skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But I guess the computer sophistication required to do this is currently beyond the abilities of the targeted people.

It is important to note that the group are not undergoing a technological attack. The government forces are utilizing their ability to investigate software piracy to physically enter the targeted groups' spaces and seize their computers. It is clear that running Ubuntu is not going to prevent them from being able to do this, since they had no issues seizing computers that had legitimate versions of Windows on them.

While it is fine to suggest that they should "be ready to discard their computers if needed", most non-profit groups that I have come across do not have the financial resources to purchase new computers if all of their existing ones are taken.
I read war nerd mostly. The rest of the paper didn't interest me so much. The unique thing a out war nerd was that even though he was too much to take for me, and sometimes I believed he was wrong, he presented such a different, enlightening and refreshing perspective.

It is rare to find in America any one who is truly politically incorrect. And the repetition ofvthe party talking points is so dreary.

But war nerd was genuinely politically incorrect.

How can you know what you think might be right if you don't test it against some one who thinks differently, and war nerd was so very challenging for me. Ill always thank the exile for that column.
why MSFT operating systems, they can just go and catch everyone with jail broken Apple ipods. and seize all computers, including linux and unix boxes stating that they were used for jailbreaking.
I use encrypted DMGs on osx, with specific folders symlinked to be inside the DMG, for example:

/Users/chip/work/company -> /Volumes/enc-base/work/company
/Users/chip/.subversion -> /Volumes/enc-base/dotfiles/subversion
/Users/chip/.ssh -> /Volumes/enc-base/dotfiles/ssh
/Users/chip/Library -> /Volumes/enc-base/Library
/usr/local/mysql/current/data -> /Volumes/enc-base/mysql-data

I don't imagine its perfect, but I know most of my important and confidential things are encrypted.
"On computers without a compatible TPM, BitLocker can provide encryption, but not the added security of locking keys with the TPM. In this case, the user is required to create a startup key that is stored on a USB flash drive."

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/BitLocker-D...
Certainly I think you could do it, but out of 100 business guys who decide to start coding maybe a couple will outpeform those who use their skills to manage dedicated resources. Some will just create an app that a dedicated developer will have to fix at some point. Some will find that it's easy to get into but very hard to master, and just give up.

However, getting into it will be priceless. You'll hopefully develop more of an insight into how tough a given problem is, or isn't. Developers will be less able to BS you (e.g. "we should just rewrite it from scratch"). It'll reduce your risks and help you to interview developers. Hey, and you're young so you definitely have time to learn any skill you want, given enough effort. At 50, more likely a waste of your time. In your 20's (my assumption from your pic) - why not. Good luck.

Btw, I'm a long-time developer that has a post-grad business degree and keeps my foot firmly in both camps! Keeping up with the technical aspects takes up a lot of time, especially if I want to build something useful in a given area.
Yes I do (since a few months):

- http://agilewebsolutions.com/knox (one vault per client) on Mac OS X, including all db data if any

- http://agilewebsolutions.com/products/1Password for all small-sized sensitive data (eg: production access, passwords etc), with an automated crypted backup

I'm looking for a reliable and as seamless solution for Windows at my pace (not a big need).

Something I'm also looking at is a way to securely erase all the free space on Mac OS X (to remove past data), as well as something that really works to find sensitive data (where I could define what sensitive means).
There's also http://twitter.com/newsyc20 and http://twitter.com/hackerlinks
I think you may be overestimating the difference between one language and another. There are differences between the BASICs of the 80s and (say) the bash scripts of today, but they're not as big as surface syntax would initially seem to suggest. BASIC back then taught one thing well, unstructured imperative code, well enough that a BASIC programmer, believe it or not, wouldn't have felt it too big a jump to move straight to assembler programming, which would have been the next logical progression to eke out decent performance on the severely resource-constrained microcomputers of the day.

The biggest difference between programming then and now is the size of our problems, and consequently, the number of abstraction tools in our languages. But there is a relatively small set of abstractions known to work well, and a substantial subset of them crop up in almost all languages. Learning all of a Python or Ruby or Javascript, and knowing how to use it well and in a structured way, would cover a good, say, 60% of various concepts of imperative, functional and object-oriented programming, such that you could move to any of the others (in that set) without much trouble.
Go That Way, Really Fast
Arrington's post seemed unnecessarily condemning of craigslist. Why should a listings website be burned at the stake for removing adult services?

I can't make the connection between "that kind of emotion", or rather, craiglist's decision to remove a section from its listings and "weakening a country". I know that it is hyperbole, but is America really less of a nation because craigslist doesn't have an adults services section?
The ability to write good, useful software does not come over night. A lot of people on this site have been programming for a long time.

