skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You'd be right. At NASA we could use whatever we wanted. There was no directive to do one thing or another (at least not one I ever knew about) - only the conventions that allowed you could communicate with your peers. Much of the technology we used had evolved over decades. Changing it to metric would have been insane.

An interesting line from that wikipedia article:
This error has since been known as the "metric mixup" and has been carefully avoided in all missions since by NASA.

This is categorically not true, as I worked before and after that, and it had zero impact on the units we used or how we checked them. Most of the time nothing was metric, so it didn't matter.
Seriously, what are you hiding?
A tank would have a much higher risk of needless collateral damage compared to rifles, and the NG couldn't play anyways due to Posse Comitatus Act restrictions (except possibly if they were activated under the state governor's authority, I forget the specifics).

Either way the comment didn't say that "more force is always better" like you seem to go along with, only that a couple of agents with handguns are in a different category than a bunch of agents with rifles available. But once you have a bunch of agents with rifles, adding a tank or soldiers doesn't significantly change the risk equation for the Feds so even their ORM analysis would say not to do it.
Fascinating. Any idea what the suffix numbers stand for for these cities?
"We were able to glean critical info through an e-mail accessible only by Prism"
Doesn't work with Firefox. Please find some solution
I have shortened the quote because of the limit, the full quote is

“We were able to glean critical information,” said a senior intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It was through an e-mail correspondence that we had access to only through Prism.”
I didn't interpret EWD that way. It's not that machines don't think, but instead that 'think' is too ill-defined to be meaningful in the same sentence as 'machines'. Turing wasn't wrong to believe what he did, but perhaps at that point in time 'machines' did not mean something so precise as it does today.
Extended Network graphic
I use wobbling windows because it makes my interaction with the system seem more transparent. Rigid windows feel unnatural, but wobbly windows let me become absorbed by my task.
"This is a lesson in the power of language."

Yes!

What exactly is being said, but more importantly what is not being said? Zuck's post was 169 words on one of the most important stories to break about privacy and tech companies.
Don't be so sure. This isn't over yet. Back in the day, the feds roamed about with orders to kill. Vigilance is the key. People freak out. Then we reign them back in.
I think all companies followed the government supplied script on purpose. To alert public that it was a govt supplied script and that they still have gag orders. They expected people to see a pattern - this is the best that they could do, given the handcuffs they are wearing.
Actually they wouldn't necessarily need to coordinate. If Google posted first and Zuck wanted to cause this phenomena, the facebook post just needs to mirror the Google one. No communication with Google required.
Congress can repeal HIPAA.
take the junk off the end of the url
Please, don't be that guy who plays word games and starts parsing words in ways that suit their agenda. It's pretty clear he meant conspiracy in the common way most people talk about conspiracies when it comes to this subject. As in conspiracy theories or any other kind of conspiracy with sinister motives. The "they're out to get us" kind of conspiracy. Please don't come back now and say "that's not the way I commonly use/see it used". We do this far too often on this site. We start nitpicking little things like the dictionary definitions of words when we don't agree with someone and it totally derails the discussion.

The OP makes a good point here. These companies aren't out to intentionally harm their own users. They are out to make money and that sometimes has some side effects we don't like. But it is also entirely possible that they really do care about their customers/users too. Sometimes I feel like most people somehow have this idea that all these big companies are evil and really are involved in some mass conspiracy to harm us somehow. I once ran a company. I think this is somewhat related to this sort of war between companies trying to extract as much money per customer and customers trying to extract as much value from companies at as little cost as possible. But that's a topic for another time.

All the OP was really getting at with the conspiracy remark, and OP please correct me if I'm wrong, is that whether or not they intentionally gave the government access to some or all of their data they didn't do so knowing or intending for it to be used the way it was. They were trying cover their ass by complying with certain laws and the authorities and this massive cluster fuck was an unexpected consequence of that.
You're minimizing the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I don't want arbitrary or harmful laws enforced in the name of counter-terrorism anymore than you do, but don't act as though 3000 lives lost in a direct attack on our soil are insignificant by any measure.

For all it's doing wrong, the NSA has a goal in mind to try to protect the American people. If its methods become cancerous that is one thing, but factor in the intentions here. They are not trying to ruin lives, even though their perspectives might be warped.
actually everyone seems to have switched to the "fast" SSL ciphers instead - only dropbox defaults to DHE:

> openssl s_client -connect google.com:443
RC4-SHA
> openssl s_client -connect dropbox.com:443
DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA

Again, this is usually done for speed, but all of the companies on the list are using "fast" SSL/TLS ciphers rather than more secure ones.
The prolog solution is cool, but I would have solved it with a bellman ford algorithm.
It doesn't matter which format of CSV file you choose, or what settings you use, what Excel actually saves will be different depending on the language profile of the individual user. Not useful in a bilingual office, especially if you want a script to parse that CSV.

