skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It would be funny if it wasn't sad.

Many, perhaps most, people are equating "conspiracy theory" with "total madness", as if there is no empirical proof of a conspiracy, such as hijacking (call it "grounding" all you want, the plane was hijacked) of the bolivian president - or the conspiracy, sorry, co-operation between the five eye secret services to have each other's help spying on their own citizens when occasionally they pay attention to the law.

It's total madness to assume that there are not thousands of "conspiracies", nothing more than covert agreements between parties (some of these agreements legal, some not), that benefit the conspiring parties at the expense of some non conspiring parties. And yet most people pride themselves on being rational for consistently ignoring any idea of such a conspiracy.
I have many good memories of the surrounding towns, countryside and people. You're right, lots of "Arthur Daly" type characters.
Thanks Chris, I just sent you a message via the support interface. Cheers!
You consider doing the job you are paid for to be sabotage? He was contracted for 7.5 hours, he was paid for that and nothing more. In what universe does the company deserve more than what they pay for?
I feel bad for you dude, but considering you never signed any paperwork for your stake in the company, and that you knew he was a very, very shady character to begin with, you were just asking for trouble. I once started a preliminary business idea with a friend, and we signed paperwork as soon as we had worked on it for a month or so.
I haven't seen any evidence of programs that are prima facie unconstitutional. You may wish that the Fourth Amendment required a warrant to search any of your communications, but that's not how the courts have interpreted it. Nations have been opening messages that crossed their borders for centuries.

That's not to say each and every instance of these programs has always been scrupulously constitutional, but we never expect our government to get it right 100% of the time. That's why the FISA court exists. You may wish its oversight were stronger or its opinions always public, but again, nothing about how it operates is obviously unconstitutional. Certainly not as self-evidently as some people around here seem to assume.
Insane and Jaw Dropping Cloud Formations Captured on Camera
Natural things happen in the most preposterous way it can, no one is to be credited for that. However, capturing the pictures when they happen is something that should be appraised. Here is compilation of a series of insane cloud formations that freaks you out leaving your jaw dropped.
This is indeed an article from the future! (notice how it says "Two years ago Edward Snowden released..."). It is basically saying that Yahoo has a serious opportunity on their hands if they want to disrupt email right now.
I agree with you. It particularly resonates in this piece as he repeatedly tears into the intelligence services (specifically MI5) as being completely incompetent.

I find his work to be a constant reminder of how fallible the human species is, how much we try to convince ourselves otherwise (some are better at it than others) and the utter inanity that it almost always leads to.

If only it were humourous endings to these reports.
Trusting coporations with our private communications has been disastrous so far. Perhaps we should find ways to take out the middle man and communicate more directly. P2P or federation perhaps?
The post is fictional; set in 2015.

"Two years ago Edward Snowden released a slow trickle
of highly damaging revelations about the NSA and the
erosion of privacy that affected people not just in the
USA, but across the world."

Sorry, if that wasn't clear.
I always hide them with css.
java and c are both object oriented programming languages so they are not so much different.
How XEROX Invented (and Killed) Printing
>the historian EP Thompson said that really Chapman Pincher was: "A kind of official urinal in which ministers and intelligence and defence chiefs could stand patiently leaking."

Wow. I wonder what EP Thompson would say about the media today.
Kind of sucks for those customers though, who can't get their email out. I get it, but man I'm glad I didn't use lavabit. The lavabit founder is probably going to have to deal with some serious civil legal problems, and maybe even criminal ones too.

I don't know where I stand on this. I feel like the NSA can't respond because they're trapped by the same secrecy that they operate in from speaking out, although the lies and backtracking don't help, so this echo chamber is just amplifying itself to the point people are making big bold moves that hurt themselves (and their customers) when anyone has yet to demonstrate a single instance of where the NSA has misused their information (if you don't assume the DEA parallel reconstruction is using NSA data, which is maybe speculative or not).

Well at least Obama is meeting with Tim Cook about this, because that makes sense. I've been thinking, why doesn't Tim Cook go talk to the president about this. Because...yeah.
You realise that this post speaks about 2013 as it would be in the past, right?
That would be better for me (in the short-term), but supporting a large number of low-value customers is probably not going to be sustainable for them.
Here's a gratuitous plug for MailDrop, an open-source version. http://maildrop.cc http://github.com/m242/maildrop
Http://devcodehack.com/apple-is-the-hottest-girl-in-school/
> you can't really expect them to shut down

Why not?
We really need to out and shame any engineer or contracting agency working for the NSA. If they can't hire anyone they can't spy on anyone.
So johnny six pack who made a web site for his crochet club back in 1997 using microsoft front page is going to fire up a VM and install an old browser to look at it?
uh huh.
Writing Plugins for gedit 3 with Python
I hope we both know that there are more ways than one to do your contracted job well. I might choose plan B that does the task but needs replaced intwo months, than job A which takes longer to implement but might be efficient over the long run. In this case, would you dock my pay?
Indeed, it is just a serious opportunity for them to become relevant again.
He hasn't sacrificed his life in the sense that he's dead, but he has sacrificed it in the sense that he left behind the quite comfortable life he had back home. And if he gets extradited, who knows what kind of punishment he'd receive.

