skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We already have an established process with established safeguards designed to strike an appropriate balance between public safety and personal liberty.

This isn't it.

This is so far from it as to make a mockery of the principles that lay at the very foundations of our nation.
IT Skills assessment product or service?
Can anyone suggest a product or service to assess employee or potential employees' IT (Microsoft Office or general) skills?
A bitcoin-accepting vending machine would be very cool, but that requires that you live near one. Setting up shipping seems a lot easier than creating a nation-wide vending machine network.
In his remarks today Obama said "Now, with respect to the Internet and emails, this does not apply to U.S. citizens, and it does not apply to people living in the United States."

He's clearly stating that they do read non-American's emails. So how do they do it if they don't have access to Google's servers?

BTW, if you run a company outside of America you'd be crazy to rely on Google since the US could be reading your emails for corporate espionage purposes. I think in the long run these revelations are very threatening to Silicon Valley.
Xamarin Studio’s powerful new iOS designer
Why would they bother asking you, when they could simply ask your ISP? Why ask each customer?
Parent forgot the </sarcasm> tag.
They're legally barred from doing so.
Why is everyone so suspicious of Google to begin with? Is there a shred of evidence to lend any credibility to the accusations thus far? Given how Google's technology works, I imagine it would be quite an expense to provide the kind of access the govt. would want and Google hasn't been exactly overly enthused with having to comply with BS government requests(e.g. see how they deal with requests to scrub search results).
Well, I would call it a prepared response to an inevitable question, at an unrelated event that was already scheduled.
There's two middlemen layers in this game of telephone:

1. What the leaker communicated to news outlets
2. What the news outlets communicated to us

It seems likely that exact terms and technical capabilities have been misunderstood or misinterpreted. Already, there are common misconceptions arising from the public's interpretation of the news...for example, conflating the NSA's deal with Verizon to the PRISM program. And there's also the natural confusion that generally arises in any discussion of government surveillance programs...some people seem to be surprised that the NSA is spying on foreign communications, when that is pretty much NSA's raison d'etre.

I think we should take Page as a clear denial, that is, that he's not weaseling out on a technicality. That doesn't mean he couldn't be flat out lying, of course. I think it's also a believable that if Google were to participate in a program like PRISM, that Page would be one of the people in the know.
Google doesn't know what the program is called inside the NSA, that is not earth shattering news. The problem is they don't need to "know" any of this. Hypothetically; If I was approached by the NSA for access to my users data... I would ask or come up with, at a minimum, some kind of Plausible Deniability... its the only sane option given the nature of these requests.

Ie. "Never heard of it... We push back as much as we can... See these push-backs in our transparency report. Feel Better?"
Rotating? That's something very common.
shameless plug, speaking of S3, I created a DSL for Amazon S3 (using s3cmd, because it is intended for my rake tasks) - http://jjuliano.github.io/s3cmd-dsl
Same thing with the "we've never heard of PRISM" language a number of companies are using. Well, yeah - that code name probably stayed within the NSA.
It's no secret that companies (and libraries, etc) must provide indirect access:

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

What exactly do you think is happening, that Google is hiding? Where are the datacenters big enough to hold a whole extra copy of every piece of data google maintains? (plus every other company)
I believe Google on this. The language is clear and non-weasel-y. Google does not hand over user data to the government unless specifically requested. There is no open-ended access.

But I also believe the government works with ISP's (all major ISPs) so that they can intercept traffic. Which would be a type of MITM attack allowing them to get data from all major web sites.
They make information processing software, and the government is a client. So what? The company is quite open about, and has been since the start.
Read the NEXT SENTENCE! "Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records."

AND THE TWO AFTER THAT: "We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false."
I thought these programs were essentially constitutional when President Bush was in office, and I think they're essentially constitutional now (perhaps moreso with the added oversight of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008). But it's funny how much more interested President Obama is in making the distinction between purely domestic and foreign intercepts now that it's "his" program. I hope the brouhaha of the last few days has taught him some humility if nothing else.
But he is right, somebody isn't listening to it as you say it. Its just being saved in a HUGE database so when they decided you did something wrong that can be used against you.
"Methods
The dataset. This work was performed using an anonymized mobile phone dataset
that contains call information for ,1.5 M users of a mobile phone operator.
The data collection took place from April 2006 to June 2007 in a western country.
Each time a user interacts with the mobile phone operator network by initiating or
receiving a call or a text message, the location of the connecting antenna is recorded
[Fig. 1A]. The dataset’s intrinsic spatial resolution is thus the maximal half-distance
between antennas. The dataset’s intrinsic temporal resolution is one hour [Fig. 1B]."

