skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: a HN clone to cover the riots in Sao Paulo, Brazil
I've never seen that search page URL before. As long as I can remember, it has been http://twitter.com/search (which still works).
quite ironic that the (German) site shoves a "like this on FB" prompt in my face as I read
This is seriously the weirdest part of this story so far. Why is it news that this guy, who clearly has resigned, is being "fired"? And why was his precise salary released? Why is it being reported on? Why does it matter that he did, or did not, finish high school?

It feels like some kind of desperate attempt to disparage him. As if someone hopes it will sound like he's a disgruntled former employee that was fired. Or that he was some low level hack of an employee.

And yet no one is disputing that he worked for our spy agencies for the better part of a decade, or that he had a job that would tend to give him significant access. No one is disputing anything he's said at all, as far as I can tell. This shit is irrelevant.
Stealthy? Have you actually seen somebody wearing glass? It's the most noticeable thing about them. During IO there were a bunch of Glass wearers wandering around Moscone and people couldn't stop staring (myself included).

You'd be much better off with something like this: http://www.amazon.com/Waterproof-Camera-Watch-Video-Recorder....
Isn't that referring to this: http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/chinese-hackers-who-...
?

which appears to have been a list of people that had been targets of "surveillance orders", which would have given the Chinese intel on any operatives that were being watched by the US, but isn't the "backdoor access system" that Schneier said it was at the time (seemingly without a source, but it's hard to tell as he doesn't say where that information comes from and no one else seems to have picked it up subsequently).

I swear that that ars story had an HN thread (maybe the washington post source article did?) but I can't find it now.
HN: Unvote Feature
Sometimes I use votes as a bookmark to follow up on promising links later when I have more time. If the link turns out to be link bait or unworthy of a vote, I wish I could unvote it.
We already know that the NSA has access to information specifically requested by an individual either by showing probable cause if they are a U.S. citizen or using some other specific request if they aren't.

It doesn't seem likely a low level border agent would have access to this. If this is standard operating procedure, don't you think we would have heard about it from other people who were presented with printouts of their facebook messages when arriving at the border?

Or more likely, this is FUD that leaves out specific facts (border agents don't have broad access to facebook messages) to give the impression it is linked to a big trending news story.
First, Chevy Chase hardly represents the current cast of SNL. He hasn't been on the show for decades.

Second, I was talking about how you think SNL is building up Biden with positive sketches. I don't agree that they are very positive. Sorry if that's my opinion.

Third, no shit they push a political agenda but its probably less biased than Fox News. They do attack those who are insanely inferior politically (Palin, Perry, Bachmann) because they can and should. I'm just saying that dumb Democrat decisions don't get the kid gloves you seem to be just so sure they do. After the election there hadn't been a lot of noteworthy political sketches this season, they didn't seem to be able to make light of the gun control debate, the sequester, etc.
I do agree.
As a Google-talk/Gmail/Dropbox user, the short-term countermesure might be to encrypt all data [1].But ultimately the long-term goal should be to find an alternative to those services (which is/will be quite hard).

[1] at least there seems to be gtalk plugin already on the works: https://github.com/nicolas-t/gAES
Instead I would suggest a save feature, much like on Reddit.
This is great. Is there an API available to query the real time stats?
The way that many CDNs do this is to use a certificate with multiple names for many of their clients in clusters. Check the certificate on https://cydia.saurik.com/ for an example of this.
It's fascinating how completely different people's experiences with the same thing can be.

I've been using it on my phone and I love it. I always had to jailbreak my phone, but I don't feel like I need to with iOS 7. Though I wish they'd add Quick Reply and then I'd be set.

But, so far, for me, it's been very fluid and smooth.

Drains battery like crazy though. I went to bed 100%, woke up at 3% six hours later.
> it's also speculation on your part to assume he did something especially wrong.

I don't think getting your fifteen minutes of fame is especially wrong. The fault is on the part of the public for being credible; that's how the market works, no?
Not really.
Deprecation of "search.twitter.com" was announced months before.
https://dev.twitter.com/docs/faq#17750
This is called the twenty-four hour news cycle. People want to hear more about this story, but there is nothing more that anyone knows. So we dive into the human element, speculate as to "why", and so on. People keep clicking the ads, so it must be what they want. (We read it, right?)
Horrible example. In the case of Osama the US could have broken each and every law in Pakistan and nobody would give a shit.

This is about a suspect, at best. Not the world's most wanted terrorist.
I think this is a pretty sophisticated PR strategy, actually, especially with regards the timing of the disclosure of Snowden's identity. It's not as formulaic as you describe...

