skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems that what PRISM is to some people has slipped away from what was originally reported to a world of conjecture. What you are saying is possible (although I think $20 million is way too cheap) but it does not fit in with what we have heard from the media and the tech industry. The NSA also would have had to crack the SSL encryption algorithms for this to be useful, and that revelation would eclipse by an order of magnitude anything else that has been reported thus far, in my opinion.
In practice, and I mean at mega-corps with government contracts that require UML diagrams for everything I've seen this as a common pattern:

1) An EA is hired who gins up a stack of UML diagrams which are sent for review and acceptance by the customer.

2) The system is then actually designed and built regardless of (and often despite) the accepted UML diagrams.

3) The built system is then documented in a new stack of UML diagrams by the EA which are then delivered to the customer as if the first stack didn't exist.

The problem in the industry with UML is not #3, UML can be a great way of describing a complex system, the problem is #1, UML is a terrible way at blueprinting how a working system will look like in the end.
Emails are getting old. That doesn't mean anything.
Oh, wow, I'm sorry. I should have seen that one. I guess I liked "long tail" and the alternative didn't occur to me. =)
Kickstarter to data mine yourself and sell the profits
This would make scripting attacks really hard to defend against. They could use something along the lines of Caja, but it's a really hard problem in general (and one they're worrying about, given the gh-pages move to a separate domain)
Mrrdyn Embrys(sp? Welsh?) Merlin, and owl Archimedes, deep and unknown in the Nottingham forest, a linux wizard, magically has an empty satchel filled with new glorious bitcoin! Leaving the stymied corrupt well armed sheriff disconcertingly pissed and helpless.
This hypothesis is certainly plausible, but I haven't seen any proof for it besides the self-serving statements of people who aren't under oath and who anyway aren't necessarily in a position to know for sure. Which isn't much, as proof goes.
Wow Kevin sure does like Facebook:

http://www.dailydot.com/authors/kevin-morris/

And the problem with that graph/article is that it fails to consider the size of the user bases. Facebook is so huge that its demographic breakdown mirrors that of the real world. Whilst all the other sites have a fraction of the user base so obviously their graph will skew more towards the type of site they have.

Maybe there should be a graph of how many 0-20 year olds there are on Facebook versus the other sites.
hahahahahahahaaa you have no idea the vast amount of windows code that is emulation layers to ensure that other companies legacy users can continue to use programs designed for dos, windows 98 etc.

Google doesnt have to do it, but like i said thats why the c levels insist on microsoft even when their products arent anywhere near the most elegant, feature rich, or performant.
Just to recap, PRISM looks like a web front-end to a shitload of other systems. This is why a relative noob like Snowden was working on it -- it was web work. It's also why he had such a broad overview of what was going on. He knew the direction and capabilities, if not the details. He was probably just hooking up APIs somewhere.

That's just guesswork, of course. I think it's easy for us (and the Guardian) to imply a lot of detail where none exists. I don't think the Guardian has anything to apologize for. It'd be great if we all got a better technical view of these systems. But asking to receive it third-hand through a leaker and a non-technical reporter is probably a bit much.
These aren't threat scenarios. They're advantages to having PGP

Eliminate most spam. Talk with your bank/do trades over email. Talk with your physician. Sign documents.

With webmail-based PGP, people are strongly incentivized to use this to avoid requiring users to sign in to other websites.
Sustinion - the large opinion collider (in spe)
Driver's license, registration, cellphone please
Well... Fat32 FSs don't support files > 2GB

But yeah, it's silly.
Yeah, I think the main point is that this is simply a way of responding to FISA requests, which are completely independent of PRISM. In other words, there is no new news here. The debate over FISA itself is certainly quite valid.

Google has claimed these requests are infrequent and narrowly focused, and they have requested permission from the government to publish some statistics. I hope they get it.
> They are technologically probably the most advanced company

What?!? How could you possibly believe that when you know they're all using Windows in Redmond. It has absolutely zero technical superiority over everything else out right now (e.g. Linux, Mac OS X, iOS, etc).

I don't want to say which company is the most technically superior right now but I'd probably start my investigation at Google because of things like Google Glass, Google Now, self-driving cars, Maps & Street View, and a search engine that still bests everything else out there by huge margins.
PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever
It looks like the Guardian is changing their story as of today: http://www.mediaite.com/online/fulsome-prism-blues-the-guard...
In school, UML seemed like a great idea. It wasn't very fun, but it was useful, and if you had a simple class project, UMLs certainly made things simpler if you were even okay at them.

When I got my first job, however, there were no UML diagrams. I was saddened to see this. I don't remember if I was surprised, but I was so sure that I would been useful to have a detailed UMI diagram available for studying the codebase.

