skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reading this, I think back to CRYPTO, Usenix Security, and other conferences in the field where participants are handed thumb drives with the proceedings -- and people thought I was crazy to refuse to plug them into my computer.
I think this speaks to our interest in clicking things on websites and seeing things happen in the real world. There have been several sites like this, but the most memorable for me was the one that allowed you to create a song to be played in a company office.
They are different, but Dropbox does have some "P2P" behavior with LAN sync:

https://www.dropbox.com/help/137/en

Note: Dropbox employee, but this is public information.
The Logic of “Stupid” Poor People
Presumably the infection includes a driver to turn the audio system into an acoustic coupler, which would appear as a network device on the target machine. At that point any packet sniffer should be able to attach to it.

I'm guessing of course, there's not much real details to go on, and that would mean this infection is more then just a malicious BIOS.

EDIT: Or he's full of shit. Honestly I said that several times reading it, the story was clearly written for sensationalism and made many seemingly impossible claims. I'm no where near an expert but it still set off the bullshit meter too many times.
From the link:

"Since I do not expect native platforms (i.e. GLibc) to preallocate gigs of memory at application startup to make it faster when dynamic memory is actually used, I do not expect this from a compiler for the JavaScript target either."

So, it would actually make very good sense to have the thing slab allocate a big honking array upfront, and then manage it with brk/sbrk/malloc, and perhaps just add more memory as needed.

Like, if we're going to be writing C/C++ in the browser, why not do this? Why make us deal with the GC at all?
You know that Kindle can actually be turned off[1], right?

Arguing with low wage employees while they're having to deal with hundreds of passengers during the short pre-flight legally mandated checks makes you appear like an arsehole. They don't know every device on the market, nor whether that device is using 3G or wifi or is just sleeping or is off. And they don't need to know, they've been told to make sure that everything is turned off and that there are serious consequences if it doesn't happen.

The fact that the regulations are idiotic is not the fault of the busy, underpaid, low-skilled, attendants.

[1] https://kindle.s3.amazonaws.com/Kindle_User%27s_Guide_Englis...

Page 20

> Power switch — puts your Kindle to sleep, wakes it up, and turns your Kindle on or off. The power switch is located just to the right of the micro-USB/power port. To put your Kindle to sleep, slide and release the power switch; the screensaver appears on the display. While your Kindle is asleep, other keys and buttons are locked so that you don’t accidentally change the place in your reading. For Kindle with Special Offers, the center of the 5-way controller is not locked while your Kindle is asleep. To turn your Kindle off, slide and hold the power switch for seven seconds until the screen goes blank and then release.
I've gotten out of the habit of this, and honestly don't know if I'm better off for it. When I didn't have access to a computer, I would fairly regularly 'implement' designs with pen and paper and test it too. As you experienced, these would then work perfectly or nearly so on actual systems.

Now I almost always have a computer or computer-like device at hand so there's just no need. Sometimes it feels like this results in more experimenting, but less thinking.
What triggers my skepticism is

* "Ruiu said he plans to get access to expensive USB analysis hardware" -- I'm not an expert on USB, but I do believe it should be trivial to tap the traffic between a machine and such an infected stick, and compare it to what should normally be happening.

* No effort seems to have been made to capture the sound waves made by this (supposedly reproduceable) high-frequency audio networking.

* The infected bios hasn't been dumped and compared to the bios the machine was supposed to have.

* For some reason, there's no mention of other researchers getting access to or investigating infected machines and usb sticks.

These are all extremely basic steps that could be taken to make the story go from vague conjecture to actual proof (or disproof). Why weren't they taken?
I misread postmortem and thought it was already dead
Heise.de started "two clicks for better privacy" that Bruce Scheiner also uses on his blog. http://www.heise.de/extras/socialshareprivacy/ & https://github.com/panzi/SocialSharePrivacy
Taking DevOps To The Next Level
The key take-away here is that a business blog is and should be treated as another product. Then it is easy to see it must deliver value. To some degree I compare this to the millions of news sites out there. They all regurgitate the same news. You could go anywhere and read almost exactly the same thing. The truly interesting ones go beyond rewording an AP story by providing research, insight and analysis that users value.
Creating a pure enough crystal and cutting it in the right format was once very expensive.

