skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If nothing else, a warrant canary would let you try an interesting defense. With the right participants, you can set things up so that if you receive an NSL then either:

a) you are able to signal that you did, or
b) they compel you to lie and you then can press a "free exercise of religion" defense (this is where the 'right participants' part comes in; you'd have to be able to ensure the only people with the power to update the canary are (1) people that the NSL cannot be hidden from and (2) members of a religion that forbids lying).
I agree, HTML, CSS and jQuery are like the very basic of Front-end, then u can go onto Backbone, RequireJS or whtever new stuff come up
You talk about liking surveillance in your final sentence, but about supporting surveillance earlier. There is a significant different between supporting something and liking something. I support visiting the dental hygienist twice a year, for instance, but I don't like visiting the dental hygienist.

Assuming we are talking about supporting, rather than liking, then it is quite rational to support surveillance when done by your own party. I choose politicians to support based on my belief that they largely share my values and goals and are smart enough and educated enough to act in ways that help further the advancement of those values and goals.

However, I recognize that politicians who succeed in getting elected gain access to information that is not available to me. That information will occasionally make the correct action in some cases appear to be against my values when judged by someone with the information I have, but actually in accord with my values given the extra information the politician has.

To put it simply, you are more likely to trust the politicians you support than the politicians you do not support, and so you are more likely to give politicians you support the benefit of the doubt if they occasionally do things that appear to go against your shared values.
>If you look on an international scale…

I keep thinking about how in some Asian and Middle Eastern countries, the same things have been going on (if not more overt), and I wonder if their citizens have as much apathy as ours?
YAYYY!!! Okaynowwhydothebenchmarkssuck.
Not quite; my parents both organize pictures into folders very well and organize them by date and tag them with metadata. They don't do the same for documents, but because every document of theirs tends to be unique, there really isn't any need to.

Also note that these are the same parents who haven't the slightest idea of what a kernel is.
If you prefer a more traditional-style desktop, Xfce is very nice.
UPDATE: looks like this is being discussed in a similar thread linking to nature.com. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5871269

--

Very cool paper, but the title is wrong on this link, and here is why, it [the paper - 1] did not predict the scandal. It predicted the method by which the NSA can uniquely identify persons from four points of metadata. It also predicted this in 2012, but the NSA has been doing this since ~2007 or earlier.

[1] http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130325/srep01376/pdf/srep013...
Also there aren't that many tech companies as big as Microsoft, in terms of either market cap or number of employees. Seems pretty easy to have friends at all of them if you were friends with a lot of people in a CS department at college.
Meet James Bamford (Wired reporter) - the top NSA writer.
This is very cool. Do you know of any other comparable systems or past work? You mention in the presentation that WinFS is a similar system (I agree; sounds similar in some ways).
A Guardian Guide to Your Metadata
"The SEC brought 58 insider trading actions in FY 2012 against 131 individuals and entities."

Seems like a small number to me considering the size of the market. The chances of being caught seems to be small indeed, unless someone is really looking.

Speaking of Raj Gupta, he was connected with Raj Rajaratnam, who was funding a group with alleged close ties to the Tamil Tigers.

I'm not saying there was no wrong doing, but something fails the smell test.
sure, wasn't saying it was.. and you just committed the same indiscretion. a hack is only a hack if it does something.

let's say it is a potentially very effective idea for CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE..

emphasis due to you kind of missing the point - arguing about the legality of such a thing is pure misdirection imho
Not making any deep point.
Twice: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/08/nsl-gag-order-lifte...
No. Nothing nearly of that scope. And that's what you need. Broad coverage.

LinkedIn maybe, but I've deleted (very useless) account there, and hate them from the depths of my soul. Someone called LinkedIn a virus and I tend to agree. I'd also trust them far less than those two you've mentioned, solely on their technical incompetence.
Where are you getting that budget? Supposedly, the new Bluffdale facility alone will cost at least $2B. Do we have any way of knowing what their real budget is?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
You'd imagine they'd be able to remove a good amount of it by removing duplicate data? e.g. video, audio and images
Create Your Own Features For Your Android Device
Programmers are fools, for the most part. They don't understand what problem they're really trying to solve.

