skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This sounded like a great idea to me at first. But,

Each balloon provides coverage to a 40km diameter area. That's a lot of balloons to cover rural Africa. It would help a great deal if the balloons could be made to stay in precise locations, like geostationary satellites. I thought maybe they had solved that problem (which would be amazing). But, I guess not. They said in the video that the balloons would follow the wind all the way around the Earth. Meaning, at any given time, the overwhelming majority of balloons are over the ocean. The difficulty, then, is not merely putting enough balloons up to cover the ground in 40km increments, but covering the ocean as well, in a solid band around the entire Earth. It's not hard to imagine that a stupendous number of balloons would be required to provide any meaningful level of coverage.

I think this is more Google hubris than technical innovation.
Bitcoin Millionaires Become Investing Angels
So tl;dr NSURLCache has a memory leak, be careful when using it.. Or?
That doesn't mean the principle is unsound, though.

Most countries sponsor research into subjects that affect their agricultural, mineral or industrial outcomes.
AT&T spun off Bell Labs in the 90's as part of Lucent. Lucent was acquired by Alcatel. Alcatel shut down Bell labs in 2008.
Things are different for agencies tied to defense or intelligence gathering. I would imagine the NSA tries to do as much in-house as they can. NASA design secrets leaking aren't nearly as potentially damaging as internal NSA plans or techniques leaking.

Of course, Snowden was a contractor so that shows they do allow contractors with TS clearances to work on their projects, but 1) it's usually only specific firms that they trust and 2) the contractors may help build the systems but probably will be told little or nothing about the exact end usage and results.
There's been outrage in the past, but it's generally been limited to the tech community and didn't last long because it dropped out of the news quickly. This time the government openly acknowledged the mass collection of everyone's phone records without probable cause, and continued media coverage has allowed it to build momentum. I think many people have been very upset about it for a long time, but everyone else seemed to show apathy so they did too, because if no one else seems upset, it's hard to feel like anything can ever get done about it. When everyone is angry, there's more chance of getting something done.
Glad to see this.
>I wonder if Google did this, partially to piss China off.

Clearly, not. China has enough air power (including drones) to shut down any amount of the balloons.
And I am thinking can this table top experiment be used in Earth Moving tech? There is a lot of rock to be moved both in construction and road-building industry.
The balloons are not going to move in one direction though. The video also mentioned you can steer the balloons, which means, there is way to keep them above the ground and not the ocean.
As far as I know there is no international agreement on this. Altitude can vary from 30Km to 160Km.

Most countries seem to claim somewhere between 70Km and 100Km as their airspace.

If someone has more details on this, it's very welcome.
(Not the person you're replying to.)

"We" is highly presumptive, but I'm sure a lot of people would. I think legal, constitutional surveillance does have its uses and is a vital component of law enforcement and security in many occasions. Improving that technology means that when it is used, it'll be more effective at what it's actually trying to do: find violent criminals and prevent violent crimes.

Of course, when you look at how China uses surveillance or how the NSA purportedly uses surveillance, things get much more murky.
I think it would be nice for there to be some reserved places on the Earth's surface which can remain undisturbed by the internet. Soon, you're going to need a boat just to escape its corrupting influence.

PS If I was a Cantabrian farmer and I saw one of these above my property I'd have my shotgun out, quick as.
How Google Will Use Balloons to Deliver Internet to the Hinterlands
Yeeeeeahhhh buddy
>It takes quite an astonishing level of arrogance to suggest that being an "Ars Technica reader" was an important part of his identity

It was tongue-in-cheek.
Unfortunately easily accessible proxies, like Tor, are very frequently abused by spammers and other script kiddies. It's easy to write, or use, a bot that takes in a long list of proxies (or uses the Tor daemon API to frequently acquire a new circuit) and spams a website with hundreds or thousands of submissions per minute.
There's a general question among cryptographers: How far ahead of the general public is the NSA?