So, as I got acclimated to the codebase, I took it upon myself to start putting together a UML for our existing product, so that training new people would be easier. After spending several days doing this, my opinion or UML changed dramatically for a couple of reasons:

1) Pretty much all of the UML tools out there are not a pleasure to use. Drawing UML diagrams was still infinitely better than using the various programs I tried. But drawing them on anything but a whiteboard wasn't scalable to the size of the project.

2) Once I had the basic classes drawn out, and realized how diverse the kinds of classes we had were, it became apparent that this just wasn't going to happen. A basic flowchart of the application would be equally valuable. The specificity of UML wasn't worthwhile, having a class with 10+ subclasses was a mess.

3) What I did have was hard to see. This goes back to the first point--the tools are not good. When you labored over all the clicking and dragging, you pulled together this monster of a graph that you can only see a small portion of at a time in a given screen. It was easy to get lost. Printing wasn't useful.

Ultimately, I only ended up using UMLs when we were thinking about how we were going to build out new features, or redesign stuff. It was a .NET shop building a Silverlight app, so serialization and strict static typing was critical. A decent JSON api would have made life easy, but since the back end and the front end were essentially all the same thing, class diagrams were very useful. So for the 2 or 3 times that we had to develop or redo class serialization while I was there, it came in handy only for working on small 2-5 class models.

That brings us to the next point: do class diagrams have a place in an increasingly dynamically typed world? Functional programming in javascript. Frameworks that have their own detailed class system, or which aren't even class oriented.

UML has essentially become analogous to cursive. You learn about it early on, and its important to have a notion of how to read it. But ultimately, since we don't use it every day, we basically never use it.
Reminds me of that old saying, "Every empire carries within it the seeds of its own destruction."

People usually refer to network effects as positive, but eventually it becomes negative. Facebook, Eternal September, etc.
>While I'm not disagreeing on the quality of Flask, "x uses y, so y must be stable" is the same kind of argument as "Facebook runs on PHP, so PHP must be blazing fast."

No, the argument is the same: "Facebook runs on PHP, so PHP must be stable".

Which makes sense. A base technology that holds up with half a billion users, I would call production ready.

As for fast, if you look at the most comprehensive benchmarks, PHP is more or less on par with Ruby/Python for raw speed of simple page serving, but when multiple DB connections are used in a page (which is the most common case for dynamic pages), it leaps far ahead, and reaches Servlet and Go levels of reqs/sec.
Exploitable crash analyzer version 1.6
The Guardian could at least "apologize" for using "scare quotes" in the process of walking back their claim.

That's underhanded for any media publication that aspires to the idea of "journalism".

In addition they could have at least mentioned the idea that other theories emerged as to what the slides they presented might actually mean that way people would be aware that there were other valid conclusions that could possibly be drawn, especially by those with tech and government experience.
Wow, the array operations are so good. I'm dealing currently with large sets of arrays in mongo and the whole $pull, $push whatever things are incredible frustrating. After seeing the array operations of RethinkDb it's so great.

For example the "insertAt" operation is really helpful when you need ordered arrays and you want to swap or change some elements. I'll give it a try definitely.
> Oh by the way, these are also by and large submitted to the Federal Register for people to have a chance to read and submit comments and request public meetings.

How realistic is it for a normal person, with a full-time job, perhaps a family, to keep track of every relevant Federal Register submission which may affect them?

Should they be keeping track of all newly-passed (and rescinded) laws, as well?

--

On a separate note, I wonder what the result would be of a legal system in which all laws have a mandatory expiry, and must be re-ratified/voted on to remain applicable. The period would have to be long, but not too long (somewhere 10-20 years maybe?) so as not to backlog, but even that might be a benefit in keeping the number of laws from growing too fast.

The biggest problems I can imagine is prosecution of subsequently expired laws, and how legal precedent could work, when it might have been made based on a wording different to the current.
Just to let you know that a lot of those improvements are already implemented on core :)

For example, now we're using origin repo instead of myusername/currentdir
Anything that replaces Facebook will have to be significantly better in at least one major way that matters to people, and not just nerds. But that's definitely an achievable goal.

In the meantime, I'd really like to see a greater focus on encryption of data. For example, think of the possibilities if we had full PKI support built into the browser, such that private messages could actually be private.
The point isn't to hide data from the NSA. The point is that widely-used PGP would be really useful for all kinds of reasons, but that we don't have it because it would be inconvenient for the NSA if we did (they wouldn't be able to read the world's email, e.g.).

In practical terms, it would mean we could talk with physicians, brokers, banks. We could sign documents. We could get rid of nearly all spam. I mean, the advantages of widely deployed PKI are MASSIVE. And the quickest way to get there is to have webmail providers deploy it.
It's a shame that they don't offer Windows as an OS and don't plan to.

http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea...

