skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hope the fridge was off.

A fridge will act as a fantastic acoustic shield but probably not a functioning Faraday cage. I think this blog post has taken a few artistic liberties in suggesting its use was as a Faraday cage, especially as the article she links to doesn't mention the fridge's purpose as a Faraday cage.

Assuming this story isn't stretched and exaggerated (I have a hard time believing it isn't) and the fridge was on, this could be a fast way to trigger condensation to form inside the phone when the device is removed back into a warmer environment, depending on the ambient humidity. I just wouldn't dream of putting my phone in a cold fridge for anything other than the briefest time for this reason.
Also, I found these algorithms could always go more and more meta. For instance, in some situations a large "clone fraction" was optimal, or large "mutation rate", whilst in other cases it brought chaos and degraded the population.

Successful parameters could also become more immune to mutation with time, a nice improvement along with "speciation" you cited.
You know, the drivers could have just gotten better over time. Remember when Vista came out, they moved to a new driver model, and there were lots of bugs...people were worried about untrusted shader code bringing down machines (not quite security vulnerability, but definitely a DOS!).

These days, the driver model is more mature, drivers that consumers have are a bit more robust, they probably re-evaluated their worries, which I think is great! Dynamism and flexibility is good in big.corp.

Disclaimer: Microsoft employee, but speaking for myself.
Charging a fee is not remotely a guarantee of longevity. At all.
No problem. In the end, Spotify’s payments to artists are not going to surmount to any meaningful income. Meanwhile, if an independent artist offers his music directly through iTunes, he/she gets 40% of all sales. That’s magnitudes more than Spotify offers.
Don't Specialize
I bought some EM radiation blocking cloth from LessEMF and stitched it to the inside pocket of my jacket which I rarely use. If I'm feeling paranoid (or if I'm not arsed to turn on airplane mode to save battery) I just put it in that pocket instead of the normal one and zero communications can get in (especially my mother)
I was just trying to preempt the inevitable "investigative journalism is dead" comments.
Interesting. I won't pretend to understand Snowden's motives, but the SCMP Wikipedia page does bring into question SCMP's independence from China, so I would appreciate it if you could comment on the issues noted on the wikipedia page.
Lustre Founder Spots Haskell on HPC Horizon
Rivals Oppose Proposed Google Concessions on Displaying Search Results
Just want to reply to say I also would like to hear an answer to this question. Something I've wanted to do for a while is write a fuzzer [1] that puts together arbitrary garbage shader script code and runs it with weird webgl operations looking for exploitable crashes. I would expect there to be a ton of bugs found, but then again the monetary barrier to entry might be high considering differences between hardware.

It also looks like the good folks at Mozilla have already been doing this to some degree [2], presumably shrinking the untested threat surface considerably (man I love those guys).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzz_testing

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665936
It is a great idea. I've heard of many companies that give small (~$500) bonuses for successful hires.

The unintended consequences listed here are interesting as like any system, people will learn how to game it.
Q&A: NSA's Prism Internet surveillance scheme
You don't need to get advice from powerful people, you need to get connections from powerful people.
For "at-rest" Google Drive encryption syncdocs works well. No unencrypted files are ever stored on Google Drive.

http://www.syncdocs.com/syncdocs-screenshots/how-to-encrypt-...
For my purposes, it works well with the list hidden, since I vary rarely use it. However, in developing this, I have found that having to open and close it as much as is currently required if you do use it (unless your monitor is very wide) is annoying, so I'll probably change it soon.
ASK HN: How Does Edward's Dead Man Switch(EDMS) Function?

How?

So, there are these remote backups/sites out there, encrypted. Say, every week ES has somebody Bob post a keyword somewhere, a forum, pastebin, etc. The owner(s) Alice, Doreen, Glen, etc... of these backup sites manually or 'auto-crontab' for this keyword, or coded sequence of keywords, if so, fine, steady as Edward goes.

