skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for that reminder. It brought to mind a scenario from immediately after the 2001 attacks, when the worlds gaze ( I presume ) focused on the US and its response to the aftermath. One of those events I saw on the BBC in the UK was a Town Hall Meeting broadcast, which was a different kind of meeting than I'd ever seen.

What surprised me most at the time was the line of questioning of more or less all of the audience members. Against a background of shock and befuddlement that this had happened to an essentially benign US by an unknown extra national entity, the main question that followed was as to why the US was hated that much. It was simply incomprehensible to the audience. There appeared to be no awareness of the trouble brewing outside the country, even though the US government was engaged in one way or another.

Watching through this portal I was struck by how little the average American was aware of the real politics that existed in foreign policy terms visa vi the US. I thought at the time that the US would have a very difficult time developing a viable strategic response when the general population either misunderstood or simply hasn't any perspective at all on the place of the US in geopolitical terms. Observe George W Bush confusing Austria and Australia.

It was a massive shock, and the following response against an unknown enemy is partly based in that lack of perspective I'd say.

It may help, if this is at all right, to inform and educate the citizenry of these geopolitical nuances. Perhaps then some change to this general idea of 'terrorism' might occur in the public psyche, and as a consequence, expectations of viable strategy. But it's a tough ask. In lieu of that I'd expect a continuation of the dragnet.
I hate, hate, hate that share thingy.
Ted Ullyot, Facebook General Counsel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Ullyot

"From January 2003 to January 2005, Ullyot worked in the White House as associate counsel and as a deputy assistant to President George W. Bush. He then served as chief of staff to U.S. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales."
This is brilliant. Fantastically done and made me laugh.
Well this is 100% bullshit
Innocent until proven guilty is as much logic as law/ethics. There is nothing Facebook can say or do to prove their honesty, but their dishonesty can be proven, eg, someone could leak data which could plausibly only have come from the sort of backdoor they say doesn't exist.

Of course, even if you can't prove anything, it might be prudent to hedge against the possibilities by assuming everything is actually public, but given the sort of things people post publicly (to four thousand of their closest friends and confidants) on Facebook, that might be a pretty low bar.
I'm looking at my phone and the power button is conspicuously not a toggle switch. You press the same button to turn it off as to turn it on. That means the phone has to have some logic enabled (even when it's "off") to distinguish whether closing the circuit on that button is supposed to turn the device on or turn it off (or wake up the screen or lock the device etc.)

Is it so hard to imagine part of that logic including the mobile phone equivalent of wake-on-lan?
Very cool stuff, very fast in loading too. I love the concept of the aliases, would be even cooler if you could generate multiple aliases
More important problems such as that Google, a publically-traded for-profit company having the very data that NSA seeks to obtain, and yet very few so much as bat an eye at that, but instead say that it's OK for Google and their advertisers and 3rd parties to have access to the data and for them to change the privacy policy at will, as long as the gub'mint doesn't have that data.

You are right, of course: The leaks are more recent in time than the people pointing that out about Google/Facebook/etc., so I'm not that surprised at the difference in reaction.
I can only speak for clojurescript, but I'm ok with trading off some debugging pain for way better semantics / nicer code.
I would imagine that they would see state legislature seats as a springboard to legitimize the party on a national stage, not as an end in themselves.
In case you're curious about the history (since you said you're new to the platform), garbage collection showed up as an optional feature in Objective-C in OS X 10.5, was effectively discouraged in favor of ARC in 10.7, and officially deprecated in 10.8. Not a terribly long run, sadly. It was a nice idea that didn't work out as well in practice.

A single piece of code can potentially work in both environments, but it needs to be written with that in mind, so binaries are annotated with their GC support. Any given library or plugin can be non-GC, GC-only, or GC-optional. Non-GC libraries can only load into non-GC apps, and GC-only libraries can only load into GC apps. GC-optional libraries can load into either, but are annoying to write as I mentioned. Since the system has to support both, all system libraries had to be made GC-optional.

In addition to the usual teething bugs with the collector itself, all the libraries sprouted bugs in GC mode due to the conversion, which made garbage collection in ObjC a bit too interesting to really be nice to use.

That ends today's long, pointless, rambling comment.
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Yes that is global 19,000 accounts in total USA and non-USA citizen.
There's a lot to be said for cleaning house in D.C.

But contrary to your suspicion, there is no law requiring companies to misreport info to the public. Even AT&T, which illegally opened its network to the NSA, never lied about it, as I showed here earlier this week:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589012-38/nsa-surveillan...
No, I don't hope. If relay operators can "peel back the layers of my onions" and see the traffic the entire security model is out the window.

