skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been trying to raise awareness in my social medias, since my family, friends and co-workers might not spend time on HackerNews.

If you want, copy my message and share with your family, friends and co-workers:

"Hi folks,

There's a new virus out there that I want to raise awareness of, it's called CryptoLocker. Basically what this virus does is that it tracks all your files - hard drives, flash drives, usb sticks, network drives/shares - then it encrypts the files it finds.

The only way to unlock the files again is to pay $300 to get the key used for the encryption. The encryption used is RSA with a 2048 bit key which makes it extremely hard to crack, I'd say impossible with the time span and todays computers.

You have 72 hours before they trash the key making it impossible for you to get your data back.

This can be extremely devastating if you are running a business and all your files are gone. If you sync your files to the cloud, you're still not safe, it syncs the encrypted files as well. If you are able to restore to previous versions of your files in the cloud - great.

Let your friends, family and co-workers know about this.

Here are some simple ways to avoid getting a virus in general:

1. Don't open e-mails from people you don't know

2. Don't open attachments in e-mails unless you were waiting for the attachment

3. Don't go to websites/click links that you don't fully trust

4. Don't download and execute files that you don't fully trust

It might seem obvious to the most of us to don't do the above, but to a lot of friends, family and co-workers it might not be.

Imagine waking up and having to pay $300 to get your data back. However, the police tracked down one of the servers that serves the keys and shut them down which means the keys were not delivered and the data was lost, this means even if you do pay the $300, there is no guarantee that you will get the data back.

Raise awareness of this and avoid having your files lost."
I think you need to decrease the size of the JS file, it's 41KB for essentially displaying a few numbers.
They also started sending me push notifications telling me that people that I follow started following other people. I have no idea why they think I'd want to know that. It took probably ten minutes with their app to figure out how to disable that.
There were over two dozen foreign intelligence agencies that agreed that Saddam either had or was attempting to build or purchase weapons of destruction. Nuclear weapons are extremely difficult to hide anywhere on earth, but many other types of weapons of mass destruction aren't difficult to dispose of.

That's not to say that the invasion turned out to be a good idea, or that we were justified in the attempt, but those agencies represent thousands of really smart people in positions of authority around the world agreeing that Iraq had them or was attempting to develop them, so its hard to argue that anyone with half a brain could have known the truth. If we were wrong, its because a good percentage of all western civilizations were wrong, not just the United States.

You also have to factor in the theory that Saddam himself wanted the world to think that he had them, in an attempt to dissuade Iran from thinking Iraq was vulnerable. Iraq's strange behavior that lead to the invasion can really only be explained in two ways: either he was pretending to hide weapons that didn't exist, or he successfully hid real weapons.

Finally, half a million people were killed in Iraq. Clearly every combatant on the battlefield shares a part of the blame, but that includes the enemy combatants. The overwhelming majority of American Soldiers attempt to avoid civilian casualties, often to their own detriment, yet the organizations we have been fighting against in Iraq deliberately target anyone they can. The larger the body count, the better. They view their fellow Muslims as traitors for failing to take up arms against the United States, and so they target them just the same as Americans.
What happened, according to the leaker, was he/she went to the site, and index.php started downloading... So it would have to be a web-server (Apache, Nginx) mis-configuration that removed the php-handler from the file-type.

http://iobm.net/forum/dos/index.php/topic,17.0.html

> It was not our aim to bring BMR down, we just published the leak because if we had it, enforcement and private hackers could have it as well, trouble could arise if the leakage would have been exploited without people to know.

> Besides, we want to make clear that we have no contact to anyone of the involved parties, neither backopy nor VPS admin.

> When we tried to access the site, it offered us the index.php for DOWNLOAD. So we downloaded it as we assumed we were not the only one to be able to download it.

> For any reason the file was not executable anymore by the VPS and thus offered for download! Whether ot not this happened intentionally or was a simple but severe mistake, is outside our knowledge.

