cpleppert

Booz Allen said he was an employee for less than three months. That sounds really interesting, I thought he would have worked there for longer since he claims he was planning this for a long time and the reporter said he was in contact for months.

If you read what the Wash Post reporter said Snowden tried to get him to release the entire slide deck. Why couldn't he put it on the internet? It is also interesting to me that he said this required a lot of preparation. If he had the accesses he claimed he had copying classified slide decks would be risky for him but not something that would take a long time.

He also claimed that the NSA could track all emails in the USA and he (or an analyst not sure what he meant) could access the email of the president if he had the personal address. If that is the case, surely evidence of that type of deep telecommunications interception would be more important than PRISM especially since he raised that claim specifically to explain why he did it. With the access he had it would be easy to prove.

I don't know what to make of his decisions. Not saying he isn't who he said he is but I think there are a lot of unanswered questions.

Weird phrasing for starters. I mean that isn't how one would describe malware or a rootkit. I can't imagine hardware would be worth the effort if you can just as easily compromise the OS with physical access.

I just don't know what to make of this guys story. He has no high school diploma, started out as a security guard and was then given a diplomat cover as a system administrator?

He further claims that his job as a systems administrator gave him access to NSA analyst intercept software which I find difficult to believe. I can't imagine use of the software isn't physically locked to a machine in a secure environment. You wouldn't expect a systems administrator to have access to everything, which he claims he had, everything is compartmentalized.

For starters, it names the President as a defendant EDIT: originally was plaintiff, dunno how that happened. Thanks

ESC or cmd period is your friend :)

He wasn't an NSA employee he was a contractor. They don't even know how many contrators they have working for them.

The media needs to get more credible technology consultants they can turn to. The days when a brief but imprecise description was acceptable are over.

In this case 'direct collection' i.e. a backdoor didn't make sense for a lot of reasons and didn't square with the program was described in other sources that came out after the slides were released.

But the real problem is secrecy. This is a complicated program with many actors and the media can't be expected not to report information clearly contained in leaked NSA slides even if they can't get the context 100% right.

This is basically what we already knew. It doesn't explain how the system is integrated with data providers such as google.

Stack is: Java/Hadoop/Tomcat/cloudbase using Machineshop(http://machineshop.io ?) data input is protobuf/queries are translated to a map/reduce job by cloudbase Client uses Ext GWT (Java Component UI Library for Google Web Toolkit |) cloud based, not sure which cloud. Docs aren't clear if machineshop hosts the actual data..wow

from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/08/boun...

Stack is: Java/Hadoop/Tomcat/cloudbase using Machineshop(http://machineshop.io/ ?) data input is protobuf/queries are translated to a map/reduce job by cloudbase Client uses Ext GWT (Java Component UI Library for Google Web Toolkit |)

cloud based, not sure which cloud. Docs aren't clear if machineshop hosts the actual data..wow

Some people are saying that the new slide just revealed [1] using the phrase "direct collection" is somehow a smoking gun but it is clear that the context of the slide shows it is for a non-technical audience of analysts (i.e. you should use both) and is contrasting "direct" with passive collection.

Of course, it could be that Google and everyone else is just lying for no reason at all and people who have talked about PRISM to marc and others in the media are spreading disinformation but I doubt it.

1: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/343421926057861121

Yes, that is what I think. The slide is making a distinction between passive listening posts and direct collection from companies. "Collection directly from the servers" could simply be a nontechnical phrase that contrasts with wiretaps of telecommunications data.

>> Things like search warrants? What has been described in the PRISM slides is a interface in which a NSA agent can access a subject's data at will, in a few clicks and an affirmation that "yes, this person is a terrorist".

I'm not sure where you getting that from the slides. They don't explain how an analyst uses the system.

>>Google has officially denied being a part of PRISM. The way you phrased this statement makes it sound like the OP is sneakily leaving out the PRISM implementation, which would be sneaky if Google were a part of PRISM.

Other media reports from insiders (not information on the leaked slides) make it sound like PRISM is more of an NSA internal thing that aggregates data and presents it to analysts. Based on the description of the slides it sounds like the NSA has some integration with the on site premises of the target company.

So it could be as simple as PRISM is just a way of automating the whole process of getting data from a valid warrant which would be consistent with the denials made tech companies. They don't have any contact with 'PRISM' per se; they have just set up their systems to spit out data when they get a valid warrant.

>>Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false.

If you consider that PRISM is not a 'dragnet' but rather an automated system that processes FISA warrants on company premises then the denial wouldn't be wrong. There is no 'scale' that you wouldn't be able to get using regular data requests to internet companies. PRISM could just make the process a lot easier for everyone involved.

So instead of sending a warrant over, having the company verify and send the data to the NSA, then finally transforming the data into a reportable format PRISM automates the whole process.

