skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But is unlimited government fundamentally authoritarian?
Well said. The not-a-choice argument has always bothered me for exactly these reasons. I'll also point out that it's utterly unconvincing on the sufficiency front, too. Pedophilia isn't a choice either, but that doesn't make acting on it OK. "But dude, having sex with kids is heinous, but gay sex is a private act between consenting adults." Exactly. That's why homophobia is repugnant. Nothing to do with choice.
You could argue that anything not physical would not be 'direct access'.
And this is my primary issue with Wayland. I cannot fathom why anyone would think it's a sound design decision to bundle a hardware-independent component (the window manager) with a hardware-dependent component (the compositor).

This hearkens back to the days of DOS video games – what fun it was to implement support for everyone's sound card! Instead now we'll get to support KMS, Quartz, whatever-the-heck *BSD uses, etc.
Also note that for a segment of the population, that is the safety net too, just as Hilaire Belloc predicted in "The Servile State" (which he wrote in 1914).
No; the opposite. This is what para-legal surveillance looks like, not CISPA.
"Tech companies might have also denied knowledge of the full scope of cooperation with national security officials because employees whose job it is to comply with FISA requests are not allowed to discuss the details even with others at the company, and in some cases have national security clearance, according to both a former senior government official and a lawyer representing a technology company. "

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-...
Popularity of MySQL and Oracle is decreasing sharply
I'm generally curious if there will be any (or many) "legitimate" (using it for a genuine belief in privacy for the sake of privacy) users of this phone? I mean, it costs more than a traditional cell-phone plan presumably and with fewer features... so anyone actually using this probably has something to hide to go through this length (or he is Richard Stallman).
Chilling rebuttal to it's okay for the gov't to spy b/c you have nothing to hide
They don't participate in any "voluntary" programs.
Or you just follow standard operating procedures for foreign intelligence collection.

You hire a foreign national, working for a foreign division of Google to be your spy. Unless every US citizens mail server is domestic, lotta a loopholes to be found.

People should also not assume the credit card statement from their bank is a batch job run on US servers by their bank. I've been told this stuff is outsourced, probably to the lowest bidder. Which if I were an intelligence service, I would be more than happy to subsidize.
Let’s Face It: Apple is lost without Steve Jobs’s Reality Distortion Field
But why use a deliberately slow emulator as a base for all of this? Is accuracy really that important when compared to being able to run it on a wide variety of hardware? Why not just bundle some existing JS emulators together or take some fast native emulators and do the emscripten thing?
I'd really like to know whether Google shared its SSL/TLS certificates with government agencies. I asked the author (Yonatan Zunger) a short question and he replied to say he doesn't know anything. I followed up with:

> It seems you care very much about user privacy:

>> I would no longer be working at Google [but for] the fact that we do stand up for individual users' privacy

> Will you be willing to find out whether Google has shared its SSL/TLS keys for public sites with government agencies? As a person interested in user privacy, I imagine this will be as of much interest as whether they have direct access to the data.

> As you mentioned, direct access would require Google to build something. Intercepting SSL/TLS traffic would not.

> If Google shared its SSL keys, then the NSA can intercept all inbound and outbound traffic, and would be able to capture virtually all Google user data. They can store the data and search it. They wouldn't particularly even benefit from direct access to Google's data, if they're planning to store it themselves anyway.

> I would be great to hear an affirmation from Google that it has not shared its encryption keys with governments.

I can't figure out how to link to my comment, but it appears in the comments on Yonatan Zunger's post. (See original post)
NSA spy scandal: Turnbull, Ludlam demand answers
OK, so the article grossly underestimates the complexities of PRISM and FISA.

But the facts remain the same: Tech CEOs carefully chose their words in order to make what they said technically true while not addressing the issue as a whole. What the government said was true and what the tech CEOs said was true, yet they seemed to contradict each other. This was a case of careful politicking from all sides.

The thing that confuses me, is did the CEOs really think this contradiction would go in their favor? In other words, did they think no one would call them on that and they would be able to get away with it? Their statements attempted to seem very forward: "Our company 'never' granted 'any' backdoor access" etc. But as a result of that feeling so contradictory to the statements of the government, it necessitated further prying.
Which is why I said "the first few years". At some point, he realized people in his apartment building were disappearing, and he began to understand his life was in danger if he pissed Dear Leader off too much.
Sure, but that's an active attack.
" ... it has been alleged that foreign-owned data hosted by US Internet companies has lesser protection than data belonging to US citizens.”
To be quite honest, I'm not sure America as we know it could survive the detonation of a nuke in a major city, but if we tear it down anyway in fear of the possibility, the only thing missing is the boom.
All phones have a unique identifier that is sent along with the SIM identification. Fairly easy to connect your "anonymous" SIM with any others you've used.
Here's an example of how a government agency could get indirect access to phone data...

