skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On the other hand, you're talking about ciphers that had short enough keys that they could be brute forced by the NSA. What's more, DES was invented back in the Cold War era back when the US's main opponent, the USSR, had better mathematicians but worse computing hardware, so making sure it was as secure as thwe number of bits gave the NSA an advantage. (Skipjack was just a fiasco full stop.)
Also, Chomsky's work is always backed by an incredible amount of evidence.

Edit: I can not over emphasize 'incredible amount of evidence.'
I see - that makes a lot more sense. Thanks for the response!
For what it's worth, the Guardian has a growing US contingent and office in NY staffed by many Americans. He leaked it to an American. We should view his leak target as Glenn Greenwald, not "The Guardian" - I think he would have leaked to Greenwalk no matter where he worked.
News: Major Updates for Windows Azure and Mobile Backend Development
Everything that an espionage/intelligence agency does against foreign governments breaks the foreign laws of that country, it's the entire point of espionage.
One thing widespread encryption would do is make it impossible for the NSA to just slurp the combined textual output of humanity into hadoop and mapreduce over it.

They can use "hitting the suspect with a wrench" cryptanalysis on a solo victim, but not on a crowd.
Since the PRISM news broke people are starting to associate cloud with a place to get spied on. It's no different than a web host. If they want your info, they'll get it and whether you us a cloud service won't be the deciding factor.
Depending upon configuration, it competes with the upper range 767/777/787s. http://i.minus.com/ibue0fziZTMd11.jpg shows the comparisons pretty well, as far as size alone is concerned.
How to make meetings and conferences productive
Not in all cases, but criminal acts are capable of cancelling each other out. Self defense is the archetypical example.

I suspect most Americans are comfortable with government operating outside the laws of other countries that are viewed as having an adversarial relationship with the US. Individuals may differ on this, but Snowden's credibility will be lost in the court of public opinion if he starts handing over information to China.
They meant that they thought magnetic effects were weaker than electric in this particular situation, not in general. It's just worded horrendously in the press release.
Someone should nuke the US for the sake of freedom.
There's a small reddit community called the American Pirate Party that's existed for 3 years now: http://www.reddit.com/r/americanpirateparty
I think Odesk is best place to find
Create Space has automated systems that check technical things (like images being in the right format). I don't think there's much of any review of content.

It only took a few hours to get approved once I submitted it.
Everything a military does when it is in a foreign country (meaning, in a war) breaks the law of those countries as well. Should America ship off the troops it asked to go fight in Country X to face justice for the war America started in Country X?

This is a very immature view of how countries interact with each other.
Journalist arrested for possessing vinegar in São Paulo
How is encryption a short-term solution? We want to be able to communicate privately, without having to trust Google or Facebook to respect our privacy or protect us from external threats. The answer is to encrypt our communications. In the case of social networking, we probably need something more sophisticated than just public-key encryption, but researchers are already presenting solutions:

https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~arielfel/pub/Frientegrity-UsenixS...

If the government will not respect our privacy -- and frankly, there is no reason to believe they will -- then we need to take matters into our own hands. We need to use cryptography to protect our privacy, so that no matter who comes into power we can communicate privately. That is a long-term solution, one that outlasts the government.
"but moooooommmmmmmmmm, loook what Timmyyyy has!!!"
people are so fucking obsessed with their own little lives that they cannot raise their heads and look at - much less critically think about and analyze - what is going on around them. They don't have the type of mental bandwidth to even try to process the big picture.

I know! Why doesn't everyone just drop everything and pay attention to the stuff that you are interested in? Seriously, do you know how ridiculously egotistical you sound? You have no idea what those people do with their lives when they leave the coffeeshop, or indeed everything that's going on in the coffeeshop. The lady with the baby might just as easily be writing a book. The barista might hate TV and be looking forward to her cello lesson or some other factor. You're judging, and dismissing, people based on your completely uninformed guesses about what their lives must be like. This is as foolish as me suggesting that you don't value the perspective of the young mom because you're incapable of forming a relationship and starting a family.

