skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah yes, I should've included the next sentence:

> Wyden repeatedly asked the NSA to estimate the number of Americans whose communications had been incidentally collected, and the agency’s director, Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, insisted there was no way to find out. Eventually Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III wrote Wyden a letter stating that it would violate the privacy of Americans in NSA data banks to try to estimate their number.

This is what I was referring to when I said the Senators didn't know how exactly it was being used. It is pretty basic knowledge about the program.

Has the NSA incidentally collected data on 300 Americans? On 3,000? On, say, 300 million?
If you have to support common functionality on operating systems ranging from Window XP to Windows 8 (so a 12 year range), and deal with all the bugs within, along with most unix systems, you would start implementing a lot of things yourself.
this article also misses 'falsification'. If the government is collecting data, there is an implicit level of truthfulness in this data, which someone malicious working in the government could use to frame you for a crime or cause other less severe harm to you (financial, social, whatever).

This person need not be accountable, say, to the voter (it could be a low-level bureaucrat with a petty axe to grind), and although presumably there is 'accountability', what if the harm done to you is significant enough to make your life miserable, but not significant enough to the monolithic agency (which remember is only accountable indirectly, to elected officials who may care about stupid stuff like political wedge issues) to justify the expenditure and effort to root out the malicious actor.
Time for Americans to wake up to the tyranny they have been subjecting the rest of the world to since WWII. If foreigners don't have rights, then sooner or later those same rules will get applied to Americans. In fact that's already happened, just not on American soil yet.
Stack is: Java/Hadoop/Tomcat/cloudbase using Machineshop(http://machineshop.io ?) data input is protobuf/queries are translated to a map/reduce job by cloudbase Client uses Ext GWT (Java Component UI Library for Google Web Toolkit |)
cloud based, not sure which cloud. Docs aren't clear if machineshop hosts the actual data..wow
Or their marching orders are to provide live data collection on specific government-identified suspects, rather than live data collection on all users.

In which case, they could claim to be lawfully complying with information requests that are "not as broad", even if the system as designed makes it as easy for the NSA as hitting a "monitor this person" button.

It also wouldn't take vast systemic corporate knowledge. All centralized systems have centralized administrative control that allow for in-depth view and analysis of user accounts and data, and most large-scale systems have relatively powerful and easy-to-use tooling (especially to support customer service, sales, etc).

Complete access to those systems is generally restricted due to the likelihood for abuse, but there remain valid internal management reasons for such access.

Adding to those systems to allow the NSA unfettered (or barely fettered) access could be done without having to alert the entire organization that their internal management systems, which they built knowingly, and have no reason to distrust, have been subverted to allow for on-demand government spying.
How America's Internet Companies Are Handing Over Your Data To Uncle Sam
EFF is a good place to start. The Internet Archive also has helped document some of the lies made by government officials .
US is actually less democratic than many countries - Canada, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Democracy_Index_2012_gree...

[2] http://www.democracyranking.org/en/ranking.htm

If we're talking about economic freedom or the freedom of press, it's even worse:

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index
Because SE is not a sexy a job as being a "journalist" or working in the "medja"
Disney Infinity: John Vignocchi interview
While I'm not an expert in the topic, the visualizations would seem to be drawn from a fairly substantial data set--over 30K respondents. http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_all...
I don't know how this is done in JavaScript, but in Go, semicolons are emitted by the lexer, so they really are literally inserted.
They do, although the vast majority of NSA staff are more like computer techs/middle managers/etc. Sadly.

It's also a lot harder, IMO, to convince a top theoretical mathematician to go to NSA vs. remain in public, since there aren't exactly amazing resources NSA can offer (better chalk?), compared to someone who needs access to multi-million or billion dollar resources. In exchange for better chalk (and access to other classified work, sure), you can't publish, so you'll never win a Fields, be respected by your mom, etc. (A guy who really is into nuclear physics could be tempted by DOE, by comparison.)

I think NSA would have a much easier time recruiting "true believers" in US national defense than anything else. i.e. "yes, you're an expert in theoretical math, but rather than doing purely abstract stuff, you can help protect your country from the evil terrorists!". An easier case when the threat was existential nuclear annihilation from a USSR your relatives may have fled in the past, than now where we're going up against mud hut dwellers who can't afford shoes and take over planes with boxcutters.

NSA also does the bullshit "EOE" recruiting, particularly in the high school and undergrad level. Sorry, but most high level math people are not particularly "diverse".

Plus, go to the math department at top universities. Find the US citizen. Find the US citizen who isn't particularly counterculture or does recreational drugs or whatever. Convince him to work for GS/GG wages (maybe $100k, tops?) vs. a tech startup or a hedge fund. With paralyzing bureaucracy, uncertain funding in the next 10-20 years, and stifling work rules.

