skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Previous discussions (including information about California):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5210732

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2208056

Summary: It is not so simple.
Also check out this website (and book) by another researcher: http://www.romanconcrete.com/
Google tests balloons to beam Internet to remote locations
Someone going wild on the whiteboard just DOSed my browser.
:)
Could OTR be added to Bitmessage?
"It's all broken folks, you may as well not use anything at all!"
It makes me kind of cynical that suddenly the security agencies get all friendly and start being "flexible" when they suddenly realise it's in their own political interest to do so. Until exactly this point they would have put people in jail for even mentioning these numbers. Now, oops, that was a stretch too far, we can all be reasonable can't we? So was it about security in the first place? or not?
> People seem to forget that democracy and freedom are relatively new to the world.

What? Would you like a detailed list of counterexamples ranging from local farmer councils accepting or vetoing kings in early medieval Norway to the Greco-Roman governmental systems on which ours are based?

Additionally, it is the case that up until the last 100 years or so, tyranny was constrained by the amount of enforcement effort required. Drones in particular I see as a very major threat here for that reason.
I may be wrong, but I believe all the high-altitude-wind-energy thingies work by having the flying bit tethered to the ground, while this baloons seem to fly much higher, making the two seem incompatible to me.
Show HN: Weekend project - Time zone converter for humans
And then they started patent trolling with the trove of patents they acquired.
I think the first time I saw Cringely predict the death of IBM, it was in Accidental Empires, where he was confident that their mainframe business, and therefore their entire company, would collapse at the beginning of 2000 because of the Y2K bug.
If there ever was any justification of using up our limited helium is this one.
However, I wish for these types of projects they would use hydrogen instead. I understand the safety concern, but a century after Hindenburg, we should be able to make these safer. At least for non-human flights. Not to mention Hydrogen is a bit better in creating lift.
The fact that a statement like this will never be voted up says so much. Do we rational hacker types really believe in ghosts? He did great shit, and he was a dick. Is that so hard to accept?
The translation is not too bad in this case and the PDF looks legit. Btw this is from 2012.

The question was if the technology they have is capable of decoding encrypted transmissions (e.g. SSH or PGP).

The reply was that in general yes, depending on the type and quality of the encryption.

What I would note is that neither the question nor the reply are about a particular encryption technology. I would not take it to mean that they can decrypt PGP in general.
Along the same lines, there is also CCAN.

http://ccodearchive.net/list.html

https://github.com/rustyrussell/ccan

And GMP for arbitrary precision math (integers and floating point numbers).

http://gmplib.org/
Building computer networks and artificial intelligence are pretty much Google's core competencies. Most if not all other companies would struggle to fund and develop this project.

First of all, the system is in total very expensive: You don't get any coverage with just a few baloons, you probably need hundreds to make any of them stay connected to the rest of the internet most of the time.

Second, this system is extremely stochastic and complex. The winds are mildly predictable, so they will have to optimize the balloon paths to cover their userbase.

This is a very exciting problem once you think about it...
NSA snooping: Facebook reveals details of data requests
From the latest pic[0], it looks like the AeroVelo Atlas[1]. Some details on their design can be found on their site[2], although the info looks to be from 2012.

[0] https://twitter.com/AeroVelo/status/345219802262036481/photo...

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcFyor9Gl0Q

[2] http://www.aerovelo.com/projects/helicopter/tech-info/
Can we try to find solution to NSA and all such spying
By now it's established that a huge surveillance equipment exists. It's not that we can't solve this problem. It's only that we didn't knew about it.

Google/Facebook/Yahoo. All the big players can solve this issue for once and for all by providing end to end encryption. But their business interests comes in play. All these companies (and other Internet companies involved) make money by showing contextual ads to their users. An encrypted message stored on the server gives no context. Every piece of communication made over FB/Gmail etc is broken down to shards to get any relevant context out of them and then ads shown to the users are fine tuned.

Can these companies create clients (web/mobile/tablets) which encrypt the message before leaving user's machine and transparently decrypt it on arrival to the recipient? Sure they can. At the very least they can provide such a service as an option.

But truthfully, everyone shall be wary of them now. I propose open source clients should be created for all major platforms which can provide such an option.

Three keywords:

1. Open source clients

2. Client side encryption and decryption

3. Making user adopt these tools instead of official ones
Do you have any specific feedback about things you have problems with?
In sane countries hate speech is criminalized.

History does not support your naive view that allowing criminals to freely congregate, organize, and recruit stops their ideology.

