skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I haven't heard the term burner phone outside of The Wire, I assumed it had been a real term since the writers were so close to these subjects. What I meant (more precisely) was that, from my perspective, The Wire popularized the term for a broader, non-burner purchasing audience.
Awesome, goes great with vimium for chrome
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...
Something still doesn't add up for me on this.

1. How does this explanation relate to the slide that the US is the World's Telecommunication Backbone? The only explanation I can think of is that Google, etc... were only providing information for servers that were physically in the US.

2. How does this prism name relate to the program? To me, the prism name seems more linked to fiber optic cable than to this sort of data monitoring. Perhaps it's an allusion to splitting the data stream and reflecting it to the NSA.
You're Being Monitored All the Time — Deal With It
Katz is not the whole story. Yet again, I suggest reading Smith v. Maryland.
"Direct access" was the wording used in the original article that started this entire debate. All they're doing is responding to the same language they were presented with.
So if I type in '.' and see the control I want to specify listed as 'C', how do I tell Shortcat to activate 'C'? I tried obviously typing in ".C" or just "C" but neither work.

/missed something obvious
If the powerpoint were fake, why would the white house hesitate to point that out?
Ask HN: What web framework/language should I learn this weekend?
So, I'm a .Net developer. I Know ASP.Net and such well and use Linux. As such, I use mono but have become a bit discontent with it recently. I don't really know any web framework other than ASP.Net, but I hope to change that.

I have a small web project I want to do in a new technology this weekend. What framework/language should I do it in? Candidates I can come up with:

1. Ruby (and something not Rails)
2. Go
3. Python
4. Node.js
5. Something else

What's a fun and relevant thing to develop with these days?
Atomgrads
If PRISM Is Real, Why Are All These Tech Companies Denying Participation?
Ask HN: Unable to post links to FB about the surveilance from reddit?
I tried posting the following link: http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1fv4r6/i_believe_the_government_should_be_allowed_to/caeb3pl

but when I try to click the link facebook returns a "Server error"

However when I post
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1fvdc7/what_is_the_most_pointless_job_in_existence/

the link redirects fine. Can anyone else replicate this?
If I'm reading the OP correctly, then, based solely on what they've reported, it seems that the denials made by FB and Google were not only truthful, but sincere (as opposed to being either weaselly or outright dishonest or both)...Here's the key passage:

---

> *
“The U.S. government does not have direct access or a ‘back door’ to the information stored in our data centers,” Google’s chief executive, Larry Page, and its chief legal officer, David Drummond, said in a statement on Friday. “We provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law.”*

Statements from Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, AOL and Paltalk made the same distinction.

But instead of adding a back door to their servers, the companies were essentially asked to erect a locked mailbox and give the government the key, people briefed on the negotiations said. Facebook, for instance, built such a system for requesting and sharing the information, they said.

The data shared in these ways, the people said, is shared after company lawyers have reviewed the FISA request according to company practice. It is not sent automatically or in bulk, and the government does not have full access to company servers. Instead, they said, it is a more secure and efficient way to hand over the data.

Tech companies might have also denied knowledge of the full scope of cooperation with national security officials because employees whose job it is to comply with FISA requests are not allowed to discuss the details even with others at the company, and in some cases have national security clearance, according to both a former senior government official and a lawyer representing a technology company.

---

The NYT is talking only about FISA requests, which are a secret process but, as far as everything reported about that process has said, targets individuals. Moreover, when FISA is used on Americans, it's a process that involves a court-approved warrant.

So you can argue that FISA is wrong or that it is administered with a rubber stamp (and in my opinion, yes, this is most definitely worth scrutinizing, and it has been for however many years it's been put in place), or that no ethical company should ever comply with a FISA request...but that's not the same ballpark as what's being alleged with Verizon or with PRISM.

The point about these companies making it "easier" by creating a systematic delivery process, such as a "lockbox", to send over the requested data is an interesting detail, but kind of a non sequitur. Either FISA is OK or it is flat out wrong...what does it matter which digital process is set up to fulfill that request?
Sounds like...direct access.
So I was finally freeing up sometime to learn some frontend dev. Was going to focus on bootstrap. But would angular be better?

I'm trying to build up a toolset to rapidly build admin sections for services I work on which don't typically have users in the traditional sense.
"unclear exactly from the articles I read"

The participants posted their thoughts during the sex assault in real time to Facebook. It was these threads that Ms. Goddard saved, and which Mr. Lostutter then published (eventually leading to his arrest for 'hacking'). One thread stated that the girl must be dead because "You don't sleep through a wang in the butthole." This suggests that among the various events was someone engaged in anal insertion of their "wang" into the victim. They also bragged about what they themselves termed a "rape" in a separate incident the previous April.

