skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No it isn't. You can run it through plagiarism software which is specifically designed to take into account scenarios like your suggest and it'll be flagged.

For example why do they all use the word "provide" there are hundreds of synonyms that work just as well ("given", "enabled", "allowed", "have", etc.). They weren't accused of "providing" the access, it's a word they've chosen to use.

The specific accusation was about the NSA, why are the denials using "government agencies" or synonyms rather than NSA. There might be perfectly valid reasons, but the chance that they'd all make the same decision to use it independently ?

Why are they all in current tense rather than "we have never x" ?

If there were on or two similarities it might be coincidence, but we're talking about dozens of grammatically and phrasing choices.
No One Has Noticed That 1,000 People Were Laid Off From Mobile Ad Companies
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I'll be adding licensing in the next month or two :)
Not at this point, sorry :(
There is a big issue with as-need-bases systems. It requires security clearance on their google counterpart side.

Every time NSA, FBI requests user's private info from google they'll [the government] be divulging the identity of a suspect or a potential suspect. This leads to potential leaks or potential reputation damage. Imagine if a congressman or famous CEO is under investigation. So the person/people inside google ought to have the same clearance OR google would need to give a back door access to the government. Which is why I don't believe google.

If google is sincere about their position, they should setup their systems so that no one but the user(owner) would ever be able to access their private data.
Actually it is 75 tons too heavy, they stretched the sub out to get more buoyancy but now they have NO IDEA how heavy it really is ..
Since we all start out as "females" in the womb, I guess it's possible that some environmental factors can obstruct whatever process is supposed to go on for for a full "conversion" of female -> male. That way you could get an individual that is homosexual, bisexual, hermaphrodite, etc...
Thanks!

Hmm, probably. I used to use Shift but the problem was there are languages where they need to use Shift to be able to type more letters (Thai for example), so it wouldn't let them type other languages. I could probably add it as an option though, but you wouldn't be able use capital letters, naturally heh
I bet leaks like that don't happen in China.
> Tech CEOs carefully chose their words in order to make what they said technically true while not addressing the issue as a whole.

I don't understand how you come to this conclusion. All the companies issued flat-out denials, which they are not required to do by law. This is as opposed to the normal "no comment" or "if such an order existed..."

Google said that they only hand over specific data about specific persons after valid court orders have been reviewed by Google's lawyers. So far I have seen nothing to contradict that.

> What the government said was true and what the tech CEOs said was true, yet they seemed to contradict each other.

Could you be very specific about "what the government said"? Are you referring to an actual quote from a specific government official or to some anonymous source?
If you believe this "PRISM" thing exists at all how the media is painting it, your data isn't safe in ANYONE'S hands. Google has way better lawyers to fight that stuff (and clearly DO fight this stuff - see the National Security Letters thing) than most other cloud companies.
Yeah, this is pretty much bullshit (then again, why is Techcrunch being featured again at the top of HN on this subject of all subjects??).

Let's say you have an actual warrant for an actual investigation, to get all of someone's email or Facebook posts. How does that article expect that information arrives? Probably in some kind of "locked mailbox" and the government has the key. It's the same exact thing, it's just the type of order that compelled the act that's different (at least as far as the only evidence we have is a bullshit "locked mailbox" metaphor...again, this is techcrunch).

Therefore, the criticism here should be at the source of FISA authorization and the sources of actual FISA demands. The fact that these companies comply with PATRIOT Act demands -- which they've been fucking telling everyone for years that they have to and that maybe these laws should be revised -- is not some kind of betrayal that they lied about because they said that the NSA doesn't have access to their servers. Just like the local Police Department also has no access to their servers.
Google & Facebook have literally said exactly that. You are just refusing to believe them for some reason.
A good summary from January: http://www.chaosreigns.com/wiki/Wayland_State
That list is a total joke. Norway is below UAE where you get several years of jail for concensual sex between adults.

EDIT: it's a list measuring economic freedom so it's clearly not relevant to discussion about PRISM.
Seems to be working for Rovio if you ask me. Branching out to toys, soda (which is outselling Coke and Pepsi in Finland), TV shows and partnerships with franchies like Rio and Star Wars is super smart. Why put all of your eggs in one basket when you can make money potentially 4 or 5 times per app downloader.
I wonder if he's hinting at spying on XMPP -- a lot of the companies implicated use this protocol and the timelines of the powerpoint timeline is aligned with a lot of companies mobile growth as well as XMPP usage -- also, this might explain why Google is suddenly dropping XMPP support (rather than just being "closed")
If a company is brave enough to close its business in China, what prevents it from doing the same in US?
Oh, so it's all OK then. Thanks for putting my mind at ease. I realise now that blanket collection of data could never be misused in the way I describe because "nobody gives a shit".
> I'm not sure belief can be avoided

No, it can't. You will always believe something, positively (X exists; X is true) or negatively (X does not exist; X is false). The point is, however, is that your final resting point should never be "I don't know what to believe anymore."