My simple hack was to create a macro button that saves to CSV, because the macro function ignores the language settings (probably a bug?) and always saves in the English format.
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You know that Walmart, and gas stations, and bodegas sell these already right? That's why this is a bad idea. Not only is this less anonymous from buying from Walmart, but it's more expensive as well.
Simple math shows why the NSA’s Facebook spying is a fool’s errand
Yes, you might be the only person here to suggest Matt Cutts is ever unwelcome on any HN thread.
This data exchange is arguably both unlawful and unethical. Unlawful in that it's an illegal search under the 4th amendment to the constitution. Unethical in that it makes liars out of these companies when they claim their customers have a reasonable level of privacy.

What conceivable "probable cause" could justify data collection on the scale being discussed? Practices being "codified into law" (largely secret laws, being interpreted in secret ways) doesn't really let anyone off the hook here. Or it shouldn't, at any rate. (Congresscritters and presidents still have an oath of office that promises to defend the constitution, right?)
Yes, this times one thousand. The terrorists won this round.
Ask HN: Isn't the NSA justified when cities can be vaporized with a nuke?
Imagine how upset we'd be if a nuclear weapon exploded in the US. The devastation of a nuclear explosion in a large city would make September 11th look like child's play and the draconian response following the attack would make the PATRIOT Act look the same. I'm not supporting the NSA, but I'm not condemning them yet, either.
This.

Acquire access to major routers, send routing commands, route target traffic into their hidden networks, and avoid physically wiretapping anything. And this framework can be done globally:

Your target's communications [...] flowing into and through the U.S. is as easy as announcing BGP route advertisements globally.

Actually the Great Firewall of China started investigated realtime and fine-grained control of national routing infrastructure as early as in 2003.[1] This allows them to apply routing policies to routers national-wide in seconds. One observable effect is that a single address can be null routed immediately after failure to get blocked by TCP resets. It is believed the HTTPS MITM of Github last time was also helped by this routing framework. And the GFW is viewed by the Chinese government as a national security framework. No wonder the USG is doing the same thing.

[1]: Liu, G., Yun, X., Fang, B., Hu, M. 2003. A control method for large-scale network based on routing diffusion. Journal of China Institute of Communications: 10.
See, this is the problem. We can't let the government scare us away from our beloved internet services. We must tell the government that they aren't allowed to spy on us. Expect more from your government; don't adapt to them, make them adapt to YOU.
For all it's doing wrong, the NSA has a goal in mind to try to protect the American people. If its methods become cancerous that is one thing, but factor in the intentions here. They are not trying to ruin lives, even though their perspectives might be warped.

This idea is mistaken because nobody knows what their intents are. Your idea of "just trust them" isn't comforting; quite the opposite.
The only people who think thermal power generation is a false dichotomy are those who haven't tried to spec out power generation schemes that rely completely on unreliable renewables. Specifically, renewables have a much different capacity factor than thermal power designs (like coal or nuclear) and therefore require a very heavy investment in energy storage schemes, especially if the plan is to go 100% renewable.

Even in Germany, which is the example everyone points to, 80% of the shift away from nuclear has been towards coal. Even natural gas would be better than shifting to coal! And despite only shifting 20% of that generation to renewables there have been increasing problems with frequency variation and brief power interruptions on the grid due to the much higher variability in power output from renewable.
Ask HN: Where are the complete PRISM slides?
The WP report mentions PRISM being described on a 41 slide presentation. Both Guardian and WP have only shared the first 4 slides only. Both the reports hardly mention any facts that are not mentioned in those 4 slides. It makes me put my tinfoil hat on, and wonder where are those rest of the slides? Is there a valid reason behind this hedging?
Enough about PRISM
Enough ranting about PRISM. We get it - its not that complicated. We don't need 300 articles posted all over HN.
Most of these cities (e.g. Zheleznogorsk [1]) seem to have a stylized atom as part of their coat of arms. I wonder if it was common practice in the USSR to incorporate similar symbols into the coat of arms of other newly founded industrial cities?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheleznogorsk,_Krasnoyarsk_Krai
It's like Ctrl + F meets Vimium.
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I followed a chain of linked articles from OP and eventually found an explanation on an article for Ozyorsk[1]:

> Until 1994, it was known as Chelyabinsk-65, and even earlier, as Chelyabinsk-40 (the digits are the last digits of the postal code, and the name is that of the nearest big city; which was a common practice of giving names to closed towns).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozyorsk,_Chelyabinsk_Oblast
We are not disagreeing with anything he says. We are saying the NSA has the private key.