That's a little harsh. I think it's fairer to say that they often don't have insight into the wider strategic objectives of the company, and that's as much a company failing as anything. I'm now a firm believer in sharing e.g. revenue numbers with everyone in the company and explaining why they're important - people are much more willing to accept things when they understand the wider picture.
Well thanks for replying I suppose. The reality is that the alternative is that customers get no SMB server, and will have to use other file interfaces. The appliances you mention.. well you didn't actually mention any specifically.. but going by the brands it sounds like you are referring to NAS boxes, in which case they are selling only hardware-- they have no valuable software of their own to protect, 99% just linux+samba, maybe they wrote a trivial control-panel backend. Show me a device that has a competitive advantage from its own software that uses GPLv3 code. 'Signed code only' does not have to mean customers aren't free with the hardware (I'd be quite happy to help wipe the device so they can do whatever they want), it just means potential competitors aren't free to steal my code and waste the investment of xyz man hours that went into that. As a consequence, those that mean no malice will lose freedom with my mix of software on the hardware they own, but they can remain free with their own software on the purchased hardware (as above. Except for GPLv3).
Introversion doesn't necessarily go hand in hand with shy. I just don't want to deal 25 assholes at the same time. I don't get a charge out of that. Once conversations involve more than three it's like the gonads start swinging or something and I lose interest. A confident introvert is a natural leader. I don't even get why this is some sort of revelation.
> Have any technicalities every held up in court?

(fixed that for you)

of course they have. For example, having corporate "document retention" policies that are actually destruction policies is usual to avoid risks associated with legal discovery.

And actus reus is a fairly critical technical element of the law. If a company has a policy of issuing (true) warrant canaries, the non-act of not issuing a (false) canary would be a significant technical hurdle to prosecution. And the 1st amendment would be a significant hurdle to coercing a person to issue (false) canaries.
I was thinking 'Pie in the Sky'
I didn't know ASP.NET was considered something in the same level of winxp or word 2003 at the point - maybe the original ASP. Unless that's not what you were implying.
Question about WinFS. I saw a video presentation of it floating around the web. They demonstrated various kinds of objects representing contacts, documents, music files, etc. Where these object types extensible? I.e. were the metadata fields static? For example, if the "song" type had the standard fields (title, artist, album, year, etc) could I add another one (e.g. "producer")?
While commenters are mentioning that this particular method has not been tested in court, is there any reason to believe that it wouldn't work? Similar situations have happened before when a group loudly says "no comment" and this is interpreted as a confirmation. E.g. in the case of the leaks last week, Google, Facebook, MS, etc explicitly denied that they were involved in blanket government surveillance, but Verizon only said "no comment"[1] in an internal email about the phone metadata news story. If the government could actually force them to lie, then they would have issued an explicit denial like the other companies.

Outside of spy fiction and conspiracy theories, I haven't seen any evidence that the government can legally force someone to lie (vs just a no comment) in order to cover up an NSL or FISA order.

Is there any evidence that they would able to force a company using a warrant canary to issue a fake one or respond with anything other than "no comment" to direct questions from the media?

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mattlynley/verizons-internal-memo-to...
I never denied pissing in CNET's coffee either.
Agreed. We need a "catch-22" amendment, explicitly forbidding secret laws.
The war against Pyrex
It's not pedantic. One of the most notable aspects of the US constitution is that its power is explicitly derived from the masses - "We the people..." - and not from some divine power, unlike the British monarchy.
Is a democratic surveillance state possible?
You're confusing Verizon's response in the last week with Verizon's response in 2006.

