skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ok, in the fist sentence of the original, it says that they can decrypt PGP partially. The whole report is based on one sentence that a spokesperson said at some point.

For some context: The news releases from German security agencies tend to be imprecise on technical details in a way that suggests that the lack of precision is not on purpose. From all that I've heard on the German media, practically all surveillance techniques they use to get at encrypted communications consist of compromising your machine and thus getting at the unencrypted data. At least that was the real story when they claimed they wanted to "wiretap" skype.
- start using encryption, download and use gnupg.
- set up your own servers on your own computers.
- start up your own (with neighbors) ISP, not connected to a central ISP, but to other neighbors' and other town's ISPs.

You have the technology, and you have the freedom to use it, then use it! In some countries, we don't have the freedom to establish long distance (or even cross the road) communications without going the a government approved telco or ISP...
Isn't the connections between tor encrypted? If not, that seems like a crazy oversight.
Google could just buy some of those awesome drones that get realtime multi-gigapixel video for a 15km radius.
Just sent you an email. Thanks Raymond.
And what happens when "Google puts thousands of cameras on our faces" ?
When user receives message, delivery confirmation is sent back.
Between them, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt hold a majority of Google shareholders' voting power (about 2/3 is what I usually hear). I won't link anything because I don't really know the authoritative source for this sort of information, but Googling [Google stock structure] turns up plenty of secondary sources.
He's slightly exaggerating, IIRC, but it's conceptually correct.

Regarding the share structure, Google has two classes of shares, or maybe three by now. Class C shares don't get to vote, and I can't remember if they exist yet (IIRC they were voted into existence a year ago, but only pending various hurdles that I think might not have yet been cleared). Class B shares are worth 10x as much as Class A shares, for voting purposes. Guess who owns most (all?) of the Class B shares.

Anyway, the various share classes are all a bit beside-the-point. The real point is that when you add up all the votes, Larry and Sergey control a lot of them. And then there's Eric. And then there are a few CxOs/SVPs with meaningful shares. So basically a small group of people, who have led Google to its current state, are in control. Other shareholders are just along for the ride.

On top of all that, Google has always warned potential buyers that they don't give a shit about quarterly earnings, and they care about long plays and such, from the IPO forward. If minority shareholders were to sue the company for lack of fiduciary care, I think this would go poorly for them.

You could look up modern SEC filings to have a more-detailed breakdown, but here's a years-out-of-date summary I found with a few minutes use of... you guessed it.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10440005-265.html
Was there a rationale to choosing performActionOnStruct() names instead of the perhaps-more-idiomatic struct_perform_action() style?

I strongly advise against putting identifiers like release() and getCString() in the global namespace, that's probably not the wisest idea if you plan to use libraries other than your own.
Were you not the first person to inject "conservative" into the thread?
Trying to do an "Energy Budget" with my low-power research background. Please help with the balloon angle.

.1 - 1W Balloon height adjustments

.1 - .5W Flight tracking, control and management

.5 - 2W RF power and conversions (balloon-to-ground)

.5 - 2W RF power and conversions (balloon-to-baloon)

1 - 2W Packet routing, processing and baseband processing

Essential missing insight: how to they lower/rise the balloons and deflate/inflate them? With 100days service time you cannot simply vent gas. So a pump and compressor is needed?
Whoa, they'd rather do a thousand as many baloons as whatever amount they're doing now, than that last part of your post. That's, you know, core business.
Yeah, but the British government is famously orweillian, and 16 weeks is a lot less than he wouldhave gotton for child porn (I hope).
I agree it's a political problem, and can only really be solved through policy in the long term, but at the same time the big companies could do a lot more to bring end-to-end encryption to the masses, especially when it comes to chat apps.
Hacker News issue #1: Something better than "Ask PG:" posts for bug tracking.
Toosell blog | How to make an iPod Case from Felt
That's just the first sentence of the original, poorly titled article. Click through to the PDF and see what you make of it - in my reading, neither the question nor the answer say anything specific about PGP at all - especially the answer.
> This is a very exciting problem once you think about it...

That's a good summary of why Google has been so successful.

They have a way of making engineers and regular people really excited about their projects. It's a feedback loop - have exciting stuff, recruit smarter people, work on more exciting stuff.
I was interested to know how this compares with existing C libraries, so I "ported" the prime number example program to use GMP and GLib instead. It's not quite working yet (see the description) and I have to run now, but here's the code--I think it's nearly complete and would be interesting to benchmark once done.
https://gist.github.com/jzwinck/5787359
Revealed – Australia’s own PRISM facility
Camunda BPM 7.0.0-alpha6 released
Funny we learn everything that was 3000 years ago and from nature.
Original article:
http://www.theage.com.au/world/the-lost-city-20130614-2o9k7....
I'm familiar with that. And the guy proposes 22Km as the limit.

