skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How did he know they were "intel" officers? Were they wearing badges? Even if they were some of the thousands of people who who work for intelligence agencies, is there any reason to believe they would have any authority in this matter? Sounds like some guys talking shit at an airport. There's a lot of hysteria regarding this issue which is distracting from a real debate on the underlying issues.
I'm still making my mind up about what I think about the activities of Edward Snowden. (I was just reading some of the press coverage about him, especially the extensive story about him in The Guardian.) And I am on record here on HN sharing information about mass popular movements to fight tyranny

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5840000

and commenting on cases I have personally observed and participated in of turning a country from dictatorship with a secret police including political assassins into a representative democracy with a free press, fair elections, and independent judiciary, and constitutionally protected civil liberties.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5844864

That said, I am also on record somewhere on HN expressing the general opinion that it is pointless for us to submit White House petitions here as new stories. That's not really on-topic for HN, and it's not clear to me (in light of my knowledge of what kind of protest movements have worked in the past to overcome dictatorships) that posting a White House petition here does any good in the real world. Your opinion may differ, but I offer the thought that we have better means

http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html

of tackling your concern about government data-gathering programs than posting White House petitions. If you like the petitions, share them in your social networks in which you see your friends, but discuss the real, powerful democracy hacker tools here.
I'd say that Palm manufactured a large number of "touchscreen devices that mattered" years before the iPhone. Just because it wasn't high-resolution and capacitive doesn't change the fact that for a long while, Palm Pilots were a staple of business.
You can change it here: http://daringfireball.net/preferences/

Or zoom on the browser itself (but you already knew that).
There is always room for a product start up. Force10, Fire-eye, etc., prove that. And products are monumentally cool. My brother-in-law is the product start up guy, and we always marvel at the low barrier to entry I have (as a services startup guy). The issue is that a hardware start up requires an order of magnitude or more more resources to get off the ground than a software startup.

Consider the process for developing the product. For software, that's a development issue. For hardware, it's (usually) also a development issue, but it's also a logistics issue. Where do you get the components? Who is going to assemble it? How are you going to make sure they don't suck? How are you going to get over the regulatory compliance issues in all the markets you want to sell to (like FCC certs, ROHS in the EU)? How are you going to package and ship. Do you use a channel model to support sales/deployment/support or do you build that yourself?

Consider the support issues. For software, it's a test/patch/deploy issue. For hardware, it's probably that, plus how do you stock spares? How do you deploy a tech to service a customer? How do you handle a bad production run? Where is the feedback loop between reliability in the field vs the test environment? If you use one, how do you support the channel?

Product just has more of everything.
Here, I'll do it for you: "We can't comment on ongoing investigations."
AES is a specification of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). USA use it to encrypt the most sensitive informations. It's hard to think that they would use a broken cryptographyc algorithm themselves
Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry
And 1984.
If you want to, there are a few options:

* Buy a VMware provider ($79). 98% of the money comes to me.

* GitTip: https://www.gittip.com/mitchellh/

* Buy the Vagrant book: http://hashi.co/vagrant-book I only get a few dollars from this.
InPowered Expands ‘Earned Advertising’ Beyond Tech
Already on front page with canonical link to article.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5849932
I think both your comment and its parent are correct.
Does Edward have a blog or Twitter account or something we can follow him on ?

I realize the irony of the question but at the same rate, if he is already accepting the 'authorities' will know where to find him - why not have some form of broadcast to the outside world? So we know he's OK?

As I write this though, I remember his primary goal is to shine light on the problem and not make it about him - so I understand if he's not interested in an online presence for that very reason.
The other problem is that nobody but change-resistant Unix geeks (of which I am one) want case-sensitive filesystems.

To the average person, "John's grocery list" being different from "john's grocery list" would be nothing more than a silly limitation of the dumb computer.
This was super-interesting, thanks!

It would be nice to see the same information in a reference format (rather than a animated quiz), is that possible?
Command Shift +
There will be a special place in history for the likes of Snowden, Manning and Ellsburg. I hope Snowden does not face the same torture Manning has been subject to.
Why I am so excited about Clojure and why I think its going to explode
Maybe one of "them" could post here offering some opinions about ways in which learning the abacus enhances or extends "their" thought processes in useful ways. Or are "they" too limited by their rote learning? Or are we safe in our comforting knowledge that we have nothing to learn from "them?"
Oh great. I wonder why? :/
They often take a while to respond, so I wouldn't rule it out yet.
i don't know why i feel they should introduce a digital camera running iOS.
Sorry, I should have clarified that it negates HTTPS in the context of the NSA (and presumably other government actors around the world), still great protection from getting your facebook session hijacked over wifi.

