skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point is not encryption. The point is that the govt considers any stored communication not have expectation of privacy. Hint: you bank records, health records, credit card purchase data, etc. are also stored data at third-party provider, so by the same logic the govt can declare it not be protected by 4th amendment and thus be accessible without any warrant requirements. Since these data also are communicated electronically, they technically are electronic communications, and if they're stored beyond 180 days (as they universally are), they are accessible without warrants. Big Brother is watching you.
New ‘time cloak’ conceals data so well, even its recipients can’t read it
what does "on such a scale" mean? i mean it could be 40% of what we think it is and its still scary.
My biggest issue with this law is that it equates old emails to mail that is being thrown out. I consider my archive to be more of a filing cabinet though.

This law was written when 15GB of email storage was unthinkable,and it needs to be updated to stay with the times.
I tutored teenagers in physics and math for a while to make ends meet. And they love snapchat. They are also basically ready to be done with facebook.

There are two reasons they prefer snapchat to facebook and texting, respectively, both of which basically come down to privacy:

1) Their parents are on facebook

2) They know that what they say today might look stupid tomorrow, and facebook (and the phone companies) save everything, forever.

Basically, they have figured out that what they say when they are 13 will look ridiculous when they are 17. And what they say when they are 17 will be really cringe-worthy when they are in college. They also know that facebook's track record on privacy is awful, so even if they went through the trouble to create different types of friend lists, with different access settings, etc., facebook could just change everything tomorrow.

I could easily see snapchat expanding to build an entire social network built around the "only see for 10 seconds and its gone" feature, and droves of teenagers moving onto it. If they do, facebook could be in serious trouble.
> Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law.

Great! So if the law - namely the Patriot Act - states the Government has the authority to spy on all your users emails, your legal team reviews it, says it's ok according to the law and you cooperate. Is that how it works?
they are required, by the law, to deny any involvment with the NSA anyway or they can go straight in jail.
The fallout in such a case has to be smaller than it would be if it comes out later that, not only were they in bed with the NSA, they (and the other companies in this situation) blatantly lied about it with their statements today.
The quote isn't talking about FISC warrants. Its talking about regular Article III warrants.

What's deeply ironic about the outrage here is that FISC was created as an extra layer to safeguard privacy. FISC warrants give law enforcement officials permission to initiate an investigation, not to access information that would otherwise require an Article III warrant.
Why is turning away business smart - don't prepaid cards get authed the same way normal cards do? Are they commonly associated with fraudulent orders? I am genuinely curious, they seem like they would be generally safe for merchants to accept online.
Mark Zuckerberg addresses PRISM
I think you need to think one level ahead. The product is not photo sharing; it is the SDK. What they have shown is a simple application that shows what data the SDK could provide for your application. I can see this having some really cool applications in iOS/Android multi-player gaming, for example.

Also - and I know this is repeated often - this is a site for hackers, and this is a really cool hack. Maybe I'm not so smart, but it took me a while to figure out how it was being done, and I thought it was really clever.
Milewise.com shut down by Yahoo - Who can I use now?
Looking for a site similar to milewise and can't find one. All of them seem to be far more limited than what milewise was.

Any help is really appreciated!
Making a Mountain Out of a Digital Molehill
But, why is the conversation technically yours? What is materially different about the metadata (originated by the callers) and the voice data from the point of view of the phone company? It is all data flowing over their network, which is created by the private parties who use their service.

I honestly don't get this exception that's made for metadata where the phone company is concerned.
Prattling on like this about how all innovation comes from the market was perhaps understandable back in the 1980s. How can you claim this now, on HN?
How much consciousness does an iPhone have?
An old dot-matrix or label / thermal receipt printer will do. Buy it at a Flea Market / yard Sale / hamfest / craigslist. Make sure you get a ribbon with it ;)
True. However, the prior probability of that statement being true is exceedingly remote, so a non-denial of that still leaves me relatively certain that I don't have to worry about aliens conspiring with the federal government to spy on me.
Based on the sentence two lines before it, it likely means "millions of users":

> 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. [...] Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false.
Yeast-powered fuel cell feeds on human blood
I am seeing that as basically defensive coding. Similar to how you may do this:

switch (mode) {
case FOO: ... break;
case BAR: ... break;
}

Do you need the very last break? Technically no, but including it so that you don't forget it when you need it later can be a good idea.

