skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We laugh, but from The Wall Street Journal today (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732429910457852...):

"U.S. Collects Vast Data Trove

"By SIOBHAN GORMAN, EVAN PEREZ and JANET HOOK

"WASHINGTON—The National Security Agency's monitoring of Americans includes customer records from the three major phone networks as well as emails and Web searches, and the agency also has cataloged credit-card transactions, said people familiar with the agency's activities."
I don't know anyone in person using it...
I've had good luck with FreeBSD on Lenovos. Its run on every one I've had since my T42 (so T42, R60, T500, T510, T520).
Power management works "fine", I usually get 5-6 hours of battery life out of my battery, but I never bothered to monkey with suspend/resume since my laptop boots so fast anyways.

Frankly the Air is one of the best laptop formfactors I've seen in a while, just load a virtualization system on it (VBox is free) and run FreeBSD in that.
No, but he may be interested in the previous comments. That's where most good things are, anyway ;)
> it's that his conclusions are insane

Until the early 80's there was no widespread use of mobile telephony and internet. It's not crazy to think that the surveillance state has ruined the internet and that there is more value in avoiding it than in using it. Maybe it's over.

I can recall some TI managers looking at Stallman like he had two heads when he told them, over 25 years ago, that developers would make money with free and open software.

The car industry is facing a generation of buyer who find cars a burden. It's crazy to think that we can't screw this up.
I get your core concept. you have a shell thats consisting of "name" and "privacy" (these need to be defined more). and those 2 things separate you from everyone else -- so without those you lose your identity.

Can you define a little bit more what goes into name and privacy?
Maybe I have missed something, but other than being a 'search engine,' I'm not really told your site is supposed to be used. Is it good for finding courses? Is it good for finding explanations on a specific topic such as Random Forests?

It looks like a great tool but I don't really know what I'm supposed to be searching for.
There's a common narrative that the two major parties are disliked, but win because people feel they have no alternative. That the will of the people gets railroaded by the political process. That things like TSA, wiretapping, drones, etc. are plots by those in power that the American people dislike but are powerless to change.

This narrative is dead wrong.

There are not many people who are properly fed up with the two major parties. The vast majority of the electorate still strongly identifies as either R or D. They may not agree with everything, but they will still see people from their party as "our guy". Those who do not identify with a political party but still feel strongly about politics are very much in the minority. You probably routinely hear about how Congress's approval rating is in the single digits. What doesn't get as much play is that the average approval rating for an individual representative by their constituents is still quite high. People may dislike Congress as a whole, but they like their own people.

As for these bad policies, there's a simple reason they persist: people want them. The Rs and Ds differ on many significant issues, but not on these. They want the TSA, they want massive anti-terrorism surveillance, they want terrorist leaders killed by faraway drone strikes.

The American electorate is, by and large, terrified of al Qaeda and anything that resembles them. Just look at the reaction to the attempt to try the Guantanamo prisoners in New York. Just the idea of bringing terrorists into the country, no matter how harmless they've been rendered, frightened people out of their minds. You can talk about "security theater" all you want, but the TSA makes them feel safe to take an airplane. The fourth amendment is a distant and abstract concept compared to the possibility that massive surveillance might prevent another Boston Marathon bombing. The collateral damage from drones is sad, but every terrorist they kill is one that can't blow up a building in the US, and a lot of those other people killed were probably terrorist sympathizers anyway.

Now, to be clear, I don't agree with any of this, and I expect most people here don't. Which is, of course, part of the problem. If you hang out on HN, you get the idea that everyone thinks these security programs are terrible overreaches, and if you have that idea, then there's only one possible conclusion: politicians are ignoring the people to advance their own agenda.

The reality is much scarier: on these issues, politicians are simply listening to the people. This is scarier because it's vastly easier to convince politicians to obey the people's will than it is to change the people's will.

I have no idea how you go about convincing the American public that it's not worth doing these things to fight terrorism, but that is what must be done if these things are to change. Telling people to vote for third parties isn't going to cut it, because people don't want to vote for third parties. They want to vote for for the major parties because the major parties are by and large the ones with the policies they like.
It's so easy from the outside to simply say things like this with absolutely no first-hand knowledge.

Maybe he did just say those things at election time and doesn't truly care. But assuming that to be the case for certain is lazy thinking.

The discussion I want to have is, what else could make a person who is dead-set against surveillance turn around so drastically once in office? What did he see, what did he come up against? Right or wrong, what scared him?

