Chess@home: Building the largest Chess AI ever (in JavaScript) - <AUTHOR> http://sylvainzimmer.com/2011/09/06/chessathome-building-largest-chess-ai/

<comment><USER2> The last time anyone did a project like this (ChessBrain), they were very careful not to give any meaningful performance results. I can tell you why: latency is critical in these applications, and APHID scalability is terrible once you go over a few nodes. Scaling YBWC is even harder, more latency- sensitive, and responds terribly if you can't effectively share memory over multiple nodes.

Using a lot of CPUs to generate heat is easy. Using them to generate good chess moves is another matter.

How about having your "2000-node chess program" play against the strongest GPL-ed chess program (Stockfish 2.1), running on a fast 4-core box?

If you can win a match of meaningful length against that, I might be interested.

Until you get there, this is a nice exercise in combining technology to achieve meaningless results.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed. APHID doesn't scale well and it will be hard to distribute YBWC efficiently but we think we have a shot at it with very short compute windows for each worker. We may also look at other algorithms but currently a variation of YBWC seems the most promising.

In terms of strength, we'll add the UCI protocol to be able to run games against other engines. We'll see how it performs but we don't expect to beat Stockfish easily, even with a very large number of nodes. That will be part of the experiment and we'll be happy to publish the results.

Now, another path to get real performance would be to find a way of using webGL on the workers. Folding@home has proven it's sometimes 10x more efficient than using CPUs. If we can manage to do that then we _might_ have a shot at being both the largest and strongest AI...

<comment><USER2> Folding@home has proven that embarrassingly parallel problems run well on embarrassingly parallel architectures. Computer chess is not one of those.

Forget about using the GPU for chess. Just getting that to work somewhat decently is a huge achievement - which _no-one_ has succeeded in so far.

Some people, when they see a problem, think: "We'll use the GPU". Now they have 2 problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair point. Though I'll have to get burned trying before being convinced it's that complicated :) However webGL is not in the critical path of the Guinness Record thing, so I'll happily trust you for now!

<comment><USER3> this guy might have a hint or two, or maybe you could collaborate if you go that way:

<http://blog.cudachess.org/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Widget ethics. Using third-party processing power has usually been opt-in: > people needed to install SETI@home or the BOINC software to lend their CPUs. > JavaScript allows us to use people's CPUs without their explicit consent > just when they visit a page with the widget, which makes this a grey area.

This could be a new way of generating revenue from a website: selling time on visitors' machines. I'm not saying it's a good or ethical idea, but it's certainly an _interesting_ idea.

<comment><USER5> That was the idea behind the Javascript Bitcoin Miner, though it turned out to be unfeasible in the end.

<http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=9042.0>

comments: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2566365>

<comment><USER6> I think somebody is building a WebGL version. That could generate a ton of money on a large website.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> By the way, just posted the source from NKO: <https://github.com/joshfire/chessathome>

</comment><comment><USER7> I tried using this, but it left me with the impression that it was unprofessionally done.

1\. The board is not correct. The black square must be in the left corner. While this may seem like a small quibble, it changes the patters so that squares like e4, which should be white, are now black. This makes it difficult to play.

2\. There are apparently no openings programed into the computer. Since openings are so complex, simply using an algorithm to find good opening moves does not work well. So, this program will almost always start out with bad first moves.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

Please keep in mind it was hacked together in 48h, so yes it's _supposed_ to be unprofessionally done ;-) However we'll now calmly fix all the issues and continue improving it: <https://github.com/joshfire/chessathome/issues>

Feel free to report more bugs, we love feedback :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Useful link:

<http://www.rgoarchitects.com/Files/fallacies.pdf>

'The fallacies of distributed computing explained'.

</comment><comment><USER8> > When the AI is strong enough, we'll invite an actual french Chess Grand > Master along with a Guinness official for the most epic Chess game, ever!

Ehm, what makes this so epic? Computers have been known to beat humans at chess for quite a while now.

<comment><USER9> Its gotten so bad (good) that cell phones are now playing at GM levels. Kind of depressing, but inevitable.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human- computer_chess_matches#Po...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human- computer_chess_matches#Pocket_Fritz_4_.282009.29)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it's astounding (if true) that Pocket Fritz only searches 20k nodes per second, compared to Deep Blue's 200M. There must be some serious positional intelligence involved there!

<comment><USER10> Your average GM is also not Gary Kasparov. The difference between a typical GM and one of the handful of elites is pretty astounding.

<comment><USER11> For a graphical grasp of this concept, take a bell curve, and _then plot only the top 0.1% of the bell curve._ That's the distribution of abilities among people who are any good at all at chess, and it is no longer anything close to a bell curve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Variation on a theme: implement Stockfish in NACL, or, if Stockfish is too hard to port, a simpler though strong program like Fruit.

Then, you can essentially isolate out one of the variables, the strength of the "node", or client, engine, and you can play your Stockfish distributed against a Stockfish on a local box.

Of note is that there will still be 2 advantages the distributed version has: \- more CPUs (obvious to everyone) \- more RAM (well, obvious once you mention it)

If the distributed version is stronger then one question will be, was it more CPUs, or more RAM, that tipped the balance?

<comment><USER2> For any reasonable amount of RAM (say >64M) and a strong engine with a good hash-replacement algorithm: always the CPUs. They are simply not RAM-limited.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great idea, it's amazing that you could build something like this so fast!

Although in my case, a single AI node is probably already enough to beat me at chess, let alone 2000…

</comment><comment><USER14> It occurs to me that you can be thinking whilst it is the opponent's turn i.e. you can give some nodes the job of looking at likely next moves and others for determining counters to that and so on.

PS don't forget to ask your contributors to open a tab for each core they have if their browser is going to use a separate OS thread for each

PPS Google Chrome's NACL is, longer term, an interesting direction perhaps?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, most chess programs do this, although it is forbidden in some chess computer tournaments with stricter rules (but we'd never qualify in those anyway :)

As for asking people to open multiple tabs, that may be an additional instruction for D-Day if they want to max out their CPUs. But we figured 1 CPU maxed out while browsing a website would already be enough :)

Chrome's NaCl is definitely an interesting direction, but we'll investigate webGL first which seems to be more promising (see Folding@home).

Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It sounds pretty interesting, but is JavaScript really the proper way to implement... Is the implementation transferable to other problems?

<comment><USER16> I've been doing some free-time hacking on a generic solution to distributing Javascript tasks. <https://code.google.com/p/mrjs>

It's definitely not secure, or very reliable, but it's a start at least. (Contributions accepted!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> duh, reminds me of my long forgotten project, I got 15GB of 200Mio played games on FICS and 15800 games of grandmasters. Took too long for my AI to look through all of them ..</comment>


Null Island - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island <comment><USER2> How does one keep a bouy moored in 5km deep water?

<comment> jagged-chisel 5.1km cables.

<comment><USER3> That would allow for quite a bit of drift–a kilometer in each direction.

<comment> jagged-chisel Three of them, set in different directions.

I'm not saying that's definitely how it's done, but it's how I'd think to do it with nothing other than my naïve geometric education.

<comment><USER4> Sounds quite expensive. Not sure if the exact position of the buoy is considered that important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/](https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/)

</comment><comment><USER6> In Smalltalk it is called nil. nil is an instance of the class UndefinedObject. In principle you could subclass UndefinedObject. But what is interesting is that you can add more instance methods to the class UndefinedObject so you could define the method #isNil for instance which could be defined also for all objects, but differently

<comment><USER6> In JavaScript there's a distinction between 'null' and 'undefined'.

You can pick your own semantics for them but I think 'undefined' more or less means "not known" while null means "known not to exist".

<comment><USER7> Agreed, but just wanted to add the context that you get undefined values by trying to access uninitialised things such as out of bounds array elements, get on a map-like object with a key that's yet to be set, unset properties on a object, return value of a function that returns void, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59437282/can-i-use- null-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59437282/can-i-use-null-as- substitution-for-the-value-of-0)

<comment><USER3> TL;DR: 0 is always NULL, but NULL is not always 0. Checking or assigning a pointer to 0 will work but converting NULL to an integer is implementation- defined.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonowon,_British_Columbia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonowon,_British_Columbia)

</comment><comment><USER9> I tried to figure out the what3words value for the location but can't find a search term it likes.