You are drowning in your own hubris, and haven't stopped to consider the possibility that that your conclusions are not well-founded. There are insane implications to lots of things, like having enough nuclear weapons to destroy all life on earth many times over. And yet we've managed to avoid doing so. Spy satellites gather up enough data to map our every move, but when we look at how much imagery there is that helps to re-establish a sense of perspective. I suggest you ask your roommate why devotes time to volunteer projects instead of posting paranoid screeds on HN; you might learn something useful.
Coding in Go isn't more difficult than coding in Ruby. Any competent dev should be able to pick it up and be productive using it within a couple of weeks. So for the same effort you get considerable performance improvements.
Then repeal the fucking Patriot act. This is partisan garbage from the GOP trying to pin everything on Obama.

Congress could end all this stuff right now if they choose to. Obviously, they are choosing political grandstanding and loudmouth politics.
Ah, the old rubber-hose cryptanalysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-hose_cryptanalysis

However, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_forward_secrecy OTR does provide "perfect forward secrecy as well as deniable encryption". Doesn't that provide some protection against rubber-hose cryptanalysis?
I kinda sorta suspect he was using ruby-json, which is substantially slower at JSON serialization than something like Oj. It's not going to make the Rails implementation start seriously competing with Go, but it would help matters substantially.

require 'benchmark'
require 'json'
require 'oj'
require 'open-uri'

TIMES = 100000
hash = JSON.parse(open("https://gist.github.com/gnip/764239/raw/6c6a2297f3e4e29a626f07db0c57b45af7d7e5d7/Twitter+%28json+format%29.js").read)
Benchmark.bm do |x|
x.report("Oj") { TIMES.times { Oj.dump(hash) } }
x.report("ruby-json") { TIMES.times { JSON.dump(hash) } }
end

# user system total real
# Oj 0.980000 0.000000 0.980000 ( 0.983426)
# ruby-json 8.780000 0.000000 8.780000 ( 8.832761)

Edit: I'm working on a Go implementation of the above benchmark. I haven't touched Go before today, though, so it's a bit of learning. :)

Edit edit: Here's the benchmark in Go. First time I've touched it, tell me if I stuffed something up awfully. Amusingly, it ended up being almost exactly 10x many lines as the Ruby code. :)

https://gist.github.com/cheald/5784471

BenchmarkJsonEncode 50000 53661 ns/op

So the final results:

Implementation ns/op
------------------------
Ruby (ruby-json) 88,327
Ruby (via Oj) 9,834
Go 53,661

I'm not quite sure that feels right, so if someone else could sanity check me, please do.
> Mr. Siever treats himself for chronic depression, reporting equally striking results.

I wish they wouldn't report such anecdota so strongly. Siever is unlikely to have conducted controlled double-blind studies on himself, so he can't know it's the tCDS doing anything or not.
Sounds like Snowden is warning the NSA that there are far more secrets that could be revealed, potentially very damaging to the US. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to learn of a dead man's switch.

It's one way to make sure the US doesn't insist too much for the right to extradite.
There's no need to throw him in jail. They can just install a hidden camera and record him typing the password. Next time he's out shopping the "maid" will drop by and the copy the hard drive.
That's the problem with logging everything. Unless they deliberately filter out all the data coming from the White House, they have it, even though having it is only useful for their political opponents.
Google Maps uses aerial photography from planes for the high-resolution layers of their maps, not satellite imagery.
Assume that over some time frame a crypto solution (the entire system matters as it's very easy to use encryption insecurely) will be compromised. You are essentially buying yourself time. So the question is how much time do you need to buy yourself.