If you read some of the media descriptions it almost looks like PRISM is more of a data aggregation and portal system that sits on top of a data source and allows analysts to explore content.

I think that you are broadly right. The government can already get access to Google, facebook etc so PRISM could be just a friendlier user interface around the whole process. So instead of: 1)investigate 2) get warrant 3) send warrant to companies with data request 4)companies send data back 5) repeat 3-4 until investigation complete

PRISM allows an analyst to load up a warrant and start exploring data immediately without having to wait for the company to verify it and then do a ETL operation back to the NSA.

The presentation made it seem as if each company was not participating passively. Specifically the stored intelligence "varies by provider" and there are "special requests available." Interestingly, there is no mechanism described which captures all content of a certain type i.e. email; it seems to be apparent that only content from the providers is available. Surely, if you can intercept email from google without their help you can grab ALL email traffic as well.

The slides also show that providers join over time. If they were just intercepting you would expect all email providers to join at once; that doesn't appear to be the case.

There are also stuff like "online social networking detail" and "login notifications" which make it seem like facebook has given access to their systems.

>>But not everything that is said here needs to be treated like it was uttered as part of a debate. Sometimes opinions are just opinions, sometimes anecdotes are enlightening, and sometimes generalizations, metaphors, analogies and other abstractions come into play.

True! But I also think that the intent to immediately jump to logical fallacies is a sign of weakness. If you can't dispute the premises (or even understand them) you can jump right to an area that allows a) total victory, he used a fallacy somehow somewhere! or b) the argument breaks down into a subjective analysis of whether someone committed a fallacy thus allowing the argument to continue without having to face the other persons argument.

Maybe it is just me, but I find that even the (few) people without any critical thinking skills don't really commit classical logical fallacies. The problem isn't the surface argument but rather the evidence or the premises that is usually the issue.

>> For 90% of its history (600 to 1900) the middle east has been under a single empire or another.

That is so totally wrong I don't even know where to begin. For starters the caliphate was only a political force until the emergence of the seljuk turks. The turkish empire was European focused and never controlled persia or arabia.

Design is still a major obstacle for advanced multi-stage hydrogen bombs. How they work exactly is still a major secret that isn't public knowledge AFAIK.

PPAPI itself is a Chrome only api at the moment. I'm really concerned about using a plugin api defined by its C/C++ behavior as some kind of standard. So we not only have the DOM apis but also another class of APIs that have their own quirks.

I'm not sure there is a great chance that other browser vendors will adopt LLVM, especially Microsoft. It will basically require them to not only reimplement the native compiler but also the frontend that compiles to LLVM bytecode and any additional SDK tools like a debugger.

Asm.js is a lot easier to implement on every level. It will be served compressed so there wont be a lot of size overhead compared to a bytecode format. If you just use asm.js to call into webGL or audio apis there shouldn't be any big performance difference over using something lower level like PNaCL. Additionally, different browsers may use different optimizations when compiling LLVM code, differing implementations will give different performance characteristics. PNacl is no different than asm.js in requiring that the compiler be optimized.

They intend to tie V8 and the Dom deeper in the next versions of Chrome by using a new garbage collector. I'm pretty sure it will be well nigh impossible to use another Javascript engine.

The problem isn't the start button or the 'start screen' per se it is the combining two entirely separate user interfaces into one product.

I personally think that Microsoft should put up a firewall between the desktop and the metro environment. Just run metro apps in a windowed environment and give up trying to do everything through the metro interface. Microsoft is committed to Metro and its new UI Toolkit but the very poor discoverability of the Metro layer when used from the desktop is ironically hurting metro adoption for desktop users making app developers deal with a massive segment of windows that doesn't have any desire to use Metro apps.

Yes, Microsoft will have to make substantial changes and backtrack a bit but the alternative will be to maintain in perpetuity the Metro toolkit and environment for both touch and mouse environments.

>>- Pin programs to the taskbar - Use shortcuts for common/important stuff (Win+i, Win+x, Win+w, Win+f are the ones I need) - Use the type to complete thing otherwise

You can also use Win+Number to switch right to the taskbar program. quite convenient although I prefer using cap locks + home row keys to switch apps on the mac.

>>Most users I know moved to that workflow anyway, before Windows 8 (the start menu entry on previous Windows versions. Spotlight or maybe QuickSilver before that on OS X. Unity / Gnome Shell on Linux).

I agree. But if your workflow is shortcuts + quick search to open everything else it doesn't really matter if you use a start menu, something like metro or the mac os x dock.

But I think that if you are asking what is good enough for 90% of our users, is easily discoverable and reduces confusion it is hard to beat the start menu + taskbar. It isn't really a question of functionality, all you are doing is managing graphical icons that launch programs. The key should be reducing confusion for users who will use the program launcher for everything they do. I don't hear a lot of people arguing that the metro launcher was something that microsoft should have done without a focus on touch.

