skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
0days like this go for $80k to $200k each for exclusive rights. The FBI owns dozens, at least.

Source: HBGary dumps, industry experience.
The FBI was never going to ignore huge stockpiles of easily accessible child pornography on the deep web, and Hacker News was never going to believe that this wasn't about more than child pornography. Just another day.
Air gapped with new hardware: "Since I started working with the Snowden documents, I bought a new computer that has never been connected to the internet. If I want to transfer a file, I encrypt the file on the secure computer and walk it over to my internet computer, using a USB stick. To decrypt something, I reverse the process. This might not be bulletproof, but it's pretty good."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-how-to-rema...

Air gapping is certainly not unprecedented, but individuals using it have traditionally been considered pretty "tinfoil-y".

edit: "I wonder if it might be possible to implement that idea into other operating systems?"

gpggrid itself could probably just be built on any other Linux install. Certainly it could be recreated. One of the neat features of TFL that I really like is the idea of blinking LEDs on the users keyboard instead of displaying things on screen. Effective? Who knows... but certainly amusing.
Using ZeroMQ Security
That would apply to tangent, cotangent, secant, and cosecant as well, and yet you still learn those (even though, at least in my experience, high school trig didn't attempt to give any foundation for what the hell any of those are (other than tangent), besides their relationships to the other functions.
Interesting. Thanks for the link.. it's the first example of it actually being used I've seen.

If anyone else has other examples, I would be interested in those too.
And how do you know the "independent" organization that comes up with the next encryption standard wasn't covertly influenced or controlled by a hostile entity[1]?

Public scrutiny and peer review are the best defenses, and the NIST did as much.

[1] IMHO, I'm far more concerned about China and Russia then the US.
I am sorry, you make a good point, but it's for "better way of doing things". Such comment is so far deep into the common sense territory that there is hardly any reason to mention it explicitly. This discussion is happening with exactly that in mind.

Other folks here have mention the separation of concerns. Is there something that you can say related to that? Loved your summary of benefits and trade-offs, but can you please address MarkHarmon's comments? Thanks.
>Of course, none of these "theories" manage to address the fact that there is fairly strong evidence that water fluoridation does in fact reduce tooth decay.

Not agreeing with those theories, but this argument is flawed.

Even if it does "reduce tooth decay", so what, in the context of their argument? Who said a substance can't do two things at one time?
Fluoride stays in the body and over time will calcify the pineal gland, which is a poorly understood part of the body.

Fluoride was used in the past to pacify populations, at least, that is the claim made by anti-F people (I haven't myself run down the sources).

There are books out concerning F and its effect on the body's metabolism, such as this one http://www.amazon.com/Fluoride-Aging-Factor-Recognize-Devast... .

Too much fluoride can lead to fluorosis - there is this case of fluorosis among horses drinking municipal water that was fluoridated http://www.fluorideresearch.org/391/files/3913-10.pdf .
How many false positives do you think users would tolerate with such smart algorithms?
First off Scala is amazing -- I'm using it for API servers -- so I'm very curious how your framework turns out=).

As you might imagine I would disagree that JS is the wrong language simply because it _is_ the web. Clearly abstracting JS to other languages can be quite useful (CoffeeScript), but by making your building blocks in JS every developer, library, or framework can use them. They become universal. If OJ can add YouTubeVideos, anyone can. It would be harder to do this if it was written in another language.
You realize that the FBI admission discussed in the article has nothing to do with the blog post on the Tor web site that you linked to, right?

Those are two completely separate events.
It depends in Europe. In some countries, e.g. Germany it is like in the US, e.g. you can contest a ticket and say that the driver was a relative from another country. You can also say that you weren't the driver but you don't know who used your car. In this case you typically are forced to keep a drivers log for this vehicle for the future.
If that's the case, then why not use one of the many static Web site generators? Combined with a simple CSS library like Pure.io for some of the UI elements.