He was willing to risk his liberty and possibly his life for his country. That makes him a hero by any reasonable definition.
> I wouldn't want EFF to become a corrupted organization

I don't think any NRA member thinks they are corrupted. They are doing the exact job they are supposed to given the rules of Washington DC. Like the ACLU and other rights organization they know to defend the extremes because the first compromise will not be the last. Sadly, there is no room for reasonable where rights are concerned.

I don't think any House or Senate member fears the EFF during election time. If we want the 4th amendment to be defended, then we need an organization they do fear.
And the odds you'll know it has happened is much higher.
Great reply, thanks
Hey Junto, I suggest you put a date on the post, something like "Aug 09th, 2015", so people can understand more easily it's a fictitious post. But the idea is awesome! I hope it can get to Marissa or some other visionary executive/entrepreneur to make something like this a reality in the years to come.
Jurisdiction works on the defendant, not the plaintiff/prosecution (or rather, it's waived for them since they chose to initiate the action).

So yes, if the NSA and CIA already have proof that Lavabit serves some minimum amount of customers in those states then it would be proper to bring it in that federal district.

But it seems like they a) wouldn't have the proof needed until they got access to lavabit's assets or b) if they had the proof, they wouldn't need formal access to lavabit's assets

Kind of a circular problem but of course since we don't know what he's appealing and why...

Edit: Actually they could just use credit card information to establish customers so nvm

Edit2: Now that I've read a copy of the search warrant linked by someone else in this thread, I see what's going on
But that's not the point to which I replied:

I agree with you in that a key difference would be if people were held accountable for illegal acts.

If you think the law makes it a police state, then argue about the law, but RyanZAG was suggesting that some evidence of a police state is that laws meant to restrain the government are not being enforced.
It is not unfair. At least some of them, most notably Google and Facebook, actively allure their users to share more and more of their private data, while misleadingly claiming, that they are able to keep them safe. If more and more people will realize the risks of sharing their personal data with those companies, it can endanger their whole business model. So who should fight most vigorously, if not them?

And nobody says they have to immediately shut down.
That link is from 1999. Also according to https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000000082 they are the 174th largest lobbying group.
It sounds like you should be proud. From a risk perspective, I can't say that simply removing the links removes all risk, it only reduces the risk. Anyone reading the account and knowing the guy in question may be able to identify that you are referring to him.

It is obviously a sad state of affairs where the merest risk of someone objecting to the content of a post could have a stifling effect on publication (edit - especially where the contents are on the face of it completely truthful). However, the unfortunate reality is that even becoming embroiled in legal action (even where the person taking action is on flimsy grounds) can be costly and time-consuming. I just wanted to make sure you were aware of the possible consequences.
"I'm try'n to think, but nuthin happens!" -Curly Joe

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxtW98VSegk
The whole geek movement is doing so well because it's so easily monetizable.

All the culture producers are playing in to it because it's easy to make money that way. So rather than shunning the D&D players and trekkies like they used to in pop culture, they now target them because they realized there's more money in it.
3D NAND Production Starts at Samsung
It's Not Software (2004)
You'd be surprised at how many things throughout the world can be easily explained through the lense of utter incompetence. Think of any type of failure out there, and more often than not plain human incompetence is at the centre of it.

When you start to understand how utterly incompetent most people are at their jobs, you quickly adopt an almost anti-conspiracy mindset that only changes it's mind based on positive evidence of actual competence.

Human error is the number one most common failure mode in complex systems. So before you think conspiracy, think idiocy.

> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

- Robert J. Hanlon of Hanlon's razor fame (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor)
Malaria vaccine - successful 100% protection
Agreed that the difference is like night and day. I also remember the black of the green-on-black terminals was "lighter" somehow, so that there was less contrast between the black and the green. The lower contrast definitely saves on my eyes.

I approximate this in iTerm2 by setting my background to RGB (0, 39, 0), and foreground to RGB (26, 223, 0).

