skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, let's see. I ran all of technical operations for Chicago's most popular indie ISP, up through the point where we were default-free BGP4 peered, in the era where every customer connection every day was an OSPF recalculation.

Then I took a job that required me to write the clientside for every protocol exposed on a "modern network" circa 1996, including FTP, TFTP, NFS, SunRPC, DNS (for which I had to write 3 different recursors and an authority server to do serverside-serverside testing), RIP(!), and lord knows what else. Our product was a network security scanner, before there was Nessus, that worked by actually testing for bugs instead of doing banner grabs.

I moved to a research role in that job and built a testsuite for network intrusion detection systems based on a line-by-line audit the 4.4BSD IP stack, then used it to reverse engineer the behaviors of the Windows NT and Solaris (then closed-source) IP stacks, and used that to discover (with my then-partner Tim Newsham) 3 new classes of attacks/bugs on network observation tools. Incidentally: I did that research because I have an ethical problem with unchecked network surveillance. Half this site seems to think I'm a secret government agent.

Then I started, with two friends, a chat company that pivoted into multicast content delivery. My role on the dev team was the routing system, which implemented a multicast link-state routing protocol and a multicast service model comparable to PIM; I was also the project manager for our global traffic management system, which took full BGP4 feeds from the networks of friends of mine that ran backbones, and used them to compute anycast DNS results.

When that company failed because our VCs and the CEO they installed decided we should go head to head with Akamai and invest all our money in global colocation fees, I thought long and hard about where to go next and decided I didn't yet know enough about networking.

So I took at a job as the team lead for Arbor Networks Peakflow DOS, an anti-DOS product now deployed on the backbones of to a first approximation all the Internets. Peakflow worked by consuming NetFlow records from the backbone Cats and GSRs of companies like AT&T; ie, it binned and computed stats for a large percentage of all the packets traversing the--- what would you call it? Yeah, the Internet.

Your call whether my career experience as a network designer, a network operator, a provider of network management and performance monitoring tools, and a kernel network software developer is germane to the discussion.

Have we dispensed with the part of this thread where we wonder whether I have any business having ideas about how the Internet might work, and move on to the part where you actually try to shoot down those ideas? The former conversation is irritating, because I'm re-explaining things you could have found out simply by reading my public LinkedIn profile. But I would love to be proven wrong on my ideas; that would involve me actually learning something.

I think you now owe me your best shot at taking down the actual notion of a next-gen Internet built as an application-layer overlay.
This was a TOP SECRET document that leaked out. Page may be well in position not only to deny any knowledge of PRISM, but even further publicly deny Google worked or works with PRISM/NSA.

The way the government bends the law for some years now just to punish everyone they feel like, either through imprisonment, scrutiny or simply by wasting years of their lives, savings of their lives and leaving them with a huge lawyer's bill, I wouldn't be surprised if Page had no choice than to lie on the record. And guess what; if, arguendo, he did, he will be pardoned later on. What would you choose? Admit to a secret program ran by secret agency and face brutal consequences (fines, imprisonment, charge with espionage or maybe capital punishment? (why not? why wouldn't government go after Page "proving" that by admitting US sees everything everyone types to Google, it tipped over some terrorist somewhere that stopped using Google and because of that government lost a track of him until he blew himself up in the middle of crowded street. You get the drift)), or perhaps come up as a good patriot and tell the truth. We already have one that told the truth. He spent 3 years in solitary confinement and may be facing life sentence or capital punishment.

People need to understand. This is too big of a secret even for someone like Page to come up and admit.
> But if he said "here they are" or they came back with a warrant or a subpoena, there is nothing you could've done about it.

Assuming lack of contract, absolutely correct. I've never disputed that, I don't think anyone else has, either. Have you been attacking a strawman all this time?

> With regards to the NSA accessing call records, there is a warrant from the FISA court

A very broad warrant. A general warrant. Precisely what the founders forbade in the 4th Amendment.

> In case of PRISM, there is voluntary cooperation by the companies involved.

I decline to speculate on what PRISM does or does not include, as the reporting right now is an unclear mess.

> There is no indication that third parties are being coerced to cooperate just "because law enforcement officers say so."

Since FISA obviously can't be trusted to provide meaningful oversight, I think the general warrant issued for the Verizon data qualifies.

> The government accessing the information without the consent of the third party would be a 4th amendment violation, not of your rights, but of the third party's rights.

I still haven't seen you cite any actual precedent explaining this.

> But that's not happening here.

The general warrant is an obvious 4th Amendment violation, whether it's violating Verizon's rights, their customers', or both.

