skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>1. You also chooose your participation in government.

If I don't want to be subjected to any country's taxes or laws, let me know how I can opt-out of this. You can relocate to a different country, but it is up to them to allow you to enter and/or settle, so the problem hasn't been circumvented.

On the other hand, I can choose to not have a Facebook account, and can use various browser plugins to stonewall their efforts to track me on the web.
Indeed, I'm highly inclined to defer to tptacek's experience here.
In this case I don't think we needed the quote of a disgruntled or corrupted official to know how offensive the US has become in cyberspace in recent years (see all the malwares attacks Stuxnet/Flame against Iran). (Note I used the terms disgruntled, corrupted to assume the worst case scenario, but it could as well be a patriotic official who is concerned by what happens and wanted to raise the issue).
Perhaps someone could explain how starting from scratch and building an encrypted p2p email system would be insecure?

That is, an imaginary mail client (hosted or local) with encrypted storage, transfer and constant processing of emails routed to other active mail clients. Perhaps split and routed over several nodes, as with Skype. Without the PGP-style need to exchange keys in advance, and based on an open standard of some kind. File transfer could be interesting this way, as with BitTorrent Sync.

Spam filtering an anonymous, encrypted service such as this seems nigh on impossible. Could there be a way to enforce accountability? Or whitelisting only messages you want to receive on reviewing sender/title details? Not any practical way I can conceive. Perhaps the only way is to manually approve each new contact. Clicking 'no' to 1000 spam addresses a month might get a little tedious, however. A shared blacklist could do the trick, but it's hardly a robust solution.

I've often thought this to be the most obvious direction to look in for a solution, yet I'm very sure that I'm simplifying the likely vast problems its developers would face.
Just FYI : Oppenheimer was quoting the Bhagavad Gita. see http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Oppenheimer#Quotes
> Android FDE is trivial to crack for us

What vulnerabilities exist with the full disk encryption on android that make it insecure ?
securely, like letting the chinese up in your grill?

Don't try to play us
The President himself acknowledged existence of the program, so that is no longer in dispute. I am, however, starting to think that perhaps the leadership of these companies truly didn't know that this has been going on.

I'm curious if these orders can be served directly to mere employees that have access to install the monitoring software/hardware, with confidentiality obligations barring them from telling their employer. Another explanation may be that NSA agents simply obtained jobs at each company, and those agents installed the monitoring software/hardware without the knowledge of the companies. This would explain the dismay, and the clear embarrassment of the NSA.
Sorry, I have not been following this thing at all but why do they think Google is lying? The new "top headline story" doesn't link to anything for me.
Http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&pubid=ketqua
The link below is to my last startup's network as I had it detailed in a spreadsheet, so you can get an idea as to the kind of details I like to keep track of.

I'd like to implement a system which does a better job than this spreadsheet did.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnJqWN5TNXbJdFA...
Scientific papers, other papers, letters, other texts, documentation, homework…

Could you maybe be more specific?
Maybe it is. So far, we only have news reports, and they look bad. Hopefully, we'll see some political push to review the program and find out more about its methods and goals.
RetroShare: For the Paranoid in You
People have grown so cynical regarding government that they can chalk this stuff up to "business as usual". Governments have been spying on us (or trying to) for as long as we've been alive, but their ability to do so is vastly increased by new technology.

So why complain about the companies? There is a much greater possibility of change in private enterprise, but they often can't escape the mandates that government imposes, either. Some would like to think that the Googles and Facebooks can be heroes, and resist whatever nasty thing the government is doing today. It isn't that easy.
Whoah, hold on, I don't think anyone is saying this is easy or there aren't risks for Zuckerberg. However to say he shouldn't stand up against tyranny and abuse of government power because he has responsibility to parties x, y and z is exactly the line of thinking that allows totalitarian governments to thrive. Government power is not absolute, that power is derived from the people. No one person can stand up to the government, but the government can't fight everyone, and if Google, Facebook, et al stood up to them and signed some light on this issue it would not be so easily papered over by the spooks.

Beyond that, in terms of public surveillance, Zuckerberg has real power in this sphere. You could even argue that he has more power than any individual has ever had. Certainly there is no bigger global database of personal information than Facebook.