There was a time when all the clocks relied on mechanical timers, and a MW sized electrical generator is more stable than anything you can put at your living room.
Yellowstone magma reservoir two and a half times larger than previously thought
I see no reason for government agents to be treated differently legally than private individuals when business secrets are requested to be exposed. Coast Guardsmen have no special right to the inner workings to a private company's data center, for example.

If their duty is to board a boat and insure there is no contraband or whatever, I cannot imagine they're also given a blanket right to learn trade secrets and then be at their own discretion to disclose those.

It's absolutely plausible to require an NDA before exposing such information.
It's incredible how okay it is to make fun of them too. Bullying is bad, unless you're bullying a hipster.
I used my dropbox for really important files. But then all the rest is archives and don't mind it getting it next day. All my external hard drives never last more than 2 years. While it is an interesting approach I am concerned about reliability if it is an archive.

I tried out Bitcasa for Mac and it is terrible. My Finder basically stop responding after bitcasa started. I have been working on a simplified version of AWS boto library for glacier, in the goal of making an open source tool like a command line sftp/ftp style access to glacier.
I live in Las Vegas. Deaths occur in homes here every summer due to AC system failures (usually among the elderly and children that cannot easily leave and go to a cooler place). Many more do not die because they realize it is getting too hot and do whatever they have to do to get to a cooler place. A device like this that changes your perception of whether it is hot or cold would likely do more harm than good here and in other extreme climates. I can see huge product liability lawsuits in their future.
Physicists Eye Quantum-Gravity Interface
You guys are doing great work! Please don't confuse my disdain for the concept of C++ in the browser for a lack of appreciation for your work.
http://i.imgur.com/opc22Lf.gif
It could be classified as a medical device under FDA regulations:http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulationandGuidanc...
Things aren't that simple. Certain rights can certainly override others (your right to life overrides my liberty to shoot you), which implies, if not a ranking, at least complexity. My liberty was only legally maximized when I turned 19: should five-year-olds be able to buy guns? Should I be free to record a conversation we have without my telling you?

A person has liberty if he or she is free to do anything lawful within a just framework of laws that is fairly enforced. Everything you do has consequences, however. Your freedom is thus freedom from having government stopping you from doing things that are within the law, but not freedom from consequences. (Note that article 12, as written, is qualified by the term "arbitrary". According to the right as written, you or I can be interfered with if the reasons for doing so are non-arbitrary.) Absolute privacy rights increase freedom from non-legal consequences -- this is a good thing when your social context is horrible (shun him! he's smoking mj!), but more often than not, removing social consequences is a net loss.

Privacy has a nice "liberty narrative" which makes it easy to defend (as you are doing) in the abstract, because it bears a close relationship to freedom (you are, without a doubt, "more free" if you have more control over what you choose to disclose). In practice, people behave best (on balance) when transparency is maximized, and they behave worst when they have absolute privacy and anonymity (see Tor, 4chan, freenet, etc.). In many game-theoretic contexts, "private information" is what leads to sub-optimal overall outcomes that tend to strongly preference the already advantaged.

Privacy rights, therefore, have much to do with the tension between the goals of the many and the goals of the few. The real problems lie not with privacy per se, but with asymmetries in its distribution.
My take on where the Healthcare.gov project failed
The decline and fall of Levi-Strauss
Infinite lazy polynomials
Ownership is something that is central in C++. Programmers who come from languages where they can rely on a garbage collector probably find it odd that they would have to specify how variables are captured. For a C++ programmer, it is natural to think about who owns something and in which scope it lives.