Besides, a lot has changed in the use of airspace and space in the last 8 years.

Yet, I don't know of any authoritative source for the actual current claims of most countries.
Could we please all relax a bit.

If the government tells you, they have a technology that can in principle be used, depending on type and quality of encryption, history shows us that this either means they can decrypt almost everything, or, most likely, not much. Both ways, they are not telling the complete truth at all.

Especially the german government likes to tell us that they have something that can in principle be used for something, like using your issued ID for online activities, a nation wide health-card system, a working toll collect system, etc., the list just goes on and on and on...

Anecdote: I remember, a couple of years ago, sitting in the audience of the yearly Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin in a talk by a pretty popular lawyer specializing in internet laws and regulation (IIRC the title was something like You have the right to stay silent; if you understand german, watch it, it's hilarious), where in the Q&A session somebody jumps up and tells the audience (paraphrased):

...the last time the police raided my home (much laughter from the audience) they took my encrypted disks with them (probably dmcrypt/luks or truecrypt) and after almost one year they still have not been able to decrypt a single bit of it...

I'm pretty sure not much has changed with ciphers becoming even stronger these days. I, at least, sleep well at night, trusting that my PGP2 encrypted mails are safe.
Doesn't most computers have TMP chips, which are perfectly capable of storing and generating private keys so the browser doesn't have acccess to them.
Why not adopt "Python Style" indentation for Ruby? (2007)
I think a viral marketing effort by the people will be good enough to create a mass of people using something like textSecure:easy to use secure(OTR) IM, backwards compatible with the android messaging app.

Still that doesn't solve the the backdoor issue. This one is much harder to solve.
Canada Moves Forward With WIPO Internet Treaty (ETA 2014)
If people who consent to be in documentaries and reality TV shows often admit to eventually "forgetting the cameras are there" and acting semi-normally despite their presence, then how will Google Glass be any different? There will be a short time period in an individual's life where it's new and they're processing it and they act differently, but then surely we'll all reach the point of "forgetting the cameras are there" and stop minding our Ps and Qs. (Whether this is a good outcome or a bad outcome is left as an exercise to the reader.)
I have this thought, but not sure if it can be considered a decent solution to achieve machine blindness?

One of the reasons why PRISM/computers or search works is because they can parse the text we type off our keyboards. Those character codes is what helps 'em look for key words, and enables the opportunity to snoop.

So instead if we doodle our text [1] in free-form and in language/lingo of our choosing (augment steganography with raw data/images) then we are perhaps closer to making it difficult for the snooping algorithms to parse and detect the keywords these people bank on.

I have significant reasons to believe that OCR across all languages for 400BB mails a day is next to impossible with available technology today. Given the diversity of handwriting/languages worldwide and the the fact that people can invent characters to communicate with each other, this could become an impeccable method.

[1] Example: https://bubbleideas.com/letters/the-tiger-by-sir-william-bla...
(Observe the second half of the page that is handwritten. Since private mails are meant to be read only by intended recipient, we don't need to fret much about search. Basic tagging would be enough.)
I'll add a more direct link - http://www.apple.com/ios/ios7/design/

They're explicitly showcasing their new icons, and I thought that was clear when they played the animation that morphs through all icons on the WWDC.
Definitely a strange mindset. How does JS not scale to rich applications? I'd rather use modular JS and a MV* framework than try to use GWT equivalents or things that compile to Java from other languages where the idioms don't translate.
"Injured in three landmine explosions and wearing a prosthetic plastic leg, Heng Heap said..."

The Indiana Jones movies always show ancient traps set around ruins. Maybe they should work in some of the modern day traps as well
And that's the thing IMHO - to some people Safari is an established brand, just like Firefox with its red-and-blue icon, or Chrome. I am rarely aware of the fact that Safari is a compass. If Apple didn't want to build a brand, they should probably just change the label to "Internet" (sic).

And the new Safari icon throws that brand away, which means that everyone has to learn -again- that the skinny white compass means "browser". And that the icon is inconsistent with every use of the icon before. All things that could have been avoided while still making the icon flat.
Secret deals with the NSA? First of all, bullshit. Second, that link claims nothing of the kind. Do you even read?

The link claims that a group called Consumer Watchdog made those claims, and then goes on to describe a pattern of partisan attack by that group, preferentially against Google, including wild and implausible allegations. Again, the majority of the column-space at PC World is casting doubt on these allegations.

Maybe you're an NSA agent, mrschwabe, raking muck on innocents to cover up your tracks. Can you prove that you aren't? How much money have they paid you? Way to undermine the free market, you commie nazi! Best case, there's no money changing hands, and you're a liar because you think it's funny. Worst case, you're a traitor. (Note: in case you got hit by Poe's Law, this paragraph is satire of your laughable reasoning, not an actual accusation.)

