skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Now, let — let me take the two issues separately. When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program’s about. As was indicated, what the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls. They are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not looking at content. But by sifting through this so-called metadata, they may identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism. If these folks — if the intelligence community then actually wants to listen to a phone call, they’ve got to go back to a federal judge, just like they would in a criminal investigation. So I want to be very clear. Some of the hype that we’ve been hearing over the last day or so — nobody’s listening to the content of people’s phone calls."

So, this is about CDRs- Call Detail Records. They are the atomic unit of all mobile telecommunications. There's no billing, no provisioning of data or anything without them. These are the most fundamental log files of all your mobile activity. They are in a sense, the primary key needed to enumerate all of your transactions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_detail_record

An excruciating level of detail on what a CDR can include can be found here:

http://downloads.avaya.com/css/P8/documents/100096784

Our president is using weasel words. Yes, obtaining CDRs isn't the same as obtaining your texts or your voicemail, but once you have them, you have everything you need for obtaining the content through subpoena. So, from here, we jump to this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iog5IeEjR00

"We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. Its not necessarily something that the FBI's going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation or the questioning of her."

Our political leaders are not worth defending any more. The whole system is corrupt. Everyone in office needs to be ejected, followed by the comprehensive removal of non-political government leadership. This country has beached itself.
"When did you choose to be straight?"

That's a pretty disingenuous question because if someone answers you "I was 10, I thought about it, and decided I prefer the opposite gender because that way I can have children."

You'll probably tell him "Oh, you're Bisexual."

So it's not a real question. No matter which way they answer you, you'll construe it in your favor.
If you believe in sexual self-determination (that each person has the right to decide what happens to their body), then how can you say people do not choose to be gay?
Now, let — let me take the two issues separately. When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program’s about. As was indicated, what the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls. They are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not looking at content. But by sifting through this so-called metadata, they may identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism. If these folks — if the intelligence community then actually wants to listen to a phone call, they’ve got to go back to a federal judge, just like they would in a criminal investigation. So I want to be very clear. Some of the hype that we’ve been hearing over the last day or so — nobody’s listening to the content of people’s phone calls.

So, this is about CDRs- Call Detail Records. They are the atomic unit of all mobile telecommunications. There's no billing, no provisioning of data or anything without them. These are the most fundamental log files of all your mobile activity. They are in a sense, the primary key needed to enumerate all of your transactions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_detail_record

An excruciating level of detail on what a CDR can include can be found here:

http://downloads.avaya.com/css/P8/documents/100096784

Our president is using weasel words. Yes, obtaining CDRs isn't the same as obtaining your texts or your voicemail, but once you have them, you have everything you need for obtaining the content through subpoena. So, from here, we jump to this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iog5IeEjR00

"We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. Its not necessarily something that the FBI's going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation or the questioning of her."

Our political leaders are not worth defending any more. The whole system is corrupt. Everyone in office needs to be ejected, followed by the comprehensive removal of non-political government leadership. This country has beached itself.
Or as if they are addressing the media talking points from yesterday... It was all over the news. Every channel was saying "direct access" and then throwing names like "Google," "Apple," and "Iphone" around.
General Clapper point-blank lied - or provided a legally-truthful answer so contorted it may as well have been a lie - to Representative Wyden when questioned about NSA phone-data collection just a few months ago. You can't take any statement by any authority figure on these types of programs at face value.

Obviously this opens the door to all kinds of unfalsifiable, paranoid conspiracy madness, but that is a direct consequence of the government's unrelenting commitment to maximum secrecy.
I agree, but what could Page say to convince us otherwise?

Either the government is coercing them, and they have to issue lies as denials, or they are participating voluntarily and are voluntarily lying, or they are not participating. The second option seems unlikely to me.
He will be escorted by the Secret Service, so he's not going to have a lot of privacy from the federal government either way.
That's not true, in Verizon's case they just said that they are under a gag-order: http://publicpolicy.verizon.com/blog/entry/from-the-desk-of-...
That's a pretty inaccurate mischaracterization of how those operations work. Typically the FBI doesn't arrest someone until they have planted or attempted to detonate the fake bomb.

Of course, it's debatable whether they would have done anything at all without the fake terrorist

Not often. If you read the transcripts of the recordings made in such cases (which are often attached to the indictment as evidence, or sometimes available in audio form), the sad fact is that some people run towards the honeypot at full speed. It's entrapment to encourage a reluctant or uncommitted person, but there are quite a few people who are eager to engage in such behavior.
Disclaimer: I don't know the truth about anything that's going on.

