skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why would the government choose to use this route to get data from Google/Facebook/etc?

It is the only way to get access to the data without requiring a vast conspiracy. If they had direct access, thousands of employees would know something was up. If they MITM, then lots of people would notice. If they had a way to actually break TLS, then there would be no slide about "providers".
Huzzah! That was pretty much my single biggest disappointment with Wayland. Although I like the visual consistency of server-side decorations, one of my favourite things about X11 is that when an app hangs or otherwise does something weird, the close button in the title-bar still gives me control over the app, I don't have to hope that it's still processing its event loop or bust out some arcane interface like Task Manager and guess what the application's executable is named.
Nothing in the names policy prohibits pseudonyms. If your given name is "Jason Ramirez", you're welcome to have a separate Google+ account with the name "Nancy Young".

You only have to prove people know you by a name if you want to go by "#RS", "Albert Einstein", or "GreenLife Rx"; all three of those are likely name violations for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with knowing who you are.
Looks like a great idea… any chance of Snow Leopard compatibility?
Ah, you are right on the PRISM distinction, I mixed up details with the "metadata" thing, which I'm sure is not accidental. A lot of the responses from government officials are to the effect of "these aren't a concern, because to get the metadata we need to go through FISA courts for every individual", which is just a red herring now.

So, there are:

1. NSLs, published on the transparency report

2. FISA orders, which are "through a court", but is by all accounts just rubber stamping, not on the transparency report

3. PRISM, which is intended to bypass FISA entirely, according to the Guardian article. Either Google is lying, the NSA is doing it without Google's knowledge, or there is subtle wordplay involved (so, lying). Or, that it's been grossly misreported.
Yeah, I saw the headline and thought "We have a chief architect?", but then I saw who it was, and he really does have a longtime track record of critical contributions to both G+ and Search before it.
Awesome! We send and receive thousands of SMS messages with twilio every day, hopefully this helps them get better international incoming message support ;)
I think he broke both stories.

From http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-n...

> The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation
When AT&T was asked politely by the NSA to open its networks under the warrantless surveillance program, the company refused to confirm or deny. They actually offered arguments like this one from an AT&T attorney:

http://news.cnet.com/Legal-loophole-emerges-in-NSA-spy-progr...
Federal law may "authorize and in some cases require telecommunications companies to furnish information" to the executive branch, said Bradford Berenson, who was associate White House counsel when President Bush authorized the NSA surveillance program in late 2001 and is now a partner at the Sidley Austin law firm in Washington, D.C. Far from being complicit in an illegal spying scheme, Berenson said, "AT&T is essentially an innocent bystander."

And a sealed AT&T document I obtained tried to offer benign reasons why there would be a secret room at its downtown San Francisco switching center that would be designed to monitor Internet and telephone traffic:
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1028_3-6077353.html

What Google and Facebook are doing today is precisely the opposite of what AT&T did.
Yes. There's no point in being a billionaire high-tech visionary if you're stuck behind bars on treason charges.

To us he'd be a hero, to the rest of America he's just helped out terrorists by coming clean.
Ask HN: Suppose that the PRISM slides are made up. Why does the gov play along?
Everyone denied "direct access".
They may or may not be lying, but I personally find the "direct access" scenario unlikely, because of the reasons outlined here:
http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-microsoft-engineer-prism-is-highly-improbable-for-these-four-reasons-2013-6

The other scenario is passive listening on the backbone, and working from the captured data.
Nowadays everyone uses SSL, so they would need to decrypt it.
Let's suppose that they have no magic, and they play by the same rules as us. In that case the only feasible way is somehow obtaining the private keys of the companies and using that to decrypt the traffic, however for example in google's case the private keys won't do any good, because (if I understand everything correctly) Google uses the Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm for its SSL connections which makes passive mitm impossible:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5843223

Active mitm is very unlikely, because that could be detected.

And I have ran out of possible scenarios. The only remaining scenario is that all this is made up for some reason. My question is: What could be that reason?
What really pisses me off is something like »It [PRISM] cannot be used to intentionally target any US citizen, any other US person, or anyone located within the United States«. Mass surveillance without suspicion of foreigners is even worse than spying the own people.
I think we should be aware that there may be unpleasant consequences...

