skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I was in the NSA (which I am not) I would place a backdoor in the browser themselves, and since the browsers auto-update from the internet anyway, I would change the DNS provider for the machine being watched (remember the DNS settings generally default to that provided by your ISP) to point to the NSA-version of the browser, and then the user would be browsing securely, but after decryption and before display, the payload would be sent elsewhere to be collected.

I don't think this would be particulary hard either. For IE, the NSA can just get MSFT to do it. For Firefox, they can compile from source, and for Chrome, well, they can probably compile from source too, because they probably have access to the build source of Chrome, with or without GOOG mgmt knowledge.

Can anyone come up with a (technical) reason the NSA could not be doing this?
That security systems are designed in the most paranoid fashion possible doesn't tell you anything about the real nature of the threat. Schneier's book doesn't tell you that the NSA has been strong arming corporations into giving up their private keys and into installing backdoors on chips.

In fact Schneier himself is outraged to the point that he seems to be calling for a redesign of basic Internet protocols and governance in his article today, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/05/governm...
I don't understand that part of the article, what algorithm standard was it? AES?
The newspaper is walking a very fine line between writing this up and disclosing things that would give ammo to those that would rather shut these things down under any pretext including 'helping the enemy'. The things you are asking for are exactly in that direction.
From what I have heard, Excelsior is a good one, http://www.excelsior-usa.com/jet.html

Additionally you have,

- Avian (http://oss.readytalk.com/avian/)

- Codename One (http://www.codenameone.com/), just for mobiles

- Aonix (http://www.atego.com/products/aonix-perc/)

- WebSphere Real Time (http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/us/en/real-time)

- Jikes RVM (http://jikesrvm.org/)
Presumably that's DRBGs[1]? Does anyone actually use them in that form?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG
Are You a Language Bully?
> A 2010 document calls for “a new approach for opportunistic decryption, rather than targeted.” By that year, a Bullrun briefing document claims that the agency had developed “groundbreaking capabilities” against encrypted Web chats and phone calls. Its successes against Secure Sockets Layer and virtual private networks were gaining momentum.

This paragraph interests me the most.

For one, it's clear that their goal is opportunistic decryption; that is, decrypting everything and being able to search through it, rather than targeting known endpoints. This is an important point that a lot of people miss when debating cryptography. While it's fairly likely that the government can find ways to access any communication they want in a targeted manner, as they have so many means to do so (hacking the endpoints, physically breaking in and performing an evil maid attack, etc), widespread encryption is generally good enough to prevent opportunistic data gathering.

The other point I note is that they only mention "web chats and phone calls" in their breakthrough. It doesn't sound like the breakthrough is something that works well for arbitrary SSL connections. The main link I can see between web chats and phone calls is that they are long lived connections, with bursty traffic (HTTP or email protocols, on the other hand, tend to stream a lot of data at once, and then the connection is closed). I'm wondering if there's some kind of traffic or timing analysis vulnerability that they've discovered.

Also interesting is this quote from the Guardian article:

> To help secure an insider advantage, GCHQ also established a Humint Operations Team (HOT). Humint, short for "human intelligence" refers to information gleaned directly from sources or undercover agents.
>
> This GCHQ team was, according to an internal document, "responsible for identifying, recruiting and running covert agents in the global telecommunications industry."

Various technology companies have been adamant in maintaining that they haven't been been giving the NSA direct access to their data. However, with HUMINT programs like this, you always have to wonder if the NSA has hired anyone within such companies to put backdoors into their systems, without authorization by the company. Obviously, they'd have to be subtle about it (it's hard to install new gigabit fiber pipes to siphon off the data without anyone noticing), but just setting up a way for the NSA to covertly run queries, disguised as some other type of job that would normally run on the system, would probably not be too hard to do.
Great article and advice at the end- the author correctly identifies that perseverance in the face of uncertain market conditions and lots of "no's" from investors or other so-called experts is a key quality for entrepreneurs that have the guts to stick it out over the long haul.

The story also conveys about how important it is to put in TIME in a marketplace. Everyone wants to quickly flip for the big exit but the real value comes over the long and arduous process of iterating, growing, and especially uncovering unmet customer needs regardless of if it's product / service
> I will bet good money that the NSA has never bothered to try and plant backdoors in encryption standards.

Did you read the article?