Ok, so even if you select a key length of something very large which depends not only on bytes of the key but also the encryption algorithm as well. For a 4096 bit key that would be 1.0443888814131525066917527107166e+1233 combinations, assuming someone tried to brute force this at 100000 checks per second (a low estimate) it would take roughly 1.655867708988382335571652572800330388413185326368886003... × 10^1220 years to crack on average assuming the birthday paradox.

2^4096 / 2 / 100000 / 60 / 60 / 24 / 365

So that's a freaking long time to keep that data secure. Even radically scaling up the brute force attack across the entire world would be akin to boiling the oceans. (Not going to do out the cpu/watt/check number calculation to determine how much energy it would actually take compared to boiling the oceans...)

So are you safe? No because starting in WWII very smart mathematicians were finding ways to crack the algorithms and find patterns and holes in the encryption solutions that made the search space orders of magnitude smaller. So the best thing we can do is select well attacked, well researched but still secure systems, use a good key length and pray (I am not a religious man).

Edit: If you wish to be truly paranoid (don't recommend it), most of the important crypto research has been done by state organizations, this is how AES was selected from a group of submitted designs to NIST. Conversely there are few still secure and well researched algorithms besides AES out there, (Elliptic Curve basically, but those designs are under patents so not widely available etc)

Edit 2: Also wikipedia is a great starting point for understanding, but is not always complete. Still haven't seen it probably explain initialization vector or nounces before.

Oh and one last thing http://xkcd.com/538/

See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_size

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute-force_search

https://blogs.oracle.com/dcb/entry/zfs_boils_the_ocean_consu...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_cryptography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_curve_cryptography
Are you asking because someone told you it could be? Dropbox can share a static, html website, not actually be a computing machine that could run software apps like an email server.

If your question comes from a certain idea about how you might possibly do that, by all means reply and I'll see if I can explain further.
I feel it's equally important to note, we don't know which companies on that list are a front for the CIA.
Accepts_nested_attributes_for with Has-Many-Through Relations
Why? This is about changing production code for better performance, not being "fair" to Ruby.
Thats because there is more than one program providing this sort of information. MAPP is for AV and other security software companies. There is also: CIPP http://www.microsoft.com/security/cipp/ and another one for "Defence" which is all government, military and intelligence agencies (apparently).
Yes indeed, almost all the telcos (except for Qwest) cooperated with the Bush administration's illegal wiretapping in the early 2000s. The Protect America Act in 2007 and FISA Amendments Act in 2008 made it legal -- as a bonus the FAA included retroactive immunity for telcos.
"Billions, perhaps trillions of dollars that are part of the drug trade "

Serious question. If the friction is removed (illegality is friction) and this process is legal and available what will prevent people from deteriorating into 24/7 pleasure seekers (much like some people get addicted and spend their life in crack houses?)
Contact your MP? MPs are real people and they have few enough constituents that you can make a personal connection with them. So, in terms of effectiveness, the more effort you make the more effect it is likely to have, up to a point. If you make an appointment and visit them in person, you're obviously serious, and even if they're a loyal supporter of a party whose official policy is to promote the surveillance, they'll have to look you in the eye and tell you to go away rather than just sending a form letter by automaton-mail. If enough constituents did that to fill up a few MPs' surgery days for a month, it would probably make quite a difference. Failing that, if you take the time to write a proper letter or ring them and talk to a real person at their office, at least they know you care enough to do something substantial. If you sign some e-petition or forward them the 253rd copy of a form letter on-line, it might be better than nothing, but it doesn't demonstrate much more comitment on your part than making a "me too" post on an on-line forum, so it's probably going to carry weight (or not) accordingly.

You could also donate to political groups/civil rights organisations like Liberty or the Open Rights Group, if you're willing to put actual money on the line to help fund lobbying against these kinds of measures.
> This indicates to me that top secret technology is probably somewhere around 15-20 years ahead of what the general public knows about.

