skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Supporting the old software engineering folklore that the earlier a bug is introduced (and the later it is found) the harder and more expensive it is to fix.

I wouldn't call it folklore as there are numerous studies supporting it.

EDIT: I decided to crack open Code Complete for anyone who is interested [1].

[1] "Researchers at Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Hughes Aircraft, TRW and other organizations have found that purging an error by the beginning of construction allows rework to be done 10 to 100 times less expensively than when it's done in the last part of the process, during system test or after release (Fagan 1976; Humphrey, Snyder, and Willis 1991; Willis et al. 1998; Grady 1999; Shull et al. 2002; Boehm and Turner 2004)".
I can see this being an OS X power-user/accessibility feature in the next major release. Enjoy your acquisition and/or idea being brazenly appropriated.
Who says they did it independently? I'm sure the people who wrote each statement read the others that had been previously released.
Not that anyone will read this now... but looks like I was wrong: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-...

Now I'm thinking that, yes, they coordinated their responses with the aid of the government. Dammit. I guess that's where my optimism gets me.
> But that's not the situation. What we have is the US government saying (albeit unwillingly) that these companies are involved. It's not "conspiracy" to think that they are, in fact, involved, it's just obvious.

Hmmm...it's obvious, but only in the way that circular logic is obvious to the one in the circle...Your claim that the U.S. government is saying that these companies are involved is not what I've seen (though I admit I may not have read every article on this). What the U.S. government has said is:

1) The executive branch is allowed to conduct legislatively and judicially approved surveillance and some of this surveillance is in coordination with communication companies.

2) The recent reporting on the NSA has contained several inaccuracies

I haven't seen any tacit admission of PRISM. If you want to argue that the president admitted to the program by not outright denying it (in this press conference, for example: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/06/07/statem...)...well, that again is a questionable standard of judgment, and one that is vulnerable to false positives.

You don't have a smoking gun here. You have, so far, 4 PowerPoint slides of a heavily-redacted 41-slide presentation. You have the opinion of the career intelligence officer who leaked those slides. And you have the two strongly worded denials of Google and Facebook. Note: this does not mean that the companies aren't just outright lying, which is always still a possibility. But I'm saying, from what we know so far, what has been actually said is kind of what I would expect them to say if they were telling the truth (admittedly, I may not have a very creative mind).
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.

Uh, wow.
But I am convinced that almost all (if not all) gay people are just gay; they don't choose to be gay at some point in their life.

The one gay person whose story I know well enough to retell probably started adolescent life as straight-leaning bi, but due to horribly misguided religious environmental pressures became gay. So, no, he didn't choose to be gay, but he could have gone in a different direction in a different environment.
In at least two cases, at Google and Facebook, one of the plans discussed was to build separate, secure portals, like a digital version of the secure physical rooms that have long existed for classified information, in some instances on company servers. Through these online rooms, the government would request data, companies would deposit it and the government would retrieve it, people briefed on the discussions said.

So THAT is why all the responses repeated "direct access".
I hope you fail with CC and let the public know bitcoin's strength rather than see sneak in some paragraph in the small print of your TOS that allows you to keep the CC data for half a year just in case.
Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
Does this mean I was right? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5843051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5843029
Who’s Telling The Truth About PRISM?
If he would be free to say what he wants, he would intentionally try to write the statement in different style and with different words, not to give impression that statements are scripted.
Or under water!
Facebook, Google, Apple, Yahoo Make Similar PRISM Denials
Only five states require firearms registration (as opposed to the near-universal, one-time federal background check at purchase).
Well, what concerns me most here is this: The US Government is in a spot wrt US citizens and US homeland, blanket surveillance on the rest of the world seems fair game.
Sure, the law would not protect the 'aliens'. Concerned citizens should look at being aware of alternative tools that would minimize possibility of the US Gov eavesdropping, inadvertently or otherwise. Perhaps a system of opensource OSs, TOR logins and specially crafted logins, on pre-identified low risk networks. thoughts?
why the day-old account?
It has been well known that they already do the beam splitting portion, so it's really just up to the keys.
I don't think it would happen. It would be a disaster and a scandal for any administration to pursue such charges against someone so high profile.
Worked for Obama.
Isn't this the same as the kit plane already available from Spacek (sdplanes.com)
As innuendo goes, that example is pretty weak sauce.
That's why IMHO secret sharing[1] algorithms are so important

We store only parity of data in one data center, and some in another on a different continent. Any data intercepted or lost does not damage the integrity of the whole, plus this makes ISP can not discriminate raw binary data.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing, invented by Adi Shamir, the S of RSA
Frontline: Spying on the Home Front
So it's not a real question. No matter which way they answer you, you'll construe it in your favor.

