skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sure the smearing of Snowden will start soon enough. All the things we know about Manning took months to come out. Manning didn't even get to publicly respond to the smearing until, what, years of solitary confinement? And when he did respond he sounded a lot more level-headed than the smears made him out to be. No man is an angel, especially the kind of man willing to buck the system like they have.

I expect that the NSA will make it their mission to dig up everything they possibly can on the guy to discredit him because they will see it as a zero-sum game, the more doubt they cast on his character the less justification for scrutiny of their billion dollar budgets.
One, I'm rather indiscriminate about my mistrust of governments. Here's an earlier thread by me regarding my mistrust of Canada, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5849265

Two, when my data is in US, there is still some hope that now or in the future the 4th amendment will provide some privacy. Or some amount of protection. When that data is not here, there is even less protection. Especially countries with strong motivations or history of selling or sharing intelligence. If Waze was in Saudi Arabia, Dubai/UAE, Pakistan, etc. I would have made the same comment, if anything, there is probably more transparency in Israel than the other countries I mentioned.

That being said. I stand by my comment. Israel has done a great job commercializing some of their intel research into a thriving IT sector (i.e. Startup Nation) but that also makes me suspect there is strong ties between their IT sector and their intel community, hence my mistrust.
On the contrary, I think that's their point ("we don't know!").
I'm going to need a good bit more than a form on an otherwise empty page to convince me that this is anywhere near secure.
As I understand it security clearance screening is done by blacklisting, not whitelisting.

That's what would make sense for a nation with due process, but it does lead to increased risk of leaks from people with no obvious red flags that come up during the background check or in-person interviews.
Facebook CEO Admits To Calling Users 'Dumb Fucks' (2010)
Ask HN: as a non-U.S. based developer, should we host in the U.S.?
Will our data be under surveillance? Should we now think about hosting outside the U.S?

Can we trust any U.S. based technology companies?
Great article, the awareness of security is terribly bad
The janitor making good, solving the famous math conjecture on the blackboard, is a Hollywood trope. Not sure why Slate is so adamant that the guy's story is a disqualifier.

We don't know his story yet but this much is certain: he is by definition an exceptional individual.
Let me introduce you to one type of cancer: chronic myelogenous leukemia. A friend of mine has it. Previously, the prognosis was terrible. Since the development of imatinib, survival rates are basically like anybody else.
GitHub really has won the war on opensource, bitbucket is nice though for unlimited private repositories (if it's only you or tiny team).

It seems that if your project isn't on Github it doesn't exist (there are some obvious exceptions to this).
Last time I checked Chrome it wasn't possible to remove certificates from the store, has this changed yet?
I didn't get the impression that Snowden actually has access to PRISM itself. If all he's doing is IT support then it could be as simple as that he ran across the "management briefing" for it on the share drive without ever having access to the system itself. Certainly I would hope that NSA is not dumb enough to farm out credentialing for a system like PRISM to one of their contractors, but who knows?
The headline "Has the US Government's History of Acting Against its own Stated Values in the Protection of Civil Liberties and Privacy" is not nearly punchy enough to attract the desired clicks though.

The window ain't just 7 years, it stretches a lot further back than that.
Nothing will change.

If you think that those involved were not prepared for the eventually of a leak, you'd be very naive. The fact that all of these companies have been sitting on boilerplate denial statements speaks volumes. Contingency plans have been put in place for this eventuality and the people making these plans are experts at dealing with these situations.

My guess is that the gameplan for the US government will be to stay silent and wait for general apathy to sink back in. Tomorrow is WWDC and, with the latest Apple news, the tech community rally will likely fall to 2-3 page in a week or so and then disappear altogether. Once that happens, the difficulty moving to alternate services (as per the other HN poll) will shadow everything, and the company bottom lines will be unaffected.

Add to that, if you believe that the US government and institutions are the only ones doing this, that would be even more naive. The Mossad, SIS, CSIS, KGB etc. are likely implementing very similar policies and procedures, if not directly involved with PRISM (or whatever it is actually called) and the outsourcing companies providing it. The likelihood of finding other territorial based services with capability, scale in an area not under surveillance is probably close to impossible.

The Arab Spring was a wake-up call to all governments/multi-nationals that these tools are power in the hands of the general public and steps were taken to mitigate and reduce this effectiveness.

It's depressing. I wish it were otherwise. I wish the companies involved actually had the ability to push back or outright deny involvement in these types of actions, but I suspect their hands were tied.

Silicon Valley is entrenched. We like to think that it is still our playground but we should know better. My only hope is that this time we learn and that brighter people than I figure out what we can do about it.
To be fair you could take Sunnyvale and draw a circle around it the same size as a "fun" place and see how much you got there. But the whole 'south bay is boring' narrative has always been weak for the same reason that equating 'walking in poo in the tenderloin' with it being 'edgy' is weak.