It is possible that some more complex UI elements (say a Calendar) will have to be done in Javascript, but that seems like a worthwhile tradeoff for simplicity, efficiency, and maintainability.
The more common scenario is tricking you into clicking the wrong link or even downloading something. Softpedia's download page[1] is a perfect example of this.

[1] http://darkpatterns.org/images/Softpedia-final-470x333.png
Build good ideas, don't be constrained by limited people.
I don't know about your first question, but the reason you need a character limit is because each time a row is added to a database, enough space is set aside to contain that row.

Each row contains the same columns. For example:
table Person:
col1 label: name / type: text / size: 10
2 label: age / type: int / size: 3
3 label: address / type: text / size: 200

the type tells the database how to encode the data found in that column - an int takes less space than a string, so this is a space saving measure. The size refers to how many characters are allowed in that field, because that is how much space will be allocated when the row is created. If you don't need 200 characters of space, it's wasteful to allow it. But you kind of have to put a number in there, even if it's a big one.

Correct me if I'm wrong, all my knowledge comes from Dr. Marla Weston's 2nd year Databases Design course.
Because that will totally go well when it's checked against it being a fraud.

Standardization makes finding frauds easier
Please watch this video:

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_...

In it Hans Rosling explains how something simple as making people able to use a washing machine to clean their clothes, will ultimately reduce population growth.

This is because the knock-on effects of that are that women are more able to educate themselves, more able to keep their kids alive as a result of education and thus the family has no need to reproduce massively.

The key is not to educate people about overpopulation, but to educate them effectively in how to remove the need for high reproduction while increasing their life quality.
Compact Linux-powered OTT STB does 1080p at 60fps
>In the current state of the world, we're all dependent on CA signatures for each connection we make to a website.

Now that you mentioned it, are those safe from say a government agency having access to the companies that serve as certificate authorities? Or is it all a house of cards, as it is now?
Alcohol doesn't go away after you stop feeling the effects, it stays for many hours more than that. If a person on a learners license was at a big party overnight, and had a big binge, then they likely still have enough to trigger a positive breath test the next morning.

I'm unsure what amount is required to produce the supposed fat effect though.
I don't see your point. Friedman wasn't saying that the market would know that a specific executive was selling or buying stock, but rather, that the very act of anyone selling or buying stock by definition affects the price of the stock, and that it's better to allow people with the most information about a stock to influence the market.
Played the game, it is very good. A couple of points,
- I was also confused by the end turn button.
- Is there time limit on the move? It wasn't very clear to me.
-It wasn't clear to me that traps affect friendly units (A warning would be good.
The original idea of a "tinfoil hatter" was that the "hatter" wore a head garment made of tinfoil, to block the mind-control radio waves the [government|aliens] were using to take over people's brains. I don't think we have any particular indication that is likely, yet.
NSA Releases UFO Files Reveals “Alien Messages”
I shoplifted the 3-volume hardcover set of Feynman Lectures from the Borders bookstore in Cambridge in 2003. I would be happy to make partial amends for this by donating the full retail cost to any efforts to digitize volumes 2 and 3.
What if you need to call out to a third party API like a payment system which requires a first name and a surname? If you've not collected those things, you're screwed.
Craigslist Apartment Scraper (meant for those affected by the Boulder flood)
Any form of trivially detected is going to cost millions. For what they assume is a tiny market, it's really an edge case that has little benifit to them. Don't forget they avoided ticketing most people who simply went through the EZ pass lanes without paying for years. Why, cost benifit analysis, they did not want to drive away users over what amounted to be a fairly small revenue stream.

Edit: Also, all it takes is a picture of your license plate as you go through a toll an any anonymity is gone which makes anon EZ passes somewhat silly.
From your link:

But his FBI handlers said he was "brilliant, but lazy": they discovered him selling stolen credit card details on Facebook, and traced him to his home when he used an unguarded internet connection to go on the 2600.com site, which is popular with young and old hackers.