It's not because you're a business guy that you'll probably never build anything useful, but because you haven't invested the time most programmers-of-useful-software have. Programming skill is mainly a function of time with an intelligence multiplier. The number of things within the world of programming that you don't know you don't know, is staggering. And you need to know a large amount of inter-related pieces of knowledge to build anything useful.

As an example, I recently built a 'web application' which will send a student an email when a college course that they want opens up at Virginia Tech (http://hokienotify.me). I haven't worked on it in a while, but it took me about three days to write from conception to what you see now.

Let me list the technologies/bodies of knowledge that are involved in this relatively simple application.

- Front end
- HTML/CSS/jQuery (Javascript)
- PHP
- Form validation and other data sanitation
- UX/UI
- Back end
- Python
- Regular Expressions
- MySQL
- Linux server administration
- Apache
- Bash scripting
- Cron

It only took me three days to write, but in reality, it took me 10 years.

To reiterate, it's not because you're a business guy, but because it's a long journey from "Javascript is like Java but simpler" to a real, useful piece of software.

Edit: I hope I'm not being discouraging. Programming is fun, and you should definitely continue with it. As you work at it, you get better. Good luck!
You may need to ensure your databases (eg mysql) don't have data that require attention, too.

That's why I'm slowly moving from a general mysql/mongo/redis instance toward a per-folder instance that I run when I need it.
Hope IE 9 Beta Launch On September 15 2010 | Latest Cool Tricks Tips Window
The only thing that i care about is that it helps a lot for doing incremental searches, e.g. if you are searching for someone, you can add keywords like their occupation, university expertise and it works really well.

most of the ppl crying over this are doing this because now there SEO is all messed up and people can look for things that they want much more efficiently. Consider so many people who rather looked at results that they got rather than modifying their searches. also people will choose top 5-6 results, so if your results are not in top 5-6 they are worth much less.

All this talk is nothing but google hate.
if you just dont want to use this feature press enter every time you type.
Any idea on how will Google Instant affect SEO?
Hey, to be fair, I googled "Java vs Javascript" before I wrote that. Here's what I read:
http://www.htmlgoodies.com/beyond/javascript/article.php/347...

That's why I put "apparently" :D
I use Truecrypt but there's also FreeOTFE, which is supposed to be "more" open source than TC.

I don't use whole-disk encryption but I have almost all my applications on the encrypted partition, thanks to PortableApps (http://portableapps.com/). As a bonus it's very easy to backup all my PortableApps data, as well as take everything on an external drive and start working on a different computer (provided it has Truecrypt).

Edit: link to FreeOTFE: http://www.freeotfe.org/
Not meaning to be a jackass but realize that maybe if you downloaded (and maybe already deleted!) that porn video with that girl that might or not might be 18 you could be in big troubles if you don't have your full disk encrypted.

Edit: or other things that would be ok but can be used against you by law enforcement, for example what about your collection of pirated MP3s or DivX?

Is this more acceptable than accidentally downloading porn with someone that might look underage? (Or having looked at it because some trolled linked it to you)
Whenever reflection can be avoided, it should be. What makes it icky is that developers then need to worry about how they name their variables. It shouldn't be a problem so long there's a convention established.

Personally, when passing a lot of parameters, I condense them into a "Holder" class:

$holder->var1 = "foo";
$holder->var2 = "foo";
//or set from array
$holder->addArray(array("var1"=>"foo", "var2"=>"foo"));
//later on, retrieving values
$holder->useStrictMode(true); //optional: throws exception if key isn't present (rather than returning null)
echo $holder->var1;
echo $holder->var2;
echo $holder->var3; //throws exception that var3 was expected to be present

It's worked well for me. It's also very handy for returning multiple values and status codes.
This was more then 20 years ago (this hurts). There are many ways one could imagine to change these rules today in the way the killing is performed. Since most people have today phones with numeric camera capture devices, killing could be changed into taking a picture of the target in a particular condition. For instance one variant could be called paparazzi where the hitman is a team of two players of opposite sex randomly combined that will have to cooperate. The killing could be taking a picture of a stolen kiss on the cheek or a photo bombing which could become a parallel contest. Replace the umbrella by a big colorful hat or anything alike which attracts attention and is funny. Those games should of course always respect the law, culture and rules of the place and require explicit (signed) prior consent of the players. The target should then be implicitly given ownership of the photo by game rules and be able to decide of their use. People should never be/feel constrained to play the game.

So the first fundamental rule of such type of real life games should be respect of the players and social context.

In the virtual worlds (i.e. WoW) one can erase the avatar and create a new one from scratch. In real life this is not possible, and interferences with other activities (family, study and professional) may become devastating by accident or youth naivety. Organizers should take their responsibility very seriously. Otherwise the limit is just imagination. The first aim of such type of game is to be fun and provide good laughs and catalyze social contacts.

