skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> How can you trust the US government less than private companies?

The US government can throw me in jail, private companies cannot. The US government can sick the IRS, FBI, and Secret Service after me; private companies cannot.

Congress has a lot of the liability, but so does the President. Read up on FDR's use of the IRS and what happened to the various Tea Party groups in 2010 with 501(c)4 status[1]. This is why the expansion of federal government reach is feared.

1) someone will argue about the nature of 501(c)4 so just remember that Obama's reelection campaign relaunched as one to advocate for his political agenda for his 2nd term.
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MoCL presentation from ECLM 2013 - new Common Lisp implementation for iOS and Android
Many fish are. Shellfish even more so. Nobody who can help it relies entirely on seafood. Where I'm from, it was the poor children of fishermen who were stuck eating seafood every single day.
It was obviously made for NSA. Otherwise the name wouldn't mention NSA. Microsoft didn't need the backup key, they were able to back up the single Microsoft key. Nobody designs the crypto with two keys accidentally. How NSA used it we can only speculate, but it was there on purpose, the truthful wording of Microsoft was "it was there for us to obey the law."
I am asking for downvotes, but I really don't see how Manning was fighting against domestic enemies. He leaked a dump of data about foreign operations and foreign governments. He could not have even known what most of it contained.

I wish we had a hero to champion our fight for privacy, but I don't think Manning is that person. An anti-war hero, maybe.

A lot of the information he dumped violated the privacy of individuals who worked for the government, interacted with the government, or were in government in other countries. We can't know for sure some poor Afghans did not suffer reprisals.

We need someone in government who is willing spill everything about these domestic programs, then fight against the charges leveled against him/her in court (knowing that most likely the court will come down upon them like a pile of bricks).
Start with Mathematica's builtin documentation. The overview pages are actually quite good. They are also online [1].

Of course, given that the early drafts were written by Wolfram himself, you'll have to ignore absurd statements like this one: "Long viewed as an important theoretical idea, functional programming finally became truly convenient and practical with the introduction of Mathematica's symbolic language." [2]

See also: Pure [3]

[1] http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/CoreLangua...

[2] http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/FunctionalPro...

[3] http://purelang.bitbucket.org/
True, but I think the point still stands. The nature of government means that we don't like everything they do, we just protest the things that matter most. If this doesn't matter, it'll be allowed, and will be forgotten.
Looks good on paper. Yes you can do whatever you want with it. But unfortunately you might find yourself on some black list. Be unable to fly. Your tax records might be meticulously inspected. Your workplace might be called and secret service might want to "chat" with your co-workers and bosses about you. FBI might visit you at home just to chat and take notes.

If anything the govt. has proven that it can fuck up someone's life if they really want to regardless of what the books say. Yes in the end you might even be exonerated but by then you have been laid off, divorced, financially drained from attorney fees, your health, time and nerves are shut.
What about crowd sourcing ? Setup a big data server named NSAleaks. Change data like phone numbers, names and locations so that only NSA can map them back to the real value. Then let people search it. Offer a reward for finding abnormal patterns or terrorist plots from it.
Medium and Hacker News, what’s the difference?
When I read the title of this article I was really hoping it was going to discuss the UX problems of key management.
Ask HN: What are the best hosting services?
I'm currently using Linode to host a server. After hearing about the security issues that they have been having recently on HN, I've been considering moving away from them to some other service that costs the same or less. (I'm on the lowest tier because I don't really do much with it) I'd like to still have root access to the server so I can install whatever software I feel like playing around with. Keeping the same basic performance Linode offers right now would only be a nice bonus. I just want a reliable host that I don't have to worry about my CC info being stolen from.
I posted the link. I wanted to describe my reasons :

I know that even the most justified war is ugly : there are accidents and mistakes and innocent people die at times, despite the best precautions.

Im aware that the freedoms I have every day, are a result of a coalition of democratic countries winning WWII and other conflicts. Many of my freedoms were won by American strength : military, economic and technological. I'm not an American, but I hold up the Constitution, the rule of Law and Democracy as high ideals - the best way humans have come up with so far of coexisting on this planet.

But a Democracy cannot exist where there is no free speech nor the right to question the government and the law. Citizens need information on whats happening : we need freedom to speak and anonymity to discuss in private, if we are to have a functioning Democracy.

I think Bradley Manning had a moral obligation as a soldier and as a citizen, to release the information he did. From what I read it seems that he was careful not to share information that would get other soldiers and spies killed, nor give the enemy any material advantage in the war.

