skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, what's new news in the CNET story?

The order has to be for account information or an intercept directed at a specific foreign person, and "you can't say everyone in Pakistan who searched for 'X'... It still has to be particularized."

This seems to contradict the NYT's claim http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-... that

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.

. Maybe it's specifically there to contradict the NYT claim.
Xbox One: Microsoft defends pre-owned games rules
IANAL but (Spain): there is NO way to get an order from the Government which you cannot legally make public. You cannot be forced to keep a secret you did not seek to know (unless you are a Gvt employee, which includes that explicitly).
w00t hireart 4tw. although wth is friedman writing about?
Ultimately any sufficiently popular platform will attract the attention of the local security services.

The question is who do you fear most, NSA or GHCQ, DGSE etc?
So, for the uninformed like me, this is a more anonymous form of torrents?
There are various cloud storage companies, TUB apparently just installed ownCloud[0], aforementioned GMX[1] has some storage thing with iPhone, Android and Windows clients and then there is always git-annex which you can run against basically anything. But you are right, there is not quite a EUDropbox, yes.

There’s even a ‘Internet made in Germany’ initiative, promising, apart from others just that[2].

[0] http://www.tubit.tu-berlin.de/?131359 (though given my experience with tubIT, I would be a little wary…)

[1] http://www.gmx.net/produkte/mediacenter&#x2F;

[2] http://www.1und1.de/internetmadeingermany&#x2F; (Curious logo…)
Backbone Debugger
Lol Dwight. Read article. Watch Vince Vaughn.
We can't have that debate if we aren't informed about what's being kept from us.
Yes, you're wrong. There's a data link from the phone to one tower when setting up a call or similar - the ID of that tower is communicated to the core network. You can handover to another tower if that signal becomes stronger (e.g. you're moving) - this'll just give you more information, i.e. the fact that the user was moving, and you can now narrow down the location further to the parts where the two cells overlap in coverage.
It's a pretty simple script but, if you're curious, the source is at https://github.com/michaelschade/netflix-trailers.
Expected, unless the leaked doc said "ignore court order" or "kill the Presi..." leaking is illegal.

The person that leaked this knew that he /she would be prosecuted, if... Let's hope that he took care not to leave any crumbs as he gave the info to the Guardian
PRISM and the Verizon scandal are two completely different fiascoes. PRISM was a supposed program that archived and collected data of American citizens in a widespread data mining project. The Verizon scandal was one where Verizon agreed to the NSA allowing tapping of phones in specific areas.

Both are equally suspicious and egregious in their own rights. What is important is the investigation of both of these programs and the final conclusion. Until that conclusion is met, I think it's best for everybody to shut up and get on with their lives.

It was bad, and I, like many others, was angry. But now is the time to wait, and be careful about which services we decide to use.
The author of the original WaPo story said yesterday that the source was expecting to be caught. "I don't even think [the source] wants to stay masked forever."

Good interview if this is a story you care about.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/video/thefold/nsa-leak-source-...
TextSecure-iOS on github was last committed to in March 2013, has work been done elsewhere?

https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure-iOS/commits/mas...
They are currently in discussions as to what they can release:

https://twitter.com/jamesrbuk/status/343432706484490240
This is a great idea. Simple yet effective. However, why did you choose not to source the trailers from, say, IMDB or Rottentomatoes but instead pull from youtube?

Disclaimer: I haven't tried the extension, just like the idea
Somehow, I won't feel bad if a multi-billion dollar advertising company has to deal with privacy laws that make their data-harvesting a little harder.
ChatSecure crashes way to much to be usable.
It has become a topic but once again, Orwell to the rescue: "the past is alterable." 1984.

How true, in this case.

But it has been the Post, not the Government, who altered it. Sad, shameful and pathetic.
Oh, that's easy: the sun never sets on the British empire.

Seriously, though, time zones do not help with that. The sun sets at nine in the evening in Leicester in July. Can't be helped, the length of the day is different.
I don't know about the collapse of journalism. What it seems to me is the collapse of credibility.

Here we have major publications publishing something and then major corporations denying it. Then the publications step back from it, but not entirely.

At the same time, this is an issue about which the parties involved may be under a legal obligation to lie. If there is a room at Facebook that does the same thing as the room at AT&T, would Facebook be allowed to tell you about it? Of course not.

So now we have media outlets contradicting each other and genuine sources legally prohibited from providing true answers, which means we'll never know what actually happened. This is what you get when you pass laws that prohibit the public from knowing the truth and wage a campaign against leakers.