Edit:
I just saw your restatement of your question. Check out the bandwidth management features and set your relay to only allow exit traffic to port 443. More info on the bandwidth management can be found here:

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorFAQ#Wha...
1% of 1.1 billion is ~ 10 million? Doesn't seem like a tiny amount.
You should look at this in the context of the company's earlier blanket denials.
If there is slipperyness it's the fact that the guy who wrote this and is Facebook General Counsel, Ted Ullyot, use to be G.W Bush's right hand man.
But Facebook does not need to answer any request from a non government entity.
There's a "Why is this important?" link on every page that addresses your question.

If youd like to make graphics to improve the design, I'd be happy to put them up! jon [at] professional-troublemaker.com
I'm doing something for fun with Clojurescript and node-webkit and for me it's mostly that I want the fast start up time, but also to get to just work with html instead of having to learn a gui framework.

Also I just want to mention that Clojurescript compiles to javascript that's compatible with Google's Closure compiler, which can do dead code elimination and will remove the parts of the standard library that you don't use.
Ah, my bad for parroting headlines.

Whatever happened, it's a convoluted mess better suited
to Communist East Germany.

Thanks for the clarification.
A fraction of 1% the release says.
Wow it's open source - https://github.com/m242/maildrop
I think these are true numbers. I assume that everything I put on Facebook is prone to public dissemination anyhow. The whole point of site is to share your data.
Why not be interested now, rather than months from now when responses come? It takes about 30 seconds to fill out a request, and it's free.
These anecdotes are interesting, but do they address my comments? I'm talking about everybody.
Did you put a db scientific terms into your random email generator? Seems like every other one has at least one scientific term in it; I approve!
On my to-do list for tomorrow!
Enigmail?

It's a thunderbird plugin and its pretty good
Distain with `Facebook trust' Hapless inane ad-feeds? Well, you too, you can reciprocate Clapper-speak. I was a youngster in the Warsaw ghetto, memories of forced labor clearing stones as a five year old, and for the past five months, I was a little girl. Watch your ad-feed adapt. Anyone I care about knows the truth, all else is noise.
You are just a brain in a biochemical vat being fed electrical signals through the sensory organs.

Are they false signals? There are non-negligible priors that support his accusation, such as gag orders and a proven and recent history of lies and obfuscation. I personally think the simpler model of Facebook telling the truth holds more weight -- to the point of a conspiracy of this magnitude sounding more than a little silly -- but there will always be a shadow of doubt to some, and not fully without reason.
This is a really good move. I've ran into several websites that check against the most popular temporary email services and the domain names that they use.
Put them on trial? OK, I'll do it; source please?
My guess is more people liked you when you were just a hacker that almost got in Bradley Manning's shoes.
Amazing felt like a real movie, Java really is ubiquitous
In my opinion this UI update is a regression in functionality in terms of the icons being harder to discern and the text being harder to read (and significantly so). And since this affects the entire OS (not just one app) I think the blowback could be just as high even if it isn't as bad as maps was. Hopefully they'll make changes though and I'll eat my words.
While being much improved over previous version of Safari 6, that's not saying anything. It's still abysmal, and Chrome and Firefox are still leaps and bounds ahead.
What do you think I meant by "trust"? What I believe I meant was: Sufficient assumption of good will, respect, and principle on the part of Facebook's staff such that their private messages, restricted-access content etc would stay that way in accordance with the privacy they expect living in the U.S. If their expectations are too low, and/or most people are simply uninformed, couldn't it easily be the case that people-in-general are really just no more Facebook-averse after this passed week?
And now you see why they've tried to automate the part of the process that could be automated.
Serious question: How to reconcile BI with more liberal immigration laws?

I see a benefit of BI, but I personally see a larger benefit of allowing open immigration (else you have large inequalities based on country of origin).
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57588845-38/justice-dept-w...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gag_order
Yahoo search results are already 'powered by' Bing.
Non-US company CIOs will be having long conversations around their previously hyped US/five eyes cloud based infrastructure. The stories around US (five eyes too?) companies getting free corporate intel for favours - presumably on their competitiors - won't have helped.

The sucking sound we're hearing is trust in anything related to five eyes related corporate infrastructure having any integrity at all.
Not really. From the I2P FAQ: Without protocol scrubbing or higher latency, global active adversaries can gain substantial information. As such, people concerned with these attacks could increase the latency (using nontrivial delays or batching strategies), include protocol scrubbing, or other advanced tunnel routing techniques, but these are unimplemented in I2P

Bitmessage is only plausibly deniable, meaning a traffic analysis is likely to narrow down the list of senders to a few, which is good enough in a manhunt.
It's still horrendous. It's better then the previous version, but it's still far behind.
>Remember that companies are not monolithic things. They are made of people, and if anyone or a group try to make a stand they will be hunted down. It's easier to follow along than be honest.

