skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's interesting how little improvement in the characterization of power structures heavily intent on limiting individual liberty has occurred over the last half century. 1984 was written in 1948 and Brave New World in 1932. There have certainly been newer works in the same vein, such as V for Vendetta, but they generally have just used the same palette, the same terminology, the same ideological formulations.

However, I think those formulations are out of date and their out-of-dateness is harmful to this critical discussion about the nature and importance of liberty and its relationship to governance.

Our terminology, our mental models, even our archetypes are best-suited to the world of the 1930s and '40s, not to today. We throw around terms like fascism and tyranny and they lose a lot of their force because they are not really applicable. That's not to say that there is no danger of the industrialized, democratic nations slipping into forms of governance which are every bit as bad as tyranny or fascism, but we must recognize that when we use terminology that is not 100% applicable it makes it that much easier to dismiss or ignore.

History is replete with examples of tyrants who have ruled harshly to further their own self-interests or out of a sense of megalomania. But I think we need to recognize that limitations to personal liberty need not be due solely to tyranny or fascism and so forth, there are other forces, other modus operandi at play. People have tried using the term "nanny state", but that has the opposite problem of lacking sufficient gravitas.

There is a very real movement that has been underway for over a century to limit individual liberty in the service of the greater good. The war on drugs is an extension of this phenomenon, as are the worst excesses in the war on terror. But lacking good terminology makes this discussion that much more cumbersome and difficult.
'Can't Innovate, my Ass'
POF Emphasizes Relationships, Ditches Intimate Encounters
Simple Theory Explaining Dark Matter
It's time for a 7.1 like microsoft did it with windows...
I can't believe that steve controlled all this and pushed it in the right direction. And now apple takes the same route to the ground....
Consider if the world had never had a revolution the current state we would be in.

I don't buy that's a better picture.
I am more concerned about them disappearing people for making public arguments against them, although I suspect I would be nowhere near significant enough for anyone to notice.
"The problem is that apparently (IANAL!) the US courts are upholding the idea that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to the US-based cloud data of non-US-resident non-US-citizens."

And further - it's not just "US-based cloud", it's almost certainly "cloud resources physically based _anywhere_ if it's owned/operated by a US based company". I'm pretty sure Rackspace[1] would consider any data that I (a non-US resident/citizen) store on a Rackspace instance intentionally provisioned in their Sydney Australia datacenter to be subject to US law instead of local Australian law[2] - and would most likely hand over any and all of my data with no need for a warrant.

[1] for completeness/fairness, I'm pretty sure Amazon would treat and Sydney AZ instances I spin up exactly the same way.
[2] actually, I suspect I'd get the worst-case scenario of the least protection available under either US or Australian law - if push ever came to shove...
I agree - that was one of the initial things we were discussing when developing SUT.
Dont know how much of this is true but i have recently seen this video which talks a bit about it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TyswmRCdl8
The government isn't really spying on us en masse, any more than terrorists are out to get us en masse. for one thing, people are more concerned with external threats than internal ones (and I think that's reasonably rational, because the US is really a very long way from anything resembling totalitarianism); for another, most people assume taht the government already has/had access to what you do on your cellphone/facebook/internet searches so actual evidence of data manaing doesn't seem all that big of a revelation. Most Americans are already used to having everything they do entered into a database already; consider that the course of most people's lives are already shaped by their credit scores without any particular help from the government. At least you can FOIA the government to see what information they have on you. Good luck getting any private firm like Google to give you that information; we had to pass a law to ensure people have access to their own credit report, and that only entitles one free request annually.
Save poddery.com, community run diaspora pod
See the last section of http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html.
sorry if I am barking up the wrong tree.. but do you think it will be beautiful with all the breakout cables ?

