skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that the blame is shared - the appeal of ubiquitous surveillance and related is just too great for any executive branch to resist at least right now. I'm not entirely sure about congress, I think mostly they're just easily manipulated.

But, I know quite a few folks who work for fort meade both govies and contractors, and it seems pretty clear to me that the nsa has significantly mutated in terms of their internal culture, goals and morality in the last 20 years. Primarily 2001+. I think most of them would agree with that though they might not consider it as bad as I do.

Based on how gen Alexander frequently takes his narrative straight to the press (+10 2-3 full page section A stories in the washington post in the last 12 months alone) and some other factors I honestly believe that organization has a life of its own and would at least take an unusual amount of effort to train.

Comparing them to the CIA it's very telling. WHile the CIA has traditionally done a lot of shit and been the "cowboys" if you will, they give the impression of an organization (today) that is much less prone to systemically "go rogue".

Not that I'm implying the NSA programs aren't with executive branch blessing. Just that if by some miracle you got someone running the show that didn't want to spy on every item on the earth, they might find it pretty hard to shut down the machine.

My (uninformed opinion) is that it mostly came from the sick, sick amounts of money they started getting post 911 as a big part - someone who knows the situation pretty well guessed that they may in fact be up 600% in total buget (combined) as compared to around y2k. The second biggest factor was the intelligance community reorginization 10ish years ago that created the DNI and has everyone including the NSA and CIA reporting to them. As an outsider, it seems the DNI never quite managed to be a strong enough organization to keep these proudly independent orgs under their control and working together. Both groups were thus left to do battle and arguable the NSA won at least budget wise, though CIA ultimately managed to bypass their boss and regain a quasi-independant status at least with Obama.

The last bit is tech, even though it's obvious. Things are just sickly out of balance now in terms of ease of surveillance, data storage, etc in favor of the eavesdroppers. It's like taking a junkie who's been pretty functional for 20 years and locking them in a room with unlimited drugs, strippers and so much money they make it rain just by walking. Who could resist?

Whatever other mistakes are being made (and there are plenty) the NSA is a big, lumbering, arrogant agency filled with political power. We've got to shoot it in the head and start over.
Economics Redefined
It's hardly being a jackass to wish that my taxes weren't wasted, in any way whatsoever.
Facebook HQ Europe is based in Ireland. They must follow the Irish data protection law. Some info about getting access or modifying / deleting your information can be found at

http://www.dataprotection.ie/ViewDoc.asp?DocID=858&UserLang=...
American who leaked NSA secrets is a free man in Hong Kong
One way I think about this is the parallel with unions.

The fundamental concept of unions and collective bargaining are good and, if you will, wholesome. There are working environments where it would be difficult to have a voice without such a facility in place.

However, it is my opinion that, unions have degenerated into virtual viruses that kill their hosts. Unions have optimized their side of the equation to such an extent that they are now absolutely deadly for both industry and government. The simplest example of this are the ridiculous benefit and pension packages they have obtained. These packages are mathematically impossible to sustain without hurting both their host and people outside the union. Imagine hiring an employee, paying them above industry average and then having to continue paying them 90% of that salary for life once they retire.

How does that happen? Are these organizations evil? Are the people evil?

Well, no, the people in the unions, the average union member is not evil at all. Tese are generally good folks just like anyone else in the country, union or not.

Where is the evil?

At some level it is in the union's management. Perhaps not explicitly. Again, most of the people running unions are probably just as nice as anyone else.

The evil really resides in the system and its interaction with other systems. Union leadership and me bership seek to optimize the deals they make looking mostly only at their criteria: more money, more benefits, protections, etc. taken to an extreme this leads to evolving a "virus" genetically coded to kill the host.

Part of this is facilitated by incompetent negotiators on the other side of the table, particularly in government.

That was a long setup to draw a parallel between unions and government agencies entrusted with national security.

The vast majority of the people who work for these agencies are good people. The failure is in the system of rules that they operate under and, perhaps, a failure to, just like unions, look way beyond self needs and consider a sphere beyond theirs and a timeline far into the future.

