skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Would anyone speculate on the technical details of what Snowden probably recommended Greenwald do, step by step? What steps would you recommend to Greenwald if you had been in Snowden's position?

It's not enough to merely tell people "install PGP." Snowden presumably went into meticulous detail about precisely how to be completely secure. Even something small like "here is the exact exe installer to download" is probably significant, because that would mean that specific installer is clean and free of NSA tampering.
I can't say this with any authority, but I imagine the NSA would do its damndest to make sure advantages gained from the second method are only enjoyed by the NSA. E.g., jealously guarding information about backdoors and influencing development in ways that only they can or know how to take advantage of.

The incentives are aligned; crypto that only the NSA can compromise is far more valuable to the NSA than crypto that anybody can crack.
Hi,

The uniqueness is in terms of its simplicity and minimalistic nature. The apps which you mentioned are all great.

Running app is just an execution for the same requirements in the minimalistic sense. I agree it will not appeal to everyone, but I am trying to find out if there are any of us who likes such minimalistic apps.
This attitude that "hackers" are all virtuous is a bit naive. I've known talented hackers who were not above taking advantage of another's misplaced trust. Would you leave $1000 in cash unattended on a table at a hackathon? Why would you leave your laptop?
What absurd responses, though hardly unexpected given the story. Rabble rabble rabble!

An institution gains disrepute through many actions over time. This particular action is very small, just as the response is. Hysterical responses as if she were sent the gallows denote a complete inability of so many to discuss a complex topic without instantly jerking to an extreme. But there is no extreme.

And the whole slippery slope thing is simply nonsense. The idea that you represent such institutions when you go out of your way to incant it has been true throughout history.
SCOTUS hasn't spoken on this matter have they?

Actually, it's not clear to me that there is path for NSA-related activities to be considered in the SCOTUS.
Apologies; I deleted my comment because i realized it was not directly addressing your argument.

I will add that while I agree it will certainly be done- I was saying that Mother Jones is arguing the "how" shouldn't have been disclosed because all that we need to know is the "what"- because political avenues are the most suitable avenues for recourse, and do not need the "how".
Switzerland’s most mysterious man
The author, John Gilmore, shared these sorts of stories with me when I was complaining about the NSA intervention on the crypto work I was doing on Java. Sun said I had to have them sign off that we were 'compliant' (which means they would tell the State Department to sign off on our export license) and that was a total PITA. At the time I was working on an end to end loadable strong encryption package [1].

[1] http://patents.justia.com/patent/6546487 - if that looks complex and twisted, it is. The original version wasn't "compliant."
If this is for a Chinese market, there's a good chance that the Chinese prices are higher than US prices (as is typically the case for electronics). From a brief search on taobao.com, it appears as though the average price for a 50" 3D TV there is more on the order of $900, not $500-$600.
The third party exception though has come under increasing scrutiny by the courts more recently. The case which really established it in large measure was California Bankers Association v. Shultz. This is in many ways more important than the pen register case of Smith v. Maryland (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vo...) because pen registers were held in part valid without a warrant due to their lack of intrusiveness, and in part because the information was not only conveyed to a third party, but also how they were used by a third party. In essence Smith v. Maryland held pen registers allowed without a warrant via "legitimate expectation of privacy" analysis of the sort found in Katz v. United States in part because everyone relied on the phone companies collecting this information and that people relied on the phone companies using this information to be able to track back, for example, harassing phone calls. If individuals can track back incoming harassing phone calls, there is no legitimate expectation of privacy when the police look at those records.

The much more concerning line of cases are the banking instrument cases, like US v. Miller (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?navby=volpa...) and California Bankers Association v. Shultz (http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/416/21/) which hold no 4th Amendment protection for banking transaction information.

The problem with communications is that while call detail records fall outside 4h Amendment protection in general, wiretaps require a warrant (see Katz v. United States) and Smith v. Maryland did have dissenters due to the fact that it is hard to draw a line between these two. More recently a circuit split has developed over whether cell site location data is at least potentially protected. The 5th Circuit (which also holds that all airport searches at security checkpoints are necessarily consented to, so presumably random strip and body cavity searches would be Constitutional) says they are not, while the third says they may be. See http://crimeinthesuites.com/circuit-split-brewing-over-gover...

My point is that "knowingly exposed to a third party" is not at all as clear as the page suggests. The reason this line is there is that it is an indication that certain information is not really expected to be secret, but if it was read literally, Katz would have come out very differently and wiretaps would not require a warrant.

Obviously if you write details of your criminal conspiracy on the back of a postcard, you can't complain when the postmaster reads it, but when you put it in an envelope then this would be a search. This sort of line is much harder to draw regarding papers outside that sort of home or mail environment than it is in them, but that's largely what I would describe the difficulty to be. This leads to the question of whether email is like a postcard or like a letter or a phone call and I don't think the answer is clear.