For me this whole thing looks like a blast from the past - my trusty C64 with everything outside the box (and there were some articles in the 64er magazine [german magazine] which showed how to build everything into a single case for the neat, "integrated" look)
Nothing stated in the Rackspace or other ISPs posts says anything about the routers in place at these facilities. They're all quite careful to say how secure the customer's "stored data" is safe on the "servers" - nothing is said about data flows through routers.
Developing Customers, Delivering News, Delighting July
Do you think the NSA spying operation in the US is only for terrorism ? This sounds so much like the pedophile argument when talking about internet privacy.
I don't get what else there is to disclose. Snowden confirms that the NSA's has "horrifying capabilities" when it comes to collecting data. It sounds like with enough reason to and time they can bug any network and computer anywhere. Which considering they are the most powerful intelligence agency, seems likely to be true and getting more true.
But the US of A has absolutely no obligation for the welbeing or privacy of any non-US citizen. if their data happens to be within US jurisdiction, the US gov't can do anything they like, provided that what they do is "lawful".

I m not saying PRISM is lawful (that remains to be seen?), but i think many non-US citizens are feeling too entitled to the protection of US law.
This whole "scandal" is a tempest in a teapot stirred up by the privacy fear-mongering industry.

There is nothing to suggest any wrongdoing by any NSA personnel involved (except for Snowden). No harm of this NSA program to any US individual has ever been demonstrated, let alone proven. No proof of any abuse whatsoever.

What we have here is a publicity-seeker with a sensationalist story blown out of proportion to drive pageviews, at the cost of undermining and compromising the program that has successfully foiled terrorist plots. Manufactured outrage drives modern media. We should be thanking the designers and operators of PRISM.

http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2013/06/07/Foiled-2009-Pl...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/us/mining-of-data-is-calle...

PS: It is also pretty funny how the people who claim to be standing up for our liberties rush to downvote opinions different from their own
I'd like to know the names and addresses of the people who ordered it. Does anyone have a phone number for someone in the Department of Homeland Security I can ask?
Oh wow, yeah... didn't realize it was 20 Gbits/s for TB2 and not GB. It's not even close to as fast as currently shipping PCIe 3.0 x16, at 2.5 GB/s versus PCIe's 16. I guess external video cards are not really much of an option. Even using up all six TB2 ports won't get you as much bandwidth as a single PCIe 3.0 x16 slot.
Government of India Launches E-Gov App Store
I think you are referring to a FISA opinion that found some 4th amendment violations were had, and that they felt the "spirit" of the law was being violated.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/06/justice-departme...
Save poddery.com - A community run and decentralized Social Network, as opposed to Corporate or Government controlled and centralized services like Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Diaspora* is a Social Networking service that doesn't spy on its users, and we need your help to continue running
I can't see any way a 'prosumer' will be able to afford it considering what's going inside. I think these things are going to run $3000+, but maybe I'm wrong. Or maybe I'm mis-defining 'prosumer.'
[he was demonstrating how it looks when you "Open up Chrome inspector tools and use pretty print to actually read it" ]
this is worth watching to see the mental gymnastics that the locutor goes through to justify 'legality'. While yes, the program may have had the FORM of a legal procedure, it's clear that at some level, he understands the absurdity of reconciling the ideal of having a government accountable, and being subject to oversight - with the fact that the legislature has crafted a law that gives authority to an organization that can secretly expand its powers. Yet he tries to anyway, and he stammers like crazy - because there's something wrong at the core that he's trying to paper over. 'The conversation should have happened five years ago' - with what? Deposition of witnesses that have come from the future to testify that the secret system that can bootstrap its own rules has not gotten out of hand and has been effective beyond their wildest dreams?
Time to change the laws then. These laws were rushed through Congress with little public debate, and whenever EFF or ACLU tried to fight them the Obama administration tried to dismiss the cases or stop them somehow.

I want to see the constitutionality of scooping 100 million phone records at once, gathering all data from ISP cables, and asking Google and others for probably thousands if not millions of users' profiles and logs at once, being tested in Court, and I want it all to reach the Supreme Court.

