skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As I see it, there are two issues here:

(a) an person is declared a terrorist in secret by a bunch of secret govt folks, basis which he or she is 'approved' for assassination by the US state,

(b) the person may or may not be a US citizen, though the former confers significantly better chances of not being assassinated.

While not disagreeing with the import of your argument, namely that "citizens and non-citizens" ought to be treated alike (it is a welcome change to hear that, because in the post Snowden era we are witnessing a clear difference in the rights of US citizens and maybe those of their 'Five Eyes' allies versus the rest of the world), I don't think its something that can ever be expected in any country. Compared to their own citizens, most countries will always place lower value on the lives of foreigners. By extension there will be a lower bar on their assassinations too.

So instead, its better to challenge the secrecy that surrounds how a person is classified as a terrorist, instead of hoping the US govt starts treating everyone in the world with the same consideration.
He did not exploit a software flaw or a platform flaw, however he exploited an information disclosure / access separation EXPOSURE. Exploiting just means "taking advantage of something."

He did exploit the fact that AT&T did not make the endpoint in question accessible only if the logged-in user matched the actual user ID (or just made it entirely inaccessible).
In what universe are Grand Theft Auto, Borderlands, Bioshock, Skyrim, Call of Duty, and Saints Row indie titles?
Let's consider a specific example:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/opinion/the-drone-that-kil...

The missile killed him, his teenage cousin and at least five other civilians on Oct. 14, 2011, while the boys were eating dinner at an open-air restaurant in southern Yemen...The attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., said only that Abdulrahman was not “specifically targeted,” raising more questions than he answered.

The people killed in this attack were either killed by mistake, or because they were nearby someone considered a target, eating at a restaurant. Because the reasons for killing were secret, if the president decided to include some of his enemies or political enemies of allies in Yemen, made a mistake, or was given false information, it would never be known, because the list is secret. We don't know why or even who was targeted.

In war we accept assassinations, murder without trial, and mass murder, because people are fighting for survival. But even in war only enemy fighters should be targeted, and civilians should not. We have a whole list of rules of war which are being ignored, and this is not even a formal war - war has not been declared, uniforms are not worn, so the rules of war do not apply, but if they did, they are being broken.

We find ourselves in a very murky area where the US is at war with an undefined and secret enemy, who may be anywhere in the world, and lives amongst the civilian population. The reaction of the Obama administration has been to order assassinations from a secret list, also killing any civilians nearby. There is no trial, no charge, and no suspicion, just a decision to kill and an attack, wherever the target may be. This means the president and his advisers have arrogated the power to decide on life or death for anyone on the planet, without limitation in time or space, and without justification or warning, and also killing civilians nearby.

The implications of this are that this war will never end, the targets are everywhere, and the list of enemies will continue to expand in secret. Nobody is safe, because anyone might be standing next to someone on Obama's list at some point, and the general terror and hate instilled by these methods will continually generate new enemies. The Obama administration has adopted terror as a method of war - they have become what they set out to fight.
Got it. Then I agree, such tiering is possible.
Yes, any frequency. Remember we are talking about a faulty piece of electronic. With some pretty weird fault. Not just a transmitter operating in an almost normal mode.

Take an ILS (instrumental approach) frequency 108Mhz. Any piece of wire of around two feet (half dipole) can be a pretty effective antenna at that frequency. Say, headset cable + an output cascade of the amplifier self-excited at this frequency? Doesn't happen in real life, but still...
Dropbox must feel like a godsend for NSA. The files for millions people from around the planet, conveniently sitting there for their taking (without anyone even knowing).

I truly love this country, but this progress is worrying.
> Because we elected Change

A little off-topic, but I'm always reminded of this: http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/248462/attack-of-the-c...
One invite to test a screensharing webapp without any downloads or plugins
Insane. They even have a way to create an Apple ID in the app!
I'm aware of that, hence why I said I won't be making any progress. I've tried using the Mac version and iOS versions, no luck either way.

I'll try BBM too once its on Android. Trying to get it off my Z10 has proven just as difficult
Where do you find a similar iscsi driver code written for windows NT
In legal terms (and I use that loosely) they have already decided that they have that right, so in that sense we have already reached the bottom.

Now, implementation wise you are correct in that things could be worse. However in the "We are the government and we can do this" sense...ditch.

(It must be said that the nice thing about the large-scale implementation problem is that the US population would rise up against that, but that is small comfort for the victims in the "small enough that 'Joe Average' doesn't care about it" death-list.)
I can't believe they left the reviews for Veet for Men Hair Removal off the list.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/B000KKNQBK
I believe huhtenberg's point is that it's the only question many of us are concerned about.

It would be as if a city fighting crime releases statistics on muggings but not homicides.
How to develop Nobel Winners
I have heard that America's bizarre obsession with keeping your salary secret is not shared by rest of the world. I haven't checked myself, though.

