skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, you'd feel more comfortable if the company threw in some rhetoric about morals and freedom that are, as assertions, impossible to verify, but would make people feel more warm and fuzzy?

So, basically, what politicians put into their speeches?

Read over your statement again. There's very little of substance in there. For example, what does "this" in "We would never do 'this'" mean? And I'm not being pedantic, because exact language is important here. The question is, what could a non-PRISM-supporting Google say that would differ from what we see in the OP?

And this: It goes against everything we personally believe in and stand for.

OK...let's assume "It" has been properly defined. This hyperbole would be a lie, because....everything? Again, impossible.

"Even if we were legally required to cooperate, we would resist and suffer incarceration if necessary."

OK...cooperate in what? The statement you've proposed leaves room for other kinds of cooperation, if not technically the kind being alleged right now. So this statement doesn't resolve anything.

"We believe in freedom more strongly than we fear the consequences of not cooperating with an oppressive government"

OK, same objections as before. But -- and again, I'm referring to an alternate reality in which Google is standing up against the NSA and PRISM, which may or may not be the reality we are actually living -- if Page is telling the truth about knowing what PRISM stands for before yesterday, then the statement you've proposed is impossible for him to assert, because we still don't know everything about PRISM...and so how would Page know if PRISM is the act of an oppressive government? He literally would not know because PRISM was unknown to him until yesterday.

And if you're saying, well, he should just know, because obviously Google is taking part in the program...well, that's begging the question.

And if you're saying, well, he should just be able to make that statement because any reasonable person, upon reading the reports yesterday, would conclude that PRISM is the act of an oppressive government. OK, that's fine, but that's still not really an assertion of fact, it's just rhetoric.
Who cares what the backed is, as long as you are getting data using xhr, angular js and HTML is same.
Oh come on. Google is willing and able to push back on overly broad governmental requests. When the Department of Justice sent subpoenas to 34 companies in 2005 asking for months of user queries, Google was the only company I know of that fought back in court and won. I know because I wrote a declaration for that case. See http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/doj-sent-subpoenas-to-34-compa...; and http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-responds-to-doj-subpoen...; for example.

We were also the first company to publish our transparency report on governmental requests, and the first company to include any specific number ranges on the number of national security letter (NSLs) that we get.

See also http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/04/google-fights-nsl&#...; about national security letters. The appropriate and constructive place to channel frustation is at bad laws/legal provisions.
Its funny in that Alec Baldwin has advocated against constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, yet still does this.
The selection process I don't believe to be public, and varies between organization. However everybody at least reserves them in a DoD database called The Code Word Nickname and Exercise Term System. Regardless of the project, code words become classified once they are exposed or no longer in use, and can be reused after two years.
Every call passes through numerous computers between the speaking parties. Why do you think the largest best-funded organizations in the world would lack the computational power to "listen"?
A nice $10M donation to the EFF would help me believe him.
US government invokes special privilege to stop scrutiny of data mining
I don't think that the ethics are so clear cut. Let's suppose that Google's servers contain data that the U.S. federal government could use to prevent an act of violence that would harm or kill innocent people. Is it more ethical to deny access to this data on privacy grounds, or to grant access to this data to prevent violence?

The typical response here on HN is that the threat of terrorism is greatly overstated. This is probably true, but I don't think it's reasonable to assert that the threat of terrorism is nonexistent. Given the amount of people who use Google's services, I think it's highly likely that such data does exist on Google's servers.
Rank hypocrisy from the man who got a half-billion dollar loan from the U.S. goverment (that he's paid it back is irrelevant) and continues to receive hundreds of millions a year in subsidies via carbon credits, tax credits, etc.
Perhaps it's performance art. They'll have a great big community on a pervasive surveillance platform in order to be personally the first against the wall.
How to Think Like an Executive When Pitching a Sponsor for an Event
It seems reasonable to suspect that for matters of urgency the transition process might have started earlier than the actual acquisition was publicly announced. Plus I am not quite sure if the dates on the slide indicate the starting or finishing date of the implementation process.
Yes!

(I think we could make the Internet work better by throwing some standards out the window. Not all of them.)
Which brings us almost right back to Turing's research on morphogenesis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chemical_Basis_of_Morphogen...
You make a common mistake: scale, efficiency and depth here are everything. Paper records are no comparison.
Obama: "And I think it’s interesting that there are some folks on the left, but also some folks on the right who are now worried about it who weren’t very worried about it when it was a Republican president. I think that’s good that we’re having this discussion."
Incidentally, a computer engineering curriculum starts a few levels below that, with the physics of the transistors and how circuits actually work.
I completely agree, and I don't know how to reconcile the two.