What I think should happen is that this should be a civil trial by jury to decide whether he acted legally and morally. He leaked news of military 'mistakes', so he should not be tried by that same organization. A civil jury should decide whether the obligation to uphold the Constitution, by leaking, outweighed his obligation as a soldier to keep the information secret.

Even more worrying here is that the Obama administration is pushing for this to be tried as 'giving information directly to the enemy' ie. treason, when clearly the motivation was not that.

If there were no Wikileaks, no Press, no privacy.. how would we keep our secret organisations in check, and have any confidence they are following their mandate ?
I'm pleased you posted this. I've two eee901's with error 2.
Do you know if this is the 4GB? Being, if I swap the 16GB's with a working third 901's, I get still same error?

These fail by SSD's limited read/write's and we use a linux journaling file system?
Attacker in Afghanistan Hid Bomb in His Body
33 Thomas Street is an awesome building, self-sufficient, radiation hardened, and 18 foot ceilings.
Analysis of text related to subjective ideas can make anything bunk ("What do they mean 'all men are created equal'? Isn't our individualism what makes us great", etc.). Line by line analysis are particularly insidious because any idea can be proposed and appear to be a reasonable response without any likelihood of response from the original party.

If you want to find problems with the various companies' responses, you sure can. I am positive things have happened with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, etc. and the government that most people would find offensive. But playing semantic games that push particular agendas without the full story is misleading and imprudent.
Your move, TSA.
I've done a much more moderate version of this with oysters. Last winter I decided to try to eat oysters at least twice a month, because I really liked them. At one point, they became a lot less appealing, and so I stopped. I can only imagine how bad it would be with trying to eat them daily.
If they don't like it its only because they want to be the only ones doing it. Seriously facial recognition is the one big technology useful on the glass and Google knows that and probably developed a lot for the glass itself.
Most big cities have a communications building like this.

My favorite one is in NYC: 33 Thomas Street. It looks like it was designed to be the capitol of a dystopian megalopolis.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/33_Thoma...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/33_Thoma...

Speaking of dystopia... I bet it houses a spy room just like the one in SF!
The slides may have come from within NSA, but they were created for a non-technical audience of analysts. Suppose for the sake of argument that the reality is that the NSA has hardware adjacent to company servers or on the internet backbone nearby that can collect messages in transit that match some search query. That's not really direct access, and it's not indiscriminate -- all the subsequent statements from company execs and government sources would be correct. But it's easy to see how some mid-level worker in the NSA, trying to convey to analysts that PRISM enables them to retrieve emails, phone records etc. from various companies, would make an over-simplification and suggest that there is direct access to company servers.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." --Robert Hanlon. Despite the duplicitous and overly narrow statements about PRISM that skirt the truth, there's no reason to suggest they are all overtly lying, when a much simpler explanation is that some NSA employee overstated their technical capabilities on an internal powerpoint.
Laws that are interpreted in secret can only be subject to massive abuse. The problem isn't the survellance its the lack of public oversight
Are you looking for a virtual or real server? There are pretty different consequences to both, but a virtual server is pretty much always less secure than a separate physical server due to "how things work". Never ever ever store really private data on a VM unless it enters it encrypted beforehand.

Linode's PW/CC problem was due to poor oversight (I'd assume, otherwise its just incompetence) so probably not a huge deal if you keep your services there. There's a bunch of popular ones out there - prgmr.com, softlayer, rackspace, digital ocean, leaseweb (very long setup process) to name a few.
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He didn't seem very nice in his personal life.
After the current NSA scandal, is there any chance for wide adoption of a wearable mass spying device ?
"shit happens in war" ... and when it does, it needs to be investigated properly, the results published [ subject to sane censorship ] so we can learn from those mistakes and prevent them in future.

I don't think that would happen without someone leaking.
Just playing Devil's Advocate here...

What's to stop them from classifying... say .... computer hacking... as a threat to National Security?
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XKCD comics lose their significance if the @title is not mentioned.

"...an irrational number isn't the extension of an infinite decimal fraction, […] it's a law" (Wittgenstein). It is a law which "yields extensions."

It's a good way to get around the http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/facts/slingshot-argument.h....

From a Grand Linguistic Sociologist's perspective, "π" and "the U.S. Constitution" might hold very similar roles, given that mathematicians and politicians speak are wont to speak with reverence of their own signs.

Heidegger reminds us that "we are the sign that is not read."
I had to install Debian on a laptop last week actually, suspend/resume absolutely did not work on it...

> The world doesn't need your BSD FUD.

