skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The judge can "throw you in the slammer" for Direct Contempt of Court. This is when you are physically in the court room or in front of the presiding judge and do/say something that "disturbs the court."
However not complying with a court order is Indirect Contempt of Court and the defendant has the right to a hearing in this case.

So disobeying a court order is contempt of court, but a judge can't throw you in jail without a hearing for it.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempt_of_court#United_States
While the geek in me acknowledges this is an awesome project and I'm really glad to see them giving it a try, the sarcastic cynic in me had the first thought that this was a great way to bring the the remaining 2/3 of the world under NSA surveillance.
"I love those who yearn for the impossible." -Goethe

I wish other large companies showed such ambition. Telecoms like AT&T can't even be bothered to roll out the network upgrades they promised in the early 2000's.
Mind Blown again.
That's the first thing I thought as well!!
Eric Brewer, who joined Google a year or so back, has been working on Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions. He had similar ideas.

I wonder if he has been involved with this project.

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~brewer/
http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu/drupal/
I'm more excited about this than Google Glass.
yeah. I am a modest fan of Greenwald, but if Manning didn't want to get caught, talking to Lamo was a pretty dumb move. I mean Lamo got caught and is under (periodic, at least, probably) monitoring by the FBI. Minor disclaimer that I went to Kindergarten with Adrian Lamo.
Luckily it's not a rumor any more, Look at the article's url!
If it's very cheap, it could pay itself just with the legions of potential costumers (or eyeball pairs, to be cynical) it brings google.
You could always rent a botnet for an hour and broadcast PGP messages to all nodes. I'm sure there'd be hacker forums in China where you could rent a mostly HK-based net.
It's reasonable to not trust Lamo, and maybe even Kevin Poulsen (although IMO he's just reported the news in the PFC Manning case; it's Adrian who turned PFC Manning in. OTOH, if I'd been in Lamo's position (convicted felon!), I probably would have turned him in, too, thinking the whole thing was a sting or otherwise a setup since it was so fucking brazen. The only other safe option is "I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE SAYING, NEITHER AGREE NOR UNDERSTAND, AND DON'T EVER CONTACT ME AGAIN.").

However, I'd trust Declan McCullagh more than any other journalist I know. He also writes for Wired. He's not uncritical of the PRISM story, but I'd trust him to be fair, and he wouldn't himself become part of the story.
It's fascinating to see how well Google has branched out. It started as just a search engine competing with Lycos, AltaVista, & Yahoo and yet they didn't just stop, they kept going. They built all these new services & products around their core product (search) and it's paid off tremendously.

It's definitely something to model future companies off of.

When you win the race, don't stop, keep running.
This is fucking nuts. I feel weird. So this is what real innovation feels like.
Microsoft releases stats on law enforcement and national security orders
It's a really cool idea.

But given Google's history of late, I wonder how long it will last?
Music brings calm to Istanbul protests
Don't underestimate just how much of a value prop that something like this can bring to the table even if you do live in a city. I think of something like this as an ultimate convenience. Imagine you've had a long day at work, you've got family responsibilities or other plans afterwards, you're tired, you're hungry, etc. The last thing you probably want to do is spend even more time of your already busy schedule shopping for groceries.

Even with grocery stores nearby, you still have to go fight crowds of people, take all the time to find everything on your list, wait in line, wait to get checked out, then get your stuff and walk back to your place. A single trip can be exhausting, and even more so if you're introverted and/or hate dealing with crowds of people. Narrow aisles, the elderly, and annoying loud/crying kids can make for an infuriating trip if you're just trying to get your stuff and go asap.

