skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now that PRISM has been exposed, the NSA should consider outsourcing data collection to China. They already have a huge team of elite hackers with a proven track record of breaking into top tech companies. Chances are, the Chinese hackers already have a backdoor on your servers. And with their low labor costs, we could save US taxpayers millions!
Can you link to where he says that? I'd like to read more, it sounds interesting.

Also, coke (both the drug and the soft drink) is well over 50 years old, but I understand the point you're getting at with being wary of consuming substances that are not well understood.

On a side note, some people who argue in favour of legalising cannabis are also argue in favour of legalising cocaine, as they reckon keeping it illegal does more damage than legalising it (Mexican cartels). In places like Bolivia, people chew coca leaves as a natural stimulant (cocaine comes from processed coca leaves). I'm not sure where I stand on legalising cocaine though, I can see two sides to the argument.
It's not "simply to avoid judgement". You're hand-waving "judgement" away as something meaningless. It can and does cause people to treat you poorly.

An example: If you work in support for anything like the general public, you either don't swear or keep it to a minimum. You may swear like a trooper in your private life, but it's not worth the social friction to "be open to everyone" in your support job.

Basically you're taking the argument to a purely theoretical level, where everyone needs to buy in for it to work, and that's just not feasible.

And in any case, whether or not we're open with each other is an entirely different argument as to whether we're open with an authoritative entity that doesn't always act in the best interests of the general public.
Well yeah. It's not often that one side is definitely bad and the other is definitely good.
And importantly, a lot of countries do have laws against mega doses, causing pills with more than 150% of RDA to be illegal, making it really hard to get a decent supplementation, especially during winter.
Ancient Taoism, ie. the real deal, emphasized living as simplistically as possible and eschewed such novelties. It later became politicized as a court tradition around the emperors of Ancient China, and underwent significant modification. It is this latter period from which much of the surviving literature derives - a common historical trajectory to most ancient philosophies.
Apparently those people in the twitter feed are fine with getting registered and living under high transparency.

I suggest the NSA to record them having sex to see how clean they are. Obviously the videos will be encryped so only intelligence agencies can watch them.
Fun novelty account, but if you actually read some of the tweets, you'll see that some of these people are being facetious. For example:

> NSA wants to spy on me? GO AHEAD! You'll see some sick shit!!! #NSA #privacy #government #internetsex #bringiton

> I'm fine with the NSA listening to my calls, but god help them if they're reading my twitter drafts.

> I'm fine with the NSA listening to my phone calls. Maybe the next time I'm getting unhelpful advice from AT&T, they could jump in and help

I know this is just a novelty account, though some on here have already called to "dox" these people. Remember that when you see a Tweet, you are literally seeing 140 characters of text, with no context to what that person was referring to or the kind of flippant personality that person may have.

Judging someone you had no previous knowledge based on a brief message...hmm, sounds like what our government agents do from time to time.
This is the whole problem with lacking transparency. The trust is broken now, and the whole network operates on some level on the basis of trust.
We may have created problems for ourselves, but life expectancy doesn't seem to be one of them.
Dataflow programming is underrated.

A few years ago, I had to help our EEs write some testing software in LabVIEW. The first thing that shocked me was the system was immune to bad data. Secondly, how elegantly it utilized multiprocessing and multithreading hardware.

I wish researchers would work on graphical, signal-based, synchronous languages like this. LabVIEW gracefully solves some of the biggest issues with functional and object oriented languages. Why hasn't more work been done in this area?

Has anyone else had a similar experience?
Do you leave your doors open all the time, allowing strangers through your abode to perhaps help themselves to a drink or use your toilet? Some degree of personal privacy is necessary for most people to feel safe. There aren't many cultures that do have completely open living arrangements, and those that do tend to be small tribal affairs where people generally know each other.
You know very little about Russia. I suggest you discuss the article at hand.
DOXX THEM IN THE NAME OF PRIVACY!

