skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
love it! Hey NSA how does it feel to have your privacy violated. If you have nothing to hide, you should care
Gervais Principle questioned
I did have the general impression that Norway had decent privacy laws, it does however seem it's rapidly changing.

Norway is implementing the EU "Data retention Directive", 2006/24/EC.

While I don't know the exact specifics, it were recently opened for private parties to conduct piracy investigations on behalf of the media industry. I don't imagine they were granted powers in regard to gathering information, I think it's more in regards of keeping/storing it.
Subwaysurf
Docker 0.5.2 Released - Security Update
I just hope "interesting things" != internet pornography
The thesis of this article seems to be that Amazon is capitalism personified in one company.
Interesting strategy. So, while they were not able to store the content of the emails, they still retained the metadata. That metadata could be subject to subpoena, and if they destroyed the data after a request, they'd be in contempt of court. Dropping the service pre-emptively lets them delete all the data before they are asked for it.
Feedback on a feature
Hi All
I wanted to get your feedback on a feature I was thinking of adding to <a href="http://sharecred.com">ShareCred</a>. Before I proceed, my sincere thanks for taking your time and providing your valuable feedback! Thanks!

As you may know, <a href="http://sharecred.com">ShareCred</a> is based on the philosophy that we need to reach out to people outside of our immediate circle. (Yes, HN allows that, agreed, but HN is very limited in expression, and not really interested in exploring the possibilities. You can think of ShareCred as similar to HN, but based on a blogging model, and bringing in controls based on one's relationship and expertise.)

Assuming that you are with me so far (with regards to what ShareCred is), I would like to ask if the following feature is of any interest to anyone.

<b>Feature:</b> Ask questions to our 1st, 2nd, 3rd degree of relations (or to people with certain recognition), and getting feedback anonymously or not.

You can think of Quora being brought down to your 1st/2nd/3rd degree relations or people of certain recognition.

What I am seeing in this idea is couple of things. 1. Asking questions to people outside of your circle, but still controlled. 2. Getting answers anonymously from people in your circle, or not.

For example, a question such as 'What wine do you drink?' is not something we want to put on Quora (of course, you can put on Facebook, but as I argued sometime back, it has limitations.) Such questions are ripe for limiting to your circles, and in some cases, benefit from anonymity.

What do you think?

Thanks again for your time,
ShareCred
I recently went to two malls in my area that, when I last visited them a decade ago were bustling with shoppers.

In one mall, I walked through a Macy's that may have had only 5 shoppers (I'm reserving "customers" as we weren't one until we actually bought something) in the entire store. The tile floor of the store was crumbling, wallpaper was peeling, everything felt old and ancient. I didn't want to be there.

In one mall, there was an entire wing of the mall that was almost completely abandoned and probably 30-40% of the mall was vacant store fronts. The food court I used to spend hours in consisted of a McDonald's and a Chinese fast food place. I remember years ago when it hosted a dozen different places, all with long lines. Getting a table to eat at required a friend to go reserve a table for you. These days? 3 people eat big macs in an empty large echoy room. It used to be the social center for the town, today it's nearly abandoned.

Amazon and other online shopping venues decimated these brick and mortar shopping venues. And it's not clear that it's generating the same amount of raw revenue in return either. It's definitely annihilating retail jobs in a way that Walmart could never hope to approach, yet it's rarely if ever discussed. At best, retail Macy's jobs are being replaced with contract warehouse work at a local fulfillment center, but automation and the loss of the requirement to interface with the customer means these places only require a fraction of the employees to move the same volume of inventory.

I don't know if the pendulum will ever swing the other way. My wife for example, buys clothes almost exclusively on-line. It's almost unthinkable that she does this, you want to try on clothes after all. But she overbuys a little, and only goes to the physical store to return items that don't fit or she doesn't like. The once proud storefront has been turned into the return counter in the customer service center. Why? "I don't like dealing with all the crowds and it's such a hassle to go there to see if things are on sale, I'll just check the web site every few days instead."

About the only brick and mortar we hit with any regularity these days is Costco, and that's largely because their wine selection is cheaper than online and very nearly always well selected and we can buy bulk toiletries and cleaning supplies at a discount.
Google Chrome is getting more touch-friendly
TechCrunch has further information:

In a statement to TechCrunch about whether the shut down was only because Silent Circle felt email was insecure, CEO Michael Janke tells us

“It goes deeper than that. There are some very high profile people on Silent Circle- and I mean very targeted people- as well as heads of state, human rights groups, reporters, special operations units from many countries. We wanted to be proactive because we knew USG would come after us due to the sheer amount of people who use us- let alone the “highly targeted high profile people”. They are completely secure and clean on Silent Phone, Silent Text and Silent Eyes, but email is broken because govt can force us to turn over what we have. So to protect everyone and to drive them to use the other three peer to peer products- we made the decision to do this before men on [SIC] suits show up. Now- they are completely shut down- nothing they can get from us or try and force from us- we literally have nothing anywhere.”

http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/08/silent-circle-preemptively-...
Ants are a great example of a self-organized complex system. They've figured out sustainable solutions to a lot of common collective action problems that all social organisms have to deal with, including humans: the division of labor, the production and distribution of resources, the management of waste and the raising of the young.