Or... you could use something like this and have all of this taken care of for you.
I think the one of the problems is that software like GPG and OpenSSL go to a lot of trouble to make sure private keys don't hang around in memory for any longer than absolutely required - minimising the risk of having the OS preempt the executing code and write the key out to swap (or having malicious code slurp it up out of ram). The bare-metal hoop-jumping required to get that right might not be possible in the context of a browser plugin.
Minor nitpick: AT&T has done a shit-ton of research: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs

edit: apparently a different beast than today's AT&T
A network in the sky.
This is Skynet.
This is literally Skynet.
Do you have some back of the envelope calculations of cost of this versus satellite or extending copper wire? I'm fairly ignorant on the subject, but would love to hear more.
I don't view it as character assassination so much as suspicion by association. He was part of the group (Bush + Obama Administrations) that pushed for these programs. It makes him more suspect to be lying than a random person. It's not proof of a lie, just reason for scepticism (grain of salt and all that).

The stuff about Snowden doesn't even make any sense. The fact that he's a high school drop-out doesn't matter. Some people who drop out of high school have a lower intelligence, but that doesn't imply the Snowden does. The fact that he worked for the CIA, the NSA, and as a NSA contractor actually implies that he is either intelligent or the CIA/NSA are incompetent. Even if Snowden was of lower intelligence, it would imply that there is less likelihood that the documents are elaborate fakes, and more likely to the be the real deal.
Awesome. There are probably alot of things you can do with metrics on usage, availability, even mapping/weather and some fun camera views and more beyond just a line in the ground. So many more informational uses with it being airborne.
I'm currently in Palo Alto, and I do not have a vehicle, except for a bicycle. I will see how long I can hold out, but so far, I've bought all of my furniture and household items through Amazon and a local dealer, and had them delivered. Groceries come from Instacart.

Tomorrow, I need to go to Ikea to get some other items, since I wasn't a fan of what's available on Amazon, or the pricing on other sites. I plan to use ZipCar.

Instacart is one of the many services that are helping me to lead a car-free lifestyle here in Palo Alto. I'm from Toronto, and I wish I could have accomplished the same when I was there.
You don't believe in OTA firmware updates?
Apoorva's got enough hustle to make the 2nd theory viable. However, he's also lazy like most of us, so that casts doubt on that theory.
You're right, I should have said "universal literacy."
Well then, wireless internet escalated quickly. In all seriousness tho', this was unexpected. They said that it will be working with an antenna of sorts that you attach to your house? Fast forward 10 years and it will be an integrated wifi replacement in every machine - giving internet to you even in places where there's no electricity. That's the future I'd give my liver to see.
Laying fiber to non-dense populations is usually prohibitively expensive.
Sounds like they're just going to be replacing them all a few times a year: each balloon is expected to "stay aloft for 100+ days at a time."

cite: http://www.google.com/loon/faq/
I'd say it still hasn't branched out. It is very much an "internet" company. So anything related to the internet (and data nowadays) is somehow going to benefit their bottom-line.
I can't help but notice (and question) the similarity between this and Facebook's statement - both give a 1000 warrant range and a 1000 affected user range.

Scripted by the NSA? Shared legal advice? _Surely_ not just a coincidence?
>allows citizen-initiated referendums to challenge all laws passed by the parliament, or even to change the constitution //

Wouldn't you say that fits within the term "direct democracy"?
It would be great if it didn't take a company project to overcome the fear of being harassed at 2:30 AM because someone misused my open WiFi.
I find all this public key and private key concept is confusing to general people. A private key is an actual key that you can use to unlock an encrypted message. A public key is actually a lock that you gave someone so that he can use to encrypt message and only you can open it.
In some regards, so am I, though this comment made me think that in some regards, Loon is a necessary component of Glass's success. There are huge areas of even just the U.S. which don't have cell/wireless internet coverage and Glass would be fairly useless, or significantly less useful, there currently.
And little things like Unix
Ipredia: An Anonymous Linux Live CD using i2p instead of Tor
Best rick-roll ever!
Snowden isn't "in hiding" from intelligence agencies, only from the news media. I assess with virtually nil probability that US and Chinese/HK intelligence don't know where he is right now (the only way one intelligence service wouldn't know details is if the other has already taken him into protection or custody).

