aasarava

Haitians in the US were discriminated against on the belief that they were bringing AIDS into the country. But medical anthropologist Paul Farmer has done a good job of showing that Haitians were only more "susceptible" to the virus than other populations because American sex tourists often visited Haiti and inadvertently spread the disease to Haitian sex workers.

http://www.amazon.com/AIDS-Accusation-Haiti-Geography-Blame/...

The real check on this sort of stupidity is actual journalist doing actual journalism.

So why does it matter that his wedding sounds like an extravagant affair to you? There are plenty of people who want to spend a lot of money on their weddings or other events and have a vision of it that pleases them.

I think we should all expect the right to spend our money the way we choose (within legal and ethical boundaries) without being second guessed and attacked by a public mob.

Now, if you had wanted to, you could have penned an editorial exploring whether there's hypocrisy in his decision to "manufacture" the scenery. But the real issue is why so many people who call themselves members of "the media" get to publish scathing blog posts that they pass off as news articles without doing any actual journalistic research.

In case you're interested in learning more, or just having a quick lorem ipsum generator: http://lipsum.com

The search does have auto-complete and shows function names. Try reloading?

"Shamrock covered decades-old secret agreements with the nation's large telegraph companies under which NSA and its predecessor agencies automatically received copies of international telegrams.

"At the peak of the operation, in the early 1970s, NSA analysts were reviewing 150,000 telegrams a month selected by computers scanning for keywords of interest to U.S. intelligence. Only in 1975, as Senator Church's committee began its inquiry, was Shamrock stopped."

Also, O'Brien is the agent in 1984.

Fair point. XSS likely wouldn't be a problem in the case of a desktop email client. But in the case of a Gmail or Outlook.com frontend, I can see how you would be concerned about something in the js served up by Google or MS capturing the private key and sending it to the server.

That said, couldn't this be mitigated by having a strong passphrase on the private key? How hard is the wrapper to attack?

Also, couldn't security researchers easily monitor the packets on this process and sound the alarm should they find that the js served up by Google or Microsoft suddenly starts sending private keys to the server?

Client-side, with a passphrase. A backup could be stored on the server or in your dropbox or wherever you'd like. It would be important, as part of the onboarding process, to communicate the need to keep the key safe and what happens to your old emails should you lose it.

As for using js for public key encryption, I've implemented it for a client and didn't have much trouble. There are libraries that workaround the usual problems. What have you seen out there that would cause a problem?

From the article: "And while most types of software get more user-friendly over time, user-friendly cryptography seems to be intrinsically difficult. Experts are not much closer to solving the problem today than they were two decades ago."

I'm not sure I agree that user-friendly cryptography is "intrinsically difficult." It doesn't seem like it would be hard for email clients and even the Gmail frontend to pop up a message saying, "Your email is insecure. To let people send you private messages securely, set up your 'public key' now. It's easy." Then a short wizard would walk users through the process and automatically append the public key to all outgoing messages.

On the other side, if you were going to send a message to a friend, the email client would check if that person has published a public key and then ask, "The recipient allows secure messages. Would you like us to send this message securely?"

Google and Microsoft and other large companies are no strangers to implementing a feature and using their size and clout to quickly make it a de facto standard. The real reason we don't have easy end-user cryptography is that these companies would lose access to mine your data and provide new services on top of that (and the article mentions this too.)

Except that, in the cases I've seen, the "why are you surprised" people aren't limiting their trace-ability. Again, these are not people who are in the same tech world as you and me. Their attitude comes from a cynicism toward government, not toward a confidence in their tech abilities.

More so, the "why are you surprised" attitude comes with an unsaid "so what?" "Yeah, we're being monitored. Why is this a big deal?"

And that is the point of my question: what can you say to explain that this is a big deal?

I appreciate the thoughtfulness of your comment. But even if the scope of this program were somehow limited in perpetuity to large-scale terrorism, the massive, centralized storage of every online citizen's Internet history should be frightening to everyone. In other news today, it was revealed that Chinese hackers targeted the Obama and McCain campaigns in '08. What happens when there is a breach in the NSA surveillance database and your individual Google search history is posted openly alongside your browsing history, emails, and Skype chats?

So can we freak out now? :: http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence...

> The adult runs off. I then walk up to the child and punch them in the face - do you think "well that punch doesn't matter"?

You're muddling the context of "doesn't matter". In your hypothetical, the rapist would be prosecuted for rape and you would be prosecuted for assault. So yes, it matters in that it should not be ignored. In mine, I am saying it is inconsequential to the morality of the situation whether the child feels harmed or not. A prosecutor may still charge the abuser with additional counts for physical abuse if warranted.

> t it would be irrelevant to analyse the exact act and try to define exactly how bad it is. But that doesn't mean there still is a scale

This is my point. Trying to define a moral scale of abuse based on the response of the abused -- consent, nonconsent, etc. -- is not more than an irrelevant intellectual exercise.

