skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Simple solution: A startup firm that warrant canaries FOR you. Every week your company receives a phone call. The pre-arranged contact is asked "Were any federal subpeonas issued for you to disclose customer data in a blanket fashion?"

The normal reply would (hopefully) no. Otherwise it might be "no comment."

I believe this would absolve the contact in question from perjuring themselves under the fifth amendment and would be no different than those "our website is hackproof" badges that get sold.

If someone wants to run with the idea, I'm game.
Whoa! Not saying CreateSpace is disreputable at all. I love CreateSpace.

It is, however, a self-publishing service and thus it is "disreputable" in that sense. There's additional credibility when you're backed by a publisher, particularly a major one. Thus, by using CreateSpace, you're lacking some credibility there. That credibility, as well as the sales channels, can be pretty valuable for getting a book into a store.

There's nothing wrong with CreateSpace specifically though.

That said, Barnes and Noble will not order books for their stores through CreateSpace (unless, perhaps, specifically requested by a customer). That is, it won't stock books with a CreateSpace ISBN on their shelves.

One person (who handles independently published books) at Barnes and Noble told me that this is because CreateSpace / Amazon is a competitor. Maybe that's true, or maybe CreateSpace does something funky with returns (like not accepting them with good enough terms) or doesn't offer a sufficient discount. I'm not sure.

Regardless of the reason, the fact remains that Barnes and Noble will not accept books printed by CreateSpace for their stores. (They will, however, list them on their website... which I can't imagine many people order from.)

AND -- if you purchase your ISBN from CreateSpace, then CreateSpace owns your ISBN and only CreateSpace can print your book. You can't, say, have CreateSpace print your book for Amazon sales and then Lightning Source print your book for B&N sales (or Pothi.com for India).

If purchase your own ISBN (for like $250), then you can print through multiple sources. This will allow you to print your book with Lightning Source (as well as CreateSpace), and thus get into Barnes and Noble stores.

That said, for the vast, vast majority of self-published books (or any book), getting into Barnes and Noble stores just isn't going to happen anyway.

Happy to answer more questions / clarify!
Surprisingly good song about Snowden & Prism:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA6T8mQg-pw
I've recognized that too. But with that, do you think there is any room to grow (as individuals and as a global society) under these circumstances (>everyone everywhere these days loves their country and distrusts their government)?

Personally, I find it hard to love my country (not even sure what that really means to me) or any country I've been in for an extended period of time. Maybe it is because I keep abstracting country back to ever changing lines on the ever changing maps drawn throughout history. Though, I'm not saying that there are some places that I wouldn't rather live over others.

>The question, as always, is how individuals and groups of people navigate the government and vice versa. The specific limits vary from one place to another but the attitudes seem remarkably stable over time too.

Maybe that's why it is easy for some individuals/organizations to play chess games between nation states for whatever (usually business) reasons? At least that's what is going on in my head now about the larger geopolitical landscape in relation to some national and some international issues…
The ABA ought to threaten disbarment of any government lawyer that argues something so unamerican.
This is essentially the same system, but with a middle man. It may obfuscate some of the players involved, but it doesn't solve the issue that you are still disclosing information due to the pre-agreed context of the conversation.
My point is that engineers have no recourse to complaining about being 'overridden'. Politicians don't act; they don't build space shuttles, they don't design nuclear reactors. They give a high level set of orders which engineers either fulfill safely, or not at all. As an example:

In the case of Chernobyl, the problem was actually inexperienced plant operators running an experiment about disaster recovery on a reactor with a positive void coefficient and poorly designed control rods. The positive void coefficient was a limitation of our nuclear design capabilities at the time, the control rods were just poorly designed by some engineer. Either of those factors could have prevented the disaster, and neither of them can be attributed to any politician.
I'm not sure that's true that CreateSpace recycles its ISBNs. I haven't seen a credible source discussing this, and it doesn't make sense to me. ISBNs are cheap and it would be a pretty gross misuse of the ISBN system (which are supposed to be unique even across different formats of a book).

It may be that they will "recycle" an ISBN if you start the process with them but never actually complete the publishing process.
There is no secret law. FISA, the law which authorizes surveillance, is a public law approved by Congress.

