skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
protection (from harm) is a right granted by the government.
I'd just like to point out that the issues here are not clear cut. Teaching students to hide their activities from the authorities also enables them to hide their activities from parents and schools. I have greatest scope to teach what I like between the ages of 11-14. Are children this young able to responsibly use the skills I might provide them in masking their identities online and protecting their data?
The scary thing is this: these people were already voted away. People voted for Obama when he promised the end of warrantless wiretapping, the closing down of Guantanamo, etc. Why should voters believe the next guy who promises these things? It feels hopeless.
Red Herring 2013 award promotion video
I build robots, 3d printers, and other mechanical things. I design, build and debug electronics. I'm also trying my hand at furniture (built http://imgur.com/a/HLbWF yesterday). I also cook a lot.
Also check out http://nacl.cr.yp.to

there is a more library friendly version called sodium[1]. I don't know how much review has been done of that so far yet though....

[1]: http://labs.umbrella.com/2013/03/06/announcing-sodium-a-new-...
That's a direct application of 1984 : make the state of war permanent so you can crush all political opposition as treason. Impressive how the US has gone from the most principled, Freedom-loving Democracy to a totalitarian state that does not say its real name in the course of 200 years.
I sortof hope they announce the iPhone 6 (aka the 5s) so I can stop refreshing macrumors :)
All I'm saying is that you don't have all the information, so why try to discredit him so early? Wait until you have the facts before you condemn someone.
That's quite a broad statement. I assume this is only for some very simple games.
yes, Im sorry (eng. is not my native language). I do not want to imply it. Just create awareness that spammers are using it.
... Or indeed any other suggestions (in addition to Tor, of course).
Not a bad summary. (I wrote one of the articles you cited.)
I wish ASCII002 was represented properly on the internet.
Breaking the Espionage Act of 1917 is unfortunately a felony though. It's nauseating.
SimCity should do a galactic sim to design species
After playing SimCity, I think: Why not go galactic? Imagine a version where you are the god-like consciousness of the universe. You input various characteristics of how you want the universe designed and the species that live on various planets. You watch them evolve (like Conway's game of life) and eventually they will contact each other and compete for planets. SimStar Wars. It's like Starcraft but you get to design the way planets and various species are structured, instead of playing for a side. Would a more Star Trek Borg-like species beat a logical Vulcan species? Ah what a video game that would be, the grandest of them all.
In addition I am in the process of composing a letter to my elected representatives. One thing I am noting is that the published standards are quite a bit more lax on this than the data, permitting the NSA to quite heavily over-select for Americans.

A 51% confidence that your target is not American when looking at a service where 15% of the users are American, or one where only 29% of the users of the users are Americans is a meaningless standard. Now the only hope right now is that companies push back but the question is how much given that they were not willing to push back enough to break silence.
This is very nice of Jonsdottir, but given the current conservative government in Iceland, I doubt it is a safe place for Snowden.

In fact, given how widespread the American influence is, I can't think of a safe country for him. Apart from Ecuadorian embassy-like hideouts.
I would love to see how _that kind of AI_ plays against person in DotA 2 or Starcraft 2.
I think there is a natural necessity that when you accept someone as an equal partner in a process, you assume they are like you are.

It goes the other way in not so great ways also that we tend to project those things we do not like about ourselves onto our enemies.

If someone accuses everyone else of being a thief, expect that the accuser is the one responsible, but the person who respects everyone is probably respectable himself.
The link is on the footer :)
I really wish it was true for serious games with a lot of metagame and strategy elements (Think Dota 2 or Company of Heroes), not just simple arcade toys...
Usually the AI in those games simply cheats horrendously and still is utterly stupid and having a real challenge in single player would be lovely
I am not in the streets over it, because I already assumed they were doing it, or were going to, since the Patriot Act was first signed. Most large policy issues don't get fixed until there is both a crisis and interests align.

Now, the members of congress fighting the Obama administration have a crisis to run their next election on. And, in their quest to "take Obama to task", they might solve some of the existing issues around the Patriot Act, which they voted for multiple times.
But it is also that it is far easier for the police who have lots of surveillance to jail their own citizens than to swoop in and jail foreigners. The risk of abuses are there in both cases but they are orders of magnitude more when the police doing the arresting are from the same country as the ones doing the surveillance.
... and will hand it to your country willingly.
I don't see why it's necessary.
How many liberal democracies can you point to that have gone the way of totalitarianism, mass imprisonment, and genocide?

I can think of one very prominent example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_federal_election,_1930
I have no power to discredit him. I'm not famous, nor any access to a venue to do so.