> We just think that such mistakes must not happen as they can endanger the users and we think they must be published and not exploited.
i wish they did have a feedback loop. i have a catch-all domain and an employee that was terminated with us left so now I get the barrage of emails to a general box for his LI account.

well he never updated his linkedin to a new email and you have to sign in to unsubscribe. well, i don't want to reset his password because i can see he still uses the LI and there is no way to stop these emails. seems like making it impossible to unsubscribe would violate CAN-SPAM.
Pretty well, #4 national bestseller, but more exciting is all the people tweeting at me that they've started programming, or just doing the stuff they've always just been thinking about doing online. Even a few people motivated to get engaged politically.

What are you working on these days?
LaTeX for thesis and basic introductions
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCRFsOKSM7eNGNghvT6QdzsDYwSTZxqjC

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCRFsOKSM7ePUBOfh3O-K5XZldM5uCPwk
Irc Abjects server.
Eztv for series.
SubtitleSeeker for subtitles.
Tokyotosho for anime.
TPB for other stuff and duck duck go for the remaining.
Accused of threatening national security by open-sourcing
asking them to click "Yes" to upgrade Chrome

You don't even need to do that. You should need administrator access to install software initially, but that installation process can set up a system service that handles any subsequent updates automatically. This then runs independent of any current user on the system, and therefore does not depend on their personal privileges, nor does it need to prompt anyone for permissions for every update.

Clearly there is a risk involved with any process that can automatically download code you will subsequently execute. However, with proper access control, at least a compromised application running in user space can't do things like modifying its own executable so the malware has a place to live or, more generally, anything else that the user couldn't do without elevating their privilege level.

This certainly doesn't get us to an ideal security model. As I noted elsewhere in this discussion, a user on most systems today can probably still do things like e-mailing all the sensitive work documents they can access to a hostile party with just their normal privileges. However, it does at least prevent one common kind of attack.
5. Consider alternatives to Windows so you won't have to deal with these silly things that have largely only been affecting Windows users for the last decade+.
"like pumping oxygen directly into the blood and then trying to hold your breath - even though you technically don't need to breathe"

It's not that simple. You need to get gases in and OUT. You also need more than O2. You need to clear CO2 as well as lactic acid and other biproducts. Some CO in the mix greatly assists exchange. Simply bubbling 02 into your blood is going to kill you with a blood clot. And, RBC's actually curl up into a cylinder shape in your pulmonary capillaries to maximize gas transfer, unlike when they're flying around your circulatory system. Pick up a physio textbook, they're a fun read.
In about any corporation you look, crucial data will be in a Windows server (no ZFS available, sorry), and backed up on intervals that are some integer multiple of 24 hours.

Or, better, the above is the best case scenario that IT dreams of achieving some day. In practice, a huge share of the crucial data sits on people's machine, with no backups, and go on vacation every year.
that is some pretty hideous code, but which part of it potentially reveals the identity of backopy? or was it a part in the full source that was apparently given away by the VPS provider?
> Complaining that API documentation gets out of sync with the code is like complaining that unit tests break when you change the code.

But that can be a valid complaint as well. There is an undeniable cost of maintaining tests, and it shouldn't just be taken for granted that the cost is worth it.
yeah, sounds more likely, otherwise someone needs to name names of the VPS provider. i'm very skeptical that a VPS provider actually started snooping.
Like material wealth, relationships and commitments generally increase over time.
Reinforced cockpit doors, and certain knowledge by passengers that they will die if they don't fight back against hijackers. Those are huge security improvements as a result of 9/11, and arguably the only security improvements. Everything else is a smokescreen and a giant waste of money, but those are effective, would stop another shot at a 9/11-style attack, and have stopped several attacks already.
I find it hard to get suitably appalled by any amount of power abuse in the USA knowing that at it's very worst it's still not Soviet Russia and the ongoing, depressing culture of corruption its created. Not saying we shouldn't fight it, but power abuse is inevitable so long as we have human beings running things.

