skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A USB stick could be anything, but if it is simply a proper USB mass storage device, it, by itself, can not execute code on the host machine.

To execute code on the host machine, either the host machine has to be stupid (like many Windows versions that try to automatically execute code from plugged-in devices without user interaction) or the device has to be malicious, trying to exploit weaknesses in the host machine.

----

Now, for the files being put on these sticks, there are probably many opportunities to inject a trojan.
Not sure what the author is after here. I mean he's not breaking any news, he admits as much, he also links to some of the articles that were published weeks ago that do a better job of discussing the security/convenience trade offs. Seems like he missed the furore at the the time and decided to compensate with a woefully inaccurate and baiting headline.
Sounds like it would be pretty easy to steal your data.
Media probably explain economics just as terrible but as a non economist I would not know..
Works for me. It's the cable most portable/USB hard disks come with.
But they didn't have to design it in such a way as to share the passwords with google. All your data could be encrypted with your google account's password (or some other secret derived from it) on the device and backed up encrypted. When you enter your account password on a new device, it then downloads the encrypted data and decrypts and restores it. Same user experience without exposing private data.
Can't you achieve the same thing with a cable whose data lines just aren't connected to the jack? Why do you need a whole circuit?
I don't understand why some people here are defending Fox News. Their explanations are terrible and incorrect. Here's another attempt to explain those same terms in laymen terms:

repository: a collection of files relating to one software project usually containing software code and documentation

to fork: to create an exact copy of someone else's repository with the intention of editing the files in that repository

pull request: asking for the changes in a forked repository to be incorporated back into the original repository

Granted, these wouldn't fit the screen which makes me think of someone actually explaining it to them in proper terms and then the journalist cutting everything out to makeit fit.
> A very minor part of it comes from mineral water: there are those who think that if tap is good enough for them then no one should use the bottled kind. A rather more serious part of it comes from the production of baby formula.

This is garbage writing that's misleading to boot. The issues with Nestlé and water are much more about its pursuit of water rights at the expense of local populations. These are hardly frivolous concerns. One day you wake up and find that globalization has priced water outside of your income bracket.
This is very much what I feel every single time I read a tech-related article in mainstream press. The cluelessness of most mainstream "tech journalists" is spectacular. I see no reason why reporting on other matters would be any better, which is quite scary.
Well, I suspect that most tech companies don't really want to give in to the NSA. Twitter have been better though, I do agree.

However, on the sponsorship of the Apache foundation, you may wish to peruse http://www.apache.org/foundation/thanks.html for the list of sponsors. You'll note that Twitter are Bronze, while Goog and FB are Platinum (along with Microsoft, oddly enough).
Do we know that's not happening? The article says "they can decrypt them, given only a Gmail address and password" which implies that it would be encrypted with your password.
There are external batteries for phones, when you charge through them I think no data will be lost.
Why does that audience need to know what fork and pull are? It isn't really useful information to them. Knowing that Github is a place to store versions of code might be useful because the name is batted around a lot, but the average non-technical human doesn't really need to know what forking is.

Here is my try:

Repository: a library of computer codes

Forked: when you copy one of the books in the library, make changes to it, and put it back in the library

Pull Request: asking the owner of the book in the library to combine your forked, edited book, back into their main copy
People generally won't be confronted with Nestle's questionable practices though, so it's likely a non issue. At any rate enough people either don't know, or don't care to make KitKat a popular enough brand for Google to do well out of it.
University of Southern Maine (USM) says physics major is underused, will be cut
Worlds First Invisible Skyscraper
Spelling errors? Check.

Bad grammar? Check.

Inconsistent formatting? Check.

Technical inaccuracies? Check.

Making up terminology (e-note)? Yep.

I've never once watched Fox News, but I've heard stories about their quality of reporting. Now I understand.
Hey, I wasn't claiming practical quantum computers existed. Just that, at whatever point running Shor's algorithm becomes practical, RSA will be pointless.
Elon Musk warned a year ago: A 'Tsunami Of Hurt'
Agree on the Dell Website, it's atrocious. Trying to get prices on servers a couple of months ago was agonisingly slow. Somehow managed to crash my browser repeatedly too (we're stuck on IE7 at work).
Just a small reminder that you don't need to touch Solaris specifically. There's a heavily-developed OSS fork named illumos out there too. Some of illumos' distros are nicer than Solaris ever was.
FUNDEC Realiza Curso de Projeto de Obras Marítimas e Portuárias
Of course you could avoid the responsibility of the company by simply not hiring people, and raising your prices until the demand for your work fits how much work you can do. And that may leave you more time and money to do what you really wish you could do.