Ian Gallager: > so if you have the private key, you can decrypt that key, and then use it to decrypt the bulk-encrypted data.

Like he says, if you have the key, wireshark can decrypt the data trivially.

If you have the CA master keys, then the only thing you can do is perform a MITM attack, but not silently decrypt the raw data. A MITM attack would eventually get detected.
More specifically http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire
Doesn't matter, since some terrorists end up revealing themselves anyway, then the government tracks the links. You don't need to find terrorists by themselves in the data without anything else to go on.
I've posted this a few times, but I'll do it again:

Why aren't we all using Bitmessage already?

https://bitmessage.org

https://www.youtube.com/embed/t_dTotavJZ8
Doublespeak Denials Of PRISM Hid The Truth About Participation
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Yeah, this cannot be emphasized enough. I know it was a long time ago, but how can anyone say that "Well, this country has truly fallen into a shithole" when, for about a hundred years, we were OK with enslaving an entire race of people, and justified it out of desire for economic stability?

Ideals take time and perseverance...thank goodness for organizations like the ACLU and the EFF
I'm more upset about Larry Page trying to deceive the public than about Obama. I trusted Google. I feel betrayed.
That's a fine-sounding statement, but unfortunately the September 11th attacks did destroy the America many of us grew up in. It gave the perfect excuse for unprecidented empire expansion into the Middle East, and expansion of domestic power far beyond anything balanced or reasonable, all in the name of safety. Which is to say, in the name of terror.
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DO they keep the apps on the server? Mine expired as well, curious if i can just turn it on again and get them selling again, or if I have to do the whole process again.
Sorry, but how does PRISM help protect us against a nuke? As I understand it, PRISM was meant to find "foreign" individuals who pose a threat to US national security. I don't think it can prevent something on such a large scale.
FISA is not just about spying on Americans.

The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 granted the government the right to order communication providers to give the government content on foreigners with a broad, non-particularized court order.

This is what PRISM is. The order requires companies to provide assistance and facilities.

A traditional FISA warrant names a citizen or foreigner specifically. A warrant is always needed for this kind of surveillance, but the target is rarely, if ever, told (unlike with a criminal wiretap).

In short, the 2008 Amendment allows the NSA to order companies to help with bulk collection. It's section 702.
Oh god. This place really is going reddit ca. 2007, and I thought that time was farce.
Given microsoft's track record, I wouldn't put it past them. To microsoft, evangelism is war waged aggressively. If microsoft's scroogled campaign makes no sense to you, it's understandable why you would be puzzled by this.
Or some copied the others.
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I use Perl's Mojolicious for all my side projects for about 1.5 years and I'm more than happy with it. It is similar with Ruby's Sinatra. I'd recommend you to choose between those 2 microframeworks based on what language you're more confortable with.
During the Cold War it wasn't simply the subtextual goal of the US to expand its influence in strategic regions but its outright goal; in fact, our problems in West Asia stem in large part from the Cold War and its idiotic attendant strategy of propping up despots to avoid Soviet communism.

The Iraq War was a terrible blunder, but it pales in comparison to Vietnam, which inflicted horrible costs on the US but even worse costs on the Vietnamese and Cambodian people, whose civilian populations were carpet bombed with napalm.

No plan survives first contact with the enemy. Speaking of which, if you're really ready to engage with the 20th Century, imagine what would have happened had the Soviets "won". Read about the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

It will be another 100 years, at least, until we're no longer feeling the immediate aftershocks of colonialism.
If PRISM is real, which seems more and more likely with every statement; you're screwed even if you use Tor if to access any of the PRISM-enabled services.
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(I upvoted you assuming an implicit /sarcasm tag)
Of course not? Why?
No, no I don't advocate blindly trusting them. My point is that they are not comparable to enemies like Osama bin Laden.
Wanting to maintain your privacy doesn't imply that you have something to hide.
Sending everyone's information to US intelligence is not one of those things; as opposed to a trade secret which is one of those things. It isn't something that other people would copy if they knew about it, it's something that people would get very angry and upset if they heard about.
You have not approached that which could be touchedl and a blazing fire and gloomy darkness and storm 19and a trumpet blast and a voice speaking words such that those who heard begged that no message be further addressed to them,m 20for they could not bear to hear the command: “If even an animal touches the mountain, it shall be stoned.”n 21Indeed, so fearful was the spectacle that Moses said, “I am terrified and trembling.”o 22No, you have approached Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and countless angels in festal gathering,p 23and the assembly of the firstborn enrolled in heaven, and God the judge of all, and the spirits of the just made perfect,q

