skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is semantics. The original slides, and the WaPo writeup, made it sound as if the NSA has "direct access", which to those of us who work in this area understand to mean "they can login to the servers and do whatever they want". But it is clear that what is really meant is that the government can access all of the personal data that these companies have, provided the "proper" clearance and assertions by the NSA analyst.

TheNextWeb's speculation that the change in wording means that the data is gathered "indirectly" doesn't make a lot of sense:

For one thing, it adds to the growing claim that the agency instead accessed the information indirectly. In such a case, the most likely method would be via ISPs or mobile operators, but that remains unconfirmed.

Given that the WaPo wording specifically mentions "company-controlled locations":

In another classified report obtained by The Post, the arrangement is described as allowing “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” rather than directly to company servers.

What this more than likely means is that the NSA uses special-access "portals" provided by these companies to do their searching in. Meaning that the NSA accesses a special, locked down website provided and built by Google/Apple/Facebook etc to do their searching in, a site that runs within Google/Apple/Facebook's datacenters/infrastructe, a system that has access to all of the backend data.

"Direct access" means something different to those of us that work with software systems like this all day long than it does to a journalist. We understand that to mean a login and shell access on a server, while the journalists seem to be misunderstanding "direct" versus "indirect" to refer to where the data is obtained from.

edit: think about it this way: would the government want access to the raw bytes stored on Google's servers, which would require them to understand how to decode Google File System data and be kept 100% up to date on how all of Google's backend systems work? Or would they prefer if Google provided them with a private search engine to access data, which Google has to keep up to date to work with all of the other Google systems?
Don't forget about chemtrails!
"My job this morning is to be so persuasive...that a light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany, and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Barack,"

In other words, say whatever needs to be said to get elected. Worry about the details later. Or not.
Here is the rub, if government does nothing and we get attacked people will complain. If government steps up and works to prevent an attack, people complain.

Where is the balance?
Of course. Shoulda seen that. ;) forEach on an empty collection returns immediately. Thanks.
HTML 9 Responsive Boilerstrap JS
I'm torn on this one and would really like to see a "Here's what we know story" because the coverage seems to overstate what is happening. My thoughts, below. Please comment.

1. I assumed (and, honestly, thought it was public knowledge) that this was happening already.

2. The bulk of coverage (and reaction) seems to believe that NSA is listening to your conversations. In fact (if I am dissecting the news correctly) they are recording the key details (length of call, location, to whom) and the actual message or conversation (not sure about this one), but only using this information after a second warrant. Basically, they find a suspected terrorist by other means, get a warrant to access the records of his/her calls, and see who the suspected terrorist is in contact with.

3. If the system works as described above, I'm a bit squeamish, but don't see a huge issue. I mean, I'm okay with Facebook, Verizon, Amazon, Visa, etc all having loads of info on me in order to sell me stuff, but once the government (who is not out to make a profit) does it, I object? I'm not a fan of sacrificing freedom for security, but this logic doesn't really make sense.

I probably have some other thoughts floating around, but these are the ones I've been mulling over.
Thanks for that link!

btw did you ever notice that the NRC always uses the diminuitive ("vliegtuigjes", "little planes") when referring to drones? Of course, in this case it somewhat makes sense, because they are in fact tiny planes.

But they use the word not just for these surveillance drones, but also for referring to attack drones firing missiles and laying waste to villages in war zones. I'm not sure what to make of it, whether it's a bias, in general I consider NRC to be a quality paper. It's just such a very odd way to phrase it, and they're being very consistent about it. But imagine writing about abandoned "landmijntjes", or any other type of weapon/killing machine, in the diminuitive.
You mean "most desktop browsers are fairly useless". Go complain and get them to fix it. Html5 inputs are very old, there is no excuse for "modern" browsers not to support them. It is much better for users if they get the same, consistent date picking widget everywhere, rather than a different, partially working maybe sometimes javascript version on every site.
Even someone on reddit pointed out that these phone taps aren't warrantless wiretaps. First, the FISA court has given a warrant for broad information gathering (whether you agree with it or not). Second, they're only taking metadata. In addition, it seems controversial whether these tactics were targeted to domestic calls at all. Just saying.
Just because you don't like it or don't agree doesn't make it meaningless.

It means exactly what it says. There is nothing to show that an ultra-limited government cannot perform the needed tasks for society such as you provide. But I say there's a big difference between a government that provides what's needed for society and the monstrosity that's currently in place in Washington D.C.

When I say something along the lines of ultra-limited I mean I want most of the political decisions that affect my life to be decided on the local or state level before it becomes a federal issue. That's exactly how the US was designed, but that's not the way it is being run now. The federal government actually has a list of things it is to do, by the way Post Offices and Roads are covered so I have no problem with that, but a great deal of what it does goes way beyond that list.

