skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately a lot of people are not going to read the privacy policies or even care about what their TV is doing beyond "it works" and being drawn in by the promise of convenience and new features... it's to the advantage of the companies doing this that their users remain as complacent and unknowing as possible.

This isn't even the government forcing mass-surveillance devices on its citizens; it's the citizens accepting and installing mass-surveillance devices themselves -- which in some ways is quite a bit more disturbing than the government doing it.
It's funny on the surface, but really a lot of it is just another form of profanity: something you say when exasperated or surprised. I have an agnostic friend, not religious in the least, who is always saying 'good lord!'. He's not actually invoking jesus in any way, it's just a saying that sound good to him. Dara O'Briain says in one of his stand-up events that "catholicism is the stickiest religion in the world. In Ireland, even the atheists are catholic". He's really talking about the cultural crossovers from the observance of catholicism, not actual belief in the religion itself.

For the record, I am a strong atheist, and I think people should be able to speak about ideas freely, including ideas I disagree strongly with, but I'm not willing to actually die for someone else's right to speak a bunch of nonsense about a man in the sky and how many raisins you get for following him. :)
I completely agree with this interpretation. I'm gay and I don't find it something to be proud of -- same as how I don't find my brown hair or blue eyes things to be particularly 'proud' of. Unfortunately, saying "I'm not ashamed to be gay" may be more accurate but it also feels like I'm agreeing to frame the conversation in terms of whether being gay is something to feel ashamed about. I don't even want that idea tied to it so, in the absence of other options, I'll err on the side of gay pride.

I didn't think it would matter to read this from Tim Cook but it turns out I feel very encouraged by his words. When he says "engineer" among his attributes, well, I'm also an engineer and it gives me a sense of possibility.
The onboard barometer has a 10cm precision, but the 10-DoF IMU is incredibly accurate. The IMU components originate from the FreeIMU, uses for DIY drones and copters.
No mention of which TV?
There's nothing inherent in the definition of democracy that requires protection of minority rights. It is true that many forms of democratic government include checks on majority power, but democracy per se doesn't automatically incorporate those protections.

Thankfully we have constitutions and a judiciary that define and enforce these protections.

That being said—even if I'm wrong on this point—it's the third clause that I took exception with, that "nobody was harmed."

EDIT: I think maybe I'm being pedantic here. While a democracy doesn't automatically include these protections, you're certainly right that ochlocracy excludes them.
Author here. Thanks so much for the interest! It's funny, I've been hacking away at a major update that I plan to release in the next few days... Was assuming I'd stay under the radar until then. The update adds a ton of features and improves the UI quite a bit ;)

To respond to some of your ideas feedback:

* I do plan to sell the service by some combination of charging to buy the native version and a monthly/yearly fee for the cloud version.

* By offering the native version I hope to assuage any privacy or legacy concerns -- all you data is on your machine (encrypted and backed up however you see fit). You'll even have access to a local API to extract or do whatever you want with it.

* One idea I've had is to offer a cloud version / native version combo. You would sync to the cloud only your bookmarked sites -- all the other indexed pages you visit would stay on the local version. This way you control what gets put up on the servers but can still have access to your links from all your devices. Thoughts?

* I'd also consider open sourcing it (it's built on Meteor and ElasticSearch) but really do need to get paid for my efforts (just had a baby) and am not familiar with all the ins/outs of open source based businesses. I'd love to hear ideas and advice!

* This has turned out to be quite a lot more difficult than I'd thought but I'm real happy with how things are coming along. Two words: ElasticSearch Rocks.

* Very embarrassed about the privacy policy link. Fixed now. ;)
There's a huge difference between ssh and ssl's trust model, where the latter requires you to fork over money for each domain name(1) and at the same time trust ALL the other CAs in the world not to work against you.

(1) except for a couple of very inflexible free tiers at a couple of vendors, which caused more trouble than it was worth during heartbleed.