If I was going to go completely conspiracy-nutter, I'd say that Page has been kept out of the loop intentionally for plausible deniability, and the actual incursion happens at a much lower level, where the people involved are coerced into keeping their mouths shut. That way, the bigwigs get to tell what they think is the truth, the NSA gets their data, and nobody is the wiser.

Granted, I think that belongs more in the plot of a thriller novel than in this actual world we're living in, but given the revelations of the past couple of days, fiction doesn't seem that implausible.
I believe a big issue he is raising is the ability to go back in time and wiretap your phone before the subpoena has been issued.
First of all, I've never even seen the second of those two threads. Shocking as it may be to your ego, not everyone follows each and every one of your myriad utterances on HN.

But neither thread is one of substance, only complaints and a vague "we need a general overlay network". Not one word about what it should look like. How it should work. Nothing.

If you want to argue about an idea, articulate one.

Edit: I see in the second thread you actually did say something about a directory service, so I guess that is one word. But as far as I can tell, you just described yet-another-DNS-replacement. If I were generous, maybe I would call it an Active Directory competitor.
It is not beyond reason that they could catch (or at least become aware of) individuals with home labs by flagging purchases of those supplies and/or equipment.

Fair enough. I don't actually know enough about the details of doing home virus experimentation and engineering to know for sure. I just have a vague recollection of having heard some stuff about how those abilities are filtering down to DIY land.
Lots of people would say yes to that question. Add up the cost of traffic enforcement and rule promulgation; consider the role of red light cameras, radar guns, in-car breathalysers, and various other tools, and the economic imposition of both fines and things like license suspensions and mandatory declarations. I think the majority of traffic laws are pretty reasonable, but they do impose a significant and measurable burden on auto users at both the individual and collective level. Why? Because the potential dangers of driving heavy vehicles at high speed are significant enough that a majority of people demand regulation.

It's an uncomfortable but unavoidable fact that most people expect the government to protect them from things like terrorist attacks too, which is why government oaths office include a clause about protecting the United States from enemies 'both foreign and domestic.'
Raspberry Pi seem to be aiming to switch in the coming months:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/4053
I've read this a few times over the last year, and I still don't know how I feel about it. He's obviously a savvy businessman who knows his way around the equity markets a bit, but I can't shake the feeling that he's confusing a lot of issues and ignoring the more pressing ones.

Banning HFT or otherwise regulating them out of business will have about as much of an effect at "bring[ing] our markets back to their original goals of creating capital for business" as banning Super Extra Gulp sodas would have in curbing the obesity epidemic. (Incidentally, that quote about the true purpose of a market is a claim I've never seen proven, and even were that true, it would be only true in the case of equity markets, which are not the only kind.)

If one accepts that the financial industry is a perversion of its original goals (whatever they may be), I can think of a lot more effective places to start than the HFT guys: the bond ratings framework that nearly helped lead us to economic disaster; the outsize influence that big banks (i.e. not HFT shops) have in our political climate; the irrational insistence that unregulated financial markets are "best"; etc.

Blaming the HFT guys seems to be an easy out rather than tackling the more difficult issues. Judging by the regulatory and legislative response to the crisis (or more accurately, the lack of an effective response), that's true. It's a lot easier to blame a technology that isn't well understood by outsiders than to reform the political election funding system, or to recognize that it is an absolutely mind-numbingly stupid idea to have bond issuers pay to have their own bonds rated and allow them to choose what company rates them.

Yes, the flash crash and subsequent events have caused some concern, but these events corrected themselves relatively quickly. It's an issue, but the far bigger issue is that we haven't effectively dealt with the thing that very, very nearly put us in a second great depression.
Transparency and the possibility for the people to review at least high level policy.
This might be the moment that hackathons went mainstream.
I have donated even before this. How about Google giving them say $10M to hold some people's feet to the fire?
very nice. would have been helpful to me on many occasions when working on distributed teams.
Separation of powers was designed to prevent a few bad actors from seizing control of the whole system, as frequently happened in ancient republics. It's actually worked well for that purpose. It wasn't intended to defend against incentives affecting everyone who gets into any kind of office. No one foresaw that weakness.

