in the LK there are different maintainer models, depending on the subsystem. Many of the driver maintainers don't even have public git tree's much less public postings reviewing peoples code.

So, with any large project, many of the subsystems are really dysfunctional. Overworked maintainers are just a symptom of someone not being able to delegate (might even be the maintainership itself if they want to code more than review). Frequently though, It all seems really territorial, with the maintainer themselves bike shedding over function naming, hunk placement in a patch series, comment wording, the list goes on. No wonder these "maintainers" are overworked, instead of acting as architectural reviewers, or even bug reviewers they force themselves and the people "just trying to scratch an itch" to jump through hoops for patch revision after revision. Others are more passive, and simply don't look at patches they disagree with, even if it adds a significant piece of functionality. So, there is a wasteland of patches that never make it, only to be rewritten a couple years later by the maintainer, or a frequent contributor.

Frequently a lot of it boils down to what is effectively territorial responses. How dare someone come in an move the tree i've been pissing on for the last two years.

Frankly, I wish that more of the maintainers actually acted like Linus, who is pretty clear about whether he is going to take a patch set, and back when he actually did more than take pull requests at face value, would himself fixup any minor issues he saw in the patches as he committed them rather than waiting for the submitter to figure out what was wrong and repost a whole series with some minor tweak.
It's a security/usability trade-off, not a flaw.

Making Signal show white-on-white text would make it more secure against attackers reading over your shoulder. So why doesn't Signal do that?

These are legitimate trade-offs that the Guardian is portraying as vulnerabilities.
Uber Hires Former YouTube Exec Kevin Thompson as VP of Marketplace Engineering
> it's quite likely I think they would simply switch to DC for everything

I'm not sure. AC has some important safety considerations that would make it better even if the efficient was significantly worse.

Switches, fuses and circuit breakers that work with DC are more expensive than AC. When a circuit opens there is a spark, and this spark can in some cases create a conductive plasma. With AC the wave goes to zero and the plasma disappears, while with DC it continues. There are cases where a DC fuse blew but the fuse continued to conduct. Of course this can be engineered around, but generally with larger and more expensive parts.

When someone touches power accidentally, AC is slightly safer. With DC your muscles will grab and never let go. AC gives you a chance to let go. This is a low probability thing, but is a factor.

The guy who wanted us to debate is wrong for one other reason though: I'm approaching the limits of what I know on the subject, while you seem to have a lot more knowledge.
There is a subtle historical irony on this deal happening with an Italian bank.

Italian banking, including the bank in question, got its start back in the middle ages by getting around prohibitions on usury with similar "guaranteed to lose" bets on currencies. The bank would give the borrower money in one currency now, and the borrower would give the bank back a different sum of money in another currency in 6 months. Given currency fluctuations, it was theoretically possible for the bank to lose the bet. Given the sums involved, this was very unlikely to happen in practice.

(Jews had the same commandment against usury, but interpreted it to only apply to other Jews. They could lend to Christians all that they liked, and did. That is where the connection between Jews and moneylending got its historical start.)

A lot has changed in the intervening centuries. The prohibition on usury was dropped, first by the Protestants and then by the Catholics during the counter-reformation. Banks have been regulated. And now the original workaround to allow loans at interest is seen as unacceptable. And so the Italian bank has been taken down by a deal that is very similar to the ones that got it started in the first place.
Trump Took Down the White House Climate Change Page; Put Up a Pledge to Oil
Which makes me wonder why so many companies make these annoying skins for Android. That has to cost money. Given that basically nobody likes them, wouldn't it just be cheaper to stick to stock?
That's because it's a completely new website. Happens with every new administration.
I actually had something like this when I was a child. It was a contraption, like a periscope, made of cardboard, that you wore over your eyes (it fit over my glasses) to read while lying down. It worked great. As I recall, I ordered it out of novelty catalog.
> I still don't know a great way to describe it in the 6 or 7 seconds you have before the potential customer's attention starts to flag.

I don't think there is a 6-7 second way to describe it. I mean, imagine someone that knows nothing of frequentist statistics, could you explain the meaning/significance of a confidence interval to them? It's a pretty high bar to clear, I've found for CI's it's typically 1-5 minutes depending on background.
Uber created an incentive structure for drivers to give you a good experience.
Thanks for link. It looks very useful.
> How much traffic do you get per day usually?

The sites average about 25 million unique views (IP address per hour) and 50 million hits per month. This increases about 20% per month, sometimes slowing down a bit, then shooting right back up again.