Is 2600.com a honeypot for the FBI? How'd Sabu expose himself by merely visiting that site?
excellent marketing strategy.
sftp(1): add support for resuming partial downloads using the "reget" command and on the sftp commandline or on the "get" commandline using the "-a" (append) option.

oooh, I likey..
It isn't proof, it's supporting evidence.
If the technology existed, you better believe they'd use it.
Creating and publishing maps like this is pretty much the purpose of the US Geological Survey.
This Is Why Google+ Is The Best Social Network On The Internet...
Sounds like somebody's random number generation function has its upper limit set a little too high.
Who cares if they would? I don't believe it exists or will exist in the near future, so it's immaterial.
When Google went public...
California poised to raise minimum wage to $10
I'm surprised to see such a baseless apocalyptic prophesy follow the phrase "I am an atheist."
For specific uses (like output to html), you will have to escape the content, as with any other content, but you can store what the user input.
For serious. Why wasn't math class just "Look, here's an empty set. Go forth and do math."?

/s
Hacking Transcend Wifi SD Cards
You have got to be joking. They knowingly sold packages of crap as AAA, sometimes shorting the bonds they were promoting to idiot clients.
Giving politicians the authority to levy a carbon tax is an absolutely terrible idea, and it has nothing to do with how I feel about China.
Why it took me five hours to replace a keyboard
Indeed, as Ted Ts'o himself says: https://plus.google.com/117091380454742934025/posts/SDcoemc9...
I think the title presages the coming of the apocalypse. The two ok-ish parts of the web replaced by the horrible one that we are all stuck with. Next step, replace all three with 666 and call it quits.
In any other random moment, that sentence could have sound simply inspiring to me.

But right now. At this point when I'm right now very long to explain, that sentence, has made my day. Up-voted.
First time I hear of Parsley.js. I will check it out, thanks
> It only has a rudimentary interface to change the focus and most of the times I've seen people take photos won their iPhones, they rarely tap to set the focus and rely on the autofocus.

The "interface to change the focus", AFAIK, is just an interface to change the reference point for the autofocus, so even if you "tap to set the focus" you are still relying on the autofocus.
Redact the account number if you don't trust me. I just need a list of everything you bought, let's say it's, umm, to help me budget.
Am I blind, or does the article never once mention which encryption standard it's talking about?
Citations?

At the moment you're simply relating a personal opinion against someone else's personal opinion.

It seems you have been struggling for a few years of losing and gaining it (like I have I hasten to add), trying different things:

https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=by%3Agxs+calor...

Note that 3 years ago you were actually recommending 100% wheat bread, now it's no wheat.

Let's just agree that no-one seems to know a reliable method yet. Some people find a way, I've a couple of friends who have, a couple who haven't. One did it on Dukan, which I found repulsive and made me feel ill. One simply pretends he lost no weight. Although if you've got good citations I'd be deliriously happy to eat my words and try it. Now, it really is time to sign up to the gym under my work...

EDIT: I suddenly realized, if it's working for you and you're happy with it, don't doubt what you're doing at all. My point was meant to be it seems different things work for different people.
If you worry about the NSA spying on your company, DUMP MPLS WAN networking ASAP, it's unencrypted and basically just VLANS at layer 3.

The easiest way to snoop on all internal company data is to sniff those MPLS links at ISPs.
> FBI basically generated a shit-load of Tor nodes (https://blog.torproject.org/blog/how-to-handle-millions-new-...) for some while to increase their chances of intercepting traffic.

The blog post you link to was about a recent massive increase in Tor clients, not Tor nodes.

From what I've read I was under the impression that Freedom Hosting itself was hacked to disclose its IP addresses, rather than the FBI taking over the Tor network.
There are a bunch of cheap, well supported, hardware random number generators out there. For example, the Entropy Key: http://www.entropykey.co.uk/
> if you think you're not in the target demographic because you don't spend money, and you don't click on ads, then you have a very limited understanding of the ad business

No, I understand the ad business perfectly well; that is entirely different from thinking CPM ads make sense on the Internet. They're in inherent conflict with how people use the Internet, and create bad incentives for content publishers (in contrast to CPC ads.)

