skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"You can't deny that CALEA, PATRIOT, FAA, the NDAA, CIA's black site and gitmo programs, drone warfare, drone warfare against US citizens overseas, etc. weren't steps back."

I can't? Most of those things don't affect US citizens. Drone warfare arguably saves lives (you'd rather that we send soliders to do the same things?). The other things present vague, hypothetical risks (when they present risks at all), and tangible, quantifiable benefits.

Look, I'm not saying that I agree with everything that's in the Patriot Act, or that I think that the US government should have a blank check to bomb citizens via remote-controlled helicopter. But when you look at the actual risks to citizens, you find that they're pretty theoretical. The people who are objecting the loudest usually have the least reason to object (which is, ironically, part of the problem -- organizations like the ACLU have traditionally had a very tough time proving harms to citizens, and as a result, their lawsuits keep getting tossed).

But if you're going to push me to be the devil's advocate, I can quite comfortably go to the argument I made before: we don't have cars blowing up (or people walking into cafes with bombs strapped to their chests) in our cities on a regular basis, and we manage to achieve that level of safety without needing the intrusiveness of the security state of even a "reasonable", western democracy like Israel. Empirically, then, we're doing OK. A lot of the teeth-gnashing going on here is breathless exaggeration from people who have such peaceful lives that they have literally nothing better to worry about.
>Curious argument, given that Apple is trying to kill flash.

Nothing curious about it. I'd like to see Flash killed myself. But when I need it, I need it, and on OS X or Windows I can install and use it in all major browsers, officially supported by Adobe. On Linux they have called it quites.

>The same thing that happens when that new gizmo doesn't have an OSX driver.

Only the second case happens far less often, whereas the first is the norm, especially for any multimedia etc work.
I think Snowden is deadly wrong, you people don't deserve to know anything.
The ethics of data collection in the age of people sharing all sorts of information with Google, Facebook, etc, are not a clear cut thing.

Moreover, it's not meaningless whether its illegal or not. Indeed, it makes all the difference in the world. Laws can be changed if we don't like their outcomes--a government that's ignoring the law is something else entirely.
tptacek why are you always defending ridiculous statements and behavior by the US administration and spy agencies? You seem willing to bend over backwards (or is it forwards) to justify any statement from the authorities but will attack the tiniest issue in a fellow HNers post.

Have you and/or your company ever worked for them? If so it would explain a lot.
For HTTPS. I will bet you they don't use perfect forward secrecy for TLS with SMTP traffic. Not because they don't want to , but because it likely isn't supported for a huge set of the servers they connect to. A large number SSL terminators/ accelerators that e.g Microsoft uses, don't likely support it and who knows about other stuff.
The ALTER doesn't have to be in the embedded code. It can be a separate utility.
This site seems to fail a lot. Every time it does someone interprets it as being suspicious, especially when their pet petition is getting attention on a site they frequent. Don't read too much into it!
Bullcrap. When people saw "direct access", they concluded direct access - as was reasonable, at the time, from what the leak seemed to show; I did the same. Many of the people on this site have since realized that that is not true (although there were sure a lot of crazy theories about the specific wording of the initial denials), but most of those people are no longer saying "direct access", and there are people still saying "direct access".
>And struggle with drivers, too. I bet, OS X still uses them, not magic pixie dust, to work with hardware.

It uses a magic pixie dust system called "GUI installer". Click, next, done.

It's not the figuring out "where to get them" that's the hard part -- even my dad knows how to Google for them. It's the installation ease, vs half-finished instructions about "make" and "tar.gz" and configuring.
So, I've love to know how you make Netflix working on Linux, seeing as how it requires Silverlight.

(and no, the netflix-desktop hack doesn't count, because it plays choppy, and doesn't work in a window)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_F91W#Claimed_use_in_terr...
Hear, hear if you thought about it long enough to know they didn't give the NSA a database console with read-only rights!
I'm not sure. It could be that they know about it and are gag-ordered (can't fight city hall!), or that they were intentionally left out of the loop for purposes of plausible deniability.

This is military intelligence we're talking about here, they take their mission very, very seriously. I wouldn't be surprised if there were multiple, independent, redundant programs for monitoring this data.
Ć Programming Language - Compile C# subset to C, Java, C#, JS, AS, Perl and D
See what I mean? This is the kind of comment that makes me think most HN people commenting on NSA think NSA has direct, unilateral access to Google Mail's servers --- as The Guardian (incorrectly) reported.
>For some weird reason Apple made it utterly difficult to be able to make a clean install.

Huh? I've made several clean installs. What's difficult about them?

The only "difficult" part is to copy the DMG to your USB or DVD media. Even that is like 3 steps you have to follow.