So now the media looks incompetent, the corporations look like government shills and the government looks like an authoritarian nightmare -- and this even though they maybe haven't actually done anything. All because they attacked our method of finding the truth and destroyed its credibility.
The Washington Post story was double-bylined (and also credited several other reporters and researchers), and the lead byline went to Barton Gellman, who used to be full-time at the WP but (AFAIK) is at TIME magazine. Not sure what the publishing process for this story was about (it seems unusual to have a story lead-bylined by only non-staff members), but I imagine it had something to do with the Guardian dropping their bombshells and the WP deciding that it also should publish (perhaps this story had been in the works, but wasn't originally going to be published this week).

disclosure: I know Gellman as an acquaintance through a colleague and consider him to be a great reporter...but I'd probably say that anyway just based on him wining the Pulitzer for his reporting on Dick Cheney (http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2008-National-Reporting)
Is the War on Cancer winnable?
Amazon Review from someone that dropped $800 for all 16 books:
http://www.amazon.com/review/RRHPZR4X8VP4N/ref=cm_cr_dp_titl...
It's incredible how the presence of the word "leaks" turns the whole headline from promising to sinister. Why can't they investigate the NSA for once? Isn't that what a democratic country would do?
It's not yet clear that anything in the original piece is actually wrong, despite some carefully worded denials. I think it's unfair to judge him as misinterpreting something (yet).
Now apply that same logic to the pursuit of life on other worlds.
I have trouble deciding whether people intentional misunderstand him, simple can't, or just prefer to be outraged.

The program is classified. Its more effective if it remains so. Since it is now public, though he wishes it wasn't, he's happy and willing to publicly debate the issue of privacy vs security. He's made it quite clear that he struggles with the issue himself.

Leaking classified information is illegal, thus it generally should be prosecuted. Though we also have whistleblower laws that protect people who are leaking evidence of criminal conduct.
What if I insinuated that certain multinational companies already choose which data centers get certain products due to tax reasons? As in, "product X can go into building #1 but not building #3, and product Y can go into #3 but not #1".
Ask HN: Is it worth to make promotions of your Apps?(XX% OFF sales)
A hackaton project of ours turned out to be pretty successful. It's an Android app which climbed the ranks quickly, now being in top 10 grossing in it's category in most countries, a month after launch.

Our app costs $9.99, and we're wondering if it would be worth putting it on sale (ex: $4.99 for a limited period). Two of us are already doing full-time support, and just doubling downloads for the same revenue wouldn't make sense.

In your experience, is it healthy to put your app on sale ?

Thank you!
PRISM: New slide released by The Guardian
What are the similar talking points? They both do strongly deny knowledge or participation in PRISM, but that's not really a talking point.

And I don't think it's an either-or situation: either it's the truth and they deny, or it's false and they deny. There's a third option: it's true, and they remain silent.
I am (have been for two months) thinking of starting an email service that is compatible with the current email system, but adds features.

-If server is stolen by authorities they got nothing;

-RSA/public key encryption on every email. Every user has a public key and incoming mail is encrypted on the server right away. Public key is available for every email upon request, then other party encrypts and not the server. (this is so that other providers can implement this protocol)

-Downloadable apps to prevent 'man in the middle' attacks.

-Private key is generated via a standard procedure, client side, on every login. User password (such as 'correct horse battery staple') will be the 'seed' for the procedure to generate private keys.

I need help for this project. Please respond if interested or for any suggestions.
Depends on how you define "communists" and "terrorists". If you say communists are members of the organisation called Communist Party (including main - USSR - party and foreign branches) and terrorists are members of an organisation like Al Qaeda that has terror as its tactics - then yes, they are - or, more correctly, were - nearly equivalent. Communist Party's official goal - at least back in the middle of the last century where it was at the peak of its power - was the overthrow of the capitalist governments, or at least sufficient weakening of them to render them unable to interfere with the Party's goals. In the service of this goal, they did not hesitate to use violence, murder and any other criminal activity. They also waged a multitude of actual wars in many places, including against the US and US allies. Of course, not every rank Communist Party member was engaged in active violence - but also not every rank member of terrorist organisation blows himself up in Baghdad market or flies a plane into a New York building. There are many supporters and enablers that contribute their part to make the final strike possible - by giving money, material support, logistics, cover, etc.

Of course, now that communist parties are mostly a sad joke, the equivalence is absent, but back in the day I would say being a communist - especially outside of Communist block were you didn't have much choice and also almost always did not possess relevant information to make correct conclusions - was not much different on the substance than being, say, Hamas supporter now, even though I realize many people did not understand that. But many people don't understand it now too.
Ask HN: Is there a news startup for collating sources?
With the Prism story there was a hugely complexity of sources. Different news services had obtained information from both government insiders and the companies. There were also lots of direct primary source like companies or employees putting out statements.