Every once in a while a big site somewhere hotlinks an asset on Neocities and this skyrockets, but we just ask them to host the asset(s) directly and things go back to normal. Technically it's never caused any capacity issues, but obviously we don't want huge sites hosted elsewhere to use Neocities as a CDN.
People legitimately disagree about value. Investment horizon is a large factor. Two teams can do the opposite side of a trade and both profit on different horizons. Usually the agreement or disagreement is statistical, executed by a program in small fractions of a second. There is almost always some noise involved at the exchange, sometimes even some intentional randomness. It's not the same as getting people talk to each other about a project.
Paris Dashboard
Donald Trump Plagiarized Bane in His Inaugural Speech
These things play out on much larger time scales. And social security is not socialism, all the countries you've listed are firmly capitalist. To quote Wikipedia: "Socialism is a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production; as well as the political ideologies, theories, and movements that aim to establish them." This is the part that never did and never will work. Note that socialism by itself does not guarantee social security of any kind. You can still starve or die of disease. Millions of people did exactly that.
Insulting people who buy a thing you don't like because it was a "collective delusion", for bad motives you impugn to them, because of your personal value judgment that it was "flailing novelty" and a "hype train"... for the best selling console ever... is being a fanboy, not making a real argument. Fanboyism for, as I said, a console generation now a generation and a half gone, which drains away whatever topical interest it may once have had and just leaves you insulting about a hundred million people for no particular reason.
Why Small Businesses Aren’t Spending More on Tech
Stanford Lecture: Don Knuth's Christmas Tree Lecture 2016
You're being facetious here with the strawman; this is clearly a choice in the protocol that exposes something that is not exposed by, say, Signal. Even if it is a deliberate choice, it doesn't necessarily make it not a flaw; as I said, it depends on your threat model.

Anyway, I don't think it's a reasonable choice. How any times do people change phones?!? Even if you're rich you don't do that more than once a year. It doesn't happen often enough for the user to become "accustomed" to warnings and simply click through them.
Agreed, their website definitely turned me off.

Quick tip for them: Having a section for showing that a bunch of people are using and "Trusting" the product is good, but your's seems to mostly (4/7 from what I can see) be the investors behind your product.

Edit: Looked at the names more, and it seems 7/7 are individual investors or VCs

https://angel.co/gun

Which is all well and good, but maybe the wording should be "Investors and Backers" rather than "Trusted By".
your problem here is that you consider climate change something you can believe in or not, and consider it as such.

GP didn't say anything like that. You're all jumping on him in a strawman beat-down party.
I'm impressed by Filip's knack for explaining complex topics in an approachable manner. His previous post on WebKit's locking infrastructure[1] is a similarly good read.

A few amusing parts of this post that stood out to me:

* A single sentence containing half a dozen links to Filip's previous work on garbage collection.

* "See here for the proof", linking to a 200+ line comment in WebKit's source.

* "But since this is JavaScript, we get to have a lot more fun".

[1]: https://webkit.org/blog/6161/locking-in-webkit/
> I'll point out none of the security researchers in the article dispute the vulnerability is as described.

Just so you know, tptacek signed this letter. I did as well.

Calling it a backdoor was outright dishonest. I've written backdoors. I even won a cryptography backdoor contest at DEFCON with one of my designs.

https://underhandedcrypto.com/2015/08/08/crypto-privacy-vill...

https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/01/on-design-and-implementat...

If it's to be said that there is a vulnerability, then it is simply, "If there are any messages that haven't been delivered yet, and the recipient changes keys, the client will re-encrypt to the new public key before alerting."

Okay, a lot of security experts wouldn't make that trade-off, especially if they were trying to compete with Signal. But WhatsApp isn't a Signal competitor. The alternative means of contacting someone you'd normally use WhatsApp for is SMS, because that's what people are using today.

Most WhatsApp users aren't interested in encryption. It just works for them. They may still need it, but they don't care about it.

Even if you could exploit this, you get:

- Any undelivered messages (if any)
- No past messages
- No stealth either; the user does get alerted

So, yes, we do dispute the vulnerability is as described, especially when it was called a backdoor.
Big $$ talk loud
Some reports even claim that President Obama himself has been replaced by a completely different person!
> The mobile phone had a direct impact in many ways, and almost immediately. The space program had indirect impact, and took years in most cases.

