skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The first question will be which American citizen was harmed, and what was the harm.

This will be extremely difficult to answer since all aspects of the program are top secret, so it is impossible to know whose data has been accessed.

In addition, merely accessing data at rest does not really do any harm. You'd really need a U.S. citizen who you can prove has been wrongfully arrested or harassed as a direct result of their data being accessed in this way.

Finally, there is a real risk that the Supreme Court (this one in particular) will defer to Congress, as it tends to do on matters of war and self-defense.

Simply put, the far, far better option here is to petition Congress. They will respond directly if the public pressure gets high enough.
'Hidden' economy in Silicon Valley built without advanced degrees
> Compare the amount of classical liberalism in 1800 and 2000. Whether that can continue past the middle and into full-blown totalitarianism is untested.

You mean in 1800 when the Alien and Sedition Acts were in force and the government didn't even have to come up with some pretense and prosecuted and convicted people directly for what they said in the press? I don't think the U.S. circa 2000 suffers for that comparison! If you want to talk about which is a more free society, the U.S. in 1800 or the U.S. in 2000, you also can't leave women and blacks (combined more than 50% of the population!) out of the equation...

It's ahistorical to pretend that the U.S. has only gotten less free over time. Vis-a-vis "classical liberalism" the government claimed the power to regulate all interstate commerce in 1824--the only difference today is that you can't even buy a candy bar at a vending machine without engaging in an interstate commercial transaction. If you live today the way the vast majority of the population lived in 1800 (on a farm growing food for your own consumption and sewing your own clothes, etc), you'd probably find that government doesn't reach your activities appreciably more today than it did 200 years ago.

It's also ahistorical to pretend that our rights are universally weaker than they were in 1800. Remember, at that time, the Bill of Rights did not apply to the states. The liberal Supreme Courts of the 1960's and 1970's dramatically strengthened due process rights and habeas rights relative to what they were before. First Amendment rights are dramatically stronger than they were in 1800 (the "obscenity" exception to the 1st amendment has been whittled down to pretty much just child porn).

Now, I won't say the U.S. is the freest its ever been. When you take into account the experience of all Americans (not just rich white males), the freest the U.S. has ever been was probably the mid 1990's. But, it's been worse before. It was worse under the Alien and Sedition Acts. It was worse under Lincoln who governed under borderline martial law. It was worse under McCarthy. From an economic rights point of view--the country was far more regulated in 1935-1970 (vast swaths of the economy, everything from transportation to telecommunication, was deregulated from 1970-1990).

The idea that the trajectory of the U.S. has inexorably been in the direction of less freedom is nothing more than looking at the past with rose-colored glasses. It's not a perspective rooted in historical truth.
This is a non sequitur. BCrypt isn't an alternative to SHA hashes; it's a password storage construction.
Given Snowden's background in intel and the information exposed, I think he calculated his decision correctly. Even though other countries (like Iceland) are offering asylum, I really do believe Snowden choose a formidable country that opposes western views...anyone recall Hilary Clinton addressing China's firewall, or Google pulling out?
Yes, but you shouldn't anyways; SHA-2 is inferior to SHA-3.

SHA-3 is the product of a peer-reviewed cryptographic contest.
Is it true that Google does not protect the rights of non-US users from having their emails read and copied by the NSA?

If that is the case, then why would any foreigner ever use Gmail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail, etc?
The fact is that civil liberties always contract during wartime and expand during peacetime. Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus during the Civil War, for example. 9/11 was twelve years ago, and we're possibly seeing the re-expansion of peacetime civil liberties here.
Ah, that explains a lot. It certainly explains why the complaints didn't resonate with me. I know JavaScript very well, and there are things I don't like about it, but these weren't them. Or if they were, I've gotten used to them.

I think I did miss the point with my previous comment. Maybe I was confused by the title: The article isn't "What's wrong with JavaScript", but as you said it's much more about things that will confuse Rubyists who arrive at JavaScript by way of CoffeeScript.

For an article on that topic, it does make sense to have CoffeeScript examples. But it would be much better - and so easy - to include the matching JavaScript for each of the CoffeeScript files. Not only would it help JavaScript programmers understand the article, but it would show how CoffeeScript attempts to work around these issues.

Even better would be to add matching examples of similar Ruby code. Code examples in all three languages would make for an interesting article: the Ruby way, the CoffeeScript way that makes JavaScript a bit more like Ruby, and the JavaScript way.
Study it: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/
Flame used an MD5 collision.
Nope. I'm an intern there and usually work ~10-6, call my girlfriend back home/hang out for a bit with people, eat, and go home. There's really no judging, everyone seems super chill.
Well, my apologies if I insulted you personally. It was meant to be an attack on the notation that this can be framed as 'terrorism'.
I am an American and I just want to point out that my latest startup (http://www.efficito.com) is a Limited UK company, and my co-founder is from the Netherlands. It would certainly be to my advantage if things change. We offer cloud-based ERP, and you might be interested to know our main hosting server is currently in the Czech Republic. We are also paranoid about security (all access is encrtpted, and we are looking at encrypted storage for virtual machines, and much more).

