skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even in those times, it was realized that there are 300,000,000 Americans. That there was no way that any techonology, including today's, could begin to monitor any but the crudest details about all the traffic so many generate. That such an insurmountable problem can be made even harder with encryption, phoney identities, phoney traffic, and dozens of counter-counter-measures. Let alone be privy to what we do and say 'out-of-range'.

Only the monitoring computers have the time and patience to look at as much as they can ... and they can't parse text sentences (let alone voice comms) well enough to do anything but scrutinize for a few common terms ... let alone nuances (seen Google translate?). A couple of back-of-the-envelope calculations will demonstrate that to anyone.

The agencies and the corporations know that but they refuse to cop to it, possibly because it's so obvious that all they can do is -pretend- to be able to monitor a significant fraction of it all. Maybe because pretending is the only hope they've got left.
Boundless Informant appears to not be an actual spying tool, but rather a GAO tool for monitoring how much spying is going on.

The colors correspond with the amount of intelligence collected. Green is the least, red is the most. If you expand the screenshot at the top, it shows part of a sorted list showing the most. Primary intelligence gathering is focused on Iran, Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt and India. 14 billion pieces of intelligence were gathered from Iran in the 30 day period shown here!
An interesting question especially considering the line from the leaked materials "Dropbox -- coming soon"
I already host most things like email myself and I don't plan to change that in the future. I might have to think about how to deal with my google account though.
I wrote "The cost of farm land seems to be around $9000/acre, and certainly under $20,000/acre."

If you're talking about oil land, then that's not really farm land, is it? It's obvious that land with good mineral/oil rights can be worth a lot more.

In any case, oil doesn't seem like a good example. A derrick and pump don't need much in the way of land, and slant drilling means that any really expensive land can be avoided. I see prices in North Dakota of 'certainly under $20,000', even in that oil boom state:

"Linda Fisher, a Land Department leasing coordinator, said the three quarterly sales [in 2010] have fetched a record $269.2 million for about 135,000 acres, compared with about $103 million for 137,800 acres for all of 2009." (http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700059300/ND-oil-lease-au... ). That's an average of about $2,000/acre, though the boom has continued since then.

"At about the same time, records and interviews show, other companies were purchasing drilling rights to land on and near the reservation for $300 to $1,000 per acre plus royalties as high as 22.5 percent.... Two lawsuits allege that by buying Dakota-3, Williams effectively paid more than $10,000 per acre for those rights." (http://www.opb.org/news/article/land-grab-cheats-north-dakot...; )

I haven't found anything which says that $9,000/acre for oil land is "really a low figure these days." If anything, that seems to be only somewhat below the going rate.

On the other hand, it is high compared to non-irrigated farm land, which goes for no more than $3,000/acre for the most expensive county average in North Dakota. (The value in most counties is usually under $1,000/acre.)

So, where is this $20,000+/acre land you're talking about?
well, the rule is as simple as it was for years - if it's online, it's not private anymore.
be it hackers or governments - someone potentially can get hands on any of your stuff online.
Need an option for 'I'm not changing anything because I already assumed all of my data was being monitored anyway'.

That's very different from 'I'm ok with it'.
I keep feeling like I've shown up to the platform 20 minutes after the money train left...
For IM needs at least, there have been privacy workarounds for some time.

1. Use a client that supports OTR (http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/) to get end-to-end encryption.

2. Use your client with Tor (https://www.torproject.org/) to protect anonymity.

3. Use a public (http://xmpp.net/) XMPP server or setup your own server outside of US. Note that the XMPP server operator will have your roster list, so caveat emptor.
The problem comes when "they" start to peek in everywhere. They being the guys in uniform who has guns and the authority to put you in jail.

"First reasonable suspicion, then limited surveillance" have served us well in the past. I don't see how that changes if the communication channel is semi-public.

You never had any privacy in a downtown coffee shop, but if they wanted to listen they had to send someone to follow you around, which kind of limited how much surveillance we had to put up with.

Electronic communication is a game changer, now we have the option to read everyone’s mail, all the time.

Unlimited surveillance will lead to unreasonable suspicion - how many honest people may be flagged and get on the no-fly list, perhaps getting their job/visa applications rejected for no obvious reasons so you can feel secure?.

I don't fancy having to watch my words so they don't get misinterpreted by the guys with guns in uniform.

We are the people, we make the laws. And IMHO the law should be very clear ... Gentlemen don't read each others mail - unless there is a very valid reason to do so.
What I thought was bad about freenet was that it was/is every-imaginable-goody-of-encryption all in one application blob. It seems like what you would want instead would be peer-to-peer software with series of optional encryption layers. Getting adoption with faster unencrypted layers would allow user to start using encryption easily when "things get rough".