Then we can establish how legal everything was. You can't trust Congress with any of the laws they've been passing. Remember the NDAA and the indefinite detention clause? That was another one rushed through around new year's eve time. This needs to stop, or I can't ever take them seriously when they say "it's all legal".
Im getting the vibe that Peer-to-Peer encrypted mesh is the way of the future for the internet.

Client to server is just too easy for large organisations to abuse.
Orwell's non-fiction is brilliant, and shines much brighter than the books that made him famous. (Animal Farm and 1984).

Also, if you'd like to read Homage to Catalonia:

http://www.george-orwell.org/Homage_to_Catalonia/index.html

I highly recommend it.
Come join us on the Open Web. It's actually really good now. There may be restrictions and difficulties but no one will stop you getting your hard work out there.
Does this really matter in 2013? Serious question. I could see ECC having been useful in 2000 in the midst of the megahertz race, but I'm not too convinced about today...
It's nice seeing people like Fred stand up for privacy/human rights, but at the same time, it's little a bittersweet because speaking out directly against PRISM companies could affect business -- as companies he invests in are sometimes purchased by PRISM companies. That might hamper abilities to speak out more directly if he really wanted to make a difference.

For example, Fred mentions he is proud that Twitter wasn't in PRISM, http://fredwilson.vc/post/52346663032/the-list-of-technology... but at the same time uses the fuckyeah tumblr meme to end the post. Tumblr was recently sold to PRISM-involved Yahoo.

I'm not saying it's wrong, or bad, but it is very bittersweet.
It's a much safer bet to make it impossible to get the data for the company.
It's not like if non-US countries were much better.
Be slightly careful with your analogies between the US and Nazi Germany, too.
> the PS4 is being received so incredibly well and the sentiment towards the Xbox One is exactly the opposite.

It's probably because Sony hasn't said anything yet about their used game policy. I would seriously doubt they don't get publishers get their way on the Sony console as well just as they did on the Xboxone. Unless they want to shoot themselves in the foot and lose publishers support.
Well, actually all genocides were carried on by people (part of a government or not), so maybe we should eliminate people.

Either that or not make broad generalizations.
"How will they make money?" is the wrong question
Dual FirePro cards, mini PCI-E SSD, and up to a 12-core [single] CPU? I feel like this will start north of $3500, but they might have a cheaper base config. Maxed, it'll probably top $5k.
They announced that you can sell your used games if you like, share them with your friends, or keep them forever.

Essentially you can do whatever you want with your games; zero DRM.
Nothing like the "father," of the net to come out and tell the "big," kids that they're doing it wrong.
Go look at the number one thread in r/gaming right now.

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming

http://imgur.com/ymUneDP
The fanboyism is rooted in nothing that has to do with the consoles themselves. It's neotribalism at its most blatant: it's the need to belong among a group sometimes reviled (usually, ironically enough, for the rampant and verbally violent neotribalism).
Microsoft has a very long history of screwing up once they get on top. They're great when they're the underdog doing the chasing, they tend to catch up over time. Once they finally build a great product, you can almost always count on them royally screwing it up. Then the process starts all over again.
They said this about their used game policy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWSIFh8ICaA

(for those who can't watch it, it sounds like they gave the green light for all kinds of used games and sharing)
But what stops Google's next CEO or CTO from doing the same?

The law. There are many restrictions on how Google or Facebook use and distribute user data, and those laws are respected and enforced.

