skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, calling out the US on the fact that it actually is a police state is sober. If you do not recognize what the true nature of the US is at this point, then you may be in denial about it.

While you might say that things are "not that bad" - just because you hav some relative "comfort" (so long as you're not against the State) - does not mean that the actual architecture of the system is not that of a police state.
I feel like this privacy issue only compels a small group of individuals to find alternatives to email. A project like this would be never adopted by the masses, simply because the cost of switching is too high and the immediate return is too low.
The email is likely incriminated in some way but the identity of the person that registered/uses the email is unknown.
I, for one, would be hesitant to hire a former NSA admin. There's a lot of things to consider:

Will they be approached at a later date by past acquaintances to circumvent normal mechanisms and allow access data?

Can they be coerced to circumvent normal mechanisms and allow access to data?

How much were they aware of about what the NSA was doing, and were they aware it may have/definitely did break the law? Should that even be considered?

I'm not saying it would prevent hiring, but it would sure be on my mind.
To be fair, initially it was a portal to itself. As in AOL did not original provide internet access, heck it was pre-www days. When they added it making it part of the existing portal interface was logical for various reasons including reducing customer service. But yeah, they also wanted people to use their content over internet sources.
Here's a fairly useful article:

http://hwstartup.wordpress.com/2013/03/11/how-to-run-an-ardu...
Hey there, what's ovh?
That may be closer than your think (except for the moon bit, space is hard). See LOFAR:
http://www.lofar.org/about-lofar/about-lofar
"LOFAR is the first telescope of this new sort, using an array of simple omni-directional antennas instead of mechanical signal processing with a dish antenna. The electronic signals from the antennas are digitised, transported to a central digital processor, and combined in software to emulate a conventional antenna. "
"To be replaced with simple bash script"
I think automatically breaking a gag order by a complicated mechanism is pretty contemptuous of someone trying to not get that information out?

I am not saying they're not worthy of that contempt, merely that they don't care if they are, just if you're showing contempt for the process and violating the order
In fact it is true, people have been concentrating thc for millenia, there is nothing out there stronger today than there has been for thousands of years:

http://www.briancbennett.com/history/excerpts/thc-content.ht...
And now your company is full of bottom-dollar workers who just nominally fulfill management's probably quite flawed idea of what the work requires.
hey right I believe you and price philip is realy a lizard man from plant zog

Karl Hans Lody is but one example
"The form of the styling of this case — the defendant being an object, rather than a legal person — is because this is a jurisdiction in rem (power over objects) case, rather than the more familiar in personam (over persons) case. In current US legal practice, in rem is most widely used in the area of asset forfeiture, frequently in relation to controlled substances offenses. In rem forfeiture cases allow property (in this case, $124,700 in cash) to be directly sued by and forfeited to the government, without either just compensation or the possessor (and presumptive owner) being convicted of a crime."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._$124,700_in_U....
I'd be discussing on HN if a shadowy entity suddenly put a backdoor on a service I run to watch my customers' actions within the app.

And I'm still very much annoyed that, as a foreigner who happens to have American customers and business partners, I'm told I have no reason to worry if the USG is watching my work, my personal activities and my relationships. I'd be just as annoyed if another entity was doing the spying and the posterior use of the information to punish me.

So I cannot understand why HN—a site for startup founders, programmers, tech business owners, and people working in technology—wouldn't be a place to discuss an entity watching our actions with the implicit threat of selective punishment.

I worry about some stranger getting access to our customer data. Why wouldn't I worry about a government, be it the US or any other country, getting access to that data?
Grad student, so not likely.
Right, we have no knowledge that they're fighting for us. And until we do, we put our money where our mouths are, stop using their services until we can be sure they're honoring our privacy. If anyone is able to fight, it's them, not the small businesses. So put the burden on them, if they want our data, then prove they can keep it safe.
Going to a web site is already opt-in. Plus google has default safe search. The only other path I can think of offhand is advertisements on torrent sites. If you want to make those opt-in I won't complain.
Whose bright idea was this? Piss off 90% of your sys admins? This is a hilariously bad move.
unfortunately we seem to have gone from a system of checks and balances involving the executive branch, legislative, and judicial, to one of judicial, democrat, and republican.

and the press just plays dead
You just did describe a new problem and process. If you have someone on staff you can watch him closely. On the other hand "exit day" brings complications ... especially for sys-admins.

Edit: and so it wouldn't surprise me if a government department with huge budget tended to accrue employees over time. The "easy" path is retention.
That sounds right for EFF, but I'd be interested if there are any numbers for the age distribution of ACLU members. I'd always gotten the impression that their core supporters are baby boomers, generally >50 y/o.
I hate Intuit. They have a huge lobbying arm and are viciously against making taxes easier to file.

