skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> the fact that we do stand up for individual users' privacy and protection, for their right to have a personal life which is not ever shared with other people without their consent, even when governments come knocking at our door with guns, is one of the two most important reasons that I am at this company

The indisputable fact is that your company gathers a lot of private info online about its users for profit, make that for extra, extra profit. Best case scenario, it makes NSA's job super easy, all they have to do is ask for it. Worst case scenario, the government knows all our thoughts as we type on Google search and everything else we do on Google. I do not trust that such info will stay private. Not anymore.

>> the national security apparatus has convinced itself and the rest of the government that the only way it can do its job is to know everything about everyone. That's not how you protect a country. We didn't fight the Cold War just so we could rebuild the Stasi ourselves.

Yeah, WTF do they think they are, Google or Facebook?????
Google operates in other countries as well and has to respect their laws, I imagine not everyone calls it "a search warrant".

Also, National Security Letters.
He actually responded to just this question in the comments (and he's a very senior 10-year engineer, so it's plausible).

"I have various reasons to believe that the odds that I would have known about it are higher than those for most employees -- but it still wouldn't be a certainty. That said, the odds are good enough that I would be fairly surprised, and rather furious, to find out that such a thing had been happening without my knowledge.﻿"
I think the article is saying that the implicated companies hand over their private keys.
Thats because they do give access through court orders, etc, ie "indirect access".
Then again if they're "lying" then it means indirect access as in "they had to authenticate first!!"
Some people debate that, actually.
I laughed and then I cried a little.
Check out this video of what Wayland can do with the Raspberry Pi GPU. People have tried and failed to get the same performance with X.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0UkU...
Looks like the art for Zynga.
That's the idea! I've had a few emails from a few devs of Mac apps and they're going to fix up some issues
For many reasons organizations move slowly. One being security. No large organization, especially one handling sensitive information, is going to jump into the first release of any software.
From page 3, "Some Misconceptions about X and Wayland":

II) “X is Network Transparent.” Wrong. Its not. Core X and DRI-1 were
network transparent. No one uses either one. Shared-Memory, DRI-2 and
DRI-3000 are NOT network transparent, they do NOT work over the
network. Modern day X comes down to synchronous, poorly done VNC. If
it was poorly done, async, VNC then maybe we could make it work. But
its not. Xlib is synchronous (and the movement to XCB is a slow one)
which makes networking a NIGHTMARE.

And later:

V) “Wayland can't do remoting.” Wrong. Wayland should be BETTER than X
at remoting, partially do its [sic] asynchronous-by-design nature. Wayland
remoting will probably look a like a higher-performance version of
VNC, a prototype already exists. And this is without us even giving it
serious thought about how to make it better. We could probably do
better if we tried.

So, Wayland will implement remoting in a way similar to VNC, which will be an improvement over the current state of things in X anyway.
That $10,000 limit you're thinking of only applies to money service businesses. Specifically, it's from the Bank Secrecy Act and is invoked in reference to negotiable instruments.
The real issue, IMHO, isn't whether or not the companies are participating in PRISM or any similar program – yes, it'd be problematic if they are – but yes or no, the fact that we can so easily be suspicious of our government is much, much more telling about the state of democracy and society in the United States of America. We've seen enough to be unable to trust, regardless of ground truth in this case.
Great!

That's quite odd... WebViews are a hard beast to figure out cause web pages generally contain quite a few elements (sometimes 20k+), which makes it rather annoying to search and deal with. Chrome with the --force-accessibility-renderer flag has issues with element positions due to caching (I think). Safari has much better support but it's a tiny bit slower than Chrome. Right now, I'm focusing on other features. Hopefully browsers get better!
I looked at these very carefully and slowly, looking for signs of shared authorship or template structure, and the only structures I could find were those practically dictated.

This being said, if you read it more closely what they say is actually quite a bit more damning. Read closely, the denial is actually entirely nonsensical.

Both deny involvement in "PRISM" but both then go on to mistakenly identify PRISM with the Verizon order. Page says he learned about it when Greenwald broke the story (Greenwald broke the Verizon story, the Washington Post broke the PRISM story). Zucherberg similarly talks about metadata significantly.

In essence it is a bait and switch. Sort of like "I wasn't at work yesterday. I can show this because I didn't go on vacation."

The Norwegians have a story called "Good day fellow. Ax handle" which would be a fair summary of what is going on here. The story is about an old deaf ferryman who is deep in debt and left all alone to face the bailiff. So he thinks about all the questions he will face and answers he will give, but when the bailiff comes to ask directions to the inn, he gives answers that are entirely humorous.

Things like:

"Where is your wife?" asked the bailiff (hoping to find someone less confused).

