Hacker News Reader

Mithrandiron NSA has total access via Microsoft Windows

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/1999/09/21577

Basically, this has been known about for >14 years and it's probably nothing to worry about.

Mithrandiron Stanford's new course on building a startup

It's free online: https://www.coursera.org/course/startup

Mithrandiron Stanford's new course on building a startup

There's a website that will help with that: http://itsthisforthat.com

Mithrandiron Introducing Project Loon: Balloon-powered Internet access

I took a screenshot of one of the videos: http://i.imgur.com/nppgVPG.jpg

Perhaps Iridium refers to the Iridium satellite constellation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellatio...) (Edit: or maybe one of their products http://www.iridium.com/Products.aspx) and "SBD service" refers to something like this: http://www.iridium.com/products/IridiumSBD.aspx?section=supp... ?

Edit 2: Perhaps they were tracking the balloon?

Mithrandiron T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless Shielded from NSA Sweep

http://archive.is/hPGfu

Mithrandiron An encrypted message to Edward Snowden

This seemed relevant from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Lamo#Greenwald.2C_Lamo....):

Lamo's role in the Manning case drew the ire of Glenn Greenwald, of Salon Magazine. An ardent supporter of WikiLeaks, Greenwald has been a passionate critic of Lamo, suggesting that Lamo lied to Manning by turning him in, and also lied after the fact to cover up the circumstances of Manning's confessions. Greenwald places the incident in the context of what he calls "the Obama administration's unprecedented war on whistle-blowers". Greenwald's critique of Wired Magazine has drawn a response from that magazine which suggests that Greenwald is writing disingenuously: "At his most reasonable, Greenwald impugns our motives, attacks the character of our staff and carefully selects his facts and sources to misrepresent the truth and generate outrage in his readership." In an article about the Bradley Manning case, Greenwald mentions Wired reporter Kevin Poulsen's 1994 felony conviction for computer hacking, suggesting that "over the years, Poulsen has served more or less as Lamo's personal media voice."

Greenwald is skeptical of an earlier story written by Poulsen about Lamo's institutionalization on psychiatric grounds, writing: "Lamo claimed he was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a somewhat fashionable autism diagnosis which many stars in the computer world have also claimed." In his response, Poulsen accused Greenwald of "name-calling, bizarre conspiracy theories and ad hominem attacks".

Mithrandiron Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken [pdf]

Chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken:

    #!/chicken/chick/chicken
    
    chicken Chicken(chicken, chick, c):
    	 chicken chicken >= chick:
	 	# Chicken chicken chicken
	 	chick chicken(chicken-c)
	 chick:
		chick chicken

Mithrandiron What Alexander Graham Bell Sounded Like

Did you try downloading it? It works for me. (http://media.smithsonianmag.com/audio/alexander-graham-bell....)

Mithrandiron Cuil Crawl Data: 310 terabytes of compressed data, snapshot from 2007-8

I don't think so. If you go to one of the items (e.g. https://ia601408.us.archive.org/18/items/cuil-domainshard-co...) and try downloading one of the .arc.gz files, you'll get a message saying "The item is not available due to issues with the item's content." I've seen this happen before with other crawls, like for Youtube (https://ia600301.us.archive.org/26/items/IA-YOUTUBE-000-2007...)

It could be a copyright issue or to keep bandwidth low, but I don't know for sure.

Mithrandiron [dead]

OP here. I'm deleting this as there are very few sources. Please repost if you find more. Sorry about this, folks.

Mithrandiron The secrets of body language

Wayback Machine has the article: http://web.archive.org/web/20101222093524/http://oppugn.us/p...

Mithrandiron What the Internet Looked Like in 1995 [video]

You can find more episodes of Computer Chronicles and Net Cafe (the spin-off) on the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/computerchronicles

https://archive.org/details/netcafe

Mithrandiron Amazon turns Cloud Drive into a Dropbox rival with file syncing

> (I remember their logo being red, forgot the name)

Wuala? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuala

Mithrandiron MongoDB 2.4 Critical Advisory

First reported by Samuel Clay (conesus on HN) from NewsBlur: https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-9059

Mithrandiron Critical PRNG Bug in NetBSD Kernel

http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/sys/kern/subr_cprng....