For more information see:
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/04/auto...
Related: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ Asking passersby in Times Square what is a browser.
What is the significance of this post? It has no context or explanation and I'm at a loss as to what this is about, or why it is significant. It's akin to a magic number in a script; without at least a brief comment it's all but meaningless!
George Saunders' Advice to Graduates
This is brilliant: The gay rights movement should align with the privacy movement.
Well, to name my personal favourites:
William Gibson. Neal Stephenson. Paolo Bacigalupi. Ian M. Banks (sadly no longer with us as of late). I'm sure I've missed a great deal more fine authors.
Is it to early to call this Web4.0?
What the inside of a Pneumatic Transport System looks like
A solar-powered Linux laptop is being designed
It really is time for a Facebook competitor to stand up and say "we will say FK YOU to the NSA/US/any other government requesting your data" by being based somewhere else safe. I'm sure they could use all this to their advantage to gain a lot of traction right now. I remember a couple years back there was a lot of talk about open srouce/p2p based social network (mind is coming to a blank to remember the name)... something like that more appealing to the masses!
The intend[1] to use pulse position modulation, which is quite unlike AM.

[1] http://cwe.ccsds.org/sls/docs/SLS-OCM/Meeting%20Materials/20...
We definitely want to see this too, and it is something being investigated for post- 0.8.
In the meantime, you may want to read http://kencochrane.net/blog/2013/05/running-docker-on-a-rasp...
The problem is that while probably FEWER than 5% of attacks are technical, they generate industrial scale issues -- e.g. tens of thousands of stolen identities.

Even so, while there have been high profile examples of encryption algorithms being shown to be flawed (e.g. RSA had to reissue all its dongles a couple years back because they were using a flawed RNG) I do not know of any actual successful dark-hat attacks along those lines (of course they may have occurred undetected or not been disclosed or I may simply be ill-informed).

High profile security breaches are generally a result of poor or no cryptographic practices, negligence (e.g. IEEE keeping its member records in a plain text file on an FTP server), or (as you say) social engineering.

In short, while really good cryptography may be hard, halfway decent is not hard, so it becomes a case of "assumed hard and left untried" rather than "tried and found hard".

Finally: there's also the problem of security theater, such as forcing people to change their passwords at a ridiculous rate.
Education is Having Its Internet Moment
Thanks. I forgot all about that. What it became makes a lot of sense in that light.
Edward Snowden 'not in Moscow', say Russian authorities
I guess at least you know your price.
Maybe they can contact the companies they compromised and offer to help remove the backdoors?
Transhumanism, Technology & the Future
NSA Customer Appreciation Page
Unless it directly impinges on what they're doing, like McCain-Feingold's suppression of its political speech, the NRA is resolutely single issue, which is one of the things that makes it so powerful, they don't give gun owners unrelated reasons to keep them away or oppose them. Compare to the 2nd largest, but very very small Gun Owners of America and e.g. their up front and continuing opposition to Obamacare.

Getting to your specifics, the NRA and I assume a large fraction of its membership know the government knows the latter are gun owners, it's very very hard to keep that secret, and most of us don't bother. Why bother when that's probably over half the nation's people?

Heck, if you subtract the states and localities where very few are allowed to own guns, just randomly picking people using a few simple profiling techniques would result in a very high hit rate.

I just don't see it as being a significant enough direct threat for the NRA to adopt it as a major issue like McCain-Feingold.
Privacy is what economists call an "externality" - i.e., the full cost of harming privacy is not accounted for in conventional business activity (like pollution).

In the past, naturally occurring inefficiencies helped to safeguard privacy. Privacy was free. However, now that the technology to collect, store, analyze, and distribute information is so cheap and readily available, we are seeing a massive loss of privacy.

As an economic externality, privacy can only be protected through deliberate effort. We will not get privacy unless we demand it from society. Therefore, political action is a prerequisite. Pro-privacy organizations will be essential in the years ahead.
another article mentioned that lavabit had complied with a child porn request. so i guess it's related to that (the first doc mentions child porn).

as to why it's significant. first, cryptome doesn't really filter stuff, so they aren't "endorsing" it. someone submitted it to cryptome. perhaps they thought it was related to the recent closure (at first glance, it doesn't seem to be).

here you go: Court records show that, in June, Lavabit complied with a routine search warrant targeting a child pornography suspect in a federal case in Maryland. That suggests that Levison isn’t a privacy absolutist. Whatever compelled him to shut down now must have been exceptional.

from http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/08/lavabit-snowden/
Wait, can you get me the source for your claim that Fast and Furious was to boost gun death stats? There is no way I'm going to be able to convince anyone else of that without some official memo. I'd assumed it was to generate traces of the flow of guns to various gangs and thereby collect data on suppliers.
There was a great article on civil forfeiture in recent New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/08/12/130812fa_fact_...
I think it gives a reason for why the Feds went after lavabit.com and the reason being CP.
According to this article, in the UK they've been at work since 1914.