In some contexts where ostensible extravagant behavior is not tolerated, i.e. army, business, the game could be changed into assigning a random secret (i.e. word) to each player with the hitman playing then as a spy that has to find out that secret by any means (except water boarding of course, although...). This could be a good game to entertain people and be useful by training their vigilance to what they say and where, etc.

The business idea could then be to provide a web service to manage the game, assign random secrets (i.e. word, object, concept) and a mean for the spy to check his finding with eventually a limited number of tests. This type of game could help socialize but also contribute to train people to hold defense/trade secrets.

Have fun...
6 of the Best Free Linux Archive Managers
To those who use single folder encryption or recommend it you at serious risk. Applications leak data, they write temporary files in places you never expect etc.

Folder based encryption will not provide protection, only whole disk encryption.
I've got 2 ideas for you, which I would absolutely do if I had the time to do them.

1) Feedback Loop: Users submit URLs and ask for feedback on them. Each time they provide a feedback for an other submission, they get to view a feedback provided on theirs (hence the loop).

You can fine tune the system by having feedback receivers rate the feedback they've recieved (better feedback = more points for the person who wrote it = they get to see more feedback on their post or their post gets pushed to top).

I think it's a beautiful and self-enforced "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" idea.

2) Graffiti: This is a bookmarklet that allows a user to draw on top of a webpage (probably requires transparent flash). Of course, they can view other people's graffitis as well.

This would be pretty awesome, and has a lot of game aspects to it that would make it extremely addictive. For example, you could notify a user if anybody writes over their graffiti (eg, starting turf wars), and you could keep a record board for "most pages graffiti'd" and "most area covered", etc.

I feel like there's a very real possibility this could go viral and stay popular. And, I've got an awesome domain name for it. E-mail me if you're interested.
I think this approach can lead to kill start-up potential at the beginning. A founder is an entrepreneur and if a company has no money - because of it has insufficient revenues - than the founders must deal with the fact to not touch their company bank reserve except for eating :)
So for #1 I would say: no income except for eating and sleeping. For my company - as a founder - I would do that way.
Massimo Sgrelli
I use encrypted LVM on linux which works great. I've used TrueCrypt in the past and that works too, although I had some stability problems with the software in Windows.
If you can keep a high enough margin in your checking account (which I'm sure you can if you're cutting a grand to Sallie at a crack) you can just set to auto pay your credit card bill in full each month. Assuming your bank offers the feature.

With this and some elementary math skills you can safely use a credit card. Also generating some perks and a good history with it.

Don't get me wrong, the #1 used thing in my wallet is my check card, but you don't have to be terrified of the other plastic either.

How many times has your check card saved you from recklessness? For example, "I'm sorry sir your debit card was declined, you have no money." "Oops, I totally forgot what my balance was."

If this doesn't happen with your check card, I'm pretty sure you can keep yourself from getting over your head with credit cards too.
"His SEO knowledge lends his conclusion credibility."

No. What lends a conclusion of profitablity credibility is numbers that make sense and not much else.
Yup, that's what I'm thinking. I mean, its one employee and me, so if we are doing well, he probably deserves something anyhow.
> meaningless searches (that I don't even look at)

One of my complaints is that I do look at those searches, which derail me. Those results, along with some of the completions, are often related and interesting, but not actually what I was looking for, so I go off on a distraction quest with "oh, that's interesting", before I finish actually searching for what I had intended to search for. Possibly a personal failing, but I definitely so far feel like Google Instant is adding one more distraction to an already-distracting internet.

It sometimes feels like a Google Instant version of the six degrees of Wikipedia game: which topics completely unrelated to what I'm supposed to be doing can I reach via one- to three-word prefixes of search phrases I'm legitimately looking for as part of something productive?
My eyes would bleed all to frequently if this gem didn't exist.
What this comes down to, really, is that people are bad at statistics. The birthday "paradox" is a good example of this; another I like is that in a random bridge hand, there's a ~67% chance that you'll have three cards of the same value and a ~71% chance that you and your partner together will have all four cards of some value.
I started using ecryptfs on my /home partition when my last laptop got stolen. I suspect there's some potential for leakage through /tmp and swap, but I suspect most likely attackers aren't that sophisticated. Should I be concerned? Are there easy ways to plug the gaps?
An encrypted disk could also get you in a position where you have to give up your password. Be careful with your porn-filled encrypted hard drive.
Terrible examples. He says "Sparklines (...) are small infographics designed to convey large amounts of information "inline" with the text" and then shows a big graph. He then continues "From the general shape the graph, the reader is able to get a sense for the general trend (upwards)" which is absolutely not true. The graph is too wide to see the upwards trend easily and since there are no horizontal guide lines I say most people don't notice it.

