skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There has always been suspicion, but nothing close to proof. Now that there is close to proof that the NSA has been inserting weaknesses for themselves (unlike the DES S-Box modifications they made which actually strengthened it) The Clipper proposal seemed to suggest the NIST/NSA was interested in strong cryptosystems with explicit, transparent backdoors, and they also had the export limitations, so many non-conspiracy theory people assumed the NSA was more interested in cryptanalyzing foreign communications and keeping our domestic cryptosystems out of foreign hands.

What used to be long held cryptoanarchist conspiracy theories are no longer so far fetched, as now the NIST/NSA is more concerned with targeting the existing communication networks of friendly western democracies/domestic intercept, on which terrorists may piggyback, instead of foreign non-aligned powers.

That is, the greatest threat is no longer foreign comm networks and cryptosystems, but domestic. We have become the adversary.

Anyway, what do you call AES? It was selected as the winner by the NIST and it has widespread industry adoption.
There are email clients that execute JavaScript?
The kid in me loves it but simulation speed would be an issue. I don't know exactly what the simulation slowdown for circuits is, but just to give an idea, in a classroom setting, you're probably waiting a couple seconds for a simulation of a couple microseconds. Of course, this depends on factors such as simulation accuracy and circuit complexity, but it's unlikely you'd be able to scale up to robots. Intel processors take hours (days?) to simulate a couple seconds of operation at the circuit level.
The vast, vast majority of them run Windows. Microsoft and the NSA have been buddies for quite awhile now.
That's not a terminology abuse, that's a hilarious misunderstanding of social norms.
I think there's a very good reason why pg and the editors actively curate HN (eg: blocking certain sites from submission) and don't let democracy do its thing: it doesn't stand a chance against Eternal September.

(Besides which: those publications, like this story, aren't all that interesting from an intellectually gratifying perspective.)
Different things work for different people, I guess. I think the clocks have two points, both aimed at simulating the conditions we evolved in--one, they turn on gradually, and two, they wake you up with light rather than noise. I personally don't care about the first point--my timed light flips on while I'm still asleep, I wake up gradually, and at the point when, in a dark room, I'd probably come up from a doze, roll over, and go back to sleep, I notice it looks like daylight in my room and get up. In fact, I prefer this, because the sunrise alarm clocks I've used haven't been bright enough to feel like dawn instead of a lamp.

Yeah, you don't get all the benefits of a sunrise alarm clocks, and it might not work for everyone. It's a hack to get some of the benefits at a lower cost, that's all.
Ah, yeah smartphone and desktop apps don't do js(afaik) - but the web-browser access is still big. If gmail's web interface went down for a day, I think a lot of people would notice.
It's unclear what the NSA thinks it's doing.

Backdooring the RNG, if they can keep the trapdoor secret(and the NSA would think that, despite the fact that given Snowden, it seems they have some security problems), doest obviously weaken security against foreign attackers who don't have the key unless they can solve the discrete log problem. Plus, it's possible(I think likely) they didn't intend for it to be widely used( it's slow as hell after all and they knew that), but wanted it on systems so they could swap it out for targeted attacks.

Weakening crypto standards(as the NYT reported), on the other hand, seems very counter productive. Though I suppose from the NSA's point of view, it depends which standards. Screwing with IPSEC would seem to hurt US national security and they've been accused of doing that. Screwing with the encryption standards of mobile phone voice communications, on the other hand, would seem to have a far lower consequence.
[petition] New Australian Government: Please retain FTTH National Broadband
You are the equivalent of a tin foil hat as a rape prevention tool.
> It's one thing to say something about a country(France & Prussia), it's another thing to talk about a race(Africans).

Africa is a continent. There are white Africans. If I had said, black people, that would be different, however I did not. I did not because the OP mentioned Africans and I was only pointing out that his statement about a generalization of an entire continent (he implied most Africans cannot be different from most other humans, which is already untrue even if you consider just skin color). However, had the OP stated what he stated and used "black people" instead of "Africans," I would have still asked the same question. Because he still would have made a generalization that he could not possibly know.

> How far down this endless rabbit-hole are we going to go? I can't prove to you the nature of any group of people, anymore than you can prove to me that you're not just another racist/troll that always shows up during conversations about Africa or African-Americans on Google+

Exactly. You can't prove that it's not a trait. That's all I'm questioning. Btw, I can't prove I'm not a racist to you, but I can prove that I have not yet made a racist remark. By YouTube's definition, I have not made an insulting remark based on a generalization of a race. Just because I don't agree with the author's assertions, does not necessarily mean I agree with the opposite assertion (that Africans are more corrupt and warlike). I have not made the claim or generalization that Africans, or black people, are more corrupt or warlike. Just because you are insulted, does not mean what I have said is actually insulting.

