skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Project Loon details from the Christchurch event today
Pictures: http://imgur.com/a/IrZFq

I went to the Project Loon event today (Sunday June 16) at the Air Force Museum in Wigram, Christchurch, New Zealand. Here's what I learned. (Some of this may be misunderstood or misremembered, so don't take it as absolute truth, and this is all early prototype stuff anyway.)

It was quite a big museum-style exhibit with lots of people (it had been on the news), and several members of the team were there answering questions.

Currently there are four balloons up. Several have recently been successfully been brought down and recovered from the ocean (land landings are easier to recover but there is no nearby land east of here). The main reasons for testing here are that the stratospheric winds are "boring" (basically all west-east) and this latitude has few countries to coordinate with (they're working with Chile and Argentina).

The project involves a "couple of dozen" people and has taken two years to go from "ideas on a chalkboard" to this.

One of the balloons was there, inflated to its maximum size (launch size is smaller because of pressure differences, but it's a superpressure balloon with a maximum size). It was roughly 5m high and 12m in diameter. It has an upper portion with helium and a lower portion with air, with an impeller that can change the pressure in the air part, and thus control the height. The height control is used to navigate, by moving to layers with different wind directions and speeds, and can take it right down to the ground (though that sounds a bit untested). They are aiming for flights of "hundreds of days".

(continued in comments)
A bit like http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ ...
The Fair Tax would "take care of" neither of the examples tptacek gave... Like all other sales tax proposals, it relies on voluntary reporting of sales. Want to cheat the IRS? Just don't tell them about it.
Yes, yes it was! Updated!
It's easy to refute someone's post by inventing arguments that the post didn't make and then knocking them down. I think there's even a name for that technique.

Two arguments that this post didn't make:

(a) That the correct path for starting any company is to convince venture capitalists to fund it. In fact, this post seems downright derisive of that idea.

(b) That the way to take advantage of on-the-job experience at BigCo's is to convince them to do things differently while you're on staff there. No, that's not why you make friends with decision makers; you make friends with decision makers to learn what it is they need. Then you leave, and go build a product.
Clickable: http://imgur.com/a/IrZFq

Edit: that should have said 8m high

There are multiple control and networking systems connected together with a CAN bus (for controller area network, used in cars). It sounds like 4-5 ARM cores total: two Linux systems ("unfortunately" two) and one realtime controller in the main payload, and a failsafe controller up on top of the balloon (which controls helium release and parachute deployment). The controllers are designed to recover from being reset very quickly, since resetting is used as a kind of universal problem solver (sensor issues, cosmic rays flipping bits, etc.).

The stratospheric daily temperature swing (30°C down to -80°C) causes difficulties, so the electronics are in styrofoam boxes about 3cm thick, and a heating system keeps the electronics warm and the batteries warmer. The rough altitude is 20km, but it sounds like they cover about a 5km height range, I think connected to the daily cycle somehow too.

The solar panel provides 100W in full sunlight. It is mounted directly under the transparent balloon (which reduces the amount of energy by 20-25%). The batteries hold about "ten laptop" batteries' worth.

There are three vertically mounted omnidirectional antennas for balloon-to-balloon communication, and one downward facing antenna. The downward one has a 90° cone angle, and is designed so that the signal strength is even across the 40km diameter ground area. 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz, one for balloon-to-balloon and one for ground (I think 2.4GHz is ground).

The communication protocol is custom, to account for the large distances and to coordinate the ground systems so they don't transmit at the same time (since they can't see each other). The system basically acts as a VPN between end users and the ground station (upstream ISP), and traffic inside the VPN is encrypted separately as well. Currently upload and download speeds are symmetric (they don't really know what the speed will end up being, but roughly the same as 3G).

The eventual goal is commercial internet access to parts of the world that can't get it other ways, but there are no concrete plans for how that will work yet, since they expect to go through many more iterations of prototypes first. Commercial use will necessarily involve large fleets of balloons to provide continuous coverage (even if they end up covering more are each), since they move quite a lot. The balloons measure atmospheric conditions themselves and are coordinated from the ground.

Edit: I forgot to mention that there is a standard aircraft transponder (yellow and black cables in first picture), and the corners of the ~1.7m square solar panel have strobe lights to meet air codes.
Yes, the article makes clear that the EFF acquired the manual via a FOIA request and that (like all such documents) the manual is now public. We know what's in the manual (guidelines for IRS employees on how to conduct themselves online).

