skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Who are the best journalism start-ups?
Any examples that people are using would be great. But founders who want to plug their products, that's fine too.
I'm not taking sides against Lavabit here, but it's worth considering the situation here without the Snowden context.

A search warrant was signed by a court for federal agents to retrieve/collect evidence for a specific target. How is what the FBI (and prosecutors) demanded different than a normal wiretap?

edit: If the FBI's order could not be completed in a way that would NOT compromise ALL users, then of course Lavabit should have resisted. My question is based on the assumed validity of this statement in the OP:

> The July 16 order came after Texas-based Lavabit refused to circumvent its own security systems to comply with earlier orders intended to trace the Internet IP address of a particular Lavabit user.
The problem is that in order to get that information the first way Lavabit would have had to write code that made all of their business claims a lie.
I'm not sure what anybody is supposed to get out of your post other than that you claim to know PHP and cURL better than an interesting person did 2 years ago. Why would anyone care?
"Always available" and and incredibly flexible form of employment. There aren't many jobs where you can sit down, make some money, when you need to take a break (kids screaming, etc), you can stop, resume again when you're ready. The flexibility is worth something.
You can swim with the fish or grow up and play with the big boys (Lisp >> Smalltalk).
Maybe the gov't just does not want to reveal all the aces up their sleeves.
Raising Capital Through Crowdfunding by Founder/CEO CrowdFundPros
It wouldn't have to be a single mutation, but let's say intelligence is linear from 1 (apes) to 5 (humans). At some point an animal mutated from 1 to 2, then 2 to 3, etc. Each step the more intelligent version ended up killing off the weaker version (either through violence or just through better survival in nature), and we ended up where we are at 5, which all humans begin at and our surroundings (i.e. nurture not nature) can modify that 5 down to 4.9 or up to 5.1

I'm incredibly not an expert on evolution (it shows I'm sure!), but from a logical point of view that seems like it's feasible at least - whether it's incredibly likely or incredibly unlikely I've no idea.
Nokia picks Thurrott's SuperSite as Blog Star of the Week
1984 wasn't supposed to be a manual god damn it!
(This is how the main character was caught. He believed in a 'alternative' system. Much like how we like to pretend TOR is untouchable)
A service that used a separate subdomain and SSL certificate per user could have avoided such a situation. Though this is an unreasonable burden for a service provider to bear for operating in the US.
Stop Watching Us: October 26
Hard to tell - the government would still try other methods first before showing their hand.
Why? Because FREEDOM!?

It funny how many here react to any move by Apple to improve their customer's experience as Evil Incarnate. Maybe Matt Cutts can come by and explain what happens to your website on Google Search when you have a 'download our app' popup.

http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/62902-google-avoid-download-...
How does Swagger compare with Scrooge (Twitter's Scala / Apache Thrift code generator)[0]?

[0] http://twitter.github.io/scrooge/
Hmm.. the FBI had probable cause to believe Snowden's email contained incriminating data. Furthermore, targeted pen registers/trace orders aren't exactly unconstitutional, but combine the way Lavabit is architected with the scope of the search, and you've essentially given them the keys to the kingdom.

Are there any older physical parallels to this? What happens if the police, in the process of securing a lawful warrant, require access to a physical master key or combination or etc. which would open a great deal more than access to the suspect's belongings?
The US placed a virus on the sourcecode of freedom hosting, either by seizing control of the servers, or by hacking, which exploited a vulnerability specific to version of firefox found in a popular all in one TOR access kit.

I think we said the same thing, or at least if I interpret your statement correctly I meant the same thing. I said "browser tricks" and you said "vulnerability specific to firefox (a browser)" and I said "de-anonymized" (which was the analysis that most people pointed to as to why the FBI was collecting data from various hosts) and you described the same scenario " ... monitoring traffic between a large enough proportion of TOR nodes ..."

My interpretation of the events was, they got to Freedom hosting, they used that to exploit browsers into giving them correlating information about Tor endpoints, and using that traffic and resources in the already documented 'meta data snooping' programs that other parts of the government have and have made available, they figured out which servers were serving up the Silk Road web site, and by that (and a copy of the servers hard drives aka a server image) figured out who the guy was who was using the Dread Pirate Roberts moniker.

So is your understanding of how this went down different than that? And was that explanation different (other than detail) than my original comment which you assert was incorrect? Happy to be shown where I am wrong here, so I'm trying to figure out what what part you disagreed with.
I have just discovered that the sign up process is a pair request too, I though that one thing was registering an account and another one asking for pair.
Thanks for digging that up. It's instructive to read the evidence in the Viacom suit and compare it with the MegaUpload indictment. Again and again, the management of Youtube struggles with the copyright problem. Clear directives are given to remove full-length videos. The legality of clips from Comedy Central are constantly questioned. When Jawed Karim himself posts a copyrighted video, the rest of the team seems angry. And yes, repeatedly, the Youtube team is shown to be sensitive to the impact that copyright enforcement will have on their user stats.

