skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As waze is not true competitor for google per se, I would be very dissapointed, if it would go the way other google-acquired software often goes - integration into google services and product's discontinuation.

I do not believe (anymore) that google could acquire Waze and leave it as a standalone product. Which would mean lots of compromises in terms of community interaction because google has different approach to this than Waze does.

Even more - waze approach to handling UGC in terms of map editing is somewhat not perfect, but with google involvement it could be discarded (not fixed), since it's not trivial to come up with better way.

Google, i believe, is more interested in traffic data than in community map editing, but latter one gives Waze lots of its appeal.
I was contemplating a different schedule.
There's no way Edward put himself on the line for money.

But... how long do you think he can access funds in his name? And how long do you think he will have to stay in hotels and temporary accommodation that he will have to fund?

He will need help, the hardest bit isn't even summoning the help, it will be getting it to him.
Microsoft PRISM Home Server
Up until now, companies offered "SSL encryption" as a security benefit for their customers. Now that benefit is wiped out, and can't be used anymore. It's just not enough anymore.

So they'll need to start offering encryption solutions as benefits that we know can't be accessed or even cracked by the NSA - OTR, ZRTP, PGP and so on.
Here's my view. I recently wrote an article on my blog (http://ledgersmbdev.blogspot.com/2013/06/tangent-design-thou...) which was on the front page of HN for a while. I want to summarize both my thoughts again and things that have occurred to me after writing it.

All of our existing key interchange systems are amazingly brittle. With X509, there's no reason to assume the NSA couldn't order verisign to produce a certificate for any given individual or site which they could then use to orchestrate a MITM attack. Purely synchronic protections (i.e. focused exclusively at the moment of exchange) are obsolete in my view. Similarly purely diachronic protections have problems too, and often aren't well implemented. Suppose you need to rotate ssh host keys. This becomes a problem. I think we need something a lot better.

Regarding PGP, the question is what they can break. Could they get a court order to force MIT to help them present that your key on their directory is visible to you but their key is visible to everyone else (allowing them to step in between and conduct another MITM attack of another variety?

Even if you add endorsements (web of trust model), how easily can that be attacked? It might be harder but not that much harder.

So my thinking is this. Start with a standard PKI model and extend it to require evidence of continuity. The assumptions required to do this are:

1. No external authority issues private keys, and

2. You must retain and continue to use an old private key for an unspecified transition period (possibly spanning several keys). This shows a chain of issuance, and evidence that the same entity controls the same internally issued private keys over time.

So suppose you define a transition period of 2 years and a key rotation period of one year. This means that anyone you have been in communication with over the last three years will be able to check that the continuity of key possession has not changed, and three keys would have to be compromised to force a certificate believably (two of those keys can be stored somewhere else and only used for the certificate resigning process) If a MITM attack starts, anyone who has been in contact in that period knows instantly that something is wrong. Newcomers get alerted when the MITM attack stops.

I would recommend looking into what we can do to implement a system like that. I am thinking of trying to write it up as an RFC and submit it to the various bodies.
And yet we will all go back to work. Just wait for wwdc and e3
Show HN: Fractals
What I'm about to say is absolutely nuts, but it could be that this is something the NSA leaked intentionally and the media is running with it for reasons we are not aware of. Despite twitter and the like, the mainstream media is still largely in control of what occupies the "news" and therefore what the otherwise apathetic public is concerned about.
I would think that if they did have the means to attack Tor they would not show their hand but taking down something as insignificant as Silk Road.
What I'm saying is that I foresee a hybrid approach in which company data officers will help guide all identifiable data and transactions to EU or local sovereign cloud companies, and that only data that is not personally identifiable, containing company secrets or in the form of aggregated data will be stored on US-linked cloud companies.

This seems to be the best approach and respects EU data protection laws, consumer expectations and rights, and still offers the company flexibility on choosing based on price/performance.
> For example, the US has held the 4th amendment does not apply to non-citizens who are not "part of the national community"

Could you please provide a reference for this?
Nowhere in the world can you escape from US omniscient powers nowadays, and I can't help think this may be the prophesied New World Order (or if you're a Christian, the "Great Abominable Church").

It's imperialism via information, and US corporations are the foot soldiers.
You missed the bit about it being unfinished. I guess the quiz hurt your feelings so you had to come here and get your own back?
Why not make an app or desktop application which works completely offline and sell it for money like we did when we were young?
Barack Obama defends US surveillance tactics
> Does anyone know how these companies, et al., actually differentiate US Citizens from Non-US Citizens? I don't remember clicking the "I'm a US Citizen box" on any website.