Unfortunately, we never have that discussion. Politicians are all just simple liars, it's as easy at that, there is no nuance to even remotely consider, blah blah.
That link is broken for me, but I found the article and enjoyed it.

https://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/12...
> In the Constitution, the federal government is given broad, exclusive, power over national security and defense

Like "privacy", "national security" appears nowhere in the Constitution. The federal government is given certain specific powers that can be grouped under the umbrella "national security", just as it is given certain specific limits based on particular rights that can be grouped under the umbrella "privacy".
Hacker Who Exposed Steubenville Case Could Spend More Time In Jail Than Rapists
Librarians Challenge National Security Letter (2006)
You'd better encrypt your private data before uploading to web sites.

Recommend to use some privacy oriented apps/sites spideroaks, securekeep.com
Both are troubling, but governments can imprison and/or kill you. Corporations usually can't or won't.

The "actual useful reasons" you mention may exist alongside personal or political reasons of individual government employees.
Don't worry, they will.
Cairn - A flat-file CMS
If your thesis is correct, the optimal strategy for us would be to sell when the prices are very high (like they are now) i.e collect the next 50 years of "rent" right now, because it is so readily available. Instead, we continually and steadily improve the product (while clearly acknowledging that we have much work to do). Don't you think that is an awful rent seeking strategy?
How far will you go with this? What if we discovered that raping the parent/child of the suspect in front of them could save even more lives?

I mean, you make a good point that it torture doesn't work (well, it actually does work but only for it's original purpose: to get people to claim they did something that we need them to claim they did, even if they didn't), but personally I don't want to know if it works or not because it's not valid no matter how effective.
We're actually working on all of the above right now.

We ended up rushing to get this to market due to the press news on the subject, so we ended up leaving out the things above -- but those are coming in the next week or two :)
I'm guessing there's an engineer at Google responding to an alert of thousands of users across the world all attempting to load the same non-existent page on their servers.
Encryption doesn't defeat traffic analysis, and a lot of the recently reported surveillance is based on metadata to generate leads.
LaunchRock adds App Deals, Video Production
Narus: carrier-grade traffic analytics with enterprise-class spyware
Obama on PRISM
Course on Practical Cyber Security
Ask HN: What is the most reinvented wheel?
I was reading through an article about html5 inputs and noticed the lack of support for datetime pickers in desktop browsers.

Ever website NEEDs to support some form of making date and time picking tolerable, each solution looks and feels different, and nay not always convey the same idea.

On mobile however, (datetime-local at least) presents a nice picker that's consistent across sites.

Sometimes reinventing the wheel makes sense for educational purposes, but at this point the datetime picker issue is way beyond that.

Are there any things in your area of expertise that feel the same way?
There are a lot of places one can tap into that community (or branches of it). I don't pretend to say this G+ community is the place to go for CA, but I wanted to share something to serve as an intro for any HN'ers who maybe weren't already familiar with crypto-anarchism. In hindsight, maybe the wikipedia page[1] would have been a better choice.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-anarchism
I disagree, that's blaming the wrong people. The voters don't necessarily create any mess. In one way or another some politician will get into office, and sometimes people just have to choose between the lesser of the evils available.
So you're saying you have no character. Thanks for admitting this on a job site...
Facts about Wayland vs X
On your third point, I have few perspectives to offer.

The first is that because the companies you listed are out to make a profit, it is easier to understand how your data will be used. The very fact that the government has less clear motives is what makes their collection of data more unsettling.

Second, when a company is driven by profit and loss, they have incentives to secure data because the inability to trust a company with your data will lead to fewer customers. Sure, your data may get out in an attack, but over time, to the extent its valued by the consumer, more secure companies will stick around longer than those that are insecure. If the government loses your data, some people may be fired, but agencies as a whole will stick around and keep conducting business as usual. Third, along these same lines, a government data store means multiple sources of data collected into one target. To those with malicious intent, it seems logical that attempts to take that data will be more frequent.

Finally, those, familiar with the school of public choice, will recognize that government actors are out to "make a profit" just not in the traditional sense. As a former gov employee, I can tell you that while there are policies in place, the fact that many gov employees transition to private sector and vice-versa, data collected will in some way be used for profit and likely by someone you did not give permission to, as is the case with Amazon or Verizon.
"Big Data"

I prefer my data medium rare, please.
Linq to Objective-C
Hat and sun glasses?

No, get a burka (the muslim body clothing that hides the entire body) -- not only will people want to avoid you, but they wouldn't even be able to write in the description what sex you are (and with a little bonus they might assume it is not a disquise in which case they are truly looking in the wrong direction).
Surely we can agree that the director of the CIA is going to be better a maintaining privacy than the average person.
Well, personally I consider jail sentences a form or torture and would like to see the prison system abolished. So no inconsistency for me. :)
In my case when the Interviewer asked if I forgot to put my education history on my resume, I said no, the conversation became bland. We sat there and waited for the time to expire and I was dismissed.
But I still managed to get another job without a degree.

