skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Silent Phone and Silent Text, along with their cousin Silent Eyes are end-to-end secure. We don’t have the encrypted data and we don’t collect metadata about your conversations. They’re continuing as they have been. We are still working on innovative ways to do truly secure communications. Silent Mail was a good idea at the time, and that time is past."

They are keeping other services going, just shutting down email.
Ask HN: When did you realize that you wanted to be a hacker?
Even if you find a price difference between Amazon and eBay, how do you take advantage of it?
Rather than use java, why not use a javascript implementation such as http://openpgpjs.org ?
Well not literally no, but the algorithm is certainly applicable.
Just need to get the other 10% and we're good.
I was going to write something and then thought why would I bother sticking my neck out and getting on somebody's list and be hassled for no other reason than needing to spend some bloated budget... Self-censorship sucks.
Convenient, maybe, but prematurely shutting down secure email because you anticipate the government will come out to get you effectively does the government's job for it.

Albert Hirschman wrote a famous book called "Exit, Voice, Loyalty" about different styles of responses to conflict. Different strategies are certainly called for in different situations. But most exit strategies (outside of suicide) rely on retreats to spaces outside the sphere of influence of the conflict initiator.

The existential space of the Internet is not the infinite, however. Although a nurturing environment for human freedom, it's also a fragile ecosystem, and giving up on a couple key nodes, in its current form, is enough to destroy it, shadowy dreams of darknets notwithstanding. When freedom retreats from all Internet spaces in the USA, that is plausibly more than enough to kill it as a haven for freedom anywhere.

It's not the end of freedom or anything like that: maybe it's strategic to retreat to spaces more decentralized and harder to compromise than the Internet, and other fights can be fought and won in those. But that's not a gamble I want to make, especially because the fight for Internet freedom hasn't been lost yet! Not by a long shot.

ETA: This came off harsher than I anticipated: I had no idea that Silent Circle is a project of Phil Zimmerman. Damn, that's dispiriting. Time to pop open a beer.

ETA2: Yeah, I think I jumped to conclusions about their central motivation and shouldn't have implicitly doubted as much their stated reasons. Boo me.
the block chain is public anyway...
yup. congrats
The exact same reasoning applies to applying the patch: if it takes 10 minutes to apply the patch with normal priority, and 30 minutes to apply in the background, then that's another 20 minutes of vulnerability for that user!

Geez.
As I often tell my Mom in phone conversations: The things I'm saying probably have gotten me reviewed by some government agent.

The good news is that if they listen, they'll realize I'm not a terrorist and put me in their "Just a Patriotic American, no problem here" file with 100,000 other people.

If somebody extremely dastardly gets elected who might use that file for harm, I'll just have to flee.
It at least implies they won't have some ulterior motive in the future.
How is PGP encrypted email any less secure in terms of meta data analysis / eves dropping than a video call or a "text message" likely sent over OTR?

Obviously, those later two protocols are forward secure and PGP is not, but that doesn't seem to be what the post is dealing with.

Were they worried about key authentication? Did they not do end to end PGP?
Wait, what? Shutting down a service that has received an NSL is illegal? Source?
I guess to me there's a big difference between automating speeding tickets and subcontracting prisons. I think the controversial issue on cameras is "What else are they doing with the pictures?"
It makes nasty clicky noises.

edit - at least, the emoticon demo on a macbook air does.
I don't know what to say to that - you provided a very vivid and emotionally-laden photo as what the "other side" was using to justify their position and now you say that the other side is not using vividness and emotion to make their point? What is your point?
Dude, My Testosterone’s Pushing 1290. How About Yours?
Somehow I just can't see this ending well either.
Good luck, guys! I'll know the singularity is here when computers don't need sysadmins.
Y == "For the next three or six months, I'm just going to work on interesting things."
"Kid, the next time I say, 'Let's go someplace like Bolivia,' let's GO someplace like Bolivia."
For those wondering, https://pond.imperialviolet.org/
Honestly this is a terrible idea. Say what you will about their programs, what they don't need to do is CUT DOWN on the Sys Admins, what they need to do is distribute access more cleanly so that no one person can take out a big chuck of classified data.
This is probably contrarian ...

I wonder if people will still go by default to Amazon if they're not the cheapest.

For instance, Newegg always sells for a few dollars more than Amazon. Heck Amazon even sells for a couple of bucks less than their own subsidiary, Zappos.

I seriously doubt that Amazon's retail operation has demonstrated that they can retain customers while raising prices.

Unless I missed some news/data. Would be glad to hear comments.
CIA, FBI and NSA Leaders Ask for Help Fighting Cyberattacks
How is walking into a public space and having a conversation with someone an invasion of privacy?
Don't worry about BREACH
> But to this generation, it's denigrated as "retina bleach".

Given that I'm 49, this feels like being carded at 7-11.