The answer: We don't know. Interestingly, back in the early 90s they were maybe 15ish years ahead of us. Decisions they made back then weren't understood until the 2000s. However, the gap may have been closed somewhat as of late. The public found flaws in SHA-1 (an algorithm by the NSA) in the 2000s that we believe the NSA didn't actually know about yet.

A general note on cryptography security margins (not really an answer, sorry, just some thoughts): The margins are designed to take into account future advances in technology. The community chooses the problems with the most conservative, best understood parameters, and that seem to be the least-likely to experience a break-through. As well, it tends to pick things with margins like "40+ years", meaning that even if we continue to improve our attacks and computing power at the same rate we have been, it is generally expected that it'll take at least 40 years before we're good enough to break it. (Obviously the experts turn out to be wrong sometimes.)

The community thinks very long term and tries to avoid ever picking anything that is very possible to be broken in just 20 years. It takes (in rough terms) at least 5 just to get through the review process and get the algorithm into standards, another 5 to get it into wide-spread usage, and another 5 to transition away from it. So a very popular crypto algorithm probably needs at least 15 years from its introduction run its life cycle, assuming theres no lull of happiness where it's just existing as a secure, commonly used standard. So there's little point in introducing any algorithm that is anything but a very low likelihood of being broken in 20, because it would spend only a fraction of it's lifespan serving as a widely-used, secure standard.

Last point: Breaks tend to be slow, and big breaks are usually smelled very far in advance. When we're 10 or so years out from a big break, we have a good chance of knowing it and we can start to transition away. Someone 20 years ahead of us may very well only find big breaks just before we start to migrate away from the algorithm.

Due to that, we might optimistically (optimism has no place in crypto, I know ;-)) think that an adversary 20 years ahead of us has relatively minimal advantage.
Eh, kids generally have plenty of free time (unless they are entrenched in a family that demands the utmost academic achievement). I distinctly remember describing to my father plans that I ran to convert my free time to money. He cautioned me about the value of free time, but as I told him- at the time, I had plenty of time to give.
The Inverted Pendulum (James Gosling and Greg Bollella, 2004)
Have you tried to fathom rolling out the fiber program in Kansas City? The machinery, the man power, the political will?

This is a no brainer.
Facebook Hashtag Killer ... seriously.
Loon has no such capability.

http://www.google.com/loon/faq/#tab=technology

Q: WILL THE BALLOONS HAVE CAMERAS OR CAPTURE ANY IMAGERY OF THE GROUND?

A: No.
Potentially NSFW
Testing times for SpaceX’s new Falcon 9 v.1.1
AI For Language? Programming Content And Intuition In Semantics
If the prosecutor is smart, they'll simply file a FOIA request and when the NSA replies that it doesn't have the requested records, they'll simply enter the NSA's response into evidence.
Language-Integrated Quantum Operations
A Software Architecture for Quantum Computing
Check out Etherpad (http://etherpad.org/). It's entirely open-source, so you can host all your own files on company servers/an intranet.

Certainly not a replacement for all of Google Apps, but it's a good start.
Have the abandoned any of the moonshots?
The Official ‘Man of Steel’ Game for Android and iOS
I would not call it "engineering prowess". I would call it "experimentation" or "luck". The Roman Empire lasted 450 years, so they had plenty of time for experimentation, and it was near plenty of volcanic ash, which provided ample opportunity to luck into a good formula.

Obviously they came up with something good, and deserve credit. But to call that a triumph of Roman engineering over modern engineering? If I grew up in a land possessing an abundance of of nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur, would you proclaim how advanced my science was, if I came up with gunpowder?
> Lorenz realized that as moisture levels changed with the seasons, a collar of ice could form around the rock. With the rest of the lakebed covered in a thin, cold-but-not-frozen sheet of water, this ice collar would enable the rock it encased to float—slightly.