If Google were in bed with the NSA, they wouldn't be leading the charge against NSL gag orders, by successfully campaigning the feds to let them publish approximate numbers. (Credit where it's due, Calyx Internet is the bravest corporate foe of NSLs that I know of. But after Calyx, I know of no company as active as Google in resisting over-surveillance and fighting for privacy.) (Also, note that NSLs, despite the name, are more-associated with the FBI than the NSA, but my point still holds, because it's fedgov surveillance.)

And Google's just-this-week petition to increase transparency over FISA surveillance is also not consistent with favouring the NSA. More broadly, Google has been trying to draw attention to this for years, but obviously cautiously, because it's too easy for irrational crackpots to make the claims you made.

We don't know for sure that Google isn't doing horrible things. But all of the public evidence is 100% consistent with Google being active protectors of the public against the government, and it is... less consistent, with the opposite.
Native downloader for WWDC Videos & PDFs
It is a technological problem as well.

Let's suppose government allocated $200 billion to create this infra. But there are free tools which can render it useless. They are less likely to go ahead with such a plan then.

Whole premise of making inroads in service providers servers is that information stored there is human readable. Store it encrypted. Come up with stronger algorithms and security schemes and this problem is affectively solved.

If we can reach to a stage where only option remain to read a person's information is to arrest them or break into their devices, we have affectively pulled a project like PRISM down.
If omitting things like the War of the Roses, Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the English Civil War, then yes, they did have a good amount of continuity (at least when compared to much of what mainland Europe went from the end of the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution). However, they were not without their times of chaos and uncertainty.
German intel claim PGP & SSH deciphering depending on encryption type & quality
3D Printable Headphones
So IMHO there's a problem with this article, and its this

> Why, then, have so many people, both in the Congress and the public been shocked at the extent to which the NSA is snarfing up data?

Because people ignore what they're being told. Eschelon and Carnivore have been around for a LONG time so none of this should be shocking.
Microsoft bugs are deliberate attack vectors for US intelligence
It's the same with proper windows. You install and you pick your location and keyboard set up. There will be very very few people in the UK, for example, with en-US windows because the keyboard set up is different (mac's that's another story)

IMO, browsers should pick up your OS language settings by default OR make it very simple to both see what your browser default is and to change it. (without an add on)

I live in the UK, but I'm a US ex-pat so I get snared with i18n problems quite a bit when it comes to addresses on my US accounts.

It gets worse because I forget to change my browser to en-GB, and I come across US run .co.uk sites that rely on accept-languages to assume the format of my postcode. sigh...
Seems cool - Free Ubuntu VMs w/ the push of a button (for 35min)
Don't forget the "Snowden's girlfriend is a 'pole dancer'" news story that has been on CNN America, the Daily Mail, Washington Times, Telegraph, USA Today, the Huffington Post, ABC News, and a few others.

If anyone thinks that Western news isn't propagandist then there is your proof, right there, that they are. That isn't a real news story. It isn't in the public interest. It is just a character attack on the man and his family.

She wasn't even in the public eye.
Handwriting won't work against backdoors.Backdoors can send screen captures. And since handwriting is slower than typing , most of the times, people won't use it - so it will be a good signal that one is trying to hide something.
In the era of Indiana Jones, were landmines laid in the area? That was World War 2 era.
Beyond that, there's even been tripe reporting about his forum participation, photos of his girlfriend and him, and several other tabloid-y types of articles that are attempting to paint a picture of an unintelligent, ideological, high-school dropout.

Also, are you sure you want to be googling "defect to China" given the recent disclosures? ;)
> Having 7 or 8 apps look completely different is inconsistent and jarring when you shift from app to app.

Which also meant that apps were actually distinguishable at a glance. You could be the slowest user ever and it was hard to miss that "yellow with lines across the page" meant Notes - on OS X, iOS and iCloud.com. There was zero disconnect between the icon and the actual app. Same for Reminders and GameCenter. iOS7 doesn't bother to develop a "mini-brand" for each app - the 'link colour' in each app is different but there aren't even enough colours for the stock apps.

Of course this branding in iOS6 could have been pulled of with fewer textures and shadows :)
Insights on Getting Acquired for $24 Million in 7 Months (Video Interview)
The important sentence here is "Ja, die eingesetzte Technik ist grundsätzlich hierzu in der Lage, je nach Art und Qualität der Verschlüsselung.".

Means (answering the question if the technology can partially decrypt or analyze SSH or PGP):

"Yes, the used technology is basically (or in principle) capable of doing that, depending on the kind and quality of decryption."

This sentence is so much generalized that the writer almost certainly meant "yes, we can bruteforce a weak encryption".

Also the question includes the capability of "analyzing" SSH or PGP. That would (imo) include reading meta-data. So, in fact, if they are capable of telling the encryption scheme used in a PGP message, they would qualify to answer "yes, we can" here.

