skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't see how they could have gotten an order under the Patriot Act. The section that deals with this is section 215, which amended section 501 of FISA.

It specifically states that such an order can be made "provided that such investigation of a United States person is not conducted solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution".

If they have been violated, then there are a number of members of Congress and the Senate who are falling down on their job - the Attorney General must inform the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence of the House of Representatives and the Select Committee on Intelligence of the Senate. On top of this, every 6 months the Attorney General must also provide a report to the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives and the Senate which details the total number of applications made for orders approving requests for the production of tangible things and the total number of such orders either granted, modified, or denied.

I've read and documented the USA PATRIOT Act on Wikipedia incidentally. Took me two years to read and understand the thing. Possibly things after the Patriot Act changed FISA, I wasn't going to spend any more time on writing up about this subject. I'm an Australian citizen, after all.

I should note that I'm not thrilled about the fact that the U.S. government can read my communications. Not that I have anything to hide, nor am I of any interest to them, but hardly the point.

The two parts to read on Wikipedia, incidentally are:

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act,_Title_II#Overview

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detailed_breakdown_of_USA_PATRI...
Startups Tap Into Mobile-App Explosion
As a teen at the time, my first reaction (well, my first reaction after thinking my father was pulling my leg to get me out of bed, given that he'd been talking about something similar from a Clancy novel in then-recent memory) was very much in line with Stallman's: authority is going to overreact.

That said, while he was far from alone, it was nonetheless close enough to say that "conventional wisdom" was on the other side of it. Even in my anti-Bush, left-leaning, civil-liberties-sensitive circles there was a profound overreaction and too much credence given to the "we have to be safe" line.
Indeed. The first version of the paragraph gave no indication as to the source of the information. The modified version of the paragraph simply defines the source, but doesn't otherwise change the content of the paragraph. It seems businessinsider is trying too hard to find a new angle on the story for views.
just following the format of who I was responding to sherlock.

"Didn't people say"
I call convergent evolution on this one. A convex optimization problem. It's the simplest explanation. They need a broadly accessible response, so that gives like what 2000 words? By the time you account for the various pits of contradiction, handwash to some sufficiently nebulous concept of indirect access; all while the government breathes down your back, the outraged crowd bustles for explanations and a gaggle of lawyers dog your every step like a herd of bumper cars, you have basically 6 or 7 words left in your vocabulary and only one way to string them into a sentence. Before proceeding to inflate into paragraphs from a very limited palette of legalese sanctioned fluff.

The collusion/double speak/poppeteering or game theoretic layered messaging within a secretly orchestrated gag conspiracy are plausible but I'd prefer to wait for more evidence before I accept Facebook and Google are complicit or prisoners to that. That doesn't mean I think they are either of them blindingly righteous beacons of morality (or even chipped and dulled pyrite morality for that matter), just that the implications of the scenario (democracy canceled xor executives willfully distorting the donut of truth into a mug) are hard to believe.
Well, there's always the federal sentencing guidlines - they would provide a little insight into what he's really facing. Also, the rape charges were state (juvenile) charges, not federal. The federales don't mess around.
If you control both the tor entrance and exit nodes, you can unmask the user. Statistically, controlling 300 nodes (~1% of the network) should be enough to unmask a large number of users. It is not hard to spin up a whole bunch of servers to the mix, and I would find it very hard to believe that the NSA/similar does not already control a substantial portion of the network.
The thing is, big retailers have cameras, a lot of fucking cameras. Better to buy them from the rinky dink mom and pop shops that take cash with no cameras in the shop. They don't care if you are John Doe or George Washington.
Microsoft Has Hired People To Make Positive Comments About Xbox One On Reddit?
It is almost 3 years old as far as an image goes. Where I work we only late last year moved from XP to Windows 7.

Large organizations move slowly.
Interesting quote:

"The diagram showed splitters glass prisms that split signals from each network into two identical copies. One copy fed into the secret room. The other proceeded to its destination"

Maybe that's the source for the Prism name?

But I don't think this is directly related to the Prism program though, since the Prism slides don't mention AT&T
I always preferred http://www.theonion.com/articles/freedoms-curtailed-in-defen...;
Maybe I've missunderstood BufferBox. Is there some sort of short-term PO box you can pay for with cash? Can you pay for a normal PO Box with cash and w/o ID?
I meant "sexually assaulted", not simply "assaulted". I didn't omit the word as part of some pro-rape agenda. Anyway, I can't edit it now, unfortunately.

Sexual assault generally means "unwanted penetration" (legally), which includes whatever happened here (unclear exactly from the articles I read).
But Clapper's statement predates the tech companies' response, no?
principiis obsta et respice finem
Or, better yet, just port the Java runtime to Javascript...
"...and Kwan expects the human head to trend larger to accommodate a larger brain."