Probably not perfect, but I found it works fine with a MBP non-retina built-in as well as an external LCD.
They're currently focusing on designing 29 logos people will like better than their final design. They'll get to transforming global communications right after that.
I think the wording there is a bit over the top, but yeah he has made great sacrifices and what he's doing is great.
Welcome to this entire planet. We're so screwed, it's not funny.
I would probably argue that being imprisoned for an undetermined time is fairly comparable to "losing your life" for most people.
They just write stories like this so it will make it to HN and drives traffic. Nothing has changed. There are just more people running on that gerbil wheel on HN.
Yes, end-to-end encryption would fix all this, but it would also fix it in OP's satirical mail service, as well as in GMail - so that's really a tangential point.

Trusting that those providers don't start siphoning off a copy of your mail (or are indeed diskless and not out of malice or incompetence actually just using regular disks. Also, being diskless is worthless if they are still keeping your mail around in memory anyway) is no different than trusting Google to keep humans away from my email.
Why would that pattern disappear? It makes money...
What I would like to disappear is naivety of people. They should understands what they actually are doing. They don't need to understands the technology, just that free doesn't exist.
Personally I don't care, it's a small price to pay to get a good spam protection, a good security and a good interface accessible everywhere.
The danger with this very good article is that it underplays the danger inherent in this system of surveillance. The spooks who put the thing together are the hard-working idiots described here:

> I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent -- their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy -- they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent -- he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief.

(often misattributed to Rommel, but actually by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord )

What we have here is a band of diligent idiots who, with their persistent, hard-working little hands, are building an apparatus of oppression that will be the wet dream of whatever future tyrant emerges (as inevitably one must, if history is any guide). They form a powerful, hidden, well-funded department of our government, and they are, from the looks of it, largely incompetent, diligent idiots.

This article/documentary is very good, but don't think these guys are harmless fools. They are very, very dangerous fools - a danger well above their competence.
Sadly, Medium doesn't seems to let me change it. I already looked. If their is anyone from Medium.com reading, feel free to tweak the date in your db!
Hi again.
So, say I have a mailing list of about 500 people, and I want to know if they will pay for what I currently have has my MVP.
How do I do that? Do I just open them up to registration and see what happens?
Should I test on a subset of those people?
If I need to pivot, can I re-email those same people in the test group that declined to purchase the first time around? And what if they did purchase and they are enjoying the original product?

Still a bit perplexed.

also: Is AdWords necessary?
It would be nice to tag something as fiction in its title here, in a category on Medium, or something like that. Sorry to be a downer, but I come here to read news and often only skim the (oft useless) introduction to an article.
CALEA (Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, 1994) addresses real-time monitoring of the communications of a single person, by way of a warrant. Lavabit has complied with warrants in the past [1] without shutting down services. Real-time interception does not fundamentally break Lavabit's security model [2] of encrypting incoming email and never storing the user's password, which is required to use their private key when they wish to access the mail. The implication in this shutdown is that the basic security model would be compromised, allowing untargeted retroactive snooping without needing to wait for the user to log in. Such a system is functionally equivalent to not having server-side encryption at all. Regardless of your stance on government snooping, this is just bad security, allowing a successful attacker to take all data in one shot rather than only being able to snoop on users currently accessing their mail.

[1] http://ia600908.us.archive.org/9/items/gov.uscourts.mdd.2362...
[2] http://possibility.com/LavabitArchitecture.html
I really like this site. It would be perfect if all these items were guarenteed to be sold :p Just because you bought a toilet seat for $20 cheaper on Amazon doesn't mean people will buy them on eBay from some stranger!
Oops. Where is that, I can't find it?
To summarize:

"The terrible truth that began to dawn in the 1980s was that MI5 - whose job it was to catch spies that threatened Britain - had never by its own devices caught a spy in its entire history."
Very cool.

Have you seen Pieceable Viewer? It's very similar, but I believe it used an implementation of UIKit in flash to simulate the apps. They were bought out by Facebook, but the website is still live. http://pieceable.com
Not quite clear - took a minute for me to figure out. Maybe I am in the minority though :)
I've just added it inline. Not quite as good but better than nothing.
Agreed. I was introduced to his work by watching The Trap in a seminar on Michel Foucault, interestingly enough. I was surprised how much depth there was in Foucault's work, despite his reputation as a fudging post-structuralist. Much of it complementary to Adam Curtis's work.

One of the important things we find in both (as well as in the last in my trifecta of organizational theory -- The Wire) is that conspiracy theories are almost impossible, because people are mostly either too stupid or too petty and shortsighted to pull off a true Illuminati-style conspiracy.

