skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reminds me of Junkyard Jumbotron, which came out of MIT a few years ago. The nice thing about that is that it runs on anything with a browser (I believe), and the devices don't have to be particularly close or well aligned. I haven't tried it -- I'm only going off of what's in their demo video.

http://civic.mit.edu/blog/csik/junkyard-jumbotron

That might be worth checking out because it uses a much different approach to achieve a similar effect.
Why were you "shocked"? Was there anything at all I said that wasn't accurate? Mormons are absolutely, astoundingly overrepresented in the United States Federal Government Intelligence Community. This is a well-known and documented fact.

When I hear "shocked", it makes me think that you think my comment is prejudiced in some way, or is perhaps making a wrong judgement on motivations for locating a data center.

Anyone who thinks there wasn't a big "there's plenty of Mormons there to recruit for the job" factor in the decision is kidding themselves. Cheap land can be found in virtually every part of the country. There are tons of tech workers in Colorado, Arizona, Alabama (Huntsville), Texas (Austin/San Antonio metro area), etc. All of these places have super cheap land.
Back in '94, I was doing a dissertation project in CompSci. I asked people who'd done it for advice. The reply was always the same "Don't use Wanda and don't use X."

Wanda was a research operating system developed by Cambridge University. X was much the same, but developed at MIT.

I'm amazed X has lasted as long as it has.
like, say, into the actual source of that story[1] instead of the wired blog writeup? For instance, the part that explicitly talks about limiting the share of information to the Chinese intrusion and not user data?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870404150457504...
Better or not is a personal preference. But the world it describes (much closer to our time, which also affects the technology), the kind of protagonists (regular folk, not associated with an all-mighty quasi-military governmental structure), the action (more personal, less "submarine in space"), and the issues (more political, and in general more grown-up, than Star Trek) do make it better for some viewers. (Disclaimer: myself included.)
Given that the graph indicates they received 20,000 - not 2,000 - I would have a hard time believing it as well!
I didn't think about high value items. That's a good use case for bitcoin at vending machines.
Official Blog: What the ...?
unless you assume the NSA has the root SSL certs.
The soldiers who enforce our laws have been deployed against researchers who published the wrong books.

What?

Spies have been sent into peaceful anti-war groups.

That's been going on ever since the time of Martin Luther King Jr, and maybe before then.
I think that horse has left the barn.
Does there need to be a point?
You can go online and add an address or call the number on the back. I have done this with a pre-paid Amex, simple as can be (you can choose any address!).
What I'd be curious about is how much of this round (if any) is secondary / going to cash out some early employees / founders / early investors.
Keep the NSA out of WebRTC
The upcoming standard for real time communications on the web, WebRTC, currently makes DTLS mandatory to implement: All communications will be encrypted at all times with ephemerally keyed encryption. With DTLS-SRTP content interception will always be _possible_ to detect (e.g. by comparing session IDs) and when coupled with something like Persona (BrowserID) MITM becomes infesable. This is a massive step forward from today's Internet: Even where we have encryption it's almost user to service, not user to user and even that can usually be defeated by a downgrading attack.

Some parties have been periodically proposing that SDES ('Security Descriptions') be also made mandatory to implement (e.g. http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ohlsson-rtcweb-sdes-support-01), and Google's WebRTC stack already supports it. SDES sends the crypto keys over the signaling channel, making them visible to all the signaling servers at a minimum. SDES-SDES makes passive and undetectable monitoring possible and provides a false sense of security in a world where powerful parties bend the rule of law to engage in massive surveillance.

If you care about building infrastructure which ensures individual privacy I strongly encourage becoming informed and an active participant in the IETF RTCWeb working group: http://tools.ietf.org/wg/rtcweb/ The IETF is an open organization and thoughtful contributions from everyone, especially people who will be building systems using these standards, are welcome.

The security architecture draft http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-rtcweb-security-arch-06 and the mailing list archives are good starting points as well as the Wing draft on problems with SDES: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-wing-rtcweb-sdes-problems-00.
It's the conflict between two different paradigms for the internet. Cyperpunks want to think of the internet as a tool for trading ideas, potentially subversive ones. Most people think of the internet as a social or commercial space.
I was once asked by a potential client I would possibly contract for: "HN, Slashdot, or Reddit?"
Isolation could be the only way to keep Windows XP around for ever
Clicky:
https://www.google.com/search?q=he%20is%20"100000000..900000...
My Thinkpad X220 usually has a wall socket nearby, but I have been able to work on a flight from Toronto to San Francisco (a bit over 5 hours) without running out of battery.

