skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Excellent point.

A thought experiment: the Founding Fathers specified that individuals' "papers" must be safe from casual government search. They did not say that by handing a sealed letter to a postman, I'm implicitly making it public. If someone had invented a machine to see through envelopes and read letters, they would not have approved of its warrant-less use.

Why should email or phone calls be different? Technically, the communication leaves my control. Technically, there are ways to snoop on it. But the law concerns itself not with what is possible, but what is permissible. A machine that could see through envelopes wouldn't make letters a "broadcast" medium; only the intention of the sender to make something public could do that.

Snooping on phone calls and emails without a warrant specifying which people's communications should be investigated and why is an obvious Fourth Amendment violation.
I agree and you'll have to pry my self-built pc from my cold dead hands but my computer is super huge and hard to take with me, the design of the new Mac Pro is super neat
The most ridiculous example is the 5th edition of "Learning Python" by Mark Lutz. It's supposed to be an introduction to the Python language and it's almost 1600 pages long. The 1st edition was less than 400, the 2nd was 550, the 3rd was 750 and the 4th around 1200 pages.

It's a very nice book, don't get me wrong, but I think it's intimidating for a beginner.
NSA PRISM Access Console
I'd launch that on Kickstarter.
The main thing I care about with a mail client is the exit strategy - if I don't like it, can I export all my mail losslessly to mbox or eml files?

Does anyone know how it fares at this?

I use gmail now, though in the past I've used The Bat.
Blog spam?
Using a standalone desktop app allows you to use encryption (PGP/GPG) while continuing to use hosted services like Gmail/Hotmail. In other words, you can again start treating networks as dumb pipes.
Forget flat design. Design in a 1995 style for full impact
Greenwald may be out of his depth in interpreting what the documents mean. But that's not the same thing as saying the story is completely bogus.

Lately it's emerging that the Guardian released their story pretty soon after Snowden contacted them. I had assumed this was the kind of story that they would slowly confirm over months, but maybe not.

I agree that whatever our judgments of the character of the people involved, it would be better to have the data.
The article says "immediately limit civil servants’ access to the popular US internet services and social networks" - which I have to admit actually makes sense.

If the NSA can get details of the personal lives of individuals then it could open them up for blackmail and therefore to be a security risk.
Are works like "1984" or "Brave New World" presenting to us such fundamentally touching truths that they actually become self fulfilling prophesies?

Are those so elementary truths that they become building blocks of our thinking, shaping our above mentioned [1] terminology, our mental models, even our archetypes?

Is there any fiction presenting us with a future outlook we would actually want to be become self fulfilling prophesies?

What is social fiction in contrast to science fiction?

__

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5860077
So I've opened support cases with both Amazon and Linode, the former will probably get back to me in several days, but as usual Linode has already replied.

---

vertis
29 minutes ago	I am an Australian (i.e. Non-US-Resident Non-US-Citizen). While I have nothing of particular interest on my servers, the revelations of the last week have concerned me for multiple reasons.

The Guardian story about the PRISM program suggests there is extensive surveillance and interception of foreign citizens' data without a court order. Do I need to move my servers to a provider that is based in a country that respects my rights to not be surveilled?

lmatos
18 minutes ago	Hello,

As an American citizen, I completely understand. With that said, we have to comply with all US law as we are a US based company.

If there is anything else that we can do to help, please do not hesitate to ask.

Regards,
Lee M
This analysis sounds very reasonable and realistic; it does fit the evidence we have so far. The key insight is "automated process" -- and I'm sure the companies involved were really happy with that solution.

This part is a little naive though: "The NSA can begin surveillance on someone(s) for a full week before they have to get the rubber stamp from the secret court"

Since everything is secret, it's difficult for anyone to examine or challenge what the NSA does. If they have a week before going to court it means they have eternity, because no one is going to make sure that provision is always observed.
The one thing I'd like to know about "PRISM"
Is what size of RSA key can the NSA routinely decrypt? I want to know that because it has massive economic implications if our SSL infrastructure is broken (and I'm not talking about the mess that is the certificate authorities but about decrypting live connections.)

Common RSA key sizes are 1 024 and 2 048 bits.

We know from past disclosures that there is widespread tapping of fibre optic lines by governments. But what level of SSL is broken?

The documentary film maker who recorded Snowden in Hong Kong stated that he wanted to communicate with PGP and that she was already familiar with it and _had keys_ because of previous work with Wikileaks and ioerror. A search in the PGP key ring shows that she generated a 4 096 bit key in 2011. She also stated the what Snowden was asking for was _beyond_ what she had previously been used to in terms of security and privacy.

So is one to assume that even 4 096 bit RSA is breakable by NSA?

