skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Direct access is only the "most extreme possible interpretation" to a technocrat.

For all ordinary people, i.e., most of the world outside HN, the "access" part is the element that constitutes the scandal. "Direct" merely hints at the method, of which the details are considerably less relevant to most people than they are to us.

If the NSA had received the data via flash drives attached to carrier pigeons it wouldn't have made any difference to the core of the story.

It definitely doesn't make the story "a lie", at least not to anyone else but lawyers and techies.
Airbus A350 XWB First Flight (live streaming)
And his packages help users even more if he can get his changes into Debian or (even better) upstream. Forking is sometimes unavoidable but it's never ideal. I think the maintainer is just trying to maintain his fiefdom otherwise you'd see him petitioning Debian and upstream with pulls.

These software projects are just as much about social relationships and sharing as they are about code. That's why I see the maintainer's actions as petty, even if you're insulted by the DDs it's never worth it to stoop to a petty level.
OTOH, the "happy birthday" song is really, really, simple and short (the text contains five words, and the music is only slightly more complex). It's valued not because of any inherent value, but because of its "cultural attachment" (a phrase I just made up, don't shoot me...), which the author has had nothing to do with.

Intuitively it seems like something that's extremely simple should have less of a government-granted monopoly than something that's extremely long and complex ("War and Peace").

Five years for something like this, maybe? That lets ditty-writers cash in on any fortuitous fads they manage to stumble into, but doesn't bog down our culture in molasses...
Historically civil war (revolt/uprising) is only triggered when people can no longer feed themselves or their families.

I can't find the link to that study anymore, so can't back this up.
Wait, can someone explain to me what's so bad about this? I'm a security company and I go from company to company, trying to patch up holes in their systems. I'm basically a network plumber/exterminator. Sounds like the NSA is just telling me what the bugs and leaky pipes look like so I can fix them in companies around the world.

What's so bad about that?
Hey, this is my MVP and I posted this.

I'd be very interested to hear people's thoughts on the site. In what direction do you think that I should take it?

Feedback please. Thanks.
You don't even really need a black box, just a traffic camera that can read your license plate, like a red light camera, maybe combined with a radar gun. Just a camera and some basic physics could probably do it (distance / time = velocity). Once the municipalities start hurting for money even more I bet we'll see this, along with automatic parking citations using cameras.
Yeah, this article is honestly painful to read with it's repetitive 'duh' style that doesn't apply to half the hash functions out there.

Hell, you could take the 'use bcrypt' meme out of context and you'd be fine.
But getting an employee to hand over the private key and giving him a gag order afterwards is an option of course.
!g everything else
That was discussed here some time ago and many people suggested explicitly omitting SO and StackExchange sites when learning new languages/technologies. The argument was that while the answers on SO generally get the job done, they rarely provide the context, depth and coverage the docs give. I happen to agree - I only hit SO when I don't know what exactly I need to search the docs for. It's absolutely great for this. For serious learning not so much.
Simple queries are done in just the same way: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=42*PI

More complex queries are typically done with Wolfram|Alpha. This goes a long way:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=graph+y+%3D+x%2Bcos^2%28sqrt%2842*...
are there any other features you're planning to include?
The natural state of any large codebase maintained by multiple persons over multiple years is to be messy and confusing. Therefore it isn't a slight to anyone to state that the Flask devs have been able to keep their source code much cleaner than the average.
I would go even further: how could they prove that they're not an NSA front?
Welcome to the 8mil people club!
Can you find non-tech people who you gel with in SF? Maybe go somewhere welcoming to new people like a burning man party, or something sports related or whatever you're into.

Do you have many non-tech acquaintances you can re-kindle a relationship with?
carefull curation ? there is next to no curation. The more projects people back the more money for kickstarter.
Startup business toolkit
I wonder why huawei isn't allowed to sell american telcos their hardware.. And I also wonder whether its because the NSA wouldn't be able to scoop its own data or whether its because china would be able to do the same.. Oh the idiosyncrasies ;)
It seems like deb(ian)-multimedia was asked to stop using "debian" as a part of the domain name [1]. But I don't see why they decided to let the domain expire instead of setting up a redirect.