He doesn't need to use anonymity systems now; he just needs to use a service which doesn't report IP address to the other end. A simple VPN or whatever would be fine.

If I were seriously on the run, I'd be using a system with days of latency (variable over 1-5 days), which blended in with a widespread current system. Essentially Len Sassaman's old mixmaster remailer system, which interfaces with the world over SMTP. The problem is there aren't enough mixmaster nodes to be really enough now, so you'd want to use a fairly anonymous sender too, and the old "USENET message pool" style systems don't work now that "USENET" basically means "http access to one of a few big providers", too.

Kind of a step back from where we were in 1999, which is bullshit :(
There go some more IQ points. This is a shining example of why I don't use Twitter.
and C
Unfortunately, if more people start using the Internet the NSA database will inevitably grow. I wonder how long it'll take the whole human population is covered by the NSA.
Steven Levy: How Google Will Use High-Flying Balloons to Deliver Internet
I find it darkly amusing that the rarity of these events is being invoked to convince people to moderate their concern, when this situation only exists due to the government's insistence that we treat even more rare events as gravely serious threats to our way of life.
It's all a plot to monitor everyone all the time. Naturally, I think it's awesome.
> They would understand that there was nothing you could do to help them decrypt the messages.

That's what I'm wondering, though. Would they believe you? Would they believe the documentation?
I'm sorry. What have you done for me lately? C and Unix don't count.
That's not quite the same AT&T that everyone knows of today...
Yes, but do you really think those rural areas are going to want to walk around lie cyber dorks? The corp I work for has already banned glass on premises.
Minor nitpick: The company now known as AT&T is essentially Cingular wireless; they bought the remnants of AT&Ts cell network and the rights to the name.
How fast will the connections be?
One day there will be a Google Glass that isn't detectable by the subject of the recording (tapped directly into the sensory system of the wearer). Then a lot of the enforcement mechanisms against "Glassholes" will become redundant.
I am impressed with both the ambitiousness and nobleness of the project that Google is pursuing here. It's true: most of the world's population is not actually online despite how it might feel otherwise to most people who are already online.

I am glad that they are working on important issues like this and I hope the project is successful in bringing more of the world's people online.
It's not the amount of text it's the 100% width that's giving it that "giant wall of text" look. The text is all over the place.

If they switched to a fixed width it would look a lot better and easier to read and scan through. You can try this in Google Chrome. Right-click on their page and select "inspect element". Then in the developer tools window find the <body> element and click on that. The body {} selector should come up on the right hand pane of the developer tools window, click to the right of the last bracket } and it'll let you add another rule, put in width:1000px; and then margin:auto; now go back and see the changes on the page. (refreshing the page will return it to normal btw). See. Much better.

There's a reason why most websites use a fixed width. People complained about fixed widths in the early 2000s because they used to be only 800px wide and they weren't used to the white bars on the side of their websites. Now that our monitors are about 1600 pixels wide fluid 100% widths are just too stretched out and it's harder to read and scan through text.

You can also use CSS3 media querries to change the width according to window size (I made a site using this http://timeforzen.com (resize the window and watch the layout change))
You're thinking of a different concept I think, i.e. when is it allowable to use deadly force at all.

If you fear for your life or are in danger of serious bodily harm you normally have the right to use deadly force (sometimes you must also have no way to escape, but let's just assume you're clear to use deadly force). Once you're in that situation it's advantageous to actually use that force. You wouldn't try to shoot someone in a hard-to-hit area like their knee or shoulder because as you say, if you had the time or perceived the danger to be low enough to line up for a shot like that, you were probably not in a situation so extreme that would warrant use of deadly force. It would be legally more defensible to go all Mozambique drill on somebody on put two in the chest and one in the head.

However, given that you are in the situation where you must defend yourself, but where deadly force would not be allowed, proportional response is usually still the operative concept.