"I am going to tar her. She's lying down on the beach, cracked up at both ends." Replied the ferryman (thinking he was being asked about his boat).
Facebook's Zuckerberg calls PRISM reports 'outrageous'
| the rest is just a matter of degree.

Exactly. Sending a couple of armed officers vs. a SWAT team with snipers and helicopters. Let's not forget that the US taxpayers are footing the bill if every arrest involves a highly-trained 10-person team donning assault rifles, etc.
" … we know of no Gasto-style "disappearing" as of yet but there's really nothing holding it back but luck … "

I suspect Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and most of the people who've ever been inside Guantanamo Bay probably see that a little differently.
What might have happened is this:
1. NSA bribed someone to obtain Google's SSL certificate private keys
2. NSA installed wiretaps outside of all Google datacenters
3. NSA hired someone to write software that would reconstruct Gmail inboxes, login activity, etc. based on the decrypted traffic

If Facebook, Google, etc. are indeed innocent they should change SSL certificates immediately, store the new ones in secure cryptographic hardware, stop offering non-HTTPS access, and start inspecting network equipment for the wiretaps.
There is also Secure Internet Live Conferencing [http://silcnet.org] protocol, server and client that's been under development for quite a while.

Here's their crypto FAQ: http://silcnet.org/support/faq/crypto
Watch this video from the Washington Post reporter who broke the story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence...

a) "We did hold back quite a bit from this story." "There are some things that we looked at on our own, and said we're not going to publish that, and there are other things we talked to the government about." What does that mean? We saw three slides of a very limited nature.

b) "This source believes that exposure was inevitable and is prepared to face that consequence." "He thinks what the NSA is doing exceeds all reasonable boundaries of privacy or necessity." This wasn't over mundane FISA court ordered data releases.

c) In response to the question, "Why do these companies authorize this?" Response: "There is a pretty complicated set of incentives and compulsions. The law does provide that they can give access and a secret surveillance court can make them give access, but in a situation that you have a clandestine program and a very rich and powerful component ... They don't want to litigate this with Facebook, they don't want a chance of it leaking ... Facebook also being a highly regulated industry, having all kinds of issues with privacy and whatever else doesn't want to antagonize the government, so they negotiate it. Now Apple took .. 5 years .. I don't know what happened, but Microsoft joined in 2007 and Apple didn't do it until the end of 2012."

So, the author, who saw all of the slides and talked to the source says that they they left great amounts out of the story, but absolutely confirms & goes in to detail that the companies were complicit with the NSA and that it went beyond what the legally mandated options.

If the denials issued by Facebook, Google, and their respective executives are not an outright lies, and this story is not a hoax (I am assuming it is real since Obama had an opportunity to deny its existence) then there is a compromise in the traffic streams entering and exiting these services provider's platforms, very possibly like the infamous AT&T Room 641A.

This may be more disturbing than we initially believed.
The point is historical preservation: Putting ancient games and systems on the Web as a way to enable people to experience them, as part of digital museums, online academic papers, and such, to provide some (imperfect) context for what would otherwise be dry technical history. It's in JS because it's the only language that doesn't require plugins, and so has a better-than-average chance of running on a variety of different hardware.

http://jsmess.textfiles.com

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3745

http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Javascript_Mess
The thing is "no comment" would basically confirm that 'something' is happening that's secret. Everyone would go conspiracy wild and pull everything they have away from Google.

They probably want to confirm it, but in a completely open and transparent way that assures people there's nothing they should fear here, which they can't do because it's all cloaked in secrecy.
MacroPy's Hygienic Macros in Python
It works in Safari pretty well and Chrome if you run it with a certain flag (see README). I'm not sure about Firefox at this point though.
Grounds for a warrant is a matter for a court, and as it cannot be presented in court, no.

The typical behaviour in the days of IRA activity was that an attack being planned would be discovered through espionage (be it wiretaps, double agents, etc.) but no action would be taken (though several crimes have already been committed: membership of a terrorist organisation, conspiracy to murder, and often various other more minor offences) until they had the bomb with them, on their way to the attack, as until that point they didn't have evidence they could use in court. Typically a road block was set up, quickly (the bomb was normally transported by two cars, about a mile apart, the first one there to spot any police to abort it, so the roadblock could only be set up after this had past), by police and army. Obviously this relies on the people wanting to get out alive (I.e., not willing to blow it up with themselves in hope of getting arresting officer), but while they'd often put up a fight, they normally knew when it was over.
>> Things like search warrants? What has been described in the PRISM slides is a interface in which a NSA agent can access a subject's data at will, in a few clicks and an affirmation that "yes, this person is a terrorist".