Because of the complexity and the fact the sources were all over the place it made it close to impossible for anyone to stay on-top of the story fully.

It seems like in the future this will happen more often (for example stories breaking with live reporting on twitter) so we need a better way to track primary sources.

Is there a startup working on this ?
US justice system in ‘calamitous’ collapse
Talk about click-baiting ...

Based on what we know so far, the stories have at a minimum gotten significant press coverage about the volume of FISA requests and (per the NY Times and Marc Ambinder) the cooperation of many US tech companies (though not Twitter) in building a streamlined approach to surveillance of nonUS persons. With public discussion, it ay be harder to invoke the state secrets clause. And we're not done yet. "Collapse" seems a litte overstated.
There is a world of difference between a statement that something is happening and a statement that someone claims it is happening. The latter is specifically about a person talking, which is only evidence insofar as the person and all intermediate transmission channels are trustworthy. Those conditions might in fact be true here, but it is an important distinction.
I used to think this. I don't entirely disagree. But:

> “The American of today, in fact, probably enjoys less personal liberty than any other man of Christendom, and even his political liberty is fast succumbing to the new dogma that certain theories of government are virtuous and lawful, and others abhorrent and felonious. Laws limiting the radius of his free activity multiply year by year: It is now practically impossible for him to exhibit anything describable as genuine individuality, either in action or in thought, without running afoul of some harsh and unintelligible penalty. It would surprise no impartial observer if the motto “In God we trust” were one day expunged from the coins of the republic by the Junkers at Washington, and the far more appropriate word, “verboten,” substituted. Nor would it astound any save the most romantic if, at the same time, the goddess of liberty were taken off the silver dollars to make room for a bas-relief of a policeman in a spiked helmet. Moreover, this gradual (and, of late, rapidly progressive) decay of freedom goes almost without challenge; the American has grown so accustomed to the denial of his constitutional rights and to the minute regulation of his conduct by swarms of spies, letter-openers, informers and agents provocateurs that he no longer makes any serious protest.”

That was written by H. L. Mencken in 1920.

I think about things like the Japanese internment camps the US set up during WW2, and I imagine that it must've always been pretty fucking bad.

Destroyed though it is. I left everything behind to move somewhere better. It's tough, but it's worth it.
You should speak at jsconf
What context is added to his original statement by the subsequent sentence that changes its meaning? If anything, it strengthens his point by mentioning that Google retains the information, and that one example of its use is that authorities could request it.
If you've the free time, see this (longish 1:27:34) Youtube video of William Binney, harassed and heroic NSA whistleblower, describing huge corporate-intelligence-complex expansion, internal intrique, and corrupt revolving door entanglement of NSA active careers into lucrative re-hired retirees.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxnp2Sz59p8

Who Does a Cyberwar Escalation Or False-Flag-Op Benefit?

What does a false flag op(Reichstag Fire) lead to in `Cyberwar'? Say, something such as personal crypto, stego, deniable crypto, hacking ... becomes illegal? Loss of more civil rights?

Possibly something much more frightening.

Rather, "follow the money", this new kind of war's required budgets, now even more centralized and higher-tech than Wall Street or Silicon Valley, more remote and alien `mathematical', `quant'; more pure-and-applied `mathematics-weaponized' focused, this new defense budget, will be handled and directed by these re-employed ex-NSA elite.

Who is going to fight a Cyberwar? Not the Marines, Army, Navy, Air Force.
It will be a relatively tiny nos of techs in these Maryland corridors of security/intel-tech corporate parks leading into Fort Meade, with ex-NSA civilians pulling down exec salaries wearing their valuable rare and tightly controlled security clearance badge necklaces.

If the above outcome is true, this appears quite the nightmare. President Bush was cognitively challenged though recognizably human. These state sanctioned and security cleared career puppet masters are way smarter, amoral, and frighteningly alien.
My comment was descriptive, not prescriptive; I was trying to provide some perspective.

I live in LA and personally know families who spent time in those camps. I also know screenwriting families who lost their jobs during the 1950s Hollywood blacklist. So yes, those mistakes were real, and they can divert the course of lives for the worse.

In the flawed world we live in, it takes time for people to change their minds and muster the political will to roll them back. This is generally prompted by over-reach. For example, as the cold war started to cool off a bit, the Church Committee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee) and the Pike Committee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pike_Committee). Maybe we're seeing such a time now.
My guess would be because now it's personal.
Verizon is not mentioned in that PRISM document. Phone record tapping is different issue withing the domestic spying program and Obama has already admitted it.
> We can also have the debate ... but that's not the same thing

Yes, it is. The whole thing is cohesive. Penetration at the source is the only thing that will halt government secrecy, and condemning those who leak classified information is egregious and a grave disservice to those people.

