skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>If the actions of the NSA were seen by American citizens as such a major concern that they would not vote for a candidate who supported it, then we'd see major votes against one of them. If all the candidates were to represent interests opposite to those of their voters, then we'd see no votes for any.

You've simplified this way too much, as if each voter only has one issue that they care about. Political strategists are experts at game theory. They build political platforms based on how to get the most people off their couches per dollar. It is a multi-dimensional problem.

>The fact that we keep seeing these votes is simply a proof of the fact that most people don't really care about it.

It is proof of no such thing. Most people are happy to leave well enough alone when they don't see a problem. NSA surveillance has never been a serious issue in a national campaign. Until recently, anyone who expressed too much interest in domestic surveillance of citizens was a tinfoil hat wearing crackpot.

> The handful of us who hang out on HackerNews aren't representative of the general populace.

So? The populace is a composite of many factions. Some people even have mixed political philosophies.

> Ask the audience of Toddlers and Tiaras, who are probably an order of magnitude more than we are, what they think about it, and 90% of them would probably tell you something similar to "NSA? Is that like, UUUUUUUM, some football league or something?"

The media is the reason for this. I wish I had some good idea that wasn't completely at odds with democratic principles.

>> People have been boycotting elections for years. That only makes it easier for the radical fringes to their their crap on the agenda and for politicians to focus on those low-hanging fruits.
>People have been boycotting elections for years -- they're only valuable when they bring the turnout below the threshold of validity, which has happened in some countries.

Well, that isn't going to happen, ever, or at least until the "Toddlers and Tiaras" crowd has some political motivation other than ["ZOMG Abortion", "ZOMG Teh Gays", "ZOMG Illegal Mexicans in our jerbs"]

>If US citizens feel their political or electoral system is biased, whining about it won't help -- and it looks particularly hypocritical after readily applauding the Arab spring.

Whining about politics is as great an American tradition as Apple Pie.
Apple should ban this app. The amount of support it is going to eat up not to mention the headlines the tech press is going to write are not worth it. Selling an app that is basically designed to break the phone is just a really bad idea.
It's solvable, too. If they are interested in having credibility, Internet services can implement secure communications and storage. They may have to charge for it because they will forego some ad revenue.

So what to make of the fact that nobody who has loudly declared they are all for customers' privacy has actually done anything about it?
Yet, here we are.

It has just occurred to me that I went from an employer for whom 'the internet' was just a medium over which biz was transacted to one for whom without 'the internet' would not exist at all.
A cute error message would be appropriate afterwards for comic relief, when you accessed it on your computer, etc.

"Your phone soared 100 ft. before dying a soldier's death. New high score! Good luck about the phone though."
Please tell me why everything needs to be taken so seriously. You wrote:
"...bad guy can dump all your session cookies, grab your history, install malicious extension to intercept all your browsing activity, or install OS user account level monitoring software..."

It sounds like that computer owns nuclear bomb instructions.

Take a breath and one step back:
How about if the kids likes to play with their friend and likes to stole his/her facebook passwords when the friend is in the toilet (others are playing games at the same time with their friend's computer).

Most of the kids do not think about dumping cookies, installing malicious extensions etc. They just like to look the password and use it later.

We do not ask from you to provide any master password. Why not only ask user's credentials (the pure end user, not administrator credentials)?

If I go to your computer while you are in toilet, can I come and change your password? Or can you agree that your following comment was not actually 100% correct:
"...when you grant someone access to your OS user account, that they can get at everything..."

At least mine OS:
1. Ask me the old password before I can change it.
2. I'm running normal end user credentials, so by default I do not have admin credentials. And by this way, I have very limited credentials to do what ever I like...
>"I don't want to throw my phone high into the air, watch it go to pieces and not even get a high score."

I'd think that would defeat the purpose of the "...and catch it!" step.

If anything, I'd want such an app to record video or perhaps fire the camera for a still the peak. I'm thinking that would a be huge plus to the idiotic entertainment potential, like a less inane Vine and a slight deterrent from the inevitable result spoofing.
I wonder if they have implemented/made use of any libdispatch ports for Linux to support GCD.
What depresses me is, I see how this information could be used in many kinds of amazing ways, but since I cannot control who gets it and what they will do with it, I refuse to use it for fear that it will be used against me.

It is the tragedy of the modern connected world, one that Stallman and others saw coming years ago. And it will keep getting worse.
It is far more likely I am using your machine with you, and then you walk out for 20 seconds to get a glass of water.

You are presuming a specific environment and an attack specific to that environment.

At first glance, it may look like adding the extra complexity of a password through the obvious user-interface path improves security. But that assumes there are no costs. In this case the cost is a false sense of security - such that all other attack vectors are still just as open and now the user is less aware of them.