NSLs are clearly "because law enforcement says so", so now I wonder, on what basis do you defend those?
Through regular old-fashioned police work, as was done in decades past.
So if I call you from outside 123 Main Street, Anytown on Tuesday at 6:37pm, what are we talking about? Even if one of us is known criminal or terrorist, the fact that conversation took place is merely suspicious rather than probative.
Two different issues:

The Verizon FISC order addresses only metadata. The PRISM presentation indicates that among the data captured from the providers involved in PRISM is VOIP data, which, would seem to be call contents.
It doesn't seem as though Twilio accepts Bitcoins. In this case, would it be that whoever is running the Tor hidden service would have to purchase the account themselves and their reimbursement would be BTC?
And the superior alternative is what?
The restaurant plays Queen? Where is it?
While it's probably good to answer these questions eventually for your clientèle, don't worry about an early or rushed launch. As Reid Hoffman said, "If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late."
Alec Baldwin blasts government for cutting corners, trading freedom for security
Twilio Raises A $70M Series D As They Consider An IPO
HEX, a new MMO and TCG game concept, raises $2.3 million
> Yes, obtaining CDRs isn't the same as obtaining your texts or your voicemail, but once you have them, you have everything you need for obtaining the content through subpoena.

Hint: it's always been possible to get nearly any piece of information with a subpoena or a warrant. The 4th amendment protects against unreasonable searches not searches period. And a subpoena or a warrant is by definition a reasonable search.

There is nothing weasel-y about this language.
If you are the recipient of the link, SSL can't be stripped.

Even if you are an author, assuming you have visited the site over SSL at least once, then it can't be stripped on future visits since the site seems to use HSTS.
Google used to cooperate with China.

Google is ACTIVELY forgoing revenue in China, because it wouldn't play by their rules. [1]

It's a start.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China#Ending_of_self-ce...
Ask HN: should we start using PGP, etc.?
Just wondering what people think about more widespread/regular use of end-to-end encryption and other privacy-ensuring practices.
I'm saying that the concept doesn't make sense when they're being issued by people who have very similar incentives to the people executing the warrant. The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution essentially says "the government cannot perform a search unless the government drafts a piece of paper saying that they can do a search."
When I've bought prepaid cards, I either bought them for zero-value or with pre-stored value, and in either case they were not usable until I registered them online. I haven't found any prepaid cards yet that do not follow this pattern. If you have then I would be quite delighted if you shared.
That would be a lot stronger a statement, but at the end of the day... we'll never know. Anything he says could have been written with a govt. agent holding a gun to his head. I know, I know, total conspiracy theory territory. And I'm not saying that is the case, just pointing out that - at the end of the day - there's very little we can actually know for sure about their involvement or lack thereof.

Therefore, IMO, the best thing to do is assume that every single bit that hits a Google server, and every bit stored by Google, is available to the NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, MI6, Mossad, etc., etc... which means using strong crypto to protect your stuff if you really care about keeping it private.
I wasn't boycotting his company because Palantir used them. (I'm not in his company's target demographic anyway) I was saying that it seems like a poor business strategy to badmouth clients because of an anoymous comment that somehow made it into a blog post. Especially when the evidence against Palantir consists of:

1. They have a project that happens to be named Prism.

2. They don't publicly disclose their own clients/operations.
Who I am calling is the vast majority of what I want to be private, what I say to them is often obvious given who I am speaking to.
Internet laughs about being spied on
You can see them doing that in the video. The screens must be immediately adjacent and aligned orthogonally. It aligns on a finger drag from one device straight across to the other.

They've gotta have some smarts about the different bezel thicknesses for all iOS devices; I don't think finger velocity and displacement time would be accurate enough for determining the horizontal spacing.
Letting out my inner conspiracy theorist for a moment, a prism can be used to split light. For example, think of a pentaprism mirror in many DSLR cameras.

Did the NSA choose "PRISM" because they are splitting the signal upstream of providers, thus giving private companies plausible deniability?
> I would think google has historical backups they could refer to to pull out data that you've recently deleted.

I should have clarified: except for temporary cache or periodic backups.

> Why not? You should already assume that google and pretty much any site logs your IP whether you are using incognito or not. You should also assume that any time you log in to gmail your IP is noted. It's extremely basic to do a db search for all gmail accounts that have been accessed by a given IP.

I meant if you do not login to Google and do a search in incognito mode, is that history stored? I can delete my history if I'm logged in. But there is no way to delete history by IP. It seems 'safer' to in fact use your logged in Google account to search.
Huh? This is the direct result of the governments toxic conduct. They issue orders that forbid you from talking about having received any such order, they classify everything (to the point where a parallel society to the tune of 1M people exist that have access to (e.g.) cables, as became apparent during the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables row), they institute secret courts, laws with secret interpretations..