They are proof that you can have an agriculturally mature, technologically sophisticated eusocial self-organized system that will last for 100 million years. In contrast, humans have been a primarily agricultural species for less that 15,000 years, and our methods are demonstrably unsustainable. We could stand to learn a lot from the ants.

The ants solve their problems by tagging their environment with rich information about their own history. Our own technological situation is starting to give us the ability to do the same for human contexts, and we're working to make that augmentation explicit.

If you are interested in ants, Deborah Gordon's TED talk is an endless source of inspiration. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukS4UjCauUs

What will humans do with ant superpowers? I can't wait to find out =)
The case for hushmail is different then lavabit. Hushmail had some piece of information, legally they were required to hand that piece of information over. They may have had the option to shutdown shop after handing that over however.

For lavabit for all appearances did not have access to any information the government wanted and was not ordered to hand anything over. It seems like they were probably ordered to implement a method for the government to gain access to future communications. They choose to close up shop rather then implement this access and lie to their customers about the security of the service.
Unless decrypting it would force you to incriminate yourself...
Does the prepaid five years of service I can't use count as a donation? :)

P.S. smalltalk, you're dead.
Doug Stinson's Visual Cryptography Page (2003)
> crash and upon restart completely have forgotten what tabs I had open

I've run into some strange behavior like this before too. When you reopen Firefox and its lost your session, try opening another window or two and see if 'Restore Previous Session' is finally available.

If that didn't work, there are also a few other tools that can help solve restoring your sessionstore.js:

Firefox Sessionstore.js fixer

http://thepanz.netsons.org/post/firefox-sessionstore-js-fixe...

What if Firefox loses your tabs ?

http://dag.wieers.com/blog/what-if-firefox-loses-your-tabs
Alright,so how long does it take for disgruntled soon-to-be-ex-system-administrator of the 90% of sysadmins to do the next leak?
He's asking if it's illegal, not claiming that it is.
Good comments, plus, if you can do it, it might be wise to have a version of your product that's not SAAS. A self-hosted version, like Github Enterprise.

Be careful, though, self-hosted customers can be huge PITA's.
And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days.

from The Book of Mozilla, 12:10
Is there any literature on whether a rules/laws violation is more or less likely in a paired environment than in a single-user environment? The thinking is that the next Snowden will be stopped by his partner. But I can also see a possibility where the next Snowden has some misgivings, but doesn't have the confidence to go through with action until he voices his misgivings to his partner, and they give each other the courage to proceed.

Which is more likely?
As long as you have Silent Text, you can still have asynchronous textual communication.

It's when async text leaves their own apps that things get tricky.
Linux 3.10 Goes Long Term: Why It Matters for the Enterprise, Consumers
Hah. That's something I hadn't considered. Oh my, now there's an interesting concept.
> It's funny to me that no one has ever claimed to have accomplished anything globally significant while using nootropics to my knowledge.

These drugs are not always legal to use by normal people (eg. modafinil) and even when they are, why would you admit them? And even when they admit them, you haven't heard of them (the Nobelist who found NGF credits NGF for her scientific productivity; the only reason you don't hear of NGF supplementation is that it is insanely expensive and you could only afford it if, well, you had your own lab synthesizing NGF).

We know that a lot of scientists and other such researchers use amphetamines and modafinil because they say so in surveys like the famous one in _Nature_; yet you do not hear 20% of them publicly thanking modafinil for helping them get their experiments or work done.
Extremely well said. Amazon remains one of the most bizarre companies in the world, and I mean this as a huge compliment. The only other company I can think of that's managed like Amazon is Berkshire Hathaway (and maybe Exxon). I am talking in the sense that they are built for the loooong run. Not five or ten years from now, but decades from now. Five years - an eternity for most companies - is a blip on the radar for these guys. It's fascinating to watch.
I couldn't find any public deployments, so I was also wondering about this. On a personal deployment is the MediaGoblin branding visible? Because frankly it's not as appealing to me as, say, the Go gopher, or the Linux penguin. Because of the negative connotations of the word "goblin", I would be more hesitant to recommend MediaGoblin than I would Linux. After all, goblins are evil creatures [1]. Does that correlate in any way with the mission of MediaGoblin? Of course not, so why keep up the association?

