skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would continue under the assumption that they can and do. If confidentiality and authenticity is mission critical, you need to be using a hidden service rather than relying on SSL. A hidden service does not exit the network and does not rely on external validation.
I am afraid that users cannot evade government surveillance.

Sure users can encrypt their mail and other content but many relevant parts of user communication will remain public. The importance of metadata for surveillance cannot be overestimated. In addition, encryption and efficient communication bite each other – there is not just momentary inconvenience, there is constant inconvenience.

Just an example: The OS X 10.8 version of GPGTools, essential if you want to use GPG not just on the command line, just became available a few weeks ago. Users who wanted to use the current version of OS X and GPGTools, had to revert to a beta version. In a productive IT environment, beta versions are not acceptable.
Well your IP determines your location. That other evasdropper is from your ISP, since you first connect to your ISP and then Tor.
Your ISP potentially knows your location which is what the NSA evasdropper gets.

And since its shared with amongst both the evasdropper, potentially NSA knows your location even if you use Tor. They should have indicated that too I guess.
While there's a framework in place that forces you to deny what you've done we cannot believe "denials". As long as there's a gun to their head, whatever they say is irrelevant. This is the true cost of surveillance and oppressive governments; the loss of trust.
Thanks! Right now we have some unique aspects per-city due to the way the data is provided and structured and the fact that we're still prototyping features.

Eventually, we plan to move to an abstracted approach using consistent data formats that means we can spin up a new city without any modifications to the platform.
No but they had 2 out of 3 of those things down to them in the last century. Still, it's probably they're own fault they're as screwed up as they are right?
What does liberalism mean in these "rightwing times"?
We're pretty quick ;)
to 1. For hitchhiking in Europe, that's all one needs - one coarse map with the main roads so one can figure out which roads can be taken and what to tell potential rides ('Are you going to Paris? - doesn't make sense if you're on a road to Rome.').

This lay-of-the-land feeling you're talking about is really important when you're not in control of your own vehicle and have to make decisions such as where to get off. It's like some fun game, really.

footnote: I don't recommend hitchhiking for anyone who's not sure they want to do it. It's dangerous.
(For others though, I can definitely recommend, since it's great fun and the amount of lone people driving their cars all over the continent for business appointments is insane. Sometimes you get a tour guide intoduction to the local landscape, sometimes there's an in-depth introduction to elevator construction in dams.)
I guess "location" means "IP Address". It's not your location in the URL bar, as HTTPS encrypts the connection, not just HTTP request body.
The Internship - Mining Economic Misery for Laughs
I'm sure they can "ask nicely" to get a working cert from a CA. It's why newer versions of browsers are implementing certificate pinning, which should help (but not solve) with the issue by locking the browser to a specific certificate.
[Show HN] Introducing AutOssec: automated Ossec deployment for Chef
We don't know. It slightly depends on how much worse things get in the US. You might get a permanent flag in "your file" as a potential troublemaker, but so might living in the wrong neighborhood, or going to the wrong bar, or being acquainted with someone under NSA suspicion. It's impossible to know what will or will not be put in the file, or which flags will give you grief (without you ever knowing why) when visiting an airport or when applying for a job.
I suppose that might be true (though I don't assume that -- references will be appreciated).

However, that does not at all address the question of whether or not they are healthy for you or not.

Fructose on its own is associated with all kinds of problems. But a fruit is not fructose on its own, and it's possible that other things in fruit make fructose "not a problem".

e.g.: Table sugar is 50% fructose - however, it is not associated with the same kind of problems that pure fructose is associated with.

e.g.: Table salt, Sodium Chloride, is harmless (actually, essential) in small amounts - however, just the same amount of chlorine (if you managed to take the sodium away somehow) will easily kill you. And I don't know, but I'm sure pure sodium if ingested wouldn't be health for you either.

So, the question stands: Is there evidence that fruit is bad for you? Even suggestive evidence? A study of comparable populations whose main difference is the amount of fruit eaten, which shows that the less-fruit-eating population is better off?
"Host it wherever you want" - unless it's physically self-hosted, it's not truly "yours" is it?
The data is shared, but the question is whether or not they can link it.
> (see Aluminum)

For aluminum, it seems to me there was also the novelty. The metal was a new discovery and had that odd low density.
See my other comment in this thread.

I disagree very strongly that my position is apathetic. I'm conscious and alert to what's going on around me and my opinions are well-formed. Choosing not to be outraged isn't the same as apathy.
First, because they are soldiers and that is what they signed up for to do.

Second, it was not 5 soldier lives versus 1 civilian, more likely it was 5 soldier lives versus 140 civilian lives.

Third, yes I myself would probably also make the same decision, favouring the lives of my friends over a bunch of foreigners who are probably on the enemies side.