Perhaps some of the other things are closer to this.
Given the graph in the article, it wouldn't surprise me if Facebook made another get-all-users-so-it-doesn't-threaten-core-business acquisition a la Instagram.

Although in this case, Facebook tried making a Snapchat clone (Poke) and failed miserably, so such an acquisition might show a weakness in Facebook product strategy and be somewhat embarrassing.
User story template that I follow
How Snapchat will actual monetize remains a mystery, but if I had to guess I would say they are working on a paid snap system. I'm not sure how they would go about creating ads that are relevant to the user. If I got a snap from a random company I imagine it would just piss me off. Maybe they will offer an ad free version via subscription model.
Nice design and slick UI. Now here's come criticism =).

- I don't think / is a good name for the default channel.

- Why can't I see the user list in the Code and Draw views?

- Sync Missed is a confusing label for a button. It appears to add N lines from the server chat log to the client chat log, so consider calling it something more descriptive (like Get Old Logs).

- I'd like to be privately invite a user to a channel.

- A public channel list would be nice.

- It would be neat to be able to draw an overlay on the Code view and do annotations.
Is there a way to get a preview before buying? I'd love something like this. :)
And some say there is no bubble in start-up world... If someone has any idea what is going on here please explain to me because I do not understand how we have come down to this.
Different degrees of intrusion. Even with my blinds open, I expect there to be no wholesale video surveillance recording me, and I don't expect my activities to be visible to somebody on the other side of the world. There are many large cities where such an expectation of privacy would be unreasonable, with cameras everywhere, but I could never live in such a place.
'It is time to stand up and say no.'
I would love to see Facebook try to acquire Snapchat. They were so arrogant when they launched Poke, claiming they made the entire app in 12 days. I thought it was pretty low to make a full blown copy of Snapchat.
New Wi-Fi enabled windows change transparency at the click of button
That's a terrifyingly wide range.
Not okay with it but I suspect that the NSA (and other governmental agencies) would be able to access it no matter what I do. I'm also more concerned about people I know getting their hands on things than about the government doing so.
Many EU countries have a legal concept that people have the rights by virtue of their birth, and that the government can't take them away.
Nope. Those are called public for a reason.

And if you are working with online business, as i guess for you being here, i highly recommend you read at least some introduction on PGP.
If you don't want to be turned into the next Bradley Manning, don't join the Army and then violate the UCMJ. He's not some innocent private citizen they arbitrarily went after.
I'll be trying to change the way the NSA manages my data. :)
So the government does nothing worthwhile? Public roads? The FAA? The park service? The EPA? GPS?

Should all of that be privatized, where there is absolutely no control available to the public? These are services that are by nature a monopoly, we can't really vote with our money.
I don't expect anyone to be looking through my window with binoculars, though.
Many European countries don't use a first past the past system that seems to be used n usa, resulting in more coalition governments
This is a joke on the implementation. I bet only the lotus devs ever read those names before.
He is truly HN's shiniest jewel. I especially like he doesn't give a damn about karma points and sticks to his guns argues in an intellectually honest manner no matter what.
Bush? Twice?
http://bit.ly/11rxC84
Zocdoc clone written in Python/Django, angular.js, moment.js.
I assumed it was the work of the programmer tasked with installing the key for the NSA, not some self-deprecating humor.
Why is this comment being downvoted? It was an honest, albeit rather silly mistake, not a misuse of HN.
Yup. The claim should either be removed entirely, or be prefaced with 'allegedly'.
I'm moving a couple of servers off AWS and onto servers in Canada as we speak.

Earlier this morning, I moved all my Dropbox and Google Drive data onto a self-hosted server, migrated off Google Reader to a native RSS reader app, and will deal with Email, DNS, etc... over the next few days.

Mind you, the NSA scandal wasn't the prime motivation in all cases... ie. Google Reader being shutdown next month, AWS getting a bit pricey and bureaucratic, etc... but it did give me the kick in the ass.
"Current technology simply does not permit us to positively identify all of the persons or locations associated with a given communication (for example, it may be possible to say with certainty that a communication traversed a particular path within the internet. It is harder to know the ultimate source or destination, or more particularly the identity of the person represented by the TO:, FROM: or CC: field of an e-mail address or the abstraction of an IP address)."

That's an interesting statement, especially how specific they got with regards to email. There are tons of email accounts that are used but are not tied to Facebook or Paypal or some other identifying service that the NSA has access. To me this all stinks of the worst-case surveillance state scenario but logically, it's starting to look a lot less sinister than I initially thought it was.