I'm deeply suspicious of the "tradition" either way since working at a place where it was actually a policy violation to tell a coworker what your salary was. Because then they would know if they were getting stiffed, and they might ask a raise.
Actually, that's an awesome app :P
Is it really any different from traditional insurance? Don't most insurance companies take money from all their clients, and use it on a fairly small number of those clients?

I personally don't see the "trap" you reference. I'd really like to understand your position there...
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought ( at the Uranium ore [1]):

Unicorn Cookie Cutter - 4.75

I am not sure that all Amazon customers know how to make yellow cake.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000796XXM/ref=azfs_379213722_Urani...

Edit: Formatting
This is awesome. Seems to break all links on the page though. I tried clicking the ribbon in the right hand side of the screen and the menu kept popping up. Maybe triggering a stopPropagation event on page links should be all is needed to fix it.
Later, when I crack your bank password,

Me: Can you provide me with all of guelo's money?
Bank: Sure, here you go.

Also, when I approach your house,

Me: I have these lock picks. Will you let me in?
Lock: Sure thing, boss!
If you accept that the US is in a war with Al Qaeda, then it is in no way surprising that the US government would then attempt to kill members of that organization. And, again, whether the members are American or not is quite literally irrelevant.

Yeah, this is a powerful argument actually. Much as I'd love to argue the president is over-stepping his bounds here, I can see that if the fiction that a struggle against the entity "terror" is the fundamental equivalent of the real, shooting war with Germany, then everything else does follow. If a few rapscallions hatching plots in Yeman are fundamentally, essentially equivalent to an entire column of tanks engaged in a pitch battle with the army, well then it is logical, in the garbage-in, garbage-out form of logical, for the US army to just blow them away.

Shows just how pernicious these metaphors can be.
Apple can just pull this off Google Play and then also reject BB Messenger from iTunes App Store. Boom. Victory through lawyering with no technical work whatsoever. Two competitors down.
Governments violate the laws when it is in the supreme interest of the country, this is called "Raison d'État".

This doesn't make it any less chilling, but we shouldn't be too naive about it.
This story is woefully incomplete. Where is the kid flying to? Boston, I imagine. Who takes him through Customs and Immigration there?

Since he flies out of LHR 4 times a year, one can only presume that he flies back also. What happens in the return flight? Who helps him at the departure airpost (BOS?)? Who helps him in Immigration at LHR, which is a nightmare even for non-autistic travelers?
I think you got exactly what they are doing. In fact if you see their "icloud sdk" looks also exactly what you mentioned.

https://github.com/huluwateam/icloud

[edit: maybe this is more simple to decrypt https://github.com/huluwateam/icloud/blob/master/DataSyncSDK...]
It partly explains it, because for some it might be a reason to go for clouds in first place. I agree, it's not always the case.

However as explained I think there are many wrong expectations coming from clouds:

- Isolation: Like already mentioned. You can use jails and nowadays LXC

- Up to date software: Either managed or with special/official images (again the isolation comes up her). This is a reason for FreeBSD. Their ports system and base system allow for both stability and up to date software. Big plus for startups, because they usually depend more on this than others.

- Uptime: I don't know why this is so big. If you are designing (mostly) stateless systems, like for the cloud you usually have the same benefits off the cloud. You have to pay for HA (many instances) on the cloud. It doesn't make it magically more available. However, if you go off the cloud, even reserved Amazon instances you can easily build extremely high availability cause it will cost less for you. One big thing when cloud computing game up was how great it is that resources can be used more efficiently and how it is cheaper for that reason. However, because of all the hype (I guess) it is only cheaper for cloud hosts.

- Scale out: Again, this is a question of cost: Do you start out with two or three instances in the cloud or for the same money just get 5-10 real systems (no joke, look how cheap professional grade hosting became!) so you don't need to bother in first place?

So you end up with less resources and higher costs and potentially cannot (or have a harder time to) run certain services that simply are not optimized for the cloud. Again, if you design your software to run in the cloud you usually have software that on real hardware is close to zero maintenance (well, at least less than what you have to do for clouds anyway).

I am sure there are good reasons for running FreeBSD on the cloud instead of just buying your own machines and connect them (over multiple data centers if you worry a lot). And we actually also use the cloud for backups.

However I really think that often the term cloud is used as just another buzzword and the benefits are mostly imagined, caused by a huge hype, not always, but way too often.

Don't get me wrong, I am not against cloud computing at all. I just came across way to many people/startups paying for expensive cloud infrastructure seemingly not having any reason for it, other than it being hyped. When I ask why they do it then they either don't know or have really wrong expectations.
Does this introduce counterparty risk in some way?

