timsally

Ouch. To make things even worse, the executable 'kaspersky_tcpip_fix.exe' to fix the problem is (1) not delivered over HTTPS and (2) not signed by Kaspersky (it is unsigned). So not only are you unable to receive an authenticated update to your antivirus database to fix the problem because your network is down, but you have no assurances that the offline tool provided to you to fix the problem actually came from Kaspersky.

For those that are curious, you can use a tool distributed by Microsoft called Sigcheck to display signature information (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897441.asp...).

I agree that Scalia's comments during oral arguments with respect to the Voting Rights Act were hypocritical and shameful.

There are a few things in this post that are widely off the mark, so much so that is actually unhinges the debate.

The first is that Alito is actually far better than Roberts on privacy rights [1]. Specifically, Alito supports a mosaic theory of the 4th amendment [2] that looks at "whether the government conduct taken over time collects an amount of information that is somehow surprising or unexpected". Alito is actually one of the best hopes for progressive 4th amendment jurisprudence, yet your characterization of him is exactly the opposite!

The second is that blind deference it is not the position of Scalia (though he certainly does support deference to the executive branch when such deference is allowed by law). He is an originalist [3] who faithfully executes that algorithm when he renders his decisions. Just because you don't agree with his point of view doesn't mean he's blindly backing national security agencies. In this situation, Scalia would tell you that what is being done is allowed by law and that Congress can stop it at any time through legislation, i.e. "garbage law in, garbage decision out". He thinks, quite sensibly sometimes, that it is the executive branch's job to deal with national security issues and such issues only become his concern when they violate the law. He is a very capable, if sometimes misguided, jurist.

As to the fact that SCOTUS does not know much about technology, this is an oft argued position that has been thoroughly debunked. Judges have to make rulings on a wide range of technical issues that they are not experts on. This has always been the case, it's not a "wildcard", and the courts are well equipped to handle it. They bring in experts and requests briefs on the necessary subjects. In the last 10 years the Court has ruled on genes, encryption, complex medical procedures, etc. It's impossible for the justices to be experts on all of these. The best we can do is require the justices to be experts on the law and provide them with support from subject matter experts.

[1] http://www.michiganlawreview.org/assets/pdfs/111/3/Kerr.pdf

[2] http://www.volokh.com/2012/01/23/whats-the-status-of-the-mos...

[3] http://nymag.com/news/features/antonin-scalia-2013-10/#print

EDITED to address some comments.

> It's not a good thing. Only a handful of nations are capable of producing weaponized drones

A nation spends money on defense for precisely this reason, to produce an asymmetry in that's nation's capabilities compared to all others. It's an explicit design goal! Your argument can be applied to all new technology being developed for defense in all countries-- consequently, I don't think you'll find much support for this line of argument.

You're the professional, but to my understanding your characterization that the amount of information yielded by a search is a 4th amendment analysis "out of thin air" isn't accurate. Alito wrote in his concurrence in Jones v. United States:

Justice Alito then evaluates the GPS surveillance here, noting that “devices like the one used in the present case … make long-term monitoring relatively easy and cheap.” “[T]he best we can do in this case,” reasons Alito, “is to apply existing Fourth Amendment doctrine” and “ask whether the use of GPS tracking in a particular case involved a degree of intrusion that a reasonable person would not have anticipated.” Alito at 13. Under this inquiry, “the use of longer term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy,” because “society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not — and indeed, in the main, simply could not — secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.” http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2012/01/united-st...

It seems to me that Alito is saying that the amount of information gathered in Jones is relevant to 4th Amendment analysis. Specifically: "society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not — and indeed, in the main, simply could not — secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period". Three other justices joined with Alito on this concurrence.

I'm not professionally trained in this this domain, so I might be missing something. Can you reconcile Alito's concurrence with your position? Yes it was not the opinion of the Court, but surely a concurrence clears the "out-of-thin-air" bar?

> I would only point that 25 tons of force, isn't really a lot - I mean, the small jack that you use to lift your car can be a 5 or 6 ton device.

Floor jacks easily punch through most points on modern cars. In fact, the only place that it is safe to jack up your car are special jack points which are reenforced to bear the load of the jack. The center ones on my car are pretty annoying to get to. Also, your estimate for the ratings of jacks is off by a factor of x2 to x4. Floor jacks, which have a leaver and a hydraulic component, are typically only rated for 2 to 3 tons. Scissor jacks, a manual jack that comes with your spare tire, are typically only rated at 1.5 tons or less.