I would not want to be the NSA's recruiting department.
The national ID card is only for citizens; I am not a German citizen.

Registering with the police when you move is standard practice with all countries, USA included - you are required to give your SSN to every single DMV now to receive your state ID card/driver's license. They are available in every police cruiser. Are we going to split hairs over which agency runs the server the laptops in the police cars get to query?
As far as I can tell, all the properties described come because this is a balanced binary tree of strings "with rank".

I'd be curious if there is anything else that makes this different?

(it's fairly easy to adjust any balanced binary tree to allow the "report" function, ie generating a ordered sublist of size me in O(log(n) + m) time )
>Not getting a wage equal to your productivity at the margin may be considered exploitation in several schools of microeconomics. If an employee provides value X and receives wages X-10, the amount of exploitation is 10.

And this is, by definition, the competitive wage in neoclassical theory. Suppose there is a group of employers, and a group of employees, and each employee adds value X to any of the employers. Then any employer will want to hire all the workers for themselves, if the prevailing wage is X - 10. So competition ensures that there is no exploitation in that sense.

So while neoclassical theory does allow for "exploitation", it also predicts that it is very unlikely to actually occur.

You seem to be reinterpreting neoclassical theory where "marginal value" is decided according to your accounting rules, rather than the competitive market.
In my usage of Tor it seemed like the router would choose a small subset of the network to be my set of entrance nodes[1] and the exit nodes chosen were also a small subset of the network[2]. Just clicking "new identity" on Vidalia would often fail to change one or the other, even though the middle node changed.

Combined with the 3-hop limit[3], this suggests that a network like Amunet or blutmagie, with a strong exit node presence, might be able to fully de-anonymize a tiny fraction of the traffic passing over Tor. This is interesting because Tor is trying to guard against mostly de-anonymizing arbitrary traffic, not fully de-anonymizing special traffic.

So if Amunet wants to de-anonymize a request, what does it do? The way this works is, Amunet runs a patched version of the Tor software; they buy a couple of servers in remote data centers which they do not notify the network as belonging to the Amunet. Those servers work as entrance nodes, not exit nodes. We'll call this entrance node the Malicious Gateway.

Given a forwarded chunk of data, the malicious gateway can tell that it's not forwarding that data to a known exit node, which means it's the first of the three hops -- not the second. This means that the malicious gateway can pretty-reliably infer that the IP which contacted it was not a dumb router, but was the instigator of the packet -- even if that router was part of Tor.

Amunet sets up their service as follows: before the MG sends on the request to some out-of-control middle man M, it sends to the Amunet exit nodes a simple block saying "expect a request of about this length routed from M; I am tracing it back to IP ____." If you accidentally chose to use an Amunet exit router, then the middle node's distinctiveness has actually helped Amunet to filter the signal from the noise, so the proof gets stronger as the network grows (though the amount of compromised traffic diminishes). That boost is provided by the three-hops limit which also removes plausible deniability. And finally, since people choose a small block of entrance nodes, you can in principle get a lot of transaction data from just one person.

[1] This is intentional: you choose a small pool of entrance nodes because Tor wants to hide the fact that you're using Tor from your ISP. Tor looks like HTTPS traffic to your ISP, but people don't open lots of HTTPS traffic to lots of different sites in short periods of time.
[2] There seem to be a few reasons for the limited exit node selection. First, it seems that Tor preferentially chooses high-bandwidth exit nodes. Second, exit nodes are not enabled-by-default, because people are scared about legal implications.
[3] Three hops is hard-coded into the system. Changing to four hops would make the proposed attack reveal much, much less -- but it would also slow down the network by 33%. The issue has been raised before but the consensus appears to be that wanting four nodes makes you paranoid.
Read /u/161719's amazing post on reddit on this topic: http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1fv4r6/i_belie...
If you read Greenwald's writing regularly, you know that this is exactly the kind of information about the kind of programs that Glenn has been imagining to exist, for many many years, during both administrations. The timing comes from at least a month of planning; Greenwald has hinted at a "big project" for a while now. The daily releases are just Glenn's style, and it's certainly gaining the attention he, as a civil liberties advocate for years now and a former constitutional lawyer, feels is needed for our democracy to continue.
It's ENTIRELY possible that that I didn't tune it correctly, but when I was looking at it as a routing underlayer for Tavern.com, it didn't leave me a whole lot of resources for running my apps.
It's a hell of a lot easier when you're rich beyond belief; have access to the best legal counsel; have an enormous media platform; have access to lobbyists; have cultivated personal connections to legislators; can pick a very public fight which the NSA dreads getting dragged into; and can threaten obama / the democrats' link to a rich, donor heavy constituency. What John Kiriakou did took courage. What these ceos need is a hell of a lot less.