To generalize a bit: a lot of the things that might seem odd to non C++-programmers are perfectly natural to C++-programmers.

It's not often that I hear that C++ is too narrow. Being able to add new operators and changing the way the type checker works both seem like niche things and something that is more fit for a research language.
Please don't tell me that Richard Stallman was right all along...
You might be right, but how do I find it?

I've been to restaurants that are supposedly decent, and I don't think there's anything off about my cooking - others seem to find it palatable enough, (though whether they'd tell me or not if they didn't is questionable.) I've tried cooking with expensive ingredients and cheap ingredients - and there's a difference in texture but not really much in the taste.

It's not like I can't recognise tastes but the response is just, 'Meh. Oh, yeah it's food flavoured like [whatever]. That stuff you eat so you don't die.'
I really liked the implementation listed out on this site. I went through it and it was a great learning experience. You also get a sweet web interface with owncloud.

http://blog.bittorrent.com/2013/05/23/how-i-created-my-own-p...
Well, BIOSes these days are all the same anyway (Award/Phoenix), and no one gives a fk about BIOS code safety. Even the "anti-thievery" measure of permanent security codes (unlockable by manufacturer only) is moot, as you can reverse-engineer BIOS updates and get the code from them.

And I would not rely on BIOS code be security-audited in ANY way! Especially not the part of the code dealing with USB. Low-level as it may be, I bet there exist buffer overflow or other vulnerabilities in USB protocol stacks.
Agreed. The only thing I saw that I would change is the highlight color (currently pink) in the bottommost area (also pink). Its a couple of shades lighter but still very hard to see.
And more importantly, I am pretty sure most startups would gladly have twitter's scaling problems in exchange for being the next twitter.
Good point. I am on GSM in the US but also prefer an international phone.
http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/index.php

This was well-solved a long time ago so...uh...yeah I guess? With much worse hardware?

Maybe Lua?

Do you actually have a real example, or were you just listing off all the magical platforms?

EDIT:

Ha, you do some pretty cool work.

Anyways, put more mildly, is there a case you've seen where you actually have to support all the platforms you've mentioned?

(I seem to be making all sorts of friends today. :| )
What you are saying is absolutely reasonable assumption to make. But let's face it, all social security systems are and should be to take care that people don't go hungry and start prostituting themselves for a loaf of bread. If I want to be an entrepreneur then I don't blame the authorities for showing me the door and telling me to fend for myself. I may have a different opinion in 2-3 months at the end of my runway though ;-)
> "Air-gapped" would mean no USB, right?

No, it means air-gapped. Traditionally this just meant no wires to other computers (and an autonomous power source if you're extra paranoid). Today of course it more broadly means no direct communication with another computer, including things like WiFi or Bluetooth.

External media has always been used to transfer data between air-gapped systems, and it's always been a weakness. USB drives are just smarter than older forms of external media, posing a greater potential threat.
oh yeah! I'm down....
29% of large, randomized trials did not have published results. This is actually a much better stat than I was expecting, given the significant incentives for industry to hide bad outcomes. There's still an unquantified pile of hidden results that stem from studies that never register with ClinicalTrials.gov in the first place. (E.g. studies done outside of the US.)
I was thinking about this too. If it's possible to send out arbitrary frequencies with it you could have a one way channel even if the air gapped machine doesn't have a mic. Only the receiver would need one. The air gapped machine would just be transmitting 24/7 hoping another machine is in range.
Yes. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/like-button/
... None of these auto install on macosx or Linux, and even not on windows since win7sp1 if I am not mistaken. So, no, this cannot be the reason for the symptoms listed by dragos
U.S. Plans Global Network of Free Online Courses
Ingress Augmented Reality game now open beta
Show HN: Lis10Up - listen to your favorite news on the go
This reminds me of the PayPal mobile application, both in terms of organization and information priority. Both this concept and the mobile app headline account balance, simplify actions to four items, and allow the transaction log to make up the body of the content.

