skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a form of civil disobedience, and hopefully people can organize legal and material support for those arrested.
That might be the case in general, but in this case they are just copying from the 'the wire' who themselves are copying from the official press statement. Which, I might add, is quite void of any real information such as the exact level of involvement of this guy and his pc. So I guess one should just wait for any real information to surface from him or his lawyer.
I never said that you outsmarted them (in fact I explicitly wrote "You even sound a bit smug"). See how you can read something that's not literally written? It seems that every single person in this thread has interpreted your comment completely differently from how you presumably intended it, but every single one of them has interpreted your comment in the same way as the others. Whether that's their fault or not, you might want to consider changing your writing to avoid this...
I wish it expanded on the first paragraph in the (new) second paragraph.

For example, we profile your browsing habits and what you're interested in, and sell that to advertisers who attempt to predict your interests in porn, our most lucrative information sharing market. Recent web browser updates have prevented us from directly querying your history, but our statistics indicate that you might be interested in child models.
Maybe it's the fact that it was a company vs a bunch of individuals... Perhaps Anonymous should incorporate.
I have no idea.

I see two basic problems, though.

One: I'm not sure you're going to be able to sell a pinball game that does not exist, in a world full of other iPad pinball games, based on quality. Why should we believe that the quality will be higher, or that we'll even notice the difference? You can't show us a high-quality prototype. You can't show an impressive resume of earlier products. You can try to find enough fanatical fans of the original PC games, but one wonders if there are enough who remember or care, or who won't be understandably skeptical that your port will be just like the original. And ten years is a very long time in gaming.

The other is a chicken-and-egg problem with the "lawyering". As long as nobody knows about these games the rights aren't worth much. But the Kickstarter model you outline requires you to talk up the games before you bid for the rights. Every iota of praise you heap on the games, especially on the oh-so-Googleable internet, is going to raise the asking price for the rights.
Those engaging in these activities are not being disobedient, they're outright breaking the law for their own amusement.
While I understand your sentiment I think these crimes are silly in comparison to the crimes perpetrated in all our names in for instance Iraq and Afghanistan and I can't help but notice that when it comes to stuff like this the justice department is very eager to do something about it but war crimes in general go unpunished.

Tony Blair, George Bush and a whole slew of others have committed far worse crimes than to cost MC or PayPal a couple of hours of downtime and they're still walking around free and are nominated for all kinds of prizes. The sense of injustice the existence of something like Gitmo gives me is much stronger in comparison to the part of me that thinks that script kiddies should be brought to justice (or at a minimum stopped).

Besides this action having no net positive effect for WikiLeaks, the article cited above already pushes the notion that these attacks were in revenge for Assanges arrest and that is precisely the wrong signal to send.
Unless you don't realize it is case sensitive. In that case 404s are the new pamphlets.
Zeitgeist 2010: How the World Searched [video]
Probability of this kid being the ringleader as opposed to just a script kiddie who get caught?
But those were lots of "warm bodies" that paid good wages and consulting rates. Within an hour drive of my home, in previous employment gigs alone, I can tally thousands of application developer jobs outsourced or staffed now by imported non-immigrant visa workers. Sure, lots were COBOL (yes, is still a lot of COBOL and old school DBMS like DB2 and gasp IMS running on the backend of major functions like reservations, claims adjudication, utility company billing and metering, charge card transactions and billing, etc.…) positions but a lot of Java and new fangled client/web application too.

The entrepreneurial startups create jobs, but mostly in one-off fashion, in contrast to the bulk of positions (and "IT" is not the sole category for such a metamorphisis) that big corporate Fortune 500 style companies had on the payroll (or funneling of funds to domestic consulting firms).

Yes, the world changes, and it is incumbent for knowledge workers to reequip, refresh and retool their skill set.
Why don't people realize that they could create custom URL's on Bit.ly?
"Underwear via the Internet?... Why of course"
So the Netherlands are going to arrest Mastercard for violating the will of its customers right?
I believe that figure includes Angry Bird HD sales, which retails for $4.99, not $0.99
Anyone remember old YouOS? Google apps needs a more desktop feel before people get comfortable using purpose web machines.
This is true, but why would that impact the effectiveness of the tactic?
Pi is wrong... really.
I don't think this was wise of Oracle. They only seem to view Java as an asset they can make money of. But I don't think it's wise to turn the tide against them for a few cents.
Civil disobedience is breaking laws, or government directives, that you don't think are just. It is definitely breaking the law, but many people and thinkers see it as a valid form of resistance to unjust laws and governments.

I'm not sure how well it applies to this case, but civil disobedience in general is more than just "boys being boys".
Always wanted to make an RPG game using sprites. Anyone ever tried?