The user would be better off having the 'vulnerability' rubbed in their face so that they would learn to take measures like locking the screen whenever they walk away. That way when someone gets physical access for 5 minutes instead of 20 seconds, the passwords are still just as safe.
Stripe launches in the Netherlands
I know some people in Russia and recently in a discussion they brought out "gays" as people "they really don't like" - even if the discussion had absolutely nothing to do with gays. There could be some real merit to this warning.
> Some people would argue that a very simple daemon with fewer features might be more secure because it has less attack area.

If it's true for something like a web server, it ought to be true for SSH. Thanks for the link to spiped.
The next major "terrorist" movement will come from transparency groups, but not for the reasons you think. Actually, most of you would probably be against such groups.

Instead of focusing on government transparency, they will seek total transparency. They will track everything, everywhere. They will collect information about you and me. They will install cameras and trackers everywhere (in a decentralised fashion). They will link your online profiles together. They will make your address and phone number public.

The next major "terrorist" movement will force societal transparency. They won't be personally motivated. They will do it for the well-being of society as a whole. Privacy is evil, and we should get rid of it before it's too late. Information should flow freely, and it will.

I predict that transparency will be forced upon us all, not just the government. But most of you can't see it.
It amazes me that some of the security professionals are sufficiently out of touch that they don't see this as an issue. The adversary in this case is the casual non-technical observer who might have a minute to click around but not install software to extract anything, it is not "hackers".
I'm not so much concerned with the why, but more... how? 43m straight up is a pretty tall throw, I'm picturing water balloon slingshots or something...
These attacks are getting more and more creative. I begin to think that there is no such thing as perfect security in a world that constantly demands new features.
Given the fact you can modify and add your own content, it does become a grey area. If it was simply re-skinning via CSS and JS, it wouldn't be nearly as alarming.
Do you run into any trouble with dust/static doing it that way vs canned duster?
People are playing crazier/riskier games everyday! I mean why not ...
Mobile site is useless.
Bad idea, perhaps. But why should Apple get to determine what is or isn't a bad idea for one to do with their own phone? (Although I would suspect part of the reason they banned it is to avoid claims of "Apple's so greedy that while they ban so many legitimately useful apps they allowed this one, just because it can break phones resulting in added profits for them from people buying replacement phones".)
NSA? It seems as if as a whole the Executive branch has. From ignoring laws, selectively enforcing them, or even delaying when they take effect, the Executive branch seems hell bent on ignoring Congress and the Courts. Congress doesn't get a free pass either, but for any Executive branch persons to lie either directly or by omission should not be acceptable.

I guess we should have realized the day we got Czars
> Google should have set requirements for distributors regarding updates.

Google could have done that as a condition of getting the proprietary apps and Google logo while maintaining unconditional openness in AOSP. And while you are right that they might not have had that leverage in the first year of Android as a commercial product, they could surely have started before now.
Court agrees to a lifelong gag order for children
Terminal multiplexers are great if you're stuck in SSH, working without a window manager at all, or have a real need to share a set of terminals with multiple people at once.

But if you're hacking together a desktop environment with tiled terminals, status bars, keyboard shortcuts, dynamic or static layouts, and the ability conceal layouts on different workspaces (which is what most people's intent is when using detachment), then just get a tiling window manager already.

You're reinventing the wheel.
The current high score is 43.16m - I wonder if somebody found a way to cheat, or if they really really do not care about the wellbeing of their smartphone.
Everyone has to learn sometimes, and learning by trying is a great way (also, sometimes a costly way...), it's not that odd a combination I wouldn't suspect.
Computational model of knitting
I've been programming in JS since early 2000 and I've only ever used it to break out of nested loops.
Amazon Appstore Now Open To Web Apps, With One-Click In-App Purchases In Tow
I agree with your idea of the camera firing...but you think this could be less inane than Vine...?
> Corporations are owned by people like you and me, composed of people like you and me, run by people like you and me, and paid by people like you and me.

That's really sunshiny happy and everything, but corporations and I have entirely different motives and values. I could just as easily point out that murderers, pedophiles, and (yes) Nazis are people like you and me.
Samsung Wants Tizen in Your Phone, Home, Car and Anything Else
Korean buses now wirelessly charge as they drive
Philosophy question:

Given that a user left their session unlocked (!) in the presence of someone who is not them (!!) with a password file and other sensitive data in easy reach (!!!) - why is it Google's problem that the end user violated the first three rules of computer security?

*ed Downvotes don't answer the question, guys. At what point do you stop taking extraordinary measures to protect the user from their own lack of sense?
Its common in hardware enthusiast forums and discussion now when there is a performance problem for there to be 2 initial questions. The first is regards to clock speed and the second is temperature. Its really common for clock throttling to be the underlying cause of performance problems on today's systems and temperature is also the number one cause.