:-/

congratulations, you just stooped to the very same level of counter-productive-intelligence as those who are orchestrating the transparent monitoring of our society.
We shouldn't forget how much $80 billion actually is.

For that amount, they should be saving in the order of 40,000 people's lives from terrorism a year to justify the spending.

(I've plucked the intervention per life-year saved from here: http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/UCSBpf/readings/inter...

and assumed each life-save has 50 potential years of their life left)
The cookie monster only goes after people with lots of cookies, especially when they don't even realize they have them.

Unfortunately, there's still no NoScript for Chrome :(.
For me, yes. When they say "You have passed the maximum reading limit", it's incognito-time
Intertubes
The Cochrane Review is a widely respected organisation who publish careful, reviewed, systematic meta-studies.

Here's a link to a metastudy about gastro-intestinal cancer and anti-oxidant supplements. (http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD004183/antioxidant-supplemen...)

That introduction is very clear. it is unambiguous. "Trial quality was exceptionally good". "Based on properly designed and conducted randomised clinical trials, convincing evidence that beta-carotene, vitamin A, vitamin C, and vitamin E or their combinations may prevent gastrointestinal cancers is not found [...] These antioxidant supplements even seem to increase mortality."

Here's the study for lung cancer. (http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD002141/antioxidant-drugs-for...)

Note that these people would really want to find effective cheap treatments for cancer, so it is in their interest to find that vitamin supplements work.
Last week I heard a perfect answer from a speaker from ISOC at a conference:
If you are claiming you have nothing to hide, you are not a social creature. Normal people sometimes feel embarrassment or shame after some error, and then we would hope nobody saw that.
Do not mistake the NSA's security to that of your average government office.

Since we are probably talking about petabytes of data, this would not be a one-time download, but would require continuous access to query the dataset interactively, which wouldn't be hard to detect if you are on the look out for it.
Your corrective is well taken. The "Didn't work, did it!" response obscures the real dangers. These enthusiasts for blanket surveillance should be asked to consider "Who watches the watchers?". One answer is: you never know.
New language for checking things in a reusable way
Yes. However, they are not all equal. Most (specifically any advertised name-brand) are horrid. Look at the Copper, Iron, IODINE, etc. in most multivitamins. When you take a multi, know what's in it and that it makes sense for your diet (or not-so-good-diet).
It's naive to pretend the trade-off doesn't exist already or that a decision hasn't been made. The trade-off has always existed- a warrant can be produced to violate your privacy. It's just a question of what the procedure should be, what information can be searched, what situations it can be used in, etc.

I don't think there is much opposition in the general population to searches where probable cause exists. But that is indeed a trade-off between security and privacy.
Imagine if the US hacked into the Chinese data repository on their citizens?

Imagine if the US hacked into the Russian data repository on their citizens?

I'm sure it's already happened, and I'm sure it is not a huge coincidence that Google and Facebook are not the biggest search / social networking companies in those countries.

No idea about the others mentioned.

Oh and what about if those countries respective agencies have an agreement to share certain data amongst each other to make things a little easier?
We too would like to make known we do not share any of the high quality client data we have available but we're always open to offers. #callmemaybe
Those people's lives are probably inconsequential. Nobody cares about the things they have the 'courage' not to hide.
Sorry hn killed the formatting :(
It's easy to say that "it probably won't happen" today. But so much can happen to change the game in the future. Budget cuts to security, internal employees being "in" on the hack, etc.

And what happens when it actually gets hacked? Nothing. Nobody will come out and say "our bad we shouldn't have collected and stored all this sensitive data". Heck, you would be lucky if it's not used as evidence for why further pushes for massive surveillance is needed.