Personally I became freelancer to work on my own ideas. I do paid jobs for others, but it's the time between those jobs that it's really about for me. Working for someone else, I never had that freedom. Now I do. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good.
the trick with humor outside your main field is detecting it.
I was like: "isn't AES a symmetric stuff ?" for a few second.

the other trick is naming thing: why would such a vague name like "Advanced Encryption Standard" designate specifically symmetric cipher?
Drug addiction: The complex truth
I would hardly think bar culture is a good example of gender equality of any sort.
As you say, in fact, disrespect a woman in any way and a stranger will probably knock you out. That's barbarism, right down to the preferential treatment and free speech oppression at best.

Even so, why is gender brought up? The author only used it initially as an example of issues in the tech world.

If you want to go there though, bars are the least inclusive (of non-stereotypes) because of the effects of alcohol; promoting our more "savage" traits.
Personal experience.
yes, but to be fair, this issue deserves to be more well known. it wont be fixed if google isn't blamed and shamed for it repeatedly.
I've seen post-selection demonstrated in a laboratory. It definitely isn't just a philosophical construct, except inasmuch as what it says about time making people want it to be less than real, and logic doesn't work that way.

As for whether you could make a PostBQP-capable computer, though.. I don't think so, at least in the most general case. I don't understand this nearly well enough to be sure, but from what I've heard, tricking causality like that has the problem that you're increasing the chance of your circuitry failing right along with the chance of getting the right result, and quantum computers are already hard enough.
Oh god not this again.
Rep... Reciprosity.

Oh my god...
Learn to Code by Competitve Programming
Google also knows all the secrets of General David Petraeus, or anyone else that uses Gmail. And everything you've (secretly) searched for.

Google's business model is based on aggregating that information and gaining value out of the data, mostly in the form of advertising. As soon as it lets a major secret out, even just once, it's game over, and no-one will ever trust a secret to Google again. This is why they publish videos saying that no-one can ever walk out of a Google data centre with a hard drive.

I continue to use the services I use because I find the benefit I gain from them, more useful than the potential risk of exposure.

Should these secrets be encrypted? If they were, it would be possible for Google to steal your key if they wanted to. This is the same kind of perception problem that led to the Chrome team being hauled over the coals in public for not encrypting saved passwords. They have to be available to be useful, but people would rather perceive they weren't available.
If you are into unprotected charging, then that's up to you.
At first I thought it was a device which would prevent an infected computer from writing malware to the inserted flash drive, as a hardware antivirus.
List of Wall Street CEOs prosecuted for the financial crisis
this kind of seems like a way to advertise the conference, but well done anyway
It might be a bit smaller, but the concept has been around a long time (I use my external hard-drive's cable):

http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Achar...
It's actually very serious. Just like ATMs, power stations can look completely harmless while being incredibly dangerous under the surface. Once you connect to a system via USB, it automatically allows data transfer, which makes your smartphone vulnerable to malware and data theft.

I can't speak for Android, but iOS 7 now has an automatic warning when you connect to new devices that asks if it should be trusted, presumably to mitigate this risk. However, I doubt anything less than a full hardware solution can actually eliminate the risk entirely.

There's a reason why conferences like DefCon warn you explicitly not to use power stations or ATMs nearby - they can be hijacked very easily.
Line #1: 80 chars, Line #2: 35 chars, Line #3: 78 chars. I'd go for something like:

* Repository: Folder containing files of source code for programs, anyone can edit

* Forked: A copy of another repository

* Pull Request: Ask for included changes to be added to original file

Folders, files, programs and source code are concepts almost any computer user would understand, although it is not entirely accurate, the constraints aren't good. Took liberties with "anyone can edit", maybe "people can edit" would be more accurate.
For those who didn't click through everything: This devices is an adapter that cuts the data lines for a USB connection.

Such a device will most probably restrict the device (if it properly implements charging) to a maximum charging current of 100mA. The data lines are used for identifying the maximum current allowed.
Pride can have positive connotations, vanity not.
if you like the entry, check out part 1 of social media and sports: www.fanpictor.com/de/blog/2013/8/21/social-media-and-sports
More like the time they convinced women in third world countries to use formula over breast milk, gave them poor instructions on using it that resulted in hundreds of infant deaths, then subsequently withdrew the formula these women now depended on as their breasts no longer produced milk, and hundreds more babies died...
Why not render the current line in HTML too?
Your "usb stick" could be a usb keyboard which changes your password and sets a new one, even sending the data over a 3g connection to an adversary.
What have you done that less than a thousand people have done? I'm always interested in learning about awesome things to do.
Because you don't know that you can just cut the data wires in a cheap USB cable, and want to be 'protected' by a cool hipster toy that'll sit in your laptop/phone baggie until you're at some party and can shout in triump when someone plugs in their phone 'just to charge': "NO, USE MY USB CONDOM!!"

