skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since three distinct people felt a compulsion to comment on it over an 8 hour span saying the exact same thing,

I apologize. Yes, sarcasm is sometimes an appropriate reaction to death.

I stand by the assertion that sixQuarks' attempt at sarcasm as an attempt at dark humor was still inappropriate, which was completely unclear from my original statement.
The laws are build on different principles making them somewhat different. However, one of the things that we pay a lot of attention to is security resilience. The question is, "what has to be compromised before your data is compromised? and is there a way to detect it?" The storage is still something we are working on but you can believe it is a design goal.

The EU has very different approaches again to privacy law. I don't know you can compare them. They tend to be more lax with collection and stronger with use.

However, we can also help you install the software (open source, reviewed by developers all over the world) on your premises if you would prefer. So our best shot is only for those who really want to cloud host.
Agreed. I see this as being a catalyst for the creation of greater competition to the US internet incumbents. There will likely not be an immediate impact for Google et al. but there will be much longer term consequences I think.
Thanks for the (funny) vote of confidence.

- The OP
The resolution spec on laptops is just for the built in screen. If you plug it into an external monitor you use the resolution of the external monitor.

So the resolution of the laptop does not limit external monitors.
These aren't closed algorithms. They are well understood and explored in-depth by the academic community.
It doesn't sound like you have a real startup if neither one of you are doing any work and he has another job. Maybe just give up?
In my university, we had a computer security program where computer scientists were heavily recruited to work for the DoD for a few years in exchange for a scholarship. One of the students I knew who ended up at the NSA was a standout, but the many others I knew were of average intellect and in many cases were below average computer scientists. These are not the level of people you want involved in mass surveillance programs.

What matters most to the NSA is your ability to pass a polygraph - not your engineering skills.
I see your point and it's an unfortunate situation.

Shouldn't our representatives be the smartest and most upstanding citizens available? How do we make that a reality?

I found a few sites similar to these:

www.popvox.com

www.opencongress.org/bill/all
Mildly off topic question: How common are asylum applications submitted? How often are they accepted?
Don't take this as a pithy, light comment. There are lawyers that are currently in jail for serving as council to some middle eastern organizations that were trying to become legitimate and work within the system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynne_Stewart
21 free PLR ebooks with master resell rights for Entrepreneurs
21 free PLR ebooks with master resell rights for Entrepreneurs
Sweden warrantlessly wiretaps all Internet traffic crossing its borders
Ironically enough, we have 2 investor meetings this week, which is the reason for my stress. Maybe this will be the decision maker..
Yes, there's lots of jobs in IT which require skills, not degrees. And SV requires more degrees than the US average, because the average SV programmer isn't plugging in cables, installing Windows, or fixing their company's simple PHP site.

It's just the daily "education is overrated, but still useful if you pick the right degree" HN article.
If you have nothing to hide, then you don't matter. In this information age, data is money. There's a difference between having nothing to be ashamed of and having nothing to hide.
Now I'm looking for a decentralized social network
I swear, it's like nobody ever read the USA PATRIOT act, even though its been law for 12 years. Obama's fault? For what, following the laws that Congress passed?
Ph.Ds with military service?

I can only imagine that that is a very very short list of people. Everyone I've met with a Ph.D. is as far from the mentality of the military people I've met and vice versa.
Rename to "what's wrong with coffeescript" and this blog post might approach accuracy.
A lot. But first they have to go through extremely invasive and intense background checks that in some cases take years to complete. It all depends on the agency and the role. Some are "Public Trust" which is the barely-above civilian clearance which takes less than a month. On the other end of the spectrum are your top-secret clearances which take months to years to complete. If I had to place a wager I would bet heavily that he has held a top-secret clearance for a long time. The NSA isn't going to let anybody off the street roam its halls.
My personal experience with reselling Google Apps here in Australia is quite different, privacy of data is almost always the first or second question they ask. I also rejoiced at AWS coming to Sydney, but having servers physically located in Australia does nothing to protect data by law from the US Govt.
> I wonder how Feynman would have fared against a slide-rule salesman?

"More digits! More digits!"
I wonder whether the HK government perceives him as an asset or liability.
Slashdot, hacker news, ... all things die. Where to next?
The average movie-goer wouldn't make the association unless the story were in the headlines for weeks, maybe months, on end. It just doesn't look like a great movie.
Good point. I can answer it, hopefully with good points of my own, since I'm the guy who created the Flood Washington with 1984 campaign earlier this evening.