For instance, if Wefunder goes broke, do the investments go down with the company or are they all in a separate entity?
Wow! This is seriously impressive.
I thought the same of the hacking scenes in Swordfish... then I realised that the movie isn't meant for me. It was meant for a mainstream audience that has no idea what hacking is - and instead they get a visual representation of 'hard, technical'. I imagine the same thing goes with that episode - I haven't seen it, but I'm guessing that tenure was just used as a mere plot device rather than a topic to explore.
You know, your first paragraph sounds strikingly similar to the premise of an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, Critical Care (http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Critical_Care_%28episode%29)...

They also found the idea silly.
I'm getting a 404 - Page not found. Have another link? This sounds like a very cool project.
Yes, we shouldn't be too naive about it, which is the very reason why we should be outright enraged about it happening.
Sure, I bet you have heaps of friends who are MBAs as well, so there's no way you could possibly be biased against them.

MBAs are there to make money, same as every other profession. Do you work for free?

You should just apologise instead of defending yourself.
Can anybody tell me anything about the possibility of non-Americans investing in startups in the US any time soon?
Heard of NSA? You bias stereotype peeps.
"Not quite as clear-cut as you think, is it?"

Weev did literally threaten to murder Kathy Sierra, and he then bragged about doing so on multiple public websites. So, yes, it is quite clear-cut.

(And, please, at least think for a minute before you try to rebut by saying that he didn't mean it, so it shouldn't count.)
Take a look at the description of ILS system. Markers - 75MhZ, 3 Watt; Localizer - 108 MhZ, 50 Watt.

These are local nav systems, not FM stations that put kilowatts into the air.
An honest assessment of all STEM jobs, based on the definition given in the linked paper, or just an honest assessment of the 50% of STEM jobs that do require a degree? I expect you are right that architects and aeronautical engineers do more often than not require a degree, but that just places them in the other 50%. It does not invalidate the study.

Even still, when ~70% of the population do not have degrees, it seems insidious to say that programming is one of the few professions that do not require a degree. Very few jobs actually require one. Again, I struggle to think of more than a few professions that actually do require a degree, even if arbitrarily.
Police chiefs don't usually worry about facing prison time if they reveal homicide statistics.
http://www.amazon.com/review/R3JUIEGFUTUWMI/ref=cm_cr_dp_cmt...

"I purchased this product 4.47 Billion Years ago and when I opened it today, it was half empty."

Brilliant!
They are expensive to design and test, and once they are in production the number produced is extremely limited, plus they are hand built and assembled... so the unit cost is very high.
If you're referring to the ongoing NSA scandals, I actually think that the government claiming the power to kill citizens without trial, accusation, or evidence is much worse. It doesn't bother you that the random assassination power is only called into question because of the surveillance power?

Here's loweringthebar.net mocking the story in 2011 (this story would appear to be almost exactly two years old; the commenter saying "we elected Change and we're waiting for it" might reflect that this is the Change we elected): http://www.loweringthebar.net/2011/12/for-christmas-your-gov...

How did "the government will read your email" become a bigger outrage than "the government can kill you at any time without warning and without ever having to justify itself"?

(If you're referring to something else, please enlighten me)
There's weak evidence that light drinking (fewer than 3 beers/day) is good for you, or at least not bad (though if you're like me you'll probably notice that you can't manage top-level coding while drunk). I wrote about this a few times in past years: http://graehl.org/tag/alcohol/
I'll call John Carmack.
They're encrypted, though, right? Do they need to be sent to this third party to decrypt?
Why is it any worse than only Apple server reading all you messages? You trust one third party with proven track record of spying on its customers, but somehow you are upset that someone else also has access to you messages, thought that someone didn't (yet) do anything wrong with them.

If you are American, you don't have to fear from Chinese espionage, and US agencies already have your data. If you are European, it's more or less the same. If you are from China, well, at least you can prove that you are not doing anything behind the government back ;)
If you have 2-factor authentication enabled and set to use SMS, then you will need SMS to login sometimes.

You should get yourself the Google Authentication app (which doesn't rely on SMS), or get print the set of one-time use codes.

I have no comments on the rest of your rant.
I know. I mostly ask, because a lot of people these days keep nearly every kind of data in databases and ZFS usually isn't the best thing for this (depending on the exact use case of course). It's by far one of the most exciting file systems, for storing "raw" data, but if you are having another layer, your data base system it (again, based on the exact use case) can become an unbearable overhead performancewise.
After Steam announced steambox, and with the massive improvements since Steam for Linux, nVidia would want their drivers to be the best for Linux to sell Linux users on their video cards.
amazing. good stuff man :)
Why should conversations about compensation be uncomfortable at all? You are not begging for a handout, and are likely not imposing any undue hardship on the other side. It might be personal for you; for them, it might be just a line item.
Imagine yourself in Dropbox's shoes. Do you personally want to go to jail for fighting for freedom against NSA, or do you prefer to move from this country to another (where some other agency will fuck you the same way)?