I made a prototype a while ago just to demo some sprite movement while messing around with Node.js (it's concurrent multi-user): http://rpg.sleeperbot.com/
They sold between six and seven million copies of the paid version between the release (December 2009) and September 2010 [1]. Rovio sold the game for between $1 and $2 (the regular price was $2 but they had at least one 50% off sale and it now seems to be down to $1 permanently).

If we assume an average revenue of $1.05 per copy ($1.50 minus Apple’s 30% cut) and 6.5 million sold copies in nine months their revenue would be about three quarters of a million per month.

The above linked TechCrunch article has a seemingly more recent but unsourced number of twelve million copies sold. That would put the revenue at about one million per month.

I’m not sure how accurate that estimate is, though. They sold a million copies of their Halloween version in only six days [2], that’s quite a bit more. (If I remember correctly there was no free version of the Halloween special.)

[1] http://mobilewebgo.com/how-did-angry-birds-become-blockbuste...

[2] http://www.rovio.com/index.php?mact=Blogs,cntnt01,showentry,...
That's the best unboxing I've ever seen, bar none. Ice T should unbox everything from now on.
yep, full of inaccuracies.
The phrase "We’re just suckers for guys with crew cuts carrying subpoenas" in the actual real-life privacy policies sounds like this

"We’re just suckers for guys with crew cuts carrying subpoenas, of for guys who look like or sound like or whose emails look like they have crew cuts and carry subpoenas, or for guys who were able to persuade us that they look like they have crew cuts and carry subpoenas"
Dude, you used a story about your daughter, etc, to try and get a discount on the license. The vendor said no. That's fine, and if he or she was rude as you mentioned above, that's worth taking into account -- there's no need for the vendor to say more than, "No thanks, we don't do discounts except for educational institutions, etc. Our basic version should fully support your needs."

However, two points: (1) it's perfectly reasonable for the vendor to think you're trying to scam him out of his or her higher priced, higher capability software; and (2), using this as a proxy of whether he or she will be flexible and helpful on a larger order is stupid. Because you entered the door as a cut rate single license purchaser, and used that as a proxy to evaluate the vendor providing bulk services.

I've sold highly priced consulting services, and people who want cheap shit get directed elsewhere because that's not what I do. If you need help for a couple hours and want a discount, the answer is of course not. If you want 100 hours and want a discount, the answer is of course. The vendor is in an obviously parallel position.

Edit: you in fact just said the vendor was dismissive. ie you got butthurt because he or she didn't want to give something valuable away for free for a one off. Who quite possibly was a scammer. And you appear to be pissy because someone else didn't want to subsidize your parenting. Sigh.
Lanstein, that is a lot of cheese. A LOT of cheese!
NIST has selected five SHA-3 finalists: BLAKE, Grøstl, JH, Keccak, Skein
You raise a good point. As a lefty, I don't want to be left out. :-)
One thing they always forget to address: was this guy a botnet owner using his zombie computer swarm or did he just download the LOIC and filled the fields as the guide instructed?

It might be a crime anyway, but calling him a "hacker" instead of saying that he downloaded a program and clicked a button make people think in very different ways.
I was surprised that these devices have atom processors and SSD drives as opposed to an ARM chipset and embedded flash because the former specs essentially put it in netbook territory. Why would anyone want a netbook with such a limited OS?
This will (hopefully) remain one of those things I always wonder about. Just how long would I last?
According to the article, the police tries to focus on the active organizers. Not sure how they distinguish passive and active help though.
The TED Commandments
Willingness to accept the punishment that the law dictates is what separates civil disobedience from... well, from regular old disobedience, I guess.
What makes you so certain of their motives?
It sounds like you haven't done any research. Try http://www.google.com, it has links to many good resources.
I no longer have a dutch passport. This is because the dutch government has decided that all applicants need to present their fingerprints on application and these will be stored in some database.

This is against my feelings on how a state ought to be run and because of that I have decided to break the law. This affects me and nobody else. If there is a price to pay (fine, jail time) I will be the one paying it, nobody else. I think the big difference between civil disobedience and vandalism is that in the case of civil disobedience you are prepared to pay that price. In this case the moniker 'Anon' indicates to me that the people who are doing this at a minimum hope that they will get away with it without paying the price.