That doesn't make it less wrong, if I was in that position, and I made that decision, I would still have to be tried for committing a war crime, because that's what it is.
A system of prison-labour combined with house arrest or curfews - if you look at it from a government perspective it is possible to imprison everybody.

I suggest you spent some time reading about oppressive governments before you state you can't do it.
Simplistic, or honest? And do you mean "explained", or "rationalized"?
نتيجة الثانوية العامة 2013 برقم الجلوس من موقع وزارة التربية والتعليم
PSA: If you go looking for trouble, don't be surprised if you get into trouble.
HTTPS doesn't encrypt the domain. That said, Tor does.
The Tsaernevs were Chechens, not Afghans.
Would be better then massive PRISM panic
Sharing the data is not enough, they have to link it to be useful. They probably can, though.
Very easily considering that ISPs are owned by the government and the Singapore population is < 6mm.
To me it's a bit like maintenance: You only notice it's there when it doesn't work.

Like someone else said, we have no idea how much crap they actually catch, maybe the boston incidence is just one instance out of many others that were prevented.
Has identi.ca given private data to the government?
Similarly, I have a little shell function loaded by .zshrc that covers 90% of my use cases:

findit() {
find . -name \* -exec grep -iH $1 {} \;
}
Must also be very very boring.
Also what you may want to hide can change as social norms change.
Every time I read "nothing to hide", I think about all does Jews and how many more would have died with today's internet.
Just because it is possible to be very safe in theory and to some extent in practice doesn't mean that so will happen ifinitely from now on. People manage the data, people manage the access to the data and most importantly people make mistakes. Given that it is possible for the data to leak, there's a small probability for it happening, and thus it will happen eventually. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Murphy's law.

Also it's not just NSA doing this. Maybe in the US, but I assume that in Europe there are many similar centralized government databases full of information about people. And Asia.

The point is, given enough time the shit will hit the fan somewhere. No matter what. Don't try to deny this.
well, it is serious, in that it's the most likely weak point in tor. however, exactly how serious is still an open question.

remember - what the nsa wants is both your location and the site. your location alone only means that you were using the internet (and tor, which itself might be regarded a suspicious). the site alone only means someone was using the site. what the NSA have to do is connect those.

so everything depends on whether the two NSA people can "join up the dots" (graphically, in that diagram, the dark blue dots joining them). because there's nothing "obvious" that tells them that the message with the location is connected to the message with the site.

if they can't make that connection, then they don't know anything useful.

but if they can make that connection, then they know that you (well, someone at your location - an open wifi might give you a little deniability, for example) looked at that site.

the way they might be able to do it is by comparing traffic patterns. if they can show, for example, that every time you send a request, the site receives a request, and if that happens again and again, so reliably that it cannot be chance, then they can make the connection.

so it depends on things like the frequency with which you look at the site, the amount of (tor) traffic when you are around, and the ability of the NSA to assemble and correlate large amounts of data.

[disclaimer: not an expert; i don't know the current state of play on how bad a problem this is; i just know it's a known issue. and if i were going up against the nsa, i wouldn't trust tor alone - i'd use an anonymous, disposable, portable connection device, and keep data to an absolute minimum.]
The term "IP address" would be similarly confusing. What would help is if they explained in context what it means, for example when a lawyer of one's ISP knows about location and site (possible termination of contract, providing it to NSA, selling it and so on).

Also, using a help window when hovering would be a quite better UX than a glossary.
So the question is what they could download before getting caught... each time....

Also another possible threat scenario would be a spearphishing attack that would plant a virus on the network which would slowly (in botnet fashion) access pieces and send it to China a little bit at a time, uncoordinated, many little connections inside the network.

Ask yourself, if you had unlimited funds, spies in the US, and so forth, how would you attack the NSA? Those resources make a sophisticated and successful largescale attack a lot more possible and feasible.
I kind of think the China idea is far fetched too. Sounds a little too boogey-man. Why not a private interest like a cartel / mafia? Or maybe anonymous, etc.?
Then it's in their own interest to publish a few numbers from time to time.
You guessed right, see the key on top.
> , if I'm not mistaken, there is some/strong? evidence linking blood cholesterol to heart disease

Cholesterol is ultimately used (and therefore made) by the body in an attempt to heal conditions that cause heart disease (The main use is for making vitamin D, whose other ingredient -- sunlight -- is in short supply for most people in the western civilization).

Thus, cholesterol is a good marker for pending problems, but is not itself the problem.

Analogy: People who take an advil are likely to report a headache 1 minute after taking it. Therefore, seeing someone take an advil is a good indication for a headache. But it is not the cause of the headache - and in fact, banishing all advil will not make anything better. But somehow, people think that banishing cholesterol will -- despite evidence to the contrary.

