skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>to have an actual conversation both about privacy

Let us have a conversation about that:

Why should Mark Zuckerberg, et al., know things about you that the government shouldn't?

Or, to put it another way, shouldn't the very thing which represents You, the People, have as much information about you as, "They", the Corporations, do?

After all, Mr. Z, et al., can quite easily tell you things about yourself which, 3 words into the sentence, would give the government a lot of information it needs to optimize itself. To Serve You.

Whereas, the corporate stance is "we will own the consumers, all the consumers, and we will encourage them to endless consume our product", the government stance is: "how do we keep 240million people from cannibalizing themselves".

Mr Z., et al., are being mighty disingenous with this position, because the fact of the whole matter is, the Government would be the absolute BEST customer for him/them/et al., there is no better way to feed a consumer than to get the Government on your side, as we see with Pharmaceuticals, Farming, Oil, etc.

There are multiple points of view in this argument, is all I am trying to say, and by setting the above in word I hope to have at least set the scene for my real, tl;dr, which is this:

Privacy is a trap. Those who are fully exploiting the nature of the system, simply keep no secrets .. and trade never willingly with those who do.
As Bob Dylan put it "to live outside the law you must be honest".
Julian Assange is pretty high profile, considered a journalist by many, has run an organisation that exposed many legitimate scandals, etc. Celebrities also go to prison quite often.
BiFrost has a good list, but just FYI, the SFMoma is closed for construction now, so you'll have to visit the other museums that the city offers.
What do you think (some) field agents of an intelligence agency do?
>>> voicing support for communism could get you dragged in front of a tribunal

I bet voicing support to a state-sponsored terrorist organisation with officially declared goal of violently overthrowing US government could get you into some trouble anytime. Especially if you work for government and have access to sensitive data.
They are service companies. If they believe in a service that takes care of their customers' / clients' privacy, they should act accordingly, yes.

They could pack up and leave. Make a statement. Be true to their customers. And they could pull it off, I think, being mostly software and service companies.

Yes, they, their employees, and a lot of dependables will probably lose out, at first. But they stay true to themselves. In the end, they make the decision to choose marketshare, power, money and all that over ideals. Not a bad choice, but be honest about it.
https://www.google.com/search?q=rape+culture
It's also sad to see the immediate dismissal of alternate story lines even after this discovery.

A conspiracy was just uncovered... and we're concerned about conspiracy-theorizing? The word itself has been dragged through the mud to the point of becoming a dismissing scare tactic, it basically translates to "crazy person, crazy ideas".

Basically, if your story doesn't match the official conspiracy theory given by the government and the companies that work for it, then you must be a conspiracy theorist...

Life is comedy.
> I don't think this is correct.

You may have adopted a somewhat definition of interception then I was intending there. Certainly it will not prevent traffic analysis but the content of the communication can not be discerned by a computationally bounded adversary under the assumption that the underlying cryptography is secure (and if it isn't... there are bigger issues). Modern cryptography isn't something you just wave CPU power at: the energy required to crack these constructs via brute force on non-reversible computers is not currently available to man kind.

> 2) Persona does not prevent against MITM.

Persona is, effectively, a distributed PKI system that binds ephemeral signing keys to a human recognizable identity. There is, in fact, a draft on using Persona (or any other cryptographic identity service) to authenticate the WebRTC session IDs: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-rescorla-rtcweb-generic-idp... but it only protects against server-cooperating MITM if DTLS-SRTP is used and not SDES.

> Unfortunately you always need someone in the middle because even in 2013 probably 99.9% of 'things' on the internet are behind NAT

Having a signaling intermediary and and ICE/TURN service to get past NAT is completely orthogonal to having ephemerally keyed end-to-end encryption which cannot be tampered with by site controlled JS.

With DTLS-SRTP you can have a conversation signaled and NAT traversed by, say, Facebook which cannot be spied on by Facebook without— at a minimum— causing the two endpoints to show and record different session fingerprints making any interception detectable.
The conf call double dare is unlikely, but imagine the commercial benefit of the one who broke ranks. The most likely is one with least to lose eg AOL or Yahoo or Microsoft.
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Just put a JavaScript (or whatever) interpreter in the window server, and program the window manager locally in that. Then you aren't fucked by synchronization issues. James Gosling did something like that with PostScript many years ago, an alternative to X11, which was then merged with X11, and it was called NeWS (and later X11/NeWS or OpenWindows): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

I've written several window managers / user interface toolkits / tabbed window frames / menu system in PostScript for NeWS. We even wrote an X11 window manager in PostScript, complete with rooms, scrolling virtual desktop, tabbed windows, pie menus, and seamless integration of X11 and NeWS windows.

http://donhopkins.com/home/movies/TabWindowDemo.mov
But you don't have to unit test a radio throwing it to the water. Just sending messages.
...The start up years have finished and Zynga needs to grow up and deliver
I enjoy how your response is not to engage with any of Rayiner's actual arguments and instead try to turn it into a character issue. If you look at the history of American law you'll find that historical scope of the 4th amendment and similar was always a lot narrower than most people today conceive it to be.

