skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right one should never say never, though by the same token one shouldn't assert with absolutely certainty something like China will be freer than the US in 30yrs.

I primarily had in mind the relative court systems of the two countries. As long as the Chinese court system is not fully independent and autonomous, has term limits rather than lifetime appointments, and replacement judges are appointed by the CCP, it will always be something of an instrument for the CCP, and I don't see them ever completely relinquishing that power.

US Judges are of course appointed by the political party in power at the time (except for lower level ones in elections), but that changes relatively frequently, and once the judges attain their lifetime appointment, all bets are off how their judicial views will evolve over time.

Sometimes we get politically partisan results like the 2000 election decision, but other times we get real surprises like Justice Roberts siding with the ACA in a tie-breaker.

But a completely independent and equal judiciary branch is the last resort of a free society, and the US has a 200yr+ tradition in that respect. China's court system was only reformed ~40yrs ago, and partially as an instrument of the CCP, rather than as a fully independent and equal branch of the Chinese government.
From the update it looks like they already have a policy of forgiving equipment loss in a case of this type. Someone gave the customer bad information.
The NSA's claims are laughable.

These clowns couldn't catch the bumbling Boston bombers, who were about as unprofessional as terrorists get. And there was no shortage of arrows pointing to them.
No computer lasts forever. So whenever the time comes to buy the next computer, whether for ourselves or for our relatives, we should choose Linux-friendly hardware.

As for poor iOS device support, that is hardly the fault of Linux developers, since the protocol between iOS and iTunes is proprietary.
Mozilla is encrypting user data using a user provided passphrase/PIN as part of Firefox Sync. Personna also has it's own browser-based crypto. Both systems have public specifications.
I think most Americans would view government-run media with extreme distrust; the fourth estate needs to be independent of the government if it's going to be an effective check on the government's power.
I'd say JavaScript instead of jQuery.

Before jQuery going mainstream there was Spry, and then it faded away.

If jQuery ever goes away, the good ol' JavaScript will still be there for us.
Project MK Ultra
> that are integrated with .Net? Almost certainly not.

There is MonoDevelop (http://monodevelop.com), of course. But speaking more generally, if you're working in .Net, you've already chosen to lock yourself into a proprietary vendor's trunk. I wouldn't advise waiting for free software developers to come up with things to make your stay there more pleasant.

> Not a single one of those supports Amazon streaming video (and I suspect not Netflix either, but I don't have a Netflix subscription). We have to use my wife's computer to watch Amazon videos because they don't work under Linux Flash.

Amazon video has worked fine in Firefox for me on Ubuntu forever. If you're trying to access it via Chrome, it won't work because Google removed DRM support from the Chrome Flash plugin (see http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8&...). God help me for saying this, but that's one you can't blame Adobe for.

Netflix doesn't work, but that's because Netflix uses Silverlight rather than Flash, and Silverlight has never been Linux-friendly.
you post things because _you_ found them interesting, not so as to get upvotes. any upvotes gathered are purely incidental...
You can't pardon someone who hasn't been convicted of a crime. This petition is somewhat premature and presumptuous!
Didn't Nixon get pardoned before he was tried?
N) The kind of power Obama now possesses has corrupted him, amplifying existing character flaws and revealing an inner despot.
Since we're talking COINTELPRO[1], might as well pull MK ULTRA into the mix. For the younger folks among us, or those who aren't history buffs, this stuff explains exactly why so many people are distrustful of the US government. It's not just silly paranoia or crazy conspiracy theories... the US government has a demonstrable history of engaging in illegal and unethical behavior.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5886672
So that's not good.

You can see how that could be happening; NSA has trunk-level access to telephony circuits. Telcos are engaged in a long-running game of footsie with the government that makes billion dollar Internet companies look like anarcho-capitalists.

But I'm not seeing how we get from there to the contents of email. To have the email of arbitrary Americans without a warrant, the NSA would need direct access to the servers that run Google Mail. They do not have that access; Google has categorically denied it, and the Guardian walked the claim back. The "optical splitters on the Internet backbone" thing doesn't hold water either; most people need to go through some effort not to use strong crypto when communicating with people using Google Mail.
As an extreme left-wing Democrat who opposes any attempt by government to acquire non-public information without a warrant, I must ask, what "shrill cries" are those?
He said they weren't listening in on calls from Americans, not that they couldn't.
That's sort of like estimating the tax rates from the length of the tax code (71000 pages in the us just for the federal tax code, less than 10000 in almost every other country on earth, most around 5000).