</comment><comment><USER10> Back when I was a network engineer I liked to imagine that I sent a lot of bad traffic there.

</comment><comment><USER11> I was just in Sierra Leone last week and I was telling my brother about this place.

</comment><comment><USER8> Also, null might be the empty string, but when is it ever zero?

Edit: this is a serious question.

<comment><USER12> You can look at headers:

#define NULL 0 //C++

#define NULL ((void*)0) //C

I think later versions of C++ do something...different, but I'm not up to date enough to know without looking it up.

<comment><USER8> Ok, I wasn't thinking of C, but even so, isn't NULL a pointer value, not an integer? If you're treating a null pointer as an integer zero, something's gone very wrong.

Also I think I vaguely remember from discussions about the standards, that a NULL pointer is not guaranteed to be numerically equal to zero in a standards compliant compiler.

But yeah, I was thinking of database NULLs.

<comment><USER13> C++03 and earlier stipulate that literal 0 is always the null pointer, whether it really is on any given hardware or not. C++11 and later deprecate this and introduce a new keyword `nullptr`.

edit: Also, null is not an empty string. The null character that terminates a string is unrelated to null pointers.

<comment><USER3> Normally I call it the NUL character to distinguish it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It would be cooler to call it Fernando Poo[1].

[1] [https://illuminatus.fandom.com/wiki/Fernando_Poo](https://illuminatus.fandom.com/wiki/Fernando_Poo)

<comment><USER15> Would it though?

<comment><USER14> The Illuminatus! Trilogy is all about #Winning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Each language can define NULL differently. However, because eventually it gets compiled to machine code, it does indeed need to be represented by some value. Most languages represent that value as 0, but not always.

It's better to think about NULL as a value plus a type. The value "False" may be 0 with a boolean type, just as NULL may be 0 with a pointer type.

<comment><USER17> Null is also the absence of a value altogether.

<comment><USER16> > Null is also the absence of a value altogether.

In digital logic, there is no such thing as an "absence of a value". Everything must be represented as bits one way or another. Computers can certainly represent higher level concepts like an "absence of value", but at the lowest levels, they must be represented by some bit-stream. Types are generally the way that higher level concepts can be translated from low-level bitstreams.

<comment><USER17> There certainly can be an absence of value if the value isn't there. Think serialization or sparse arrays. A null may be represented by the absence of representation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Professional network for CTOs? - <AUTHOR>

Lead architect turned CTO here-- my partner- a more experienced CEO has a great mailing list for sharing tips, struggles, connections.  Anyone know of any community like this for CTOs / engineering leaders? <comment><USER2> In the NYC area we have <http://www.ctoschool.org/> Am not sure it's useful outside the region, is mostly f2f meetups.

</comment><comment><USER3> I run one, feel free to contact me to find out about it: <http://pixelmonkey.org/contact></comment>


Sweden's School Choice Disaster - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_dismal_science/2014/07/sweden_school_choice_the_country_s_disastrous_experiment_with_milton_friedman.single.html

<comment><USER2> I'm fine with having public schools, as long as we can get rid of bad teachers. I'm also tired of hearing the excuse that there is no fair way to grade a teacher's performance.</comment>


Captcha.nsa.gov - <AUTHOR> https://captcha.nsa.gov <comment><USER2> Oh wow, they just disabled it while I was reading some comments. It's no longer working, I'm now getting redirected to nsa.gov

Edit: This seems to have been online since 2018, see [https://web.archive.org/web/20181206224407/http://captcha.ns...](https://web.archive.org/web/20181206224407/http://captcha.nsa.gov/).

<comment><USER3> As someone very confused as to what people are commenting about, thank you. I'm clearly just seeing the post-patch version

<comment><USER4> Before they fixed it, it redirected to Googles homepage in Portuguese.

<comment><USER5> Here: [https://web.archive.org/web/20200203154312/https://captcha.n...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200203154312/https://captcha.nsa.gov/)

<comment><USER6> I still see a Google homepage

<comment><USER7> That's what it was. The NSA was reverse proxying Google.

The legit explanation (given the domain name) is probably they wanted to use reCAPTCHA, but block all non-NSA hosts with a firewall or something.

This is not great, because the NSA expanded its attack surface to all of google.com.

The more conspiracy explanation is that this is actually a phishing page set up, and due to a misconfiguration it's exposed under captcha.nsa.gov, but Occam's Razor should apply here.

<comment><USER8> I think you meant "Hanlon's razor"[1].

[1]: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm guessing that the NSA website uses recaptcha, which is served by Google. Perhaps in order to comply with strict origin policy, they want everything on nsa.gov to be served from their domain. They seem to have a reverse proxy that proxies requests to google.com.

That's one plausible explanation, but in any case, even if my explanation is wrong, I doubt the explanation is interesting.

<comment><USER10> If that's the case, they are being sloppy, considering that everything under www.google.com is proxied through their servers, not just specific reCAPTCHA assets.

Gmail by NSA: [https://captcha.nsa.gov/intl/us/gmail/about/](https://captcha.nsa.gov/intl/us/gmail/about/)

They're inheriting a considerable part of Google's attack surface. For example, Google's open redirects could be used to bypass origin checks as part of an attack on nsa.gov, or to phish NSA employees.

<comment><USER11> My favorite so far: [https://captcha.nsa.gov/logos/2019/loteria/rc2/loteria19.htm...](https://captcha.nsa.gov/logos/2019/loteria/rc2/loteria19.html?hl=en)

<comment><USER12> For me (in Sweden) that URL seems to just redirect to [https://www.nsa.gov/?hl=en](https://www.nsa.gov/?hl=en) ...

<comment><USER13> They appear to have change something in the past few minutes. When I first opened this HN thread it showed me Google's homepage. Now I'm also seeing that redirect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can someone explain what's going on? Is this a domain hack to get Google's captcha working under an nsa.gov hostname, presumably so that it's usable on whitelist firewalls? I'm surprised Google serves a homepage to the domain, and that it doesn't only respond to requests to google.com (etc.)

<comment><USER15> If the NSA rids the web of google captchas, it will have fully deserved its budget and all past mistakes will be forgiven!

<comment><USER10> Until then, you can use my browser extension to solve them: [https://github.com/dessant/buster](https://github.com/dessant/buster)

<comment><USER16> Huge fan of your work. Use it daily with no problems. Just wanted to say, from the bottom of my heart, thanks.

<comment><USER10> You're sweet, thanks a lot!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've seen this on Twitter all day. My guess is that they wanted recaptcha, but serving the resources themselves. The easiest route was probably to reverse proxy google.com, which is what recaptcha is hosted on:

[https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/docs/v3#frontend_int...](https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/docs/v3#frontend_integration)

<comment><USER18> How has no one used this for ads yet? You could make any third party site appear as a first party site. As blockers usually aren't set up to block first party ads.

<comment><USER19> First-party ads are a thing.

Kind of related post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21582698](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21582698)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Looks to be cname forwarding.

> $ dig captcha.nsa.gov

> ;; ANSWER SECTION:

> captcha.nsa.gov. 13246 IN CNAME www.nsa.gov.edgekey.net.

> www.nsa.gov.edgekey.net. 21528 IN CNAME e6655.dscna.akamaiedge.net.

> e6655.dscna.akamaiedge.net. 19 IN A 23.213.xxx.xxx

The IP addreses at the last one all seem to be Akamai IPs. So So that is fronting Google here it seems?

<comment><USER21> Can anyone just do that to any domain? My website is hosted at GitHub Pages and requires a CNAME file in the repo root as well as the DNS entry at Cloudflare.

<comment><USER22> Yes, they are not using a CNAME (whereby the original server serves the page, just on a different domain), they appear to be using a reverse proxy.

You can find more info about how that works here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_proxy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_proxy)

<comment><USER23> That's copyright and trademark infringement.

<comment><USER22> That is not a technical limitation but a legal one.

<comment><USER23> Yes. The NSA is is breaking the law here.

<comment><USER24> You have no way of knowing that. They could have an agreement with Google to allow this.

