skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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Angelfire
31 August, 2017

Today, August 31st 2017, WikiLeaks publishes documents from the Angelfire project of the CIA. Angelfire is an implant comprised of five components: Solartime, Wolfcreek, Keystone (previously MagicWand), BadMFS, and the Windows Transitory File system. Like previously published CIA projects (Grasshopper[1] and AfterMidnight[2]) in the Vault7[3] series[4], it is a persistent framework that can load and execute custom implants on target computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system (XP or Win7).

Solartime modifies the partition boot sector so that when Windows loads boot time device drivers, it also loads and executes the Wolfcreek implant, that once executed, can load and run other Angelfire implants. According to the documents, the loading of additional implants creates memory leaks that can be possibly detected on infected machines.

Keystone is part of the Wolfcreek implant and responsible for starting malicious user applications. Loaded implants never touch the file system, so there is very little forensic evidence that the process was ever ran. It always disguises as "C:\Windows\system32\svchost.exe" and can thus be detected in the Windows task manager, if the operating system is installed on another partition or in a different path.

BadMFS is a library that implements a covert file system that is created at the end of the active partition (or in a file on disk in later versions). It is used to store all drivers and implants that Wolfcreek will start. All files are both encrypted and obfuscated to avoid string or PE header scanning. Some versions of BadMFS can be detected because the reference to the covert file system is stored in a file named "zf".

The Windows Transitory File system is the new method of installing AngelFire. Rather than lay independent components on disk, the system allows an operator to create transitory files for specific actions including installation, adding files to AngelFire, removing files from AngelFire, etc. Transitory files are added to the 'UserInstallApp'.

[1]: https://wikileaks.org/vault7/grasshopper/

[2]: https://wikileaks.org/vault7/#AfterMidnight

[3]: https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/

[4]: https://wikileaks.org/vault7/#

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And here are the documents linked beside the post:

Angelfire 2.0 -- User Guide: https://wikileaks.org/vault7/document/Angelfire-2_0-UserGuid...

BadMFS -- Developer Guide: https://wikileaks.org/vault7/document/BadMFS_Developer_Guide...

Wolfcreek Docs -- Angelfire User Guide: https://wikileaks.org/vault7/document/Wolfcreek-Docs-Angelfi...

Wolfcreek Docs -- Angelfire Test Matrix: https://wikileaks.org/vault7/document/Wolfcreek-Docs-Angelfi...

Wolfcreek Docs -- NotesSee more: https://wikileaks.org/vault7/document/Wolfcreek-Docs-Notes/
Good sci-fi is good philosophy. A good companion to sci-fi is history. When people nay-say because we have no proof and 'given what we know today' I am reminded that most people didn't have electricity 150 years ago. The combustion engine is being superseded only 100 years after it became commonplace. Hell, 50-80 years ago half of England didn't have an indoors toilet and plumbing. What was the population of the US's tech-central, California, in 1850? The region was hardly populated. The last 500 years, and especially in the 20th century we have moved at an astounding rate, both technologically and socially. I have sci-fi books on my shelf from 40 years ago in which the population of Earth reaches 'critical' proportions at 5 billion. Nay-sayers at the time would never have accepted that we would reach over 7bn in 2016. Some HNers in the comments here clearly don't realize that a great many sci-fi writers have been scientists and cosmologists, professional and amateur, but dedicated to the science of the genre, and from there they take their starting point.
Well, is that wrong?

Is the Nike logo really a unique logo purely from a design perspective, or has its extremely strong brand made it a successful logo despite its actual design not being very unique? Whereas a dumb meme is the opposite -- terrible brand, but very unique.

The tool clearly can only look at actual visual design, not branding or any meaning within the image. And in that limited context, it seems successful. I'm not sure it is reasonable to expect it to go beyond a purely visual evaluation of the logo.
"Easier" is a relative. And in this case relatively small.

The server and DNS configuration you need for a subdomain is identical to what you need for separate domain. Possibly slightly more to manage if you are using the "naked" domain because of the DNS issue with not supporting CNAME records on the naked domain.

If you already have a wildcard SSL certificate for the subdomain a separate domain might be more work because you need a new cert and you don't if you stick with a subdomain.

The most work is actually buying the domain.

Then again, this is government we are talking about so buying a $10 domain is probaly three weeks worth of paperwork.
>Creative work is going to mobile in a big way

What does the author mean by 'creative work' here? Writing? Image edition? Video edition? Software development? None of those things are going mobile in any way shape or form as far as I know

> Losing PC gamers also isn’t a major concern for Microsoft, because again gaming is already mostly mobile

Casual gaming is already mostly mobile. Hardcore gaming is still very much a non-mobile thing, and will stay as such for the foreseeable future. Companies are developing their games (think Call of Duty, Overwatch, Battlefield, Dota) with consoles and desktops in mind. And regarding gaming on Linux, it's better than it was -- it was nil -- but it's still a joke. Go to the steam store page right now and see how many games on the front page run on Linux
The problem is an inability to synthesize knowledge from outside disciplines. The piece itself is proof. No consideration of the economic factors or sociological factors at play. Just inward focus and self examination unaided by the very applicable knowledge provided by other domains of study.

