skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
H-Online have a nice article about an external enclosure that offered "hardware data encryption with 128-bit AES, access control via an RFID chip".

The visualization (of the encrypted data, not of any PRNG used) showed that the encrypted data had strong patterns. The data wasn't encrypted using RSA, it used XOR with a non-changing cipher block. (This is trivially easy to crack. Even I could do it.)

The error arose because the manufacturer of the controller chip was using confusing terminology.

> The IM7206 merely uses AES encryption when saving the RFID chip's ID in the controller's flash memory. The company explained that actual data encryption is based on a proprietary algorithm.

(http://www.h-online.com/security/features/Enclosed-but-not-e...)

Other people interested in testing PRNGs might be interested in the DIEHARD tests (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diehard_tests), but read all the cautions too.
مستأنف الاسماعيلية تودع حيثيات الحكم في قضية وادي النطرون | التيار
How long until a wordpress theme based on this is on themeforest?
> but even morality is defined by the people themselves

Absolutely not, and that mentality is a repeat of one of the most dangerous ideas to have ever been put into practice across history.

Much of our 'progress' has human beings has been advancing past the idea that might (of the mob, or of the authority, or otherwise) alone makes right.

It may be that the people shield you from punishment if you do something wrong, but it is still wrong and will always be wrong, though one can usually be rehabilitated.
I don't know why is it so hard for people to understand that you can not make computers run faster, you can only make them do less.
Maths professor hits multi-million scratchcard lottery jackpot 4 times
Those devices still need to be built. So a 4th or 5th place might not generate enough revenue to pay them.
Your points aren't really strong either.

> * Markup language processor and layout engine designed
for hypertext documents, not UIs

Unlike XML which Andorid uses, right? I mean XML was made for designing arbitrary (potentially hyper-linked or linked) documents, no?

> * Parser for a poorly designed programming language
and advanced JIT optimizations.

So are you talking Java or Javascript?! At this point it doesn't matter. Without doing any benchmarks and solid number crunching your claim is empty air.

This doesn't mean Firefox OS is more resource efficient than Android. Without benchmarks on same hardware neither can claim performance high ground.
Paul Simmonds of the Jericho Forum on cloud and deperimeterization
Up until 2000, export control regulations made it illegal for a U.S company to release cryptographic tools internationally with a key size greater than 40 bits. Lotus Notes got around this by making a deal with the NSA to let them encrypt an additional 24 bits with an NSA key to allow greater security from everyone else but let the NSA still access things easily. At least some have speculated the Windows NSAKEY was for a similar purpose.
There were so many people just calling for rubber-stamping SPDY as HTTP 2.0 without any changes that frankly, I feel lucky that we're getting revisions at all. The editor of the draft is a good guy, and I trust him to make good changes.

I think it's pretty ludicrous that so many people are willing to let an advertising company basically re-write the way that every computer on the web talks to each other with very little questioning, but this is the place that we're at nowadays. For better or worse, the big vendors guide the standards process. I'd like to see more involvement from the little guys, but that has its own set of challenges.
Top 5 Network Switches for 2013
Read again, nobody said emotions are bad in all situations. Thus your use of "if nothing ever" doesn't apply here.
What a beautiful map - what service are you using for that?
" Congratulations gentleman - you're everything we've
come to expect from years of Government training."

-- Zed, in "Men in Black"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cflpNLjhi0s
And, thankfully, all the current packages in Debian are either unaffected or it's been patched :)
He also has a new book on Amazon that is basically the book version of his Ask The Pilot column.

I actually just read it the other day and was pretty interesting (and a quick read)
You don't, but your grandkids probably won't care.

Eventually you're going to elect priests and public officials (i.e. establishment authority figures) even though there are videos of them having sex and/or taking a shit. Because no one will care anymore.

I don't think I'm ready for that future, but there will be benefits as well as the obvious negatives.
Paper Football in your terminal
> ... but I think it is also advantageous for the NSA to have foreign governments think the NSA has a bigger lead than they actually do.

