skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If spying on citizens was a business
If spying on citizens was a business I would ignore Google and Facebook.

Wouldn't it be better to hook into a few major desktop players.

You have your Adobe Acrobat type programs that are wide spread and lots of chatty client/server communication.

Better yet, you can your anti-virus programs. These also have lots of network activity. Better yet they come with escalated system privileges.

And the more obvious. You have Windows/OSX. Both closed source and are now always phoning home.

I realize you can't do as much on a single system as you can with an aggregated data set back at your main server. But it seems like you only need a few bytes of flags to be able to deduce that this system is worth looking into further.

Sometimes less is more. If spying on citizens was a business... Forget about downloading all the data in the world. Reduce it at client side and send back the results.
How about something like this for the grandparent's case:

"In some countries people can be persecuted for their religious beliefs, politics or sexuality. Their text messages could potentially reveal all of the above to the government and/or someone listening in on GSM traffic [1]. Those people could use an SMS encryption app to provide them with plausible deniability or, should their local law doesn't have that notion, at least help them avoid automatic keyword detection."

[1] See, e.g., http://www.ti.bfh.ch/uploads/media/19_Vadym_Uvin.pdf.
Tor is open-source and its developers and supporters include the EFF, Jacob Appelbaum, and others who (if you can trust anyone at all) would not cooperate with government surveillance. But again, it's open-source and lots of security experts regularly look at the code, so it's not so much a matter of blind trust. The reason it was funded by the US government is described at http://cryptome.org/0003/tor-spy.htm -- not because it helps governments to spy on users but precisely the opposite.

The fact that it's very unlikely it was created as part of some conspiracy doesn't mean that it's impossible to compromise a Tor user's anonymity. I'm not an expert but as far as I know the most credible large-scale attack against it is still the one described in this paper: http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1... . To be successful, it requires controlling a very large proportion of Tor's entry and exit nodes.
Whistleblowers and illegal aliens might be morally equivalent to trade unionists and socialists, but terrorists are not equivalent to communists; I said nothing when they came for the terrorists because the terrorists were trying to murder my children.
They've said what you'd expect if they were telling the truth, sure. They've also said what you'd expect if they were lying. In other words, these statements provide no information. Given that, and the other evidence, it's reasonable to think that they are lying.
This quotation is over used, and in the present case it's not really appropriate, because they started to harass "hackers" before they started to run after anyone else.

They even subverted the word "hacker" to have it mean something bad.
I don't agree. Good governance is possible, and size has little to do with it. If there is proper democratic control over government, government can be a force for good. Many northern European countries governments show this (they generally are trusted, and few people resent paying taxes).

Democratic control can provide equality and fairness, with every person one vote, rather than the market where some people having more impact than others, simply because they are richer.

Maybe because in America there hasn't been good governance for so long, trust is low, and the only solution many see is to simply chop down government to the minimum... but there are other solutions, actual democracy is one of them.
LI: "How much data do you estimate will be able to be stored at the NSA facility in Utah?"

WB: "I simply took what was commercially available off of cleversafe.com, which is 10 exabytes in 200 square feet. Then I divided 200 square feet into the 100,000 square feet of storage that will be at the facility. Then you get 5,000 exabytes stored in that area. That’s five zetabytes. What that means is around 500 years of the world’s communications, if they used all the space for that purpose. I figure they wouldn’t have to do more than 100 years, and the rest of it they can use with parallel processors to try to break codes."

5 zetabytes? wow.

Also, here's a video of a different interview from last year.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=590cy1biewc
Instagram: Making the Switch to Cassandra from Redis
> There is a big risk that some workers won't do their jobs right given the freedom to do so.

Find new workers then. The principle is you do the work, you own your work or job, it is yours with a share of the risk and reward that comes with it.

> Bad work in one component (e.g., a poorly designed database schema) will leak out into the rest of the system.

The solution there is two-fold:

1. Encouraging (though not forcing) getting second opinions, discussions etc ahead of time.

2. Post-review once the component is nearing usefulness by respected peers. "Can we use this? What is the quality?"

Is there expense when you have to say "this needs more work" or even "this must be done again?" Sure. However does putting less technically apt managers in charge of the technical decisions cause fewer problems or more ones?

You can't just have management and review go away. But management is the midwifery of production, and review of technical peers beats review of managers any day.
I agree, this is the question. And the answer is "both". From the NY Times article:

> 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. There were 1,856 such requests last year, an increase of 6 percent from the year before.

Imagine a 2x2 matrix of intelligence requests, with one side being "narrow" vs "broad" and the other being "short" vs "long" duration. Verizon was long and broad, the worst kind.