The phrase "in your favor" seems to suggest an adversarial stance where none is necessary. Besides, the point of a rhetorical question is to make a statement, regardless of the answer.

Receiving the hypothetical answer you gave as an example serves to demonstrate that there is a spectrum of orientation on multiple axes, ranging from knew for sure and had first crush in preschool, to no interest in either gender and everything in between.
You're one of the few whose opinion I would trust on this: how much data would the NSA need to derive TLS encryption keys from encrypted data? I feel like I read once that you could possibly use statistical methods to derive the key if you had enough encrypted source data.
This is exactly the conclusion I came to. My guess is they have the SSL/TLS keys.

That being said, tptacek thinks we are wrong, and he is a subject matter expert, so I am not sure.
I don't agree with the post you're replying to, but your argument seems pretty specious to me.

Software developers are generally no more responsible for the misdeeds of others using their software than anyone else that produces almost any kind of tool.
don't blame this startup for trying. i don't know how big a cut the telcos take and yes, a phone should not be that expensive but we'll see where the price goes. for a start, higher prices are completely normal and later hopefully some competition will bring the price to more reasonable levels. ultimately anonymous would it only be if wallmart started buying them in bulk and people could grab one at the counter paying with cash.
Well it's pretty clear now

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5843352

They don't have direct backdoor, but they have a system in place for a fast and effortless data sharing.
Don't believe. Ever. Agnosticism is a philosophy that extends well beyond religion.

Instead, focus on what you want to be true and figure out how to make that true. You probably don't want PRISM to exist, or more generally, you probably don't want an extensive surveillance program of PRISM's caliber or greater to exist. In America, or anywhere? Be specific. Figure out exactly why each component is problematic. Understand that.

Then start going about making it harder to exist. Learn about and teach ways to circumvent. Talk to people and convince them of your well-founded views. Turn the world into a place where PRISM won't exist. It's a project that can easily exceed your lifetime.

But it's better than belief.
Bees and Pollen: What Games Can Learn From Social Insects
I haven't used it much yet, but it seems nice.

How do I pay you for it? :-)
Probably, although IMO this was pretty obvious from the $20mm budget. The only question was "is it a repurposing of the existing law enforcement API" or something slightly unique, and was it "Google/FB in the loop" or totally automated.

NSA presumably wouldn't want most Google employees to know they're FISAing info on KSM. They may be willing to read in a few Google employees to handle turning over the data, though.

There may be some special magic to hide the actual target from Google while Google still gets to review the order itself. (the name of the target is presumably non-meaningful to Google).
Obama Ordered Overseas Target List for Cyberattacks
The technique they'd be using to do that would be new to science.

Here it is worth pointing out that Google did something awhile ago to make NSA's job much harder (if their goal is to read everyone's mail): they became aggressive advocates for TLS forward secrecy.

http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2011/11/protecting-...

TLS forward secrecy involves the ephemeral Diffie Hellman ciphersuites (which your browser supports). Instead of deriving a session key and using the server's RSA key to convey it, the DHE ciphersuites run the DH protocol to derive a session key between the client and the server, and then use the RSA key to sign the exchange ("breaking the tie" if there was a MITM). The RSA key is never used to convey a session key; if you got all of Google's TLS keys, you would not be able to go back in time and decrypt old sessions that used a DHE ciphersuite.

It is also worth pointing out that some of the hardest people working in security show business, including Adam Langley and Michal Zalewski and Justin Schuh, people with unimpeachable reputations in my field, work for Google on these problems.
and, whats the bet the industry's supporters will be offering that same unhelpful rationalisation, come the next reactor failure.

I don't accept that the significant disqualifications you raise are all 'solved problems'. some are solved. some mitigated. I do accept the scenario I think you're describing: the US[a] is choosing to extend licenses to old plants instead of building safer ones.
But beyond the US[a], I'm concerned we're illogically facilitating development of more conventional reactors that offer none of these benefits, in part under the cover of promises that the industry is moving in the right direction. That's the disconnect I see between promises and realities.
The right reaction is to ignore it completely.

By that logic, disbanding the police and court systems should bring crime to a swift and sudden end, because everyone knows that there was no crime before the creation of institutional policing.
Thanks for clarifying. You should have started out with that.
Who The NSA Follows, On Twitter
NYT explains gaps between PRISM leaks and company denials of 'direct access'
I wonder what the NSA thinks about Google's plan to change their SSL certificates?

http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2013/05/changes-to-...

Seems like that could put a crimp on any beam split obtained data. At least for a short while.
I'm imagining something like this:

Imagine if the NSA has a copy of these companies' (Google and Facebook's) traffic, and has perhaps subpoena'd the TLS keys. Having the TLS keys is still not having "direct access" to their network, since the NSA at no point accesses internals of their network. But the NSA gets all the data and decrypts it.