I'm reading "Whitey: The Life of America's Most Notorious Mob Boss", and I'm almost underwhelmed. Bulger managed to capture the Boston FBI and had informants in all the other police services and a brother in the state legislature and all it was good for was a handful of murders and control of some very profitable local rackets. That seems like small peanuts compared to the developing world and even much of the developed world. Someone with Whitey's skillset could have become the richest man in a very large number of countries and wound up running the whole country.
Or the police could just investigate the wallet, because it there is a feature that Bitcoin does not have, it's anonymity.
That's it exactly.
You can try disabling (not deleting) the startup task. Start > Run > msconfig > Startup > Disable GoogleUpdater.exe

Or try Firefox!
If the posts have to be approved by mods, they're not doing a very good job:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.apps.fir...

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform...

On another project I'm involved in, I've seen Google Groups decide that legitimate posts are spam. Not sure if that's what's happening here, but it's a possibility.
Too bad, 24 hour consciousness could help a lot of startups.
I had a continuous Arch install for 4 years without massive breakage through half a dozen major switches, including the fs layout and the systemd transition.

I just upgraded to an SSD and decided to clean slate rather than carry extra fs creep baggage that isn't linked to a package to remove, but I still have that partition around, and I'm pretty sure if I upgraded it it might still boot.

It is why I like rolling releases - rather than have catastrophic breakage every half year, you continuously migrate upwards. It means occasionally you need to pull up a web browser to see why your desktop is missing, but its better than doing a dist-upgrade and getting an unbootable system.
> 9/11 was a mild success

9/11 caused billions of dollars of economic damage, and we are still suffering the (stupid, self-imposed) effects - shuffling through airport security without our shoes, mass fingerprint surveillance, longer travel times, etc.

9/11 caused two wars, killing many thousands of soldiers, and maiming very many more, and those people now need expensive medical treatment and rehabilitation and benefits and etc.
Economist is conservative (erm, right) by European standards. It just happens that it comes out as fairly left by American standards, given that we are so right of the continent.
Not so fast. Desktop versions of new Ubuntu distros all require 3d support. And you can easily run into an obscure problem [1] that would have you reconfiguring graphics for a half a day and result in an unusable system, even if you'd try to go back to an old kernel.

[1] an example: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69928
Ten Life-Changing Tips
Just the implication that a big chunk of the site is in index.php kind of tipped me off that it might be ugly. A little bit of modularization might have helped contain the damage from the screwed up server settings, if nothing else.
Apply reverse, tail, etc. on the result of 'map' and you get something of the same type. Types don't tell all.
Do this for Twitter please
Ars Technica: Ubuntu 13.10 Review
Private Address Forwarding Proposal
Thoughts on Cypherpunks 2.0
It's helpful to add /A (shows .exe files even if they have hidden/system attributes set) and maybe /B (bare format, just the path/filenames without all the header/footer information).
So in other words, nothing ever changes, everything has always been terrible.
There's also the much more substantive consideration that "public pressure", in the shape of a rally like this one, only works at all if there's a credible threat of meaningful action if the presented demands aren't fulfilled. There being no chance of that here, the upcoming rally is little more than a chance for the soi-disant protesters to get out in the fresh air and reassure themselves that they're Doing Something Meaningful.
BioShock 2, The Bureau: XCOM Declassified dev 2K Marin hit with massive layoffs
Asus sold a 1080p ultrabook last year that had a dedicated graphics chip. It was an amazing machine, that almost no one knew about.

One thing to remember is that you are replacing a MBP with an ultrabook, a more fair comparison is to look at the specs in the Macbook Air, to which many ultrabooks compete in terms of thickness and weight.
The Weaponization of Code
On the cause and mitigation of collapses, my humble opinion is that a culture of technical ambition and inquiry is likely to be as important as specific knowledge.

You might want to look at what kinds of people (culturally and ethnically) are behind most innovation and engineering, and look at the differences and influences there. (It may be interesting to look at the historical trend of their power, as well, for futurological purposes.) If the culture that produces civilization stays around through a collapse, there probably is less to worry about than if that culture doesn't survive.