I strongly suspect this will all prove to be a self correcting problem. The solution may be closer than many realize.
A small percentage of the workforce is actually paid minimum wage and most get a better job once they have had the entry level experience. The idea that minimum wage should sustain an entire working life is a fringe one.
The author's point is not that his time was wasted. It's that the system is broken.

Sure, he could have spent a lot of time and effort to learn and adapt to the broken system, and his study would have been done, and fewer people would perhaps be misdiagnosed.

But the point is that it shouldn't be this hard to make the world a better place.
Mayweather-McGregor sentiment analysis via emojis on Twitter
If it were so great men would want to do it, instead of just telling women how great and important it is.
Using ISC Kea DHCP in Our Data Centers – Engineering Blog – Facebook Code
Your Windows installation is insecure full stop. No matter when you patched. Even if all vulnerabilities would be patched then there are still backdoors siting and waiting to be exploited.
The whole concept of "serverless" strikes me as a fairly stupid way of handling things. As much as we'd like to, it's impossible to separate absolutely everything from the platform that runs it. Although "serverless" may be great for a backwater operation that's looking to save a few cents and lower dev workload, any software doing heavy lifting is going to be made with the strengths and weaknesses of its underlying platform in mind.

It's only a matter of time until we're making optimization considerations the same way we were when we were still concerned with the underlying software running our programs.
One wonders which humans you surround yourself with to consider that "basic human behavior".
The Complex History of the Monopoly Board Game
I don't think I understand the project.
For most operational purposes there isn't a crying need for optimizations and handwritten assembly outside the kernel but a good programmer must at least recognize where something like this is called for and be able to implement (imo).
"If you do care about it, maybe you should be complaining much more about all of the corporations that are "Delaware" corporations to avoid state taxes instead of being corporations where they're actually located."

The corporate tax for Delaware is 8.7%. How can that benefit a company in not paying taxes? I am sure there are other benefits in incorporating in Delaware but does not seem like it has any tax benefits per se.
You can harvest the yeast from live beer and grow the yeast for use in your own beers.
Do you realise that 99% of consumers are not IT related?

This means that 95% of people who own windows do not care about all the issues you pointed out. I subtracted 4% because some people do not like the telemetry and maybe 0.001% dislike the fact that candy-crush is pre-installed.
Sure, but the cost of enforcing who receives benefits is orders of magnitude less than the cost of paying $12k net of income taxes to the large number of working age people who for whatever reason (usually existing wealth or partner/parent income) aren't currently interested in working.

This isn't just common sense; the data on working age economically inactive people, working age economically inactive people receiving benefits and admin costs is free and open for most countries.
If you want to eliminate the possibility of people who don't need to work choosing not to work, you should be in favor of a 100% estate tax before you should be against UBI. Make it impossible for children to inherit enough wealth to live without working, and get those lazy parasites into the workforce where they belong!

(or you could look at what happens when people are actually presented with realistic options for escaping the cycle of minimum-wage poverty, but that's a few steps of consciousness-raising away from where you currently are)
All these merchants are using a spot rate of the BTC to dollars or other traditional, universally accepted currencies. They are not using the BTC to price their goods and services, but they use the BTC as an extra form of payment.

At the end of the day, those BTC are exchanged into dollars, or even right away, making the the dollar the de-facto currency you used for purchasing the goods or services.
More likely that the developer didn't even think about it, I know I probably wouldn't.
You don't even have to go that far. One of the nice things about hiking outdoors is you get far enough away from civilization to reduce or eliminate city glow. On the off chance you ever get tired of looking at all the stars and the milky way, you can also spot satellites flying overhead, especially just after sunset.
Other way around: the sat system supports Bitcoin, not BCash.
Pitching OSS Development
As I said, I'm not complaining, so don't take it wrong. But that's not a «logo rank», that's an image evaluation. What it should do first is figure out whether it looks like a logo, or not; if it's a simple shape, with few colors, it might be a logo (yes, there are logos with complicated shapes and a lot of colors—the algorithm should decrement its score based on this criteria).

My point is that your tool is very cool, I wish I could do something like that—but that's not a «logo rank», it's a «how unique, legible and eye-catching the image you upload is» rank.
> since they're not backed by a central authority (government or bank).

That's a weird way of wording that. The US Dollar (along with many other currencies) doesn't meet the definition of a "backed currency", because it doesn't have a direct correspondence with the value of a commodity. If the value of a currency isn't guaranteed, it isn't backed. Instead, the value of the US dollar is determined by imports/exports, interest rates, monetary velocity, confidence, etc.