I did some testing of .NET on Windows vs mono on Linux and unfortunately mono is just too slow. For the money saved on licenses more would have to be spent on hardware. Licensing is a pain though. Working out what you need and how to pay is non-trivial.
Thanks a lot, but I used typeform.com for this. :)
Are you claiming that "SEO" no longer stands for "search engine optimization", or are you claiming that "search engine optimization" is no longer about "optimizing" a site for "search engine" result placement?
If you ever think you can't be powerful, if even for a moment, remember this.

A highschool dropout has been, for a moment, more powerful than the DNI, the Director the NSA, the members of Congress who knew about this and the President. He's stirred the lords of nations and brought fear to the fear makers.

Was he right? I can't speak to that, but was he powerful? I can say yes.
That has questionable legality in the United States. I won't want to run it on my corporate PC.
Whether it's real time or not doesn't have anything to do with the letter case.
Wozniak talks about iOS7 and PRISM
They realize the instant most people around the world realize storing stuff on "the cloud" is equivalent to forwarding a copy to the CIA, their business is SOL internationally.

Imagine if I was sending copies of everything (emails, internet uploads, photos, videos, skype recordings, aws server snapshots) to China's Ministry of State Security... I'd have the FBI at my doorstep in no time.
User options considered harmful
was hoping for an article on user mode linux
Was Snowden under oath? Did well-known concepts such as Occam's Razor suddenly stop applying because a contractor with biases and motives of his own decided to drop a bunch of data on a WaPo reporter with a 72 hour deadline to publish?
I agree that gratitude is the secret to happiness; however, I think that if we are all happy and grateful there will be no progress in the world. Economical progress happens because a lot of people work hard to become rich/famous/powerful or because they are trying to fill expectations or are trying to make an example to those they love or to rub it in the face of those who don't believe in them. Surely when they finally reach the top they realize that they are still not happy. The world progress economically but maybe not humanly.

So I think we need to have people that believe that happiness is in gratitude, people that believe that happiness is in producing more and people that believe that happiness is in given other people opportunities.
A Simple Animation: The Magic Triangle
Well... "enterprise" can sit still for as long as they want. I don't really care one way or another. Besides, eventually we'll be so far ahead that we won't even be able to hear them complain about the shrinking world they've built and refuse to leave. I've worked in government which traditionally is even worse than enterprise when it comes to things of this nature. But we had a pretty good IT department that didn't just dig in their heals and refuse to budge. Sure we weren't installing nightly builds or anything but we got fairly regular updates and stayed reasonably current. It is possible. Eventually it will catch up to you in terms of maintenance costs.
I don't know OSX versions, is that a recent one?

More important, can I get the most recent versions of browsers? (Safari,Chrome,FireFox)
You actually use the UI? I've been using Rackspace and AWS for a while (years?) now and I can't say I've logged into their web interfaces much at all. Not in months, for sure.

How's their API? Can I whip up (and down) servers and DNS from a Python script in a few minutes? That's what I do with AWS and Rackspace and franky, I won't use a cloud provider that doesn't give me that power. Automation is critical for any use of the cloud these days.
You're completely right, I have it backwards [red face]. It was an iPhone which I saw and thought that it would make a sweet iPod if they just removed the phone.

Nevertheless, though I agree that there were no devices out there with the same design, the idea was ripe. Surely the concept of manipulating the screen directly rather than through a stylus or buttons is abstract enough to stop calling it 'copying'.

In other words, it's such an obviously natural interface that someone was eventually going to do it first, so we can stop saying that anyone after the winner of that race is copying.
Supposed to, according to whom? In the original constitution, members of the Senate were chosen by State legislatures; the president was chosen by the members of the Electoral College who were not simply tokens, but really had the choice. The vote was restricted to white male landowners.

Most importantly, the point of having a constitutional republic is the constitution protects the minority from the tyranny of the majority.
This is a great writeup and helps tremendously, thank you! Now, wrt specifics.

> the find-and-modify command

This has been baked into ReQL from day one and doesn't require a special command. Here's an example:

# 'jobs' table contains documents of the form
# { type: 'type', jobs: ['job1', 'job2'] }
r.table('jobs').filter({type: 'printer'}).update(function(row) {
return r.branch(
row('jobs').contains('job1'), // if there is job1 in the array
{jobs: row('jobs').difference(['job1'])}, // atomically remove job1
null // else don't modify the object
);
})

This isn't limited to arrays -- you can do all sorts of atomic find and modify this way within a single document. We clearly need to do a better job documenting this. I'll make sure that happens.

> Packaged linux/mac Rethink binaries

That's been available for a while -- http://rethinkdb.com/docs/install/, you can download a binary pkg for OS X if you don't want to use brew, and we support apt-get on ubuntu/debian via a private PPA. We'll be adding binary packages for more distros soon.

> binary storage format

Mongo wins on this one, but it's definitely on the horizon -- https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/137. The storage engine bits for this have been done for a long time, we just have to figure out a sane ReQL API (which is harder than it seems).