First, I'm not a US citizen. So, it seems I just have to assume that NSA is certainly tracking me.

Now to the topic of spying on US citizens, considering how no one seems to have ever heard about PRISM, the breaking of this story based on flimsy evidence seems to me like an attempt to side track from the real and confirmed story of NSA accessing Call Data Records from Verizon of millions of citizens (The industry calls it CDRs, why have we started calling it "Metadata" since yesterday).

I wouldn't be surprised (though I have no evidence at all) that the PRISM story was planted to change the public discourse.
Was not an NSL as that would be turning over data on a specific individual.

This was a request to install hardware to collect all data at any time.
Wow, so many weasel words.

So what would satisfy me?

"We minimize intrusions into our users' privacy by encrypting their data on the client side with good crypto algorithms and secure keys that assuming a secure client system are under the full control of our users."

Followed by a list of types of data, and which types are or are not encrypted in this way.

That comes close. It's not exactly PR-speak, but captures the spirit I would hope for.

Google could at least try harder to be proactive about protecting privacy.
You don't need google to answer some of these.

2. If I delete my Google search history, is there any way for anyone to access this history, with or without a warrant?

I would think google has historical backups they could refer to to pull out data that you've recently deleted.

3. If I make a Google search from an incognito window, is there any way for Google to connect it to my Google account via my IP address? I know I've done this in the past to prevent spambots from creating fake accounts. Can Google connect these dots if someone sends them an NSL?

Why not? You should already assume that google and pretty much any site logs your IP whether you are using incognito or not. You should also assume that any time you log in to gmail your IP is noted. It's extremely basic to do a db search for all gmail accounts that have been accessed by a given IP.
In Germany the publishers realized that it's a net loss but instead of doing what you described they lobbied a law [1] ("Google tax") that will prevent search engines from showing snippets and thumbnails. The law has passed and will apply from August 1, 2013 onwards.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_p...
Constant propagation is not really cheating though: it's a completely safe and accurate optimization. We use that in the PPC->X86 Jit of the Dolphin Emulator to reduce register pressure and use the fact that X86 instructions can have 32 bit constants (while PPC is usually limited to 16 bit consts, and 32 bit values are loaded with 2 instructions: lis/ori). If you implement it properly, you can actually brag about it :) (we have an abstract object that can be either an X86 register or a constant value, and instruction handlers handle these two cases differently - when they can't, the constant is loaded to a register).

+1 for IDA Pro. It's a shame this software is so expensive. The UI is actually pretty decent when you get used to it, and there are a ton of good plugins.
The only way I could think to do it would be to have it process the transaction in memory and never store the data at all. Make the running code open source, and make it hashable in some way so that when you visit the site, you could tell if the current running version is the same as the one in the code repository.
"We would never do this, not because the government hasn't asked us to, but because it's morally abhorrent. It goes against everything we personally believe in and stand for. Even if we were legally required to cooperate, we would resist and suffer incarceration if necessary. We believe in freedom more strongly than we fear the consequences of not cooperating with an oppressive government."

That kind of thing.
What exactly is harmful about the TSA? Annoying and stupid, sure, but as far as I can tell nothing more sinister than that.
I missed the pictures of the slides. That said, there are ways to target these services without involving the companies directly. Up to and including espionage itself.
Clients Don't Have to be Evil
Those options aren't mutually exclusive.
Do you really think the situation would be better if the government knew--knew--they could march into your house at any time and black-bag you with total impunity? I'd rather the doormat factor not be absolute.
HUR DUR XML IS BAD HUR DUR
This is cool and all...but can you actually even use this for anything?
To your point, PG wrote a complete essay on exactly why GROWTH matters so much to valuations - http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
I have a link above about about using PBDKF2 and bcrypt together http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/11552/would-it-m...

The user Thomas Pornin knows his crypt which is why he has 86k reputation.
The modern version of that is "it's just the metadata."

I don't think legislation is the solution to this though. The spying is done because it //can// be done. By using a web application administered by somebody else you have implicitly given them your access logs.

The right solution is more along the lines of bringing the power home[1], or friendly neighborhood colocation locations. If the Internet has 1M servers, they can monitor transmission at the large ones. If the Internet had 1B servers on it, they wouldn't be able to handle.