At any rate I would suggest that this is an area of developing law regarding electronic communications and I have been watching interesting developments there just in the last few years.
You know, I was thinking about that too, but I thought I would give the real story :P
Nobody uses Google Plus anymore. It's too crowded :)
Exactly, hehe.
I say it is not protected speech. You ask me to prove it is criminal. I see this discussion is futile.
As a young engineer-type with no exposure to the psych field, I had about the same opinion when I was in my early 20's.

However, a few decades of real life later I've seen first-hand, successes and turnarounds for people who either found themselves in bad situations or were just plain genetically vulnerable. In fact, I'll go as far as saying that counseling or therapy are nothing compared to the difference that the right medication(s) can make in a life. Finding it is hit-or-miss, and there are still people who ultimately can't be helped but there are countless success stories - they just aren't worth reporting, like every time antibiotics work as expected.
Maybe Kevin Drum can provide the government a live encrypted feed of his family's bathroom and bedroom. I'm sure they will only crack the encryption if they think a bad guy is on the video.
> Humans with unchecked access to information (=power) will NEVER be completely trustworthy.

Hey, look. The Internet. Whoops.
> 1. I don't trust them. I honestly believe that if an advertisement ever states anything, the opposite is likely to be true. eg. "Our product helps you lose weight!" I am now convinced this product makes you gain weight.

Uh, ok.
As a guy who struggles with design -- which entirely my own hangup -- I was exited when I clicked on this article. However, I've got to say, reading about design doesn't do much for me -- and I feel like I'm the posts target demographic!

If we're talking about design, I'd argue that "show" is a few orders of magnitude better than "tell." This goes double for when the article begins talking about color usage.

> 3. Colours is the single most important thing of design

The most important thing!? Then why does this section sum up to

A) Use good colors
B) Don't not use good colors.

This is a section ripe for a couple of visual examples, man! Are certain color combinations the equivalent of Comic Sans?

>Just a tip here: not all palettes work well for a presentation. Firstly, some palettes have too much contrast.

I have no idea what that means. Is Black on White out? That's about as high contrast as you can get -- and that was my go-to. Could a guy get an example of too much contrast? Too low contrast?

Help a guy out! :)
The same can be said for every method of communication in history. Security agencies have the technical capabilities to record your telephone conversations, read your mail, and listen to your private conversations. Yet we manage.

There are so many frightening powers out there, trying to prevent them from existing is a complete waste of effort. You simply cannot make it technologically impossible to shoot you with a bullet, or snoop in your house, or track your car. This is why gov't is regulated, and answers to the people. You simply cannot prevent everyone from having the technical capabilities to take the advantage of you.

So, IMO, forget about whether they can or they cannot. Even if you manage to prevent them from breaking strong crypto, if it can be done someone will do it. Focus on controlling what they do with it.
The book "the paradox of choice" by barry schwartz touches the subject (among others) and is an interesting and entertaining read.
I wouldn't mind coupling Wordpress to Varnish, since I'm controlling my particular installation.

An ajax solution isn't a bad idea, though it would mean at least hitting PHP (whereas the Varnish option never gets that far).
It should be noted that Mother Jones is generally regarded as a left-wing magazine - even by Wikipedia's description. [1]

From my understanding left-wing ideology has always placed the interest of the collective, represented by the state, over the interest of the individual. So the article and the author's conclusion seems to me completely in line with this way of thinking.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Jones_(magazine)
So? Fork the driver, it's open source.
And be off-grid? Or just be energy-cost neutral? If you want the latter any number of folks can get 'zero cost' panels put on their roof by agreeing to buy their power from the panel installer instead of PG&E.

Off-grid is harder since there is a ton of maintenance that goes on with battery systems. That said, for a single family detached home, we're getting close to the point where there would be enough volume in the foundation / floor for charge storage in "super" caps. When we were installing the 5.2kV system on our house we looked at Maxell supercaps and it would have added another $122,000 to the install but you could have nominally fit them under the house (about 1800 sq ft of crawlspace). The reason I think such things would be better off being built into the foundation is that you really really don't want a rat to urinate on your system and cause a (brief) short. A lot of energy that can come out way to fast to be safe.
They will not get it to begin with.

1. there will be not many people watching it to begin with.

2. even if there are, it's distributed across so many media goblins install. break down youtube access for (1/3 * number of videos they have) = number of different DMCA requests the MAFIAA lawyers will have to work out. It just will not scale as it does now.
I have a hard time imagining the problems with this. This is a case of the "Chinese Room": The scanning in the advertising isn't 'understanding' what you wrote, so its completely different from if a person was reading your e-mail.