Thus among your important books may be some of the books of industrial culture, like Atlas Shrugged, most good science fiction, some enlightenment philosophy and poetry, Paul Graham's writing, etc.
"had or was attempting to build or purchase" is a pretty weak standard. Do I qualify if I put an ad on craigslist asking if anyone has some spare anthrax? How about if I doodle a nuclear weapon design on a napkin?

I don't doubt Saddam was trying to develop or purchase WMD. But absent the capability of doing so, such attempts mean nothing.

Regardless, it was obvious that Iraq was not a threat to the US. Even if Iraq had had a hundred nuclear bombs, there was no way to deliver them. If you're on the other side of the planet, WMD doesn't matter without ICBMs or long-range bombers to take them to the target.

Did two dozen foreign intelligence agencies go so far as to agree that Iraq was an imminent threat that needed to be stopped by overwhelming force? Somehow, I'm guessing they did not.

One can debate the specific details, but one can't really debate the question of whether Iraq was a threat to the United States in 2003. They were not, and it was patently obvious to anyone paying the least bit attention.
Leaders from Saudi Arabia, India, and probably the UAE, Lebanon, Algeria and others all disagree with you on this one.
It's a reference to the simpsons, the episode "Much Apu about nothing".
http://www.snpp.com/episodes/3F20.html

Search for "not a bear in sight"
Oh man, I can't believe the school (I grew up in Port Townsend) both offered a Joint Stool From A Tree course earlier this year and didn't get enough signups for it: http://www.ptwoodschool.com/joint_stool_from_a_tree.html

I would absolutely love to do that. The book is a great read -- the basic premise is that you can build furniture from green wood in such a way that the drying of the wood will lock your joints and strengthen the stool: http://www.lostartpress.com/Make_a_Joint_Stool_from_a_Tree_p...
Acknowledgement of powerlessness and healthy disengagement in favor of more worthwhile ways of spending one's time. I appreciate it's not for everyone, but I have to say it's done wonders for my peace of mind.
Shocked! I am shocked to hear that a major tech project with a hard deadline was pushed through at the last minute.

Kidding aside, a selfish part of me likes things like this because it lifts the veil and shows me that plenty of other people screw up. It's easy to dismiss it as a botch or idiot contractors but I'm guessing there's a lot of smart people, who worked long hours, and it's just hard to do right in these circumstances.
"When the receiver clicked on it, he saw a white box flash briefly on his screen but didn't notice anything else out of the ordinary"

What email client automatically unzips AND executes any containing .exe files?
There's reason RVM, virtualenv, nvm, pythonbrew etc etc exist. You should NEVER use the system packages for programming. It's a tale as old as time.

Now, the postgres issue is bit different, but Juju solves this problem flawlessly. Check this out: https://github.com/charms/postgresql

What I do these days is setup a VM (vagrant, maybe), depending on what I'm doing, setup RVM, NVM or virtualenv. Juju deploy locally the services I need (mongo, postgres, redis, memcache etc). Done and done.
The beauty of this protection racket equilibrium is that everyone gets exactly the amount of protection they can afford. This leads to rapid and efficient re-allocation of resources (via the mafia/police) when inefficient organizations cannot meet their obligations.
Does anyone have the same problem as me regarding ATT customer service?
Few months ago, I talked to one ATT customer representative on the phone to unlock my previous iPhone 3gs. After chatting ~50min, they told me I need to provide my original receipt. I bought the iPhone from att 4 years ago and lost the receipt unfortunately. So I can't unlock my phone. That's fine.

And few minutes ago, I called ATT to unlock my iPhone 4s. After speaking with a CS representative for 40min, no solution was given and my call was dropped, suddenly. Nobody called me back. I tried to call the service number and find the lady I was speaking to and there is no way...