I'm not sure where you getting that from the slides. They don't explain how an analyst uses the system.

>>Google has officially denied being a part of PRISM. The way you phrased this statement makes it sound like the OP is sneakily leaving out the PRISM implementation, which would be sneaky if Google were a part of PRISM.

Other media reports from insiders (not information on the leaked slides) make it sound like PRISM is more of an NSA internal thing that aggregates data and presents it to analysts. Based on the description of the slides it sounds like the NSA has some integration with the on site premises of the target company.

So it could be as simple as PRISM is just a way of automating the whole process of getting data from a valid warrant which would be consistent with the denials made tech companies. They don't have any contact with 'PRISM' per se; they have just set up their systems to spit out data when they get a valid warrant.
Why is it a hypocrite thing to do? Glass is a device that takes pictures and so they're banned. Has Google argued that these are ok to be taken everywhere?
How Examiner Censored News to Appease a Loud Conspiracy Theorist
Hopefully all this spurs more transparency like Larry suggests. We're certainly on the wrong side of a slippery slope right now. -(says a Canuck who has to deal with this stuff to)
Commits massive domestic spying operation, people complain.

"Can't win with you guys."

I mean, not much more you can do than just laugh at shit like this. Yeah man, everyone here is so unreasonable with their standard of "I don't like when companies blatantly lie" how hypocritical of them?
What are they alleging he did?
These are great points! I'm definitely not saying you could literally take IRC, give it a routing protocol, make it 8 bit clean, and use it as "the new Internet". It would break down in a lot of the ways you say.

I think we don't know enough yet about how to build reliable network topologies on top of reliable datagram delivery to have immediate answers to all of these issues.

I think one baby-step answer is to say, let's start figuring out how to do this on an application-by-application basis. But then, we're already saying that; that's how Skype worked, and Skype was (a) ambitious and (b) worked!

So then:

* I don't think things need to boil down to a single head. IRC doesn't. I remember IRC working even back during the NSFNet split in the mid-90's, when my ISP (Ripco) lost connectivity to university sites. That's because IRC is a mesh of lots of head-end services that leaf nodes rendezvous with.

* Skype and BT are hard to control because they are deliberately designed to be hard to control, because they're P2P (in the late-90's sense) schemes. Their deployment priority was to work in spite of network policy controls, not with them. But that doesn't need to be true of a next-gen system. Can you think of ideas to make protocols easier to moderate and make policy decisions about? I can, but wouldn't want to belabor the point.

* It's definitely true that running a dynamic routing protocol on top of a transport routed by its own dynamic routing protocol is a recipe for byzantine failure. But mitigating that issue is the fact that routing on top of a well-connected (but not completely-connected) transport is a simpler problem than traditional routing protocols handle; I remember feeling silly going through all the contortions OSPF goes through to carefully forward link state from hop to hop, knowing all along I could just be pulling the whole LSA table from a central database.
two words:
plausible deniability
It sounds like this employee was not even aware that Google's "Transparency Report" specifically does not include the number of FISA orders that they have received:

"Update 2013-06-07: at the time that we wrote this post, we asked Google whether its Transparency Report included data about secret FISA court orders that would send data to the NSA. The response we received was extremely vague, but seemed to possibly be "no". In the wake of yesterday's revelations that the NSA was harvesting data from Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, AOL, PalTalk, Skype, Youtube and Apple, Google has now clearly confirmed that the numbers in its Transparency Report do not include the number of orders or targets for NSA surveillance."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/new-statistics-about-n...

This is especially interesting, because it means Google has acknowledged the distinction between NSLs, which include a gag order, and some other even more secret directive, which services NSA surveillance.

It's also worth noting that if Google was willingly supplying anything PRISM-like, this employee would not be allowed to know without a Top Secret clearance. Any Google employees who do have such clearance face the threat of prison if they tell him or anyone else.
> the work I've done personally hasn't contributed to nuclear war or anything of that sort.

You might find this interesting: https://gist.github.com/zmaril/5326884

TL;DR: if you've contributed to open source in some way, you've probably given Palantir the tools they need to do their work.
HN is auto-encoding trailing slash in links right now, not sure why.
Absolutely right. That's an entirely different problem. One of education. Not implying college as a requirement but rather an understanding of the issues.

It's really easy for politicians to snow voters with statistics, percentages, factoids, contortions and all manner of lies and manipulative tools in order to get their votes. Few people really have command an understanding of all topics that come into play in an election. At some level allowing everyone to vote might be a romantically attractive feel-good idea but it sure creates a situation where you have a lot of really ignorant voters (probably a majority) voting on stuff they simply know nothing about.