If someone comes at you with a bat and you manage to disarm them that doesn't give you carte blanche in the U.S. to beat the attacker to within an inch of their life.
That's consistent with Cuba's own benchmarks - http://files.soveran.com/cuba/#9 - where Sinatra improves over Rails by a little but Cuba improves by a lot.
The original source of this thing seems to be NSFWCorp, which if anything is nuttier than Pando (although never as lame). Indeed, the explicit preoccupation with "libertarians" (as if they could be anything but a tiny slice of SV) reads more like something Mark Ames wrote.
Each balloon can provide connectivity to a ground area about 40 km in
diameter at speeds comparable to 3G. For balloon-to-balloon and
balloon-to-ground communications, the balloons use antennas
equipped withspecialized radio frequency technology. Project
Loon currently uses ISM bands (specifically 2.4 and 5.8 GHz bands)
that are available for anyone to use.

From http://www.google.com/loon/how/
I'm not sure what you mean. The previous conversations, and history of stories, offer insite into the technical, cultural, and legal issues that everyone might find valuable. News without context is just hype.
How long does a 100k+ employee company get credit for something a small handful of their employees did almost half a century ago? Not that C wasn't an achievement but . . .
Harshest punishment?? He hasn't even been charged yet...
If you look closely, about halfway down, in the ciphertext you can almost make out some non-random parts:

http://pastebin.com/q7mxqRn7
I laughed. It was obvious.
People who work at places like Google have been known, from time to time, read science fiction.

A lot of it comes true because someone says "yes, good idea".
But they're tethered, right? Or no? if they're untethered, that's just crazy awesome. If they're tethered, I'm still slightly worried about the cables.

OH! They're just going to make enough that there is always one overhead! That's so damn cool. I can barely believe it. Wireless technology is some of the most amazing stuff.
The way this thread is going, one probably ought to say that or otherwise imply/explain it :S
it's not branching out as much as broadening their distribution channels. every project meant to increase availability of internet access is increasing google ad traffic, but hey, this one is crazy and amazing!
I didn't realize no car in Palo Alto+ was doable.

I do the above in SF.
I've always wanted a near-live satellite image for Google maps.

If this takes off that'll be possible. I could find a parking spot from the sky. :)
I take my point back as the AT&T of today is not the same as it was back then, but the fact that the company funded this research is what makes it admirable.
From Mark Zuckerberg:

> I want to respond personally to the outrageous press reports about
> PRISM. ...

Mark Zuckerberg should apologize for calling the activities of the free press "outrageous".
More likely they will not even bother to fix broken balloons and just launch new ones.
The government will only allow NSL and FISA warrants to be acknowledged within ranges of 1000 requests.
And now they sell your data?
The formula for (Roman) concrete was lost for centuries or the Romans didn't share it which also makes sense if you're a militaristic society why give away the secret to concrete?

And it's only recently the secret of Roman concrete was discovered.

Also I don't think Roman concrete is exactly the same as what we think of concrete it's not like the Romans poured it out into forms as is done today.
Why would you be afraid of that? Is it a frequent occurrence where you live?
"www." is a good indicator in other media that a web address is being presented when it might otherwise be not entirely obvious.

Not entirely pointless.
Almost everything they're done is centered around ads and getting more data on their users to sell more ads. Even this project, in the end it's about getting more people online to look at their ads. (not sure how much ad revenue you can get from poor places, but whatever)

EDIT: To those saying they're playing the long game; Playing the long game doesn't make sense. The long game is being fully wired. By the time poor areas become economically important enough to be advertised to, they will have traditional telecoms servicing them.
>It's illegal to break into computers in all civilized countries. The director of the NSA should be extradited to China to face justice for his crimes (after being punished in the US for his crimes here, of course).