I would think it is more advantageous for the NSA to have others believe that it has less capabilities than they actually do.

The NSA is well known for its disinformation campaigns. Why wouldn't they try to make others (governments, end users, etc.) believe that they don't have the ability to break various key sizes.

This could provide a false sense of security to others and cause them to believe that, for example, a 2048-bit PGP key is more than sufficient when, in fact, it isn't.
We've had the fixed versions of the packages for quite some time.
This will be interesting to see when finished, but it would be better if each 'Fortress" had to offer services, instead of dictating that each camp has to run POP + Wordpress + some bullshit plugins. Also, this type of activity definitely will break terms of service for internet service and hosting providers, as well as potentially several laws.
The training/gear isn't a budget issue, because it's externally funded via grants and seizures. Except for the largest cities, nobody is going to the mayor for $1M to buy something like this: http://gs.flir.com/integrated-systems/skywatch . But when the Feds are giving away money for lookout towers, speedboats, etc, everybody needs two.

What they DO need to justify is the overtime and the extra pay for being in the SWAT detail. That's where driving tanks through buildings to liberate and euthanize chickens comes in.
Recursion brah.
Being choked is nothing like using psychedelics.
It was a detailed technical ramble about how I made a SAME encoder using 80s era hardware and software because I was poor in the early/mid 90s because I was trying to "startup" a little hardware project to sell a mobile car SAME decoder optimized for storm chaser people (and more likely electronics fiends in general). The whole market segment has pretty much been replaced in the 2010's by smartphones and 3G networks so I'm not exactly worried about giving away my idea.

Turns out the encoder was really easy to make using 1980s era stuff, but the tech required to pull off the decoder product greatly exceeded the technological/economic limitations of the time, so that's why the project failed. Oh well.

The point was a raid to eliminate fancy Java and GUIs and modern computers won't stop forbidden SAME encoders from being written, they'd actually have to raid and confiscate museum pieces.

It would be like trying to forbid DES-56 by getting rid of everything DES-56 capable. That's a lot more than year 2012 quad core pentiums, that includes my 25 year old HP-48 calculator...

Another interesting note is that I'm sure the security theater guys would like to calm people by claiming it takes millions of dollars and dozens of people and years of effort and top of the line modern high tech stuff to make a SAME encoder, but I did it alone as a poor yet smart kid using junkpile stuff decades ago in a ridiculously short amount of time. The only reason this doesn't get hacked on a regular basis, is despite the paranoid delusion that they're all out to get us, they actually are not, because they would have gotten us a zillion times over already, if "they" actually wanted to, which they obviously do not desire to do. Some lower forms of humanity profit off convincing people to be hostile toward each other, nothing new there.
Point him towards the github repo!
Congrats to Google for ruining the internet standards in an official way, without strong proofs of big significant improvements over the simpler past protocol.
I used to do that with laptops. Then, I switched to the opposite end of the spectrum. I spend inordinate amounts of time in front of my laptop. If I'm going to outspend myself, it is on the laptop. The personal concession is that laptops must now last at least four years.

Now, whenever I need a laptop, I buy the best Lenovo I can find (well, not the absolute best, I aim for best-ish; price curves on laptops are stupid at the very high-end).

So far, it has worked better than the expendable machine style.
Ouch, you're right. Refreshed my memory of UTF-8 encoding and now it seems it's designed so it can't be made to express arbitrary values. Not sure why I imagined the opposite. My mistake.
The folks at Development Seed are doing really awesome work between Prose and MapBox and it's great to see them get some recognition for it.

Also a great plug for Jekyll in general. While there can certainly be more worrisome factors than cost for a site, site performance should be one of the most important issues when launching. By completely getting rid of a backing database, page lookup times can be reduced dramatically. As Prose continues to mature, it's getting more and more flexible by the day. Just last week they implemented an extensible "tagging" feature for posts: https://github.com/prose/prose/issues/464.