There is some news site that embeds tiny sparklines of company's stock history actually inline with the text. That's good use of them.
This Is Your Brain, This Is Your Brain On Internet
NYT uses a free subscription wall to make sure I don't read their articles.
No. 0: Communicate Clearly and Effectively

Branson omits the unspoken secret to business success: good communication skills. He succeeded in business because he learned the art of getting his points across clearly and efficiently. True, the advice in his article is rather general, but that's also its beauty. It's easier to agree with a simple point than it is to agree with a complex composition of points. The point being, it's usually best to get people to agree with you to accomplish anything.

Simple ideas are quickly understood most clearly. Reading through the article, I couldn't help but notice how efficiently Branson gets his points across. I suspect this same approach serves him well in business, convincing partners to sign deals, customers to buy products, and employees to continue doing a great job.
I am using Espionage (http://www.taoeffect.com/espionage/) on my Mac. Working great, I wanted to avoid whole-drive encryption for performance reasons and only encrypt what is necessary (my work related files, pictures, videos, etc).
Building a Multi-Million Dollar Business with No Funding: StudentofFortune.com
This is an admirable idea, but for most people, it's just not practical, and from reading your post, I think you would fall under the "most people" category.

I, and everyone else here, totally understand your goal, but what you're trying to do is epic. A better goal would be to find a person, who is experienced, cross platform, and honest, who can guide you through your issues.

The idea that you are going to handle these things on yourself is just a non-starter. Or, aka, how corporate north america runs, except this way, its you, not the shareholders who have to pay for it.
Not in every country, not in Italy for sure.
Anyway truecrypt-like systems gives you plausible deniability since you can have a "decoy" system.

Fortunately that is not my case but I can't say I don't have any MP3s of DivXs that aren't, err, properly licensed.

Edit: or cracked software, we have very high fines in Italy for using softwares without a license.

I'm just saying that in case the police have a look to your laptop and they WANT you to charge with something, they will.
Linux - dm-crypt. If I could, I'd make full-disk encryption mandatory for all business use laptops. I work for a smaller shop, so a developer or two usually ends up going to a trade show.

With full source and a build environment for our product on their laptop. That makes me paranoid about loosing a laptop in the chaos of a trade show, while our booth is surrounded by our competitors.
Since most of my life exists in one way or another on my hard disk, I consider it to be an absolute must to encrypt the drives.

I’m using PGP Whole Disk Encryption http://www.pgp.com/products/wholediskencryption/index.html, which works perfectly. I prefer it over OS X’s FileVault feature since it just protects everything and is completely transparent to the system and the user.

And, btw, I’m still hoping for a mobile OS besides BlackBerry’s that provides a reasonable secure encryption option.
Also, I remember I have read an article about some guy that had some pics of their little childrens sometimes naked in an "innocent" way on a trip.

They had their children taken away because they went to a photo shop to have the film developed and the clerk called the police.
Building things from scratch can require a lot of skill that may take a long time to acquire, but it is certainly valuable to learn how to code so you can at least maintain code you bought or hotfix things when something goes wrong.
also, you'll be able to judge a developer on his factual skill and not on some proxy.
A related tip: I use a True Crypt (file) volume to store all my personal stuff, in particular a scanned version of everything ever sent to me in the post (tax stuff, bank stuff). I highly recommend this practice (scanning everything to an encrypted volume). The files stay organised - unlike my paper records ever did. It's trivial to have a complete copy of you're personal files at work... which can come in remarkably handy and of course it's secure and backing up is easy (just copy the file).
Also, modern submarines have been known to stay submerged for > 100 days. A nuclear submarine is limited only by its food supply and psychological needs of its crew.

http://encyclopedia.stateuniversity.com/pages/21428/submarin...
Every time he talks to people, he's exercising the linkbait strategy. If it works online, why not offline? Salesmen already know this. Do startup entrepreneurs? When people are listening and understanding, they're ready to be converted into satisfied users and/or customers.

Linkbait is slightly slimy, but it's also a proven success strategy.
As a semi-professional nude photographer I have encrypted every hard disk I own, including my laptop's. It's part of my promise to the customers to keep their photos really safe. I am using Ubuntu and LuKs on all my machines because I find it very convenient to have a superb encryption mechanism built in.

As a side note, I do all my picture editing in Gimp. While this is not commom among professional photographers, it contributes in some ways to my landmark style.
Exactly. If you ignore the hype, Quickbooks online provides descent app and info for $9.95 a month, and really killer features for $34. More than enough.
Cashflow etc are the basics.
what law would they be breaking?