[1] Talk by Eben Moglen about the Feedombox: http://youtu.be/gORNmfpD0ak?t=1m23s
Hank asks NSA director tough questions about wiretaps, e-mail intercepts
Former President Obama would also have far more power than John Q. Citizen to make his metadata "disappear" if need be. I don't particularly buy this argument.
If Google is forced to turn over data to the government, but precluded from discussing it due to national security laws then the denial really doesn't mean anything. Right?
Why would you prefer bitcoin over cash for anonymity at a vending machine?
>> As for those living outside the US...

You should assume the US is recording all your calls. As well as China, England, Russia, Iran, France, and anyone else. The cyber world is spy v. spy. Large govt entities are collecting data on whoever/whatever they can. They are. Doesn't matter how benevolent you think they might be (or, even are). The big deal in the US is that it is spying on it's own citizens, which is a big big no no as far as the constitution and the mandate of the NSA are concerned.
They've stolen $300 worth of stuff from my checked baggage and don't provide any means to get it back. There are dozens of similar stories. Not quite sinister, but beyond annoying and stupid.
Uh, that doesn't explain how they're making money, or plan to. More users = more photos transmitted = more bandwidth = more money burned, and not earned.
So now you're objecting to the very concept of a warrant?
The Verizon order explicitly applies to calls within America between American citizens, which is why it was so novel. PRISM, as described, only incidentally collects information about Americans. This statement does not preclude the direct access to user data that the PRISM reports describe.
Bifrost : A Novel Anonymous Communication System with DHT
According to the report they don't listen the voice of the calls, only the "metadata" such as the numbers the calls are made from and to, and when.
This would be awesome for watching movies! Downloading right now.
Hey Alex, Danny here from StatusPage. Agreed, not the best timing! We'll have a fix for this in the future and to answer your question, yes, a custom domain would get around the problem.
PRISM is clearly not the whole picture. The Utah Data Center alone is much more than $20M a year and PRISM's specified purpose was using US IT infrastructure to intercept foreign communications, which would presumably be filtered from a large data set.

The bulk of the data transmission and storage costs are probably under another budget
Larry Page wants to live. And he wants Google to keep functioning as a company, and not e.g., to have sudden tax issues crop up with the IRS. He has plenty of incentive to tell an out-and-out lie in this case.
True, but he was called out for it and that viewpoint is considered loony. It prompted an apology from him.
Emails are the new landing pages
Personally, I'm really glad that Google published such a clear, plain-spoken post to tackle this issue head on.

This whole issue makes me want to donate a bunch of money to the EFF. If anyone else feels the same way, you can donate to the EFF here: https://supporters.eff.org/donate and I believe a lot of employers will match contributions.
Unless you can MITM SSL, having ISP access isn't enough. Remember, Google's the company that discovered that Turktrust had issued rogue CA certificates through Chrome's cert pinning.
I would interpret that as Obama casting himself in the position of an average citizen to garner a feeling of connection and trust.

I'm taking a wild guess, but I doubt that presidents get bumped down to "average dude" status by intelligence agencies after they leave office.
That URL is fail.
Sounds like Haiku.
Facebook's servers spend most of their time finding, sorting and then transmitting bits to the billion people who use Facebook. Storing a bunch of data and storing a bunch of data that needs to be dynamically assembled in real time for a billion users are two very different things.

Regardless, no one has theorized that the NSA storing yottabytes of data. The (still probably crazy) rumors are zettabytes.
You can't: as long as you have self mutating code (including loading more code in memory from another place), static recompiling is simply not possible. It's not a matter of being "better", it's the only solution.

As video game consoles start looking more and more like PCs, self mutating code starts to be less frequent and more easily detectable. On the Nintendo 3DS for example, only the OS can allocate executable pages, and executable pages are forced read-only. This means you could in theory do static recompilation of a 3DS game. This is the only case I know of though - all other recent video game consoles allow self mutating code or dynamic code loading.
In context it was meant as reference to the story of Bangladesh, meaning you don't know how lucky you are until you travel a bit of the world.

My story however, is pretty typical, I worked through my 20s and didn't take time to travel then even though I had disposable income and more importantly was in charge of only myself. When I got married, got a dog and had kids, traveling increases in complexity at O(an^k) where k is the number of people traveling together and a is the number of people you have to arrange babysitting (or dogsitting) for.

Now travel seems like a giant luxury an I doubt I will truly enjoy it again until the kids are in college. By then we'll be so bogged down with college costs, there will be no money.