In a broader context, it's particularly instructive to look at the history of Shays' Rebellion, which took place a mere decade after the founding of the US; the people running the government at the time, including founders such as John and Samuel Adams had no hesitation on dropping the banhammer on the rebels, to the point of suspending habeas corpus.

The Constitution was most certainly not written with the intention of producing weak government. Like it or not, it invests the federal government with far-reaching powers, and such limits as it does put in place are partly to limit the Federal government's authority over the states, as opposed to individuals.
He was very far from turning American into anything, even more into a Stalinist dictatorship which denies basic rights to life and liberty, routinely starves off, murders and imprisons millions of citizens and has no concept of human rights to speak of. He may falsely accused some people of being communist sympathizers, and he may cost some people that associated with communists their jobs (to appreciate it, think about current Congress discovering there are multiple Al Qaeda agents in all levels of government and trying to investigate it, and people answering "I'm taking the Fifth" when asked if they have had any ties with Al Qaeda). But nothing even close to turning America into the thing he most despised - i.e. Stalinist USSR.
We're indeed talking sunk costs.

By the way, you could even argue that some measures, such as increased airport "security", indirectly killed people, who took their more risky cars instead of just flying.

This title reminds me a quote from Ultimate Spiderman: "Your uncle snuffs. And you stop basket ball!?". Seems rather… blunt.
Very interesting article indeed. Some time ago I made something similar for GameBoy games and ran into the same set of challenges (and ended up using similar techniques). The ROM is decompiled and translated into C code, which is then compiled and linked with runtime libraries. Jump tables and indirect jumps often need some manual fixing. I went up to the point where I can convert some simple games (without memory mappers) into binaries running on iOS and X. I did not have the time to document the tools but if anyone is interested to continue that work just let me know.

I guess one of the advantages of static recompilation is that you can port old games to new platforms if you hold the copyright of the game itself, but without running into issues with the manufacturer of the console (Nintendo)--but I might be wrong. You could also conceivably improve the game more easily during conversion (e.g., incorporate higher-resolution graphics). Finally, you could potentially have the resulting code distributed via app stores that do not allow general-purpose emulators.
Isn't this exactly the reason why these companies, which are infinitely more influential than the person who leaked it, have a civic obligation to take a stand?
It's not even that. The journalists say "Google is doing X" so Google responds "We aren't doing X" and suddenly internet commenters everywhere are taking that as evidence that Google is doing Y and Z because they aren't X.

It's ludicrous.
It's definitely not coincidence, but it's important to keep an open mind about all the possibilities.

Participating with government requests doesn't make these companies any money. It must be a major drag, actually. It involves lawyers, tech people, and trying to strike an uncomfortable balance between user trust and trying to persuade a court that a request should be denied.

This might be because they've been given a script, but it might also be because they chose to copy each other. They could copy each other out of not wanting to be "the odd one out." Any company that puts out a statement much different from the others risks being trusted less than the others. They could copy each other because they want people to jump to the conclusion that the government gave them a script (even if they didn't) so that people get more pissed than they already are.

As others have pointed out, the similarity could also be because the PR/lawyer response to this is so cookie cutter. I think the "not wanting to be the odd one out" would be the #1 mundane reason, though.
Ask HN: What news have I missed since PRISM broke?
I've been mostly reading news about PRISM and the NSA and who's culpable or not and who knew or not for the past few days. What slipped by during this firestorm? What news should I really know about but I missed it?

Note: I think I'm being pretty snarky by asking in this way but the HN rankings have been dominated by the same story and I don't know a better way to ask. I'd also love a response that tells me how I should have handled this differently.
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There are two features in the slides that need to be accounted for in any explanation.

1. The second slide, which implies that the fact that the internet traffic passes through the US is relevant.

This implies that either some physical interception was necessary, either from outside the companies, or from the inside with their cooperation, or that it was legally necessary (on order to require the companies to deliver the information. And yet it would seem like the issue of what the NSA could require US companies to reveal, is orthogonal from which traffic passes through the US, since in that case the issue would be what was stored on US servers.