Looking through 3 billion records and tying them to people would require a massive database of Facebook, Google, etc. users, ISP subscribers, and tons of other data. I sure as hell hope that the NSA can't come up with a number of Americans spied on without invading people's privacy and serving more warrants/tapping more sources for information because otherwise it would mean they would already have it!

It's also comforting (in a macabre way) that despite having fifty times more people, the US has more than 10 billion fewer records than Jordan (records = what? Likes? Facebook messages? Emails?)

They also said they track the "path" of the data, does that mean that a lot of the American records could just be inconsequential movements of network data within the US before it is sent back out or delivered?

Looking at this article, it doesn't disprove anything the NSA said. It's a heat map of communications, not people spied on and there's a big difference.
But I want it now!
My opinion is that it didn't make any sense to assume total surveillance _wasn't_ already happening, _before_ the scandal broke.
I don't see how you can base a long term business model on a technology that can easily be broken (i.e. cracking the app so that photos aren't deleted after some time like the sender intended).

I guess in the short term they can make some money and transition to some other business model, but I feel like "SnapchatKeep" is just around the corner if it doesn't exist already.
I've got a handy HN filter site: http://diff.biz/?remove=(nsa|prism|privacy|crunch)&only-show...

Update the removal list in the URL as necessary (or go to http://diff.biz for an old default removal list).

My site has been dead for a while (I think crawlers are crawling my site causing it to hit HN, but then HN blocks me due to over requesting), but I unblocked it today. We'll see how long it lasts.
That applies to versions of Notes and Domino prior to R5.0.4, since which there has only been one version (outside of France, at least, which didn't authorise import until October 2000 -- that's due to France's crypto import regulations at the time, not the USA's crypto export regs). This back door ceased to exist more than a dozen years ago, and the current international key length is more than 64 bits (4096 bits for users/servers, 8192 bits for certifier ids).
Never compromise
The table of contents has entries like:

> Describe the mindset of most people in Cambodia. Progressive or conservative? Future-focused or present-focused? Work-focused or pleasure-focused? Optimistic or cautious? Pressing for change, or maintaining traditions? Strict or easy-going? Or, if the mindset is very divided between groups, please describe the divide. (Feel free to just share your personal opinion.)

.. which doesn't look like a table of contents; it looks like the e-mail you sent to the person that you asked to write the book for you.
>The NSA used Minitruth as the name of their backdoor? Gimme a break.

More like the guy charged with implementing it had a sense of hunour / clear perspective.
Python is somewhat different, in that a newline is simply a statement separator. Semicolons aren't inserted, as far as I know, they're simply an alternate statement separator.

Python does make some exceptions, in that newlines within balanced paratheses and brackets are not treated as statement separators. But outside of that, this is what they mean.

As an example of the difference, consider the following JS:

if
(0)
statement()

This is legal JS. Now consider the roughly equivalent Python:

if
0:
statement()

This is not legal python, because the newline after the "if" terminated the statement, and a bare "if" is not a legal statement.

Another example. This is legal JS:

obj
.method()

As it is parsed as a single statement in JS. However, it is not legal Python, as the newline after "obj" definitively ends the statement, and ".method()" by itself is not a legal statement.

In short, Python can always say "this newline is the end of a statement", except for some very easy-to-detect cases. JavaScript, on the other hand, parses until it encounters an error, then goes back to insert the semicolon and tries again. This implies some additional overhead. I don't imagine it's a significant amount at all, but there is at least a good reason to think that this might apply to JS but not a language like Python.
Not mentioned in the article, but implies use of http://www.shodanhq.com
>I was just an unfortunate user of XFree86 and then Xorg, then I gave up and bought a Mac.

Same here. I am able to get work done on an X11-based desktop, but the experience is definitely more aggravating than working on OS X. (OS X is slower than X11 + Linux and seems to have a weakness relative to Linux in which file IO slows down processes that aren't even doing IO, but that's not as aggravating as what X11 does.)
Ask HN: Online Contract Law?
Is there a way to make contract law more straight forward? Something like computer code with explicit syntax.

And the natural segue would be, could one imagine a way to enforce these contracts online outside of any given court system? Perhaps a social contract abstraction on top of a given judicial jurisdiction.