The Neo-Nazis on reddit have publicized the tactics they're using to normalize racism across the internet. According to watchdog groups the Neo-Nazi movement has grown tremendously since it was able to start recruiting and spreading that hate ideology online.
Is this just another way to locate him as if it's really serious, only his private key can be used to decrypt it, and his former employer have the public key they use to exchange crypted messages before. In this case it's really stupid
...what!?

edit: So this is from over a year ago. Probably safe to stop panicking.
With Google's share class structure, they don't have to justify anything to their shareholders, only to their employees.
The Libertarians do align "left of the Left" on social issues, but those social issues were never the basis of the Left anyway. Left means proletarian-driven economic positions, and that means the Libertarians are pretty firmly not-leftist.

There's also the fact that Libertarians have pretty much never actually endorsed left-leaning governments, while they have endorsed quite a few right-leaning but impurely-libertarian governments.
Let's not forget reddit :]
Default brightness is probably brighter than minimum brightness (it is on Android, at least).
I know there are plenty of conservatives worried about both - they're not the ones blowing my mind. Why does this have to be such a partisan thing for you?

But in answer to your second question, it's not progressive liberals who passed the Patriot Act in the first place. We don't really have any representation in Congress at all, any more than libertarians do. Why do you persist in talking about an aisle when both sides of the aisle are wholly owned subsidiaries of corporate America?
There is an asic bitcoin miner which can generate 500GH/s which retails for 22k$. What if you had a billion dollars to crack encryptions?
This is a pointless article, and I'm going to be maintaining skepticism until there's some detail. For example:

Do they have an actual method for breaking PGP, or do they have some sort of backdoor they've planted? Or some sort of access to the keys through other means?

If they have an actual method to break PGP, does it work against all the algorithms, or just one or a few? Does it work against arbitrary key length, or is there a maximum they can break?

If it's general-purpose enough to be just "PGP" regardless of algorithm/key length, how quickly can they decrypt? Is this real time? Is it "we can decrypt in time to find out where next week's attack will be"? Is it "we can decrypt in time to present evidence at this guy's trial next year"?

Without that sort of information this reads like a scary mistranslation, and not the sort of thing a government would disclose anyway.
Except that Spock is a total strawman of a brainy person in the first place.

Random deviations from what your opponent thinks is your strategy are in fact known-good components of good strategy.
I guess he does not consider systems in which esclavitude/serfdom existed as "democratic": your examples are more -in his mind, I guess- "aristochracies/oligarchies" than the "democracies" we now have.

Athens is probably a mild exception (but with esclavitude).

I agree with you, though. I am only trying to clarify what the parent was referring to.
The theory is that the frequency of requests, timezone, server being used and time skew (see also[1]) provide enough bits of information to identify a client.

The exit node or ISP could also forge a response and set the clock a unique amount of time out of sync which can later be identified over a non-anon network.

Whonix, the privacy oriented Linux distribution which uses two virtual machines (an isolating proxy and then a client on a private network) disable NTP by default and require the user to sync time out-of-band because of these concerns. There is a section in their docs about NTP[2]

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/onions/comments/10usgv/clock_skewing...

[2] http://sourceforge.net/p/whonix/wiki/Advanced%20Security%20G...
I hope all they've discovered is a technicality allowing for partial decoding. If they can break PGP/SSL in a way that isn't just brute forcing the hashing algorithm, then we'll have a lot more trouble than just the government(s) spying on us.
The answer is technically correct, if someone uses a weak enough cipher, they would be able to decode it. What else could they say? "We spend a lot of money on eavesdropping software, but really if people are encrypting their communication, it's all pretty useless."?
There exist a Skeptoid episode about this: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4021 , the 'Living Stones of Death Valley':

"When we reached the lake, we found to our great surprise that the entire lake was moving with the wind, at a speed we estimated at about one half of a mile per hour. The sun was on the lake by now and we could see a few very thin ice sheets that were now dissolving back into water. This whole procession was washing past many of the famous rocks. It's easy to imagine that if it were only few degrees colder when we were there — as it probably had been a couple of hours earlier — the whole surface would be great sheets of thin ice. Solid ice, moving with the surface of the lake and with the inertia of a whole surrounding ice sheet, would have no trouble pushing a rock along the slick muddy floor. Certainly a lot more horsepower than wind alone, as has been proposed. The wind was gusty and moved around some, and since the surface is not perfectly flat and with rocks and various obstructions, the water didn't flow straight; rather it swapped around as it moved generally forward. Ice sheets driven by the water would move in the same way, accounting for the turns and curves found in many of the rock trails."
SSH is not 'ie SSL'.
Whoa?! Care to elaborate on that or at least point to a relevant link? You really made me curious...
Or, even more likely, people who decide to troll the legislature.
Correct. PGP mixes symmetric and public key encryption algorithms, letting you choose your favorite ciphers and key lengths. You can choose RSA, DSA, AES, CAST5, TripleDES, etc. To say you've "cracked PGP" is akin to saying you've cracked pretty much all of the widely-accepted ciphers out there. I don't buy it.
Porting Udacity CS253 to Go part1
What kind of technology are they using to send the signal from the balloons to the ground? Though there were succesfull attempts to establish succesful WIFI links from the ground to stratoshpere(even 25 miles as I recall) this was achieved using precise DIRECT antennas (impossible when balloons are in constant movement)

