skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The coverage has been ludicrous. The timeline was pretty much:

Day 1: We see some out of context powerpoint implying Google, Facebook, et al. have given the NSA full access to private info.

Day 2: We find out that wasn't true at all.

Days 3+: We keep filling HN with articles about how awful it is that Google, Facebook, et al. gave the NSA full access to private info.

The tech media really dropped the ball on this one. It's absolutely insane to think all of the CEOs who said they'd never heard of PRISM or given the NSA any special access were lying. The CEO of a large publicly traded firm would be taking a huge risk and be certain to be caught for such bold-faced lies.

It reminds me of a great joke Stephen Colbert told about George W. Bush at the White House Correspondent's Dinner. Paraphrasing: "he'll think the same thing on Wednesday that he thought on Monday, no matter what happened on Tuesday."
You get used to typing !g if you want google's results, and then it's automatically run through encrypted.google.com
so, according to this article, their intended capacity is adequate to store all internet traffic.

All da bytes.
If only they had young clerks working for them.
> FISA requests can be as broad as seeking court approval to ask a company to turn over information about the online activities of people in a certain country.

I wonder what the source for this is. It contrasts interestingly with Google's statement regarding Prism:

> Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false.

If Google received one of these broader requests, wouldn't they have had to comply with it? If the requests can be that broad, it's hard to imagine they never did. It's harder to imagine why they would deny it so strongly if they did receive one.
Chrome passwords have an export feature, right?
I would be slow to assume that anything is known for certain in this kind of "spook biz". I also don't assume that everything interesting has been released on the slides already. (For example, there's interesting reporting in the first Guardian story about what happened to FISA 702 request rates since PRISM was introduced which includes quotations from the slides, but hasn't got much attention seemingly because the relevant slide or slides have not been reproduced yet.) However, there a couple of things that make me fairly confident Greenwald is (or was? I'm not sure if he is still standing by his claim) wrong about this.

One is that AFAIK the Guardian and the WaPo both have access to all the same materials Greenwald has, and they have both been backing away from the NSA-has-root claim for some time. But an even bigger factor is how Greenwald defended his claim. If he'd said "there's still-unreleased material which proves me right, hold tight" that would be one thing. But instead he quoted the "collection directly from the servers" text and linked the new slide it came from, implying that the quotation unambiguously ruled out the drop-box/API interpretation and supported the NSA-has-root interpretation. But in fact "collection directly from the servers" is not at all unambiguous between the two interpretations. And even worse, the You Should Use Both slide, which Greenwald produced as his trump card, provides context which clearly undermines the NSA-has-root interpretation! In that slide it's clear that "collection directly from the servers" is being contrasted with upstream collection of IP data from the telcos. The fact that Greenwald evidently didn't pick up on this himself is pretty clear evidence that his understanding of the presentation is imperfect, whether because it's being distorted by his desire for a bigger and more damning scoop or just impeded by a lack of technical savvy.
You got your reddit in my HN!
Thanks for the advice. I'm starting September after I finish this internship at a bank which will hopefully fund the next or so year of mine.
American "innovation" has just become "fad mashing." Take fads, mash them together for no apparent reason other than to create a new superfad.
Ask HN: Good side projects for resume
I'm a rising junior interested in getting a (preferably large company) software internship next summer. I've got a Django site I've been working on as a side project, but I'd like to get one more thing going this summer. What makes a side project sound attractive to potential employers?
And a willingness to seethe with hatred at anyone who says they resolved an issue that's plaguing you without giving any hints as to how they resolved it.
What do the first four letters of "democracy" mean?
Chrome is the most invasive piece of spyware you could ever install.

Unless you turn off some 10 or more options, it literally phones back your entire online activity, in or out of incognito mode, in or out of any google service.
Escape from PRISM: how Twitter defies government data-sharing
I do this also. Once a tab is opened, it is rarely ever closed. I'd like a feature that automatically bookmarks and closes a tab if it's been open for a day or more.
It's really not nice how they treated him. In general his packages are better than the debian ones (where they duplicate).

Harm to users - right. I've been using dmo for at least 7 years and if I had any problems in that time I don't remember it.
Why are you so invested in not getting the answers to the questions I'm raising? That's what your argument is: that my questions are unimportant, because they don't address your more important questions.
Great catch, we'll update the blog post!
I use DuckDuckGoog. Non bash-syntax searches automatically hit google.
>It could be detected if the user knows what the public key should be and compares it with what they received, but that seems pretty unlikely.

there is no need to know what the public key should be - only that there are several [more than expected] different keys. Any distributed organization (including Google itself who can be fully expected to monitor which certs their users receive especially after Iran/Diginotar story) could notice it and thus identify the MITM. Thus Google must be on it. Thus no need to involve extra certs from CA though of course i'm not arguing NSA's ability to do that.
Thanks for noticing this, we'll update it shortly.
Identity validation, reputation and trust remain major pain points on the internet.
Eddie Redmayne to play Stephen Hawking biopic
And everything the NSA puts on Powerpoint about its own budget is true?
Kill 'Em All works well for me too. I know all the other songs far too well to not listen to them and try to sing along in my head.
Stop using your credit cards while you're at it...
When the FAA was first enacted, defenders of the statute argued that a significant check on abuse would be the NSA's inability to obtain electronic communications without the consent of the telecom and internet companies that control the data. But the Prism program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies' servers.