Courts make secret decisions all the time, especially when surveillance is involved. When a local police department gets a wiretap on a mob boss, it happens secretly. If a detective oversteps in the midst of a larger investigation, it's quite likely that the ruling about the particular use of surveillance would be sealed.

The question here is not whether we have courts that make secret rulings. It shouldn't surprise anyone that judicial oversight over in-progress investigations would be secret while the investigation (and related investigations) were in progress.

The useful policy question is what the scope and length of the seal should be. For FISA, it seems that the scope and length is "everything, and forever". We can do better than that.
So while on the one hand Congress, NSA, etc. are denying what Snowden is claiming; on the other hand, they're calling him a traitor and guilty of treason.

If he's lying, _how_ can he be guilty of "treason"? Don't you have to reveal some classified (and truthful) info to be guilty of treason?
ha, beat me to it, was just writing this!

my own take is each person asks individually (through a service) and the company is then forced to respond via an automated method (or set up an api) to deal with the deluge of requests (sound familiar?)
That's a summary of the Washington Post story and what was changed. It looks like the Washington Post reporting of this was a disaster. Not only did they initially publish language that was more sweeping than the Guardian, but they had absolutely no backbone and edited their story when companies said the NSA slides were wrong.

It seems the claims of the Guardian have not been edited, proven incorrect, or retracted. I haven't re-read their entire article, but it appears to be the same one that was initially published.

It appears that the exposé you linked eventually concludes: "According to a more precise description contained in a classified NSA inspector general’s report, also obtained by The Post, PRISM allows “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” rather than directly to company servers." Looking at this from a process perspective and not a technical one, it appears there is little functional difference between this and "direct access" to servers. And it perfectly explains why the NSA presentation cut to the point: you get data from the company's systems without the company being involved.

It's up to the companies and the NSA to clarify things, but it appears the NSA slides are likely correct in terms of process, if not in technical terms.
Thanks for the info!

What's your opinion of file-tagging systems like Tabbles and the new file tagging feature in OS X finder? Tabbles is a far cry from full WinFS, but it enables some interesting organizational techniques. I've been using it lately and I like it. But tags don't always seem to be enough. In addition to tags, I'd like to have genuine fields.

Seems like a NoSQL database would be a decent core for a poor-man's WinFS implementation.
I'm curious if you can even attach a quantitative value to information omission and lying through experiment. I suspect that there is some sort of nash equilibrium achieved that creates more overall welfare in a system with information omission and lying than an identical system minus the information omission and lying. I'm curious what quantity of omission/lying (assuming it's measurable) produces the greatest overall welfare even if some individual actors may fare more poorly in said system.
So? The "so" is that it's the canary operator's deliberate actions that turn the "being compelled to stay silent" into a "being compelled to lie."
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Deep Learning used to improve Google's Photo Search
http://www.people-press.org/files/2013/06/6-10-13-4.png
I'd take this further and do a poll of people to find out how many people agree with individual provisions of the Constitution. Like literally show people one clause/section at a time, have them read it and ask them what parts they agree and disagree with.
More of Plotkin's publications:

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/gdp/publications/
It sounds like this congressman is begging for another leak.

I smell blood. And a republican president in 2016. It looks like this is going to be Obama's big theme for his second term. Like LBJ, he inherited a shitty situation and made it much worse, and thus lost out for credit on all of his domestic work.

We'll see, but I don't see any easy out for Obama. Ironically the only thing saving him is that the conservatives really love these policies, and the liberals, who should be at his throat for this, really can't because he's part of their club. Lucky duck.
Yet another Pure CSS3 Angry Bird
By the way, check out this project posted by user "freework" above:

https://github.com/priestc/Library-Transfer-Protocol

It's WinFS inspired.

If you love thinking about this sort of stuff, maybe you should get back into it! :-)
Back in the early 90s, it was an actual scandal that the Pentium had such a huge heat sink. The magazines (at that time, computing magazines were quite popular) were joking that next they'd put a fan on the CPU. Haha.

Those were the days, really, because there was still the possibility that in the future you'd have any damned thing in your computer, not necessarily an x86. You could have an Alpha or a SPARC or PPC or maybe an i960. And it would be silent and use no power and you'd install it in your bitchin' conversion van.
I too was expecting something very different. Something nice and uncreative.
I support PRISM and don't think Snowden is a traitor. Is that opinion acceptable?