> By this year, the Sigint Enabling Project had found ways inside some of the encryption chips that scramble information for businesses and governments, either by working with chipmakers to insert back doors or by surreptitiously exploiting existing security flaws, according to the documents.

Seems pretty cut and dry.
> the ones that CANNOT be done on polynomial time is "NP".

I see you've solved one of the great open problems!

NP is defined as problems that a nondeterministic turing machine can solve in polynomial time. Imagine, if you will, a turing machine that when it "branches" always chooses the right path (Or: chooses "both" without overhead)
9 major logo redesigns: Yahoo and beyond
There is special "blame" here put on the US government, but I think this is irrelevant. In pretty much any country today, the foreign intelligence services are allowed to spy on everyone else except their own citizens. In the minds of most citizens, this practice might seem reasonable, and maybe necessary.
This, of course, means that everyone, everywhere could be monitored by (almost) everyone "legally".
The basic architecture of the Internet is naive in that that it does not treat countries as separate, "hostile" entities, while in fact they most certainly are.
This would make a pretty nice Ubuntu machine (next version of the OS). Imagine in laptop mode, you get desktop Ubuntu and flip for tablet mode for Ubuntu Touch. The orange version even matches Ubuntu's theme. Hum..
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I posted elsewhere - I'm neither indignant, nor concerned that food will be replaced by soylent.

I'm negative about Soylent because instead of the message being, "Hey look, we're trying to make mass market meal replacements that might help people eat healthier at a better price point", it's, "We're making food unnecessary"

That doesn't mean food will go away, of course, but it's a very smug, technocratic way to go about this process. "We have solved the problem" instead of "We're trying to figure this out".
Thorny Side Effects in Silicon Valley Tactic to Keep Control
What provides an leverage is not that level of advertisement, but the delta in advertisement with a change in behavior. As long as you wouldn't attack them if they changed and they believe that then you've got leverage.
Good luck with that. You would need the government to prosecute and the government makes it illegal to talk about what you want to prosecute.
As a fellow hacker who has spent a significant amount of time trying to understand how diet, exercise, and nutrition work - especially within my own body - I can confirm the Soylent campaign's "know it all" attitude is off-putting.

But then again, it seems like these days being pretentious helps to sell.
The Thinkpad Yoga and "Yoga 2" are two different machines, both released today. Near as I can tell the stylus support exists ONLY for the regular Yoga, not the "Yoga 2" linked by OP. (but since information is still limited I could be wrong.)
Seriously. Having fun and creating cool artwork shouldn't be allowed in this industry.
Eventually there is an emacs port of every application.
I like the fact that you're trying to unify the whole app dev lifecycle. But what about requirements management, don't you consider that as an essential part? Also 99% uptime is not really a 'rock solid' I hope you can improve that along the way.
Up until very recently, the received wisdom was: the crypto wars are over, we fought the law and the law gave up, the NSA has quit trying to crack encryption, they have decided the USA is best strengthened by having a reliable internet which business rival nations can't just read like the morning's news. The NSA knows the problems in crypto and their suggestions make it stronger against attacks we don't know. Trust the NSA.

Would that it were true! It would make sense. This makes no damn sense. Just recently I would have ruled out huge conspiracies as implausible because they inevitably leak (roll save against ethics how many times?). The joke's on me, folks. The NSA has no sense. And the conspiracy leaked.

So now every single decision that was taken with help from the NSA (SELinux, TLS, elliptic curves, etc) needs unpicking and running by a cryptographer who isn't a shill. What a damn drag. And meanwhile, the aftershocks will run for years trashing trust in the networked economy.

Fuckin' brilliant, NSA. You screwed the pooch. You accidentally the whole internet.
America is called a constitutional democracy. It started out as a constitutional republic. In practice, it's closer to a plutocracy and has been for some time. The average net worth of a US Senator is ~$10 million. Political solutions will only come about in reaction to technical solutions that we come up with.

I'd posit that the political classes are an evolutionary obstacle for the technical community to solve. If successful, we thrive. If unsuccessful, technology will be owned by the political classes and we're beholden to them until we solve the problem.
Wow this actually crashes the entire Chrome browser on Mac OSX. This is the only one that fully crashes the browser instead of just the tab. The weird thing is, though, you need to copy paste it for it to crash not just view it. Weird huh
Server side is already too crowded, there is nothing that Dart brings to the table.