Seems like a simplistic analysis. If the programs are of equal difficulty and MIT admits more a more qualified class, MIT will have a higher graduation rate.

OCaml sees a lot of use in the applied program analysis community, which has applications to automated reverse engineering and formal verification. A company in this area recently started by CMU assistant professor David Brumley is: http://www.forallsecure.com/mayhem.html.

Tailing someone on a public road is a very old principle as well, but that didn't matter Alito and the other three justices who joined with him in the Jones concurrence. He found that 24/7 monitoring for 28 days on public roads only with a GPS device constituted a search. I don't think the FBI did anything wrong here, but you're drastically oversimplifying what surely is an un-litigated issue. The fact that a GPS device was so much cheaper than 24 hour surveillance via a tail car is what Alito's concurrence hinged on, despite the fact that the monitoring was exactly the same.

There's a slight misunderstanding here. It's not that we need to forbid the government from using drones when they are super cheap. Checks and balances are already at work here and are likely to arrive at a reasonable solution. Based on on the opinions of a few of the current Supreme Court, it seems highly likely that the government has to get a warrant to use a drone to follow someone around 24/7.

In my opinion the only thing to be concerned about is Ginsberg being replaced by Thomas/Scalia. If that happens, the way the Supreme Court will come down on this issue is not so clear. It's definitely something to worry about. According to a certain block in Congress, winning two presidential elections still doesn't entitle you to make appointments.

I suspect we are on the same page in regards to the constitutional issues and the problem(s) with this article. I personally find the massive suspension of common sense in our community about these types of issues quite irritating. I just wanted to point out that cost seemed to be used by you as an argument in favor of the use of drones by law enforcement, when according to four Supreme Court justices in certain cases lower cost can make it unconstitutional without first getting a warrant. Neither I or you believe that is the case with drones at this present time, but I think it's important to mention in these conversations that costs do matter (i.e. cheaper is not always better). My purpose here is not to nitpick. It's just that I'd bet that these issues will permeate Fourth Amendment jurisprudence in the future and I think people who are part of this "anti-surveillance" camp should know what they're yelling about.

Is your point here that past techniques are far more expensive and therefore the use of drones is an improvement? I'm a little unclear here, but that's what I'm getting.

Applying Alito's interpretation of the Fourth Amendment (and everyone who joined with him in the Jones concurrence), the fact that manned aircraft are probability expensive make them fundamentally different than a much cheaper technology. The idea is a reasonable person knows manned aircraft are super expensive and thus law enforcement will only use them in certain situations. Because of this, such activity is not considered a search under the Fourth Amendment. However, according to Alito, this does not mean that the search is still considered reasonable when the same activity becomes much cheaper. Indeed, he held that extremely lengthy tailing of a vehicle on public roads with a cheap GPS device constituted a search while the _same_ activity done manually by law enforcement did not constitute a search.

For what it's worth, I think the FBI's use of drones here is fine. I'm one of the last people on HN who would ever jump on this surveillance bandwagon/train wreck we are seeing. I bring this up because four Supreme Court justices believe that the cost of an activity can determine whether it constitutes a search (yes, it is not settled law). Because of this, drones being cheaper isn't actually an argument for them being ok. The correct argument here is that drones are cheaper, but still probability expensive to deploy en-mass against the public. If drones ever become cheap enough to do that (like the GPS device in Jones), then it's a whole different ballgame.

This is Jeff Erickson's free textbook (really a set of detailed lecture notes) on Algorithms, a course that Jeff teaches at UIUC and routinely wins teaching awards for. Definitely worth your time. Jeff is working on a similar set of notes for Computational Topology: http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/~jeffe/teaching/comptop/schedule.html. These are not as developed yet. He's also written an interesting piece about getting into a graduate school with low grades: http://3dpancakes.typepad.com/ernie/2005/03/re_phd_with_low.....

This is why checking the fees of the products you buy when you invest is so important. I'm lucky enough to have index fund options at 0.04% and bond fund options at 0.07% in my 401k. That doesn't matter if you don't use them though! I work with some pretty smart people that used to put their 401ks in target funds with fees in excess of 2.0% until I sat them down and worked out the math with them.

If you want to quickly eyeball how your 401k stacks up, Brightscope (http://www.brightscope.com/) is pretty useful.