(Yes, statins do decrease heart disease, but they increase all cause mortality. And there have so far been many cholesterol-decreasing drugs developed - but none other than statins have decreased heart disease)
The author probably wanted a simple command, that required as few parameters as needed.
Good point. Still a little too meta imo, but I retract my snap judgement.
It is outsourcing domestic spying to an Israeli company (yes, a private enterprise) that produces "lawful interception" software (which it undoubtfuly sells to other customers too). Saying "Israel" is helping NSA spy on its citizens is akin to saying "the United States" gets people hooked on Farmville.
> I don't have nothing to hide from the government.

Imagine some crazy, hard-line politicians get elected and make a law that retroactively throws to jail women who get abortions. Or homosexuals. Or maybe it's a party that decides the 1% is due for some rich-shaming, who knows. Last century it was communists, and maybe the USA will feel nostalgia for that again[1] but, who knows who will paranoia strike tomorrow? This fellow at the NSA could be a very honest person that votes, say Remocratic, and you're a Depublican senator who's had an affair, so naturally this pious person decides to blow some whistles, should this pseudo-crime go unpunished.

Not to mention bullshit non-crimes like smoking pot, drug consumption, or possession of child pornography. They get your pot dealer, now they've got you, and so the government gets to enforce a ridiculous law much more tyrannically.

> If you think the problem is that the government could leak that information, anyone that is currently handling your data (e.g. Google) could.

Not everybody is okay with Google doing that either. That's why I, as an European, support stricter, better privacy laws at the European Union level.

[1] Don't laugh, it has happened. Some months ago, many Chinese nationals were fired from the NASA HQ in Virginia, then arrested, at the request of the Virginian senator. Their crime? Being Chinese, and thus suspects of espionage. Imagine what levels of paranoia this new technology could enable, if put in the wrong hands.
Great article.
As an attendee I really love it when a conference starts and ends with a keynote just like you described. Inspiring, not to specific and fun. At the start of conference it is fun to set the tone and wake you up if it is early.
When the conference has multiple tracks I love it when the last talk of the conference is the same for everybody, just to end together. That talk should send you home with the energy to start doing something. Again not to specific about something so you just reflect that on what you are doing instead of what somebody else is doing.

As a conference organiser these thoughts help me make decisions on who I invite to speak at the beginning and at the end of our conference. Maybe not only who, but definitely the content of the talk. We ask our keynote speakers to make it fun, inspiring and so far that always worked out for us and our attendees.

As somebody who would like to start speaking at conference your ideas and links really boosted that idea. Not that I want to start do keynotes, but I think those rules and the link to the questions Kent Beck sums up.

By the way, really loved your talk at Nordic Ruby!
Would it be helpful to run a forwarding (at least non-exit, possibly entry) Tor node on one’s own computer to mask the Tor traffic actually originating from this machine?
One side was treated different than the other. Pure and simple failure to follow the rules. When government agencies don't follow the rules and treat all as equals then we have problems. Clearly having a 501(c)4 with a political bent isn't the problem or else Obama's reelection campaign relaunch would have seen the same scrutiny and rejection.

> In my opinion, that is just another loophole that needs to be closed, same as religious organization tax exemption

Regardless of your wish to close loopholes, the current law needs to be followed: equally and fairly. Going back to how taxes should work is a side trail and not relevant to how the government has acted against different parties.
"I'm in the desert, with a bunch of hyper-masculine trigger-happy ignorant rednecks as neighbors..."

Funny how averse most HNers are when it comes to perpetuating stereotypes and making negative generalizations based on race or gender, but when it comes to the military or people from "flyover states", it suddenly becomes acceptable.
Vagrant is absolutely fantastic. But I have an issue with the default precise64 box.

If the vm is shut down abnormally (manual power off from virtualbox, unexpected power outage, etc), next time I run `vagrant up`, the vm would be stuck on grub. It appear to be a problem with ubuntu and I need to start the vm in gui mode (as opposed to vagrant's default headless mode) to resolve this (changed timeout=-1 to timeout=0 in /etc/grub.d/00_header and run update-grub).
The fluorescent yellow is usually specifically due to high doses of vitamin B2, and is because vitamin B2 is orange. It's not by itself an indication of a problem.

Some of the B-vitamins can have nasty side effects in huge doses, but those doses are far above the RDA for most people.

EDIT: Note that "huge doses" are still within range of quite a few "megadosed" vitamin supplements. I've experienced annoying side-effects from vitamin B's as a lot of pre-exercise products have high doses as it is believed to have an effect on energy levels (I don't know if the science stacks up or not), but "neon pee" occurs with very low doses of B2 and is by no means an indicator you'll run into any of the other side effects.
From the Google privacy page: http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/

(Heavily redacted, to make it smaller and highlight the more relevant points.)