> If you want to take action for or against something, you have to ask: what if your information about that thing is malformed or incomplete, due to human error (either your own or somewhere in your chosen network of cognitive authority) or even malice? The answer is that you'll never know for sure. You could always be the victim of your own or someone else's bias.

This is precisely why it's useful to apply agnosticism liberally. What you've described here is agnosticism. You don't know. You never know. If you have the fortitude for it, it is usually reliable to say that you're always wrong in some respect. But you should still act. Paralysis is worse than misjudgment.

Or to use the words of a now famous movie, "There is no certainty, only opportunity." The only reason he turned out to be right was movie magic, and nevertheless, in the movie, he admitted that he didn't know what the right action was after all.
> If you're going to say your data not safe in Google's hands, then your data just isn't safe on the internet which I think is a needlessly extreme position to take.

Google isn't the internet.

Dump gmail, FB and other spy holes. Use public key crypto. Take your own network back.

Or continue on as usual. Our choice.
I don't get your point on obligations. He has a family ok, but nothing would prevent him from resigning from Facebook and writing a post explaining his reasons for doing so(unwillingness to spy on its users). He would still be a rich man able to provide for his family and there are tons of others who could step into his place.

I'm not saying he should do that but with the amount of money he has he can afford to lose a job and still don't worry about his financial future.
They also have an obligation to their users. I hope they realize that I will be actively be on the look out for alternative services from Europe in the future.

This means Google (and the other American companies, too) has a problem of loyalty now, and I'd say a huge one. It's only a matter of time before such services arrive, and I'd like to believe people will start quitting it in droves.

I see it much like with the ISP situation in US. People don't really have a choice of ISP's, but they've grown to hate them so much over the years, that as soon as a decent competitor is around, they'll be switching. I believe (and hope) the same will happen to the American companies, including Google - at least until this mess is fixed, and the Patriot Act repealed.

So I do believe the Patriot Act, and the uncovering of what it can really be done with it has caused irreparable damage to US companies. I received a Chrome update yesterday, and now I have to wonder "is it just a coincidence? Or is it to remove some tracking technology they had it until now, so people don't find out about it when all the spotlights are on them now?".

Could be a genuine question, or maybe I'm just too paranoid, but the point is these unveilings made me feel this way (the Google "privacy issues" never bothered me before, and I was actually waiting for Google Glass - not anymore obviously), and I don't think anything Google and others say in the future will make me feel otherwise, until there are concrete steps done, wide in the open, to stop this kind of surveillance.
Nobody really wants to end up as the first Mikhail Khodorkovsky in the new fascist America.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Khodorkovsky
*"It is further ordered that no person shall disclose to any other person that the FBI or NSA has sought or obtained tangible things under this Order."

But why is that stopping them? Do they really see themselves being dragged away, Bradley Manning style – to sit for years in a prison before even being given the dignity of a trial?

Because that’s not going to happen.

Please Google, hire Mike Arrington and task him to spill all your beans so he can put his butt behind his words instead of raindancing on the sidelines.
Valentina Tereshkova: The Greta Garbo of space
Let's put some algebra/order into this...
Bellman-Ford works for any totally ordered group (G,+), such that a+b<=a+c if b<=c.

What logarithm does is just a order preserving homomorphism from (R,*) to (R,+).
as a current employee, his responses rang very true. Rough week :(
I thought you would want the most negative cycle, which would be NP-hard to find.
Nothing new in this one.
Hitler upset about the changes to Reddit's /r/atheism
The reviews for this are one of the more enticing reasons of late for me to switch off of linux. I'm really excited about this. great stuff!
So basically communicating online only with people that will use pubkey-crypto? I think that's a needless extreme. Also, what happens when everyone does that and the government makes crypto illegal? You're back to the original problem, the abusive government. That being said, I did just suggest encryption in an earlier post today... but that was before I started getting the feeling this problem goes deeper into the government than just a small gov-agency & some cellphone companies.
Your website copy is misleading--bitcoin is not anonymous, and a user must take additional steps to obtain bitcoin anonymously.
That hinges on browser support for DHE for key exchange (or some other method that provides PFS, like the elliptic curve optimized ones), which is not supported on all browsers. Notably IE and older Chrome/FF, though this could've improved since last time I checked.