In case you haven't noticed, I'm a fan. Kudos to dev seed and big props to the White House team for the willingness to move away from Drupal.
Or we just get tired of the same spam on every article.
> Early theories as to why a plane crashed almost always turn out to be wrong or incomplete.

In the Air France crash over the Atlantic, the early theories all centered around the loss of airspeed indicators--a mechanical problem. When the flight recorders were finally found (an astounding feat of salvage BTW), it turned out that the airspeed indicators did fail...but then they came back online, and the pilots flew a perfectly good aircraft into the ocean anyway.

So as we look at this SFO crash, the lessons from Air France are mixed. On the one hand it's possible that the early theories of pilot error will be wrong, and it will be some subtle or previously unknown software or hardware error. On the other hand we know that modern highly trained pilots can make enough wrong decisions in a row to crash a sound airplane.
> Android and Firefox OS both also have a VM to run managed code, along with a JIT compiler. Android's VM, Dalvik, was specifically designed to be memory efficient in the case where several apps are running as separate Unix processes. Is the same true of SpiderMonkey?

Short answer: yes, SpiderMonkey has been designed to be quite memory efficient.

> But on top of this, Firefox OS and its apps add:

Actually, let me clarify something, if not for you, then for our readers: "on top of this" means essentially "on top of the kernel and HAL," rather than "on top of Android."

> [valid points] So how can you say that Firefox OS is more resource-efficient than Android? Perhaps the Android platform developers have gotten sloppy lately, since they're primarily concerned about high-end phones. But that can be remedied.

All your technical points are valid. However, you have not taken into account the fact that Android is much larger than that not to mention, conceptually, very old. Just the Core Libraries, for instance, offer at least three or four ways of reading/writing files. Most of these APIs should be removed for the sake of performance, as they were based on Java 1.0 designs from the 1990s, a time at which industry believed that disk speed would keep improving as fast as CPU speed and that concurrency was too expensive to be used. But these APIs cannot be removed, simply because too much code depends upon them, both in Android itself and in applications that Google would not want to lose. Sadly, this means that all such code is a performance hog, especially on mobile devices, since mobile storage is horribly slow in comparison to PC storage.

Now, while I am less familiar with the rest of the architecture of Android, I seem to remember this is true of many features and that many features are accidentally implemented several times in the kernel, Dalvik, the libraries and/or the frameworks, in the interest of (partial) compatibility with Posix, Linux, J2SE, etc – and tutorials.

While it would theoretically be possible to get rid of all these inter-layer duplications, and to only keep the good APIs, this effectively means breaking too much of both Android itself and of many applications. Google cannot afford to do that, as they would risk driving away all developers and users. Moreover, Google does not need to do that, as Android has always been targeted towards high-end phones. A new operating system, by opposition, with everything to win and nothing to lose, can start from a blank state. Moreover, since Firefox OS offers only high-level APIs and no NDK-style access, it is easier and will remain easier for a number of years, to perform whichever low-level refactorings are necessary to improve performance and/or memory efficiency without breaking applications.

Note that this is almost the reverse of Chrome vs. Firefox. Firefox is burdened by the number of add-ons that need to be supported, and the low-level APIs provided to these add-ons, while Chrome, starting with a blank slate and restricted public APIs, managed to rise the stakes of performance quite harshly.
Will "the government" exist in 100 years?
It doesn't force you, but it is pretty insistent. You have to look for options really hard to see how to avoid entering a credit card. But it is possible.
Exactly what I'm looking for. How to go about it? Where to start.
Why Culture Should Be Your Central Focus
5 reasons to blook
Bet ya if your phone was locked down in the typical corporate IT security way (pattern lock is out, need to use a numeric pin, it needs to be at least N digits long, entered correctly before you can do squat with the phone, gods help you if you screw it up too many times), you couldn't.