Information we share
[...]
* With your consent
[...]
* For legal reasons
We will share personal information [...] if we
have a good-faith belief that [...] disclosure of the
information is reasonably necessary to:
- meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process
or enforceable governmental request.
- [...]

In spite of what you want to do, you can't ignore a enforceable governmental request, so Google can't say "We never share anything with the government." . Most sites have similar privacy policies.
It wouldn't be the first time an unintended party gained access to unsuspecting parties' personal information via government surveillance systems. The Prime Minister of Greece, among others, had their cellphones tapped by a hacker using a law enforcement agency's backdoor.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/07/story_of_the_g...
I don't particularly agree with them, frankly, but I would still hold them up as an example of the proper use of civil disobedience as a tool to affect change.

a) broke the law, knew there would be consequences

b) did not cause harm, injure or endanger people in the process

c) used the attention to proselytize their cause, not beg for leniency

So, as a person who does not want society to stagnate, I applaud that there are people out there will to take risks for (perceived) needed change.

However, that only stands as long as there is a society to be 'risking' it against. We need laws and we need structure to be a society. And not every change truly is needed.

Since there is a compelling reason to punish people who break into government weapons facilities (we don't want every high schooler with a naive moral streak imitating it), It strikes me that, while I hold nothing against them and applaud their willingness to take the punishment, I think their does need to be a fairly harsh punishment.

Now, if despite the harsh punishment, more and more people start doing this and if the less brave of us who are in agreement with them are vocal (I said already I'm not particularly in agreement), and the less brave still at least vote, then over time laws and government can change. But in the short term, the brave revolutionaries must take the consequences.
Thanks Joren! Great points about opening and closing. Conferences use the word "Keynote" really loosely, but I think they're best when used to open and/or close to set the context and mood for the event.
An absolutely corrupt elite that made their tiny city state one of the most prosperous and stable countries in south-east Asia. Lee Kuan Yew is probably one of my favourite political figures - studying Asian leaders like him, or China's Deng Xiaoping, can be perception-shattering.

I still think democracy is important, but the order of priorities for a country should go something like stability -> rule of law -> economic prosperity -> democracy. If you mix up the order, you're gonna have a bad time.

As for this case in particular, it sounds more like lobbying by the newspaper industry than any campaign to suppress free speech.
No it isn't. There's a big difference between "was unavailable for a couple of hours" and "censored".
He was an interesting fellow. Interestingly a lot of his work was based on Jacob Grimm's efforts at Germanic mythology and folklore and its connection to Germanic and Indo-Iranian linguistics.

He died just before the end of WWI, and it was after his death that the real nastiness of German nationalism took off. The only reason the SS could find von List acceptable was that they were so batshit crazy[1] regarding their views on the German race that they couldn't see anything else about what he was saying.

[1] For example by the time the Nazis took power, a common theme in nationalist circles was that all languages were descended from the ancient Germanic mother-tongue. Of course once you get to that point, the Germans had to be descended from Aryans (the folks who brought Sanscrit to India). Why? Because the Aryans brought Sanscrit (a language!!) to India and therefore must have been Germans! If you want sources on this idea I am happy to cite them. Again though there were the crazies in List's time but they were nothing compared to the crazies after the war.
I agree that the one of the USA's greatest strengths is in how it welcomes immigrants.

However, when it comes to actually welcoming immigrants, there are many (Western) countries where it's easier to immigrate to these days than the US if you take the route from work permit to permanent residence to citizenship.
> When you have travelled a bit, you come to recognize that people do have interesting social behaviours that are intrinsic to the region and/or culture which are different from your own.

What? Didn't I just say that yes, Scandinavians are not ones to strike up conversations? I merely pointed out that the Scandinavians being relatively reserved, while true, you're exaggerating it IMO.

And you don't know how much I have travelled. I have not been living in that neck of Europe all of my life (and I'm currently not).
It was also incredibly hard to extract, so it was more valuable until technology caught up.
When they say "Israel", they actually mean "Jews". Exploit the prejudice without appearing antisemitic.
Good point, I haven't really checked it out any more than a google search, but it would be interesting to see if they actually published any numbers at all.
the license also undermines the legitimacy of the ruling party without reducing the spread of information and propaganda that goes against the ruling party - these tend to arise from smaller (individual) publications which are not governed by the license.

the motive of free speech restriction just doesn't fit the consequence (grant originators the benefit of intelligence).
i think it might, but only at about the level of adding an extra tor hop (the NSA can compare requests in and out, and try to detect which ones out are extra).
Implications of NSA surveillance on the average Internet user?
He's just expressing how he feels out of place. Being a hero is not what he feels he is cut out for.