Complete paragraph quote. Both claims in the last sentence --- that NSA has direct access, and can unilaterally sieze comms off servers --- now appear to be true, so much so that the Guardian itself is now walking them back.
Why is it a non-issue? One interpretation implies that the NSA is constantly accessing the data of anyone, anywhere. The other implies something incredibly smaller in scope and with a legal framework (which you may or may not like) behind it.

This seems to be the entire issue to me with PRISM - whether it's an unprecedented level of access or merely a statement of what has known to have been going on, and what was covered under FISA, for years, but just in a more technically expedient manner.
How to Calculate Equity Split Between Founders in Startups
He has a package deb-multimedia-keyring, and I actually think most users install it because if you don't apt-get complains.
Drop box that Google selectively places files into pursuant to court orders, backdoor that allows NSA to pick and mix its own selection of communications. Not that big of a deal, huh?
I used debian-multimedia for years and it was mostly great.

I felt I had to stop because of all the conflicts. Over and over again I'd see mplayer crash seemingly randomly, then I'd look into it and discover that the debian-multimedia stuff was linked to the stock Debian stuff and they had differing ABIs for the same library name, so I'd have to uninstall everything from column A, then reinstall everything from column B ... after so much of this I gave up, and by that point the codecs in stock Debian didn't seem so bad. (Whereas several years ago you'd have to be stupid not to install debian-multimedia.)
What? They most certainly are exceeding their legal bounds domestically. It's called the Fourth Amendment

And who even knows what the NSA's "lawful charter" is? Secret interpretations of laws (meaning secret laws) evidently mean it's ok for them to capture the phone records (and, as reported, credit card statements) of everyone. They lie about what they are doing under oath and they hunt, jail, and kill those who tell the truth.

They prevented these unconstitutional secret interpretations of the law from getting to the courts or to the public. That's the only reason why they haven't been struck down.
Read the court order. It is, as NYT says, heavily redacted, but it's also full of interesting stuff about the FISA process.
The Guardian "backwalk" actually VALIDATES our worst fears, albeit with technical nuances to ensure legality. It's really just about the only viable way to implement this absent an SSL encryption crack (I would guess they're dumping encrypted communications from Room 641A waiting for an encryption weakness to be discovered, that way they'll have everything). As Snowden said, you could wiretap the president if you have a personal email.

Here's how it works (this is my opinion as a web developer, not verified details from Snowden leak):

1) Fancy user interface developed by Booz Allen Hamilton. Enter email address (good choice for a unique identifier, used as unique key in many databases).

2) Backend uses curl to send a request to NSA-certified web api on each service shown on the slide. This serves as a legally-binding FISA request either regarding a foreign agent - no court order required - or a domestic agent - secret FISA court order required (see http://www.npr.org/2013/06/13/191226106/fisa-court-appears-t...) and assumed to be fulfilled by the api.

3) Kick off NSA equivalent of gearman worker that checks contents of "dropbox"-like service from each company for updates.

4) Services (Google, Facebook, etc) automatically grant request without question as it is a legally binding FISA order. This saves them a ton of money and, hey, it's legal! They have some custom code that allows them to look up a user by their email address - almost guaranteed to be indexed in their database - join it to relevant data sets, and dump it to the "dropbox"-like system.

5) Fancy frontend shows progress bar, while skinny backend compresses retrieved data into zip file for easy download.

This is the most efficient, cost-effective way to do this without venturing into science fiction, ie storing a mirror of all the data which would be stupid on NSA's part. It still verifies our worst fears and answers the question as to how such a program can cost "only" $20 million per year as reported by the slides.

The trick is in the legal framework, not the technical details. This is why the FISA courts are secret.
This. Use bcrypt or scrypt for storing secrets. HMAC is for...hash(ing) message authentication code(s); read: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/16809/is-a-hmac-...
NYT does not report in this story that Google (or anyone else) received a directive requiring them to relay all the communications from all users from any country.
>Individualised FISC orders are required.

doesn't sound like it. 2nd slide:

http://www.aclu.org/files/pdfs/natsec/faafoia20101129/FAAFBI...
Google Shuts Down AdWhirl, Asks Developers To Use AdMob Mediation Instead
I made the subversive list, I kid you not, at the age of 12. Needless to say, I stopped caring long long ago. Didn't find out about it until years later, when I was silly enough to think about enlisting in the Navy's Nuclear Propulsion School.
> It also highlights a paradox of Silicon Valley: while tech companies eagerly vacuum up user data to track their users and sell ever more targeted ads, many also have a libertarian streak ingrained in their corporate cultures that resists sharing that data with the government.