There are many other differences that the US dollar has with bitcoin that are more concrete:

1) It's legal tender in the US

2) It's exclusively accepted for the purposes of taxes (follows from 1)

3) It has a dynamic (as opposed to bitcoin's fixed) monetary policy (which is either good or bad depending who you talk to)

4) It's the world's reserve currency

5) It's far more popular than bitcoin

6) It's not deflationary (which is either good or bad depending who you talk to)
You shouldn't completely rule it out, but you should apply occam's razor to try and guess the most likely cause for such an event. Looks like the scientists did that and largely ruled out this hypothesis. Of course as long as we don't figure out exactly what created this signal we can't be absolutely sure.
Which is why Cryptocurrency is attractive in the first place.

I expect if you did a survey, a very small, very libertarian group of cryptocurrency "investors" may be concerned about governments managing their respective currencies.

The vast majority just wanna make money on the hottest new thing. A subset of those people might even believe in the fundamentals. The rest are just glorified gamblers.
Des Moines offers residential tax abatement on new construction and home improvements from renovation, a deal very similar to what Apple is receiving.
You're not used to it. It's about as remarkable as a liquor store or tire and lube shop to the people who are used to it.
The propensity to work is more of a social matter than an economic one. Also, most people today in the lower economic classes are over worked. I remember when I was working out of a temp agency with someone who had been working three jobs (two full time and one side job). I'm not sure the exact reason for this other than he had a child and his wife was also working part time herself. It's just scary to imagine that people think working is a virtue onto itself. I'd rather pay a marginally higher tax rate to make sure people don't work more than 40 hours a week and were able to get their basic needs (housing, food, healthcare). At least then there wouldn't be the chronic issues that poverty brings to drag down the economy as a whole.
I suppose that's why "even if" precedes a number most people will accept as a common enough phrase: one in one thousand.
Carl Sagan talks about this point in Cosmos. Life arose here on Earth pretty quickly after it cooled. So the thought is that it's not difficult for life to appear on favorable, habitable planets. A probability of 0.1% may be far too low.

Remember too, an earth-like planet can have lots of organic chemicals floating around, and you only have to hit the right combination once over millions of years to end up with life.
Do-it-yourself biology and electronic waste hacking [pdf]
Your premise is that anyone having children at all is equivalent to unbounded population growth. If literally everyone stopped having children, humans would obviously become extinct.

Moreover, it is generally considered a sound principle that successful professionals should be encouraged to have children. Whatever combination of genes, knowledge and resources allowed them to become successful themselves is more likely to lead to a successful next generation. And high income earners are more likely to accept paying taxes to fund good schools and other programs for children if they have their own children to make use of them.
IMO it's a mistake to view cryptocurrencies as "money".

If you view them as what they are, a commodity, you realize all you need is a buyer and a seller of that commodity. Whether or not you can trade that commodity for goods and services is entirely irrelevant.
I do research in this area and have many reactions to a lot of topics being brought up. I read this piece when it first was written and didn't think to look at the posting on HN until now.

The problem with dichotomous ratings (binary, thumbs up-down) is that they lose a lot of meaningful information without eliminating the problems you're referencing.

That is, the same problems apply to dichotomous ratings, in that people still have tendencies to use the rating scale differently. Some tend to give thumbs up a lot, others down, and people interpret what's good or bad differently. People who are ambivalent split the difference differently.

On top of that, you lose the valid variance in moderate ranges, and actually amplify a lot of these differences in use of the response scale, by forcing dichotomous decisions, because now you've elevated these response style differences to the same level of the "meaningful part" of the response. E.g., maybe one person tends to rate things more negatively than another person, rating 4 and 5 respectively. But when you dichotomize, now that becomes 1 and 2.

The question is whether or not, on balance, the variance associated with irrelevant response scale use is greater than the meaningful variance, and generally speaking studies show the meaningful variance is bigger. In general, you see a small but significant improvement in rating quality going from 2 to 3, and from 3 to 4, and then you get diminishing returns after 4-6 options.

Also, people really don't like being forced to take ambivalence and choose up or down, so in the very least having a middle option is better (unless you want to lose ratings).

It's fairly straightforward to adjust for rating style differences if you have a bunch of ratings of an individual on a bunch of things whose rating properties are fairly well-known. Amazon could do this if they wanted to, and Rotten Tomatoes I think might do something like this already.

RT, in fact, is kind of a bad example, because their situation is so different from typical product ratings, in that you have a small sample of experts who are rating a lot of things. They also are aggregating things that themselves are not standardized-- their use of the tomatometer in part stems from them having to aggregate a wild variety of things, as if everyone on Amazon used a different rating scale, or no rating scale at all. Note too that there's then a "filtering" process involved by RT. Finally I also feel obliged to note they do have ratings and not just the tomatometer, which I've started paying attention to after realizing that things like Citizen Kane show up as having the same tomatometer score as Get Out--a fine movie but not the same.

