skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To amend that, I would also elaborate on why they should use such things as no one wants to be told without given reasons. In giving reasons, I would explain how you can be tracked as well (what things like an IP address are in relatable terms and how it is logged in services they use [including email]), so they understand why and how the tools should be used.

Also, I would teach them not to post or share anything on the Internet that they do not wish to come back to haunt them at a later date. Give examples of users that have had such things happen and the consequences as well (since many people do not believe it can happen to them). If they use services like Facebook, limit how much info you share (and also private info you give Facebook) and use a private browser windows while browsing such sites. Obviously this does not prevent everything, but there's no reason to make those that would watch them's jobs that much easier.
> When it comes to the bad things groups of people, such as governments, do to individuals, whether it's killing, torture, imprisonment with or without trial, surveillance or any other of the misdeeds that seems to have returned from the dark ages we deserve the same protection as American citizens.

Despite the actions and statements of our government, most of us Americans feel the same way. (It's just that the shitty entitled xenophobes are just so damn loud sometimes...)

You'll note that in our declaration of independence, it states that the rights to life and liberty are the inalienable birthright of every man, endowed by his creator, before it says fuck-all about anyone's government.
Slightly unrelated but is there a better algorithm that can give me "nth random number after a seed"?

Currently I am using something like

r = (n*very_big_number)+seed
The Official WWDC App - JUST UPDATED ahead of Opening in a matter of hours.
"Infrastructure Against Humanity"... That is a really really nice term for it. Also very memorable, I shall be appropriating this term for future use.
I'd recommend reading Fatal Purity if you want to understand just how evil the French Revolution really was - even the architects became its victims in huge numbers. The terror is not something I would wish on any country, and it is no way comparable to the American revolution in scope or brutality, that and the Russian revolution are fascinating periods but great examples of why revolution often ends in disaster for the countries involved, and frequently ends in dictatorship.

The Russian revolution started relatively peacefully, moved on to a brutal civil war, and then to draconian dictatorship (under Lenin) in just a few short years, then in 21 the resulting wars and disastrous economic policy caused a famine that killed 6 million people before NEP was introduced. And that was well before Stalin began to terrorise the country. Again, I think you're romanticising events which were nasty, brutish, and mostly harmful in their effects.

I'd argue European socialism (the social Europe we currently enjoy) evolved more from the evolution of liberal democracy and liberal capitalism in a peaceful society than from Marxism - many of the things Marx & Engels criticised have been peacefully removed (child labour, alienation of workers from means of production, lack of unions etc). Granted the UK and other European nations have other problems, but let's not forget how far we came peacefully, and how much of a set back to civilisation war and revolution really are.
This has been true for a long time, however I am wondering if there is an opportunity here.

Why do IT admins get full rights to read data? Their job is to get the systems running, but somehow right now this means carte blanche from a systems perspective. It is easier to build a tool like that of course.

The problem arises with configuration of access rights, whoever has edit rights on that config, controls the system. Nuclear launch procedures have the famous 2 keys sequence where at least two people need to be involved - even if this is only Hollywood, the idea itself is quite interesting.

In IT systems this would mean some sort of approval process where any risky operation would need to get requested and confirmed by another party. You want a full data dump? Wait a sec, care to explain why?

Of course this wouldn't be foolproof, but better than the systems today, no?
I think that beyond the obvious skills (encrypting everything, using HTTPS and TOR where possible) you need to instill in them a healthy sense of paranoia. If they think the government is reading their Facebook chat messages they're sure as hell not going to use it.
So that's where the Snowdens of yesteryear are.
I did a search in google for the HN post but couldn't find it. Could you give me the link to that HN post?
GCSB’s new powers for wide-spread spying on New Zealanders
"Looking forward to conflict" comment auto-logged, reference #391Z328. Report to the proper authorities within 24 hours for interrogation. You've been auto-added to the no-fly list.

That's likely what will happen from here, because only a small percentage of American voters care about this issue.
> secure, self-destructing

Because the page just said so? Right, right.
Air Force trying to respect privacy while data mining?
overall moral: even if your own country don't collected your internet traffic, always assume that another country does.
Article 1, Section 6: "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 returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place"
>Sorry, but I don't buy this guy's story. Something is just incredibly fishy.
>I am not sure this guy is the lone ranger whistleblower hero is painting himself to be.