Bizarre definition of "libertarian."
Utility in the form of purchasing goods and services.

I give information to google because it provides me utility. They take my searches and everyone else's, aggregate them and sell that information to advertisers. That allows me to keep using Google for free. If the information were not in aggregate, I would opt for paying for search services because individual privacy has value to me. I also trust Google just enough to know that my information will be lumped in with everyone else's or that Google will provide a black box where advertisers can tell Google who they want to reach and Google will deliver the message without ever informing that advertiser of who I am. If I choose to reveal myself to that advertiser later, that's my prerogative.

With the government, I pay taxes because the taxes pay for a lot of services the government provides me with [0]. I get things like roads, civil servants, police, firehouses, education, etc.

I don't provide them with my personal info because doing so does not provide me with any utility. One could argue that providing them with my info via dragnet provides increased safety for me. The merits of this are arguable, but even then the merits are irrelevant to me because the utility I gain if any far outweigh my losses in terms of privacy, and even more importantly, outweigh the ability for society to progress if there 100% perfect and immediate prosecution of all crimes that would come out of perfect surveillance. My privacy and more importantly the privacy of my fellow Americans is worth far far more than the safety benefit of any dragnet.

[0] What bothers me with my taxes is that I can't perform a "vote" every time I file my taxes where I play "divide the dollar" with my taxes. I would love to be able to tell congress exactly how to spend my tax dollars. In my case, military and surveillance spending would get maybe 1-4% of my dollar, not the 33% currently spent on those activities. Voting for representatives is half the battle. Voting for how I let those representatives spend money is the other half.
> It's gone from being funny satire to a leading indicator of where we're heading as a society.

Back in 2005 or so I was given one of the _Onion_ collections. I was flipping through it for the first time, and it fell open at a January 2001 piece they had written on the inauguration of George W. Bush where the headline was the quote "Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is over" ( http://www.theonion.com/articles/bush-our-long-national-nigh... ). I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
So the PS4 is Steam for consoles with offline support. Best of both worlds.
Snowden Stole Secret NSA Documents With a Flash Drive
Hacker news forgets that people need to get shit done, and all of this bullshit marketing is just a distraction.
Stewart Baker, former general counsel of the NSA, posted about this "collection-first model" last week on the Volokh conspiracy. To his credit, he did describe the gathering of the data as collection; but his underlying point was that the government is taking the approach of collecting it all and putting restrictions on use. Of course, he thinks that's on balance a good thing ...

http://www.volokh.com/2013/06/07/minimization-and-the-collec...
The reality is that nobody cares about the poor schmuck in rural Nebraska.

80% of the US population is urbanized. Most of the ones that aren't still have access to DSL, cable modems, or fixed wireless of at least a few megabits.

Of the remaining population, a lot of them don't want to play video games or can't afford them anyway. Some (probably large) portion of those that are viable gaming customers will simply make do with satellite connections.

The "poor schmuck in rural Nebraska with 25kb/s" market segment is just too small to economically justify catering to.
Last month an FBI agent admitted on CNN that the contents of phone calls are being collected[1]. It was written up by none other than...Glenn Greenwald(GG).

One thing that has really bothered me since I become a hardcore HN regular is that GG articles almost never come to the front page, even when they are entirely on topic. I recall, on multiple occasions, finding links to places like Ars or a similar site which are basically just doing a summary of GG's latest article.

I really hope after the latest NSA revelations that HN will begin to take GG seriously, get his articles to the front page, and give him the respect he more than deserves.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/04/telephon...
Complete bullshit. It's not a "long tail" strategy at all. Allowing people to sell their games means consumers can recoup some of the cost and put it towards a future purchase. So the $60 price tag isn't as bad as it seems, and developers shouldn't actually see any lost sales as long as they continue to make games.

You can also circumvent unfair DRM on the PC by pirating games, so the consumer ultimately has the power to take back their rights in that situation. On a console, this sort of DRM would absolutely be the death of "owning" your games. That's why the reaction to Xbox One's DRM has been so extreme.

I doubt the guy even works for MS though. His writing is barely as good as your average forum-trolling college dropout.
We don't "know" anything such thing about direct access. We have no evidence other than interpretations of a vague slide that fly in the face other claims.
British Airways’ In-Flight Hackathon Spawns Solutions To The Engineering Crunch
Wait a sec, that sounds like Japanese innovation! (I guess my point is that the reverse could happen anywhere... and I wouldn't mind tasting Kobe jerky if given the chance.)
Torvalds, in classic Unix hacker fashion, designed git to be so stupid it doesn't care what it's being used for, which goes quite a long way to making it all things to all people.