Or as I like to put it, something about having your cake and eating it. We can't demand the administration turn a blind eye here, and rage at that same administration when they turn a blind eye there.
Thought twice about posting this, but am I the only one who feels really queasy about someone like Matt Cutts jumping directly into conversations about their own company on HN (especially when it could be connoted as being part of damage control)? He's hardly rank-and-file. I think it is plain old creepy, YMMV.
So while we're at that, how do the proponents of Turing test respond to the lookup table argument? Say I make a giant lookup table, with keys being all possible conversation prefixes and values being the answers. E.g., h["Hi"] = "Hi.". h["Hi. / Hi. / How are you?"] = "I'm OK, how are you?" etc. Sure the lookup table would be big but definitely finite, since its size is bounded by the maximum possible length of a Turing test conversation (which is at most the length of a human life--we would like humans to pass the test, right?) Will we be morally obligated to grant such hash table the same rights a person enjoys?
is "beyond 9000" some obscure(?) meme?

also, the example is confusing (well confused me), because it has two different things that have a value of 1. it would be clearer with

func = f[_ + 100]

(for example) and changing everything else to match (imho).

cute project, though.
Yes, you're misunderstanding, because I am not being clear.

I'm not saying we get rid of IP (I'm not talking about TCP at all, for what it's worth).

I'm saying, we stop trying to make IP better, accept it for what it is, and building something better ON TOP OF IT.
Obviously you're not familiar with this disastrous policy and how it's often heinously executed in the sticks; from the article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#Current_status):

"Current status

"The limit has been strongly enforced in urban areas, but the actual implementation varies from location to location. In most rural areas, families are allowed to apply to have a second child if their first-born is a daughter or suffers from physical disability, mental illness or mental retardation. Second children are subject to birth spacing (usually 3 or 4 years). Additional children will result in large fines. Families violating the policy are required to pay monetary penalties.... [ Lots more detail. ]"

So, yes, they do care about "remote villages". Enough to place them under the control of the government; don't know how true this was for the rural areas, but back before a free market in food was allowed, getting on the wrong side of the local functionaries resulted in your not getting ration tickets and dying of starvation, or so I was told by a couple from the PRC in the late '80s. Those same functionaries enforce this policy and they're not polite about it.

Seriously, do some very basic research before you continue to downplay the utter horror of totalitarian societies.
Google merely stated that they had not heard of PRISM--probably because they were told it was called something else.
Obama Cyber Spying Scandals Complicate The China Problem
"Any program" would be broad enough, but he didn't say that at all. He said they are not part of "any program that would give any government direct access to their servers." I could drive a truck through the holes left in that wording.

Do they have indirect access? Some API perhaps? Do they have any means by which they can automate the export of data for whoever they want, perhaps after clicking a checkbox that says that the target is officially under surveillance? Is there some form of data sharing that is brokered through a trusted non-government entity?

He also goes on to say that they follow the law (meaningless if the law says to hand over the data), and they frequently push back (which orders do they push back on? Probably not the orders that they aren't allowed to legally push back on).

He states that they don't follow "broad orders for all data", but this is easily satisfied by the description in the Guardian article that says an analyst simply has to certify each request by saying they believe that there is a 51% probability that the request is legitimate. Obviously, no one at Google even could challenge such requests.
I didn't omit the word as part of some pro-rape agenda

I'm not sure it's worth your time to contend this. The debate surrounding rape is very if-you-arent-with-us-youre-against-us, so too often it seems it's already a lost battle.
Twitter said no? I like twitter more!
A Blind Boy prevails against the Indian Education System,goes to Stanford
share your thoughts :)
I think the predicate you wanted to demonstrate is called append/3, which works on list (while concat applies to atoms).

In Prolog, 'foo' constructs an atom, which is equivalent to foo without any quotes (but the quotes are useful to construct atoms with spaces, with digits, starting with a capital letter, etc.)

However, if you want to manipulate atoms as text, you typically want to use strings instead, which are literally lists of character codes in Prolog, and can be entered as double quotes. For example, "ABC" = [65,66,67]. To convert between strings and atoms dynamically, use atom_chars/2.

For example:

?- append("Prolog is", " awesome", Z), atom_chars(A,Z).
Z = [80, 114, 111, 108, 111, 103, 32, 105, 115|...],
A = 'Prolog is awesome'.

?- append("Prolog is", Y, "Prolog is awesome"), atom_chars(A,Y).
Y = [32, 97, 119, 101, 115, 111, 109, 101],
A = ' awesome'.

?- append(X, "is awesome", "Prolog is awesome"), atom_chars(A,X).
X = [80, 114, 111, 108, 111, 103, 32],
A = 'Prolog '.
A Process For Learning A New Codebase
This is a lesson in the power of language. The companies involved and their denials of knowledge of PRISM were not lies, but clearly they were making it easier for the government to extract data for surveillance, under an unnamed program with specific point people in each company who were only allowed to talk to the government and not talk to their CEOs about the extent in which the government was extracting data. It may go even deeper. We just don't know.

The thing that upsets me most is that I suspect nobody except for the whistleblower will take any real heat. I hope more will come forward with more details in the coming weeks, before the government makes an example of the whisteblower.

Will this incident change user behavior? I doubt it. We're too dependent on these companies to cut them off en masse.
No argument there, just providing a counterpoint on the XP->whatever else at another large organization.

