skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Standard Operating Procedure is to say it was handed to the Metropolitan specialist computer crimes unit who cracked it. Someone turns up in court saying they are a Met officer from the unit and they worked really really hard. It's never been a problem.

Remember this was originally a terrorist case; there would have been plenty of resources made available - there always are for these.

A likely scenario is it was cracked and found to be irrelevant so the option of going for a political angle for more powers was much more preferable than letting some low-level frauster know his encryption had been cracked (and hence letting lots of people know the USB encryption was worthless and risking real terrorist cases where suspects used the same approach).
Here is the article from 2012 on the bomb attack plot: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22200133 same guy, already jailed. Plotting an attack is a criminal offence, in most countries classified same as the actual crime.
How interesting that they report an irrelevant hyper-detail (the password itself) but not the specifics of what "sophisticated encryption technology" that "GCHQ ... were unable to crack."

Also interesting that a password based on word-and-number games, an approach that has been criticized lately as vulnerable to new attacks using common password fragments, seems to have flummoxed the pros in this case anyway.

Here's one point that I think should be referenced more prominently, maybe in the headline somehow:

Police accessed the memory stick [as part of a counter-terrorism operation] and found it contained ... nothing relating to terrorism or national security.

That is: We convicted this guy of a crime for obstructing a terror investigation, even though he wasn't actually doing that. We used our special emergency terrorism powers to push someone around and make demands that were potentially impossible, but it turned out to be just another false alarm. Of course, the guy we pushed around is a certified scumbag and he doesn't look like the sort of white-bread upstanding citizen that most readers of the article imagine themselves to be, so we can count on you to not get too worked up about the whole thing.
Is this trolling? Or a serious question where you just don't understand the difference between collaboration with non-profits to provide a public good and for-profit companies selling their customers to the highest bidder?
> The NSA said the technology has not been used in computers in the US.

But of course not. The NSA wouldn't spy on Americans, would it?
There are efforts underway to redefine the kilogram: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilogram#Proposed_future_defini...
I suspect that in this case there was substantial indication of intent. There was clearly evidence of conspiracy.
I agree, I can tell you this would work on my kids: if there is a ranking for brushing teeth they'd be much more inclined not to miss it.

Sure, there are other solutions to solve this problem. But I like this one.
Or go to India, or Russia. Antibiotics are sold over the counter and (at least in case of India last time I checked) are dirt cheap.
Taking ownership of a problem they caused. Giving more credit away than they take.
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Cheese.... wait for it... E!

And can I see the product without having to hunt down my country in a gigantic freaking select box first?? Isn't it fundamentally the same in every country?
> I don't understand this defense of the NSA, no, its not what they are supposed to be doing. At least not anymore.

What are they supposed to be doing, then? Should the US just not have any spy agencies? Should it shift away from signals intelligence and focus on human intelligence like Israel does?
It's more likely that they spent a couple of hours, figured it was not worthy of more time (hey, lots of crypto to crack, these days they scan the whole internet after all!) and returned it to Plod. There was enough proof to incriminate him already.
I'd be interested in someone knowledgable writing a comparison of the UK & US systems.

For example, do judges need to issue the paper work or can a senior police officer do it?
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Silicon Valley VC Thinks a Single Bitcoin Will Be Worth $100,000
The issue most people have is the warrantless data collection that's going on. If there is no warrant specifying who, what, where and for how long, there is too much room for exploitation.

It's not that they are hacking. It's that they are not accountable to the system that feeds them.
so music.

such keyboard shortcuts.

wow.
I am reminded of so many great and formerly dominant tech giants that have pursued a similar course of deep investment, acquisition, and R&D in newer and more cutting edge technologies outside of, or tangential to their main engines of revenue and dominance without ever fully moving beyond those engines.

Thinking specifically of companies like Intel, Microsoft, Cisco, et al.

All spent (and continue to spend) literal billions on acquisitions and R&D and yet all still pretty much make their money from their original core competence.

I think Google's case is simply more ambitious. Android is probably their second biggest adoption success after search/web apps but it seems evident they're not satisfied with the financial ROI of it... It's a defensive thing.

tl;dr: Pivoting is very hard and history is full of brilliant companies that have tried and never been fully able to.
Absolutely! Over the last ~10 years, with perhaps an average of 6-8 disks at any one time and relatively low intensity use, I've probably had 4 hard drives where the files had checksum errors, before complete failure.

But you don't need anything fancy; 2TB is small enough though that you can just buy another HDD and back it up manually.
As you mention in your post, they didn't get "caught"
Any good idea you have today can be made into a bad idea later. See Alfred Nobel.
The Windows DPI scaling control panel has DPI scaling bugs: http://i.imgur.com/zi80IhG.png

That's all you need to know about high DPI support in Windows, in a nutshell.
Let's count.