For SSH your key management is 100% in your hands and no third party can create a replacement key pair that would work in a MITM attack.
Yup. Great idea. Along with "github-backup" like tool (I use this one - https://github.com/joeyh/github-backup) then I could spend days browsing and reading :)
Yep, that exact page is one of the reasons I stopped. I like to joke that I am an insect since caffeine is also a poison for many of them.
I have one of the latest sony televisions. I think of the internet features as something for newbs. I would never even consider putting my tv on my network. It doesn't have a camera for facial recognition or the mic for talk to use. It's a really nice tv though and I can access all the functionality and settings without accessing the internet. This aricle is a bit overblown, but I get the point. There is a reason my xbox one's kinnect will never see the light of day.
> The meaning of 'safe' as it applies to physical harm is fairly easy for us to agree on. When it comes to emotional and psychological harm, what does it really mean? Where is the line drawn?

Offer a meaning of safe as it applies to physical harm. Let's see if we actually agree to that as easily as you presume we would first.
Apple Reverses Course on iOS 8 Notification Center Calculators
Lockheed Martin: Aliens are real
a lot of these are inherent on the laptop you wrote this with coupled with using the internet in general.
> In the meantime, I’ll be in the market for a new tinfoil hat and cone of silence.

I know this is meant as a pseudo-joke and I know there are going to be a ton of comments here on why the guy is overreacting, but is the tin foil hat really useful anymore? We have demonstrated proof that things like this have been exploited on purpose in the past few years.

Instead of the tin foil being representative of the crazy person - it now almost seems like common sense. Is that scary to anyone else?
...I am able to send data about every 200ms or so. I haven't weather tested it yet, but the ATMega32u4 is fairly robust. With practical weather proofing and vent ports, this board should last reasonably well in an average environment. As with any electronics, humidity and temp control factor into its life expectancy. We just got out of beta, so I don't have weather proofing tests to show for it. :-)
Android is only a "success" insofar as being the only game in town for an open-source iOS competitor. I'm frankly amazed it ever gained any traction at all, but when your competition is non-free garbage like Symbian, Blackberry, and Windows mobile, I guess you can just win by default. Especially when you have the might of Google's multi-billion dollar support behind you.

Android has already gotten miles better in the year since Rubin is no longer involved, seeing long-needed improvements such as Chrome for the browser and WebViews, radically better runtime, more unified UI design, etc. Overall, Android is much better off without him and I look forward to whatever comes next (for Android, not Rubin).
Well, the obvious one is your deployment options: You need to either compile binaries for the target platform, or ask the user to compile from source. As far as I know, you can't yet compile Rust to Javascript.

Support for GUI toolkits will probably require some glue code. I've heard that Windows is a particular source of headaches, but I'm not clear as to why. SDL seems to work everywhere; remember that Rust is designed for seamless C interop in both directions.
I find I quickly become tolerant to the awakening and focusing effects of caffeine but not to the anxiety-inducing effects leading to increasingly anxious thought patterns.

Every time I start in on caffeine again because of a crunch I end up regretting it later.
I was in the market for a new TV last year, and I found it difficult to find one that wasn't loaded with "smart" features. I didn't want the smart features since I already had a home theater PC, which I built myself. Plus from my limited prior experience with smart TVs, the UX on those is just awful. I didn't even consider the privacy issues, although I should have considering the Snowden leaks had just hit the news. Lucky me, the TV I ended up with was one of the LG Smart TVs that was caught leaking file names from USB devices (HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6759426).

Edit: It was also logging network folders. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6778397
Tell HN: Please stop saying “This.”
It's so fucking annoying.

Thanks.
This is a good step into making Star Trek law the real law.
5 Landing Page Must-Haves to Boost App Downloads
I agree that it's trade-offs. UK's maternity leave - considered the gold standard by many - does indeed allow 52 weeks, but only the first 6 weeks are paid at 90%, then from week 7-39, you get a paltry £136.78/week. Weeks 40-52 are unpaid (some employers offer "enhanced benefits" that override these numbers, but now we're back to relying on employers' generosity).