The article talks about the 2006-era responses from AT&T and Verizon. The one in the last week isn't especially interesting when you have the NSA director and multiple senators confirming the phone log collection exists.
This is a strange and ambiguous statement, I think:

> Several sources said that as a systems administrator, Snowden would have been unable to actively spy on people, even though he told the Guardian newspaper, "I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authority to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President."

What does "actively spy on people" mean in this case? As a systems administrator, did Snowden have a way to get to the private data, even illegal or otherwise?

To me what Snowden said, considering his position and assumed competence, what the aforementioned sources say seems to contradict that. However, they might just rely on saying that sysadmins don't have the legal power to do so, or that other sysadmins would notice it even if he breached his privileges and so on, rather than that there is no way Snowden could have done that.

A play on words and not revealed meanings might just be turning a fact into fiction here, at least that would be in the best interests of NSA for sure, so there's also the motive for such wordplay.

Or then Snowden is a liar, which I find doubtful, especially in such a clear case and would turn up being harming for his cause.
But that is the closest match of weaponry there ever will be.
The idea that this is Apple's business whether to allow shows the whole thing to be corrupt.
There can't be a democracy with "secret laws". I hope people will see that through whatever excuses the administration will try to launch next.
You just have to hover it for the kudo counting. How many are from people that didn't even see the widget? Or people like me, that just read it, and discovered that I was interacting with it only after it counted my vote?

Anyway, it doesn't have any consequence. It's just some feelgood freature... Kind of stupid to have a counter that doesn't count anything real.
http://gitorious.org/

I don't know where they are located (I'm assuming U.S. or U.S. servers) and I don't know what their limits are, but there are a lot of open source projects using them for hosting.
It wasn't just him, it was everyone, the senators included.
Pretty darn cool! Was looking for a good way to pair the Pi with hardware controllers like this.

Also now that we have a good hardware tutorial, if anyone is interested I have a detailed instruction on how I get retropie/retroarch working here http://www.codingepiphany.com/2013/03/27/raspberry-pi-retro-...
Sounds interesting, let us know how it works out.
Google Says It Has Uncovered Iranian Spy Campaign
Ask HN: WebApp to transfer Photos from Google+ back to Flickr?
http://www.flickrtoplus.com/ allows you to transfer all your photos from Flickr to Google+. Now with all the extra storage for free I would like to move everything back to Flickr. Does anyone know of a similar web services for transferring back?
Airplane Forced To Turn As Runway Vanishes In Pouring Rain
If you say "No comment" and it leaves open more than 1 possibility then it would be unfair to ascribe any particular positive statement to that.

On the other hand, if you're pre-arranged that you will simply fail to communicate something after a certain event then there is no doubt what statement has been made. A judge will see right through this if it's tried and probably impose contempt of court. If one were to try something like this it would be essential to broaden the scope enough that it couldn't be used to reference a specific gag order.
Did you not read the Verizon order? The order that very clearly demands a daily dump of all metadata (source/destination phone numbers, date/time, etc.) for all customers, even those calls wholly within the US?
Variants: The Challenge of Changeable Design
I'd love to have the opportunity to try it, but I'm not in a position where I'm likely to ever get an NSL in the first place.
> The Atlantic is really churning out great articles on this, another good one from yesterday

I agree; and anyone else out there who agrees should consider getting a subscription. Information may want to be free, but content production isn't! :) I subscribed last summer, renewed last month, and haven't regretted it.
Wasn't there a recent story where Gmail asks the user to renew their agreement to the Gmail ToS as a hint to their email being accessed?
Mitchell Baker on Total Surveillance
Wanting to make things better really isn't enough. You need to be able to make it happen. Writing a blog post to the world from your limited experience that a particular company has problems is cute and probably feels good, but not really helpful to fixing the problem. If he actually explained what he would do to make things better, that would be a start.
Ex IBMer here. Spent some time there when I was OPs age and my experience was similar. I'm at a mid-size company and it's better but still not perfect! Nothing is, at least all the time, I assume.
A Developer Platform To Compete With The Likes Of GitHub and Atlassian
First, by citing NSLs, you're unintentionally proving the point of the article. Google recently began disclosing how many NSLs it received. NSLs do not require the recipient to lie.