Apart from that it's exactly the same procedure as upgrading. Next, next, some preferences, done.
There's something sick and wrong in the semantics of how the laws have been interpreted here.

The authorities seem to have decided that they can record anything they want, any time they want. The legal boundary is only crossed when somebody listens to the recording. So it is fine for them to slurp up every bit of data they can tap into and then retrospectively figure out which bits they were authorized to listen to (with almost no oversight, as indicated by this article).

But most normal people don't interpret privacy that way. They consider the act of recording without consent the violation of privacy. The listening afterwards compounds it, but the power of the third party comes from having the conversation recorded, not the listening.

This misinterpretation of privacy is a subtle but deliberate and totally corrupt act by the authorities.
My thoughts on Edward Snowden
77k statesmen more like it. If it doesn't reach 100k I'll be pretty taken back by the lack of spine in Americans today. Go back 10-20 years and it would be a much bigger push back.

Freedoms are easy to give up, but you have to fight to get them back. Maybe we shouldn't give them up so easy.

When you have to break the law to reveal constitutional attacks that are illegal to even speak about yet might itself be illegal, something is wrong and it is an un-winnable situation.

If I was the NSA I'd do the same thing, it is their job to pry for national security. But it is our job to let them know when they have gone to far or just gotten lazy. Is it really too hard to ask for judicial approvals? Oversight? And when the executive branch overreaches happen yet make emergency directives to make it legal those need a check. Yes a free society is harder to manage, but others fought and died for that for us, least we can do is hold strong. Authoritarian nations are much easier for the leaders and much harder on individuals/citizens.

Then again the ARPAnet was a DoD project, it is ultimately the best honeypot in the history of the world.
If they were obtained without a warrant, wouldn't they be inadmissible as evidence, especially if they were being used in an inculpatory rather than exculpatory manner?
> there are people still saying "direct access".

Undeniably. What tptacek thinks though is that those people are "most" people on HN.

burntsushi thinks this is plainly false, and I agree with him. I think tptacek is seeing whatever it takes to stroke his ego.
Here is a data point; take it for what it's worth.

I run my own email service (Postfix) on 4 different domains. TLS is properly configured on all of my mailhosts, using certificates issued by StartCom. My servers routinely receive mail from Google, Apple, Yahoo, GNU, and other major email providers. Most of the messages are from various mailing lists.

I occasionally peruse the mail logs, and in the last 3 years, at least, I have never seen an unencrypted SMTP connection. I'm not saying it never happens, I've just never seen it. The most common protocol is TLSv1 with a variant of AES (nearly always 256-bit). Apple's listservs use TLSv1 with 128-bit RC4-MD5, but they're the exception.
I think that's an excellent summary, but also: that SFTP-like access almost certainly keeps happening, for that targeted account, after the initial request. Perhaps it happens hourly, or even faster when relevant account events (login, message-received, message-sent, voip-call) occur.

For most of the world -- those who have never SSH'd into a machine, nor had machine 'root' access -- that rapid-batch-dump access still would be fairly described as "direct access". Word meanings vary based on context and the expertise of the discussion participant; the slide deck and the journalistic reports were all written at the level of fuzzy understanding, not technical precision. Practitioner nitpicks about the implementation details don't refute them.
As 'DannyBee, himself a lawyer, pointed out a few days ago: no provision of any Federal law requires anyone to issue false statements. There are times you're prevented from saying things†, but there aren't times when NSA gets to put words in your mouth.

† ... we think; the ultimate Constitutionality of this is up in the air.
I don't see how you can possibly jump to that conclusion. But if you don't want to analyze the question from the position of the NSA (as you should be doing), then you are welcome to personalize it. So reiterating the question, which of your assumptions listed above do you think I suspect are wrong based on the kerfuffle over statistics reporting?

Put another way, why on earth does NSA seem to care so much about aggregating its FISA requests with other law enforcement agencies when reporting statistics to the public?
Ask HN: Where can I find this Carver Mead talk?
Bret Victor posted a clip of a Mead talk, but I can't find the full video online: http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/note.html
Rap News 19: Whistleblower
It's been my experience that you shouldn't put "simple" or synonyms in the title of a software library. If the project is any good it will grow, and eventually outgrow its simplicity.
The first post of Satoshi Nakamoto, Nov 2009
Without getting into a debate over the rest of your points, Snowden did not commit treason, and anyone arguing otherwise has no idea what they're talking about.

“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort."

You have to show "specific intent to make war" to convict someone of treason.

* http://www.salon.com/2013/06/13/no_one_understands_what_trea...
You have exactly as much technical control over Mac OS X as you do over Windows. You can execute arbitrary code and modify any system file you wish, even the kernel.