There is no such conflict in the Mega emails. Kim Schmitz is show repeatedly to be concerned solely with maximizing the value of the content Mega stores to users. The operators of Megaupload are repeatedly shown to be aware of specific infringing content --- sometimes because they themselves used it, sometimes because their users pointed it out, and in some cases because they paid to have it put there.

Could there have been a criminal infringement charge leveled against Youtube? Based on this evidence, it looks like "maybe". But would DOJ have won the case? Almost certainly not. Read the judgements in the Viacom case. The founders are repeatedly found not to have had awareness of specific infringements. The DOJ doesn't bring cases it doesn't think it can win.
You can still watch them with HTML5 using this addon for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/youtube-all-h...

I'm assuming there's a Chrome equivalent. I've completely disabled Flash in my browser now. Feels good.
I doubt it. Most likely a good buying opportunity.
I'd consider Salesforce to have #1 and #2, but pretty sure no one who's used their API would call it "great".
Except that per the article they already had that code written so they couldn't credibly claim that they weren't able to do it: "The representative of Lavabit indicated that Lavabit had the technical capability to decrypt the information, but that Lavabit did not want to 'defeat [its] own system,'" the government complained.
Without taking a stance on this statement, I think it's important to realize how alarming it is that simply trying not to betray the trust of your users has become such a difficult, dangerous, and unusual task as to be called heroism.

The intelligence community has put us in such a bad spot that anyone who actually tries not to do something unethical, which should really be the default, is now exceptional and lauded.

Lavabit stood up, and that's admirable. That it's this admirable is a really bad sign.
Did anyone think this could go on? It's not just about narcotics, this is about the government's ability to regulate and tax. The US government has refined its ability to tax so well that, if you make a large amount of money illegally, you still need to pay taxes on it (e.g. laundering). This has been the case since before computers enabled massive surveillance. That's incredible!

I can imagine that, had the Silk Road specialized in consumer goods and threatened to become popular, then it'd have been brought down much, much faster.
Your first statement I don't agree with -> I don't see how you can't break out of your frame of reference. If your frame of reference is working with data and building skills that are equally applicable in a business environment, then I think you can make the transition without major hiccups. That's the belief of the people running the Insight Fellowship as well, which has had great success in providing a channel to bring people with an academic background into industry.

I absolutely agree, formal education doesn't not imply greater influence nor greater success, however, neither does it imply that you can't reach the highest heights. So there's a fallacy in the thought process that if you want to be a data scientist, school is not the a possible option. I think there are people who can be successful in the data science business who pick it up by themselves, with all the free material out there, and equally I think you can approach the field with formal training and make a name for yourself.

Anyway, by the sounds of it, we're probably reaching the point of agreeing to disagree.
Balls of steel. What a hero.
Shine A Light On Government Surveillance
I disagree. He doesn't address the actual topic here at all. All he is doing is saying that Steve Gibson is a charlatan.

His history as a security professional has no bearing on the actual content here. We are all talking about an idea SQRL not Steve Gibson. If you said, "SQRL isn't worth my time because I don't trust Steve Gibson" that's fine, but the author made no note on SQRL at all, he just attacked Steve Gibson and let it be.

Sure there may be precedence to say that SQRL isn't worth your time, but Steve's credentials don't affect this idea at all. For all you know he may have been given the idea by a team of security researchers who wanted to see if the top post on Hacker News would be some bull shit argument about Steve Gibson. Obviously not the case, but come on let's talk about the freaking content here not the man.

The saying "throwing the baby out with the bath water" comes to mind. Let's look at SQRL and see if it actually makes any sense before we throw it all away.
Not sure how many other companies do this, but it seems really bad for user privacy.

Any time you email the support system of a company that uses Freshdesk to manage tickets, your information gets stored in their system permanently, with no way to delete.
Because of what handing over the data would necessarily entail. (If I understand corectly.. someone please correct me if I have this wrong).

The data the FBI wanted wouldn't have just unearthed Snowden's emails, but everything by every Lavabit user. And if you believe that information wouldn't have made its way to certain other 3 letter agencies...
True, but if widening the scope of a warrant ends up invading the privacy of others completely uninvolved with the investigation, it just isn't right. And that is where the government messed up.
Tesla stock tumbles after Model S catches fire
That's true. But then, engage with the question of whether those promises were reasonable. "Even if we have the capability of complying with a request for information on a specific user, we will resist the courts". There's a reason providers tend not to make that promise: keeping it can involve going out of business.
Tesla stock burned by car fire video, downgrade
Yes! Thank you very much for this information and the links.

I am very glad I spent hours configuring a working virtual machine for classic Mac OS last year and that I did not get rid of it!