I think you were just trolling but if not then one of hundreds possible ways to find that:

1. get a hold of your your email (or name and then facebook / gmail snoop)

2. your email leads to your paypal account

3. your paypal account leads to your dob and ssn, bank accounts

4. your banks accounts hold information whether you are citizen or not;

- OR -

4. your ssn codification tells whether by the time obtaining the number you were citizen or not

PayPal, Facebook and Palantr has the same co-owner, P. Thiel.

But seriously I don't think they discriminate. Last thing they look at is whether you are citizen or not. Your IPs (all the one you ever used while login to any website you have an account with) can quickly tell them whether you are on US soil or not. Most likely as long as you are here, you are consider us citizen, whether lawfully or not but you "operate" on US soil so the same rules apply to you. Good example would be if you are in US as a tourist -- you still need to obey US laws and regulations.
I don't have a problem with obstruction of justice being a crime, but I do believe that the law should make it similarly illegal for a law-enforcement officer to lie to a criminal suspect or witness.

If we care about the truth as a moral and cultural foundation, it seems reasonable we demand it on both sides of the playing field.
It also brought us Napoleon. And dictatorship. The guillotine. Many wars. More executions. The identification of the political right vs the political left. And on, and on, and on.

The world was certainly changed. Not always for the better.
I think it's more a case of, "oh, I see you don't want to be re-elected. We can arrange that" rather than direct prosecution.

That's why you don't see guys like Bernie Sanders on those committees :-)
There went that fabled "moral high ground," right out the window.

This government wants to keep increasingly more secrets from its populace, while simultaneously decreasing our rights to secrecy.

More of the double standard which widens the gap between "We the People" and the ruling classes.
>And yet we will all go back to work. Just wait for ww3

FTFY
A lot of people— sometimes the most technically competent ones— were busily telling them that wholesale surveillance was infeasible... greatly underestimating the available funding and ingenuity.

So it was easy to imagine that only a few things were being intercepted: Communications be an amorphous "bad people". A distant problem for someone else.

In the mean time digital communications devices, cloud services, social media, etc. have become increasingly central to our lives— mediating more and more of our most private communications and storing our most trusted data. Most of it has built on an architectural house of cards which provides little systemic security beyond "hasn't screwed you yet".

The fact that this is happening to _everyone_, that the data is being correlated and stored— perhaps forever— that the argued legal basis of the program itself is cloaked in secrecy, that the public has been denied the ability to question something that potentially impacts the entire world, that the leaders of technology companies that we trust with our most personal data are either clueless or lying— as they make claims that appear to contradict the whitehouse.

And now it's becoming clear enough that its harder to say "well, maybe it isn't really happening" (even as you say "which may ver well be fake!)or "the black box rooms are for someone else" and so instead of ignoring it people are being forced to process the information. Some of them feel violated and upset. "Hasn't screwed you yet" is starting to look a little too weak once considered in the sunshine.
Teach them how to use PGP/GPG, S/MIME, VPNs, never to use "free" email services, never post anything identifying on any social networking site, don't use cloud file services without encrypting files first/etc.

Thats a good start anyways.
"They don't have to show us Catch-22," the old woman answered. "The law says they don't have to."

"What law says they don't have to?"

"Catch-22."
Thanks. We'll check these out.

We're creating a development environment based on a visual object language using a fully composable framework. The output of the development environment is blobs of "hooked up" objects. The user's programs are stored on host servers and, in real time, propagated to all people working on the project. Meta-data and data are also part of a program the user is creating.

We would like to encrypt the blobs of objects so behavior can not be injected into the program (logic can be injected anywhere - think something like Aspect oriented programming to an extreme). We would like to encrypt any data (program - blobs of objects, meta-data and private user data) that is being persisted and/or propagated.
Snowden is probably already a PRC citizen, he doesn't have much to worry about.
Already this is scrolling off the news. It's a safe bet that the vast majority of voters either don't care or don't feel they can change it. If they do try to change it, they put themselves at risk. The surveillance will continue and become more pervasive. As before, if you don't have anything to hide you have nothing to fear, until you do.
And my point is that what they can get without a court order is more than they can get with one.
That second one is a benefit not to PR to the general population, but as an underline to Chinese statements in arenas such as the UN which seek to defend their practises (censorship, monitoring) in the face of very hypocritical statements by the US. The cost of doing this is negligible, yet the value to them as a PR coup on a political level is quite high.
I'm surprised the NSA/government agencies trust people like him and Manning with the nation's secrets. Based on what I've read he doesn't sound like the most rigorous individual. And Bradley Manning, childhood trauma and seriously questionable life decisions. Isn't this what the purpose of a security clearance is?
If he died two years in a row, yeah, that warrants the front page
Watsi is looking for a front-end developer, our first hire
Watsi.org is a global crowdfunding platform for healthcare that enables anyone to directly fund low-cost, high-impact medical treatments for people in need. We're a technology-focused non-profit startup fresh out of Y Combinator with one goal: global access to basic health care.

