skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wayland is a critical technology for Linux desktop community.

X11 has been a reliable workhorse, but its time is up - simply too much cruft accumulated over the years that's not even used anymore. Yet all of it needs to be continually supported, adding to complexity. No one uses X11 primitives for drawing apart from bitmap functionality - even repainting dirty regions (expose events) often involves sending over a new bitmap and using X11 to draw it. This is very inefficient.

To implement a reasonably fast GUI, X11 has essentially resorted to hacks (extensions). DRI2 (+GLX) is probably the most important of those. AFAIK, it's what almost everything uses for drawing, and does not work over network at all. Yes, modern X11 is local only. If you're on a network, it's back sending those uncompressed bitmaps. Even with all these hacks, X11+DRI2 can't even maintain tearing free display. Well, at least DRI3 should fix tearing...

So if none of modern software needs nothing but a bitmap surface to draw on, why implement and maintain anything else?

Which leaves us with Wayland criticizers' favorite topic - network transparency (which X11 practically doesn't have either, but unfortunately that does little to stop some loud uninformed people):

Remote display software should use low latency video encoding for essentially same user experience as working locally. Preferably hardware accelerated. But even with software, you can encode a frame under 10ms, using for example a subset of h.264. Even if you added network latency, time for one frame network throughput and client display hardware retrace period, you'd still typically end up with a figure well under 50ms. That'd feel essentially local. It'd beat easily X11 over network, VNC, RDP, etc. in latency and thus practical usability. Heck, that'd even beat Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 game display latency when connected to a typical modern TV (70-170ms)! Many TVs do image processing that adds over 50ms of latency before image is actually displayed. (Note that this processing latency has nothing to do with "pixel response time").

Why no one I know of has written remote display software that functions this way is beyond me. Anyone except OnLive and Gaikai, that is...

So, let the old X11 horse have its well-earned rest. It's time to move on.
At this point, it pretty much is a conspiracy theory. The only evidence we have of these companies' involvement is the leaked slides, which could have been the result of over-promising from a contractor or a misunderstanding from a non-technical manager. We have a lot of evidence to the contrary, particular that nearly every company allegedly involved has issued strong denials, which, again, they cannot be compelled to do by NSLs.

We can't conflate everything the government or the NSA does. This program seems unlikely for a number of reasons, including the conspiracy aspect (quite a lot of engineers working for Google, Apple, etc. would have to be in on it) and the technical challenges involved. Do you have any idea how much data Google produces? How complicated their infrastructure is?
You know, you don't really hear about these kinds of sketchy behaviors and associations with the hundreds or thousands of other companies that work with the government. What is it with these guys? I suspect amateurism, but there's got to be more than that. Getting your CEO invited to Bilderberg running what's still not a terribly large or influential company takes one hell of an operation.
More likely that each startup cobbles together their own Internet to build their app on. (This muck also creates a nice barrier to entry against other startups.)
But the set of "random guys" who might appear in front of your house includes potential government agents.
> I can delete my history if I'm logged in.

At least you can mark it as deleted, and you can't access it anymore. Is it really "deleted"?
"no one has theorized" that except for Wikipedia, Wired magazine, C-Net, and most of the people commenting on this thread.

"NSA to store yottabytes in Utah data centre" -- http://crave.cnet.co.uk/gadgets/nsa-to-store-yottabytes-in-u...;
If it's MITM between user and Google, then Google would not be coordinating or even necessarily aware.
>increasing amounts of NAT-ting are making the classic point-to-point model of the internet more and more irrelevant.

which is a bad thing.
Look at how governments these days are acting. Can you afford to assume that the answer to all these questions is NO?
Elon Musk comes to tears over auto dealers perversion of democracy
> That's just as bad as saying since a person uses TOR, they're being secretive and must have something to hide.

People who use TOR are being secretive and have something to hide.

They may have very good reasons to want to hide it because of threats from bad actors (including, potentially, their own governments), but if they didn't have something to hide, they wouldn't be expending additional resources to actively hide things, which is exactly what using TOR is .
It's really easy to complete when the invaders never drop down at the end of each line. Nice tribute to the game but fatally flawed.
Amazon is not involved in Prism, it seems. So that helps.
I agree: IPv4 is going to be a fierce competitor for the slot that IPv4 currently occupies and IPv6 hopes to occupy. The point of an overlay design is to moot the point of which one wins, by "pushing them down" the stack and building something new on top of them.