PRISM can't be dismantled, for the same reason no one on the planet has figured out how to dismantle nuclear arsenals. The other guy is doing it too.
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I completely forgot about Snowden in Catch-22, weird that Edward Snowden and the fictional character share the same name...unless that was intentional.
With all due respect to the former CIA officers, there's a bunch of poor and outdated advice in this article.

The one I'll point out is using a dead person's birth certificate to get ID and an SSN. The databases for the death index were cleaned up after 9/11 and if you try this, your attempt will be flagged and you'll likely be visited by law enforcement pretty shortly. You will not get an ID nor an SSN.

The best way to hide is to not leave any (legitimate) money/electronic trails. Practice disinformation. For example, use a credit card to buy a plane ticket to Bangkok on Saturday, then go buy a bus ticket to Mongolia with cash for Friday and similar tactics. It won't stop professionals from eventually finding you, but it will buy you (sometimes significant) time.

All this is pointless because almost certainly the US IC knows exactly where Snowden is already. It's laughable that anyone believes they're still searching for Snowden.
Eugene Chung Out of TechStarsNY just Two Weeks before Demo Day
> Conversely, if we lived in the same world of intensive surveillance, but where law enforcement was instead 100% efficient, we wouldn't have the often valuable ability to break the law.

You can break the law. You just can't avoid punishment. Difference is subtle, but important.

My country lived 20 years in a dictatorship but the people breaking the law (including intellectuals/communists from middle class), for good or for worse, were the ones that forced a change back into democracy. Now the president is an "ex-terrorist", and we have superfluous legislation and bad law enforcement because the ones now in power abhor it. The result is corruption and crime.

This is just arguing two sides of the same crap (paternal, surveillance state in one side; granny, lenient state in the other) without changing the rules of the game (e.g., less state).
Bill Regulating 3D Printed Guns Announced In NYC
It'll be interesting to see if AMD cornering both the new xbox and ps4 has an effect on game engines for the pc as well -- specifically if the tuning that probably will go into console versions will translate to pc -- and whether or not Intel (and nvidia) will end up being penalized as a result.
Why would you have to produce an unsent draft in discovery? Are employee's personal notes and diaries really subject to this?

Why would subsequently deleted and unsent drafts even be in your data retention policy?
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No, you have to wage war against the United States or provide aid and comfort to its enemies. Revealing true classified information, per se, is neither necessary or sufficient for treason (one of the reason for the Espionage Act and other laws criminalizing revealing secret defense info is that those acts often won't meet the Constitutional standard for treason.)
> they pass on the volume discount to employees who want to buy one for home

Really? I don't see the use case for ordering a PC this way for the home. When I'm buying a home PC, or recommending one for others, it's either:

(a) A bottom-of-the-barrel PC. As long as it has 1GB of memory and more than one core, you can use it for web browsing, Youtube, email, and word processing. This is what non-techies usually want (but they don't know they want it and may get upsold by good marketing). This is what I want unless I'm planning on running a specific application that requires more.

(b) A powerful PC for gaming. It needs a decent discrete GPU if it's going to play current games. Most office PC's don't have one, unless you work for Pixar.

AFAIK the machines purchased by corporations for general office use are usually middle-of-the-road beasts that cost more than category (a) but don't have the discrete GPU of category (b). I'd be guessing they'd be a waste of money for home use, even after the volume discount.
hey, maybe he has some bitcoins
I really hope this issue sticks around long enough to be the theme of Obama's second term -- not because I want it to ruin his legacy, but because it's a big enough issue that it needs to not go away.
There is nothing sad about it. The "secret court" (FISC) is a panel of regular U.S. District Court judges created by Congress in the FISA to add an additional layer of protection on activity that would otherwise operate entirely in secret within the executive branch. They key understanding is that it is empowered to grant warrants in situations where an Article III warrant would not be Constitutionally required (specifically, surveillance of foreign intelligence agents within the U.S.). Surveillance that would require a warrant under the Constitution still requires the government to obtain a warrant from an Article III court.