There is a pretty active club scene on Murphy street, there are great restaurants on Sunnyvale a few miles up in Mtn View, a few miles south in Cupertino, and a few miles south in Santa Clara. You've got hiking and parks with wetlands and concert venues (Shoreline, Great America, HP Pavilion), soon you'll have NFL football and world cup Soccer nearby, and you've got an amusement park with concerts and roller coasters, and you've got quicker access to the mountains, and the Steven's creek trail for some excellent biking, running, and walking.

Downtown Palo Alto is a quick train trip, where you can walk from the University Ave station to pretty much anywhere.

What you don't have are some high density urban buildings. More of those are coming with the Murphy Park build but they will still not be high rise apartment/condos. Its not clear to me what the buys you, but it is a difference.

And yes, I'm a bit defensive when people say "its so boring and plastic" (or words to that effect) but getting them to say what is 'not boring' or 'not plastic' seems unexpressable.

I'd love to know what makes a for a 'non-boring' place if you have a list.
Oops, I think the author meant to have copy[key] = val for the last line of this example:

copyObject: (inputObject) ->
copy = []
for key, val of inputObject
copy.key = val

As written, it uselessly sets a bunch of values to the key property in turn.

The point stands though.
"Oh, hey Ahman, hold up real quick, the government just announced that they're tapping my phone. We'll talk again later".
Do you know the Vim Original?
Very nice presentation, examples, and explanations.
I think you miss the real power of Gandhi's method (as do most people who want to reduce it to pacifism). The point is very simply, to live life as both a protest against what the world is, and as an example of what it can be. Be heroic. Be strong. Let nobody break you.

I don't think that Gandhi's writings espouse a general abhorrence of violence or even sabotage. They represent however a willingness to stand above such methods, and to be heroic in every little thing. The salt protest is perhaps a great example. The message is "I don't need to sabotage you because you cannot break me."

The distinction between violence and non-violence is a remarkably difficult one to make. Punching someone in the gut is undeniably violent, but what about deeply insulting a person's character? Why do we draw a line between those? Why is it that razing a bridge is violent but sitting down in the revolving door of a business establishment preventing customers from entering not? So-called non-violent resistance tends to eschew deliberate and overt outward and tangible violence for a more subtle but even more important battleground, that of morale based on legitimacy and the moral high ground.

> I reference this merely to make the point that the reach of Gandhi's tactics do have a limit.

But here's the real dirty secret. It doesn't matter who is in power, the average everyday decisions are made by individuals, and foreign powers rely very heavily on local support. I won't second guess the French resistance (and I don't think Gandhi would have either), but I think it is dangerous to opine what would have happened given that Germany was not really in a position to dedicate a lot of force to France (given that their military was somewhat occupied elsewhere). Both Ghandi and the French Resistance existed in cases where foreign powers were dominating, in a mixture of positive and negative ways, but where the foreign power could not reasonably dedicate significant military forces to reconquer the area. WWII effectively destroyed Great Britain as a world superpower largely due to the toll the Battle of the Atlantic had on their navy. Germans may have been ruthless (look up the night and fog decrees), and they were very careful not to allow visible resistance show up, but that itself can make it a more effective protest. They can't throw all of France in the death camps can they?

Now, things like drones are problems because they are force multipliers. If one person can control several drones at once, it means less people need to be making the decisions but I am not sure what that will mean yet.
One biggie that the author left out of the piece:

The US Gov continues to insist that they are not monitoring the data of US citizens because that would be unconstitutional without warrants. But that's a tacit admission that they are openly monitoring the data of non-US citizens. I think this is one of the most important revelations of this leak, the US Gov has made it clear that if you are a non US citizen using a web service based in the US your data is definitely under observation.
Right now? Probably not.

However, you don't know and can't predict how the government will change in the future. Data collected today is data that can be abused tomorrow.
Maybe at a private company, but it is not wise to disclose classified information about the US government if you are or were employed by them.
If the rest of the intelligence community treats their IT people same as Schindler in his tweets, it's no wonder they can't get quality staff.
A jury found him guilty of 19 counts.
I'm not sure how common this is on this site, but I happen to be an HN reader the vast majority of whose friends in the US and across the world don't know or follow technology/security stuff.

Out of my 600-odd 'friends' on Facebook, one (1) is posting stuff about the NSA allegations. The other 599, are posting pictures of cats, music videos, snaps from vacation, reflections about life, et cetera. I myself am extremely reticent about posting on Facebook due to the recent revelations.

As a result, I am afraid Edward Snowdon's fears might come to pass, atleast in the short run. Not enough people care. They crave the short-term dopamine bursts that result from people liking their posts, or pictures, or videos. Getting them to set that aside and care about the fact that the Government might potentially have access to it all is a very, very hard task.