Source: http://m.xojane.com/issues/steubenville-rape-verdict-alexand...

In the actual plea bargain the two that were sentenced admitted to "digital insertion", which is generally understood to be finger penetration. This seems to understate the extent of the rape however, based on the statements they made during the rape to their Facebook accounts.
Apple WWDC: The Big News Preview
Do startups tend to cobble their own infrastructure, or do lots of them in fact use things like Rails and Django?
> It just seems extremely plausible and not part of a massive conspiracy to give the NSA access to as much data as possible.

Wait, why can't it be both of those things? What could the phrase "massive conspiracy" mean if it doesn't apply to a situation like this?

"conspiracy" suggests a bunch of people were trying to accomplish a goal in secret, at odds with the interests of the general public. Yup!

"massive" implies significant scale - that it was a LOT of people sharing a LOT of information. Check!

I'm not seeing anything missing...
God and others have access to brains. God can do time travel.

God says...
C:\TAD\Text\PLATO.TXT

or myrtle.
And they and their children will feast, drinking of the wine
which they have made, wearing garlands on their heads, and hymning
the praises of the gods, in happy converse with one another.
And they will take care that their families do not exceed their means;
having an eye to poverty or war.

SOCRATES - GLAUCON

But, said Glaucon, interposing, you have not given them a relish
to their meal.

True, I replied, I had forgotten; of course they must have a relish-salt,
and olives, and

----

fertle murtle, war on poverty in Socrates.
Yeah; they are waaaay more hygienic than what we started with though. For example, it is incredibly easy to "get it wrong" trying to utilize these tools to make things hygienic, but in general that should cause the macros to fail pretty quickly (`NameError`) rather than continue working unhygienically, so you're not likely to accidentally capture anything. Not perfect, but not bad (for now)

It would be great if someone who actually knows what he's doing (e.g. a Scheme `syntax-XXX` expert) could chip in with help/advice on how to proceed.
Beyond 9000 is a (not very) obscure meme

Noted, we may change it, thanks
NSA Also Mining Data From Sprint, AT&T, Credit Card Companies
Any way this can be "downgraded" for Snow Leopard? I hate the iOSification Lion and Mountain Lion have gone through. I like my vintage Expose with the Dashboard disabled.
This is cool. Nice name.

I've already been doing something like this in browsers for some time:

Cmd+F

Type

Enter/Shift+Enter to go next/prev result (or Cmd+G/Cmd+Shift+G)

When it highlights the link you want to press: Esc, Enter

Of course the beauty of this app is that it works outside the browser too.
Precisely this. It's really sad to see the sheer volume of conspiracy-theorizing going on around HN.
Huawei's exclusion was based purely on FUD.
There was no evidence to suggest such a thing.
Man, I don't know. If I was a lot stupider and could get the drop on them, I might like my chances against two agents with handguns.

A SWAT team, on the other hand - I don't care how dumb, drunk, or high I am, if ten officers with heavy weaponry come with a helicopter escort, I know I'm going to lose.
Video Games Under Fire
In that case it's not a passive attack. If the NSA was routinely actively mutating nearly all SSL traffic to Google, I'd expect someone might have eventually noticed that the TCP segments are received with a different checksum than with they were sent.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-...

New York Times tries to explain the difference between the Washington Post's report and the companies' denials
When I worked at NASA, nothing was metric unless it came from overseas. Everything we built was imperial. I preferred it for a few reasons, one of which was that it's harder to make a decimal point error with imperial units.
A much better idea (US centric) would be, except for the Constitution, all laws sunset after X years (say, 10 to 20).

The laws that are important will be passed again; otherwise, they'll fade away into history as society changes.
Just because the system described in the article exists, is there any reason to believe that it is PRISM? Couldn't PRISM be something the NSA is doing in addition to this?
Through a PRISM, Darkly: Tech World's $20 Million Nightmare
Could it be both? Most network monitoring systems specifically don't want to modify the network data, so "direct access" is undesirable anyway. It seems Google, FB and others are compelled to duplicate all data (including real time data) specified in the FISA, which is basically everything, into these special portals. Then the agencies can access whatever they want carte blanche from the duplicate environments without alerting sysadmins on the production servers. And the CEOs can say they don't have direct access and haven't heard the word PRISM before.
This is the exact same thing that sprung to my mind as soon as I read the testimonies. They sound too homogeneous; too staged and rehearsed to be genuine.

I wish somebody had the guts to be a hero. We need more of them.
Wow, one second of unconcentrated reading, and a bunch of weasel words fly right through the blood barrier into your brain.

