skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Edit: I was a PM on Exchange and Exchange Hosted Encryption for some time, so it looks like Lavabit tried to fight the government on whether they are required to release private keys. I've seen one other customer try to fight, and it was not pretty either. The US government in these cases are serious.

Takeaway for fellow hackers: If you are building a system that stores user-generated data, prepare for the eventuality that someone other than the user will demand to see it.

In general, the prevailing theory is that all companies are required to release private keys or passwords needed to unlock evidence. As a consequence of Lavabit fighting, they likely got slapped with some pretty harsh contempt of court rulings, including a demand to record all private keys needed for decryption going forward. The worst case (that I can talk about) I saw involved requiring a specific employee be demoted due to improper care of a company's systems.

What's sad is that because Lavabit was such a small service provider, they never had the previous rounds of government threats and must have been caught off guard. As I've said in past posts (before Snowden), it is common knowledge among large-scale service providers that the local government can always come in to take a look. Doesn't matter if you are in the US, EU, or China, you have to comply. I've seen the US DOJ threaten pretty harshly a customer who simply asked about 'options' of how to comply.

Past post with explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5754641

P.S. Right or wrong is a separate conversation...
Ah, the irony. I'm not a native English speaker, but I believe the word "fabrication" also has a less used meaning of "made, created" with no falsehood necessarily. A quick web search seemed to confirm this.
Yeah, you are right. My friend grows indoors, I am sure this is part of the reason I hear of his difficulty, among other things, he keeps a busy full time job and had no previous experience growing anything before diving in to it all.
Ask HN: Best Hacker News App on Windows Phone 7/8?
I have a Lumia 900 with Windows Phone 7.8 and would like to know what's the best app out there for me to read hacker news with my phone? It would be great if I could login as well and post/contribute to threads from the app.
It would be cool if they added a package.json file with the necessary dependencies and a start script defined.
I initially included a calculation more specific to my life, but with most of my money coming in during the summer and the rest of the year spent in college I had a weird result that I thought might be unhelpful for the average reader. I chose to just give a simple value calculation instead.
I once worked with a specialist doctor whose handwriting was so bad, even he couldn't read it.
I used a similar term, with the word "becoming" first about a month ago. Maybe we should start running regular polls. It's not a cliff you're going to fall off, it's more like slowly sinking into a pool of it.
Where are you going to go? People playing up third world countries don't know shit. The day-to-day corruption in nearly every such country is so bad that after awhile you'd rather have someone reading your e-mail but otherwise leaving you alone. And let me tell you from first hand experience--it is soul sucking to live in a country like that where you're constantly surrounded by people living on the edge of subsistence (or if you aren't you've segregated yourself into 1%-er bubbles, which is its own kind of bad).

Look at the BRIC countries, which are supposedly on an upward trajectory. Russia, India, and China are out off the bat. Russia and China do not have functioning democracies, and while India does, it is corrupt from top to bottom. Someone commented about Brazil yesterday how debts are inherited in that country, not to mention it's got outrageous income inequality.

Out of the big European countries, you've got the U.K. with cameras on every corner, and France where until recently it was a crime to insult the President. It has come out that Germany spies on people too, though apparently less than the U.S. to a degree (I guess just because of shorter retention periods).

Australia tried to put up a nation-wide internet wall a few years ago, so that's out. Canada? Canada does it too: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6870/125.

Libertarians like to put up Hong Kong as some shining example, but that's just proof that libertarians don't really value democracy (since Hong Kong doesn't even pretend to have democracy). Hong Kong apparently does less internet surveillance, except if you're a pro-democracy activist in which case all bets are off.

That leaves the Scandinavian countries, I suppose, but I have a hard time seeing a lot of libertarian-minded people fleeing the U.S. for that collectivist utopia.
Elon Musk Just May Have To Develop an Electric Supersonic Jet
Why You Really Need A Co-Founder (Or Two)
They have a dedicated service for SaaS companies, Saasy (https://saasy.com)
Who would risk their own life to do that for "the good of many"? People like Snowden are exceptions, not a rule, because the guns are out there pointed to everyone. Why don't we instead of asking individual heroes to fight a killing machine called "the state", do that:

1. Acknowledge the evil of the state.
2. Find practical non-violent ways to boycott it. E.g. blacklist personally everyone involved in violent aggression. Switch off USD to Bitcoin. Expose violence of the state consistently in every relevant circumstance etc.
I actually ran into this while doing some research. One thing that worries me about using this framework is how much freedom would I get? I really need custom widgets, such as chat, videos, images and many other types. Do you think this will handle the large amount of custom code on top of it?
Did Philip K. Dick disclose the real Matrix in 1977?
I've already said: stay away from my kids.
Could you explain how rot13 helps?