In the end it is a failure in the leadership of these organizations. They all work for the executive branch, which means the buck stops with the President.
Go Montreal!
EHR (electronic health records) Developer Code of Conduct
I have direct experience with an international academic conference that at one time rotated between being hosted in the USA and "abroad". The conference now avoids hosting in the USA because it is too difficult for academic phds to get travel visas. So much for your theory
1). LOL
2). They did fix it - they stamped cancelled on a visa the guy (allegedly) shouldn't have. Fixed. Seems to me, that's the American way, no? :P
What iOS 7 design should have been
How switching to Ubuntu will help me in this case? This makes no sense. PRISM probably monitors the network traffic that goes through the US. It makes no difference what OS you're using.
No, it's a ciphersuite; the server and client have to agree to use it.
impulsively down-voted you out of sheer bewilderment that anyone could possibly think that selling an app is more important than a systematic and widespread government invasion of civilian privacy

But not every story about PRISM is important or even telling us anything new. Reflexively upvoting any story that has to do with the government being "bad" is just going to fill the front page with a lot of repeated info (at best) and speculative nonsense (at worst).
Video: Drones, Quadrupeds, Humanoids, and More Robots From ICRA 2013
Well, we don't have to. But if you say so, I suppose it's the way to bet.
Yes, it's true that Now TV are relatively unknown despite a great catalogue.

The upside is that they have much more recent movies than other services.

The downside is that it is much more expensive than Netflix and Lovefilm combined (£9 for 3 months and £15 p/m thereafter).

It depends what you are looking for really. You can actually compare Now TV with the other service providers at Tank Top Movies in case you want to see how they stack up.
No they can't, because the public keys for properties like Google are increasingly "pinned" in the browser binary itself.
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At which point we've crossed into "Matter of opinion" territory.
Two words:

mainstream media.
So you are saying that Mozilla can be a trustworthy partner in the development of Persona (since it is opensource, I guess?), but not a trustworthy Persona provider (since they are US based). That sounds reasonable, and Mozilla deserves much credit for that.
What is ASCII?
Does switching to Ubuntu really help you that much? Unless there are secret NSA backdoors in Windows/OS X. Hell even under Ubuntu they could just backdoor my nvidia drivers.

I would really struggle to recommend using Tor as a "daily driver" for web browsing as well. Unless we want to go back to the 56k web.

Most of the others (bitcoin,social networks) rely on network effects anyway.
Elon Musk is what PR should be
3 features that improve Facebook ad targeting
Interns at Google probably make more than you
Meanwhile Netflix seem desperate to link my Netflix and Facebook accounts (which I have no interest in doing), so much so that I have to make sure I'm signed out of Facebook before even going near the Netflix site.
Depends on what you consider to be the "app". The procedure you describe means the app gets a new name, a new bundle ID, means that no existing purchasers get a copy of the newly submitted app, no automatic upgrades, user settings are not migrated, no reviews transfer over, etc.
Ultimately, all security is by obscurity or delay by physical impediment. Kerckhoff's doctrine is just an abstraction in a limited context. Throw in all complications of the real world, and your left with just those two.
lol, this made my day
Perfect use for the Pi I have collecting dust (played with it for a few days). Someone should sell a turnkey box to plug your TV into.
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No, I'm thinking about the design decisions the Web Crypto team made and the mailing list posts that supported them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5868581
Zwamy Job: Cool biz idea to create "the Spotify of Images"
I'm not sure what you argue exactly. That policing has no effect on crime rates?

The modern state we have is here not to build Heaven on Earth, but to avoid Hell. Eliminating all crime is impossible, but without state intervention you end up with Somalia, Afghanistan or post-Katrina New Orleans.
This is great. I have a single free app I have no interest in updating, but which I am forced to pay apple £60/year to keep on the store, both for new and old users. Now I can 'park' it with a friend still involved in iOS development.
I wonder if there might be some way to do secure, PK-encrypted, federated message-based services using Tent.io or similar?
Turn Excel Spreadsheets In Persistent Reactive Structures
There were thaw periods around the countries of the block and agencies sometimes tended to chill out a bit with their activites, but on the other hand on Berlin's memorials you can find people whose deaths are dated even just a few months before the falling of the wall, so I don't know, to be honest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others#Reception

Slavoj Žižek, reviewing the film for In These Times, criticized the film's perceived softpedaling of the oppressiveness of the German Democratic Republic, as well as structure of the playwright's character, which he thought was not very likely under a hard communist regime.[23] Anna Funder, the author of the book Stasiland, in a review for The Guardian called The Lives of Others a "superb film" despite not being true to reality. She claims that it was not possible for a Stasi operative to have hidden information from superiors because Stasi employees themselves were watched and almost always operated in teams
Hmmm... your first link doesn't seem to load...