The only way Dart will have any future is if Google makes a requirement to use it somewhere.
Not a crypto expert at all, but did they knew in advance that nobody would use it? Otherwise it could just be a failed attempt.
Yeah, I'm a little baffled by Schneier's reaction to this. The revelation is advanced cryptanalytic capabilities at NSA, which is literally an article of faith with Schneier. Why is he freaking out about this when he didn't instead freak out about wholesale call record database dumps or AT&T fiber taps?
It might not be a problem for you - it isn't for me either - but many others suffer from this problem. My other half struggles to read because she has so many line transition errors. And she has to spend all day reading. I see a huge market for this.
Yes, but that appears to be a pic of the "Yoga", not the "Yoga 2", so I'm not sure both new laptops have this ability.
I'll grant you that there appears to be a thin line between mystical thinking and genuine curiosity when it comes to the whole-foods movement. But we do a disservice when we conflate the two.

The more rational argument in favor of whole foods isn't that there's something fundamentally, irreducibly complex about them. It's that we don't yet know everything there is to know about how various nutrients work, and we're learning more all the time. While it's true that a chemical is a chemical is a chemical [1], we don't fully understand which chemicals are necessary, which are unnecessary, and which ones need which other ones to absorb or function properly. All we can say is that whole foods offer the whole package; what we can't yet say is that we've completely reverse-engineered that package. Someday we might, but today's science would beg to differ.

That's not Vitalism. Vitalism is something very different. It's a belief in some sort of "life force" that imbues the animal and vegetable kingdom, along with the implication that we'll never be able to recreate it. There are a lot of armchair Vitalists in the whole foods and organic foods movements. But dismissing the entire whole-foods hypothesis based on their beliefs is attacking a strawman.

[1] To an extent, of course. If we really want to go down this rabbit hole, we need to get into subjects like chirality, enantiomers, methyl groups, etc., and how the food industries tend to choose the cheapest version X if it's similar to Y, rather than choosing Y itself. Y may or may not have the same bioavailability as X, metabolize into the same byproducts, etc. For a good example, look into "Vitamin B12" in methylcobalamin form vs. cyanocobalamin form, as well as its other chemical cousins. All of these compounds can be labeled "Vitamin B12" in consumer products, even though they behave differently in the body.
I think you have confused America with the idea of America.
I don't know what they expected, but Dual-EC is self-evidently noncompetitive.
The American people tried that when they first voted for Obama, who said all sorts of pretty things about rolling back the surveillance state.
Refusing to rely on the RNG in Intel processors doesn't seem particularly unreasonable in the light of this revelation does it?
The only thing that's "broken" here, or been "taken", is our privacy and our freedom [mainly the freedom of corporations to go about their business without being forced to spy on their customers with no warrant]. Both of those can only be re-established through legislation, as any attempt to subvert law enforcement is going to be responded to with more law enforcement. You can't hack your way out of this. You have to actually change the laws.
4) Google Now. Enough said.

You are aware that "Google Now" is available for iOS
If you see the diagram, and someone else makes the chip, how do you know the diagram matches exactly with what's on the chip? Unless you can make your own chip from the diagram, you still cannot be sure.
There are countermeasures concerning the Trusting Trust attack: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/countering_tru..., though I'm not sure if anyone has ever seriously attempted to deploy them.
How to create a fair NFL Wins Pool Draft with advanced metrics
It was all over HN a while back. They were incredibly cryptic and slow to respond after they got hacked. They tried to downplay what happened instead of saying it straight. So clients didn't know what measures they needed to take to protect themselves. The community response afterwards was that basically these people can't be trusted at all.

Even their wiki mentions that they got hacked
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linode
It's a strawman: "objections are Vitalism, Vitalism is false, therefore Soylent is good."
Are you sure about that? As far as I understand it, generic quantum computation would cut that '3072' in half, and using quantum computers specifically for factoring reduces problems to a low polynomial time.
Hacking Tea? 7 Reasons Why GoMo is a Kickass Hangover Recovery Helper
Could you spot a "trusting-trust"-style backdoor in an FPGA you were offloading crypto to? How would you even start?
My dichotomy was between the parent and the grandparent.

I totally agree that not addressing issues and not bring (constructive!) criticism is a poor strategy. But your persons A and B have the same problem: they're critical without being providing any actual information. Person B just compounds it by also being a jerk.