My definition of a ultra-limited federal government? Simple. It's what the Constitution says it is.
Any idea why we got removed from the front page? We (the creators of ViziCities) didn't even post this to HN.
Thanks for apologizing for a bunch of liars and criminals washingtonpost. If there's one thing a corrupt government needs, it's ass licking apologists.
From what I read in this thread, the odds of it working is 2 in 7, so it's pretty likely a good portion of the commenters will say it works for them.
Yeah, I was deploying to Heroku when this roots error occurred. This screwed up the deploy (as it crashed in the middle) and just 500'ed on every page load. And meant every DNS request in my deploy chain that relied on *.notable.ac resolving ended up caching negative results. Luckily it's back up now :)
No, no it doesn't. It needs more useful 404 pages:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans...
Screenshot: http://cl.ly/image/0P2C0z013h43
Eye Blood Vessels Linked to Cognitive Function, IQ
For some reason, comments on HN appear with seemingly random font sizes when viewed on mobile. I've seen it on both android and iOS.
>Devs should still rely on validation scripting prior to a form submission (js)

Why? Adding redundant code that doesn't solve a problem is always a bad idea.
Tails is ridiculously well known; if something was bad in it, it would be big news.
Facebook is where inconsequential nonsense goes.

I guess I should be more concerned with gmail...
i use this

lg = log --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %C(bold white)%s%Creset %Cgreen(%cr) %C(blue)@%an%Creset' --abbrev-commit --date=relative

tig is neat, i need to port it
The balance is lost in the clusterfuck that has become our toxic bipartisan Congress and the bloated hyperpluralism that engulfs it.
You could just agree to disagree with them without expanding such emotional energy.

Though I wonder when dissemination of vaccines will be more of a science instead of "We know this strand of virus is going around, everyone come here and get a shot of xyz because it is good for you and will protect you all", especially since overdosage of the massess will eventually lead to resistant strands.

It would be really cool to have a personal 23andMe api where people can test themselves without sending data to a 3rd party.
The communications from the journalist certainly do need to be private. Advertising that you are working on a story that will reveal big government secrets is a good way to be put under surveillance to find out who is doing the leaking to you. The journalist would not want to announce to the world that the process of receiving classified information is ongoing.
Dumb question - am I right in thinking the Y-axis here is percentage of population?
Big Data and the possibilities with Hadoop – infographic
This defends against the Dropbox part of PRISM, but hardly the rest of it.
See also https://github.com/jsmess/jsmess which is a port of an existing emulator codebase using emscripten
Have you been in contact with the OpenStreetMap guys. There's a thriving London community of mappers who I'm sure would be interested in talking to you. https://twitter.com/OSMlondon is probably the easiest way to get in contact.
We should fill the HN frontpage with Erlang again.
The Increasingly Wearable Cloud
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Quite simply, the freedom of hundreds of millions is worth a few terrorist attacks that kill a few dozens.

If not, then you should definitely ban cars, as they kill a whopping 33k people a year.

In other words, the balance is: let people die free rather than live unfree.
Pingdom reckons https://www.photographer.io is still up, but I guess I really can't be certain. It hasn't been a great week for my domain, what with the DNSimple attack and this.
If the government buys a ham sandwich, people will complain too. The balance is having principles and sticking to them until the people get rid of you.

The US voted against this crap in 2008. The new administration doubled down on it. Where is the balance?
They're not, but Obama was referring to a prior program that was basically equivalent. So by the definition that Obama himself was using at the time, these are wiretaps.

Also, check out the news on PRISM, which comes much closer to the common definition of wiretaps. I'd say his administration has pretty thoroughly broken that particular promise.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence...
I agree it's a complex problem, but there's a middle ground between "doing nothing" and this.

And maybe even the NSA's work is in our best interests (and maybe not), but it seems disingenuous and perhaps flat-out wrong for the president to have campaigned on this specific issue, and do the exact opposite.
I would certainly agree that the methods for bringing virtuous and valuable jobs more into alignment are quite limited, and it is a vain pursuit to hope to bring them into perfect harmony. However, I would disagree with my libertarian friends and say that such limited methods as we have are worth employing, and new ones are worth seeking out, as the endeavor has merit. The difficult part is finding a balance between seeking to control and throwing our hands up and saying "nothing can be done."