The dutch police are showing that that is not the case, it remains to be seen how eager and open the remainder of this group is to continue. If they sign each packet with their name then more power to them.
What are the specific problems with Flash and YouTube on Cr48s?
The article says 12 million paid downloads, right?
Remember that half of civil disobedience is gracefully accepting the punishment. You can't break the law and then argue you shouldn't be punished because it was 'only civil disobedience'- that's not civil disobedience. If they really believe in their cause, they shouldn't need other people to save them from it.
Where was his attorney (or is that just an American thing)?
Please don't turn this into a debate about Iraq, Bush, and our evil government. That's neither here nor there at the moment. Visa and Mastercard are not any of the forementioned and the people who DDoSed them commited a crime, plain and simple. The cost to PayPal etc is not known, but you can bet they (and their many customers) didn't deserve the "wrath" of these kids. I still think they should be brought to justice. What if you and your property suddenly came into the Internet mob's sites?
That's the US government's fault, not his. They're the ones who decided to make the offer to sell currency at a loss to the taxpayer.
Then how difficult would it be to create a new Java that has the features (syntactical and whatever else) that everybody's been clamoring for and calling it a different name? C# basically did that, and it's still around....
US Census data is multiple gigabytes, and well documented.

If you want to run a database through its paces beyond the point where all the data fits in memory, that's a good place to start.
I just used your web-app and it's very useful.
> It seems like the epitome of peaceful protest.

Surely you're not suggesting that all "peaceful protest" is acceptable, because it isn't.

Peaceful merely means that you're not committing battery. That's not enough to make something acceptable, and attaching "protest" help.

Your right to speak does not imply that I have an obligation to listen.
Is there no Dutch equivalent to the Fifth Amendment? In the US at least, it doesn't take guts. Just remember the word "lawyer" and any interrogation stops right then and there.
The author misses the key point of WikiLeaks: Assange doesn't which to make diplomacy public: he empowers any member of an organization to denounce its contradiction. According to a alarming report by the Washington Post, the current US Intelligence community employs more then two millions people — some who disagree with it and are ready to take risks like Manning. Countries with limited, empowered civil servants don't have anything to fear.

For instance, no nuclear engineer will even leak secret launch codes: why sabotage a project that your support? They might leak information about secret deals with nations that he believes his government shouldn't secretly associate with.

The goal of WikiLeaks (and this is why I commented here and not on the post itself) is communities like Zappos, where every worker is independent, criticizes freely, but agrees enough with the direction to remain loyal. What this prevents is having frustrated people like Manning approached by actual enemies, and have a similar access used for harm.
And I agree with Locke1689, anybody that equals IT with actual software (or system) engineering is ignorant of the space.

IT is a very broad term that can potentially cover most anything primarily related to computing. Rather than arguing what it does or doesn't mean, it's generally preferable to recognize the relevant meaning of the term in context.

Though in this case, he's right, it appears the authors are ignorant about much of the industry and are using the term "IT" to mean traditional corporate "IT departments" responsible for internal infrastructure (pc/email/network)
What kid knows to, or even can afford to, lawyer up? It may seem obvious to older, more experienced people that you should get a lawyer, but this piece of knowledge typically has to be programmed in.
I suspect it's a worldwide thing (America, too) that many people will say things they would be advised not to say, without counsel present.
They'd be making a bit more if they didn't spontaneously downgrade my account when it expired without encouraging me to upgrade. I got an email saying it had expired, been downgraded, and please could I could renew? I noticed, though, my account continued to work great on the free level and I wasn't using the quota at all, so I never renewed.

If, though, they'd e-mailed a week or two before expiry, I'd have just blindly renewed for fear of the downgrade.

The business lesson here: give people an opportunity to avoid perceived pain in advance, in case it turns out that the pain, when inflicted, isn't a pain at all ;-)
So they believe that not being allowed to DDoS is unjust? Otherwise I don't see how civil disobedience applies here.
Mirrored display face-to-face pair programming setup
My theory is that universities are compromised of the elite, and I think it's a natural fit for elites to think "hey, I'm pretty smart about my field; I bet there is some other really smart guy about [economics/the environment/healthcare/agriculture/...] and we just put that guy in charge of that he can design a great system for that that we can all live under and it will be just great!"
Fact check: the Fifth Amendment only means you don't have to answer. It doesn't mean they can't keep asking. Continuing to plead the Fifth when you're a scrawny 16yo in the face of a police officer in an interrogation room is probably harder than you suspect.
"To spell it out, a organization that treated a one off request for a discount due to non-conventional circumstances is a company that shows attention to detail, and a willingness to work with even the smallest purchaser to make them happy"

To spell it out even more slowly than other people have above, developers who do one-offs with discounts are developers whose companies go out of business. It's not profitable and not scaleable. It's not a lack of maturity, it's maturity.

If you are worried about your clients, then write a contract with vendors that specify an SLA for support requests. For enough money they should be happy to do this and it's a very reasonable request.
I've been in jail for several hours on a charge of tax evasion (long story short: I drove a car with foreign plates in to the Netherlands which was not yet fit for road approval, it was insured and otherwise ok), it did not make me suicidal (though they did take my shoelaces out of my shoes) but I was ready to do murder by the time I got out.