<comment><USER22> Agreed. The copyright holder / trademark owner must be the party that wants to limit distribution, not the government or some unrelated third party.

i.e. if I see you producing fake Coca Cola drinks, I can't sue you for infringing on The Coca Cola Company's trademark. They would have to sue you. Same applies for the government.

And of course, if NSA does have an agreement with Google to reverse proxy [https://google.com/](https://google.com/), them doing exactly that would be perfectly legal. I presume they have SOME sort of agreement, and aren't just doing this behind Google's back, as the website is on HN's first page in the first 5 places for an hour already, and Google hasn't banned access.

Try getting even 50 Google queries with a reverse proxy, and you will see what I mean -- they will show you a progressively more difficult ReCAPTCHA until a certain treshold, after which the CAPTCHA is unsolvable and is there only to waste your time. This hasn't happened to HN readers [yet].

<comment><USER23> Meanwhile I presume they misconfigured a service meant for doing captcha checks using Google. What's more likely? Why are you so aggressively.. eh.. okay, not going to write that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> From this twitter thread: [https://twitter.com/mikko/status/1224349151384821762](https://twitter.com/mikko/status/1224349151384821762)

You can't search traceroute. Weird.

<comment><USER26> People on that thread also noticed more keywords and think it might be Akamai WAF. I don't know enough about it be sure.

You can't have some strings in the URL for the main NSA.gov domain as well. So [https://nsa.gov/fakething?hey=traceroute](https://nsa.gov/fakething?hey=traceroute) will give you the same error.

<comment><USER27> Yeah it's clear that a system is just blindly grepping the request url for certain keywords and killing the query.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interesting alt names on the SSL certificate:

DNS Name=www.nsa.gov

DNS Name=nsa.gov

DNS Name=apps-test.nsa.gov

DNS Name=stage.nsa.gov

DNS Name=apps.nsa.gov

DNS Name=www2.nsa.gov

DNS Name=captcha.nsa.gov

DNS Name=m.nsa.gov

<comment><USER29> Even NSA has mobile pages these days!?

<comment> kube-system It looks like it's actually required by law.

[https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house- bill/2331](https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/2331)

>If, on or after the date that is 180 days after the date of the enactment of this section, an agency creates a website that is intended for use by the public or conducts a redesign of an existing legacy website that is intended for use by the public, the agency shall ensure to the greatest extent practicable that the website is mobile friendly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> My first instinct is that this is some kind of puzzle. It'd be pretty disappointing if this was just a misconfiguration or oversight.

<comment><USER14> That's actually a really viable theory, especially given the "can't search for traceroute" thing - that spits out what seems to be a time-based error string.

<comment><USER31> It's not, that's just standard akamai WAF behaviour.

E: sorry, HN is throttling me and I can't reply below. This is just a silly web application firewall that blocks a list of "suspicious strings". There's not much else to be said about it.

<comment><USER14> Can you explain in more detail? captcha.nsa.goving for more information didn't return anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm curious if this is a (temporary, unsecure) way to use google if you're in a place that google is currently blocked.

Small chance, but in case anyone on HN is in a place google is blocked, would be an interesting test to run.

<comment><USER33> If you're in a country which bans Google, I'd suspect a high chance having nsa.gov wouldn't be too favourable on your DNS lookup records!

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> NSA's official statement on twitter:

[https://twitter.com/NSAGov/status/1224456957622472706](https://twitter.com/NSAGov/status/1224456957622472706) (1/2)

[https://twitter.com/NSAGov/status/1224456959618945024](https://twitter.com/NSAGov/status/1224456959618945024) (2/2)

</comment><comment><USER35> Looks like the good folks over at the NSA are reading Hacker News. And fix issues quickly. I'm proud of them.

<comment><USER36> They probably have alerts set up for anyone on the internet talking about NSA lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> So someone with control of a .google.com address can get a certificate for the equivalent .nsa.gov subdomain ?

</comment><comment><USER38> You can see what IP it uses to send requests to google using [https://captcha.nsa.gov/search?q=what+is+my+ip](https://captcha.nsa.gov/search?q=what+is+my+ip)

<comment><USER39> The link didn't work for me (i.e. just got regular results) until I added &hl=en to get the English version: [https://captcha.nsa.gov/search?q=what+is+my+ip&hl=en](https://captcha.nsa.gov/search?q=what+is+my+ip&hl=en)

<comment><USER40> Another write up at the NSA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> 1970-01-01 NSA thanks you for you participation in this experiment. Please terminate all knowledge with the purple pill at this time.

<comment><USER41> Assume the party escort submission position or you will miss the party.

</comment></comment><comment> 867-5309 it's all a ploy to finger HN users. imagine how many uniques they'll harvest!

<comment><USER42> Yeah, no way I'm clicking that link. I'll let others do that and read the reports here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Can anyone from mainland china try this?

I am curious to see if it is blocked.

<comment><USER44> According to this website [0] it appears to do so which is interesting.

[https://www.comparitech.com/privacy-security- tools/blockedin...](https://www.comparitech.com/privacy-security- tools/blockedinchina/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> [https://captcha.nsa.gov/intl/en/about.html](https://captcha.nsa.gov/intl/en/about.html)

There is some truth to this.

<comment><USER46> What did this say?

<comment><USER45> [https://google.com/intl/en/about.html](https://google.com/intl/en/about.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I feel like the valid SSL cert is my biggest issue here.

<comment><USER48> Why wouldn't it be valid? Its for O=National Security Agency and it has alternate names matching this URL authority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Why is everyone talking about a captcha? All I get is a google search page (no recaptchas).

<comment><USER50> Because google recaptcha is served from that domain (www.google.com).

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> It's just a CNAME to an akamai IP:

        $ host captcha.nsa.gov
        captcha.nsa.gov is an alias for www.nsa.gov.edgekey.net.
        www.nsa.gov.edgekey.net is an alias for e6655.dscna.akamaiedge.net.
        e6655.dscna.akamaiedge.net has address 126.96.36.199
        e6655.dscna.akamaiedge.net has IPv6 address 2600:1406:5800:7b5::19ff
        e6655.dscna.akamaiedge.net has IPv6 address 2600:1406:5800:792::19ff

edgekey.net is an akamai thingy, all of nsa.gov seems to go through it

        $ host www.nsa.gov
        www.nsa.gov is an alias for nsa.gov.edgekey.net.
        nsa.gov.edgekey.net is an alias for e16248.dscb.akamaiedge.net.

</comment><comment><USER52> I don't get it - I'm seeing a Brazilian version of Google?

</comment><comment><USER53> I assume that the archive.org mirror is showing what was visible? [https://web.archive.org/web/20200203154312/http://captcha.ns...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200203154312/http://captcha.nsa.gov/)

I see a google search page (google.com equivalent). Which fits with the reverse proxy that does ~any google url.

</comment><comment><USER54> NSA's cert, too. All your are TLS belong to us.

</comment><comment><USER55> A potential vector would be to potentially load images/content through google image/AMP and make it appear as legitimate NSA content

</comment><comment><USER56> The creapiest thing to me is that this post is 7 hours old, and the comment states it's disabled. It was fixed within 2 hours. Ergo, the NSA is actively monitoring HackerNews and taking quick actions when needed.

I wonder what other sites the nsa has active alerting on?

<comment><USER57> Or maybe the domain admins have active alerts on their own domains. Which would be good practice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Doh, I was hoping for a captcha made by the NSA, for catching bots, and terrorists and such.

</comment><comment><USER59> Why Brazil?

<comment><USER50> Because Googles geoip DB thinks Akamai IPs like "18.104.22.168 " are in Brazil.

<comment><USER59> Ah that makes perfect sense, Brazil confused me for a minute there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Nothing especially interesting happening here, someone just pointed captcha.nsa.gov at google.com in their akamai config.

Perhaps they're just using google.com like example.com, or they're trying to serve recaptcha under nsa.gov.

<comment><USER21> That doesn't explain the fact that you can't search for traceroute.

<comment><USER31> It does though, Akamai WAF.