So "ice collars" are responsible for moving 700 pound rocks on a "thin sheet of water"; and all this in the hottest and driest place in America? I must be missing something....
It's so encouraging to see a Hacker News comment section that is almost overwhelming informative and positive. I get varying amounts of flak for constantly posting about the quality and nature of HN comments, but as an unabashed optimist it means a lot to me to me.
Just cover the continent will require a lot of balloons. The world has 148,429,000 sq km. If you cover 1600 sq km per balloon, that is 92768 balloons. Just cover Africa will require around 20k balloons. It will only work out, if Google can increase the coverage area per balloon.
I found their pricing to be a bit high compared to other providers such as Engine Yard.
This is great question. In urban area it is extremly cheap to buy area for towers. What area can a tower cover with LTE? What is the theoretical limit with different technology?
4 million balloons and routers would cover earth. That's actually not a lot compared to how many cars and cellphones are manufactured every year. If each one is $100 dollars, the total cost is only 400 million - less than google fiber installed in kansas city ($1 billion).
You'd probably need a missile to shoot it down. The balloons are probably 80,000ft above ground. I'm not sure if there's anything that can shoot a bullet that high. Maybe a high powered railgun?
Mind boggling!
My point, and I don't think I'm alone in this, is that powerful tools/weapons will always be used for "evil" as well as good.

It is naive to say "well, let's build the perfect surveillance tool and then trust that some government will never abuse it (against its own citizens, political opponents, other countries, or whoever)." Such a pure government has never existed, and will never exist, not while humans are running the show.

More succinctly: "absolute power corrupts absolutely."
I feel bad for people like you.

I fee bad that you can't believe that some people or company with money just wants to make the world a better place.

You said it yourself. Google probably won't make money. Maybe, just maybe, they just want to do something good.
Google has mentioned that they had this sort of internet infrastructure in mind, right? Awesome to see it move forward!
Coming next in the NSA saga: war.
How will the government move the media off the issue of the NSA spying on everyone? How will they get everyone to forget and move on?

War. Watch for it. Coming soon. U.S. will take military action. It will distract the news, and provide justification for any surveillance action.
that makes sense, i did forget to add the pricing for different addresses... thanks for the reply
Is that what they did with 9/11?
True, but they would have to do this for every single web server they would want to collect information from. Not impossible, but it'd be a lot of work.
news.ycombinator.com/leaders

Check out the top spot.

Not saying that makes it impossible for him to be an astroturfer, but the community sure seems to appreciate it if he is.
Confirmed. The IP bans are mostly automated. If an exit node is blocked, it's because someone else ruined the fun for everyone.
It's low power in known bands, but coving a very large area. Maybe somebody could launch their own jamming balloons. In the short term Google says they'll abide local laws so I suspect no jamming will be needed.
It happens once every few years. Rain isn't as uncommon as yu think, and temperatures drop below 0 during winter frequently enough.
I doubt that, otherwise you could argue that Kinko's would be at fault when people pay to make photocopies of copyrighted content in their stores.
You still very well may be leaving a trail behind; it's just likely that such a trail won't be correlated among multiple different domains you visit (from ad tracking bugs of a single company embedded into multiple websites you browse).
star-able url: https://github.com/theck01/offbrand_lib/
There were lawful procedures for putting people onto trains to Poland. Lots of paperwork and rubber stamping.

Of course the public didn't find out what was going on in Auschwitz until the end of the war.
You don't own the airspace over your land in most countries. I doubt NZ is that different.
What next, the entire conflict in Syria was organized 2 years ago in case Obama needed a distraction at some point in the future? This kind of rumor-mongering belongs on infowars, not HN. Flagged.
Hi there, Founder of TryPaper.com here, we handle some of the core printing & mailing processes all via API :)
Duckduckgo redirects all requests to HTTPS and uses only HTTPS; it is highly unlikely the NSA or anyone would be able to decrypt that traffic, unless of course they force DDG to divulge their SSL private key. Which I suppose is plausible.
For credit repair, you'll need to do certified mail for certain requests. This is something we're getting ready to launch :-) Feel free to reach out (info in profile), if we can help.
During the winter months the temperature often drops below freezing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Valley#Climate
why is this not using xmpp?

i am sure there are reasons to dislike xmpp but throwing out more than a decade of standardization effort without even a word is a bit difficult to understand.
Yeah, that's all kinds of weird. For starters, what rational person would expect that in a world where everyone but the government has access to their data- that the government would not have access to their data?