As a programmer/businessperson, I'm not interested in making people feel good about poor quality work. I'm interested in people who want to improve themselves and the overall product, and ideally, enjoy the process. I just don't see how insulting code or people helps. I think it's perfectly possible to hold high standards on code and respectful conduct, and it's perfectly possible for people to rise to those standards, guided by constructive criticism.
> I understand convenience, but why should we think we've "cracked the code" of the totality of nutrition?

I don't think Rob and is collaborators are making that claim at all. From the OP:

"We do not yet know what the ideal diet for a human is, but our present understanding permits us to easily design a diet that is far superior to what most people are eating."

He clearly states that they are making no claim to providing the ideal diet. They are simply on a mission to do something better than we have. I cannot predict the future so it's possible that he and his partners get rich and stop trying to improve the formula.

I would hope that instead they continue their research and further refine their formula over time and science finds out more about our bodies and their necessary nutrients.
Good point. A centered stance might be ideal, and may just seem 'forward' in comparison to the typical shortboard stance.

And now I think about it, it might not be board flex that limits front-truck turning when leaning back - rather, the lack of weight on the front truck might allow the outside wheel to lift. Either way, it's a bad situation.
I don't really care about the constant jabbing, smugness, or strawmen.

I am angry with Rhinehart because he has the balls to promote his product with not an iota of attention being paid to the scientific method or any type of rigor for that matter.
Petition for public access to EMA clinical trial data (AbbVie & InterMune case)
My latest attempt was with one of the booksellers on Amazon claiming to have that edition. I sort of gave up on the site after that fell through.

I'll give the .co.uk version a try, thanks.
Startup Hiring Trend: Rock Stars Are Out, Collaborators Are In
Relevant visual reference: http://www.animatedengines.com/wankel.html
The scenario that he's found is when the two timestamps are actually identical. In that scenario, Cassandra cannot maintain its atomicity guarantee.
I think this comment wins the thread.
Npm origins and Node.js with Isaac Schlueter (Audio)
We knew we wanted a logo that reflected Big Dogs - big, yet also dogs.
If you are interested in dessert island life, this is a wonderful read: "An Island to Oneself" http://www.amazon.com/An-Island-Oneself-Tom-Neale/dp/0918024...
Ruby & Perl use /x to ignore whitespace & comments like this.

eg.

/\d+ # some comment
\w # another comment
/x
FTA:

>Pets live on synthetic diets and are much healthier and long-lived than their wild counterparts.

Assuming this is actually true, I bet the reason for it is more complicated that "See! Synthetic is better! The End". What impact has mankind had on the natural habitat of the animal in question is the first thing that comes to mind.
And it's debatable about living longer when the body is so old that it barely functions. Maybe the lifespan of animals in the wild are exactly "what they're meant to be" given the removal of mankind's interference.
I question the assumption that science's "improvements" on mother-nature are always for the better. Unforeseen consequences and all that.

That being said, I still find this soylent thing to be interesting and I'd like to see how it all turns out. The same way I look at Bitcoin.
I've been mulling how a technology could be used to leverage generalized citizen support in terms of time and money into actual political change. It seems like broad uproar often dissipates without any real change. e.g. protests try to concentrate media attention, but that's really difficult and nothing really happens legislatively until some huge threshold of participation has been reached.

The technology to really focus the agitation might be a website that collects and displays key contextual data vs data of citizen promises of campaign money, voting intent, and/or time resources (for or against an issue).

The key contextual data would be something along the lines of summaries of issues & legislation, showings of each congressional position & vote history (is the rep generally for, against, undeclared vs an issue), key leverage positions (do they sit on comittees, could they be a swing vote between decided congress members?).

It's one thing to see general media coverage of some issue, and get a handful of calls/emails etc, but to see concrete votes and money stacking up on an issue that would be pledged to go into play in the next campaign - that seems like better leverage than protests and letter campaigns. It would be moving the Kickstarter model into a PAC framework.
To further that, I see signs of photo manipulation in the second (after) photograph, i.e., the bizarrely V-shaped torso that is not match by corresponding visible gains in shoulder, chest, or back muscle, the areas of blurring around the suddenly muscular abs, etc. Oddly enough, he even appears to have gained a few inches in height...
>>I am angry with Rhinehart because he have the balls to promote his product with not an iota of attention being paid to the scientific method or any type of rigor for that matter.

Can you point me to a food manufacturer that uses the scientific method to support their ridiculous claims?

Or have you not seen the fine-print on the vast majority of food packaging along the lines of "these claims have not been evaluated by the FDA"?