skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They could have done what they thought was right in the interests of the Internet as a free, unregulated medium and by extension their business which depends on the Internet, even if that course of action (or inaction) was not clearly legal. Then they could have used some of their billions in cash on hand and their team of lawyers to defend themselves against prosecution. They, instead of some random sysadmin, could be the ones bringing this issue of Internet spying to the fore.

Now, before you say "What, do you expect them to break the law?", consider that they routinely push the boundaries of US law (securities law, copyright law, tax law, etc.) and lo and behold they are usually successful.

Now, I expect you might say "What you're suggesting is still nonsensical because resisting orders related to national security is, among other things, far too controversial and not in the interests of shareholders." And I would not disgaree with you.

My point is simply that Google, with its vast resources, is in a much better position than Ed Snowden to take on this fight for the future of the Internet and privacy of communications.

You could even argue Google has more skin in the game than Mr. Snowden, or any of us individually (aside from those who exploit others' private information for profit, of course)... because if this controversy brings about knee-jerk changes in privacy law, it could materially affect their bottom line.
Megastereo: Constructing High Resolution Stereo Panoramas
Heirs of Infocom: Where interactive fiction authors and games stand today
If Russia bent it's rules. Having been at many international airports, I can't see how a car entered that holding /transfer area. His passport has been cancelled but is there an international db to check valid vs non-valid ones? What if Russia made believe they never got the "Snowden's passport has been cancelled" memo?
This doesn't seem worse than what's happening in the USA (monitoring... just about everybody; keeping hundreds of political prisoners at Gitmo for 12 years and counting) or Europe (UK government spying on... just everyone; or the countless robberies and abuse of power of Sarkozy, Berlusconi and friends).
"There it is: If you have online contact with someone that's of interest, there's a chance all of your info will be of interest also."

Aside from the obvious chilling effect this has, how do you know if the people you speak to will become "persons of interest" later? Anyone you speak to now could be a high-profile activist in a year. That means that anyone could be the subject of this sort of surveillance.
I would love to see evidence that non-citizens on US soil, as a class, are protected by the Fourth Amendment.

It only took ten seconds on google to note that the NSA apparently doesn't agree with you.

http://www.nsa.gov/sigint/faqs.shtml#sigint4

Federal law and executive order define a U.S. Person as:
a citizen of the United States;
an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence;
an unincorporated association with a substantial number
of members who are citizens of the U.S. or are
aliens lawfully admitted for permanent residence; or
a corporation that is incorporated in the U.S.

I doubt that "permanent residence" includes H1-b workers, or other work visas, and I very strongly doubt that it includes people on business or pleasure trips.

The NSA's language seems to derive very closely from FISA (the law itself, title 50 chapter 36),

http://uscode.house.gov/download/pls/50C36.txt

..which in 1801 (i) has similar language, though it clarifies that the definition of "lawfully admitted for permanent residence" should be taken from "section 1101(a)(20) of title 8"

According to http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1101 , here is that section:

(20) The term “lawfully admitted for permanent residence” means the status of having been lawfully accorded the privilege of residing permanently in the United States as an immigrant in accordance with the immigration laws, such status not having changed.

I don't feel enlightened.

The EFF, in a surprising turn, claims that any legal resident is a US Person... normally I expect the EFF to (a) do their research correctly, and then (b) point out the worst-case scenario. This appears to be neither. https://ssd.eff.org/foreign/fisa

IANAL (though sometimes I play one on HN), TINLA.
Isn't Texas the state that doesn't even allow you to buy sex toys?
As a person who actually used to live in a former Soviet republic, I completely agree. But that does NOT mean that the US is becoming a communist/soviet state. No. But it's using techniques we had 30-40 years ago,and which were part of everyone's life. You could expect no privacy then, and it seems like in the US you can't expect privacy now.

"Those who don't remember history are bound to live through it again".
Best comparison/definition of MBA guys ever :))
Even North Korea cannot prevent assassination attempts. That should be all anybody wanting a "solution" to terrorism has to know.
Thunderbirds are gone: BAE systems 1960s project idea
By not having such broad categories of things to be seized. It is not "specific" to seize "every email message he sent to anyone ever."
He didn't give them away to other nations, but to journalists. And he's exposing illegal acts that actually are treasonous ("National Security" is just an excuse to protect existing power structures, not the actually best-interests of the common good).
Trailer for Ashton Kutcher's Steve Jobs Movie
Last time I needed to to create a diagram, I experimented with Diagrams [1], which is an interesting way of doing it if you like Haskell.

[1]: http://projects.haskell.org/diagrams/
What is this obsession with body counts? To bang again on my favorite drum, many, may more Americans were dying of polio or coal mining accidents in 1941 than German or Japanese bombs. That doesn't mean it was stupid to enter World War II.