<comment><USER21> Okay. That seems pretty logical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> No ads. Nice! :D

</comment><comment><USER61> It seems like we broke it -- it now refuses to do any searches for me (due to suspicious activity from 'my' ip)

</comment><comment><USER22> And it's gone (redirects to nsa.gov)...

</comment><comment><USER62> It's likely this is set up to collect data by impersonating Google Search in an iframe etc.

Consider reporting this to Safe Browsing complaint form as phishing attempt: [https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_phish/](https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_phish/)

<comment><USER63> You think the NSA is phishing from a nsa domain?

<comment><USER64> Why assume that _was_ served on the link, and how it was served, is working as intended?

It could have been part of a phishing setup that got accidentally pushed out with obfuscation components still missing.

It's not like everybody working at NSA is a flawless human being, mistakes happen everywhere, sometimes even rather big ones.

Also kinda weird how everybody seems to be giving the NSA the benefit of the doubt of this having some kind of supposedly totally benign purpose, completely ignoring the NSA's history and purpose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Why is it in Portuguese?

<comment><USER66> What's odd is that it came up in English at first, but now it's Portuguese for me. Another comment here mentioned it's the Brazilian version of Google's search page.

<comment><USER24> It depends on the IP of the Akamai server that's hitting it. If you search "what is my ip" you'll see it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> A test version of a MITM proxy that captures data?

</comment><comment><USER68> Just went down, now redirects to www.nsa.gov.

</comment><comment><USER69> I am somewhat baffled. What was that?

</comment><comment><USER70> ??????

</comment><comment><USER71> This looks really really dumb. I wonder if you can get personal sites to display through nsa.gov somehow through this.

</comment><comment><USER72> Among other things, it's weird that it shows up with a different GeoIP triangulation for different users. Someone commented here about seeing this in Portuguese. I'm seeing this in Japanese. Does anyone what's going on?

EDIT: And now it's showing up in English.

<comment><USER73> It gives me Brasil's Google

<comment><USER74> yeah I am on brazil also.</comment></comment></comment>


Amazon S3 Announces Increased Request Rate Performance - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/07/amazon-s3-announces-increased-request-rate-performance/ <comment><AUTHOR> Looks like such a small change that people even haven't noticed it, but it matters a lot to the development.</comment>


Jenna Abrams, Russia's Clown Troll Princess, Duped the Mainstream Media and World - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedailybeast.com/jenna-abrams-russias-clown-troll-princess-duped-the-mainstream-media-and-the-world <comment><USER2> It's stories like these that make me so glad I never used Twitter.</comment>


Gumby Framework: Responsive 960 Grid CSS Framework - <AUTHOR> http://www.gumbyframework.com/

<comment><USER2> Awesome framework! love that it is flexible, light-weight and easily comes with or without a UI kit. Other frameworks create a disconnect between developers and designers where this comes with the PSD's with the guide layers setup so quickly prototyping from the design to working markup/css is fast. Sounds like a bunch of designers who have a ton of 960 experience will love this since its "familiar" yet flexible.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting. I constantly advocate Skeleton[1], and one of the better reasons I tout is that it's _not_ 960.gs.

This seems nice, but I prefer 'cutoff' value changes. I don't know why it bugs me that text might be constantly shifting as I adjust the screen, but it does, and I much prefer the layout to only respond when it has to, to prevent overflow beyond the visible viewport.

If the submitter is responsible for the project in any way, the teaser text ("The NEW Responsive 960 yadda yadda") overlays onto the 'Gumby' logo as you resize into the smaller resolutions.

Edit: This post seems negative, and for that I apologize. I've been up for about 20 hours now and perhaps it's made me cranky. Regardless, this _is_ a nice project and I'm glad somebody did it.</comment>


Japan has a worrying number of virgins, government finds - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/japan-has-a-worrying-number-of-virgins-government-finds-a7312961.html <comment><USER3> Before we get into a huge discussion about virginity, it's worth noting that the government isn't actually worried about it. They're worried about fertility rates.

Virgins sell more papers though, so lets get that clickbait going.

<comment><USER4> Yes, but virginity is an interesting part of the issue:

> Around 42 percent of men and 44.2 percent of women admitted that they were > virgins

this seems quite high, although I haven't compared it to data from other countries. Are Japanese people having less sex? And if so, why?

<comment><USER5> I am not a Japan-expert but I remember seeing a documentary about young Japan couples renting sex-hotel rooms on hourly basis, because they have no other place to get intimate. It's quite hard to loose your virginity and get pregnant when your family is watching...

<comment><USER6> You are talking about love hotels. They are extremely common in Japan and they are really not a big deal. Almost all of them are perfectly clean and they are cheap as well (for Japanese standards); for less than the equivalent of $40 you can get a room.

People who are dating use them a lot. Because flats are usually quite small, it is sometimes more convenient to spend the night in a love hotel than going home. Married couples use love hotels from time to time in order to be able to make sex without having to worry about the noise, or about a kid interrupting.

The most important for Japanese society is convenience! ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Having relationship in Japan can be tough when a lot of people are under non- permanent employment which they would get paid less and is unstable. Even if one's lucky enough to have a stable job, there is a problem of practically mandatory overtime (which, incidentally, can be unpaid.)

Though, gap between ideal and reality is certainly a one of issues out there, but financial and time issues have a lot of impact to this problem.

<comment><USER8> This is the real issue, and it's where we're headed as well in the west. Unfortunately, we'll probably suffer through this completely avoidable problem because politicians are too beholden to business interests.

<comment><USER9> With the two recent recession dips and the long slog of recovery that doesn't seem to have any real vigor, I think the west might already be on this trajectory instead of merely headed there.

<comment><USER10> Yes, see The strange case of the missing baby [2016]

[http://www.economist.com/news/international/21697817-financi...](http://www.economist.com/news/international/21697817-financial- crisis-hit-birth-rates-fell-rich-countries-expected)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Japan has a fertility rate of 1.41. Replacement rate is around 2.1 to maintain the population. Here's the world table.[1] Most of the developed world is below replacement rate. Most of Africa is above 4. India is at 2.51; China is at 1.55. Singapore is at the bottom at 0.8.

It's amazing to see that much variation between countries.

Maybe Japan shouldn't have cracked down on love hotels.

[1] [http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?v=31](http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?v=31)

<comment><USER12> If I understand correctly, love hotels are mostly used for, let's just say "recreational" activities by singles.

The adult industry doesn't help increase the birth rate; it helps plummet it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > There was one clearly positive indicator in the survey: For the first time, > the proportion of women returning to work after having their first child in > Japan's once notoriously patriarchal society exceeded 50 percent.

In all seriousness, if the concern is low birthrates, how is the above a "clearly positive indicator"?

<comment><USER7> Because women can be discouraged of having a children in fear of not being return to work afterward.

Implementations of maternity leaves are not very high in Japan -- this is coming from the work that histrically, they were expected to leave the work force when women are married.

<comment><USER12> Who is going to take care of the baby?

Also, returning to work probably means no intention of having another baby any time soon.

<comment><USER14> If only there was an industry of trained professionals whose only job was taking care of children...

<comment><USER7> There is a serious shortage there, too. And even if working parents do have access to it, it won't go beyond usual hours (e.g. like 6PM) and it won't help them much if they are expected a lot longer than that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What is concerning is this:

>Most people surveyed said they want to get married at some point.

This isn't delineated by gender, so I interpret it as meaning that Japanese men and women both want to get married -- but they aren't enough for each other.

>A booming industry surrounds Japan's growing condition of loneliness, a phenomenon at once quite particular to the Japanese, yet also a glimpse into a future where many people live atomized lives mediated exclusively through personal technology.

That modern philosophy tends to devalue (or rather not value) human relationships is the one thing I'm tempted to blame this on:

[https://philosophyinseconds.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/the-...](https://philosophyinseconds.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/the- schizophrenia-of-modern-ethical-theories.pdf)

But that is probably personal bias creeping up. Working hours are the popular explanation, but there is an incongruity: _most_ Japanese claim to want to have relationships, so if they thought working hours were the problem then why haven't they complained? And how could they fail to notice something so obvious? If housing prices are the problem, how does this occur when Japan's population has been in decline for forty years?