We're looking for a senior designer/front-end developer to join our fast-moving 4-person team in San Francisco. The ideal candidate will be an HTML/CSS expert with Javascript, design, mobile web, and Rails experience. The more Javascript and Rails experience you have the better. You have to be serious about alignment, consistency and executing the design to the fullest. In fact, the more design you do the better.

A few challenges we'd like this hire to tackle:
- constantly improve page load time, let’s say by 10% in the first few weeks
- implement a really nice redesign that looks right on all the most popular screen sizes
- take responsibility for anything a donor or a team member sees on all of our apps
- get us off of Bootstrap, or at least slim it down to the bare minimum
- maybe even get us off of the asset pipeline, as it slows down deployments to Heroku

If you are excited about joining a motivated, passionate team that's working its ass off to help people receive the medical care they deserve, we'd love to hear from you. Please send your resume/github to jobs@watsi.org

For more info, here are a few recent articles about us:

New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/business/watsi-a-crowdfund...

Techcrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/30/watsi/

Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732382950457827...
Somewhat. Article I, section 6 of the United States Constitution: "They shall in all cases, except treason, felony and breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest during their attendance at the session of their respective Houses, and in going to and return from the same; and for any speech or debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other place."

How that plays out in this situation, I'm not sure, since I'm not a Constitutional Scholar, nor a lawyer.
Here's two high level pitches someone should go and try to validate:

"Like Google with strong data protection."

"Like Facebook with strong data protection."

Feel free to send me some of your billions later.

I think there's some outrage now but by and large most citizens don't really care as long as there's some justification they can buy (ZOMG gotta protect us against those terrorists). Yes it's a sad state of affairs but that's what it is.

If I'm wrong on that the US has just created a pretty sweet incentive for European/Other entrepreneurs to grab a good chunk of the silicon valley business.
Hacking Elance - how to actually book jobs against everybody on the planet
Welcome to counterintelligence, have a nice day.

Sorry I forgot to point out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_forward_secrecy
I'm a peaceful person, but this issue has been simmering in my head for years, and I find myself actually looking forward to some kind of meaningful conflict. I'm sick, sick, sick to death of the president issuing denials while they keep building more and more infrastructure against humanity. I think the article is right, that it'll get worse from here, and in a way, I'm glad.
(Maybe) We asked for this
Schneier is classic: “Welcome to an Internet without privacy, and we’ve ended up here with hardly a fight.”

But the author also has an interesting ending.. "When apathy is our defense we deserve what we get. But apathy breeds another kind of insecurity and makes us bigger targets still. We forget this at our peril."
The court's opinion is classified. The DOJ is trying to block a FOIA suit filed by the EFF to release the opinion.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/government-says-secret...
... and anybody with any sense could guess they've been doing this for far longer. The NSA doesn't go around shouting it from the rooftops, but they've never tried particularly hard to hide that they're doing this sort of thing.

Note the copyright date on this file from the Emacs distribution:

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/lisp/play/sp...

The most surprising thing about the current episode is simply that everybody's acting so shocked. Seriously people?
This is something that already pissed me off when drone strikes were discussed. While not caring about foreigners is probably the most important reason, there is another one that actually makes sense, and which is why I give Americans a little bit of benefit of doubt: Given the strict protections of your constitution, it is much easier to fight the parts that concern citizens of the US. Edit: accidentally submitted after the first word, rest of post added.
> This site is turning into a libertarian silicon valley version of freerepublic

GOOD!
Not sure about Obama, but maybe Snowden did just for the timing and the linking in the public mind with these companies. For those who've been keeping track of this, this isn't all that entirely new - I mean articles going back over the past few decades in the Washington Post, at least 3 NYT bestsellers by James Bamford, what more do you really need in terms of "revelations"? My general gist of it was that the NSA probably was scooping packets somehow, and if they really wanted to get you, they could.

Somehow, this time, the story got traction. I agree w/ the general consensus that it's about damn time. The Mil Industrial Complex will keep rolling on w/ "Top Secret-creep" and "Surveilance-creep" until a proper re-evaluation of the Church reforms and the Patriot act and other contributory/relevant legislation for this day and age is conducted, and enforced.

I am hoping the earlier "All wars must end" speech on the part of Obama is hinting at a step in this direction.