[1] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-multimedia-main...
Google has won the war for the navigation service
Thanks for your input guys, it's very valuable!
from 10:00 am CEST
http://everytimezone.com/#2013-6-14,-240,6bj
Building Responsive Web Applications
The GWT thing threw me off as well. How maintaining a separate stylesheet per user agent could possibly be seen as an optimal approach is beyond me.
I so want this to be the case.
Ah, but Mickey Mouse also has trademark protection. So if Steamboat Willie entered the public domain, then I could put it up on YouTube, but I couldn't sell an unlicensed Mickey Mouse Tshirt, which I think is totally fair to Disney.
Hah, this shows what you know! If a browser plugin for IE6 causes problems, we just remove more sites from the whitelist on the proxy! You can Google, but you can't follow any of the results. :-)
Why do you feel you need validation from tptacek?
The neatest outcome would be that restaurants will (should?) stop singing their alternative non-infringing songs to those celebratimg birthdays.

On a possibly related note, here's something I've been wondering about. A few years ago phrases like "I love LA" or "I love New York" became "I heart <whatever>". Is this also some kind of a copyright issue? It sounds so ridiculous that I couldn't imagine radio and tv stations using using it if not by force.
This post was published 2 days ago at Smashing Magazine. I'm the author and I'm wondering what you think about the approach presented, and how you have built, or would build responsive web applications.
the plural is abaci :)
I think this approach actually disregards the original purpose of copyrights. To judge its importance before it has the opportunity to realise any cultural impact would be a pretty biased approach; since word length, or duration, or simplicity of the music, doesn't necessary mean it won't have an impact, as "Happy Birthday" clearly shows.
Acts as taggable on: Another reason out of a million to learn rails
Not judging the book by it's cover, but MariaDB doesn't do the DB any justice with this crappy name.
Something is very, very wrong with your government agencies when such a sizable percentage of the population can be considered "threats".
FBI Online Agent Virus Removal Guide
> I see this is scary. At the same time this is something we collectively want.

That's what early adopters want, but for the rest of us...
Yes, but how do you get the fingerprint to check against?
Encouraging engineers to blog
CSS3 Animations with special effects
Repository: https://github.com/miniMAC/magic
I covered a lot of the historical stuff about carrier-level monitoring in a previous post ( http://blog.rubbingalcoholic.com/post/52361697693/a-tale-of-... ). I could literally write a book about all of this nonsense, but I wanted to take a narrow focus with this post, specifically that the government is lying, changing definitions of words, and backpedaling to cover up its shameful and unconstitutional surveillance practices.

You're absolutely right. When you connect all the dots, especially with the Utah Data Center, the big picture is really pretty scary.
Don't do this for web development. The browser emulations are just that, emulations, and they fail to be perfect emulations.

Which means you are likely to be fixing rendering issues and buggy behaviour in the emulated version that don't exist on the real thing, and more importantly missing issues that are evident in the real browser but not on the emulation.

It's a cognitive dissonance, you are testing a browser stack your customers won't be using.

Virtual machines are practically a better solution, though it gets into slighty murky territory when there's a lot of JavaScript magic going on. At that point, nothing really beats a native browser running on native hardware.
I thought he was NSA
Working with Virtual Machine images
Repository: https://github.com/miniMAC/magic
Copyright should last 5-10 tops. In the current digital world it is more than enough for monetization and we don't lack creation of artifacts which copyright was created to spur. So we may tone it down a bit.
One of the biggest surprises has been the grudging increase in "open" support in web apps with execs and field support staff/salespeople adopting iPads.