If not, .... ES released his hand(See hyperventilated Dyson's DMS in Terminator II film) sprung trigger. NOT good:

This interrupts the auto-cron periodic keyphrase(word) update and the toothpaste tubes are vigorously flattened, and you can't get the toothpaste back in.

(How? ie, How does EDMS trigger release become known to remote system trigger manager Bob or crontab daemon?)

Neighbor Bob check's local lampposts for Ed's new white tape once a week?

Can Bob be automated?
We do try to remove unanswered questions after a while, though in the meantime it's important that they're able to be found - after all, someone out there might have an answer.

We're stepping up efforts to remove closed unanswered questions more promptly though, since those won't be answered and just end up being noise in the search results.

For details, see: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/78048/enable-automat...
And just like Wikileaks the trickle of information will gradually dry up and we never hear anything again. The thing I hate most about these leakers is that they have huge stores of documents but only release a tiny fraction.
Has anyone ever actually found NSA spyware on a feature phone?
I can't imagine there'd be much interest in so such a thing just to read blogs.

It probably goes without saying that, perhaps despite appearances, Kickstarter projects require a massive amount of marketing to have any hope of success.
What does a "code-based cryptosystem" mean? You can approximate asymmetric cryptography using something like Kerberos, but these schemes requires a trusted third party.
> Also, I found these algorithms could always go more and more meta.

Haha, I've had this same thought before. I wrote a genetic algorithm to work on the sphere packing problem (in a periodic box) and I kept thinking about how I could mutate the settings within the program and optimize them, and then mutate the rate at which those settings themselves changed, and so on. I wonder if there's an optimal point to stop being "meta"?
I agree with most of the sentiments but definitely not that feed reading should be in an app. I have always found web-based feed readers to feel much more proper (including on mobile).
Not featured, have raised about $800k from AL. It took a special kind of determination.
This guy has some weird sense of humor:
http://gawker.com/266979/a-bullet-in-your-head
Probably best to put the phones in the microwave, and leave the microwave in the bathroom with the shower running to create masking noise.

Or just turn on the microwave for a few seconds. :)
This is one of my personal favourite utilities that I find a use for quite regularly and kind of wish was installed by default in mainstream Linux distros.
I have tentative plans at some point to make a product called something like Learn Enough Rails To Be Dangerous to fill this niche. The plan would be to cover just the basics of Rails, while largely omitting TDD.

Awesome! I look forward to it!

Leaving out TDD would definitely be easier on a beginner—but it would also undoubtedly make him dangerous.

I would think the opposite actually: learning TDD often gives people a false sense of safety.
SNI is already plenty viable if you have few/no IE users. That's certainly not everyone, but it's good enough for some of us.
Undergraduates in most settings will still be extremely prone to conform to recently-acquired knowledge as dogma, probably even more likely than a layperson. "Uh, they said data must be normalized, so here's 15 db tables to represent an employee..." maps the same as "Uh, they told me to use this and this word for red wines, so here's this and this word..."

The paper implies that they sampled "experts", when they really just sampled "students" or "disciples". Quite the difference.

(Besides, it's dramatic how scientific research keeps oversampling university undergraduates to such a large extent, purely out of practicality.)
Introducing the Go Race Detector
Wikileaks made their "insurance" available to everyone via torrent... in other words they have safety in numbers. Snowden having distributed to file to "many different " people is vague and if the # is small could put them in real danger.
An account is not a person, and thankfully some courts are recognizing that: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130218/21462222020/yet-a...
A 48 Hour Hack, A 100+ year Flood, and a Nenshi noun
McBits is a public key encryption algorithm which should be resistant to attacks by quantum computers: http://binary.cr.yp.to/mcbits.html
They did, sort of[1], it didn't appear to fly.

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-fx/2012JulSep/007...
Carberp Source Code Leaked
From a security point of view I don't think this changes anything - in the absence of SNI, you can get the hostname anyway just by starting a TLS connection to the server, as your browser would.