And don't think Elliptic Curve will save us. Rumeur is that NSA has a back door into the most common curves in the NIST standard.
Google Search for 1984 from George Orwell spike after PRISM scandal
I've started a checklist of sites and services that I will need to migrate away from. The list is extensive.

The question of whether to migrate to other cloud services, or to host my own private cloud is up in the air.
Are Education Standards for US Student’s Education Adequate?
I somewhat respectfully disagree. Java as a programming language, conceptually is not huge. It does have a huge API library. However 'experts' should be able to make it concise
- as in what is the object or goal of this lib/package. so the the reader knows 1) whats possible in java 2) if they need to dig deeper they know where to look.

I guess to me the idea is not to know everything, but to know whats possible and where to look.
Buyers evaluate a books price by it's length. That is they're more willing to pay $50 for a 500 page book than a 50 page book.

It's completely irrational, nevertheless it a behaviour that even completely rational people display.
Uncaught ReferenceError: Set is not defined
An important feature for email: fast and flexible search over a large dataset. This is easier to implement in the cloud than on the client. So I don't see a strong future for desktop-based email clients.
One of the real things is that we need a framework for rights which is not dependent on "Wouldn't it be nice if everyone...." The problem, as the article notes, is that rights applied universally, are not a liberating concept.

I am going to propose one here. Rights, I see as emergent from cultural context, rather than inherent in the human condition. Culture is always an interplay between the group and the individual, groups of individuals repurpose culture all the time.

So my definition is very simple. Rights to the individual and subgroups are held where necessary for the reasonably just functioning of the culture. We recognize abortion as a right in contemporary American culture because women cannot have equality in a soul-crushing corporate workplace without it, but that doesn't mean one can declare that it always has been a right to everyone.

Similarly free speech and due process are necessary for our form of governance to survive. Otherwise we just have turn our country into something fundamentally unjust according to the ideals of our culture.
Show HN: Invoker, a utility for managing processes in development envionment
maybe more significant.
Open source is an incomplete defense against this - I don't know of a way of proving what software is running on a remote host.
Thanks, I feel like an idiot now.
Seat Count in Tamil Nadu Engineering Colleges for TNEA 2013
I am not particularly happy with its integration with Gmail. Each email from facebook group is assigned separate mailing list. So now when I expand mailing list it is just cluttered with rubbish sublists like [0-9]*.groups.facebook... In general part which is responsible for detecting what is actually a mailing list isn't very clever. It would be nice if instead of creating folders for each label on Gmail it would create new label - so that it will be 1-1 integration.

Design seems really neat and if it will provide better Gmail integration I would love to use it. Of course I realise it is not going to be number one front-end for Gmail ported from web to standalone application, but I think that most popular mailboxes deserve it.

Is anyone here using fastmail and can tell how well it integrates in it? Is it more ingelligent and joins labels from fastmail with those in OperaMail or it just works the same way as with Gmail - new folder for each label?
Aren't NSA's full accounts pretty deeply secret http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.11/patton_pr.html ? so I think the only real issue would be tidying up the MS end. Another obvious way to funnel money into MS is through sweet deals on buying or licensing patents.
Is the privacy outlook for the UK very good?
For any party other than Democrats and Republicans to get a foothold in the US, we'd have to reform our voting system.

Suppose you want to vote for the Libertarian candidate but you'd prefer the Republican candidate to the Democratic one. By voting for the Libertarian, you "take" a vote from the Republican and make the Democrat's success more likely. (Or reverse the scenario: voting for a Green Party candidate hurts the Democratic candidate and gets you a Republican.)

Thus the system discourages you from expressing your true preference.

This is a major flaw in the most basic idea of democracy. All citizens, and especially all parties outside the Big Two, should work toward a better voting system.

One proposed system: http://rangevoting.org/
Agreed. Forget the beginner, even for the person know works with it everyday, it can raise the question about how much they know and lot of it is noise. I can understand if the book is a desk reference - thats a different story. but to learn..come on. I think this thread is common in new papers too...nytimes wsj etc. all thier articles are like 4 pages, when the whole point is to be concise. I do understand that a 4 page article generates 4 times more ad revenue. "The smartest minds of our generation are trying to figure out how to display and get people to click on ads" - :(
It will never die on my PC.
Just to put the other side.

Given Snowden's claims, they may well not know. He claims the NSA is so advanced that they routinely break the best encryption available and can literally access anything on the internet.

Assuming that is true, the NSA can access your PC at home and get anything they like form it. Have you noticed that happening? Has any one reported it happening? We get incredible third part analysis of the likes for stuxnet, but for this, nothing what so ever.

So, we could say Snowden is wrong or lying. Or, we could say the NSA is so good no one has seen it happen and hasn't analyses the attacks.

On top of that, how many employees for Google, MS, FB, etc are also working for the US government secretly? Would Page and co know that?