People keep talking about separation of powers because it was once a good solution to a problem that no longer exists.
And what the hell does "accountable" even mean? So long as they "merely" act unethically, not illegally, there really isn't any way that we can realistically hold them accountable other than to say "In a few years we are going to try to fire you... if we remember too."
Then why bother parsing their language or even reading their blog posts?
He did not say

"We only give data to the government in response legal requests about named individuals."
Even so, I wonder if you could get better speed for, say, Dolphin, by pausing to do as much statically as possible (perhaps going all the way through LLVM's optimizations) rather than being in a hurry to do everything dynamically without pausing.
أفضل إستضافة مواقع
ارخص استضافة ، ارخص هوست
أفضل وأعلى وارخص إستضافة مواقع ، إستضافة ووردبريس ، إستضافة منتديات إستضافة جوملا ، إستضافة Reseller ، إستضافة VPS ، سيرفرات خاصة Dedicated Servers مساحة وترافيك غير محدود .. واحصل على كوبون خصم
أفضل وأعلى وارخص إستضافة مواقع ، إستضافة ووردبريس ، إستضافة منتديات إستضافة جوملا ، إستضافة Reseller ، إستضافة VPS ، سيرفرات خاصة Dedicated Servers مساحة وترافيك غير محدود .. واحصل على كوبون خصم
If you're having trouble stretching your imagination, just go back to your teenage years.

Mom: Who was that on the phone?

You: My (girl|boy)friend.

Mom: What exactly did you talk about?
>...it's morally abhorrent...even if we were legally required to cooperate, we would resist and suffer incarceration... oppressive government.

That's subjective, and I think you have severely unrealistic expectations of how far companies should be willing to go in this matter.

I believe Google's response is satisfactory. We can't prove negatives, so it's pointless to second guess Larry's post as being an orchestrated ruse. It at leasts gives us an official position and stance from the other party.
Whether its Palantir or not, it does make perfect sense that the NSA would subcontract this work to a 3rd party. Someone is out there with this contract
> I've honestly never really quite recovered from watching the dreams of the cypherpunks die so hideously and completely.

This is really what the rage on the internet is about. People like to pretend they're mad at the government overstepping its Constitutional boundaries, but what they're really mad about is the failure of their attempt to re-litigate the division of power between government and the people.
The logical fallacies in his speech are remarkable.
Your comment may be tongue in cheek however the concept of universal jurisdiction is a serious one that many have contemplated over the past century or so.

Why do you assume the 4th Amendment applies for foreign people? Is it because their data simply transits through the US (eg: to Facebook's servers)? Or is it because you expect the US Government to use that data to impose its laws and regulations selectively at its convenience (combating piracy)?
When you say you can sync app data across devices, how do you know which sets of devices are trying to connect with each other? Because that's sort of the premise behind Bump... how does this beat that?
Please, please don't use the word "magically". Only Jobs could pull it off.
Seems pretty cool! What kind of latency it achieves?
There is no reason to trust large companies with our data. We should move to content oriented networking where data is encrypted by default and we can choose what networks our data goes into and how it is accessed.

We should also use peer based grid/mesh networks as much as possible
And yet here you are talking about it.

(My point with this comment is to point out a contradiction--you can't prove that silence clauses work by talking about a real example of one.)
What's wrong with a half-billion dollar loan from the government to help out building a car company? Isn't that exactly the type of loans our government should be making - ones to companies who create high-paying jobs, become successful and then repay their loans early?

I believe Elon said Tesla will be profitable next quarter excluding carbon tax credits which is the only existing subsidy they get as a corporation. As for the buyers do you really think the $5-$7k credits the buyers get (at least in the U.S. based on the state they are in) are enough that if they were to stop getting those credits Tesla would stop selling all cars? I mean they aren't exactly selling cheap cars. What's $5-7k if you are already spending $70-90k? That's about a 10% discount.
At some point, I think - perhaps this is only wishful thinking, but I do think it nonetheless - someone from one of these companies will simply come out in a TV interview and spill the beans.

Just make a big enough stir, be explicit about what threats were levied, and tell us all. It would be impossible to prosecute them after that shitstorm.
I wanted to experiment with this idea at some point (without pausing - using a background thread that does optimization and patches code with the optimized version when it's done) but our current JITCache is just not fit for this. We perform JIT compilation per-basic block, which does not allow for a lot of optimization compared to per-function (following all direct branches as long as possible). Changing that would've required too much time and I got bored of it :(
> And if it does require active participation from the data custodian, they have nice National Security Letters with highly-threatening gag orders, which have proven to be quite effective.

But they don't need NSL's to get the data. Just as a plain old warrant or subpoena would have been enough to get your local video tape rental place's records of the movies you watch, it's enough to get Netflix's records of those movies.
Did FISC warrants suddenly start requiring probable cause? Did the court itself suddenly start scrutinizing requests (how would we even know)?

Don't conflate FISC warrants issued for criminal investigations. FISC is barely even a speedbump when it comes to this sort of surveillance.
"We launched this early due to press on the subject"

So prematurely launching an incomplete and unvetted security/anonymity product to profiteer from momentary spikes in hysteria and paranoia is disingenuous at best. Besides all of the issues of payment, shipping, trust, legality, etc. that have already been raised, what is your companies qualifications to provide for secure/anonymous service?
I have an extremely hard time believing google received less than 2000 requests for user data last year.
Google sometimes scans books upside-down by mistake...
What's going on in USA? Why does you care so much about privacy?