> Query optimizer

This is a somewhat longer-term project (i.e. we probably won't get to it by mid-fall), but we're definitely thinking about it. So far though, there hasn't been a real use case yet where it's a problem.
So the Gaurdian appears to have done some very very shoddy reporting. But isn't this all a distraction?

FTP or direct acces, it makes no practical difference if the employee on the other end rubber stamps the requests when they get them. The real question is how much data can the NSA get and what procedures do they have to prevent the targeting of US person?

what checks does e.g Google actually run on the requests? If the procedure is email FISA@google.com and then some google employee rubber stamps it and sticks the data in an SFTP server, the NSA effectively has unfettered access.

Its clear that you don't need a warrant for targeting a foreign person, so the employee can't check that it came for FISC. Even if they did, FISC seems to be willing to rubber stamp things themselves. So aside from maybe checking if the account is typically accessed from a US IP, whats Google going to do? I pick on Google here specifically only because they have a reputation for trying to automate everything including a lot of customer support and I suspect that if they don't have any discretion on these cases, they may well have automated it.

Of course, maybe they didn't, maybe there are rigorous checks both at the NSA and at the receiving companies. But we don't know and we need to.
Yes, but you can just re-import the image every so often. They're meant to be transient VMs for testing, so blowing them away every 90 days shouldn't be a problem.
Dropbox: Even quicker sharing from the desktop
The Costa Concordia on Google Maps
try rss, identi.ca or diaspora
I don't have any evidence to support this, but I can't believe they wouldn't have any filters in place to weed out all the nasty stuff people are googling.
The EULA forbids you to run OS X on non-Apple hardware though.

"to install, use and run up to two (2) additional copies or instances of the Apple Software within virtual operating system environments on each Mac Computer you own or control that is already running the Apple Software, for purposes of: (a) software development; (b) testing during software development; (c) using OS X Server; or (d) personal, non-commercial use."

http://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/OSX1082.pdf
Hi Tmmrn. I work on the team that made these available. We originally had these as >3Gb single files and had many requests to reduce the file sizes from people who had failed transfers. It also helps when using sneaker net to setup test environments that are isolated and you need USB sticks to move bits around.

We went with RAR because:
* It's available on all platforms
* No client or 3rd party software needed to extract when using self extracting SFX and EXEs respectively
* some degree of built in resiliency and self correction

Hope you find them useful. Open to suggestions for improvement too. Follow the team @IEDevChat for updates and feedback.
A few more are taking on the phone record issue directly:

> H.R. 2014, the Telephone Records Protection Act, was introduced by Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) and Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) and would require court approval for the government to demand phone records from service providers.

It's also been fun to watch Jared Polis' tweets mocking the NSA: https://twitter.com/jaredpolis

For those not aware, Polis was an internet startup guy before going into politics.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5844303
I'm surprised to see how young deviantART users are considering the quality of its content. Since 2006, this site has been my goto location for anything graphic-related: drawings, web designs, pictures, Photoshop brushes and actions... Maybe 0-24 years old is the period when you're the most creative?

About Facebook: it's a website where you build your network, especially with family and close friends. Although I don't visit it anymore, I know my friends and family use it solely to follow each other's lives ('What have you been up to?'), while sharing theirs as well. It's not a one-time visit. You follow the evolution of your relations' lives, especially the major events of a lifetime: marriage and children. Facebook is the network where people go to develop and share their real identity (whether it's a good decision or not). The more you use it, the more you feel connected to it (and compelled to make a contribution). That's why most Facebook users who joined it at the age of 25-35 are now in their mid-life, because Facebook is the only online network they're part of.
Of course, if your systems can execute trades a nanosecond faster than your competitor, you can afford to get the news a nanosecond after them.
Yea, it's more expensive and not so upgradeable and you lose a few seconds by setting it up.

The display adapters should be only a few dollars, so maybe not ideal, but hardly a really good reason.

There's not really a reason why a powerful laptop should be really bad on battery power. Modern CPUs save power pretty well, especially mobile ones. And any powerful GPU should have the capability to be disabled.

But still, it's mobile or "mobile". As long as it fits in a backpack and I don't have to hike for hours I really don't see the problem. Maybe laptops today are not completely feasible, but I suspect in one or two generations the successor to USB3/4/? will be capable of driving everything from screens to external GPUs or CPUs so you'd only connect one cable and have everything attached there. But that's not now. For me it's just a minor inconvenience for the big convenience of having everything with me. And everything is not only stuff I have synced or in a version control system (by the way, don't you have that moments where you are somewhere and remember that the code you want to access is on a machine dozens of kilometers away and you forgot to push it?), but really everything and everything exactly how I left it. It's just the feeling that I can just suspend and go somewhere, no matter where, get my laptop out and continue exactly where I left off.