Look-and-feel aside, I think this concept aligns with the intent to bring parity between the mobile experience and desktop. I do worry, however, that the use cases for the desktop application may differ (particularly for bigger sellers) from the mobile, and this flow may fall apart for them.
should've called it lazarus
Admittedly very few, although I did run into performance issues on Rails sites handling orders of magnitude less traffic. It's an interesting use case though -- tough to imagine a simpler web app than circa-2006 Twitter. Tellingly, they ultimately threw up their hands and moved it all to Scala.
If that's the suspision, then use an exotic platform to dump whatever the drive is doing. I know a guy who got usb mass storage devices working from a Zilog z80 based calculator. I doubt an arbitrary usb malware is going to be clever enough to effectively subvert an arbitrary homemade USB stack on a (these days) obscure arch.
Can’t Have Your Privacy Violated If You Don’t Know It Is Violated
T-Mobile's John Legere Trashes the Wireless Business Model
With the dominance of the WWW now, most people don't realize the Internet (and the ".com" nomenclature) predates the WWW.
I think you've probably misunderstood.

The mere loading of the widget sends a signal to Facebook that you visited the shoes page. You don't have to interact with the widget for the info to be sent.

Ghostery blocks the widget from loading.
Economist: Crime in Florida
Yes, the "Like" button is used by Facebook to track users across third-party sites. Clicking the button is not necessary for information to be transmitted to Facebook.

More information straight from Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/help/186325668085084
> Also, what was so special about the N900 and is that relevant in the market today?

The idea of it was great but the phone itself was pretty frustrating.

The idea is that it was a little bitty linux tablet, with something of an open source community behind it, that could also make phone calls. I explained some of my thoughts in this arstechnica thread[0] from 4 years ago.

But the reality once I got the phone was it was just slow and frustrating to use. Aspects of it were great (it multitasked the best of all the phones of its day), but over time it's glitchyness (hanging up on calls instead of answering them, because the buttons jumped around), and the lack of multi touch brought me down.

I still have my N900 in a box somewhere. If anyone in the Boston area wants it, ping me (email address on my profile here) and I'd be happy to give it to you.

[0] http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=49987
>> I say this because I think people used more common sense about money 100 years ago. They likely learned it at home, not at school.

This is true, but 100 years ago, compulsory public education until ~age 18 was much less common, people simply had less money, and credit was not ubiquitous the way it is now. I agree parents need to take responsibility for filling in the gaps of school, but that doesn't mean you can't also advocate for the schools filling those gaps themselves.
I also find the response to the above article contrasted to the response to this one[1] very interesting. They both do the same thing but with a different target audience. From which one might conclude it's okay to be condescending and insulting to a target group, as long as it's a target group that one does not identify with (directly or indirectly).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6645925
It was actually hearable but could be mistaken for crappy electronic noise

https://plus.google.com/u/0/103470457057356043365/posts/3reW...
That last picture is fantastic!
Apple enabled BEAST mitigations in OS X 10.9
When to actually suck up your pride
Nice post.

Summary: Find your voice (Be authentic). High quality visuals. Give reasons for others to care about (or subscribe to) your blog. Get noticed by influencers.

I hope this is accurate.

Also, one more implicit take-away: make sure readers to come back to read next week by ending a post with a cliffhanger (e.g. I will tell you how this blog got 1000+ subscribers in a day if you come back)
Coursera and US Department of State launch Global Learning Hubs
Probably. You could also argue that if a government (state, local or federal) organization came to him and asked for a design, they're being "paid by him" since they're operating off of tax dollars.

That wasn't my point. The point is that in the real world, every designer (and developer) has a client, regardless of whether they're a freelancer, employee of a commercial company, or even a government employee. Who pays whom is unimportant in this context; what is important is that an agreement has taken place: the designer is to create something at the specific request of a consumer.