As an aside, I agree that this is a very difficult proposition for incomes, but gains are to be made with a strong public sector which provides numerous basic services such as healthcare, education, and affordable subsidized housing, so that the unfortunate man with a virtuous job of little economic value is not left out in the cold. Or dying of long-undiagnosed cancer due to lack of access to prohibitively expensive preventive care, like my wife's cousin is currently.
i like your config i'll borrow some of that, here's my current one

https://gist.github.com/fishman/091d32da731c8b841c94

EDIT: I either already did many many moons ago, or we would had the same master :p
Don't worry about posts that contain degree requirements, many will interview you anyway, also see https://medium.com/this-happened-to-me/8f381aa6bd5e
Being Brazilian, I am not so worried if the US government has access to my data, my main concern is about the Brazilian government having access to it.
jcook818, this is a really nice project, really nice, but I do wish you introduced it differently, as it doesn't have a huge amount to do with PRISM.

With that said, I can definitely see me using this on my RasPi.
The NYT also disputes earlier claims:

While the newspapers portrayed the classified documents as indicating that the N.S.A. obtained direct access to the companies’ servers, several of the companies — including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple — denied that the government could do so. Instead, the companies have negotiated with the government technical means to provide specific data in response to court orders, according to people briefed on the arrangements.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/us/nsa-verizon-calls.html?...
It can be both.

But I agree with you that the useful stuff should be first and most prominent.
How to Say ‘No’ With a Smile and Save Your Startup
I'll save my full accolades for when I hear about the results of the first human trial, but I think this is an amazing idea and I really hope it works how they expect. More importantly, we are now one step closer to turning me into Robocop.
> if government does nothing and we get attacked people will complain

Who says this? Do you honestly think warrantless wiretaps are a valid form of defense?
How can we minimize NSA surveillance?
In light of the NSA spying situation, what replacement services out there can we use to legally minimize NSA surveillance without going off the grid?

duckduckgo search?
Linux distros?
TOR?

What else?
or buy a crappy one from goodwill or a pawn shop, pawn shop might have cameras goodwill probably not
True.
The article has so many mistakes in it, it's almost as if it's written by the government !!
We need a new article.
What do you mean "got away with"? These laws exist to deter leaking, and that only works if people believe they'll be applied. Do you think they're worried about losing votes over this? There's only a handful of congresspeople who are vocally against it, and most of the American people don't care. "It's called protecting America." - Sen. Dianne Feinstein, (D-California). Who's there to vote for?
Most of my London based friends spend >50% of their income on rent + bills.

Everyone is chasing the dream and everyone thinks that they will be the 1 in 1000 that makes it big.
Protect citizens in every way possible that doesn't encroach civil liberties. In those areas where civil liberties require that we be left vulnerable, citizens should be expected to protect themselves.
Having read all the comments I am disappointed. This is a great opportunity to discuss this issue and make more people aware of the dangers of such activity. Yet the bulk of the discourse has degraded into partisan drivel of "Obama vs Bush". Honestly who cares? Every administration has played a part in this and they all have equal blame so get over it! Attempting to say one side did this or that will not solve the issue.

What they are doing is bad, it shouldn't happen, all who support it need to be kicked out..full stop...no excuses...
If you have the skills, and the passion for the work, on you resume:

Undergraduate Studies:
Univ of whatever

This will get you through the door if you have a good portfolio and if you can wow them in the interview, when the time comes for a background check, if they even ask about it, you can just explain your situation that you have N years of study, but couldn't afford to finish, and you don't think assuming debt is a valid path. As someone who hires, I'd go to bat for them if there was any concern irt the diploma and I thought they were a great fit.

I would also look for work, at smaller companies, and sign up to some mailing lists for your area that have to do with your area of expertise, ie ruby meetups etc. Lots of job opps come from the lists.
FreeBSD 8.4 is now available
I was getting that too, but it looks like it's fixed now.
People are blame crazy these days, they have to find someone at fault. Every single thing that happens recently from a Tornado to a bombing has 24 hour media asking who to blame.
Unless I'm mistaken, I believe President Obama has "merely" continued the Bush-era policies and programs. Maybe they've extended, but that's because the initatives have matured and the technology has improved.

To build from the original comment: What if President Obama had ceased these programs, and a (preventable) terrorist attack occurred, that otherwise could have been stopped.

Playing devil's advocate, somewhat, but there indeed lies the rub.
but its okay if its a secret warrant?

Why do people think that throwing up quotes to the contrary matter to these people? I mean, its no different than listening to talk radio, just a days difference.

These guys do not care, they don't have to care, and they know it.
Just launched subtleshade.com to help my learn about all this cool new HTML/CSS stuff I keep hearing about! Design and cross-browser support is sketchy at the moment, but it's a v1.0.

EDIT: Should probably provide some more information. It's a easy way to add colors to the patterns provided on subtlepatterns.com without having to dive into Photoshop.
June 3, 2008
"This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." --Barack Obama

...on what will happen if we elect him POTUS.
I cringed when he mentioned the National Security Letters. Didn't even realize he was supposed to be getting rid of those, too.
From: "We will fight the illegal enslaving of millions of black people across the country."

