skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't use the tools for every conversation, but for anything I wouldn't want overheard, I help the person I'm speaking with configure Pidgin or Adium. PGP is more of a rarity.
Web companies starting to release surveillance data
But seriously
Please don't use XMPP, pick something sane if you wish to standardize.
I have used Spamgourmet for years, and I'm finding now that even on some of the more obscure domains alternatives that they offer, I'm starting to have websites block mail to them. As in, they don't reject the addresses on the site, but I just do not get any mail.

Forums and websites get lists of throw away email address domains and block them...how are you going to combat this problem? spamgourmet.com still has it, and it dozens to choose from and you only have one...
Facebook's comments do not discredit the leaked materials because even if you treat Facebook as trustworthy, the NSA slides explicitly encourage analysts to use a combination methods including "UPSTREAM" data collection ("You should use both", the document reads).

The only really interesting revelation here is Facebook's confirmation that the FISA court is bundling approval for multiple users into single warrants. And if we assume that the vast majority of requests are for single users, this is a non-trivial admission. With those numbers, there could easily be a handful of warrants used to grab information on thousands of users.
The original author will continue to be allowed to make money -- they will just no longer have a monopoly on doing so.

Tee hee, good luck with that business model.

The cold hard facts are that if you're not able to make something profitable within five years from its publication, you're not providing a service that the market finds adequately valuable.

And we all know that the market (especially in the arts) is always right, because no successful work has ever languished in obscurity for years before finding an audience, right?

Er, wrong. In the film industry, establishing your ownership of a screenplay means registering with the Writer's Guild of America and/or the Library of Congress copyright registrar - many production companies won't even look at an unregistered script because of the potential for costly litigation if a dispute arises over authorship. But it's quite common for scripts to bounce around Hollywood for a long time before getting turned into a movie, often over a decade. This is referred to in the industry as 'development hell' because it's frustrating and financially draining for everyone involved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_hell

I'm pretty sure that similar problems exist in the music industry, the art world and so on. There's a truism that being an overnight success in the entertainment business takes at least 10 years, but under your proposal the copyright holder that finally makes it after years of trying is likely to find that they don't have any saleable rights in their prior work any more.
There is also the conversion to an information economy with a growth in white collar jobs that are usually salaried with hours no longer being tracked.

Most employers report a normal 40 hours per week on paper, but that is usually the minimum expected.
Scientists Go Medieval To Solve Ancient Leprosy Puzzle
Autonomous cars, too.
Archaeologists Discover Lost City In Cambodian Jungle
What I love about these stories from the trenches isn't just seeing how the mystery gets solved (although that part is great), but seeing the evolution of the investigation -- which might be the more valuable of the two things when it comes to improving your own bug tracking skills.
And also Obama promised no surveillance before winning the first election. It took him weeks to change his mind.
> a local sheriff trying to find a missing child

As worthy as these cases might be... this is not a national security issue. This kind of case should never use any law regarding national security. This is a regular police investigation, and as such, should require a regular old subpoena or warrant.
> Okay sure, but it makes a seriously weird nonlinearity to the work/income relationship.

Pretty much every set of real policies in the world does that. So, what?

> Now let's say I make the same wage but I get a guaranteed $20k tax-free. For every hour I work, I earn $12 post-tax. My income looks like y=12x+20000. 44k/year if I work a regular 40 hour week. But I could also work only 20 hours a week and still make $32k/year, doubling my effective wages. I could work 10 hours a week and bring in $26k/year. Or work a single hour and make an effective hourly rate of $22,012 in that one hour.

Which doesn't really matter. Total income over hours worked isn't what measures the incentive to work, the marginal utility (not the same as dollar amount, to be sure, as income experiences diminishing marginal utility) of the next dollar is what sets the incentive. So, sure, the incentive is less in a system with basic income compared to one otherwise identical without it -- but nowhere near what you are portraying.

> People are absolutely smart enough to see how that works and many of them will choose not to work at all.

Sure, some will, but to an extent that's the point; people are going to be without wage labor one way or another.

> Yeah, it might be true that you don't live anywhere near as fun of a lifestyle on $20k/year as $44k/year but that's only if you value spending money.

You mean, if you value any of the things for which money can be exchanged. Which, pretty demonstrably, most people do.
Why can't they do both? Make the world a better place and make a nice profit while doing so?
The security model of Tor allows the exit nodes to see all the traffic in 'plaintext' (indeed, the design of Tor requires it). What the security model requires is that the exit nodes not be able to identify who sent the packets originally.

I put "plaintext" in quotes because they can only see what you want to send to the server, which could be encrypted outside of the context of Tor.