The tech companies are trying to imply that they were short and narrow, at least most of the time, and the journalists are trying to imply that they were long and broad, but never come out and say it because they have no evidence. If we had better transparency about FISA, we could answer this question ourselves. Just knowing how many requests were for individual user's data would be extremely helpful.
I would believe that, was it not for this:

"I realized that the U.S. government loves the "PRISM" acronym. There are literally dozens of projects and applications named PRISM at the state and federal level, many with delightfully goofy logos."

http://waxy.org/2013/06/these_arent_the_prisms_youre_looking...;
I must be misreading, because it looks like a guaranteed price floor on exchange rates.

I thought it was widely known that those are not sustainable. It's exactly what Soros exploited to break the pound, and that was backed by a government, while this is just some guy's app.

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

Those who don't learn from history...
> Am I the only programmer who doesn't like being economically exploited (in the formal microeconomic sense)? For me, it's demotivating to know I'm putting forth effort for which someone else is reaping huge value.

Jobs are the problem and self-employment is the answer ;-)
Since this is probably the 20th PRISM story today, here's a pitch for a new startup:

darkness.io is a incredible startup that is a complete game changer. I founded darkness.io after realizing that there is an untapped 383221 billion dollar opportunity in removal of prism stories from the web.

I can't tell you the details about our platform because we are currently in stealth mode, but we are the only player in removal of prism stories which we will completely disrupt in 3 months. At darkness.io we believe that everyone deserves less prism stories. Our product will bring together prism annoyance, anti-prism and boredom to introduce synergies that will democratize, and revolutionize removal of prism stories.

This idea is so potent yet so deceptively simple that it has the capacity to produce an unlimited amount of profit.

We haven't created our product yet, so we are looking a real javascript samurai to join our team so they can build it for us. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for you to be a part of the next big thing. We have free food, unlimited vacation, generous equity compensation. Also each week we give you a new iSpy just for being amazing.

If know javascript and 'want in', just tweet me and you'll be on our uber game-changing, revolutionary, disruptive team in no time, helping us change the world!
"Two things that cannot be true at the same time"

Only if you assumed he is fully informed. Do you think Google chief software architect would fall within "need to know", if Google had been ordered to hand over their SSL private keys? I doubt it.
That quote should be, "I didn't speak out because I saw what happens to those that do."
Nice...

Getting the run-around for the IRS and the media seems to be the lot for those trying to get it together.
Anything that makes Java harder to use is good for the industry.
A Video Game Studio From Hell
I think it's fairly straight forward how to keep any great employee, whether they clean your floors or maintain your $1 million a year generating product. Treat them with respect. This may go as far as allowing them to leave, which seems counter to what we want, but still. "Treat them with respect" is very broad but no matter what angle you think from, it works.

For example, employees get bored because they are consistently doing work which is far below their skill level in a vocation which they haven't fully explored[1]. The respectful thing to do would be to either find work that is more challenging for this employee or allow them to move on to greener pastures, giving them great references and even assisting find their ideal role. If they do move on, whoever used to be our second best employee in that area becomes the best we have, who will be closer to what we need in terms of skills, whilst maintaining a great relationship with the previous employee.

Also, if I'm overseeing an absolute wizard at what they do and they are far better than me at it, they deserve respect by being listened to when they offer advice when it comes to their craft. They deserve recognition of skill and if something isn't feasible or if there's a better way, I damn well better make sure I do it their way for the sake of my product/service/building/whatever and for the sake of my employee's general wellbeing. Hell, if they're that good, perhaps I can entrust them with a little bit more. After all, we should be hiring people to both do the jobs we haven't got the time for anymore and, at the same time, do them better than us.

Telling an employee "do x by this time and you get a promotion" is not respectful either. This will create a bad culture, where cutting corners is rewarded where as doing your best work and offering sound advice is ignored or punished.

It's really interesting to talk about theories of motivation, value and what not, I've done this and applying tactics and strategies like this works but it's overcomplicating shit that can be kept simple: treat everyone with respect, treat everyone as you'd like to be treated. It's very motivating going to your manager and saying "look, I need work that's a bit more challenging" and them replying with "understood mate. give me a bit of time and we'll work something out" (and, for brevity, ignoring the conversation in between of what exactly 'more challenging' means). It's very motivating your manager calling on you to give advice on the best course of action, rather than dictating how things will be done. This is simply respect.

You should aim to give absolute respect to every person you work with, who works under you and works above you. Hell, you should do this for everyone in your life. Whether they return in kind is irrelevant, just keep at it. Sometimes those who haven't treated you right before will warm to you.