edit:
We've seen how these ceos can react when they care, ie when something threatens their income.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA

edit2:
punctuation
More that bittorrent was significantly faster and more convenient for users. In general, the more anonymous you want to make a network, the worse the tradeoffs involved will favor performance. Tor, for example, is designed to be low-latency, such that you can actually use instant messaging etc... but if an entity has the ability to monitor enough onion routers simultaneously it is actually trivial to pinpoint the origin of a message. This can be countered with traffic mixing, random delays, fake traffic, etc... all of which significantly increase latency and reduce bandwidth.
Director of National Intelligence issues fact sheet on PRISM
Or maybe the slides are inaccurate?
As FISA court rulings are secret, you cannot know this for certain.
There are a lot of videos on youtube taken by US/British/Whoever troops with helmet cameras on youtube where they get sucked into a gunfight. I've watched a few, usually linked to me by reddit or family members who are in the military. Generally the way it goes is that the camera man will be walking around with his buddies, cracking the crude jokes you would expect, and all of a sudden a mortar round lands near them or the dirt in front of them starts getting whipped up by bullets. Everyone scrabbles and starts firing at various adjacent hilltops or ridges. Fairly intense stuff.

The part that gets me though is how the videos are always labelled. It is always "Gun battle with Al Qaeda" or "Taliban sneak attack"* or whatnot. I don't blame the camera man and company for shooting back or anything, but where are they getting the "Al Qaeda/Taliban" part from? It is not like the attackers are wearing uniforms (or can even be seen in most cases...) It really does seem to be implicitly assumed that anyone who sees value in shooting at foreign troops in their country must be members of Al Qaeda or the Taliban. This rubs me incredibly wrong.
This is basically what we already knew. It doesn't explain how the system is integrated with data providers such as google.
I disagree. It's bad news for California, and bad news for the environment long-term. It's not an ideal nuke plant, but the current alternative is to kill ourselves burning oil and coal.

Here's a former Greenpeace bigwig's account of switching to pro-nuclear:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04...
It is a common praxis today to extend the online version of the stories. As far as I see, the changes aren't stepping back from the points already made, and the zdnet article doesn't point to any significant correction that would discredit the authors.
The 'back door' system support isn't as complicated as you make it out to be. Centralized administrative access to user data must exist for support, maintenance, and legal purposes, and it will be implemented throughout the organization without anyone batting an eye.

In addition, internal analytics systems will have reason to tap into data streams/events, as will content-based advertising systems.

All of these things are often designed to provide general interfaces; locking them down is done through generic privilege levels and access controls. The people managing those access controls are few, and may not even know the true purpose for the controls they've authorized. Indeed, someone could requisition the insertion of a content analysis system that was fed user data, appeared to be a legitimate deployment, and yet was actually a core service used to push data to the government.
The "nothing to hide -> nothing to fear" sophistry is about shifting the basis of judgement from "innocent until proven guilty" to "guilty until proven innocent," replacing reason with superstition. It's McCarthyism; it's an inquisition. An individual has no rights over the hysterical "consensus" of the mob.

Unfortunately, there is no piece of evidence that can exonerate a person in such a context; one cannot "establish innocence," the best one can hope for is to plead tirelessley in an endless popularity contest.

The right to privacy is nothing less than the right to keep an individual mind... To own a body. If you value your own life, the right to privacy - to be left alone - is your beginning and your end, if not kept.

(Edited an error/reversal.)
Why Did Instagram Succeed When the Color App Failed?
Seems to be timing out for me. Anyone have a description or mirror?
This is neat, it reminds me of the app 'Bloom' that Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers created a few years ago. It would be nice to have some sort of interface where the user could modify characteristics of the audio as I noticed that on refresh the engine is generating different tonalities.

One thing to watch out for is the CPU load on this, my Google Renderer process was pushing 100% when I ran the generator.
2nd page

"I have no interest in an article that debates what we consider to be an obvious point -- which is that there is a dramatic reduction in battery costs," Musk said, after a few questions. "You clearly do not understand the business. My apologies. I am terminating the interview."
> does ASI affect compilation speed?

No.
> Also, a question: do you think there is anyone online reading HN that has not already heard this line of argument, that both governments and terrorists kill children?

So? Does this make the argument wrong? Or does this mean that arguments that have been used once, cannot be used again? Arguments as toilet paper, in some way?

I'm French. France was occupied by Nazi Germany (as every American I ever speak to likes to remind me).

Resistants were ordinary French people who blew up trains in order to make the life of Germans in France as difficult as possible -- and of course German propaganda called them terrorists. I'm not putting this word in quotes, because of course that's what they were. They were trying to terrify the occupiers. It was a good thing.