I think this temporal disconnect happened for two reasons. First, the NASA was involved with foundational research. The microchip is a prime example of this. NASA gave a lot of money out to companies to invent technologies that didn't exist before hand, and 10 or so years down the line, industry figured out how to make them affordable/found a market for them. Apple didn't invent anything new with the iPhone - smart phones and phones with touchscreens and computers existed before the iPhone. Apple 'simply'[1] did it better than anyone else.

Second - technology moves faster now. Of course the iPhone is going to immediately move the market/general population forward because we have the infrastructure to build such things at scale. No such industry existed when NASA was doing its work Foundational research/technology takes forever to percolate into the markets.

> But I imagine we're both right in our own way, and just talking past each other. Like any other nerd battle in the vein of "Star Wars vs. Star Trek".

I know that feel. I apologize if I came off aggressive!
When you are thinking like that, you are yet to accept the reality. When you absolutely convinces yourself that you are doomed, your mind will not be thinking about should. Your mind will be thinking about what can you do -- or accept doom.

The population still panics at every progression as if it is a surprise is an evidence that we by far are not realizing the reality. This is understandable -- our perception scale is simply too minuscule to the scale of the actual problem.
You really need to read the article.

Those servers aren't just for managing the messages. It's also for their advertising and analytics platforms. And since over a third of their servers are for generic Mesos it could be for anything e.g. development containers.
Opera Neon: A New Concept Browser That Looks Amazing
What context needs to be given except for probability for which the statement "can" becomes "does"?

The probability can be conditioned on some relevant assumption to make the story sensationalized. But as long as the probability and assumption is clearly spelled out, I don't see what other context should be required for PUBLIC disclosure. Maybe also the total incidence number.

For example: Jihadist terrorists can kill you! With a 0.001% probability for every hour you spend in a large crowd. It has happened in two crowds so far.

Or: 97% of climate scientists agree the rise in greenhouse gases is mostly attributable to human activities. That is 97% of 35 PEOPLE in the world.
My reading of that is that everything is made immutable, at which point aliasing isn't an issue anymore. I might be wrong though.
Demystifying misconceptions about Bitcoin
I downvoted this one just to push your buttons (it's a pune!). I didn't vote either way on the other comments.
I'm not joking here, or making a strawman argument. You could make Signal show white-on-white, so the recipient had to select text to see it.

But you don't, because shoulder surfing is not the threat model for Signal. And individually targeted MITM attacks by governments that can take over a server are not the threat model for WhatsApp.
The Immortal Bard – Isaac Asimov – Shakespeare Learning Shakespeare
The Guardian made a mistake. They mischaracterized the issue. Now they're trying to correct it and offering a forum for rebuttal. The comparison with vaccines is actually offensive to me as someone negatively affected by that controversy.

In general I want potential issues like this to be noted (when properly defined and characterized) and debated.

These experts are arguing that WhatsApp makes the best possible trade offs given their user base. I don't agree and think it's worthy of discussion. The tradeoff they refer to is really a UX/product design decision.
What's a fermi question
This also covers the design of the Be File System, for those who don't know.
Shenzhen built more skyscrapers in 2016 than the US and Australia
The White House climate change page did not contain the word nuclear. So it was not a actually page about addressing climate change, but instead an exercise in virtue signaling.
I won't bore you with my credentials

No, please, do. None of us will be bored by this.
Same here, I was just finishing university at that time, and it seemed like every student house had a Wii for party games, and for casual gaming while drinking and getting ready for a night out. Aside from that, I remember guitar hero being popular.

As for the Wii U, I think most people my age just moved on to a different step in our lives, we get together less often, and there just isn't the same interest or opportunities available for casual gaming with friends. I don't know what's happening with the younger generations, and what they're doing in university now.
I can't stand Unity, I have been using Ubuntu since just about when Unity was introduced, but have always used Gnome Flashback on Ubuntu.

It's the first thing I install after installing Ubuntu on a computer.

http://tipsonubuntu.com/2016/10/16/install-classic-gnome-fla...
Why is the vaccine comparison offensive to you?
And a few extra additional seconds of research shows that they don't change the token unless you change your password, as opposed to having the token expire after every session.

Very bad security practice.
I get the feeling that nobody (untapped-market alert) measures whether they're trying to optimize something users don't really care about.
let's create a crowd-sourced effort to migrate archived geocities sites to neocities.
For the first time (starting in the fall), Nintendo will be charging subscription fees for its online multiplayer service. So expectations and pressure will be on more than ever. I want to believe.
If an introvert is quiet and no one is there to hear it, is he still an introvert?