I'm not clear why people don't know this. Do non-Mac users really think OS X has to be "jailbroken" like an iPhone?
I'm having a hard time parsing your question but can I ask a different one: do you disagree with any of the bulleted points in my comment above? I don't want to waste a lot of time petulantly agreeing with each other.
> The ethics of data collection in the age of people sharing all sorts of information with Google, Facebook, etc, are not a clear cut thing.

It is a peculiar brand of corporatism that thinks the privileges afforded to corporations should somehow be considered when talking about the privileges given to governments. Quite the opposite of what one normally sees, but still curiously the same.
The Guardian went out of its way to characterize the access not only as "direct" but "unilateral".
Seiko watch movement, Part 1
Unless I'm mistaken (IANAL), they can still be used as exculpatory evidence.
Every time I've looked at the Fair Tax proposal, I've been underwhelmed and thought the name was the same sort of anti-nomer as the Patriot Act. But maybe you can change my mind.

It's a tax on buying. Think about that for a moment. Fair Tax proponents claim that the current tax system causes disincentives for things like exports and U.S. manufacturing. Why would the Fair Tax proposal then not cause a disincentive on the demand side of the economy? ("How will the plan affect economic growth" in the FAQ clearly espouses a particular economic ideology that has yet to be supported by any of the facts of history.)

It also places the entire tax burden on the consumer. Annual pre-tax corporate profits are somewhere between $800 billion and $2 trillion, depending on which data you decide to believe. Why is all that money being left on the table in favor of drawing the entire national budget from consumers?
Designers, more than anything else, have to 1) know the problem better than the user, and 2) interpret what users say they want/need to ascertain what they really want/need.

I agree that this is what designers have to do in a perfect world, but in many cases in the real world it doesn't happen that way. Also, that kind of specialized design costs money:

It's like buying a suit. It's better to get one tailored to your exact measurements (needs) than to buy a suit mass produced in the most popular, requested sizes.

Yes, this is an apt analogy: many people can't afford custom-tailored software any more than they can afford custom-tailored clothes. In fact, custom-tailored software is harder to come by.

a programmer could just identify his own problem using his own experience and solve it. But in practice, this doesn't scale to anything larger than an individual

This is just as true of proprietary software as it is of open source. As you note, the problem is a simple matter of scaling. Specialized expertise in general doesn't scale.

proprietary software ... where skilled designers are paid heaps of money to do all of the aforementioned.

Many people never get to use any software that's been custom-designed this way, whether it's proprietary or open source. Even in a corporate environment, from what I've seen, most custom-designed software is not designed by skilled designers who do all the great things you've described.

But the point the OP was making about Freedom Zero isn't really about a corporate environment; it's about things like Facebook. See further comments below.

If there's one thing that kills open source software, it's the amount of decision making it places on users.

And if there's one thing that makes proprietary software suck, it's the amount of decision making it doesn't allow users to do even when they want to.

Good designers (which cost money) know which decisions to make themselves so they don't confuse users.

The (which cost money) qualifier is key. See above.

Users don't want freedom because they don't want to make decisions. They want a problem solved but they don't care if they're "free" while it's done. They just want it accomplished so they can be on their merry way.

Yes, that's true, but that doesn't mean that's always a smart position to take in the long run. Sure, buy an iDevice--and be prepared to cough up more cash whenever Apple decides, for reasons best known to itself, that you need to upgrade. Sure, use Facebook--and be prepared to have your surfing habits sold to the highest bidder.

That said, I think you have the right answer to the question the OP asked: people don't care about Freedom Zero because they don't care about the long-term consequences of their decisions. They just want a problem solved, now, and they will take the path of least resistance to get it solved.
I understood there to be references to both; to other DOD programs called "PRISM", and to programs called "PRISM" that probably are the NSA program. Other DoD agencies are clients of NSA.
You will certainly find a programmer to help you with money, provided you offer enough of it.

And what about all the ordinary users who can't afford to offer enough? They're stuck with mass-produced software. See my response to dylangs1030.
A new lightweight lift cable will let buildings soar ever upward
Saurabh Kaushik | Program Manager Wipro Technologies
Thanks, so it seems likely that Gmail->Yahoo email is in plaintext.

That Google will "do TLS" is ambiguous. Are we sure Yahoo attempts TLS on their SMTP-connect to Google's MX? It seems unlikely if they don't support it on their own receives, and also unlikely that Gmail would reject all non-TLS SMTP.