The number and content of laws is irrelevant. The way they are practiced is. E.g., if you read the 4th amendment you'd think the us government would need reasonable suspicion and a warrant before border search, wire tapping, stop and frisk, etc.
In addition to COINTELPRO, it's interesting to read up on MK ULTRA, another US govt. program which engaged in illegal and unethical behavior, including conducting illegal experiments on unknowing / unwilling subjects who were US citizens.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5886782

I know some people will argue that this stuff is off-topic, and maybe it is in a certain sense. But there are a lot of younger readers on HN who probably aren't familiar with a lot of this history, and it helps explain why some people are so quick to distrust the US government. In light of the recent news about the NSA, IRS, etc., I think this is worthy of discussion.
THE MAN in the middle
The Snowden Principle
Interesting, I hadn't heard of that. Thanks. It does look better.
The source said even though the NSA may have that power
to collect the geolocation data under the law and the
secret court's rulings, the NSA does not use it.

I think this gets to the heart of the misunderstanding between the administration and the critics of these programs: the administration assures us that they have not and will not abuse the program, whereas most critics argue that abuse will occur (eventually) if such abuse is not actively prevented, rather than merely forbidden by policies.
The response is going to look something like "because we don't know the full extent 'related to the NSA surveillance programs,' we cannot make any such promises" mixed in with some reasonable sounding stuff about due process and rule of law.
Doesn't seem like they will get very far trying to paddle out without flinging shit elsewhere…
For a single meal.

The average American family that even has a savings account has around $6,000 in it, total (http://finance.zacks.com/much-money-average-american-family-...). You can see how spending 1/6 of your total savings on a single meal would strike most people as out of reach.

Not to mention that ~30% of families have no savings at all.
A copy of Google's SSL private keys, provided they don't use cipher modes that provide forward secrecy, would suffice if they'd already tapped all the transit fibers (though not gmail-to-gmail).
A huge portion of all Google Mail connections can't be MITM'd even if NSA has an SSL CA banked, because Google baked the identity of their public key into their browser (using public key pinning).

File that under "things you don't do if your goal is to cooperate with NSA surveillance", by the way.
This is just an unusually stark demonstration of how it really works: One party stakes out a set of statements and positions with which it will pander to a portion of the population, and then actually do WTF ever they want. Another party stakes out a different set of statements and positions with which it will pander to a different portion of the population, and then do WTF ever they want to do. What both parties want to do is often surprisingly the same.

We let them know what we want to be told, and then they cleverly tell it to us.
Couldn't agree more with this. The notion of an "85% rule" seems unnecessary as long as business features are being implemented regularly and by their target milestones.
If you combined the output hoses you'd get an OR. So you have AND, OR, and XOR in one device. You can make a NOT from the same device using the XOR and connecting an input to the water source.
A copy of Google's private keys would be a more outrageous and damning discovery than NSA somehow having direct access to Google's servers. NSA doesn't have Google's private key.
> the NSA would need direct access to the servers that run Google Mail. They do not have that access; Google has categorically denied it, and the Guardian walked the claim back.

Also, I don't necessarily buy this. I don't think Google's denials are lies, as Google is not a single brain, but thousands of individuals. Hard to prove a negative.
> provided they don't use cipher modes that provide forward secrecy

They use a PFS cipher spec: http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2011/11/protecting-...
As one extreme left-wing nut to another, let me suggest that you enter the word "partisan" in the search box below, sort by date, then start clicking back through the past few days.
I think that a distinction can be made here. Consider the device as an XOR gate. There is no element within the device that is not a fundamental part of the XOR system. The AND gate arises as a natural result of constructing the XOR gate. This feels fundamentally different from constructing an XOR gate, and then adding an AND gate.

On a meta-level, in writing the above comment, I feel as if we are missing some critical vocabulary that would make this entire question seem trivial. Any ideas on what this vocab. is?
"Edward Snowden is a national hero and should be immediately issued a full, free, and absolute pardon for any crimes he has committed or may have committed related to blowing the whistle on secret NSA surveillance programs."

Looks completely reasonable to me and hence I just signed the petition.
Well, Larry Page says "... we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law"

If the law is that the NSA just has to request it, no warrant necessary, there you go.
Not in my experience. On Mac OS X in emacs, vim, and sublime text 2 rope based auto complete is pretty poor compared to PyCharm, X Code (5 which I've been using the beta since it's release pretty heavily is really REALLY good at this compared to 4), and Visual Studio.
The president can indeed do that. See Proclamation 4311 for Nixon, signed by Ford.
You think it's possible that NSA got direct access to Google's servers in a way that was invisible to Google's CEO, it's general counsel, its Chief Architect, Justin Schuh of their security team, and any of their thousands of employees, most of whom would immediately report such a thing if they discovered it?

Moreover, having obtained this illicit access, in direct defiance of the corporation that owns and controls those servers, their use of that access is so routinized that it appeared in a "USE BOTH!" Powerpoint deck for NSA analysts?
Maybe people got lazy over time and tended to use the abbreviation?