Amdocs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdocs) provides billing services and customer support for most of the major phone companies so it has access to all of the transactional data on your billing statement. If a government agency had access to the Amdocs data, it would have access to the phone data through an indirect channel.
>everything should be encrypted by default

Regarding phones, this is already the case with iOS. The Full-disk and Full-filesystem encryption mechanisms appear to be fairly/very strong. I believe since Android 4, full filesystem encryption has been supported, but I'm not sure if it's as well-integrated as on iOS.

Apple has made an effort (although an imperfect one) to make text messaging secure by default.

Obviously Apple screwed up pretty badly by making all this stuff closed-source, and it's probably full of vulnerabilities, but the reality is that this seems to be, in practice, enough to thwart LEO attempts to surveil users of iOS devices.

I think we're on the right track.
"might have also denied knowledge of the full scope of cooperation with national security officials because employees whose job it is to comply with FISA requests are not allowed to discuss the details even with others at the company" http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-...

Welcome to evil google team. It was nice knowing you. You will not miss me, but good bye.
We've added Bitcoin support since this comment was added -- but if you look at our website copy now we've revised it to pushed users towards using Bitcoin as the preferred payment medium.
Thank you for the clarification.

I did not intend for it to explode like that... but I'm on the Internet, so I'm not surprised.

I think I also see where you're going with this; we've got so many adhoc implementations of this already (I'll toss on XMPP as another example) that some sort of eventual agreement and standardization seems inevitable. Don't know where it'll come from or what it will look like, but Historical Imperative is calling for it.
Techcrunch knows nothing, if this is really going on it will be confirmed by someone within one of the companies forced to implement it within days. As of now I doubt that it is, I think the Washington Post got it wrong. Does anybody think Google and Apple would bend over for the federal government because of some semi-legal secret court order? Give me a break.
You're absolutely right, somehow I read "this pales in importance to that" backwards. In my defense, I'm tired and a non-native speaker.

That being said, I still find it odd to bring up the inconvenience of not being able to use Facebook Events.
However...Google cannot promise that it doesn't give indirect access. They've admitted openly that they comply to tens of thousands of data requests over the years.
Have you used the new GPGTools client for OS X yet? It's the easiest thing in the world to encrypt emails. I don't even have to put a second thought in. OS X also supports S/MIME out of the box, which is just as easy (if not easier) to use after you get it set up.
Washington Post Updates, Hedges on Initial PRISM Report
I think TSA should encourage passengers to drink alcohol during flights: a drunk passenger is technically incapable of being a terrorist.

We're lucky the haven't introduced a mandatory in-flight sleep pill.
Classic. I just finished a rotation-based training program, and this is how my co-workers and I got through the constant travel. The TSA never took any issue with it, and many folks were quite amused/inspired by it.
It is literally funded by the federal government. Says so right on the website. If you want to know who pulls the strings, follow the money.

While Tor theoretically can be secure (as long as you don't use it to access the clearnet), there are a few known vulnerabilities which would be trivial for an entity like the US Government to take advantage of. You can be sure there are also plenty of non-public vulnerabilities known to government security contractors and, of course, the NSA.

If you want close to guaranteed security on Tor, use PGP for all communication while connecting to it from a VPN bought with Bitcoin. Never use javascript, java, flash, etc. Use only a live linux CD and a non-standard browser. Just don't be a low hanging fruit.
I was not running a recursive DNS server, just an instance of tinydns for my own domains. A non-rescursive server can still be used for reflection attacks (as I witnessed), it just doesn't do much if any amplification.
That's an interesting defence of McCarthyism, that we must do away with American liberty because otherwise we will lose it to the Soviets.
In Portland, Startups Work Together to Recruit Engineers
Bitmessage is open source.

https://github.com/Bitmessage/PyBitmessage
grad means town/city
I'm going to have to try this next time. I'm just surprised that I never heard about something like this till today
Which means that they don't need to do broad sweeps of people to find the terrorists, they can use their algorithms on people who are already suspected, via some other means, of being a terrorist, and crucially, they can get a warrant to do so.
9/11 destroyed the Western World. European countries have followed the US and now they're less free than they used to be.