???
Yeah, it's better than Oracle, but I forgot about it because I haven't heard of anyone using it recently? Btw, who uses Firebird and what does it have over Postgres, SQLServer or Oracle?
> tooling isn't great (this true of anything jvm to some degree though)

Well, you have plenty of very decent tools to inspect a running JVM state, and that's priceless. Eclipse is alright if you manage to set it up once with the tools you need and don't fiddle with the setup afterwards. Although slow, it packs a lot more features out of the box than Visual Studio. The debugger is pretty good too (including remote debugging).

If you compare it to state-of-the-art tooling for more fringe languages like Python or Haskell, it's lightyears better, really.
What are "class[es] built from functions and incomplete types"?

I once built classes using structs and function pointers, but this sounds different?
Better Interactive Data Visualization In Diabetes Tracking
That's a remarkably low rate, considering that it includes all levels of law enforcement. For instance, around 2000 children are reported missing in the US every day. I would expect a lot of those to lead to local police to ask to see the child's Facebook data, and that alone could account for most of the requests.

Now throw in all the other ordinary crime local police deal with every day, and I'm completely astonished that Facebook only deals with 50 requests a day.
Right. That may be what "at least partially" refers to. They may be able to crack one in some conditions...
Ok:

Project Loon currently uses ISM bands (specifically 2.4 and 5.8 GHz bands) that are available for anyone to use.

Still doesn't explain how they achieve good quality link
> It's only that we didn't knew about it.

This has been well known since the 1990s (Eschelon, Carnivore, etc)

> All the big players can solve this issue for once and for all by providing end to end encryption.

You as the user really has to take responsibility for that, if the $BIGCO holds your keys, they can do whatever they want with them. I've put up GPG encrypted posts on Facebook, no big woo. Twitter is really only good w/ROT13 :P

The only thing thats sortof close to what you're looking for is OTR, but its only for instant messaging.
It reminds me of "Michel and Webb - Dr. Death"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Skl71urqKu0

"The Giant Death Ray was meant to help mankind not to destroy it!"
Well, Norway wasn't really serfdom (serfdom basically evolved from Roman slavery). It was rather a matter where free farmer districts endorsing one king or another. Keep in mind that the troop levies were locally managed but not on the continental feudal model, and these local assemblies were the primary legal bodies of their areas. I don't think it was any less democratic than the US today.

Additionally keep in mind that during much of the time, if there was a dispute (and this was common before the Conversion), these districts could and did lead to the rise and fall of kings.

But even if you say monarchies are out (in which case the UK today is not democratic), you still have Iceland, Gottland, and much more.
You know what would be awesome? If they'd open-source the technology behind these balloons - so that we could build and launch our own!

My relatives live in a tiny village on the south coast of India and whenever I visit them I have to use the extremely slow 2G network. I tether my Android phone and basically setup a little WLAN hotspot there. The next bigger city with fast internet connectivity and 3G coverage is almost an hour bus drive away.

Every student in the village now possesses a laptop with WLAN capabilities. They got them for free - basically as a bribe so that the villagers stop protesting against the construction of a nuclear power plant the government is building nearby: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koodankulam_Nuclear_Power_Plant

But that's another issue.

I would love to build a wireless mesh network using cheap routers with an open-source firmware like OpenWRT for these kids. Internet connectivity could be achieved by using a single uplink antenna to Project Loon.

Speaking for myself, I had the privilege - unlike most of my family - to grow up in Europe and believe me, having access to the Internet completely changed my life. I’ve had access to free resources, taught myself how to program and I am now making a living out of it.

I want anyone on this planet to have full, free, uncensored and fast access to the Internet.

Thank you Google for doing such a project! I really hope it will work as planned and I wish you all the best on this journey.
This is not a software engineering problem but social and political one. Thus, any attempt to solve it only by means of some smart engineering would be bound to be rendered uneffective for most or all of the masses.
The answer provided by the government does not make a specific claim they can decrypt PGP or SSH.

The question is quite vague - can the government decrypt, at least partially, encrypted communications (e.g. PGP or SSH)

The answer is even vaguer, something along the lines of 'The deployed technology is, in principle, capable of that, depending on the type and quality of encryption'.

Both the question and the answer are so woolly they can mean anything from 'German intelligence can partially decrypt ROT13' to 'German intelligence can read 4096 bit PGP encrypted messages like a morning newspaper'.