What about protection from the average NSA sysadmin or analyst with slightly less moral fiber than Edward Snowden? (or gambling debt, or a mental disease, or an obsession with your significant other etc.)
? Maybe I'm missing something, but you should re-read carefully http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-record... and see if you still think the same... by the way that news story was built on information leaked by Edward Snowden. So, in my opinion, that's why he's an American hero because he directly responded to people like you to provide real proof that, yeah, things are really bad right now, worse than almost everyone thought (except for us tinfoil hat types).
You can take a stand without violence.

You can take a stand without destruction.

Hell, ask Snowden if he would rather have organized online action to protest, or people in the street beating other people...
They're nice amenities and not all employers offer them.
Thank you for spreading the word! See you all there!
Petition The Supreme Court to Rule on the Patriot Act Constitutionality
This is the nature of all corporate endeavour. The corporate style of organization is very good at certain things and very bad at others. It can't be compared to a human being. It's a different animal.
But how do we know that? There is no accountability. They do everything under secrecy. It might be different if we had a third-party, non-governmental agency verifying that they are not violating the 4th amendment.

Why have no accountability and no transparency if they were not going to violate our privacy? I'm flipping the "If you have nothing to hide" bit on them.

But even if there were oversight, the main issue is the potential for abuse. Having all that data in the hands of an entity that can imprison you is a pretty frightening idea. Sure, maybe they're following the rules now, but in desperate times, people can behave immorally and radically. Do not trust other human beings, even if they are under the umbrella of "government". Look at what evil humans have done in the last century alone and you'll agree that we should limit the potential for abuse as much as possible.
Amira Hass? Where is she referred to, in the article or comments?
You're assuming that it's possible.
Here's a model you can work off: http://www.trialbytimeline.org.nz/
Weak productivity is generating jobs, no need to worry about robots
Why didn't tech company leaders blow the whistle?
mashape.com
The psychological terror of the Panopticon cannot be overemphasized. The Panopticon is more real now than it ever has been. Watch as former radicals instantly self-censor with these new NSA revelations.
That's not how what you wrote read. You may have meant that a BSD license existed in '82, but you implied the BSD modified Unix operating system was generally open source long before it really was. The fact that many manufactures secured separate licenses (for which they paid Berkeley a lot of money) is irrelevant. The simple fact is that the truly "free" BSDs did not exist before the early 90s and the resolution of the dispute between AT&T and Berkeley. Full stop. End of story.
Thank you so much! I recently made the switch and have been waiting for just this tool :)
At least they said 'the I95,' which at least makes it sound like it's in California.

Dialects are interesting. In my native Pittsburgh, I always said 'Route 28' or maybe '79,' but now that I'm in LA, I always say 'take the 405 to the 10.'
If everyone uses Adblock, it could be detrimental to a lot of free web services that are supported solely on ad revenue. I am not sure if there is a good solution here...
I was under the impression having the ability to subpoena a key or cert from either the CA or the company issued the cert would give the NSA carte blanche on decrypting any (encrypted) data they may have gathered by other means.

Since I don't seem to be understanding the associated technology as well as I thought I was, could you point me towards some relevant reading on this topic? How/Why are the current implementations of HTTPS considered to have perfect forward security?
That post is over a day old and sitting on page 3 right next to a day old post about the Rope data structure with similar points.

Moron.
Really? They pay you to make money. Trying to change them just gets you bad performance reviews. Eventually fired or sidelined as a poor team player who doesn't understand the business.

I've never heard anything more naive than trying to change a corporation as a new hire, as a small cog in a giant machine.
That's not PRISM. That's the other program revealed last week. The warrantless collection of phone number "metadata" has also been ruled legal by the Supreme Court, whereas the legal basis for PRISM has never been reviewed by SCOTUS.

Which leads me to an important aside: how much of the outrage being vented here comes from people who don't even know that these are two different programs? Take everything you read here with a huge block of salt.
Making information cost money restains governments from becoming spy services
So? Any particular thing you're missing in the desktop from OpenGL 4.x?

Do people really play that many games on their Macs? And do they think 3.2 vs 4.x would make that much a difference?

And it's not like 2009 is that back. If you want to see real pain, see us web people not being able to use 5+ year old CSS technologies without tricks because of lack of support, and having to use an almost unchanged for 15+ years JS language.
Well grids aren't essentially tables. I'm surprised by the comparisons here, it seems like many people have worked with either tables or grids, but not both. I frequently use both grids and table layouts along-side each other.

Tables are especially helpful for creating a horizontal list of elements that are evenly spaced, but of uneven/unknown width. You can't do that with a grid. Since grids are floated, it's easy to adjust the number of elements in a row (by either changing the width or the row or the width of the items). You can't do that with a table, since each row has to be delineated in the markup.