Although I think it is illegal to spy on the data you pass as an exit node, a point that is often not said is that by the design of Tor, you are showing some random person the content of all of your requests, which opens up a whole new attack vector for eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle attacks.
Unless we jump right to, "Everybody does and says crazy stuff, so it doesn't matter what you said" (which we won't) we are going to go through a period of being extremely cautious. Any time someone with Glass is around, or any time you think someone with Glass might be around, you are speaking the Queen's English and watching what you say & do as if you were on TV.
I sympathize, 100% with that.

So I suppose this is just a way of automating the hide feature of FB then?
I don't know what numbers you are using but my calculations are different.

I don't think it matters that there are 1 billion users worldwide. I think it's fair to assume that a majority of local, state, and federal requests affected US users. That number is more like 165 million [1]. Which means the likelihood you are affected assuming a random distribution of requests and you live in the US is closer to one in a thousand.

And that only accounts for Facebook requests. Consider if you regularly visit 10 websites. That might make the odds much closer to one in a hundred.

[1] http://www.quintly.com/blog/2013/02/facebook-country-stats-f...
Glass is simply paving the way for the future forcing us to deal with the privacy and social issues now. Eventually we will have video recording devices smaller than a grain of rice. What then?
Is your project hosted somewhere? I would love to see the source for that, no matter how early/unpolished it is.
That's not what he's saying; he's saying that "enormity" isn't a synonym for "enormousness".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Emery

There are other examples. This is the one that came to mind most readily. I don't smoke up. I don't support Marc Emery. I was however, ashamed at how nut-less my government was in handing him over.
I'm sure it's all shrouded in "classified" and "top secret" tape, but I'm intensely curious to know what President Obama knows that Candidate Obama doesn't.

Maybe it's the same thing all presidents learn their first couple of months in office. Maybe it's a memo that gets placed on the desk in the Oval Office by some shadowy figure. Whatever the case, the honeymoon is over, folks.
If you watch the video, they say that the winds mostly blow west-to-east, opposite the Earth's rotation, and they can't counteract that. They show the balloons traveling across the ocean.

It doesn't help the way the landmasses are oriented in the southern hemisphere. I think it's a given that the majority of balloons will always be over water. They mentioned a demo in, I think, New Zealand with a handful of balloons. It would be interesting to know how long they'll have for the demo before the balloons are pushed out to sea, and whether the coverage area will be constantly drifting.

The video seemed to show the balloons in a thin band encircling the Earth. Aiming to cover a thin band would seem far likelier to be achievable than spreading them over a broad swath. They also mention using the steering ability to form them in clusters, which is probably what you'd need to solidly cover an area.
I find it odd that you assume they're going to take these highly advanced routers and litter with them.
Outlook.com with your domain could be an option. Why do you "need to" stop using them though?
Obviously very cool (but not without precedent). The things I'm wondering about is cost and resilience. What do they cost? And could bad actors bring them down with lasers?
It's actually a standard, not a heuristic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch

If the search box is nonstandard, you can also add it manually by right-clicking the search box and clicking "Add as Search Engine".
I don't want them to share my view, dude. I just want them to be aware of what's going on. To be informed. Disagreement is completely fine with me.

But, looking around, people are way, way more obsessed with the latest episode of Game of Thrones, for example, than the fact that they are being watched. And the reason is that they aren't even aware of the latter. They have shut it out.
Thanks for pointing me at those papers! I'll admit it's been studied more than I thought.

(I was actually more worried about cryptanalytic attacks - the construction itself is obviously secure when instantiated with a random oracle - but I don't really see how that would work either. I maintain that it's ugly, but HMAC isn't the nicest construction in the world either, I suppose...)
Particularly over long, sparse networks, wired connectivity is not as cost effective as wireless connectivity, even including the cost of pole assets and antenna mounts.

And data rates of > 1 Gigabit for wireless connections are readily achievable these days. [1]

[1] http://www.bridgewave.com/solutions/whitepapers.cfm
Cameras are so cheap these days. Why doesn't he set up a camera continuously recording for the next 5 years until he catches a glimpse of it moving?
Why Use Monads(2009)
Dedicated hosting at companies like Leaseweb is a good option if you are not sure of your cloud hosting performance. tell us a bit more about your app and requirements.
How Search Works - The Story
Any news about other "moonshot" projects that Google[x] is working on besides self-driving cars and Loon?
This explains clearly what happened with AT&T, and its multiple acquisitions over the years:

http://videosift.com/video/Colbert-regarding-the-new-ATT
It could be as easily be the case that Candidate Obama was free while President Obama is blackmailed.