The statement is of course a strange construct when examined literally, but have you ever tried keeping a secret from just one person?
Here's the clip. The Daily Show also had fun with it on Monday.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9ss2_0emOY
Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't realize just how high those numbers were!
Find a co-founder that's a lawyer. There is no way you should get into doing this without knowing what you're doing - if you screw up you could be accused of fraud or tax evasion, and if you don't have your bases covered someone else could use your service to engage in fraud and leave you holding the bag.
Wireless is a hack, it will never replace wired. Sure, in Africa they get online with mobile phones, but that's only because it's not profitable _yet_ to run landlines. Even 56K would be better than mobile, but since it's Africa they don't even have that.

Give it a few more decades and they'll be wired just like everyone else.
So you create a doughnut of ice around the base of a rock. The base of the rock has friction reduced by the area of the doughnut while slightly scraping the bottom sand. How high does this layer of frost get?
It started off as just a way to play around with socket.io, but eventually ended up as a bit more. Can you do true anonymity with no-signups with XMPP? I don't know a lot about it, but I'll definitely look into it!
I've read all of them. I've written about them. They're categorical.
What about a maser?
Why?
(Editor's note: This is not a "why" in the sense of "why did you build this" but instead "why does this need to be built when Facebook has an option for objectionable content: The hide feature" why)
I find stuff like this awe-inspiring, particularly w/r/t how it could be used to protect internet access for not only those who are underprivileged but also for those being denied internet access by autocratic governments. Think back to Egypt, Libya, Syria - how different could those have gone if the authorities had been unable to shut down communication networks?
If NSA has nothing to hide about FISA requests, what are they afraid of? Works both ways eh?
I know this isn't what you want to hear but you really need to talk to an attorney on this. There are potentially significant implications for the donors and the charities that you work with if you don't get it right.
I don't think conventional drones can fly that high.
He could sign his comment with KP's GPG key. That would be proof. Somehow I feel the real KP would have been savvy enough to do that in the first place.
Interesting.
The original Am. J. Phys. paper[1] is from 2011.

[1] http://ajp.aapt.org.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/resource/1/...
How is 56K better than 4G or at least 3G?
Secrecy of the message and secrecy of the source are two different beasts entirely. OTPs solve the easy part of this two part problem.
One thing, is #that #hashtags #create #space #clutter ... annoying -if overused- especially for ADHD dudes like myself.
When you've taken over the internet, what's your next move? Make the internet bigger of course.

I for one welcome our new Google overlords.
It's a good theory, and not the first time that ice has been proposed as playing the major role at the Racetrack Playa. I have a friend who is obsessed with taking photographs of these, and it was about five years ago that I first heard the ice theory (and about these wacky furrows in the Playa) - I'm sure people have had ideas like this for even longer.

I think it's a stretch to say that this has been "Figured Out" - I'll give that credit to the first person who records an observation of them moving.

Until then - just more theories.

[Edit - I like this 10+ year old theory, which suggests it's actually a case of moving ice sheets, with rocks embedded in them, that actually causes the furrows. http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4021]
Is it so hard to imagine part of that logic including the mobile phone equivalent of wake-on-lan?

Yes. You don't have to power up the cellular transceiver to poll a power button. That's usually handled by a dedicated power-management chip with few/no other capabilities (and an internal clock in the kHz range at most, I'd expect.)
Can't you just separately report the number of non-confidential-law-enforcement requests (as an exact number), and let the reader take the difference?
"The resource you requested requires you to log in with your UW NetID and password"
In India there is a huge demand (quite outstripping supply) for flyash bricks, made from the industrial byproduct of coal burning furnaces (which supply >50% of India's power supply). They closely resemble the properties of volcanic ash.