It doesn't matter if Arrington is being a hypocrite. It doesn't matter if I'm being a hypocrite. Zuckerberg, and indeed all technologists should stand up on this issue. If we love what computers can do, we owe it to the world to fight so that they don't become the Orwellian tool of control that totalitarian regimes have always dreamed of. We can't put the genie back in the bottle—data is going to be out there—but we can force the government to be more transparent. We can stand up and say that a handful of isolated terrorist attacks is not justification to ratchet up governmental power to something a thousand times more terrifying than any homicidal extremist ever could be. This is fundamentally one of the most important issues of our time, certainly far more important than the fate of any one company.
PRISM is not the problem
Mad Catz reveals an Android gaming console (M.O.J.O)
> Once installed, you send an email to your Friend(s) with a copy of the F2F key. Then, they do the same, by installing RetroShare and sending you their F2F key.

Uhm.
The simplest possible way to post status updates on multiple Twitter accounts.
If we assume that everyone is telling the truth and that there is no back door or drop box, couldn't they simply get the data with man-in-the-middle type software? Getting data from Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and co is nice because it comes to you in a structure way but that wouldn't stop me from trying to get information in many others way, including working with the internet providers to put servers that copy data and direct them to my data center.
The Human Body as a Well-Engineered System
How to calculate 2^n-1 efficiently without overflow?
Depends - as it's designed (using GRC's Paramarine - http://www.qinetiq.com/what/capabilities/maritime/Pages/nava...) you can virtually unit test things like propulsion, stability and buoyancy.

Once it's been assembled into one complete system, it's very difficult to do that - individual systems on-board from a systems perspective could be unit tested, but actual physical items - not so much - generally they only find out about mismatches when they try and assemble the warship/sub from different sections (sometimes built by different companies) and they discover their tolerances were off.
>I've been told this stuff is outsourced, probably to the lowest bidder.

You have been told incorrectly. (Source: I work for a major US credit card company.) Certain pieces of the development and maintenance may be outsourced (under the supervision of US employees), but we (and, as far as I know, all our major competitors) own the data centers where they are run.
The Mac Pro and the Future of the iPad
Use the force, Luke Control a Three.js 3D scene with your mind
AMAZING++: http://uberspace.de
Risking one’s own well being to help the community is basically a definition of an altruistic behaviour. Nobody and i mean NOBODY can reach and keep the position of CEO of big international corporation by exhibiting altruistic tendencies. The environment is too competitive and it promotes egoism and punishes altruism. (BTW, The same reasoning stand for political leadership too). So, I don’t think we can really expect this call to be heard…
One important thing with RetroShare: Don't add random strangers that you don't trust.

Once you have someone as your "friend", random traffic will go between you and him (the network works as sort of p2p). If that "friend" is actually some government agent/copyright enforcer, you can then have troubles with illegal sharing of files, even when you didn't share them yourself.

This is not theoretical, this actually happened in... Germany or France, I am not sure. Probably France.
Global before local
-[NSBezierPath description] - Postscript
I liked it! It lives on in MaxScript, the extension language for 3D Studio Max, written by John Wainwright, one of the architects of ScriptX.

Here's something I wrote about MaxScript:
Automating The Sims Character Animation Pipeline with MaxScript
http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/30
Exporting every account on a daily basis can't possible work for Google or the government. To be scalable and useful, and to meet the "no direct access to our servers" mantra, they would instead need for Google to replicate all database updates straight onto the NSA servers.

That's no small feat, and it certainly requires explicit engineering effort, but it's not a hugely complex undertaking either. Maybe the infrastructure of Takeout can also be used to do that, but the data transmission itself would have to work differently. Again, I believe it has to be basically a data pipe that replicates every user action, probably in real time.
When this came out, I remembered about that whole "you can never really delete your Facebook account, or the data from Facebook's server" situation. The whole NSA thing could also be one of the reasons why you can not.

Oh, and you can't delete your Skype account either. Not even in the UI.
This looks great. We launched an event tracker for the Arduino Tracker a while back[1] and have struggled to bring it to the attention of the Arduino community - so any equivalent to Rubygems or LuaRocks for Arduino would be awesome.

[1] https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow-arduino-tracker
I'm pretty sure that's it, especially given the call for 'greater transparency'.

That one is definitely optional and would not be part of any scripted response, the fact that a large number of the statements have this exact same optional closing paragraph suggests they are inspired by a common source.
Maybe add some kind of window movements with a keyboard? To fully get rid of mice.
Ask HN: Gift for web designer
My friend and fellow web designer is celebrating his birthday today.
I don't have idea for a gift, but I am thinking about buying him some software, or licence for some design work.
He php, drupal programmer and quite good designer.
Any ideas?
No need to apologize, I was just genuinely curious. Considering you wrote it yourself, that makes it more of a discussion in my eyes. Bandwidth was never the issue. No hard feelings :)
It is well documented that deaths increase with more forceful arrests. Interestingly not only among arrestees and innocent bystanders but the police as well.
Well, who donates more to get the lobbying ears? Individuals, or huge businesses? Do you think your congressmen will listen to you, or a man donating millions to campaign funds? Politicians don't mind being hated, but I bet the likes of Page and co very much do. Reading their statements reads like they don't personally like this at all.