I have written a little more about my experience on my blog a month ago:
http://idiallo.com/blog/2013/04/do-you-really-need-a-college...
I'm getting the same thing with Konqueror

edit: same thing = same problem
In light of recent events, I'm putting together a course on practical cyber security.

Basically it's a practical guide to make the average internet aware of what information they are revealing, and put together a bunch of rules that will help them stay safe if they follow.

contact me if you want to help teach this.
"The documents were said to show that the British agency had generated 197 intelligence reports through the system in the 12 months to May 2012 - a 137% increase on the previous year."

Perhaps we need more details about these documents. May has not denied the specific allegation, just mentioned the usual 'legal framework' thing.
Save the National Media Museum in Bradford
Obama: No one listening to your calls; Privacy worries called 'modest'
That may be the law but in places like Russia you can also just hand them 20 USD to look the other way.
Here a few examples of how citizens are treated in the United States:

Cameron D'Ambrosio - held in jail for weeks without bail for posting rap lyrics the government found offensive. [http://cms.fightforthefuture.org/teenager/]

Peaceful Occupy protesters - subjected to beatings and pepper-spraying at point blank range [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Davis_pepper-spray_incident]. (Note that no one was actually run over by a tank in China; OTOH, the US has the legacy of the Kent State Massacre [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings]. ETA: there have been worse massacres of protesters elsewhere, but the point is that the US is not exempt from this.)

Bradley Manning - held for nine months in solitary confinement under conditions that at times could only be described as torture: naked and without his eye glasses, permitted to read or watch TV for only one hour a day, not permitted to exercise. [http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/manning-treatment-i...], [http://solitarywatch.com/2012/08/11/defense-motion-describes...]

North-west anarchists - accused of no wrongdoing but refused to testify for a grand jury. Held in contempt of court and sent directly to jail. Spent 5 months in jail, much of it in solitary confinement during which they were permitted no visitors and had only one 15 minute phone call a month and limited access to reading and writing materials. According to the judge who both sent them there and then released them, "their physical health has deteriorated sharply and their mental health has also suffered from the effects of solitary confinement." [https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4hDq2p2PpMKRDRDQzViLWJTUmc/...]

None of these people are even suspected terrorists. What they share in common is that they did things the government didn't like.

As for suspected terrorists, they are not guaranteed due process. See Jose Padilla [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Padilla_%28prisoner%...]: U.S. citizen, held from 2002 to 2006 as an "enemy combatant" and denied due process. Finally transferred to civilian court and convicted anyways, showing that criminal defendants do not get off on "technicalities" as you claim. Look up "harmless error analysis" if you want to learn the truth about "technicalities."

The United States is not exceptional, and we need to stop pretending that it is.
You can't have 100% security period, so why are we giving up our privacy to reach an impossible goal?
That's what throwaway accounts and VPN's are for.
I would like to see a satirical version of this, in the vein of The Devil's Dictionary: http://www.thedevilsdictionary.com&#x2F;
Every Library and Museum in America, Mapped
User generated computer software/hardware related technical notes
Why TechCrunch Won’t Make You Money
This is pretty cool. A few terms that immediately came to mind but are missing from this list as of right now are "network effects", "lifecycle email", "CPM", and "angel". Not strictly startup related, or even all that obscure, but there are a lot of not-strictly-startup-related-not-really-obscure terms on the list already (API, AWS, cloud, NDA, churn rate, etc.)
>The order leaked to the media organization details that the numbers of both parties on a call are given to the U.S. government, as well as location data, the length of the call, the time and duration of all calls and "unique identifiers."

Setting aside the fact that the government likely does not have the right to gather this information, the biggest question I have is how secure is this information?

Do they log every time a government employee queries this data? Can government employees take copies of the data? What security protections are in place to prevent foreign or domestic hackers from accessing the data?

This whole thing gives me the willies similar to when I found out that my employer was using proxy software from BlueCoat to strip out every site's SSL certificate and replacing it with its own so they could see all your unencrypted SSL traffic. They then store that unencrypted data which presumably includes logins and passwords to employee's unrelated bank accounts and other highly sensitive private information. Even if they have the right to monitor this type of activity, I don't believe anything gives them the right to store the data long-term because of the tremendous risk it presents to innocent people.
something I didn't adress in my point there is that I feel like this is a weak argument because my identity isn't shattered so easily, I am not "insignificant" because I was wire taped. in fact, it would seem that someone intentionally listening in on me considers me to be significant!
You can't have 100% security anyway, and even if you could, I don't know that anybody considers that the goal. And I don't think most people who have actually thought about the issue would say that "100% security" is such a desirable goal that it would justify trampling all over basic rights.
Sure, but I wasn't alive then, and the work I've done personally hasn't contributed to nuclear war or anything of that sort. Through my college years I had a couple of opportunities to work in the defense industry, but chose not to.