That is exactly right. Its much too convenient. This guy was probably a PRC mole/sleeper. Who defects to a country that still executes dissidents?
Is it possible, then, that my government can get hold of my private data without technically spying if another country (which could've been spying on me legally, as I'm not its citizen) would provide it?
Well it made the Apple Daily:

http://www.appledaily.com.tw/appledaily/article/internationa...
For me, this incident is an example where the U.S. democracy failed, pure and simple. Obama made campaign promises to not do surveillance. He was elected and then did it anyway. It's frankly impossible now to change this issue in a democratic fashion.

From the outside it often looks as if American politicians are overly busy with a very expensive "game", rather than using the game for the greater good.
What's your question? How someone could possibly dare to care about something they did not care about before? How being pummeled 24/7 with reports about terrists and nucular mushroom clouds could possibly have lead to an atmosphere in which questioning the NSA was not an issue, what with starting wars all over the place and what not?

And what's with "being surprised" somehow being the only time where people to be allowed to discuss things? What's with that "argument" showing up all the time? If that's the only criticism you have, you have none, are you aware of that?
I've been wondering about this. The U.S. will be considered the anti-Switzerland with respect to our privacy. If you want your data safe, don't store it in the U.S.

Next question: how are Google etc treating my data when my own government wants to know what I say about them? Do they also bend over backwards to set up portals for different levels of ally, or are foreign citizens safer from their own governments than US citizens are from theirs?
This article is pure crap. I don't think people should really be siding with the NSA on this stuff. Fear mongering is not a reason for the level of invasion they are saying they should have access to.

If the NSA can hack and steal documents and other stuff with exploits and the like without a worry in the world they too should also be charged no matter if they are under the NSA or not from any other government. That'd only be fair in the hacker game.
The graphic does, but your reference to it makes no such mention.
I wonder if there will be a bigger outrage if companies like Salesforce and Oracle are involved. Non-US companies might be a tad alarmed if their ERP provider is cooperating with PRISM.

Since Microsoft is explicitly mentioned I wonder if the access includes their SMB-ERP stuff.
I have heard from multiple sources that the CIA loves Mormons.

Language skills. No drugs. No alcohol. Does well in a hierarchical environment. Check, check, check and check.

It would be against the law to ask about the underwear.
"destroy" is hyperbole, but it's certainly going to have a chilling effect. We can't ignore the elephant in the room any longer - our utopian global human internet is actually just a US government controlled plaything.

My company provides a service to the government sector in Australia, hosted on Google's Appengine. We've been negotiating a blanket deal with a government department, and I can see that we're going to have to answer some very hard questions about the security of their data after this. Winning this deal would make a ten-fold increase in hosting costs irrelevant, and I wouldn't be surprised if they even offered to pay us more to host in Australia just for their peace of mind.

Most of us learn as kids how asymmetrical trust is, and how once you're caught lying no-one believes your apologies or promises to mend your ways. Before PRISM, it was only the cynics muttering about how the US Government saw everything we did. Post PRISM, most non-US companies (and probably many US companies too) will be looking for neutral alternatives to US services.

And Richard Stallman... proved right yet again!
I don't understand why some of them aren't becoming whistleblowers, either. Maybe because Obama has already shown he is willing to use the Espionage Act against whistleblowers, because his logic is that "any revelation of our wrongdoings helps the enemy". That seems like a very weak argument to me either way.

But why aren't Americans in the street already? Europeans would be already in the street by now for a lot less than this. Remember the ACTA protests?
I've forwarded a domain to this URL if someone to conveniently visit it without creating an account:

http://www.hackertraps.com/

(Bought since mentioned in Arrested Development Season 4 and I'm otherwise not sure what to do with it.)
Costco does not hire business school graduates
Of course it has this "vulnerability": 624 of those values are MT's internal random seed.

RNGs have two primary functions: to provide statistically random values (for simulations, say) and to provide unpredictable values (mostly for crypto). These are different goals, and many RNGs are good at one but not the other. That's why we have both RNGs and Crypto RNGs.

Like many good RNGs for simulation, Mersenne Twister is not, and never has been, a Crypto RNG. It is explicitly in the first category.
It wasn't intended to be pejorative I honestly want to know how these people passed whatever tests are required to maintain the United States secrets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Manning#Early_life
To be honest, when these things happen 6 out of 7 times I empathize with the 'disgruntled' IT guy more than the object of his revenge. IT is thankless and when smart people end up being forced to work for sickening immoral egos you can't expect it to end well. We're probably lucky that most of them use computers for their revenge and don't go for violence.
Concatenation is Composition
You're a cat.
Oh, and the way these "blue badgers" talk is sickening. It's like they think they're the nobility or something. They should go join a monarchy if they want to act like they're the only ones who can make judgments or comprehend things.
It's not because we have more information, it's that THEY have a lot more information. The amount of our lives that we divulge to or involve the internet has shot up exponentially, certainly since the 1990s but when you think about it, even since, say 2000-2005.
Court opinions can be classified? What in the actual fuck?
"besides Snowden being very astute and mature vs. Manning being a troubled, depressed individual with a sad history of personal problems"

