Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://news.trust.org/item/20161004170601-99f8c <comment><USER2> I think the attitude here that most tech companies are rolling over and just complying without a single ethical consideration is misplaced.

The government has been doing an excellent job of basically extorting these companies into compliance. They threaten the full weight of the US government's wraith and then tie every order up with classifications and gag orders.

You aren't legally allowed to talk to other companies in the same position. Most your legal team probably doesn't get to know what's going on. You can't take your case to the public without being held in contempt.

I'm not giving these companies a complete pass for being complicit in the erosion of individual's civil liberties but treating this as if the decision is easy is vastly unfair.

<comment><USER3> I wonder what the actual personal consequences are for someone going public that there is an NSL requested. I seriously doubt they'd destroy a major public company with lots of employees/voters/users; fines, maybe, and going after execs, but the Government loses most of its power to threaten things once the act is done and everything is public.

I think you win in the court of public opinion if it's a broad program like this (and IMO clearly unconstitutional). If it's an NSL about, say, an order to specifically target UBL, you probably hang in public opinion. If it's an NSL about, say, finding Snowden, you might be ok. This is an interesting check and balance vs. government overreach.

I'd be a lot more comfortable with someone going public in a live press conference in DC (maybe releasing a key to a file which is pre-distributed), than someone running off to Russia or doing it anonymously, though.

<comment><USER4> It's an experiment that I would personally be willing to try were I a high- visibility C-level exec. Been to jail, not that bad, mostly just boring; and certainly the jail that CEO me goes to would likely be better than the jail the real me has been a guest of. But the kind of person willing to tweak the nose of the government doesn't usually get to be C-anything.

As you point out, best to wisely pick your battle as you'll want public opinion behind you. And remember that as popular as she is, Martha Stewart still went to jail.

<comment> compiler-guy Chelsea Manning, who is imprisoned over something similar to this case, may have a different opinion on how nice jail is than you.

<comment><USER5> Chelsea Manning was imprisoned over something very different: she was a US soldier, not a private citizen, and she made public internal government documents, not a letter explicitly addressed to her.

Different standards do (and, IMO, should) apply to leakers who are government employees or members of the armed forces with a security clearance and to private citizens who are not 'leaking' something but rather sharing something they did not explicitly and voluntarily (through a contract or NDA) _agree_ not to disclose.

<comment><USER6> And yet the non-military CJ system can be brutal and harsh. I'd imagine it's certainly possible the first person to disobey a NSL might be made an example of, especially depending on who is in charge of the executive branch at the time. You could be locked in solitary for years until you lose your mind. You could be assigned to prisons in such a way the authorities ensure you would be repeatedly beaten and raped. You could be indefinitely detained without trial or attorney -- the crime is national security related, after all. There is a horde of horribly nasty things that could be done to you even if you aren't military or security clearance. It's worse for the military, but it's bad enough for the rest of us.

Perhaps unlikely, but certainly very scary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone remembers this?

> Barack Obama: NSA is not rifling through ordinary people's emails. US > president is confident intelligence services have 'struck appropriate > balance', he tells journalists in Berlin

edit: link fixed [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/19/barack- obama-n...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/19/barack-obama-nsa- people-emails)

<comment><USER8> Yup. So that's a complete lie now (not that I actually believed him when he said it then). When you searching through everyone's emails, then you're invading everyone's privacy.

<comment><USER9> I guess they are using the same justification as GCHQ; they use tools to scan everything and a human doesn't actually read ("rifle through") the majority of material.

Is it still an invasion of privacy if a machine reads my emails? Google read my emails to check for spam.

<comment><USER10> To me, the main difference is that you know about Google's automatic parsing of your emails upfront and it can therefore be a factor in your subscribing/unsubscribing decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was honestly a bit unhappy when Stamos left Yahoo in the middle of a bunch of (what seemed like) cool projects for users -- seemed like he was just jumping ship from an objectively pretty crappy company to a continuing-to- accelerate rocketship, presumably for career reasons.

However, if it went down like this -- he did probably the least destructive thing possible. I probably would have gone public or done something stupider, but at the very least not being a party to ongoing abuse of users' trust is necessary.

I'd like to see what other senior execs at Yahoo! were aware of the program and supported or at least tolerated it, so I can avoid ever working with any of them.

<comment><USER11> This should forever taint Marissa Meyer's reputation. Failure to save Yahoo is understandable. Disregard for user privacy and safety at this scale is unforgivable.

<comment><USER12> Don't forget this story.

Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio who <edit> claims to have </edit> resisted NSA spying is out of prison (2013)

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- switch/wp/2013/09/30...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- switch/wp/2013/09/30/a-ceo-who-resisted-nsa-spying-is-out-of-prison-and-he- feels-vindicated-by-snowden-leaks/)

<comment><USER13> Nacchio is no hero. He ran a $50MM pump-and-dump scam that personally netted him millions of dollars in profits at the expense of common shareholders, and he was indicted in a wave of similar prosecutions in the wake of the Enron fiasco. His offenses are there in black and white: with full knowledge that his company faced materially adverse changes unknown to his investors, he not only promoted the company but privately (and illegally) sold his own shares.

You do people like Stamos a huge disservice by drawing this comparison. People like Nacchio are exploiting the good work real privacy advocates do, for their own personal enrichment.

<comment><USER14> _People like Nacchio are exploiting the good work real privacy advocates do, for their own personal enrichment._

Or it's possible for people to be dual-natured: capable both of flagrant chicanery and abuse, as well as acts of conviction and principled defiance.

<comment><USER13> The entangling of the FISA order and the insider trading scandal actually makes things worse. His most significant trades came just months after he refused the FISA order --- after which he claims NSA arranged to have DoD contracts with Qwest terminated. He did something with an obvious material impact on his shareholders, and secretly profited from it.

The reality, though, is that his tenure at Qwest appears broadly similar to the kinds of bullshit that was rife in corporate America at the time: accounting scandals, entirely unrelated to Qwest's government contracts, that boosted apparent growth and drove share prices higher than the fundamentals of the business could possibly justify.

Google, for instance, [qwest kmc telecom].

<comment><USER15> If you know, what was his defense against the fraud case? It could have been retribution (yes, that's completely speculative).

<comment><USER13> His claims included:

* That he was simply very optimistic about the business he was running that that he believed there would be an uptick in the stock long term after the company weathered the downturn he knew to be coming.

* That he was "set up" by NSA: yes, he sold at a high price anticipating a sector-wide downturn, but he did so because he'd been assured that Qwest would be part of a multi-billion NSA modernization program called "Groundbreaker", led by CSC, which contract would surely rescue Qwest's stock and even out his sale.

* That his board had demanded that he sell his stock, and that such sales were routine at Qwest.

* That he was distraught over the suicide of his son and sold the stock as part of an effort to immediately disentangle himself from the CEO position which he hoped to leave.

Against that, you have the black-and-white record of his trades and the testimony of numerous high-level Qwest executives all saying they'd been urgently warning him to revise Qwest's targets downwards. He not only maintained the unrealistic targets, and participated in channel-stuffing-style schemes to fake up earnings numbers, but profited personally by trading against those bogus numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Lets take it a different way:

You're knowingly sending your data to a 3rd party. You're not encrypting. It's not through the USPS (special protections).

It seems bloody evident that, of course, your email provider can read your emails! Unless you're encrypting with GPG, then they can (and they can still read the signing keys).

Yahoo, Google, and friends all scan, dedup, and all sorts of tricks to determine marketing and quality content (spamming). If you're worried, run your own mailserver. It's what I do, along with using gmail. But I know that, at any time, people/scripts/ai are reading everything sent and received.

edit: I'd much prefer to hear commentary/how wrong/how right/how crazy I am, rather than -1's.I'd like to hear a discussion about the "Secrecy of text written on postcards"....

<comment><USER17> I've upvoted you, despite disagreeing with you, because I believe it's worth us all discussing the reasoning behind our opinions.

What you've just said is the email equivalent to "she deserved to be raped, because she was dressed like a slut".

Yes, we should take precautions to protect ourselves. But that in no way justifies the privacy intrusions that happened here.

<comment><USER18> I think it's closer to "you deserved your message to be read, since you put it on the back of a postcard". But ok.

<comment><USER19> This. Email messages are digital postcards. When it leaves your computer (house) and goes to your ISP (local post office), anyone at that place can pick it up and read it before sending it on its way to the recipient's mail handler. While it's in transit, it's not sealed, it's not obscured or encrypted, it is plain text.

Now, that doesn't change the fact that Yahoo rolled over like a puppy when the government came calling, which is reprehensible for any tech company to do. They should have fought it and asked for a warrant for the specific persons of interest, rather than happily fucking over every single Yahoo email subscriber.

<comment><USER20> Don't a lot of the big providers pass emails between each other encrypted with TLS? And emails internal to Yahoo's email system wouldn't be visible to your ISP or anyone outside of Yahoo.