FISA did not move some previously public check on executive power into a secret court within the DOJ. Instead, it created an additional mechanism for the judiciary to exercise some supervision over executive activity that would not otherwise be subject to any judicial oversight under the Constitution.
The next 9/11 could be tomorrow. I'd certainly rather have PRISM running with even a slight chance of preventing it than see 2,000 americans die.
Wikipedia leads me to the belief that "omission" will "give rise to liability when the law imposes a duty to act". More specifically:

* "the omission is expressly made sufficient by the law defining the offense; or"

* "a duty to perform the omitted act is otherwise imposed by law (for example one must file a tax return)."

I don't know of any such law involving canaries.
How is frame any less correct?
Public Knowledge [ http://publicknowledge.org ] is shoulder to shoulder with the EFF. PK does the actual boots-on-the-ground lobbying in Washington that the EFF refuses to get involved in.
Thanks for the correction, I'm glad to hear the law was modified. I went back to the story in Wired and I see they did make note of the change to the law.
I think part of iOS 7 task is to create buzz. And it's doing it successfully (with hundreds of votes and comments on this and Marco Arment's thread). The last few iOS iteration, for lack of a better word, has been boring.

At this point, iOS is walking on the similar path to Windows Phone 7. Looking back at WP7, it did generate a lot of buzz, it rallies a lot of MS fan out to become the product's evangelist.

Time will tell whether iOS 7 will sell. I bet it will.
You mean besides running the secret prisons? It's exactly the opposite for me; I can deal with the NSA overreaching on surveillance (so long as they occasionally get slapped back), but the CIA is a national embarrassment.
It couldn't stop the Tsarnaevs.
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Putin on NSA leak: Government surveillance shouldn’t break law
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So, again, theoretically: if one were to infiltrate Kenya, capture commercial wallets, link their prices with objects, one can create a network of consumers and a decent amount of data from the transactions. Introducing Kenya, or any developing country, to Bitcoin can be used as a way to gather insight on markets- perfect for knowing what products to advertise- with this I came to the conclusion that distributed-public-pseudoanonymity allows anyone to monitor markets in real time when you know commercial wallets and their menu / items that they're selling. Is this legal?
Want Speed? Pass by Value
i'm surprised at the democrat vs. republican split on this. i would have guessed the opposite result.
Would you also vote against the 2nd Ammendment? That would probably save a lot more than 2000 lives.
This will get messy. Everyone will start pulling at this database. Can they send men to prison on account the information needed to exonerate them is classified, even if the person requesting the data is the same person under surveillance?
It would be very interesting to see what would happen if this were to occur in a case where the defendant's phone records were relevant to the defense's case and the defense attorney asked for the NSA records to demonstrate innocence. Not sure if this case qualifies or not, as I haven't heard anything of it other than this article.
honestly, i'd love to have this guy in my team at Microsoft. its good to have a reflective nature on what's not working.
It would be hard for you to have been more wrong in your assumption, in regards to me.

Speaking of assumptions, I didn't call you a fanboy. I said it was a peculiarity of Apple culture. Given that I only have "a single comment of mine" on which to evaluate, it sounded like so many other comments on Apple equipment, where failures are papered over.

And given that it's a beta, not an alpha, two reboot crashes in one day is still definitely not what I'd characterise as "very stable". I'd even be wary of using that for an alpha - a "very" stable software suite simply shouldn't be crashing that often, regardless of where it is in the cycle.
New 31-km-long International Linear Collider ready for construction
Could you elaborate on your question? I seem to not understand its context with relation to the article.
List of government surveillance projects
It always makes me think of the Cybermen from Doctor Who. Fits perfectly.
Oops that is the WaPo story you are right. Also the summary above sounds like the story that floated by on HN yesterday (hard to keep track since all this site is this week is NSA outrage), IE: data is sent via sftp to offsite servers by humans when complying with requests.
I assume they will know if you don't use a plane ticket that they know you bought, but the idea is that by the time they could know that you are already in a different place?

That is pretty clever. I wonder if tickets with less verification could be even more effective (for example, two bus tickets; one with cash and one with credit for a day later.) Might buy you more time, but the lower ticket price might also make it less convincing.
But it hasn't stopped anything, and it won't. It will only get abused.
Even better a dual Killer Instict cabinet: a guaranted way of destroying both your controllers :-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0RJDsH1D8g
What does it say about USA when countries like Russia look like the "reasonable" ones?