skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hmm, also this says if you would like personal information to file a PA act, which would you actually file? Either way. Ridiculous. More than a little bit scary.
Amazon.com: Indie Games
Got a source? That sounds so incredible I almost want it to be true.
Bumblehive (the Utah datacenter) is just one of many massive infrastructure investment programs NSA is working on. Fort Meade and San Antonio are already online at a similar scale to Utah, with another facility in Maryland breaking ground.

The NSA is Baltimore Gas & Electric's biggest customer, even before the expansion.
Every startup has faces behind it. A story behind it. Zoho feels like it's hiding something. People like to see the faces of the startups they sign up for. You can't just wear a mask over your face and reach out your hand and say give me money, sign up for my service. Who are you? Where are you? What's your story. That information is important for a business relationship.

What kind of leader hides? It's like a man who won't shake hands or tell you his last name. It's just strange.

Do they think people are going to avoid Zoho because it's Indian? Facebook, Google, Craigslist, & a bunch of others were started by Jewish founders and you know how people have and continue to feel about Jews. Their ethnicity didn't impact them negatively.

Hell, Americans are paranoid about the Chinese and yet still we buy Made in China products.

Zoho should be proud. It came from India, it's privately held, profitable, and hasn't taken venture capital or bank loans. I'd put my name all over that If I were the founder. That's an amazing feat.
"no direct access" Of course the gov't didn't have raw dumps to the SQL databases, they have their own neat little front end web application that Facebook provides to them.
25 apps can save you from corporate email hel
I don't think it is irrelevant at all. The problem though is that the court actually ruled officially in Jones on very narrow grounds which are inapplicable here. That 5 justices went further and said that general surveillance could reach 4th Amendment problems if large enough in scale, and that this would require rethinking existing precedent throws a real monkey wrench in things but it is premature to say the Supreme Court has ruled on this issue.
Really? We would see that data in FERC http://www.ferc.gov/docs-filing/eqr.asp#.UbFZk_ZATns
Ask HN: serious alternative to Skype on Linux/OSX/Windows and smartphones?
In the light the NSA scandal, I'm considering terminating our company's use of Skype. I had been looking at Ekiga for a while, but it does not seem to support OSX nor smartphones. Any more serious alternative ?
the fantasy would be if we didn't have the secret courts and illegal wiretapping by an administration that promised to be the most transparent in history.
>Wikileaks has two audiences: the people that agree with its editorial voice and the people that are interested in the raw data.

This borderlines on being paternalistic in overlooking another audience -- arguably the most important one for an information clearing house -- those whose opinions can be swayed by new information if they trust the source of that information.

Engaging in editorial commentary that overshadows the content of the actual data undermines that trust in a very real way. When you're pushing an editorial agenda, people are going to dismiss the data because it's coming from a source they consider ultimately untrustworthy.

>Furthermore, by providing the raw data, scientific journalist give other organizations a chance to provide alternative context and/or analysis.

This is exactly why the clearing house and the editorial voice need to be separate entities. If the data is available, then anyone is free to (and will) perform analysis on it without tainting the data itself with the reputation of agenda of the organization releasing it.
Right, you probably wouldn't get terrorism coverage as part of your homeowner's policy. However, terrorism insurance is big business! Berkshire Hathaway has extended coverage to airlines, the World Cup, the Sears Tower, etc.
Ask HN: Would you go into this market?
There's a potential market for an application targeting local BigCo. Today, I found about a local engineering firm providing a similar product packaged with their service. The head of the 'competitor' have more than 20 years in the business (and apparently good connections).

I haven't seen their product, but I'm giving it 6 out of 10 on usability/features, for the choice of hosting (and the fact it was developed by an engineering firm).

Would you go into such market? What would be a discussion (if any) with the competitor be about?
StackOverflow prompt changes
(CEO here) There is no particular reason. Perhaps part of the reason is that we don't have an org chart the conventional way many companies do. If you look through our posts and our press releases, the people who run our products are mentioned. LinkedIn has a lot of our people too.

This public presentation I made 3 years ago on our history:
https://docs.zoho.com/show/published.do?rid=s0uyx6d6a7e9c859...
Everything you need to know about the NSA’s phone records scandal
Senior Govt Official Confirms PRISM data-collection program
The most sophisticated Android Trojan
Don't worry it looks like they can barely use powerpoint, massive data analysis is a cinch compared to powerpoint (sarcasm)
So people participate in economic systems for no reason?
Those are weak checks and balances and are essentially ineffective for those most important problem: Stories which are never reported.

There are serious systemic faults that the NYT cannot solve. For example,
1. Corporate influence
2. Government influence
3. NYT management self-interest
4. NYT institution self-interest.