So, why would Page and co have any idea their systems are compromised. Apart from responding to legal requests, they may have no idea.

On the other other hand, if this were true, I'd expect Page and co to be bright red furious, and I dont see that either.

I dont know. I do think it is possible that they didn't know everything. Although, given their reactions, if I had to bet actual money, I'd have to say they did. Their reactions kinda suggest they knew full well.
Funny you mention it. Search in opera mail is excellent and extremely fast. It searches through all of my 12k mails in the blink of an eye.
Symbols of this new tyranny are highly sophisticated propaganda/subversion and bureaucratic repression. So, unlike standard totalitarian systems which are, in a sense, straight and clean, this system is not - you could say it's opportunistic. Bureaucracy is just formal execution of their will inside legal system (some people call that justice, but it's just tool of repression towards people). As you can see they are so strong that they can even play with constitutional rights.
Interesting idea, except that working out for seven days a week is quite boneheaded.

I think I would rather go the opposite. Set every day as a work day but take off the days where I just can't get motivated. The procrastination / motivated days don't go by a schedule. Maybe build days off sort of like sick days. Work on days I feel like working and then when I hit a day where I can't get motivated, burn a day from my cache of days off.
Five steps to get into the top Google
Оnly this way you can achieve good results in the Google search results this year
It was using an ES6 feature. I just removed it. It will now work fine in all browsers.
>When no one steals, it’s easy to be a thief. If somebody is stealing from you, then you either put a bigger lock, or you figure out why so many people hate you so much. That’s why only thief will go to great lengths to educate people to not steal to have a whole territory open only to him.

Ah, so thats why I was taught not to steal by my school teachers, parents and other mentors. Its because they were all thieves, just trying to clear their territory of competition. I'd better go buy some locks from the lock shop...
I thought I recognised that quote - it's from Lavrentiy Beria

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria
Just tested this with https://emailprivacytester.com/ and it failed

Even though it claims to not load remote content by default, and pops up a "Load Images" dialogue, it actually loads content from the html5 video and audio tags immediately.

So whilst this doesn't work unless the user clicks "Load Images":

<img src="http://TRACKING_URL/">

This does:

<video autoplay="true" src="http://TRACKING_URL/"></video>
The same holds for MP3, does it not? Come to think of it, the only CODEC stuff you really hear about after its launch is video related.
"If you would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."
Cleared the cache, refreshed, it's still there. Weirdness abounds.
They come over here and train all the time. If they had the numbers they probably could carve out a base within one of ours, or even a separate area.

There is at least one U.K. facility home-based here in the U.S. in fact.
They still get access to the "metadata" though
> All I'm saying is that I wish that Apple were more focused

> on creating the best products they can and letting people

> use them, rather than erecting artificial walls to keep

> people in and out.

It's ironic because that's precisely what they're doing yet you don't realize it. They limit the scope of hardware that OS X is meant to run on so they don't need to spend as much time on making drivers and ensuring the millions of hardware combinations work with as few issues. Just ask Microsoft about the effort involved.

Now, if you want to make the best product possible, wouldn't you make a single piece of hardware and software made specifically for it and take it to perfection? Rather than certifying tons of 3rd party hardware and fixing associated problems.

The fact that OS X runs mostly without issues on customacs is a lucky coincidence, but Apple doesn't want to be responsible or guarantee that it'll work properly.
I don't know about the US, but there's a project here in the Netherlands where ISPs can voluntary submit that information to a central databank where law enforcement can access it. There's some due process that has to be done before law enforcement may access it, but it's been shown that the process is faulty or not adhered too.
Text Morphing Effect with CSS
Yes its the 'more is better' mentality. but its a crude one at best. When applied to text media its stupid because I would pay somebody to summarize things for me, instead we are paying people for long unsummarized content that will take more time to digest.

Also why are book prices so high considering I have read so many times on HN that the authors seldom make any money from royalties and publishers have a fixed cost (for the most part).
I'm on ios 6.1.2 and everything works as smoothly as anyone would expect.

What version are you running?
> "clearly you can't depend on Americans to keep their own government in check, no matter how good the US Constitution is."

The Government has been taking away our rights for years, the general public seems to expect the government to solve all of their problems and give them free paychecks.

Of course, I really would be surprised to find out the America is the only country spying on their own citizens.

This has been going on for years and everyone knew it.. now with the leak hopefully we can reign in our own government and abolish the practice officially.
She's got a deLorean for sale, that makes up for a lot.

edit: gender corrected, tx.
The Camlistore VFS is written in Go and has read-only fuse bindings if you want to have a look: http://camlistore.org/code/?p=camlistore.git;a=tree;f=cmd/ca...
We already know a bit about Google's automated wiretap system for Gmail, because it was the system that the Chinese attacked in 2009/2010 in an attempt to access the accounts of Tibetan human right's campaigners.[1][2]

Bruce Schneier wrote a bit about this back in 2010[3]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned this before, since it's public confirmation of much of what the PRISM documents say, on the record.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/chines...