(Also, I think explicitly using comparison operators in conditionals might be the idiomatic thing to do in Go. Someone correct me here if I'm wrong about that.)
Everybody wants to commoditize programmers. Commoditizing is how you build mass production, mass production is how you get cheap accessible goods, cheap accessible good is how you keep 7 bln people fed and reasonable comfortable. I get it that for a professional programmer the threat to his priesthood status is unpleasant, but it's where it is going, and it is inevitable.
I would like to believe these reports from Google [1] and Facebook [2], but someone is not telling the truth.

There is evidence that directly contradicts their stories (i.e. The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims "collection directly from the servers" of major US service providers. [3]).

Who are we to believe?

[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.ca/2013/06/what.html

[2] https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10100828955847631

[3] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-n...
AOL Censors Huffington Post Former Headline Story About PRISM
How's that a moral choice though? If anything it's a nationalistic choice, which is totally fine.

To the OP, they do hire H1bs for their commercial products. I know an Australian and Indian working there.
>People want even more freedom than the GPL offers, they'd rather use the MIT or BSD license.

Oh please, stop with 'people' generalisations. First off GPL is the most used open source licence there is, and that doesn't mean it's what the 'people want'. Just as certain as MIT or BSD is also not what 'people want'.

The 'people' is a diverse mass of individuals which have different needs and ideologies, some want the source code of modifictions/derivatives as an exchange for their code, others want their name retained in the source code commentary, etc.

Also many times developers chose one licence for one type of project and a different one for another type of project. What we typically see is that for full application style projects, copyleft is dominant, while for component/framework style code, permissive licencing is dominant.

Copyleft and permissive licences caters for different needs, they fullfill those needs and hence they are used.
None of that information is protected by the 4th amendment, and never has been (some of it is protected by statute). See: https://ssd.eff.org/your-computer/govt/privacy.

The 4th amendment says: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects..."

It does not say anything about your bank's, credit card company's, etc, records about you.
What chipset do you use to manage baseband communications? Do you implement any Trusted Computing standards? Can you tell us anything about the hardware architecture?
Virtualbox with a shared directory and no network connection does this for me for quite a while. XP runs much more smooth under Linux than on bare metal...
> Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers.

Amazing how all them, to a company, are using the "direct access" phrase.

Plausible deniability for the whole world to see along with the revelation of the biggest spying operation in history.
<sarcasm>That's the problem with you geeks: you need real evidence for everything. Can't you just have faith? Can't you learn to just believe?</sarcasm>
Boxer for iOS
Join the GitHub Archive mailing list or read this page for updates on latest GitHub projects (for days when HN has its political mood swings)

http://us5.campaign-archive2.com/home/?u=439aa16a39e4b10e0b6...
Probably one of the easiest ways to stand out in a typical US crowd. More noticable than hat and sunglasses. If the purpose it to make video surveillance not as notable but also not attract attention than a large hat and sunglasses in hot weather or a scarf and hat in cold weather (even better) will do the trick. Also, modifying hair color and facial hair features is a good trick.
The thing is, you don't know about the abuse until its too late. Plus he's retired at the time, he'll do some 'consulting' and maybe speak for a lot of money but he'll have his security detail and he's done.

Kind of the ultimate abuse would be some future presidential candidate's records being gone through and perhaps in his youth he had some questionable friends or something. Our politics and politicians are not nearly civil enough to have these kinds of tools and information available. It's basically just a hope and a wish that the NSA folks with access take their jobs seriously and take the nation's security seriously and that they are otherwise trustworthy about it. Not long after 9/11, anthrax, anthrax that originated in a top secret US defense lab was sent to politicians in DC... In Fort Hood Texas, a member of the US military, a guy they vetted and indoctrinated, went through their background checks and they accepted shot up a bunch of people.. These were trusted people with trusted access.

The knives are already out, should we shut this stuff down, as soon as there is another terrorist anything the other side will use it for political gain. How do you undo it?
0x80 is 0b01010000.

Consider that (foo & 0x80) is (0x16 == 0b00010000) if foo is 0x16.

(This may or may not be the intended functionality one way or the other!)
You can connect to IRC because the IRC server is not behind a NAT. Try to run an IRC server on your host which runs behind the consumer NAT which runs behind the CGN. Yes, if the gear supports it, you can use uPNP for the first, and PCP for the second, to open up a port.