"acpiconf -i0" tells me my battery has a design capacity of just over 93Wh, and it's using just over 14W while idle.
Of course it's hedged with a limitation of scale. Obviously Google, like any other company, is going to provide information on much smaller scales (e.g. a user or a handful of users) for investigation based on specific court-issued warrants. It would be lying to state that Google never provides information about any user activity at all.

What would you prefer Google to say?
Are we to understand that Sweden has not charged him? Why then are they trying to extradite him?
Hacker Who Helped Expose Steubenville Could Get More Prison Time Than Rapists
Rob, may I how much is Twilio valued right now?
Pedants gonna be pedantic.
Free & Pro Is the Way to Go
Aaronsw evidence to be released within 88 days
> Could you quote/link to Obama's confirmation that Prism exists

I'll give you gizmodo because it has specifically the quotes
http://gizmodo.com/president-obamas-prism-response-wont-make...
Nice timing concerning PRISM
I'm sorry but that article talks about how Google and NSA worked together when the accounts of Chinese activist were being hacked.

How is that related to helping the US government spy on its citizens?
Are you guys in anyway affiliated with swyp? http://fluid.media.mit.edu/projects/swÿp
woot. our numbers are swelling now.
Congrats, guys! Great news ahead of Twilio Con.
UPDATE: We now support Bitcoin! ^^
Did he confirm PRISM exists, or the court order to Verizon? These are separate things. The Verizon story came first, followed by PRISM separately, less than a day later. Many people seem to be conflating the two.
(His company produced the challenges also, for what it's worth.)
I didn't choose to be gay. I did choose to wear a blue shirt today, and buy an Android smartphone.

None of them are good reasons to treat me differently in the workplace or under the law. Nothing about the unreasonableness of such discrimination changes if being gay were a choice.
Even legal docs are open to interpretation - they're not math. It's hard to expect a concise and readable post, not couched in legal phrasing, to somehow exclude all possible alternate interpretations. Especially when it can't be absolute in phrasing because there are known (and accepted) exceptions.
People rarely like bad news when it means great change. If you can convince them that the change isn't as daunting as they might initially conceive, you've got your foot in the door.

An example, "Beef is bad for you, but chicken/turkey is better." Sure you might miss steaks, but most recipes that call for ground beef could easily be substituted with ground turkey or chicken with little fuss.
Great news! Hoping the extra resources that this money brings, can give them the opportunity to introduce voice recognition.
I don't think so. Those usually sound like,

"We cannot confirm or deny the existence of such a program,"

or

"It is not our policy to comment on national security topics"

or

"No comment."

or even

"We'll wait for the results of the investigation."

I don't think the government generally asks civilians to lie so enthusiastically, because . . . well, as a rule, they just aren't good at it.

No, I think it's most likely that Page doesn't know of any such program. Now, it's always possible that such a thing is being carried out on the scale everyone fears by a rogue, loyal-to-the-NSA employee, or a group of them. Or it's possible the original Powerpoint slide including Google as an information source is oversimplified or even inaccurate. Such things do happen when presenting overviews of program capabilities.

And many other things in between are possible. It's concerning, but . . . I'll wait for the results of the investigation. ;)
* If IPv6 is cost-effective to deploy, sure, it's great.

* The point of overlays is to moot the question of what IP connectivity you have; to provide "the full Internet" to people who only have NAT IPv4.

* Whether you build it on IPv6 or on IPv4, an overlay is in some sense "proprietary".

* But who's to say the most successful overlays won't be based on open source projects?
I doubt even if this should pass as first-world problem. Do we have some people meeting and all of a sudden go like:

Gosh! I took a photo with Iphone #3 and now I want to view it across Ipad #1 and the two Galaxy s4s lying over there at thing same time. ?

Any use case you decide to put this to, won't fly in the face of good user experience.
I'm confused by that as well. The POST data sends a nonce value but the message itself is in plaintext... not even Base64..
I see it forward that one day Churchill will be dug up, made apologies for Turing and be buried back upside down.

Figuratively speaking.

Geek does not forget.
Thank you. Hope to see you there - we've got some serious fun planned.
Interesting to see everyone speculate on how terrible of an investment this is when most users couldn't wrap their head around the concept of Snapchat ~7 months ago.

Here's why the need $100 million: They are building the future of chat and they already have incredible engagement and growth month over month.
All this stuff has been known for awhile. Glad its finally getting some attention - hope it lasts.
Thanks so much gales. You are right - there is a whole lot of work ahead.
I was replying to the fantastical claim that the datacenter "was designed to host more storage than existed on the entire planet at the time". Of course 100,000 square feet is a medium sized data center and can hold quite a bit of data. If you're happy to go even slower, you could fit even more in with a tape archive that big. You're still so very very far away from a data center sucking up all human-produced data (even accounting for duplication) and storing it for later retrieval and analysis as many here apparently believe.

