skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Last time I checked it's a staged paywall. You get X articles for free without any action, X+Y articles if you register, there may be another "free" stage, and of course you can start paying and that may have more than one level.

They compete with The Wall Street Journal, which is famously about the only paper that made a success of on-line subscriptions a long time ago.
Claims that keys are stored locally and not sent to their network. Applications not open source, no way for anybody anywhere to verify such claims.

These are for paranoids, paranoids may not be able to read the source code and verify such things, but the fact the at least someone can certainly helps.
I think the theme of the article was less that they have nothing more to offer but that the things they offer are rarely followed up on. They become disillusioned with the ability to get things done. That it's relatively difficult to get promoted into a position of power as much as it is to go to another company and try to get things done there - at the very least you get another throw of the dice with people who might be more inclined to listen to reason.
2 Axis Sun Tracker
Great read, I love the look and care of the writer in which medium has taken. I expect even better things from them on the long form writing platform in the future.
Hey, I hear ya. Much respect to the Radar O'Reillys of the world.
I've got nothing to hide

Got a handy link to that or similar arguments?
Google have also denied providing any kind of locker-room facility.

Also given slide 2 (talking about network traffic routing) it seems unlikely that it's describing FISA requests.
To answer precisely: I have given more than $50 each to both ACLU and EFF in the past 10 years.
The August smart phone re-invents lock systems
The terrorists do not want to see the U.S. turn into a police state.

The terrorists do not hate our freedoms.

The terrorists -- and specifically I'm talking about al-Qaeda and related groups -- want "atrocities against Muslims" to end, they want support for Israel to end, they want U.S. presence in the Middle East to end.[1]

Terror sects aren't B-movie villains.

[1]: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/military/july-dec96/fatw...
This article by Walter Russell Mead says a massive intelligence effort is an necessary corollary of Obama's position that the Global War on Terror is over, that we can return to a 9/10 mindset: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/06/06/public...:

Key bits:

"From the day he took office, President Obama has sought to defuse the war and decrease public concern about it....

"It is in many ways an excellent strategy, but it has one serious flaw: it leaves the President terribly vulnerable if a significant terror strike should succeed....

[ Details the intelligence effort required. ]

"More than that, he has to be able to act. If terror is to be nipped in the bud, drones must fire down from the skies. If the al-Qaeda leadership is to remain stunned, scattered and incapable of large scale actions against the United States, houses in Waziristan must mysteriously blow up. American citizens making war against their homeland must die, even if that means they don’t get to hear their Miranda rights first.

"President Obama’s core war strategy depends on massive intelligence capabilities that were undreamed of twenty years ago. It depends on the substitution of drones for troops. PRISM and similar programs aren’t a ghastly misstep or an avoidable accident. They are the essence of Obama’s grand strategy: public peace and secret war. To cool down the public face of the war, he must intensify the secret struggle."
This! Who cares if the laptop is a "burner" if you were caught on Starbucks cameras opening a laptop minutes before the communication was sent, in a place you'd never normally go?

Or parking up and walking past the bank next to the coffeeshop a few more minutes before entering the coffeeshop?

You have to be even more paranoid if you are on a short list of people with access to the information - they will pull up all of your movements, possibly check traffic cameras for your care movements, etc.

Long range Wi Fi just makes so much more sense.
I closed the popup and the article still didn't appear, so I closed the tab and found something else to read.
One thing to keep in mind about both Facebook and Google is that both were late arrivals to their respective markets... created by founders from elite schools who were able to get funded to build a "Cadillac" version of something that already existed.

This kind of entrepreneurial success is closer akin to being successful in finance and less about innovation than about mapping a set of ideas to a set of value props that appeal to holders of risk capital.

This is a highly "establishment" mindset... but since that doesn't make a compelling creation story, emphasis is placed on the riskiest and most personality-driven elements.

So it's perfectly expected that both firms act cautious and conservative in a situation like this.
>>> it is okay if the talented developer narrative doesn’t necessarily involve the company in five or ten years. That’s fine.

I always get queasy reading lines like this. In the US, most employers can fire at will. The corollary should be that any employee can leave at will. There should be no cultural stigma against the latter.

>>> humans are not motivated economically toward self-actualization

The RSA video that supposedly supports this claim cites research that is only tangentially related to full-time employment. I'm not sure it's as applicable as the video host thinks: I can't help but note that ownership of tasks doesn't come with ownership of the company relative to the value of the tasks. It's all about who started it, or who got big equity.

Am I the only programmer who doesn't like being economically exploited (in the formal microeconomic sense)? For me, it's demotivating to know I'm putting forth effort for which someone else is reaping huge value.