What if those computers are breaking into computers in your country? While I wouldn't be surprised if we are involved in things like this more broadly, we have no way of knowing, from the information presented, if this was the result of counter-espionage attempts.
Tapping the full potential of brain. Be a genius. In 15 minutes.
Not tethered -- watch http://www.google.com/loon/how/
Even simply things like ntp time sync request can give you away

I'd really like to hear more about this one.

Murdoch's hot-or-not required a lot more than an ntp sync request and was concerned with identifying hidden services.
"With all that said, it is also our understanding that the NSA has larger issues to be concerned with than a VPN company."

I think that is a strong factor.
They're missing AA 50/50 and Tri-blend, the only two types of tshirt I'll wear (maybe standard AA in a pinch). Once you've worn AA's blend shirts you'll never want to wear another type again, assuming athletic fit works well for you.
Maildrop looks awesome on the iPad.
Reading it full width on 1600x900 and it's fine. The only thing I would change is the contrast. I am having trouble reading some of the font. If it was a bit lighter or bolder I would be able to read it better.
Yep, but it was more than any other company in the history of this country has ever disclosed. And give them another 48-72 hours from now to divulge more info.
In defence of the XBox One
This was posted on Reddit like a month ago.

People knew about Roman concrete. According to CivE people in the thread, the problem is that volcanic ash isn't present everywhere and it sets much slower than Portland cement.

This study was paid for by a Saudi Arabian University, and as mentioned in the article, Saudi Arabia happens to have a lot of volcanic ash.
Even if its true, it's still a great win-win for everybody then.
We have known about the composition of Roman Concrete for a long time, the main difference is we trade long term strength for a shorter curing time. For an excellent dissection of this recent round of "secrets technology of the ancients that our modern science only now is beginning to understand" check out this reddit thread, it has quite a few engineering students and professionals chiming in and I learned quite a bit from it. http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1fohl2/berkeley_dis...
Great tip. But, can we point it at maildrop!?

Maildrop guy, you there?
>not sure how much ad revenue you can get from poor places, but whatever

They're playing the long game. They see the third world as a market in the making, and they want to be entrenched when it develops.
I'm surprised that Microsoft's own statistics released about an hour ago haven't made their way to the HN front page:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5883894
In another thread, a software engineer working for Palantir commented that the two systems were not the same.
You act like that's a good thing.

I don't want some Google balloon watching me every step of my day.

Even less so if what it's seeing is published near-instantly
In California companies are much more limited about what they can claim to own of your (unrelated) side project.
They're thinking long term. If you provide cheap (free?) balloon-based internet access, you will open opportunities for people who have little access to the outside world.
Correct. This is an artifact of DOJ/NSA demands for secrecy, nothing more.
Definitely not tethered. Cables become super heavy at those lengths. Not to mention you need very strong/thick cables.

If you just try flying a kite on a good windy day an keep feeding it string, it will pretty quickly start loosing altitude.
He's a whistleblower of historic importance. That Verizon FISA order alone has exposed deception at the highest levels of government. Proof that an Ars Technica reader can amount to something.
That said, no internet company has products as diverse as Google's? Smartphone OS, wearable computing, gigabit internet etc.
I always thought that the USA was a Constitutional Republic.

As for my fascism remark, it refers to some campaign posters from 2008.
http://americanbuilt.us/images/facism/not-fascism.jpg

However, fascism is not a single, set, ideology, and there are those who view the current spate of "crony capitalism" as a form of fascism, namely "Corporate Fascism."

I have not seen the word "democracy" anywhere within the US Constitution, yet the word "Republic" is present in that "damned piece of paper" which I swore an oath to defend.
http://rense.com/general69/paper.htm
(apocryphal source)

I do agree with your final paragraph, and consider myself lucky to be an American. We could be a lot worse off.
No, they sell ads targeted at you based on your data. Nobody but Google and the gov't has access to any of your data on their servers.
We used the same technique at Slant. Do you think our max width is a little too wide though? http://www.slant.co/topics/154/~what-s-the-best-jabber-gchat...