I think the difference is screen resolution and intensity. I could sit at an old green screen for hours with no retina bleach. But jwz's site, even with the same color scheme, feels so much more intense than the screens of yore.
The technical solution to that social problem (yeah, we know how well those work) is to set the refresh interval to be less than the time required to process a motion contesting the government's order to update the canary.
Now we need a new semantic tag to indicate content will be annoying that we can style with css however we like. I propose we reuse the blink tag for that purpose.

<blink>The new iphone is rumoured to...</blink>
<blink>Version 0.1.2 of xyzscript has just been released...</blink>
Agreed. I don't mean to construct a strawman here. However, it surprises me how this is not relevant. Code doesn't exist in vacuum. Ultimately, software engineering is about applying yourself to solve real world problems. Including mental health care. No one crawled out of the woodwork when 7 cups of tea announced their product. Yet the opposition for this is surprising. How does one understand and solve a problem like that unless one is aware of one's society? An interesting problem requires discovery. That requires awareness of the world.
I just quit mine too. I have 5 days left. No clue as to what's next. I'm not ready to talk about it.
As long as they are in the Carlyle Groups portfolio to offset the loss from their company BAH.
I wish I could give this a dozen upvotes!
If the person you're replying to is going to flag it based that vague criteria, they might as well flag much of the front page. One should start finding better articles and submitting them if they believe HN is lacking what they perceive it to be proper content.

I will vote something up is based on the quality of the article (whether it's technical news or not), if it has not already been submitted recently and if the article will lead to an informative/intellectual discussion. If it only has one of those criteria, then I'm less likely to upvote it when there's other articles that meet two or all three criteria.
OK guys we've had a security breach. Let's fire all the guys who look after security!

Oh and everybody has to work with a partner so the work output of our remaining workforce is halved.

Idiots.
Hobbyists (continued)
A good start, have you considered using geojson? Github has a native viewer for that.
What do you mean add threading support? Last time I used libev (I thought libuv was just libev plus Windows) it allowed creating multiple loops for use in multiple threads just fine. Do you mean adding the ability to move file descriptors across threads into another loop?
I'll be happier if the administrators cut NSA's current data-sets down by 90%. Just leave the 10% data that points to communications of the Government and their secret agents.

Parsing that data will help us figure out moles and real traitors.

/sarcasm. I prefer they shut down NSA completely.
Let dealing with it be a cost of business when there's a business. Right now, addressing the issues is premature optimization. No customers. No problem.
Why ants? (Other than it's a fascinating topic, but so are so many others...)
What makes this different from say... flippa.com?
Is Your Password Really Protecting You?
I found it especially funny in light of an article I was reading this morning: http://plover.net/~bonds/positivism.html
PHP extension is added to the family:
http://cybozu.github.io/php-yrmcds/

I believe it is quite stable compared to other PHP memcached extensions.
As someone who followed Phil Zimmerman's epic battle with the US govt in the 1990s over PGP, I am seriously bummed by this news. For someone with as much personal conviction and moral depth as Phil Zimmerman to essentially pre-emptively give up on the idea of offering truly secure email, means to me, that the US government has now crossed a certain threshold that will be very very difficult to come back from.

Think about it. It's chilling. The idea that a paragon of privacy and encryption, not to mention a legend in terms of standing up to the government for freedom, has now said "I fold" to the simple idea that an American company offers true privacy of email communication.

How long before we have government installed microphones and cameras .... Oh never mind. It's already here.

Maybe Americans will have to get their privacy tools from other countries. Think about that for a second.
Nano-satellites with encrypted email servers? http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-07/04/satellite-pla...
Ending Secret Law Act (S.1130)
There's already a good chunk of effort gone into solving the problem of access to Scary Things for nukes & master crypto keying material, such as the Two Man/No Lone Zone[1] rules.

I'm not sure how well it would translate to things like sysadmin tasks which can't all be pre-scripted checklists, but something like a pair-programming model, combined with a full audit log of actions taken, along with actual independent auditors randomly pulling logs and checking for naughtiness could work.

I dread to think of the bureaucracy overhead involved though - I suspect it would probably end up increasing staff headcount several-fold.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-man_rule
I did not read anything about an invasion of privacy. Did I miss it? I am not sure what is worse: ignoring the privacy debate or being the chicken little of privacy.
I was surprised to see Canada green on that map.

We have a great privacy commissioner ( http://www.priv.gc.ca/index_e.asp ) but the office holds no power so far as I can see, and the Canadian government has a pretty solid track record of being obsequiously cooperative with u.s. interests
Memento Design Pattern in Java – Example Tutorial
It would be up to the client to install PGP for true end to end encryption.