I had the opportunity to go to China for work and it really opened my eyes about how little of the world I have seen.
How do you get the screens to line up? Or is that done manually?
Because the metadata about your phone calls is AT&T's information about you not your information?
Google loves ‘The Internship,’ but critics call movie a wreck
The "slippery slope" is a real danger when collecting data.

Once we have it piled up in nice data center it would be a shame just to leave it there, and soon everyone and their cousin will be lined up to get a share .. IRS, DEA, FBI and the rest of the alfabet soup. It has pretty much happened already with every government register and I don't see why it wont happen in the future.

And once we start to analyze the data we will see patterns. The guy who stops at the same local pub every day on his way home from work will most probably be scrutinized by both the police and DMV sine driving under the influence of alcohol is considered to be serious matter.

The fact that the pub he visits have the best hamburgers on this side of the Atlantic can't be seen in the gps-location log of his cellphone.

Once people who doesn't follow the ordinary patterns starts to get extra attention from them - the guys with guns and uniforms who have the authority to put you in jail - we will start to self-censor what we say, where we go and in general try to avoid sticking out.

This will hurt our economy, the entrepreneurs who wants to do things in other, better ways isn't there any more - they are buzzy trying to conform. You didn't find to many entrepreneurs in the former eastern block - nor will you find them in your future "balanced" surveillance state.

We will also effectively stop the any development of our society. Not so many years ago homosexuality was a criminal offence, how can the future version of the LGBT-activists possibly assemble, discuss and debate when the rulers of the country knows who and where they are and what they are doing. No more progress and humanism reforms.

We survived the cold war against the Soviet union without having to sacrifice our personal integrity or legal security, and they had spies, infiltrators, actively supported terrorist organizations across Europe and a military with thermonuclear weapons.

Our "enemy" today are a bunch of imbeciles with large beards dressed in nightshirts running around waving with a book that contains as much truth as something written by Brothers Grimm.

And you fear them enough to make the wet dream of stasi a reality?

"First a reasonable suspicion , then limited surveillance" is a principle that have served us well so far, and I hope it will continue to do so.

Unlimited surveillance will lead to unreasonable suspicion, how many honest people should get on the no-fly list of have their job/visa applications turned down for no obvious reason so you can "feel" safe?

Gentlemen don't read each others mail!
[video] John Merritt, Wood Carver
"They are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not looking at content. But by sifting through this so-called metadata, they may identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism. If these folks — if the intelligence community then actually wants to listen to a phone call, they’ve got to go back to a federal judge, just like they would in a criminal investigation."

So if you're not collecting names, whose name goes on the warrant once suspicious is aroused?
Behold, the world’s most sophisticated Android trojan
This always happens when people without any knowledge and understanding have the power to approve and impact so many lives.

Re: names of government bills, it's all a "marketing gimmick" to make sure the bills get approved. If you call it "Spy and monitor everyone (just in case)", no politician will have the balls to vote in favour and the press will have a field day. The moment you call it Protect America Act, everyone is screaming "yea"!
Oh you are so wrong...
People forget things pretty fast.
It's likely my own ignorance, but I don't understand the concern you're raising. What's the relationship between frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology and communication/antenna records?
Well… exactly. When you learn that a given woman has taken a pregnancy test, your probability that she is in fact pregnant goes up.

However, her probability is not affected by her taking the test: she takes the test for a reason, so merely taking actual action doesn't give her any meaningful information. Only the result of the test will tell her anything.

Similarly, if we're talking about your wife, you most likely know when she has sex (because it's with you), and maybe she tells you about her period and such. In this case, merely learning that she took a pregnancy test doesn't tell you anything you don't know.
I do not get why people are not using PGP more. It takes 10 minutes to setup your email client and put public certificate on web. It is just question of time until government starts using this data for "other dangerous stuff" such as tax evasion and not paying parking tickets.
>" A single 65MW datacenter with only 100ksqft of machine room space can hold all of the data in the world? That's not even as much power as one of Facebook's facilities in Oregon."

You're off by a factor of 10-15 on the square footage. Per the wiki page, "The planned structure is 1 million or 1.5 million square feet."
Probably true haha!
In the same way that you would expect "AngularJS for Node Developers" to include information on running your app using a Node.js backend, this has information on using a .NET backend.
How are they immutable? Given some obj, is obj.prop immutable?