So yes, the NSA does have a new datacenter. But no, it's not the new Area 51 nor is it host to magic computers.
Show HN: YoutubeTV - A slick, library independent YouTube User/Playlist player
I believe Carlin's point generally holds in light of http://www.urbanarchipelago.com/:

"It's the cities, Stupid."

Look at Facebook, for instance. I'm seeing splinter social networks that generally rip off its UI so they can develop their special interest via their particular domain name. Let's look at a pessimistic utopia where Developer == Plumber: everything eventually becomes decentralized because of the dividing and conquering of the digital laborer. In an optimistic utopia where Developer == Artisan: everything eventually becomes decentralized because each small team or developer group manages some autonomous function of digital society.

None of this national stuff really matters unless we're talking about a Nation-state divided. In which cases, we're talking the worst case scenario, and any pretense that rational debate will absolve these architectural problems of "the State" fails to acknowledge the already unfit architecture of the State, wherein direct action is necessary.

'The unfitness of the object may cause one to overlook the unfitness of the means.'
In order to consider the possibility that this is clever language avoiding the truth of the issue, can someone explain how a system might work where google maintains plausible deniability while allowing access to the information it collects?

I have a naive understanding of how the internet works at the physical layer, but it seems like it would be trivial to create a system that allows for this statement to be true and for the data to actually be captured.

For an oversimplified, spherical-cow-in-a-vacuum example: if the user is the source in a passive optical network[1] and both the nsa and google are targets, google has not provided access to their data to the nsa, the user has.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_optical_network

edit: And what would a statement of denial that is inclusive of all possible arrangements sound like? I think that any statement that asserts a one-to-one correspondence between you and google would be unrealistic.
I do not believe that had ever been emphasized, definitely never tested/quizzed on, in any of my courses.
Actually, I'm saying we should replace IP, in the same way that IP "replaced" X.25 (if you want to call Frame Relay the successor X.25) by relegating it to a layer 2 connectivity technology.

I'm saying it would be great if all web pages were delivered over an overlay protocol running on top of some TCP friendly transport provided by an overlay; a "peer to peer" routing system like Skype.

The simplest way to describe the architecture I'm talking about is, "what if you made IRC a modern, fully routed binary connectivity fabric, then tunnelled the Internet over it?"
Smarter sites know it is a prepaid card and decline the transaction.
It looks like the security team is currently working on upping the SSL bits.

http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2013/05/changes-to-...
This is incredibly far fetched. None of the audit controls at these companies notice that these employees are constantly accessing user's private data? And these double-agent employees manage to do all this secret work while still maintaining a cover as a regular employee who does well enough of a job to get good perf reviews and stick around?
On the contrary, 5 seconds for an Ad is the sweet spot before people get pissed off. Look at YouTube videos. They require you to watch about 10 seconds before you get the "skip ad" option and it seems to be working great for them.
I think you're mistaken about the "spirit" of the 4th amendment. First, the spirit of the Constitution must be read consistently with that of English common law, which means that pretty much any information is accessible with a warrant or subpoena pursuant to court order. To the extent that the NSA is collecting information pursuant to court orders (e.g. CDR's) that's a very relevant point. The "spirit" of the law is that courts can authorize getting at pretty much any information.

Second, you're wrong about the "spirit" of the 4th amendment being about the government not searching through your stuff. It's about not violating the sanctity of your home or person to do so. That's a very key distinction. Even in 1802, the government could, pursuant to a court order or even just consent, search through "your stuff" that you had left for safekeeping at a friend's house.
I vote.

Nobody I've voted for in a Federal election has ever won that election. I often vote for third-party candidates with the knowledge that they have as good as zero chance of winning, but sometimes I vote for major-party candidates who seem mostly reasonable. None of them have ever won either.
Equating the allegations denied in this post to the response to an attack by a nation state against Google is kind of like comparing reporting a robbery to the police to criminally conspiring with them.
None of those seem to have anything to do with PRISM. This is a confusing situation, because two secret surveillance programs were leaked on subsequent days. These seem to be related to the first leaked program, which involves collection of Verizon's call metadata. That seems pretty clear-cut. Verizon has issued a non-denial, it's in line with what we've known about the NSA's conduct since 9/11, and various members of congress and the executive branch have commented on it.