They opened discussions with national security officials about developing technical methods to more efficiently and securely share the personal data of foreign users in response to lawful government requests.

Really, NYT? More securely? And the users, they are all foreign? And all the government requests, deemed lawful from the outset?

Come on, at this point, are they even trying with the balanced reporting thing? Tech companies may be bristling, but the NYT is surely lodged in the government wing.
First off, the generator is awesome!
Second, (and i cannot remember who famously said this, sorry) the best description of any system is its results...

What does it matter whether they knew or did not know? The end result is the same, they are going to lose my (future) data!
UDOO Mixes It Up With An All-In-One Solution
Maybe they do, but I don't think you can assert that from what the NYT is reporting in that link. The article is talking about FISA requests:

> The companies said they do, however, comply with individual court orders, including under FISA. The negotiations, and the technical systems for sharing data with the government, fit in that category because they involve access to data under individual FISA requests. And in some cases, the data is transmitted to the government electronically, using a company’s servers.

The data sharing is effortless. But the process to get it is still the bottleneck, because in the NYT article, the companies still assert that they conduct a lawyer review of the requests. And, moreover, FISA mandates that when the request involves an American citizen, that a court-approved is required.

If you're arguing that FISA is wrong and that companies should be doing everything they can, including sending the requested data in dot-matrix printouts, to hinder the process -- no argument from me there. But the question at hand is whether they are part of PRISM, which, according to the reports so far, is a program that is different in implementation and legality than FISA.

(And if you want to argue that sending any data upon a legal review is not at all different than direct, near-real-time access to a company's servers...I'm sure some infrastructure engineers would disagree with you, among other kinds of people required to make such a pipeline happen)
How much data is leaving?

There could be a lot less data leaving than you think.
Flask[1] for Python or maybe Play 2.0 Framework[2] with Scala. For Google Go, Revel[3] is probably the most widely used web framework for Go. If you want something in Ruby, perhaps Sinatra[4].

If you're just looking to expand your knowledge and use them on your own, I don't think you can go wrong with any of them. If you're looking to expand your skills for employers, Python with Flask or Django (or alternatively node.js) probably have the most (current) adoption for companies out of your list if you're interested in using whichever language on the web.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flask_(programming)

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

[3] http://robfig.github.io/revel&#x2F;

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinatra_(software)
My favourite part of Prolog is that if you ask it if something is in a list it will decide to add it to the list so that it can return true!
America’s puritanical crusade to resist technology is wrong. Again.
Some things happen in secret but are not part of a conspiracy. Conspiracies require secrecy because they are unlawful or unethical. It is codified into law (which is public) that the US gov will make classified information requests like the ones presented to the companies in question. Automating the exchange of information that the government has announced will by law be exchanged is not a conspiracy even if the specifics of what information is exchanged and the mechanics of the exchange are a secret.
Hey, check out the Underhanded C Contest.

http://underhanded.xcott.com
California Legislators kill fracking moratorium under oil industry pressure
I don't think the two are at all mutually exclusive--in fact, they play very nicely together (see [1]). Bootstrap is mainly a library to help with layout stuff, while AngularJS provides a way to structure the logic and bind it to the DOM. They're completely different libraries, so learn whichever is more applicable to what you're doing (or better yet, learn both).

[1]: http://angular-ui.github.io/bootstrap
They serve different purposes: Bootstrap is (mostly) a CSS framework for quickly laying out pages etc, while AngularJS is a Javascript framework for developing front-end application logic. They can be used together pretty effectively for rapid development.
I would vote for Go along with PostgreSQL
Denials in surveillance program require decoding
Same with a tank, and the National Guard. Should they get involved too? :P
Any number of towers might be in range of a phone, but (from my understanding) only one tower (with the strongest signal) is used by the cellphone. As the cellphone moves, it can be handed off to other towers (based on signal strength).
Also, this is very interesting from a NYTimes article on the matter: "But instead of adding a back door to their servers, the companies were essentially asked to erect a locked mailbox and give the government the key, people briefed on the negotiations said. Facebook, for instance, built such a system for requesting and sharing the information, they said."

They didn't give the NSA "direct access" to their system but created a front end for them instead... LOL.
> Could you link to tptacek's comments you're referring to?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5842915

I was being a bit devious. I am just so tired of tptacek dismissing stuff I say with asinine arguments and then watching my comment get downvoted to hell.
Bounded gaps between primes
I'm not saying an RM campaign is ridiculous, I'm quite sure they, like most big companies are doing one. I'm just also quite sure that the guy this article is using as a source is completely full of shit.
The message is clear: the government is forcing them to say that. They're resisting by repeating their mandated message verbatim, which is as far as they can go in admitting that it's a lie.
Why Turkey Needs an Independent Free Press, And How OpenWatch is Helping
Who did the cute little cat design?
Most press releases have only a handful of paragraphs

Are you surprised? High profile figures are going to want their statements to say exactly what they mean to say, and no more, no less. This means vetting, and keeping it concise helps when your timeframe is "same day".
Python debugging tools
Lately, I've come to realize that the September 11 attacks actually destroyed America.