I would love for things to change. I really would. What I worry though is about attention span of even decision makers on the business side, and what the alternatives are. The ideal situation would be a bunch of smaller private social networks able to interop (the Diaspora model) but it isn't clear there is a financial way to make this work.

So I hope it changes. I really do. I just am somewhat pessimistic :-P
European Union Data Protection Directive
If you look hard enough you'll definitely be able to find a lot of the failures. A lot of startups make the risk even higher because they're not always transparent with their finances. You might be working hard to meet a deadline and show up to the office only realize your company has gone bankrupt. A lot of newly funded startups live month to month and offer no security whatsoever (although they definitely try to make it seem like they can).
If you haven't set any deadlines or goals, do it now.
If he doesn't meet those goals, cut him loose. Obviously make those goals attainable, but to quote -> "Its time to fish or cut bait"
A current BAH executive is also the former DNI.
As I noted elsewhere in the thread, Echelon taught us that the agencies can circumvent these protections by agreeing to spy on each other's citizens and then forward the intelligence.
Edward Snowden in Hong Kong.
I'm not making an excuse. If the theory is that folks will pull out of U.S.-based cloud services, then the question is, where would they go instead?

The U.S. data-mining program has been revealed. I would not assume the lack of revelations from other nations is definitive proof that those nations aren't doing similar things. In the absence of data it is very easy to make convenient assumptions.
How much the government protects us from other individuals is one thing, but I was speaking more to interaction with other governments.
What does this have to do with Obama? Genuine question, the article doesn't say. I thought this was a consequence of the Patriot Act.
They don't have to actually charge you with anything. You'll just end up on a no-fly list or have some assets frozen.
> Manning betrayed his country

What do you mean by this, exactly? I was born and raised and still live in that country, and I do not feel the slightest bit betrayed by Manning's actions. If you mean that he betrayed the US government, then I can agree, but the same applies to Snowder. But if you're talking about betraying the entire country as a whole, I think that's up to each person living in that country. I was not betrayed, and I don't think I'm the only one with that opinion. Your next sentence is:

> He is truly an enemy of the system itself.

That makes it sound like you're saying that Manning betrayed the government, not the people. That doesn't sound like an entirely different thing than what Snowder did.
True.

The old rules still apply. If you can't afford someone else to know something, you have to encrypt it in motion and at rest.
Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, Birgitta Jonsdottir, Jacob Appelbaum and Rop Gonggrijp.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks-related_Twitter_subpo...
It says here that he was on leave from his NSA job for treatment for his epilepsy (well, that's what he told the NSA). It's been known that medical tourism is somewhat big in Hong Kong (though mostly for other Asians, particularly mainland Chinese). In this respect, going to Iceland would've raised a few NSA eyebrows, and in light of this I think HK was a good choice (of course, I'm sure there are other, better, choices).
I think 'destroyed' is a strong word, and it's still early. Damaged? That's probably fair.

I wonder if that's a major reason the Google-centric 'The Internship' movie kinda bombed this weekend. I mean, it might just be a crappy movie (didn't see the reviews), but I do suspect a lot of people weren't really into seeing a movie about Google after all this.
Do you call what Manning experienced an "established procedure?"
I think you're just looking for a blessing to cut him loose because you've already lost faith.

Personally I would. I sometimes procrastinate on my own projects, but I don't have a partner I have to answer to either.
The "Obama Administration" isn't prosecuting Manning, except insofar as has hasn't ordered the Commanding General at Ft. Meade sacked (which would be a much different kind of legal system interference).

Likewise, (and I hate to sound like the ski instructor) if Manning hadn't wanted his trial to be "shrouded in secrecy" then he shouldn't have leaked classified information while under arms. Closing a trial is something that can be done in a court-martial, and that was true since far before Manning had raised his right hand to fight the war in Iraq and signed his DD-4.

Even with the secrecy though, the article itself answers the question of how Manning might be sentenced to life imprisonment: The charge of "aiding the enemy" requires only that Manning knowingly leak the information knowing that it could be directly or indirectly provided to the enemy.

If even one page of that had ended up in any AQ or Taliban hands that would seal the deal. As it turns out a bunch was found in Osama bin Laden's possession. Case closed, as far as that goes.