Frame Relay is a good example of what this design looks like: a "layer 2" technology with "layer 3" features (Frame had aspirations to be a layer 3 technology) that only network operators care about, because no Frame user ever expected global all-points connectivity to be provided by Frame.

IPvX should be demoted to Frame Relay status: a very flexible way of providing point-to-point connectivity between nodes that will provide global connectivity through routing done at a higher layer.
There is a "huge material difference" between touching your sibling and merely hovering your finger a millimeter over them.
The only comment I'll make on this subject.

"When I came into this office, I made two commitments that are more important than any other. Number one, to keep the American people safe. And number two, to uphold the constitution and constitutional rights to privacy and to civil liberties."

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

There's nothing in the Presidential oath that promises safety for American citizens. There's only one job sworn in the oath. To uphold the Constitution.

You had one job. ONE JOB.
This is one article that I hope does not sink, and could benefit from a different title than the one used in the article.

The whole point of this article is to raise awareness that the age-old intelligence trick of planting moles in companies can explain both how the NSA could have access, but the targeted companies wouldn't know it. This squares the newspaper reports with public denials.
Is there any statement that would actually make you feel comfortable? If you're going to choose to disbelieve someone's statements, there's very little they can say to change that.
For a lot of calls, sure. You can guess that calls between me and my mechanic are probably about my car.

Calls between me and my wife when I'm out of town? You could guess what we're talking about, but I don't want you to listen in.
That's it exactly! We've got some smarts about those bezels :)
I find it deeply alarming that you would even ask this question.
AngularJS, the one island of stability in a NSA world!
I agree, but is there any reason why any actions taken 15 years ago shouldn't be matters of public record? It seems like secrecy on that time frame serves only to protect illegitimate actions.
It is important to note that in the startup community it is generally a good tactic to raise money when you don't need it, because that gives you enormous leverage in the negotiation. If, on the other hand, you're in a negotiation where the other side knows you need the money, you are going to get much worse terms.
I doubt that presidents get bumped down to "average dude" status by intelligence agencies after they leave office.

Isn't that exactly his point? After he leaves office, he will be very high on "List of people to snoop"?
If I stretch my imagination I can see the argument, but I don't buy it (IMHO).

I think the spirit of why the privacy of the content of my conversation is important equally applies to any information about that conversation. If my conversation is privileged, why shouldn't my meta-data be? What's the difference?

If AT&T provided a service that cataloged and tagged my conversation for retrieval based on analysis of the content (and I opted into this) would that meta-data also be available to the government?
The limiting factor here really is the lack of computational power to listen to everyone's phone calls. As soon as technology gets there, you can bet it'll be on the table.
I think you are right, everything has a hype cycle but the outcome is usually a wastly improved way of doing things. I think email needs that
Thank a librarian - they will bat an eye, and have.
The Insane Law That Lets Authorities Read Any Email Over 180 Days Old
Counter point: They catch moonshiners by staking out the places you can buy large volumes of corn and sugar. They catch meth cooks by monitoring large quantity purchases of those ingredients (whatever they are...). They bust up grow houses by finding higher than average power bills due to all the climate control equipment used. It is not beyond reason that they could catch (or at least become aware of) individuals with home labs by flagging purchases of those supplies and/or equipment.
Google doesn't have to actively disclose...the government just needs to know where to "listen" to get the same data that's moving around Google's data centers.
They'd have to MITM SSL traffic largely.

Also, that's what they were doing for more traditional wiretaps and you should be sure that they have access to siphon off live traffic for analysis if they want.
I'm 100% with you. I don't know what Page could say, and I agree that it's extremely likely that the truth is somewhere in the middle, but damned if any of us have any ability to actually suss out what that is. It's very frustrating.

I just think it's important to not be entirely cynical here, and to keep in mind what such a statement might look like if it were being truthful. I don't know how much different it might be, which generally makes the statement only as good as Larry Page's word, and only then if he doesn't have a gun to his head.
Stop playing dumb. You can't simultaneously complain about my older posts and then refuse to address the points they made. Here are two of them:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5587264

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3408523

All you've said so far is "Boo! New ideas bad!"
Timeline: Smartphone-enabled health devices
That could be the natural evolution of things, until at some point in the future one by one the CEOs of the world are breaking their touch screens in half out of frustration, "why is the network so fucking slow and unreliable?" Then the CTO casually mentions the darknet (ie. IPv6) that all the hardcore tech geeks are using for high performance network apps.