You look like crazy paranoid to me, as if you all are trying to hide something from a criminal or a law enforcement.

I bet there are lots of North Americans complaining of this PRISM an Verizon thing, but at the same time is using Foursquare and every cool internet location-based mobile app you also created.

There is a dictate in my country that says (in other words) that "If you are innocent then you have nothing to fear."

This BurnerPhone service would be used only for criminals in my country. I see no use for innocent people. This is too much even for people that have something non-criminal action to hide, like cheating your spouse.

If you have fear of your government watching you, then it's better to move to another country or live like a monkey in the forest. Burn your social security card and go live as if you didn't exist for your government.
via Ed Pegg, Jr.: http://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/16dt8i/se...;
Amazon Storyteller turns an Amazon Studio screenplay into a storyboard
I think network operators should have about as much say in what service models Internet protocols should support as the telephone companies do about what apps run on Android and iOS.

I think large open source projects (like BitTorrent) and startups should start thinking about applications that build their own connectivity layer on top of IP, and that don't assume any two nodes will have direct IP connectivity. Obviously, this is already true of the Internet we use today, because a huge percentage of hosts don't expose direct connectivity for reasons of security (not addressing scarcity --- there are companies sitting on /16s that static-address every desktop, but allow none of them direct Internet connectivity).

If you believe TorrentFreak, BitTorrent accounts for double digit percentage points of all Internet traffic. BitTorrent is an overlay design (albeit not one that reliably avoids the need for direct point-to-point connectivity, unlike the Gnutella overlay). We already know designs like this are tenable. I'm saying we should explore them further as alternatives to an Internet design controlled by giant telecoms.
Mary Meeker's Misinformation
It's a data-feed, not a wiretap!
Client-side crypto in JS has value if and only if the following conditions are all met:

1) The application receives no HTML, CSS, Javascript, or code interpreted by plugins from a server in the same context (e.g. not an iframe) as the crypto code.

2) All assets that are run in the context of the crypto code are fixed and signed. No unsigned javascript code (generated at runtime, passed from a server or input to the app, whatever) is permitted to run in any way in that context.

3) The code as signed is completely transparent. It must be possible to audit the code as it would be run, and be able to 'quarantine' updates.

Without all of these things being met, client-side crypto in the browser is completely untrustable. These conditions have never been met.
Far from it; in fact, as a non-citizen I have far fewer rights than you do, assuming you're a US citizen. Now try addressing my argument instead of attacking me personally, and try to distinguish between defending the actions of the government and pointing out factual context, such as the fact that it is not in fact illegal or unconstitional for the government to collect records of phone calls, even though it perhaps should be.

As it happens, I'm from Europe, and one thing I do miss about the EU is that citizens of that territory enjoy a explicit and robust constitutional right to privacy that does not exist in the US, not to mention a unilateral right of access to and control over their personal data in both governmental and commercial spheres. I have called on many occasions for an amendment to the US Constitution that would confer such rights on Americans instead of relying on the vague and implicit 'discovery' of a privacy right that did not exist before 1965 and which could be taken away as easily as it was given.
I don't know why we'd expect the truth to be in the middle. If the NSA document is genuine, the information the NSA is collecting from Google is part of a Top Secret program as described in the leaked internal document.

If that is true, why would we expect that Google officials would be able to make any public confirmation of the Top Secret program? And, given that, why, in that case, would we expect the truth to be "in the
middle"?

Conversely, if the leaked document is not genuine, then I still don't see any basis for expecting the truth to be in the "middle" between the false document and the Google denial.
Similar premise, but the media applications are much more compelling. The SDK provides very precise locations of the devices relative to one another in addition to associating them to one another in a group.
I'm not sure how that's "by contrast". How exactly does "He didn't just write papers or give speeches, he wrote software to further his cause, he went out of his way to challenge the status-quo and force people to to pay attention" not also apply to Stallman? Stallman probably wrote even more code than Aaron Swartz, in addition to writing the first software license that guaranteed the freedom of all future users of the software. All licenses, including proprietary ones, are shunned by some people; the effectiveness of the GPL is evident in the simple fact that it's the most common free software license in use today by a wide margin.

So what if Stallman doesn't contribute to software projects much anymore? The whole point of this link was to direct attention, not to his coding skill, but his unusual foresight, which he retains.
Really? with the added bezels of the two devices in the middle?
I like the guy who complains that I bring up the same idea on every IPv6 thread, then acts shocked when I suggest maybe he's read one of those posts.

Boo! You continue to say. New ideas bad! How dare you, of all people, assault the old ideas!