"The algorithm provides virtually no cryptographic security..." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROT13
The HN webapp for mobile.

http://hn.premii.com/
Every time I read stuff about mobile careers in the US, I instantly think how awesome we have it in Europe.

We have 3 major mobile careers in my country (Vodafone, Orange and Cosmote), and my unlocked Android can work on all of them, whether we are talking about GSM, Edge, 3G, LTE, doesn't matter. And oh, you should see the pre-pay offers that we get.
> The way Microsoft put a back door into the new Outlook

Could someone provide a link for this? Thanks.
All of these centralized services (such as the one you linked) are susceptible to the same strong-arm tactics if they're based in the US.
Taiwan's animators ridicule China over "PR smear campaign" against Apple
Do you have a recommended path to learning JS and a frontend framework? I never did much beyond a making a trivial JS app, and that was over 10 years ago.
Put the fingerprint in your business cards? In fact, maybe we finally found a reasonable use for QR codes.
This is a brilliant suggestion actually. If I ever make a crypto messaging system I'll surely bake in a module that sends bogus messages to random nodes in the system. Then any sorts of metadata are useless to evil people.
j"ust following orders" like a good citizen? change requires change.
Where do we draw the line?

At some point, we must take a stand - and that stance must be time, money, voice or vote (and preferably all four). If we continue to take no action, we become part of the problem by our submission and tacit endorsement of the abuse of the legal rights of others.

For me, personally, I think it's time to start standing up.
Blind Games: The Next Battleground in Accessibility
Once you explain a joke, it's not funny anymore.
... Harry Wayne Casey?
What did Lavabit think would happen by physically locating servers in the US? It's almost irresponsible to sell customers on the illusion of privacy and to not mention the risk of the servers being confiscated.

edit: This whole Lavabit thing is so dumb that I'm inclined to think it was a honeytrap designed to waste supercomputing cycles on decrypting random data.
Remember when Walmart started selling Linux PCs 6-7 years ago? They were the cheapest, lowest-end models you could buy. So people had the association between Linux and low-end/underpowered for quite a long time.

On the other hand, remember what phones were like before the iPhone? Creating something that blew away the current market worked well there.
I believe it was meant ironically. Similar to the joke "I double rot13 all my emails, but I'm probably just being paranoid." (If you're not familiar with rot13, running it twice results in the original plaintext.)
Even if the rate was 10% of their quote, it's still $20k. Which is no laughing matter.
Space station poised to launch open-source satellites
For those not trusting random PayPal links, you can click the donation link at the bottom of this page: http://lavabit.com/
Echoing the comment below me because it's great advice.

How do you know your friends birthdays? You either ask or you look it up on Facebook. How many times have you added a client on Facebook? Seems weird right?

If you did add a client on Facebook, you'd know more about them. You might discover you both like capoeira or that you both hate Nopa, or you might discover they love cilantro and you hate it. Whatever it is you discover, it'll be 1000000x more personal than trying to sell them on your product.

So how do you get their birthday? By being their friend. Big partnerships almost always consist of big friendships.
I so wish that Google had opted for native code on Android, and a native toolchain SDK

100X this. Android's platform APIs are now trapped in Javaland. That is just totally inexcusable.

I sort of imagine the decision to use Java was a conservative one. "No one gets fired for choosing Java". But they forgot the memo that Java is for applications, not systems programming.

Microsoft seemed to be going down the same road some years ago with .Net, only to back out and realize the same thing. Now it's back on C++.
How to Get More Out of Your Employees - Blog Series
Have you read the previous articles?
I doubt, even in our current situation, that Jury members would become targets if they refused to convict.
The US certainly has many more prisoners per capita and in total than China does.

Also, the U.S. government is censoring Ladar Levison of Lavabit and others in his situation.

I've never been to China to see anything for myself, so I won't make further comparison, but prison state thing definitely bothers me.
I Don't trust Paypal. I sent him something to support@lavabit.com I'll update if it is rejected or something.
>the famous adage of shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time...

> In 1969, the Supreme Court's decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio effectively overturned Schenck and any authority the case still carried. There, the Court held that inflammatory speech--and even speech advocating violence by members of the Ku Klux Klan--is protected under the First Amendment, unless the speech "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action" (emphasis mine).
You nailed it, configuration management. Getting a little difficult managing the Arch servers in production, making sure updates are safe, etc.

Most of our developers seem more comfortable with ubuntu/debian than Arch as well.
Is it just me, or do people who review apps on the iTunes App Store basically have no accountability? (With the resulting ethical failings that often accompany that.)
Again, why not?

It would reduce the number of differences between dev and production, for one.
Absolutely true! However the innocent-form of 'fabricate'/'fabrication' is mostly used with involved manufacturing/assembly processes, rather than a discovery/transcription process.

So specifically if 'fabrication' is chosen where a simpler word would do, or chosen to contrast with a simpler word, then it acquires increasing implication of falsified/counterfeit work.