That being said, I'm sorry if it offended you, but I stand by my point. All I wanted to say was that the OP himself made a generalization. And I tried pointing it out with a question that might have made me look like I was making a racist remark... but I was just pointing out the fallacy in his claim by implying the opposite could be true..
Welcome to EE lab. In one lab as an undergrad, my partner and I found that we could get our circuit to work by attaching a capacitor with one end to our circuit and one end to a random place on the breadboard. It made for a bit of a funny circuit diagram in the write-up where one end of this capacitor was connected to nowhere.
Details? It is hard to provide advice to an amorphous product.
That was not done by a "Google Researcher". That was done by an independent human who happens to also work at Google. And there are valid arguments in favor of releasing 0day.
That's shitty but the only annoying thing IE ships with by default is the tutorial to set up stupid things, and on servers a high security whitelist-only mode on by default.
You do realize that users with sufficient karma can flag articles here, right?
I've been a jerk plenty of times, and those are my problem and I feel badly about them. I try to be a better person through introspection, patience, and humility.
All interfaces are poor to people who don't know anything about the computer in front of them! The other day I pointed out to the mother of my daughter she can actually type in the address bar instead of googling every domain lol.
I don't think you understand what the term 'copyright troll' means.
DigitalOcean is your option. For, static assets suggest you route through CloudFlare / self hosted ngnix.
Well this is just great. Whenever the NSA head, General Keith Alexander is asked whether the NSA has the capability to do <fill in the blank>, he responds by saying that the NSA is not authorized to do <fill in the blank> So now it turns out that the NSA doesn't even know what is authorized.

Once again, he didn't outright lie, but he evaded and used a completely misleading verbal formulation.
was that a press conference after the event because in the event they were clearly shown (and mentioned) to be over the original iPhone with the added claim that half of the total improvement so far is over the iPhone 5 ( a very roundabout way of saying the performance has doubled as compared to the previous iPhone)
When I saw 'new details' (edit: this was referring to an old title), I was hoping that the backdoor in Dual_EC_DRBG was either confirmed or denied ... in reality, there's not much new here. The NYT confirmed that their previous article was talking about Dual_EC_DRBG, but that's what everyone (edit: in the cryptography community) expected anyway [1].

We still don't know the exact story behind Dual_EC_DRBG. Maybe the NSA carefully crafted the DRBG to contain a backdoor that they knew from the outset. Maybe they didn't notice the backdoor until later (perhaps after cryptographers pointed it out) but ended up discovering the 'key' that allows you to predict the stream, completely breaking the DRBG (this is very unlikely, however). Or maybe they're no better off than the general public.

Annoyingly, there are no concrete details. Internal memos "appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency". In the latest NYT article, the internal memos "suggest that the N.S.A. generated one of the random number generators used in a 2006 N.I.S.T. standard". (What "generated" really means here is beyond me; obviously the constants were generated somehow. The question is whether or not they were generated with malicious intent. Is the 'generated' part quoted/paraphrased from the memos?)

Now I'm not saying that the NSA didn't have some malicious intent with Dual_EC_DRBG. But we have a stunning lack of any evidence. Internal memos 'appear to confirm' and 'suggest', but the bits provided from them are... lacking. Things certainly seem fishy, but we don't even know the context of the quotes.

I don't know. It certainly wouldn't surprise me if Dual_EC_DRBG was engineered to have a backdoor, but all of the articles I've read seem to carefully use weasel words when talking about it.

[1] http://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/10258/2454
Both my brother and I have done a fair bit of IT consulting and have always either been told or found out along the way.

Anytime I've been employed to provide services, it has always helped me do my job to know exactly what value we were providing to both our customers and our business.

It has always been my experience that the more business-minded employees are significantly better at doing their jobs and that the ones who tend to waste company time/money also have the poorest business-sense.

The companies that don't want you to know this don't want you to have enough information to ask for what you're really worth. It also tends to negatively affect the client as well. I don't want to work for any company that behaves like this.
Once-lost Star Wars-related short to screen for the first time in 33 years
For any practical purpose, there is no limit on our supply of plastic bottles. They are incredibly cheap to make and the raw materials are incredibly abundant.

> Low-cost is not no-cost, and digital copies made by someone else are actually no-cost.