That's what Snowdon found so disturbing about the NSA - they no longer feel constrained by any law, and that they think their actions are a matter of policy because the laws governing their actions are so weak and ignorable (not the case for corporations). Even senators can't find out what they're really up to or talk about it to anyone else if they do.
Yes, it is possible. Many people do it.
How about the entire graphic design industry? Finally a 'headless iMac' with balls. The MacPro allows me to attach my EIZO monitors. The iMac screens are consumer-quality, really. If you're looking for high quality screens (and OSX), the MacPro is the best. I am curious about the price-range.
Freedom of general purpose computing is more important than a company's bottom line. Also restricting anti-competitive behaviours is not equivalent to a forced medical procedure.
I would very much like to have the same question answered by Amazon in regards to AWS (maybe it has been already).
Not quite. If you are in the US as a tourist, it doesn't matter what you have signed. They can't go and strip search you just because they felt like it.

What you have to realize is that 4th Amendment law is largely tied to searches for prosecution reasons and so usually the issue is "well, the 4th Amendment is violated and so to punish the government and give them the right incentives, we won't let them use the following set of evidence in their prosecution." It's really hard to make such rules effective regarding surveillance of foreigners conducted overseas.

Non-citizens in the US for whatever reason do have relevant liberties. This does not extend to say buying tv advertisements for candidates in elections, but it does extend to unreasonable searches and seizures. Non-citizens with no real ties to the US, and not in the US are different.
Indeed. Imagine if we just killed everyone how many social problems we'd solve....

But my broader point was, larger government surveillance and national security powers won't stop genocides or wars between governments. This isn't what they are there for. They are there to prevent groups which are deemed politically dangerous ("terrorists" which evidently include nuclear protesters, environmentalists, and states' rights advocates).

It's one thing to have spy agencies. However widespread spying on one's own people is never a good sign.
Well-deserved...is there a high school classic that is so thematically substantive and yet also such an accessible, enjoyable page turner? Yes, in retrospect, of course there wasn't going to be a revolution, but you weren't so pessimistic and cynical back in 10th grade. Also, I think I owe my latent fear to rodents to that book's finale.

"Shooting an Elephant" also deserves to be mentioned almost as much as 1984, in terms of lessons in civics and human psychology.
That depends, is Edward Snowden plainly out of his mind like McAfee clearly was even before the murder flap?
I feel like Apple is betting the farm on Thunderbolt being the future, and I don't see that future materializing. How many Thunderbolt peripherals have y'all even seen in real life that weren't the Apple external monitor or a mini displayport display adapter? I feel like this is even less prevalent than Firewire was back in the 1394 glory days (it was/still is an excellent bus for running audio, due in no small part to the fact that it's not USB; separate controller, doesn't crash if your USB bus gets wonky, etc.).
Before Nazi Germany it was just Germany. Unless one is racist against Germans, one must in the interest of humanity seek to understand exactly how that transition happened.
If poddery.com, one of the oldest and well known Diaspora pods, is closed down, it will have a huge negative on the wholde Diaspora ideology. So let's not let it happen.
But it has already happened... nearly 15 years ago it got pretty bad, and it continues to get worse. Anyway these "backdoors" already do exist in routers.

None of the big companies with statements (denials) about PRISM say anything about protecting data that flows through its networking equipment, only that they do not provide access to "stored" data on "servers" (without a warrant).

Here's how to configure a Cisco 7600's LI (Lawful Intercept) "feature":

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/routers/7600/ios/12.2SR/conf...

* Note the cute assumption in the naming of this "feature" - it almost implies that the use of "Lawful Intercept" is necessarily lawful as the feature itself has the word "lawful" right there in the name!
The fact is Sony just has to produce a more "open" console than Microsoft and Nintendo, and it looks like they are doing that. Microsoft is a huge sell out, looking to control every aspect once again, and Nintendo have lost the plot completely.
Flat, Rich Text ,Gentle Beam, mess up, etc
That is a theoretical possibility, and a highly unlikely and unobserved possibility at that. Real life mutations aren't like in children's cartoons. Most of the genetic material in a multicellular organism do not belong to germ cells, and most mutations caused by ionizing radiation either cause death of the cell or no effect at all, especially in eukaryotic chromosomes. Cancer, highly unlikely itself, is many orders of magnitude more likely than any inheritable effect.