Obviously those who have chosen to deliberately kill civilians in spectacular ways are not right now a danger akin to imperial Japan or Nazi Germany. But will it really take a dirty bomb, a successful mass infection/poisoning, or god help us a nuke to stop this silly argument?

It's bizarre to me that one of the anti-anti-terror arguments of choice reflects that hilariously dystopian scene in the film Brazil, wherein the staff and patrons of a restaurant that has just been bombed attempt to paper over the incident by completely ignoring it, as innocent people suffer and die.
This is a valuable insight; even if you can't distinguish reliably between Value 0 and Value 6, you can still increase your net gain by reallocating time spent on Value "Engaging" and "Interesting" to "WasteOfTime".

Also, I just realized most of my reading is Value 1 now. :/.
Well, my take on the American character is wildly different, then again I'm culturally a Southerner, we're always ready for a fight. (I mean, if you've missed "the call for a war on CO2 to reduce climate change induced mass casualties" we are definitely existing in different universes, then again We've always been at war with Eastasia, I remember when it was SO2 we had to fight since it was obviously causing an ice age.)

But, geeze, this united the nation for a very brief period, I mean, when the ruling class in their national cathedral sings The Battle Hymn of the Republic 3 days after 9/11 it does mean something (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_Hymn_of_the_Republic...).
5TB of storage on AWS would cost >$500/month.

You could buy a server and colocate it for less than that.
I literally said I agree that statistically the data is insignificant

> How many people are year are killed by emergency services vehicles? How many are killed following other police interactions?

You're kidding right? Is this really an acceptable form of argument? The point isn't total number of deaths, the point is the increasing use of flak jackets, stun grenades ("flashbangs" but don't kid yourself, they're grenades), automatic weapons, and military counter-insurgency tactics in situations where you can't rationally justify such actions.

And to preempt an obvious red herring: Gang shootouts, extensive drug rings, hostage situations, and violent offenders DO JUSTIFY the use of such force. Nonviolent offenses and other situations where there is little reason to expect an armed suspect do not.
I can't stand to read Wolfram's ego-stroking for more than a few paragraphs. The guy is very into how great he and his software are.
Http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&pub=xa-4af3e1272f178ef0
IIRC, unless you explicitly state otherwise, Celery forks for every task. A lot of task queues do this because it becomes a lot easier to recovery from errors.

Multiprocessing makes it pretty straight-forward to manage inter-process communication with queues, but you'd have to write all the other stuff task queues handle for you, such as error management.
http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/xs13
How I Got Started Hacking Rustc, and How You Can Too
I'm not so concerned with Quickmeme et. al, (because I don't follow default subreddits) but rather I'm concerned with voting rings against personal accounts. I had an account for a substantial time where I posted good, useful comments frequently (for which I was upvoted frequently). Once, maybe twice in response to other commenters I disagreed with them, like 0.1% of my time on the site. Afterwards I found myself downvoted to hell no matter what I did, how long I waited between writing comments (ie, 6 months). Everything (quality comments) would go rather quickly to a 0 or a -1/-2. I had to make a new account, there's no way around it.
could you only put a gist with the code of a hello world application ?

Like AppDelegate and a label with hello world in it ?
Not doing what the NSA is currently up to, and letting a 9/11 happen every year, would be better than what we're currently doing.

In a democracy, you have to at least try to get people to agree with you, and given what we know about the NSA program, you're nuts if you think any politician who proposed the tradeoff you're making would get 15% of the vote.
Diagnosis Woilenz - Weekend Project - Indie HTML5 Game
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-19431682
Chomsky: spying does not protect you
Show HN: Serial communication using the WebAudio API
As others have said, the US placed him in that position themselves. Why should he owe any loyalty to a country and a government that wants to detain and perhaps torture or even execute him?

Loyalty to humanity as a whole should (and seemingly has, in his case) override more parochial considerations. The "national security" of the US nation is far less important than the individual humans who live in it, and Snowden has done the latter a great service.
where were you living, and can you (if you wish) tell us something about how you knew you did not have any privacy?
However I'd think they can still do far more with direct dollars/euro they receive, especially since they should have hands tied for options of converting Bitcoin to dollars. As more of the services and goods that represent their operational costs accept BitCoin, though, that problem should go away. I wonder what hope we'd have in this context without something like BitCoin becoming strong.
Obama himself is now compromised. How do we know that what he releases to the press is factual, and not tampered by a secret entity who received the real information and his cooperation in exchange for fame? I think this pretty well destroys the credibility of his information from this point forward. What happened to him "facing the consequences" of his promises to make sure the States are governed by the Constitution and Bill of Rights? I certainly understand him fleeing his promises, but it severely jeopardizes any further trust he can lead the States and a World power. He has made it much easier for the public to discredit all information he parrots from his pulpit rather than being forced to face it as they have been doing.
It is worth noting that they often choose to do this the "loud" way, but the FBI has been granted warrants to pick people's locks and copy their hard drives without leaving traces. Alarm monitoring companies are also subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, so that won't help you either.
I'd appreciate any feedback, especially from more experienced devs. I built this JS class to send serial commands over the headphone port of an iPhone using Javascript and the HTML5 WebAudio API. This enabled me to use an iPhone application to control my embedded systems design senior project.
> What happened to him "facing the consequences" of his actions to make sure the truth would out?