    Fix a security issue: when we are reseeding a PRNG seeded early in boot
    before we had ever had any entropy, if something else has consumed the
    entropy that triggered the immediate reseed, we can reseed with as little
    as sizeof(int) bytes of entropy.

Mithrandiron You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3115951

Mithrandiron Formerly Top Secret NSA Cryptologs From 1974-1997

Here's a 7-zipped archive of all the PDFs: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/94483242/nsa-cryptologs.7z (md5sum: 88b39bd611a88e5e0bc789fe493701ba)

Mithrandiron Thrown Off a United Airlines Flight for Taking Pictures

No, I'm just saying United has done that before, so it seems odd that it didn't happen this time as well. I certainly don't think that it's right.

Mithrandiron Thrown Off a United Airlines Flight for Taking Pictures

Something similar happened a couple years ago involving photos being taken of employees.[1][2] What struck me as different this time was that neither the FA nor the GS Rep attempted to take the camera away or have the pictures deleted. If this was a security issue, it makes sense that they wouldn't just let him walk off the plane with the photo(s).

It's possible that his saying "terrorist" was part of it, or maybe UA has a very strict no-photos policy, or maybe there's something else we don't know (and I think this is probably the case,) but this still seems pretty absurd.

1: http://consumerist.com/2011/07/28/united-says-photographing-...

2: http://consumerist.com/2011/04/25/allegations-of-photography...

Mithrandiron Tell HN: You guys scared edw519 off Hacker News

These tweets he made last month seem somewhat relevant:

https://twitter.com/edw519/status/290809378213359616

https://twitter.com/edw519/status/290461720290418688

https://twitter.com/edw519/status/290840931404492800

I tweeted this thread to him, but he hasn't been on Twitter in nearly a week so I doubt he'll reply anytime soon.

Mithrandiron Sergey Brin, Please Pick up your Paychecks

Apparently, Barack Obama has $250 in unclaimed cashier's checks from First Republic Bank: http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe...

Also, looks like Woz hasn't claimed his $5.61 from Apple yet: http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe...

Edit: Related to an article posted earlier about John Draper/Cap'n Crunch, looks like he has some property to claim too:

http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe...

Edit 2: Hmm, looks like Jesus Christ has some unclaimed property too: http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe..., http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe..., http://scoweb.sco.ca.gov/UCP/PropertyDetails.aspx?propertyRe...

So I guess some of this is people using fake names.

Mithrandiron Hackers Turn Burger King’s Tweet Stream Into A Whopper Of A Mess

The account is suspended now. Here's what it looked like:

Before: http://archive.is/Fg9Ss

After: http://archive.is/BsLQe

Mithrandiron Happy Valentine's Day

Here's what it looks like: http://i.imgur.com/xnvaTiK.png

Mithrandiron Bill Gates' AMA

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/4759466

Mithrandiron Bill Gates' AMA

http://www.topiama.com ? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4148415)

Mithrandiron Porting LLVM, clang et al. to GNU/Hurd

Symbian ran on EKA2[1], which was a micro-kernel, although since Symbian included device drivers it wasn't technically a true microkernel[2].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EKA2

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian#Symbian_kernel

Mithrandiron Porting LLVM, clang et al. to GNU/Hurd

Of Hurd? Debian has had an in-development version since 1998: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_GNU/Hurd

There's also Arch Hurd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arch_Hurd

Mithrandiron We Need to Have Sympathy for Those With Depression. It is an Illness

Note: The video linked to by parent is by CCHR, a known Scientology front group[1]. Doesn't mean they're necessarily right or wrong, just thought people should know.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Commission_on_Human_R...

Mithrandiron Breathtaking Photos of Modern Architecture

More of these amazing photos are on Flickr: https://secure.flickr.com/photos/tjintjelaar/

Mithrandiron The Atlantic president explains Scientology advertorial ‘screw-up’

Here's the original ad archived: http://www.webcitation.org/6Do5yGrId

Edit: Ha, the images from the ad are still in The Atlantic's CDN: http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/sponsored/0.%20M...