(Unless porn sites start whitelisting incoming IP addresses, which seems pretty unlikely)
Although even with PFS, cracking Google's private key would still give them access to every future encrypted session, until the key changed. So PFS is no panacea here.
Thanks! I'll definitely check out the guides and try to get started!
Edward Snowden and North Kardashian West are neck and neck
A sufficiently patient attacker can still eavesdrop on TLS sessions established via RSA or ECDHE today, wait for quantum computers to arrive (10+ years?), then break their public keys, and derive the symmetric keys used to encrypt the session from there.
This is needlessly complex. Just find people that you trust to hold onto the key, and a few other people to hold onto the file. People who's priorities are aligned properly and are use to being leaned on (journalists and/or activists). When they read in the New York Times that Edward Snowden is dead, some or all of them publish.

If you are worried about one of those people colluding with another to get the secret sauce too early, then split the secret. Give it to 50 people and require any 10 of them to release their material. Or whatever, you can tune it how you like depending on how many people you trust and how much you trust them. Automation is unnecessary.
I remember reading from multiple sources that MDMA is able to suspend Parkinsons, apparently through its primary effect, ie. flooding the brain with seratonin. Could someone more clued up on brain science please explain how the mechanism of deep brain stimulation (DBS) is related to that route of suspension, if at all?
> no third entity should ever have a copy of the unencrypted message at any given time.

The first company that offers serious client-side encryption (with steganography + noise thrown in for good measure) is going to make a bundle.

Hint, hint.
it's the 10th time this one pops up in HN.
This is the kind of stuff I wish Wikileaks had stuck to -- mostly or completely legal, beneficial to national security, etc. They are still challenging powerful entities and supporting change, but without becoming the story themselves.
Betaworks Unveils Its Highly Anticipated Digg RSS Reader
As he's mentioned several times, Glenn Greenwald is not the only one with access to all the material Snowden has released. There are several other people at the Guardian and perhaps elsewhere, so targeting him in that way makes little sense.

Instead, they've wisely chosen the strategy of trying to discredit him.
1) Linked in request - ridiculous

2) Overtime - I am in similar situation myself. Working for a startup with over 30 staff. I haven't been asked to work overtime but it has been mentioned on many meetings - "We want to create team of people who would enjoy this work so much that they would work overtime, I mean come on we are startup people should be working overtime anyway". Please note, this is BS. Doesn't matter if you work for startup or corporation. At the end of the day, you are employee working for your own live and that means 8 hours for which you are rewarded by salary. It is completely illogical to limit your life by working overtime and get paid like any other person in other company. Yes, sometimes I enjoy current project so much, that I forget about time and leave work few hours later, hell sometimes I even open my laptop in the middle of night ad work on something if I really enjoy it. But overtime should NEVER be expectation. Your answer to them should be: If you expect me to work overtime on regular basis I expect to be paid over time rate for it or some other reward (such as share in company).

Just one more note about developer position in general. Doesn't matter what people say, developing is very creative job. It comes and goes in waves exactly like art, music and such. I am trying to actively fight for changing developers conditions in workplace for this reason. Take for example my job. I work 9am - 6pm every day. But there are days when I just don't get the vibe and I do all together 1 hour worth of work and lousy on top of it. Sometimes work goes well and I am into it whole day, but then I finish one part by 4pm and just cannot get myself start anything new til 6pm. In that case I should be just able to go home at 4 because I am no good for the rest of the day anyway.
Same as now, it is already 8:24am and I am still at home writing this comment instead of being in subway on my way to work. I would do the same in office anyway...

Developers should have much looser schedule in my opinion. On the other hand of course every developer should be responsible and if there are (reasonable) deadlines they should know how to work hard to meet them.
> Credit to Microsoft for reversing their previous stance on WebGL.

One cant believe anything MS says. And it's another proof of that.

Remember when WebGL wasnt "secure"? Strange , now it is.

I say bull* , like their bull Venture Capital sh*t.