I am just waiting for all the personality attack pieces. About him not finishing high-school, perhaps some story from training buddies in the military about how he was erratic or behaved oddly and broke his own legs in a foolish way... it doesn't take much until it's easier to believe he was a one-off instead of a courageous and principled patriot who loves his country.

We are all human. For what it's worth any smear that comes his way now will not effect my image of him. He is untouchable.
well then we send them copies of Fahrenheit 451!
Put a better interface on GPG to make managing web-of-trust not a nightmare. The infrastructure has existed for a long time, but using it is amazingly unfriendly.

It gets more interesting when you consider a model like off-the-record encryption, where the goal isn't encryption and verification but deniability. OTR has the great property of ensuring that any time you manage to decrypt or intercept a message, you've also received all the information necessary to forge that message. Identifying keys are transient so you can never really prove any individual, sent any message since if you hold a copy of the message you could just as easily have faked the message.
America is a free country, the govt does what it wants but restricts the public.
This is not democracy as the speech goes.
I play violin. I consider playing it to be valuable to my own piece of mind and play for others on occasion. I'm sure I'm not the only amateur musician on HN though.
Another way to accomplish anonymity is to not use the so called internets, but I guess that is either very comfy or intresting.
But those companies are both American, aren't they? Regardless, I feel like the ceiling for outrage and/or concern has reached its ceiling, at least among foreign governments who can at least do a semblance of something about it, since it's way more important which companies are used the most than the nations from which the companies in question originate, and the NSA has the data of all the most popular internet companies in the world.
Evolved artificial intelligence can play video games better than humans
It's not just opportunities elsewhere. I specifically chose not to apply for an NSA scholarship in college because I didn't want to end up as an Edward Snowden. And I'm sure there are plenty of others -- pretty much anybody worth trusting is bound to self-elect to exclude themselves from working for the NSA.
Threads like these might as well be generated by an algorithm.

>NSA news
>Why is everybody so surprised!? comment

Like clockwork. Let me ask you, though. Do you really think that people only "suddenly" care (with the implication of ignorance or a contradiction on their part) or is it possible that there are nuanced differences between all of the things you casually reference as common knowledge and the current NSA news? I mean, there is speculation and there is confirmation. There are hunches and there are reputable sources. There is pointing somebody to the Room 641A Wikipedia page and there is telling somebody, "hey, look, this guy who was a part of the NSA is not only confirming this, but has sacrificed his career to give us even more information about it."

The public unconscious may have assumed that this was going on, clusters of people may have known, but you're underestimating how people compartmentalize this kind of knowledge. So when we have an event that brings a lot of this knowledge together and to the forefront and gives us something we can point to and talk about (even if it's only a story or a face at this point), I don't think we should pass up the opportunity to develop a louder voice about all of this rather than being cynical AGAIN just because we can't resist putting down public outcry.
Having been at three "failed" startups in my 15 year (to date) career, I guess I can provide a data point.

I've been involved in the staff and eventual senior management (but not founding) of three small companies in my career: two began as bootstrap startups that morphed into relatively successful lifestyle companies once it became clear we had no scalable product/market fit. They settled into hardware or software consulting, one is pretty sizeable now (a few hundred strong), the other remains under a hundred employees. The final one got to Series B funding but tanked after burning through $15 million.

To summarize, all were highly intense and emotional experiences. I compressed 2-3x the amount of learning I would have otherwise had in most other jobs, particularly in areas where you don't usually get exposure to as a young geek: business development & sales, marketing, HR, finances, etc., and I also became a much better software developer.

That said, small companies, especially if you're involved with steering them, are very personal affairs, and are extremely sensitive the founders' personality quirks while they're under 50 employees. They were hard to work for after a while.

So, in sum:

- Working in a startup is a great experience if you're not in it to get rich, but rather to improve your career by compressing your learning & working on something that inspires you

- Get involved with senior management if you want the experience, but be prepared for the emotional/health toll

- Luck is important, but not just any luck, you want luck that helps you survive - a good market being most important.
I think the Swedish wiretapping is wrong and that the law should be torn up.