The supply is likely to go down even further as we transition into gas furnaces and nuclear power.
The "NSA" in "NSAKEY" could stand for just about anything. Or it could just be some programmer's joke. It's definitely not convincing evidence that this construct has anything to do with the NSA.
Tried on Firefox 21.0/Ubuntu and it didn't work. Works fine in Chromium.
Look at it this way: if I wanted the government to put a CCTV camera in front of my house and snap photos once a year, it would mean I thought the best way to publish pictures of my house was to take tax dollars, enforce it through legislation, submit it to the whims of politicians, suffer the fruits of their corruption as they sell me out, and on and on.

Me? If I want to publish pictures of my house, I would likely use some sort of internet service to do so... therefore:

The laws around private companies photographing private property are both (1) very restrictive and (2) well known and well tested in court. Compare that to warrantless spying only reviewed by a secret court – and even then the government fails to (1) keep it secret, (2) abide by their own court's rulings, or (3) successfully apply the intel to the stated cause of terrorist threats.

Basically, there aren't really very many things the government does well at all.

When Google wants to send a car down my avenue or fly a balloon over my house, they'll be regulated by laws that literally follow the Streisand effect... in other words, if I don't want you to see my backyard, I might have to put up a roof.

It'll be uncomfortable, yes. And maybe Google isn't the best company to publish live video of an entire continent to the internet. But if someone else doesn't beat them to it, I imagine Google is going there. What's your contingency plan?
I wouldn't expect to get away with it on all phones all the time. But certain phones targeted by surveillance malware? Sure.

Malware can't run when the power management logic has shut down the SoC and baseband hardware.
20K ballons doesn't seem like that many unless each one costs a ton of money. From an industrial production point of view it barely seems like a drop in the bucket given how many cars/phones/planes we produce.
But the advance of technology also inevitably advances the capabilities of murderers, rapists, and parking meter scofflaws.

The question is, does it advance their capabilities more than it advances the capabilities of those who oppose them? Is there any way to influence that balance?

Or should we just say "any technology can be used for good or evil, so don't even bother considering the question, let someone else worry about it"?
Environment plays a huge role in everything, constructing superior concrete is no exception. That doesn't preclude it from being useful at the end of the day...
Not when the phone's powered down, I don't.
> guilt-by-association

I agree, silicon valley does not support development of behavior tracking technologies.

Strong encryption, user privacy, "really delete my data on your server", robots.txt, have all been implemented using the latest standards, across all websites.

Terms and conditions clearly state that, user data or backup data will not be mishandled by admins, although users might be purged from the database from time to time.

Nerds and Geeks are very hippie-liberal so you won't find them supporting tyrannical governments, to sell ads.

I can't even imagine a Nerd not caring, being unemotional or careless. They wouldn't hurt a puppy ! Let alone kill 200_000 sand people !
You can use another "attacker" balloon to do it.
Looks neat, but I think I would prefer (or have available as an alternative) a service that lets me create (and possibly manage) "throw away" forwarding addresses to my real address.
Iridium is the ultimate backup connectivity (for balloon control, not for data). It's very slow and very expensive, but works everywhere and requires a small antenna.
Microsoft joins Facebook in partial FISA disclosure: 6-7,000 requests
The Bitcoin Believers
Wasn't Page about to focus? Shutting down small, useful and used tools because Google should only do a few thngs, but all of them well?

So will this litter the countryside, and even worse, the oceans with electronic equipment incl. highly toxic batteries? will they maintain and retrieve every single one of those balloons? who pays for that?
without addressing the remainder of your comment..

> I feel bad that you can't believe [..]

the same could be said for naiveté.
Prism NSA surveillance 'did not collect European data in bulk'
We are living in the future.
Begun, the balloon wars have.

Actually, kite fights are an old Asian tradition: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20101010110043AA...