That's the problem with centralization, with representative democracy. A single point of failure is a bad idea. It's time for participatory/direct democracy.
And of the computer science and other researchers that were at Bell Labs at the time, many now work at Google.
I think the key is that wired networks were ideal in the situation where customers would pay off the investment. Wireless is way cheaper - one station could be 20+ people and take far less investment upfront.
Why do you assume the NSA mostly targets US users? That's not a fair assumption at all.
This master's thesis from 2005 ("The Vertical Limit of State Sovereignty") has a fairly comprehensive account of the history and present state of international law in this area:

http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA436627
This begins to hint at something I've been kind-of hoping to see since this all started to break: internet companies competing with one another over who can be the most transparent. If only that were to have time and opportunity to set, and become the norm...
It does not have it now, because they want to focus on the basics. Once that is done, adding a camera is not a big deal.
To be fair he's not really hiding...
I think there were external factors that forced a hard deadline for Apple Maps: the Google contract expiring, and the fact that for a service like mapping, not releasing the app into the wild serves as a blocker on a lot of engineering work that cannot begin until there is real-world usage data to work with.
Did anyone notice where he (effectively) asked for Android widgets? Good luck.
I think Google Glass started out as a Google[x] project as well. I'd love to be a fly on the wall in their division.
A small observation: CoreFoundation typedefs CFTypeRef (the generic object type) to void * , rather than having obj * be a separate type as in this library. This lets you pass pointers to any CF type to functions that expect CFTypeRe without the ugly cast: it's unsafe, as you can pass a pointer to any type without the compiler complaining, but so is explicitly casting. If you're not going to go the void * route, it would be nice to provide some macro like obj(x) to safely cast only valid types to object.

Anyway, it's nice to see a portable, modern CF-like library, although of course it's too slow for some cases where code specialization is called for.

Edit: On the general subject of C data structures, in case anyone's interested, I wrote a little portable C header that provides minimal hash table functionality using macros, with a large amount of control - still generic, but totally opposite to the approach used by this library, much lower level. It's modeled after the BSD <sys/queue.h> header, provides three versions (open, closed, and a higher level version), and is completely undocumented, but I'm somewhat happy with it as a proof of concept. Just throwing it out there. https://github.com/comex/cbit/blob/master/hash.h
You're missing the more obvious form of attack http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-announce/2006q4/00024...
That's not the only form of "exploit" http://www.scip.ch/en/?vuldb.2721
Kinkos was in fact successfully sued for just this thing. Example: http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/comm/free_speech/basicbooks...
Take note, I believe Greenwald deals with the primary objections that have been raised here.

This is just one of his strong arguments: "The New York Times reports today that Yahoo went to court in order to vehemently resist the NSA's directive that they join the PRISM program, and joined only when the court compelled it to do so. The company specifically "argued that the order violated its users' Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures."

If, as NSA (and Silicon Valley) defenders claim, PRISM is nothing more than a harmless little drop-box mechanism for delivering to the government what these companies were already providing, why would Yahoo possibly be in court so vigorously resisting it and arguing that it violates their users' Fourth Amendment rights? Similarly, how could it possibly be said - as US government officials have - that PRISM has been instrumental in stopping terrorist plots if it did not enhance the NSA's collection capabilities?"
Or aliens.
Human-Powered Helicopter Team May Have Won Sikorsky Prize
As long as they cost less than putting up cell phone towers in the middle of nowhere, its all good. Idk but I don't imagine cell phone towers cover a 40km radius. Telco's have no great incentive to do this so kudos to Google.

And as Larry Page said, stop already with the obvious negativity. Bad actors can bring down cell phone towers too. And who cares about precedents.
Dev here. Thanks to everyone for the comments, suggestions, and support. MailDrop is one of those nights-and-weekends projects that came together as a bit of an experiment.

Here's a few responses. The design at a wider width is, okay, let's call it suboptimal. Send me a pull request with a fix for 1600px screens and I'll gladly put it in. Testing was originally done on a non-maximized desktop, along with an iPad and iPhone. (If something looks strange on Android, send me a pull request for that fix, too.)

MailDrop was designed to be a friendly clone of Mailinator, with a little different architecture. It isn't going to approach the speed of Mailinator, but I'd like to think the extra functionality makes up for it. You can point any CNAME or MX toward MailDrop and it will accept messages; the system doesn't care about the recipient domain at all.

If you don't want to browse through the (poorly-formatted; what's up with that?) source, here's a quick roundup of the architecture. MailDrop runs in two JVMs and uses Redis as its datastore. One JVM runs the SMTP server (written in Scala, using the SubEthaSMTP Java library and a collection of custom Akka actors) and one JVM runs the webserver (written in Scala/Play).

Performance should always be IO bound; the Akka actors use very little CPU overhead. If you're finding that you're running into bottlenecks, spinning up another JVM is pretty easy. Right now, maildrop.cc is running on one small EC2 instance for everything; if it explodes, I'd probably just add another instance for another SMTP server.

You'll notice that there's no way to actually send mail from MailDrop. That's by design-- the moment you can send e-mail from a service without authentication, spammers are all over it. Hence, no forwarding messages, no forwarding inboxes, etc. MailDrop is designed to help fight spam.

