skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why limit it to terrorism? With access to email, instant messages, social media streams, search terms and some damn fine data scientists Google could sniff out an awful lot of wrongdoing.

Should they be developing software to figure out who is beating their kids and notify the local police? Cheating on thier taxes and notify the IRS? Breaking their marriage vows and notify thier spouses?
I've never heard it said that anyone was required to deny involvement. Did you mean that exactly as you wrote?

I think there's a world of difference between a gag order where you are not allowed to confirm, and an order to explicitly deny involvement. I'm not saying the former is "good", but there's a difference.
Playbook is pretty useful haha so that leaves a ton of room for usefullness.

Still curious how I could use Mosaic?
Yes. That is a very standard ratio.
Usually telecom equipment is near the lower bound of the computer power needed to carry calls; there is not much room for advanced signal processing, speech-to-text, etc.
Get a VPN anonymously, pay in Bitcoin and never expect third party companies to adhere to any policy they can potentially break.

Anything else involves trust.
Sprite3D.js, a small library for generating and manipulating CSS 3D transforms
A lot of people get excited and set it up, then realize there's no one else they know who is willing to use it, rendering it pointless.
Are you suggesting that the executive branch has been taken over by the right wing?
> Why do you assume the 4th Amendment applies for foreign people?

Because its a limitation on the power of the federal government that has no restrictions as to nationality of targets written in to it.
If I were guessing (and I am): probably not, but later stage investors usually want their ~10-20% of the company in a round. After a string of "no, we don't need that $YYm++", the valuation (the only truly negotiable number in the negotiation) gets high enough that it is insane to continue saying "no".
He's just not jumping to conclusions right away. He asks a valid question and your answer didn't contribute in any way.
This may not be PRISM, but wtf is this???

"A US government-mandated backdoor allowed China to hack into Gmail"

"In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access."

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/23/schneier.google.hackin...
The last paragraph sound to me like: "Oh guys, we'd love to tell you what they force us to do, but we can't because we're under gag order.".

Especially the final sentence is explicit:

But the level of secrecy around the current legal
procedures undermines the freedoms we all cherish.

Am I reading this wrong?
They don't come from afar. As an ex-dev, I can actually say that most of them come from across the street (Stanford). When I was there, the heaviest represented schools were Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, UIUC, and Cornell.

And no, at least on the core dev team, I can't imagine any of them ever even considering joining the NSA. We did what we did because it was fun. NSA sounds too corporate.
Palantir may not be printing this on t-shirts, but they aren't that secretive about what they do.

Let's say you're an FBI agent with a warrant that allows you to spy on Joe Schmo, and any of his foreign contacts (not named individually). And maybe you're doing this because of ties to drug smuggling, so you're allowed to ignore the fourth amendment when dealing with some particular data source, but other sources are only allowed within the scope of the warrant.

Palantir (or at least one of their products) allows querying across those data sources within the bounds of the warrant. So rather than the good old days when "secure in their persons and papers" meant that you could actually keep your data private, with Palantir, the government has moved the position that until a human sees it, it doesn't count.
Are you going to articulate an idea, or just be your usual self?

Edit: Ah, you've edited it to clarify. You're just going to be your usual self. How disappointing. Broadly speaking, you're an interesting, intelligent person I would love to know better and to learn from. But you can't stop yourself from being the get-off-my-lawn guy.
http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Javascript_Mess summarizes why: it makes it as widely available as possible and lowers the barrier to entry considerably.
And he sucked when he said that for every non magical thing they did.
The 4th amendment is not a prohibition on collection of information about someone. It's a prohibition of violating the sanctity of your home and person to collect that information: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."

The beauty of the modern world is that the government does not have to violate the sanctity of your home or person to get tons of information about you. You freely give it away: to Google, AT&T, Facebook, etc. Nothing about the 4th amendment prohibits them from going and asking these entities for information they have about you or that you have shared with them.
If a Tea Party leader gets a call from a Koch lobbyist, that information could easily be used to discredit them. Lots of the past abuses of government power would have been just as effective with merely the data the government is collecting about us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
"The Internship" & Google
Matt, I know you really love Google but you need to do a bit more research:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/google-nsa-secrecy-...
They are not getting through a single centralized location, and transcoding voice traffic does not require as much performance as voice recognition (the difference is several orders of magnitude). Your average telecom branch exchange station is not anywhere in the ballpark.
That's just BS. Working hard is about attitude, with or without a degree.
After reading the headline, a part of me was hoping that they found Atlantis! Alas...