But yes, if PFS key exchange is used in TLS then having the private key alone would not help with decrypting previously gathered packet data. In that case the only thing I can think of for NSA to read the data is if they successfully created (in secret of course) a practical quantum computer which then renders RSA and DHE (anything that relies on integer factorization or discrete logs for that matter) completely broken.
Nice. It looks like a system-wide EasyMotion.
The private henchmen that help make police states possible, should always be called out. The government could never even remotely come close to implementing their policies without vast help from the private sector.
By the same logic, if you rent a storage locker, it can be searched without a warrant since it belongs to a third party. Or your rental house can be searched, since you only rent it from the third party. And if you put your bag in a taxi trunk, you just gave it to a third party, so if the police stops the cab, they can search the bag without any probably cause. How does it make sense?

I don't see the logic. If you give it to the government, you can expect privacy from the government, but if you give it to somebody else, government can take it? Makes no sense. It's like saying if you confess to the police officer, he can not testify against you, but your own lawyer has to. Completely opposite of what reasonable person would expect.
3D Pen
No problems, I should've made that more clear :)
First, since we do not know the information obtained, we can't say if the CEO or CFO should be informed.

If the scope of what they were required to deliver included information that could have an impact on the financial disclosures of the company[1] then, under Sarbanes-Oxley, they are at least required to put controls in place to communicate or prevent inaccurate financial reporting. This could also be why the CFO was not involved in the denials, because they've at least separated NTK.

As for the portal, the lowest common denominator would be an ftp server. Maybe they put it on fbiguy3@gmail.com's Google Drive so he had to log in. I'd like to think I'd encrypt it with a huge whopping GPG key, email it from a gmail to a yahoo address under my control, and ask,"Did you get that?" but I know I'd just piss down my leg and give them what they wanted.

Finally, Google is rather proud of the predictions or observations it can make based on (they say) trends in search queries. For example, it is now taken as fact that "Google can predict the flu better than the CDC/WHO/etc." I would not be surprised if Google and other companies could tell at least how many FISA requests have probably been generated by segmenting requests for related searches. (Of course, LexisNexis, FindLaw, and the like would have even better information when paying customers do their due diligence on compliance with unreasonable requests.)

[1] E.g., Send us all credit card information for customers from outside the USA.
There are cowards and then there are people who willfully exaggerate. A backdoor implies unfettered access to data for batch collection and processing. That's what this story was about at the beginning - the government was indiscriminately collecting and possibly analyzing your private data using some sort of massive, sinister Big Data operation, the scale of which we can not even conceive, and these big web companies were essentially handing them the keys to their telecommunications networks and telling them to go wild. This has been downgraded again and again, now to a few websites constructing a "secure mailbox." Most of us, including Arrington, know exactly what that means. A secure portal/mailbox is exactly what it sounds like: it is the equivalent of sending someone e-mail with a curated collection of data, except for instead of sending an e-mail you are posting it to a private web page accessible through some sort of authenticated login page. And if this data is only in response to a FISA warrant or subpoena and only regarding data posted by non-citizens, suddenly your outrage begins to look a little melodramatic, and what's happening begins to look a lot like what we already knew was happening for years. Just because we've known about it for years doesn't make it right, but can we at least admit that the novelty of the original story is long gone?
It has nothing to do with the details of the technology, and everything to do with expanding government powers. They saw a new area in which the laws weren't established yet, and they established such laws that suit them most, and since nobody was watching them at the time, they got all the access they wanted. It it makes no sense to you, it's your problem, not theirs - you lost, they won.
Ask HN: NSL in a court of law
So you recieve a NSL then you are called to testify in a court of law and you are asked about this NSL. How do you testify? What would you say?
The fact that Google had very little market share in China, and made almost no money. Versus 3/4 of its $50 billion in sales coming from the US ad market.
You can't exactly unit test the buoyancy - the hull is the only part that floats on its own[1], all the other crap you put in would sink. The two need to balance when you combine them, but there's no way to test that at the unit level.

[1] Ok technically a few other parts like air tanks would float.
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I don't find this particularly surprising or secretive. It seems logical and sensible to me that governments would try to hack each other for information.

Espionage has been par for the course since long before the information age. We've decrypted messages and radio transmissions for decades, this just appears to be the advancement of technology.