You have just doomed yourself to the "I have no idea what I'm talking about" club.
Unfortunately not. I skipped Laos, Brunei, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and a few others. Having to draw the line somewhere, I picked countries where I either had an in, or had at least heard a lot of buzz and interest about (like Myanmar and Sri Lanka.)
I think it is basically a form of semantic satiation. Mention something controversial enough times and eventually the public stops understanding that it was real. I wager that if you took a poll of Americans, most would believe that ECHELON is a fictional plot device in spy movies that "conspiracy theorists" think is real because they are dumb.
oh boy, tis a sad day when a south park episode goes from satire to documentary
"If your company has set up the proxy correctly you won't know anything is off because they'll have arranged to have the proxy's internal SSL certificate registered on your machine as a valid certificate."

Yes, this is basically textbook MITM for SSL. This is why the NSA can't do this at "your local ISP", because it requires access to your machine...
Haven't you heard? The way they do it now is that the NSA secretly spies on people, and then they give the info to FBI, which now has "probable cause".

These guys are hellbent on finding every possible loophole in the Constitution, and (ab)using it to the extreme. They've forgot all about the spirit of the Constitution.

It must help that they have a Constitutional lawyer in office helping them discover all these loopholes. And here we thought that because he was a Constitutional lawyer, he was going to use that knowledge to uphold the Constitution. The joke's on us, I guess.
Read the articles by Post and Guardian. They published enough leaks to make clear how it works: the special court gives a blanket order, valid for as much as one year, but at least three months, under which the inteligence comunity can operate from their servers at the company site for up to one year without the company even knowing (or wanting to know) what is being requested from their servers. The court order is what's making the operation "legal" so the companies can't be held legally responsible. But that can't mean that the system doesn't exist.
Leaking is the most effective form of protest today. A leaker can do more than 1,000,000 marchers with picket signs can. This is why they're cracking down on it so hard, like they do anything that allows mundane citizens to affect the status quo.
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That's what happened with RICO. When it was passed they told us racketeering was only organized crime. Now you can get RICO charges doing just about anything.
>If I were a Chinese official reading this, my #1 priority would be to try to get access to PRISM.

No it wouldn't. You'd be after the things Chinese spies are already after: trade and military secrets. They don't care who's calling who.
You ever know someone whose parents always said "because I said so?" It doesn't turn out well, and this is what they're doing to the country.
For such an event, you really want to know there has been a proper investigation.

I dont know if there was a video, what it showed, how many people died, how many were combatants, what their ages were.

If I was a soldier.. Id want to know that these things are investigated well.. because I really don't want to kill innocent people by mistake. Where did the mistake happen along the chain of intel and of command, who didn't double check, was someone gung-ho or negligent ?
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"You are free, because this is what freedom looks like."
> Zuckerberg and Page, at the least, could be said to have lied if the companies referred to in the OP are them (both Page and Zuckerberg said that they (they as in "we") had no prior knowledge of PRISM at all)

How so? They said they had no system for direct access, and indeed PRISM is apparently not a system for direct access. They said they hadn't heard of PRISM, but it's at least quite possible that they weren't familiar with the NSA's "PRISM" moniker, as opposed to the system itself.
And broad surveillance makes it that much easier for them to harass their political enemies.

For example, they could hassle everyone you've talked to on your Verizon phone.
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How about this newer article [1], also by Ambinder, which the top post in your link links to? It seems to be speculation but it's the best reconciliation that I've seen of the leaked document and the denials of the tech companies. I also find it to be plausible, overall, if a little too trusting of the NSA's auditors and methods.

http://theweek.com/article/index/245360/solving-the-mystery-...
Statements from the President assert:

"What you’ve got is two programs that were originally authorized by Congress, have been
repeatedly authorized by Congress. Bipartisan majorities have approved them. Congress
is continually briefed on how these are conducted ... Congress has been briefed 13
times on the programs since 2009."