This seems kind of sketchy to me considering how CDMA networks currently work:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_division_multiple_access#S...

"These systems were designed using spread spectrum because of its security and resistance to jamming. Asynchronous CDMA has some level of privacy built in because the signal is spread using a pseudo-random code; this code makes the spread spectrum signals appear random or have noise-like properties. A receiver cannot demodulate this transmission without knowledge of the pseudo-random sequence used to encode the data. CDMA is also resistant to jamming. A jamming signal only has a finite amount of power available to jam the signal. The jammer can either spread its energy over the entire bandwidth of the signal or jam only part of the entire signal."
PRISM Confirmed: major US providers grant direct, live access to the NSA and FBI
135-passenger electric bus can be flash-charged in 15 seconds
Are you talking about the 1947 act that created the CIA as a spy agency while also prohibiting them from spying domestically on our own citizens?

Why can't we have a spy agency that actually spies on foreign countries an doesn't act like the KGB?
>Now, with respect to the Internet and emails, this does not apply to U.S. citizens, and it does not apply to people living in the United States.

For EU and rest of the world: Every message (email/IM,anything..) trough gmail, hotmail, AOL or facebook is stored by US Gov. and used as they see fit.
Ask HN: What is the best stylus for iPad mini to take math notes?
What is the best stylus for iPad mini to take math notes?

More specific: Wacom Bamboo or Adonit Jot Pro or Applydea Maglus? Thanks.
Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the
broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that
appears to have required them to hand over millions of
users’ call records. We were very surprised to learn
that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google
is disclosing information about our users’ Internet
activity on such a scale is completely false.

I'm not sure how much more strongly you'd like that worded. It seems pretty complete to me.
"Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law"

Well, now I feel better. Oh wait, PRISM is technically legal since it's supposedly authorized by the senate?
There is another explanation:

https://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/001431.html
- What indirect access does Google provide to the government?

- What lawful data does Google automatically provide to the government without any requests?

- Can the government can ask Google for data once, and then Google is required to constantly supply data, periodically? If so, what is that data?

- What data does Google provide to the government upon request?
Let's talk a little about trusting the government to abide by the Constitution. The Constitution establishes the treaties we enter into as the law of the land. The Geneva Conventions are treaties that make torture illegal. The government has tortured people pretty recently.

We're pretty far beyond "trust, but verify" territory here.
What a lot of people haven't considered is that it's likely that the NSA had a big breakthrough on Integer Factorization and their capable of breaking RSA public key crypto (used everywhere you see HTTPS)

Then they can just save all your encrypted traffic and break it on demand.

We all need to start considering moving to Elliptic Curve Cryptography.
I think the US government can put enough pressure on any CEO of any company in the United States to lie about information collection efforts that such denial is meaningless.
What role does AES serve in your application? Your site is just sending plaintext wrapped in SSL.
He also says:
"Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received... We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false."
Seecrypt Mobile: protect your private conversations
Font mime types in Nginx
OK, in an alternate reality, what would a clear, flat-out denial look like? I mean, how could we tell such a thing differently than what was in the OP?

First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday...Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period. Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records.
Except that the form is already validated client side by the input elements, that's the point. It doesn't make any sense to validate it twice client side.
In the age of nuclear weapons doing nothing is not acceptable.
We believe in fair degree of autonomy and tight-knit teams. I won't call it "open allocation" because we encourage people to stick to a particular work for a reasonable period to really excel at it (experience being the best teacher), but people do have the ability to transfer to other teams, or even across functional boundaries (engineering to marketing etc). The goal is to maximize mutual chemistry and cohesion, maximize autonomy. Our attrition rate tends to be very low, in spite of (or perhaps because of) there being no "golden handcuff".
And this is relevant to what?
I am going to guess that PRISM is a system which receives and parses the data files from those companies that are produced as a result of warrants/subpoenas/national security letters. So the excerpt from the NSA document that the Washington Post gave—"Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple" — may refer only to some kind of secure file transfer (private circuit with NSA hardware encryption, maybe).