This is totally personal speculation based on how I would have behaved if I were in his position as a whistleblower that was a strong human rights privacy advocate. To me, his actions are incongruous with his statements. If he's not being manipulated by the Chinese, the other option is that he is just naive or careless and picked Hong Kong without considering what kind of political implications it would have, and was either unaware of its history in human rights and privacy, or chose to ignore it.

I'm fully willing to believe my opinion will change if more facts come in; just as it it stands now, I remain skeptical.
> Since more or less all software encrypt their traffic

I suggest that you open Wireshark and start browsing the internet and use your applications that you normally do, then check the packages sent from/to the servers. If you think that "more or less all software" encrypts their data, you'll be really surprised what the dumps will show you.
I live i Germany. And whenever we try to sell cloud-based services to our customers there is this group of people that are not comfortable with Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. They like to keep data in their own racks on their own servers. The standard reply is to call it FUD and talk about all the advantages the cloud has.

It will be a lot harder to win an argument against them now that everybody knows that data which is stored in the U.S. is free bait for the NSA to play with. It's no longer fear, uncertainty and doubt. It's just fear now.
"In 399, the 'climate of opinion' was no doubt unfavorable to him. Most of the young aristocrats who had flocked round him were dead or discredited, and the leaders of the restored democracy were middle-class 'no-nonsense', rather anti-intellectual business men. They would approve when Meletos (probably a religious bigot, not the same Meletos who arraigned Andokides) undertook a prosecution calculated to force Socrates out of Athens." The Pelican History of Greece, Pg. 306

I admittedly flipped to the index and skimmed until I found that quote, but as I understand it Socrates was executed as a counterrevolutionary by the restored Athenian democracy. (Though the crime they actually charged him with was a little different, to say that the primary purpose of the trial was corrupting the youth of Greece would be like saying that the primary purpose of trying Al Capone was his tax evasion.)
At 80 drives in 4U, removing the drives from racks is only going to improve density by a small percentage. Perhaps by removing any walking space between the racks you could bring it down to 180 square miles from 360. HDD are more volumetrically dense than tape.

Any way you look at it, a yottabyte is going to occupy an enormous amount of physical space.
Mein WWDC Wunschzettel
"The records were exploited by Swedish Intelligence. They were also shared with Japan, Britain, France and the USA."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Stella_Polaris
Did you even read the article/mail? The author makes a lucid argument which you totally fail to address:

> And so—before the capability was made public, it _likely_ wouldn't

> have been used against mere political nuisances, at least not without

> the additional cost of creating a solid pretext for the resulting

> intelligence. But now this deterrent is gone: the burden of utter secrecy

> is reduced. And if these programs are not eliminated, greatly curtailed,

> or made moot, we can expect them to be employed much more freely.
You mean Spore?
Well, this is getting really grim. There seems to be no safe place left.

Although, this is to be expected. The US is a common trend-maker and the world is looking up to them. Of course who can sit this one out when the US itself is at full speed spearheading it. And very likely gently forcing to abide.

We're all at fault in what is happening.
Python Flask NSA Backdoor
Related, as fractals are not uncommon, are there any favorite sources for such visualizations?
Sadly those votes don't mean a thing when there's lobbyists involved.
> He was elected and then did it anyway. It's frankly impossible now to change this issue in a democratic fashion.

And this is an intentional feature of the system. It's in the Constitution. That's what term lengths are for. The American people never understood how to hold enough power to keep the governmental branches in check. They're too busy feeling self-righteously indignant to actually keep ahold of any power.
I don't believe his opponents where a lot better. As long as they didn't get president, it's easy to say they have more morals and spine, but they were sure squawking opinions I didn't like.
To everyone saying the petition is useless:

It's a good start. If enough people sign, it will force the administration to answer the petition. Even if it doesn't push the administration to give a positive answer, it can help fuel more protests and actions.
When the system has cracked you down so far that poverty is a bigger threat than surveillance, yeah. It's hard to care.
As a designer, throughout this entire scandal I've been wishing for the same thing. I assume there are projects out there that I can contribute design thinking to, but I honestly don't know which ones need it or would welcome it.
He will be discovered sooner or later. So it is better for him to come forward and have the public attention and his current location to somehow protect him.

He needs to be protected and supported. And we will see in the coming days whether we actually care about privacy by supporting whistle blowers like him.
Sodium looks really interesting. Thank you.
The others I can understand, bur Linode? What about something like hetzner? Just checked, and their VPs have more ram and more HDD but only one core: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix_vserver/vserv...

Aanyway, I though these hosting companies where a dime a dozen?
Dokku - Docker powered mini-Heroku in lt 100 lines of Bash
"Why would you use AES/RSA/etc. when the NSA employs more
mathematicians than anyone else and may well have cracked them?"

Well, because of everybody else seems to be a good reason.

And one thing a bunch of good mathematicians is not better than is math. And as far as we know, they may still be good systems.