[https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/saferemail/](https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/saferemail/)

<comment><USER19> They might pass the email around via TLS but they store their copy unencrypted on their servers[1]. Even if they do one day decide to encrypt their local copy, they hold the keys, you don't. According to the Ars article on this subject[2], Google has officially said "We haven't been subpoenaed and if we were we'd say 'no'", but that stance could change in the next few years.

[1] [https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/saferemail/faq/#wh...](https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/saferemail/faq/#what_do_you_mean_by)

[2] [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/report-fbi- andor-...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/report-fbi-andor-nsa- ordered-yahoo-to-build-secret-e-mail-search-tool/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Most illustrative part: "Yahoo President Marissa Mayer and the company's legal team kept the order secret from the company's security team."

If you have to hide things from your own security team, it's pretty clear you're doing something very bad and you know it.

And my imaginary hat off to Stamos for resigning when he found his boss betrayed user privacy and undermined security. If everybody had such level of integrity, doing shady stuff would be much harder.

</comment><comment><USER22> It sounds like Yahoo will fit right in at Verizon... It also sounds like another leak designed to damage Marissa Mayer:

> According to the two former employees, Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer's > decision to obey the directive roiled some senior executives and led to the > June 2015 departure of Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos, who > now holds the top security job at Facebook Inc.

<comment><USER8> Sounds like she was a pretty terrible CEO all-around. But as a user, I would never use a service run by Marissa Mayer again. She lost that trust for good.

<comment><USER23> > But as a user, I would never use a service run by Marissa Mayer again. She > lost that trust for good.

Realistically, this is every American company. Why trust anyone?

<comment><USER24> It is impossible to live functionally in society without trusting someone on some level.

<comment><USER23> Yea--I'm just saying this is a product of being a business, not Meyer. One can fight it and still give information over. You can't take the sign of struggle as a sign your data is safe.

<comment><USER24> It's not a sign that your data is safe, but I think the point here is the opposite: You can take easy capitulation as a sure sign that your data is compromised.

Similarly, the lock on my door doesn't make me safe against everyone who might want to commit any crime against me, but all else being equal, a locked door is still preferable from a security standpoint, and it's _very_ preferable to keeping your valuables in an unlocked room with a known thief.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> While it is damning that Mayer didn't go to Stamos about this and went straight to the email team, it's hard to say whether she felt it was necessary to tell him, or was even allowed to, since we don't see the court orders and what they entail. It's really easy to be against this and play armchair preacher but this is something she probably had no choice in, in many ways.

Also, I'm wondering if this story is bigger because people love to hate on Mayer. I am certain this kind of thing happened/happens at Facebook, Google, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc., so it's confusing why this is so newsworthy. It's not really newsworthy that data from an email provider is sent to NSA under secret court orders and NSA can search the full text of it. Is the newsworthy part that she asked the team to do it without consulting the security team? My question would be, why wouldn't a manager from the email team consult the security team if they had the power to?

<comment><USER26> > It's not really newsworthy that data from an email provider is sent to NSA > under secret court orders and NSA can search the full text of it.

It absolutely is newsworthy. We may have suspected it beforehand, we may suspect it happens at other providers, but we have specific proof about Yahoo now. This is new and important and we should be making a fuss. If we play the jaded cynic we are joining the enemies of democracy.

<comment><USER25> No, we had proof back when Snowden released documents about the search engine that NSA has from data siphoned from providers. I'm not being cynical, I'm being realistic in that this isn't newsworthy now because it was extremely newsworthy when it first came to light a few years ago.

I would rather this be newsworthy because it gets people interested in fighting FISC orders again, not against Yahoo and Mayer.

<comment><USER27> What Snowden revelation are you talking about? I remember when everyone was up in arms about PRISM, but that's just a pretty interface on more focused requests of data for specific users.

This is the first instance, to my knowledge, of the government requesting carte blanche realtime search of _all_ incoming and outgoing email for _all_ users.

<comment><USER28> No 2 and No 8 on this cover Yahoo directly:

[http://mashable.com/2014/06/05/edward-snowden- revelations/](http://mashable.com/2014/06/05/edward-snowden-revelations/)

That's them searching for what they want plus seeing everything without notification. There was also a $250,000 a day fine for non-compliance with court orders. That adds up. I can't find the link but they made it grow exponentially over time in another report.