I realize that the FreeBSD mascot is a devil, but FreeBSD is a far less consumer-facing product than MediaGoblin aims to be. Moreover, the FreeBSD team has struggled with questions about the appropriateness of such a mascot for corporate and marketing purposes [2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goblin

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_Daemon#Use_in_operating_sy...
I know, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that Snowden may be in contact with people that his pursuers are not yet aware of. Tapping his communications would give them a much larger attack surface.
Fairphone: "A seriously cool smartphone. Putting social values first."
I just created an account to ask this after 2 yrs of lurking here.

Can you/somebody kindly recommend me a server I can host? I have been looking for a server to host, and I have to admit that I am yet to find company in a safe country which has strong privacy ethics like Lavabit had?
Facebook is tweaking your News Feed
If that's what's going on, then it is pure CYA. There is no practical difference between a contractor and a direct employee. Yes it seems like security clearance vetting has been outsourced (for contractors only?) in recent years. But assuming everybody did their job right an employee is no more trustworthy than a contractor.

I'm entirely willing to believe it is CYA - based on my experience working classified programs practically all security procedures are CYA: Provably follow the checklist and you won't get fired if something goes wrong. Don't worry that the checklist is full of holes like swiss cheese, the checklist is more important than actual security.
I'm a Silent Circle employee, but I'm not speaking in any official capacity...

The issue with email is that we _had_ to touch plaintext at times. People expect email to work universally, so we had to accept unencrypted mail from outside clients, which we then encrypted for our users. That is a major departure from our other services. It's something we disclosed quite clearly, but we've decided that even with the disclosure, it's simply not worth the risk. We don't even like the idea of storing ciphertext (and obviously, running a mail server means you end up storing a fair amount if it). You can't be compelled to give up what you don't have.

This isn't a 'retreat.' Silent Mail was used by a relatively small percentage of our users. Silent Phone and Silent Text are services that we can provide 'responsibly' (in that we don't ever see plaintext, and hold ciphertext in extremely limited situations). They are our core services, and provide our users with the some of tools necessary to communicate securely and privately. We aren't giving up the fight by any means.

EDIT: llamataboot summed things up very nicely in another comment thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6183394
Despite being a rich country, the US has a surprisingly wide wealth disparity. Walmart targets the lower end of that wealth gap. It seems that Walmart struggles in countries with a smaller wealth gap (at least w/r to local economics).
Lecture on how to convert Blu-ray to PS3 with DVDFab Blu-ray Ripper
This is a video tutorial on how to convert Blu-ray to PS3 with DVDFab Blu-ray Ripper. DVDFab Blu-ray Ripper is a powerful Blu-ray Ripper software that can help you to rip and convert Blu-ray discs to other devices such as PS3, PSP, NDS, Apple TV, Xbox 360,etc. For more info at: http://www.dvdfab.com/blu-ray-ripper.htm
Croikle's right. This is using Google's public OpenID endpoint to validate your email address, and bootstrap a Persona certificate. We did this independently of Google, though we are in informal contact with the relevant folks on that side of the Valley.
The Tragedy of Toms Shoes
virtualenv is your friend
Two thoughts:

- Docker is entirely dependent on LXC at the moment, so if you're developing in anything other than Linux, it's not a good solution for creating a dev environment. They're promising to make LXC just a plugin at some point and support BSD jails, OpenVZ, and other containers, but even then I'm not sure there will be an answer for OSX users.

- You can do just what you describe above with a Vagrantfile. It works cross platform already.
DOL goes where the developers are
Read what I wrote. Did I justify what the government is doing? Or did I say that relative to non-governmental threats that the government has not yet reached the top of the list?

If those like you were in charge of invention shops in the 19th century the light bulb would never have been invented. "Ugh, look, this piece of shit failed for the 20th time, this will never work, we should just give up entirely."

Luckily we have had innovators throughout history who are not afraid to see the future as it should be and to iterate, iterate, iterate and iterate some more to bring the world closer to that ideal reality.

Does the government still have work to go? Absolutely, but it can be made better, which is not something I can say for everyone.
Sounds like a driver issue. Minecraft works quite well for many people.
Lavabit's UI was a bit imperfect, but their death is a horrible loss to people who were using it and looking to defend their privacy. Additionally, the fact that this guy running the service was clearly threatened with some kind of national security letter that clamped down on his freedom of speech is rage inducing.

There's a lot of ridiculously smart folks on here who are making good money working on advertising, social networking, and other typical web 2.0 startups and companies. There's nothing wrong with these things, they are certainly enriching peoples' lives and create value.

But if what is going on in the world isn't a clarion call for a lot of these smart people to look into startups, networks, services, software, open source projects, etc that try to defend peoples' privacy I don't know what is.

I urge everybody to look at your notes, ideas, forgotten projects, and see what you can come up with to provide services and ideas and concepts that will work to defend people's security and privacy from government entities that have gone drunk with power.

Not only is this vital to everybody's liberty, but there is a ridiculously huge business opportunity here for services and software that can provide some measure of defense for people.