In order to do this, you have to get people to switch en masse to new, secure social protocols. In short, you have to build a Facebook alternative, an client-side encrypted webmail service, or a document sharing site that JustWorks, is secure, and doesn't require any terminal commands to access / run. Otherwise the majority of the population is going to use products from Microsoft, Facebook, and Google. You can use your encrypted webmail and identi.ca, but very few people outside the "tech-aware" world will communicate with you.
The New U.S. Industries Entrepreneurs Should Be Watching
Snowden himself mentioned the difference between his actions and Manning's. Seriously, go read the interview.

However admirable Snowden may have found Manning's principles, he demonstrated a much different of Manning's actions when he explained his decision to leak what he did.
I'm Canadian. I'll be locking down my communications as best I can: email (GPG), instant messaging, chat, etc. I'd like to see my American neighbours do the same and hold their politicians feet the fire over this.

I feel like I should boycott the US companies on the list, at least to some degree. I have made the switch to DuckDuckGo and Mozilla. A Blackberry, as opposed to Android, will be my next smartphone. As a developer I'll be dropping my iOS support in the coming weeks. I haven't used a Microsoft product, including Skype, in a long time (exclusively Linux). I will likely phase out Google Drive and Gmail as well.

Not sure how many of my compatriots will follow suit or if that will have an impact financially.

There are lots of recommendations out there now to lock-down your browser, e.g. adblock/https/etc, if you haven't already. If this becomes mainstream then advertisers like Google may take a hit.

I'll be emailing my member of parliament (MP) to make sure we keep tabs on this in Canada, and keep our privacy laws intact.
While in Boston "the [number]" would mean a bus.
Manning admitted it himself in a guilty plea in court. He even made a long statement where he explained why he did it.
Note that he doesn't deny that they did in fact collect literally every piece of phone metadata generated by Verizon (and presumably every other phone company).

Every single phone call you have made for quite some time exists as a record in an NSA database.
Where's your "mistaken" and "misquoted" options?
I disagree. It is objectively correct that these programs need significantly more public accountability. The fact that their existence has been an official state secret is about as contradictory to American principles of government by the will of the people as it can get.

I am aware of the argument that disclosing their existence makes them less effective and to that I say if we must violate our principles to defend them, we aren't really defending them.
Can you trust China based technology companies?

Can you trust EU based technology companies, where governments have similar programs?
It seems like hiring someone who isn't a tech genius (assuming Snowden isn't one, but it doesn't matter) is exactly what the NSA should want, the less technically advanced their employees, the less likely they are to be aware of the wrongness of what they are doing, especially if they are given simple tools that do all the work for them and mask the technical guts behind a point and click interface that "anyone" can operate.
United States Government Emergency Telecommunications Service
It might be wishful thinking, but part of me wonders if Steve Jobs might have actually been able to push back a little and prevented Apple from joining the program at the same time as Microsoft/Google et al. Apple isn't known for being outspoken about privacy, but Jobs is a formidable character to deal with and, well, if anyone had the balls to say 'no', he did.

Apple wasn't added until after Jobs died, years after other major players:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Prism_slide_5.jpg
The government isn't supposed to deter harmless political protests.

The whole idea of civil disobedience is to get yourself put on trial for something you're willing to do the time for. "They aren't being deterred, the prison sentence has to be increased" is obviously a flawed response to that unless your goal is to suppress dissent without regard to how draconian and disproportionate you have to be in order to do it.
I had access to the full rosters of everyone working at the N.S.A., the entire intelligence community and undercover assets around the world.

That's another mind-blower, if true. One would think that such things are highly compartmentalized, and need-to-know would apply.
I work with companies that do this pretty regularly due to other regulatory issues. The problem involves how poor data privacy laws are in other countries, in some places data is more illegal than others, and then how its accessed from the US. Sometimes you're not better off in other countries anyways.

Right now the problem is "the cloud" not the country for the US anyways...
Snowden, in exchanges with Post reporter, made clear he knew risks
Are there any concerns using the NSA's SHA-2 functions?
Because treason and national security are taken very seriously.

It's well known that there is a "secret" interpretation of the PATRIOT Act and FISA revisions that basically allow unlimited loopholes for accessing any data. Going up against what is arguably the most powerful organization in the world and the most powerful government in the world, while you have a nice cushy tech job, would be dumb.

Besides that, not many engineers employees for private companies have a firm grasp on all of the details of the law. How many people can say for certainty that it is even illegal for the NSA to do broad data-mining of US citizens?
I don't think you've been paying attention. Glenn Greenwald (who writes for the Guardian) and Laura Poitras (who's independent, but has had bylines for both the Guardian and WP) interviewed him in his hotel room in Hong Kong. He definitely was in Hong Kong for a while.
Do you have an example of its application in that manner? I am unaware of one.
It could be under surveilance if you allow it to be surveilable. If you aren't taking precautions to keep it out of the hands of hackers, the government is certainly not going to have a hard time getting at it.

