Hacker News Reader

mikemokaon Perry Fellwock

"These allies can't maintain security even if they want to. They're all working with machines we gave them. There's no chance for them to be on par with us technologically"

mikemokaon Give Manning and Snowden the Nobel Peace Prize

We need people like them in every single country if we want to live in a world actually guided by public interest and not by the most powerful of the particular interests.

mikemokaon Expert Says NSA Have Backdoors Built Into Intel And AMD Processors

Steve Blank started by working in signals intelligence actually:

http://steveblank.com/tag/signals-intelligence/

mikemokaon Coinbase hires Charlie Lee, creator of Litecoin

I can't be convinced that bitcoin is anything but inevitable, and I think that it will, at some point in the near future, solve its apparent problems by means of a company born from its very ecosystem

mikemokaon LibreOffice 4.1 New Features and Fixes

I appreciate the effort of everyone involved in this complex project but I think that we should see something like an opensource replacement to google docs in our future

mikemokaon Snowden asylum still under review, stays in airport for now

Granting asylum to Snowden will just influence relations between US and Russia,and is not done to be coherent with previous standings of the country on the topic of human rights,almost always different.

We have to be careful not to associate concepts like "freedom of speech" and "example of democracy" with countries like Russia, given the actual situation the people there live under I am not sure we can say Russia holds human rights in the highest regard in my opinion.

mikemokaon Facebook wins right to police “face-” trademark prefix

And now corporations try to steal common words from people, even the word "Face", it will be interesting to see how hackers groups will react to this.

mikemokaon Questions about Cameron’s ‘new’ porn-blocking

This totally looks like a way to justify government snooping and limit any protests in case they get discovered again.

mikemokaon Snowden's Dead Man's Switch

Actually multiple persons in my idea were added just for the sake of redundancy, namely to avoid that the disappearance of someone involved would stop the process as a whole. The system in my opinion will then always work if the minimum number of actors is present.

mikemokaon Snowden's Dead Man's Switch

My take on how this works, in summary: he distributed something totally unrelated to some people, quite a few of them, not even friends probably, with the instructions to do some non-specified action with that thing if something bad happens to him. Those non-specified actions on those non-specified things, once done together by a minimum number of different actors, act as the famous dead man switch, which is therefore impossible to intercept via MITM attacks and impossible to beat,even by torture, because every actor could only know his/her specific action. For what we know he could even have "outsourced" the whole setup to someone who then fleed/changed identity, this way not even him may be able to tell what actually has to happen in order to trigger the release of the documents.

[edited for clarity]

mikemokaon So does Google Glass have a back door?

In theory everything goes through the big G servers and might even be activated remotely as far as we know at the moment, anybody in the developer program cares to weigh in?

mikemokaon Namecheap now accepts Bitcoin with zero confirmations

Could the raise of anonymous and distributed services using bitcoin be the answer of people exasperated by government surveillance?

mikemokaon About the Reuters article

solitary confinement could trigger it as well probably, it depends on how things have been set up.

Obama should have handled this in a totally different way, he should have treated him as a partner for having shed light upon a corrupted practice of the NSA, and should have asked the people heading the NSA to resign.

This would have been a checkmate against any other US antagonist in my opinion, but I admit that is definitely too easy to judge things you don't know in every aspect from the comfort of your own home.

mikemokaon About the Reuters article

"the tactic of the US government has been to attack and demonize whistleblowers as a means of distracting attention from their own exposed wrongdoing and destroying the credibility of the messenger so that everyone tunes out the message. That attempt will undoubtedly be made here."

looking back at all the articles recently published on HN about it, this has undoubtedly happened here as well in a sense.

My feeling is that people are already starting to somehow forget about the revelations by replacing them in their mind with the engaging story of a whistleblower on the run.

mikemokaon Statement by Edward Snowden to human rights groups at Sheremetyevo airport

granting asylum to Snowden will just influence relations between US and Russia,and is not done to be coherent with previous standings of the country on the topic of human rights,almost always different.Russia and others clearly try to challenge the rest of the world to increase their power in times of crisis, how nice,the sooner world leaders realize that the internet is an early glimpse at the future of society and start researching and doing things together the sooner things will improve,for everyone.