I've heard of this phenomenon (and similar ones in Western Europe) and I pick up and discard economic explanations like bottles of some alcoholic beverage. But the alarm in the back of my head says that _our_ culture is the problem, and it just happens to be popular in Japan. If that's the case, things will get worse, not better.

<comment><USER10> Is it wrong for me to see that devaluation of human relationship in your linked thesis as Marx's theory of alienation without the capitalist critique?

>The theoretic basis of alienation, within the capitalist mode of production, is that the worker invariably loses the ability to determine life and destiny, when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of themselves as the director of their own actions; to determine the character of said actions; to define relationships with other people.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Disclosure: I've been living in Japan for half a decade now.

There are a number of interplaying and compounding factors that are responsible for creating this situation. I will list a few in no particular order.

\- The hours are absolutely insane. My partner rarely leaves her office before 10pm, and by the time she does, she is completely exhausted and unable to do anything other than hit the sack. This type of situation is _extremely_ prevalent and generally affects both men and women. It is no wonder that young people have no time to socialize, go out and meet potential partners when they spend 90% of their waking hours working or otherwise subordinating to this insane work cult.

\- Japan is a country of predefined roles and expectations, and at different ages people are fully expected to meet certain benchmarks and seamlessly transition into new roles. One such role is that of a provider, and men are expected to be able to become full-time breadwinners by the time they hit 30. With the economy being what it is and the traditional Japanese notion of lifetime employment being a thing of the past, a lot of men aren't able to live up to these expectations and simply drop out of the dating pool. Some of it is involuntary, since Japanese women tend to maintain very high expectations as to what a man needs to be able to provide.

\- Sex is generally highly available and there are all kinds of parlors, services, salons, middlemen and clubs catering to both men and women. It's cheap, legal and safe, thereby creating a disincentive for people to attempt and engage in the old fashioned mating process. On top of that - and this is going to sound completely nuts to those who aren't familiar with the country - there are full-time gigolos, both foreign and domestic, whose only life goal seems to be getting as many notches as possible. They approach women on the street, in bookstores, train stations, malls, you name it. I know a few of these characters and many of them have notches in the 3 figure range and juggle up to 7 women at a time. It's all they ever do, and I suspect that they tie up a huge number of women at any given point in time. I can't say I've noticed the same phenomenon in any other country.

\- The local culture isn't exactly touchy-feely and even when people date, it's something they do because it's what young people are supposed and expected to do, not because they like their partner or dating in particular. Just a curiosity I've noticed with many couples.

Obviously, the situation is very complex and cannot be explained with a simple narrative, but I hope this helps clarify things a little.

</comment><comment><USER12> IMO a decent solution to the low-birth-rate problem is not to try to hook up all the singles together, but rather encourage existing couples to have more children.

Make it socially acceptable and even desirable to have more children. Give incentives to working men who have more children.

<comment> james-skemp This seems wrong to me. This seems to go against the promotion of diversity, for the species and in thought.

If society is moving toward the idea that children aren't a 'benefit,' then having people who are 'willing' to have children have more just postpones the issue, instead of fixing the root cause.

<comment><USER17> Presumably, those who have children would pass their genes onto those children, and raise their children similar to how they were raised. Therefore, those children would be more likely to have children than the general population.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Perhaps the darker side that could be missed is that despite their demographic problem, Japan continues to refuse to let in more young foreigners in to help balance the demographics.

<comment><USER19> Japan isn't going to change in that regard anytime soon. They'd definitely rather have less Japanese people, and have them still be what they consider "Japanese" enough. Japan has many wonderful aspects to it, but the racism and nationalism are not part of them.

<comment><USER20> I remember reading an article about AirBnB breaking into Japan, where the local resistance wasn't the usual complaints of limiting the monthly rental supply therefore jacking up rental rates, but that AirBnB 'encouraged more foreigners to come here'. To get rid of foreigners, Japan puts up so many blocks and delays to permanent residency they hope you get the message and choose to leave.

<comment><USER19> They're not a culture that relishes saying "no" outright either, so what you're talking about can get intensely aggressive by way of a substitute for "no". For example, if someone in Japan tells you that something is, "Very difficult", they means it's about as likely as spontaneous, unpowered, human flight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Low birthrates, low marriage rates, sure that's a problem for a nation.

But I don't think virginity need be a problem. If one wants to wait until they meet their right partner why not? Data shows this leads to stronger bonds (though the causation is unknown and may be something like religion).

It's not like more premarital sex even correlates to higher birth rates. If fact for first world countries the correlation has been the inverse since the introduction of the pill in the 1960s.

I suspect child rearing is one of those things that mentally many consider to be a nuisance, but once it happens and there's a kid our emotions take significant hold and it becomes all important.

<comment><USER22> I suspect it isn't about the kids. Or even sex. I suspect it is about old people. The period of one's life during which one must take care of elderly parents and grandparents is growing. Many people of marrying age are in families with several elderly people to care for. They aren't free to move out and start their own households. If I am correct, the answer isn't more child care but more government-backed elder care.

<comment><USER23> > They aren't free to move out and start their own households

Why is that a problem? You don't need to live separately from your parents or grandparents in order to get married. Multi-generational households were the norm until very recently. Also, given that the elderly are much healthier now than in the past, they may not need as much care.

<comment><USER24> If you are already a virgin, don't you think it might be a difficult road to get to being a parent when your elderly parents are living with you in a tiny cramped house?

<comment><USER25> On the other hand, when the Japanese had more children, they also took care of elderly parents and maybe had even less space and privacy in their dwellings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It would be interesting to hear the point of view from a Japanese on those numbers. How is the dating scene? Are those numbers surprising or matching with your own experiences?

<comment><USER20> According to 4/2chan posters from Japan it's all about money. Men are expected to have a career by age 30something and be set for a family, if they don't it's seen as shameful so they don't try to date. Too many low paying jobs, with fleeting job security, and no support for single women to raise a family.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why is population decline from the current levels inherently bad again?

<comment><USER28> Because it kills the economy and forward momentum of a society, puts a huge burden on public health and other services, creates a elderly society with less "new blood" innovation in ideas and politics that stifles the (fewer) young people, and beyond some point it's not even reversible without the country falling many places in GDP and standards of living.

</comment></comment><comment> d--b Is that a coincidence that this got upvoted just days after this came up? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12504271](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12504271)

</comment><comment><USER29> Those pixelated genitals are an unfortunate physical trait, and would certainly be a turn-off for me in any potential relationship

<comment><USER30> You obviously didn't grow up with a 1200 bit/s modem.

<comment><USER31> obligatory xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/598/](https://xkcd.com/598/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> As opposed to Europe's solution, where they allow unrestricted immigration from volatile areas?

<comment><USER19> "Allow"

Your alternative is to shoot them at the border, or film them while they drown at sea... and even that wouldn't work as well as you might hope. Just wait and see what the next few decades hold, it's going to make this recent wave of migration seem absolutely delightful by comparison.

We've made the implicit choice to live our lives in such a way that the AGW is going to make the places like Northern Africa utterly unlivable, and then we'll blame people for fleeing from it.

It's the typical tragicomedy of a species that has a collective memory of about 20 seconds.

<comment><USER33> The reason they are even at the border is that they are enticed by welfare in countries like Germany and Sweden. There are relatively rich nations with nobody at the border, like Saudi Arabia.

To the degree Africa is unlivable it's because of Africans and their high birthrate (but most of it is not unlivable at all, it's just that Europe is richer and you get free everything).

Either the EU closes its borders or immigration will be the end of Europe. Don't pretend you don't understand this.

<comment><USER19> It's the end of Europe, brace yourselves. It's not going to help that many there share similar (wrong) beliefs about why Northern Africa is going to hell, so you'll waste time on draconian measures that won't help in the slightest.

I can understand the desire to feel like you have something in your control though, when the reality is so very different.

<comment><USER33> Controlling the border is no problem at all. It's only a matter of will - <USER2> look at Israel.