It's easy enough to tell someone "you can't use Mac/Linux/IE9/FFox/etc. unless you can make a case for it," when they're not contributing to the top line. Kill arguments claiming that it will save money by asking if it will increase general support costs.

When the CFO wants to be able to access the intranet with her iPad, it's a different story.
Please stop, these posts only add noise.
As opposed to MySql? Sounds like sound kind of toy database.
GreenPlum is plenty successful. I doubt the name matters too much.
to your latter question: no, not with the right ciphers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_forward_secrecy
Uhhh, so it was ok for Disney to take the stories of the Brother Grimm, who in turn took them from people all over Western Europe, to remix and then copyright them, but it is not ok for someone to remix Micky Mouse? Why?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_grimm
But as I said, "cultural impact" in this case seems to really have little to with any inherent value in the song, and stems mostly from the actions of society rather than the song's author.

Why should the author reap the benefits, at the expense of society, when the author didn't actually contribute much?
Jony Ive Redesigns iOS
Cheers for the response.

I should have said 'Great to see some checksums!'.

(I looked high and low for checksums for my Windows 8 download, and what I did find didn't match what I had. Gives you a little piece of mind after a 7hour download, and a crashed OS!)
I'm not going to canvass all Latin American countries, but the median per-capita income for South Africa is about US$500.

Are you unwittingly basing your comment on the standards of the still-privileged White minority, comprising less than 9% of a country of just 53 million?
The importance of Facebook to modern life is probably not the same as land for a medieval peasant.
I can support this, but only if it offers real safety as opposed to Google.

So does it? Or is it safe only because NSA hasn't bothered to go to DDG yet, or do whatever they are doing to get Google's search data (cable splitters or whatever)?
I'll attend the conferance that is organized by a professional team. I would suggest you.
Not while it's hosted in AWS/USA.
I'll be sorely disappointed in myself if I'm not on the list.
The link at the bottom of the content is:

"Please consider backing us on Kickstarter so that we can share more this story and 99% of crowdfunding stories that will inspire you."

I do understand that the scam isn't the focus of the documentary, I just find it ironic financing a movie about crowdfunding through crowdfunding.
Are you sure about your scenario? Dan never actually used the illegal evidence to violate any rights. If he had gotten a warrant based on the wiretap it would be different and the fruit of the poisonous tree would apply. But Dan just hung out at a specific street corner. The fourth amendment was never relevant to the drug bust.
"I ♥ NY" was part of a campaign to attract tourism, and became a pop-culture symbol; it's not an issue of copyright. In fact, using the heart is more likely to get them in trouble, since it's trademarked by NY and they go against imitators.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_New_York
I never would've thought PHP was popular in Turkey.

That's because one of the stupidest bugs I've heard of: if you select the Turkey language (tr_TR) as locale, your PHP-code breaks:

https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=18556

Fortunately, it will be fixed in the upcoming PHP 5.5.
Seniors don't riot.
'cutting edge' - with a double t - it's also misspelled on your homepage.
What matters me is that most even forget to mention part of the metadata is the location of the device. With that data they can basically track everyone's location, almost as accurately as with GPS.

And such GPS tracking was just considered unconstitutional in a 9-0 decision by the Supreme Court. I really hope all this stuff gets to the Supreme Court. Even if not all of it is unconstitutional, I could see at least 80% of the policies comprised in Patriot Act and FISA Amendments Act being unconstitutional.
Smartphone users on tablets
Thanks! On my 'to read' list!
offcourse, bug fixes will be released publicly. No doubt. The prior information of these bugs is what is not released publicly.
It's only really meaningful if their operations and management are outside the u.s. Is this the case? Are there search companies with their engines in Switzerland or even the EU?
You have to do something on your Pomodoro breaks...
actually, we have similar issues on lots of libc dependent applications/libraries. the main issue is İi -> Iı conversions :(
Are you sure that min. speed isn't just for multiplayer? I don't see why the call-home would know or care how fast your internet is.
There's no reason you can't apply both tactics.

