skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>It should give you a full history of all commands entered.

Commands entered by that user, in a shell, assuming the shell's history file wasn't cleared. So maybe you'd get a history of what someone did if they sat down at your computer and typed things while you were away refilling your coffee.

Your shell history isn't going to show a trace if someone actually remotely roots your computer and starts executing commands.
You can make that connection with anything any company does.
People still listen to Naomi Wolf? I was really wanting to like the "Shock Doctrine" but being from South America, I found the history she portrayed of SA to be totally inaccurate.
This would be more viable if more people were running for office.

..of course, how much time would then be spent picking and grooming a successor?
Isn't that what lead to the creation of the SuperPACs?
Never argue with a Sicilian when death is on the line!
No, the list of instructions at the start of the post indicates that you can create an account like miles.standish@gmail.com even if there is already an account like milesstandish@gmail.com.

If that is not what you mean, you should edit it to make it clearer.
It's beautiful, well made, and useful. Nicely done.
Every single point of hard data and evidence says otherwise.

Facebook, in the past year, has increased every single metric of success; whether it be the amount of money it makes, the number of advertisers on the site, the number of users on the site, or the level of engagement from all age ranges. Every single metric has increased in all countries.

If you're getting your data and information from sensationalist articles which get thousands of hits just for mentioning Facebook, then you should look elsewhere to form a more accurate assessment.
Snowden is seems like a student of machiavelli far more than american idealism. He has an objective and is doing the best job he can to make that objective happen.

Which would contrast highly with most whistleblowers who believe that doing the right thing will result in their objective happening.
Thanks! Hard to believe they would let this go. The email I receive that is intended for someone else is not something I would want others to see if I were them.
If it was done through a root account, then

sudo su

and accessing a shell history should do the trick, right? Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Google is just one of multiple similar search products that prevailed through better execution and marketing.
This actually describes intelligence based on overly-broad data collection as well.
This is one curious bit of the story that I am surprised other journalists haven't yet harped on Greenwald to reveal.

For instance, did GG know if Snowden planned to take the BAH job for the purposes of taking documents?
20 Things I learned about the Browsers and the Web
To be fair, I doubt I would attend the classified briefing. The point is the senators represent the peoples interest (specifically the states interest), if the state does not want it, then they shouldn't get it.

Also, each senator should receive the briefing in paper. They never need to attend unless it is being voted upon.
What? It's by design of gmail. I am skeptical that you possess two accounts like first.last@gmail.com and firstlast@gmail.com that are actually distinct accounts. The person sending you email probably typed the wrong email address.
I don't quite understand Jeff's point in the article. Is Windows really that much more open than OSX?

I got my (first) Next^H^H^H^H Mac about a year ago. I don't want to stop running Linux yet, but the Mac works much better than any Windows machine I have ever been forced to endure. While the Mac might not have open hardware, it at least lets me load a wide variety of open software onto it: Libre Office, Groovy, Go-lang, Ruby, etc. (Windows does also, but the BSD personality on the Mac makes the experience more frictionless)

I do care about freedom, but the platform which often simply does not work well enough to be playable is no freedom at all.

I should probably add that my first programming job was back in '85 working on (dead language) under MS-DOS, so I have a long history of abuse at the hands of Microsoft. I'll agree that the Apple II, and also the C64, were nice little machines to tinker with, though.
Synthetic blood
From what is being divulged, and from the fact that Phani is suddenly a former CEO, not 'current until', during the time of the deal this seems more like a distress sale or a forced one. Hope this is not true, but so it seems.

Redbus was a splendid initiative and I have experienced bus ticketing on it myself. Must congratulate the team that brought it so far... it's not an easy journey given the thick and thin of internet in India.
Thank you! We are not designers so it was hard for us.
Thanks a lot. Also, it's definitely possible an iOS app is already in the works :)
The low-transaction-fee argument for Bitcoin is silly
Any details about bandwidth and latency? Where are the gateway stations out of the balloon network? In the local region?
"The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda."

Anyone reading HN should be aware of this program before accepting comments at face-value. Especially in light of the recent NSA/PRISM leaks. Unfortunately this is the reality of today; and some of the discussions here may be subject to "Operation Earnest Voice" or similar operations.
This article mentions that the NASA engineer determined it to be ballast from MIR or a Progress resupply ship: http://english.ruvr.ru/news/2013_06_14/US-Man-Finds-Russian-...