I would like it if one day we could start to make that distinction.
I am building modul.io [1], a “multiplayer sandbox” which allows to setup AI-controlled entities in JavaScript.

[1] https://github.com/lisezmoi/modul.io
Well,

You could say that technically he wants the NSA to secretly have the ability to secretly snoop on anyone but somehow not use it widely despite the complete lack of oversight, the fact that they have done each time they were given the option, etc.
>The previous vaccine was only "safe", and not "very safe." The older vaccine started with blood serum from people who had Hep-B, and purified it so only Hep-B proteins remained. This has a risk of infection should something go wrong in the purification process so that the full virus - or other viruses - somehow get through. This sort of failure would be very risky for newborns.

>But the current vaccine, which is based on a genetically modified form of Baker's yeast, does not come from human sources. Since human viruses aren't in the source material, they can't enter the vaccine. There can still be other failure modes, but the most fatal - introduction of virulent particles directly into a newborn baby - can't happen through a process failure during vaccine manufacturing.

That is interesting and reassuring to learn. Thanks, I will also pass it on to Mrs. Fnord.
I've had similar problems and saw a talk by Heidi Halvorson that reframed it a bit: Instead of trying to stop the "compare to others" behavior, replace the behavior instead with "compare to my own past performance". I've found measuring and hacking your own improvement is a more useful feedback loop.
> Look at what sells at the grocery store....

Correlation isn't necessarily causation and a group observation isn't necessarily applicable to individuals.

It frankly pisses me off when people tell me to stop drinking soda and eating fast food to lose the fat I have right now, and that going to the gym will fix it all. I don't drink much soda. I drink 95% water and unsweetened tea I make at home (jasmine or barley tea bag and one pitcher of water) and the other 5% being milk, juices and soda in that order - and this is a habit I've had for over half my life. Fast food and delivery is generally limited to 1x a week, and I may rely heavily on packaged foods (like trader joes frozen stuffs) but it's usually accompanied with a huge salad with only a little vinaigrette as dressing for a total of 1.5-2k calories a day most days. That's if I even eat much because I'm on Adderall _and_ Alli (the OTC version of xenical) quite literally pooping what little fat I'm eating. I have also gone to the gym anywhere from 2 to 7 times a week with workouts of all sorts, and at some point I even had a trainer looking after me for months as I spent 2-3 hours a day every day with him. And I. look. even. fatter. than. ever. even if I might be able to climb 10 flights of stairs without a sweat and I feel healthy - like how I'm on track to hit 100k steps (w/fitbit - 10k is about 5 miles) this week without much effort. The only thing that I can't do is getting out of my chair more often, and that's because I damaged a nerve after doing so a few months ago. For as long as that's lasted that hasn't done anything noticeable either.

A lot of my friends are in the same boat, and we're all sick of the same advice. There has got to be something in the equation that people are missing where fat is concerned. There are definitely people out there that eat junk food that need to stop, but not every overweight person is the same. The current advice being thrown out there and hammered into our heads isn't very helpful.
I remember a similar sense of joy when i was tinkering with the battlefield 1942 Wake Island Demo, before there were any kind of indication of mod support.

The sheer joy to be able to change simple but undocumented variables to have a plane moving like a jet or having bombs which behaved rocketlike inspired me to learn programming to a deeper degree. Oh the pure joy of exploration and creation.

Later we had flying aircraft carriers which had its fighterplanes "docked" on the sides and would "fall" down towards the battlefield, the fighters had shields which had a blue glow once shot upon...
All scripted ontop of 1942...

Once in a while it would be worth a fortune to be young enough again, not used to thinking in terms of projects, roi, timelines and goals...
That list contains a lot of good advice. However, I did pause at:

3) Money isn’t going to make you much happier. It might make you unhappier.

It's true that above a certain point, money doesn't correlate much with happiness. People are terrible at affective forecasting, so most rich people don't spend their money on things that will make them happy.

If you are wealthy, see the paper "If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right" for some ideas on how to purchase hedons: http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~dtg/DUNN%20GILBERT%20&%20WILSON%...
Computer program uses Twitter to 'map mood of nation'
What needs to happen first is that we need to attain a much deeper understanding of how the brain works on the low and high levels, mechanically and abstractly.

I like this idea. I have one question; in the meantime, while we spend the next five hundred years figuring out the brain (because as we already know, it is wildly complex and we know almost nothing about it), what do we do with the people who really need psychiatric help? Can we hang them out to dry, or would that be too cold?
Bad headline. Here's what he actually said:

"Our team (FreeS/WAN) built the Linux implementation of IPSEC, but at least while I was involved in it, the packet processing code never became a default part of the Linux kernel, because of bullheadedness in the maintainer who managed that part of the kernel. Instead he built a half-baked implementation that never worked. I have no idea whether that bullheadedness was natural, or was enhanced or inspired by NSA or its stooges."
Consumer encryption products employ "strong encryption". There's no difference between the two - this isn't the 90s.