Shifting use away from, as Bruce Schneier puts it, feudal architectures, both puts the Government on notice that its methods aren't appreciated, and creates a damaged class (the SAAS feudal lords: Google, Facebook, AWS, Apple, Salesforce, and others) who can petition the government to lay off the tactics as it's hurting business.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/more_on_feuda...

Hell, push this hard enough and a sufficiently feasible decentralized VOIP might become sufficiently common enough to put the WiFi carriers out of the voice business, relegated to carrying encrypted bits. They might know your handset location, your data usage, and the Tor entry point you're using, but that's it. It's something I've been giving though to.
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden not welcome in the UK
But does that mean the government by definition doesn't trust the people that put them into power in the first place?
PRISM-style surveillance is global, Julian Assange says
The nice thing is that they are just named after Monty's kids, from what I remember from an interview on FLOSS weekly.
The first stated purpose of copyright in the US is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Keeping this in mind, first we can ask ourselves whether the current system does or does not significantly limit progress by disallowing derivative works.

If the purpose of copyright is still the same as it was when it was first specified, then our goal is to optimize for progress, and for that we need to ask ourselves at least one more question: to what extent does the duration of copyright prevent or stimulate potential creators to create. I don't think Disney had the income of his grandchildren in mind when he first started drawing.

Perhaps the purpose of copyright has since shifted towards a principal of fairness and compensation for efforts. If this is the case I wish it wasn't: in my opinion the goal of society should be for society to progress on several levels, including culturally and technologically - at this level we shouldn't be interested in the wealth of individuals or corporations.
He's definitely right in assuming that the people who think Sony is suddenly their best friend are complete and utter morons.
When we first started to worry about mysql, we looked at the alternatives and chose Percona. However, if this is in the base repo...
What a ridiculous argument. The author contributed the tune, It's a cheesy tune, but it's clearly enormously popular. You're basically arguing that if enough people like something they should just get it for free.

Now copyright terms are a separate issue, I think they should be substantially abridged. I'm just pointing out that society hasn't taken any action that could be construed as authorship.
Also mentions MongoDB making it into RHEL 7... pretty interesting as well, although I can't seem to find any other sources for that currently.
Copyright should be 5 years by default, for free, but you can extend it every 5 years up to 20 years, but you'd have to pay say $1,000 every time. If you won't extend it, then it goes to public domain by default.

We're living in the abundance age, which also means 90% of the stuff out there is "crap" and is quickly forgotten even by the authors. If they can't monetize it in 5 years, and can't afford to pay $1,000, then maybe it's not worth it, and should go to public domain so it doesn't get abused later. And who knows, maybe someone picks it up and makes it much better later, which will benefit the society and culture.

I think some of this is what this document proposes, too:

http://www.copyrightreform.eu/case-for-copyright-reform
How does this help? Isn't DDG still located in the US?
Just use Google through a VPN you trust. Same threat model, better results.
It would be great to have a program that does the same thing for telephone calls. A web app that let's you record a message, that is then called into a representatives phone lines.

I'm Paddy Mullen, and instead of donating $50 to your campaign, I donated it to the EFF. I did this because you ignore the rights of the citizens and haven't held the NSA responsible for the infringements on privacy.

Let the staffers get 100s - 1000s of calls that way.
Sadly, it's not about logic in a lot of these cases.
I don't know what the correct answer with, because I sympathise with both sides in different cases, but I think it's definitely not as simple as saying "5-10 years is more than enough for monetisation".

Should JK Rowling not have been receiving money from the first Harry Potter book (published in '97) for the last 6-11 years? Sure she's rich enough already... but why should she lose out on that money which she arguably earned?

And not everyone gets rich in the first few years after publication. My mother is an author of children's books, and my grandfather was a composer - money still comes in (not to me, to my mother and her sister) now, many years after some work was written, but it's never been a huge amount, even at time of publication, yet alone now.