[1]: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f6/Cha...
taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
I thought the poster was referring to something other than "Men's Rights Advocates"; maybe implicitly trotting out the hackneyed "Tumblr SJ crazies" strawmen
Wardrobe on the Cloud
This article itself says otherwise, that PRISM is a front-end to the data itself, providing a unified interface for searching through all the data types from the many sources they're coming in from.
Pretty sure they were trying to demonstrate that we could have continued to fund NASA at a full burn rate for a few years with these funds.
no it isn't a problem to be solved, it is a property of the world (of human psyche), like gravity is a property of matter.
See here for why it would be detectable (for Google, at least): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5843525
'Not subject to American law' might not be possible if you want to use today's Internet in a global manner.

US citizens for example get taxed worldwide and banks worldwide have to comply with American law if they want to remain part of the global banking system (and don't want to go out of business). That's possible because the heart of the global banking system is located in the US or at least under American control.

Today's Internet is very similar and American companies are the dominating forces on the Internet anyway. And with regard to surveillance and interception, the US even has many supporting allies worldwide, just think of Echolon …
Google denies PRISM-dropbox allegation from NYT article
To me, these are the relevant paragraphs:

It is not clear how the NSA interfaces with the companies. It cannot use standard law enforcement transmission channels to do, since most use data protocols that are not compatible with that hardware. Several of the companies mentioned in the Post report deny granting access to the NSA, although it is possible that they are lying, or that the NSA's arrangements with the company are kept so tightly compartmentalized that very few people know about it. Those who do probably have security clearances and are bound by law not to reveal the arrangement.

This arrangement allows the U.S. companies to "stay out of the intelligence business," one of the officials said. That is, the government bears the responsibility for determining what's relevant, and the company can plausibly deny that it subjected any particular customer to unlawful government surveillance. Previously, Congressional authors of the FAA said that such a "get out of jail free" card was insisted by corporations after a wave of lawsuits revealed the extent of their cooperation with the government.
I want my private files and private communications to be private.

We should all be boycotting centralization of private communications and unencrypted file storage in the cloud as a precautionary measure. In light of NSA/Prism, especially when communicated across national borders, we should insist on end-to-end encryption: GPG/PGP, S/MIME, HTTPS, RSA/DES/etc, i.e. nothing sent in the clear.

For public services like Google+ or Twitter, the information is public anyway. Unless Google, Apple, Microsoft, et al, start implementing back doors on my devices for the NSA I don't think boycotting is the answer. The pressure has to be primarily on the politicians, hold their feet to the fire until FISA/PATRIOT acts are repealed.
I was just frustrated at the low fire rate :P
You might be right! The core issue of the ICCCM though is not that it's poorly designed in and of itself, but that it is forced to worked around certain specific deficiencies in the X11 protocol (and by "specific" I mean "easily fixed in the next protocol bump", as opposed to "warrant an entire redesign"). The ICCCM authors even suggest improvements to X11 to make for a more coherent system, but sadly it seems most of them have not yet (25 yrs on…) been implemented.

My overall thesis is that the overall design of X (client/server model, mechanism not policy, extensibility) is a sound one, and that the issues cited by Wayland proponents would be better addressed by an evolution of X than a whole-sale replacement.
If I was operating this service, I would just sell the Bitcoins as they were deposited to me. When people wanted to withdraw, I would buy them back at the current market rate. Of course I would do this in bulk and have a small reserve pool of Bitcoins to reduce my fees and improve liquidity, but that's not very significant.

As long as I can buy/sell for cheaper than I am charging my customers (which I can if I'm using MtGox at 0.5% and charging 0.75%), this is profitable with no risk to either me or my customers. There is no need for this to be a scam or a gamble by the operator (although it doesn't exclude the possibility, obviously).
Google has specifically stated that they don't take this ("drop box") approach:

"We cannot say this more clearly—the government does not have access to Google servers—not directly, or via a back door, or a so-called drop box."
I actually boycott certain airlines. Yes, there are TSA rules but their implementation is very different. American airline staff ('airline', not 'Airlines') seems to operate on a paranoia level that is simply not compatible with the service level I expect from an airline. I want to be treated as a customer and not as a potential terrorist … other airlines flying to the US (and worldwide anyway) manage to do that.
Exactly. One phone call to verify the signature is all you need. Skype (or any other insecure (against passive attacks, i.e. the attacker shouldn't be able to modify what's going between you) channel) will work just fine, as long as you can be sure you're talking with the person you think you're talking to.
Any email provider out there in a 'safe location' that can compete with GMail?
I'd really like to move the GMail Acc. I use for some of my mail, but every option kinda feels like moving from smoke to smother.
(But to compromise many users, there might not be a need for a complicated, expensive large-scale attack -- if you can infect someone with malware, it renders whether or not they are using Tor moot).
I don't think this is a binary choice:
a. do nothing
b. take up arms and revolt

But now may be the time that we need to actively take action so we don't have to exercise said rights at some point in the future. Frankly if they are eavesdropping on everything it would be incredibly difficult to organize at some point in the future.
Quantum Teleportation: Breakthrough in Teleporting Info Between Gas Clouds
Your government is owned by your corporations. Thus, the best way to get to your government is doing something the hurts your companies' bottom line.
+1. When I started learning to develop for the web in 2001 I was part of a list with an iron-clad list mom (of some repute). I fell foul of him numerous times, but it kept the discussions good and on track. I learned a lot, the feedback I got improved my coding no end, and everyone kept a level of respect for each other.