Similar is how the Linux filesystem code flatly refuses to care about what encoding scheme filenames use as long as the byte 0x2F (ASCII '/') is only used to separate pathname components, the byte sequences 0x2E (".") and 0x2E 0x2E ("..") appearing alone in a component are special, and the byte 0x00 (ASCII nul) is only used to terminate the entire pathname. The kernel is so stupid it only sees byte sequences and only cares about those specific values and sequences; as a direct result, users can use any character encoding which guarantees those values will only be used for their respective purposes, and rely on easily-configurable applications to sort it out.

Here's Torvalds, Viro, and Ts'o chewing out someone who thought the kernel should enforce UTF-8 file and directory names:

http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/utf8.html
Funding Brooklyn Castle
Okay, tinfoil.
No, I can see that evolution as well. I started playing with Linux in 1993-95 era and in that time it has gone from something you could only get if you went somewhere geeky and found a table with Slackware CDs on it, to something that the geeks knew about but no one else did, to "that hacker thing I've heard my geek friend talk about", to "that alternative OS that also runs on my cable box and I hear it has something to do with Android", and finally to "yeah my friend runs that cuz he hates MS and Windows".

In other words, it's true that to the average person, it's still kinda 'weird', but SO many more people know about it now and seem to always have "a geek friend that runs it" that I also wonder if we are approaching some kind of critical user mass.

If we get more Steam games on Linux, I can see this happening MUCH quicker.
I remember this problem too (I was reading http://twitter.com/reybango at this time). It was when they first launched modern.ie. If I remember correctly, there was also a problem with the initial XP image that led to it being pulled.
Google runs its own fiber. You want to bet that the NSA has, among its reported [1] "10 to 20" 641A clones, a tap into Google's trunk? I would bet on that. I would also bet on NSA operatives within Google, some clandestine. If Google can't identify Chinese spies with 100% probability, how likely are they to identify American ones?

Simple terms. If either of those two points come to light (NSA backbone taps of Internet companies or clandestine NSA/IC operatives planted in Internet companies, perhaps in foreign subsidiaries of the same) you publicly post that you were wrong/credulous and the "conspiracy theorists" were right.

After all, if the FBI infiltrated [2] the unimportant KKK, the US government definitely has an incentive to infiltrate the all-important Google.

[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/al...

Former director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and
Military Analysis Reporting Group, William Binney, has
estimated that 10 to 20 such facilities have been
installed throughout the nation

[2] http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2010/october/kkk_102910/kkk_...
> Our leaders have embraced that core view of Lenin that “A Lie told often enough becomes the truth.”

Excuse me, but core view? Injecting the supposed words of Lenin, sans any context or source attribution at all, from which one might be able to understand the purpose behind the words, and the author wants to throw this in at the end and call it Lenin's core view?

Bullshit. That's akin to saying Jesus' core view was "My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?"
Very naive. Perhaps the CEOs are lying in order to avoid going to prison on trumped up charges?

"In 2006, USA Today published an article that revealed that Verizon, AT&T and BellSouth (since acquired by AT&T) were voluntarily providing the NSA with millions of call logs. It also said another landline provider, Qwest (since acquired by CenturyLink), refused to hand over logs without a warrant, and that the NSA had rejected Qwest's insistence that the matter go before the FISC.

In 2007, former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio was convicted on 19 counts of insider stock trading. During an appeal, Nacchio's lawyers claimed the charges were retaliation for Nacchio's refusal to go along with the warrantless surveillance program while he ran Qwest."

http://www.technewsdaily.com/18302-national-security-agency....
A Look Back On Symbian On The Eve Of Its Demise
Anything involving Kobe beef in the US has a very high chance of being a scam, since it is not a protected term. Real kobe beef is extremely hard to get even in Japan.
You wrote a comment above saying that because NSA taps overseas cables, it's probably tapping domestic communications.

I responded, "tapping overseas cables is NSA's stated mission, and so it doesn't follow that they're tapping domestic communications".

You responded that of course they're exceeding their legal bounds, because the Fourth Amendment restricts them, which of course begs the question.
Debut? The man does PR shots of riding bears.
Ex-Palantir folks building a communication ingestion technology
NSA Snooping Matters, Even If You Have 'Nothing to Hide'
At the same time, Stefan (the DPL) asked nicely [1] twice, a year ago, for the owner to transfer the domain to Debian. He even had the foresight to point out the renewal race condition which Debian lost recently resulting in the press release. The debian-multimedia guy is just being spiteful at this point given that Debian's been nothing but diplomatic.

[1] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-multimedia-main...