It might be tempting to call Adam Curtis a conspiracy theorist because his notion of how power is distributed and wielded is somewhat arcane -- for instance, it's at first odd to say that the populace is controlled by propping up freedom as the guiding ethos and removing arbitrary forms of control by implementing statistical guidelines, since these things are nominally in place to remove top-down control -- but such analyses, arcane though they may be, are not conspiracy theories, because a conspiracy requires a coordinated effort.

Adam Curtis describes situations in which there is no coordinated effort, and no secret cabal. Just struggles of power and agreed upon fields of debate/combat which are then exploited after the fact by those who are able to do so.
Lavabit was a much more "under the radar" provider. Silent circle has gained huge traction since they started and provide secure Phone, SMS and mail services. They may not be "equal" but silent circle is certainly more of a high profile target.
Hey guys, Koding developer here, thanks for the comments, there are some really valuable ones that we should consider doing. Would gladly answer the questions, if any?
There have always been reasons to object to working in national defense. During the Cold War quite a few physicists and engineers chose not to go into defense work because they did not want to feel like they were hastening nuclear Armageddon.

And yet, the U.S. government developed effective new defense and energy technologies during this time.

There are reasons to work for the government that are attractive to top tech talent: access to information and tools that no one in private enterprise has; gigantic budgets, with no demand for profitability; a great mission: protecting the American people.

And if the issue is privacy, there are objections to made at most top tech companies now as well--most of their product development treads on or over the privacy line of their customers.

I'm not advocating for defense work BTW, just expressing skepticism that the Snowden affair will substantially harm the government's ability to attract tech talent.

It probably will scare off the most innovative, forward thinking hackers...but they've never been a crowd that works for the government anyway. Too slow and bureaucratic.
but not only Yahoo, also other could jump on the train now... it is not a matter of $ in the beginning, it is a matter of conception.

@junto
it took me some minutes to understand the article, thanks for this awesome piece of content.
I don't know about a police state, but I've maintained for a while we're clearly living in a very dystopian society.

The problem now is who's going to step into the vacuum and start providing services these people are being persecuted for?? I think this is the real issue. The further you push people down, the more they scatter and go further underground.

Sad, sad state of affairs for this country. . .
Constitutional challenges come in two forms: "on their face" and "as applied"

The people who argue this is constitutional have really only addressed the "on it's face"/prima facie sort of constitutionality.

Whereas, "as applied" is both harder to defend and attack because we know so little.
Will Konex (Startup Stock Market) fulfill its mission to foster Korean startups?
C is hardly object oriented.
Go. Right now. Donate all you can to EFF. NOW.

https://supporters.eff.org/donate

Other ways you can help EFF, like using their Amazon referral link:

https://www.eff.org/helpout
hmm.. maybe place it hard-coded in the text somewhere. it may affect aesthetics but will enhance understanding. :-)
A proof-of-concept Android app, so you can emulate a chromecast on an Android HDMI stick (or tablet).

https://plus.google.com/107130354111162483072/posts/KMMwKTpN...
My rant about the topic of UK Porn is that it is entirely analogous to what is happening in Russia with the anti-Gay legislation.

Two forms of sexual expression, both states using the same logic in terms of reasons for legislating against them, namely "Protect the children". Both with social stigma and negative attitudes from the most ardent conservatives of the population.

Though in Russia the bigotry extends a little deeper in terms of social acceptance (or lack thereof), i.e. violence against porn watchers is pretty much non-existent in the UK. But in terms of the law, what is to be codified into law is very similar.

/endrant

Feel free to debate and correct my naive interpretation if you disagree.
The truth is somewhat in the middle. I've worked with a couple ints and a couple of their bosses. Some are hyper competent, some are effectively the equivalent of people that "play business" by forwarding technical "advisories" to non-technical people.

So yeah, it's a range of skills and dispositions, at least from what I've seen.
If anybody develops a truly secure messaging system, free from NSA's snooping, it won't be Yahoo. Simply because Yahoo is US based and can be secretly forced to change the code or push a hidden update that will decrypt everything.

And by the way, such systems already exist

1) https://crypto.cat (after a few bad releases it looks like they got it right... probably)

2) https://github.com/ChatSecure for iOS

There are a few more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-Record_Messaging#Nativ...
But, do keep in mind that this won't always be the case. Tools are making it ever-easier for people who know practically nothing to break into the product space without the filters that you'd normally get from someone going through hard sciences in school.

Since there are so many new makers with engineer-like skills, it means you'll have more sociopaths in sheep's clothing in the future.

Still, there are ways to interview for meritocratic behavior.