They release some tantalizing tidbits (they are tidbits, aren't they? we already had heard about the metadata in 2006, didn't we?), and at the peak of interest (where did this come from?!?) release Snowden's identity in a carefully crafted video. They maximize control over his story before the government even has any idea who he is, before they can even think how to paint a picture of him in a negative light. Once the media has spent its powder covering Snowden (letting him speak for himself in a gorgeous HD video), there is little the government can do to add to the story; Snowden's identity is largely frozen in the picture that Greenwald et al have painted, while the government PR machine is struggling to come up with a cohesive strategy, let alone a response.

Then, after the Snowden story has run its course (at the point where talking about Snowden any more will mean losing viewers), they drop the big disclosures. At least that's my prediction. So what might the next disclosures be? This is pure paranoid speculation, but I think Snowden hinted at it in the video: the government is recording all telephone conversations, but storing it according to a legal theory that says that as long as no one actually listens to the recordings, they don't need a warrant. They obtain a warrant that is individual-specific, but instead of using that warrant to capture evidence of current actions, they use that warrant to retrieve all of the target's past activities.
There's a lot of skeptics in this thread whether the US immigration would actually snoop through social networking sites. But if these two cases are true as reported, it seems there's some level of semi-automatic filtering of social media accounts for people entering the country.

That is completely different to what is being alleged, especially in light of events this week, that they had access to private facebook messages.
Has any programmer ever disappeared after writing code that pokes fun / ire / controversy at the NSA? Has anyone in the US ever disappeared after something like this?

I guess we can imagine a new world where up is down and white is black, but in the current world, the government is just a bureaucracy filled with bureaucrats trying to get promoted for coming up with crazy ideas. Disappearing random people is not high on anyone's agenda, I don't think.
Maybe because federal taxpayers paid his salary?
Luckily, the US hasn't declared war since Vietnam anyway.
One practical reason to object to the government holding private information on everybody is that such information might be vulnerable to theft.

This is an example of a channel for information theft. What happens when someone submits a request for your information with your (forged) signature? That would be fraud, of course, but that doesn't mean it won't ever happen. Will they get all your texts and gmail?

Maybe they check requests very thoroughly and this isn't an exploitable security hole. But it changes the equation of storing data on 3rd party services: instead of just trusting the cloud provider and his software, you also have to trust the government to never make a mistake.
Many countries consider whether something is a job based on what it should be paid (accounting for typical pay, minimum wage, etc), rather than what someone is paid.

This is to prevent abuses such as shipping in workers from a poorer country, giving them food, board and $10 a week for them to stack shelves, and claiming "It's not a job", so the not-workers don't require a working visa.

Similar judgements are also often made in relation to tax law, working conditions, etc.
I actually posted the article since I found it amusing more than anything. As if anyone was still wondering what happened to his position.
I think I'm going to do this, just for shits and giggles. But I wish the site said more about what they consider a valid digital signature. I wonder if the US government has a general policy on this? TBH, I've never really bothered with digital signatures on email much, so I'm pretty clueless on the topic. shrug
Well, I sure do hope that the OS image doesn't have keylogger pre-installed and auto-generated user password is not available to the owner..
I have been struggling with these types of questions in my career as well. For a while, I was more of a front-end developer doing Swing rich-client desktop applications and touched on some mobile development with some basic back-end. The last few years, I spent doing more of the back-end development, "big data" technology like Hadoop/HBase and worrying more about HA, consistency, redundancy. What I found is that if your not careful with the type of job, this applies to everything but more so for back-end, you can be stuck doing grunt work, data quality, operations and system up keep. Moreover, I think most of the innovative, creative, and interesting work is moving away from back-end and into the space of data scientist type positions. So currently I am stuck in between, I have experience in front and back end -- this makes it hard to find the right job. I think I might go back to doing mobile development just because it seems to be more of a greenfields with some hard problems still to be solved. In terms of pay it's about the same, maybe back-end developer gets 10% more. That's just my thoughts.
> No amount of cooperation from Certificate Authorities will enable passive attacks on SSL

Actually, it's quite common for CAs to do the site admins a favor and generate the keypair for them. The admin then downloads the private key and installs it on his server.

On TLS connections where the client and server do not negotiate the use of Ephemeral Diffie-Hellman (EC)DHE (sometimes called EDH), then the CA could have retained the private key data which could be used to decrypt the packet capture after-the-fact.

Google should be applauded for configuring their servers to prefer (EC)DHE on their TLS services. It also means they can fight a law enforcement subpoena for their private key.
Can anyone spot where the TI Omap 4 processor is in this?
The root cause? It's always money. Lawrence Lessig makes this clear, in a TED talk no less ( http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_t... )
> Existing and proposed laws, especially as relate to the US Patriot Act, etc., provide
for secret warrants, searches and seizures of data, such as library records.

> Some such laws provide for criminal penalties for revealing the warrant, search or seizure, disallowing the disclosure of events that would materially affect the users of a service
such as rsync.net.