I'm not old, but I long for the old days :)
RedPhone - end-to-end encryption for your calls
you don't have to obey the law, you choose to obey. When you decide to not obey the law, you also decide to face the consequences.

When the law doesn't sit well with you, you should indeed choose to not obey, then fight the consequences.
I think asking powerful organizations to give you privacy is a lost cause. If you want something, you have to take it. I think making cryptographic tools more widespread and easier to use will have a more practical impact.
Ask HN: Has Mozilla dis-continued its support for Thunderbird Enigmail Plugin?
I recently, tried to install Enigmail plugin in the latest version of Thunderbird and it is repeatedly throwing a security warning and not allowing the plugin to install...

Has it's support been dis-continued by Mozilla?
Also probably the same in reverse, takes the data back and sends it back in a useful format.

The other side though is this -- if you let such requests be quick and easy, you will get more of them. If you want to take a position against such surveillance you should make the process as long and drawn out as you legally can. Insist on hard copies hand-delivered. Insist on manual review by lawyers of hard copies, and the like.

But if you make it easy to get information you will get more requests for them.
Destroying jobs is the entire point of this invention stuff
There is no significant evolutionary advantage (for humans) to seeing UV light, so it will, at best, be a rare instance, if it's even genetically possible for something like that to happen.

Any advantages there may be gained from this will just be provided by an external set of glasses or visors.

Maybe Google Glass will provide something like this in 20 years, but otherwise, I highly doubt it.
The Enterprise App Economy
It sounds like they have multiple processes, which makes some sense.
They're just using the data they have in a new way... you're not giving more.
Homeland Security: Requirements for Security Decision Support Systems (2004)
ASK HN: Which NoSQL DBMS for client-side web development?
Which is your favorite NoSQL DBMS for your web projects?

How do you you is it? Is it REST full ready or you using it with backend code like Ruby or PHP?
Musing About SnapChat, Including Business Models
W Cape: Africa's Silicon Valley
Aaron Swartz dad wants justice for his son.
I hope he gets the justice he demands and deserves for his son.
But in 2001 Qwest refused. Now refusal is illegal.
Why doesn't it make sense? Snapchat has become massively popular on mobile devices, and much moreso than even Facebook and Twitter in terms of engagement and growth.

People had literally this exact same sentiment about Facebook in 2008-2010. ("It's just a photo sharing site for kids...") And they also suggested adding a subscription service. Instagram sold before they got along to integrating ads (they had less than 20 employees), but that product was/is on a similar trajectory. There doesn't exist a single large social network that directly charges users, so I don't think you can just assume that's a valid strategy.

When you're on a wave like this, you ride it. They likely sold <15% of the company for that $100MM. Sure, the current product is silly. But it's unbelievably sticky for users and really fun. If you don't understand this, I bet haven't used it at length. It feels surprisingly like Twitter did early on. A new medium. A new protocol. A new way of interacting with friends.

"Toys are not really as innocent as they look. Toys and games are preludes to serious ideas.” - Charles Eames
Google is currently working on upgrading their certificates so in the future it will be better: http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/changes-...
Number of users.

Diversity of product use.

Lack of existing brand stigma.
That's pretty much my plan. Email is too easily ignored. I'm going to start sending letters to Feinstein (Her unapolegetic stance has me particularly annoyed at her. http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/06/18796204-nsa-snoo...) and my other local reps.
This Is Your Brain on Coffee, wow
This is huge, bounded gaps between primes 
The twin primes conjecture states that there are infinitely numbers n such that n and n+2 are prime. David Roberts on Google+ refers to this as “to put it mildly, EXTREMELY HARD to prove”. An equivalent statement is that there are infinitely many primes p and q such that |p−q|<3, and this, says David, allows the production of weaker conjectures:

Conjecture(N): there are infinitely many primes p and q such that |p−q|<N.

Anyway, according to a blog post by Peter Woit of Columbia University, who apparently got an email announcing it, there is a seminar today at Harvard at 3pm local time, in which “Yitang Zhang will present new results on ‘Bounded gaps between primes’”. Peter says that Zhang claims a proof of Conjecture(70,000,000), that is: there are infinitely many primes p and q such that |p−q|<70,000,000.