What we don't know—what the article speculates about—is what's in the IRS's databases, how those databases are populated, and the extent of the IRS's claimed powers in audits generally. As with the NSA's secret surveillance program, we're left guessing what's under the IRS's gaze and what oversight, if any, ensures that its scrutiny is circumscribed to what's appropriate in a free society.
So now we have a single node from which all electronic forms of human communication can be read, listened to and analyzed. The decisions of any and all businessmen in the running of their financial empires, the conversations of all persons as they speak to their stockbroker, their mistress or their business colleague. And I am told to believe that this situation is OK, is normal, and that nothing untoward will be done with all of this information.

Yet I know that if I had access to this information I could make billions of dollars (e.g., by shorting stocks or by buying businesses or commodities), alter the lives of people who I do not like (e.g., get them fired for their hidden or unhidden human weaknesses), destroy entire organizations by revealing the contents of their communications to a selective person or persons. The list of possibilities is almost infinite and I cannot, do not, will not believe that such actions not only are possible, but have already happened and indeed are happening at this very moment.

The Roman Terence said: "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto", that is "I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me."

PRISM must be dismantled, it's backup volumes destroyed, it's creators punished. But we will never likely be able to put it back into Pandora's box: there will always be someone who saves a hard drive or a backup tape cartridge and who will sell it to the highest bidder. We will have to declare new laws rendering these acts illegal. We will have to hunt illegal data gatherers down and punish them the old-fashioned way using humans, knives, blood, sweat and tears.
That's the difficult part, not for me, but for the vast majority of people who don't even know what a DMG is.
So now we have a single node from which all electronic forms of human communication can be read, listened to and analyzed. The decisions of any and all businessmen in the running of their financial empires, the conversations of all persons as they speak to their stockbroker, their mistress or their business colleague. And I am told to believe that this situation is OK, is normal, and that nothing untoward will be done with all of this information.

Yet I know that if I had access to this information I could make billions of dollars (e.g., by shorting stocks or by buying businesses or commodities), alter the lives of people who I do not like (e.g., get them fired for their hidden or unhidden human weaknesses), destroy entire organizations by revealing the contents of their communications to a selective person or persons. The list of possibilities is almost infinite and I cannot, do not, will not believe that such actions not only are possible, but have already happened and indeed are happening at this very moment. As the Roman Terence said: "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto", that is "I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me."

PRISM must be dismantled, it's backup volumes destroyed, it's creators punished. But we will never likely be able to put it back into Pandora's box: there will always be someone who saves a hard drive or a backup tape cartridge and who will sell it to the highest bidder. We will have to declare new laws rendering these acts illegal. We will have to hunt illegal data gatherers down and punish them the old-fashioned way using humans, knives, blood, sweat and tears.
I think I'd prefer for my food to come from that "backward" farming than the developed nation's industrial agriculture.
With respect to the hair-splitting going on around here.

> Every company involved denied the most sensational assertion in the Prism documents: that the NSA pulled data "directly from the servers" of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL and more.

> Technology experts and a former government official say that phrasing, taken from a PowerPoint slide describing the program, was likely meant to differentiate Prism's neatly organized, company-provided data from the unstructured information snatched out of the Internet's major pipelines.
There were a couple of year that buying a functional motorcycle from HD was difficult. It was more buy the cycle and fix it (or get someone to fix it for you).
NSA has all the access they need. Which side of the property line their equipment resides on is a detail. Google is bound by what they're treating as a lawful order, to lie, as is anyone on NSA's team. If NSA doesn't have hardware inside Google, they have what they need to read the data at the boundaries of the Google system.
What is up with HN's Twitter links?
Just receiving "unknown" whenever I click a link.
The "Special Agents O’Brien and Bloom" kind of gave it away.
What does it mean for a corporation to be at "the same level as" a government?
Test Your Browser's SSL Cipher Suite Support
Without Bluetooth support, it's not much use. You'd be limited to having a dongle connected your smartphone, or the watch only working when you were within the range of a base station.
The 1st sentence seems fine: the companies have no practical way to withhold consent.

The phrasing "directly and unilaterally seize" seems exaggerated given the preponderance of current revelations and denials, but if Prism includes other not-yet-revealed acquisition methods, might still be substantially true. After all, the denials you're relying on are from company leaders who also said they've never heard of Prism.

I can believe Greenwald got overexcited in that phrasing, and trusted the slide deck (including as-yet-unreleased slides) too much. Just like perhaps Obama was a bit clumsy and overeager to reassure with his phrasing, "Nobody is listening to your telephone calls."
I stand corrected, thanks. I often underestimate the crazy money still being made in IT infrastructure. This will teach me.
For the sake of argument -- This should be called The Snowden Principle.