Second, two courts have ruled that NSL gag orders are unconstitutional (this is before the Ninth Circuit now with a summer briefing schedule). The <secretsauce> lie order you speculate, with any evidence, exists would be extra doubleplusungood unconstitutional.

(BTW, I was the first to disclose less than two weeks ago that Google is litigating two different NSL cases. I daresay I'm familiar with the topic...)
I'm from an Asian country, and I have always assumed I have privacy, but that's only because my government is too incompetent to set up any reliable surveillance system.
> You didn’t learn python via abstract tutorial, comparing lists to Smaug and dicts to Bilbo [...]

> STFU and code. There is no other way to learn to code.

I think this is true of a lot of languages, but learning Haskell verges on learning mathematical concepts at times and learning monads is definitely one of those times. In these cases analogies are sometimes the easiest way to grok the concepts.
Raj Gupta was a huge Democratic Party fundraiser, so much so that his status within the party was the lede in many stories written about the case. Yet it was a Democratic administration that he helped put into power that took him down.
AR Drone - The Maiden Voyage
This is sad but probably true.
Congrats Chad and everyone involved! You've done so much to change the world in just one year (if Gittip didn't exist today, my perception of the world would be very different), and this is only the start. Here's to a great year ahead. It's about to get real exciting. :D
I thought it tasted funny.
Is the law itself actually secret? I thought someone linked to Section 702 straight off of the GPO website on one of the other stories.

Likewise the court itself is not secret. The proceedings are, which is worrisome in this particular case. But this would hardly be the only time that has ever happened, how many times have we seen e.g. the EPA sue a company and later the company settles for "an undisclosed amount" with the settlement itself held under a gag order?
I think being arrest for it would surely disclose it as well.
From their early documents, it looks like the KDE4 developers got out to create exactly what you describe. But they created something with very little semblance with this. What you describe is hard, and may not be possible to define well enough for implementing. It's good to know that some people try it, maybe someday somebody will get there.

But, anyway, no you'll still need a filesystem to organize the data you use on each task. Do you use only one level of directories?
Images: Edward Snowden Modeling Shoot Found
Obama makes brain research announcement
Red Hat Launches Linux-Based OpenStack Platform, Targets VMware
Surveillance is reflexive. It has no doubt already changed, irreversibly, how we all communicate. We hesitate more, we collaborate less. This is the immediate, intrinsic downside---an economic impact, even---that isn't being discussed. This loss alone makes the surveillance state a net sink on our society. Let alone the threat to democracy ,the potential abuse of power.

We need to show Obama and the other leaders that standing up against irrational fear of inevitable crime IS a tenable political position
The amendment should of course be a secret. :)
Inside Vert.x. Comparison with Node.js
That money will likely be split over multiple years, if I'm remembering my Federal Acquisition Rules training correctly.
Microsoft: Selbstlob bei Reddit?
Is it? Maybe the iPad is supplanting laptops in some niches, but I'd argue that those are ones were maybe a laptop wasn't the proper device in the first place.

AIUI Glass can't do augmented reality only because the API is currently too restrictive, which is really too bad. Using a HUD as a glorified head-mounted camera seems like a huge waste of opportunity. Even if they never open up the API, a HUD can still do things that a watch is going to struggle to replicate.

This[1] is a good overview of what it takes to make an AR device, and it examines the Glass hardware in respect to that. The verdict? The hardware is there (although it's not stereoscopic) but the software is behind. You have to start somewhere, though.