But the second major cause, representing about 30% of cases is software/firmware bugs in the drivers for the graphics card or the Windows scheduler doing odd things for the CPU under a particular workload. As more of the performance of components becomes dependent on boosting and clock increasing in order to save power the more we are seeing inconsistent behaviour and problems with the implementations.
Thanks for the links. The reason why we decided to go with an in-memory architecture for this project is that we have (soft) realtime requirements and complex custom data structures. Users are interactively manipulating a medium size (hundereds of gigs) dataset that needs to be up-to-date at all times.

The obvious alternative would be to go with a traditional relational database, but my thinking is that the dataset is small enough to do everything in memory and avoid all serialization/copying to/from a database, cache or message queue. Tuple Spaces, as I understand it, is basically a hybrid of all those things.
Man Enters Subway – What Happens is Something Even New Yorkers Have Never Seen
This is the next move. Criminalizing the opposition not because of their actions, but simply because they are the opposition. And it's not a response to Snowden, it has been decades in the making by slowly making everything that could potentially pose a threat a criminal offense.

It's only a matter of time before the question will be asked: "Are you now or have you ever been a hacker?"
Instead of boycotting, I would advocate for subversion. The Games have been a platform for highlighting social issues before: get on that platform and show that gay and lesbians can be winners too and that other athletes support their plight.

At any rate, it's going to be interesting to watch.
Not that hard. Lifeproof case, throw it from a pool of water, watch it land in the pool of water.
Howto add the Gentoo Overlay:

A) Quick & Dirty
1. Run: layman -o https://raw.github.com/LubosD/darling-overlay/master/overlays.xml -f -a darling-overlay

B) Safe and Standard

1. Find the overlays section in /etc/layman/layman.cfg
2. Add https://raw.github.com/LubosD/darling-overlay/master/overlays.xml
3. Update all repos by running: layman -S
4. Now run: layman -a darling-overlay
The way it goes down is this:

Members of the intelligence community are patient. Very very patient indeed.

They will build up a dossier of all of your dirty little secrets over a period of years; decades even. They will wait as long as it takes for you to get into a position of power; until they really need something from you, and then, why then they have a nice big fat file waiting for them in the archives, they will come to you and ask you for a "favour".

It could be to hand over some information, perhaps your organization's "red lines" in a negotiation; or the price your company is willing to pay in a takeover bid. It could be to do somebody else a favour, help them out with some insider information, or give them a job. Perhaps, they will ask you to screw somebody over, deny them a job, block them from a position, and so on. Easy for you to do, no skin off your nose; particularly in comparison to the alternative: the awkward conversations you could be having with your spouse that evening, or the IRS later in the week.

In this way, positions of influence get filled with puppets and cronies, and their network of influence and power grows and grows. Who needs money when you have all these little bits of leverage, all these people who will do things for you, individually inconsequential, but collectively ... world changing.

Indeed, the financial services sector .. so dependent on (and so vulnerable to) hard-to-trace insider information, I would not be totally surprised if that sector is completely in thrall to the organization that is dominant in the information-warfare arena.

An addiction to information? No. An addiction to power, fuelled by information. That is why they gotta collect it all.
If Chrome was concerned about your sense of security it would inform you that all your saved passwords are clearly readable in plaintext at chrome://settings/passwords. It would do this each time it saved a password. It does not do this because you would be less likely to trust Chrome with your passwords if it did that.

So Chrome wants you to feel secure and give you convenience. Either it makes some attempt to prevent casual password access or it informs you that your passwords are casually available. It can't have it both ways.

I agree that the user would be better off having the vulnerability rubbed in their face but Chrome does not do that.

Edit: You also need to take into account intent and the emotion of the user accessing the passwords. The system currently implemented in Chrome makes it easy to peek at someone's passwords without malicious intent. If you simply had to overcome some hurdles it would make most people stop and think about what they are doing because it is a breach of trust. We're not talking about stopping determined attackers.

Edit 2: Also, I presume that specific environment because it is the environment I work and live in every day. We bring our personal laptops to work, we debug code on each others' machines, and we occasionally step out of the room. Sometimes at home I take a friend's laptop to look something up, sometimes I lend mine. I think these are common scenarios for computer users (though admittedly I have no evidence for this).
Or just use ghc -e, e.g. some useful scripts

for interact:

#!/bin/bash
ghc -e "interact ($1)"

line processing:

#!/bin/bash
ghc -e "interact (unlines . map ($1) . lines)"
> Instead of boycotting, I would advocate for subversion

I'm not sure "subversion" is the right word there.
Jeff Bezos, "Dread Pirate" Founder
My one is visualising a clock face, 12, 3, 6, 9
You logged into the proxy? But they could steal all your karma!
Review on What is the Future value of Gold
Here's the original http://www.stephenfry.com/2013/08/07/an-open-letter-to-david...
I did vote for a candidate in 2008 who opposed the Bush administration's massive build-up of surveillance infrastructure: Obama. By 2012, it was clear he wasn't following through, but the other candidate on offer would almost certainly have been, on balance, a whole lot worse --- and a bad choice is still a choice.