Then there is also the issue that even though the data might be stored with good intentions today, we don't know who is going to be in charge tomorrow, or after that. Whatever Obama promises only lasts until somebody else becomes president, who thinks that all this data that is already stored and ready, should be used in new interesting ways. The data doesn't even need to leak and be hacked for it to be misused, when the owners of the data are in constant flux.
Reading the article slowly, it's a lot less than it is suggested. To qualify one must be covering Singapore news and have 50000 unique visitors from Singapore per month.

I think it is a pretty catastrophic law, but it is not the same as saying all blogs must be licensed.
Oh, definitely. Maybe before we rush to adopt smartphones, we should stop to consider the consequences of blithely giving this technology such a central position in our lives.
The trials show vitamins don't help cancer patients. They also show that OD-level supplementation of vitamins that are hard on the liver (vitamin A) increase mortality in cancer patients. That last part shouldn't surprise anyone. I'm sure if you give weakened people who already take chemo and whatnot, high levels of anything, mortality will increase.

They say nothing about the effects of healthy people, or the effects of lower (common) doses. I don't understand how the author jumps from that, to the concusion that multivitamin pills are bad for everyone.
I think RT is great. They're certainly an alternative to American "mainstream media".

Our media (mostly) give Obama a pass about everything they were foaming at the mouth about when Bush did it. RT offers a much different perspective to our media that had a "thrill going up my leg" at the prospect of an Obama presidency.

But we shouldn't give Russian state funded media a free pass to run photos with signs that say "INTERNET CENSORSHIP WORST IDEA EVER" when Russian censorship and reaction to dissent is harsher than that in Singapore or most other countries.

There's a word for stories like that. The word is not "journalism". The word is "propaganda". In this case, state funded propaganda.

RT is much like the Pravda of yesteryear. I saved a quip about the NY Times and Pravda: "My basic view on the New York Times is that it is best read the way the Soviets used to read Pravda: The purpose of reading it isn't to learn the truth, it's to learn what those in power want you to think."

Keep in mind that you read RT to learn what Russia wants you to think. Then it's great. That's the point I was trying to make.
I think the most embarrassing question you could ask all of them is : could you give me a summary of the last three century of History ?
Welcome to HN :)

"Show HN" just makes it stick out more if someone is skimming for new content, since it shows you're not just a submitter, but also the creator. No worries though.
I admit I believed the headline. Somewhat amusing article, but I can't see this doing well on HN.
One important thing to recognize is that: "You can read my text/call logs" !== "You and the rest of the world can know everything about me"

So someone saying they "have nothing to hide" doesn't really mean they would answer all the above question publicly, but rather there is no electronic record/evidence of anything they know they want to keep private.

And, as another point of discussion, whilst the matters raised in those questions may be deeply personal for many people, frankly I wouldn't be concerned if my answers to those questions were in the public domain.
It was a joke. They are parodying the (allegedly) vague wording that companies used. E.g.

direct access to ports 81-49152 on any of our servers.

Obviously they could use a port outside that, etc, etc.
I used to get really bad headaches like every other day.

One extra busy and strange week I forgot to take my multivitamin a few days in a row.

And it dawned on me my headaches went away.

Now I've stopped taking my multivitamin for a year and I've only had headaches I can count on one hand.

Tried another brand multivitamin and same headache problem happened so I'm done with that.
I don't understand in how far this is an act of shaming. If I walk around the pool and tell people that I like to get thrown into the pool I expect somebody to throw me into the pool.
It must be "A, NSA Notify".

$ grep 'nsanotify' /etc/services
ansanotify 116/udp # ANSA REX Notify
ansanotify 116/tcp # ANSA REX Notify
How a law school graduate published the first book about the NSA
It would be 'funny cuz it's true' only if atheists were not responsible for the greatest amount of death in the 20th century (ie Communists of various shades in Russia & China).
That's part of the reason for the Utah datacenter. Consolidating several NSA datacenters around the country into one super-secure fortress.

First, separate offline networks and the most advanced network security ever conceived will be put in place at this new datacenter.

If you're thinking that a reverse engineered Stuxnet might be able to hop over to the secure network, I doubt it, and even if it does then what will it do to transmit the data out?