You're trying to make the case that if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, then it didn't fall.

If a stranger breaks into your home, goes through your belongings, and takes your prized possessions, it doesn't matter if you're well insured or if you're poor. It also doesn't matter if you're the extremely rare edge case who does not feel violated and doesn't press charges. The actual act of burglary occurred and the degree of it doesn't change based on your response.

Likewise, when a child is molested, it doesn't matter if he or she is not harmed physically. (Indeed, the psychological effects might be the longest lasting and most painful in many cases.)

Certainly, we can be thankful that they weren't physically harmed -- or in your rare edge case, that they are able to live the rest of their lives without any apparent repercussions. But that doesn't change the fact that there was an abuse of power (the other person was bigger, in a position of authority, more mentally capable, or more sober, etc.) And as I said before, it doesn't place any more responsibility on the child, nor any less culpability on the abuser.

The response does not change the act.

> presume that there's a difference between a young child who doesn't know any better, v.s. a young child who is being forced to do something they hate.

Your disclaimer is troubling. Are you saying one is somehow a lesser problem than the other, even if only by a degree? By that logic is it "less" of a rape to sexually assault a 30-year-old with a mental handicap who doesn't understand what's happening vs. assaulting a 30-year-old who fights back?

Raping a six-year-old is rape. It doesn't make a difference whether he or she "hates" it or whether situation plays into some vulnerability.

The victim is no more or less responsible because he or she had an awareness of what was happening, and the criminal is no less culpable for his or her actions.

Any reason your snark has to be obligatory? Especially since it's about a pedantic issue with the video about the service rather than the service itself?

The thing is, you've actually got something interesting to say -- we should certainly consider the privacy implications, and whether this could change limits on government intrusion into your correspondence -- but you buried the lead and presented it in a negative way for no clear reason other than you were feeling like being snarky toward someone's hard work.

They also seem to be in some parts of San Francisco, as noted in places in their blog. But yes, a list of Zips would be helpful.

Uh, no, in the US, debt does not pass on to children (unless the children co-signed the loan as adults.)

> This sort of thing is why I'm tired of political news on HN.

Because someone interpreted information differently than you, or did not do the same research as you? I think you'll tire quickly of political discussion anywhere, in that case.

From my perspective, your reply to the parent's comment is exactly why HN works. Someone makes an assertion, and another person comes along and adds additional information to better round out the issue. (Thank you for that, btw.)

Facebook has since updated its design, and the padding is better balanced. My account got upgraded to the new design a month or so back. I assume they are rolling it out slowly.

Was anyone else pleasantly surprised to find that this is a well-researched, plainly-told article -- the kind you rarely expect from local news? This should be an example on how to investigate and report impactful news.

As far as I can tell, there was no real "intercept" in this case other than the government asking for records of calls. So the software involved was probably just a SQL query.

That said, I do agree with the point you're making that there can be a larger context to our work. Indeed, it can give meaning to our work.

I don't begrudge anyone who enjoys writing iPhone apps; but the prevalence of things like Stuxnet, and Chinese cyber spying, and Bitcoin (in particular the political philosophy behind its origin), and Facebook (and its implications for privacy), and now the AP subpoena, is increasingly telling me that there's a huge opportunity to use tech skills to make a difference in the world. And the people most suited to do it are people who understand both politics and technology.

Adding to your question, it seems there are two things that are needed: Reducing reliance on a third-party service (phone company, Skype, etc.) that may keep call records which can be subpoenaed; and encrypting the conversation itself so it can't be monitored.

It seeems there are "crypto phones", but do these still rely on a third-party service to initiate and transmit the call? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_phone

It's great to see designers focusing on this issue. Interestingly, fonts that "assist" people with dyslexia have been around for quite a while. I wrote an article for Wired about the Read Regular font in 2003: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2003/10/60834

You might also find this interesting: http://www.iansyst.co.uk/about-us/resources/directory/articl...

If the information in the book (regardless of page count) gives you insight into a new technology that you can use to expand your career, is $30 really too much? If you're a contractor billing at market rates in SF, $30 is one-third to one-fifth of a single hour's income.

Time to start valuing books based on knowledge contained rather than paper weight.

> Web Developer common sense rule #1 — Always put alt tags on images, especially when they're being used as icons in content sections, wow.

Actually, no. The icons are correctly labeled with text and many of the images are CSS background images (which can't have ALT text anyway.) In their usage, a screen reader would sound out the text on screen, providing a user with enough information to make a browsing decision.

Even if the images were inline rather than applied in the background, you need to use ALT decisively. ALT text that repeats what is already a link label can be more redundant than helpful.

What are some of the things you've been inspired to do differently?

It's only obvious to cultures that eat meat. I grew up vegetarian in a Hindu family (in the US). Until late college, I would not have been able to tell you how filet mignon, sirloin, chuck, rib differed -- or even what animal they referred to.

Except that doing so might open up news organizations to claims of bias in their reporting on aid organizations and on how aid money is spent.