skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find that entirely implausible.

If the NSA is getting as much data as we expect, then they can get people's reading lists from their ISPs. So Google shutting down Reader wouldn't have kept much of anything out of federal hands.

Further, if Google had a sudden attack of nobility, then it would be Gmail or Google Voice that they'd be shutting down. That's where the real private information is, and that's what most people are angry about. Not what a small fraction of Google's audience gets in their daily papers.
Bolivian president's plane forced to land due to Snowden on board rumor
His apps are exclusive to the Apple platform?

Instapaper has an open API, and The Magazine is available online.
Inside Google (Moma)
Does it, though?

The plugin today quite arguably scrapes Craigslist programmatically. I think Craigslist has a case there.

However, if Krrb instead injected JS at post-time to publish cross-site, I think that argument becomes much less convincing.

You can make a case on either side, but I think doing it at post time is important (for one thing, it guarantees that the publisher is actually the person krrbing it)
I would have paid for it. They didn't ask. Because the problem here is not them making a product choice, it's them blatantly not giving a shit.

Also, I hate, hate, hate this line of argument. It gets trotted out every time an immensely powerful corporation does something that upsets people. It's universal applicability makes it universally pointless.

My friends aren't entitled to anything from me either. But if I fail to show up for something where I said I'd show up, they're going to bitch, and I am perfectly fine with that.
The worst part is the hypocracy... what Buckmaster claims about himself:

"Possibly the only CEO ever described as anti-establishment, a communist, and a socialistic anarchist"

http://www.craigslist.org/about/jim_buckmaster
I suppose that's why -- since about the time Buzz was introduced -- Google's been pushing an open push publishing specification (PubSubHubbub).
It may take advanced equipment to tap an undersea cable, but not to cut one.
The biggest difference between the spying in the past and the spying today is that most effective spying usually involved HUMINT. You had to get someone with access to a secure location to go in there and bug the place or you needed a mole on the inside leaking information to you.

Today we have an Internet infrastructure that for all intents and purposes is centralized in the US. Lots of network collections pass through the US and many commonly used service providers are in the US. HUMINT is now a lot less important because SIGINT became much much much easier.

However abusing the current system for the sake of SIGINT comes at the cost of trust in the current system and architecture. There will be an economic penalty paid by the US of this abuse of trust. At the very least, we're now in a much weaker position to negotiate with the rest of the world when internet governance issues (ICANN for example) come up for discussion.
Football isn't known for typically being aimed solely at teenaged girls. Harry Potter fanfiction is.
http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-usenixsec2011.pdf

Check this out and look at the source as well as take some time to critically think about the technical resources a group like the NSA has vs. the researchers of this paper...

You think that "It's hard to imagine any remotely competent government group or organized crime group" choosing it" is an informed position?

I would HOPE you are aware of Stucnet, as well as Duqu...

Do you recall this: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2012/01/20121116284...

This was supposedly the work of the USG/Mossad in Iran. If you think that they would use lowly tactics like a magnetic car bomb -- but would be "too competent" to employ remote hijacking of a late model car, then I simply cannot agree with you on this matter.
BSDCan 2013 DevSummit Special Status Report
When was either of those ever implemented? How much do you even know about the theory to start with, if you talk about "utopian communism" as if you read Marx back to back? Or are trigger words like "Stalin" and "East block countries" enough to make you enter and stay in the back of just any old van?

I wish people at least spoke for themselves. Because know of a lot of examples where I went above and beyond simply because I felt good about the work and enjoyed finding out about and increasing my potential. I can work hard in a cancer ward for lodging and meals and love it; but you could hardly pay me enough to sell people something they don't need, or that actually hurts them. I know I'm not alone with that either, I am in awesome, priceless company.

Ever watched horses in the wild? Or dogs play? They exert themselves because they can. Those who need to be forced or tricked are sick.

Then there is also this: "The trouble with the rat race is, even if you win it, you're still a rat." (Lily Tomlin) Capitalism doesn't solve anything, it just shifts the problem out of the range of short-sighted people. Even those often feel it subconsciously, and cannot hide their confusion and despair trickling through the cracks of the facade.

This article essentially points out that humans have defensive strategies in situations of uncertainty and distrust. The suggested reaction is not to reflect on what causes them, where they might be justified and where they might not -- but simply assumes as given that "life isn't fair" and that it would help to better deceive people into thinking it was. I'm making another connection to marshmallows here: "white and spineless, without any traces of intellectual honesty".

Problem: People don't trust Facebook and are less engaged because they either feel it's just a thinly veiled mechanism to shove them into marketing segements, or because they're uncomfortable with the cooperation with snoops.

Solution: PR campaign. Yeah, Facebook is "just a company", and "needs" to make money at whatever cost, so all of this and worse would be to expected in utopian capitalism, but Skinner showed us ways around that.