Of note, it was probably worse pre-internet, when the NSA could just scoop radio signals out of the air...networked communications made it much harder for them - at least temporarily.

Also with SIGINT, the NSA is joined at the hip by the UK, Canada, AUS and NZ...the NSA technically could avoid spying domestically by sending intel requests to their counterpart agencies...
How indeed, but people smoke and stuff their mouths full of unhealthy food even if they know it can kill them. Humans aren't always 100% rational beings. When they suddenly get cancer (ie actual proof) they wake up.

Also, this isn't just about the NSA but also about FBI, and that order certainly isn't fake.
Why now ? The article is old.
Why? Why not?

Mandelbrot set implemented client-side with canvas. Color shifting every 80ms - why? Why not?
Another interesting quote, but I'd be far more interested in concrete examples. The biggest problem is restrictions on the freedom to dissent. I agree that is a big problem (if not the central problem) with regard to government surveillance. Beyond that, though, there are some laws that should be changed (controversial issues like gay marriage, etc.), but what else? What am I wrongfully denied the freedom to do?

I hope you realize that "you don't know how enslaved you are" is really a terrible catchphrase for a movement. People just roll their eyes when they hear that. You need to back it up with something they can relate to.
lol "Poke Place".

But seriously, I feel like technically you could be homeless if you're single and work at Google or (now) Yahoo, they've got gyms, couches, private rooms to chill, you just put a tie on the doorknob (or whatever) and sleep there for the night. and Boom! you've just saved yourself like $1000+ /month, not to mention paying for internet/cable or furniture and other household items, in fact, I wonder if people aren't doing that right now...

/s
Heh, you're probably right.
Yea sorry about that - In retrospect I shouldn't have included a brain-deadening link
United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez - 494 U.S. 259 (1990) at 264-266

From the headnote:

"The Fourth Amendment phrase "the people" seems to be a term of art used in select parts of the Constitution, and contrasts with the words "person" and "accused" used in Articles of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments regulating criminal procedures. This suggests that "the people" refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community."
Sorry, but I don't buy this guy's story. Something is just incredibly fishy.

I don't buy this guy's argument for going to Hong Kong, e.g. that has a history of free speech, and its supposed autonomy from the mainland -- even after all of these years, Chinese pressure prevents Taiwan from international recognition. You think they are just letting Hong Kong do its own thing? He seems intelligent and must be aware of this, especially having worked in the intelligence world. The Chinese firewall is the most renowned internet chokehold in the world. The Chinese are known for hacking Google to spy on their own citizens.

I just have to think of it if I were in his situation. If I were a freedom-loving individual looking to seek asylum, I'd probably first look at countries that granted asylum in similar cases that weren't internationally renowned for suppressing freedom of speech. Assange has asylum with Ecuador, why not go there first? China is just such a weird choice for someone who is purportedly morally driven to his actions by privacy violations.

Not only that, this situation has nothing but upsides for the Chinese. It looks great for them to expose another world power is spying on their own citizens (and weakens any diplomatic arguments the US has when pressuring them to open up free speech and the internet). It's also a nice thorn to retort after all of the recent hubbub about Chinese government hackers. If he wasn't an active spy in the traditional definition feeding the Chinese information, he is certainly an asset by circumstance -- why wouldn't they manipulate him to their benefit?

Now, that's not saying the US did the right thing -- we kind of fucked ourselves here having PRISM in place first of all -- but I am not sure this guy is the lone ranger whistleblower hero is painting himself to be.
apt-get upgrade ... innnnnnnnn spaaaaaacccccceee!

I'll get me coat.
The fact is there are almost no facts. The NSA is allegedly putting some stuff in a database. That's essentially the "facts." We don't know what, or how, or really understand the scope. We don't know if it's real time or archival. There are ZERO technical details.

The only thing that concerns me is that the NSA is actually somewhat incompetent, as those three PowerPoint slides make it seem like the kind of security strategy developed by a 12 year old kid.

I would have assumed that the NSA wouldn't need to ask Facebook or Google to participate. I just assumed that they could get access to any encryption keys necessary through any number of ways, and syphon off the data wholesale at the ISP level. These aren't exactly "secure" organizations. Gmail accounts routinely get hacked by 15 year old Chinese kids trying to steal WoW passwords. I would hope the NSA could do much better.
If you're going to make perjorative comments like this you should at least provide references/links to what it is you've read and heard that support your view.
We kinda did, we kept voting in anti-privacy and big-govt dirtbag bureaucrats. Until they're gone, the government will rule all of us instead of the way it should be -> we tell the govt what to do.