If we don't stop what is going on soon there will not long be a market for a lot of cloud based services that people are going to want to use.
The same server(s) also control the JavaScript code run by the client/browser. They could serve special code (to any one the government wanted to spy on) that returned their password to the server.
IPython 1.0 released
Minus the gifts part, this is all terrific advice. As the person-in-charge-of-apps/collab at a large enterprise, I typically have 3-5 vendor meetings per week (this week I have 8... this kind of thing is probably why a lot of you hate working at/with/for large companies!), most of which I have no intention of purchasing from, but all of whom have something in their unsolicited emails that piqued my interest. A lot of times it's market research: if I'm reasonably happy with New Relic, I may still want to see what Appneta and Compuware can do for me. If I want to step up from Hangouts/Skype to something with QoS but not Telepresence grade, I probably want to learn about Fuzebox, Vidyo, Bluejeans, etc. If I'm a Google Apps customer, I am likely in touch with the kind folks behind Flashpanel, GAT, and Cloudlock. If I manage our data centers, I most likely have contacts at all the major server/storage/virtualization/infrastructure vendors. One of the most important parts of our job is to know the landscape and be able to make the best decision for our company. A lot of times we don't have the time to perform adequate due diligence, and this is where a skilled salesperson will succeed where an average salesperson will give up. You need, as josh2600 says, to make it personal, to truly understand your target, and to pitch what they want to hear.

And remember that all signed deals absolutely must be win-win. If your sales target feels or knows they're getting screwed, you're toast.

As an aside, also know that the days of "no one got fired for choosing IBM" are over. BigCos do plenty of deals with startups and small businesses. I could give examples of where that's worked out great for us, or terribly. I could also give examples of where choosing the 800lb gorilla was an awful decision.

If you don't enjoy this kind of existence, being an IT exec at a big company is probably not something you'd have fun with.
I am going to read the thread now do you know if any court cases were mentioned that set precedence for requiring someone to lie to their customers?

I am definitely interested in any court cases that set a precedence for ordering/mandating/require lying.
Love the concept, but

Using GPS data collected by Glass, the game generates a record of each player's daily routine.

Scares me a bit. Do you have more details on it?
If they get rid of the service and the data pre-emptively, they can safely destroy the data. Once they've recieved an NSL, they have to comply with the order and provide the data (or at least the metadata) or be in contempt of court.
WRONG:

"Other security measures that Alexander has previously discussed include requiring at least two people to be present before certain data can be accessed on the agency's computer systems."

CORRECT:

Before admins or analysts view native text, a preprocessor regex substitutes innocuous synonym barium canaries for parts of speech, puncuation, possibly with Google capable proper noun recognition, places and people too. These substitution events are hashed with each specific tractable viewers, and the viewers, so informed of this preprocessor, know it, so they don't rat.

This is also `panopticonable', say this occurs only 10% of the time.
it doesn't have to be surrender. It could be an acknowledgement that email is insecure by nature, that there is no good way of making it completely secure, and wanting to keep people as safe as it is possible to do so. ie; it could be a move towards /more/ privacy by saying, here, use these other tools we have where we cannot be compelled to give the USG anything. If they were shutting down everything, I would be scared, sad, etc. Shutting down email they are essentially saying, we can't make this secure, and we don't want you thinking we can.
The most touching thing I ever got from a sales rep was a Christmas card from her family, delivered to my home (rather than the company mail room).
I'm just one person, but I shop Amazon all the time due to the sheer convenience of doing so...regardless of price.

Why? Free shipping (I get mine free, but $80 is well worth it because I buy a lot of stuff), always 2 days shipping, excellent service and a huge variety of goodies to buy. I also have their rewards card which returns $... Free coupla hundred bucks every six months, no sweat.

I mentioned convenience as an opener to this reply, and I'll close with it. In a world wherein lots of things become more and more of a PITA, Amazon delivers easy and pain free, every day (I don't work there, so I can say that).
When the sharing economy goes wrong: are more rules the answer?
What are you talking about? Are you quoting someone else? That isn't in my parent comment at all...

But since you mention it, while the devs can test their apps, they can't fix them yet. There is no way to submit an iOS 7 based app until, oh i don't know, iOS 7 is released.
Classic security theater.
Science is not the Enemy of the Humanities
They probably want to just dispose of all the data that NSA is technically and legally allowed to snoop into their servers.

Since there are no real laws for online privacy I wouldn't expect laws about private data when a company shuts down.
Well, it looks like we got ourselves a reader.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwkdGr9JYmE
This is what I do. No one has ever asked me to clarify start and end dates.

That said, I'll never just up and quit a job now. Did it once, and those were some of the most stressful months of my life. No matter how crappy a job is, it doesn't compare to watching your hard-earned savings decline and facing the real, terrifying possibility that you won't make rent/mortgage payments.