Unless someone is using it already.

Then you need to choose another port.

Which you need to communicate to the other clients behind the NATs around the world. Fine, we'll just update the DNS server with an SRV record. You probably will always have a spare public IPv4 address to map the ports 53 to something on the inside network, so this might work.

Until your CGN does not have enough IPv4 addresses/ports to permanently allocate one to you. Oh, by the way this is a great way to introduce a "premium" tier service with a public IP address - if you really want to run a server then you can buy an address. So doing the PBX-style circuit switching with NATs is not really in the economic interest of the ISPs. (Not saying that they need to do all the accounting/logging).

If the app is awesome enough that the users will pay extra to get the public address - great.

That will help to further exhaust the IPv4 addresses and drive the prices up. Rinse, repeat.

I am of course exaggerating.

But this presentation from NANOG may be a less biased view (though Lee's employer does deploy IPv6, so you can argue it is biased):

http://www.nanog.org/sites/default/files/wed.general.howard....

Full disclosure: I am into this IPv6 thing. Before that, I spent ~10 years of my life at a random 5-letter vendor to find the bugs in the code and misconfigurations causing outages in people's NATs. It's refreshing to be able to use access-lists again. (the latter statement is only partially correct, but this is a topic for another rant, IPv6 has tons of its warts as well :-)
NSA Dragnet Debacle: What It Means To IT
if you think devs working on these framework don't understand client side javascript/HTML framework on its own and need to be explained for their particular framework, may be they outta be not writing code at all.

Also, another thing that bothers me about MS is that they hide so much real HTML/javascript from devs with visual basic like facade called webforms that MS devs don't get into a new platform unless they see a document like "Angular js for .net" title.
http://youtu.be/cGKEkI8IV2o?t=7m43s
Amazing how much Zuck's PRISM response was like Page's. Almost like the same people were telling them what to say.
A picky hetero woman doesn't magically become gay.

If you're equally attracted to men and women but only have sexual relations with members of one group, you are bi.

There certainly is a continuum from straight to gay. Plenty of people have tried to "cure" gays, including some unhappy with their own orientation. These efforts are failing, suggesting where we are born on this continuum is not in our control to change.

If you feel like you are able to change your orientation, it may be that you fall closer to the middle of the spectrum than most. Do you believe it was a choice or your environment that most shaped your orientation?
Even better, receipt / thermal printers. No ribbon and pretty much untraceable. Lots of them lying around second hand in flea markets and yard sales.
I think a related story about the evolutionary link between jaw muscles and brain size was recently posted somewhere on HN. This article seems like a logical extension of that trend.

http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040322/full/news040322-9.htm...
A better carefully worded response is still a carefully worded response. Google is in a difficult place because we all expected this to be happening, there are now documents suggesting that it has been happening, and no one takes at face value anything that sounds like a lawyer wrote it.

EDIT: I mean: (a) No one cares if they have heard about a program called "PRISM" when the point of that program is to aggregate data from other programs. (b) Anyone who is actually innocent in this needs to stop mentioning "direct access to servers": no one expects this program to be directly accessing servers. (c) We also don't care whether actions were "in accordance with the law", as the constitutionality of the surrounding laws is part of the debate.

I will say that "Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false." is a good statement to make. It sounds broad in a good way and doesn't appear to have many weasel words, other than specifying "Internet activity" and not email or general activity. Are Google searches even "Internet activity", or is he referring to Google Analytics / Google +1 / 8.8.8.8 DNS?
From what I understand, modern X applications run remotely are just painting a region of bytes to be shot over the wire anyway. I'll borrow X terminology for a second here, what functional difference is there between these two approaches:

X client -> (network) -> X server

Wayland "client" -> wayland intermediary "server" -> (network) -> wayland intermediary "client" - wayland server

I get the feeling that the pushback (not necessarily yours, but in general) might be rooted in the visual interface where an X server will manage and composite remote applications as if they were local but vnc and rdp (in most use cases) offer a window to the remote system. As I understand it, the former presentation style isn't precluded by wayland's approach.