In the grand scheme of things, the attacks themselves caused minimal damage and casualties. We're only talking about ~3,000 deaths and ~$30 billion damage.

But look at the aftermath. The Iraq War itself cost the USA $5 trillion, and another ~4,500 lives (American lives, that is. The total number of casualties is well over 100,000). At home, the PATRIOT Act enabled countless breaches of freedom, and the TSA has cost untold number of hours wasted at airports. And now this NSA bullshit.

All of this is beyond Osama bin Laden's wildest dreams. The guy just organized a couple of airplanes to be rammed into the WTC towers. Heck, he didn't even expect them to go down, and was pleasantly surprised when it happened. In light of all the freedoms America lost since then though, he must be dancing in his grave right now.
"They are entitled" typically means more than "strictly they have the legal ability." No one disputes that the current legal situation is the current legal situation. Some people dispute the broader meaning.
First, third party doctrine is more limited than that, and in the event where a party is compelled to retain information and disclose it, third party doctrine becomes quite questionable (because they end up acting under the color of law).

The thing is that usually CDR data doesn't require a warrant. The court ruled that since people are typically aware that the existance of CDR's and may rely on them for services from the telephone company, and because they are relatively non-revealing they do not constitute a search.

The point is that the user of the telephone service discloses the calling information to the phone company and in such a way as to expect no privacy over the information. A similar case might be IP packet header information over routers, or photocopying address/return address/postmarks on the outside of envelopes passing through the USPS. None of these are considered to violate any reasonable expectation of privacy because, for example, we can expect that the address on the letter we drop of at the post office is publicly visible.
As a reporter, I think it's great. I wish we'd see senior folks from Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, and Apple doing the same right now.
I wonder what book time is?
I think Hillary would agree. ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvLjwB1tDMQ&feature=youtu.be...
Good job, thank you so much. Public Trello board is a brilliant idea too :)
If the internet was Evangelion, there wouldn't be many humans left to page.
> FISA orders can range from inquiries about specific people to a broad sweep for intelligence, like logs of certain search terms, lawyers who work with the orders said. There were 1,856 such requests last year, an increase of 6 percent from the year before.

From the NYT story seems that PRISM is more b) than a). However, I suppose the remaining questions are:

1) To what extent did these automated processes for reducing the burden of handling FISA requests enable the total quantity of data requested through FISA requests to increase? "Quantity has a quality all its own."

2) How extensive are these broad-sweep FISA requests now, and to what extent do they falsify the impression that FISAs are "lawful, specific orders about individuals" (Google), "orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers" (Microsoft)? In other words, that each individual FISA request covers only one person or a handful of people, so for example the number of people intruded on by FISAs last year is some reasonably small multiple of 1,856?

3) To what extent could the compartmentalisation of FISA information to a few employees, combined with the streamlining process and broad FISA requests, mean that the CEOs have less awareness than they thought about just how broad the FISA net really casts by now? Or instead are they happy not to know, or happy to be able to pretend not to know?

In other words, is PRISM b) in principle but something closer to a) in practise, and if so who knew?
In addition to its other merits, apps like this are a great way to encourage developers implement Accessibility support, which is really not that burdensome at all.

If it gets more app developers to support it (even if it's because their users want to use power tools like this), then indirectly, much good will be done for the users who need Accessibility support for its intended purpose. Definitely a win all around.
Not really. I wrote:

> Terrorism is not about blowing stuff up, it's about scaring people into changing their society and politics.

Organized terrorism has a particular goal in mind, and killing people is only a particular way to achieve it. If you won't let acts of terror influence your policy, they will have to chose another way to pursue their goals.

It's a grown-up, serious version of school bullies problem; the best way to get rid of them is to either ignore them 'till they get bored, or hit them by surprise in hope they'll be so shocked to never think of attacking you again. What you don't want to do is to walk around scared and yield all the time, as this only invites more attacks.
This is an understandable but ahistorical perspective. There was a time not long ago when wiretaps weren't yet considered searches, and where voicing support for communism could get you dragged in front of a tribunal. The ideals of this country aren't an end-state; they're a goal that we will constantly struggle to achieve.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag#As_pretexts_for_war
I'm always amazed by Hakim's stuff!