When, in office, has Obama been representing what I want, in this regard, and when do you think I had an opportunity to change that through the ballot box?
Why web application security and shared hosting don't get on well
An explanation of why shared hosting is not the right hosting solution if you would like secure your website and web applications.
France is undergoing a pro-business revolution – don’t miss the signs
Must be fundraising time. Yawns.
come on... WINE is a compatibility layer. Nothing gets emulated in any way. You can check the FAQ, a sibling posted the link.
>You just played right in to the hands of the likes of Hayden. See how divide and rule works?

Aww come on, can't we have a little debate with our coffee? Maybe we'll eventually converge on some action that gets an optimal level of support within our cohort.
There are some non-naive startups too.

I was very impressed by the winners of the Latam Startup Challenge (4pets in particular, though Zoop was very ambitious too).
Don't forget mesh networking. Seems like mesh with a combination of trusted anonymous P2P would be very difficult to tap into.

There's lots of nerd fun here for those interested. And there's a big need. A shame more folks aren't stepping up to the plate.

Just to whet the appetite, how much of the internet do you actually participate in, versus just consume? Most server stats show a 40-1 or even 200-1 ratio of readers to commenters. And how much unique material is really out there, anyway? I'd bet a couple hundred MBs of text represents the vast majority of internet content most consumers passively consume each day.

So why all of this client-server, point-to-point nonsense? For most consumption content, do some kind of BT for common content distribution, then use some other solution if a consumer wants to send information the other way.

I understand many will yell "But that violates the TOS!" but screw 'em. If whenever I get on the internet all my information is being stored against my will, I have no obligation to abide by any subsequent agreement.
Meh, probably the author should not have categorically asked everyone at plan9 (an incubator he heads) to up-vote this story and make comment like awesome , cool etc .

Umar Saif probably thought that he could use his position of power to get all the up-votes he want , what he didn't know was that HN has specific filter to counter the just the karma gathering activities like this one.
There is indeed no other way than to trust the governmnet, but the tools and means to verify should be there too, and they aren't. We should not accept to be forced into blindly and naively trust the government in a claimed democracy.
History of simplifications in programming languages
Dismissive sneers at the opposition aren't an attempt to provoke or engage debate. They're an attempt to sideline it, and effectively shut it down.
Run by a tiny subset of people like you and me.

The problem is most of the time companies aren't there to benefit us. Chief Exec's will give themselves massive bonuses while cutting the wages on the lower tiers. Corporations will readily use dirty tactics and lobbying to drive smaller companies out of business without any thought of the people who depend upon that business. And so on and so forth.

Corporations are not there to serve our interest, they're there to serve their shareholders interest. And unless you've got a direct dependence on said corporation (eg you work for them), then our interests aren't the same.

Corporations should never be allowed to influence on politics. Particularly not on the scale that they already do.
when you say "innocent" I think you mean "exonerate".
He surely does. Most Russians have not once meet a person who they would know as an open gay. And still they've got an Opinion despite that.

(Hitler's Germans had at least meet Jews in their life)

It's a sad story about how media wrecks the minds of rednecks.
There probably is merit to the warning, but the word "scapegoat" may be wrong. It means that your blaming the nation's problems on them. I haven't yet seen Putin blaming gays for economic hardships or crime. Misuse of overly strong words discredits the article.
Justin Schuh had a nice capsule summary of some available techniques for compromising logins:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6166731

- dump all your session cookies

- grab your history

- install malicious extension to intercept all your browsing activity

- install OS user account level monitoring software

The last one could plausibly work, in combination with "grab a copy of the encrypted 1Password key file", to compromise all the 1Password stuff. The others essentially work around 1Password, or so I believe.

This is why there are certain passwords that I don't even store in 1Password. It's also an argument for two-factor auth.
Why the 3V’s are not sufficient to describe big data
This SaaS and open source project just popped up on HN: http://quickcast.io/

Also check out http://www.kaltura.org/

If you just need video hosting and a robust player, look into Brightcove.
This is a fascinating attack. Definitely read the bits on the SVG filter timing attacks. They construct something that allows distinguishing black pixels from white pixels, apply a threshold filter to an iframe, and then read out pixels from the contents of that iframe.

Then they turn this around, set an iframe's src to "view-source:https://example.com/", and read out information from there (in a more efficient manner).