sinak

Historically Cloudflare have been quite strong in their support for free speech. For example, they run Project Galileo to protect public-interest sites against DDOS attacks: https://www.cloudflare.com/galileo

I'm guessing in this case it's simply a case of them choosing which battles to fight. They probably don't want to commit to run an open proxy for everyone in China to access banned websites. That would likely get them banned outright in China, which, for a CDN like Cloudflare, would really hurt their core business.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation - San Francisco - Full time - Frontend/Backend Developers

The EFF fights for an Internet free of surveillance and censorship, and we’re hiring. EFF's technology team implements EFF's activism campaigns, builds exciting new activism tools and creates new technologies to protect the Internet as a whole.

A small sample of projects we've worked on in the last year:

- Worked with over 100 volunteer developers to crowdsource and populate contact-congress, an open dataset describing the contact forms of members of congress.

- Created and open-sourced congress-forms: a delivery mechanism for sending emails to congress based on the open data we crowdsourced.

- Created a new (and soon-to-be open source) activism platform that’s currently live at act.eff.org.

- Launched numerous projects including Surveillance Self-Defense, DearFCC.org, The Day We Fight Back, Trolling Effects, Tor Challenge and others.

- Launched a preview version of our OpenWireless open source router firmware.

We're currently hiring a frontend designer/developer and a backend developer with experience with Ruby on Rails and/or Node.js. Both positions are listed here: https://www.eff.org/about/opportunities/jobs

If you think you might be a fit for either role, take a moment and get in touch: techjobs@eff.org

This is really great. Two big missing features preventing us from switching away from Slack are direct messages and mobile push notifications. The latter is hard to do: push is highly centralized, which is really bad for self-hosted/open source software. But DMs are totally doable.

Here is the actual ruling itself:

https://ia801403.us.archive.org/22/items/gov.uscourts.cand.2...

Excerpt:

> Disclosure of this classified information would risk informing adversaries of the specific nature and operational details of the Upstream collection process and the scope of the NSA’s participation in the program. Notwithstanding the unauthorized public disclosures made in the recent past and the Government’s subsequent releases of previously classified information about certain NSA intelligence gathering activities since 2013, the Court notes that substantial details about the challenged program remain classified. The question of whether Plaintiffs have standing and the substantive issue of whether there are Fourth Amendment violations cannot be litigated without impinging on that heightened security classification. Because a fair and full adjudication of the Government Defendants’ defenses would require harmful disclosures of national security information that is protected by the state secrets privilege, the Court must exclude such evidence from the case.

So the court isn't ruling on whether NSA surveillance is constitutional. They're saying NSA surveillance is too secret for them to be able to rule on, because state secrets privilege.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation - San Francisco - Full time - Frontend/Backend Developers

The EFF fights for an Internet free of surveillance and censorship, and we’re hiring. EFF's technology team implements EFF's activism campaigns, builds exciting new activism tools and creates new technologies to protect the Internet as a whole.

A small sample of projects we've worked on in the last year:

- Worked with over 100 volunteer developers to crowdsource and populate contact-congress, an open dataset describing the contact forms of members of congress.

- Created and open-sourced congress-forms: a delivery mechanism for sending emails to congress based on the open data we crowdsourced.

- Created a new (and soon-to-be open source) activism platform that’s currently live at act.eff.org.

- Launched numerous projects including Surveillance Self-Defense, DearFCC.org, The Day We Fight Back, Trolling Effects, Tor Challenge and others. - Launched a preview version of our OpenWireless open source router firmware.

We're currently hiring a frontend designer/developer and a backend developer with experience with Ruby on Rails and/or Node.js. Both positions are listed here: https://www.eff.org/about/opportunities/jobs

If you think you might be a fit for either role, take a moment and get in touch: techjobs@eff.org

We did most of the development and testing, but didn't get it 100% production ready after we decided we wouldn't release the app.

Since the main functionality of the app is the push notification service, having users compile their own apps wouldn't really be very helpful. Users need to subscribe to our push notification channel via APNS, and they can't do that if they're compiling themselves.

We could have ignored that and built our own, less-than-realtime push service, but even still, having users compile their own apps means that our users have to pay the $99 and sign the developer agreements instead of us, and I don't think that's a very reasonable request.