PRISM is a completely separate issue and one I'm much more skeptical about. I also haven't seen anybody specifically admit to PRISM's existence, so I'd be interested if you can find a better source.
What's become very clear is that there is a lot of careful parsing going on. Careful parsing of the constitution, careful parsing of various laws, very very careful interpretation of the words on the page.

Does Google give anyone, any company, any entity, anyone at all direct access to their data? They've specifically excluded NSA. Does NSA subcontract that to Booz Allen Hamilton? Google claims that no government has this access, what about one of the 1200+ Top Secret cleared contracting companies?

Can these companies officially comment on this stuff yet? Or are they violating court orders if they talk about it? I like Google, I really want to trust them and I think they've moved the needle in our industry in some very positive ways. Honestly though, I think they could make much much stronger statements about this stuff. I expect them to say stuff like this to keep up with appearances.
who says they haven't?
maybe not completely (it's way easier for the US, as most of Google resides on US soil), but you can bet they have people in a position to extract at least some data on demand.

this has previously happened: stuxnet (a product of several intelligence agencies) was digitally signed by a large semiconductor company!
There's a new kind of Birther or Truther, let's call them PRISMers. No amount of denials or evidence to the contrary, no matter how they are worded or exposed, will satisfy PRISMers that Google is not uploading all user activity to the NSA. It's just impossible to repair the harm that's been done to the brand by the government.

For some people, I doubt trust can ever be regained. Companies affected by this PRISM program should sue the US Government for damages, or at least sue them until it is completely declassified.
Ah, the old `if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear` fallacy. I'll leave you with this - http://falkvinge.net/2012/07/19/debunking-the-dangerous-noth...;
Sorry for the wall of text. I think this is a place where the people on Hacker News can actually _do something_ about the surveillance.

But bringing in a bunch of unformed yelling people into the IETF won't help. Bringing in a bunch of concerned but informed people _can_ make a difference. But like most things that make a difference it will take a bit more of your time than just clicking a form.
One key feature of X that Wayland refuses to implement is the concept of remote access. Everything is intended to be local only. For those "strange" users out there who want remote access, the developers replies has so far been to use VNC.

Its kind of odd that remote access has been shoved to the side in this age of cloudiness and always connectedness. One would think that there existed better methods to remote access then just copying the image buffer and compress it.
Sure.
The statement does not rule out the possibility that aliens are using advanced technology to watch the bits on optical lines without affecting the photos either.
There's a difference between seeing these stories in dribs and drabs all over the place and seeing them all on here today. It's sort of the forest vs. the trees, and I for one think that we're all starting to see the forest where we once only saw individual trees. It makes me hopeful that there will be enough outcry that there will at least be some slow down of political power-grab.
There are a multitude of resources - I am still learning, but the biggest difference I have come across so far is taking a course with classmates and a mentor/instructor at www.rubylearning.org. The material is very similar to other resources (such as Chris Pine's Learn to Program, which is excellent), but simply having a knowledgable tutor to give feedback on your solutions to exercises and nudge you towards new (better) lines of thinking is invaluable. I would recommend reading through Pine's Learn to Program perhaps concurrently with the Treehouse Ruby track, and then taking an actual course at rubylearning.com (~$50).
White House admits it has 'access' to Facebook, Google
I knew there was I reason I always liked your posts.

If you're ever in Austin drop me a line and we can have a chat. The CA community is pretty strong down here and growing thanks to people like Cody Wilson and Defense Distributed.
What the fuck is the "we are not reading emails of any US citizen" bullshit. I am not a US citizen, so you are reading my emails? That is even more fucked up. For one second forget about US citizens and think about all the other people in the world. I don't care what US government does to it's people, it's your government after all. But what I do care is what it does to data of others (including myself), because it has no right to any of that data. So someone get the questions answered.
The password is sent in plaintext in the POST body.
Even with these recent scandals, I find it somewhat difficult to categorize Obama's policies as right wing, but I was just seeking clarification.
How easy is it to set on fire, I love the smell of burning electronics.
Nicely put. When viewed that way, the internal "nymwars" at Google looks like a pretty direct culture clash between those paradigms: should G+ allow pseudonymous profiles to protect free exchange of ideas (possibly including stigmatized or even dangerous ones), or should it insist on real names, to reduce spam, trolling, and other trouble-making, and improve the quality of the data collected?

It seems Google had a significant number of employees in each camp. But the market logic was pretty firmly in one of those camps and not the other...
what is the reason for this being classified? so that people don't stop using Verizon?
> But, I think there is a "huge material difference" between a parents right to know who their kids are talking to and a governments right to know who I am talking to.

No, there isn't. Children are not a parent's private property.
Except, not many would pay for that and will move to alternative.