That's interesting! I didn't know spacecraft used ballast - I guess to tune the centre of gravity.
This should not be news, though, right? Consumers can only be trusted to be concerned for their own best interests. More than that -- only about their own immediate and simple best interests (i.e. we consumers will totally vote for a destructive political initiative, if it promises short-term gain for us personally, while crippling the economy for decades).

So, any advocacy of free software ideology which is aimed at the 'masses' and the 'people' is doomed to fail. It has to be aimed at the minority of more responsible and educated agents - who, in turn, can (and should!) care about these more distant and noble and sophisticated goals, while not being angry or judgmental toward the 'consumer', who isn't championing such lofty goals.

You have to walk alone, and should expect isolation and hardship, essentially. Wasn't it always the case?
If torture gains information but breeds new terrorists then it isn't efficient.
Politics hasn't been "for the people" since party politics took over. The elephant in the room has always been how can someone represent their constituents when their constituents views might be at odds with the party line, and the chief whip is on their case to make sure they vote as the party expects. These are career politicians; there are no promotions or prizes for voting for your people over your party.
It's impossible to receive email for someone else as Gmail blocks as unavailable all dot-added usernames when you signup for an account.

E.g.: if you create abcdef@gmail.com, then a.bcdef@gmail.com , ab.cdef@gmail.com and so on become unavailable and are directed to your main account.
You maybe positing that this could be the NSA; me, I hope they're not quite that corrupt as of yet.

I'm assuming other state actors (the DoJ currently is saying "Not to our knowledge"), or someone attacking for political motives but not a formal state actor.
It would IF they obtained a root shell and started typing commands into it like they were at the console, and that they didn't just go ahead and delete the history file right afterwards.

But if someone's used a privilege escalation method on some vulnerable software and injects code that makes system() calls as the root user, that's not going to show up in root's shell history.

Shell history is just a convenience for the user typing things in the shell; it doesn't log everything that goes on in the box as that given user, and isn't an audit trail.
I would be willing. I'm a believer in multiple streams of passive income so this idea is a natural byproduct. I would love the opportunity to do small pieces of development work in exchange for micro equity. In this way, I could 'invest' in a dozen different startups and thereby make some long term bets. In todays climate, one win in ten has enough ROI to cover the cost of the other nine.
> Granted that is the worst case for the cracker, but the average case is also going to take quite a while.

The average case for finding something equaly distributed in a space is half the time, or about 5 * 10^59 seconds, what is about the same thing, because with numbers that big "about" usualy means anything from *10 to /10.

Of course, RSA keys aren't equaly distributed at the key space. That gives an speedup of sume number between 1 and 2 that I can remember (still about the same thing), and there are search algorithms that reduce the number of tries by some non-trivial amount. I'm not up-to-date on them.
Nice! I have rocked the "Keep Calm and Swag on" shirt as well. Will catch up on email.
No. So many reasons.

* Even people with long-term commitments to companies have a hard time valuing equity.

* In order to value equity, you need to be given access to confidential details of the company.

* It's legally expensive to give different kinds of equity to people, and every time you do it you create a small (or worse) amount of risk.

* The rules about employee equity are well-tested and understood. The rules about equity offered like this aren't.

* Offers for exchange of equity for in-kind services could be construed as unlawful solicitation of investment (I don't know, and am not a lawyer).

* Having a web design contractor on your cap table is going to make it harder to close VC rounds.

* Screwing up your equity grant to a web design contractor so that they have an effective veto on a VC round is going to make it impossible to close VC rounds.

* Employee equity vests.

* At good companies, a grant of equity has uncapped upside. Nobody buys web design for "potentially unlimited dollars".

* So now you also have adverse selection to deal with: the companies whose equity is available in a program like this won't be the Airbnbs and Dropboxes of the world.

* Similar barter programs (based on pure in-kind/in-kind exchanges) have been tried for decades (the ISP I worked at in the '90s was involved in one) and they appear to reliably fail; once people start to believe their contributions aren't fairly valued, a vicious cycle sets in.

I wouldn't just not participate in a program like this; I wouldn't work for a company I found to be participating in one.
Because nobody can exercise it anyway. Freedom 0 is really just a corollary of freedom 1, "The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish." If you can't change a program, you can't run it for any purpose, you can only run it for the purpose intended by the original author.

Freedom 1 is pretty hard to exercise too. For any given bit of technology, there are very few people outside of the original authors that are capable of changing it in meaningful and useful ways, and even they will need to put in a lot of effort do so.

It may be apocryphal, but the Apple II discussed in the article is said to be the last computer designed entirely by one person. Modern computers are just too complex for any one person to entirely understand. We can only answer questions, fix bugs and add features in a narrow speciality. In order to use a computer system we have to rely on other people to handle issues outside our areas of competence. Those people might be part of communities that help each other for free, or might work for companies that provide support to their customers.

