skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed - a reason wine bottles have a capsule in addition to a cork is to control diffusion.

The diffusion rate through the cork should be quite small, but might serve to help equilibrium. It's an inspiring thing to try... the plant of the long now.
Texas actress arrested in ricin case, sources say
but it would nevertheless be very difficult to obtain such a certificate.

Not if you're the government. Just send the root CA a "National Security Letter" and bob's yer uncle.
> Also if more than one percent commits fraud you could have a problem.

Yes, it means that the definition of "fraud" is too broad.

Most UK citizens have probably laundered money this year [1]. That does not mean all money laundering should be legalised.

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_laundering#United_Kingdom]
Read: did everything but risk himself to stop it.
Larry Page addresses PRISM
Stanley Milgram: The Perils of Obedience
Live map of every ship on the planet
The government want GCHQ to be able to do this directly rather than use NSA.

The government want this information to be usable in court, although we don't have the US concept of "fruit of the poison tree". (We allow evidence got from illegal wire taps; the US doesn't.)
>And the reason that’s not how it works is because we’ve got congressional oversight and judicial oversight. And if people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress and don’t trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.

The people shouldn't have to "trust" anything and surely not blindly. As is the case here. The people should KNOW about everything that is being done, and judge for themselves.

If the people have to ..."trust" their government ("Don't worry, we know what's best and we'll do it, we wont bother you with details, just trust us"), then we already have a huge problem here.

The government should represent the will of the people, transparently, openly, and under constant oversight of the citizenry -- not just of judges and congress. Trust should only come into play in very small doses into this.
Appeal to Authority, you're implying that NSA are more trustworthy than us, only because they say so.
Pimp my Backbone.View (by replacing it with React)
Somewhat related, the person to whom (presumably) the letter was addressed (Norman Routledge) recently (April 27th, 2013) passed away:

http://www.kings.cam.ac.uk/news/2013/norman-routledge.html
What does Snapchat need $100M for? The idiocy continues.
I don't buy Silverglate's thesis at all. Every long-form article of his I've ever read is awash in BS (for example http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732382670457835...). There are daft laws that people sometimes break and get punished for, which could not have been foreseen and for which no moral culpability can inure. Those cases are exceptional. But the idea that people are typically committing three felonies a day and effectively living in a state of perpetual blackmail is just not true.

He spends much of his book complaining (with some justification) that people such as securities traders have so much bureaucracy to deal with that they face a heightened risk of criminality through non-compliance. I think that both our regulatory and litigation systems are extremely unwieldy and that what we need is a bit less mechanistic proceduralism and a bit more bureaucratic autonomy and accountability but that's a far cry from the notion that pretty much everyone is a criminal.
I'm sure there are burner retailers that don't have security cameras on 24/7 like Wal Mart. Or even if they do, they may recycle their tapes more quickly than Wal Mar would. Buy some burners now--wait six months until activating/using.
I am a bit suspicious of the lack of algae on the inner wall of the bottle...
Didn't people say the same about instagram and twitter? There are services that have the ability to stick around.
I experimented with that too, but the character limitation was what made me go server-side. Cool project though, works really well
> Asked. Asked. And he could have said "come back with a warrant".

But if he said "here they are" or they came back with a warrant or a subpoena, there is nothing you could've done about it.

With regards to the NSA accessing call records, there is a warrant from the FISA court (which itself dates to 1978). In case of PRISM, there is voluntary cooperation by the companies involved. There is no indication that third parties are being coerced to cooperate just "because law enforcement officers say so."

The government accessing the information without the consent of the third party would be a 4th amendment violation, not of your rights, but of the third party's rights. But that's not happening here.
Shipping is tricky, but as someone go has worked at medium and large firms, I know what I'd do. Ship to some random company using their street number, with a fake recipient name. Walk in to the reception, explain that you addresses something wrong, show a fake ID and get the parcel. The number of issues with stuff being posted, misaddressed etc are huge at a decent sized company. There are always random parcels sitting around, couriers collecting, swapping, and delivering. I'm sure this isn't foo proof but its what I'd do.
I feel like after this report, we've been bathing in a sea of pseudo-denials. I've yet to see anyone say categorically that any of these reports are 100% untrue, which is unfortunately, very illustrative of what's actually going on.
Daniel Stone actually did a talk involving much of the same subject matter called "The Real Story behind Wayland and X". I'd recommend that over this article (which was partially written by the same guy). He's actually a really charismatic speaker.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44
One of these exists and the other doesn't.
40 years ago is not that long, some of the same people might even be employed! Also, what if Malcolm X had been an issue 20 years ago? Also, this is one we know about, what about the ones we don't know about? Also, half the equation is the surveillance in this PRISM thing. To enough of a point to be concerned: The other half can be extrapolated from actions during the war on drugs/terror, whistleblowers, iran contra, northwoods, vietnam, grenada, bay of pigs, chile, and generally messy law making. Some of these are dated, but that's partially due to one: my info being out of date/depth, some things not being released or uncovered yet. There is no real assurance that any of these behaviors have stopped. The burden of proof is on them. This news is not reassuring. There is a difference between secrecy and lying.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9845595-7.html