They're not actually no-cost, it's just that the costs are indirect so it's easy to lose track of them. For example, I'd be interested to see someone make and use a digital copy without a computer and electricity, both of which cost money. Distribution takes an Internet connection and servers, which cost money too.
Hello, thanks for your feedback. PUT is coming to Eve with v0.1.0 (next release).
the big majority of the people in this thread seems to lack the understanding that whats is really bad by this new wave of walled gardens created by apple, is not only about inly closed software anymore.. its against to let someone to decide by you what is good or not.. if they dont like something, or is politically incorrect, you will never have the chance to choose for yourself! im not talking about virus, and malware.. but political matters..

we got several problems with this approach.. one is the monopoly of one.. the centralization.. this is bad economically and politically .. since the bad guys the ones who have the apple in their pockets already could own whatever apple has..

the other big implication, something unnaceptable for me.. is the fact they can do whatever they want remotelly from their central with something that you bough with your own money and SHOULD BE YOURS, its your property.. you do whatever you want with it... do you wanna sell a music you bought to somebody else.. can you? can you choose a app with artistic nude , because its your choice??

its not just about now, its about the future.. its about the freedom of the future generations.. i think all of this moves from any company ridiculous.. and by paying for this you are paying for the society failure in stand against something will take our liberties away..

its a pretty phone with a big trap inside of it... corporations are taking a ground they should not trespass
and the problem is that others big companies just follow..

dont worry, they are your friends.. they will protect you!
while this community in 100% in terms of technology wisdom , its visible the lack of critical thinking of so many people is this thread.. its pretty sad
With RC4 being used to mitigate beast, we need a solution soon for the web, because RC4 is falling apart http://www.isg.rhul.ac.uk/tls/
> If the NSA can break 2048-bit RSA, it would be a Big Deal

2048-bit is nothing. Here's why:

1. A great mathematician can find shortcuts. Tons of great mathematicians working in parallel will find them faster.

2. A fast processor can eventually brute force a key. Millions of fast processors working in parallel will find it faster.

You are talking about a well-known method with a determinate algorithm. May as well just hand them a cake, because they are going to eat that up.

Why use encryption mechanisms they've trained us to believe in and use? And how could be beat them at a game where they hold all of the talent and power? The only answer is to have dark encryption methods that are not shared, and that change frequently, frequently enough so there is no group of mathematicians with millions of servers that could determine the constantly changing algorithms.
How I use python to start dissect the Jazz
Note these number os occurrencies: D=32, G=29, A=21, Bb=25, B=25, C=25. This is a Blues in D. Because, we have some elements of Blues scale: The tonic note (D) is more present in the music, the third degree is G. And we have some elements of Bebop Scale: The sequence Bb, B and C have a lot occurrences in these places. In Bebop it's a common thing. So, All Blues is a mix of Blues and Bebop Jazz. Is that right?! ;-)
> Microsoft's racist facial recognition
Hah, I thought it was using infrared
I'd just go with DigitalOcean and serve up the static assets with nginx until that is no longer tenable (longer than you think).
Golf clap, anyone? Anyone?

This is a huge confidence builder. Huge.
I do realize that, which is why I said 'user-visible'. Flagging as HN currently has it can be used for moderation purposes, and for downvotes in extreme situations. But a user-visible flag would provide a warning to users that an article is fluff or otherwise problematic, and possibly attract more discriminating attention.
Good point, but it's probably at least as secure as a four digit pass-code that everyone around you can see.
Pretty much always this. I don't think I've ever seen that multiplier been less than 4x.
... then you've probably never used this phone :)
http://www.oebl.de/D-Netz/Geraete/Siemens/P1/P1.JPG

(IIRC this was the phone with the full size sim card)
I just came across PopVox:

https://www.popvox.com

Pardon my ignorance, but is this startup well-known? It seems like a pretty good concept.
These kind of stories annoy me, because none of them ever give me enough information to understand the significance of their numbers.

In any wealth distribution other than everyone having the exact same wealth, it is mathematically necessary that the top X% have more than X% of the wealth. The same observation applies within wealth groups, so for example the top 25% of the middle third wealth group must have more than 25% of that group's wealth unless everyone in that group has exactly the same wealth.

When you apply this recursively, things accumulate at the top and and the bottom end. For instance, if within each wealth group the top 50% has 60% (which seems to me likely to be flatter than reality), then for the whole group the top 1% would have 5.6% of the wealth. If the top 50% of each group has 75% of that group's wealth, then the top 1% of the whole group would have 19.7% of the overall wealth.

Given this, I have no idea whatsoever whether I should react to this kind of article with outrage or indifference.
Hello, there's a third party tool called Eve-Docs http://blog.python-eve.org/eve-docs. It is a work in progress, and looks promising.
This was exactly my thought after having seen a documentary about how Nestle does business
I have my Bash set to vi keybindings, but I had no idea it was possible to remap them. Now I can finally stop hitting escape in Bash too. Thank you so much!
The 5S let's you add other people's thumbprints in addition to your own to unlock the phone.
Given how much word-of-mouth business they must get, I'd hope that there would be strong disincentives against scumminess of that sort.
I'm 2 years into development of my sandbox game, Moonman
dont think this article suits in HN
Wow. Give me a break, please. What the OP reported was a super minor issue, and he's already got what he deserves.