[2] http://www.techcentral.ie/21618/aurora-hackers-may-have-acce...

[3] http://edition.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/23/schneier.google.ha...
Larry Page says nothing of the kind.

Much has been made of the carefully-worded "direct access to servers."

I really do doubt that Google gives the NSA a shell login. It's also completely truthful that Larry Page never heard of Prism (it was a TS/SCI program, of course he wouldn't know what it's called.)

But giving the NSA a special "Spy-only portal" which allows the NSA to type in "Show me everything in Mr. X's Google+ profile" is not direct access, and could be given within 5 minutes of getting the legal request.
Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language, 4th Edition is 1,368 pages long. It has a fair amount of repetition, but it makes sense because it gives an overview, then quickly gets more detailed as you go through the book.

Personally, I like that. But then, I love reading computer books.
There would certainly be some unusual things about this pardon, but none of those have a bearing on whether it is within the power of the presidency.
List of Macs Compatible With OS X Mavericks
>> It calls into question his motivations when it comes to civil liberties.

Only if you accept a priori an answer to the core issue which is debated in the abortion issue: whether an unborn baby should be protected as a human life.

Nobody argues that government is invasive if it forbids stabbing a toddler to death behind closed doors. People do argue that one may stab a fetus to death behind closed doors.

The point of contention is not privacy, but the definition of human life. Pretending that the issue is already settled even as you argue for a particular policy is either naive or disingenuous.
Hmm, well "muslim" isn't a nationality, it's a religion almost as big as christianity. is he an American citizen?

Because otherwise that is profiling. They don't show up and ask others if there is any problems at their church or anyone using hate speech about the government at the church.
Why is generics so huge? You can cover it in a chapter, possibly two.
You probably have nothing to hide (in context)
Close, but it still doesn't beat Yvettes' [1]

[1] http://websitesfromhell.net/view/yvettesbridalformal.com-10/ (Site is no longer up).
I just tested running the Windows version under Wine on Debian Wheezy and it works.
A must watch - http://www.besquare.me/session/the-future-of-digital-marketi...
I actually loved that site without seeing the deLorean. Now that I know that its there I like it even more.
It is a good point that we should focus on track record, not speech. But:

1) don't we have more track record on Paul regarding this issue than we did on Obama?
2) isn't it possible that having a senator express this opinion publicly could influence other elected officials?
Parallel Testing in Action
> He claims the NSA is so advanced that they routinely break the best encryption available and can literally access anything on the internet.

Do you have a reference/quote for that? That's extremely interesting.
No, PlayStation Suite does not run on PSP or PS3. It runs on the PlayStation Vita and a very small subset of Android phones/tablets (not even 'All Sony Phones', unfortunately)
Could you make a showhn or maybe just reply with a pastebin of security/privacy tools you would recommend?
Part of the point is you aren't supposed to know, otherwise you'll be able to stop doing them and the authorities will lose their potential future leverage.

Another way to look at it is you aren't, but should you come to the right peoples attention, they'll figure out how to bend the rules enough so that you are.

No way of really knowing until laws are rolled back, simplified, and followed both from within the confines of the letter of the law and the spirit thereof.
Similar colour scheme to iOS7.
If you're talking about Nellis that's a US airbase with a few UK planes/pilots stationed there mostly for training purposes, which is clearly not the same thing.
If your server has IMAP, you shouldn't need that.
GM Wheat found in Oregon 10 years after abandoned by Monsanto
Aaaand it's down. lingscars.com will never understood why a scary DDoS from a "Hacker site" hit them..
One of the biggest criticisms of democracy is that it would be too slow of a process, when, for example someone runs a plain into a business building and kills lots of people.

So the founders of America created something called setting the country into a "state of emergency" which grants certain rights and privileges not normally legal. They didn't think that the government would be so power hungry that they'd just leave this feature permanently on.

They were wrong.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/09/11/messag...
Great find, so Aurora may have been an attack on Prism. Thats a very good demonstration of the dangers of these systems.
Aha! Below the deLorean is this statement:
"This is clearly a joke listing. This car ceased to be made in 1982. For the ASA benefit - this is a j-o-k-e"
"... but it's more common for companies to go to the advertising trough because it's seemingly so easy."

Easy and lucrative once you're big enough and to get big enough, you probably have external investors (who've trodden the path before and know the likely outcomes).

The sad thing is that while we may see lots of disruptive innovation in tech, we see much less innovation in the business models that follow (though please do correct me if I'm wrong!).