That said, in practice it's less intrusive than the recently revealed US wiretapping-programs. Since more or less all software encrypt their traffic, the FRA-wiretapping is pretty useless.
Upgrading my MacBook Pro's RAM and HDD was extremely easy. Apple even provides guides on how to do it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5844621
The BBC should launch a social network
I was about to make a note on my iPhone
I was about to make a note on my iPhone. Then I realized, that as a Canadian citizen, the NSA would be immediately analyzing the contents of my note and likely reporting back to CSIS its subversive nature.

A few days ago this would have seemed like paranoid delusion. In the past week we have realized how far the tentacles reach, and we must now reconsider our choices of technology. Amazing that a note I write on my phone is considered fair game for foreign spy agencies.

I had always assumed that Skype messages were recorded, even before 2011. I had always assumed that email was read. There is a huge difference between assuming something is happening and knowing that the very worst of those are true.
While consumers may be too lazy to care, cloud providers will lose a lot of business. You can bet that every trade magazine outside the US will have articles discussing if it is even legal to store data with US providers given the particular country's regulation and the information we have.
I wish there was a site to connect open-source projects who need better UIs with the designers over at Dribbble. On Dribbble you see a lot of UI concepts that never come to fruition. What if we could convince some of them to help build a better PGP UI? After all, real world applications look much better on a resume than concepts.
This problem is systemic. It has little to do with Obama or Clinton or X, Y, Z individual. Individuals are irrelevant here. What you have is a runaway state.
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.

According to the whistleblower, they don't in any meaningful sense. They collect all the data they can, and then currently only use bits of it, when they feel that is justified. His point about checking the US president's email in the video was that all they need is one email from a foreigner in order to tie anyone in the US to an investigation, and look through all their records.
Lessons learned from a small tech startup
The problem is two-fold.

1. Ensuring that the key belongs to the person you think it does.

2. Graceful changing of keys.

In theory you could do something like what I am proposing with GPG too. You could sign a public key with the previous private key or two. In practice, getting the keys to where you want them is a bit more complex.

As a point I made clear in my blog entry, I am not a fan of X509, because the impedance mismatch of anything OSI and TCP/IP is significant. However, it does a decent job, when combined with LDAP (another monster IMHO) of spelling out the general solutions to problems PKI's suffer. It is therefore a useful reference point and probably the best foundation to build a decent proof of concept on.
America is not a direct democracy. The reputation of democracy has been in tatters for two millenniums. (Whether or not it deserves it is another thing entirely.)
The average SV programmer requires an education, but not necessarily a degree. The distinction is important.

I feel that this "hidden economy" emerged out of basic supply and demand. When programmers are hard to find, you do not have to apply sweeping filters to cull the numbers and can evaluate each prospect on their own merits. At that stage it doesn't really matter how the education was obtained.
I suggest everyone get a copy of The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and read it. It's a fun read, and is a really good basic outline for how to dismantle a tyrannical regime from the ground up.
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.

The fact that this is happening to _everyone_...

Has this actually changed? Is there any evidence that a U.S. citizen's gmail account, or skype calls, or yahoo searches, or facebook information, has been obtained without a court ordered warrant?

I'm not a U.S. citizen and have always assumed that anything I put on these companies' servers can be read by the U.S. government at will. But if you're a citizen of the land of the free and the home of the brave, I haven't seen anything come out that actually showed your cloud data is being accessed without probable cause being shown, the way it always has been.
The innocent days of building software and having fun are probably over. Let's get our kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames. Then we can figure out how to teach the next generation to build software in the brave new world we'll give them.
Stop being a baby.
The difference now is two issues:

(1) Previously, various official sources have denied this sort of thing was happening. As a specific example, Congress has asked and been told that universal surveillance of US citizens was not occurring, and the plain-text meaning of the law makes universal surveillance of US citizens illegal. (Now we are told that this is contradicted by a secret legal opinion.)

(2) Frog boiling. You can argue that at every point along the way the difference from the previous point is not big enough to cause an outcry. But there is a fallacy in this reasoning: at some point the aggregate IS enough to cause an outcry. Right now, there is an outcry among the media (partly exacerbated because these stories about leaks are contemporaneous with cases of prosecuting the media for leaks), perhaps it will spread to politicians and the citizenry.
My reading of it is he was referring to the 2016 Presidential primary contest for the Republican Party, not to the Republican primary for the Senate race in Kentucky.
The reputation of democracy has been in tatters for two millenniums.? How?
Foreigners don't want equal rights. Just equal protections from the government.