The "Note 3", however, certainly sounds fishy, but this seems only loosely related to the question at hand.
Totally sincerely, why not just use reddit for that? Hacker news is not "better" than reddit, it's just (meant to be) highly focused on news that's specifically relevant to the hacker community. The PRISM situation impacts privacy for many software startups, and that's why it's so well covered.
Ask HN: What is the most secure mobile/desktop messaging platform?
iMessage seems to be incredibly secure but is only iOS and OSX. Are there any secure messaging platforms that are cross platform and web?
Herge is saying that the free (libre) nature of free software means that these organizations must also be free to use it.
> This is utterly false and unfair. Please don't lump the entire US population with a few ignorant morons who have not seen the world five miles outside their home town. A quick look at our universities is proof enough that what you are saying is incorrect. The last time I visited MIT it almost felt like I was outside the US.

If anything I've been surprised at how consistently keen Americans are for high-skill immigration.
I suggest the paragraph be more clear on that, then. "We may however receive orders unrelated to FISA, in which case we are legally allowed to challenge the order."

It might be best to be completely forthcoming. Let the customers know that their data can always be secretly read by the NSA with CloudFlare's assistance, even all customers' data, but you challenge what you are legally allowed to challenge. Or say nothing about it. As it is the text implies that the customers' data is better protected against snooping, which isn't possible and most everyone knows that now, so it leads to suspicion.
I worked in a pair programming shop for nine years. What I saw was that some programmers couldn't handle it at all (you're probably one of them), but others took to it like a fish to water. I can go either way myself.

But again, it's not about the productivity of the individual. It's about the productivity of the organization. If I put on a manager hat and one programmer can't deal with team processes, no matter how good she is, she's gone. If I want the benefits of pairing for a team, I won't hire programmers or keep programmers who can't deal with it.
Waterboard: An Open Source iOS Forensic Imaging Tool
Could anyone suggest an additional title?
I would add Bitmessage to the list:

https://bitmessage.org
Wouldn't a court have to prove that they intended to infringe copyright?
May I ask to expand this request to all the advertisers, and other consumer trackers? Google, Facebook, 99.9% of all Internet consumer stuff basically? Plus Banks, Credit Card companies, TelCos?

The fact that PRISM is so cheap (20mil) is only possible because the NSA does not need to actually snoop at all - it is just taking data from Google, etc. that they already collected on us (which for some fucking reason is ok if it is a commercial entity).

So if I ever get slammed for using AdBlock, I'll cite this NSA bruhaha and the stopwatching.us initiative.

Or, as the genius Onion put it:
Area Man Outraged His Private Information Being Collected By Someone Other Than Advertisers
http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-outraged-his-priva...
While I agree with you on principle, the number of anti-immigration xenophobes is much greater than "a few ignorant morons". A few ignorant morons would not be able to elect so many congressmen over such a long period of time to support their agenda. Places like MIT hold the true minority opinion.
IBM's Watson installed at Computer History Museum
you transmit your public key, identity and server information.

the CA then verifies your identity, and then produces a certificate by signing (using their private key) the message digest of the concatenation of:

- certificate information: server name/organisation/country/... (the "subject"), start date, end date, etc

- your public key

- the subject of their certificate

your private key should never leave your system.
For a small website, sure. But it would be noticeable at the origin if you knew what to look for: all of the sudden your usual distribution of client IPs would be replace by a much smaller set of NSA IPs.

And there's no way they could scale it up to deal with google or facebook. They'd have to put start buying dozens of datacenters around the world and a vast amount of bandwidth. And they'd need to be able to hijack an enormous amount of traffic.

Honestly, it seems like buying up zero-day exploits and putting malware on people's computers would be oh so much easier and much much cheaper.
I'd recommend VPNs that route out of the US.
Health Insurance vs. Food Insurance
What a top notch grad supervisor to write a letter like that.
> and the main sponsors (governments and governmental institutions) try to be fair in the way they distribute their money. To do so, they have to make scientific output measurable.