Or maybe one can see a general decline of less popular terms due to the growth and change of the internet usage in the past 10 years? Imagine all those people who search for 'weather', 'email', 'facebook' etc.
It'd also be vastly easier to do once, covertly, and then keep secret, versus a live connection that mirrors them the plaintext copies. I'm not so sure they wouldn't just do both.
Ah, the partisan downvotes arrive sans open debate.
Well, if you plan on using the command line then you don't need to learn to run programs in the IDE. You can just learn the other stuff.

But there's no doubt about it, learning to use an IDE is an investment. It's not needed for "hello world" but pays off when using complicated API's or refactoring a large application. And nearly all the API's we use these days are complicated; languages that don't have large standard libraries aren't used much.

The irony is that people who don't use IDE's spend large amounts of time configuring their text editors. How much of an investment is it to learn vi?
>Having not lived during the Cold War nor studied it, I don't have a perspective on what that is like. But I find it difficult to understand the idea that a political ideology like Communism ought to be "illegal."

Let me help:

http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/c...

Basically, every communist (Read: Marxist-Leninist/Stalinist/etc) party that existed during the 20th century took its orders from the U.S.S.R. The authoritarian form of Marxism practiced by the Bolsheviks would never fly with the population of the United States, so the Soviets would use the sympathies of American communists to leak info and sabotage national defense programs.

This meant that every communist was a de facto U.S.S.R spy in the eyes of the USA.

The above document is a report to President Truman in 1946 about the ideological underpinnings that would go on to cause the cold war.
Hashtag: #HeyNSA: Talk to the NSA
The NSA has a great feedback system! They are watching everything - even if it has nothing to do with them! Get in contact with #HeyNSA! ^^
This will play out exactly like the waterboarding thing:

1. The journalists probably already warned the administration about this stuff a couple of months ago.

2. In the near future, the wh press secretary releases a statement about how this is already old news and how the prez already put a halt to this back in February (or whatever) which explains how all the recent statements by wh and Google etc can be truthful.

3. NSA spooks spend the next 5 years whining internally how they can't do their jobs anymore because of all the bothersome warrants.

4. The next top secret program is started in 2018 that does away with all the "cumbersome" oversight.
Wi-Fi Light Bulbs Shipping Soon.
It would probably be better described as amnesty. I know the word pardon was used in reference to this, probably because it derives from the president's constitutional pardon power, which was interpreted by the SCOTUS to also include granting amnesty. But the petition should really be a petition for amnesty, not a pardon unless he's successfully convicted and all avenues of appeals have failed.
I think that the (theoretical) MITM attack is played out not between the user and google, but google and the other email provider. For example, a person on gmail sending mail to a yahoo account could be comprimised when google talks to yahoo.

EDIT: Yahoo does NOT use TLS SMTP[1]. Also, Gmail fails Cert verification...[1]

[1]http://www.checktls.com/perl/TestReceiver.pl
Definitely forking this to provide a saner API. And some of the implementation is a little iffy (like objIsOfClass). But in general, very cool. Thanks for contributing to the C community!

Any particular reason why you're avoiding the C99 _Bool?
You're saying that despite the fact that everyone who hits Google Mail with Chrome uses a ciphersuite for which Google's private RSA key only works if you actively man-in-the-middle the connection, no matter how many hard drives you have in Utah, that NSA stole Google's private key, and then (I repeat:) documented that fact in a slide deck for NSA analysts?

You could more easily and credibly argue that NSA has solved the conventional discrete log problem.
It wasn't so much that Communism was illegal, but it was:

1) A witch-hunt in the context of McCarthy-ism.

2) The possibility that KGB spies could turn said person into an agent using the person's "Communist leanings."

I'm not saying that I agree with it, but I don't think that Communism was ever "illegal" in any sense (I could be wrong).
The FBI's Vendetta Against Berkeley
Why is Snowden a traitor but Nadler not? Did Nadler not just go to the press with information that was part of a secret NSA briefing?
Makes sense! Being able to detect a subset of errors in dynamic HTML is a nice feature, even if you have to rely on a static validator like the W3's for syntax errors.
And so it's going to be an empty response, as cynically predicted.

Which is good.

This is a system that the White House devised itself, and like so many statements and positions it took, it never thought it was actually going to be held accountable. What they didn't realize is that it actually will serve a useful pupose.

The sooner and more the WH makes cynical non-responses to these petitions, and is caught in lie after hypocritical lie, the sooner the majority of people will hold the WH, Congress and the government itself in open contempt. Then we can get on to the next stage, whatever that's going to be.
Google uses TLS SMTP.

Later

Nice catch. I based the Yahoo thing off message board posts with people getting TLS SMTP working, but from their mail clients, not server-to-server.