When people focus their disappointment on companies that are forced to comply you get civil war while the real aggressor is just laughing at you. Let's instead focus on how government got so much brutal power, how can we possibly reduce it and prevent from increasing again in the future. That's the real issue here.
Silicone Oil Droplets showing quantum like interference
ClearBooks is doing private placement through Cloud Funding
I'm on Android and I think the last thing I want to install is an iSomething.
Well in a private by default world, browsing the internet just became one hell of a lot scarier. Any page you visit could become a felony.
This is amazing. Well, not really as amazing anymore from a technical perspective, but the Nouveau-Project, which had a really hard road came into existence because such a move seemed to be impossible, back then.
They usually remember to end these sentences with "...if any". :P
This remembers me how an interoperability fiasco iMessage is. Just for the interoperability issue many iOS users are slowly switching to Whatsapp: you start using it to message your Android buddies at first, then eventually you want to just use a single app... the limiting factor for iMessage to be dismissed completely by some user is the fact that there is no way to message iPad users from Whatsapp, something they should fix IMHO.
Or, if you're capable of reading between the lines, you as a citizen can recognize that expecting other people to risk prison time for your approval is entitled cowardice, and that you should be giving your government Hell for the laws in question.
Does putting my iPhone into "Airplane Mode" automagically disable the NSA bugging processes?
I remember, long ago when the Linux community was much smaller everyone wanted a killer feature so hardware vendors would do something like this. Never thought something like Steam could be such a killer feature.
Using "she" when talking about developers to be politically correct is really getting old.
> Why is it any worse than only Apple server reading all you messages?

Not. This. Again.

Because one person can read your messages, it doesn't mean that the whole world should be able to. One happening doesn't mean the other is okay.
Valve's own game - a version of bossles workers?
Could it be they hope to offload the basic driver support to an open source project, especially with the shift towards DRI/DRM, and they plan to move the proprietary 3d support to a blob attached at the mesa layer? I feel like this would be a positive move overall, even if it's not completely ideal.
HERMES（エルメス）専門ショップ エルメスの販売·高価買取｜エルメス(HERMES)専門店 通販
エルメス（HERMES）を取扱っている全国の正規販売店一覧です。バーキン·ケリー·ボリード·エヴリン·ガーデンパーティ·ベアン·ドゴン·ジプシエール·ピコタンなどエルメスの販売や買い取りを専門におこなっています。
Life offers you no guarantees, and risk avoidance costs money, time, and convenience. How safe do you want to be? Speaking for myself, I was fine about three nines ago.
Pretty much. Linked In is a convenient way of maintaining a formatted CV and a Rolodex for me. It does a very good job of those things.
You address an important topic, but I think the problem at hand comes from a more fundamental dysfunction within the system. Once a president is elected into office, he/she is in charge for a minimum of four years, almost guaranteed. We can't simply rely on improving the chances of getting better people into office for at least two reasons: a lot of damage can be done in four years, and even then, most of the electoral branch isn't elected by The People and at least some of it is allowed to carry influence from one president to the next.

I believe the most effective way to solve this problem will be to approach it from many angles with the ultimate purpose of restoring accountability to the executive branch. Improving voting methodology seems to be one of many possibly useful angles. Another might be to put weight on congress to begin scaling back the powers of the executive, such as by repealing the Patriot Act, defunding the NSA, etc. Another still might be to support legislation to protect the voices of other power structures and communication enablers, such as the internet, journalism in general, and organizations like Wikileaks.

Sorry, I suppose this doesn't really bring any new insights to the table. Rather, my point is that there's this really big problem (an overly powerful branch of government) that's been brewing for a while, and it's going to take a lot more than a single fix the repair the whole machine.

Of course, any single effort is better than no effort---I absolutely do not wish to discourage!
However since this protocol is really strong:

1) They are using a workaround like a vm running osx where a program add the requested account on Message.app and then send back the I/O.

2) Second solution they got from an insider the protocol description and decryption.
Paints a great+balanced high-level picture picture of the phenomena - I noticed it was submitted a few weeks ago without much attention. I'd also add reading about TopCoder and IOI / various competitions - star performers in another, highly measurable, field. Sometimes, absolute skill differences at the top may be small but in a competition environment lead to huge result disparities in wins/losses (see sports or eSports - every small advantage matters). Though mosts aspects of engineering aren't highly competitive, I'd argue similar features such as need for creativity or logically difficult problems, produce the power-law-like distribution.

Rereading the Medium piece now draws me to its relative lack of citation especially in the moral arguments toward the end, with a lot of judgments on a shaky empirical ground.
Yes 10ms does matter, but building a data center in the middle of NY vs 20 miles outside is not going to create anywhere near 10ms latency, its not even going to create 1ms, on the Google network at least. Your cable provider is a far higher source of latency.