You can rather easily use DETS (Disk Erlang Term Storage) for simple applications and Mnesia for larger ones. This is a simple approach that works quite well IMHO.

This looks really great, Elixir plus this would be quite a nice web stack.

That was the question I was going to ask. I don't understand any possible means that the system can resolve this issue. Traditional database systems always have one canonical value of row X at any point in time. The value can change for earlier transactions but there can never but multiple values of X for the same time. What happens as soon as client 3 comes along and wants to read row X? Making a decision is akin to choosing which transaction you will accept as valid and which you will reject!

The paper describes this scheme as READ Committed which doesn't make generally make sense except in the context of a database with secondary indexes.

I'm not sure what the article claims here. This is the first dated inscription but the positional arabic notation (with a zero like glyph) had been in use for at least 300 years earlier. If you consider other place value systems the concept of a 'separator' goes back much farther.

This isn't necessarily evidence that they understood zero as a number as opposed to a concept. By 1000 in Europe they used a symbol as a placeholder that looked superficially similar to our modern glyph of zero. When explaining it, however, it was clear it was simply a placeholder that could always be omitted and was "sometimes useful" and was absolutely not really a number. It isn't clear that the glyph used here or in Europe was anything more than an elaborate 'dot.' It certainly didn't seem to be be transmitted as a recognizable glpyh but each culture rendered it in the way most convenient as a counting and placeholder aid.

The problem is that the DOM is a hard upper limit on performance compared to what the performance of an unsafe language (asm.js) is. It is massively complex because it must perform every UI task in the browser and simply moving around DIVs doesn't give you a feel for its the performance in complex scenarios.

If you think about how native applications perform and then imagine every one having to go through a DOM interface and every button and UI interaction being composed of DOM elements and re-styling these elements on every interaction you get a sense of what the problem is. There is simply no way to get the DOM to do something it wasn't designed to do, which is to be a document display interface and not a general graphical user interface. You have to clobber together a lot of interactions to get the desired behavior and not only does this increase the overhead for both your program and the DOM you are going to hit cases where the DOM isn't optimized.

This doesn't mean that the DOM is inherently slow. If you tried to offload the UI work onto javascript you wouldn't get the performance benefit of doing that on Asm.js or NACL. You really need unsafe code to solve this problem. Asm.js and NACL are only useful if you are going to do this; targeting the Canvas and WebGL gives you the ability to do that.

"It furthermore states that commercial licence must be acquired for closed source applications."

I love the description of the scripting language as "Turing complete" based on "JSON". That is the first time I have ever heard turing complete used to market a programming language!

The scripting language is incredible, I have never seen a more verbose way to program. It is a scripting language, yet seems to combine JSON, PHP and C standard library functions with C type casting. Look at the samples: http://unqlite.org/jx9_samples.html

I am speechless, the description of the project is the most vacuous collection of buzzwords imaginable. "Built with a powerful disk storage engine which support O(1) lookup." "Support Terabyte sized databases." Of course with a global lock and after taking a look at the scripting language I have reason to doubt the claims made

jQuery has a considerable performance cost for the abstractions it provides. It doesn't just call the native methods under the hood, it has to provide additional abstractions like chaining by wrapping every returned object into a jQuery object. In a lot of cases these abstractions aren't helpful because you need to understand exactly what jQuery is doing. If you compare the cost of native methods over what jQuery does you easily add 500 lines of javascript code on every method call.

Additionally, jQuery may not provide the abstractions you need or want. If you are using a high level framework that manages templating I would argue that you should use the abstractions designed by the framework and not the one-size-fits all ones that jQuery provides. There is a lot of functionality that jQuery provides that may not be relevant at all for you. jQuery animations are one example.

Using jQuery doesn't stop you from running into browser bugs. jQuery could help you out with basic things like selection and event handling but modern browsers are already much improved in this area.

I very much dislike the spaghetti code that over reliance on jQuery plugins results in. You have pieces of code that rely entirely on jQuery and can't be refactored out or reasoned with clearly. It is terribly unidiomatic in any case.

EDIT: That being said jQuery does have its place.

Wouldn't this have a lot of moving parts as compared to Elasticsearch? Redis, django, nginx, sphinx all have to be configured. Elasticsearch already has all the feature you list as coming soon, and I imagine it would be very hard to add transparent clustering to this setup.

If you are embarking on such a Keynesian program in a climate of general depression and lack of investment in other countries then you will enjoy generally low interest rates but you lose the ability to make short term investments and must make longer term ones.

In the case of Nazi Germany Hitler purposely took on massive amounts of debt to rearm the country. Any economic success was temporary and entirely dependent on the massive arms program. Not only was the Nazi state inefficient arms investment couldn't possibly have ever paid back the investment in borrowed money that created the Nazi military.