Disclaimer: I don't actually mind as much as I should. I somewhat OK with a cyberpunk dystopia because the closer to Ghost in the Shell we get, the cooler.
If anybody needs true, total anonymity it's worth reading this paper before buying any cell phone: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3607247/pdf/srep...

The paper shows that 95% of cell phone subscribers are personally identifiable from VERY little spatio-temporal information.

Another issue is that an upstream vendor could easily provide the government with the phone IMEIs and SIM IMSIs that they supply to BurnerPhone, without disclosing this to BurnerPhone. This would create a pool of phones that are self-identified as high-value surveillance targets.

If I was in charge of identifying miscreants for a nasty regime, I'd also watch for SIM card changes (an IMEI whose IMSI changes on a regular basis), and I'd especially look for cliques of handsets that showed the same SIM-changing behavior. As such, I can't help but wonder if swapping SIM cards might generate unwanted attention.
Also the bizarre photo in which he looks stressed out.
Why is it that politicians think that "not listening to your phone calls" is any different than tracking everything about your phone calls.

It reminds me of little kids fighting, getting in each others face and shouting "I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you!"
Now, with respect to the Internet and emails, this does not apply to U.S. citizens, and it does not apply to people living in the United States.

As for those living outside the US...
Google CEO on NSA spy program: We're definitely not involved
Right. At the end of all the debate, when the smoke clears and the dust settles, you have the rights you're willing to claim, and able to defend.

In this context, the issue though, is what rights should "society" in the large recognize and hold as sacrosanct. I argue that the basic essence of being a conscious, self-aware individual, with agency and self-ownership of your body, entails what Bastiat refers to as the "inherent right to self defense". Others are, obviously, free to disagree.
Why is it that politicians think that "not listening to your phone calls" is any different than tracking everything about your phone calls

Because there's a huge material difference, maybe?
Tufte Slams NSA PowerPoint
Except the NSA already gets all visa/mastercard transactions directly from their network.

Destroying the transaction on the vendor side is useless.
It's not really my _will_ that every single intelligence gathering operation be disclosed to the public. There's a lot of value in terrorists not knowing exactly what communication mediums to avoid at any moment. I think it's a good point that hundreds of directly elected people, representing the entire country, have known about this since it's inception. You can't just put every single government action to a vote, for several reasons.
These types of services might just turn out to be the "killer app" that pushes bitcoin out of collector space and into currency use.

People will already be committed to going out of their way to obtain extra privacy. Figuring out how to use bitcoin for the transaction will seem like little additional effort.
Who gets to choose the names? How do they prevent duplicates? Is there some approval process for names? I find this particular topic really interesting, specifically who and how a name for any top secret program is selected.
Still, according to Wikipedia the company is not spotless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#WikiLeak...

And its technology is probably far from being privacy friendly:
'Every day, our platforms are quietly at work helping law firms, banks, hospitals, law enforcement and defense agencies, regulators and enterprises of all stripes protect and maximize their intelligence and other core assets. '
http://www.palantir.com/solutions
Privacy or true privacy (which is it?) is a dangerous illusion? I don't know what you mean. What does 'as human as ourselves' mean? However the gist of your rhetoric could have been tailored nicely into an address by Stalin or Ceausescu.
Or as if that makes it true.

Wasn't there reports that warrantless wiretapping is widespread?

They may not be listening to everybody's "phone calls", but how about activists, dissidents, whistleblowers, etc phone calls? How about people active in grassroots campaigns, from OWS to ecology, etc? How about people that work at EFF? What about journalists that are preparing a government corruption story, etc?

Heck, they had files one mile long for people like ...John Lennon and MLK, back in the sixties/seventies.
How would you identify and disrupt terrorist cells in America that were talking with known terrorists overseas?

I'm not trying to defend the government, but genuinely ask, 'How would you do it?'
Not to mention he is being very disingenuous because that "oversight" is extremely limited.