In other words, IPv6 adoption will accelerate by orders of magnitude once the real pain of IPv4 address exhaustion starts to be felt.
HN is being drowned in content by medium and none of this content is any good.
What "core principle" extends to the government not collecting information you happily share with big corporations?
But who you're attracted to changes, sometimes quickly. And even in general, it's not like most straight guys are attracted to all women, just as a trivial example. How many women would they have to be attracted to before they're straight? If they like one guy is that enough to count as being bi or gay? I don't think it makes any sense to define "straight" or "gay" in those terms.

Edit: Specifically, it makes no sense to me that people are "born" being attracted to a certain group of people.
As a CA I don't use either. Deep web.
The key word here is "direct". Based on the other thread speculating about Palantir its pretty likely there is a 3rd party contractor who does have direct access, and provides convenient plausible deniability to both parties
That explanation is far easier for me to believe than the theory that Google would have agreed to cooperate in this spying effort.

This link has been submitted to the new queue at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5841505 and I hope it gets voted up for wider attention.
This is even less useful than The Playbook.
I guess I'm a prude but the name alone would prevent me from using it.
I've occasionally wondered as a crazy hack has anyone ever implemented the VNC window system? The API/interface is squirting out a stream as would be seen over the network on VNC? Client has full control?

Much as the simplest way to get cross platform cross browser pixel perfect web page rendering is of course a really big imagemap and skip all that large, slow html and css stuff, the simplest way to implement a windowing system might just be a VNC viewer that can render many simultaneous possibly overlapping streams.
At least Spotify seems to be waiting until local and/or state governments contact them about collecting sales tax. With Amazon now collecting Sales tax on purchases here in California it's probably only a short time before Spotify does as well.
It depends on your definition of useful

Did you ever fly a kite in bed?
Did you ever walk with ten cats on your head?

Did you ever milk this kind of cow?
Well, we can do it. We know how.

If you never did, you should.
These things are fun and fun is good.

These things are fun and fun is good.
The truth comes from the source that wasn't intended to be public.
I'm the first to believe that the one thing saving us from the surveillance state is the unlimited technical incompetence of our watchmen. To that tune, when I hear about stuff like ThinThread or other surveillance fantasies, I think of upper management losers dreaming up Java Enterprise systems that only ever achieve to convert gigantic amounts of energy into waste heat.

That still doesn't mean we can accept the government lieing to us or hiding basic information, just because we believe they are harmless kids way over their head.
keep drinking the kool-aid. seriously, every response up to this has been you defending the ongoing actions of the government. are you a government employee?
xpra does the video compression stuff:

http://xpra.org/trac/wiki/Enhancements
If you're born and raised in America, with a clean record, and sane, shouldn't getting clearance be easy?
haha, ouch! I'll try to write something better for you next time.
Just because the government has access to Google's servers doesn't mean Google gave them that access.

We're all big kids, if you read that the Chinese/Russian/whatever government had access to information straight from Facebook's servers most people wouldn't doubt it for a second and most people would assume they took it through hacking.

So how can you be surprised that NSA is listening to your Skype calls? Maybe they're using a backdoor made for them, maybe they're using a backdoor MS put in for synergy, maybe they threw a million gpus at it for a few years... And maybe they got permissions from MS, or maybe they social hacked it[1], maybe they take it before it gets to MS's servers. Some of those might be illegal and some not but anyone who's surprised or suddenly outraged has been living under a rock since forever.

[1] "It is generally done via secret arrangements not with the company, but with the employees. The company does not provide back-door access, but the people do. The trick is to place people with excellent tech skills and dual loyalties into strategic locations in the company. These 'assets' will then execute the work required in secret, and spare the company and most all of their workmates the embarrassment"

http://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/001431.html

I don't see any citation or evidence given for this so this persons claim could just be idle speculation but it's along the lines of what I'd assume. The NSA treats your privacy as a math problem and routes around it.
If Google is not part of PRISM where is the lawsuit for damaging the image of Google and putting their Trademark in a document that is fake a lie... Where is that slander, PR lawsuit? Google you have billions, if its not true file a lawsuit we will believe you then.
Potentially we can though. Why is our first reaction to hamstring our intelligence agencies and deny them information other entities doubtless already have? Why not instead work out how to provide them the information in a way that both protects our rights and enables them to do what we pay them to do?
It's a bad thing now, because the only way to get assured direct connectivity to the "Internet" is via IPv4 connectivity.