EDIT: if this thing actually had some diagnostic LED's that would show you that the 'power port' was trying to do something nefarious on the data lines, it'd be a lot more useful than an ultra-cheap snipped cable imho ..
For convenience, most people won't opt out of it. Most people won't bother at all. Google employees(or even NSA if you don't do anything illegal) coming to your home/office to use your WiFi is a joke! Only the paranoid ones are perturbed by these kinds of revelations, and they are ready to face the inconvenience caused.

I didn't use last pass until recently when keeping a difficult password on every site became a major pain given that countless numbers of password enforcing rules are there on the web some requiring at least one caps, some enforcing using at least one symbol but not using a ~ or a # yeda yeda. I gave up on it. Every damn time I had to reset password on services I use less frequently. But now I don't.
Although LastPass claims that they keep the passwords encrypted and they themselves can not read them. But I don't believe them. Login to lastpass.com. Click your vault on top right corner. Click the pencil against any site in the list. Click the 'show' link in front of password field. And your password is staring at you in plain text. And it has been accessed at lastpass.com. Once they start storing master passwords, or once someone cracks their hash you are done with.
But there is no simple and easy alternative. To get the job done we need to make these sacrifices.
I disagree. I think it's just spreading ignorance. I think there are ways to explain stuff in a simple way without having to neglect the actual accuracy of the information you're giving.
Postgres' HSTORE is as document oriented as Mongo.

I have used Mongo plenty and I really don't want to do it again. With its almost-safe writes it's extremely slow and no simpler to use than Postgres. Also much less flexible, basically a subset of Postgres' data model.
'Blamed and shamed'?! I don't even think it's an issue, your wifi password isn't that of your bank account. They store your emails unencrypted for crying out loud, wifi passwords pale in comparison. It's a non issue.
Well, like everything else .. Marketers are betting on the laziness of people.

Why tell someone he can lose weight by working out and eating less, when you can sell them a pill that makes them lose weight while they sleep and get abs in 7 minutes?

Why learn programming in several years, when you can "learn programming in three days".

Why tell people to be cautious with their data, not to click on everything, when you can sell them a "condom" that enables them to remain reckless and careless and lazy ?
Here is the full video: http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/2667694577001/writing-new-dic...

Warning: cringeworthy
What Are People Better At (Than Computers)
The average non-technical person doesn't know what code is, or that code is versioned. Telling them Github stores code isn't very useful without first telling them what code is. I'm going to say at least 50% of people don't even have a conceptual understanding of what software even is. I've learned this from having conversations with various people.

Relating it to library books is interesting...
I agree that it's unlikely Google as a whole would decide to read/use confidential data. on the other hand, the idea that someone w/in Google might abuse their position is completely plausible.

if we know that people at the NSA were passing around phone sex calls by US troops, do you really want to keep trusting that no-one at Google will ever do anything problematic w/ yr data?

edit: to be clear, I use Google services all the time & store a lot of confidential data w/ them. but there need to be institutional (whether at Google or outside it) safeguards that go beyond trusting a company as a whole to always behave in a way compatible w/ its own rational self-interest.
Blamed and shamed for what? I suspect most people are more than happy that they can carry their existing settings across to a new 'phone and it Just Works™...
> And, although they have never said so directly, it is obvious that Google can read the passwords.

Frustrating then that it's so hard for users to reveal the password being used by their phone to connect to a WIFI hotspot.
And in addition to that they have the audacity to not make them accessible to the user! No way to look up your own wireless password in your phone, i.e. to tell a guest, thats just ridiculous.
"The night I was born, all of the screens in the hospital went blue"
It's an OS issue, not a medium issue. That is, any storage medium is a risk.

USB is particularly interesting because a single USB device can turn into a hub or a completely different device at runtime. So you can have a USB flash drive suddenly become say a keyboard and start typing stuff in.
What it's like to be Internet famous
That's not the problem - choosing to give up your own secrets is fine, but giving up the wifi password of your friend's router because they kindly let you use the network whilst visiting is not cool at all. I personally refuse to allow access by friends with Android devices, and they are shocked to learn what Google does when I explain why...
But they spelled it "reposotory." That's pretty bad.
That's not an argument. There's no reason why cp shouldn't report progress if you want to. Not one.
Or we could all just realize that for the time and effort of trying to write a backdoor into a general purpose CPU, which would need huge amounts of memory to be remotely capable of keeping track of code execution and to correctly make an OS remotely exploitable (you know, involving the network stack, probably TCP/IP and other things) rather then just crashing it...that it easier just to email someone an executable saying "I love you.exe" and wait for them to run it.