I think the best solution is for us to release on the Cydia marketplace, and I think it's pretty likely we'll do that.

My understanding is that you need to have the Play Store on your device for apps to register and receive push notifications from GCM [1]. Since that's the main functionality of the app at the moment, an APK for sideloading won't be too useful, but perhaps we can add one once we add more functionality?

[1] Would love to be wrong about this if anyone else knows differently.

For any other non-profits or companies who might need a similar app to notify users, both the app (Cordova + Ionic) and the APNS/GCM push notification server are open source and available here:

https://github.com/EFForg/pushserver

https://github.com/EFForg/actioncenter-mobile

If you're an Android user, consider downloading the app. Its really, really simple - it just sends you a push notification if there's an action EFF needs your help with - but we hope to improve it over time.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.eff.action...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation - San Francisco - Full time - Frontend/Backend Developer

The EFF fights for an Internet free of surveillance and censorship, and we’re hiring. EFF's technology team implements EFF's activism campaigns, builds exciting new activism tools and creates new technologies to protect the Internet as a whole.

A small sample of projects we've worked on in the last year:

- Worked with over 100 volunteer developers to crowdsource and populate contact-congress, an open dataset describing the contact forms of members of congress.

- Created and open-sourced congress-forms: a delivery mechanism for sending emails to congress based on the open data we crowdsourced.

- Created a new (and soon-to-be open source) activism platform that’s currently live at act.eff.org.

- Launched numerous projects including Surveillance Self-Defense, DearFCC.org, The Day We Fight Back, Trolling Effects, Tor Challenge and others.

- Launched a preview version of our OpenWireless open source router firmware.

We're currently hiring a frontend designer/developer and a backend developer with experience with Ruby on Rails and Node.js. Both positions are listed here: https://www.eff.org/about/opportunities/jobs

If you think you might be a fit for either a role, take a moment and get in touch: techjobs@eff.org

I just ran a quick comparison:

Original: 250kB http://files.sina.is/original.jpg

Compressed by JPEGmini Lite: 133kB http://files.sina.is/jpeg-mini.jpg

Compressed by MozJPEG 3.0 @ Medium: 82kB http://files.sina.is/moz-medium.jpg

Compressed by MozJPEG 3.0 @ High: 141kB http://files.sina.is/moz-high.jpg

> Unless you hypothesize that the U.S. and Australia are putting citizens in prison using secret courts, the government still has to present evidence in a court proceeding, and that has to comport with the 4th amendment in the U.S., and whatever the equivalent is in Australia.

rayiner, how about the reports of "parallel construction" by the NSA? While it's true that the government still has to present evidence in a court, according to recent reports [1] the NSA "tips off" organizations like the DEA.

1 - http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/05...

If you haven't seen it, S01E03 of Black Mirror, The Entire History of You, deals exactly with what PG describes at the end of this post: technology that lets you review and relive your past. It's very much worth watching, and was recently added to Netflix's library:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2089050/

http://www.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70264856&trkid=33258...

I'd recommend taking a looking at The Wirecutter's guide here: http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-wi-fi-router/

I'd quite highly recommend the Archer C8 if you are okay with the fact that it doesn't support HFS or ExFAT on external drives: http://smile.amazon.com/TP-LINK-Archer-C8-Wireless-1350Mbps/...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation - San Francisco - Full time - Multiple positions

The EFF fights for an Internet free of surveillance and censorship, and we’re hiring. EFF's technology team implements EFF's activism campaigns, builds exciting new activism tools and creates new technologies to protect the Internet as a whole.

A small sample of projects we've worked on in the last year:

- Worked with over 100 volunteer developers to crowdsource and populate contact-congress, an open dataset describing the contact forms of members of congress.

- Created and open-sourced congress-forms: a delivery mechanism for sending emails to congress based on the open data we crowdsourced.

- Created a new (and soon-to-be open source) activism platform that’s currently live at act.eff.org.

- Launched numerous projects including Surveillance Self-Defense, DearFCC.org, The Day We Fight Back, Trolling Effects, Tor Challenge and others.