His bug allowed him to inject links into verification emails sent by Google Scholar. He claimed that he could inject CSS links too, but that didn't make this problem any worse. Why? Because it's up to mail clients to load the linked CSS stylesheets or not. Gmail, for example, would never load those remote CSS files. If your webmail client does that, it's time to switch to a better one.

So he could inject links, which is annoying, but still a very minor issue. It may make phishing a bit easier, but you know what phishing has always worked against average Joe if you try hard enough. That means that this problem doesn't really give an attacker any advantages that he couldn't do by himself.

Disclaimer: I'm a member of the team that handles VRP.
Sorry wasn't trying to be un-chilled. I just realized that my original message intent was ambiguous. David and others were drilling down on the details of the job categories, which was incidental to my main claim which was that US employers view H-1B visa holders as employees at a discount. There are some ineffective efforts that try to prevent this from being the case but as others have pointed out too many employers game the job description and get the future employee to go along with the charade. Which they do because the immigrant is getting compensated in two ways, both by getting a visa and by getting a job.

My thesis is that if employers were required to pay immigrant workers 'market wage', they would no longer be seeing a 'shortage' of tech workers. If I were an immigrant worker I'd be quite irritated by this abuse but understand that many consider it the cost of getting a visa.
Too little, too late.

This is like a criminal promising he won't do it again, but only AFTER been caught and having the entire town surround him with pitchforks.
Thanks Hacker News for keeping me sane during that time. :)
>For any practical purpose, there is no limit on our supply of plastic bottles. They are incredibly cheap to make and the raw materials are incredibly abundant.

The raw resources for bottles are abundant, but it requires labor to make and transport them. Labor is not free, so bottled water remains scarce. If robot swarms will refill and restock bottles for you, then you can take one off a shelf.

>They're not actually no-cost, it's just that the costs are indirect

None of those come out of the pocket of the person being copied. I guess I was too unclear about specifying made by someone else. When we're talking about a '''theft''' scenario, the burden imposed on the person being '''stolen''' from is very important, and when it comes to digital copies they are uninvolved in the action and have no costs at all.
> that's what everyone expected anyway

This one sentence is a _remarkably easy way_ to kill a story for the 99.9% of the world who this is news for.

"Everyone" indeed.
I really wish MS had a 'Trust me, turn all security off' or some variance of the same option.
Funny: Amazon (and Newegg) were actually the sites I thought of that do this very well. I can shop around, add things to cart, get recommendations based on my shopping history, everything really, until checkout time. At that point it becomes reasonable to make an account.

If Amazon did what a lot of sites do that I come across -- that is shove a monsterous sign-in form first thing then start asking me for referrals -- that would be a total turn off.
That was a poorly written response.

"Your clients are important to you", etc.
Much respect for what you're doing. I think this is exactly the right approach to take.

I might be willing to take a little bit more risk than you would but I'm also a lot more willing to fire people early (see here: http://www.defmacro.org/2013/07/10/firing.html)

So many companies and their HR departments desire to just fill seats for the short term needs of the company rather than invest in efficiency and protect the long-term needs of the business.
> Your definition of domain expertise seems self-referential. If you define it as "knowing everything which makes a business in this area successful".

Your if is a big, incorrect one.

Expertise is defined as "expert skill or knowledge in a particular field." It does not mean "knowing everything which makes a business in [a particular industry] successful." There is no way of knowing whether a new business will be successful, but I think most reasonable people would agree with the statement, "An experienced individual who knows a thing or two about the industry he's in almost certainly has a better chance of being successful than a person who knows very little."

> Can you explain why chipotle and chobani are massively successful?

Chipotle was founded by Steve Ells, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America who worked as a chef before he opened the first Chipotle.

Chobani was founded by Hamdi Ulukaya. He worked on a dairy farm his parents owned as a child and ran a cheese company prior to starting Chobani.

I can't respond to your meandering analyses of these companies, which seems to be based more on assumption and personal perception than fact. But if you believe that the experiences and domain expertise of these two successful founders did not help them spot opportunity and did not contribute greatly to their success, we'll have to agree to disagree.
Which one are they not taking pre-orders on? The 5S.
It is impossible with any phone today. Unless you made it from the scratch yourself.
It's too fucking late. Government, we don't trust you anymore. You're not a part of us. For once, I'm ashamed of being an American.
It reminds me of Aero's little antennas each receiving broadcast television which they then re-stream over the net. A nice hack on the ToS!