What I was wondering - why don't they keep the email service but reject all emails that are sent without PGP? Then people would have to go through the pain of installing PGP but they would end up with truly secure email.
Whoa, the NSA finally cares about privacy!
I don't live in the US and have never made an Amazon return. I was under the impression though that they organised for a courier to picking the package from you, rather than you having to go and send it?
Malaria vaccine shows early promise in clinical trials
In terms of actual content: um, The Economist. I don't think Hacker News is a particularly more valuable bellwhether of 'valuable content' for non startup/tech-related stuff than the publishers themselves (I'd say NYT, The New Yorker, and The Economist have a much better signal-to-noise for general things.)

In terms of 'deep discourse': honestly, the level of discourse in HN comments on things that are outside the traditional purview of the site is not particularly deep. I've found that if you want deep discourse about a topic X, you should seek out areas where there are many people very knowledgable about X.
It's more complicated than that, it also has to be "not along the lines of business of your employer".

That phrase can mean different things for different employers. If you work at Morgan Stanley then doing a social bookmarking tool in your spare time is probably fine, if you work at Intuit then doing an iPhone game is probably fine. If you work at Google then everything is potentially problematic, as Google has a knack for poking its head into any line of business imaginable.
Here's one that makes me a bit sad: half keyboards have a patent that is enforced.

(http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000021.html)
I hope none of them read The Mythical Man Month.
Silent Circle is a software client and service, not a cloud hosted solution. As such, they can do PGP themselves and (from my understanding) did.
It would help for another year if all the email providers could at least use TLS when talking to each other.
Ask HN: Help implementing OAuth 1.0A (Client) in PHP
I'm having trouble setting up OAuth for Twitter, and was trying to create a abstract-ish way of using the API using my own sort-of-abstract way of using Requests for PHP. Was wondering if anyone who's more experienced than myself would mind looking through the linked source and double-checked it, if possible :)
I'm having trouble setting up OAuth for Twitter, and was trying to create a abstract-ish way of using the API using my own sort-of-abstract way of using Requests for PHP. Was wondering if anyone who's more experienced than myself would mind looking through the linked source and double-checked it, if possible :)
Overstock.com recently launched a promotional campaign selling all their hardcovers for 10% less than Amazon.com.
Which will be really easy because our airports and borders are so open.
With over 14 years in academia in chemistry and physics labs, and in my personal experience, European scientists speak English often with greater precision than native US citizens. And, given my own experience in academia, ... "make up" probably meant literally "you need to 'find' the data to fit the conclusions of this paper, ... truth be damned." Many academic PI's (lead investigators or Professors), for many complicated reasons and under the weight of a ridiculous feedback-loop that relentlessly increases the pressure to publish, have abandoned what many perceive as the White Tower's pursuit of truth in exchange for the pursuit of career. That's not to say there aren't many noble academics pursuing the truth and publishing only verified, repeatable findings ... it is just that they seem to be unfortunately in the minority within the zeitgeist that presently drives the climate of our academic research institutions. Academic research is no longer about White Towers and truth ... Academic research has become "big business" with millions of dollars of funding at stake. Unfortunate...sad...but tragically true.
I fixed blink in Mozilla twice (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=89065) in the old days, back when I was running around looking for things to fix. The first time it broke was a result of Dave Hyatt's rewrite of the style system; I always suspected he had broken it on purpose. The second time seemed like it was just a mistake.

Anyways, a sad day.
You don't have to give up the key, just decrypt the data upon request...
Alternatively, purchase the original Nexus 7 that still has the factory images and proprietary binaries posted for Android 4.3 and before. It still runs great (current owner) and the differences between the new one and the previous are not dramatic outside of the screen resolution.
No, but you must follow your own policy.

You also need to take reasonable measures to preserve relevant data when you have reasonable cause to suspect that litigation or an investigation will begin.

Not having a policy can hurt you. If you have no deletion/retention policy, and happen to destroy data for some random reason when a litigation begins, you or your company may be in trouble.

Note: IANAL, and different industries or data categories have specific legal requirements or best practices for retaining things.
Could be wrong, but I think most of these patent trolls are wrapped up in an endless series of shell companies... so going after them simply isn't worth the effort.
"Relationship status" is flat out illegal.

The personal family stuff is just wierd.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=things+you+are+not+allowed+to+ask+...
Loss of Moscow’s Steve Jobs Hits Russia's Largest Search Engine Overnight
Silent Mail had to inter-operate with other mail services and users (many of whom have no desire to use PGP). That means we had to touch plaintext at times (even if it was just an incoming message from a non-Silent Mail user, prior to us encrypting it and storing it for our user).

It was different from the other products because mail inherently doesn't allow end to end encryption without a lot of manual key management (which is exactly why no one does it). Some day we would love to offer a service that _can_ do that, but email, in it's current form, can't do that for us.

Speaking personally, I'm very excited about projects like Adam Langley's Pond.
Agreed. I suspect there's no significant relationship at all. As another comment mentions, Lodsys used to have this page on their website, now only found on archive.org:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110618140937/http://www.lodsys....