2. The implied cooperation from the companies in the slides. According to the Washington Post, the "Special Source Operations" in the logo refers to "the NSA term for alliances with trusted U.S. companies". Given this, and the use of the terms "providers", it seems unlikely that no cooperation from the companies is involved.

From the above, I would propose that the PRISM scheme must involve some combination of physical interception, and cooperation from the companies involved.

For example, the NSA may be intercepting traffic then asking the companies for private keys for some of the traffic they intercept. This would fit the above facts in that it requires the traffic to pass through the US, and also requires cooperation from the companies.
"Surface positioning" -- especially when you want a USER INTERFACE to let human beings position the "surfaces" instead of automatically positioning them algorithmically -- is an extremely complex, open-ended problem that's too general to write a "plug-in" interface to cover. The best you can do is to "plug in" an extension language like JavaScript (or PostScript ;).
Their is a certain psychological threshold around what will evoke protesting. Abstract concepts like these are hard for average people to grasp or care about relative to more immediate and direct concepts like "war". Unlike "war" their are no emotionally intense images to accomodate cyber spying. On the flip side I think people probably intuitively accept this is part of the world we live in now. This isn't just the government spying on people, this is people from all walks of life spying on one another as part of 21st century "culture", from marketing to state security. It's like the book 1984.I'm not even sure how the public could hold anyone accountable for any of it within the current assumptions we're living by. You could impeach politicians, but that's not going to do anything. The intelligence community has a blank check and the corporations have the rights of individuals devoid of the social constructs of real-life people. Or more to the point, they're superseded by the survival mechanisms of the collective within a company. Some of those mechanisms are good, some not-so-good. Anyway, I don't have an answer beyond that but felt like typing it.
Automated system for NSL letters will work a lot like automated system for DMCA takedowns. And we know how fine that turned out.
> This is silly and trying to tie it into the recent NSA revelations is disingenuous [...] (a) will not be enabled by default; the developer would have to enable it explicitly?* ;

The point of showing the relationship here is to point out that site/service operators ("The developer") in your example cannot be trusted to not be coerced into acting against the user's interest.

> (b) is mainly intended for compatibility with existing SIP systems

WebRTC cannot be directly compatible with existing SIP systems because the data transport channel must use ICE to negotiate permission to send. (Otherwise JS bugs on webpage could turn random browsers into traffic flooders.

> where the server can do whatever kind of interception it wants by modifying the page JavaScript

SDES always sends the cryptographic keys to the signaling service, so the traffic can be undetectably captured. DTLS-SRTP does not make them available at all— even to the JS. So you never get unconditionally undetectable capture— at worst you get is capture which is only detectable by users that bother to page-info->media->session ID and compare.

> a downgrade attack

Whenever a less secure channel exists you can be forced into using it by blocking the more secure one. In particular, the thread model pointed out by the recent revelations is that the "developer" (site operator) can be secretly acting against the user's best interest.

> NSA taking over WebRTC

Huh? I wasn't ambiguous about who was pushing it because I wanted to suggest it was some shadowy force. I don't think it particularly matters _who_ is pushing it. I believe that when technology creates backdoors available to third parties those backdoors will eventually be used. As an engineer in this space I believe we can only protect the public by building systems which, to the best of our ability, are structurally immune to being subverted.
The Warrant Canary has a lot of caveats, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary

It's never been tested legally so there's nothing preventing law enforcement from compelling someone to comply by continuing to post up-to-date canary postings under duress.
I think with email expectation of privacy is exactly the same.

Yours may be, but it's the Supreme Court's opinion that actually counts.
X11 was pushed out the door too early, because some companies were threatening to standardize on X10, and they sure didn't want that to happen.

I attended the first X11 conference, and used X10 to develop pie menus and a window manager (based on UWM) that was extensible in Forth. http://donhopkins.com/home/movies/X10PieMenuWM.mov http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/piemenu/uwm/fuwm-main.f
Of course? Gay or straight is who you're attracted to, not who you have sex with. And this is not at all what you were saying further up in the tread? You were talking about attraction, not who you have sex with. I think everybody pretty much agrees that who you have sex with is a choice (except for the issue of whether free will exists at all). So far the evidence points to that being gay or straight, that is, who you're attracted to, is at least for the most part not a choice.
There is a difference between being gay and having a gay relationship. You can choose to have a relationship... but nobody chooses to be gay.

"Gee, you know... I think I will choose to be something that a large portion of the world hates, thinks is somehow wrong, or think is disgusting. That sounds like fun!"