Several reasons:

- Elected officials have a direct vote. "These programs are subject to congressional oversight and congressional re-authorization and congressional debate." — President Obama on June 7.
- If the campaign is successful, journalists will hear about it in a way that makes it more interesting to report on. If I'm a journalist, I want to write about a grass-roots campaign to change Washington--not a campaign to--what, change journalism?
- I'm upset with elected officials such as my own Dianne Feinstein who are publicly defending the program. I have no beef with journalists.
- It didn't even occur to me to send the book to journalists.

P.S. You are correct about the goal, but there is a further goal you did not mention: to change the law. The best way to do this: change the minds of lawmakers.
Police Visit Pirate Bay Proxy Owner’s Home Demanding a Shutdown
> And this isn't tin foil paranoia, the US Government just told you that in public discourse.

You know, if you had said that about anything else, it'd be a transparency win.
I wonder how many of these are of the "Computer Science B.Sc. or 'equivalent experience'" sort. In theory, you can get those jobs without a degree. In practice, acquiring the "equivalent experience" is nearly impossible without the degree.
> Or why has Congress been willing to approve this program on multiple occasions?

From what Obama said, "Congress was informed", it was not asked to approve anything. That's very different.
I wonder if Dropbox are caught up in this too?
I'm a UK citizen with a startup http://microco.sm that has gone to some lengths to avoid US domains, companies and laws.

All of our domains are EU based, the company is UK based, and whilst we've used Linode for blog and basic site-hosting and will use Cloudflare for CDN, we are putting nothing on the server of a US company that could be a risk to privacy.

All of our data we are keeping within the EU which we feel holds much better standards and has stricter laws on data protection, and for user-generated content we feel that the EU E-commerce Act is better than the DMCA and risk created by the copyright lobby in the US.

Ultimately what this means is that for our core data and API, European companies with no US parent or holding company will win our hosting business.

We will still use US companies, but in a way that is little more than transport and performance increases for US-based users. But even then, we are not requiring real identity and we are implementing SSL everywhere and are happy if users use VPNs or Tor to connect.

Why all the fuss? I believe that through a persons' interests one can determine political affiliation. So I believe that to allow people to organise themselves freely around their hobbies and pastimes, that we must consider this and protect them from any entities that might use that information against the individuals. Further I believe that when people of shared interest come together that they are likely to organise to protect and preserve that interest, and this means that interest groups galvanise ad-hoc lobby groups and activists.

I also hope it changes, but I'm going to act as if I believe it will get worse on all fronts.
Does anyone know how these companies, et al., actually differentiate US Citizens from Non-US Citizens? I don't remember clicking the "I'm a US Citizen box" on any website.
There are technological solutions to address this for US firms. Encryption on the client side, before data is sent to the cloud, would work. I would suspect (hope) that browser makers will quickly introduce features that make sending and receiving end-to-end encrypted communications (email etc.) a thoughtless process - since that is the only way to get people to use it.

Even better, perhaps someone will write software that sits on top of the network stack and automatically negotiates secure communications regardless of the origin client software. Maybe some sort of public key registry might come into play.
At least Sweden is publicly and legally doing it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRA_law
Yes Australia runs a SIGINT collection point for the NSA, at least since the 90s.
Either way the USG will be working as hard as hell to make him a liability for everybody except the US.
Strong privacy policy is all I can think of, something along the lines of a statement saying you'll close shop before you implement a siphon for the government.
Oh, people noticed that they disappeared. There were all kinds of vigils in support of at least one of the women. (Apparently, the kidnapper was even at some of these. This in my mind was the most bizarre fact of the whole story.)
Why we can't go back to business as usual post-PRISM
Sorry, this lead seems to be previously covered by http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57588337-38/no-evidence-of...
I can't speak for others, but as far as I am concerned, every person on earth has the exact same rights. I see no difference between an American and someone from another country. This informs my stance on all of US foreign policy. To me, spying on an innocent Iraqi or Chinese citizen is just as morally reprehensible as spying on an innocent American citizen. That being said, not all people feel as I do, and you are right, the legality of it all, unfortunately, hinges on how Americans are affected.
If you're outside of the US, then yes you are not subject to NSA orders. But your data will still be accessed by the NSA, as the NSA won't require an order to read what you've got.
It's because Apple isn't any good at services, and didn't have a cloud of note until extremely recently.
I've found the need for a "half" column several times. I like the idea of a 24 column grid.
I made this app a while ago that lets you search for jobs in multiple countries at once. Maybe it will provide some inspiration: http://leavethe.us
Life in the information age (a response to PRISM)
This is likely the root of the issue, which is that they probably capture all communications, but when they have a foreign target, that is when they actually "look" at the stuff they captured, trying to find stuff "related" to that foreign target.