It might be somewhat more difficult and allow for access to more sensitive information, but it really just seems to be a natural escalation to what we've always done as a country.
Well, duh. We point spy satellites everywhere as well, for exactly the same reasons (and I'm pretty sure that a) nobody's going to quit using Google Earth and b) the government pays attention to what people chatter about in the GE forums and so on because some of that has intelligence value). All significant military powers maintain lists of strategic targets in other countries as a matter of course.

Next you'll be telling me that military compiles detailed maps of foreign nations for potential distribution to troops, and that we have spies on our payroll.
> It means that if telling the truth is illegal, they should have the courage to break the law.

Personally, I think they found a way to tell the truth without breaking the law.

They apparently said what they were required to say, to the letter. People found it transparently suspicious. Now the secret appears to be out.

Could be an accident, I suppose.
Or they simply know more than we do. Maybe they've gotten the answers to "Why?" that we want and that convinced them? That's the "conspiracy" that almost worries me more. Not that I hold any real faith in such a thought.
/u/161719 offers a chilling rebuttal to the notion that it's okay for the government to spy on you because you have nothing to hide. "I didn't make anything up. These things happened to people I know."

http://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/1fw77t/u161719_offer...;
Yeah, there is very little chance of CEOs leaking. The obligation they feel most is their obligation to the interests of their company. It definitely wouldn't be in a company's interests to rebel against the government of the country in which the company is headquartered.

Implementation side would definitely be very difficult, but you could screen the candidates for those who are sympathetic toward it. Ensure they understand how important it is that the program stays secret. Keep retention high, and perhaps even have some ongoing benefits for any employees who do churn but were part of the program. It definitely wouldn't be easy, but I think it is doable.
I'm sure an Adwords campaign offering information on FISA would net you some data on who and where requests are being made. It wouldn't be explicit and the people wouldn't have to tell you WHY they are looking for information on FISA.

However, when you saw blips from people paying $99 for your packet of case law on 4th amendment protections with respect to stewardship of online data, you'd have the start of a signal. That is, for all of about ten minutes until you couldn't find a hosting provider or payment processor on Earth who would return your phone calls.

Not that it would matter because a "Chinese PLA hacker nuked your box, your bank account, and your house from orbit."

[Insert relevant quotes regarding government requests on named individuals from Eric Schmidt here.]
You shouldn't believe everything you read. The tone of the article is very suspicious: the author will admit nothing bad about Wayland. In particular you might want to examine the claim that VNC style remoting is better than what X does, or that X remoting is a bad VNC.

In actuality VNC is equivalent to the worst-case option X has in terms of rendering. If you wanted something else it's just a bad joke.
Only when one powerful politician wants to bury another. And that's also common in the US, whether with politicians or agencies - they burn eachother constantly.
Espionage was a key force multiplier long before that; Julius Ceasar discusses specific episodes in his commentaries on the Gallic wars: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commentarii_de_Bello_Gallico
Is there a free webmail product at the start of the funnel? An online office suite?
I don't think danso was necessarily agreeing with that sentiment — he was just pointing out that the current reality of the justice system would result in such sentencing.
Are you qualifying a real time feed as a bulk request?
Seriously.js, a real-time, node-based video effect compositor
Again, not surprising, since other countries are actively engaged against us in the same manner.
The X-Windows Disaster: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disast...
"But that's easily fixed with an "X12"." -- Ha ha ha! And I would like a pony with that brilliant original idea. I wonder why nobody ever suggested that before. And if that doesn't gain any traction, then solve it with "Y".
The government would go after Facebook as an entity when Zukerberg speaks out. This means other FB directors could be held liable, shareholders could sue him for breaching his fiduciary duty, his life could be made hell even if PR wise it's impossible to arrest him, etc. We are talking about the most powerful monopoly on force humanity has even seen here, a group of people who consider it their right to kill people or detain them indefinitely without a trial.

I support what you say in theory, but a sign of intelligence is to take longer term approaches to solving the issue. (I would hope they are furious at the government for doing this or at least for hurting their business, I know I would be.)
I like your second sentence, the first not so much. Where does he say you have to look at the middle east for such examples? He doesn't. Discussion on the internet is fraught enough without making things up to disagree with.
Yes, but do we really think that person will lead a long and untroubled life now?
No I'm not going to do any of that.

My mother doesn't even know what the words "public key crypto" mean.
Electronic Frontier Foundation Survives on $5M/year