For the sake of argument let's say we don't call this the Snowden principle, because that would mean we are in an argument with uninformed people who are so arrogant that they think they are the first generation to wrestle with tough decisions and lofty ideals. Forty years ago my parents could have called this "the Ellsberg Principle" and I am sure that HNers from other countries can easily come up with examples from not so recent history in their country. Can we please try and raise the level of dialogue and expect a little more of ourselves before running to twitter/blog/HN?
So, the US would actually be significantly behind the global curve on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_identity_card_policies...

_Most_ first-world countries already implement this, mostly without disastrous effects.

The strongest argument against this is probably that the US has unusually bad institutions - a more powerful argument in light of PRISM, etc. But it's not the case that a National ID card is indicative of instant tyranny.
Are elevators really the limiting factor? Why can't we setup two staggered half-kilometer shafts?
Reminds me of the underground mail-delivery system, W.A.S.T.E., in Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_of_Lot_49), which was also the name of a peer-to-peer app developed by Justin Frankel (the original developer of Winamp) while he was at AOL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE).
Not an excuse at all but watching President Obama these days is like watching the end of The Man Who Fell to Earth (the original one with Bowie) where he's lost all control of people around him that he helped bring to power in the first place and he's utterly frustrated but stuck having to work with them.

As someone who was thrilled to see him elected, I am going to be very relieved to see him flown away on that last day, just like Bush.
He explained why he stepped forward in the original interview: he felt that since he was breaking the law, he owed Americans an explanation as to who he was and why he was doing it. I, for one, really appreciate it. He's taking the high road and doing all that much more damage to the liars and criminals in government.
I went to the Project Loon event in Christchurch today. Here are details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5887330
"What is the code? What does this say in plain English? This ‘selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless?’ – what is this shit?”
You know very little about agriculture in China I would guess. Short answer: no you don't. Long answer: we've had chicken, milk, pork, rice scares all in the last few months.
I think it is deliberately written to be a little too absurd to be plausible.

In real life, if you are accused of hiding information in a well known text, you could just show that your version of the text exactly matches the original, and so there is no scope for hiding information.

Instead, the protagonist, with his lawyer's encouragement, study secondary texts on the interpretation of the text and work with the FBI to help them understand a poem someone else wrote?

It is very Kafkaesque, but also plainly obvious that it is fiction (I also started reading it with the expectation of a true story rather than fiction).
The article implies that Linux had a planned marketing strategy (like a cult) .. I dont agree with this, I am pretty sure that the growth was quite disorganized, it just happened to be a better product.
Which is a great parallel with organized religions, where "better products" in their times raised to be the mainstream.
... because I am an actual 3-sigma talent

3-sigma in what direction, though? ;)
We need to hear what the NSAs version of listening is. Do algorithms parsing streams count as listening? Or only when a human sees it/hears it?
Certainly true that there are a number of possibilities. The one that seems to make sense per Occam's Razor and the mass of evidence we now have is that Prism is an NSA-side "facade pattern" against a set of company-specific FISA/NSL-compliance APIs.

In NSA-speak this is "collection directly from the servers of $FOO" because there is no wiretap or other SIGINT or ELINT shenanigans. They ask, or the FISA Court compels by warrant, for a company to turn over information they have, the company sends it over electronically.

Prism, on the NSA end, takes care to feed that information that is sent over to whichever analyst is working the case, patches up company-specific details so the analyst doesn't have to worry about it, etc. But they don't have feelers onto every datacenter owned by those 9 companies so there is no "direct access to data", as has been errorneously and loosely parroted around.
I'm 20 now, and I think I'm smart. When I was 15 I did as well, but now I think I was pretty stupid at the time.

No doubt the pattern will continue at 25.
Spoilers ahead

To be even more clear it appears to draw inspiration from various works of political fiction. Notably the "love" for authority figures towards the end smacks of Winston's transformation in '1984'.
The only restricted driver I have ever installed is Nvidia, which is completely unnecessary unless you are playing modern 3D games or doing GPGPU development (as I was).
Prediksi Skor Spanyol VS Uruguay Piala Confederations 17 Juni 2013
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Got it.

Certainly his twitter seemed to say the opposite.

What didn't add up to me is
A. Prism could track these emails.
B. It would trip it off
Developers have to pay development fees to cities, who then provide the services. Roads are probably a bit more complex because they are capital intensive, but zoning rules are supposed to keep development in check in this case. A town/city can decide to "expand", perhaps with developer prodding, and in some cases the other way around.

Detroit was utterly killed by its suburbs combined with white flight accelerated by the race riots of the late 60s.
It would be possible to backdoor the SSL offload devices such that passively intercepted connections were decryptable.