I think it's important to note again that Snowden was quite clear in his initial interview that his actions were materially different from Manning's. He went so far as to note that he leaked only a few specific issues, and not just anything that he could grab, which he certainly could have done had he wished.
Hey Europeans, does this mean your love affair with Skype is over?
One thing you might try to do is set a deadline by setting up an important meeting to show someone the prototype. That way there is more of an urgent need to get point A up and running. If he can't get it finished a few days before the meeting then you have your answer on what you should do.
There are local social networks, to give an example from Russia: vk.com, odnoklassniki.ru, etc. And these are more popular than Facebook.
More likely, he could be flying somewhere and the plane either enters US airspace, or has to make an emergency (real or not) landing in the US.
It depends. If you're an American citizen, you break several laws every day, as do the rest of us. Which laws "count," and who decides?

They don't want to be able to arrest everyone. They want to be able to arrest anyone. Data collection processes like Prism are an important tool.
"How many liberal democracies can you point to that have gone the way of totalitarianism, mass imprisonment, and genocide?"

How many 'liberal democracies' have built international surveillance dragnets? How many have secret prisons all over the world? How many spend more militarily than the rest of the world combined? I wouldn't say the US is exactly your run of the mill democracy these days.
How many people do you think are capable of running their own mail server?

There is no irony here. People make the best use of the tools that they have to prevent a future where they wouldn't be able to use such tools because the government would ban/stop the protest.

By your logic, they should stop using their cellphones also and use carrier pigeons.
The government can decide at any point than anyone is an enemy of the state, so if you really want to be careful you should stay completely off the grid. Donating to a third party, or even a major party that happens to lose, could one day become "aiding an enemy of the state."
I'd just download the SDK toolkit, it's got a decent emulator that supports host-GPU acceleration and you can at least get your feet wet.

A typical 25-45 year old Android user is a pretty wide open space dude. I have a HTC OneS but I also had to buy it out of contract.
You know how these things are. Sometimes your lawyer asks you to plead guilty so that you can expect to do fewer years in prison. That does not prove anything.
Oh, and what about this?

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward-snow...

Wouldn't that also be considered aiding an enemy of the state?
I just mean more discussion.
My latest startup is Efficito (a Limited Company, registered in the UK). The web site is http://www.efficito.com and our servers are all in Europe. We have built the service up with a very careful eye for security (why we are going hosted cloud first, and multi-tenant is still in the works).

You have just given me what I think is a very good possibility regarding a marketing message, namely that we are not subject to NSA orders, and that we take security extraordinarily seriously. We are still looking into whole disk encryption for virtual instances, but key management is a non-trivial problem there to get right. For those who want it I can be pretty sure we'd be happy to work with you to find a way of making the system meet your needs. (Of course given a few customers, we could work with a server in Australia too.)

But I also think it goes beyond shipping the data overseas. 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. So you can't only look at where the business's servers are but also where what legal authorities they are obviously subject to.
To where? Anything overseas is stated as fair game for the NSA. They at least pretend to not watch American activity. Any other country will cave to US pressure if they want your data, and of the countries that don't like the US and still have a decent internet connection, they'll probably do worse spying of their own.
Blackscreen on Chrome, Ubuntu. Works fine on Firefox
Ask HN: What threats are present with SELinux, AES, etc?
Forgive the general lack of knowledge about security and cryptography. I had previously operated under the assumption that NSA developed systems for security were pretty sound for business use. Is there any evidence of backdoors or other existential threats to security by using these systems?
The point of this pst is that foreign business will be affected, AFAICT, Europeans have always held the Internet to a stricter standard than Americans and have passed stricter laws around everything from what data can be retained to the behaviour of tracking cookies.

I run businesses in the UK that deal with personal data and sometimes use US companies to do so.

There is a specific provision intended to fix the problem of exporting personal data outside the EEA to be processed in the US, which would otherwise be prohibited because US laws are inadequate in this area: the US Department of Commerce operates a Safe Harbor scheme, recognised by the European authorities, which US businesses can participate in to demonstrate that they handle data with sufficient care to satisfy European standards.

The problem is that if the US government is going to permit itself to access data contrary to the claimed protections anyway, then the Safe Harbor scheme is demonstrably unfit for purpose, and any legal shield it provides to European businesses that want to use US-based services to process personal data is in doubt.

This problem is hardly a new discovery, but until recently, the issue was being dealt with quietly, with European officials making occasional mutterings about being in contact with the US government to resolve the conflict here. As of the past week, I'm not sure that's going to carry much weight any more.