Your first sentence is right, but the second is off-base.

No one in gov't really gives a damn about measurable progress, which is why the measurements used are so broken. (See my other comment for a better measure.)

The real issue: As with any gov't cheese it needs to be spread around, or it doesn't get the congressional support required for continuation. Ever wonder why:

1. The National Magnet Lab was removed from MIT and placed in that bastion of great science, Florida State University?

2. The Superconducting Super Collider ended up in that great cultural center of science, Waxahachie, Texas? Perhaps ease of access?

3. Plans for Mission Control, which were already drawn up to be north of MIT, was redrawn to be in Houston after Kennedy was killed? (look up the history of Tech Square in Cambridge.)

Politicians think they can spend money in certain areas and results will materials. And they will get results, so it's self-reinforcing, but they're too scientifically obtuse to imagine that the results are not necessarily the ones they want.
The Google-Waze aftermath: The good, the bad and the ugly
The Onion on the hypocrisy of tracking outrage
Davy Crockett of entrepreneurs unveils mysterious web startup
That response doesn't address his point at all.

Nobody is accusing the NSA of MITM-attacking Google, Microsoft, etc, so I don't know why people keep bringing up certificate pinning.

His point was that if the NSA got to Google's certificate authority then they could use information within that private key to help decrypt Google's traffic.

I don't know how much water that theory/speculation holds, but I do know certificate pinning has nothing at all to do with this.
Point by point:

The first paragraphs make the mistake of assuming you need to break keys to collect SSL traffic (assuming no PFS). You can start collecting SSL traffic now, and break the keys at your leisure later on. I can see cases where breaking confidentially of contemporary communication even 10-20 years hence would be extremely valuable.

"Just the power necessary to run the server farm
needed to break a 1024-bit key would likely cost
in excess of $20M/year"

The ECRYPT II Yearly Report on Algorithms and Keysizes suggests that an adversary with a budget of $10M should be countered with at least 78 bits of security, and that 1024-bit modulus RSA keys have 73 bits of security. I think this is a pretty good source on this sort of thing.

"Google is a notable anomaly. The company uses a 1024-bit key"

I've seen in the past Google presenting ECDSA server keys on P256, for some hosts and assuming your client advertises ECC with suitable extensions. Such keys are roughly equivalent in strength to 3248-bit modulus RSA keys.

"This means that if the NSA, or anyone else, is
recording encrypted traffic, they cannot break
one private key and read all historical
transactions with Google."

An important note here: an active attacker can silently downgrade client connections to turn off PFS.

"(Remember, for a naive algorithm, each bit doubles
the time it takes to break the key, so a 2048-bit
key isn't twice as strong, it is 2^1024 times as strong.)"

This is dangerously misleading, even with the qualification. In fact, its around 2^30 times as strong. You really must assume your adversary is using the best available factoring algorithm, or your conclusions will be meaningless.
No response means "Ain't gonna happen, bozos".
People will only rise up and get upset when they're denied their status quos.

Let's talk about it economically. To effect real change, there would have to be a huge shift in the number of upset and angry people. So one or two of a few things would have to happen:

1) right now, most people are working from paycheck to paycheck. They have no buffer, no savings, no freedom from their day job. In fact, they are sacrificing more and more basics just to have the privilege of a job. How do you expect them to find the time to rally?

2) Probably near half the people in the US believe they have nothing to hide and thus shouldn't care about these issues. Something very significant would have to happen to many of them to get them to take action on it. Just by the nature of intelligence, this is likely outside the realm of reality.

3) what's left after throwing all your time and energy at your work and dealing with torturous bureaucracies? Whatever it is that makes life worth living. Your family, entertainment, food; whatever it is, a person just wants to enjoy these things for the little time they have on this planet. When trying to wrangle an entrenched insititution like the US government seems like it would take an entire lifetime to make happen, people evaluate their lives and make that calculus. Most find its just not worth it.

I don't really know what the answer is except to say that for anything to happen, probably at least two of those three things have to affect most people in a negative way.
That's legally useless without the details though.
Meh, just leak the last record on every person.. name, address, social security #, favorite porn site, etc.