Next, NSA engineers spend time reverse-engineering the company's protocols. Or maybe the companies hand over the specs. Anyway, the NSA can now recognize a request to Facebook representing posting a message; or it can recognize in Google's traffic someone reading or sending an email. It can tell when a file is stored into iDrive.

It saves copies of all of this - the date and time of the request to Facebook, the message, etc.; for Google, the entire copy of the email, or search query.

NSA stores all of this data into a searchable, queryable database, that is capable of looking up a person's activity in those systems. And retrieve the same Facebook message, Google meail, or iDrive file that the user had sent.

This is a version of events that seems to fit the data I've seen.

In another thread, someone suggested that PRISM records information without "tapping" the companies lines. Perhaps that is true, and the tapping happens at the Internet backbone level, without awareness by these companies (beyond giving up their TLS keys).

I think the question we need to ask Google, et al., is: did you divulge your SSL/TLS keys to any government, agent of the government, or any other entity?
Microsoft remains pathetic, and evil. On a positive note, it looks like they're heading down.
So basically, PRISM is just a system for negotiating electronic dead-drop locations to pick up data when companies are compelled by an NSL to archive and copy an individuals data? If it were done by printing out the data and dropping a physical box in a pre approved location, would be be as scandalous?

What are we to believe PRISM is now? Is it

a) a firehose feed that allocates arbitrary, indisriminate, ad-hoc querying over large swaths of user data in cloud datacenters?

or

b) is it an automated system for sending out National Security Letters, and the polling dropbox locations for compliance, and then importing the data into some centralized government intelligence repository?

a) is an absolute outrage, there should be rioting in front of congress and the whitehouse

b) is pretty much just making delivery of information they are compelled to legally deliver more efficient. Although if I were these companies, I'd make it as painful as possible by printing all of the information requested on sheets of paper in Comic Sans and mailing it USPS.
PRISM Internet Surveillance Thwarted NYC Attack: Report
I dunno, it sounds to me like the companies in question were being hit with a lot of government requests and they did the natural thing to take them seriously and make it easy for their employees to deal with: make an API for it and automate the parts of the process that can be automated.

It is inevitable they are going to be hit with requests for information, they could dig their heels in on some things but ultimately they legally have to provide some of the information requested. They could have implemented APIs without any idea of how the NSA structured or code named the technology internally on the NSA's side. And I'm sure Google, Facebook, et al implemented whatever they implemented with little knowledge of how other companies were complying or not.

What I imagine happened is that any company that took compliance seriously, likely for their own staff's benefit, as a side effect became a stronger asset to the NSA than companies like Twitter who resisted.

And lastly, I'm not saying any of this is good. It just seems extremely plausible and not part of a massive conspiracy to give the NSA access to as much data as possible.
| they are compelled not to tell their managers
| about what they did for the NSA.

This seems problematic. What if another employee discovers what was done? What if it goes all the way up the chain? When they ask the employee why the created a backdoor, is the employee then obligated to lie? Get fired for the lie? Go to prison while maintaining it's not a NSA secret program?
In the spirit of the zeitgeist ("let 100 flowers bloom"!), I shall disclose: (high ranking, not a cog, multiple conflicts background) UN military COMSEC/SIGINT type, 2012. Looked me in the eyes, measured their words, and then said "PGP [meaning GPG] has been compromised since early versions".
Maybe it is just me, but could PRISM just refer to secure portals where data that was summoned from a FISA request (either as spartan as access logs, or as deep as emails, depending on provider), could be securely delivered upon collection? It doesn't have to describe the actual COLLECTION system, just the exchange between government and corporation. As someone has just mentioned, a secure Dropbox.
Just as if they had a legitimate search warrant for details, you would hope they had a secure way of providing that information to the requesting agency.
I agree; I wanted to avoid repeating previous comments from older threads, but that was a bad call.
I don't think there's a conspiracy here. Just bad decisions.
Technically these are still unhygienic macros, because it relies on the programmer's carefulness to avoid accidental capture. Hygienic macros prevent capture by default.

Still, nice work :) It'll be great to eventually have both types of macros available.
Is mailing hard copies more secure? I tend to think of phone calls and hard copies as less secure.
Comment 7 In Response To PRISM, Anonymous Leaks DoD Documents
> Do they even call them functions in Prolog? Doesn't seem appropriate.

Nope. "Predicate" is the term you're looking for.
The linked quora answer (from the co-author of Firesheep) says that even in that case one can't launch a passive man in the middle attack if perfect forward secrecy is used.
Google.com uses Diffie–Hellman key exchange which provides perfect forward secrecy.