On the one hand, put every non-US citizen killed by the US.

On the other hand, put every US citizen killed by all other countries and terrorists combined.

Guess which number is vastly bigger than the other. 5-10 thousand dead in 9/11? That's peanuts, compared to the disproportionate responses that ensued. (I'm not saying it's peanuts in an absolute sense. It's still a tragedy, of course. Any death is.)
I am "the author" and I do understand that but the point of my post was to simplify the issue for the vast majority of folks who don't get the net neutrality issue
Well that's too bad his post got deleted. While the following doesn't address all the issues [he has], depending on location int he U.S. many "express clinics" are popping up in convenient locations (like grocery and retail stores) that do not require an appointment, can diagnose common ailments (such as ear infections), write prescriptions (for such common ailments as ear infections), and are relatively inexpensive.
In the U.S., it would have to be a judge.
I think its perfectly reasonable for someone to later remember a password. Its happened to me a lot. I realise they probably had some reasonable suspicion into him previously, but on the surface it reads like they are just throwing the book at him rather than legitimately investigating terrorists.
Not when you are associated with Terrorism. But in a way, yes. As long as you are not associated with terrorism, then you can not be compelled to testify against yourself. I am not a lawyer, but I do remember reading about a case where a judge said the defendant had to give up his password. So in this case, a deniable encryption scheme would probably suffice. Again, not a lawyer.
I think this is essentially what N900 did. The GSM part was handled as an external modem so that people would be free to have root on the rest of the device.

http://flors.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/software-freedom-lover...
As a young angel investor, my advice to entreps is something my parents ingrained in me from a young age: always have a cushion. It gives you flexibility to have a few months of expenses saved up; you can take risks and respond to surprises. Same goes for companies, especially in an environment where there's a lot more seed happening than A and B money to be had. I see way too many companies closing a smaller round and then suddenly deciding they want/need a bridge to make an extra hire, try out a new marketing strategy, etc. Just do it upfront and know you'll have the wiggle room.
I get why he dashed out some throwaway ideas to make the point. But yes, those business ideas seem so maddeningly trivial that I can't forward this on to non-industry people. I'm a giant fan of net neutrality and hate oligopolistic telcos deeply, but my first reaction to this was, "Well, anything that stops a gamified social Snapchat from seeing the light of day can't be all bad."
When I ask what time it is, do you think harder about the minute or the hour?
Linux-powered telepresence robot gets personal
That's very fiddly compared to using ZFS and getting it "for free".
Doing nothing useful doesn't necessarily result in harm.

I keep pointing out that people are claiming that this is harmful in some personal way. I keep asking how. The best I've seen is that it creates harm to the standards, which is more about causing harm to the people who control the standards. This decision directly harms the standards body itself, it does not harm the open web. Corrupting the standards with bad decisions hurts the reputation of the standards body, which will eventually importance in the scheme of things. The open web will just move on to something else. The reason I say that is because if the web is truly open, it is free to ignore the "standards" it doesn't like. Meaning, the people who use it can choose to not participate. It's a standard because everyone agrees to use it together. If the people using the open web decide they don't like a browser that implements DRM they don't agree with, then they have the option to choose a browser that doesn't implement the DRM. If there isn't such a browser, the open web allows someone to create and share it with the masses.

If this decision actually causes harm to the open web, then it's not truly open because that implies no one can get around the decisions made by this select group of people. If that's the case, then the web doesn't sound very open as it stands today.
Can't rule it out. You don't have to be showing symptoms to be a carrier, and you can be a carrier for extended periods. It's quite possible (in fact likely) that there are plenty of virus sources waiting to get you, including inside yourself.
...seems to be relabelling 'low tax' as economic freedom here.

Taxation is 10% of the index, government spending another 10%.

http://www.heritage.org/index/about
TA = Army Reserves, not town council / home association!

The article might make it appear they jokingly talked/thought about a bomb, but others make it clear there plans were concrete. It mentions them going to "meet the brothers" at a training camp where duties would include "helping them making the bombs". I think it becomes a crime when it goes from curious learning to definitive plans. They weren't just thinking something socially unacceptable, they were planning to cause harm.

It sounds like they only charged him for this after he gave up the keys he was previously withholding. While I disagree with the power this law gives, its less extreme if its only used when they can prove the password was both covering up a crime and not forgotten. More of a deterrent, and slightly less of a thoughtcrime.
Media may have used the term "discussed" but they were convicted for plotting. By legal definition, in order to commit a crime there has to be a proved conscious intent and actions taken. Even grouping together is considered an action, I assume for 16 years they've dome more than that. There was also existing home made bomb.