It's just a guess, but it could fit with the relatively low cost figure given ($20 Million).
One thing I'd think about: If Google is lying or misrepresenting the truth here, then it would be phenomenally foolish to put out a denial under Larry's name as it just did.

Specifically, the personal integrity of the founders -- especially vis-a-vis these kinds of issues -- is one of the bedrocks of Google's culture. If a statement like this was proven out to be a deliberate misrepresentation (even if not an outright lie) it would cause IMO severe harm to Google morale.
The Apple documentation on Quartz 2d is pretty good (although depending on how familiar you are with the rest of the system, you might need to follow some of the links to read about the other parts):

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Graph...
Um, you're aware that he wrote http://insecure.org/stf/secnet_ids/secnet_ids.html, worked for a networking (security) company (Arbor) for years, etc.? He may be wrong, and he may think that he knows more than he actually does, but he does know a thing or two. ;-)

Regarding overlay networks: note that HTTP, WebSocket, Skype, BitTorrent and such are already looking quite a bit like an overlay network, and that increasing amounts of NAT-ting are making the classic point-to-point model of the internet more and more irrelevant. I'm not sure I particularly like this vision of the future, and I agree that the performance will be worse, but it's far from insane.

(As to performance, note how everything is routed over HTTP these days, despite it being rather inefficient for lots of use cases.)
I guess you missed the recent news where a governor was exposed for cheating on his wife due to data collected using these systems?

Or, what about the case of qwest where the CEO was coincidentally convicted of insider trading after refusing to comply with this BS?

I have no issue with the government doing analysis and collecting data. I do take issue with them using it for BS political agendas and illegally compelling private companies to participate. And, to be honest, the mere fact that they are allowed to collect this sort of stuff will lead to the other. So, I think it's perfectly reasonable to simply require more transparency and approval in the first place to remove the temptation.
The President getting on national television and acknowledging that the program exists is a pretty big shred of evidence.
No, its pretty clearly written to me. Larry Page is genuinely surprised that this program thinks it has access to Google data on demand.
Marlboro begins stealth marketing
Because it is, in fact, significantly different; and the differences were articulated several decades ago by the Supreme Court. The two cases you should examine are Katz v. United States and Smith v. Maryland.
Too few people do that. They can afford to tag you for other kinds of surveillance.

If the State wants your head, there's not much you can do even if you're innocent.
Seriously?

To elect somebody you trust.

This is a republic.
You're confusing things. Both the NSA and the CIA can constitutionally intercept communications that cross U.S. borders. It's debatable how much oversight Congress can impose on those intercepts without encroaching on executive authority, but the basic principle of cross-border monitoring has been accepted for decades.
So we're expected to trust someone that has been lying to us for 5 years?
I think it's completely weaselly. It leaves wide open the possibility that a 3rd party, like Palantir, has access to the data.
For all those complaining about the language of this and other denials, what could possibly satisfy you? This seems as blanket as possible.

"Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process."

"We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale [as of the Verizon order] is completely false."

Finally, NSLs cannot compel an organization to lie like this, and doing so would be very legally dangerous for Google.

It's amazing how little critical thinking HN does when we see something that confirms our beliefs.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
The NSA's Utah data center was designed to host more storage than existed on the entire planet at the time. Sheer volume of data is among the least of their concerns.
the social "who's talking to who, and what sites did they visit" information... oh, probably this big -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
Presumably university IT would have been able to provide more precise demographically identifying data than the ISP. It's unlikely the ISP was running the RADIUS server.
US government agencies have money available to them for this sort of things.
"NEXT SENTENCE": I don't think they're a telco with millions of users, Goggle Voice is pretty small, right?

The two after that look like a pretty good denial, though.
Cross browser compatibility is fine without putting in javascript (which people frequently fail to test cross browser and ends up being wrong and broken). Modern browsers get the best experience, old crap browsers get a degraded but still functional experience. You don't need to try to make everything the same everywhere, just make it work everywhere.
> Why does Grails use Groovy for its core programming language? Why not just use Java? In this episode of Grails Example, we present a brief slide show that talks about the shortcomings of Java and why Grails needed a groovier language for building web applications.

Didn't see the slideshow, but...