Good find!
Thanks. I agree with what you said, and that's why I posted this article. I've updated the title, do you think it's better now?
You need a bigger screen. Let me think ... ummm ... like a Tablet, laptop or a desktop? How about TVs? :)
It's a good start for a response, especially since it has the CEO's imprimatur on it.

However with all the shady definitions the NSA is using (e.g
I can imagine some weasel claiming user data is only the content not the metadata) I would have liked an explicit example.

Something like, "For example, when one gmail user emails another gmail user the government is not, for the majority of users who are not the subject of a specific government order, made aware of this in any way including the contents of the email, metadata and even that an email was sent. Obviously, we have no control over emails, sent outside our network."
Collecting CDR's is not wiretapping.
What is your current phone that has this feature? Sounds interesting.
Obama confirmed in a press conference that PRISM exists, so concluding the program is imaginary would seem to require a fair lack of critical thinking.
New leak: Obama orders US to draw up overseas target list for cyber-attacks
The Court Transcript of Everything Bradley Manning Told Adrian Lamo
This video is a very good example of parsing. Obviously a court order is not part of a technical system, it is part of a human system.

The UK intercepts US citizens data in N. America as a loophole in our laws, using ECHELON. The the NSA is given access to the data they collect with U.S. equipment on their soil. This has been ongoing since before the World Wide Web existed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
It's also a straw man argument. Nobody ever claimed voice recordings were collected, all news sources were very clear about that. He's just distracting from the actual complaint, which is that all of the other data is collected.
Can anyone clarify please, how is full OpenGL stack supported in Wayland cases? In X there is libglx, while Wayland relies on OpenGL ES. So how for example would some games which need full OpenGL work on Wayland?
I mean, aside from being a corrupt organization that wastes tax dollars and has done almost nothing to keep us safe, I suppose they are fine.
I like this title better, but I'm sure that a moderator will change it back. :-(
It just occurred to me: the "data liberation" thing they have which lets you download your own data... would be terribly useful for such requests. What better way to scrape the entirety of the various storage systems than to have a team who does nothing but that?

The team itself wouldn't even need to know about it. Just keep them funded and let them stay current on supporting the latest doodad, and it stays useful to the nefarious spy work as well.
I still don't get what it is with the HN community battling as hard as it can to never have another Jobs, or any of the other greats. I consistently see comments that try to put people down so that they revert back to the mean.
Why is TCP/IP one of those standards you want to get rid of? Its flaws (particularly IPv6's flaws) appear to be primarily academic, and from my experience the cost of not having standardization is significant, so we'd need to see significant gains to make it worthwhile.

If you want to throw out TCP/IP, I hope you have specific dramatic improvements for its replacement in mind.
Or even better:

Mom: I see here from looking at the phone bill that you were talking for your (girl|boy)friend.

You: ...

Mom: What exactly did you talk about?

You: I'm not telling!

The metadata isn't your information, it's the phone company's. The conversation is yours.
"nobody's listening to your calls" != "nobody's recording your calls".
It works with iPads too!
Society refusing to tolerate any group of people having a legal monopoly on the use of violence.
The most sophisticated Android Trojan - Securelist
What about the strategy you hear about of getting around this? Where they say "we're not under a gag order" (or whatever) each day until they are, until they go under a gag order, at which point it reveals they are.

Now, I'm not so naive to think that if someone tried this, the government and courts would just say "Herp, derp, you sure outfoxed us there!" But has that strategy ever been tested in court?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5838921
Me personally? I do. I still want Google to up the number of key bits on our SSL connections, plus explore how to make the connection even more secure though. But yes, I'm quite confident.
First, I hear your point.

But, I think there is a "huge material difference" between a parents right to know who their kids are talking to and a governments right to know who I am talking to.

To put it another way: is this a form of blocking the assembly of people? If I meet in private with a group of people does the government have a right to know all of the meta data about the conversation such as who was present, when they arrived and left, etc? In this hypothetical, I'm assuming we are convening on private property and not a public sidewalk. If we met in private does the government have the right to compel the doorman to reveal these details indiscriminately?
Free Software Foundation statement on PRISM revelations
How The Human Face Might Look In 100,000 Years
> "So, you'd feel more comfortable if the company threw in some rhetoric about morals and freedom that are, as assertions, impossible to verify, but would make people feel more warm and fuzzy?"