> rsync.net and its principals and employees will in fact comply with such warrants and their provisions for secrecy.

http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
And why was his precise salary released

A little known fact is that thousands of companies participate in this (including Booz Allen): http://www.theworknumber.com/Employees/index.asp

This is an Equifax-owned entity that may resell salary information and dates worked at a company.

It is possible that a reporter just bought the salary info, but in this case it does seem that Booz Allen plainly released it.

More info: http://redtape.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/30/16762661-exclusi...
His Hugo-winning, perhaps most famous novel, "Stand On Zanzibar" also deals a bit as well with surveillance, terrorism and authoritarism (among others). A great read that manages to stay hugely relevant today. I'd definitely recommend it to any Sci-Fi lover.
I'm sure Peter King would say yes. He, or some others, would probably try to spin it to fall under the Espionage Act[1] or something.

Whether or not that would stand up to Supreme Court scrutiny is, I think, an open question.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espionage_Act_of_1917
They'll probably rewrite the PR so that he was fired before he quitted. Snowden will be a fired, highschool dropout with no job.
Daniel Ellsberg turned himself over to the authorities, was released on bail, and saw the charges against him thrown out. Today I imagine he would be held indefinitely in degrading conditions, brutally interrogated, and sentenced to decades in prison if the government ever bothered bringing him to trial.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/09/h...
> As if anyone was still wondering what happened to his position.

Maybe it'll show up in the next "Who's Hiring" thread here on HN. :-)
Hack everything by simply copying a cookie?
Most Web Applications use cookies to manage the session for a user and allow you to stay logged in even if the browser was closed.

Lets pretend we did everything in the book to make sure the cookie itself is save.

encrypt the content
set http only
set secure
ssl is used for the connection
we check for tempering with the content of the cookie

Is it possible to prevent someone with physical access to the machine to copy the cookie and reuse it on another machine and thus stealing the session?

From the answers it does not seem like it.
The quotes on the home page don't have a closing quotation mark, and are not attributed to any people.
> I thought, after 35 years with this language, I would have finally would gotten to the end of inconsistent rules that favor what looks/sounds/feels right.

That's your mistake: You're looking for consistent rules, instead of looking for what communicates.

In the "Two i's" title, if you leave out the apostrophe, all you're left with is capitalization. So you can try:

Two is

Two Is

Two IS

All of those are clearly wrong; they beg the question [1], "Two is what?"

The problem is, "is" is already a word. You can't possibly use it as a plural of "I", because there's no way in the world that anyone could tell that that's what you meant.

So, you have to use the apostrophe here.

It's really fairly simple if you forget about looking for consistent rules.

Of course, this is not important, but with any luck it's interesting.

[1] This applies to "beg the question" too. Forget the rules, and instead communicate with people the way they do in the real world.
It doesn't hurt that he presents very well on camera, either.
Ask HN: should we create the UK version of the EFF
Many years ago I worked for the national council for civil liberties, (early ninties) and we created an idea called "electronic liberty" to be the UK EFF - it never took off and I moved on.

Should we revisit the concept?
The lion beta was a nightmare as well. I have never seen an os with that many kernel panics (definitely not custom driver related), lag and just random flakiness. And safari was just in a league of its own - although I do miss the tabs on top.
>It feels like some kind of desperate attempt to disparage him.

Not desperate at all; the tactic is wildly successful. Just look at what happened with Wikileak's work with its editor Assange and source Manning. The same tactics will come up against the Guardian with journalist Greenwald and source Snowden. The situations are similar in enough ways.
The US Government sought an injunction preventing the New York Times from publishing parts of the Pentagon Papers. The case quickly got to the Supreme Court, which threw out the injunction 6-3. It was one of those rare decisions in which nine justices generated ten different opinions. One was a basic, unsigned opinion of the court throwing out the injunction with barely any reasoning because the majority could only agree on the result, not the process to get there.

Suffice it to say, this is a very complicated question. I'm inclined to believe that any attempts to prevent journalists from publishing additional documents like the ones now in question will be quashed. But it's not a sure thing.
It would be pretty funny if he just came back to work next Monday and pretended like nothing had happend.

"Bill, have you seen the game last night? What, why is everyone looking at me? Do I have something stuck in my teeth again?"
Is this part of the 'add your own contact information for this person' functionality? I'm not seeing anything but that.

It is a rather strange feature.
Who cares? Do you want to live in a country where this matters?
Reminds me of another classic, much earlier..with Gene Hackman.. playing the sax mournfully, after he tore his apartment to shreds looking for a hidden bug.

'The Conversation' 1974 : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071360/
You always have to look at the wording of polls - that is exactly why I included it in my comment. I don't think this is "spin" on Pew's part but the fact that the current situation is different today than in 2006. In this case the comparison is mixed: the wording is worse is some ways better in others.