It would be less of a bad thing if IPv4 connectivity (specifically: what ASN was advertising the IPv4 prefixes your traffic was associated with when it traversed, say, Telecom Malaysia) wasn't the sine qua non of global connectivity, in the same sense that nobody cares what IP address you use when you connect to IRC.
borp! borp! CNN is a state controlled "news" source.
Grand Jury Rejects Indictment of Teen Arrested for Rap Lyrics
> I guess what I'm wondering is what your company is adding to this equation for the extra $10 aside from being a middle man to obscure the trail

probably nothing. this is what's known as a "value proposition"
So how far does this go? For example, I would expect most of us litter from time to time, if only by accident (a piece of garbage flew from my car, for example). I would also say most of us speed (once again, if only by accident) and most of us have cut a corner on a noise ordinance. Does that mean we ought not to be able to fine anyone for littering, speeding or being too noisy?

The biggest issue I can see here is the "slippery slope" problem. At first parties are a bit louder, but enough people are doing it that we need to set the noise bar a bit higher. Then everyone gets a bit louder, and so on until it's untenable. It's like trying to walk across a street that never has speeding enforcement. People have long ago realized that and now drive much faster as a result. It didn't start like that, it just sort of got that way naturally.
The Fourth Amendment, prohibiting unreasonable search and seizure by the government. Search and seize with probable cause, sure, go nuts. But "seize it all and let big data sort it out" is a pretty fundamental abdication of the oath our officials took to uphold the Constitution, no matter what the excuse for it is.
Maybe he's more flexible now, but I'd read that he browses the web by downloading pages over email, and even when it came to email it was under very strict self-imposed rules.

Honestly, he sounds like he's never given up on UUCP.
We obviously stil have a lot to learn about PRISM... But with that said, I have some conflicting instincts & feelings about all of this and the company responses.

On one hand, I would think a very-visible CEO of a major corp would keep their name off of a press release, if the press release was a lie that they were compelled to tell by the government.

On the other hand, I feel like each company's response and their use of the exact same terminology ("direct access", etc) feels like a wink and a nod.
> or they are participating voluntarily and are voluntarily lying, ... seems unlikely to me.

Their business is based on user's data. If you do not feel comfortable giving them your data, it might hurt their business. Hence, IMHO, they do have some incentive to deny PRISM, regardless of the facts.
It's a clear criticism, but not a clear assurance that Google isn't cooperating ("voluntarily" or not) with those "legal procedures".
I don't care about George W Bush's military record and I don't think it changes my point.
One of the earlier articles discussed the government's concerns about keeping the program secret, lest they lose the cooperation of their private sector partners. That isn't a concern that they'd have if they were implementing the program through espionage.
I've never seen that sort of ratio discussed here, is it normal to be raising at 20% of your valuation?
For new programmers, I'd personally recommend 'eloquent ruby' over 'the well grounded rubyist' not because its better but because I believe it to be more accessible to those without a ton of programming experience.

I actually love the well grounded rubyist and definitely think all ruby devs should read it eventually but hesitate to recommend it to someone new to programming.
In Stalin's USSR, that was not true. Generally there were folks (or even a lone soul) in every village answering to the state, expected to keep that area toeing the party line. Absurd meetings on party ideology would be held in the most remote of places, with a close eye kept on those who could be some threat to the state. The Gulag Archipelago, Vol 2 discusses the intersection of the surveillance state and everyday life at length.
One thing we know for sure is the truth of what they have been doing will leak out.
Rumor is they already tried to buy them and after the snapchat CEO rejected them they built Facebook poke (which is a prettier snapchat clone). Details about potential purchase price were never leaked.

Snapchat CEO welcoming Facebook:
http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/21/3793648/snapchat-ceo-on-p...

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Facebook-s-Poke-App-Is-a-Snap...

http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/facebook-poke-app&#x2F;
Building the Ultimate Budget Linux Tablet [p.1]
People have not yet accepted the fact that in a digital age, there will always be somebody snooping your information. They still believe with enough laws, it can be stopped.
Ok. Done.

My email is in my profile.
Personally I reserve trust for people, but for governments (and other organizations) I have standards and expectations.
They never revoked the ones they gave to Kissinger or Arafat. It's a bit of a sham to be honest.
Take a bus or cab to the Old Town Transit center. From there light rail, trolley, and Amtrak are available. But the buses are not very nice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Town_Transit_Center_%28MTS...