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Is there such a thing as submarine unit testing?
More interesting to me is where did the bimbo come up with ricin? I don't think that product has a SKU at most department stores.
So the CEO knows every technical detail of the IT infrastructure? that's awesome
Unprecedented empire expansion? You must JUST be saying unprecedented into the Middle East if anything, I would even argue that. I'm a major, MAJOR opponent of the Iraq War especially, but it was arguably an empire expansion at it's grandest, and certainly not an unprecedented one.
The law _should_ apply to everyone.
An attack like that would also mess up the flow of the data.

Me in Europe ------200 ms------- MITM magic --1 ms-- Google

For the attacker not to introduce huge extra latency, it would need to complete the handshake with Google almost instantly. Someone would eventually notice instantaneous TLS handshakes.

Also 2 separate TLS connections would contribute to bufferbloat pretty badly, and someone would also eventually investigate that.
Why are we comparing blunders with even larger blunders? It sounds like you're saying "this isn't that bad." Why, though? It's still very bad, and should probably be opposed, not justified. Can you help me get into your head a bit?
Ephemeral Diffie-Hellman creates a new key per connection in a public-safe manner. You cannot eavesdrop on such a connection, even if you have the signing key. The question then becomes, are the SSL sessions actually using that mode.
What if it's the trusted Root CAs who are giving state agencies copies of their signing keys thus allowing them to sign valid certificates to impersonate anyone?
If we're going to discuss McCarthyism, we need to remember that the US government was riddled with soviet spies during the Roosevelt administration[1][2][3][4]. Communist spies outside of government were also instrumental to soviet espionage efforts, including the theft of nuclear technology[5][6]. McCarthy was responding to real threats, although my high school history class didn't talk much about them. Members of the Communist Party USA were instrumental in the Soviets obtaining weapons to destroy life as we know it and the lesson we take from the period is that McCarthy was a bad guy.

McCarthy wrote a book arguing that the Soviet Union was the real winner of WWII[7], thanks to the help of willing US accomplices. Looking at the map of Europe before and after the war you have to admit the guy has a case. But who would read a book by Joseph McCarthy?

[1] http://foseti.wordpress.com/2013/03/06/harry-dexter-white/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Dexter_White

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Silvermaster

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlo_group

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alger_Hiss

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Rosenberg

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whittaker_Chambers

[7] http://foseti.wordpress.com/2012/08/19/review-of-americas-re...;
8 months in Microsoft, I learned these
Agreed, Bellman-Ford is a more efficient solution.
Ask HN: Is the density of NSA, surveillance, etc posts high, persistant?
These are the best videos in the list, hands down.
Seriously. Anyone naive enough to believe that FB/Google/etc isn't involved?
This is completely unmotivated. The author seems to conflate running a DNS server that is authoritative-only with running a server that handles recursive queries.

It is a bad idea running a server running recursive queries blindly: as the example shows, running an unmonitored recursive server tends to result in the server being used as a reflector for DDoS attacks. It is also opens the door for the server's cache to be poisoned by false DNS data. Running a recursive DNS server well is hard.

On the other hand, it is a good idea running one's own server, authoritative for one's own domains, but which refuses recursive queries. This stops others having control over when and how you can transfer your domains, what kinds of records you can add, or how often and when you can update the configuration of your services.

It is worth learning the difference.
He hints at a couple of reasons for his confidence in his post.

One of his assumptions was that people would notice surreptitiously installed hardware or software doing the monitoring. I don't think this is unreasonable. Hoovering up all the private data in Google is bound to be a big job, regardless of whether you are sieving it on site or transferring it off site. Even if it would only take a few people to install and manage, everyone else would probably be tripping over it constantly. Accessing all of Google's data means you'd be tied into nearly every system.

It's possible to keep projects secret inside a large company like Google, but only if an exceedingly few number of people know about it, and have good reasons to not tell anyone else. A system with as much surface area as you'd probably need to hoover off all of Google's data would be vulnerable to almost every engineer and datacenter worker accidentally running across while debugging other problems. Even -- especially? -- if they didn't realize the significance of it immediately, they'd probably ask their coworkers about this weird extra code/jobs/hardware, and pretty soon everyone would have heard about it. Once everyone inside of Google had heard of it, I think you'd have a very hard time keeping the secret from leaking into the outside world.