If you're worried some specific product isn't enough, you have to say which one it is.
Other sources:
http://www.lematin.ch/faits-divers/loyon-rire/story/25650014
And here is the link to the real content:
http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg123...
Here you go: http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/events

Looks sparse but I don't think the academic year's started yet, scroll back to last spring and it looks like the real departmental calendar.

Could just be you're SOL on the type of stuff you want at UC. That's academic life.
I also wouldn't mind a 3D monitor for the computer also just for the neat immersion that can be had for games and such.

If that's what you want, then you'll absolutely love an Occulus Rift.
Your comment seems reasonable, but you don't speak to the elephant in the room: who the NSA spies on. It's not supposed to be "everyone."
You could skip the depressive nostalgia-inducing (and not in a good way) Slashdot thread, and link the source:

http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg123...

Although, that had just been submitted by danieldk:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6346531

So maybe you had a reason to make us sift through /. noise.
Don't forget about the hedonic treadmill.
> This looks like a decent article

Their stats don't line up with the final cost to the consumer. Going by average LA energy costs

http://www.bls.gov/ro9/cpilosa_energy.htm

'Los Angeles area households paid an average of 20.3 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity in July 2013, up from 19.3 cents per kWh in July 2012.'

Whereas, according to the linked article,

> 1 ton of coal costs $36 = $0.006 per KWH | 1 barrel of oil costs $70 = $0.05 per KWH | 1 cubic foot of gas $0.008 = $0.03 per KWH

Which may well be true, to the people with the powerplants, - but consumers can take advantage of the price of solar much more directly.

Assuming that we buy into their stats about the price of solar, (which I'm now a bit reluctant to do,) things look a bit happier; more like 1.7 times the price rather than twenty or thirty times.
One thing I really hope Hugo pushes is international availability of the MI2S and the Hongmi smartphones. The former is a handsome 4.3in 720p phone with a quad-core Snapdragon processor, and is one of the thinnest (in terms of width, not depth) 720p Android smartphones which retails for about $300 USD. The Hongmi is a 4.7in 720p device that is retailing in China for ~$130 USD off contract. Even with a modest markup to support the international distribution, the Hongmi could make waves in the low-cost and prepaid smartphone market here in the United States.
Also Colobot (and CeeBot, etc.) from http://www.ceebot.com/.
Yes, there have been for-profit "social-minded" startups such as Amicus (s12):

http://amicushq.com
The Russian president rides a bear. You can't criticize that.
we need facts, the list of compromised ciphers, the bugs they are exploiting etc

More than that, we need the names of those involved.
Because thats what Ubuntu needs, more fragmentation, and a little less contribution
Ask HN: Looking for a co-founder?
Appliciations have opened for YC Winter 2014: http://ycombinator.com/apply.html#w2014

As per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6341565, here's a thread for co-founder pitches.

"[Your pitch] should include what type of roles you can do as a founder, which roles your future co-founder should fulfill, and your location. Also a general description of your idea, what you've built so far, and your technology stack."
> But the thought of students having to censor themselves because they are now a member of a school (which they paid $50k+ to join) is scary.

Um. This has basically been true throughout the entire history of law schools. The only significant difference is the amount they paid to get in.
Some different thoughts about android kitkat
All I see here is a lot of claims with zero evidence. And some of those points e.g. a non encrypted mode seem entirely reasonable for testing purposes.

And wouldn't end to end encryption be pointless if you are trying to secure a mobile connection since the NSA has hooks into the provider's core infrastructure ?
it seems much of a muchness?
I don't like ads and prefer content without them, however I've never thought that the act of avoiding them was taking a stand or anything like that. It's interesting though to hear someone's justification for it. What are your thoughts on pirating content? I would guess you also hold some strong views on the righteousness of that.
So why isn't the repo up to date?

I honestly don't know the answer as I don't deal with Linux repo's much
The New Science of Mind
See, this is the kind of security thinking I can get behind. The kind of realist thinking that says "Ok, we should just assume we've been compromised by every major government entity. Now what."
I think this is notable because Intel as a company is taking this stand against Canonical. Canonical in the long run is going to need support from the other two major graphics hardware vendors to make this work well. Having Intel already come out against it isn't a good start.
That philosophy is going to wear a bit thin by the time USB 8 comes along.
How is it spam? The whole point of "Show HN" is showing off products people have made. What could you have possibly expected clicking on a Show HN with ebook in the title?
U.S. Intelligence Officers: Syrian Government Didn’t Launch Chemical Weapons