So freedom 0 is a bit like the freedom to go to the moon. Having it is better than not, but most people don't benefit from it.
> Bad actors can bring down cell phone towers too.

That doesn't mean there aren't relevant lines of debate about the ease of bringing them down.
That's Naomi Klein.
The problem is that they'll say what they collect in your "whole file" (if such a thing exists) is a national security secret. This whole retrieval of phone records by FOIA is (remotely) possible because they can no longer claim those records are secret.

Also, NSA likely doesn't have too much of a file on you. FBI, CIA, DHS, on the other hand...
A Better Way to Ask for an Email Introduction
Gmail will sometimes try to unsubscribe you if you flag a message as spam.
Our firm has played with that concept already for number of years. However in the last few years with easy access to funding capital it begs the question why exchange equity for those items? It would seem then that this would appeal to startups only if they can't get funding, which raises another question on how viable of a startup is it?

With that said, we concluded that a capped equity swap might be acceptable. As in where the service provider would be rewarded with up to 4x to 8x their or the industry normal business rate for the services they performed. So a lawyer normally charges $150/hr. He choose to only charge $50/hr in exchange for the other $100/hr be some sort of investment. At payout time he could receive upto $800/hr for services performed. Payment could be tied to any company metric. This would be much easier to track then say % share of equity.
How do you know the other account exists?
The senate is suppose to represent the states, essentially the wealthy elite (at least that was the original intent).

The house is suppose to represent the people. Also, each senator receives a written transcript of every meeting, so why not leave and just read it on the plane?

Not to mention, if the people do not know what is in this briefing it should really be the senators duty to leave by the logic you used. They should only vote on what the people want and have no reason to waste their time attending something that is not for the people. In other words, why attend something that does change their constituents minds?
Friday afternoon briefings and statements like the following (paraphrased): "All congressmen have been briefed and are fully aware of the NSA's totally legit and above board program. There is simply nothing to see here, and making a big fuss about it compromises everyone's safety."

Reminds me of this:

"But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months."

"Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything."

"But the plans were on display ..."

"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."

"That's the display department."

"With a flashlight."

"Ah, well the lights had probably gone."

"So had the stairs."

"But look, you found the notice didn't you?"

"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."
On one hand she speculates that Snowden isn't a genuine whistleblower beacuse he is too organized(a, b, c). Then she speculates that Snowden isn't a genuine whistleblower because he is not organized.(f, h)

Which is it? Seriously, this article does more to decredit Namoi Wolf than anything else. I had more respect for her prior to reading this piece.

I could continue to rip this article apart but I'm hungry and need to cook dinner.
Are you sure you read that second link? This is not a bug.

Click on "Your address is similar but has more or fewer dots (.) or different capitalization." to expand the explanation.

We had to add a link to this support document to the security@google.com autoresponder because people misunderstand this behaviour so often (They think they're getting someone elses mail, but someone just sent it to the wrong address).
I'd have thought the reverse was the bigger part of the problem: finding skilled people willing to work solely for a small slice of equity in a company they had no influence over.

I'd expect there to be an adverse selection issue too (startups most likely to succeed are those that can pay for stuff with revenue or investors' cash; startups most likely to hand out equity like candy are those that know they're struggling)
When Woz talks about being proud that American soldiers didn't torture, I feel like I'm listening to a simpleton who happens to be utterly genius but was still brainwashed into seeing any agressive war as commendable.

But then he impressively says some very radical things, such as comparing America to the Stalin-and-on's Soviet Union, which I know many see obvious holes in (e.g. no dictator in America has killed tens of millions of dissidents or forced a territory to starve, though we are obviously committing other atrocities). He mentions property ownership but he chooses the cloud as an example which seems to loop him back to talking about privacy, though I was really interested to hear if he had an explanation for saying private property beyond what is convertible to digital is somehow threatened in America.

He's wonderful though.
Packet radio
The steps are too big for it to feel smooth, especially when tilting diagonally. If you are close to a step and holding (reasonably) still it jitters between positions. Animating the movement between positions instead of just translating tilt to position would improve the feel of it greatly.
If you're going to try, go all the way
It works on my Mac! But you have to tilt the whole computer..
Create a list of representatives and mine all their data that is available on the internet and put it on your website. I think that would allow us to easily form a picture of who that person is and what he stands for, whether he's being influenced by certain corporations etc...