Is there a single country that is reasonably free and where freedom is increasing instead of decreasing?
Depends on amount though, kamikaze used to drink (one shot?) before their last mission
SSL broken by design:

http://cryptome.org/0005/ssl-broken.htm
Well, they are certainly not an observant Muslim. That suggests the odds are better they are not a terrorist.
just like how in the US engineering (except houses) uses metric

Copying from a previous comment: This isn't true in my experience. Of course my experience certainly isn't comprehensive, but in my work I interact with a lot of US fields (environmental, manufacturing, civil & mechanical engineering, etc) and I almost never see metric units. The Federal Highway Administration tried to encourage state DOT's to go metric for design and engineering work back in the late 90's but they eventually gave up. If you ever worked on an American car, you still find a mix of metric and Imperial bolt sizes! About the only field where I found that metric units are used extensively is wind energy.

Even my mechanical engineering PE exam used Imperial units exclusively (pounds force vs pounds-mass... sigh)

I imagine that your statement is probably most true for the military though.
Yeah, I have never heard the Atomgrad word, though some people can probably use it.

Btw, cities like that are also commonly called "scinetific cities" ("naukograds"), though "naukograds" are not necessarily closed and don't have to do nuclear physics research.
What contradiction are you referring to? The government has not explicitly referred to PRISM and even if we take their non-denial to be an affirmation, that doesn't preclude the possibility that Google and Facebook aren't being honest and sincere.

BTW I'm not saying that PRISM doesn't exist. I'm saying its actual details are unclear in significant ways.
It may be illegal to drink these on a plane (from one of the comments):

"Sec. 121.575
Alcoholic beverages.

(a) No person may drink any alcoholic beverage aboard an aircraft unless the certificate holder operating the aircraft has served that beverage to him."

http://www.airweb.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library%5C...
3,046 comments!

At a certain large scale, I've a suspicion that FISA gag order eliminates silence, and to defend their cred press releases must speak with forked tongues.
Optimizing code for the European Space Agency (35x speedup: SSE, OpenMP, CUDA)
This sounds about right in the context of William Binney interviews given last year. I would really like to hear opinions on this from people who know a whole lot more about SSL and certificate issuance than I do. I think given a little more time the blanket denials will sink in and people will start to figure out what the very ugly alternatives are.
Right, that mostly paraphrases his arguments. But it doesn't convincingly eliminate a few possibilities for how this works.

One possibility: Google obviously has some capacity to honor search warrants and NSLs. And presumably that involves some technical artifacts somewhere: admin-level API access to data and some sort of external endpoint through which the government can actually make those requests. So that's all stuff we can confidently say is already there humming along happily, whether used for nefarious purposes or not.

OK, so given that those exist, how much volume do they support? How hard would it be to modify them to bypass the scrutiny process? Or give the NSA access to those endpoints instead of just domestic law enforcement? In other words, these are just changes to the process, totally invisible to anyone without explicit access to it. It might not involve any weird hardware at all, and could operate with very few people in the know.

Another possibility: Google handed over its TLS keys and just let the taps happen upstream.

That's why the confidence of a senior person that there isn't fishy hardware running around makes the question of how PRISM works more interesting. But it certainly doesn't make the project impossible.

Edit: removing distracting aside
> when FISA is used on Americans, it's a process that involves a court-approved warrant.

What? So not being a US citizen makes us second class citizens in game of online privacy? That's ridiculous. And no, these requests were not just for individual foreign users.

> FISA orders can range from inquiries about specific people to a broad sweep for intelligence, like logs of certain search terms, lawyers who work with the orders said.

from the OP.

Who gives the US government the right to see my online private data without my consent? esp when I am not even a US citizen.
NO. Power corrupts and this is way too much power. They have been doing it for a very long time, too:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/18/warrantless_wiretapp...;
Let me make it more specific: it is soft-realtime C++. It is way more error prone and on top takes way longer to wright code with same behavior as regular C++ (ignoring latency), no to mention it takes much longer to develop.
That would likely work for targeted attacks against browsers other than Chrome (and maybe recent FF, I'm not sure) but not for large scale dragnet attacks.
Well the statute can't trump the Constitution. It isn't clear whether the 4th Amendment requires a warrant even if statute does not. This is something that the courts will have to work out. There are however many authorities on 4th Amendment law including many I would not describe as civil libertarians who do think that current precedent suggests that a warrant in fact would be required.
Estonia.

Seriously [1].