One can also be reasonably sure that in the extremely unlikely event some entity somewhere were capable of breaking PGP, they'd go to great lengths not to tell anyone about it - such a (again, wildly improbable) capability becomes a lot less valuable if it was common knowledge.
Yes, but it's still Apple hardware and a quick Google shows that it may be possible to install Mac OS X on it.
I personally like and use uthash (no reference counting) but:

* only a header file
* has hash, array, string, list, implementations

https://github.com/ned14/uthash
But I feel like that would make the media -- followed by average people -- go crazy. Consider the current NSA news combined with "Google puts hundreds of cameras in the sky".
Hello.
May I suggest looking for some code by tptacek for the red-black trees. I am looking too, but so far , I haven't been able to find it. I read about it first in this link: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4455225>.

I think your project looks very interesting. Reference counted datastructures is a great convenience.

Thanks, and Good Luck further.
It's not paranoid. They did that regarding the Communists, Civil Rights Movement, and much much more..... It's just the way things go when you have people in power who believe in their agenda and want to accomplish things.
It's not a scary mistranslation, just a lousy title in the original article. The question is posed in such a general way that it can be answered without providing any specifics or making any claims about particular crypto technologies. And that's exactly how it's answered.
good job on making this, but.. it's useless
Let's assume one hash is exactly equivalent to one attempt at brute force and the keys are 256 bits. 5GH/s * ($5B / $22K) is about 10^17 GH/s. There are 2^256 possibilities, which is about 10^77. So to try them all you need about 10^60 seconds. Granted that is the worst case for the cracker, but the average case is also going to take quite a while.
They are already trying to dirty Snowden with spin. Yesterday morning on ABC "News" they kept saying he is dangerous because might defect to China which is complete speculative BS considering all he has sacrificed (don't normally watch that disney-owned cr*p but it was on at the laundrymat).

Ha, look what source comes up for news when you google it: https://www.google.com/search?q=defect+to+China (ABC "News")
A bit more regarding "sufficiently strong and consistent" effects: We all do little experiments all the time and generally reach valid conclusions based on them. Some examples. Imagine your friend says one of these things:

"Spicy pepperoni pizza late at night gives me heartburn; I feel better when I stick to milder foods."

"My stomach hurts when I eat cheese."

"I feel great when I get around 8 hours of sleep, I get grumpy when I only have 4 hours and I feel groggy if I stay in bed for more than 10 hours."

"If I drink caffeine after 7pm, I have trouble getting to sleep."

"Gin makes me sick, but vodka is fine."

Somehow, all of those seem like PERFECTLY REASONABLE statements, even though they are anecdotal and based on a sample population of one. Nobody says this is invalid information because it wasn't double-blind and there was no control group. Nobody ever says, to paraphrase the upstream comment I responded to:

> I wish they wouldn't report such anecdota so strongly. Joe is unlikely to have conducted controlled double-blind studies on himself, so he can't know it's the {pizza, cheese, caffeine, sleep...} doing anything or not.

Right?

But if Joe says: "When I zap myself with tCDS it helps relieve my depression", he DOES get that sort of complaint!

Why is that? Why is it okay to report that Joe said "I feel less depressed when I exercise" or "I feel less depressed when I get to bed earlier" but NOT okay to report that Joe said "I feel less depressed when I use the tCDS"? Why is he allowed to KNOW those first two things based just on personal knowledge of how he feels, but not that last one?

There is a weird and (I think) inappropriate double standard at work here.
They did not say that those requests use national security laws. They are just giving us the total number of accounts they have released information on regardless of what law was used to compel release.
You're right. I think the lighthouse was also used in some version (or theme) of the animated icon in the top right corner, which was usually a big N [1].

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/93/Netscape_Navig...
You would be able to break weak passwords, but you wouldn't be able break PGP with decent key sizes.

Reason? Physics: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/25375/why-not-us...
نتيجة اعدادية المنيا 2013
We're living in 2013, and this is a tech forum, so let's get real: advertising is about tracking, about total surveillance, not sticking a logo on a bus.

That's what Google does, that's what Google's motives are. Every damn time, so there is no reason to assume this is any different.

That's not a "trade-off", that is surrendering.

If the government would set up a balloon network to track everyone you would be screaming bloody murder, but it's Google and people get internet access in exchange it's okay?
The NSA knew about differential cryptanalysis more than 10 years before academia and the general public. It's become cool to bash the NSA, but don't make the mistake of underestimating them. (Also, remember that the NSA is far, far larger than the CIA.) They have plenty of smart people working for them--in fact, a bunch of the most prominent researchers/personalities in the security community worked for the NSA in the past.
Google Calls Facebook’s Data Deal With The Feds “A Step Back For Users"
Another anonymous form of communication he could use that would he an lot simpler and hard to track would be old fashioned mail. No need to use a sledgehammer and all that.
Good to know I'm not the only one!

I had not heard of leemail before. I will have to check it out.
Hovering the world to spot all the faces that are hidden on earth.