It isn't a quick thing because there is so much to be checked/validated/tested/touched. I don't envy the admins that have to deal with it.
It's like:

John Doe asks, "Hey Larry, did you let Zuck read my mail I wrote you last week?".

Larry says, "No! He doesn't have my password or yours, right?"

Joe persists and proves Zuck knows the contents of the email. Then Larry shrugs and says, "Well, I didn't give him access to your email, I gave him a print out when he asked for it".
http://int3.github.io/doppio/about.html

https://github.com/int3/doppio
| The IRS was talking about their right to read our
| email four years ago. The IRS has no known
| infrastructure to pull that off, it's clear they
| were talking about NSA or FBI programs.

I seem to remember that this was about their ability to just walk up to Google and request someone's emails without a warrant of any sort. There's no implication that it has to be related to some NSA or FBI program. Assuming that the NSA has every email ever written in storage, I doubt that they would coordinate with something as 'mundane' as IRS tax collection. They are a spy agency after all, and their purview is National Security.
I've seen this attitude several times now and I simply do not understand it.

This is not "conspiracy". It would be unfair in the way you state if there was no evidence, and then these companies' denials was taken as evidence that they participated.

But that's not the situation. What we have is the US government saying (albeit unwillingly) that these companies are involved. It's not "conspiracy" to think that they are, in fact, involved, it's just obvious.

No, there is probably nothing these companies can say that will not look suspicious. That's not being unreasonable, that's simply looking at the evidence and realizing that the evidence against these companies outweighs their statements of denial.

We're just short of finding a guy with a bloody axe standing over the still-bleeding corpse of his victim, and you're complaining that nothing the murderer can say will clear his name. Well, yes.
A target's phone call, e-mail or chat will take the cheapest path, not the physically most direct path - you can't always predict the path

Dates When PRISM Collection Began For Each Provider

This is complete conjecture, but this reads to me like the NSA set up its own backhauls and set up peering agreements at artifically low prices to get traffic going over their pipes. Is there historical data for route announcements available anywhere? There are a lot of specific dates that could confirm/disprove this.
Secure SSL/TLS Certificate Thumbprint Retrieval Service
My guess is they all got the same template of what they're allowed to say. With something this sensitive the language is very important, especially for public company communications.
I think you are in a very fortunate position. You should be able to get into a startup doing "interesting problems" on the strength of your BD/Marketing/Sales experience. Then work take on programming tasks with the dev group. In a smallish startup, being versatile, i.e. doing BD one day, cutting code the next should be prized.
"when you send a piece of snail-mail, you are literally sending it to the government to be handled, have its "metadata" read and recorded as necessary as a means for it to be sent to its destination."

But I don't expect the metadata to be retained indefinitely (except if I requested special services such as tracking or proof of delivery). That has nothing to do with delivering my mail to its destination, just like the phone company retaining my personally identifiable GPS data indefinitely has nothing to do with providing phone service.
Facebook doesn't have a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility)
Launching start-ups not enough to make them fly
Two things that cannot be true at the same time: this Google+ post, and the idea that Google coughed up their TLS keys to the government.
Using the existing phone network? Probably not easily.

I think the ideal way would be to make the device a passive satellite receiver. Then when a phone call arrives for your device, the satellite broadcasts a message which your device can passively receive which tells it to wake up and get on the cell network.

In theory you can do this with cell towers (it's how pagers work -- you may even be able to reuse the existing infrastructure), but in that case you either have to know somehow which tower is in range of the device (which obviously leaks the device's general location) or you have to broadcast on all towers everywhere (which, as wireless bandwidth increases, becomes increasingly practical since the incoming call message would have nearly trivial length).
Looks like they took down the photo.
they don't have to MITM SSL if they clone the traffic: "install beam splitters at peering points"

then there are 2 endpoints that are decrypted separately
This service is supposed to help protect against man-in-the-middle attacks on SSL certs signed with trusted Root CAs. But it can't protect if the man-in-the-middle attack is against the service itself. In other words, if the trusted Root CAs are giving away signing keys to state agencies, there is no protection for anyone against MITM. With this situation, how can SSL certs be considered secure at all?
That doesn't give you the type of data (and tools) that the provider has. I don't see the government building tools on top of user-level access when the provider already has better data (like login records) and tools.
Same with the Mexican Coke bottles that we get in some US stores (Mexican Coke is made with real sugar). It is a 12 ounce bottle, labeled as 355 ml.
I'd wager it's one of them mobile types.
SILC isn't anonymous.
Because he starred in the video which someone else already admitted to posting.
"It's not a choice" doesn't make it more or less right or wrong. It's how people are. The failure to accept that (or at least ignore and tolerate it) is the problem, and it will not be answered by "well it's genetic."