I'm not saying Wikileaks is perfect, but it certainly plugs those holes.

Finally, you needn't choose between NYT and Wikileaks, both can co-exist. But the world certainly could use more Wikileaks-like organizations than NYT-like ones.
Remember that PGP does not encrypt headers, so it doesn't hide the recipient list, the sender or the subject line. In some implementations, it may not encrypt attachments.
Show HN: A Simple News Aggregator w/ Rails + Nokogiri
Our people are prominently mentioned in our press releases. We respond on our forums, on twitter, on forums like this. The reason for the lack of a "management team" page is that we don't the org chart typical companies do. First, there are geographic divisions - India/US/China/Japan where we have offices which run fairly autonomously, and second there are product divisions, which also run fairly autonomously. A private company can operate this way (with a fair degree of autonomy in teams) that a public company cannot.

I have made presentations on the history of the company before. Here is a public document on this:

https://docs.zoho.com/show/published.do?rid=s0uyx6d6a7e9c859...

It isn't like we are famous or anything ;) which was why we don't go around touting it!
I am looking at it, admiring it, and I'd do the same in a heartbeat.
I guess I'm a little less accomodating than the teacher in this article. I believe that he should have to go through all of that (and almost whatever else gets thrown his way). People that fought for the rights of 'the other side' of his beliefs endured much much worse for a long long time. (for the record, I'm a college instructor and I would have handled this student in class just as the professor in the article did but I probably wouldn't have engaged in any conversations about his out of class activities with him at all).
You claimed:

Actually, going by 10-20 sites I'd put my money on spying
on non-US Tier 1 provider traffic.

If you really believe that, why do you think Binney risked his entire livelihood to reveal what he believed to be a domestic spying program?
I have a general policy of not divulging exact personal details of friends or family on the Internet without their express consent. But suffice it to say she was old enough to understand what the Stasi did, and lucky enough to have not been directly affected by them as an individual, although some people around her were: interrogations, permanent disappearances, etc.

However, not everything was beatings, disappearances and terror. Believe it or not, East Germany wasn't all downsides. People were employed, general crime was apparently quite low, children felt relatively safe, children were given education (though indoctrination was certainly a heavy component), they were clothed and fed. While the standard of living sounded like it was relatively low across the board, it also seemed that this standard of living was more evenly distributed than might have been the case in some other places at the time. Obviously traditional Communism has borne out to be more or less unsustainable, and I won't be participating in any debate about Communism vs other dogmas, but I feel I would not be accurately conveying all that I've been told were I not to mention these counterpoints to the Stasi's behaviour.

One fascinating thing my partner has told me is that for some reason, the memories she has of East Germany before the wall came down tend to be in black and white, in her mind's eye.

As you retell, the Stasi were quite big on the human intelligence angle, but I doubt they would have had to resort to such measures would they have had access to the kind of communication infrastucture that is common in the developed world today. Such a system as the NSA et al have access to now, would have been a Stasi wet dream, I'd imagine.
Software engineering has not yet gone through a true manufacturing disruption. We cannot put software on the kind of assembly line/stamping process...

Such a naive view.) The whole Java ecosystem was especially marketed as a "industry standard" way of creating a "coding sweatshops". All you need is coding and testing teams, and a bureaucratic process (such as Scrum) on top of it.

With very rare exceptions of some OSS or in-house projects (Google, FB) most of software industry consists of such sweatshops which are almost an assembly lines which produce bloatware that mere passes most of tests.

Have you ever seen so-called Enterprise Software? ERPs? Web-portals?) Or take a look at the bloatware MS produces - these all products of such software-manufacturing processes.

Now about an artisan analogy. True (gifted) artists are extremely rare nowadays as thew were in the ancient times. Just take a look at the few examples:

- the requests module for Python. It is such a rare example of clean, idiomatic, human-readable Programming (not mere coding) that it could be considered as an art of programming. How many other modules programmed with such craftsmanship are around?

- nginx and redis are the example of the art of Software Engineering. They are works of art because of an approach and personal involvement of its authors.

- Plan9 team, FreeBSD's and OpenBSD's core teams, the author Gambit-C, authors of MIT Scheme, Symbolics Inc., the authors of Emacs are examples of a teams of gifted programmers.

If you want to see the examples of PG's "painters" - these people are. They are artisans of our craft. OK, there might be few hundreds more of such craftsman in the past (who created Lisps and other marvels) but it is mere 1% of all the field.
Seeing the picture of the CEO or management team hardly tells you anything worthwhile. Specially on his company's website. That you couldn't find the CEO on the website hardly means they're hiding anything, a simple google search would've told you anything you wanted to know.
Also convenient when we change our definition of "terrorist" and can reexamine the evidence with new eyes...
Peter Pham answers the big question: WTF was up with Color?
The idea that PalTalk was a top-tier data collection target up there with Google and Facebook does stretch credibility. I'd never even heard of them before.