Terrorists try to murder your children because your compatriots murder theirs.
Agreed. I read it hoping to be convinced (wanting to be convinced), but it was too wordy and lacked a compelling argument. I do believe privacy is important and we should all care about it. But I also want to read a strong well-written argument to support that position.
>There is no such thing as a legal obligation to lie.

So what are you supposed to do if you're not allowed to disclose something and someone directly asks you about it? An obvious evasion is clearly going to be a de facto admission, and you're not allowed to admit it, so you either have to lie or mislead. I'm not sure the distinction between a lie and a misleading statement is particularly meaningful in this context.
In light of this week's subject of outrage, it's important to point out that TOR doesn't protect against a global adversary sniffing traffic at a significant number of nodes and then correlating sessions.
Drew Houston of Dropbox (YC S07) MIT Commencement address
Your definition of "superior" may imply vastly different trade-offs. If you want files fast, then they are quite inferior to Bittorrent. The aforementioned protocols can vary a bit in what they do well, but in general the goal is to protect the identity of participants from hostile peers on the network. With Bittorrent, the goal is to transfer files efficiently with no regard for privacy, and it's very good at it.
> I will for this comment ignore the very real problem of loads on grids that weren't designed for this, e.g. blowing transformers by using them at night when they need to cool down

I know this isn't part of your central thesis, but this comment really doesn't pass the sniff test. Yes, transformers generate massive amounts of heat, but I've never heard of the need for a cool down period at night. Do you have any additional information?

> I don't follow this field; is it that obvious costs will go down for these high performance (at least as claimed in the article) battery packs?

Well, certainly no one is talking about increasing prices. If you look in to the projected costs of LiIon batteries over time, the majority of the analysis suggests that the prices will continue to go down. The disagreement is over how much. Some say they're going to plummet, but most agree that cost reductions will fall in a moderately-significant range. McKinsey & Co published a decent report that disaggregated LIB pricing in to 40 components, and analyzed each of them for potential future savings. That's a pretty thorough breakdown.

http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/energy_resources_materials/...
Doubtful, these are pressurized water reactors, not boiling ones, an inherently safer design.
A Japan rerun? Among all the problems Japan has faced in recent history, matters related to nuclear power barely even register.
If we are discussing the benefits of logic programming, I think it's important to include other declarative languages like SQL.

The idea of specifying directly what is computed, and not how it is computed, is very useful, and not limited to abuse mathematical problems.
I blogged my thoughts on the speech last night: http://notonlyluck.com/2013/06/07/doers-run-circles-around-b...;
Keynote: OpenStack at the National Security Agency (NSA)
If you're interested in running networking applications on small hardware, you may be interested in the Beaglebone. It's more expensive, but vastly outperforms the Pi with regards to network I/O. The Pi is awesome for video, however.
They aren't telling, and that may be telling on itself. Court approval apparently is needed but then Verizon hands all metadata every day, based on a court approval.
You can say you are not in a legal position to comment on the issue: for a company with scores of lawyers, it's easy enough to hint that you are bound by gag order.

None of the big tech companies have an incentive to cover up: for them wiretapping both an extra cost and a continuous PR nightmare.
I'm talking about freelance developers too. The usual rate here is extremely rarely over $35 (for clients in the US).
This is of course possible.

But it is also possible that a conscientious US citizen has decided to leak.

Bradley Mannings do exist in this world.
Using the information as a basis for arrest or prosecution is what I'd call
'big brother'. But I'm not 100% confident in that definition
Marginal additional energy in CA (to replace the nuclear capacity) means either burning more natural gas in-state or burning more coal in the Pacific Northwest.

Coal (and even natural gas, surprisingly) puts more radioactivity into the environment than nuclear fission. Plus, all the other negatives of fossil fuels (particulates, acid rain, risky mining, etc.). And global warming.

So, yay?
Khodorkovsky is a Russian, in Russia. The USA courts' credibility may be in decline, but they aren't on par with those in Russia.
The media needs to get more credible technology consultants they can turn to. The days when a brief but imprecise description was acceptable are over.

In this case 'direct collection' i.e. a backdoor didn't make sense for a lot of reasons and didn't square with the program was described in other sources that came out after the slides were released.

But the real problem is secrecy. This is a complicated program with many actors and the media can't be expected not to report information clearly contained in leaked NSA slides
even if they can't get the context 100% right.
that is quite a story. thank you for posting this.
Ask HN: How can I see top HN posts Not about NSA/PRISM?
I come here for tech content and interesting discussions, not US political discussions and speculation. Are there any tools which classify/filter HN threads? I've found http://hckrnews.com/ but there's still too many NSA stories hogging the top.
Microsoft’s Xbox One: Owning Your Video Games Is So 1994
America has a power grid. California uses power from all over and supplies power all over.

Trivia: the discharge water from the plant raised sea temperature enough that surfers could feel it.