It's not like being gay is some fad that one decides would be cool one day while idling at the pool.
I guess the bandwidth savings would be completely offset by the increased latency from the larger number of required RPC calls.
We can't -- and shouldn't -- hope to kick every pro-surveillance Congressman out of office

I strongly disagree. We are blessed with the right to vote. It's important to use it on things that actually matter.
I think I'm going to take Daniel Stone's word over yours.
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Like the huge number crunching center in utah?
Sassc (libsass) and Bourbon: It Works.
It's not just MySQL and Oracle, you'll see similar curves for "Database" and "SQL".
Buried in the article is the key line:

"the BBC has learned that Twitter was invited to join the Prism programme last year but rejected the approach from US authorities."

So we now have a confirmation from a third party that at least one tech firm was approached about joining PRISM, and that joining wasn't legally compelled of them.
Also, I don't understand the claim "between all of your displays you can only have 32,768 pixels". A 1920x1080 screen has over 2 million pixels (2073600 to be precise). Can anybody explain that part?
The studies supporting it have apparently been somewhat hard to confirm, a lot of the source material used by McConnell seems to be from secondary sources and self-referential. [1] is a detailed blog post where the author tries to track down the original sources:

[1] http://blog.securemacprogramming.com/2012/09/an-apology-to-r...;
Probably because Oracle started advertising in movies.

Nothing makes me a hate a company more then when they ruin a perfectly good movie.

Or maybe it's because you would have to be high on cocaine to think Oracles prices for anything are reasonable or worth it.
No amount of Moore's Law will change the speed of light...
If you want to see how it is really done, look at Russia - people that have money get charged with money things. You have tax audits, labor laws audits, financial compliance audits, whatever. With 2000-page laws and over 50 new federal crimes added to the statutes every year, I'm sure if you need it you can find it. I'm not saying Obama is there yet - I really hope not - but the technology is there. Nixon was impeached in part for using it, and Obama could use it too and there's some evidence it is being used here and there, even though no evidence yet it is used systematically by the highest branches of government. But it is there, and it works.
Because it is plagiarism. Do you honestly believe the PR people who wrote this didn't also read what others wrote? I don't think they released their statements all the same second.
An integration with [alfredapp](http://alfredapp.com) would be so awesome! Hope you can get in touch with them!
Nobody gives a shit until the government has some beef with you. Then it becomes the crime of the century.
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Although I agree with your point, Khodorkovsky is likely guilty as charged; Russia probably was just selectively enforcing the law until he started to threaten American oil interests.

(The real outrage in Khodorkovsky's case isn't that he has been repeatedly convicted while still imprisoned. The real outrage is that ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco found a way to destroy their Russian competition.)
Any comment on the fact that now ALL modern X rendering is worst-case? Why bother having all that useless complexity (have you ever read how the SHAPES extension deals with window borders?)?
Why paste the link content here? Most people already read it, it's nothing new. I can go find 10 X quotes too, but a link should suffice. Quote pasting is no discussion.
At least they can stop being hypocritical about it, and stop pretending they're only ramping up cyber capabilities and trying to pass new bills for "defense", when it's obviously much more about offense than rather defense and real security.
Cute speech, but if you need to rely on the honesty or courage of CEOs of huge corporations (that are in the business of trading private info, no less) to step up and protect you from your government, then I wouldn't keep too much hope.

Imagine someone urging CEOs of Big Oil / Pharma / [0] corps to do the same? Would you take it seriously? "Someone in the Oil Industry should stand up because what the US is doing in the Middle East is wrong!"

To be clear, my point is not that it's wrong to demand this, or even that it's stupid (it is naive, but understandable).

The point is that this is something that an actual democracy should be able to solve because its people demand it. Not by relying on CEOs of powerful corporations to do the right thing.

[0] or farming, weapons/steel, the US prison industry ...
I think with the fall of the rivaling system, the need for the western world to differentiate itself just went away.
I don't know what you are listening too, but 99% is misleading. It's quite dependent on the conference. For example, nearly all the presentations on DConf were good. You must be watching something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0fAyL4Xo2k , I guess?
As I* understand it the only "traditional" engineering field with anything close to unit testing is electronic engineering. Lots of chip or circuit design packages let you automatically test small parts of your design.

For mechanical/civil projects, this approach is less common. I think that's partly because of the projects' nature (good luck unit testing a submarine!) and partly because of the engineers being more traditional, and further from the software industry.

This said, I can envision some cool things you might do by taking a CAD package and associating some (automatically updating) equations with various parts' critical dimensions. This might act a bit like unit testing. A check of total mass would be another such useful check.

* Engineering student with some work experience, but by no means a blooded engineer.