This person has probably not seen Idiocracy...
This system of yours sounds very interesting. Did you strip down an existing GNU/Linux distro, or build a base system from scratch? A pointer to an ISO image and/or repo with build scripts would be great.
To anyone considering using this in production, please note that the license is certainly not GPL-compatible, and probably not Open Source.
When I was in college 20 years ago in Boulder the local feminists would get upset when people didn't say "assualt", or if they modified it with "sexual". I always maintained that assault wasn't as bad as rape or "sexual assault", but they wanted nothing of it.
For clarity, he's currently chief architect for Social/Google+ not Google as a whole, but he's still a very senior, longtime engineer.
7) destroy the data (or key) in case everything else fails
I like how a bunch of people obviously voted this comment back up. (It went light grey, then black again an hour later).

I'm not like, mad or anything about it; it's a self-evident kind of comment.
I love this! Would love it even more if it let me choose from the open tabs (the open coversations) in adium...;)
I think with email expectation of privacy is exactly the same. And 4th amendment, saying "papers", obviously does not mean "only something that is never recorded can be private and protected from government". Obviously papers are very permanent things.

In the same vein, then, mail should not be protected, since you give it to the postman to send, so nothing prevents them from opening the envelope, reading everything inside, copy it and tell the police. I don't see how this is any different from taking emails from private email mailbox. In both cases I expect only machines and people that need to read it for purposes of the transmission to access it, and only in parts that are necessary for such transmission to happen, and do not expect them to disclose it to anybody else.
That project's name has always bothered me... My brain tokenizes it as J SNES rather than JS NES.
Pretend for a second that your advisers give you two options. Secretly sign bills to allow the gathering of data regarding US citizens from indirect sources, or allow a terrorist attack to happy under your watch as Commander-in-Chief.

You don't have all of the information. The big picture regarding cyber-security and national security in general is very complicated, please lets work together to come to a logical solution rather than blame one political party or candidate.

Policies are never perfect, especially when you involve a technology as new and complicated (technically and ethically) as the internet.

Most people are fully aware of the ability of the US government to spy on all communications. How can you expect the NSA, which has the mission of protect the US security systems and provide foreign intelligence, to have limits on it's information sources?

Is the real concern whether or not the FBI and other agencies have full access to the data the NSA collects? Patriot act might have allowed them to have more access.
Small nitpick: You probably mean to say "I will apologize to your team" not "I would apologize to your team".

The word 'would' is used when expressing something in a conditional mood, often times in light of some possible future occurrence. E.g. "I would try harder if only I were getting graded for this assignment" or "I would lose my mind if anything happened to my children".

The more you know. :)
Ask HN: "More" feature?
I might be going crazy, but since when does HN have a feature called "More", that truncates stories/comments?
Hasn't anyone here ever watched The Wire?
OK, I'll say it.

I think there's a non-zero probability that there are US government agencies who can and have compelled people to explicitly deny something that they know is true.

Realistically, it would boggle my mind to discover they'd done that to all the founders/CEOs/legal departments of all the companies involved here (at least Google/Facebook/Apple/Yahoo/AOL), but given the stakes in this game - I have no doubt that it _could_ be done.
Working from Android
That would underplay the story too much. The person who had their work claimed by someone else found out and broke the story. The only misleading word is "from".
Oh noes, it's a conspiracy!
Facebook cloud downed by actual cloud in 2011
We pretty much already have confirmation that PRISM exists. [1] It's a little funny all of these companies expect us to believe that none of them are involved.

[1] http://gizmodo.com/the-government-responds-to-the-prism-spyi...
maybe the guy meant he created airbnb and got confused, since they're the exact same service.
Good clarification. Only so many words that would fit into the headline...
Now they can say "what police state," everybody already knows about it!!! :P
If you want to go full conspiracy theorist, you might suggest the slide deck and capabilities were all a psy-ops tactic to persuade the real criminals to abandon using google,Facebook,apple, and all of the big corps who refused to freely hand over user data, and instead flee to smaller businesses that the government could much more easily coerce into participating...
If it's going over the wire, you can bet they have access to it, with or without 'access.'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
I believe this is an issue with Adium and the way it reports the accessibility details for the tabs. It seems to be the entire tab bar rather than just the tab itself (I use vertical tabs). I haven't found the time to send in a patch just yet as I'm sinking most of it into Shortcat. Hopefully an Adium dev ends up using Shortcat and fixes it!
They probably just skipped Vista to save the tax payers a little money, that picture was in 2010. Imagine the headline "Whitehouse wants to spend XX millions upgrading to MS Vista. Is our money being spent wisely?"
It does seem as though these companies are trying to signal something (a la cryptonomicon), by the repeated emphasis on direct. That's the part that is scary - as someone else pointed out, with the right SSL keys and a copy of the bytes flowing thru a limited number of NAP's, you don't need your grubby fingers in the google/facebook datacenters. The telcom's seem quite willing to roll over...
A blogger saw the posts (later deleted) and took screenshots. She tried to get justice for the victim by re-posting these on her blog.