If you (or more likely an large team/firm) can 'fabricate' a 'car', good job, you're skilled.

If on the other hand you 'fabricate' a 'paper' or 'result' or 'fact' or 'photo' or 'logo', you're involved in something shady.
Wrong model on jquery object collections
id and class atributes are switched on chrome model and firefox model of jquery object's attribute collections, but when i wrote to them well they didnt took it quite well:

http://bugs.jquery.com/ticket/14235

it might not be a bug but hey! the idea is to improve the crossbrowser develoment right?

see the "bug" example here:
http://jsfiddle.net/je34429/exYja/2/
> His letter states that he has already made representations twice to the authorities (the FISA court?)

A Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order wouldn't be appealed to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, it would be appealed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review and from there to the US Supreme Court; from the context, then, its likely either a District Court under the Fourth Circuit or the Fourth Circuit itself (possibly both, given the "twice made the appropriate requests") to which application has been made.

Which would make sense if Snowden was targetted, since he is a US person, and an order for surveillance targetting him would go through the regular District Courts, not the FISC/FISCR.
FYI: The "just add it to the item price" was covered in Part 4. Its linked at the bottom of the article, or here it is directly: http://jayporter.com/dispatches/observations-from-a-tipless-...
You should use base_64 instead, that's what all the cool kids use.
You struggle to understand that the margins in food service are amazingly thin?
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-c...
What is really bizarre is that Hushmail still has a lot of loyal users following that incident.
AmazonFresh is Jeff Bezos’ Last Mile Quest for Total Retail Domination
It's unlikely they asked him to decrypt and forward everything. Someone would immediately notice the change and raise the alarms.

Much more likely they asked him to slip in a backdoor for some specific users. That's much harder to detect.
Sometimes a David makes a bigger impression than a Goliath.

It's been years since I've worked with Ladar. However, he's a man of great intelligence and principle. It's not unheard of for "the little guy" to take on the machine and win. I believe that Ladar will prevail in the end, and I hope he'll resume operations or come up with something even better.

I'll be donating something as soon as I finish my post.
That is absurd. Do you think every country, and every country folk, would let the government pass a bulldozer all over their rights like this? This is just projecting.

In other words, that shit wouldn't fly everywhere, for sure. This all emanates from the 9/11 and Patriot Act and Secret Laws with no oversight, that's your problem specifically, of course every government must be wanting it's own surveillance supermachine too, but it doesn't mean every single one of them is willing(or have means) to pass every possible barrier to do it.

Other countries have their own constituitions too and people guarding it, and different political systems, and different relation of the people with their government. Brasilians, for example, are not patriotic(as you are), we like the localization and our folk but absolutely everyone despises the government, the governants are completely cowering with the demonstration, pulling their repression apparatus out and on...

It's absurd and it's also a derrotist statement, this lavabit guy is a hero and the more people go against this rotten government, more clear it becomes the damage is shared by everyone AND the country itself.
> I got the impression the court battle hasn't started yet over this.

He wouldn't be continuing the fight in an appeals court if it hand't started in a lower court under that court of appeals.
Quick search reveals:

Accusation: http://www.tweaktown.com/news/31729/edward-snowden-reveals-t...

Denial: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/16/microsoft_denies_it_...
Seriously. First they colocate in Texas. Then use Paypal for donations. It's like they are trying to martyr themselves.
>"A witty saying proves nothing."

Node + Varnish + (optionally) CDN is a very production-ready stack for serving static content.
I enjoy Michael's descriptions because they provide a conceptual understanding of very profound evolutionary principles. As someone who understands the difficulty in simplifying evolutionary psychology for non-experts, I sincerely commend him for his work.

I would classify Michael's work as an introduction to applied evolutionary psychology, using corporations as a case study. If you'd like the reasons behind why his work is valid, I'd recommend starting with Richard Dawkins' Selfish Gene followed by The Extended Phenotype. The sections on game theory are particularly insightful, as they describe how competing strategies reach equilibrium in a given environment. You will find the strategies described are quite similar to Michael's classifications, thus shedding much light on corporate environments.
Touche sir.
Distributed cryptography/services in multiple jurisdictions is the only permanent solution or as a delaying tactic at a minimum. Where keys or parts of data or multiple onion style encryption rests in a chain of services distributed globally in multiple jurisdictions. Something like the Ceph file system but for everything.
has Gupta let you down some how? You sound bitter. I'm not that much interested in him or the issue. He's getting on the marijauna train or to quote some Dylan: The times, they are a changin'... You don't need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows... Gotta serve somebody ;-)
They're not asking for any particular information that lavabit has now. If they were, shutting down wouldn't be a solution to not handing it over. They are asking for additional access going forward.
Excerpt from Graydon's (BDFL) reply:

> Despite all these caveats I have a very strong sense that writing the
> runtime in Rust will go a long way to validate Rust in the domains it's
> aiming for: concurrent and systems programming. Even in the task
> scheduler, where there's quite a bit of unsafe code, the shared-nothing
> nature of unique types forces you to consciously break the type system
> to share memory, and that seems to go a long way to making parallel
> programming easier to reason about.