<comment><USER29> #8 is a weird thing to bring up. Yahoo was going to be fined for not letting the NSA secretly tap their cables? They didn't even know the tapping was being done! How could they be non compliant?

<comment><USER28> Yeah, that might not totally fit in the point I was making on compliance side. It does fit into overall picture of answering losvedir in how they'd be collecting and searching everything in real-time. The next order might force a tap on the cables on the inside. Much like the "pen register" Lavabit was going to have to add.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Friendly reminder: the FBI and NSA are part of the executive branch of government and report to the President of the United States. Make no mistake -- there absolutely _is_ someone who could stop this. The fact that this clearly unconstitutional activity not only continued after being exposed, but actually appears to has expanded in its scope, leaves us with but one conclusion: the President supports this activity and wants it to continue.

<comment><USER31> > (...) are part of the executive branch of government and report to the > President of the United States.

It's very likely, from what we have observed over the past sixty to seventy years, that the Executive Branch does not operate this way in practice. The actual bureaucratic system has probably morphed to allow for deniability and other measures that offer structural protection against political or legal attacks.

<comment><USER30> But we know that he knows about it. Because he has talked about it. He once gave a speech specifically about government spying. Not only was the illegal activity not stopped, it expanded. There simply is no deniability left.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The scariest part of the whole piece answers this question: Why are back doors with secret keys a BAD idea?

"... he had been left out of a decision that hurt users' security, the sources said. Due to a programming flaw, he told them hackers could have accessed the stored emails...."

The CEO of Yahoo must have known that this kind of scanning and storage puts their users at risk. She choose to do it anyway as being the path of least resistance against a more powerful adversary (US govt.). Bad judgement compounded by zero spine... Verizon looks like the perfect fit.

</comment><comment><USER33> I mean, think about the threats from .gov, right?

$250k per day doubling every week that can come with a gag order sounds like the sort of thing that could damage a business to the point of extinction, no?

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/11/yahoo-nsa- laws...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/11/yahoo-nsa-lawsuit- documents-fine-user-data-refusal)

</comment><comment><USER11> Secret URL for deleting your Yahoo account.

[https://edit.yahoo.com/config/delete_user](https://edit.yahoo.com/config/delete_user)

<comment><USER34> Do you seriously think that it is better elsewhere? I think that the NSA and the FBI are out of control...

<comment><USER35> Of course it's better elsewhere. Many companies are not under US authority. Many provide better security features. Many are not known for having terrible security, or the biggest breach of user data ever.

IIRC, Yahoo has always provided more data not even because they shared it, but because they were so lax with security.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Let's see a show of hands for those who think Yahoo was the only one?

</comment><comment><USER37> This reminds me of what happened to my grandfather in the early 30's. He was employed by a small glassworks in PA, a factory town that owned his home, the town store, post office everything. They opened his mail and fired him for trying to start a union. Three kids under five and a wife thrown out on the street. Seems like the Oligarchs are still reading the spues mail all of these years later.

</comment><comment><USER38> Distribute, encrypt, and anonymize. The only way forward doesn't include them.

Congress is up for grabs. You can really change who is in congress this round. If you don't like the guy you have vote in another. Vote for people that want to cut surveillance programs and agencies that request them. We could save or reallocate mountains of money.

</comment><comment><USER39> Yahoo was attributing its recently announced data breach to state-sponsored attackers.... Maybe that wasn't so far off the mark after all.

</comment><comment><USER40> Ignoring fiduciary responsibility for a minute, what would happen if a publicly-traded company refused to comply with such a court order until they were required to release a financial statement? Wouldn't they be legally required to disclose that multi-million dollar fine?

How would a company under such a gag order announce bankruptcy? "Sorry, we lost all the money and we can't tell you why"?

</comment><comment><USER41> The lesson from this is to not trust corporations with out privacy. Sadly, it seems many of us are not learning it.

<comment><USER42> Would it even be possible to make similar, but privacy centered products without corporations?

<comment><USER43> That's what Free Software is about. And it does.

The problems are of establishing protocols and standards, and seeing that others adopt them, and of creating self-contained systems that are bulletproof to set up and operate.

There are projects working on this, but the hurdle for having Joe Random User operate their own server is fairly high.

I'd much rather see a highly, but _not entirely_ distributed system, with pervasive security, and very strong legal protections. I don't know if that can happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> The interesting part of the news is this:

""" The sources said the program was discovered by Yahoo's security team in May 2015, within weeks of its installation. The security team initially thought hackers had broken in. """

this is from Reuters: [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-yahoo-nsa-exclusive- idUSK](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-yahoo-nsa-exclusive-idUSK)

I can imagine being in that security team :) But there is also something more profound in this about secrecy in our times.