This is true, but "it's not a choice" is a stepping stone to more general acceptance.
V53 FGTECH Galletto 2-Master EOBD2 With BDM Adapters
Hardware version: V53
Software version: V2012
Language: Italian, English, German, French, Spanish Portuguese, Czech, Turkish
Congratulations! More like you!
This is expounded upon in some news articles, particularly that data is routed not by the most efficient geographic route but by the cheapest by dollar price.

It's a very important tidbit of information that divulges the heart of the matter -- the NSA is a backbone operator[1]. It's a tall claim to make, however their involvement in internet exchange points (and other regional network access points) would be far more difficult to conceal.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network#List_of_tier_1_n...
Because obviously allowing the media to make speculative statements with are completely unfounded is much better than at least tempering with fact. OK.
Priorities, our masters sure got them.
Beam splitters (prisms?) inside the backbone providers. All traffic goes to its destination unharmed, but the NSA gets all the packets. SSL is harder, but all you need is the private keys. Those are hard to get but not impossible for someone with the resources of the government. This is the only scalable way to do what they are supposed to be doing and not involve lots of outsiders. Note that the people who have really clammed up the past few days are the telecoms in all this.
OK, so when did Google push SSL everywhere? How does that fit with the graph at http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/assets_c... ?

It's possible Google come out as good guys in this...?
Thanks for the explanation. It's such a neat idea that inputs and outputs can be interchangeable. Opens up approaches that are very different than the standard ones. The append predicate is definitely a better example so thanks for sharing.
But why not do both? Honest question?
Twitter by nature is very public messaging platform and therefore this data is less private.

I'd be curious how many DMs are sent compared to public tweets.
Hetzner web hosting service hacked, customer data copied
In at least two cases, at Google and Facebook, one of the plans discussed was to build separate, secure portals, like a digital version of the secure physical rooms that have long existed for classified information, in some instances on company servers. Through these online rooms, the government would request data, companies would deposit it and the government would retrieve it, people briefed on the discussions said.

If true, that would explain the very carefully worded language of both Google and Facebook that they did not give the NSA "direct access" to their servers.
I accused you of doing X on mondays. You could say "You know, in fact, I do X, but on tuesdays". Most hypocrites however will take your question as literally as possible and will just say: "No, I don't do X on mondays".

You see, people don't want to know if government has direct access(ok, they want, but it is not their primary concern), they want to know what happened.

It simply doesn't matter if google uploads data to government servers or government gets data from google servers by "directly accessing" them. I would even guess that the latter is simpler to implement and maintain.

I don't mean that google is happy to hand user data to government - they probably aren't - I want to know how many data governments gets.
Plus anything on SMS can already be monitored easily in the clear at the telco level. Most of the "interesting" twitter users are probably using SMS.
I have to bring this up.

I'll never forget growing up on reddit and digg during the Bush Era. People were talking about this stuff all the time, calling Bush Hitler and the Patriot Act evil, Gitmo unconstitutional, and raising awareness of the uncivilized wild-west Republican and Conservative Parties. I mean Redditor's honestly thought the USA was coming to an end. Then after Bush left and Democrat Obama got in things continued to get worse. Attacks on privacy and constitutional rights, drones, surveillance increased yet the backlash isn't there. Think of all the terrible things you read about Bush, now come to the realization that Obama is continuing this behavior yet people (Democrats in particular) aren't complaining. Because their party is in power.

That was the moment I realized the worst thing about America was the 2 party system. Each party is oblivious to it's own flaws, blames the other party for everything. It's called "Ingroup Bias" http://www.alleydog.com/glossary/definition.php?term=Ingroup... This same "Ingroup Bias" is what's preventing Americans from standing up against their party when they introduce invasive legislature AND preventing members of both the Republican and Democratic parties from standing up against their party's own extreme views on national security.

=== My Point ===

If either party puts a stop to the extreme surveillance and a terrorist attack happens, that party will forever be blamed by the other and will lose elections for quite some time.
It's a fact, not an opinion that can be debated. They are entitled, legally, to close whatever parts they can.
As I've come to believe its always a communication (or generally human) problem rather than technical. Yet another blunder in line with the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Gimli Glider.
The Chinese security bureau didn't have "direct acces to servers" as well, instead, they install black boxs in every IDC which mirror router traffic to an unknown destination.

There's also shit ton of papers on Chines academia on how to reconstruct and rapid classify packets from raw IP dumps

Edit: THIS -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5843442 Beam splitters, or 分光 as called in Chinese.
Because IPv6 is extremely expensive.

But don't get me wrong: I'm not on a crusade to get rid of IPv6, and overlays work just fine on IPv6. I'm just on a crusade to put it into context.
My theory is that the slides will eventually turn out to be a hoax, and they are just trying to raise the ppls' privacy-invasion tolerance levels, so that they can actually implement it later on.