Again with this "all leakers and disssidents must throw themselves upon a pyre" attitude. Snowden never said he was going to needlessly kill himself (passively, or otherwise).
God forbid square starts blocking payments ... how will we ever get asian fusion tacos from our favorit food trucks?

Square uses Visa, Mastercard, etc. If Visa blocked something, you'd have a hard time buying it with square and if Mastercard + the rest did, Square wouldn't save you.

Visa doesn't get to decide how you spend your money, they get to decide how you use their system. Since no government provides electronic payments, there is no other convenient way to donate to wikileaks (mailing them cash seems risky).

Why do governments not provide electronic currency? I'm not sure, but if they did I suspect we'd be using faxes to send DES encrypted coins places.

Yes, there are problems with the system and there ought to be regulations on it, but in general it makes sense how we got here.
The NSA isn't the almighty spirit of the internet. They can't just clap their hands and magically get access to any server on earth. And even if they can, it certainly doesn't make the evidence obtained that way acceptable in court.

I don't like this argument that since the NSA is almighty, avoiding Gmail for security reasons is stupid. For the US government, accessing emails stored under my bed may not be impossible, but it's orders of magnitude more difficult than if they were on Gmail servers.
Some of those entrepreneurs are creating that crony capitalism. Don't try painting entrepreneurs with a pristine brush. See Cisco CEO's meeting with Obama on how to improve the country. See what others in the meeting wanted. See which of those are coming to fruition. I bet in return we got acquiescence on rampant NSA spying. Why does Obama come to the Bay Area so often? A: To raise money. What is that money buying?
News studies show people go for junk gossip/celebrity/sex/emotional type news far more than anything economic or political. Which makes it difficult for things like my project (http://jkl.io) which specifically seeks to remove the trivial in favour of the high brow broadsheet type news. However I think the "information diet" meme is gaining more traction as people are feeling overloaded and want to focus on quality, less visual distraction and fewer ads.
I think this is one of the biggest concerns for Reddit going forward. Fighting bots can be approached systematically and with relatively decent results. Fighting coordinated groups with an agenda and voting brigades is a much harder beast.

The SRS "fempire" is probably the scariest case study in all of this.
AIUI passport requirements are up to the receiving country. If Ecuador are willing to receive him then he can travel there (and travel through any number of airports on the way as long as he stays "skyside"), passport or no. Indeed the best policy for Russia and Snowden is probably for him to not legally enter Russia at all.
Lions and Tigers and Secrets and Paranoia! Oh My!
Plants do sums to get through the night, researchers show
>the best that the government can do (without your knowledge) is to tap your upstream connection, which does little for past emails.

Really only applies to emails before Room 641A. It might be easier to go after email at the provider level, but NSA is capable of capturing all internet traffic if it wants to.
Snowden has awakened the whole world to the surveillance leviathan that is the US. The US have been the one world government for awhile now, it's just that most people (and countries) refused to see it until now.

The C&D to the Bitcoins Foundation is no surprise either. It's in the cross hairs of the US government and it can't be allowed to exist. Read the book Cypherpunks and you'll find out why. I'm sure those in power know the book well.
The state is too large and diverse to research at that level and make any determination about the community/region you might move into. The diversity from city to city in the metroplex alone is vast.
Read the opinion: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vo...

The court found that a single "knock-and-announce" violation (not waiting 10 to 20 seconds in this case) wasn't enough to disqualify evidence that was found in the hours following, during the execution of the search warrant. What Kennedy meant was that if this wasn't an isolated incident and was in-fact becoming a common side effect of police procedure, then the legal system would have to start reevaluating how strict it will be with such violations.

Relevant paragraphs:

Today's decision does not address any demonstrated pattern of knock-and-announce violations. If a widespread pattern of violations were shown, and particularly if those violations were committed against persons who lacked the means or voice to mount an effective protest, there would be reason for grave concern. Even then, however, the Court would have to acknowledge that extending the remedy of exclusion to all the evidence seized following a knock-and-announce violation would mean revising the requirement of causation that limits our discretion in applying the exclusionary rule. That type of extension also would have significant practical implications, adding to the list of issues requiring resolution at the criminal trial questions such as whether police officers entered a home after waiting 10 seconds or 20.