There's also startup time once you've launched the app. Even on a modern iPhone, that's a second or two before the shutter iris goes away and presents you with the viewfinder screen.

The Glass demos I've seen make it instantaneous.
Looks like a service called CloudMade: http://cloudmade.com/products/map-tiles
I can't believe I read this article on HN. People died due to some human error (if it's not the weather it must be some human error somewhere) and the public wants to know why. Media is serving that demand, it could be over-speculating but it doesn't mean that a polit should feel obliged to start defending the engineers on the expense of first categorizing it as a non-catastrophe and then blame the passengers.

To me, listing all the past tragedies to make the point that this one doesn't deserve the public attention is at the very least inconsiderate if not offensive.
>I think it's pretty ludicrous that so many people are willing to let an advertising company basically re-write the way that every computer on the web talks to each other with very little questioning

I don't think there's very little questioning...in anycase, Google's goal is to deliver ads to you in the most efficient and fastest way possible. The more you browse the web the more Google makes; it's in their interest to develop SPDY/HTTP2.0. So what is wrong with them doing it? IEFT spec drafts are public and they're audited (as SPDY has been).

Also, most of the specs that we love and rely on today came from "big vendors", its nice and all to say you want the little guy to be a part (and they should be) but it takes quite a bit of man power to develop, draft and finally get ratified a spec.
Ask HN: Will you be an Enterprise-Snowden?
If you see malpractices or some idiotic/stupid moves in your company, would you be bold enough to report them? Or blog about them? Even at the expense of breaking the bridges?

Corollary to the above:
- If you are working in a startup and you see some 'bad things', then would you blog about it after you decide that you are going to quit.
- If you are working in a big company, and are essentially Dilbert there, then would you rant about your PHB once you quit?

Let's not debate the legal hassles :)
When talking about this common scenario, there are two ways of think. Some people argue that you shouldn't expose private methods only to test them. You should do it through the public method to keep the encapsulation. Others argue that yes, you should expose these methods to make easier to write tests and to identify possible bugs.

It depends, we have to analyze each case and choose the advantages and disadvantages.
Sync and share your sensitive files without giving up control of your data
IRS Leaks Thousands of Social Security Numbers Online
I think it is changed, I just noticed a close button on that login-wall. Does it unlock all?
What does Google's involvement in advertising have to do with the design of the SPDY protocol? Can you make a substantive criticism of SPDY based on Google's advertising incentives, or is this just innuendo?
"U.S. Patent Pending." -- wasn't expecting to see that on a JS lib.
That's what I meant by my question: is there any reasonable manner in which joe/jane user could decide to not punch in their credit card and still manage to setup the device?
Pretty cool! I can see this being really useful.

Beware, however, that, while there are certain cases that mysql can utilize indexes in a group by clause if values are constant [1], mysql definitely won't be able to use indexes with any of these functions (I'm not very familiar with postgres so somebody else would have to comment on that). If your load is relatively light or your table is small enough you'd probably be fine, otherwise I would either 1) set another column to the value you want when inserting the row or 2) have a cron run in the background to fill in values on another column, something like update tbl set creation_week = gd_week(creation_timestamp) where creation_week is null.

[1] http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/group-by-optimization...
> I love clean and well-written code but to achieve clean code we should be able to refactoring without break our code. This is the point for TDD.

That's also true for vanilla regression tests. There's nothing special that TDD adds in this regard.
How about by forcing the government to admit it was a jobs program and not a program to improve the environment. How about the government officials having to acknowledge the burden their system puts upon their local manufacturers?

So was it a jobs program or environmental? Politicians love to sell programs as one while really doing the other. Jobs programs tend to be vote buying schemes for the most part.
> I keep looking for alternative compilers and can't find any.

Really??? How long did you look?