By the way, if anyone is ever in this situation, don't do this on behalf of the victim unless they ask you to. It may very well be perceived as a violation. I don't know the specifics here, but in general, this is not the way to help. Tread lightly. Rape victims are often cast aside by the government who cares only about prosecution and little about healing. We need not do the same in misguided attempts to help. Put the victim first.
Deny PRISM - Generate a PRISM involvement denial statement for your company
It's not the fact that e-mail is recorded. It's the fact that e-mail is recorded and retained by third parties.

The mail example is interesting. A letter sent via FedEx or UPS is not protected by the 4th amendment. Letters sent via the Post Office are protected, because in that case the "third party" is actually an organ of the government.
That's been there since forever on long comment threads.
Not necessarily: you could for example throw in red herrings and disinformation along with whatever facts you're disclosing. The "limited hangout" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout is apparently a real thing, though of course once you've heard of them it's easy to start imagining them where they don't exist.
More ways to drive down programmer salaries and import virtual slaves...

Will programming as a profession disappear or become unionized first?
Doers Run Circles Around Box Checkers
Thanks..I'll browse through that list this weekend to see if I need to add any of those.
I'll grant that some innovation comes from the market - and, moreover, specifically from the market incentives created by constraining what individuals can do with their bits and bytes in whatever format.

Like most things, there are trade-offs. The question is: does the increased value and freedom afforded by that marginal innovation outbalance the tremendous destruction of value and freedom that these restrictions entail?

"Decreasingly," I would argue (even if we're presently making some people very very rich); I'm working on a project to make it even less the case.
How do you resolve the the fact the presentation is real, and Larry Page's statements?

This is the only explanation that makes sense. Some secret court compels Google to provide their TLS keys, which is a a few kb of data. No one at Google has to know, and no one at Google can accidentally detect the leak.

Also, can you clarify for me why you think giving someone access to eavesdrop overlaps with "direct access to servers"?

If what I say is correct, Larry Page's statement is 100% defensible.
https://www.google.com/search?q=define:performantly is good enough for me.
Rsync.net does this:

http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

And they note:

This scheme is not infallible. Although signing the declaration makes it impossible for a third party to produce arbitrary declarations, it does not prevent them from using force to coerce rsync.net to produce false declarations. The news clip in the signed message serves to demonstrate that that update could not have been created prior to that date. It shows that a series of these updates were not created in advance and posted on this page.
I believe the threshold is 200 comments.
I don't know about more courage. Look at how many people in Washington State lost their jobs due to being accused of Communist involvement in the Canwell hearings in the 1940's. The mere accusation was enough to cause people to be fired and blacklisted, setbacks from which they would never recover fully.

I think less things change than everyone likes to think. We were just living in a more protected time after the McCarthy approach was deemed to be Un-American. The cycle is swinging back the other way, and it will be perhaps a few decades before it recovers (if it does).

The real danger from where I sit is actually that for things to recover we need a vibrant middle class. We need people like John Caughlan (my mother's uncle) who went to Harvard but then dedicated his life to fighting for the politically persecuted to an extent he was even kicked out of the ACLU for defending the unpopular (the ACLU later apologized and gave him their William O Douglas Award). You can't have that if everyone comes out of college with crushing student debt and you can't have that if small businesses and self-employment becomes prohibitively regulated. The economic and political realities are unfortunately intertwined in a way that makes me pessimistic sometimes.
If it was Erlang, the reason that Prolog would be considered a variable would be the initial caps. is and sweet would be atoms (which are like names or labels) because of the lack of quotes and lack of initial caps. Prolog may convert atoms to strings when they're used in a string function (or that particular string function may convert atoms to strings.) Do they even call them functions in Prolog? Doesn't seem appropriate.

edit: also, single quotes in Erlang are a way of creating an initial cap atom, or an atom with special characters in it. Double quotes are used for strings. Might be the same.

edit: just checked, it's the same. And compound term?
An IPO creates a liquid market for existing shareholders (management, private equity) to cash out. Seriously. There are cheaper forms of financing if all they wanted was to expand operations.
I enjoy how your response to Spooner's criticism of the Constitution is to declare that the Constitution permits these invasive acts.

