trestles

What problem does Julia solve again?

honestly, since this is in translation, a word like "petty" raises numerous issues for negative connotations that might not be in original.

Very few people care about the issues raised by the author. From a practical pov, I think the best way to create something like this would be from some prebuild community that might care like Burning Man or something.

Kinda an obvious post; the name dropping of schools is a bit obnoxious in my opinion esp since the current highest valued private company is run by a UCLA dropout - something Suster would obviously have loved to invest in after the fact. I find the exceptionally smart "startup" people are very knowledgable about their competition and their companies relation to them and can project out to the future.

I agree there is not a great difference in the places I am mostly (SF and LA) but I think Uber was smart to bring on a lot of cheap capital the past few years.

I could see see something like Uber electric cars / golf carts where driving distances are small such as Sun City in AZ. Baby steps. Can't have a death in an accident though.

I know a LOT of people who prefer Uber to self-driving. Expect that to be an emergent behavior once the cost of the driver is subtracted.

a bit of a strange argument. Twitter's salty environment is the nature of the beast in many ways. He seems to have some idealized nature of "how it should be" vs "how it is". Also, make clear distinctions about where you feel Twitter went wrong as a business and where you just don't like it ( <- this is by far my biggest pet peeve of engineers talking about other products). Pretty pointless article.

bradley manning used cd's and supposedly edward snowden has a bunch of usb drives. Solves a very reasonable problem

Why is a dot release on the homepage of hacker news? Not saying that to be snarky but is there any specific reason.

The problem is with Greenwald / Snowden - they needed to provide indisputable evidence regarding their most garish claims; or `direct access` to a representation of the evidence

Sounds like a new product; just integrate your pgp public key into your facebook profile or something. It'll be here in like a year or something. Geez, why the constant downvoting?

Could you just PGP encrypt all your email?

These publicly traded companies lying? There's plenty of things that companies are legally obligated to lie about. See Boeing, Raytheon etc.... The fact that it is now a tech company is just new players in the game.

The problem with his claims is that he has made far-reaching accusations such as "I could wiretap the president's email" with no proof. While I wouldn't necessarily be surprised if he could (see the existence of Carnivore), to make that level of a claim without SHOWING and VERIFYING that claim in the same video is frightnigly foolish in my opinion. I'm guessing that it would have to be access to servers since other 'communications' require the actual application. In other words, there would almost need to be application level awareness of this external output point. Again, not impossible but could / should have been presented better.

I agree - there was an egregious failure here and if it was due to somehting that could be fixed than it should be. Nobody is asking for a lynching or anything.

My point is that, if you perceive that the capabilities of PRISM are new and that the behavior that the NSA has engaged in for 10 years are new and you are outraged by it (which was the point of the original article and I assume is the point of your stepping stone argument), then I think you are naive. This behavior, the FISA courts, etc... are part of the Patriot Act and Carnivore has been known about for > 10 years and is IE3 type technology. I actually probably see the world much more sinisterly than you do (hence the contradiction of the Madison quote). Snowden probably can't get asylum not because of what he has said but the can of worms of what is in his laptop. Oh well....

The fact that you are trying to cast me as an apologist for ' long-term human rights abuses by your government cause you to automatically approve of their actions'; I think the stupidest thing America has ever done is invoke the traditional war-machine (esp drones and block sites) against the Middle East.

If terrorism were 1000 times worse than it is in the US it would not justify this activity

In light of the fact that the Patriot Act allows this, you are a naive person - it's no big deal but just acknowledge the reality. The comparison to tyranny is absurd. This has been going on for 15 years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_(software) The fact that you don't know that isn't my fault. Get with the times. The question is why are you so naive to act surprised to hear about this? You really think Auschwitz or the Gulag is the next step from where we are now?

You're talking about public pronouncements being the same as PRISM which shows you just don't really get what this article is about. If you say you're going to do something in a public forum, then you have to live with the consequences. If you don't understand that, good luck in life.

Would be interested to hear more but that's not at all what PRISM is about which is what my original posting was. There are plenty of news media sources that would like publicize those types of abuses and I suggest that they pursue that.

I'm not sure what your point is; the story is about PRISM and privacy not about writing jokes on public forums. Local authorities do stupid stuff sometimes.

You realize that the excample you provide has absolutely nothing to do with what the article is about, PRISM, or my post. A chat board is PUBLIC which is the exact opposite of what PRISM is supposed to be.

Major can of worms lol. Are you arguing that your concern is that the gov is going to change the record if it decides it doesn't like you and then imprison you?

How about a bank creating fictitious > 10k deposits that they'd have to report to government? Now, the FBI is on your tail (see Eliot Spitzer).

You don't get the irony of the Madison quote?

Re 'your' data, the problem is that it all exists in the private sector already and IS GROWING in the private sector much more quickly. What do you the big data bandwagon is? I'm much more concerned about a breach of my SSN from Equifax than the US Govt.

That wasn't a very well-written article. First off, the anachronism of quoting James Madison to discuss internet privacy. Did you know that James Madison also owned slaves? Is the author condoning slavery?

Second off, the intrusions he discuss already happen in the private sector. Having your credit card transaction? Wake up, that already happens. Child pornography; I'm fine with the state creating a system to find child pornographers.

His point about the cold war is also inaccurate. Nuclear war with the Soviet Union didn't happen because each side was basically assured destruction. Our surveillance there was to figure out what they were capable of (satellites, U2 / SR71s) not local communication as is the case with terrorism.

So a bunch of vague talk about our privacy with bad comparisons. The fear of terrorism? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XELamUnF0EU

Society has already moved beyond what this guy is talking about. Look at the Anthony Wiener case; he could very well be the next mayor of New York.

We have more freedom and more ways to talk than ever before.

There are other points he should have made better, specifically whether the archive could be manipulated. Snowden also mentioned this but this could easily be handled by simple hashing. Maybe they should propose it but I'd bet it's already being done.

decent service I've heard - good purchase