Instead of, you know, having a decent society, this article is about the tools we are supposed to use in broken one. It's sweet, but no thanks, because it just sticks between the teeth and makes you fat. Can't think well with a fat brain.
Craig didn't sell to eBay, one of his employees did and it was a minor scandal at the time.
I thought stealthy black helicopters was the ultimate ridiculous conspiracy theory.. until they crashed one in Pakistan.

I knew the NSA could listen in wherever they wanted, but I thought mass surveillance and storage of all communications was outlandish 1984-like paranoia.. until Edward Snowden.

Now I don't know what to think.
It is quite different.

That said, I expect no response from Craig. Despite his self proclaimed love of customer support, he has been very quiet on these issues.
Of course they want to close us in. Or, more technically, they feel commercially compelled to do so.

There are only so many eyeballs, and right now being very sticky is an obviously viable strategy for dominance. Google didn't get into phone operating systems because they knew or cared much about them. They did it because their revenue base was under long-term threat. (Hell, Google is trying experiments to see if they can get in front of your actual eyeballs, intermediating your entire waking life.) And Facebook tried taking over people's phones for exactly the same reason.

Talk to the Googlers who have left over the last few years, and you'll hear very clearly that things have changed internally.
Japan seeks answers from U.S. over embassy bugging claim
Craigslist is the saddest example of a near natural monopoly formed in a two-sided market on the internet. Considering the pace of innovation over there, it's only a matter of time until they are disrupted.
In the meantime we'll dread looking for apartments, buying/selling through classified ads, and anything else that we need to do on Craigslist.
You need the prefix because without it, you will end up picking the same object every time you run the algorithm (e.g. On the next day's stream of data)

Depends, of course, upon the size of the stream and the range in variety of the objects in the stream.A stream of bytes would not be a good use case, for example.
There is a book called Blind Man's Bluff that documents how this started during the cold war by NSA tapping soviet undersea communication cables.

According to the book one of the captured tapping devices is on display in Moscow and on the side it says "Property of the United States Government". No point in hiding it...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Man%27s_Bluff:_The_Untold...
This is a pointless waste if time. The guy has made shed loads of money and his actions have clearly demonstrated he doesn't give a flying whatever about anyone's opinion of his actions and will continue to do whatever maximizes his profit. I say that without positive or negative judgment. It just is what it is. The whole - hey we know you're really a nice kid so stop bullying the other kids - schtick never worked in the play ground and it doesn't work as grown ups. I see this sort of thing all the time. We don't live in a society where shame has any meaning any more so trying to appeal to someone's good nature and the whole "hey it's not you it's your minions" crap is of no use.
Your analogy is definitely misleading.

> if I fail to show up for something where I said I'd show up, they're going to bitch

This never happened. It's more like, "if I decide to stop showing up because it no longer benefits me and give my friends a month's notice, they're going to bitch." Sure, that's true, but it seriously doesn't make you evil or mean the end of all friendships ever like Marco would make it seem. It just doesn't work like that.

Also, If something is universally applicable, it might have a nugget of truth somewhere, by the way.
You're responding to an entirely different complaint than the one that was made.
The cable operators need to encrypt all traffic going through the fibers - problem solved. In fact what goes through the backbone should be encrypted many times over - by the backbone operator, by the company leasing the backbone bandwidth and by the end user.
I think this is the same issue as Padmapper, just on a much smaller scale. Don't write code that will re-display/re-post content of a Craigslist post on your 3rd party website.

I bet if the button were changed to just cut/paste an html link to <city>.craigslist.org/post all would be well.

This is just CL trying to keep their postings exclusive to their website of which they've spent many a time and money trying to build and brand.
I suspect most cables could be pulled up to a surface ship for tapping, but of course that would give away the position of the tap to satellites.
I doubt Ebay has any influence on the day-to-day operations of Craigslist. They have those shares because CL gave them to an early employee who then sold Craig out. It was not an investment CL sought or wanted, and I suspect that the official answer to any Ebay request is a curt GFY.
I went for the reader prototype: Instapaper.
I've done something similar in one of my older iOS apps however I used a 8x8 sample. Still an interesting read.
Or the "dark" fiber was the return line for the tapped data.
Bolivian president's jet rerouted amid suspicions Edward Snowden on board
The No Escape Signup Page
Smart businessmen (who want to stay in business) don't blog about litigious information, no matter how cool or web 2.0 it is to do so now days. They let their lawyers handle it.
The post wasn't actually a criticism of anyone, and Apple has nothing to do with it, since it's not a Web giant.
Craigslist has been incredibly consistent about its position. It would be shocking of Krrb didn't get a C&D. The author's mock surprise and petty insults come off really pathetic given this is clearly a planned publicity stunt.