I call bullshit; you did not look. GCC is an alternative compiler. Go away troll.
I thought there was a light on the outside of the view prism when recording was happening?
Pythran - Python to C++ compiler
I'm not a manufacturer, but at a guess, I'd say that 4th/5th place is still plenty of billions of dollars.
Only implementations of the final, published RFC can identify
themselves as "HTTP/2.0". Until such an RFC exists, implementations
MUST NOT identify themselves using "HTTP/2.0".

Here we go again - as with -webkit in css, expect 'HTTP/2.0 DRAFT' or similar to be the new http 2.0.
I was thinking less about being able to stop them at the time of recording, and more about the legal use of what they've recorded.

For example,

-- if they poke their head into your house uninvited & record you breaking a law - that might not be permitted as evidence.

-- if there are laws against recording individuals in certain circumstances, and they do & post to YouTube, you can sue them for damages in some places

My point being, Yes, there are more cameras everywhere, but that shouldn't really matter as long as there are laws in place regarding recording people. It is no different from when they walked around with camcorders, as long as the law stands up for individual rights of privacy.

Having said it that way... oh, crap :-(
I like that he named Archy after Don Marquis' Archy and Mehitabel, the cockroach and alley cat duo. Archy the cockroach would spend hours throwing his body against the keys of a manual typewriter to convey his poetry about his muse Mehitabel, who in turn would throw herself repeatedly against the harsh world of alley-cat living with irrepressible gaiety. Two paragons of the struggle with interfaces!
Yeah, I just noticed that too, and managed to read the post.
Libbson: A BSON Utility Library
well sure, but why even make this geo distinction? it was a Korean airliner on an trans-continental flight. hence the multi-national news this is making (vs. the even more recent crash in Alaska that killed more passengers but is indeed a local event).

and this was not exactly a minor crash, it broke the spines of several passengers for chrissakes. the evacuation was top notch, even if the rescuers rolled over one of the victims. and a lot of luck, if that plane had turned on its head during the stumbling phase, the evacuation wouldn't have gone so fast.
What is a "free market"? Can you (anyone) provide a real world example?
I think the question is how can you be confident that the optimised code does exactly the same thing as the non-optimised code.
Genuine question: Is it really that big of an issue? We still have to use tools (telnet/curl) to inspect text-based protocols. We don't examine raw bytes by hand, do we? In other words, isn't every protocol ultimately a binary one and the issue here is only a matter of degree?
So this website does what exactly? Summarizes things? I'm discarding it as blog spam. Link the actual video not an article with a loose description begging for page views based on somebody elses content, and then they ask you to donate at the bottom of the page.
PICTURE: Wilfried Zaha Enjoyed His First Day At United
Don't confuse the cart and the horse. The IETF standardization process has never been less relevant than it is today. The reality of deployment of a "next-generation HTTP" involves two things, neither of which the IETF has any say in: (a) whether anyone can improve HTTP as it runs between a mainstream browser (or some as-yet unforeseen browser replacement) and a content serving backend in a way meaningful enough to drive adoption, and (b) buy-in from the major browser owners.

That's the way it's supposed to work; the horse is meant to drag the cart. The RFC database is littered with cart-led insurgencies that went nowhere. If binary HTTP is one of those, it'll join them as a historical curiosity.
>I would have liked to see an ascii based protocol

I disagree I think HTTP should have been a simple binary protocol from the start and HTML should have required compilation into a binary format.

How much work would have it really been? htmlcmp foo.html providing foo.bhtml. No whitespace, No end tags, one or two byte tags, etc. Strictness in the reference HTML compiler implementation could have saved the web from all the stuff outside the actual standard that browsers (and other tooling) now have to support (so they don't "break" the web).

I'm not suggesting anything as crazy as the flash binary format (I wrote a Java flash player once...), but when I started to write things like proxy servers and HTML minifers I was blown away by the extreme inefficiency of HTTP/HTML.

This is a step in the "right" direction IMHO.
I've been reading though Hacking: The Art of Exploitation. So far I'm enjoying it.