So... If I understand everything correctly, it should be impossible to decrypt passively captured HTTPS traffic to/from google.com.

http://www.quora.com/SSL-Secure-Sockets-Layer/Is-it-ever-pos...

Could someone more knowledgeable confirm this?
> 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.

That sounds to me like PRISM is in fact just a name for an overall consistent system of routing data from specific individual requests.
Looks like Gmail in 2010, and all of their sites for logged in users since 2011.

[1] http://blog.chromium.org/2013/01/google-search-in-chrome-get...
This article is terrible. What exactly did "the White House" say? There is not even one sentence that is attributed to a specific individual. Was it the White House press secretary, or Obama, or somebody else? Or are they referring to the statements from the Director of National Intelligence?

Here is what Obama said: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/06/07/statem...

Here are the statements from the DNI:

http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/191-pre...
http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/191-pre...

Nowhere in those do I see any confirmation that there is direct or unlimited access to the servers of the companies mentioned.
Only if the OCR couldn't process it, although the OCR has gotten a lot better so the "Remote Encoding Centers" see a lot less volume. You could always tell when your mail failed the OCR in the past because it would have a faint orange barcode printed on it -- this was used to track it through the human encoding system at the RECs.
The chinese hacker proliferation
I don't particularly mind the security implications of the technique. However, It certainly is less convenient if you are the recipient.
Obama Is An Open Government Pioneer, Spymaster Dataholic
Ask HN: Can I trust Tor?
...
Lots of fun things can happen if you control peering points. Putting on my tin foil hat for a minute: trivially place yourself in the middle. The client connects to you, you impersonate Google by spoofing their IP (which you can do becase you control the peering point and routing tables), and using their certificate. Connect to Google simultaneously, spoofing the client's IP. Use EDH to establish independent sessions to both the client and Google, with your (now essentially useless) perfect forward secrecy, MITM away.

Edit: replying to the poster below, it doesn't have to be a passive attack, and I'm not sure what you mean about checksums. The scenario above would look exactly like normal Internet traffic. You're not mutating packets, you're sending entirely new ones.
The Bill That Could Make or Break Our Economy
In the aerospace business there is a guy known as the Mass Properties Engineer who gets to rule the project with an iron fist. He is responsible for knowing the estimated, calculated or measured weight of every part on the spacecraft from concept through to launch. It's not a very fun job, but it's very important. Some people actually made careers out of it. You simply cannot get this stuff wrong and not pay dearly for it later. There are reviews, arguments, dealings, and handwringing over all of this.

Now, I have no idea if the Spanish sub business runs anything like that, but it surprises me that it apparently doesn't or didn't in this case. It's not like you just let some engineer in the corner calculate the weight and then go build it. This is a systemic fuckup, not a shifted decimal point.
Precise measurements test QED, constrain possible fifth fundamental force
Even without keys, the metadata from the packet headers and traffic analysis can be quite useful.

Could you link to tptacek's comments you're referring to?
Yeah, this is really the most straightforward explanation.
They certainly aren't a drammatic innovator, but they've managed to stay strong for more than a decade by slowly refining their core service. I've been using it since 2004, and have more than 100,000 scrobbles. What I want out of their product is a way to easily record and capture statistics about my listening habits across multiple devices and operating systems, and last.fm does that very well.

I agree that recommendations are limited, but to be honest I'm okay with relying on humans for that.
U.K. Security Agency Also Tapped Into The NSA’s PRISM Surveillance Program
Wow... that sure does explain a lot. Thank you for posting this!
Here's a much simpler explanation: The Feds submit a FISA order for specific data collection. The companies' lawyers approve it. Then the NSA has a convenient user interface for accessing that data (perhaps real-time?) somehow from the companies' servers (possibly through an intermediary). How else is this data being sent to Ft. Mead? Thumb drives via FedEx?

The dates on the slides might be when a company has erected some convenient access point to grab the data "lawfully" obtained by a FISA order. Microsoft whipped something together quickly. Apple took years to get the UX just right.

Frankly, sucking in ALL of the Internet seems extremely difficult and useless. We're talking GOOG+AAPL+MS+YHOO+Skype+many more. And all for $20M/year? The gov't spends more on toilet paper.
Cat Facts denies it's involvement with PRISM

http://colingourlay.github.io/deny-prism/?company=Cat+Facts
My guess? They worked with the CEO to discuss the issue. Then recommended hiring some consulting company that specializes in key management. The consultant says something like, you need to keep a copy of the keys in an offsite vault for disaster recover purposes. The NSA now has the keys.

It is also possible they just got the keys from spies. In my company, anyone with sudo access to front end machines can get the keys. I have no idea how to keep these keys secure from the NSA.