But I guess they have enough spare change to do community management on HN ( ie propaganda ), looking at all the MS spin here.
Thank you! I'll be sure to try and start taking my first steps :)
Ghanaian Actress Jackie Appiah Spotted with American Rap Star Jadakiss
This one got me out of just about everything, and it's very very true, good luck;

Never, Never, Never give up. Winston Churchill
Was coming here to post just that! It's a really terrific tool, I'm really happy to see the Go team providing great default tools with the distribution.
All the News (and Ads) That’s Fit to Print
Popular libraries such as OpenSSL and GnuTLS support TLSv1.2 (NSA Suite B Crypto[1]). Typically this means preferring or forcing TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 with elliptic curve CURVE-SECP521R1 for maximum security. Refer to [2] for more information on the elliptic curve key sizes recommended to be used with various symmetric key sizes.

The notable problem for many users (particularly client-side) is libraries such as NSS not yet supporting TLSv1.2[3] and therefore not supporting NSA Suite B Crypto.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_Suite_B_Cryptography

[2] http://www.nsa.gov/business/programs/elliptic_curve.shtml

[3] Refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_TLS_implementati... for a comparison of libraries providing TLS crypto.
> 1. all details, functions, settings options, etc are explicitly laid out

The same is true for a well written man page.

> 2. I don't need to remember the command for a setting, nor look it up. I can change a setting with just a couple mouse clicks.

You still have to remember where the setting is located. You'll still keeping track of a piece of data, but instead of text it's location.

Rather than clicking around through a menu, trying to remember where a specific setting is kept in the GUI, I can open the config file, search for the option I want to change, and quickly adjust it. Same for options, opening up a man page and searching for keywords is a lot nicer, to me, than randomly choosing an option to see if it's what I want.

Plus, I really like tab complete, especially for files, and would rather use that than a file chooser.

I'm not saying it's bad for you, just that those aren't advantages for everyone (specifically, me).
> so targeting him in that way makes little sense.

The fact that others have the same info means that it makes a lot of sense.

Not a lot of people have the backbone to carry on after someone has been made an example. And those that do, well, they can also be made examples.
That makes sense. As Snowden said in one of the interviews, the reason he doesn't want to release everything is so that other countries don't have a blueprint from which to develop their own PRISM.
Snowden isn't carrying military secrets or anything. Details about internet/phone surveillance are of relatively little consequence to foreign governments, who certainly have a good idea of what's going on already.
Right, so next time we download something private from a different party, we'll ask them to change their file structure to suit our privacy needs. :)
Give us some time :) We are working as hard as we can and the amount of content is growing at a really good rate each month. That said, we are missing the vast majority of the content we need so probabilistically you're not going to find a specific query on Slant right now. Could you let me know what question you had? I'd love to research it for you.
> It was a joke. We have about a thousand jokes just like it. “If you have time to xyz, you have time to get fired.” It’s a joke about staying focused and not getting distracted.

The irony is strong here, that OP wrote a blog post to defend all their jokes that are meant to keep employees from getting distracted.

The thing about jokes is, they should have an element of truth to them that the audience will pick up on. If you're in a position of power over someone, be honest and straightforward, instead of trying to be clever with your amateur stand-up comedy career.

You still can have a fun work culture without acting like a drunk frat boy.
We need a high-scores page with levels :)

Level: marc - 172.68
You could have a whole product line. E.g. Copper mesh lined laptop sleeves.
In my case, I rolled my own ten years ago, and I'm still using it (https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog). The hardest bit about it was parsing the request, since I wanted the ability to specify date ranges as part of the URL (for example: http://boston.conman.org/2000/8/10.2-15.5).
I would as well - old econ reading is a little rusty, so layperson is probably the right level to restart my brain at.