1. http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking

Lots more too.
When do we meet outside Feinstein's office? Let's do it.
Scala 2.10.2 now available
Maybe the larger point is that they don't need permission
CPU pipelines and the structure of work
I think it's just a lame barely-relevant graphic.
No one is asking to turn a blind eye, but a ten year sentence is absurd. If they actually get it that is.
It's easy, we encode encrypted audio data in binary, print out the 0s and 1s on an eco friendly paper and send the bundle off in mail. It is pretty secure since they will be the only one with private key.
Forward secrecy ensures that even if the private key is compromised at some point, one can't decrypt passively captured traffic.
Cool. However, what I really want is an app that trains me while I'm doing my own work. Going to a specific site to practice on that site is great and all but it doesn't help me remember a shortcut nearly as much as learning that shortcut while working on my own work. Learning on my own work is far more likely to be retained, because my brain can link the recently learned shortcut with something which has meaning to me and is likely to be far more top of mind than a random lesson example.
But you still run into the fact that when authorities listened in on the call by a specific individual (by a manually enabled/disabled microphone) on a public phone booth, the Supreme Court held that the individual was protected, not the place and therefore when he entered a phone booth and closed the door evesdropping (by wiretapping or just a microphone) was a 4th Amendment search. See Katz v. United States.
yes it appears Google has PFS for Chrome/Firefox:
http://www.imperialviolet.org/2011/11/22/forwardsecret.html
The Constitution is a set of rhetorical norms and constraints, nothing more and nothing less.
"Forward secret HTTPS is now live for Gmail and many other Google HTTPS services(*), like SSL Search, Docs and Google+."

http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com.au/2011/11/protecti...
"The Iraq War itself cost the USA $5 trillion, and another ~4,500 lives (American lives, that is. The total number of casualties is well over 100,000)."

Honestly I feel like the most understated danger in all of this is the 95,500 non-American deaths presumably caused by Americans. I imagine that each of those 95,500 or so has a family and many people who are angry and looking for revenge. It's pretty incredible that we have done all of this in the name of "safety" and have simply gone out of our way to recruit hundreds of thousands of people who want to kill Americans. Utterly amazing how modern human logic works.
As a result of this “expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks,” as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)

It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world’s 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. By 2015, market research firm IDC estimates, there will be 2.7 billion users. Thus, the NSA’s need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text."

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/al...;
Reading between the lines:

> Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers.

We have however set up a tap that mirrors all traffic to Facebook to NSA servers, and we've given them the certificate to decrypt that traffic.

> We have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information or metadata in bulk, like the one Verizon reportedly received.

Instead, we were requested to provide our SSL certificate and to install some hardware in our data center. We never handed over any data ourselves.

> And if we did, we would fight it aggressively.

Too much work to provide all that data. Best to just give them a mirrored PHY stream.

> We hadn't even heard of PRISM before yesterday.

We didn't know _what_ the program was called; they never told us, specifically for plausible deniability reasons.

> When governments ask Facebook for data, we review each request carefully to make sure they always follow the correct processes and all applicable laws, and then only provide the information if is required by law.

Technically, they didn't ask for user data, they asked for a hardware interconnect and a private key.

> We will continue fighting aggressively to keep your information safe and secure.

Our lawyers made us say this. C'mon, we're Facebook, what do you expect?

> We strongly encourage all governments to be much more transparent about all programs aimed at keeping the public safe. It's the only way to protect everyone's civil liberties and create the safe and free society we all want over the long term.

Good God, what have we done?! We're under an NSL, can't you tell that, people?!
In at least two cases, at Google and Facebook, one of the plans discussed was to build separate, secure portals, like a digital version of the secure physical rooms that have long existed for classified information, in some instances on company servers. Through these online rooms, the government would request data, companies would deposit it and the government would retrieve it, people briefed on the discussions said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-...
Voted up for an astute observation
Yeah, it was quite common:

http://bit.ly/14HIT5f

I think, it was really fun. Sadly, it seems that nowdays, our (Russian) government favors religiouis symols over indistrial/sientific ones..
$12? Totally worth it.

Might I suggest checking out the Van Westerndorp approach to pricing a product intelligently to make you the most revenue?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Westendorp's_Price_Sensitiv...
US government invokes 'special privilege' to stop scrutiny of data mining
Easiest way to feed data to PRISM
Wired already written about PRISM last year.
In the transparency report, Google can only report wide ranges of numbers, not actual numbers (i.e. 1000-4999). They have always said they wished they could provide the actual numbers of requests as well as copies of the requests themselves, so this is consistent with that.
http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf , section 4. I consider that to be essentially the final word on the topic; it is an objective, mathematically, philosophically, physically meaningful distinction drawn between a lookup table and a computing machine.