The NSA at least was supposedly run as a very tight ship (I have no idea now, i have no friends who have worked there recently), so I'm sure they theoretically have really detailed redaction and other procedures meant to keep personal or private info of americans from appearing in reports, but that is not exactly comforting.
Using Facebook’s React with require.js
I think this campaign largely misses the more interesting problem, which is that we got to this point despite the fact that 1984 is a bestselling cornerstone of literature. It's been required reading in high schools for years and years.

Are the representatives on the receiving end of this campaign going to slap their heads and go "Oh golly, I never thought of that"?

There's no easy way to get through to people who think the benefits of ubiquitous surveillance outweigh the costs. They know 1984, and they don't see themselves in the role of big brother. Throwing this book at them isn't going to change that.

Edit: "There's no easy way" suggests that this is meant as a solution, which obviously isn't the campaigner's intention. What I mean is that I don't think this will have an impact other than to make the recipients think their constituents are oversimplifying the issue, a la Godwin's law.
Obama's NSA Defense: Congress Can Raise Objections It Can't Actually Raise
That's what I've been wondering:

- if they aren't targeting specific persons, how do they know what country the person is from & if they (the govt) are violating the law?

- if I'm American living in another country, am I safer from or more likely to be tracked (terrorism aside) Am I being picked up "freely" as someone from outside the country?

- many, many, many similar questions I'm sure you are also asking

I realize these seem rather naive questions, but my first thought on reading Obama's response was, "How can you possibly know what country the person is a citizen of?"

Considering that that was a major part of his defense - "Don't worry, it's only those foreign people we're looking at"- I really think that needs to be a bigger part of the whole discussion.

I think it is quite obviously more bullshit.
I agree. It all comes off as super-defensive, 'you guys just wouldn't understand' rhetoric. Not to mention all the insider backslapping. And the consistent claims that Snowden defected to China is clearly taking the situation out of context. Terrible PR for their side of the argument, at least, but fascinating (if not terrifying) insight into a bit of the minds behind the curtains at the NSA.
Could a better communication standard ensure better data privacy?
Like many, I've been soaking up the new information as it comes in about this NSA debacle. What happens next? What's the solution? We could just accept that privacy is a thing of the past. Or could a better standard make the server not even be capable of handing over your data if it wanted to? On the surface, the idea seems patently absurd. And maybe it is.

I'm no encryption expert. I'm sure there are AT LEAST a few dozen people here whose knowledge on this subject dwarfs mine. So, let's get those mental juices flowing. Maybe something already exists but isn't being used. If not, I'm hoping the mere suggestion of the idea sparks an idea that leads to greatness.

After thinking about what such an implementation might look like, the best I've come up with is a key that changes each time to be used for the next message. You send an message to a server. It's encrypted with a key that your client generated the last time it sent a message. The server can use that key (which it received with the previous message and stored) to decrypt that message. Included with your new message is a new key that will be used next time. This allows the server to store a bunch of messages for you, but it's only capable of decrypting one of them. To be able to view history, the keys would all be stored on your own computer.

Unfortunately, this brings us a step backwards in terms of usability. Suddenly you're back to the days of only having one client capable of reading your stuff. The other thought that crossed my mind was client-to-client communication.

Maybe there's a better way to accomplish the same end goal - give companies an excuse to tell the FBI/NSA "Sorry, but I couldn't give you that information, no matter how badly I want to".

What do you all think? Am I crazy or is there any validity to any of this?
How Apple’s iOS Fragmentation Problems Distort Design Thinking
"Suppose you do business with an American company that has servers in Australia (for the record we are registered in the UK, not the US), and they get a FISA warrant? Of course they will send the info over"

There's a way out. Those server offshore must be handled by subsidiary. Then the parent company in US does not have the data and they can not also command subsidiary to handle it over.
That's not what is being discussed here. What is being discussed is the leaker doesn't appear to be a standout individual. He isn't the top of his field. He doesn't have numerous advanced degrees. So on and so forth. He is "garden variety". So, given that, if a "garden variety employee" can get access to all this data, just how many ordinary Joes have access to it? The more people, particularly those low on the totem pole, the more opportunity for leaks to the wrong people.
At least in most countries, this is just not the way it works, legally.

Every country has different rights for citizens and non-citizens.

For example, the US has held the 4th amendment does not apply to non-citizens who are not "part of the national community" (IE if a bunch of canadians came down and fished every weekend, you could search them however without violating the 4th amendment. If they lived here illegally, you couldn't).