ccarter84 (at) the all-surveilled google mail

Thanks!
Use Lo-Dash Instead of Underscore
the surveys seem to be targeted to us/ca/uk-visitors only. hope they open this up for the entire world in the future.
I'm in two minds about this. Focussing on this issue is obviously important but I think the general public gets bored of it after a few days. They are much more interested in the human story. Keeping them hooked on that with the obvious regular explanation of who Snowden is and why he's in the news might get people to want to look into the actual story more. And if there is a big 'break' in the story (Snowden captured, makes it to Ecuador, etc.) people will be hooked and then the story of the spying will hold their attention. People (and I include myself) are much more interested in a story about other humans than a computer hacking/spying story that doesn't really involve many specific people directly.
Virtualized NASCAR?
It has to be grounded to properly act as a Faraday cage, doesn't it?
I just repeated this, while streaming (with no buffer) over wifi. The wifi connection dropped out almost instantly, and the phone signal dropped out after about a minute. My guess on the phone signal is that it assumed it was still connected momentarily while trying to reconnect. I know from experience this happens when between towers, and appears to be a sort of UI smoothing to avoid showing "no signal" frequently.

Also, from experiments I've conducted, a cookie can will work for certain frequencies; for example, the RF transmitters in anti-theft devices. I suspect the material is too thin to stop phone transmission though.
Cool, I am in calgary and ya I wanted to know the same thing, I was wishing gps data was saved with all the photos posted so that I could plot it as well, great that you filled that!
Then perhaps it could be shared with http://google.org/crisismap/2013-alberta-floods
why wouldn't it be a hash of the download URL only?
Your title suggestion is too much of an assumption and accusation.

While the disclosure of Prism has confirmed what many tech minded people I know have always assumed, it does not stand to reason that other countries do not monitor chatter and would not act on intel that is valuable.

Basically, what I'm saying is to keep our minds open while reading these articles...an example of why would be if you remember Huawei Routers not being allowed in certain US infrastructure [0], or Clinton lobbying China to remove it's firewall [1].

Open minds can then start speculating past motivations in old articles.

[0] http://www.dailytech.com/Huaweis+CEO+and+Former+PLA+Officer+...

[1] http://www.salon.com/2010/01/22/hillary_clinton_internet_fre...
Its not the mass of concrete and steel, but the faraday cage effect of a continuous closed loop of conductive material.

Though aas has been pointed out, a fridge probably isn't electrically continuous at the door gasket. Depending on the construction, you could replace the rubber gasket witha rubber core metal mesh gasket.
I, for one, welcome our new WebGL overlords. Seriously though, it's good to see Microsoft reversed their stance on WebGL no doubt their hand was forced by Mozilla and Webkit (probably Mozilla more so). And SPDY support as well? Looks like IE11 might actually be a decent contender in the browser race. The future of web development doesn't look so bad after all.
Die shot of first 55nm Bitcoin mining chip manufactured by TSMC
If you don't know whether or not your rights are being violated, you're not "free".
It seems pretty clear that this isn't an insurance policy for his personal well-being, but rather an insurance policy for the data eventually being published.
D*mmit.
Guess I finally should break down and burn a linux bootdisk for banking.
Typical stubborn child.
I used to work as a phone tester and sometimes had to test things while the phone was in a unreceivable location. I tried many things, like a safe, fridge, cookie jar etc, but the only thing that worked was wrapping the phone in 2 or 3 layers of tin foil.
There's also the gap around the door, which is often poorly fitting on older worn-out units.

Still, the phone could be recording audio to upload at a later time. Audio storage capacity isn't likely to be a problem on modern phones.
Go has such a great set of tools, it's definitely one of the reason I love it so much.
The Go team did an amazing job on this.
Companies receiving "party rounds" raise follow-on financing at higher rate
Interesting view. Hadn't thought about it like that :) For now China seems to be pretty happy about Snowden.
Perhaps the first time I've ever upvoted an action by Putin. And it's well deserved, here.
That's actually very interesting! But, far too expensive for me. I would have to pay $348 per year to read the same stuff I read now for free with NetNewsWire + Google Reader.

Even though I don't actually read 15,000 articles a month, I definitely download that many to browse through.

Personally, I would pay maybe a tenth of that.