They are very hard-working, of course: they're on a mission to save the world!
> Ok there are lot of fucked up states. So still doing well there.

> Again if Somalia did this, nobody would care.

I think you've just illustrated his point...Those fucked up states? Those are the actual police states (some of them at least). The whole point is that you can't just gloss over them, that's the injustice. I absolutely agree that we should hold ourselves to a higher standard, but calling it a police state is hyperbole that's not really helpful.

It's like calling the US a third-world country because you saw a homeless camp. It belies a lack of perspective as to what an actual third-world country is.
Evolution & Creation Cartoon
Question: If Lavabit was operating in the way they say they did (i.e. zero-knowledge encryption), how could this warrant be complied with? Dump their encrypted maildir to a disc?
I just watched their "Koding in 2 Minutes Video" and the only thing I know is that they have VMs. And the terminal is an app.
"Lavabit abruptly shuts down" [0]

The original poster believes that this case is apparently the reason for Lavabit shutting down. The issue as hand is that a proper search warrant has been issued for the email address in the title. Lavabit appears to have chosen to shut down rather than respond to the search warrant (or has responded to the search warrant, but chosen to shut down rather than have it happen again)

[0] - http://lavabit.com/
Funny enough, they actually edited that article. I believe the quote was originally something along the administration losing all credibility without the specification on the issues of transparency and accountability.

http://gawker.com/the-new-york-times-quietly-softened-its-sc...
It isn't that pinpointed, calculating and tracking the position of something in our solar system relative to earth to a few (hundred) thousand square kilometers precision should be little problem.

"For example,
a typical Ka-band signal from Mars spreads so
wide that when it reaches Earth the diameter of the
energy is many times larger than the diameter of
the Earth. A typical optical signal, however, will
spread only over the equivalent of a small portion
of the United States, requiring less energy use and
waste."

From http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/742122main_LCRDFactSheet3.pdf
Remembering ?
Those people are the huge majority.
Well, it's probably the 10% they didn't fire that they have to worry about now.
I have to wonder what they had the sysadmins doing. One of the primary functions of the job is usually automating common tasks. Had they already done this and they just never downsized the department? If not, I doubt they can cut 90% quickly, that's a lot of automation that needs to be put in place. Guess whose job that is?
> every post-Reagan defeated Presidential candidate was, or appeared to be bad on gun ownership

Curiously, Reagan himself was quite successful as a Presidential candidate, despite pushing through one of the first strong gun-control laws during his term as Governor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act). I wonder when the GOP tide shifted on that; mid-'80s?
All the report says they handed over is an unmarked DVD. Maybe all it contains is encrypted data.
I'm confused. If you don't have your laptop with you, how are you going to access Koding?
If you are inspired by him, you should realize that he would want you to focus on the message, not the man himself. He's done a lot to initiate change, but others have in the past too. If we don't follow it up with appropriate political pressure, his sacrifices will have been in vain.
This sounds sensible. However isn't the same problem present with "out-circle access" in voice calls?

"Silent Phone subscribers can place and receive calls 'outside the circle' from wherever they are in the world, to or from conventional phone numbers*" -https://silentcircle.com/web/out-circle-access/
Their shares went down immediately after due to concerns they forfeited the opportunity to expand their business in the world's 2nd largest economy, but as the immediate economic damage was immaterial their decision wasn't followed with a deluge of shareholder lawsuits.

Google already bowed out of one major market due to ethical disagreements, asking them to do that again with their home market is unrealistic - lobbying to mend the laws is the more sensible approach and one that scales better to businesses of that size.

Besides despite disagreements with US policy it's still not China.
What's most interesting about this, I think, is people's unwillingness to admit they don't know something. No one wants to look stupid, or ignorant, or uneducated, even in front of complete strangers. I'm certainly guilty of this, I suspect most of us are.
I'd suggest re-reading those first few paragraphs. It sounds like you're a bit twitchy and "ready for a fight" when, in fact, OP did not in any way give the impression you mention.
This article took me to another from the same author

'http://skibinsky.com/godel-incompleteness-for-startups/#foot...

and I found the below statement and laughed out aloud. Although in the context, this statement makes sense, in general, I trust books that don't belong to human-related matters (technical etc), because in human-related matters it is mostly one's opinion against others.

"As soon as these popular books leave the domain of human-related matters you are totally on your own."
Sick burn, it's almost as if you're acting like you're on a website that doesn't value productive discourse over petty, childish, condescending feces-slinging
I have the impression that the following are true of the NRA (with comparison to the National Association for Gun Rights)

1. They don't file audited accounts (the NAGR are as bad)

2. 4 million members is widely seen as a large overestimate (the NAGR figures don't attract as much noise)

3. The NRA board aren't really accountable to their membership (the NAGR says they are)

4. It's unusual for a grassroots organisation to have most of its money come from sources other than membership fees and merchandising. The NRA seems to be around 40%, the NAGR claims that most of its money comes from subscriptions. It is common for corporate supporters to make donations on behalf of lobbyists, rather than to the lobbying outfit, and pay the lobbying outfit "consultancy fees".