Indeed a tough problem.
So what happens if you just don't plug in the network cable or setup WiFi? How does it gather anything?
if you have the smart-phone that it is compatible with, they probably already have most of the information anyways
If anything, the tinfoil hat conspiracy wackos of yesteryear were far too conservative in their paranoid fever dreams. They'd never have believed this.

I wonder sometimes: if things like this had existed in the 50s and 60s would we ever have had a Martin Luther King? Or would such things have been picked up at their earliest stages by the data miners and nipped in the bud? Would Ginsburg have read Howl in Golden Gate Park? Would there have been a summer of love, underground basement punk shows, raves? What new civil rights movements or fascinating spontaneous emergences of culture are being silently suppressed today? Is that kind of culture jamming really going on? I really do wonder.

I also wonder about the seeming asymmetry. I see protestors in Hong Kong using mobile phones to organize, yet over here it seems as if the same technologies are being used to enforce the most toxic aspects of the status quo instead of challenging them.
1984, 30 years later.
Something I've noticed about this however is most tech-literate people who actually care about their privacy tend to leave the wireless disconnected and simply attach the TV to their HTPC device which is from there connected to the internet.

Disconnecting it from the internet and possibly even sabotaging the wifi module will ensure that prying eyes will not have access to your information.
Yes, but to be fair, that is mostly emscripten's fault, not rust's. Once emscripten rebases onto something more recent (currently it's somewhere around 3.3-3.4), building a single-threaded program using rust shouldn't be that hard.
I think you overestimate how many people are even going to be aware that their shiny TV is doing 1% of this stuff.

Non-techie people assume a TV is a TV -- which is to say, a dumb video terminal. Even "smart" TVs are understood this way, in no small part because most people never bother interacting with their "smart" features. It's all just items on a checklist full of marketing blather, safe to ignore.

I fear it's going to take a serious hack of these devices (or twelve) before people start to understand that their new TV is more like a giant, poorly secured PC that happens to be wall-mountable than it is like their trusty old CRT.
... and the mention of downvoting was a small part of an otherwise excellent comment anyway!
Sounds like there would be a market for an openWRT-like firmware hack for these TVs!
it also has a much larger battery
And yet he's worried enough about internet points to create another account so he won't lose them through down votes.
But tin foil hats were really designed and promoted by the government to help them spy on the paranoid. http://web.archive.org/web/20100708230258/http://people.csai...
The problem with this argument is that if we only relied on compassion, people who fit well into community norms would be taken care of, and those people who didn't would get lesser or no services.
This if a fluff piece.

They write an entire article on why we should be terrified but then they don't even mention the make or manufacturer of this scary new TV, so we can't check the details of the TOS. It's the hypothetical smart TV that everyone owns.

They also neglected to mention you could just not connect it to the internet - you know, like the ancient TV he just turned in?
I'm probably not normal, but frankly I would just leave it unplugged from the Internet.

At the end of the day my current tv does what I need to do (ie act as a big monitor) without an internet connection. Given the number of devices already floating around here for browsing the web, I don't really need my tv to do that. For streaming I have Chromecast or whatever.

I get that tv makers want to sell me something, but they're really bad anyway at the convergence - so the best option for me is just to use it as a screen and get devices to do what I want.

The only real motivation to get a new tv is if the current one breaks. I replace all the other living room devices a lot more frequently than the tv.

But the point of bothering to read the terms is well worth knowing so I appreciate the article.
Searching seems to suggest it's a Samsung device, but I haven't tried to locate the manual in order to verify that notion.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=smart+tv+voice+facial+recognition
Yes, and any mobile phone. "Ok Google"

RMS was right all along. We need free software, or we will have no control over our computers. And our computers are going to be everywhere.
It's a two tier world that's coming. Either you know your gear inside and out, or your gear knows you inside and out.
Generally, if you work for a large employer, you have some form of disability insurance that picks up after a month or three. If you're out that long, the theory is that you're probably going to stay out, and your employer should be able to replace you and pass the costs onto an insurer, rather than pay salary for a non-working worker.
That could be an indication that building a viable mobile phone OS is really, really hard.