It had the exact opposite effect on me than what it does on most people apparently, I was ready to be reasonable at the time of being arrested but by the time they let me out of the holding cell they had lost each and every bit of credibility and respect with me that they ever had.

It was clearly a load of bull, they knew, I knew it, so I wanted to file charges and before you could say 'wow' I was escorted back out on to the street with a 'don't do that again' warning.

They would not even let me back in to file those charges.

Now, what a longer time in a prison cell would do to me I could not tell you but anger at this injustice is the only thing that still stands out after all these years (2 decades).
Also it's worth noting that the FB API's are notoriously down quite frequently, so you lose auth at that point, which may not be the user experience you're looking for.
2010 Summarized With Google Searches (Google Video)
> Is there a way I can just waive my ability to sue? I would love to know my weaknesses in the eyes of others.

If you could (and it was binding), HR departments would try to require such waivers.
I wonder if IT is being replaced more by 3rd party software than by outsourcing and offshoring as claimed by the author.
I think it is very appropriate to drag Bush and the evil government in to it because if it weren't for that we wouldn't be having this massive support for wikileaks. The two are far more connected than you might think.

Without the evil empire to play underdog to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks would be seen as a bunch of two bit hackers, now they are at the forefront of a movement that claims to want to improve society by enforcing greater transparency.
I haven't owned a desktop machine since 2001. My last box was an 800MHz AMD Duron.
What's with the recent fetishization of Big Data? I'm moving to Dziuba's camp -- its a developer dick size contest.
Great point. A mistake often partly based on not understanding marketing well. I hear things from clients similar to "Our ad looks like their ad—how come we got zero sales?" If you're still asking questions like that, you don't understand what you're doing yet.
Thanks for this comment Joel. This is why I love hacker news.

I was reading the post nodding my head in agreement and then I come here and the first post provides a perfect counter point to the post and explains why the blog post may not in fact be correct.
Why not use both? I'd imagine the more views the better for educational videos.
Rosie Redfield is another eurasian government hack scientist operating through colonial Canada. She claims to play the atheist card, but is a known eurasian cheerleader, all those gods be told. Her work is pseudoscience and can never be trusted or taken seriously. Her principle position in America is to take American biology for the holey sleigh ride through eurasian political hierarchy. Fortunately, she has no substantial chance of succeeding.
I think you are wrong about one key point in your first paragraph. In fact, these kids are not fully aware of the consequences of their actions. By this I'm not saying they're necessarily immature (some might be, some are certainly not), but some are jumping on the bandwagon because the bandwagon is both fun and packs just enough social justice to make the wrong-doing seem fair-game.

That being said, I am certainly against what's happening to Wikileaks and Assange. As I heard someone say earlier in the week: if this thing was happening in China and he was exposing that regime, he'd be called a hero.

Anon as an organism (no typo) is interesting. The fact that it is guided by the hive mind and not one in particular means it transfigures to good or bad depending on the general mood of the group. That is socially fascinating.
Or even a professional online video platform if you need more control over quality and branding. There are several providers who offer plans starting at or less than $100/month.

disclaimer: I work for Brightcove
Wow that was obvious. Thanks for pointing it out; I was not thinking clearly.
Voter turnout is the percentage of people who commit the act of voting for any party. 63% of eligible voters in the US voted.

Obama only managed to get 33.3% of eligible voters to actually vote for him. But got 52.9% of general vote.
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An interview I had asked my experience with large data sets and high traffic web sites and such and what I thought about them. I got an impression they were a bit shell shocked by the workload of a high traffic website. Many software paying positions and startup problems deal with large data sets vs. the small easy ones you usually deal with in client applications, many games, iPhone apps, etc.
What is the most expensive data you can buy? - Quora
Eldorado canyon is my local favourite, though I'm a big fan of most of what's in the area... (http://mountainproject.com/v/colorado/boulder/eldorado_canyo...)
Willingness to accept punishment and taking steps to mitigate that punishment are two different things.
Support is emailing your senator, or doing _anything else_ other than commiting crimes. I don't see why this is turning into Tupac.
Our country is broke, we can't afford the research. There are plenty of research projects out there that could be done on a zero budget basis, why not concentrate efforts towards these and use the profits as private donations to fund your pet projects -- instead of taxing individuals who produce a profit and forcing them at gun point to pay for your project? The reason is, because if you had to fund it yourself with your own money, you wouldn't be doing it because its not worth your own investment. Why should we have to pay for it then?