<comment><USER19> So it only takes massive support from a superpower, being a tiny nation, building an actual wall and manning it, and spending an absolute fortune on defending it? [http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/israel-shells- ou...](http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/business/israel-shells-out-almost-a- fifth-of-national-budget-on-defense-figures-show.premium-1.503527)

This just in... Europe is quite a bit larger than Israel, and composed of different sovereign nations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> immigration will solve all these issues for now? Japan is not alone. In the future I think the babies can be born outside of the womb at some centers in volume per nation/race's needs.

<comment><USER35> Japan is remarkably uninterested in becoming an immigrant country. Guests are treated with warm, well-mannered hospitality but long-term immigrants are neither desired nor able to assimilate. How many other countries are there with a sizable population of _3rd generation foreigners_?

Immigration might be a harder sell than dwindling down and disappearing altogether as a nation/culture/race/whatever else is bundled in with being "Japanese".

<comment><USER36> It is definitely their choice to remain homogeneous. One way or another that choice will have strong consequences be they good or bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I had a conversation with a Japanese American artist a couple of years ago on the general topic of the post-WWII infantilization of Japanese culture.

I believe we reached a sort of mild agreement that Japan's collective unconscious is still trying to process the shock of being on the receiving end of a nuclear attack.

<comment><USER13> Please, can you give some details about this "infantilization"? I can't be the only one who can't think of anything other than Hello Kitty.

<comment><USER38> The original "Gojira" (Godzilla) in 1954 has been regarded as an expression of the impotence and powerlessness felt by many Japanese after being forced to surrender to the Allies in WW2, and the subsequent American occupation.

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/10788996/Godzilla- wh...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/10788996/Godzilla-why-the- Japanese-original-is-no-joke.html)

<comment><USER39> Interesting perspective. Defeat was the consequence of having started the war in the first place. Nobody in America was sitting around in 1941 thinking up ways to vaporize Japanese people. As they say on the Internet: play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

<comment><USER40> It wouldn't surprise me if some Japanese viewed the atomic bombings as an unwarranted act of unprovoked aggression - and they may not be entirely unjustified if they do.

From their point of view, it probably seemed as if the US had already won and just decided to spike the football.

<comment><USER39> Yeah, unprovoked? That belies a lack of historical perspective.

Japan killed tens of millions of Chinese and intended to occupy the entire western Pacific, killing or enslaving all the people who lived there. The entire nation, all of its labor and industry, was bent toward this goal. It was a nation of profound evil.

<comment><USER40> >It was a nation of profound evil.

That's one perspective. Another is that Japan was merely doing what it felt was necessary to protect itself from interference by aggressive Western Imperial powers, and weren't necessarily more "evil" than any other empire at the time. A third is that the country that dropped two atomic bombs on civilian cities and firebombed Tokyo to the ground was no less evil than the empire they were fighting.

I don't necessarily agree or disagree with this, but "evil" seems more often than not to be matter of cultural relativism and propaganda. It wasn't long after World War 2 that the US was begging Japan for help in their other Asian conflicts and burning whole villages to the ground in the name of fighting the "profound evil" of communism.

<comment><USER41> It boggles the mind to hear 10+ million civilian deaths and wartime atrocities in Asia described as being "merely one perspective".

One can only assume that this individual believes Germany's concentration camps and what occurred therein were just "cultural relativism" and "propaganda" too and that Germany was "doing what it felt was necessary to protect itself".

<comment><USER40> >One can only assume that this individual believes Germany's concentration camps and what occurred therein were just "cultural relativism" and "propaganda" too and that Germany was "doing what it felt was necessary to protect itself".

One can only assume this individual didn't bother to read all the words I wrote before deciding they knew what I believe.

I specifically said I didn't subscribe to the views I enumerated, but those views certainly do exist. Personally, I think Imperial Japan was incredibly evil. I also think the atomic bombings were evil. Hell, many Japanese feel the atomic bombings were justified - and Japanese legislators contributed to the very peace constitution that "emasculated" them, because they felt (justifiably) betrayed by the Emperor's ambitions.

But since we're discussing the way Japan may view the atomic bombings and how that event affected Japan's culture, reducing that culture to the thought- terminating cliche of "profound evil" adds nothing to the discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> So that's why every chick in a Japanese porno flick is a virgin.</comment>


Show HN: NStack – Typed, composable microservices for data analytics - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nstack/nstack <comment><USER2> Hey guys, I'm Leo - one of the founders of NStack.

We started work on NStack around a year ago, to help data-scientists productionise their models and compose them together with various data sources.

We built NStack using a mixture of low-level Linux technology, including systemd-containers, btrfs, dbus IPC, along with high-level concepts such as building a DSL, type-checker, and runtime. As a functional programming company, NStack is built using Haskell and are really excited to launch our CLI and server -- along with a sandboxed demo PaaS which you can try out now.

We'd love to hear any feedback.

<comment><USER3> What are some good resources on better understanding composability?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have some info on our docs here: [https://docs.nstack.com/en/latest/features/index.html](https://docs.nstack.com/en/latest/features/index.html) (See the composition section at the top).

Composition is a simple technique to build functions out of multiple simpler functions. It's heavily used in Functional programming but we think it's really useful for everyone, particularly data workers who might be gluing together lots of different modules/libraries/systems. We also use types to help check that functions can compose - this can catch schema mismatch errors early rather than waiting until you run your data pipeline to realise that the output of one function isn't _quite_ what your second function expects.

Wikipedia as some more detailed info on function composition: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_composition_(computer...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_composition_\(computer_science\))

</comment></comment></comment><comment> d--b This looks great. It seems like it's a great open source alternative to all these big software vendors like dataiku.

kudos.</comment>


NSA slides explain the PRISM data-collection program - o0-0o http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-collection-documents/ <comment><USER2> (note/edit: I've made an error of conflation between the recently reported massive phone record sweep-up and PRISM, which according to the WP, simply allows analysts to trace (essentially) the totality of someone's online interactions, though not everyone at once. So really, things don't seem that much different than last week when it was well known that the government has discretion to warrantlessly tap us. Still, $20M a year is a pretty good price for a government contract)

Isn't it kind of surprising that the leak for this came from a career intelligence officer and not one of the many tech-utopia idealists who work at these kinds of startups? Not necessarily someone at the executive level, but one of the scores of employees required to assess, review, and implement the alleged backdoor? It's not just a matter of ethics, but just that you'd think _someone_ must be idealistic/reckless enough to leak it from the companies' side

Edit: Also, as has been pointed out elsewhere...this program only cost $20M a year? If that's the price of eternal security, I'd say we got a pretty goddamn good deal. The shitstack that is the government's stimulus contracts database alone cost $18M to build ([http://www.propublica.org/article/stimulus- transparency-watc...](http://www.propublica.org/article/stimulus-transparency- watchdogs-keep-contract-details-a-secret-813)). And what percentage of a fighter jet's paint job does $20M cover?

I'd say it's possible that the government is unconstitutionally intruding on our privacy but also doing it in a bumbling way (which also has its downsides).

<comment><USER3> To be honest I'm still catching up on a lot of the details with these stories, but it's this comment that made me wonder if there is a bit of hyperbole going around. Companies make leaks all the time on the most mundane things (hell Apple can barely contain the new iPhone that is usually coming out.) I'm hesitant to believe all the conspiracy theories going around that the companies willingly did this, or that it's as easy as it sounds.

<comment><USER2> What really makes me suspicious is this passage:

> _"They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type," said the > "career intelligence officer" who gave documents describing PRISM to the > Washington Post._

Think of the engineering needed at multiple endpoints to allow something like this...I can believe the NSA has some of the best cryptoanalysts, but our best front-end hackers as well (do they have their own Meteor.js)? I'm only being slightly pedantic here. If this is "literally" possible, then the amount of work needed for the collaborating companies is non-trivial. It's one thing to pass along uber-authentication credentials allowing an NSA-agent Zuckerberg- like privileges...that could be something implemented with as few as a couple people. But to bake in something right out of a hacker movie?

It just makes a few of the claims sound a bit suspect...because what is terribly frightening is the government's ability to aggregate and analyze this information in bulk, not to peep in on you as you're typing in real-time, which would be one of the least efficient ways ever to spy on the general American public's online activity.