It is slightly insulting to the engineers and security experts whose full-time job is to keep the NSA secure, but I suppose this scenario is worth discussing just in-case someone thinks of a clever way which the NSA has not.

The most vulnerable aspect is any remote access either to company servers or to the NSA search tools. I would hope that a data dump or unrestricted access to the NSAs "database" would be completely impossible. Even with extensive insider knowledge of the Utah datacenters systems, an ex-employee would have zero chance of gaining unauthorized access.
Can't think a possible reason... it just doesn't compute. Atheism and Agnosticism are not a belief but a lack of one because of rational reasons. What kind of possible quarrel between these two?
My Reaction to Eric Schmidt (2009)
> Well, what more did the industry do than destroy the bill?

I don't want to talk about a monolithic "The Industry". But there's no doubt that some companies and people involved in mega-dosing or in vitamin supplements are evil. I don't mean wishy-washy "making lots of money and being a bit cynical" kind of evil, I mean actually evil.

Mathias Rath has probably caused the death and infection of very many people in South Africa because of his AIDS denialism and promotion of vitamins as a cure for AIDS. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthias_Rath)

(http://www.irinnews.org/report/38577/south-africa-controvers...)

(http://www.irinnews.org/report/78739/south-africa-tac-prevai...)

Remember that this was during mid to late 2000s when HIV / AIDS was a significant killer in South Africa, infecting nearly a third of the population (http://www.avert.org/south-africa-hiv-aids-statistics.htm)

Patrick Holford has written books with titles like "Food is better medicine than drugs: your prescription for drug free health" - people are turning away from conventional medicine and using multivitamins. He's not as scummy as Rath, but he's pretty scummy. Selling vitamins as a cancer-cure to desperate people when there's no evidence that it works is unpleasant.
> Then he decided to start releasing information according to his own political agenda.

What is his political agenda, and what information has he released that is in line with it?

Are you saying that he releases fake/forged documents, or that he gets sent all sorts of documents and only releases those that suit his agenda?

If the latter, do you have evidence to back up this serious allegation? Care to share it with us?

What sort of documents/information would he receive but refuse to release?
Listen while you work: The magic of music and what it does to your brain.
I think it's entirely wrong for Americans to sympathize with Boston victims while disregarding and in many cases outright denying the existence of victims of drone strikes. It's hypocrisy at its finest and especially rich coming from self-proclaimed Christians.

That is exactly the problem with nationalism.

I suspect you're probably saying that it's understandable for Americans only to feel the reality of this kind of cruelty when it affects "their own", and my response is that it may be understandable, but then so are the mechanisms of cancer.
Counting Characters
Most frightening thing is that some of these people really don't have anything to hide.

Just out of curiosity I went to the blog of one of the first mentioned twitter users (https://twitter.com/MeaniePants/status/342430468442042369 ) and found photos and stories about toilet training of her child. WTF.

>I also think it's histerical that I put a pic of Lily pooping on Facebook and it received the most likes ever. I think even more than her birth photo or Roman's homecoming pics.
We don't even know if this thing has a public interface and even if it did access would probably be limited to a couple dozen IPs.

Furthermore, the article assumes that an adversary gets somehow the data. We're probably talking about petabytes of storage, how on earth could you get hold of all that data? Download it? That would raise a gazillion alarms.
Iceland? Lovely little country. I've been seriously considering learning Icelandic lately...
Young people tend to be less aware/accepting of morally shady things normal people do as they had less time themselves to make mistakes.
Funny Linux commands
ViziCities Update #2: London Underground in 3D with live trains, and Leap Motion
You are confusing security and privacy. The people in question are not speaking for lower security, they are speaking for lower privacy.
It sounds to me as if what he did could be considered witness intimidation. Lawyers are considered to be officers of the court, and are held to a higher ethical standard than police officers, who are allowed to use deception to gather evidence.