- Launched a preview version of our OpenWireless open source router firmware.

We're currently hiring a frontend designer/developer and a backend developer, listed here: https://www.eff.org/about/opportunities/jobs

And we’re always open to hiring exceptional candidates too. If you’re excited about our mission and our projects, take a moment and get in touch: techjobs@eff.org

I agree, but the appropriate route is to email hn@ycombinator.com with this sort of feedback.

Eric Mill's excellent post about Slack's new arbitration clause was just merged into this thread by the moderators. Here is the URL:

https://konklone.com/post/slack-is-now-forcing-users-into-ar...

The post is titled "Slack is now forcing users into arbitration and that is terrible." I highly recommend reading it, as there's no mention of the arbitration ToS change in Slack's own blog post.

Edit: Also worth reading the ongoing conversation between Stewart Butterfield (Slack CEO) and Konklone on Twitter: https://twitter.com/stewart/status/536975596920635393

I agree: more cyclists is good. But risking my own health and safety to make SF drivers more aware of cyclists just doesn't work for me.

I think this is called a "social trap" by sociologists. I'm not sure there's an easy solution. But for my part if I stop cycling, I'll make sure to up my donations to the bicycle coalition.

The idea of any one company owning such a large proportion of global transport infrastructure seems scary to me. And the fact that Uber's leadership seems to have a very poor ethical compass makes the path we're headed down seem pretty ominous.

I've been trying to think of better, less centralized solutions, and they're not too hard to imagine. An open transportation marketplace, populated by independent vendors, isn't so far-fetched. In fact it'd probably look quite similar to Craigslist, except with better handling of user identities and reputations, and a much better mobile-focused user experienced. Anyone could list a delivery service in one of a number of different categories, with custom price rules, and categories might include taxi/human transport services, food delivery, package delivery, etc. A review system, payment integration and mapping would come built into both the provider and user's mobile apps, but insurance etc. would be up to the individual vendors. Fees for listing services would be nominal, and almost all the revenue would go directly to the vendors themselves.

The trouble with this kind of service is that it'd end up being quite a bit less safe and quite a bit more messy than interacting with a single company like Uber. But the lower transaction costs should make services significantly cheaper, and power would be much less centralized.

So I cycle around SF, but am considering stopping. The data varies depending on which source you use, but it seems like cycling is about 3 times less dangerous than motorbiking, and considerably (at least ~5-10x) more dangerous than driving. Most people who've lived in SF have plenty of anecdotal evidence of friends who've been hurt, often seriously, by bike accidents.

I'd love to be proven wrong about this: I love cycling and particularly like getting built-in exercise in my routine. And I'll continue to donate to the SF bicycle coalition, and vote for improving infrastructure to support cyclists. It just seems most rational to stop actually cycling.

If I'm not mistaken, this is EFF's latest analysis of the bill, as well as their justification for supporting:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/08/understanding-new-usa-...

The bill isn't perfect, but it'll mean that the government collects less information on innocent people, there'll be greater transparency, and an advocate for citizen privacy in the FISA court. Beyond that, it's the most likely vehicle for NSA reform. We're unlikely to see anything stronger if this doesn't pass. And it seems like a better bet than trying to push for Section 215 to sunset next year.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation - San Francisco - Full time - Multiple positions

Come and help us fight for an Internet free of surveillance and censorship. The EFF's tech team is expanding, and we're looking to hire strong frontend and backend engineers and sysadmins.

You'll be join a community of passionate people who are excited to be working on issues that we think are of paramount importance to the future of technology.

EFF's technology team implements EFF's activism campaigns, builds exciting new activism tools and creates new technologies to protect the Internet as a whole.

Here's a small sample of projects we've worked on in the last year:

- Worked with over 100 volunteer developers to crowdsource and populate contact-congress, an open dataset describing the contact forms of members of congress.

- Created and open-sourced congress-forms: a delivery mechanism for sending emails to congress based on the contact-congress dataset.

- Created a new (and soon-to-be open source) activism platform that’s currently live at act.eff.org.

- Built the sites Surveillance Self-Defense, DearFCC.org, The Day We Fight Back, Trolling Effects, Tor Challenge and countless others, which were visited by over 2 million people in 2014.