I don't use table elements for layout of course, I use display:table. Using a table element for non-tabular data would be unsemantic, unlike using a div which carries no semantics.
Feel free to check out the source. If would have preferred to do this using OAuth...but there are just no offical APIs for that right now.
There's one more thing all Tor users with good bandwidth should consider: start relaying.

I relay when I can, which is not very often because I am mostly behind a NAT which I have no control over.
I've run a Radicale server for almost 2.5years now. It's definitely progressed greatly in the time I've used it. In conjunction with syncEvolution[1], I keep my work gCalendars, my family Radicale and gCal's and a device-portable task list all synced.

_____

1: https://syncevolution.org/
Nice to see screenshots from X11, every once in a while.
They can be, but it depends on the company's culture. I personally prefer to go home and cook for myself, and when places offer free dinner, I worry that it comes with social pressure to stay and eat there, which I'd prefer not to do. If you have a family it's a bit less of a worry (you have an "excuse" for leaving to go eat with your family), but if you're single, there seems to be this expectation that of course you'd love to eat dinner at work, and you must be somehow weird if you prefer to cook for yourself at home.
When I switched to OS X from Linux, case sensitivity was a thing I missed dearly. I know that it's a fringe feature, and that even I don't use it much, but it irks me that it isn't there, especially when both ext4 and NTFS have it.

It's more important considering Time Machine backups and actual UNIX moving and copying of files, and this is also where resource/data forks are also a huge burden. Unless OS X implements a different cp and mv than the standard FreeBSD ones, just implementing a filesystem without forking could be a solution. Also, case sensitivity is affected the same way.

For the normal user, it's fine to keep a case-preserving filesystem. But, Apple needs to make sure developers write their apps with case-sensitivity in mind (I'm looking at YOU, Adobe).
I have a feeling the removal of the Instagram twitter card played no small role in this
Sensationalism on Hacker News... interesting.
Palm pilot was probably the first usable device.
Wait, in what world would RSA be able to be broken with current tech to the degree that the NSA can decode it fast enough to make it essentially plaintext?

I get the whole keeping it for later decryption bit but really, 4096 bit RSA is not going to be easily borked no matter what scale of computing power you throw at it.
Shop talk is indicative of a general mindset and attitude. "Spies" are not in the business of serving due process. That is the job of lawyers and judges. You would therefore expect that kind of attitude--"if we could, we should just disappear them."

Of course it's shit talk and it's not going to happen. That wasn't the point though. The point was about the attitude.
Ask HN: What are the realistic capabilities of the NSA?
From a technical perspective, what are the data collection, analysis, and code-breaking capabilities available to the NSA?

What implications does this have on widely used security protocols and methodologies?
I have every expectation that they will. My impression was that people were working very hard to port NAT and all of its problems to IPv6. Even if that doesn't happen, somehow, I expect 99% of routers will ship with broken, difficult to use deny-by-default firewalls.
Those rules were relaxed three years ago.

http://n4g.com/news/607824/apple-approves-manomios-c64-2-0-a...
There are many examples of programming language runtime apps, such as

Scheme: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gambit-repl/id434534076

OCaml: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ocamlexample/id396515573

Python: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/python-3.3-for-ios/id5779112...

Codea (LUA): https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/codea/id439571171

What restricts these apps from being awesome is that they cannot download source code or accept source code pushed to them from other apps. Cut-n-paste is the only way to transfer existing code.
I was thinking much the same thing. "Yeah, lets review our browser use, and then switch to the browser made by one of the companies pointed to in this whole mess.
reddit is encrypted: https://pay.reddit.com/. (the "pay" part doesn't mean you have to be a paying member.)
Joseph Nacchio
The Civil Rights movement used peace tactics, non-violence and Ghandian ethics. The Vietnam war protests were largely peaceful, except when e.g. government soldiers attacked college students at Kent State. @csomar is correct that changing peoples minds and following nonviolent tactics can effect change-- although not always matching everyone's expectations
Ah, fair point. The Palm didn't come to my mind because I didn't buy one - I personally felt that the device & the stylus-based interface were too clunky - but you're right, it was still a touchscreen device that mattered.
SHA-1 should be assumed to be broken in any case.

The Flame malware was distributed using a fake certificate that was generated via a brand new (publicly unknown) chosen prefix collision technique against SHA-1.
the common xkcd-answer when it comes to cryptography.. http://xkcd.com/538/
Maybe. I personally would never leak something I gained through employment to the public; if I had been in his position and felt it was truly worth leaking/sacrificing my career and freedom, I would have gone to NSA/DOD IG, Congress, or a federal judge. (at a private company, to CEO/CFO/board or regulators/police) There isn't much which would make me leak to the public but not take up arms (I mean, if somehow time traveling Nazis took over, I can't see just leaking info and not killing them.)