CL is simple, unobtrusive, and doesn't make its users feel like it's try to monetize every click or pageview. That's why the dominate the market. I love it that they sue the hell out of anyone that tries to ride on their coattails. If they're doing it wrong, someone can prove it buy building a better classified ad site and clean up the market.

EDIT: since I'm getting downvoted anyway, and I have no conflict of interest (not a CL employee, relative, and very infrequent user).... pg, instead of posting stuff like this, you have unique resources at your disposal to build a CL clone that behaves in the way you wish CL would behave. How hard could it be? Or is it that building up and operating a classified listing site while allowing 3rd party sites to repost your listings is a money loser?
As a supposedly computer literate software developer, the only place I ever hear ssh keys mentioned is on HN. I haven't encountered them anywhere else. I doubt I'm alone.
> Is there anyway for the signal to be bulk encrypted in realtime and have the cryptographic key between two end points automatically cycled and exchanged via means other than that cable?

They could use one time pads (two identical lists of pregenerated random numbers) at the ends. Then XOR the traffic with those. It's unbreakable. They "key" could be terabytes long.
From Vim To Emacs
If I had my own discussion site, I'd permaban anyone who used that fucking word.

Unless someone is demanding legislation to force Google to keep Reader alive, stop with the entitlement bullshit. We are entitled to dislike business models and approaches, we are entitled to criticize them, and we are entitled to not use projects from companies which follow them.
The tone of this letter is horrible IMO. I understand you're angry, but I imagine this will piss him off more than rile him up. I'd rather see you take them to court with a strong case than start a public, one-sided flame war. There must be a syndicate of investors that realize it would beneficial for them in the long-run to see Craigslist lose the stronghold they have on classified's data. PG (submitted this) and Garrytan (got angry re: padmapper) might be a good starting point.
IPhone App PhotoUpLink Launches 3D Printed Photo Frames
After reading the WSJ article from 2001, it's become clear that the FAZ/FAS article is largely based on it.

Interesting quote from the WSJ article, in light of the fact that it was written 3 months before 9/11:

The NSA long boasted some of the most powerful computers on earth. But the agency's technological edge dulled as the equipment aged and money grew tight. The NSA's budget is classified, but individuals familiar with it say it is about two-thirds what it was a decade ago, even before accounting for inflation.
...a dependence of which we are not conscious.2
http://randomdrake.com/2008/02/13/google-maps-version-of-the...
I haven't seen anything in the Bill of Rights about nailing things up on public property.

> interpreting the bill of rights there is a meaningful distinction between public and private property that you are apparently unaware of.

That's because that distinction is not, as far as I know, actually in the Bill of Rights.
Yes, the "fuck you" and the last paragraph are definitely anti-climatic. You do not need such a post to say that. Of course, Larry stated very clearly that if something does not help + then something must disappear...
There is a considerable body of evidence that "top-down" processes affect not only how sensory evidence is processed, but how the sensations themselves are experienced. In other words, high-level (but subconscious) neural "judgments" about the statistics of the world, actually influence how you perceive it. To put it still another way: sensations aren't simply passively experienced; they are actively constructed by the brain. Phantom phone vibration is, in many ways, just as "constructed" as real phone vibration.

Perceptual illusions provide one of the clearest ways to show that sensations reflect factors other than external stimuli. Here are two illusions, in different sensory modalities, that demonstrate the strong top-down influence of the brain on perception: The rubber hand illusion [1,2] and the McGurk effect [3,4]. The rubber hand illusion is particularly relevant because it is quite similar to the phantom phone vibration effect.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_hand_illusion

2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCQbygjG0RU

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect

4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0

EDIT: Here's an additional example to consider. People generally can't tickle themselves. The sensations are less strong when one touches oneself than when someone else does so. The explanation for this is that the brain automatically discounts sensations which arise as a result of self-motion. This has obvious advantages, namely that you don't constantly overstimulate yourself just in the process of moving through the world and are as such better able to attend to important externally generated stimuli.
You'd still need to terminate at the surface point, in which case what are you gaining by sending a modified sub to the bottom of the ocean?
It's more about companies taking an open platform, co-opting it's userbase with a good solution, and then kill or stagnate the platform in one way or another...

Microsoft did something similar with IE back in the day: it was better than Netscape and it quickly dominated, but then they kept adding proprietary hooks (ActiveX etc) and the open web started to stagnate - until Firefox saved the day with a faster, more secure alternative that slowly gained back hard-won market share.

I don't think this phenomenon of hurting open platforms is necessarily intentional, perhaps it's a side-effect near-monopoly products in a given space.
Why in the world are you being a dick about this? The whining and lack of balls are all things you are brining to the article; they're not in the text.