As an aside, the FTC is considering a special investigation "piercing the corporate veil" to ferret out the real entities behind trolling operations. If they do, I look forward to seeing their findings. My hunch is that they won't find the usual suspects behind them, if they find any at all.
With the two-man rule, the two man are the users. They are not the people building and maintaining the hardware switch that implements the two-man rule. Now thats obviously a silly distinction because it was a simple electric circuit, but nowadays everything runs on Linux and real operating systems, and you need people to maintain them continuously.
His claim was that it was intrinsically less secure, not that the government was stoping him
Lavabit needs to contact their congress representative and raise stink. Explain to the representative that jobs and money is at stake. And explain to the local community how there will be jobs lost due to this behavior.

We need to start getting on both local communities and their representatives to emphasize the long term dangers of NSA's actions towards tax revenues, jobs, etc.

In other words speak their language and make them understand that inaction is not an option.

And yeah spare me the comments about how all Congress representatives are owned by corporations etc. It is still possible to get your representative to pay attention as they still need votes for the next election every two years.
I wouldn't say impossible, but yes, there are reasons this is difficult to fix in Go compared to Java and C#, and intentionally so.

Quoting from http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article (emphasis mine):

"To give the programmer this flexibility, Go must support what we call interior pointers to objects allocated in the heap. The X.buf field in the example above lives within the struct but it is legal to capture the address of this inner field, for instance to pass it to an I/O routine. In Java, as in many garbage-collected languages, it is not possible to construct an interior pointer like this, but in Go it is idiomatic. This design point affects which collection algorithms can be used, and may make them more difficult, but after careful thought we decided that it was necessary to allow interior pointers because of the benefits to the programmer and the ability to reduce pressure on the (perhaps harder to implement) collector."
Is Google Authorship Affecting Rankings Today?
Silent Mail was not a separate client.
I'd take it personally and go after the individuals.. even the lawyers know who is paying them. We're dealing with a set of individuals that are harrassing the entrepreneurial community... and have never IPO'ed anything or have any customers to vouch for their character. They may have patents, but no products, and they are harrassing those creating products and getting customers. If I got a patent troll on my back, I would find a bunch of their other prior targets and get a petition from all our customers, and ..... do what's right. Maybe obtain some punitive damages. They're not acting in the spirit of the law, rather the spirit of the cockroach. One could even conceive of a reverse troll, creating a honeypot company to attract the trolls, and then to counterstrike.
I take it you're not a fan of pair programming. ;-)
We're all aware that providers can be compelled legally to backdoor aggregation points (i.e. central servers), but could they be forced to put backdoors in their client software too? What about a letter or court order compelling them to re-engineer their software to either remove strong cryptography or force all traffic through a central point, thereby killing their business?
Overview of App Engine Features
"Email that uses standard Internet protocols cannot have the same security guarantees that real-time communications has. There are far too many leaks of information and metadata intrinsically in the email protocols themselves. Email as we know it with SMTP, POP3, and IMAP cannot be secure."

I didn't read it as they were prematurely shutting down before the government came after them. I read it as them admitting that they couldn't secure email as much as they would like and are admitting flaws in their encryption strategy.
Indeed, that is very true - though it holds much more so for the generations before mine.

I didn't live the dictatorship, but it's a big part of our lives - we have as prominent figures for political parties both President Mujica who was a guerrilla fighter, and the son of Bordaberry, the president that led to the dictatorship.
Hold on. It's reasonable to critique an article on the basis of the evidence given (or the lack thereof.) That is what the parent commenter is doing.

It is a big theme in HN, but why not give all ideas the same treatment? What is your thesis, your pitch, and have you made your case? What are the holes, where do you need work?

How do you evaluate ideas, if not by critique?
Once again the Wikileaks plan succeeding. In order to maintain their dirty secret, they have to take more and more drastic measures that weaken their ability to operate their illegal enterprise in an efficient manner.
+1 for GEB. I have been reading it on and off for about 2 years. It's a fun book, but every time I finish a reading session, I am exhausted. I am about 25% through.
Don't get me wrong. I think Snowden is a patriot, but read between the lines here. Security breaks at the interface, and for the NSA, it broke at the interface between itself and it's contractors. Snowden was a Booz Allen Hamilton employee, so just like a diseased appendage threatening the rest of the body, I think the NSA is going to start cutting Booz off. Cronyism between the government and private business only extends so far. Booz has become a liability for the NSA, and they're not going to let that relationship, no matter how cozy, threaten the whole thing.
Those second set of eyes, always judging(helping) and meddling(contributing). Damn(bless) them.
Fruit Flies have 2.3 Inch Sperm
The Anatomy of a Successful Responsive Website
Deploy a standalone Sinatra JAR with JRuby
What indicates they will be cut off?