Which doesn't mean people aren't getting shot and blown up, it just means I'm not closely involved with it. My stance is not beating people over the head with morality, it's purely personal and self-centered. It helps me sleep better at night when I'm not building tools that directly spy on people. I'd like to be as many degrees removed from that as possible, really. Don't take my post to mean that I'm prescribing this morality onto others.

We could do a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon that proves that my work actually does lead to pain, death, and suffering throughout the world in a convoluted and indirect way, and it may in fact be true - but I don't think it's a stretch to say that there is a large moral difference between directly working on something with ill effects and being far removed from it with no intentional contribution.

Side note though: I don't buy this argument that we can't condemn things unless our hands our perfectly clean. The fact that we all are products of war, suffering, and other terrible things does not remove our ability to steer the ship forward.
TAILS is actually now done by the Tor Project, so I think they have a vested interest in vetting it before it is released.

https://www.torproject.org/projects/projects&#x2F;
They're saying they aren't intercepting audio recording of phone calls, but can we really trust them at this point?

And he wasn't very clear about the online communications, from what I read so far. So probably Skype calls and such are intercepted and recorded anyway.
I'm starting to question if morality and legality are considered the same by those in power? Honest question, although off topic and a bit esoteric.
doesn't this just solve a piece of the mess? it is the communications channels being monitored, so email, chats, voip, whatever messages would still be easily tapped into.

they control the pipes, the endpoints do not matter much.
This seems to be done with divs and dom manipulation. Anyone know why they didn't use HTML5 canvas for this? I'm curious because I'm currently making an HTML5 canvas game.
Sure, but the government wouldn't have a database of those anywhere and getting rid of a typewriter isn't likely to get anybody noticed (I cleaned up in the attick the other day, can you believe what I found?).
Do they hire H1B's? That would be a really quick clue as to whether or not they are doing work for NSA. None of my Indian friends know any H1B that works at Palantir, which is really odd, but maybe other people have different anecdotes.
Where's Stallman when we need him?

Ah, here!

He didn't have to spend much effort in predicting the future in 2001, he just had to be consistent.
Show HN: Google in U.S. gov't spending contracts (requests for user data, etc)
I'm a developer at enigma.io, which is a public data search-and-discovery platform. With following all of the PRISM stories, I've been looking into the data we have on U.S. government contacts going back until 2006 and found a lot of interesting entries where Google is the vendor (descriptions for the servies include supoenas for personal data, "information check", "expediting records", "subscriber info", etc)...

I collected exports of these datasets filtered to where Google is the vendor and threw it up on Google Drive (lol) over here:

https://drive.google.com/a/enigma.io/folderview?id=0B0YuuXl1EUquVnhnQmh1ckRDUU0&usp=sharing#list

You can also download a ZIP of all of the CSV's here:

https://mega.co.nz/#!JY8zUTbC!KmogFX_uoY-GWqpsTmCyLG_-nq0MLzU9s8zLDTwVguw
Would you like to explain that, and maybe cite some references?
Suspend and resume have been stable for me as long as I've had a computer capable of supporting them.
And I'm not aware of any way to make them fail without doing something obviously intended to disable them.
regarding the voting dilemma, the only real solution is: http://rangevoting.org&#x2F;
I hate that attitude so much. Abstaining from voting is just lazy, it's not activism, in fact it's inactivism. You don't have to vote for the two major parties, if you can't find a candidate you like then at least show up and vote for yourself.
FYI, it's more effective to call your senators and representatives than it is to email them.
The original purpose of torture was to get people to admit to things the government needed them to admit to. For example, the Templars were taken down by the king of France by torturing them until they "admitted" committing heresy. That allowed him to execute them, and avoid paying the huge sum of money they were owed.

Getting information, I'd say not very effective. The issue is, what if the person really doesn't know? How do you tell the difference? You listed some examples, but how did you confirm that this information was true and not just bullshit these people were saying to make the torture stop? In the end, weren't the "loyalists" just killed anyway? Maybe they weren't actually loyal so they were simply killed and logged as loyalists. Since the main "evidence" is testimony under extreme duress there's no way to know for sure.
If you're implying that the internet would not exist if the US government had not seen it as a way to prepare for nuclear war, I disagree.

(I do not have an opinion on the morality of working for Palantir.)
For this very reason. The public outrage is there and they know it.
Introducing ClusterFsck: Filebased S3 Configuration Kontrol
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