Sorry this guy is a criminal and a murderer, his value to society is pretty low to considering he hasn't done anything of a value in his life, except moving to UK.
I wouldn't even qualify this by saying "normal." VCs are hyper-capitalists. Other people give them money with the mandate to turn a profit...period. That's the whole job. Most of us "normal" tech folk get migraines looking at the silly crap that gets funded, but a VC's job really isn't about anything else, and couldn't be ethically, unless the people who pay into the fund wanted it that way.

The investors who do the stuff that I suppose one would call meaningful tend to be investing their own money or their friends' money, or it's a slice of a regular fund used in a way similar to corporate donations. Plenty of VCs do care about tech and meaningful endeavors, but that has to be secondary, unless they are playing with their own money.

There seems to be a lot of misconceptions about what the business of investment is, when it comes to venture capital, for some reason. I've spent enough time around the activity and the people that I can see what it is and the logic of it. I don't really like it, but then I don't like a lot of things in our culture.
How are you tp prove you did in fact not forget it?

Under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000[1] it doesn't matter whether you forgot a password or not. Failure to provide it is against the law.

This Act has proved highly controversial for a number of reasons. The potential for fitting someone up by claiming that they aren't disclosing a password that in reality they can't disclose was one of the civil liberties concerns expressed even before the Act was passed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investigatory_Po...
Xiaomi gets another new convert as Steve Wozniak drops into Beijing HQ
Yeah. I could have tried harder to come up with less frivolous ideas but I wrote this in about five minutes and I just went with the first ideas that were mobile bandwidth reliant I could come up with
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Yes, both latent sector errors (data that is lost that you don't know is lost) and detectable and undetectable bit errors happen at rates high enough to affect 2TB of family photos. NetApp[1] and the Internet Archive[2] have published good data on this in the past.

Scrubbing (periodically reading the data and comparing it to checksums) is one way to get around this. It's very effective against small numbers of sector errors in backups (you should have more than one), and in detecting marginal data on drives. It's less effective against some other kinds of corruption. Another option is to store multiple copies (replication), or additional ECC information that can be used to recover the data if one copy is lost.

How much effort you put into this really depends on how much you need or want the data.

[1] http://www.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/latent-sigmetrics07...
[2] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.64....
Black gold.
That's the idea -- even your mind is not a safe place for a password.
+1. First, I wish to know what technology he used. Is TrueCrypt sufficient (with similarly strong password). Not because I have to hide anything, of course, just my wife wants me to encrypt our spicy photos, in case :)

Second, I am not sure I understand the judge decision. If the man truly forgot it, or lets say the files on USB got corrupted (can happen) and the password he is giving out does not work, then how can you continue to jail him (for that reason)? Is this something specific to UK, or are similar US cases out there?
Agreed, I think ideas like these and @pedalpete's hint at making a play commercially lends to packaging this up into a LaaS (ha!) offering and putting a Kickstarter campaign in front of that. Depending on your costs, needs, and some more feedback, you might offer some custom solutions/packages to backers on the higher-end.

+1 on Student associations being restricted. If I'm not mistaken, GSU has these sorts of restrictions [0] - although it couldn't hurt to get some grassroots support that isn't necessarily monetary

0: I did some web development for a student association at GSU and provided some basic tech support for a symposium.
This is not the 'first' phone to do these things. I had an idea along these lines in 2003, and some searching turned up a German company that was already doing it. Somebody bought them a couple of years later, and I don't know what happened to the phone. This sure isn't the 'first' though.
The issue isn't the speed, it's what this arrangement can lead to. I believe the inherent right to information supersedes the wants of a few corporations. What we are really talking about is potentially losing access to valuable information. To me the internet is a public domain and limiting traffic like this is the equivalent of limiting speech.
2014 belongs to Social Commerce, Bitcoin, Wearable Tech and Sentiment Search
How to become an Authority and Influencer
AFAICT (and please correct me if I'm wrong), the ruling actually disallows the FCC from regulating in anyway at all, including classifying ISPs as common carriers.
This Smart Bowl Will Charge Your Gadgets
Planting evidence is a practice as old as law enforcement though...
Pdef, a simple yet powerful interface language for the web with a compiler
Yea - then we just walk through their answer to make sure they get the reason it works and ways to improve it. It's usually quicker and leaves time for another question that they hopefully haven't heard.
A single bit can be corrected, but there's a threshold per block. As far as I know, the hard drive won't auto-scan blocks that have been sitting still, so it's probably not a bad idea to run a full SMART scan every once in a while.
Net neutrality threatened by court
If I desire privacy would I buy a Blackphone, or would I buy another more common smartphone which I would then secure?

If you're "picked up" or detained and you have a Blackphone, or someone observes you using your Blackphone I doubt very much it would help your pricacy concerns.

If however you have a seemingly normal phone it might be overlooked and simply using it wouldn't raise suspicion.