The main use case for grOOvy seems to be Grails (and its build tool Gradle). It also has some legacy use (grOOvy 1.x) testing Java classes, not much uptake since the gr++vy debacle.
I question your minor premise, just for starters. I also think you're committing a fallacy of composition, since the government is not a monolithic entity.
It's relevant because some of the things that are being suggested here on HN are clearly infeasible, from an infrastructure standpoint.
PRISM can exist, AND they cannot have direct access to Google data. Both can be true.

There is another vector of privacy leakage here - there are also the ISPs, who I am pretty sure work alongside the government in a majorly secretive way.
Couldn't agree more. The key terms used are subject to interpretation. Still not feeling comfortable about this.
I always wonder how fast telepests start to call you once you register at some online service with your phone number. UKFast hosting I believe sells your data immediately. Comparison sites do the same.
In the context that's not the point -- another plus for client-side decorations is that no synchronization is needed between the decorator and client for resizing.

Personally I think client-side decorations are far easier to implement reliably and would welcome them becoming default.
They're using the phrase "direct access" because that phrase appeared in the leaked NSA slides.
Finance. Perhaps this is a knock-on effect from the industry's drug use in the 1980s, but traders are a paranoid bunch. Client communications have to be recorded, but it is not uncommon for hedge funds to have highly sensitive discussions in bug-free rooms or via encrypted voice calls (who we are talking to is of less concern to be known than what we are saying). Traders who slack on security tend to get mopped up fairly quickly.
I've read teens are slowly moving away from facebook to Twitter & Instagram. Probably because it has less drama. It is more about narcissism without needing to reply to anybody.
There are two obvious ways to fight this. First, add a lot of noise. For example, you could change your name to something extremely common. You could broadcast inaccurate data about yourself.

Secondly, whenever you do need privacy, use the social equivalent of a one-time pad. Never execute the same mechanism twice. For example, you could conceivably use a cantenna to access a distant wi-fi spot. You could buy the wireless cards with cash (and walk to the store where you buy it, preferably in a city that you don't frequent - and get there by car with good mileage so that there's limited trace of you being there), and buy a used laptop on craigslist with cash....

While surveillors can be open-minded, to a certain degree access to enhanced tracking technology will also engender a stronger reliance on the streetlight effect - and complete expurgation of the streetlight effect is impossible.
"Separation of powers" is such a bogus concept. We've got three groups of people in different office buildings with almost exactly the same set of incentives, and it's hammered into our heads that this somehow will cause government to police itself. I doubt anyone who didn't repeatedly hear the praises for separation of powers in school throughout their childhood would think that is even a remotely effective plan.
They don't need to access to all network traffic, just the interesting bits, like e.g. the internal traffic for the storage/backup systems used for GMail or Google Accounts .
The program and requirements were somewhat surreal. The architecture of the plan seemed to make little to no sense.

They considered anyone who provided internet access to 100's of people a provider (mostly universities etc) and requested that they install the pre specified hardware at their own expense (purchase, installation and maintenance).

They may have been concerned specifically with universities due to their foreign students and access to certain backbone lines that normal ISP's dont always have (WWW2?).

I spoke with the EFF and I was told I wasn't alone, but most people were rejecting the 'request' and not suffering any consequences. Our IT director took a hard line on the topic and tried to speak openly to reporters about how much the request offended him. He got as far as the school newspaper as in 2005 most people didn't understand the ramifications of this activity.
OK. How does this automatically make Google and not, I don't know Chevrolet's onstar system, a target for criticism? Where's the evidence?
"Do you welcome the leak, sir? Do you welcome the leak if you welcome the debate?"
LONG WINTER (completely made up).

!!! WHO THE F%!# told you about LONG WINTER!?!? What do you know? Tell us now... we know you're lying dsl! Tell us everything and we'll let you live! Lie to me one more time and I'm drilling a hole through your hand with this electric drill! Who are you working with? Who's paying you? When did you convert to radical Islam? Who's your contact? Tell us now!
There might not be enough water. The walls don't look visibly damp.

Also, there might not have been any introduced from the start - if he used only dry rocks/soil, and planted from a seed.
Some of the comments here just shows that people will believe what they want to believe.

There's nothing Google, Apple, Facebook, etc can say that some people won't poke holes into.