[1]: http://blog.integratedrealities.com/?p=261
Note that the SEC tends to focus on public-company stuff, so the industry isn't that big. How many F500 c-suite execs are there?
Amazon Has a 3D Printer Section Now
They are too busy toppling countries.
So much slurping and barfing. I hear this guy's voice in my head every time I manipulate sexprs in paredit.
There are a lot of Americans concerned about this, in my opinion. However, most Americans go to work, get home from work, eat dinner, surf the web, watch tv, mow the lawn, pet their dog, play with their kids, and go to sleep like it's just another day, same as the prior and same as the next.

The NSA is currently doing very little to physically intrude on the lives of the typical American. Like most people, if a threat isn't in their face, they generally will not respond to it. So it doesn't seem real (making it very easy to cower in fear and avoid confrontation, with statements like: I have nothing to hide), and by the time it does, it'll be far too late to stop it.
This idea that the NSA must resort to statistical inference techniques in order to associate call metadata with individual Americans is ludicrous.

Has Foreign Policy never heard of Caller ID?

Why are people going to such mental contortions to avoid the plain facts?: They. Are. Spying. On. Americans.
They're doing research in the US for a US university that collaborates directly with US corporations. What more do you want from the deal?
Microsoft’s dirty PR tactics denied by Reddit
GNOME 3 Rocks
Where these object types extensible?

Yes.

I.e. were the metadata fields static?

Well, yes, but that doesn't preclude extensibility.

In WinFS terminology, object types were called Item types; object instances were called Items. From the docs: "An item is the equivalent of an object in object-oriented programming. It has a complex structure, specific behavior, and operations described by the 'WinFS' schemas."

So one way to extend an Item type was to create a derived type (i.e. use inheritance.) WinFS also supported what it called item extensions, which were basically "small objects" that you could associate with existing objects. They were for things like reminders, which don't mean much on their own and could apply to many different Item types.

For your scenario, creating a derived type would probably have been the right solution.

EDIT: Well, now that I think about it, what if every different music app created its own Song subclass? So inheritance might not be the right choice.

Ahh, that's the kind of thing I deeply love thinking about! I hope that one day I can rejoin the ranks of the lab-coated guardians of epistemology. (Nod to "Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia" by Cory Doctorow. http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm)
I'm still not seeing how that makes warrantless secret surveillance with gag orders and secret courts reporting to special committees not a threat to democracy.
However, I bet your parents know what filing cabinets and floppy disks are, while your kids most definitely do (or will) not! Pictures and music were also some of the first content classes to be de-filed [1] with apps like iTunes and iPhoto (the file hierarchy is still there, its just hidden from most users).

I think this is one of those rare cases where the future is just staring us right in the face, like when Apple got rid of the floppy disk on the imac, or when CD ROM similarly went away. It doesn't mean file systems die right away, but they will become invisible to most users in one or fewer generations.

[1] A funny punny
Email encrypted with the recipient's public key can only be decrypted by recipient's private key.

It is the most secure way to send an encrypted email.
Actually, the current thinking and observation by some urban designers is that "naked roads" can result in safer driving habits[1][2]. The problem is one of environment, design, and policy.

"There is a clear link between people's surroundings and their behaviour. If people are in an unpleasant environment, they will behave badly." - Ben Hamilton-Baillie

Also, in Montana, for example, adding speed limits to interstates which previously had none resulted in more traffic fatalities[3]

1. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4213221.stm

2. http://www.salon.com/2004/05/20/traffic_design/

3. http://www.motorists.org/press/montana-no-speed-limit-safety...
War on privacy?
For those who argue that the hierarchical filing system isn't going anywhere, consider Yahoo vs Google. Yahoo was once a hierarchical filing system for the web, Google's philosophy was 'search don't sort'.

For those that argue that tags aren't hierarchical filing systems, consider that '/Documents/Theses/TagsVsHierarchies' is the same as tagging 'TagsVsHierarchies' with 'Documents' and 'Theses'. It's turtles all the way down.