> About a week before each election every NRA member gets a bright orange postcard in the mail with a list of the candidates, local and national, that are up for election and exactly what the NRA thinks of their stance on guns. Those members pay attention and vote. That is what makes the NRA powerful.

That's a good argument. I'm not sure what I think, to be honest, but the EFF seems to be grassroots to me in a way that the NRA isn't.
I think part of the NRA's effectiveness is that "gun people" spend serious money on guns all the time, and there are active ways to use the guns (going shooting, hunting, etc.) which are concrete, and both could be taken away. Privacy is much more abstract, loss of privacy doesn't have direct physical or financial cost to individuals (voters) as it happens, etc.

I'd also be wary of pushing this NRA analogy too far, for fear of deterring anti-gun pro-privacy people (who do exist, and can be quite principled) from the pro-privacy cause. While most pro-gun people are pro their own personal privacy, and pro gun owner privacy (anti-registry), there's absolutely a large contingent who are fine with the government keeping watchful eyes on "those other people", within and without the US, so it's not as if NRA members are inherently anti-NSA/pro-privacy either.

I ultimately care about the tech/crypto/privacy issue a lot more than guns (which I also care about, along with low taxes, non-intrusive regulation, drug decriminalization, open immigration, etc). To the extent that being ardently pro gun turns people off from supporting privacy, I'd personally be more than willing to tone down/cut back on the pro gun message.
Or Bradley Manning. So, basically give up everything in your life for one chance to do the right thing that just about half of America will call you a traitor for?
Find something else for them to do, lower risk, and let a few of them go here and there over the next decade.
You've just discovered the reason our investment banking system is so screwed up. Earn $20M on your trades this year? Take $500K as a bonus. Those same investments lose $30M the year after? Well, now your bonus is just $30K and maybe you'll do better next year.
> I got her to show me how she used the computer; she got into Facebook by typing Facebook into Bing and clicking on the search result.

This is so common to non tech-savvy people (I observed this dozens of time) that it makes you wonder why browsers adopted single bar for searching AND entering the URLs so late. This, when implemented properly, solves the problem, because usually you only need to type just few letters from site name and hit Enter to go there.
> I would be surprised to learn they had more than 50,000

The membership drive page says around 20K: https://supporters.eff.org/donate/membership-drive

To me, this is shamefully low...it means that only tiny fraction of people who claim to have a strong interest in online freedom actually have joined.

The sad reality is that in modern politics, money talks, and the tech culture tends to strongly reject that ("the better idea should win"), and thus we don't participate in the political money game, and it's why we keep losing political battles.
Perfect Timesheets For Agencies
it's basically how the police are allowed to rob you.
Thanks! As someone who has a PACER account and uses RECAP to upload case files to the Internet Archive, I'm always appreciative when someone is out there using the IA stored copies.
I'm glad this is being discussed, because for many years inlining functions was considered a performance panacea in C++, with no regard to the size of the object code that was being generated, or the effects inlining was having on instruction cache performance.

The C++ community has brought itself all kinds of complexity and long compile times all in the name of performance which, in my mind, was always pretty suspect.
I spend basically all day in a terminal, but green on black is still pretty grating. I use http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized (the dark version), which is quite pleasant - most text is a light grey, and the background is a very dark blue. In general, though, I find that light on dark is much easier on the eyes than black on white. That's how my Kindle Fire is set up, too.
I am not the network guy at my office, but if you look at his code it uses special DNS records (look-up Zeroconf, it is a discovery protocol for services on a network). Do you remember using Apple iTunes back when you could share music with people on the same network? Same difference, so to speak.

If your VPN provider, you or otherwise, does not block the mDNS/Zeroconf network traffic and had a permissible DNS configuration (almost all commodity routers have mDNS/Zeroconf config available if not on by default), I am sure you will have this work. The author can answer you more clearly.
For anyone curious why it is entered as "filed 4/11/13" but executed on "3/28/13" (weeks before the filing), it appears as though it was served on 3/28/13 and the clerk filed & entered it to the system on 4/11/13.

Even though this may be clear to some, it sounds a bit misleading to me and at first I thought they were just doing a poor job of backdating stuff they hadn't done properly.
As an aside, gun trusts are a decent way around the CLEO signature requirement for NFA items, at least in states which don't ban them outright (sigh, California). (acutely noticed since I've seen <$200 .22lr suppressors on the market recently. Almost like cheap airline tickets, where the tax > the fare.)