While I consider myself a well-rounded and reasonably educated person I would gladly welcome a scenario where, for example, the general public (including myself) is not allowed to vote on, say, medical laws or policies where medical knowledge is paramount to the understanding of the issues at hand.

I am not exactly ignorant about these things but compared to my wife, who is a doctor, I am the equivalent of a moron. Her vote ought to have hugely more value than mine when medical knowledge is key to understanding what you are voting for or against.

Now, I can see a scenario where if I wanted to have a voice in such a vote I could take a test (and maybe a class prior to that) in order to receive qualifications to vote.

I don't see anything wrong with that at all. I really don't see why we insist that everyone's votes are equal for every single issue in front of us. I don't think it makes any sense. I am not, even for a millisecond, trying to be elitist here at all. I include myself with the millions of "ignorant" when it comes to a myriad of topics.

Two hundred years ago people didn't have to deal with the complex array of knowledge domains we have in our hands today. You could make an argument for voting being open to everyone. Today, well, nobody knows everything. Why is it that everyone can then vote on everything? I mean, people vote on matters of economic impact and, if you dig, they don't even know how to balance their checkbook or are "uncomfortable with math". Really?

I really think voting age ought to be increased significantly and voters ought to qualify to vote in areas that require having an understanding of the topic at hand. This would definitely prevent politicians from manipulating the masses into voting based on utter bullshit arguments designed to guide them by the nose.
That is very creepy and suspicious indeed.
The USA is a Surveillance State.

FTFY
I really enjoyed reading this - thanks for posting!

I had totally forgotten about Prolog, and I love how it essentially forces you to approach problems in an absolutely new manner (conceptually) than more traditional imperative programming.
Yes, I think the $20M figure makes it clear it is targeted. They have the ability and authorization to eavesdrop on foreign packets, but that is like drinking from a firehose. They need a way to syphon and interpret the data, and also a way read TLS streams. I think the dates and companies are a combination of getting access to the TLS keys, and actually implementing a sane way of sipping from the firehose. In facebook's case, I think they implemented a way to eavesdrop, and then later compelled Zuck to provide the keys.

The slide about how traffic is routed through the US is really telling. This program works because there is access to the packets.
Since I'm randomly coining terms here, let me try to be clearer.

When I talk about next-hop transport, I mean, "the mechanism by which one node might connect to one or more other nodes in the topology". As soon as those hops form a connected graph --- a very easy problem to solve when your connection fabric is datagram delivery on IP --- routing over the topology is a Solved Problem. Think of what I mean by "next hop transport" as "the lowest common denominator of connectivity that allows any 2 hosts in the world, possibly by means of some number of intermediate hops, to talk to each other".

Then, to be clear about what I'm saying --- though this is probably not how you'd design such a system in the real word, imagine we did this:

* Stopped fussing about IPv6 (and IP multicast, although we've already stopped fussing about that).

* Took IRC

* Made it 8 bit clean and capable of delivering much larger messages.

* Gave it a real routing protocol so that it could express biconnected graphs.

* Built applications on top of that.

That system would provide a service model that would be compatible with a superset of all Internet applications today --- it would allow point-to-multipoint applications along with point-to-point applications, it would admit to client-server, it could express caching and CDN topologies, and it would admit to logical addressing that would enable you to attach to lots of different endpoints on the network with the same, static address, in the same way as I can talk to you now on HN as "tptacek" despite the fact that my IP address is temporarily owned by GoGo Inflight.
Better designs aren't "just around the corner". They're 25 year in the past.

We aren't building them because people are too afraid to build new plants. We're keeping plants based on 50 year old designs around because we need the power. These plants require weapons grade uranium. They are inefficient. They are expensive to run. They are physically able to melt down. They produce more waste than needed. Their waste can be used to make weapons.

These are all solved problems. They were solved decades ago. It's about time that they werer implemented.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/01/carrier-iq-what-it-is-wha...;
I understand that. The previously linked quora answer (from the co-author of Firesheep) says that even in that case one can't launch a passive man in the middle attack against SSL if perfect forward secrecy is used.

Google uses Diffie–Hellman key exchange which provides perfect forward secrecy.

So... If I understand everything correctly, it should be impossible to decrypt passively captured SSL-encrypted communication to/from google.com.
Why would you believe anything these guys have to say on this matter? For one, the government has clearly given them some kind of deniability. For two, if they were given orders under the National Security Letter program, they couldn't admit they had knowledge even if they did.

I don't trust Zuckerberg, I don't trust Larry Page, hell, I wouldn't trust you either if you had to respond.
I was asked in an interview in Denver, so for varying values of "Midwest" HN is notable there as well.