If so, NSA wouldn't need Google or Yahoo's private key to record the plaintext of all email between them. And if the Google<->Yahoo interchange is representative, plenty of other email to or from Gmail will be similarly transparent.
So is your logic basically that even if most SMTP is unencrypted, that doesn't affect most Gmail because most Gmail is sent between Gmail accounts? If that isn't your logic, and we discount internal mail, I cannot understand how the majority of mail originating or terminating at Google would be encrypted, provided the claim that most SMTP is unencrypted is also true. Further pedantry, SSL can be used instead of TLS.
You're seeing Yahoo inbounds with TLS enabled? Because the service posted downthread seems to show that Yahoo won't accept inbound mail with TLS.
>only if they had whistleblower status--i.e. the leaked programs were illegal.

It doesn't matter if the programs were legal or not. If a secret court came to a secret interpretation of legislation that permitted them to claim what they were doing was legal, that doesn't make it right.
Brad Nickel | Partner Captiva Communications
Is anyone else suspicious about the amount of money that they raised in their first day (around $130k)? The company's crowdfunding site doesn't let you see who contributed to its campaign and that's a lot of money to raise in one day.
I really hope the current work on irssi-otr will improve some things:
https://github.com/cryptodotis/irssi-otr

Some bugs in the old 0.3 release are quite annoying.
Want a preview of the exact text the White House will use to not comment?

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/why-we-cant-commen...

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/why-we-cant-commen...

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/why-we-can’t-comme...

Though maybe we'll get extra lucky and get a non-form non-response, like Bradley Manning's:

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/why-we-cant-commen...
"To be fair, some of the people Stalin executed really were out to get him."

What the fuck kind of justification is "some were accurately targeted"?
There are more things we are still just learning about.

See for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio
Since there's already a program (Ambinder reported on it) called PRISM that pertains to dropboxes used to handle data from FISA requests, Occam's Razor tells me that it's more likely that the slide deck author was referring to direct access to these dropboxes than it is that NSA would somehow have allowed it to become common knowledge within NSA that they had a capability to unilaterally take data from Google Mail.
I'm about as paranoid and distrustful of the USG as most people here but as the news unfolds it seems some senators and congressional representatives genuinely care about who they represent.

The CSPAN meeting on Wednesday started out unpleasantly devoted to public-private cooperation and other back-patting but it very quickly took a sharp turn into a grilling and -- dare I say -- public flogging of General Alexander.

Here is a short excerpt of the first shot across the bow of the NSA surveillance programs: http://pastebin.com/pqMxP0s6

I recommend reading the transcript along with the video: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/event/220078

It starts at 49 minutes.

After reading it now it looks very dry and uninteresting but the tonality and the volume of their verbal exchange was certainly reassuring.
Before anyone else does it, let me adapt the old joke:

An American and Chinese businessman are talking about their respective governments.

The American says, "See, you in China don't have the liberties that we do. Why, if someone exposed an unflattering truth about the US government, they would be lauded as heroes for standing up for our rights! You can't say that about your own country."

The Chinese responds, "Not true, not true. If someone exposed unflattering truths about the US government, they would be very welcome here too!"
Stackexchange weighs in with the secret to avoiding jetlag
I wonder what it would take for you to stand up for something? I think you play it safe. Do you think standing up for something after it is too late is worth it?

The program is preempting privacy for security. Here preempting overstepping of the Constitution should be pardoned.

It is better to err on the side of protecting rights than protecting overstepping authoritarian actions. The latter needs to prove itself more thoroughly if rights are lessened.

Noone will stand up if there isn't some support for people that do things for our freedom. Is making this public really worth putting someone in prison who clearly was smart enough to make it in the CIA and NSA?

If he is wrong and it is now legal to do illegal search and seizure of papers (without oversight and judicial approval/warrants), then we should just kill off the 4th amendment and stop pretending. Giving up freedoms is easy, getting them back is hard and too late. I think you should reconsider.
On a related note, I have read this book several times:

http://books.google.com/books/about/Great_Boss_Dead_Boss.htm...

The book, written in a Socratic style, is about tribes and tribal behavior in businesses.
From the 'dhess comment downthread it looks like it's possible that Yahoo does TLS outbound but not inbound. Google, it seems, does both.
I don't really disagree with the principle, but it seems to more or less be a statement of the idea of "whistleblowing". Snowden is a high-profile current example of a whistleblower, but it might be going a bit too far to credit him with the principle itself! Even sticking to relatively contemporary U.S. history, you could call it the Buxtun principle, among other names.

On the topic of naming: I didn't realize until some googling just now that "whistleblower" itself is a neologism, dating to the '70s, and coined by Ralph Nader. He wanted to give the concept a positive spin by analogizing it to a referee pointing out dirty play, vs. alternatives like "leaker" and "informant" that have negative connotations. I'm not much of a fan of Nader's subsequent political career, but in retrospect that was a pretty successful move.