While I'm also quite glad to see the recent Chrome/Android integration, I think Rubin should get a lot of credit for getting Android to the point where it's even worth integrating with. A bunch of competitors tried and failed; I'm glad that there's more than just Apple available in the mobile OS market.
But since it's free, nobody will pay for it. If nobody pays for it, it won't get built.

Free as in beer is the enemy of free as in freedom.
Wow, if I'm reading this right, this seems like evidence of widespread (possibly sub-conscious) racism.
Went through this recently at Best Buy. The salesperson said by next year they may no longer carry any "dumb" tvs. Currently, those options are almost gone. I didn't see any dumb tvs over 40" and there were no 4Ks without "smart" features.

I plan on just blocking it in my router, but who knows if the TV scans around for open hotspots. If I were a "smart" developer Id store everything locally if offline, then dump to the manufacturer if it ever does get a connection. Not my problem if the feds happen to be "selecting" for that dump somewhere upstream...really not my problem if they have a dragnet FISA warrant for the data.

Where is that noble hacker who'll make a tutorials on how to destroy smart TV WiFI radios?!
Yeah... once I find it on my old backups. =) Ironically, my script that produces git repos was not itself version controlled. Lesson learned (for the umpteenth time). I wasn't comfortable putting it public due to sloppiness and I didn't yet have my own GitLab server. I now have the latter and am motivated to fix the former (put the script itself on Github). =)
>Like Cook points out, the US is still country in which gay people are subject to life-altering discrimination all the time.

And also a country where if you get that you can be settled for life with suing them for their houses and cars.

The thing is, this "life-altering discrimination" is not unique to gays in the US. You can get it by being different in all kinds of way. Seems like a lot more crackpots than usual (that what you'd get in Denmark or Belgium) operate in the society. I mean, bombs in abortion clinics? Seriously?

>I suspect you're overestimating how accepted homosexuality is outside of your bubble.

Maybe, but my point was Cook's an even more protected bubble. Hyper-rich, CEO of the biggest (or close) company on earth, Valley-based, ...
I picked one up today. Impressions so far:

- Comfortable.
- Looks nice, I like wearing it. Doesn't feel flashy.
- Does what it says it will. No buggy surprises.
- Scroll performance isn't very good.
- UI feels right otherwise. Nothing annoyed me.
- Complementary iPhone app is well done.
- Doesn't feel flimsy. Feels sturdy without feeling bulky.
- Setup is simple.

No complaints so far. If you desire the features it offers I'd say it's definitely worth buying.

I'm impressed.
SlimerJS meets Ruby = Yabbie
Now try that with dollars.
This and the paper above were extremely entertaining reads. To the point that I am downloading CHICKEN right now to start exploring. Thank you for those links.
The only reason I feel comfortable connecting things like consumer network-connected cameras, TVs, Bluray players, game consoles, or anything else "Internet Ready" to my network is because I perform outbound filtering, and it's a big eye-opener to see first-hand what these devices are trying to connect to.

Luckily most things use HTTP so you can actually filter based on the URL it's trying to access. For example, permitting software updates, but denying any kind of analytics reporting.

And with VPN on your phone (especially Always-On VPN) you can filter the requests from your phone with the same granularity, which is even more eye-opening.

Outbound filtering is incredibly useful if you value your security and privacy.
Clickbait, and bad title. Lockheed Martin claims no such thing.
"Scott McNealy used to congratulate people getting promoted with "One step up, one step closer to the door.""