Studies of the Chernobyl disaster have not found evidence of teratogenic effects in humans [1], and neither have studies of survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings [2].

The malevolent-sounding yet meaningless phrase "fades your genes" is nothing short of nonsense, especially in reference to inheritable teratogenic effects. The number of special places in hearts can do nothing to alter that judgement.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10440782

[2] http://www.rerf.jp/radefx/genetics_e/birthdef.html
PlayStation Suite is more like PS3 OtherOS than anything else. It's incredibly crippled.
How is it free ?
James Clapper made 'least untruthful' answer possible on data collection
Security reassurance is something I hadn't thought of, but I think you are right that this leak goes way too far for that to work. I don't believe this either...but if I wore a tinfoil-hat I would point out that:

1) The NSA "leak" is not really news because it was reported in 2006[1].

2) "Bad" publicity from it is the beginning of Obama's 2nd term downfall which is happening too soon in his 2nd term for us to be angry enough to elect a Libertarian 2016. It'll be an opportune time to usher in an all-talk small government Republican in 2016 to maintain Red State vs. Blue State illusion. Even if the Repub doesn't win, it'll look like the election was a close ideological fight, which is all that matters in the eyes of the public. Of course, all 2016 candidates will continue to support the NSA oversight regardless of what they say during their campaign, so it won't matter whether red or blue gets the oval office.

Like I said... science fiction.

[1]http://yahoo.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.h...
Everyone be slightly careful about anything they read on history.
(it's probably cheaper too, but you'll still have a huge "ugly" "old" box [sitting under your desk where it won't matter anyway])

I'm still glad Apple made this, but I feel like it might miss their target market a bit. It does fit with their strategy of "disposable devices" though; you'll be buying a new one if you want to upgrade.
He seems to fail every time:
"In April 2011, Klayman filed a lawsuit against Facebook, accusing the social media website of "negligence" for not responding quickly enough to calls to take down an anti-Israel "Third Intifada" page and demanding $1 billion in damages. Facebook representatives responded that the suit was "without merit." In December 2012, the district court dismissed the complaint on 47 U.S.C. 230 grounds.

Also in 2011, Klayman represented Joseph Farah in his unsuccessful defamation lawsuit against Esquire magazine. In July 2011, Klayman represented Bradlee Dean in his unsuccessful defamation lawsuit against Rachel Maddow; Dean was eventually ordered to pay defendants' legal fees that totalled nearly $25,000.

In 2012, Klayman filed on behalf of a Florida resident an unsuccessful challenge to Barack Obama's placement on the primary ballot and claimed that the latter is not a natural-born citizen."
Better something than nothing. One of the few papers in the world with enough guts to publish at all, I'm glad The Guardian got it to be honest.
What freedoms are being protected exactly? The freedom from government intrusion in your private life? The freedom to travel? The freedom to bear arms and defend yourself? The freedom to grow whichever plant you wish in your own land? The freedom to do with your own body as you please, provided you do not harm anyone else? The freedom from excessive labour? The freedom to run a currency like Bitcoin? The freedom from being targeted by the IRS if you go against the status quo? The freedom of the press? Or do you mean some other freedoms? Or maybe, just maybe, you mean security and not freedom at all?
I don't know, I still don't mind if the NSA has access to my data if they're not allowed to share it.

I accept that things that I share on the cloud/with big tech companies are probably accessible by someone. I don't have any guarantee that the top people at Google/Yahoo aren't looking through my stuff--they certainly have the ability to do so.

As long as you're storing your data in a service like this, someone will have access, probably multiple people. This new PRISM stuff just tells me that a few more people have access, it doesn't really change much for me.

If you are concerned about this type of privacy I'd suggest living like Stallman then. It's not as if you don't have methods to keeping your data private.
This is the audio of the 1984 quote, going to save this one. http://db.tt/gqOVbl9f