Every individual has the particular interest to live in a healthy society,and not to have his possibilities limited by his country of birth if you ask me.

mikemokaon Small Utah ISP firm stands up to ‘surveillance state’

>Why?

Because it looks like an instrumental use of these events.

> "the best Russian propaganda machine targeted at the outside world" I trust RT with issues outside Russia's geopolitical influence, they don't have to lie.

The problem with propaganda is that they don't only emphasize the desired facts, they even blatantly twist some of them.

mikemokaon Small Utah ISP firm stands up to ‘surveillance state’

When I realize, after reading these stories, that I read them on "RussiaToday" I always feel a bit sad.

A former advisor to Vladimir Putin, has labeled the channel as "the best Russian propaganda machine targeted at the outside world" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network))

These news are important here, but we have to be careful not to associate concepts like "freedom of speech" and "example of democracy" with countries like Russia, given the actual situation the people there live under I am not sure we can say Russia holds human rights in the highest regard in my opinion.

mikemokaon The Architecture Twitter Uses to Deal with 150M Active Users

I am playing the armchair architect and my question will be probably wrong in infinite ways,but I might learn something, what is the reason why the service has to write a tweet on two million timelines, wouldn't it be cheaper if they let the client build the page on its own via restful apis?

mikemokaon Ask HN: How does one create a fake identity?

Yes, who has legal reasons to ask, wouldn't ask about it here probably

mikemokaon Ask HN: Why don't companies open-source the source code of their old products?

Google Reader may come to mind..

mikemokaon Restore the Fourth

The leaks have been corroborated by the Director of the NSA itself actually, the FAQ could be updated to reflect it:

"To address this shortfall and protect the nation from future terrorist attacks like 9/11, we made several changes to our intelligence efforts and added a number of capabilities. Two of these capabilities are the programs in the news. They were approved by the Administration, Congress, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court"

http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/speeches_testimonies/25jun13_...

mikemokaon Google Reader is dead

It is their right to choose to discontinue a product, I would have appreciated them more anyway if they would have chosen to give back to the community and put in the limited amount of work needed to opensource it though.

Goodbye Reader.

mikemokaon Keith Alexander's Statement to the NSA Workforce

Maybe I missed it before but this looks like the first official NSA statement I heard of about the programs:

mikemokaon Bitcoins Seized by DEA

The coins of a specific user have been sized, why this sensationalistic title?

mikemokaon Evidence that the NSA Is Storing Voice Content, Not Just Metadata

So it turns out we should have actually listened to Shia LaBeouf back then:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNRgP4FVDzA

mikemokaon Kevin Mitnick on NSA Leaks

two articles that may be someway related:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-13/snowden-links-being...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/11/obamaxi_presidential...

(see my other comment for the original links)

mikemokaon Kevin Mitnick on NSA Leaks

http://blog.knowbe4.com/bid/297153/did-china-leak-prism-deli...

source: https://twitter.com/kevinmitnick

mikemokaon PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever

I like DDG, but has it ever mentioned how this TRACKING data is used?

http://duckduckgo.com/l/?kh=-1&uddg=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dmv.org... (every time you click on a search result you actually click on a link like this,which redirects you to the actual page)

Is it just for pagerank?

mikemokaon OPSEC for hackers

The so called hackers have to be dissuaded about sharing personal details in the chatrooms? This document looks like the proof that these groups are made of regular kids more than security experts in my opinion.

mikemokaon World's first 3D printed gun test fired

The only control possible might be included by law in 3D printers themselves I think, just like modded car can be fined buyers and sellers of non-limited 3D printers could be fined/prosecuted as well, given that such control is possible.

I am against control in general because it limits creativity and innovation but I am not sure it is in everyone's interest to let weapons flow freely and without any possible limitation.