(Alternate theory: the slides are an awesome marketing hoax by PalTalk.)
ahh petitions.

Lets make it an online petition, that way we don't even have to do anything than click and type and spread our online outrage instead of actually making this issue a big deal.
There is only one reason for collecting this data, to analyze it... and the biggest obstacle is the gathering of that data.
Peter Thiel's Advice For Startup Success
On Mentorship:
I am relatively new to IT. I know, at a basic level:

AWS (EC2 S2 and RDS primarily)
MS SQL Server 2008 R2
Excel/Excel Automation
API Consumption
Principles of Web Scraping
Visual Studio
Languages: C#, Visual Basic, Python, Ruby (Puthon on Udacity and Ruby on Codecademy - no hello worlds with Rails yet);

I would like to have a career mentor to tell me whether or not I am going down the right path. I would absolutely be willing to pay significant amounts of money for the right person. How do I find one? Someone whose mind is a clone of Peter Thiel's would be optimal but not required. I idiotically studied economics at my Unjversity. I did well on standardized tests, if that matters :)

Please help!
Feel free to start digging, but from a quick glance your link seems to apply to wholesale rates between power companies. I really doubt commercial customer data is reported.
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, as the saying goes.
Gee, I deserve to be constantly monitored for daring to legally enter your entry in order to be a productive member of your society.

Thanks for that.
A company cannot say with great accuracy how many NSLs they receive[1], but Google has this page, covering summaries of various types of requests:

https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests/

1. "You'll notice that we're reporting numerical ranges rather than exact numbers. This is to address concerns raised by the FBI, Justice Department and other agencies that releasing exact numbers might reveal information about investigations." -- http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2013/03/transparency-...
It is interesting is that Facebook, Apple, and Yahoo used the term "direct access".

But what is more interesting is that Microsoft claims "If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don’t participate in it".

Does it mean that participation is not required as in a more sophisticated 641?
Premature f-bombation.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/sean-p...

Not that you care what I think, or will read this but I'm sorry for pre-judging. Apparently you can't believe everything you read on the internet.
Pretty peeved they were caught?
PTT messaging SDK for mobile app
And if this were to happen in a developing or an under-developed country, it would just die a silent death...The way it happened/happening in India.
Bitter? We are doing just fine and we have intentionally chosen to remain private (17 years and running now). We could sell the whole thing or go public tomorrow if we choose to. So why would we be bitter? My post is to draw a clear contrast between us and one of our principal competitors. We believe our model would work better for customers long term. The post reflects that conviction.
the author of TFA also has bad things to say about less wrong: http://plover.net/~bonds/cultofbayes.html
How about some kind of non-violent mass protest, it worked for sopa? A million geeks have quite a lot of power, if its focused at one point in time.

What would be the most effective form of protest?

Examples :

Everyone call random phone number on their mobile phones at exactly the same time "Hi, Im your friendly geek, just wanted you to know this conversation is being monitored"

Everyone use TOR for one week.

Everyone tweet "You are being spied on by the US government" at the same time ?

Basically the protest needs to drive home the massive swell of opposition on the issue - so that both sides of the house see it as a political survival necessity to reduce state sponsored surveillance.
Lol whatever
I've been a founder or early employee at several Boston startups. Had I received this, I probably would have responded but blown you off. Here's why:

- Your note is too long.

- I don't care about your scheduling details. I'm doing you a favor (in the best case). The right question is when would it be convenient for me.

- There are plenty of networking events to meet founders, hear their stories, and get inspired. Go to them.

- A noob sales/business development guy is of low value.

- A non-tech evangelist for a tech company is useless. (I've been doing database and storage startups. The view of a consumer company might be different.)

- Your ultimate goal is to leave and do your own thing. While that's true of many people, saying that is not a good move. And it isn't even a good idea. Your goal should be to work your ass off for any startup that will take you (assuming you think they have a chance of success), and learn what you can.

tl;dr: It isn't all about you.
Are people actually upset with Google and the other tech companies over all of this? It seems they were legally compelled to do it. Be furious at Washington, not Silicon Valley.
And if I was an editor, I'd dial it back a notch too because it reads more as polemic than principle. Administering the executive branch of the USG is a huge and diverse task; To suggest that the administration had lost all credibility, on any topic, in the light of this news seems laughably overstated to me.