This prosecutor is probably lucky that the only thing that happened to him was that he got fired. He could just as easily have been referred to the Bar Association for sanctions, including disbarment.
The Perfect Desktop - Linux Mint 15 (Olivia)
Facetious if anything, the sheep were a nice touch.
The OP is posting BS links to BS sites, this is the 2nd today.. Linkbaiting for points ill guess...
I was a bit suspicious about the truthyness of the article, until I saw "rabbits eat onions" at the bottom.
The scenario that a bigger adversary gaining access to the data is definitely troublesome. We also need to consider other scenarios.

How about the ramifications of the pipes created for NSA, getting leveraged by other actors?

What happens when a rogue employee hacks the infrastructure created for providing the pipe to NSA?

What if a group of such rogue employees across multiple companies act in concert, may be creating a cartel?

Such things have the potential to remain unnoticed for a pretty long time, ruining lives of innocent people.

Now, let's replace the word rogue with innocent and intelligent but cleverly manipulated by sophisticated player and the scenario reads bleaker.

To believe that such things haven't happened before or aren't happening now, in some part of the world, will be pointless.

Consider a scenario in developing countries: let's say you wrote some piece of code (unrelated to telecom) for a businessman. Let's also say that the businessman runs many companies, one of which provides BPO services to telecom companies. Let's say that the businessman wants to exploit you. He can very well track your location using the network of the telecom company without that company knowing it, let alone the law enforcement officials. He can remain under the radar because the request can be clubbed with other legitimate ones.

This is not just a US problem, it's a global problem.

It is precisely for such reasons, that we need a manifesto about data collection policies, like "Do No Evil" or "The Patent Pledge."
Any data can become public at some point.
> Imagine if the US hacked into the Chinese data repository on their citizens?
> Imagine if the US hacked into the Russian data repository on their citizens?

"Your copying all of my private data from several sources to the nsa, what is another country hacks that and copy it ?"
"No worry, we can hack them and copy their citizens data too"

I fail to see how to answer the concern for the question, or how that should be reassuring in anyway. That we can, or cannot, or already do similar data repository in other countries is irrelevant to the question "should all of my data be aggregated in a single juicy store".

I'm not even sure I agree with OP's premises (especially since I'm an European, for me the NSA thing is a foreign governement spying on me and I expect the EU new data privacy laws to be much more strict than the safe harbor joke we've had so far), but your answer doesn't address it at all.
Customer Culture Revisited
These are immaterial obstacles. It will have a public interface otherwise data would not get in (and there does not exist anything like a one way street in computer networking).
Extracting interesting parts of the data can be done with the tools that are available to the agents. If someone breaks in successfully, they will have someone inside feeding them. Wetware is still the weakest link in security most of the times.
Why not both? Better yet, why not try to figure out[1] what you're deficient in, and supplement that (either by diet, or supplements as needed)?

It is silly to just assume everyone has the same dietary needs and can be given broad, vague advice like "eat a balanced diet", when that could easily be a full-time job itself and all that might actually be lacking is just a few micronutrients, or just have a subtle intolerance to something that needs to be removed from your diet. These problems are not as uncommon as you may think, and there is too much variation to not only suggest one 'fix-all' solution, but to assume that one can even be had right now. Learn about your specific needs and treat those; don't go off of random anonymous internet comments or bloggers looking for page views.

[1] One possible way to do this: http://www.spectracell.com/patients/our-tests/patient-micron...
Hague: Law-abiding Britons have nothing to fear from GCHQ
It seems like what you're describing is close to what GetSatisfaction provides.

The obvious advantage of running your own is integration with your CRM system and moderation powers.
This is news.ycombinator.com, not obvioussatire.ycombinator.com.
"No worry, it's impossible to break/hack/destroy/do !" is the start of so many disasters.

Especially funny (in a way) at a time where leaks of secret/classified data and informations is becoming endemic.