This leaves a paradoxical position for any business wanting to operate legally in both the US and Europe. It's not clear whether the huge players like Google or Facebook could avoid the problem by changing their corporate structures, if doing so means that a parent organisation in the US would not be required to disclose personal data held and processed only in Europe by a separate European legal entity under European data protection law. In practice, this might be worse news for US businesses that aren't yet big enough to play the corporate structures lottery, and for those European companies who benefit from services provided by such companies and might have to make other plans. Obviously quite a few smaller Internet services well known on HN would fall into that category.

If you'd asked me a year ago how the paradox would be resolved, I would probably have cynically suggested that the EU authorities would ask how high when the US authorities told them to jump, as they have done previously with things like travel and banking data. But now that this has become a major public issue that people are actually talking about, any attempt to do that seems likely to turn out very badly for European authorities whose popularity is already at an all-time low. I suspect far more Europeans resent the constant privacy intrusions and security theatre of modern life than many across the Atlantic may realise, probably because the consequences of excessive state surveillance are still within living memory in many European countries, and because all around the Med we've been watching timely reminders playing out over the past 2-3 years.
After reading through some of his tweets, I find myself more confused than not. Bizarre name-calling aside, his views are pretty inconsistent.

For instance, in the tweets cited in the linked article, he repeatedly mentions that IT [dorks / weenies / etc.] have low status and wide access. This is in line with the general premise, and makes sense.

However, some of his other tweets paint a starkly different picture, namely one in which Snowden is a "poseur", and agrees with other commenters' disparaging comments such as "he probably only had access to a printer and copier" or "was given powerpoint 100 training and has delusions of grandeur".
Edward Snowden, thank you for your effort and your unwavering principle in believing what is right!

You are definitely an inspiration to a lot of young people!
There's still a major limit there. The issue of the Verizon and PRISM systems is that they probably involve the possibility at least of legal authority over the vendors. Court orders or possibilities of court orders....

If the NSA is spying on Australians clandestinely, then they don't have that authority and they are limited to what they can scavange. It would be far better if we were to a point where no courts would coerce cooperation of this sort, and the system you are describing is better than what we have. The problem is when the NSA gets a court to forcibly deputize an American business to spy on Australians, and that's a very, very different problem.
Technically there was no "war" in Iraq. The US never officially declared war on Iraq. I might be arguing semantics, but that's probably relevant when you talk about the legality of someone's actions.
Underground Bicycle Parking System in Japan
A relatively recent Nexus device is a good proposition, Google are pretty good at providing the latest OS revisions on the devices and if needed you can flash it to older versions of the OS.

https://developers.google.com/android/nexus/images
Prenda Law’s appeal bond rises to $237,584
> if I didn't have to work here, would I still live here?

A fantastic question, and my answer as a south bay dweller is absolutely-freaking-not. Expensive, hot (for CA), crowded, weak culture:size ratio.
One of the rather interesting side issues in this whole debate has been how casually the rights of foreigners are tossed aside as secondary to those of american citizens. There is intense debate about whether US citizens rights are being violated, but almost nobody questions whether there's any moral or ethical issue with completely unrestrained spying on everybody else.

While I understand that this is largely because the legality of the spying hinges on whether US citizens are subject to it, I still find it a rather fascinating aspect.
You have just given me what I think is a very good possibility regarding a marketing message, namely that we are not subject to NSA orders, and that we take security extraordinarily seriously.

You certainly won't be the first with that idea. I've now lost count of how many blog posts, tweets, forum posts and so on I've seen in the past week that essentially say, "Is the next big selling point for European service companies that we're not subject to US laws?"
Researchers explore how to harvest electricity directly from plants
While I actually hope that the predictions in this article come true, as people should not put their data at risk by allowing it to pass through the US at this point, I am pessimistic that anything will change. I was sure that seizure of overseas internet poker domains, on the basis that .com domains are controlled by an American organization, would have been enough to drastically reduce .com registrations. That didn't happen. People have a tendency not to care about things until it directly smacks them in the face, and then it's too late.
The video and the links at <http://ec.europa.eu/justice/newsroom/data-protection/news/12... contradict at least the point of free personal data flow, european data seems to go only in some directions:

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/EUJustice

Twitter: https://twitter.com/EU_Justice

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/EUJustice
Solving Problems That Count
The idea that would be just as subject to surveillance using Australian hosted servers is pure speculation and not supported by the so far leaked information on PRISM.
Hackers plan space satellites to combat censorship (2012)
ApiAxle - open source API management and analytics proxy | CUBRID Blog
I'm glad I won't be alive to see this.
How Startup Funding Works (Infographic)
The UK has quite a strong military sector with their own secret agencies and a strong relationship with America.

Could that make them capable of similar monitoring? Does the UK have stronger information privacy laws that the US doesn't?
Performance of Raspberry Pi with OpenCV