</comment><comment><USER45> I find this hilarious since the only thing I use my yahoo address for is retailer sign-ups and things I know will land me a boat load of junk mail. It is my email landfill.

<comment><USER46> Likewise, although I refer to it as my spam storage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> From the article: "Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to a spy agency's demand by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time."

The first case _to surface_. Anybody else could have been doing it for just as long, but we don't know yet.

</comment><comment><USER48> Now gotta wonder if Google has succumbed to government pressure to do the same.

I'm really hoping and trusting they haven't.

<comment><USER49> I wouldn't bet a bent penny on it:

"Experts said it was likely that the NSA or FBI had approached other Internet companies with the same demand, since they evidently did not know what email accounts were being used by the target. The NSA usually makes requests for domestic surveillance through the FBI, so it is hard to know which agency is seeking the information.

Reuters was unable to confirm whether the 2015 demand went to other companies, or if any complied.

Alphabet Inc's Google and Microsoft Corp, two major U.S. email service providers, did not respond to requests for comment."

It's not a hard question to answer. You either are or are not searching all emails in realtime at the behest of the NSA.

<comment><USER50> They later responded. Quoting from Arstechnica's 5:11 ET update:

A spokeswoman for Microsoft, Kim Kurseman, e-mailed Ars this statement, and also declined further questions: "We have never engaged in the secret scanning of email traffic like what has been reported today about Yahoo."

For its part, Google was the most unequivocal. Spokesman Aaron Stein e-mailed: "We've never received such a request, but if we did, our response would be simple: 'no way.'"

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/fbi-demands- signa...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/fbi-demands-signal-user- data-but-theres-not-much-to-hand-over/)

<comment><USER51> Don't the NSL's typically have a section saying that they have to deny they ever received one?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I imagine Yahoo! Mail engineers being royally pissed about this. Well, I suppose that includes all Yahoo! folks who are still putting real effort into improving Y!'s services. Every odd day something surfaces about Y!'s execs questionable practices and decisions, every even day problems, leaks, bad press. Moral must have hit rock bottom.

Maybe the Yahoo! Board should have surveyed the startups scene, looking for founders who bootstrapped successfully and proven their worth, and recruit the best they could get. I am not very familiar with management of people and aspects of running a business, but I believe there is a lot more to it than being a smart person with computers.

<comment><USER53> You may have missed the part where Yahoo engineers implemented this scheme, they are to blame as much as management here, possibly more because they could've walked away and gotten a different job without much trouble, but management had a responsibility to the whole organization.

Contrast with the rumors that Apple engineers were prepared to refuse & resign if ordered to share the iPhone's encryption keys.

<comment><USER54> Why should they lose their job and salary to defend someone else? Yahoo users can go to court themselves if they feel that their rights were violated.

<comment><USER50> Yahoo users can't go to court if they can't prove their rights were violated. Even with this news story there is no court-admissible evidence of collusion with the government.

Also, from the perspective of a civil suit against Yahoo, this program is likely somewhat legal unless it was specifically against their privacy policy and terms of use.

That doesn't mean the engineers knew they were performing unethical behavior. A better question is: why should anyone hire someone who aided unethical behavior?

<comment><USER54> Their behaviour might be not very ethical in relation to a customers but they were loyal to the company. This is a good point for an employer. I doubt a company would like to hire a Snowden type person that puts public interest over company's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> If she had wanted to this to get out, I wonder if she could have ordered the email team to go ahead and build out the sniffer so she is not in contempt of the court, but let her security team openly blog about it, without informing her, when they found it - which could lead to an inadvertent release of the info? If the sec team was not under the gag order maybe they would not have gotten in trouble.

Or take her to a super boss level, she could have used whisper to talk to guccifer and let him know about some vuln that would allow access to the legal directory.... which would have to gag order. #wikileakitup

<comment><USER50> The security or email team could also blog about how to "hypothetically" implement real-time scan of email for keywords, and then stay mum about if they ever actually implemented something like their proposed program.

Totally protected speech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is substantially worse than PRISM which operates on individual targeted persons and the upstream Verizon, AT&T program which collects plaintext over the public Internet.

This involved bulk search of data past the decryption layer.

</comment><comment><USER56> Since all these companies (Yahoo, Google, FB, MSFT, etc) all operate and with users in other countries, what happen when other countries/governments demand the same "search/access" of info?