In this case the relevant evidence was discovered not because of a failure to knock-and-announce, but because of a subsequent search pursuant to a lawful warrant. The Court in my view is correct to hold that suppression was not required. While I am not convinced that Segura v. United States, 468 U. S. 796 (1984), and New York v. Harris, 495 U. S. 14 (1990), have as much relevance here as Justice Scalia appears to conclude, the Court's holding is fully supported by Parts I through III of its opinion. I accordingly join those Parts and concur in the judgment.
It's unfortunate because he is pretty smart and has made some good software, and the style sort of gets in the way of that sometimes.

A New Kind of Science even has some good points in it, but it's written in such an over-the-top, "I have revolutionized all of science" way that it actively hinders its message, so a lot of people in the computing-and-philosophy intersection it wants to reach just don't take it seriously or even read it. If someone were really charitable and wanting to put some work into it, it could be greatly improved by being edited into a "what Wolfram really meant to say in that book" precis that includes the main points in maybe 1/4 the space, and with a different tone.
Future is Unpredictable !
Something might surely come ahead of services too ..

P.S i am preparing my self to get future ready.
Exactly. "All emails" negates all bullet points. It's like asking for 9 specific items in a real world warrant, and then point #10 is "and your whole house and everything in it".
At least then you know.

Also it requires a much harder to get warrant as well as cost approvals.
A repressive government wouldn't stop things which can be used to justify the need for repression.
It's easy to say that this comparison is silly because the US still has free press (well, kinda) and such, but it really does make you look twice when you read about the US government making people disappear off the streets without a trial, and has been engaging in torture.
Someone could rig up their own system to notify themselves which is very doable. I can see the situation where someone gets notified, then emails their server to backup offsite, and wipe the hard drives (and for those well versed in demo, there's always that option…).
A Lazy Sieve of Eratosthenes
From the principal architect - Skype/ NSA
You've asked some tough questions which are really against the grain here. You've been respectful, direct to the point and articulate.

Just felt a simple up vote didn't convey enough of a thanks. You've provoked the conversation in far more interesting directions than it would otherwise have taken. Thank you sven7.
At 200 bucks a license there isn't going to be more than a couple people who are ready to answer stack overflow questions about this, there isn't going to be a good plugin to most IDEs, the tooling support is going to be poor in general and there is going to be libraries for approximately nothing (yes I know, it takes a lot less time to write them in Lisp, but it still means you need to dive into the Oauth spec to work with Twitter, whereas I can just download a library for Java that works).

I say this as a huge fan of Lisp and there was a time where it made sense to buy a commercial compiler - that time has passed, because when you buy a compiler and a new language you are also buying into an ecosystem, and the more people that are in that ecosystem the better for you.

I can see maybe using Lisp to do some special parts of the program, but even then there is Chicken Scheme which is free and already have a bunch of eggs (extensions), oh and it compiles to C too.
If he thinks it is so important for humanity, he should consider to open source it..
I was homeless for the last 28 hours in NYC. This is how it played out.
Google has a legal team whose full-time job is pushing back on these requests. At some point, they have to either obey the law, or go to prison themselves. Get off your high horse.

It feels like some people won't be satisfied unless Google says "well, our existence has many benefits, but it also makes it slightly easier for the government to spy on people, so we're closing up shop".
10x the population should mean 10x the rejected people, but it should also mean 10x the accepted and 10x the graduated, right?

I don't know where you got that. The number of seats in "elite" or even "good enough" universities is not a linear function of the national population. In populous but poor countries like China and India and Bangladesh, there is much less educational opportunity than there are smart people.
Are you talking about the "direct pipes" PRISM and FISA media story?

Or all the other documents he is releasing about the USA spying/hacking on other nations? Because that's what the NSA and CIA do, and all the other countries take part in. It's part of the game nations play.

Or are you talking about whatever else he has / will release to help damage the USA?

Not only did he release those documents for anyone to see (in effect), he and his "journalists" sensationalized it to the point of it being a falsehood...

Read the response of the government, the number of FISA requests involved, how they are handled, the limited number of phone taps done, how this does not aplly to US citizens at all, and what the involved companies are saying. Even Google is claiming the media is downright lying about what is going on (no "direct pipes")...

http://allthingsd.com/20130618/google-formally-petitions-to-...

> Google's reputation and business has been harmed by the false or misleading reports in the media, and Google's users are concerned by the allegations.

Or just keep ignoring the facts, and pretend you know better because the government must be evil and you live is a Nazi Germany like state.