Asking me to stick around for salary only (and perhaps a few worthless options) doesn't overpower my understanding of economics and make me excited to drive someone else's value creation process.
FT apparently requires you to register to see your 8 free articles every 30 days. So you have to do something, not just nothing.

Any other sources on this story? The fact that the US spends $80 billion (overall?) on signals intelligence would not be particularly surprising.
git-stash is cool, but it can be easy to fall into a habit of creating stashes that you never come back to. When you finally list them all, you find 10, 20 stashes, and you can't remember what they all refer to. I find that situation nightmarish.

I prefer to make a half-commit (and note this), and simply rebase -i later on (before I push my feature branch).

Then again, I'm very comfortable with rebasing my work and how to avoid issues when doing so, and I recognize that not everyone is.
"Obviously we need to be careful here, but if that's the wording that was used, PRISM could be just that voluntary system to give easier access to NSA requested data."

Isn't that exactly what the leaked PowerPoints and original Washington Post article suggested? They had time-line when companies joined. And specific Special Source Operations seal for the operation and companies.

>The technology companies, whose cooperation is essential to PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley, according to the document. They are listed on a roster that bears their logos in order of entry into the program: “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” PalTalk, although much smaller, has hosted traffic of substantial intelligence interest during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war.

>PRISM is an heir, in one sense, to a history of intelligence alliances with as many as 100 trusted U.S. companies since the 1970s. The NSA calls these Special Source Operations, and PRISM falls under that rubric.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence...
Man able to view ultraviolet light after eye surgery
You can't really use the way someone frames a sentence as evidence for guilt. The terminology they used, like back door, was simply what they were accused of having. And the nitpickiness of pointing out that they said direct access rather than access is, in my opinion, crossing the boundaries of reason. We know, and have known for years that these sites provide data to the US when required by law. That would be considered access, which could easily explain the terminology.

Just because it's not the most sensational story doesn't mean it's not the true one. If we're going the conspiracy theory route: what if the documents are phony? What if the leak was made up?

Basically, rather than wildly speculating based on he said she said and the framing of a sentence, why don't we try to be intelligent and wait for some real information. None of this speculation does any good.
CNET is claiming the Washington Post & Guardian stories were wrong and the whole thing was based off a leaked Powerpoint document. James Clapper said the stories contained numerous inaccuracies but didn't specify. This whole thing is hilarious, especially HN's reaction.
why don't they target Canada

They do[1], but I agree, not as often. I've felt for decades that we need to stop meddling in other country's affairs. Remember, we've been a target for decades, too. Hijackings and the first WTC bombing.

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/22/world/americas/canada-terror-p...
Did Your Senator Vote to Expand the Government’s Spying Powers?
What sort of reporting mechanism? One of the articles (the one that Arrington thinks refutes the public denials of these companies, even though it does no such thing) talks about Google trying to organize a more efficient, standards approach to responding to lawful orders for specific data. That has nothing to do with this wholesale data pipe that is supposedly in place.
I think this is the third time it's on Hacker News or something.
I guess they've changed their policy and I didn't notice because I registered a long time ago. Not a good idea, there should be no friction until you've tasted a bit of the fruit they're offering. Then again, such mechanisms tend to make it too easy to entirely circumvent the subscription system.
I am not actually going to stand with them on their denials. I understand what you are saying but I think you are missing something simple, namely that the easier, cheaper, and more efficient you make the information sharing process, the more requests you are going to get. What Google is being accused of here is collaborating on making this fast and efficient.

As it takes less resources to obtain information you can bet that there will be more efforts to obtain information. If you want to avoid much of this, you just require hand-delivered documents from accredited agents to accredited agents, manual review of these documents (and perhaps shipping them between corporate offices for such review). Get a review for being thorough, pushing back, and not hurrying. Make sure it takes time, that lawyers go through them one by one, and send to another lawyer (preferably somewhere else) to cross-check. stall for as long as you can on every order you can. You will get fewer.

Google is essentially claiming transparency, while ensuring that the transparency report is increasingly meaningless because it is easier and easier to get info in ways that won't get into it.

Within Google's denials is more or less a confirmation that what the NYT is saying is true.
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what about the NSA slides?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-...;
It is and shouldn't be on HN.

There is a recurring argument that these sorts of paywalls are okay for submissions because you can run various circumvention techniques that remove them. Aside from the serious legal grey area there (it may fall under the realm of "hacking"), it is in effect stealing for those of us who abide by intellectual property rights.