Classified information should only pertain to anything with national security at stake. The in-country data mining obviously did not.
So the whistleblower law is just a "pretend-law"? Whistleblowers are needed for a healthy democracy, unless we have a pretend-democracy at this point, too. How do you uncover dirt on the government if every single act of whistleblowing and investigative journalism on the government is being prosecuted? Not only does that create a very chilling effect, but it also takes out everyone who did it, "before they cause too much damage". And doesn't this begin to resemble a little too much with some of those oppressive regimes?

The government classifies everything it doesn't want the public to know these days, and then tries to arrest everyone who leaks those documents. I think we need to stop thinking about what's legal and what's illegal, and start thinking about what moral and immoral. Many of these laws are immoral.
I was thinking the same thing.

"We are very happy with the hammer we are currently using. Previously, we were using pliers to hammer nails and we saw that it wasn't very efficient."
Cross-reference the data on www.appshopper.com with www.appannie.com ranking information.
Good point. Maybe because HN is mostly a tech news site and the IRS targeting didn't involve any tech like the NSA scandal did.
If a non-technical person can reasonably understand the service to have "direct access", perhaps the technical distinction between "direct" and "indirect" access that everyone is using to CYA is meaningless semantic babble.
Currency Arbitrage in Python
Rotten Tomatoes required an API key, which meant I'd probably need to build some intermediate service. (I of course wouldn't want to include the API key in the Chrome extension.) I didn't want the extra overhead for that. I looked at other services that did have an API without authentication (like Trailer Addict), but their player required Flash, and lacked a bunch of content (like for TV shows).

YouTube has a better player interface, is more likely to contain obscure content (e.g., from old movies, or relatively unknown TV series), and had a super low barrier to entry, so I went with that.

I remembered poking at IMDB awhile back and that there wasn't an API, but I just found http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1966503/does-imdb-provide.... It seems that endpoint will give me the IMDB movie ID, which you need to show the trailer, so I may end up switching to this.
Big Data and the NSA: Hero or Villain
> Isn't that what a democratic country would do

An informed democratic country, yes. But people in the United States are misled, misguided, and taught not to question government.

I know this from personal experience. My parents taught me to be afraid of government. Many of my friends were also taught the same thing. Everywhere I go, everyone in my age group either worships the government or fears it.

There is absolutely no democratic attitude here; it's frightening and totalitarian.
It appears this was justified by a specific law that was passed by the representatives of the people for the people, so why should they investigate the NSA, especially in a democratic country?
Hey PR People, Listen Up
Seems like the 'directly' could easily refer to the company-provided secure lockers that are referenced in the uncrunched article.

If true, that means there's no direct panopticon access, only an expedited, direct, digital means of getting the data, once retrieved, into the government's hands.

Ignoring whether I think a government should be able to ask for this information at all, I think the existence of such direct means is probably on the whole a good thing, because if the british government's repeated losses of laptops and DVDs full on private information are anything to go on, governments really suck at secure data transfer and I'd rather only a government had it than a government -and- whoever managed to steal the thing en route.

I still hope google will continue to challenge the NSL process etc. in court, but I can't say I mind them arranging things in the meantime so as to minimise the odds of the government screwing up the execution of said process.
I don't even know what to say. I think I might cry. This is going to be so useful.
Friedman is a hack[1]. Aside from the fact that his primary source for this article seems to be a New Yorker cartoon, he seems unaware of federal law on unpaid internships, which is quite stringent.

[1] http://nypress.com/flathead&#x2F;
Only a matter of time before a nefarious person discovers how to trigger the kill switch at their will. If this happens, Intel will immediately go out of business. They know they can't just blame the NSA. That's why Intel has every incentive to aggressively fight such orders.
Getting rid of leap seconds and summer time, that would do it for me. BTW China has only one time zone, so they are kind of practicing what you suggest.
Tldr;

"As a result, Tesla's balance sheet will sprout a contingent liability for the "residual value" of those cars, and analysts worry that the amount will quickly rise to hundreds of millions of dollars -- on the order of half of the company's book value. The deferred impact of all those used batteries will become clearer in coming years, after Tesla also starts running low on the government-legislated zero-emission-vehicle credits that offset $68 million in expenses in the March 2013 quarter.
We had hoped Musk would advise us on these points, but our scheduled interview with him ended abruptly on Friday, when he hung up on us."
That's an odd collection of feminists, though there are a variety of thoughts on how best to serve the victims of rape and how best to make it understood that rape is a crime of violence (and not merely a harmless act of overzealous sexual desire). I don't think it is common among my friend circle (who are mostly all feminists) to call rape anything other than rape.
It's like we are living in the darkest timeline and what we have is evil Abed