This is looking through the microscope to determine whether a forest is on fire.
Xiaomi's Minos: distributed deployment & monitoring for Hadoop, HBase, ZooKeeper
You can stick a resistor on the data lines to pretend to be a high-power charger.
I know it's popular here to bash on non-technology people.

And yes, apparently Fox News is terrible (I wouldn't know, I'm Australian).

But seriously, there are people outside our circle, for whom computers are not their every waking moment.

Heck, I know people for whom using a featurephone is the most advanced "computer" they touch (and to them it's a phone, not a feature-phone).

So look, I think we should cut them some slack - the reposotory typo was just embarassing and unforgiveable, and whoever let that go to air should be reprimanded - but the rest of it's, while not great writing, isn't terrible.

However, instead of lambasting it, people be constructive and positive share how they might explain it to a non-technical person?

I'll start:

* Repository - the source code that we turn into a program

* Forked - where we clone a "repository", and then make amendments to the copy

* Pull Request - where we try to merge our amended "repository" and the original "repository" to produce a better program
On (jailbroken) iOS there is an app which displays all saved WIFI passwords. I am sure there are something similar to Androids.
Where is their inclusion of transgender, gender dysphoric, gay, and lesbian speakers? Also, where are all the non-white/asian/indian speakers? I think this is going to require a bigger spreadsheet!
Having actually watched this a number of times I was amazed that everybody just believed the hype.

What I was most amused by is Nestlé taking tap water for free, bottling and selling it back to you.
Great aticle!
My gmail is my personal email choice. I know the risks associated with that and accept them in return for the convenience of google email. On the other hand, my employer may not like that google has the password to our company's internal wifi. That's why I think there may be a bit of an issue here.
The paucity of imagination in this post is depressing. Markdown isn't the future, it's the past. I mean that literally - markdown is a formalization of a set of kludges to approximate formatting when using the technology of 1970s dumb terminals. Is that really the best writing system we can come up with?

Clearly, it's not. One obvious improvement would be a system with the same semantics as markdown which presented these semantics using the standard typographical conventions everyone knows (italic for emphasis, larger text for headings, etc). A further improvement would be a more carefully thought through and richer semantics than the rather arbitrarily-chosen subset of HTML that markdown currently supports.
Unless declared integer.
and it's a phone
I don't really see what this has to do with Fox News. Lack of research, investigation, verification, education, accuracy, grammar, formatting, spelling, and truth are all endemic to all reporting/anchoring/journalism, these days.
Phone locks are not designed to keep a well resourced attackers out, they are to keep nosy people from casually accessing your data.

Competent authorities will not access your phone through the phone interface, they will just image the data on it. Unless you encrypt data on your device with a strong key, they will get all your data anyway.
Even when referring to a child of unknown gender? Or a fetus? In Dutch, those are acceptable uses for it (or actually "het").
I am not sure why is this such a problem.

OK, when NSA goes physically near my home, they can connect to my WiFi and secretly use my internet connection.

That's not really what I am concerned about.
> "As soon as it lets a major secret out, even just once, it's game over, and no-one will ever trust a secret to Google again."

I used to think this but now I'm not so sure. With the way services like FB and others slowly change settings, Sony gets hacked and other data breaches, news about govt spying etc, I wonder whether the mass public is suffering from Learned Helplessness [1]. After all, what alternatives do most people really have?

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
My go:

repository: a pile of computer code making up a project

fork: a new copy of the project probably with changes

pull request: sends changes back to original project
It's convenient for the owner of the Android phone, but the wifi password is not necessarily theirs to give away. That's the problem. It's not because your friends and family have given you their wifi password that they intended to give that password to Google as well. You're trading their security for your convenience.
Yeah, I am looking for more of a smartphone. Apps, customizability, keyboard, wifi.
Not only that but the "reference" implementation on the website has bugs in it that Gruber has fixed but for some reason he hasn't updated the file. If you know what to search for in the Markdown mailing list you can find his latest version but it is insane that it's not on the page.
There's a difference between simply calling your OS KitKat and actually partnering up with Nestle when you do it.
I ejected after the redhead spewed her first sentence. Painful.

Here's what people need to realize: Think of all the times you notice journalists failing with regard to topics you are an expert in. Or more than failing - outright lying or misleading. Now, multiply that by all the things other people are experts in and the things they catch journalists doing that you aren't expert enough in those other things to know about.

We make a big deal about intentionally corrupt journalism, but outright laziness is just as big of a problem.
If you stopped people on the street and asked them what they thought about it, they'd probably say, "Hey, those give me a break commercials?" not "Hey, I boycott Nestle! Screw those bastards."

Clearly _some_ people think the latter. And those are the people who are causing a fuss right now.
"On an HTC device, the option that gives Google your Wi-Fi password is "Back up my settings"

Evil Google, disguising the 'Can we steal your password button'