Congress passes these laws in a hurry, trying to limit public debate as much as possible. Judges get pressed into signing whatever NSA/FBI wants them to sign (there was no denied FISA "general warrant" denied in 2011 and 2012, and probably none before either), and of course the president can't be trusted with this. He's in charge of it all.
It also mentions that the spying doesn't involve reading emails of US residents? So that means people outside US jurisdiction are being targeted?
Surveys of the American people show that at least two of his three preconditions are correct. I think we're going to have some problems here.
I'm a little confused as to what you're suggesting here. The best interpretation I can find is that you think IP will be replaced by a mish-mash of different network operators' ad hoc standards. But that hardly seems like something to hope for.
(At least) one party did not tell the truth - opinions?
UTouch - turn any LCD into a touchscreen, in an awesome way
They are still in a dumb phone world, where people use their phones to call other people.
Well, before the Internet, the police could get a warrant with just cause, and tap your phone. That would end up as a box of reel-to-reel tapes that someone would have to listen to and transcribe.

Now, in the electronic age, they could demand that the phone company keep records of every phone call made by every single customer of theirs, and have it uploaded to the NSA computers for real-time analysis using AI. Different scope entirely.
You are not required to use it all month. If you want to smash the phone, go for it.
> Why would you put genuinely private data on anything other than a private server?

I don't know, but people seem to put stuff like that on AWS all the time and assume that SSL will protect them or something.
So when is Facebook going to buy snapchat?
I trust Google more than the U.S. Gov't.

Who's lying? Confused?
I was asking for clarification on Greenwald's "barely defensible" positions. Sam Harris's gripe with him isn't really about that.
Here I disagree.

We are a republic. The proper mechanism here is to hold our representatives accountable. To me it seems absurd to say that "everybody should KNOW" about every intelligence program.
Meet Paltalk, The NSA’s Weirdest Surveillance Target
I can't understand the repeated use of "direct access". It's the kind of language a lawyer would use to qualify a patent clause.

- We do not provide direct access to our servers.

- We do not provide direct access nor is there a backdoor.

- O, but we do still pipe all of your data to external NSA servers. </sarc>

Every company named (I'm not just picking on Google here) has come out with the same overarching statement. "We do not provide direct access". It just smells of being rehearsed, and carefully coordinated to select such language.
I'm not sure how to read your comment. Are you arguing that we can somehow make the internet work better by having everyone use whatever routing protocol they please, and throwing standards out the window?
You shouldn't need to close the entity every time you move. Many companies are registered in Delaware even though they have no presence there. Other than that you will probably need a registered agent service http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_agent#Who_can_perfor...

I live in a state that doesn't have income taxes, so I have no frame of reference for how short term residency would impact your need to pay state income taxes.
> Releasing it only to the media companies is an odd decision, if you want to be sure the information will be made freely available.

Because journalists are known to sit on earth-shattering news. Journalists have the greatest incentives for making the information freely available.
There's that "direct access to our servers" verbiage again. I love how these people apparently think that denying doing something that's not the thing that everyone is talking about is going to distract and mollify the public...
What a ripoff. I can get a cheap throwaway phone with unlimited minutes/text for less than $50. I also can buy it with cash at any mom and pop cellular phone shop. I don't need I.D. and I can use any fucking name I want. This phone needs a fucking credit card and an address to deliver. Might as well put up a fucking sign saying dumbest criminal in the world! Leaving a paper trail all over the damn place.
Select2 - jQuery select box with search, remote data, and infinite scrolling
When I worked IT for a medium sized university we were asked by the DOJ to install switches that copied all internet traffic directly to an unspecified government server. We were told all ISPs (anyone providing internet to more than 100 persons) were told to do this as well.

We refused to comply obviously as the request was absurd, but in the small print of the request we were told we were not allowed to speak of the request and were to deny any involvement if asked under some unknown penalty.

I wouldn't be surprised if special terms of Google's interaction with any government agencies has a similar clause.
If this entire PRISM thing is fabrication, then it is the best thing to have happened to personal liberties and Internet privacy since encryption. Until the recent shooting in CA, all the major networks were going on and on about PRISM. No amount of money could have bought the kind of attention PRISM is getting.
Read the blog post. "Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period"
All I want to know what happens if I kill -STOP any client. Doing this under X while clients had various grabs caused problems. Does Wayland fix this?
You have NO right to complain if you didn't vote. Not voting causes cronies like Obama to get in office. It was obvious from the start that Obama was going to multiple all of the evil Bush policies. By not voting you consented to that happening.
Latency would make voice impractical.
He also glosses over the fact that cell tower location is included in this data. Most of the information that they would overhear in the actual call audio can be deduced from the data they're collecting. Which is kind of the whole point of the program.
>It's not really my _will_ that every single intelligence gathering operation be disclosed to the public. There's a lot of value in terrorists not knowing exactly what communication mediums to avoid at any moment.

Really? As if skilled terrorists chat their plans over the phone like casual people. They might get some young idiots, but nobody else. And those things are black swan events.