My point is that this type of phone is more for the "regular" person who simply doesn't want to be monitored (as much) and not covert agents looking for a secure phone/platform for communication.
Disagree with the title; if anything, these practices are correlated with a SURPLUS of arses involved in the project. :)
It is that notion in modern people "pain must go away, fast!" that makes things worse.

Because people think that way, many will go to hospital and get said: There is nothing we can do for you (anymore).

And wait some years, than the problem will widespread.

We are indeed really lucky: Only 100 years before, there was no cure for many diseases where we just throw a pill today. But we today just take it for granted and we gamble the advantage away. They day will come and has yet come, that nature is throwing back onto us.
Put your hand up - always be the first to volunteer for a project or help out
I'm digging the trend of pushing things out of the way and using packaging to solve the big OS hairball .. Just today I booted a small Linux image straight to lua-jit. A delightful platform!
And that makes us better than the terrorists, how? 9/11 was an atrocity, no doubt, but people in Yemen and Pakistan live through the same atrocities daily.

You know when the US government tells you it's killing enemy combatants in Pakistan via drone attacks? What they don't tell you is they define any combatants as men aged 18-40 in that region.
I'm also a very happy ZFS user on FreeBSD. I've tried to use it in a lot of crazy ways. At the moment I'm researching if ZFS and a virtual machine running Microsoft SQL Server can improve query performance(with LZ4/GZIP compression) and improve the backup speed.

Though I'm wondering about if there are any plans to add XZ compression? Or faster hashing with Siphash24 for data checksums?
Facebook to enter the online newspaper market with 'Paper'
Ask HN: Which Macbook is best for development?
I need to get a Mac for iOS development (and some ruby on rails). I have limited amount of money, so something below $2000. Should I get a 13 inch Macbook pro with 4gb of ram or is retina something I should get. Is a desktop Mac better than laptop?
The 3 Most Surprising Insights From a 200 Website Eye-Tracking Study
One problem with this plan is that it solves the problem only for a few relatively rich and aware people. The majority of people will continue to be screwed, which also means that new businesses trying to compete with incumbents will be screwed.

Also, there's a good question whether telcos will sell Google the ability to prioritize traffic, and then sell somebody else the ability to get out of that. The VPN provider will always be a minnow, so my guess is that if any of the whales object, the telcos will just never sign with the VPN provider.
A site peddling a product that is supposedly about user control and privacy that won't even load without javascript...

The irony is almost too much.
IOS-Blog: Only two advertising spaces left
Unless ZFS isn't easily available on the OS you are using.
The author commented on that in his foreword of later editions of the book. He said something along the lines that if he was writing the novel later in his life, the dichotomy wouldn't be as pointed.
Finally, someone who spells "arses" correctly!
Texas Tea.
Ok, how is that any different?

An artist who works alone deserves your money but an artist who agrees to work with a third-party does not? Because the third-party might get a piece of the pie dictated by the contract the artist agreed to? That's an extremely weak defense of not paying for content.

Are book stores okay? Because I'm sure they make money from the books they sell that they didn't personally write. Well, that's not an exact comparison but I hope you get my point.

I have to say, I am astounded at the level of entitlement people seem to have when it comes to consuming content others worked to create. I want it, therefore it should be mine is the mantra of this type of thinking.
A source for mentioned Israeli spy tactics. I've never read that they focus solely on human intelligence
I totally agree. Coming from a teaching background, I'm much more comfortable with working off of a loose framework of bullet points, then filling in the talk with my own anecdotes and narrative.

Still, practicing a few times helps me remember, in a broad symbolic sense, what I'm going to improvise. It's a bit like jazz or improv comedy. You build up a body of material and just draw off of it at the appropriate point, using your bullets or slides or whatever as a "pointer" into your own memory.

I've had to work off of a word-for-word script a few times and it's very hard for exactly the reasons you mention. I remember practicing a speech like this 20 or 30 times because I kept losing my place in a couple spots in the speech whenever I looked up.

It's probably why teleprompters are so popular these days. If you watch the president give a speech, he appears to be looking around, but in fact he generally looks directly at one of two or three transparent teleprompters.
Here's the Chrome issue https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=143619

I think it should be an easy fix since Chrome OS already supports hidpi displays.

At least some work has been done recently:

https://codereview.chromium.org/27156003/

http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/ui/base/reso...

So maybe Chrome 33-34?
So he was already sentenced for plotting an attack to kill innocent people: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22200133 He was responsible for another home made bomb and he is now a convicted thief and fraudster. There was a suspicion another attack is planned, what's horrible about police taking precautions. That's why we have laws - to protect us, and sure in some situations people may be wrongly accused and detained if society's interest is above and suspicion or crime exists but blame criminals who commit the crimes not the law.