So why haven't any members of Congress spoken up about this program? Rand and Ron, where were you?
That's why nobody cared about the NSA spying on foreigners. Like your privacy (or any other human right) was more valuable depending on where you happened to be born.
> really just look like giant insects that happen to live in the water

That's because they basically are, since crustaceans are likely more closely related to proper insects than millipedes, centipedes, and arachnids are.
I tried to parse your comment way too many times.
You can use the information in ways to harass and intimidate even without using it for prosecution; e.g. the FBI threatened to publicize MLK's extramarital affair (which they'd discovered by putting him under surveillance (authorized by the then-Attorney General RFK)) if he didn't give up his civil rights work.
there is the fear of prosecution of course, but i think that plays less a part than the threat of how the market will react to a full confession that we're giving your data away (even if it's under the pretense of "safety" or whether you trust the data given is whole or in part).

so lets say Google admits, ok we give access to the gov to sift through your contacts...the vast amount of the population will say, that's messed up but will continue to use their services...who I do see leaving are the small segment of people who value their privacy and the technically savvy individuals who can roll their own services...those people could be the taste-makers of society and depending on whether you believe their influence, could pivot the market to a competitor.

of probably greater importance are the government and corporate entity of the world who now will be concerned with whether they should use Google for their own sensitive data knowing that a third-party (and in the case of nation states, an overly meddlesome competitor) can access it, who historically are also known to have difficulty holding onto data (ie, leaks). So there would be definite loss of trust there.

from my view, those are the greater risks for those particular CEOs...it could result in killing your own baby, as they are also the founders.
I believe that "national security" reasoning has been expanded to cover the country's reputation. The security being protected is that of a portrayed image.
This is an odd comparison. There are a lot of differences, I guess.
Everything about this comment is perfect, down to your username.
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As a predominantly Asia-resident member of this community who has passed through many of the countries I find this post rather interesting. I suggest changing the title to make the subject more obvious - I nearly skipped it.

However, I am going to be honest: I think the horrible truth here is that there is no 'startup scene' in most of these countries, no 'serviced apartments' in the places 'to meet the post people'. The claimed contents themselves betray a distinct lack of understanding of the host cultures through an American perspective.

Quite simply, these products look far too much like smoke and mirrors with external cultural baggage to boot.

As someone who as actually run a startup in China, for instance, the contents are a joke. No mention of the most important areas of consideration, overemphasis of things that are irrelevant.

So what the hell is this? They are hiring. Job description: "Find a few real estate people. Ask what’s the best place for a new business to locate." ... subtext: publish that as fact.

Come on... this is lowly. Just because you have some money to spam-market quick-e-books with doesn't mean you are the arbiter of truth. Hire a real writer, do some real research, and be honest about it. Without quality, there is little point in publishing.

Fail.
I have had to consider the possibility that the military has gone rogue and it's not his decision to make.
Ok, so the one thing we have figured out in the past couple of days is that the NSA undoubtedly has the ability to collect almost all user data and internet traffic, even for US citizens.

Your link is broken, should be: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-prism-server...

Now, what do they do with it? The guardian is claiming that 77,000 reports have referenced PRISM but it is also the name of an internal accounting program (http://www.dot.gov/individuals/privacy/pia-prism)

We have a long way to go with this NSA issue. I believe that they are a great agency but have a very difficult job to preform, and unfortunately their mission sometimes requires questionable actions. They're powerful enough to make anything they want legal retro-actively, which isn't necessarily a good thing.

Many people assume that the NSA has been "spying" domestically for decades, because it's arguably necessary in order to sufficiently protect the country. I love technology but am already tired of this debate. You are not going to prevent the NSA from data-mining, end of story.
They didn't ignore FISA. FISA (as extended after 9/11) is the basis for a lot of the surveillance which is done today.
Rewriting an article is. You can add a list of errata or write a new one.
Can anyone say exactly what this paragraph is supposed to mean (or really mean, if there's a difference):

Intelligence community sources said that this description[direct access], although inaccurate from a technical perspective, matches the experience of analysts at the NSA. From their workstations anywhere in the world, government employees cleared for PRISM access may “task” the system and receive results from an Internet company without further interaction with the company’s staff.

So they get data from an ad-hoc query without interaction with the company's staff. And yet it is not direct access? I've read the other back-and-forths but I'm still not sure what this could even trying to imply.

Edit: and read - According to a more precise description contained in a classified NSA inspector general’s report, also obtained by The Post, PRISM allows “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” rather than directly to company servers. The companies cannot see the queries that are sent from the NSA to the systems installed on their premises, according to sources familiar with the PRISM process.

But that the meaning is no more clear. Or the meaning is, we buy an "indirect access cable at Best Buy and so everything is OK", ie, the distinction is nothing but word games.
I'm guessing you're referring to something at the level of discussion of vulnerabilities as opposed to actually breaking into some government resource or an enterprise with enough leverage to affect the nation in some way. Yes, enough lawyer-speak combined with general ignorance could probably make a jury believe any kind of security talk is somehow threatening. I suppose that's where careful wording comes in, for example limiting a threat to include intent to act on at least some specific class of target.
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True startup guys.