- Launched a preview version of our OpenWireless open source router firmware.

We're currently hiring a frontend designer/developer, a backend developer, and a technology generalist. The latter two jobs are listed on this page: https://www.eff.org/about/opportunities/jobs

But we’re also always open to hire exceptional candidates too. If you’re excited about our mission and our projects, take a moment and get in touch: techjobs@eff.org

I have exactly one invite left, and happy to share it. First person to reply to this thread agreeing to terms below gets it:

- You agree to share at least one of your invites with another user on this thread.

- You agree to update your comment to indicate which users you sent invites to and how many more you have left.

Update: invite sent to codepeach. 0 invites left.

For those interested, a more detailed analysis on the history of Smith can be found in this EFF blog post:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/06/smith-v-maryland-turns...

I'm by no means a lawyer, but I'd respond by saying that the judges responsible for the original decision likely didn't realize the consequences the Smith decision would have in the Internet age. So much of the digital content we produce ends up in the cloud, whether in an online backup service, SaaS, email, or otherwise. To say that sharing information with a cloud provider eliminates your expectation of privacy is almost the same as saying that it's not really possible to have any sort of private digital records whatsoever.

The exception to that would be in cases where end to end encryption is implemented, and only the user holds the key. That seems to be where we're increasingly moving in a world where Smith stands, and it's certainly not optimal for law enforcement, who won't be able to access that information even with a warrant.

The EFF's Tor Challenge reward was really nominal - they offered "a limited-edition sticker if your Tor relay is still running 12 months" later. It was really more symbolic than anything else.

This isn't related to the MMS announcement, but I'd like to give Twilio big, big props for being one of the most developer and technology-friendly companies out there.

Not only is their API easy to use, constantly improved, and impeccably supported, but over the course of the last year, they've donated thousands of dollars worth of free credit to technology activists including the EFF, Taskforce.is, and Fight for the Future. They've even modified their privacy policy to make it possible for my team at EFF to use Twilio on campaigns we run.

Rob Spectre, who's replying to comments in this thread, has been amazing too - offering hands-on support when we run big campaigns like The Day We Fight Back and last week's Battle for the Net.

Thanks to all the Twilio team. You rock.

The title for this post is regrettable, but op-ed authors often don't choose their own headlines.

Despite the title, the article is well worth reading. Barbara von Schewick is one of the leading thinkers on net neutrality and understands the underlying issues better than almost anyone out there.

Now is a good time to enable two-factor authentication on your accounts. Here is how to do so for some common services:

- Google: https://www.google.com/landing/2step/

- Github: https://github.com/settings/security

- AWS: http://aws.amazon.com/mfa/virtual_mfa_applications

- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=security

- Twitter: https://twitter.com/settings/security

- Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/account/security

- Lastpass: http://helpdesk.lastpass.com/security-options/google-authent...

- More: https://twofactorauth.org/

OpenSignal - London, UK (Full time, permanent)

At OpenSignal we're using mobile apps to tap into the smart phones we're all carrying around with us to build up global crowdsourced sensor networks. Our first [1] is for wireless signal where we are building a global database on the coverage and performance of wireless networks (both mobile + WiFi) on a scale that has never before been possible. Our second sensor network is WeatherSignal [2], which uses the barometers, thermometers and hygrometers on smart phones to crowdsource weather data and we have already published a scientific paper [3] showing the potential of this approach. If the concept of crowdsourced sensor networks appeals to you too then please get in touch. We are hiring for all manner of different roles right not (backend, frontend, UX/UI & data science) but most of all we are just looking for smart, like minded people rather than people with specific, existing skills.

More info: http://opensignal.com/jobs/ Email us: join@opensignal.com

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.staircase3... [2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.opensignal... [3] http://opensignal.com/reports/battery-temperature-weather/

I'm posting this because a) Mike knows more about tech policy than almost anyone, and deserves more exposure here, b) he makes some really interesting points about the net neutrality debate in his comments.

The point of §1201 of the DMCA was to prevent piracy by preventing circumvention of DRM. It wasn't meant to be used to lock down cell phones. So in some ways, it is a quirk. In other ways not.