They have poisoned public discourse beyond repair, and you make it sound like a conspiracy theory.
We were are talking about a random guy in front of the house, not the government.
I just posted this a few days ago, before all of this leaked, and I argued that this is a political issue. Right now there's nothing stopping anyone in a position of power from controlling you other than the social pushback. Who gives a damn about tracking you if the powerful can just scare you into submission? But we don't allow that. That's not kosher in today's world.

I feel the same thing goes for all the data we create. That data can be seen as an important tool for law enforcement (which I no doubt think that some of it is), but we cannot let it be use as as reason for subjugation. We need make that unacceptable.
How exactly is capturing CDR's "burning the village"?
> It's not going to be able to hold more than an average size datacenter, and there are a lot of data centers out there. T

Why not? Most data centers aren't designed to store a bunch of stuff, but instead are designed to serve a lot of users. Facebook has at least one storage forward data center and it packs an exabyte into a 60k sqft footprint:

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/01/18/faceb...;

I don't think the NSA has zettabytes at hand, but you can store a massive amount of stuff in 100k square feet.
'Genius' 13-year-old with IQ of 162
Regardless of the wording, no statement from Google (or Facebook, Apple, etc) is really going to be believed. A denial from innocence is indistinguishable from a denial which is legally compelled by the language of an order form the government.

But to be honest, I don't bear any ill will toward Google on this. Based on their behavior in the past, I'm willing to believe that if this program existed, they pushed back to the extent they felt they could... but if they eventually complied, it's difficult to blame them, given the threats the government is capable of making.

Unfortunately, the only place to resolve this is at the government level, if it can be resolved at all.
"According to USACE, the center will have 100,000 square feet of raised-floor data center space and more than 900,000 square feet of technical support and administrative space."

Typical government installation. 90% overhead.

http://defensesystems.com/Articles/2011/01/07/NSA-spy-cyber-...
Well, you can't prove a negative so I'm not sure there's anything Page can say.

But at the same time they can't all be right. NSA says it's getting data in some form from Google, Page says no direct access.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle then... but where?
I'd like to point out that their upper capacity limit, "a trillion terabytes", would require approximately 1 trillion hard drives, probably at a cost of $10-$100 trillion. I feel comfortable saying that they have not built out to that scale yet.
I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist but those statements are hardly unambiguous. It's the "press reports" that are called false. Close-ended could pretty much be just as broad. The second sentence is hedged with "on such a scale". What is "information about our users' Internet activity"? Does that preclude sharing the actual internet activity? Also, Page keeps referring to "orders" but the press reports suggest some sort of volunteering.
There are really two different concepts here, that of who you're inherently attracted to, and that of who you actually try to sleep with.

The latter is a choice, but evidence appears to be that the former is not. The phrase "is gay" generally refers to the former, although obviously it can be hard to determine if a person is really good at hiding it.
Hi. I've sent you an e-mail, but I haven't received an answer yet.
I imagine it's actually fairly simple for them to integrate ads: you'll have to watch a ~10 second ad before you can see your message.

Edited to add:
Not to mention that they have a captive audience--you'll have to watch the ad, which I have to think is prime ad space that they can charge for.
You don't think that an agency that exists to condition the American people into the belief that a police state is "normal" is harmful?
There are cases in which you can't even confirm the existence of a gag order. I can not believe it's constitutional... but they do it.
The blog post concludes with "But the level of secrecy around the current legal procedures undermines the freedoms we all cherish." That's a clear statement criticizing overly broad secrecy provisions.
The phrase "Democracy is terrible, but it is the best we've got" makes some sense.

But "American Democracy is terrible, but it is the best we've got"? That's a new one to me.
What percentage of all Internet traffic is already carried over overlay networks of some sort? You need to account for all of BitTorrent and all of Skype, both of which are overlay designs. It is also worth noting that SMTP is an application overlay design; you just don't notice it because in its modern configuration everyone is one hop away from each other.
Fine, you have a fair bit of experience, though I'm frankly still not seeing architectural experience in there. You're just wrong. I can live with that explanation.

And I'd be happy to shoot down your ideas, if you had any. All you have is your regular content-free rant against IPv6 that you constantly re-post.

> Half this site seems to think I'm a secret government agent.