What a s*t company and service!
Blogging, The key to creating your cult
Amazing, very polished. It also blinks ;)
People+ is Google Glass Wikipedia for people and companies
They were in Windows 8. The theory was everyone would use touch, so touch first, mouse/keyboard second. Far-sighted, perhaps.
I'd try it in a virtual machine just in case.
http://torrentz.eu/
Former Valve employees started CastAR is what I was led to believe. From Valve point of view supporting CastAR is a good option because they want both initiatives to succeed (Oculus Rift is already supported in SDK). Why? More VR = more games, more games = Steam is more relevant. And with Micro Transactions (No other game distribution platform does it AFAIK. So if your game wants to use them Valve will take a cut.) Valve's margins and market segment is so high that investing in technologies like that (Steam Box/VR) makes sense even if they do not pay off for years. Eventually they will bring more people into gaming and Valve will be right there conveniently offering all the games that support VR right on the front page.
I think you mean r selected species?

Otherwise, fascinating points! My day disappeared to Wikipedia thanks to you :-)
Thanks for the detailed reply. I didn't mean to imply anything about your argument specifically around "OK this show isn't great now..." More that it's just a general observation that (especially genre) fans have this expectation that audiences and networks have this sort of moral obligation to cut the show some slack and give it time to develop.

I won't violently disagree with any of your pilot examples. I thought all those were OK shows (especially Sarah Connor for as long as it ran--on a tangential topic, some shows would really just be better as 20 show or whatever runs) but I'll agree they didn't really ultimately live up to the promise of their pilots.
Most corporate windows file servers (since 2003) use shadow copy, which saves previous versions of files every couple of hours. Any decent IT dept will use folder redirection, which redirects deskop, my documents to the local file server.
Entrepreneurship is contagious. Let's spread the bug
Were you aware of this beforehand? Did you take precautions to keep the LSD in a cool place away from light?

If it was just in your fridge for five months, I doubt there was much left at the end.
Elop Was Second Choice as Nokia CEO
This is the same link as the one attached to the thread, though this may be due to after-the-fact HN moderation?

In any case, this is just an excerpt of the full interview which will be printed in the December issue of the magazine.
You are assuming that something needs to be done, that something "needs to work." In reality we would be just as safer (actually safer) if we did away with TSA, than we are now.
All this concern for women choosing their own path, and so little concern for men being pushed by both men and women to pursue high-stress careers just to be accepted. It's hard for someone who's happy with a less ambitious career to compete with someone who's been trained from birth to never stop seeking more power and wealth no matter the personal cost. It's no surprise most take the more fulfilling role and let guys destroy themselves.
Thanks for mentioning this book. I think this book by Robert Pirsig should be on the short list of "Must Reads" of any true hacker
I can't speak for CoffeeScript or ClojureScript, but Evan Czaplicky does get paid to work on Elm: http://elm-lang.org/blog/announce/Elm-and-Prezi.elm
> The thing I most remember about having to program with Qt was having to convert all my standard C++ types back and forth to QStrings and QLists and QFiles in order to work with the library's APIs

same think can happen with gtk or any framework (toolkit, actually, to be pedantic about it), and anyway, in an oo language especially, there are design patterns to cope with this.
Well, the way the SQL code in that file is ripe for SQL injection, it's possible that the database has been compromised for a while...
If I were to open my dropbox at work, could my employer view private things in the dropbox?

If your employer has physical access or the admin password to your work computer (very likely) then anything you store or do on it is potentially compromised. (including passwords, keys, etc.) Same for work-issued phones etc. The security of the protocol is irrelevant in this case as you're trusting a compromised client.
As anti-Apple as I am, I think we have to give them this one, especially when the alternative (i.e. making iMessage completely unencrypted) would have been much, much easier.

I would be prepared to give them this one, were it not for the fact that they claimed the opposite. Make all the security vs usability trade offs you want, just don't lie about them!
The NSA Revelations Are Destroying IBM Hardware Sales In China
Yeah like Apple makes your iPhone hardware anyway.