I'm personally a fan of the (life + X) model, whereby it extends a little beyond the creator's death. I don't know what that X should be, though I do feel that the X=70years that we currently have in the UK is too long. But while the creator is alive, why should they not continue to earn money on their work?
Am i supposed to believe all the companies participated in the program just out of the goodness of their hearts?

Yeah right... Anybody want to dig deeper see what they got for participating?
Agree. I think Disney et al like to play up confusion on trademark v. copyright. Trademark protects corporate identities, brands, and icons, like Mickey Mouse in the context of a representative of an amusement and media company, and copyright protects whole non-trivial creative works, like "Steamboat Willie".

Due to trademark protection, other companies couldn't use Mickey Mouse to create confusion, misrepresent themselves as associated with Disney, etc., but anyone (including Disney) could watch, disseminate, or modify early Disney films under any terms they saw fit.
Ya, I don't like the name either, I think he named it after his kid?
I would say that the user should be forced to install the correct GPG key, however in this case I imagine the attacker would just put up their own key on a "fake" website on the compromised domain and people would then install that. Or just ignore the warning.
It's too long. Both copyright and patents should be limited to a few years. In the case of patents, you could maybe have 20 years, but it would have to be an invention on which you worked 2-3 years on it, like say Andrea Rossi working on e-cat, or making a new drug.

If we're talking about slide to unlock or similar stuff, then either ban such patents for good, or give them maybe 2 years at most.
Which of those is the best for the average joe?
iOS, iPad, iPod, iMac, Flickr, Tumblr, Posterous, Cybershot, Vista, Wii (children smirk), XBoxOne (didn't we have an XBox 1?), are all pretty shitty names. I can even remember thinking that Google was a toy name when I first heard it. So doesn't matter that much - over time you ignore them. On the flip side, I loved the name Bing until MS used it, I feel uneasy each time I hear it.
Patriotism. Yeah, sure.

This article runs terribly short on the other half of the question: what did companies really get in exchange?

Call me a cynic, but I can't believe it was just the fuzzy warm feeling of being a patriot.
Ask HN: Do start ups need finance people?
So, I have this passion for programming (yes, I have my side project in flask), but I was wondering if my day job skills as a finance controller might also be helpful for start ups.

To be clear, I am not talking about accounting here, but rather more about modelling/understanding the company financials: budgeting, cost tracking against the plan, sales planning, margins, cash flow, account receivables, etc.

This is especially important if you get pushed on profitability or if you want to show a company in order to increase its acquisition value. Another example could be if you are considering giving up equity or getting a borrowing. Etc.

Do start ups do this? If they do, do you think they could benefit from external advice as hiring a person for that might just not be worth due to their size?
The Wikipedia article is correct and covers most of it. Technically it is correct the current list is from 1982. But really the list surfaced in 1950.

Another Wikipedia article to check out is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarran_Internal_Security_Act#... . The provisions of that act are more-or-less the same thing - a reversal of the idea of habeas corpus. It grants the executive branch power to indefinitely detain masses of political dissenters without trial. The provision that allows this was proposed by the champion of US liberalism at the time, Hubert Humphrey.

That 1950 list is the 1982 list and is also the current list. Of course the names change as times go by, but the purpose is the same. For the government it is a good idea - it worked pretty well for Germany and Italy - you get rid of troublesome nationalities and political dissenters. It works well and makes a lot of sense for them. Of course I myself don't condone it.
Fixed :) https://github.com/phpistorg/etkinlik-2013/commit/6d34883bbc...
I have fixed bugs in an IMAP protocol parser, and therefore could not possibly agree with you more vehemently.
Sorry, the tone of my original opener was unduly harsh and slightly ignorant; fortunately the edit window was still open.

Good articles.
Heh, I make the same suggestion for term in a thread further down. I don't think anyone who understands the space believes these vastly disproportionate copyright terms, sometimes potentially lasting well over 100 years, are fair, unless they're directly benefiting from the arrangement.