Personally, I'm much more interested in the implications of this for the legislative branch, which has had a pattern of abdicating its responsibility on these issues to the executive for the last decade. (The most obvious example, for context, is the AUMF of 2001 which basically gives the EB a a blank check while eschewing any meaningful oversight role.)
THE CULT OF BAYES' THEOREM
As Senators defend mass-surveillance, Patriot Act FOIA lawsuit still awaits
That was a joke, as the article points out. As in, all the lights happened to be timed such that he was denied from moving.
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Yes but there are plausible ways to deny "direct access" that do not inconvenience the USG. They just need something they can point to to defend this statement, they don't actually have to have any meaningful obstruction.
This is probably more informative on the matter: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/
You could do something data science-ish and look at how much power Baltimore Electric is buying in comparison to other companies, whilst controlling with Census data and perhaps other industrial activity data, see if there is really a gap in the power they are buying for the type of demand they should getting in a comparable scenario.
>You're giving too much weight to the editorialization of that video, which amounts to nearly nothing in context of subsequent (and previous) leaks from wikileaks.

I completely disagree with this.

Collateral Murder frames the entire incident as the intentional, deliberate killing of civilians and a journalist. It's filled with commentary telling you exactly how to interpret what you're seeing. You're told that this guy on the video is clearly carrying around a camera. You're told that, sure, some of these guys were carrying around rifles, but they were just calmly hanging around. You're shown a quote from the military saying that they did not deliberately civilians, then shown images of a van with big arrows pointing at it labeled "CHILDREN." The entire thing is presented with the clear implication that these were deliberate killings of innocent people.

The actual context of that video? A mechanized infantry unit in the area was taking fire from unknown sources and the Apache was there to provide air cover. The Apache gunner is sitting in a helicopter being buffeted in the air while peering through a 5"x5" monochrome display -- something roughly the size of two iPhones sitting side by side -- and sees a large group of men obviously armed with rifles nearby. He sees a large cylindrical object and calls RPG because large groups of armed men in a war zone with active shooting going on are more likely to be carrying around an RPG than a Nikon. He opens fire on them.

The result is the same: a bunch of people died absolutely needlessly and tragically. It never should have happened.

But in one context, you're telling people that the military is going around deliberately killing innocent people for no reason. In the other context, people are dying despite the best intentions of the troops involved because war is a messy, confusing, and terrible thing.

Presenting it in one context is just going to turn off anyone who -- rightly -- thinks you're just trying to sell an agenda. The other just might get people realizing that war is something to be avoided because there's no such thing as a clean war.
It seems obvious that it means there are compulsory programs that they are not permitted to speak about.
In this case, I would be happy if some CEO refused, breaking the law in support of a higher principle.
I hope they are this stupid and their plan to spy on all Americans fails.
Okay, but stealing a backup gets you 21 days of those documents, the same amount you can get from the live system. There is no need to worry about backups in particular.
I'm sure he has thought very carefully about how to maximize his profits be convincing people they need terrorism insurance .
Other people have offered some more "modern" options, but SFTP and WebDAV over SSL still work very well.
You being paid to post here?

Wish I could say that I was surprised.
Actions, good or bad, have consequences
PRISM is the NSA. This article was about the FBI.

The FBI has always had less access to SIGINT than the FBI.

The NSA has one purpose: SIGINT. The FBI is a much broader and, in this sphere, weaker authority.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/26/cybersecurity-nsa-...
Is this getting downvoted because of advertising or because of the integrity of the software?
They should have moved all their operations to a free country instead of caving in.
>> you get the data in its raw form

The Guardian provided raw information as well. You can download the FISA court decision here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/veri...

EDIT: And by download, I mean view the decision in a silly embedded thing-of-a-bob.
I found blocking GAnalytics broke too many websites (although that may be poor design of those sites). There's an opt out[1] which I'm sure is carefully worded that if enough people used it they could still track us but at least websites load.

[1] https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout
Google is dismantling XMPP federation, but if these slides are true then their NSA federation is working better than ever.
"Just give us everything." "OK"
Currently, the comment's font color is black. It appears gray for you because you have visited that site.
The NSA info gathering program is still in it's infancy. People who have been paying attention (e.g. The EFF) have known the score for well over a decade.

To answer your question: The NSA stores EVERYTHING, but they do not yet have the computational ability to parse everything and make sense out of those reams of data. They can certainly do this to some extent but it's very limited. IIRC this came out in the early 2000s from various NSA whistleblowers who were completely ignored like usual.
IOS7 / OSX 10.9 on Facebook?
Now, I want a T-shirt that says "Google Code is My Assembly Line" and has a link to one of my projects there.

The fact is we design and make the archetypes. These get mass-produced by computers.