The record contradicts what you are saying here; what you've written is almost a perfect inversion of historical fact. All the commercial networks being developed or deployed when the Internet was being invented were circuit switched, centralized networks. They really didn't have anything to do with the Internet at all. The design philosophy behind the Internet [1, Section 3] was drastically different than all commercial efforts at the time. The design was so different and so unique compared to existing work that the inventors won a Turing Award for it.

As an aside, all of the above is typically covered in the first week or two of a networking course (I like Brighten Godfrey's [2]).

[1] http://ccr.sigcomm.org/archive/1995/jan95/ccr-9501-clark.pdf

[2] http://courses.engr.illinois.edu/cs538/

I've read all your comments on the various threads and a central theme seems to be the following question: how does sexism fit into all of this, isn't this just harassment/stalking? It's a fair question. Recall that sexism is discrimination based on sex OR behavior that fosters stereotypical/hurtful attitudes and roles. The attacker did both here. He attempted to drown out the technical ability of the victim by, during her technical presentation, spamming pictures that quite literally turned her into an object. This is a manifestation of classic behavior where men value women for their appearance only and everything else is ignored. Had that attacker had his/her way, this would have been the reality; all the attention would have been on her appearance and no attention would have been paid towards her technical presentation. His/her goal could not be more clear. To tie the goal back to sexism: what the attacker wanted is both a distinguishing treatment based on her sex (the first definition) AND a behavior that encourages ignoring the technical ability of women in favor of focusing on their appearance (the second definition).

I hope this makes my use of the word sexism clear. I welcome further communication here in this thread or at my personal email, which can be found in my profile.

Whenever an instance of blatant sexism comes up, an attempt is invariably made to rationalize away the fact that a sexist act has actually occurred. We have had two such attempts made here so far and I expect more. One commentator is attempting to advance the baseless theory that the bully did not care about the sex of his victim. This particular individual even goes so far to say that "the biggest problem" is the alleged misuse of labels related to racism or sexism, as if this could somehow be worse that the discrimination the disenfranchised experience on a day-to-day basis. Another commentator states that it is because of her popularity not her sex. This too is bunk. There are significantly more males in this industry with significantly more popularity. Yet no evidence is presented that these figures also have received this level of harassment.

There is one word for this behavior mentioned above: denial. Unfortunately, there seems to be a part of our community that refuses to call things what they are. This was an instance of sexism that manifested itself in a nasty way.

> I have ATTAPL and couldn't get through it. Now I know why. I didn't realize there was a more introductory book in the series. Thanks!

This brings out a point not explicitly mentioned in your original post. A key thing you get in college is access to people who know the topology of your field. It is a routine recommendation to start with TAPL. A map is invaluable in order to limit backtracking or dead ends.

In my field of reverse engineering, those who have produced the top public results are completely self taught. Advanced forms of reverse engineering require a large smattering of knowledge from many graduate level areas of Computer Science and Mathematics. Autodidacticism of some form is the only option, whether it involves complete self-instruction or designing a custom curriculum in graduate school. The aforementioned authors have described the process of learning without a roadmap as extremely painful. If you don't have to subject yourself to it, I don't know why you would.

I'm finding the definition of a symbol using a parsing expression grammar for C. I haven't yet decided upon the particular algorithm for finding the first commit, but I plan on using libgit2 to work directly with the repository. In the simplest case, you just iterate through all versions of a file and find the earliest one with the string in question. Obviously care is required when walking the repository history.

Thanks for the pointer. I know I'll find the commit using libgit2, but I hadn't yet gotten to thinking about the algorithm to do so. git log -S seems like a good starting point.

Ah I see. I'm not aware of an instance of an appellate judge moving to another circuit. I suppose technically the President could nominate him. I actually dislike that the Federal Circuit gets all patent cases. The end result in no circuit splits and SCOTUS ends up hearing a lot less patent cases than it should.

Posner has been a Judge on the Court of Appeals since 1981, on the 7th circuit. SCOTUS was never in the cards for him. He's an intellectual giant, but he's been on record for a long time in favor of the legalization of marijuana and hard drugs.

If you're not familiar with Judge Posner, you should be. He's been a judge in the Court of Appeals (a set of courts right below the Supreme Court) since 1981. In addition to being a judge, he is the most cited legal scholar of the 20th century. He's only the only judge on the 7th circuit to reliably send clerks to the Supreme Court (indeed, Lawrence Lessig was one of those clerks). In short, he's an extremely acclaimed and well regarded jurist. And to boot, his opinions are a pleasure to read (http://www.projectposner.org/case/) and sometimes quite biting (http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/tmp/LZ19Y7FG.pdf).