The construct of encryption systems today is so complex I think the last part they would address would be the algorithms themselves (but they certainly can factor the product of two primes in record time)
The very fact that Edward has the integrity to risk his life in the name of public interest means that he's exactly the kind of person the NSA should be trusting with our data. It's probably his combination of integrity and competence that let him get the access he did in the first place.
It's logic like yours that's keeping the broken political system you have in america in place.

Somehow pretending that voting for some other guy would have prevented this
Anyone who follows China's foreign policy knows that it's entirely driven by economic interests (eg, supplying weapons to Sudan during the Darfur genocide, breaking the UN embargo). From a pure economic standpoint, the US government could easily make it more beneficial to give up Snowden then to keep him.
Looks like a fairly useful admin console actually. Time to fork it!
While I have my quibbles with the American Constitution, I do understand that politicians in a representative democracy are not bound to the will of their voters.

I still object in this instance because promises were broken, and in a significant, yet to be determined, portion of the population the spirit of the constitution was broken as well.
He probably did his research, looked at court systems etc. He probably expects to spend some time fighting over extradition. Its not really a bad call (Hong Kong). The question is, where do you want to fight? What battlefield do you want to choose?

I don't know. It is probably better than many other choices. One major problem with choosing Ecuador is that if Ecuador is involved in both Snowden and Assange there are potentially large problems for them. I don't doubt for a moment that Correa would love the fight, but I do doubt that it would last past one administration.

He's the underdog. Wherever he chooses, he bears a huge level of risk. There is a lot to recommend HongKong.

But in addition, the fact that it poses important options for resisting extradition provides another way of fighting. If the Obama Administration wants this to go quietly they do not want a long extradition fight showing up in papers followed by a long court trial.
I haven't found any interesting information. Apparently this theory is being speculated on CNN (as I said, neither interesting, nor information...)

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/former-cia-officer-officials-cons...
When people say "this country is a democracy, or that country is a democracy", they've obviously referring to the "representative democracy" or a "republic", not direct democracy.

What they mean is a free country, where everyone has equal rights. So you're just arguing semantics. That being said, I do think current "democracies/republics" need a lot more true direct democracy influences in the system, especially US, which has the least direct democracy influences from all the world's republics.
European socialism owes more to the threat of Stalinism than we like to admit; western governments were forced into improving conditions for their working classes mostly by the threat of civil unrest, while leftist parties and unions benefited enormously from their soviet connections - both in motivational and economic terms. As soon as the USSR disappeared, now-unchecked European elites promptly started renegotiating workers rights, pushing salaries down in real terms pretty much across the whole of Europe; public services were dismantled and sold off, and welfare benefits were slashed. Leftist parties have lost most of their economic independence and are now captive to established interests, so their policies are all over the place. Of course there are other elements influencing this state of things, but the post-89 trend is quite clear and has a lot to do with the disappearance of an armed contingent of "reds" on the horizon, like it happened with the Space Race.

I know my history well enough, I'm not denying that revolts often (but not always) result in weak political structures which are prone to collapse in the short term; you only need to look at the current wave of Middle-Eastern "springs" for confirmation - from Tunisia to Egypt, in practical terms they're now worse-off than under their dictators. Still, they play a often necessary role in putting the fear of consequences in the heart of established elites who would otherwise refuse to change; places like Saudi Arabia are now grudgingly considering improving conditions of their women, for example.
For better or for worse, Obama is a good symbol for the problem though in that his entire campaign was based on hope and change, only to prove that such change isn't actually possible in a couple of election cycles, if at all.
They would simply charge them with a felony--revealing classified information.
You change the global state — it's bad.
https://supporters.eff.org/donate

Just donated.
It's worth noting that Facebook's European datacenter is in Sweden so a large part of Facebook traffic passes Swedish borders.
>We bought their cell phones

To be fair, folks in the US bought a LOT of European cell phones first. :)
Why Startups Need to Find the Happy Medium Between Profits and Purpose
Even in Mexico, there is a stark contrast between the feeling in the stores and employees treatment from a Costco vs Sam's Club. Also the quality of products sold is very noticeable
This all hinges on being able to declare individuals enemies in the same way that nation states were once enemies, and on being able to create a state of war without an actual opponent (war on terrorism) or on some pretext (Iraq). Iraq & Osama Bin Laden had nothing to do with each other.