Sites that implement paywalls understand that they eschew social news sites as a consequence. Abide by that understanding.
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> I always get queasy reading lines like this. In the US, most employers can fire at will. The corollary should be that any employee can leave at will. There should be no cultural stigma against the latter.

If you think about it, there's a pretty good reason for why this perception exists. Human social dynamics. Just like pack animals, we tend to ascribe virtue to the collective and vice to the individual. We've a fairly individualistic society, but still, jumping out of a safe and secure collective for an uncertain and possibly lucrative future is still going to be looked at as somewhat sociopathic. Even if it's the only way to receive fair compensation for your services.
> Outlawing is a meaningless gesture if the possibility of enforcement does not exist

Irrelevant; it isn't a right if you can't defend yourself in court if you're caught doing it and detecting someone using encryption is not at all difficult. We're talking about rights here, not "what I can get away with". You position isn't defensible.
Even though two people may literally "look at the same map", their experience of it will be completely different. They will both have different places to call home and work; they will have their own mental no-go zones and various other associations. If this article is correct, it seems Google recognises this and is taking it to its logical next step: literally changing the map for the individual.

As far as Google is concerned, services like this are very clearly what they are most interested in offering; convenient personalised digital experiences based on all the data we're willing to feed it. And, hell, they are getting pretty damn good at it!

Which is not to say that local community engagement is not a valid problem to solve. Just that, it's one for a different organisation.
Jacob Appelbaum: "Not My Department"
Who Says What
Obama, Xi Discuss Cybersecurity
I'm wondering if you could add Meteor to this list?
That's a good point. It does seem like the slides are fake and someone is trying to play the public against Internet companies, or alternatively, that someone is playing public against US governement.
Wickr, Onion Browser, Cloak.

https://www.mywickr.com

https://mike.tig.as/onionbrowser

https://www.getcloak.com

Silent Circle as well, closed source or not, given that one of the founders is Phil Zimmerman.
> the law does care what the average person thinks

In regards to battery; please do stop now, you've resorted to using nonsense as argument.
You know what the NSA loves best? Burying the real news in conspiracy theories so they can write off ALL the complaints. Feeding the trolls undermines the serious fight for govt transparency and civil liberties.

This post hurts Americans, for one person to build a picocelebrity career out of smearing a famous ex-employer
Recetas de atún encebollado
Sources: NSA sucks in data from 50 companies
Just so you know: I am german as well. Also, the comment is not racist.
Call connected through the NSA: Ars readers react
giving preferential treatment to the places frequented by our social networking friends, the places we mention in our emails, the sites we look up on the search engine.

This all of the sudden looks like a nightmare to me, post NSA Prism. You aren't getting that info from me. Not Google, not Facebook.
The public has unprecedented access to information b/c of the stuff publicized on HackerNews. Should come as any surprise the White House also has this access?

I just assume Barack is LOLing everytime I crack a funny on twitter.
stash is something that should be used for only the briefest of times - the only time I use it is "stash, pull, unstash"

If you want to save partial work to a branch, commit it, go do your work on the other branch, then use "reset --soft HEAD^" to undo the commit but keep the work.

Far more reliable
According to Cnet, they are telling the truth, and not in some weasel word sense of it.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57588337-38/no-evidence-of...;

They are already standing up for freedom in the way that we would want them to.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57587005-38/justice-depart...;
Best Way To Merge A (GitHub) Pull Request
I think the Palantir link is the most plausible, it's startling to see how many companies utilize their technologies (mine does, under the premise of being "AML-compliant"). The end goal of these cretins is to chain men with invisible, digital shackles.
Google actually has many data centers outside the US (in addition to those it has inside the US).
This is ripe for a crowdfunding campaign.
Cnet is confirming that they are telling the truth. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57588337-38/no-evidence-of...;
Probabilistic encryption
So they are crowdsourcing their business's core competency? Their raison d'etre is that no one knows how to right real world Haskell.
If Google says that Takeout has all your information stored on Google, and if NSA wants everything for Person X, why isn't this ideal?
Less than 6% of business reporting less than $5MM / year are audited. If the IRS might take especial interest in this business, we're getting back to why this business is getting attention from this crowd.
Well start will building a user registration and login panel. Then a way to upload pictures to your server. Then a way to share a user's pictures.

Then.. be VERY VERY VERY good at marketing and sell your idea.

Good luck. You'll need it.
Bit operations are a great way to store multiple datas in one place (you still have to limit yourself to 32 true/false flags though).

My latest use has been to store (multiple) categories of an item in a database in a single spot and do a quick search through bit operations (instead of joining to another table to fetch relations between item and categories).
I think the "real question" is whether people are okay with the government being capable of retrieving personal information that they thought was private. Public outrage is justified even if the nuance is not understood.