The Google Mail certificates don't validate because their hostname doesn't exactly match the host for which the certificate was issued ("mx.google.com"). I don't think that's a huge problem in practice.
"and the Guardian walked the claim back"

No they didn't.

"The Guardian has not revised any of our articles and, to my knowledge, has no intention to do so. That's because we did not claim that the NSA document alleging direct collection from the servers was true; we reported - accurately - that the NSA document claims that the program allows direct collection from the companies' servers. Before publishing, we went to the internet companies named in the documents and asked about these claims. When they denied it, we purposely presented the story as one of a major discrepancy between what the NSA document claims and what the internet companies claim, as the headline itself makes indisputably clear:"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/14/nsa-part...
Not invisible, no. (Please don't strawman.)

I think that some of those people have knowledge of a secret program that enables access to the data (maybe without direct access to the servers that house it). That would make it easier to manage without having to bring all the SREs and such into the conspiracy.

I think that most of those people would not allow their lives to be destroyed with federal charges (or maybe even extralegal harassment, who knows - they do run secret prisons) in the process of reporting such a thing.

Tens of thousands of others have chosen to keep quiet about NSA's extralegal collection practices (from the contractors at the IXes installing beam splitters, to the mechanics who welded the fiber grabber arm onto the nuclear sub). Why is it such a stretch to think that 3 or 5 or 10 at Google wouldn't?

It's not even a stretch to think that NSA would have done their homework to know _which_ people inside of Google would be both able to participate and could be coerced into keeping quiet.
You can't deny that CALEA, PATRIOT, FAA, the NDAA, CIA's black site and gitmo programs, drone warfare, drone warfare against US citizens overseas, etc. weren't steps back.

While ssh replacing rsh, SSL-by-default, no crypto export restrictions for (almost all) commercial software, certain legal decisions (mainly in the 9th), etc. were steps forward. This is all independent of what reddit/hn people generally know about the situation.

"auto-updating" client software and the cloud have advantages and disadvantages at the same time.
Look, 77k people for the NSA to target heavily.

I signed it too, Hi NSA you'll get bored real quick reading my traffic ;)
HN is over. I'm sorry to see your reasonable response treated that way but if you've been following the past few months you'd know this is now more of an echo chamber than ever. Groupthink rules the day. But anyone who would care seems to have left by now.
Having now done so, I think your definition of "shrill" and mine are entirely unrelated, as are our definitions of the word "all".

I see annoyance with some clearly partisan statements and actions. I see people talking about the pathetic, even laughably bad polls done on the subject, and badly misinterpreting the statistics. And, of course, there's the idiot who decided that if half of Democrats support an action, that must mean all Democrats are mindless Obama supporters.

But I see no one suggesting that all outrage about this is partisan, much less shrilly.
> Recently on HN people have been acting like the government can dominate the world through wiretapping. As if the NSA can find out a few secrets and people will bow their heads and be silent.

In a democracy where we have constitutionally protected rights, why should one need the courage of MLK to do the right thing. Also, why go through the pain of following a constitution if we define right/wrong by "the will of the people at the time".
Fighting Unwanted Cat Calls, One Poster At A Time
It stems from the president's constitutionally granted pardon powers. SCOTUS decided this also includes the ability to grant amnesty.

It's a petition for amnesty because he hasn't been convicted of a crime, yet. Colloquially the two words are pretty much interchangeable, but pardons and amnesties are different things.
I'm not interested in the semantic argument. Emily Bazelon called The Guardian out this week on the Slate political podcast, as have many others; this is now a mainstream criticism of how The Guardian reported the story.

Either way: the original notion that NSA had direct access to the servers that actually operate Google Mail has been found to be unsupported by the evidence published thus far.

I call this out continuously and obnoxiously on HN because it is very much not the mainstream view on HN; most of the people commenting on the NSA story on HN say things that make it clear that they believe NSA continues to have the direct access to Google's systems that Google and the Guardian say they do not have.
If Snowden would be free on low-cost bail while there's a real investigation into the legality of the program (review by Supreme Court seems to be the only way) I'd support postponing pardoning until after the investigation. But since the opposite will almost certainly happen (lengthy solitary confinement and no due process for Snowden, no investigation into the legality of the programs, etc.) I support an immediate pardon. Potential hero whistleblowers who risk their freedom for all of us (whether or not Snowden is one) shouldn't have to suffer so much.
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act says all email stored on a server that is older than 180 days is not protected under the 4th Amendment.

Furthermore, the IRS appears to operate under the assumption that no email is protected.

> New documents released to the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that the IRS Criminal Tax Division has long taken the position that the IRS can read your emails without a warrant—a practice that one appeals court has said violates the Fourth Amendment (and we think most Americans would agree).

http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-national-sec...