Pressure the people paying donations. Its the best chance you have.
what platform does he develop on?
"and if the government DID have access to Google servers, we would be sworn to secrecy under penalty of prison and fine"
I'm no security expert, but at least in theory Retroshare may be one of the safest ways to communicate out there (along with some of the OTR-enabled apps; Retroshare doesn't use OTR, I believe, just P2P OpenSSL).

When the general Petraeus scandal happened, I was thinking that if he would've used Retroshare, which is P2P and encrypted, to talk to his mistress directly, he wouldn't have been found out (unless his PC had a keylogger).

Now if only someone made a prettier interface for it, so "normal" users would be compelled to use it.

EDIT: More info on its security and privacy models, by the team behind it:

Ideals:

http://retroshareteam.wordpress.com/2012/11/03/retroshares-a...;

On security:

http://retroshareteam.wordpress.com/2012/12/28/cryptography-...;

On privacy:

http://retroshareteam.wordpress.com/2013/01/06/privacy-on-th...;

Distributed chat:

http://retroshareteam.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/distributed-c...;
Visualizations, e.g. I have a script that composes a huge image from road traffic video which you can see at different scales. In raster it would be something like 200 MPx for desired level of detail, whereas in PDF you can freely mix raster and vector graphics in portable way.

Also, scanned document compression, using Mixed Raster Content technology.
At his company they all use Drupal. He knows php, but I am not sure if he uses any other platforms.
Which NYT article are you referring to? Do you mean this?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-...

> In one recent instance, the National Security Agency sent an agent to a tech company’s headquarters to monitor a suspect in a cyberattack, a lawyer representing the company said. The agent installed government-developed software on the company’s server and remained at the site for several weeks to download data to an agency laptop.

Where in that paragraph or the ones surrounding it does it say that Google or Facebook was the company involved? Don't you think that if these incidents involved either company, that they would be named here?
Wyden Warns of Potential Public Backlash From Allowing Secret Law (2011)
> Even though this is an actual conspiracy between the government and several large Internet companies?

If it's a conspiracy, what's the common goal? There's nothing in in for the companies involved. You might just as well say rape is a conspiracy between the rapist and the victim.
About the case in Germany: http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=...

Quote from the post:
the IP's of the sued user "rechner3" was from an IP Range from the lawyers (Rasch Legal).

The e-mail of the user "rechner3" was "pm.hh.04@gmail" it is possible that pm stands for the anti Piracy Company "ProMedia"
hh == "Hansestadt Hamburg".

and other indications that lead to the lawyer company and anti-piracy company.

The maximum value of discussion was 10k. If a lawsuit had been started, this value would have been cut down.
There was never a lawsuit to discuss the case and start a prove collection or discussion.

There is only a contract with rechner3 and the anti-piracy company, where rechner3 committed to not use RetroShare again.

rechner3 was never seen afterwards.

It looks like, this was a "forged" case to be present in the media with a high value sentence.
Hackers of the week
GoCardless (YC S2011) is hiring B2B salespeople in London
GoCardless is an online payments provider, specialising in Direct Debit. Based in London, we're currently a team of 25.

We're looking for an ambitious, motivated salesperson to join as part of our outbound sales team.

You will spend your time identifying and contacting potential GoCardless customers, both in-person at industry events and by phone & email.

You should be competitive, driven & persistent.

On a day-to-day basis, you will be:

- Working with the sales development team to identify new target industries for our market-leading Direct Debit product

- Identifying key decision-makers at target companies and making the initial contact & pitch

- Working with the Account Execs & founders to close high-value deals

Requirements:

- Proven experience of high-performance in a sales environment

- Outgoing, energetic & highly competitive personality

- Great oral & written communication skills

Bonus points for:

- Experience with b2b sales
- Experience selling payments products

Salary negotiable depending on experience, including a significant element of performance-related pay. Part-time & temporary contracts also available

To apply, email tom@gocardless.com with a CV & covering letter.
Some of these warnings start delving a bit too close to "Warning: Competent C programmer detected", ... too eager to flag "less common" usage like the dreaded 'original definition of the insertion operator' rather than specifically targeting things that are genuinely suspicious.
"That Blessed Mood"
Agreed. The main sticking point for Retroshare is it's atrocious interface. I love the concept but can't bring myself to actually use it.
I'm not aware of a good reason to think that Google sends all user data for everyone (or even all non-US-citizens) pre-emptively (or at all) to the NSA. The Takeout system is doubtless used to comply with FISA requests targeted at specific individuals, but it's not at all news that Google receives and accedes to such requests fairly routinely.