Hunted down? In the bay area? As a software engineer? You must be new here.
I've always used mailinator for this.
It doesn't seem to work with puppet. Only chef:
https://github.com/smdahlen/vagrant-digitalocean/issues/37
True, but even the look and feel of Apple Maps (the map display content specifically) was shoddy in my opinion. It's actually improved in this current beta, but really that's a testament that Maps should have been worked on for another update cycle, and I think the same is true of this UI refresh. Hopefully they can make the needed changes before release later this year (assuming that is when they plan to release).

Edit: Also just a comment along the lines of your second paragraph... it's crazy that Apple Maps still can't find the News Corp. building in Manhattan (at least by that well-known name). It's a building that I noticed it couldn't find at launch and continually checked for over the months just to take the temperature of Apple's data updates. Still nothing.
Wow. I am really grateful for this response. As I was reading through what you've written, I got the feeling I was putting off a negative image of myself which is definitely not helping my case.

Wording things in a way that highlights my positive aspects is not lying, as you've put it. This puts me more at ease to speak about things I excel in.

I agree that my previous work experience can be viewed as "blue collar". I hadn't considered it may be difficult for a hiring manager to overcome.

And about taking the leap of faith, I think that might be what it boils down to. It's a difficult thing to do alone, but I think you may have given me the push I needed.

I really appreciate the response. I wish you and your family the best of luck. I will record your username and if I end up in Austin I will shoot you a message.

Thanks again.
Actually, I reloaded the issue and it was closed. Looks like digital ocean wins :)
Don't confuse footnotes with evidence.
I think he means Netscape Communicator, which used the lighthouse icon (where the metaphor has something to do with guiding you around in the dark?); Navigator had the boat wheel icon.

http://dialup.pacbell.net/images/16-4_22.gif
The problem is that before these leaks, the Director of National Intelligence was asked point-blank in a congressional hearing whether or not the NSA was conducting surveillance on Americans, and he unequivocally said no. Given that history, I think it's prudent to approach the veracity of further denials with caution.

It's true that Facebook is not the US government, so perhaps we should be less hesitant about the claims they make. However, Facebook does have a history in this area that gives me some pause. Their former CSO was Max Kelly, who is ex-FBI, and would give talks about shit like the need for "uniting" military and commercial "cyber defense." So to the extent that we're dependent on Facebook's internal narrative to determine how they respond to the US government, my sense is that at Facebook, much of that narrative was set by someone who is largely sympathetic to government cooperation.

I think you're correct in pointing out that the NSA is ultimately to blame. However, I think we should acknowledge that while companies like Facebook obviously do not have malicious intent, they are still in the surveillance business. What they are building does have some inherent danger, and will continue to attract the interest of the US government, foreign governments, and attackers.
"Submit profile data for user $FOO and all users $FOO has messaged from $DATE_1 to $DATE_2". I'm assuming it's something like that.
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Assuming we believe the numbers, it seems pretty clear PRISM was not the drag net it was originally portrayed as. 19k accounts over 9k requests is not mass access.

There is,however, a readily confirmable and some what plausible alternative: Facebook's numbers are low because no one the NSA is interested in (e.g. AQ, China, Wikileaks, maybe even Occupy) uses Facebook heavily.

If Google and Microsoft aren't allowed to release numbers, than we should actually be concerned about this possibility.
From first-hand experience, Facebook is overly protective of user data when it comes to state and local law enforcement requests (I obviously don't know about the NSA side). They provide very little on initial subpoenas and require warrants for anything more. In fact, most law enforcement are angry at how little Facebook will reveal about a suspect.
I'm still unsure exactly where the story transitioned into Microsoft...
If there is no firmware update process that may be even more reason to avoid buying a used Trezor. No process to authenticate a device of untrusted provenance, yet bad actors could still figure out a way to tamper with the firmware (see the photo on the site of the unit in development with the cover off and an extra cable attached), or replace the board entirely.

A well-documented, well-understood firmware update process with mutual authentication (firmware and device must both be validated) might improve things for secondhand Trezor buyers.
There is nothing wrong in building surveillance software. We would all love to see the boundaries of that technology pushed.