God knows when I hear things like that I thank my lucky stars I don't have to work in a large corporation or answer to anyone but customers. (Well more than that obviously but at least I'm not at the whims of corporate culture.)
A STORY ABOUT PERSEVERANCE. Several Years Ago,
In the Best Conditions, iOS-Exclusive Vainglory Is a Top-Notch MOBA
Sure. People have been doing that since 2000.

http://www.puredarwin.org/
Thank you. I agree, this is just scaremongering.
Andy Glew's CompArch wiki
No, tin foil hats work just fine. That study is about aluminium foil hats. Decades of government propaganda has brainwashed everyone into conjuring up images of aluminium foil hats when they hear the phrase "tin foil hat". /s
Thank you. I thought I was the only one who cared about getting the raw data out or was just missing something obvious. Why is it that hard to get the minute-by-minute data?
Keep in mind that there are a lot more Frameworks other than just GUI related ones that aren't present as well. They have a lot more tools missing than just the "glitter"
> I just bought a new TV...The only problem is that I’m now afraid to use it. You would be too — if you read through the 46-page privacy policy.

Wish I had the money to drop hundreds of dollars on a product, and figure out what it does afterward...
>A call to time(2) or gettimeofday(2) is hundreds of times faster in Linux than on OpenBSD

Got a link to those benchmarks? Did anyone file a bug report?

>But commercially and at scale I run Linux

Wouldn't netbsd be a better option?
re: "but anyone who is serious about building for the enterprise should definitely study other enterprise SaaS companies"

Can recommend http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2/ as a good starting point.
Can you recommend any resources for getting started?
Well the difference is simple, most cell site simulators force unencrypted protocols... There are android apps that supply this sort of information.
Maybe the business week puff piece on Sundar (which somewhat atypically spent a page complaining about Andy)?
now let's wait for the answer. :)
Every email service I've seen offers an API and SMTP. For many applications, SMTP will work just fine.
>>girl cant even do anything of her choice..

In India we have messed up things so badly we have scared away a lot of people from having girl kids. I'm not talking about female infanticide and foeticide(This kind of things do happen, even now). But, These days those couples who have the morality of not committing such inhumane acts don't even bother to have a second kid if the first kid is a girl. While I see couples who have boy as a first kid generally go in for a second kid.

This is creating a massive irreparable gender imbalance in the society. Only this time, no one is breaking any law or committing any unethical or immoral activity. They are merely exercising their freedom to not bear children.

For a country where people have so much hate towards same gender marriages, every parent aspiring to have only boys is sort of straight hypocritical.
I agree with you. Just bought a new TV myself, and I've disconnected it from the network. When it was connected my internet was seeing slowdowns every 30 seconds, completely destroying a hangout I was trying to have at the time.

If I didn't have an HTPC in front of my NAS, I would probably connect it again. But I don't need or want any of the network features. The apps are stupid. Browsing with the crappy remote is an exercise in extreme frustration. And I hardly ever watch youtube from my couch, so "throwing" content to the TV is pointless for me.

I can understand why some people would really like some of the "smart" tv features, but all my other devices that I connect to the tv have enough smarts in them anyway. Quite happy using my tv as a dumb monitor.
Doesn't "git blame" take care of your timestamps for you?
re: " how people get to express their ideas in such a clear and persuasive way"

http://www.amazon.com/Pyramid-Principle-Logic-Writing-Thinki...

Recommended reading, especially for anyone whom consults or writes proposals.
@gmail.com? done
You.Have.Got.To.Be.Kidding.
I think it’s a good time to reflect on the massive impact of Android on the mobile OS market.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_operating_system#Market_...

The Android team under Rubin executed extraordinarily well with a tiny fraction of Google’s engineering resources.
So did VAXen. If you turned it on, about half the UNIX utilities broke.
Here's my first day thoughts: http://randomfoo.net/2014/10/30/microsoft-band-overviewrevie...
It's pretty easy to find the TOS though, by Googling the quoted text. Apparently it's manufactured by Samsung.

http://www.samsung.com/us/common/privacy.html
Yeah, I'd also be interested in some resources on outbound filtering your network.
If anyone wants to build it, I would love a website where you could look up any device/program and see a profile of what data it sends out of your house, or what it brings in. Pair it with an open source app to collect the profiles and upload them to the website (somewhat ironically).
What sort of firewall/router setup do you recommend?