The revelations of the past week seem to put this category of idea back on the map.
And in fact I'm willing to bet that explains the divergence of opinion that the Senator noted in the linked story.

He probably was told in his classified briefing that NSA could record and collect phone calls without a warrant.

Mueller, on the other hand, would be talking about actually tapping into that data, which would need a warrant.

I'm not sure I buy the argument that you can record a phone call without a warrant just because it's using VoIP or some equivalent instead of a physical wiretap, but it does sound similar to the other arguments that have been made to collect data for later analysis by warrant if necessary.
He might be interpreting the claim as being that Snowden could do that, which is, of course, false.
I'm not sure I would link a source that is about "Christian and Mayan spirituality and our approach to health and fitness" that gets all its information from a site called towerwatch.com with the motto "Helping Christians Reach Jehovah's Witnesses with the Gospel of Our Savior Jesus Christ".
Format Factory – The Complete File Conversion Software
I'd always heard that Joyce is utter trash. This hasn't helped change that impression.
Also note the subtle allusions to 1984, Brave New World, and Farenheit 451. I really enjoyed it and would like to read a longer treatment of the theme by this author.
Why lawyers?
The author included over-the-top details to make it clear that his story was fictional.

I mean, FBI agents seeking clarification about emails you wrote? Pssht...they'd just read the emails, build their case and send you to a military tribunal.
Do you think that project loon has anything to do with the recently acquired Makani Power? http://cleantechnica.com/2013/05/24/google-buys-makani-wind-....

It would be interesting if they were to merge these two projects.
We are, apparently, about this right now.
The NSA brief to congress wasn't referring to PRISM at all. Telecommunications interception != PRISM.

The slide deck was always very ambiguous. But it was very interesting that it said that analysts should use both methods (PRISM and interception)
Does it matter?

Just the copying and storage of the bits today is laying the groundwork for any imaginable abuses in the future.
Sounds like you're not familiar with the rules of Calvinball, friend.
I can't comment on the first part (seems weird to me?) but they briefly mention "staged" elevators towards the end of the article (although it does not answer the first question.)
What's the Difference Between Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg?
I'd contend that while upvotes are purely incidental, comments and discussion are reasons to post something.
This pattern continues to at the very least 29.
So the reporter says there was an elephant in the room, but instead of an elephant, it was two donkeys. The reporter gets it wrong, but what about the two donkeys? What the hell are they doing in that room?
This is good startup story for India. Exits in India are rare but not unheard of, as claimed by article. There are some Indian company products acquired without creating much buzz here. For example, Pramati's Qontext acquired by Autodesk. Yasu acquired by SAP. UserRules acquired by some company(not sure)
The companies can withhold consent simply by not consenting. Both NSA and the company then have to appear before a federal court and argue the case; a court then orders one side or the other (obviously: virtually always the company) to back down.

It bothers people that the USG virtually always wins these cases. But I think it shouldn't bother people as much as it does, for a couple of reasons:

* It's also the case that state governments win most attempts to get Title III wiretaps; in those cases, it's because getting a Title III wiretap is an expensive process that involves a shitload of paperwork, and prosecutors don't waste the time going for them unless they're sure they're going to win. It appears easier to get a FISA directive upheld, but it's not free.

* It's what you'd expect to see happen if the USG was only using FISA to conduct foreign surveillance, which, while I wouldn't take NSA's word for it, is not at all hard to believe; what is the motivation for them to set up a paper trail with the FISC of doing something else?
I'm almost positive that was dry humor, but in case it wasn't, and for other peoples' benefit (namely the parent), it's called building a strawman argument[1].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawman
Perhaps it's evolving closer to what the truth actually was the whole time?
Nobody can please a cynic. When it comes to the White House petitions, maybe you are the one entirely level-headed critic I've come across. But there seems to be no way for them to win you over short of doing precisely what you think ought to be done.

Their petition promises a white house response. That's it. It's entirely likely the response will be "Snowden is a criminal. Leaking is a crime. We will not pardon him because I, Barack Obama, don't think that's the right and just thing to do."

But nope, to you that's another act in their "dog and pony show".

Also, if the petition does reach that 300k mark you mentioned, that means it earned the support of 0.12% of the internet-using American public. Perspective matters.

(To be clear, I don't support the spying. I do think the reaction has been overblown in some cases but the program should end. To paraphrase Bill Maher, "This doesn't worry me all that much but it IS a slippery slope, and that's coming from a guy who thinks most 'slippery slope' arguments are bullshit".