If Google was actually taking a moral/ethical stance that being an accessory to unconstitutional warrantless searches is something that they find to be morally wrong, yes, I would be more comfortable. My reading of this was Larry saying, "I enjoy being a billionaire and will say whatever it takes to continue being one."
More power to them. One of the best SaaS companies I've worked with. Good price, good service, good docs, good support.
Picking out logical fallacies and blasting people with them, even going so far as to name them, does not contribute to the conversation:

http://plover.net/~bonds/bdksucks.html
Presumably someone who works with a particular framework, whether that's Django, Ruby on Rails, or ASP.NET MVC, would like to know how to properly use AngularJS with those frameworks without throwing out the benefits those frameworks provide. I'm assuming you have enough web development experience to understand that not every backend is just a dumb REST endpoint.
Go to Walmart and get a $35 phone for cash. Includes a 30 day service plan card with with 1000 minutes, 1000 text and MMS messages, 30 MB data
How to sell things to developers
krh is working on a lossless "codec" that uses a rsync-like rolling hash that should provide good compression with no artifacts (as long as the app isn't too skeuy). http://people.freedesktop.org/~krh/rolling-hash&#x2F;
I'm curious why we're satisfied with an anonymous leaker and some shoddy looking powerpoints.

I'm not going to comment on what's true or what's not, but I know a few things:

1. Having been "in the news" or when I've had firsthand knowledge of an event in the news, I'm always shocked by how inaccurate the news is. Usually not in broad strokes, but in lots of details. I have learned to take everything I read in the media with a healthy grain of salt. I'm not dissing journalists here, but that's what they are: journalists. They are not tech experts. What we are reading could very well be inaccurate. We've not vetted their source either. At least Google is known entity.

2. This whole "we scan everything" business just seems farfetched. That's a lot of data to just double.

3. This program has been subject to oversight. I haven't lost that much faith in my elected officials, or government employees for that matter.
Watch the youtube video referenced above. There is some kind of wiretapping going on all the time.
Are you alleging they are trying to avoid making untrue statements in this blog post? Then what about "Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users' data are false, period."?

The first sentence of the WPo article which started this is "The NSA and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies". I think saying "we do not provide direct access" is a reasonable response.
Computer vision presently comes nowhere close to human performance in almost any respect.
Ooooh, they know exactly where the future lies and where to invest. That is why they have had such stellar performance.

http://www.businessinsider.com/venture-capital-kingpin-klein...

Everyone looks at these kinds of things with wide eyed astonishment. We are talking Pets.com era stupidity in valuations.
I guess the question then, is: how big of a cabal of "rogue" employees would it take to put evil code into production at a place like Google. I seriously doubt one person could do it, no matter how highly placed.
I hate it when people who haven't built anything criticizes others for not being innovative enough anytime there is another photo-sharing app (or related vain product) here on HN. but seriously this is a really stupid idea and I wish you had directed your efforts into less silly effort. Did you really enjoy watching those images on several screens with those distorting breaks within devices?

Or maybe no?:
http://instagram.com/p/UmEDP0j-Cg&#x2F;
http://instagram.com/p/UaE7dQD-F_&#x2F;
The internet makes it far far more efficient, but it didn't invent the collection of such records.

This reminds me of a quote attributed to Joseph Stalin, "Quantity has a quality all its own."

The collection of data is not new. However, the extraordinary amount of data now collected, and the ease with which those data can be cross-referenced or otherwise mined, create a phenomenon that seems qualitatively new.
Isn't that what Airplay Mirror (and the underlying Intel tech doing the encoding on the hardware) does? To the Apple TV, this is merely MPEG4 over HTTP Live Streaming
It says to "throw away" the phone on the website, not to recycle it.
> The 4th amendment is not a prohibition on collection of information about someone. It's a prohibition of violating the sanctity of your home and person to collect that information.

There's actually considerable current debate (and it will no doubt accelerate with the recent revelations) over the extent to which the "persons, houses, papers, and effects" part of the Fourth Amendment extends beyond ones physical body and tangible property, but its eminently clear that it does because the 4th Amendment is the basis of the general requirement of warrants for wiretaps, even when the wiretaps do not involve a "physical penetration of a constitutionally protected area". [1]

[1] Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967)
How to seal the sale in blogging: Win readers and sales
Well, don't completely give up hope just yet! All the tools needed to create the world you mentioned exist today. We have good open-source encryption that can be applied to all sorts of data and hide your tracks if you really want to. What we don't have(yet) is something so easy that the general public can do it. Like, tap a padlock icon on your cellphone and suddenly anything your phone does is encrypted and only the receiving party can decrypt it.
GPG/PGP-plugins could be added to just about anything. Hang in there and keep up the fight. Keep explaining your point of view to anyone who will listen. There have been times in history where seemingly-invinsible corporations and/or groups of very privileged people get overturned when the general public "wake up" to what's going on.
Even what's going on in North Korea won't last forever, there will be someday that one major incident that domino-effects into the downfall of that whole system.