Err, maybe in optics at the time, but you can't just generalize like this. You can't consistently be ahead of everything all the time. More than likely the NSA suffers under Moore's law like everyone else.
A better comparison would be Golang vs Sinatra Synchrony, instead of using Rails.
NSA and the Wayback Machine (2007)
A specific example from my own use. Basic image processing to track a bright spot.

I want to be able to take a stack of 100 TIFs, look for a few white spots on a black background - and track their centroids. That's it.

State of the art:

- powerful, but written in many years ago in a government-controlled, expensive version of Fortran http://sun.iwu.edu/~gspaldin/rytrack.html

- Growing, but written in Java (burnt out two batteries, a fan and an HD trying to track 128px x 128px frames...). Also very difficult to modify/extend/customize/export http://fiji.sc/wiki/index.php/TrackMate Oh and did I mention it was written in Java?

On the data analysis side. I want to take a CSV file with a large number (1000s) of such 2D coordinates and pull information out. Average distance between hop. Total distance traveled. Duration of travel. Extraordinarily basic matrix/vector manipulations of any other random flavor of basic computation I, the scientist, can come up with.

Fortunately I'm one of very few biochemists who reads HN. I know how to use Mathematica. I've taught myself Python and Cocoa. But I've never taken a course on CS. I still don't know the real difference between a float and a double.
Looks cool. I downloaded the diff PDF and it rendered correctly in evince on Fedora 18, without a single warning. I routinely see GVFS warning in terminal for many PDF documents with evince. I'm impressed.

The idea itself is equally interesting. However, I don't understand the legal nuances enough to know whether this can really catch up. Best wishes to you!
Opening firmware would be simple. Many devices have loadable firmware, like your phone's baseband processor. The toolchain is unlikely to be exotic, and providing build-able source code should not be a great burden. Some people hack baseband firmware for fun. They manage to reverse engineer it and inject new code with publicly available tools.

Considering the grave threat to US online services' from lack of trust, you would think that some announcement in this direction might have been made. Crickets, so far.
Regarding the title of his article, as a someone who routinely uses TCP/IP for tasks other than transmitting HTML, I find his concept of "internet" to be rather myopic.
James Turrell builds art from illusions of light including from inside a crater
Seeing Turrell's work in-person is unlike any other art you've ever experienced. Make it a point to see his exhibitions this summer. You will never forget how it makes you feel and see at the same time. Fifteen years later, it left a deep groove in my psyche.
That's the old mentality: "NSA/CIA/FBI/UGA will actively spy on me."

The way I see it, that's not the greatest danger right now. Instead, we should be worried about the government being able to passively spy on everyone at the same time, by indiscriminately siphoning and analyzing data.
You mean when I can write that could 3X faster?
Except that they still have traffic data, which was the main thing they were collecting in the first place. Encryption only hides the contents of your communications - it doesn't hide who you were communicating with and when.
This is congress. They could repeal the patriot act and be done with it and start passing laws to limit the NSA's power. Oh right, instead the GOP will pin this on the president for short-term gain while we all suffer from long-term loss.
Remember that post a little while ago about how most logical fallacies aren't actually logical fallacies? Here, you are committing an actual logical fallacy. It's called "shifting the goalposts."

The article is in response to a dragnet surveillance program, where everyone's communications are watched and presumably datamined. It's very easy to do this, because nothing is encrypted, and everyone uses services that expose metadata (like who is IM'ing who).

Your comment is entirely true. However, it presents an adversary that doesn't want dragnet, but targeted surveillance. It assumes that Bob will be immediately arrested if his communications become encrypted.

This is not the threat model that we're faced with now. Let's say you and Bob communicate using accounts you've made on random XMPP servers using Tor, and all the messages are encrypted with OTR. Both servers are in the US, and the NSA's metadata database shows E83Gxw@jabber.org sending lots of ciphertext to PAnd9B@jabber.org.