I am glad his disclosures seemed at least somewhat contained, unlike PFC Manning.
No data forks of an kind? The data fork of a file is ... the file. Mac OS X only supports resource forks as a legacy and I believe only through Carbon which is gone. Case sensitive file system? This is an advantage how? More modern how?
It does now. It didn't when I posted that. Or I might have missed it before?

Still, tries to sell "pseudo" vs "true" as if this image showed the difference.
> In my observation, national pride is nearly universal.

In my observation, it might be universal, but its degree varies greatly, with americans on the high end of the scale.

Nobody would say "a Greek hero".
Bullshit. Windows RT has similar app interoperability and significantly advanced share functionality when compared to iOS and yet has no 'security issue' nor 'malware'.
The only thing you'll accomplish is to get yourself banned.
Ask HN: What's the most effective way to protest in the wake of the NSA leaks?
Some articles on HN have outlined ways that individuals can increase their own online privacy using various services and tools. But none of those things really "stick it" to the politicians or government officials who sanctioned and ran all of this.

There has to be a better way to protest and say "this isn't okay" rather than simply hiding yourself from the current, known methods of surveillance.

Ideas?
Gaming and PRISM
I'm on the original iPad and it didn't work at all for me.
Could elaborate a bit more as to your needs. Lots of rest frameworks are scalable since they're all based on net/http. If you want more of a framework then just simple rest routing. Revel is very good. I currently use gorest in production and am very happy, I had problems though with using a custom sessions package though since it didn't export the responsewritter bit still very happy.

Sorry will provide links when I get home.
"I'm pretty sure that does NOT mean a warrant specifically naming each person whose information was collected. Or does it?"

Nobody (here) knows. This conversation is more heat than light in part because people are spouting all sorts of uninformed nonsense just to perpetuate their theatrical sense of outrage.

What I've read so far suggests that there's some sort of FISA-related oversight of the "reports" generated by PRISM. It sounds like analysts can do queries based on certain rules that are designed to include only conversations with foreign participants, but to get detailed information they need to go through a FISA court.

Honestly, though...you can't tell much of anything from the documents that have been leaked. Most of the details you see people discussing here are speculation, or worse.
Can Yahoo Ever Be Relevant Again?
Indeed much of the violence in Vietnam war protests turns out to have been instigated by FBI agent provocateurs. Most of the violence of the era was perpetrated by the forces against change.
Umm, you know that this is a petition for the Executive Branch, right.
"Microsoft cannot provide those guarantees. Neither can any other company."

The most telling and most important line in the article. Recent days have made it abundantly clear that anyone under US jurisdiction is susceptible to scrutiny and surveillance.
The British committed acts of genocide in virtually every colony. Just because they were not as efficient as the Germans, don't think they were not every bit as depraved.

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

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/secret-massacre-slaughter-...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/05/kenyan-mau-mau-p...
Iain Banks, for me, was the individual responsible for introducing me to seriously good Scotch. ^_^

It was East(er)con '90, at the Adelphi Hotel - a rather wonderful example of architecture, designed by someone with a passion for steps, to the point that you couldn't walk more than 20' without at least a single step along the way - after a long, good day of con proceedings. We were gathered around in the lobby, around 3am, a circle of some dozen attendees, and he begins passing his whisky flask around. I forget what it was, specifically, but I believe something at least a dozen years old, maybe even a 21.

It was a revelation. ^_^

There was no barrier - no Famous Person, just a bunch of people who all enjoyed sci-fi, chatting into the early hours.

He made the world a richer place to inhabit.
We go to gigs occasionally, and some comedy and theatre. But we're choosy and set limits on how much things are worth to us. We see mainly indie music, and that can be done cheaply enough. Comedy is local. Theatre is always the cheap seats and special deals.

We're also both very well travelled, holidays abroad are the only thing that have majorly suffered by the PhD and startup. But we view that as a temporary thing, a few years at most... that said, the startup took me to San Francisco a few months ago (flights and accommodation paid), and conferences take my girlfriend to Europe occasionally (scholarships cover these). So we have sacrificied overseas vacations together for a couple of years, but we haven't experienced a substantial hit on travel overall.

There are just cost efficient ways to do everything. When YC talk about what people have hacked, and others talk about relentless resourcefulness... I think it shouldn't just be a startup or work, life is ripe for the taking too.
Ask HN: Why do we have a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court?
It seems like a perversion of checks and balances to have a special court for these kinds of things? It seems like it makes it too easy to appoint judges to that court who would side almost indiscriminately with government secrecy over justice and individual privacy rights. If cases could be heard in any one of our nation's courts, wouldn't that make it much more likely to be heard by judges that have a more balanced opinion?
You are downvoted, but this is exactly what eventually happened with the Stasi archives (those that were saved from destruction), and is exactly what I wish to one day see in America.