Websites, due to their interactive, choice-based nature ("what links do I open next", etc.), can be analyzed using game design theory. "Banner blindness" is a well-known problem for CPM advertisers, but at a fundamental level it is one of the principles of game design: a player, with the "algorithm" of a game fully loaded into their mind won't bother to mentally process anything which has no game-mechanical effect. Once you see which part of the website is "the content", your brain enters a mode (in the vi/emacs sense of the term) where anything other than content on the page will be filtered out at a pre-conscious level.
Touch ID doesn't work with copies of fingerprints that police collect. It actually scans the underlying living tissue with RF signals.
Thanks for those replies. I've updated that section to better reflect Scala just being a library dependency.

I'm looking forward to playing with Finagles Java API as at some point I'm going to need to connect our Finagle projects with our Clojure services.
> The FBI used standard police techniques to infiltrate and eventually dismantle the those groups.

Seriously, how do we know the FBI's story isn't "parallel construction"? It always seemed to me that tracking down Anonymous would be easy if you had NSA-scale monitoring. I don't want to sound like paranoid guy, but maybe the FBI's stories about tracking down clues from chat logs are all made up.
Invite Hackers: Work with a YC startup (InstantCab) for a week
TL;DR: We'd like to pay smart hackers to come work with us for 2-10 days (preferably, at least 5 days).

We'll work together on a real problem. You'll get to see what works, and what doesn't.

We think you'll enjoy it and if you find out it's your thing, we hope you'll come work with us full time.

If not, you just spent a week working on something useful and got paid to do it.

Interviews full of syntax questions are dead. Let's do this the right way.

----

About us:

Transportation is just now becoming the sexy thing with millions of dollars in funding. While we've got some of that, we have been making transportation easier for a long time starting as a profitable bootstrapped company.
Our team started by automating transportation for a bunch of University (U.C. Berkeley, Georgia Tech, Duke, Stanford), corporate and public transit fleets - automating over a million rides a year.

We were in YCombinator's W12 batch.

In March 2013 [1], we launched InstantCab (www.instantcab.com) which provides friendly rides from the best drivers in SF. We have fixed fares that never surge, a small motivated team of 13 with a lot of ♥, and a laser focus on serving our customers (riders and drivers) better than anyone else in the world.

How will we win against the behemoths, you ask?

We'd love to tell you. We'd also love to tell you why some of best investors in the world (Khosla Ventures, Garry Tan, Alexis Ohanian, Harj Taggar and YCombinator, amongst many others) agree with us.

----
What we offer:

- A meaningful role on a small team.

- Near market salary and meaningful equity.

- Team mates who are genuinely good people.

- Catered team lunch every day (including home made catered lunch on Friday).

- Your SF rides will be on us.

----

About you:

You have at least 2 years of experience writing great code. You have code samples you can share with us - preferably real projects hosted on github or something similar. We use Python+Django and have apps on iOS and Android. We'd love for you to have experience with one or more these, but it's not necessary.

----

Next step:

Email team at instantcab.com your resume and preferably a link to your github profile or some code samples.
HTML Version - 56 Characters, no dependencies:

<ul><li>They</li><li>create</li><li>themselves</li></ul>

OJJS Version - 57 Characters, thousands of lines of js dependencies:

var myList = oj.BulletList('They','create','themselves');

The fact that just writing the html output is the same (and in this case less) amount of characters then the ojjs functions makes me unsure about this. especially considering all the extra dependencies.
Thanks for this, good refresher and some more insights on performance tools such as vmstat(1) etc, although I wish GNU/Linux had a production ready tracing tool that is as easy to use as Dtrace(1), watching Ktap currently which is making some headwinds.
This person has rediscovered the William Banting original low-carb diet from 1863[1] : "The emphasis was on avoiding sugar, saccharine matter, starch, beer, milk and butter."

Banting knew carbs made you fat over a century ago, but of course since the scientists couldn't figure out WHY they discredited it. And so it ever was.