On one hand listening/reading without warrant is worse than tracking with secret order. But on the other hand targeting suspected terrorists is not as bad as targeting millions of Americans. After all that might be you!

The theory is that a secret court order procedure on much broader surveillance program is enough to make NSA's surveillance acceptable to 27% of Democrats seems farfetched to me.

Of course the clencher is that the new program is IN ADDITION TO the continuing 2006 program. This was not mentioned in the poll question. Too bad most people don't understand this.
no, although if you check out the HTTP requests your browser is making to our servers, you might find something interesting ;)

again, there is no real-time API as of now, and don't count on anything staying put - this is a labs product!
If you visit Reid Hoffman's page, do you see the "web page" link that I put there? If so, it's a bug at least for some of us :) I'm wondering if it's just Premium users. www.linkedin.com/in/reidhoffman
I was going to say that looking at it through a more cynical lens it's to discredit him, but I'm not sure such a lens is required. The difference in reported income, the firing, the criminal investigation, and his job being re-listed as a junior level position are tools to do this. The reason for this smearing could be a PR stunt to shore up investors' confidence (and therefore the stock price), or it could be character assassination and to make casual readers think this was a low-level employee with problems telling the truth and holding down a job.

The article that's linked half way through paints Booz Allen as a wonderful, benevolent employer that was gracious enough to hire someone without formal credentials (in this job climate, no less!). It's most certainly to bolster its reputation on Wall Street and also to make people think Snowden was an ungrateful chump for giving up such a cushy position.

I've seen it reported in other articles, but I didn't see mention in this article about him not finishing HS. Was this original article edited?
I think he knows. The disagreement here is that characterizing pure-CS-stuff as "innovation" and the other stuff as not is an incredibly narrow way to define innovation.

It feels like LowKarmaAccount really defines innovation as how far down the stack it is, which is a wholly arbitrary (and IMO nonsensical) criteria.

By that criteria a helicopter is not innovative because it's just a slight rearrangement of fixed wing aircraft, an "evolutionary" progression. By that criteria the Internet is not innovative because it was just the natural evolution and consequence of radio and telephony.
That was sort of my point: those apps require sizable teams and a huge amount of cooperation from dependencies.

If you're operating in secret, cooperation is going to be a hard commodity to come by. I also feel like a sizable team of the sort of people who work at Google would inevitably have leaked something about this before now.
What is that book?
I think persona is extremely useful. The only addition I'd like is for a similar service that allows you to query an identity provider for a public key for a user.
Time to air some dirty laundry. I worked for one of their competitors - Riverbed was set up after we were successful with the intention of beating us. (They eventually did mainly because we were acquired by a big company who essentially threw away the $300m they spent on us.)

But Riverbed's SMB implementation was done by people who didn't understand it, and who had a dangerous attitude. Essentially a WAN optimizer is looking at commands and responses going by and doing a beneficial man in the middle attack based on that data. One technical issue is to decide how you handle the unknown - eg a client or server speaking a dialect you haven't tested, or a command you haven't seen before/developed support for. Our attitude was always that it invalidated any caches, and worst case would disable acceleration on that connection. Riverbed just let it fly by.

An example of how that breaks things is that there is something similar to an ioctl to set ranges of a file to be zeroed out. Riverbed didn't know about that, and would keep returning the old cached contents. Similarly they didn't know about alternate data streams, and especially how they are named which breaks a naive filename caching implementation. At one point I sat down and came up with 5 separate demonstrations of how Riverbed corrupt data (ie 5 different areas of the protocol they messed up). The first one got published and Riverbed threatened to sue, as there was some Oracle inspired clause in their legal agreements! Our lawyers were chickens and that was the last of it.

My own view is that customer data is sacrosanct and I made sure we always did the right thing. They played fast and loose. However most people would blame Microsoft if there are issues rather than realising it was Riverbed's attitude causing corruption.

Riverbed did many other things right. They didn't get acquired like most in the industry, so they didn't have to deal with being squelched by an acquirer. Their marketing focussed a lot on the low end - when people already have two devices they are likely to buy more of the same (sunk cost fallacy). And they did TCP only (we did IP and TCP). TCP only makes it far easier to configure, load balance and do auto-discovery.
Configurability is the root of all evil, or, The design of Fish.
Overheard on IRC:

"Mr Snowden's employer, defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, said on Tuesday it had fired the 29-year-old infrastructure analyst for violating its ethics code."

… They found out that he had some.
Scary that Greenwald has to be quite so specific about Snowden's state of mind. Between the lines, he's not about to jump off a bridge. It suggests that they're genuinely worried about what someone might do to Snowden.