We would?
Tor being pitched as a one-stop privacy solution like this is going to backfire bad at some point in the future. It is good that they have the warning about cookies, but there are a hell of a lot of other ways you can be identified.

You simply shouldn't be using the same machine you use with your real identity with an identity that needs to be anonymous. Even simply things like ntp time sync request can give you away, let alone features like Windows Update (which will definitely give you away since they send a machine ID), browser fingerprinting, evercookies, etc.

Nobody can think of all the different things a machine can send that need to be blocked or reset, which is why you just use a fresh new machine. It is the only way to use Tor safely.

Any device that makes it easier to use Tor with your existing computer is bad for privacy. Especially something being pitched as an 'on/off' switch for instant privacy.

edit: A good setup is the following: install virtualbox, install a light-weight linux distro as a tor router, setup a private and isolated network behind it and then install your 'client' operating system on that private and isolated network in a second virtual machine. Never use the same client machine for long and use the virtual machines snapshot feature to blow away your data every x hours/days (and never use the suspend feature of virtual machine software, it saves your memory (with passwords, keys, etc.) onto disk).
I pity your local retail employees if they're never able to express amusement at something funny.
FYI, my understanding is that you can also set up the MX record for a domain you own to point to the Mailinator service if you want to get around this problem.
A friend in law school to explained that this software is used for in-classroom exams and prevents any other programs from being used while a student is taking the exam, as well as saving all the work incrementally (in case the computer crashes).

It's certainly not the most secure thing to do, but they need to focus on studying law, not securing systems. I imagine that when lawyers are working on cases, they might end up using more secure devices than their old college laptops.
<marshray> cited a CNET article I wrote this week as a threat to "put them on trial." As the author, I disagree.

If FB received a FISA Sec. 702 order for the contents of nycterrorcell@facebook.com's account, and they disclosed that, that would presumably violate a court order and they would find themselves in contempt of court. For good reason: when there is an actual terrorist investigation (remember the terrorist threat is overhyped and you're more likely to get struck by lighting), you don't want to tip off the bad guys.

But aside from that very narrow non-disclosure exception, there is no threat to "put them on trial."
regexp.MustCompile doesn't result in a compile error; it panics at runtime. The purpose is to simplify compiling regexps at the global level, and the assumption is it's a hard-coded regexp that can't be wrong.
If you were hiding from the NSA.... I'd avoid browsing the internet for a while...
I hate the way nytimes misuses "trove" to mean "a valuable collection". The word is from French "trouvé" through the expression "treasure trove", meaning found treasure. It has a technical legal meaning: treasure apparently hidden so long ago that its original owner can be presumed dead and therefore can be kept by the finder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_trove
Illinois pushes for smartphone "kill switch" to deter thefts
Most Americans would tell you it's not a legal "problem" at all, but a clear homage to time-honored First Amendment rights.

On the other hand most of my friends from in the E.U. are quite willing to give up freedom of speech for neo-Nazis and extremists. They find it a worthy trade-off to avoid the possibility of widely spreading that form of hate and filth again.

I find it all kind of amusing, how a lot of the rights we find inviolable and those we find we can bend a bit depend as much on our national origins as it does on anything else.
And if you refuse or actively obstruct the court order?

(I was mainly citing your article to establish the the gag order. First hit for https://duckduckgo.com/?q=facebook+gag+nsa )
So? You can download my public key and encrypt something with it... and only I'll be able to read it with my private key.

It's still "my" key even though you're signing or rather encrypting a message with it.
Seems not to work...
I know that these tests results are kind of bogus but there's been a series of web framework comparisons http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/ (there was also a lot of discussion about it on HN) and Sinatra seems to be faster than Rails but not by as much as I would have guessed.
Apparently up until this point people figured that everyone but the government would have access to their data, but they were OK with that... it's free to signup, after all!
While I understand the theft deterrent part, I have some concerns that such a "kill switch" could create a vulnerability that could bite us in the butt. I presume Madigan and her compadres are thinking of a central control through which the switch could be activated... sounds like a very bad idea to me.

Combine it with the NSA revelations and the last few years of social media fueled uprisings and this gets my conspiracy theory engine revving...
I believe some people, myself included initially, misinterpreted the "encrypted with" key as being the sender's key rather than the recipient's.

We don't know who that key belongs to for sure, of course, but it could be Snowden's.
To keep things in perspective (assuming these numbers are roughly accurate...)

The odds of Facebook handing over your data to a government agency are similar to the odds of dying from a shark attack or lightning...

source : http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/how-scared-should-w...

I still find these numbers fairly high. If cops need a warrant to get into my home why don't they need one to get into my "facebook home"?
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