Wayland's design for a client and server on the same machine doesn't do much more than pushing a buffer full of painted bytes to the server. So anything fancier than that isn't something they refuse to implement for just a network connection, they don't do it at all.
An informative read if you're curious about US sentencing: http://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentence...;

excerpt: "People reporting on federal criminal justice — whether journalists or bloggers — routinely report on the statutory maximum sentence that a defendant could hypothetically get, an oft-ridiculous figure calculated by taking all the charged crimes and adding up the maximum punishment for each. This is usually followed by some sort of pronouncement that THIS PERSON CHARGED OF MINOR CRIMES FACES MORE JAIL TIME THAN YOU'D GET IF YOU BEAT A TODDLER TO DEATH WITH AN UNCONSCIOUS NUN WHILE RAPING A BLIND LIBRARIAN, or words to that effect."
In this case, wouldn't it be acceptable? I mean, if we stay in the context of a burner and security is the main feature, would it matter so much if it was like basically talking on a half-duplex voice call? Again, if the main goal is security and anonymity, would it matter so much if the conversation wasn't as fluid as a 'regular' call?
People rarely like bad news when it means great change.

Isn't this exactly what jlgreco said? You've argued yourself in a circle.
There are subsections within large companies; it's usually unclear to most employees what that subsection really does (that is, if they're even aware of the existence of the subsection to begin with).

Companies try to gauge level of "trustworthiness" and transfer folks higherups feel are trust-able into the subsections where work is done that some may feel is ethically dubious.
Does it matter? What are the odds these guys are telling the truth when the President himself has lied about it? Maybe it's a concern of national security?
Show HN: Reviews Checker for Android Developers
Even if I could change, I wouldn't want to.

If you gave me a pill to turn straight, I wouldn't take it.

I like being gay and wouldn't change it. That's why we have fucking great big parades and talk about 'pride' and all that. That other people are assholes and bigots ain't my damn problem.
No, they're nonrandom. And more to the point, it's worth defending against some threats even if you can't cover all.
> Careful parsing of the constitution, careful parsing of various laws, very very careful interpretation of the words on the page.

There is no "careful parsing" of the Constitution going on. Just people who never read the document very carefully other than what they thought the teacher said in 8th grade.

This is the entirety of the 4th amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

If any "parsing" is going on, it's creative parsing to make the argument that information you freely handed over to Google and AT&T, or indeed information that was never even in your possession but was generated by AT&T (e.g. call data records, web server logs) is somehow your "papers or effects." Tell me how that is anything other than creative parsing? How is a document that you never even had in your possession somehow your private information?
ok now... how Twitter's CEO will respond with 140 chars?
Verizon said what they could: we have to comply with the orders when we get them. Nothing weaselly, maybe because we read the judge's order.

Why should we trust the safety of any information on our searches, emails, location data, chats etc stored by Google? Stop storing it
Mark Zuckerberg Comments On PRISM
I want to respond personally to the outrageous press reports about PRISM:

Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers. We have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information or metadata in bulk, like the one Verizon reportedly received. And if we did, we would fight it aggressively. We hadn't even heard of PRISM before yesterday.

When governments ask Facebook for data, we review each request carefully to make sure they always follow the correct processes and all applicable laws, and then only provide the information if is required by law. We will continue fighting aggressively to keep your information safe and secure.

We strongly encourage all governments to be much more transparent about all programs aimed at keeping the public safe. It's the only way to protect everyone's civil liberties and create the safe and free society we all want over the long term.
If the next logical step for Twilio is an IPO, does that mean that they're not profitable? If they are profitable, why is an IPO the logical next step, does an IPO provide specific value to the company (or any company) beyond financing?
Note how similarly worded this response is to that posted by Larry Page: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html

The cynic in me wants to believe the coincidence is because Facebook has equally good lawyers as Google.
How could an entire social network be built around the "only see for 10 seconds and its gone" feature? I'm genuinely curious.
When something is against the law, how do you go about getting an accurate estimate of those who break it?

It's not like people will voluntarily admit to crimes on the off chance that it may get the law repealed.
And those will be a different set of kids - next generation.
I don't buy it. What I quoted above doesn't say anything about US persons or non-US persons, about content or metadata, about this law or that one. It just says,

Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information
about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale
is completely false.

Now, Page may well be lying, but he definitely isn't weaseling. I'm pretty sure that denial covers both of the possibilities you're referring to.