The three questions which remain open are 1) just how many individuals are getting FISAed - and has it gone up sharply thanks to the shiny new infrastructure for streamlining the request process? 2) do the FISA requests being acceded to now also include "broad sweep[s] for intelligence" in addition to those "specific orders about individuals" which the Internet companies have acknowledged (and which everyone knew about already) and 3) to what extent are the CEOs still fully aware of the nature and extent of the FISA inquiries now that the nice semi-automated processes are in place?
Cool, I thought it could not use the extensions and thus would be slower than other options like Xen or KVM.
Yeah, key exchange is always hard. You need to use a secure channel for that, we found a OTR-encrypted jabber-message the easiest way to go.

Sadly, RetroShare didn't really work for us. The UI is too clunky and the software has too many weird issues, like reindexing all files occasionally.
FISA doesn't preclude "real-time" data - that's one of the points of the surveillance. The original intention of the law was to listen to phone calls as they happened.

What's unclear between the original descriptions of what the slides called Prism and these descriptions is just how automatic the system is - if the steps of lawyers individually reviewing each request still exist.
PRISM means that internet companies like Google will be free from future FISA and NSL headaches, and so they can even truthfully say that they haven't received any requests.
Thanks for the post, it's very informative. I believe it would bode the go community well to publish guidelines/best practices on exposing reusable types/interfaces for re-use. Some libraries I come across simply make it very hard to extend minor behavior without a. modifying the library, b. copying the code from the library and not using the library or c. requires elaborate workarounds that requires creating a new type and passing in the old one (composition) and re-implementing the old types' interface and simply calling the old type to change the behavior of a single method via closures.

Perhaps I'm still very new to go, but I find the hardest part of writing go is reusing external libraries that don't exactly do what you require.
This is fantastic. I've been wanting to create something like this for a few years now but never actually did anything about it. Now I have an existing project to contribute to.
New Derek Sivers' company: Entrepreneur’s Guides to Asia
I generate a PDF when I want to print something out.
Critiquing Mockups
On the other hand, at a time when someone might be examining their opinions and conclusions on what limits governments should have on spying and information gathering on people living in the country's borders, it also seems prudent to examine actions governments take against those who don't live inside those borders.
I agree but only to a point. I actually have a piece on my blog I will be submitting here today which discusses the idea of a PKI for the current threat model (resourceful organized crme and secret government surveillance. I have an idea for how to build a PKI to help combat these and laid my ideas out there.

But what is relevant for this discussion is that one of the goals has to be to increase the effort of a security compromise and reduce the value of one. Nothing is going to stop a government official spearphishing a target with an appropriate warrant, but if you can force the issue to that level of attack, and if you can make sure that the endpoints and only the endpoints are where compromises are vulnerable to sustained secret attacks, then maybe we have a chance. (It also means it is a lot easier to serve a warrant on the related computers rather than evesdropping silently in the middle.)
PragmataPro is a nice programming font. The regular width (which is all your really need, IMO) is $19; the full version is $170: http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragmatapro.htm
To Zynga's credit, they had an honest layoff, with severance and a press release (so peoples' reputations don't get burned). Most tech startups hide a layoff in stack-ranking and so-called "performance improvement plans", which additionally humiliate people on the way out and are used as an excuse not to give severance.

I'm not a fan of Zynga-- their games are garbage, and the equity clawback was vicious-- but it sounds like they did the right thing here.
There is one very efficient way to thwart these big data collection attempts: build fake profiles and build fake networks. If everyone would use a little of his or her time to do this, it would be extremely difficult to find the real address or security number or phone number of a person.

I foresee quite some opportunities for startups who would automate this. In this case not for "evil" purposes such as fake product reviews, or spam, but for - I would say - this ethically acceptable purpose of making it a tad harder to mine your personal information online.
Thats pretty great bang-for-buck, they've got a lot of ongoing cases, and the website has been pretty superb over the last year.

Nice vertical javascript timeline on Surveillance.

Id be very interested to see a compiled / aggregated list of sentencing for hacker and whistle-blower related prosecutions... I think we'd see a sadly consistent picture, which would help get the word out to non-geeks.