The unfinished demo and open ended nature of it was totally part of the appeal for me. Infinite map/enemies and no goal was just kind of a relaxing way to play ( for hours and hours ).

Seriously, thank you again!
These articles (among others) mention the seizure... but I don't see any details about the process.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/10/02/end-of-...

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/02/alleged-si...

Edit: updated whitespace
iFixit supposedly has the iPhone 5 (not 5S) rear camera listed for $40 here:
http://www.ifixit.com/iPhone-Parts/iPhone-5-Rear-Camera/IF11...

I imagine there is a substantial software component cost associated with it too...
Individuals are also a problem: see things like spying on girlfriends and blackmail.
I was concerned about this while preparing for the talk. However, my research turned up strong evidence that laziness is indeed an emotion:

http://ph.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=2011090705482...
Parent is getting downvoted because Linux is not from the FSF.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/02/us-crime-silkroad-...
"Technical ability" means that yes, it's doable if someone does work. It's doesn't mean that they 'already had the ability' other than in a theoretical sense.

And even so, it still doesn't change the fact that it would have turned all their business claims into giant lies, possibly even exposing them to suits for false advertising, etc.
I don't follow. The inference we're meant to draw here is that DOJ wanted pen/trap information for Edward Snowden --- one specific person very much the target of the investigation. And what this article communicates is that Lavabit had that capability, but deliberately chose not to make it available to DOJ.
Arguably they should have thought about that (especially in the wake of Hushmail) before making such claims.
> "Well, it's not really 2-factor is it?"

Whatever you use to unlock/authenticate to the device would be the other factor.
We cannot to run this nation based on heroic self-sacrifice.
I was glancing down through the comments and caught the whole first sentence before processing the breakingbadspoiler tag. Might want to change it completely..or just remove it. Is the show still worth watching knowing what I saw? I had Six Feet Under spoiled for me in a similar manner :-(
It just means that at least in some possible cases, the way that SSL is broken is by demanding the private keys and installing a transparent proxy or tap outside of the network.

So while it might not be broken in the way we usually expect crypto to be broken, it continues to be broken from a trustability point of view.
Certainly they performed jobs for 25 cents an hour, but that rate just isn't sustainable if you actually want to get fast, reliant results.

Just as the requesters on MTurk are smart, so are the workers (aka Turkers). If you hang around the market place long enough you will quickly discover that your time is worth much more than 25 cents an hour.

The Turkers are smart; high throughput is the only way they are going to make any money.

As a requester, someone posting work, if you don't respect that in terms of 1) streaming-lining your instructions to simplify the work for the Turkers, and 2) giving a descent wage relative to the work needed

The Turkers will go elsewhere and your results are just going to trickle in.

MTurk is actually a perfect marketplace, as a worker you can see ALL of the jobs that you are qualified, all of the competing bids for a piece of your time in one consolidated place, and you can choose how and when to work instantly or whether you want to work at all.
I'd like to point out that I did not say that a high-performance GC is easy. What I actually said is that a simple GC is easier than simple automatic optimizations. A high-performance GC is the same level of difficulty as good automatic optimization.
And what is the disadvantage?
What do you mean by "journalism startups"? Does MuckRack count?
That's not the promise they made, rather it was that they had not developed and would not develop any means to circumvent the protection/encryption for paying users' accounts.

The 'not complying' is only a side effect, and is more so tantamount to a refusal to do work for the government in opposition to lavabit's own business promises. I'm not sure the government in any instance has a right to compel work to meet their specified ends.
Thanks for sharing this link. I just donated $$

$29,341 Raised of the $40,000 goal.
Huh? You'd still have a private key per certificate. You might have one key for all of them or one key per cert, but you'd still have a private key for each of those certs.

Unless I'm missing something?
Well the founder pretty much had to throw away his livelihood as well as part his dream to do something that could land him in jail, for someone he had never met.

He could have easily quietly given them the key (if he had it?), and then live the rest of his life with success and guilt.

Very, very few people would throw themselves in front of a bus the size of the US government to save an honest stranger. Those people are worthy of calling heroes.
The $360 billion annual drug trade figures haven't dented the image of government currencies. Some hold the view that silk road actually provided legitimacy to bitcoin.

Source: www.drugwardistortions.org/distortion19.html
While slightly nitpicky and not 100% relevant to the discussion, I hope you aren't misunderstanding what entrapment is (and is not!). Learn more at http://nationalparalegal.edu/public_documents/courseware_asp...
Feels like you didn't read the page I linked. You can do all of this: "navigate object graphs, edit them while the program runs, inspect UI elements and modify their behavior interactively, and so on." It just isn't persisted to an image.