General surveilance is easily avoidable...
Is that to say, no, U.S. companies can't be trusted but it doesn't matter cause no-one else can be trusted either?
No, I'm not. I'm sure you can do your own search for "law", "tax", "immigration", etc.

If you had done that, I'd have no issue with a civil critique of the content but to dismiss ("fail", really?), insult ("spam") and patronize ("Hire a real writer[...]") the project of a respected member of the community (or anyone) to the extend that you did, with no basis (you haven't read the book and don't seem to have read the table of contents), has no place here or anywhere intelligent discussion is desired.
There is no way this petition can succeed. The powers that be speak realpolitik, and you don't. It's just that, with easier worldwide media outlets, their secrecy is occasionally exposed for a brief while until we forget.
Go home. Get on with your life. If you're not already playing in the big leagues, there is literally nothing you can do.
The essential problem is that once the IT people were held to an objectively lower standard AND paid better (because the government was having a hard time recruiting), it turned into a death spiral. Resentful career people shit on them more and thus they had to be paid better and overseen less and thus resented more and thus shit on more...

The correct solution would have been using more military people at NSA and accepting a much longer in-house training pipeline. The benefit is I'd trust an 8-12 year military IT veteran who served in general military IT then got put at NSA a lot more than someone hired as a contractor; much harder for the enemy to infiltrate someone, and someone who has been in for 8-12 years probably has a pattern of behavior, family, ties, etc. to make it less likely he'd accidentally or intentionally fuck you.

Schindler seems to be particularly upset (which is probably understandable) and maybe not representative of how people treat contractors normally :)
Have you been acqui-hired before? Is this coming from experience? How long did it take for your "golden child" aura to wear off?

(I've been through one startup/bigco acquisition, by [what is now] McAfee, back in the '90s; it wasn't a good experience, from the jump.)
Totally - welcome to the farking cyberpunk future we all dreamed about in the 80s.

THis is amazing.
History has demonstrated the opposite, at least in the U.S.

You had no right to privacy on a telephone line, unlil eventually Congress passed a law against wiretapping and set controls on when the government could wiretap, controls which were later strengthened by the Supreme Court.

Cell phones: Started off with no privacy. If you had a radio scanner you could legally intercept conversations, even if you were the government (after all, they were being broadcast right in the clear in plain view of anyone who had an antenna). Again, Congress passed a law to ban deliberate interception of these communications and set similar control s on the government.

Even beepers had a specific law passed for them.

On the other hand, your slippery slope argument has itself been used to support horrific policies. Does anyone remember the reasoning for Vietnam? It was based on a slippery-slope argument itself.

The flipside of having a democracy is that people might actually choose to entrust the government with a given power. For example, the American people have seen practically no qualms whatsoever about the American government having things which are much more potentially dangerous: nuclear weapons.
Interesting comparison, but shoukd be mentioned that Dell, AWS, and others, are leveraging knowledge around Chef.
this.

I thought of this, and then thought... Is that ridiculous? If it's already running nix, is there a need?
There are plenty of obscure modern HTML tags.

If anyway is bored I would love to see a graph of every possible HTML tag (old and new) plotted by frequency of actual use in the wild.

Some very rare - non outdated - ones:

* colgroup
* rowgroup
* datalist
* optgroup
* fieldset
* figure
* figcaption
* hgroup
* keygen
* legend
* mark
* ruby
* details
* summary

How many of these do you know? And how many have you ever used?
Would that be the Rand Paul who said this?

"I’m not for profiling people on the color of their skin, or on their religion, but I would take into account where they’ve been traveling and perhaps, you might have to indirectly take into account whether or not they’ve been going to radical political speeches by religious leaders. It wouldn’t be that they are Islamic. But if someone is attending speeches from someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government, that’s really an offense that we should be going after — they should be deported or put in prison".

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2011-06-08/entertainment/ba...
Is Betteridge's law of Headlines true?
It might be a solid starting point though. I'm sure people looking for information on home made bombs and the like would, at least hopefully if there was to be any possible defendable reason for this, be at the top of their lists of people to monitor.
I think most people with some technical savvy have already concluded that everything on the Internet is potentially subject to surveillance, both government and corporate. You can mitigate the impact on your privacy to some extent by going offline or using crypto but not totally. People need to choose what to share, when and with whom. The people who are loudly shouting on social media about the evils of government interception are still shouting on social media where everything they have ever said or done is able to be mined and analysed. Nothing really has changed except perhaps the perceptions of the naive.