And no, I'm not being an apologist for federal expansion of powers. I'm pointing out that some of what this source is leaking seems to be beyond reality, not because of technological sophistication, but because of the number of mundane moving parts and actors that would seemingly have to be involved (theoretically, wouldn't they have to have as many datacenters as all the companies they're vacuuming from?). The entire PowerPoint slide set looks like something a get-rich-quick contractor would whip up to win a fat contract that would never actually be scrutinized for viability.

But still, even if the government doesn't actually have the capability as described, it is wrong for them to not disavow it...it's not any good if their mindset is: "Oh we're not doing _that_... _yet_...but we would love to, some day)

<comment><USER4> I think "as you type" means different things to an intelligence officer and a programmer. The intelligence officer probably means "real time" (no need for a judge/approval/etc). A Google Wave like interface is probably not in the backend, but if the FISA route took weeks and the new kit takes seconds I could see "literally as you type" being a description that fits.

<comment><USER2> Yes...maybe I reacted too strongly to the often misused "literally."

But even real-time interception would not (seemingly) be that valuable to analysts. Assuming that suspects aren't dumb enough to use their own personal accounts and to talk of their plans explicitly, it seems analysts would want the historical aggregate of which alias accounts talked to which other alias accounts.

Hell, Facebook can already figure out if you're connected to someone even if you've never directly interacted on the service...if the allegations are true, I wonder how much of the requested data comes with pre-baked network- calculated goodness?

<comment><USER4> Obviously all conjecture here, but what came to mind for me is things like having a keyword filter on a bunch of accounts (whoever you're watching). The moment they Google for something you want to see you get an alert that it happened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's no coincidence this is called PRISM.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beam_splitter>

Some parts of this technology are actual prisms (several patents pop-up via google) , this might remove all parties legally speaking.

Furthermore these can be installed fairly easily without anyone really knowing, though some physical access is required.

The same technique was used in <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A> and pretty much all over every pipe, including the one this data went throught to show up on Hacker News.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure why this is a big surprise to anyone. I'm a cynic, but if anyone asked me whether I think the NSA, CIA, or FBI are eavesdropping on personal communications, I would say, "of course they are." This is nothing new: ECHELON, Clipper/Skipjack, Carnivore, ...

<comment><USER7> How many times does some one have to say this? I'm sorry, but this sort of comment is getting pretty tiresome.

Yes we all "knew". All of us "knew". Some of us have "known" for something like 15 years. (Which, BTW, is why I'm most sure why Obama is getting so much flack. Its a Clinton - Bush - Obama scandal.)

But none of us, not one, actually did know anything at all. We suspected, or assumed. But we did not know. Not unless one of us is working for the NSA, etc, etc. (Ironic if I have just picked on the one poster who is)

Now we do _know_. It is absolute. No doubt, no shouting down, we know.

There is a huge difference: Before we were written off as conspiracy nuts jobs. Now we have certain knowledge.

Im not picking on you personally. Your post is one of many in the past couple of days. As such I have not down voted you, that would be unfair. But please, can people stop with this sort of comment? We all know we "knew".

<comment><USER8> No. Don't downplay people concerned with privacy who noticed a series of obvious, blatant actions over a period of literally decades as cynics or conspiracy nuts.

You are picking on people; we really did know, not "know." It was obvious, it remains obvious, and the fact is that its going to continue and get worse despite the revelations of this week, unless we do something.

Painting rational people who notice and complain about government overreach as paranoid is precisely what enables the expansion of these policies. You should be asking what you can do now to help rather than setting us up to be further discredited or ignored by implying our years of complaining weren't substantiated until just now.

<comment><USER9> Alan's point is that others _have_ downplayed us, people concerned with privacy, as conspiracy nuts. Having hard evidence helps with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Two days, two major reveals, wouldn't be suprised if tomorrow I wake up to find out that they've been switching on the microphones and cameras on webcams and cellphones.

<comment><USER11> Not to mention all of the revelations over the past few weeks. Either the administration is trying to top Nixon or there is some kind of conspiracy playing out.

<comment><USER10> I wonder how the Obama administration will repond to this other than the usual "Terrorism is bad and you need to trust us that we do all this for your own safety"

<comment><USER12> I hate to be this guy but there _are_ people lighting off bombs out there and as soon as a big one goes off people will demand they do a lot more than this. Would you rather have your Facebook scanned or see a car bomb go off in Times Square during rush hour? That's not hyperbole, that's the decision we have to make.

<comment><USER13> That is hyperbole. The number of terrorist incidents is massively low, and the few that the government claims to have stopped were such laughably unrealistic plots that one wonders the government even bothered. Meanwhile, we have a government surveillance program that literally surpasses the level of the Stasi, here in the United States, and simultaneously an administration that will not even reveal the criteria used for deciding when to engage in an extrajudicial killing.

Sorry, but you cannot scare me with terrorism. I would rather see the rare terrorist attack than live in a country where I have to think twice about what I say on the phone.

<comment><USER12> Bullshit, 'the Stasi"? Go talk to somebody who lived in East Germany. And they catch people all the time trying to get bomb materials, how did you think they were doing it, luck? (In the case of the car bomb in Times Square you're right, it was dumb luck, the timer malfunctioned.) If the average person didn't freak out and start yelling retarded things like 'Stasi!' I'd say fine, maybe my fucking Facebook is worth people's lives but they do freak out and then they pass things like the Patriot Act, or worse. So to prevent mindless fear I say fine, scoop up whatever crap you need, if I want something kept secret I know how to do it.

<comment><USER14> My partner grew up in East Germany and has told me of the Stasi and their activities. I note that the GP wrote 'we have a government _surveillance program_ that literally surpasses the level of the Stasi' - emphasis mine, and I think this is a fair statement.

Also, on a meta-point, every time I see someone start their post off with the word 'Bullshit' on HN - and I see it quite often, like it's some sort of HN meme - I always think: gee, that post would have lost nothing from the exclusion of that first word and probably would have been a little more in service of promoting civil discourse.

<comment><USER12> How old's your partner, I've known two people who escaped from East Germany and one from Romania. I asked them all about what it was like living there & how they escaped because of course I'm an asshole American and all I got was the thousand yard stare. When the Berlin Wall fell there were hundreds of divorces because they found out their spouses were spying on them. Bugging people's homes was routine. If you said anything against the government you were shipped off or executed. In the case of the Romanian guy I've never seen that kind of look on a man's face. In all three cases I feel terrible for even asking, and I won't be doing it again. Datamining your worthless Facebook page does not compare to what they went through.

<comment><USER14> I have a general policy of not divulging exact personal details of friends or family on the Internet without their express consent. But suffice it to say she was old enough to understand what the Stasi did, and lucky enough to have not been directly affected by them as an individual, although some people around her were: interrogations, permanent disappearances, etc.

However, not everything was beatings, disappearances and terror. Believe it or not, East Germany wasn't all downsides. People were employed, general crime was apparently quite low, children felt relatively safe, children were given education (though indoctrination was certainly a heavy component), they were clothed and fed. While the standard of living sounded like it was relatively low across the board, it also seemed that this standard of living was more evenly distributed than might have been the case in some other places at the time. Obviously traditional Communism has borne out to be more or less unsustainable, and I won't be participating in any debate about Communism vs other dogmas, but I feel I would not be accurately conveying all that I've been told were I not to mention these counterpoints to the Stasi's behaviour.

One fascinating thing my partner has told me is that for some reason, the memories she has of East Germany before the wall came down tend to be in black and white, in her mind's eye.

As you retell, the Stasi were quite big on the human intelligence angle, but I doubt they would have had to resort to such measures would they have had access to the kind of communication infrastucture that is common in the developed world today. Such a system as the NSA et al have access to now, would have been a Stasi wet dream, I'd imagine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why leave Apple off the list in the title submission?

(Because they deny it? Then better leave Google off the list, too - they deny it as well).

<comment> o0-0o Actually, in my haste to post I only listed the ones that I thought of right away. I was quite disappointed to hear the Apple too, has succomb.

Now I really have a reason to install Debian Wheezy on MBPr. ;p

This is no way to live. Something must be done.

<comment><USER16> Does Debian (or any Linux distro for that matter) support HDPI displays without looking awful?