So, that's not surprising and the article is kind of link-bait.
It seems that I should give commenters more credit. =) It's often that I read comments (some other ones even in this story) that I literally cannot believe people are willing to post. Sorry about that.
Calendar was never skeuomorphic on the iPhone, only on the iPad (just like Contacts). We don't even know what iOS 7 will look like on the iPad.
These are the kinds of leaks I would love to see far more of--be they from intelligence operatives, contractors, political staffers, journalists, etc. Talking points are a huge game among the media, pundits, and leaders. Leaking the talking points as issues arise would make for excellent public discourse as more people become increasingly aware of their presence (hopefully) and become able to actually notice the ways in which the language surrounding issues is carefully constructed to shape public opinion.
Easy enough to add shadows etc with CSS if you like them, but I do think anything (even just text) would be better than the current buttons - at present they make the site look pretty dodgy and home-made - strange how styling can affect our trust.
Your language and name calling stands out, it looks like an authorian in damage control mode trying to influence the more dumb demography into distrusting critique against FISA and the US government.
I suggest you better try that in a different place where that dumber demography reads.
In this context, what do you mean by 'realtime' 3D? You can already use 3D transforms to your heart's content without any stutter, since at least the iPod 3G / iOS5.
> Handwriting won't work against backdoors.Backdoors can send screen captures.

It will be very hard to find/detect context from screen captures without human intervention. Which means only those who need to be snooped will need to be snooped by the Gov, not everybody.

> And since handwriting is slower than typing , most of the times, people won't use it - so it will be a good signal that one is trying to hide something.

This one is important. The example that I linked above has been written off the iPad. On the iPad it's relatively fast to write by hand (clunky keyboards?), and with a Wacom Pentab too, but then this could be the earliest of such experiences that we're talking about. If Tech focus/innovation can be centered around it, people would love doodling as much as typing.
Joke:
Maybe they have some incentive from NSA or whatever to get and store information from everyone on this planet.
If we're talking about the same question, he was asked if the NSA collects data of millions Americans, to which he answered in the negative. This information from Facebook does not contradict that statement.

And to me, that's an important distinction: millions versus < 20,000. I might be persuaded that there existed a few thousand cases in those six months where law enforcement had legitimate reasons to get data from Facebook, for the types of criminal activity mentioned in this post from Facebook.
This works both ways. The people in power are being tracked, too, and if not, then it's another scandal.
You can naturally use longer fingerprint to confirm keys.
pub 1024D/274EF626 2006-07-25 [expires: 2046-07-15]
Key fingerprint = 166C 5F6B 8808 A9BE B2B4 F265 AE02 7784 274E F626
I dont have something right now, but i constantly find my self wanting to host an app and not sure where to put it. I 've also wanting to know your opinion guys!
What is struct? Or do you mean the C struct type <-> SQL? Like an ORM for C?
That might be true, but do not forget it is a hybrid between Python and the C Family (C++?).
I was curious if you are using PaaS or something like. I like AppFog, where you can imidiatelly choose your 'container' and get started. So you can actually focus on the code side and in the server administration stuff.
This combined with Tor could be interesting....
Beauty on Facebook - meet the pretty girls
I don't think the writing is pretentious, it's simply bad and awkward. People are commenting he just likes to use words, but there are ways of doing that, while at the same time crafting something that flows well.
I've been meaning to refresh and expand both my algorithms knowledge and my C programming with a project like this, myself (as an application developer I find I've barely used either since graduating from university). Was that part of your goal at all?

I think this is pretty cool. I like the presence of the tests as well.
One downside of building things using flyash that people are going to be around a lot is that it increases radioactivity exposure. I'm not sure how it compares to granite though, but it can be fairly significant.
Even if now it is only NSA and a few multinationals that have mass surveillance data, in the future the number of entities collecting an trading privacy data will increase 1000 fold.

Then we'll get into a stalemate - we all know about everyone. Nobody will be able to use such information if they are not completely clean AND their family/associates too. Otherwise, they are blackmail targets too.

Whatever information you generate: speech, messages, GPS logs, social network (with whom you communicate, by any means) it will be intercepted. The only way to maintain privacy will be to keep things into your head.
Python tweet scheduler prevent repeating tweets for your spamming needs
Awesome idea!!! This will eventually provide alternative to the current telecom carriers....
In the long run they could provide the service free for Google Wallet users... They'll make profit on Wallet transaction...
I always get annoyed when governments claims secret things they have done have "protected us from an attack". First off they will never ever give specifics "because its secret", but secondly prove to me that this attack would not have been thwarted anyway using more traditional policing methods.
I don't say this to be a smartass, but instead because I want to see this fixed.

Have you filed Radars on these problems? If not, please file Radars immediately.
They would still need to issue a National Security Request to compel Facebook to release data.