Thanks again for the responses!
It'd be interesting to integrate this into the GWT toolchain, so you can write both java and scala for the browser!
Has no one noticed that this is a super-governmental network? Like, including the US government and its NSA?
There are probably many ways to shoot down the balloon, but it's probably out of the technological reach of a farmer. I don't think there's anything off the shelf that could shoot something down from 80,000ft.
Each balloon would cover a circle, so it'd be more like 1,250 sq km. I think it would be optimistic to expect each balloon to cover exactly that area. They'd need to overlap just to eliminate gaps, and I'm sure there's a random element to their motion, so that would require them to overlap more.
Yes, actually I built a prototype for myself but I suck at design so I dropped the idea. A clean,minimal tv guide would be a nice thing to have.
I share the same concerns - what about the batteries and other products that aren't as expensive as the routers?
> Wireless is a hack

It's been years since I've had a landline phone. I'm sure I'll eventually drop my landline high speed internet connection too.
Is New Zealand now the test-zone for everything? App betas, and now this project lol.
I believe he is. I've followed his research work for quite a while and Ninja Project seems very similar to Project Loon.
autonomous cars mean people can be on the internet while driving.
Goddamned that's a brilliant take I hadn't considered. Well said.
German intelligence agencies can decrypt PGP?
Project Cryptbook - Encrypting Facebook
Is a plug really that offensive when the thing that's being plugged is a 100% community commons licensed repository of repair manuals and is described as exactly that?
I also greatly enjoyed the claims that a pre-industrial society's building methods were "greener" than those used on a massive scale today.

I think I sprained an eye muscle from the abrupt roll.
Contrast their behavior, with other companies sitting on mountains of cash.

They don't need to do this. Yet they do. That's good enough for me.

Though opening up their index and creating a search marketplace might seal the deal.
They address this in one of the videos. They can direct the balloons to land at collection points for recycling etc. How they do that I have no idea - but it's definitely something they've considered in great detail.
Uh, the existence of a buffer overflow (which doesn't even cause disclosure of an encrypted message) has nothing to do with the strength of the RSA algorithm, which is what the comment I replied to was talking about.
The old monopoly AT&T wasn't just a company but presented itself as an American institution. They heavily publicized their Bell Labs inventions to help keep the anti-trust regulators off their back. Unix/C certainly benefited from this.
I thought the same thing a few weeks ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5776908
"why not mine a vast body of texts (which are a reflection of human knowledge) and use the implicit connections between the words to create a weighted map of relationships"

Isn't this essentially a markov chain?
This recalls me one of my oldest project:
http://libdacav.sourceforge.net/

However I didn't do reference counting. Good job OP!
We all have something to hide from Big Brother, we just don’t know it yet
http://ajp.aapt.org/resource/1/ajpias/v79/i1/p37_s1
Not really. It does only remove the # sign from each hashtag, but the link remains clickable.
You can watch the demo video for more.
The AA tri-blends are my go-to shirt. A service like this would be well worth it if they offered either this or the Summer shirt over the normal 2001 / 2102.
I agree, though presumably Glass will be useful for things other than continuous recording, whereas a camera is just that.
Hell, can't they just get some grad students to camp out there for a few months with a motion detector and a siren? It would hardly be the most boring job ever given to grad students.. This really doesn't seem like the sort of thing that should go unobserved for so long.

I suppose I should be glad that this isn't as bad as the pitch drop.
Right, one way is to share one instance with someone you trust (and who runs a linux server), and to use it remotely.
This made my day. Thank you! :)
New Xbox 'a sin against all service members'
16MB minified. Ok; for what?

"How to scale to Rich Internet Applications?"

Good question. They didn't answer it. Is the Scala code going to be much more compact? And what problems scaling JS to rich applications were they thinking of, exactly? They don't say.
Google is a business. They're only going to spend big money on a project if they expect to make a profit. Even if it might be possible in theory to provide coverage to the whole world via balloons, you'd have to be willing to lose a lot of money. From the standpoint of philanthropy, you would most likely get more benefit per dollar in other ways. For instance, the Gates Foundation has spent a lot in Africa on fighting diseases, and I'm sure lots more money could be spent on that.
In this case it's not engineering prowess, however, it's just dumb luck: they had plenty of volcanic ash to work with, we don't.

Another example is Roman pottery. By sheer coincidence the clay they used was of exceptionally high quality (extremely fine particles, IIRC) so Roman pottery is extremely hard and durable, much harder and durable than we can make pottery today. Unfortunately, there was only one source of this clay (somewhere on the coast of Italy) and the Romans depleted it.
Absolutely. I'm currently using the paid version of leemail.me for this exact thing. Unfortunately it seems development has stopped and leemail still needs considerable features to make it THE "email forwarding" and "throw away" service. I can't wait for some other company to come in and make it happen.
Is it Possible to Spot Earthquakes Before They Strike?