Moreover if the government is doing dragnet surveillance on telephone records it is only a matter of time before they expand the program to tech providers even if it hasn't already.
It does not really resolve problem for the fully paranoid. Instead (and in addition to) of service providers the backdoors could be installed to your software, Raspberry Pi, or even to silicon. There is small number of providers of any of these, so they are quite easy to be controlled by interested parties. Solution: publish designs, so everyone will write your own software, build your own hardware.
It's not too hard to draw a line between using information your company collects for business purposes and government surveillance.

Also, it's worth noting that one of the key features that helped Facebook take off was much better privacy controls than anything that existed at the time.
Recent reports in the Washington Post are incorrect and based on a misreading
A counterargument is that they have a registration wall that allows you to read a certain number of articles per month (currently 8 according to carbocation in another subthread of this thread). I find their content to be of sufficiently high quality I had no qualms about doing that some time ago.
The Guardian leak claimed direct access, which is the wording being used in denials also. It doesn't seem like a system for easier FISA requests, in the form suggested, would qualify as direct access. I said we should be careful, because if there really was direct access under PRISM this wouldn't fit.

Also interesting is that Twitter claim to have been approached about "PRISM" while all the other companies claim not to have known about that program. Would the NSA approach a company using the operation's actual codename? I suspect Twitter are jumping on the good PR after not appearing on the slides.
Government Loansharking
Complete proof that the government is using things like PRISM in a big brother sort of way, even though I dislike what they're doing now, I don't know what they're using it for - just yet.
After ExactTarget, Salesforce Buys Intelligence And Analytics Startup EdgeSpring
Hardest part is figuring out what's going on. Second hardest is figuring out what to do about it.

My path has been:

concerned bystander, protester, activist, lobbyist, and now reformer (aspirational thus far).

My advice to everyone is

#1 - Find your tribe. Working alone is too hard.

#2 - Learn how to organize, message, lobby.
Terrorist just want to commit their atrocities in peace, without anyone bothering them.
Looks pretty cool.

Except if I wasn't using bit operations on a day to day basis, I wouldn't understand any of this "magic".

Okay sure, "programmers should know", yadda, yadda,... What about some of us who just don't know because they didn't go through C and don't know what is an integer?

Sue me, but until three years ago when I began being taught C, back when I only used ActionScript, JavaScript and PHP, I had no idea a number was "a suit of bits" and not just "a number". Same goes for linked-lists, binary trees,...

Not trying to "dumb down" HN, but let's not assume everyone knows everything.
So CNET has a source who says it isn't true and the NYT has sources who say it is true. Who's telling the truth?
Perhaps, though as a general rule HN bars any content that sits behind a login/registration, whether it's Facebook, Quora, etc.
70 tonnes sub cannot float after designer put decimal point in the wrong place
I would tell anyone to watch the 'Lives of Others' - great film about how surveillance can be abused.
Yes: the freedom to say "I shall not comply with your exigencies just because you are powerful". This is what they hate. Because it prevents the fulfilment of their 'dreams'.

I live in Spain. I know something about terror, man. And what ETA despises is FREE people in the Basque Country, willing to say to them: get your shit out of my hands and my house.

Terrorist are cheap people, in that sense. B-series villains, really. They just hate people not complying with their wishes: i.e. 'free' people.

This is what each dictator hates most. And they are dictators: "I know what is right and shall put all means into play in order to obtain it".
Agreed, the non-profits are set up, they just need a big marketing campaign. Crowdfunding pages are good ways to communicate to general audiences.
This doesn't work in all organizations. There is a big risk that some workers won't do their jobs right given the freedom to do so.

In a nicely compartmentalized organization/application this isn't a huge issue - worst case, one compartment performs poorly, the people running it are replaced, and a complete rewrite of one component is performed.

This can be really bad in a more monolithic organization/application. Bad work in one component (e.g., a poorly designed database schema) will leak out into the rest of the system. Because others are building things on top of it, it will be extremely difficult to rip out and replace.
Why Apple Will Announce iRadio At Monday's WWDC
Barbara Liskov: The Power of Abstraction [video]
I probably explained myself badly.

What they want is to terrorize. Their success is measured in money.

Any economist will just point out that money is how most things are measured as regards human relations in a normal society.
Knowledge gap on my part...

I thought Tor was suspected of being compromised, since is was originally developed by ex-government or military types? Is this the case, is Tor actually accepted as secure and free from government interference?

Also, I vaguely remember concerns about things like child porn being handled by exit points. Were the legal or moral concerns resolved? Or are such concerns accepted as being a thin end of the censorship wedge?