"And never forget, the internet only knows what you tell it... more or less" --me!
SomeOps
New podcast for business builders. I was the first guest.
Thanks that was rather informative.

He is quite a dramatic speaker. I'm surprised because 99% of the technical talks you hear have a speaker mumbling away about minutiae hoping enough of the crowd will fall asleep that they can slip out unnoticed.
I'm gonna go ahead and say about 6%: http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/05/14/netflix-accounts-f...
Revolutions are much easier in homogeneous populations than they are in ethnically diverse ones.

I fear that if there is a violent revolution in a society as socioeconomically and ethnically diverse as the United States it would result in a civil war. I have no idea how that would play out in a country as developed as the United States but I don't think it would be pretty.
A few thoughts: It's unlikely that he cannot deny or admit giving data to NSA /FBI, because he both admitted and denied, albeit with weasel words. No "backdoor" and "no direct access" but maybe from the front door and indirect access :). I suspect that NSA has live access to Google /FB / MS for certain cases, tracking every online move for certain individuals. That's why it costs just $20 million, maybe they created a portal from which they track Person A going from site to site, what he searches for, who he calls, and what he types.

Larry smells the end of his company's "trust us with all your data...all your life on cloud...search while logged in...visit pages with Google Analytics...it's secure" etc. etc etc. While NSA might not catalog everything you do, Google does and everything is there for NSA's and FBI's asking. The more information Google and Facebook (to pick two of the largest) have stored, the worst it is for us. They know EVERYTHING about pages you visit, how long you stay there, what you searched for, what places you went to (Android) what you emailed, foods you liked, what your ordered from ebay, and so on. A treasure trove for NSA, a nightmare for us.

Start thinking! Stay logged out of Google and FB, use hosts file, Ghostery etc to block and make NSA's and FBI's life as hard as possible.

What's good for Google is good for NSA, but not necessarily for you. NSA would love Google Now, wouldn't they?
It would only be rank hypocrisy if there were polls showing that people were significantly against lending the money and offering credits and subsidies to reduce dependency upon fossil fuels though right? (extending his main objection to "democracy" here). If you're really going to go after him much safer ground is to point out that people can be easily manipulated by the way a question is framed to give you the answer you want. For example, what if the survey said "Do you think it's fair that a newer entrant into the marketplace can put 1000's of people's jobs at risk by being allowed to have a different set of rules to the established market participants?" Shockingly that poll might come out at 86% against Tesla.
My problem with his remarks was that he was addressing the wrong issue. He was defending the need to access this data without a warrant. He then repeatedly stated that he welcomed the discussion.

But how can a national discussion take place about a secret program??

He never addressed this issue of why the program needs to be secret in the first place.
Thank you very much for that. Still much work ahead - glad you are with us for it.
Considering the context, the name of the company is very, very interesting.

> A palantir is a dangerous tool, Sarumon. ... We do not know who else may be watching.
Not sure why Obama thinks he would be high on the list of people this program would abuse. Why would the people running the program punish someone that supported the program? The innocent people that have to fear from this program are the people currently opposing the surveillance state. If you are in a position of power either in private industry or the government and are not co-operating with NSLs or other surveillance requests then you are high on the list.
Nobody objects to building layers on top of TCP/IP. We've been doing that forever. I think we are all very confused by the idea that a layer built on top of TCP/IP will replace TCP/IP? It just doesn't make sense.
And to that I totally agree, I do not think that governments should automatically have the right to all call metadata and that the status quo is a gross overreach. I was just pointing out that there is a real (legal, common sense, whatever) distinction between knowing that a call was made and listening in to a call.
Not all rights are given by consent of society.

A right that you have is one that cannot be taken away. Traditionally this is limited to things that society has agreed not to take away. However we are slowing entering into an age where a new type of right emerges: a right that you seized and society is powerless to take away.

We don't normally think of "PGP'd email can't be read" as a "right", but that is essentially what it is. A right that has been seized, not granted.

These rights are of course vulnerable, just like rights granted by society. Instead of keeping society convinced that the right must remain granted, you instead have to be careful that you remain in a position where society is powerless. In practice, this is quite difficult.
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Get Real with Accurate User Personas & Dominate UX Design
Do you deny all GSM technology have state accessible wiretapping built in?

Also, your product is less anonymous than paying cash for a pre-paid phone at a store because you ship it to a physical address.

Buying this phone from you instead of NewEgg is worse for privacy because with traffic analysis it will be easy to identify the sales to you as opposed being mixed it with the 9k orders NewEgg gets a day.

Why should people trust you not to be a FBI run honeypot (like they do with warez BBS, etc. etc. ad nausium)?
this isn't a photosharing app...