EDIT: http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1geg2t/senators_skip_c...
Forget Google Reader, Use SyndiFeed
Obama's speech is obviously canned, while Biden's is the opposite. He is speaking candidly and openly, because he knows that it's the truth. The President, on the other hand, is hesitant and only chooses neutral words.

Amazing what diction can do for public viewpoints. It's equally amazing how many don't care enough to notice the aural cues of the state of being disingenuous.
There is no security bug.

milesstandish@gmail.com and miles.standish@gmail.com are the same account.

To prove this, log out of the former, and into the latter using the same password. You will see all the same emails. Sign out and in again with m.i.l.e.s.s.t.a.n.d.i.s.h, using the same password.

Those emails you are receiving in error are probably for someone like miles.p.standish, who forgot his middle initial when sharing his address.
Not true. I have a "john.doe@gmail.com" account that is quite old and in the past year someone created the same account without the dot (johndoe@gmail.com), or at least started using it in the past year. I get email from one of their senders, or a copy I presume, to this day!
This isn't a bug, though. I've been using this since I got that precious invite oh so many moons ago.

You can log in to that other account yourself, with your own password. You'll find that you have logged into your own account rather than anyone else's.
So the NSA is this organisation which can tell what you are saying to anyone else, yet it failed to realise that Snowden was talking to Greenwald for about six months?
Ambinder's article describes it as a piece of software that would be used daily to view info collected from many sources.
Crowdfunding students: Helping youngsters to sell stakes in their future
I'm the opposite of believing someone working for the USG hacked into a reporter's laptop.

I believe "someone attacking for political motives but not a formal state actor" is the second most likely scenario, after "laptop was randomly popped by a drive-by Java or Flash vulnerability and WaPo wants it to be more newsworthy than it is".

I sound cynical about news organizations here, but I'm not. I just think they suck at reporting on computer security stories.
Do you have 24/7 control over the access to your computer? Or at least something that cannot be bypassed that would make tampering evident?

If not, you're subject to a "black bag" job that could easily bypass all your protections, e.g. a physical key logger that would pick up your password/pass phrase that unlocks your disk encryption so you can use it.

Otherwise, do you surf the net from it? I don't take all your precautions, but I do run my browsers in a dedicated VM that has limited access to the rest of my infrastructure.
We ported to OS X in about three weeks, and we have an outstanding pull request for FreeBSD support (https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/pull/688), so as long as it's a Unix-like operating system, there a reasonable amount of work involved.

Porting to Windows is another level of complexity altogether.
Nice find. I was disappointed that the article I posted and another I found didn't say what the object actually was.
It can, yes. But the narratives NSA comes up with are falsifiable; that's the function of the agencies who are NSA's customers.
Perhaps the emails you received were misaddressed. I'm fairly certain that you were never able to create similar emails which differed only by periods.
Whistleblowers that serve China's needs.

Oh, you're a whistleblower against any Chinese policy? Say goodbye to your freedom and count yourself lucky if you don't end up in a stadium with a bullet in your head.
There soon will be no "offline"
Which only says something about the person drawing the conclusion, not about deconstructing arguments.

Torture must be both moral and strategically effective to make sense. Therefore, if either one is not the case, then you shouldn't stand for your government torturing people.

It is difficult to convince someone to adopt different values using logic alone. Perhaps ultimately the ethics behind the value of privacy can be traced to its role in constructing a society that produces the best quality of life for people.

If so then it may start with whether hurting someone can defuse a ticking bomb, then be expanded to whether hurting more people can undermine an enemy and whether it yields less accurate information than subtler interrogation methods, or perhaps whether it recruits more enemies and is a losing strategy, and some many steps later, after addressing whether it undermines the fundamental goals that make the society worth protecting, what kind of people it makes us to engage in torture.

I suppose that what I am getting at is that we wouldn't necessarily agree with the values that informed past ideas about what is moral. Therefore, if we can simply point out that torturing also isn't in our strategic interest we can short circuit nonsense arguments about necessary evil. The same goes for privacy invasions, however, I don't agree that these programs are likely to be inefficient. More likely, they will be unscientific and confirm biases, and tend to cause suffering for many innocent people, while also encouraging self-censorship.

They will also undermine the checks provided by institutions that have gone of the rails, or officials that have become corrupt having to interact with moral people. Perhaps most terrifying, I have read a couple journalists, of all professions, talk about these programs in context of TSA checks, and having to stand barefoot in front of gawkers, or be touched by strangers. Though these checks are a cause for indignity, and are varyingly effective, in comparison to universal surveillance, they are unlikely to quash any meaningful dissent or other important responsibilities of citizenship.