No, we just think you're a strict authoritarian who gives the American left a bad name.
Consider the NSA having MITM capabilities before the data reaches google:

1) This is exactly what you would need to do, to consider it realtime

2) None of the denials cover this
>Palantir has always been secretive about what exactly it is they do every day, though it's always been implied and rumored that a large part is government intelligence work

Wow. That's just as bad as saying since a person uses TOR, they're being secretive and must have something to hide. You must be able to see the hypocrisy in all of this.
Dan Lyons: Lessons From Steve Jobs That Every Marketer Must Learn
Which it doesn't, any more than the power to tax for the purpose of general welfare (which is part of the same phrase as the "common defense") gives Congress independent non-taxing power to provide for the general welfare outside of the grants elsewhere in the Constitution. There's quite a lot of conditions, etc., you can apply to liability for taxes, etc., that allow some substantive regulation to be plausibly included under the taxing power, but if you read the purpose limitation of the taxing power to instead be a positive grant of power independent of the taxing power, as you suggest, that one clause alone would shift the federal government under the Constitution into one of universal plenary power with only negative restriction instead of one of specific positive powers, and its quite clear that that was never the intent of that clause (as well as that interpretation being completely inconsistent with the actual words of the clause.)
Stay away from free VPNs.

Nearly every VPN service in this article is a good choice - http://torrentfreak.com/vpn-services-that-take-your-anonymit....

I've personally used Mullvad and PrivateInternetAccess, both of which are on the list and provide good service.
Ways You Can Help The Electronic Frontier Foundation
This is so wrong on multiple levels.

First, self-modifying code is still extremely present on modern consoles, at least on the current generation (PS3/X360/Wii/WiiU). Loading code from external media is basically the same problem as self-modifying code (statically recompiling it is trivially equivalent to solving the halting problem).

Second, modern hardware might be similar, but game consoles SDKs export a lot more features to the developers than PC drivers do through DX/GL. The example I take every time is fetch shaders on the WiiU: these are a kind of shaders supported by AMD R600 GPUs but completely abstracted by DX/GL.

Third, maybe there is no more mid-scanline framebuffer tricks, but you have a ton of other problems with the framebuffer: while a PC assumes separate CPU/GPU memory, on modern consoles the framebuffer (and a few textures) are often stored in memory that is shared and synchronized with both CPU and GPU. This is incredibly hard to emulate because a full GPU->CPU FB transfer induces a lot of latency (several hundreds of us last time I checked). IGPs and APUs make this problem a bit more manageable, but we're still missing the graphics API support for shared FB and shared textures.

Some things are better than older consoles but some other things are also a lot worse. JIT-ing shader bytecode is another problem that I don't think has been tackled yet (except maybe for Xbox emulation - which is still in its infancy and for a console using a very old GPU with no use of stuff like compute shaders).
Emails are the "new" hotness, like landing pages were a few years ago, and SEO and PPC were a bit before that. Everything has a hype cycle, even though none of this is particularly new.
> Not sure how you would deal with people doing "things that are rightfully illegal" with it, though.

One of the things about privacy-boosting mechanisms is that they explicitly do not make such a judgement. In other words, they refuse to deal with it on principle. The exact letter of the principle differs between the actual people implementing the mechanisms, but the result is generally the same.

I don't personally agree with it, though, so that's my limit on being able to explain it.
If you eject every person from the government at once then the only ones left behind will be the lobbyists to influence their replacements, and without any tenure or political clout for those new people to resist.
Instead of enumerating what they don't do, which leads one to wonder what's left out, they could exhaustively enumerate the ways that they do cooperate. To a certain extent that's what they do with the transparency report. But I saw no strong claim that the report was complete, on the contrary the "whenever possible" language outright suggests the report is incomplete.

I'm sympathetic to being caught between a rock and a hard place, but given that this program only seems to involve US based companies, I would suggest that where ever possible people should prefer non-US software and services. Just as one prefers non-Chinese hardware for the exact same reason.
So then what could these companies do to convince you, short of giving you physical access to all of their datacenters and shell access to all of their servers?
Actually, one more question. I see that you're marketing the Tank T190 phone by Blu which can be purchased on Newegg for $25 (http://bit.ly/ZyKBHA) and packaging it with an unknown 30 day data plan with talk and text which sounds very similar to the 30 day talk + text ReadySIM card which retails for $40 (http://bit.ly/13qyhtM). I guess what I'm wondering is what your company is adding to this equation for the extra $10 aside from being a middle man to obscure the trail? Also have you obtained permission from Blu to use their imagery?
Violating your core principles to fix a problem is pretty much the definition of "cure being worse than the disease".
As if that suddenly makes everything better

Well, it does seem like most folks are primarily concerned that they will be listening to your phone calls. So maybe it doesn't make you feel better, but maybe it wasn't targeted at you.

(I know, as if that makes anything better!)
Spotify Now Charging Sales Tax
Separation of powers is a good concept. The problem right now is that all three branches of government have been taken over by the right wing; there is little disagreement about these things. Separation of powers tends to work best when there is more than one opinion.
EFF is certainly doing a great job right now, so donations are definitely going to help.

Let me ask you this - do you feel 100% comfortable that nobody outside of Google can read your personal gmail?