The biggest enemy of the US at the moment would appear to be the US itself, goodwill built up over half a century has evaporated in a decade.
I think the future should and will be more "open" and more "transparent", whether the people in power like it or not.
True. But the French Revolution went wrong at breakneck speed in a lot of ways. And France's history since has been rather tumultuous. (How many different forms of government have they officially had?)
You should teach them to be good people by example and subtle advice. And above all, show them that programming is one of the most enjoyable intellectual activities and actually needs no computer at all. You can write programs with pen and paper, or just in your mind. And if somehow the government ends up watching live feeds of us all one day (I don't think we're there yet btw), then who cares. Professional athletes still win games when the whole world's watching. And we used to, or still do, believe in all-knowing God(s). Let's just hope the god of the next generation follows the 'golden rule' of treating others the way you want to be treated, and also making us in god's image. Or let's hope there's no god at all. Yeah... I think the news this week is that profound. NSA/CIA/FBI/etc have ascended to have nearly god-like powers... we must put them in their place, afterall, our country was founded upon the idea that no man can take away our God-granted liberties. That turns out to be a powerful and useful concept, whether you're a believer or not.
I would prefer a new iOS, the hardware can come later :) I'm very happy with my iPhone 5 and iPad 2
North Korean Concentration Camp - Google Headquarters
This isn't about a backdoor in NSA's Flask (SELinux). This title will be misunderstood. Add [python] or [parody] or something.
Surveillance in the US and UK: Spreading national insecurity
So an American president didn't keep a campaign promise and it's all of the sudden impossible to change anything?
Then this is just another example that your democracy is broken. Go fix it.
The US government classifies everything it doesn't want the public to know these days. So with that logic, they could say anything that leaks and was classified is "aiding the enemy". Since the enemy is basically the whole world now, that's might convenient.

I think people need to understand "authoritarian logic" more. Because even behind the most ruthless dictators and most oppressive governments in the world there is a logic. They may want to keep the country "unified", or "secure", or whatever.

Of course they aren't going to just go the public and say they are doing something "because we say so". That would make revolutions way too easy to happen. They need to give them some kind of "logic", no matter how ridiculous it sounds, to keep the people docile.

That's why they still keep laws around. It's just that they pass whatever the laws they want, and then simply say "what you did was illegal". And that's how they keep the rest of the population docile, and making them think: "hey, maybe that guy deserved it - he shouldn't have broken the law".

I mean just look at Aaron Swartz. Even he had quite a few critics, that thought he "shouldn't have broken the law", no matter how insane those laws were to begin with.

I don't think most Americans realize it yet, but the US law is so complex, and has so many crazy laws, that they could arrest pretty much anyone over anything at this point.
Yes. This is one of these moments when you can feel whether you truly have freedom or not.
Thanks for the recommendation, looks interesting. My other favourite book in this area is To the Finland Station, of course the NSA knows that already as I bought it on Amazon :)
Little bobby tables is at it again...
INAL but I believe they could be charged under the Espionage Act (18 USC sec. 793) for leaking national security secrets, which is a felony, and they would lose privilege.
Sad, if not unexpected, news.

My only other comment would be to encourage folk to go read his books. All of 'em - not just the "M". Too many geekish folk only pick up his Culture books - and they're missing out on some really great reads.
ENTRÜMPELUNG
ENTRÜMPELUNG , ENTRÜMPELUNG wien
Sie möchten Raum schaffen z.b. für ein neues Büro oder einem Hobbyraum? Alles kein Problem, für Ihren Ansprechpartner bezüglich Entrümpelung…Unter Entrümpeln oder Ausmisten verstehen wir vor allem Ballast loswerden, sich befreien von Dingen, die man nicht mehr braucht. Sie gewinnen Platz, vielleicht für andere Dinge oder sogar Platzschaffung für andere Zwecke! Sei es in der Wohnung, im Haus, Büro oder Betrieb. Defektes und Unbrauchbares geht in die Entrümpelung…
My guess would be that typical pen&paper dice would have biases in excess of typical software PRNG implementations (although I haven't exactly researched this topic). You're unlikely to detect any biases with a sample size of a few hundred throws.
In ex Yugoslavia we had secret laws, published by secret official journal and enforced by secret courts.

So you could easily get persecuted for breaking the law that you were prohibited to know it even existed.

The same was going on in east Germany and other socialist countries.

I warmly recommend watching The Lives of Others (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/) to those who haven't seen it yet.
(1) The FBI has just recently acknowledged that all (including all U.S. citizens') electronic communications are tapped - the NSA is/was not allowed to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens (with exceptions now seemingly the rule).

(2) You do know that Friedrich Goltz, the creator of the "Boiling Frog" experiment had the brains of the frogs removed, only then these did not jump out of the heating water - I hope you're using the reference to this experiment intentionally that way
Character assassination. They are going to try and rip Snowden apart. I don't think they'll succeed though.
Added as requested!
They've already got it. It's called the NSA.
I'm fine with traffic going in and out being tappable. As long as they have good reason I have trust in the FRA.
JAP - Surf the web anonymously through 'Mixes'