I can't imagine this is a new idea.
In the usage example for the C lib, you have

'uint8_t *str = rope_createcstr(rope, NULL);'

Did you mean 'r' instead of 'rope'?
I'm doing neither. I'm saying that nothing Binney has said or that has been leaked thus far shows evidence of a program that is designed to comprehensively intercept internet traffic between US persons and that doing so covertly is technically and politically impossible because of the number of intercept points required, not because they lack the software (we know it exists via Binney), or have a place to store it (they do-in Utah).

Putting taps on undersea cables is risky. Cables are closely monitored and quite frequently are owned by multi-country consortiums so if you don't want a party to the consortium to find out you might not want to stick a tap in the landing station. Also, you might only care about public IP traffic and not want to see piles of corporate MPLS traffic.
I'm not saying that's what happened, just that there are valid reasons why tapping fiber coming into the country wouldn't be desirable.

It is entirely possible that you are claiming a "there exists" and I'm arguing against a "for every". I'm sure we both agree that there exists a NSA program that happens to intercept some US traffic. That's what Binney and others have claimed. I'm arguing that going beyond that isn't supported by the leaks OR the nature of the internet.

I run operations at small regional Tier 2 ISP/transport provider with 25 provider edges on that AS graph that I mentioned before. I've personally installed, repaired, or inspected all cable and gear that 12 of those links traverse end to end and there weren't any secret spy boxes. So, no, I'm not just guessing. I can guarantee that quite a few people aren't having their bits snarfed wholesale when they email (local ISP mail to school mail), post on locally hosted community forums, or reserve a book at their local library.

My network may be too small to matter, but any comprehensive intercept regime would require myself and every other Tier 2 (transit + unpaid peering) ISP to cooperate.
Your comment was a lovely read. Can you recommend a text or subject matter I could look over to learn more about this point of view?
That's very poignant, are these your words or some quote of some such.
If it's an idea that is seemingly obvious then perhaps the tech already exists across several applications and it would take little programming to bring it together.

You should do as much as you can before even considering coding.

Imagine you were about to pass this project off to be brought to life - either by a co-founder or to a hired developer. What details or documentation would you provide them with? Create that now.

Decide on the core functions, sketch it out, write the copy/wording, decide where you will pull data from, what data from the user needs to be stored and passed from page to page.

Look at what people are currently using to solve this issue and why it's like that. Research pricing points and customer concerns.

Strip the idea down further and further until you are confident all that is left is pure coding. You could even step through the application in plain English - then it's just really the syntax that's left for the developer to execute.

There are 3 reasons why doing all of the above is a good thing.

1) The project remains undoubtedly your idea. You've done the thinking, the planning and it has your vision running through it.

2)Your effort in your own idea gives others more confidence in it, e.g by showing how far you've come on your own makes it more likely you'll find a co-founder willing to jump in. In the case of hiring a developer, you cut the cost back ten fold by doing this, you show you're easy to work with, decisive and you explain exactly what you want and don't expect them to think for you.

3) If you really wanted to build it, you wouldn't let lack of coding skills stop you. Doing all of the 'paper' development makes you consider if you really are the right person to execute on this idea. We put a very high value on our own time and if we can't convince ourselves to put effort in, then how will we ever convince a co-founder to join or a customer to buy. Remember, we're not always the right person to execute our own ideas. If you are motivated to do all of the above, it gives you a better understanding of how to run the business once the tech is built.

Some of the best hacks out there are merging existing technologies, no point reinventing the wheel - use what's already proven. It's an efficient process.
If you did that in the UK, you would almost certainly be arrested.
Smarter Children Have More Gray Matter 60 Years Later
My entire startup is run using Google services. I have such a love/hate relationship with Google. Their services are great, but I'm very far from being OK with how they use my data. This whole scandal has definitely made me think more about it. I'll be discussing it more with my co-workers to see what it would take to move our data elsewhere.

I'd love to see a comprehensive writeup about how to get off Google services as a startup. I imagine someone has already written it...and my first impulse is to Google it. (facepalm!)
Cloud services provide great help but blindly relying on their security doesn't make sense. If you built the system ground up, you'd take time on security so you should do so with your data no matter where its located. Tools like BoxCryptor (or encfs for us diy folks) make quick work of securing remote files. If you store trade secrets or pass sensitive information through cloud services, you should consider the risk/reward of choosing those over a solution you can have more control over (and consider if there's an option to secure your data). While remotely hosted applications can make life easier, you need to always consider that security and convenience are at odds.
I'm not going to change how I manage my data, but I'm no longer voting for either of the factions of our one-party government anymore. That being said--

I'm just waiting for the news to come out in the next few decades that the CIA/NSA have been rigging election results in the US. Given their track record and their machiavellian nature, I would be shocked if they weren't doing this.