Furthermore, if every single government action was "disclosed to the public", there wouldn't even be more terrorists. People that get to be domestic terrorists would have less reasons to mistrust that open government. And the country wouldn't be made to invade, mess with other sovereign countries and get their people to seek revenge -- at least not without consensus.
Or he's just going to plead ignorance and maintain plausible deniability.
Larry Page: "the U.S. government does not have direct access"

Apple: "We do not provide any government agency with direct access"

Facebook: "We do not provide any government organization with direct access"

Yahoo: "We do not provide the government with direct access"

Remarkably consistent - as if it was coordinated, or scripted by an attorney...
First things first. None of them were accusations, as I know Zoho for sometime now. All of them are facts. Also you are not liable to reply as you are anyway a millionaire and why should you care others who come to you looking for cheap software alternatives.
Sure you have a thick skin to say that you are continuously evolving even after 15 years and no innovation or patents.
I don't think probable cause exists just to protect Sam Altman.
If voters in the US are just supposed to "trust" Congress and the executive, why even bother having elections?
You can't just put every single government action to a vote, for several reasons.

True, but we also know the moral/ethics of those elected (and how their campaigns are funded).
Ah, your link doesn't support that rather wild claim in the least. You're saying a majority of UK citizens are involved in some sort of crime for pecuniary gain? Absurd.
If you start by thinking you need to stop crimes before they happen, it opens the way up for much broader abuses.

When the government does want to be preventative, usually they just set up a fake terrorist who tries to recruit people into their fake plan, and then arrest those people when they agree. Of course, it's debatable whether they would have done anything at all without the fake terrorist, but it gets results!
There comes a point where you just admit that you can't. Bad people do bad things and sometimes you can't stop them.

Burning the whole village to save it, cure worse than the disease, cutting noses to spite faces, and all that.
> Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law.

Which is what is in question, no? If being in accordance with the law means keeping secret the requests you do serve, even if broad, means you're still handing out the information. You just don't have to put it in your, "transparency report."

Can't really say any of this is even remotely surprising given what we, in the industry of software development, know about what kind of information can be gathered and how vast volumes of it can be processed and analyzed.
Do you believe there is zero value to client-side JavaScript crypto?

There's a spectrum between "unencrypted webpage loaded over cafe WiFi" and "locally compiled open-source application". You don't always need the latter.

EDIT: Say you're using a web app that encrypts your data on the client. All the executable assets (html, js, css) are static and hosted on a CDN over HTTPS. The app stores your encrypted data to another server. Even if that server is compromised, it's still impossible to access your data without also compromising the CDN (assuming a correct implementation of the crypto and no XSS vulnerabilities, of course).

EDIT2: It would be interesting if you could sign a bundle of static assets that the browser could verify. Maybe as part of the HTML5 app cache. Like a lightweight version of a Chrome app. Add on a restrictive Content Security Policy and it sounds pretty good to me.
In the words of Jamie Kilstein:

"Honestly democrats, does Obama have to fuck your girlfriend for you to get mad?"
They can't say "we don't provide access", because depending on the law, they are forced to.

They say "we do not provide direct access", because as explained, any access goes through proper legal channels.

I'm not sure what you'd call it?

Remember language matters, and these are actionable public communications.
Here's an idea. Instead of telling us what you DON'T do, tell us what you DO do.
Aren't these the same words we've been hearing from the others, ones that ignore the concept of a front door, push mechanism to satisfy government demands that cannot be revealed without committing a felony?*

I'd be a bit happier if we were to hear from Soviet refugee Sergey Brin....

* That's one of the terrible things about doing everything in secret; we know that if Google is subject to a broad demand from a National Security Letter they can't tell us that without suffering terrible penalties. The government has set up a situation where we literally are not able to trust the words of Google et. al.---at least prior to a major figure deciding to pay that penalty for the greater good. Which history tells us requires a rare courage.
I wouldn't conflate legal with moral. Those are two separate questions.
Which is still pretty flexible language. "Oh, it's not open-ended access, it's limited to the conditions in the authorization..."

The Verizon order was limited to 3 months, for example, which is hardly open-ended... except that it presumably got re-upped every three months.
Software engineering -> Harvard/Wharton MBA -> McKinsey -> CEO
The obvious issue here is that if the order was similar to Verizon's, Google wouldn't be allowed to admit its existence anyway.
I believe everyone's using the term "direct access" in contrast to the access the government is already known to have, which is via warrant or other "indirect" requests.
It's not "direct" access, it's access through a one-way live xml feed
the name is awesome.
Very carefully worded & not a denial of the allegations.
Please throw out an estimate of how big you think a mirror of all Google's network traffic might be.