The clients have a need, and the designer's job is to meet that need. In the anecdote from the article, the professor is the client, and that client said "redesign a popsicle".

My point is that Kim, as talented as he may be, did not address his client's need in this case.
Even Boerries says it will still take a long time for a 'techie' to acquire a Visa, Germany just offers a simpler application process and is fastER than that of Americas.

And even if the time it takes to get a Visa is close to similar, it comes down to a debate between being in Silicon Valley vs. Berlin...despite the so-called saturation of startups in the valley, the reality is opportunity is far greater in the valley than anywhere else. Silicon Valley wins IMO.
With a staged payload, the ability to communicate across an airgap could allow successive stages to be delivered in the presence of counter-measures. It could also facilitate minimization of the spore's footprint during initial infection and thereby reduce the likelihood that the spore will be detected.

The conclusion that for communications across the air-gap to work, the receiver must already be infected is the only alternative to "No, it isn't happening."

Now I'm not in a position to say, that it is happening. But I'm not in a position to say that the supply chain for electronic devices is hardened against an attack by a state sponsored agency seeking to inject spores into devices at the time of manufacture. If an agency is interested in maximizing backdoor accesses, having infected devices roll off the assembly line and straight to end users certainly seems like an ideal outcome. It's map reduce.

Don't get me wrong, I know I'm furiously folding Reynolds Wrap. But I also know that there is a cognitive gap between the furniture of everyday experience and large scale phenomena - e.g. collecting meta data on all phone calls simultaneously and then storing and searching it doesn't fit with the MOS 6510 mental model of computing I habitually use.
I agree. The new Opera Browser is essentially a completely new browser. It doesn't appear that they are trying to bring in the features from the old browser. Instead, they are starting over and creating new features while ignoring why people were using the old version.

Originally my hope was that they were going to replace the rendering engine in the browser, but keep the browser UI the same. I supposed the two were too tightly coupled for that.

Opera Classic on mobile is a much better browser than the new Opera Mobile, especially on low end devices.
Quite like a navigation beacon...
I had one as well. Same experience with a brand new AMD Athlon XP 1800+.
>> I would say its possible that personal finance isn't taught deliberately - banks want people to be worse at money and debt management so they can make more money off them

Public education seems to me to be one of the few sectors that big banks exert little to no influence on. The main problem is cyclical, many teachers and administrators never got this training, and so aren't well equipped to teach and advocate for it. Much of education curriculum setting (in terms of what classes to teach) is driven by union demand, so a lack of accounting/finance teachers leads to less advocacy, while a surplus of visual arts and music teachers leads to substantial demand for those classes.
I am studying philosphy on my own and I thought transcendentalism meant something else: that all people are inherently good and social structures takes that away.
Snowden gets website job in Russia, lawyer says
Apparently he did make a recording of the output (second last comment on this G+ publication https://plus.google.com/u/0/103470457057356043365/posts/3reW... )
That's a great point about the in-flight magazines. I wonder if there's an substantial return on those, and if so, if any airlines would maintain the current policy in attempts to keep people engaged. It'd be interesting to see if some airlines adopt a more lax policy sooner than others.
So do you do you think Meteor can scale? I don't know if I'm following, but I'm assuming limiting the queries(?) means limiting the size.
Fortunately, FAA regulations also seem to require the flight attendants to sit in their seats during takeoff and landing.

Once the flight attendants are done "policing" the isles and get in their seats, I just take out my Kindle and start reading again.

So far, I haven't caused any aircraft crashes... and my fellow travelers have never called me out on it: apparently they also think the rules are stupid.
Edward Snowden to start work at Russian website
Nice! I will try it too.
Bosh did put up Titanic numbers as a number one option on the Raptors, and is a fixture on Team USA. "Superstar" may be a slight overstatement, but given the overapplication of that term to "any famous athlete," I don't think it's worth quibbling with.