They also knew carbs should be avoided by diabetics, but when insulin was invented they chose to (more profitably) just shoot people up all the time and make them sicker. Do you know what shooting yourself up with insulin constantly does, by the way? [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Banting
[2] http://garytaubes.com/2012/02/on-the-greatly-exaggerated-dem... [ see disturbing picture ]
Just out of curiosity, is there anything objectively better about colorful coral than the drab and dreary sea-life? The implication is that we should be upset that our sea life is about to get less pretty.
Note that the original article is from ProPublica and the original headline was:

"Government Standards Agency “Strongly” Suggests Dropping its Own Encryption Standard"

http://www.propublica.org/article/standards-agency-strongly-...

Ars Technica, however, changed it and added in "NSA-influenced algorithm" because, you know, clicks.
> Asked whether Microsoft would continue to use the encryption standard in some of its software, a spokesperson said the company "is evaluating NIST's recent recommendations and as always, will take the appropriate action to protect our customers."

Pretty funny, coming from an NSA partner company.
>Also, all it takes is a picture of your license plate as you go through a toll an any anonymity is gone

No, because a prepaid eztag wouldn't mail a statement of your whereabouts to your home/office.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6383435
> The apparent FBI-malware attack was first noticed on August 4, when all of the hidden service sites hosted by Freedom Hosting began displaying a “Down for Maintenance” message.

The underlining reason for this has been the notion that the FBI was attempting to catch people engaged in CP related activities...

This maybe a little tin-foil here, but...

If you deliver a 404-type of a page on all requests, no website is traversed, no CP is viewed, transferred, replicated, or distributed. Meaning there is nothing here to charge the person with.

Does this article get the facts wrong, or was the purpose of this exploit something entirely different. Because if the article is true (this exploit was only in "Down for Maintenance" pages, which were the only pages served), all they did was get a bunch of useless IP to MAC to host-name correlation/mapping data for that moment in time.

There is also the 'Fruit of a poisonous tree' argument here. Would this untargeted hacking even stand up in court if this data is used to prosecute someone?

This sounds more like flexing of the muscles - the FBI saying we can get you if we want to. Or something else was going on. It also seems like a waist of a good exploit that they would probably use towards terrorist or national security related issues (ex: if they knew the MAC or host-name of a bad guy using TOR that day, but did not know his IP / so they put this out).
> A news headline about the Apple iPhone event, completely overshadowed by NSA speculation.

Discussion on articles of one topic being completely overshadowed by tangential other topics is a problem with the way HN's commenting system works (Reddit does this much better, folding certain comments away, based on votes and nesting level), not at all specific to the NSA discussions.

It happens for every topic on HN that receives a lot of mindshare over a longer period of time. It annoys me there too. Thankfully I have a bookmarklet that allows me to collapse threads on HN :)
I see this useful for writing UserScripts/browser extensions.
Yes, I shed a tear as I had to remove all the futures. Disappointment I could not get multiple thread pools and scheduling with Clojure's concurrency primitives.
Cap'n Trade was, is, and will always be a guaranteed frenzy of corrupt corporatist rent-seeking. Both varieties of Coke-and-Pepsi Repubmocrat eat from that trough. I actually wish they'd pass a carbon tax, only to forestall the disaster that Cap'n Trade would be.
You are confusing two things, one is the sudden increase in tor traffic you linked to, and which was possibly caused by a botnet which used tor as command & control network. The other is the attack on freedom host, which the FBI perpetrated. There the FBI injected a trojan into websites and could therefore deanonymyze users of the websites. So in that case tor did protect the malware as designed, but could not protect the anonymity of the user, because the local computer did made a connection over TCP/IP.
Disallowing 3rd party cookies will end cross-site tracking. (In practice, opting out[1] will pretty much cover you too, but I understand why you might not trust it.)

[1] http://www.networkadvertising.org/choices/
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. It's also part of HTML now, so it has that going for it as well.