The OP is implying that Redline is just Smalltalk skin on a Java pig. That's not true, but if your goalposts for Smalltalk are "it must be Pharo" then, yeah, it isn't Pharo. This is basically the same unhelpful puritanical attitude that left Lisp basically dead from the end of the Lisp machine until PG started talking it up. It doesn't have to be the same to be good, or better than a lot of alternatives, or to count as a real Smalltalk.

For what it's worth, not having Morphic is a huge win IMO. A UI built on something else that attempted to achieve the original goals of Morphic but with, say, a little actual OO design and architecture, would be way better than that disgusting, unlearnable mess.
How to install Guest Additions for Windows 8.1 in Virtualbox
How many of us want to help, but are afraid of the consequences?
Circumventing their whole system's security is a step beyond "wiretapping." It opens all customer communications of a supposedly secure service to inspection by an agency that doesn't recognize legal bounds. LI interfaces are usually rate-limited (IIRC the legal requirement in most places is 1% of traffic).
The Vanity Fair article made me sick to my stomach. I feel so, so bad for Serge. Too little, too late.
Thanks. I just replied to your email.
Pruned? How do we do that? I mean, how do you distinguish the changes you want to deploy from the changes you want to drop?
From the feds' perspective, sure, but the feds' perspective is equivalent to "If he'd only paid the protection money like I told him to, I wouldn't have had to burn down his restaurant. I tried to be peaceful, but he just wouldn't cooperate!"
The title is a little misleading; Just because one Website has a bad Mobile Experience does not mean we have a 'reign of Morons'. There are lots of Websites out there that have awesome Mobile Experiences, this just (apparently) is not one of them.

But even with this said, I think it's important to note that designing a great Mobile Experience is no easy task. To me, it all starts with the Viewport, which is not necessarily an easy thing to understand. It seems as though the original Use Case for the Viewport was to provide the capability of zooming, presumably to account for Websites that were/are not mobile friendly. Over time, it seems as though the preferred User Experience has shifted to a set (non-zoomable) Experience, which is common with Web Apps. In fact, many of today's common Web Frameworks (example: Bootstrap, jQuery Mobile, etc), set the viewport to a 1.0 scale, and prevent zooming with the max and min scale set to 1.0, and/or an explicit user-scalable=no. So it stands to reason that there are grey areas between the original use case, and how people use it today. This could explain why some of the "Bigger Name" Websites still have Mobile Experiences that require Zooming. But this is still no excuse for the overall User Experience described here, which does not sound good. Just like an App, I believe that Websites (or Website Projects) should have someone dedicated to a User Experience role, which would identify some of the issues raised here, and solve them. When the Advertising in conjunction with the Design makes the Website un-usable, that really is sad.
Show HN: rad urls - trending URLs on social networks
I think you need to gain some perspective. They just didn't respond to your email. It happens. Fwict, it was outside of the expected communication channels for proposals anyway. It would have been more respectful if they contacted you, I can understand your frustration waiting for the reply, but you've completely overreacted. IMO what's most unprofessional about the incident is you taking such a minor grievance to a public forum.
The FBI seizes money so that criminals who manage to acquire $90 million from their crimes can't use that money to pay off people in an attempt to get off. The practice is a response to organized crime prosecutions, which were historically extremely difficult because the organizations had tremendous resources at their disposal.

I agree that there is a potential for abuse, but I'm not sure I want to return to the bad old days where rich organized criminals could totally swamp prosecutors.
Introduction to laziness and strictness in Haskell
Here's the Jalopnik video mentioned in the USA Today article:

http://jalopnik.com/this-is-what-fiery-tesla-model-s-death-l...
I think you're reading the sentence incorrectly. The way I read it, it's not saying that they "technically had the ability", which is what you're suggesting as having the ability in a theoretical sense. It's stating that they "had the technical ability", i.e., they had the technical prowess, knowledge, etc.
You know, this may be true (minus the instrumentalism, which is a label I think applies better to the prevailing sentiment of HN), but I don't think it's "amoral" to ask whether the operators of massive criminal enterprises should be able to use the fruit of those operations to reduce the feasibility of prosecution. If you make $10MM selling illegal firearms, the proceeds of that operations aren't "yours"; they're assets generated by criminal activity.

You may be innocent of the charges. If you are, you should get the assets back. To the extent that asset forfeiture makes that process fraught, that's a problem that deserves careful scrutiny.

I submit that I don't sound "amoral" so much as that I don't have exactly the same set of biases that most vocal people on HN seem to have. I don't start from the premise that all prosecution is unjust or malicious; in fact, I think I start from the opposite premise. So when something happens like "all the assets of a business are seized as part of a prosecution", I ask myself, "why would people who have chosen to spend a significant part of their life working at sub-market compensation to help fight crime choose to do that?" Sometimes the answers seem clear to me; in other cases, like the Carmen Ortiz-managed prosecution of Aaron Swartz, they are less clear.