<comment><USER17> I use Debian on a chromebook pixel. It looks fantastic.

<comment> o0-0o No fair, you had Linus guiding you. Debian on MBPr might be as challenging. I'm up for it.

<comment><USER17> > _No fair, you had Linus guiding you._

Part of the reason I chose it. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if the NSA and the politicians that enabled this realize the amount of economic damage this could do to the US by promoting the balkanization of the world's telecom networks and spreading mistrust for US tech and telecom companies. This seems very short sighted, if they care about that stuff at all.

<comment> o0-0o I guarantee free markets care about this, but yeah. You knew that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Now. Exactly which data is exposed for each provider?

I'm thinking mostly about Gmail. Because virtually everyone now is using it…

The whole content of any communications? Just origin/dest?

This is becoming scary.

<comment><USER20> _Exactly which data is exposed for each provider?_

According to slide 2, all of it. You might be confusing this with yesterday's Verizon story, which was "only" metadata -- caller, sender, time, and duration. This one is "actual" data -- email content, chat text, audio/video of VoIP calls.

(From the article, there's _also_ a parallel NSA program (BLARNEY) that collects metadata only. I don't know why there's two of them).

<comment><USER19> Rather, I'm trying to hold onto the idea that my mail is not directly piped, entirely, into a government tracking and storage system. No questions asked, no filters: just everything.

Which is what is probably happening right now.

<comment><USER21> Let's just say the pipes are there and they have the desire to use them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> o0-0o Link to delete Google Account:

<https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/32046?hl=en>

<comment><USER3> I don't think this is helpful or productive -- it's not the companies at fault, but rather the government that is making this compulsory.

<comment><USER22> They lend their face and their bullshit smile to the government towards which many people have a much more healthy distrust. I agree that this doesn't make them the main culprit, but they don't get to completely wash their hands of it either. Big (monstrously huge, actually) corporations make the job of tyrannical governments much easier; how about we chop them into more manageable bits _without_ having personally hard feeling towards them, and deal with the government(s) _at the same time_?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What really shocks me is why wouldn't a technologist/coder / etc - <AUTHOR> this sort of information. Why would they sit behind a computer, deploy/design such software, and not have some concern, and go public with this?

This is not about the "NSA, CIA, or FBI" - it's about those other companies enabling those gov agencies to gather such information, why doesn't someone from those companies speak up that deploys this software?

Is it really about $$$? Is it the same reason programmers create SPAM bots?

SOOooooo, which one of you geeks wrote the code to track call data, then wrote a script to export the data to the NSA - THEN you didn't tell the rest of tech community.

DISAPPOINTED IN YOU

<comment><USER17> Most programmers are very much unlike you or I. Think about those _legions_ of DoD/DoD contractor engineers that trust government implicitly and totally, and really don't give a shit about more "hacker"/"technologist" subjects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> So when do we get to read about The Machine in Person of Interest?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series)>

</comment><comment><USER25> Don't worry it looks like they can barely use powerpoint, massive data analysis is a cinch compared to powerpoint (sarcasm)

</comment><comment><USER26> Eagle Eye...my favorite movie!

While I understand that this had been uncovered today, is it really that surprising.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'd like the raw/unredacted slides, please (or at least images of them, to protect the source).

</comment><comment> o0-0o I-M-P-E-A-C-H

<comment><USER28> oh please. like this has a thing to do with POTUS. I worked at an ISP in 1998 when we were contacted by the FBI and required to install carnivore. This has been going on a very long time.

<comment><USER29> When a junior developer screws something up, I accept responsibility and apologize to the client.

It's my fault.

There is no authority without responsibility.

If you don't like that, don't accept the job.

[FWIW I didn't like Bush either]

<comment><USER30> Are you really conflating the challenge and compromises involved with being the leader of the free world to being a mid to senior level developer?

<comment><USER29> Absolutely. I think all presidents should be expert programmers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> $20M a year, what a bargain!

</comment><comment><USER32> Google is dismantling XMPP federation, but if these slides are true then their NSA federation is working better than ever.

</comment><comment><USER33> For what it's worth Apple and Google denie it: <http://www.cnbc.com/id/100797046>

<comment><USER34> IIRC, they're legally required to deny it.

Plus, careful wording allows all sorts of out. Google says they don't provide a "back door", but this sort of thing could be defined as coming in the _front_ door.

<comment><USER35> Gag orders don't require them to deny it, the require them not to confirm it.

<comment><USER34> Which can be considered to require them to deny it. "We can't talk about that" confirms it.

<comment><USER36> Confirming or denying, or stating the (in)ability to talk about it is a breach of the requirement to keep the information classified. The proper response is 'we do not know what you're talking about'. Which is what they said. It can't be conflated with something stupid like 'cannot confirm or deny' which tells you right away.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-snowden.html

<comment><USER2> "On one occasion, Poitras says, they did seize her computers and cellphones and kept them for weeks. She was also told that her refusal to answer questions was itself a suspicious act. _Because the interrogations took place at international boarding crossings, where the government contends that ordinary constitutional rights do not apply, she was not permitted to have a lawyer present_."

<comment><USER3> The most amazing thing about this is that the government asserts that the "constitutional-rights-free-zone" at the border extends _100 miles_ away.

[http://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/fact-sheet-us- con...](http://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/fact-sheet-us-constitution- free-zone)

<comment><USER4> I don't get why they don't just do away with the constitution altogether. It's clear that those in power have no belief in it and work to circumvent or strip away its protections every chance they can. Why even keep up with the pretense?

<comment><USER5> I'm sure they would _absolutely_ love to. But the Constitution came with conditions to prevent this very thing.

But don't worry: sooner or later they'll figure out a "threat" big enough to get rid of it, while people are busy worrying about who'll be the next American Idol and whether to join Team Jacob or Team Edward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Someone posted this on reddit, thought I would repost here as its timely:

From a jail interview with Hermann Göring during the Nuremberg Trials:

Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

</comment><comment><USER7> No new information (and personally I'd prefer not to see this on Hacker News) but...this is a really remarkable article. It reads like a spy thriller in a way none of the short form reporting has.

It also introduces a new protagonist that is much more appealing than Snowden or Greenwald. Poitras seems like a truly remarkable woman. I cannot wait to see her final product.

This is the type of article that would make my parents - lifelong Democrats who refuse to consider that Obama could be wrong and a pesky computer geek be right - finally come around on Snowden.

</comment><comment><USER8> This page is fixed size on my android meaning I cannot adjust the text size. When I rub to scroll it sits still for a moment and then jumps before scrolling properly. Does anyone else get the same bugs and maybe know the cause or workarounds?

<comment><USER9> It's a shame when someone asking for a workaround gets downvoted on hackernews.</comment></comment>


Keep It Moving - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/well/move/keep-it-moving.html <comment><AUTHOR>
      When the men were regularly active and ran, this lead to a healthful
      reduction of triglycerides.

      But when the men instead sat for 14 hours a day, running did not
      bring down the high levels of triglycerides in their blood.

      Sitting seems to have made the men's bodies exercise-resistant.

      Inactivity altered the men's physiology in ways that apparently
      prevented exercise from improving the metabolism of fat.</comment>


Stealth update to enemy power causes an uproar in World of Warcraft - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/03/stealth-update-to-enemy-power-causes-an-uproar-in-world-of-warcraft/ <comment><USER2> [http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-03-29-blizzard- explai...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-03-29-blizzard-explains- surprise-enemy-gear-scaling-in-world-of-warcraft-as-community-fumes)

Curious what they were thinking with this. Haven't played WoW in years, but given that it's an endless treadmill, getting gear seems like the only way to feel any sense of momentum at all. Now I guess you can only feel momentum in instanced dungeons and raids... probably designed to keep geared players from questing too fast, or AOE farming... Still seems filthy they would keep such a huge change out of the patch notes.</comment>


Facebook's Zuckerberg discusses hate speech with Macron - <AUTHOR> https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/05/facebook-zuckerberg-discusses-hate-speech-macron-190510144412745.html <comment><USER2> Heads of social media companies meeting with heads of State to discuss what the plebs are and aren't allowed is creepy as hell</comment>