This is "NSA-proof" in that the NSA would not know to link PAnd9B@jabber.org with you using their existing systems. They would have to drastically escalate the cost of their surveillance program with respect to you and Bob to figure out what you're talking about. Unless you really are a political dissident, conspiracy theorist who accidentally discovered the UN's black helicopter program, or radical Islamist, you are now out of the surveillance dragnet.

That is to say, unless the threat model changes, using privacy-enhancing technology will keep your data safe from PRISM and similar dragnet programs.
What processor architecture is printed on the box? There isn't one. It is irrelevant. Backwards compatibility is a feature; it can be accomplished through a number of means. The Xbox One, as a product, either offers that feature, or it does not. Consumers, possessing the power of the purse, either accept the available features or they do not. The technical details, while very important to the engineers building the system, are irrelevant to the consumer.
How is PGP not a solution here? You are (a) using the email system, (b) your messages are privacy, and (c) your mail client will perform spam filtering. If you need to hide who you are communicating with, there are anonymous remailers, or you can broadcast your encrypted messages over Usenet.

Really, these problems were already solved a long time ago, but people thought it was just paranoid to even suggest that the solutions were necessary.
Dotcom fights slide into Old News.
Wssh · Python ssh to websockets bridge
Ask HN: is there marketplace for writers?
While I can write English OK, but I think I would like to leave it to the pro writers to do it. I need it to write the content of my site such as FAQ, About Us, How it works, etc.

The only marketplace I found is scripted.com but it's not that user friendly, in my opinion.

I could go on in odesk, freelancer, elance but there are more of developers instead of writers.

Just curious if there are any other options to look at.

Thanks.
The problem isn't picking up a language, it's language support (and 3rd party libraries) that are crucial.

For example, if a client requests that I add a module to my application to fetch records from AD and cross reference with data pulled from salesforce, am I going to have to write a ton of low level networking code by hand or will it be trivial to find a robust open source module that does all of that for me?
Completely agreed. These kinds of comparisons are always a joke. Rails has always been about programmer efficiency, not execution efficiency since day one.
On the list of big Lib Dem capitulations there was also the NHS bill, legal aid, work fare, secret courts and criminalisation of squatting, just off the top of my head. Which were all issues that significant numbers of their MPs opposed, but in the end they gave in on all of those in exchange for Lords reform. The tories then turned around and rejected lords reform and the only measure the Lib Dems could retaliate with was killing boundary reform, which was a trivial issue nobody cared about. So they sold out on nearly all of their social/health policies in exchange for the AV referendum and Lords reform and got outplayed by the Tories both times. Tuition fees was bad PR wise for them, but that was their own fault for trying to buy the student vote so blatantly.

They try to claim the bottom tax rate change as a huge victory but I don't really buy it. Either coalition or Tory government they would have needed something to counterbalance the top rate tax cut and austerity, those "how does it affect you" articles would have been too politically toxic otherwise. Additionally, other cuts to benefits and services significantly nullify the income tax changes for lower paid people.

I agree that we could see something like what happened with ID cards, and there are at least a couple of Tories (David Davis probably) who will be opposed to internet surveillance and speak out, which will cause trouble for the PM since his ability to control the party is already at breaking point. So I do remain slightly hopeful that this proposal can be blocked - it will certainly be tricky for Cameron to get it through. I'm more worried about Labour coming into power in 2015 and forcing it through before there is much chance for people to get angry about it. It also depends how much media coverage it gets. The BBC can be very very silent on issues when they want (see: the NHS bill), and if the right wing press don't talk about it much a lot of people just won't hear much about it.
There are a lot of much more basic (far less sexy) things a basic programmer can do that don't need much power. Being able to access those Biopython/biohaskell libraries entirely from a GUI would aid so many people. If you already know how to use python/haskell/fortran, then there is far less urgency in having a good UI or even using those really basic libraries. But there are a lot of fantastic biologists/geneticists/etc. who can reprogram the genes in a living tissue with alacrity, but run in fear from a command line.