It's not just the US of course, almost all countries are like this (the EU has broader protections for EU citizens than random other people, like US citizens living in the EU).

I don't remember all the details, and i certainly agree with "morally reprehensible", but you are suggesting a "natural rights" based approach, which, while common, but not universal.
This.

Was a point I raised here just yesterday - glad to see I was on the mark.

This is why we are now in an Orwellian state, rather that one with necessary secrecy but checks and balances.

When Congress can say, "We are reviewing National Security measures to be sure they comply with the law & Constitution, but we can't go into details" - that's the latter.

When Congress is under threat of penalty for even saying that we HAVE National Security measures, that is Orwellian.
For now (until it's replaced by hits from blogs), you can Google for "Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization, and Management", and you'll get plenty of hits describing intelligence job positions and PDFs with descriptions like "PRISM: A web-based application that provides users, at the theater level and below, with the ability to conduct Integrated Collection Management (ICM). Integrates all intelligence discipline assets with all theater requirements."
I suspect the primary reason we (in the USA) are focusing so much on it is that these are the people appointed, promoted, funded, etc., by people we elected. Some people think that has meaning while many are cynical enough to think that they're all the same under the various masks.

This is a revelation for most people, especially younger people, and they're dealing with the immediate, personal, consequences.

As with the embarrassment created by the second Bush administration, whereby we squandered a great deal of global goodwill after 9/11, we've done a stellar job of undoing the redemption we thought we had gained by electing Obama in 2008.

Many Americans really thought we could be less embarrassed of our leadership with that decision.

The story is still unfolding. Our government will be measured by how it acts out the next few months and how it responds to the inevitable criticism from the rest of the world. As Americans, we will be measured by how we respond to our government.
A minor correction in terminology:

The US Constitution and case law makes no distinction between protections granted to US citizens and foreigners. All are treated equally under the law, and thusly "enjoy" the same "protections."

However, case law has determined that such protections are not granted outside of the US's borders. Thus, an American citizen and a foreigner have equal protection (again, in theory) when inside of US borders - and both are equally unprotected when outside of US borders (it's a bit more complex regarding the 'outside of US borders' part, but that's the general gist).
So much of internet business rides on trust. Yes, this is gonna damage the US Internet industry.

If you're selling cloud-based services in overseas markets, your non-American competitors just got a big helping hand.
I have heard (no guarantees) that they collect information on everyone, and analyse it later as it is needed. They only investigate this information if and as if relates to a foreign suspect.

Doesn't seem like there's any way to abuse this .....
I agree with the "education is overrated...article" bit, but its not wrong in its premise either.

CS/etc eduction is not about "being a good programmer", and I've seen a LOT of really poor programmers come out of good schools. If you want to be educated thats one thing, but if you just wanna be a good programmer, you're probably better off doing hackbright, codecademy or something other than "school".
It is unlikely bullshit.
They are likely not indiscriminate in targeting.
It's just likely post-hoc targeting.
That's the question you really want to ask: "So do you capture all the data, and then only look at the data for foreign people, or do you only capture data for foreign people?"

At one point, with watchwords/etc, it was clearly the latter. I think they've moved to the former.
From 1984 to now ~= 30 years
When is the American media going to realize that Hong Kong is not Beijing?
The Once (but No Longer) Golden Age of Human Capital
Don't fake it. You either make it or you don't.
> which is just too much.

Compared to what? Surely the competition?

For micropayments they're cheap.
This appears to be a rare case where the headline is a meaningful statement (If an NSA contractor violates NSA's infosec, how can we trust the NSA with ours?) while the article is sensationalist tripe, focusing on an irrelevant angle.
FYI: Birgitta is in a minority opposition party (The Icelandic pirate party) with 3 representatives out of 63. Given the ruling government's track record, both regarding refugees seeking asylum as well as a strong will to have good relations with the U.S., I find it highly unlikely he will be given asylum in Iceland. Now, Bobby Fischer was given an asylum in Iceland in 2006 in a unanimous parliament vote - but that was without great objections from the U.S. This is (obviously) a completely different thing.
It's widely known and acknowledged that the information gathered this way is used not only by Swedish agencies, but also traded with foreign agencies in exchange for information gathered in whatever way is possible to them. In effect it means that communication that crosses any border is likely collected, analyzed and available to all western intelligence agencies. Good luck trying to hide.
Unfortunately, Oz is one of our spying partners, so your ASIO is probably just annoyed that the NSA can't keep its house in order.
And this is a key point, a decision that many people said would never happen again: dividing the world into two groups of people is what started a few problems before.