To: "We have won the fight! Slavery is now legal. There is no more illegal slavery."
Most users/visitors use a variety of browsers. I agree in reducing code overhead, but cross browser compatibility is still the main problem[0] with relying solely on these HTML5 features (the OP touches on that in his article).

[0] http://www.w3schools.com/HTML/html5_form_input_types.asp
"Household" income is a bit of a pointless stat when you're a bunch of strangers in a flat share—which I'm betting represents a fair proportion of London's earners.
The idea is that it would provide an easy alternative to the services that are provided by these large companies, i.e. Google Talk (or whatever they call it nowadays) replaced with an XMPP server, Gmail replaced with self-hosted email, Dropbox replaced by your own self-hosted instance of ownCloud, etc. The only part of PRISM that it might not provide a defence against would be big social networks (Facebook et al), but you would still be able to host your own StatusNet instance or Tent server on your arkOS server and have alternatives that way. When services can be decentralized and brought back under individual user control, a "direct link" into major web company's servers is definitely made irrelevant.
Fancy machine learning for cheap students.
I think there are plenty of quality leaders that exist. The problem is that there are too many cunning politicians that beat them in elections.
Why privacy matters https://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/12...;
>It would be really cool to have a personal 23andMe api where people can test themselves without sending data to a 3rd party.

The point of 23andMe is that they're trying to figure out what all the data means, using the data itself.

You can go get your genome sequenced or a partial sequencing like 23andMe does and get the giant, raw output file.

And sit and stare at it. I know I've played with that data in bio lab before. It's not exactly easy to infer data out of it.

Which is why having a lot of different sets of data, and information about the person the data came from, can help us.

Without a third party aggregating genomic data for study, we're not going to be able to understand the genome, and certainly not going to be able to deliver private, accurate and useful analysis of personal data.
ooo, you do 301 redirects, I'll be over shortly...

To explain why that's useful, we have three domains, draw.io (mutter), diagramly.com and diagram.ly that all map to the same thing. The actual site runs on a Google App Engine appspot domain. On GAE, you have to buy a Google Apps for Business account to map a domain to an GAE appspot domain.

We have three Apps accounts because of this. We're not happy to do the 301 on a physical server, that loses the scalability advantage of GAE. This has always needed to be done at the DNS level ( I know it's not truely a DNS feature, but I'm assuming the scaling of the redirects at someone who does it as a service is better than mine ). This is the first time I've seen this service. That's all...
Which PAGER are you using? If it's less, try setting PAGER='less -R', or LESS=-R to enable raw control character output.
``Being stabbed by a handsome gentleman is awful, but being stabbed by an ugly man is worse, so thank God I'm only being stabbed by a handsome gentleman!''
I've been meaning to port some classic games over and utilize better input methods for a while. It would be fun to be able to load old GB games on my Android phone and tap the menus instead of navigating them with the DPad. Thanks for this, I was looking for something to do with my Friday night!
Did anyone really believe him?
I'm wondering if the name of the project is a clue. Maybe they don't need access to the structured data. Maybe they just split the fiber optical stream using a 'prism' and pipe the output to Fort Meade.

In which case, Facebook are not lying when they say that the NSA don't have access to their servers, but they do have access to their network traffic.
Due process. It is fully OK for them to go after the bad guys if they do it the right way. The right way isn't blanket spying just in case it is useful.
This is interesting, and I had the same thought reading the article. One approach might be for the user to store the information on their own computer, and only when they enter (login) the social network, does their information become available, and only to those that they specifically give access to.
Just launched http://www.babelmatch.com. It's a crowd-sourced alternative to language-learning programs like Rosetta Stone.
CIA Chief Tech Officer: Big Data Is The Future And We Own It
I think the main issue is that the people have not been involved in any discussions regarding where this balance should be.
Hey, it's based on Ajenti, isn't it? :) I love Ajenti, I use it for my VPS.
Coderwall: meta content='width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0'

Really??
Toronto VPN start-up gives Turkish protesters a helping hand
WaPost backtracks on claim tech companies ‘participate knowingly’ in PRISM
Me too, I wanted him out of senate on this. http://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/110-2008/s168

I learned to be more specific.
Lesterland http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_t...
I have a lot of respect for how far Ubuntu has come, but I recently made the switch to Mint. The last several releases have become more and more about bringing Canonical's service offerings to the forefront when all I want is a terminal and a browser to do my dev work. Mint gave me a nice default desktop setup, access to the Ubuntu repositories and a world free of any brand's come-ons.
Thanks! :) I'm updating my comment above to more clearly explain the connection with PRISM.

If that still does not make sense, I'd welcome the input as to specifically how it isn't related.