The guy did what he thought was right at the time. He's not complaining about it. He's just saying that under today's conditions, he would have chosen differently.

He also didn't say he would have pulled it off independently. Just that today he would leave and build it on his own.

Given that other people are doing that successfully (I just paid good money to NewsBlur), it seems like a pretty sound evaluation to me. And I'll note that the guy did leave and do something independently, so it sounds like he has plenty of balls to me.
Halsbury's Laws of England: Local Government says this about the relationship between the Lord Mayor of the City of London (not the Mayor of Greater London) and the Queen:

By ancient custom the Lord Mayor tenders the City Sword to the Sovereign when she enters the City on state occasions, in token acknowledgement of her overriding authority. The Sovereign touches the sword and, by that gesture, returns it to the Lord Mayor with implied permission to carry it before her whilst she is in the City. Also by ancient custom the permission of the Lord Mayor is sought for the passage of troops through the City, and he receives quarterly, under the Sovereign's sign manual, the password of the Tower of London. As spokesman for the citizens, he is entitled to the right of special access to the Sovereign.

They're essentially a small enclave of "free" [1] people who are allied with Liz, smack dab in the middle of London. Most of the previous Lord Mayors of the City of London were descendants of the people who forced King John to sign the Magna Carta. If, in order to stay in honor of the rules of law, they must grant her a faux sovereignty in their kingdom, it's to do her honor that she would not normally [2] need bestowed on her, in order to keep her allied with The City.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_City#Freedom_of...

[2] (Free people are all "kings" or "sovereign")
The problem is that you are depending on commercial entities for basic Internet infrastructure: search, social graph & newsfeed, and real time communications.

These companies' goals are not necessarily aligned with goals of an interoperable Internet. This has been repeated over and over again: Twitter locking down its API, the percentage of ads on Google search, lack of privacy on Facebook, etc...

You probably need open source/Wikipedia style alternatives to prevent abuse. They don't have to replace the commercial ones, just provide counterbalance. I think people have tried to create open versions of Twitter, Facebook, and possibly Google but they haven't succeeded.

Wikipedia is an outlier in that it is a non-commercial service versus primarily being code or protocols. Services have ongoing costs which make it much harder for non-commercial entities to survive.

I think the Firefox(?) mobile os is a good start.
This is odd.

1. We know it isn't retail. They'd have just said so.
2. We know he's probably not going to have any design influence: YSL, like Vertu, is so far behind Apple's design that it'd be unthinkable for Ive to cede any control here.
3. I have to believe that the watch Apple is working on is way more of a computer than anything else. I'd be less surprised if they appointed a scientist to run this.

Very weird.
Sure, but this is talking about a whole room of people. What's the chance that no one would benefit from taking notes?
What you're saying is that a company wants you to use their product and no one else's. Sure, that's how companies work. They aren't compelled to allow anyone from the outside to contribute. This is not closing us in. Unless I'm missing something, people are still able to choose the applications they install and use on their mobile phones, and I don't see that as a lock-in in the slightest. I understand the internal changes that have happened over the years at Google, but to say that Google no longer supports or does not plan to support openness or interoperability is either the word of a prophet or Google Reader-inspired sensationalism.
Apple apps are basically just a special folder that contain a combination of compiled files and uncompiled "resources" which can include images and even some of the config files.

You can easily browse any native app on a Mac by just ctrl+clicking it and selecting "show package contents"

These cloners are just replacing image files and changing some text in config files which requires almost zero programming or reverse engineering skill.
Does it increase the chances that they would sue? Yes, it does. Does it increase the chances that they'd win? Perhaps not, if your arguments hold. Does that matter? No, because you're still talking about stealth distribution of a program that tracks and republishes user data without their knowledge or permission! (And no, a notice buried in the TOU doesn't count.)

Edit to reply to below: Ah, ok. Your phrasing of "piggyback your plugin into popular installers to get this on millions of computers" sounded like you were planning to sneak it in without users' awareness. If it's an explicit opt in, then I would have no great problem with that from a user perspective. (Of course as a user I'd prefer to just install what I want, rather than being presented with options for a bunch of unrelated stuff, but advertising and affiliate programs keep things going, so I deal with it.)

Personally don't have a problem with the part about scraping something I might post on a classifieds site. Whenever I post something on a public web site I expect it to be scraped and to appear on search engines and such. It was specifically the idea of a service running on my computer, watching and potentially publishing aspects of my web use (and who knows what else), without my knowledge or permission that I took issue with.
That's a pretty depressing outlook, but it is hard to avoid looking at history as a sign of things to come. (I just started reading 'History of the Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire')
How I'd do it:

1. pick 500 random points from the album art

2. cluster them in 10 classes (k-means is an old, well understood algorithm)

3. pick the median point of dominant class for the bg

4. pick a contrasting color from a different cluster for the text