>If the Constitution said: "Congress shall pass no law... abridging the right of privacy" we'd be in a different boat.

No we wouldn't.[1] We'd still have some people[2] coming along and making whatever arguments are needed in order to preserve and expand the state. One way might be to constantly frame government power only in terms of explicit limits, with the default being otherwise unchecked power. Such limits can then be read to mean whatever those in power wish them to mean.[3]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znQe9nUKzvQ

[3] http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm
The private key should not be that hard to obtain. Google has thousands of frontend servers, each one of them has to have the SSL private key (at least in memory). Probably at least a hundred people have access to these servers. It's enough to bribe just one of them.
>"the only way in which Google reveals information about users are when we receive lawful, specific orders about individuals -- things like search warrants."

Things like search warrants? What has been described in the PRISM slides is an interface in which a NSA agent can access a subject's data at will, in a few clicks and an affirmation that "yes, this person is a terrorist".

Also the US government has confirmed that systematic collection of user data was indeed happening for non-US citizens. What of that? Are they users of lesser rights in the eyes of Google, etc?
Yeah, this is a joke. "Send your address to a stranger over the internet so they can ship it from a warehouse employing a small number of large corporations so you can be anonymous!"

Pay-as-you-go phones bought in a grocery store are more "burner" than this.
>They don't know if the person is armed or not, so better safe than sorry when it comes to the lives of agents.

I wonder if there are any actual statistics on this. We always hear the arguments about the number of accidental firearms deaths in favor of gun control, is there any reason to suspect the situation to be orders of magnitude different with a group of cowboy cops? If anything it could be worse in a group, because it turns the situation into a powder keg such that one shot fired by anyone (or anything that sounds like one) and you immediately have a massive firefight in an area populated by numerous friendlies and nearby civilians.
Loving the product, have been using it for 20 minutes or so now. I can see myself using this super heavily. Thanks!

Bug report: http://i.imgur.com/wTwXpx2.png

(your "reply" link isn't highlighted, but all others are)
I'll be adding '/' down the track for a proper hierarchy, but things that are close to each other aren't guaranteed to be in a sane hierarchy. What about '@'? "comments@shortcat" kinda flips it around first, which could work as you might decide to narrow down the query when you see too many results. A possible problem is that the second part of the query also has too many results.
Chat Tuesday: The NSA, Prism & The Future Of Communication
Thanks for that link; That hack (and the accompanying video) has just become perhaps my favorite thing, ever. Also, it led me to this similarly incredible hack as well:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3EvpRHL_vk
> So other governments have a backdoor to our government's backdoor... What stops China among others from being able to access this?

Nothing, and that's exactly what China was doing during Aurora and similar operations.

It's worth noting that Google posted incorrect/misleading information on their blog at the time of that incident as well. They claimed that the intrusions were motivated by China wanting to target human rights and freedom of speech activists, positioning them as a villain.[1] It ended with the same crap about pushing for freedom and transparency.

A few months ago it was leaked that the actual motivations behind Aurora were that China was using it to see which of China's spies were being monitored by the US government through the PRISM-like interface[2]:

""What we found was the attackers were actually looking for the accounts that we had lawful wiretap orders on," Aucsmith says. "So if you think about this, this is brilliant counter-intelligence. You have two choices: If you want to find out if your agents, if you will, have been discovered, you can try to break into the FBI to find out that way. Presumably that's difficult. Or you can break into the people that the courts have served paper on and see if you can find it that way."

[3]:

"As Google was responding to the breach, its technicians made another startling discovery: its database with years of information on surveillance orders had been hacked. ...

The most sensitive orders, however, came from a federal court that approves surveillance of foreign targets such as spies, diplomats, suspected terrorists and agents of other governments. Those orders, issued under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, are classified.

Google did not disclose that breach publicly, but soon after detecting it, the company alerted the FBI, former officials said."

[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china...

[2] www.cio.com/article/732122/_Aurora_Cyber_Attackers_Were_Really_Running_Counter_Intelligence

[3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/chines...
While >in America< you never.... This reads better. In other countries you could never rule it out either, but the chance is magnitudes smaller.
Need a generic PRISM involvement denial statement? Well you're in luck:

http://colingourlay.github.io/deny-prism
"His answer to any problem seems to be to boycott it, as if that'll change things."

If you're an engineer with a penchant for scratching your itches, boycotting problems does change things.
Since the Chief Architect is so supportive of privacy rights - I'd like to participate in G+ using a pseudonym. How about it Google??
I joined last.fm in 2006 and subscribed to their radio service for a while - but it always played the same few songs in each genre despite having much more than that on their service, which got old, so I moved to Spotify.

Now I use Google Music, which has a great radio feature and the ability to play anything specific I want also.