I recently did exactly what you describe. My first contribution to the Linux kernel actually shipped with this release. If I recall correctly it took me about 80 hours to go from no knowledge to first patch. Assuming no knowledge, it is a two step process.

(1) Learn basic OS concepts through xv6.

xv6 is a reimplementation of an early version of Unix, designed to be as simple as possible and accompanied by a whole book of commentary. Get the book and the source cost listing printed and bound: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2012/xv6.html. Work through the book and exercises. Use the lecture videos from 6.828 from 2011 if you need extra material in order to understand: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2011/schedule.html.

(2) Pick a part of OSes that you are interested in. Contribute to that part in Linux.

Figure out where that part is in the Linux kernel. Find a bug in the bug tracker and submit the patch. I found filesystems interesting, so I fixed a small bug in one of the filesystems. Use a cross reference, it will save you a lot of time: http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/include/linux/cpu.h. Also feel free to subscribe to the Linux kernel subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/kernel. I've set up the sidebar with a lot of useful links.

The Linux kernel is large and complex. You need to equipe yourself with a mental model of an OS through xv6 and then pick one small, specific part to attack in Linux. Be tactical! Otherwise you will be overwhelmed.

--

As an aside, I'm actually currently working on a tool that parses the Linux source code to find symbol definitions and then works its way back through the Git history to find the commit message for when the symbol was first defined. These commit messages usually contain really useful information about the original intent of the symbol and implementation details. Currently fighting with a few bugs in my C grammar, but should be able to work through those soon. Please feel free to email me at tsally@atomicpeace.com if you want to be pinged when the tool is released.

I think some expansion of this statement is in order. As far as settled SCOTUS cases go, the only reason why police need a warrant to attach a GPS to your car is because they must "sieze" the car (for however brief a time) in order to attach the device. As you alude to, it has nothing to do with the surveillance itself. However this is far from a settled issue. At least 4 out of the 9 SCOTUS justices support a new Fourth Amendment theory called the "mosaic theory", introduced by Alito in US v. Jones (2012). Under this theory, courts would evaluate the actions by government in aggregate to determine if the actions constituted a search. Under such a doctrine, 24 hour GPS surveillance on public roadways may well be illegal without a warrant. This theory has been criticized by some academics as too difficult of an analysis for the courts to handle. Yet it does show that the justices are indeed considering the scope of surveillance and some of them are trying to figure out a way to limit the scope using Fourth Amendment analysis. Alito in particular seems worried about it and he has found support for at least some of his ideas from Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor

Thank God this costs $5 dollars. I might have even gone as high as $10. To all those that think 5 bucks is too much: for you to actually get any value out of this app you have to use it over a non-significant portion of your life. We're talking on the timescale of years; I find it hilarious that 1 dollar is fine but 5 whole dollars is outrageous.

> Edit: Contrary to what I said here, José Valim is not stepping down from Rails core, he is merely on sabbatical. My bad.

And then later in the article...

> Jose Valim, (now former) Rails core member,

When you have to issue a retraction, you should update the article. The way the Times does it is to make the edit and then put a small note at the end of the article recording the original error. Like so: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/early-music-lessons....

Yup. I don't have much sympathy for him, considering he took out $160,000 in debt with only a 50/50 shot to pay it back (that's your chance to get a high enough salary coming out of a top law school to service that debt, outside of Harvard and Yale). His poor decision is further compounded by the fact that he decided to go to law school after the legal market crashed in 2008 and people started to realize how ridiculous first year associate compensation was getting. I'm not really sure why my tax dollars should be bailing out a guy with a college degree who took a six figure gamble (though I suppose we've already set the standard by bailing out those who took gambles much larger than that).

The company brings in several millions dollars a year [1]. They have one of the nicest offices in Chicago [2]. One of the partners had a super car commissioned a few years ago which on a technical level is more sophisticated than the machinery available to your average military [3]. So how aren't they "living up to their true potential"?

[1] From the article.

[2] http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2593-official-pictures-of-our...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagani_Zonda#HH

> But it's not OK to let people abuse you.

Yes of course. But what specifically in this story do you think constitutes abuse? The situation could at worst be described as a lack of tact by some of the interviewers. If your bar for abuse is that low, you're going to have a bad time in this industry. Or any industry for that matter! Pulling the ripcord because, surprise, a few 20-something engineers don't have flawless social skills is simply a mistake. Far better to figure out how to navigate the situation to mutual advantage, as Patrick's straightforward algorithm demonstrates.