Yes, even just reading it seems much clearer since the mutability,
lifetime and ownership of each value and reference is spelled out, not
just "some Foo* that you have to remember special validity rules about".
It's noticeably easier to reason about. Really interesting!

When Rust matures (and this dogfooding-via-self-bootstrap is going to accelerate its maturation) it's going to be seriously revolutionary for, for example, modern multi-core video game development. Really excited.
I'm actually interested in a more technical discussion of you're experience using couchapps. Did that model of packaging html/css/js into a design document work well? How do you handle deployment? Did you get constrained by cross-site-scripting and our (Cloudant's) lack of CORS support?
err, 'your', not you're.
I may have to.
haha, I just tried M-x spook, I didn't think it would actually work.

Here was my output:

national information infrastructure Ceridian INSCOM supercomputer AIEWS Afghanistan Blowpipe chameleon man sweep M-14 hackers Roswell lock picking codes spies

second time:

world domination cracking Operation Iraqi Freedom IRA Reno analyzer M-14 David John Oates electronic surveillance pipeline INS security Tony Blair national information infrastructure ASLET

"""
spook is an interactive compiled Lisp function.

(spook)

Adds that special touch of class to your outgoing mail.
"""

; Variables
(defgroup spook nil
"Spook phrase utility for overloading the NSA line eater."
:prefix "spook-"
:group 'games)

(defcustom spook-phrases-file (expand-file-name "spook.lines" data-directory)
"Keep your favorite phrases here."
:type 'file
:group 'spook)

(defcustom spook-phrase-default-count 15
"Default number of phrases to insert."
:type 'integer
:group 'spook)

--

Looks like it'd be a good idea to update and expand the spook.lines file.
Spot the smear.
More patents in the service of open source
This reinforces the point that web-based cryptography (particularly when the JS is provided by a server) is not adequately secure. This vulnerability--sniffing the plaintext prior to server-side encryption--is one of the two most commonly-citied reasons to avoid web-based crypto. (The other reason concerns client-side, JavaScript crypto. In that architecture, a compromised server can just send a backdoored version of the JS crypto code.)
The government can compel you to paint a wall green. They can't compel you to say you liked it. They especially can't compel you to break the law (assuming you set up some kind of situation where it's fraud/perjury/whatever to lie).

And look at how email retention works.
Alright, promise: next month we'll blog about becoming an identity provider, and I'll highlight Persowna, the Drupal module, djc's persona-totp library, etc.
This comment implies you actually trust Microsoft's crypto implementation.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/cdn.kk.org/cooltools/2013/07/font.j...
I think we're referring to the person willing to put their freedom at risk to wager that a jury nullification would happen as the 'hero.'
tryrethink.info and my blog are both flask apps. The one thing I haven't written about is databases/persistent storage in containers (as the tryrethink sites are ephemeral)

Would this be helpful?
Sounds like anonymous remailers to me. Unfortunately it is impractical to run a remailer in many countries, the USA included, because of the approach law enforcement agencies take to remailers (basically, "attack the datacenter with a team of soldiers").
So, since HN is filled with smart engineers, how should one build a sustainable, fully encrypted email service untouchable by the Feds?
If a gmail user sends a plain text email to a lavabit user or vice versa, do they consider that scenario to be "fully encrypted". Or do both recipient and sender have to be lavabit users?
Bootstrap Travels: Sprint 1. Development Speed 0.
The reviews, taken as feedback and then sent directly to the developers could be useful.
But to have the reviews/feedback actually show up in the iTunes store reflects bad for Apple and the developers of the app.
Psychosis is not required for a definition of Schizophrenia, or at least, it wasn't in the late 90s when we looked at it in the DSM. The most frequent symptom of Schizophrenia at the time was 'hearing voices', and that struck 69% of diagnoses. Have a look at the DSM-IV criteria.

And certainly, it's possible to have a lighter form of schizophrenia that is worsened by whatever factor.
Probably secret keys for all the users, along with TLS secret keys, user records, etc. Nothing extraordinary for the US government to demand; what is extraordinary is for a service provider to shut down because of it.
Epistemic Vigilance
Swiss banking (famously) had this niche biz model, but its future seems unteneable in the digital era. Silicon Valley has been complicit behind the scenes. Both overtly with technical hw/sw, and also more subtly (ie, "personalization" from which you can't opt out).
> Who would risk their own life to do that for "the good of many"?

People who feel strongly about what is right, versus what the law says, do.