The game theory angle is interesting to think about. It's something I don't deal with usually because in the situation I'm used to, the raters don't have access to other rater's ratings. That's one solution, but impractical. A sort of meta-rating is one solution--a lot like Amazon's "helpfulness" ratings. It's imperfect but probably does well in adjusting for game theory-type phenomena, like retaliatory rating, etc.
Actually, I worked in such a project a long time ago and I had the opposite feeling. They just gave us a few cds with the code on it. There were some restrictions as who could use it and so on, but it seems they didn't really care.
I don't know about Australia, but this is completely true in Central Europe. An average Joe cannot tell how much an IT project can cost, so IT projects are the best place to "make your friend rich". See the slovensko.sk project (https://spectator.sme.sk/c/20429221/governmental-agency-plan...).
YMMV, but it gave my white square with the word "Titty" in black Verdana 72 a 42/100, so it might not really be especially tough.
It's not enough, because it's money. When it comes to money, most don't care what it smells like. That's why it's so unstoppable.
There is no step 3.
Gonna guess Sovereign U.S. forces on this one.
what do they mean by accumulated data? Are they mapping the raw signal to some other format that necessitates this huge file size? Is it recording the signal at multiple wavelengths?
Heh. Flooz would be the perfect candidate for an ICO and a cryptocoin. I wonder if they could get Whoopy Goldberg to promote it again?

(This is a joke.)
https://github.com/imrvelj/ng1-jest-example
... per upload.
And the right's fantasy? Everyone has a right to a gun, but we can't trust them with money.
> Folks would gladly take Pence over him.

Some folks would.
You're thinking investment markets, not philanthropic giving markets. Any think tank is competitively attempting to gain funds to stay afloat. Some do this by lobbying for grants, some by soliciting private donations. But there's a finite amount of capacity to fund think tanks regardless of the source of income.

Google can certainly find other think tanks they like better.
Understanding the Beta Distribution
Life started on Earth relatively early in it's history, so a high percentage isn't unreasonable to assume.

It took 4 billion years after that and several mass extinction events for a species to evolve that can send radio signals (and so far only briefly ), so even on an astronomical scale we might be rare.
Or maybe it knows users better than you think.
Australian cop cars already have fixed cameras that do rego checks... how do I know this... I got pulled over for expired registration and the cops told me as soon as the camera saw them while they drove past me it flagged up on their onboard computer...
The problem is, as you said, that it seems Drake and others like the sound of billions of stars in billion of galaxies, but when it comes to an unknown number for existence of life in a planet they pick a very optimistic number, to justify their thesis of abundance of life in universe.

Maybe they take the earth as an example, the life existing under very harsh conditions and deduce that it should be a good probability given enough time. But I am skeptical of this.
Just chiming in to say your username gave me a chuckle. Big Monero fan as well.
Trying to maximize earnings is basic human behavior, sorry to break it to you. Welfare scams occur regularly, and that's before UBI.

And you're dodging the bigger question: I'm on UBI and my money runs out, can't afford to feed the kids. Multiply that by at least several thousand people every month. Now what?
> I just don't see how that's possible, because inevitably there are going to be a lot of people with real or self-imposed crises crying about how they don't have enough money to pay rent or buy food, and what is the government going to do, tell them "tough shit, you should've managed your UBI better"?

In the UK, many welfare payments go directly to the person, so this wouldn't be a new issue.

Many of them are designed really just to ensure a floor people don't drop below, but combined with exceptionally high marginal tax rates and odd conditions. The marginal tax rate in many cases is 100%, and can be above this.
Most people simply don't care. It constantly surprises me how paranoid people in the technology community are about their social interaction and browsing data.
They likely understand that they'll have to legitimize this in some form, and it's really a dream situation for them.

It'd be easy to construct a network, either from-scratch or a fork of an extant blockchain, where they set up rules that allow them to manipulate with minimal effort while maintaining the appearance of independent mining and consensus algorithms. If they wanted to, they could pretty much already do this with bitcoin itself, which is still small potatoes to a state-level actor looking to disrupt it.

And of course, the permanent, irrevocable public ledger of every transaction ever is the ultimate tool for concocting false associations.

You mean you accidentally contributed 3% of the bitcoin that was used to fund a drug operation 2 transactions down the chain? Sure, tell it to the judge. It doesn't matter that we didn't unearth this until after you published an article critical of the Central Money Authority! That is purely coincidental.

People learned long ago that the best way to undermine a burgeoning movement is not to moralize or criticize its obviously-resonant principles or core properties. It's to build something that you can continue to control that appears to have those same attractive qualities. Meet the demand with a trojan. Big companies and governments do this constantly.