<comment><USER57> Well, if you're Google in 2010, the answer was "stop putting any servers in China, and accept getting blocked by China."

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> It was part of carnivore and AT&T also supported that. I'm pretty sure all major vendors had hooks into their systems for carnivore.

</comment><comment><USER59>
      Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to
      search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific
      information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according
      to people familiar with the matter.

Wonder how much of the 4.8 billion can be attributed this _custom software program_?

</comment><comment><USER60> This shit needs to stop. Immediately.

Like most people, I have no problem with the government using probable cause to get warrants that are in search of something specific (none of these grab- all bullshit orders). If you have a legitimate reason to be looking at someone, then there should be no problem getting a warrant.

These secret FISA court orders are a serious violation to the rights of Americans in many cases. At minimum, if we really do need these secret courts to prevent people from finding out they are the subject of surveillance, then there needs to be an expiration on those gag orders. This crap about never being able to mention it FOREVER has to go. There should be a limit, say 5 years, which is well beyond the length of time most investigations take. At that time, those orders should expire so that these government actions can be brought to light if there is any question of wrong-doing on the part of our overzealous law enforcement.

"Former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker said email providers 'have the power to encrypt it all, and with that comes added responsibility to do some of the work that had been done by the intelligence agencies.'" Sorry, but no. That's not how it works. There is no obligation to do the work of government unless it is actually written into law (i.e. record-keeping laws). And it currently is not. This is precisely why everyone should be encrypting all communications on the CLIENT side themselves. It should never leave your device (PC, phone, whatever) unencrypted. That way, if the government wants to go on a fishing expedition or has an actual legitimate reason to look at you, they will have to get a warrant for the device itself, which will at least give you a head's up that they are trying to put you in the clink with a bunkmate named Bubba.

The NSA, and the government in general, has completely blown any goodwill they once had with the public. Under no circumstance will I ever advocate for anything that makes their job easier. And it is for no other reason than simply because they have proven time and again they cannot be trusted.

Honestly, I'm still not even clear why every employee of project PRISM isn't rotting a jail cell right now after Snowden shed some light on the program for the rest of us peasants. Every single employee of that program had to know the clear violations of the constitution they were helping to partake in. Keep in mind the constitution protects against unreasonable SEIZURE as well as search. Gobbling up communications in the manner they did clearly counts as seizure because they would not have had them otherwise - whether or not they actually search the records is immaterial.

I'm not an Apple fan, but when they told the government to go pound sand regarding that terrorist phone encryption case, that was the first time that I can recall I actually approved of Apple's political position on something.

</comment><comment><USER61> Some people here laud some companies for being good about user privacy and security. This shows they have not yet reached table stakes for privacy and security.

This is why no provider can be trusted. Every routine communication should be e2e encrypted. Otherwise this WILL happen.

<comment><USER62> This is where I remind everyone about S/MIME. A bit awkward to setup for the first time, but with good email clients it is a pretty transparent experience once you have it setup.

<comment><USER61> That's good, but the correct response from the big internet services/portals should be to make it impossible to comply with such a request without an obvious and public withdrawal of service. And, beyond that, to use their resources to make key exchange and management simple and secure (they do that in _some_ real time communications products) for storage and email. They have your social graph, they can implement web-of-trust features. They can made it both simple to use and exceedingly difficult to subvert. They can provide secure, open endpoint software. They can effectively end dragnet surveillance by providing a refuge from it, AND make burdensome and credibility-destroying requests/orders impossible to implement. And all these years after Snowden, they have not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Note the attitude toward encryption:

 _Former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker said email providers "have the power to encrypt it all, and with that comes added responsibility to do some of the work that had been done by the intelligence agencies."_

</comment><comment><USER63> Is this is the best solution? [https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org/en/](https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org/en/)

Getting anyone else I know to do this seems like a long shot. Is there something simpler?

<comment><USER43> Setting up and using PGP _personally_ isn't all that hard, though it's got a few twists. Above and beyond any learning-curve issues:

1\. It doesn't protect metadata. _Who you communicate with_ , and when, and what subject you specify, are all available to any system which can read the packets. Unless you _only_ accept and transmit TLS (secured-session) transport (HTTPS), this means that your communications _patterns_ are in the clear. If your receiving party are fetching messages via a cleartext protocol (IMAP or POP, say, and in some cases HTTP, rather than the secured variants IMAPS, POPS, and HTTPS), then the headers _and possibly mail body_ will be clear.

Cryptography has to be end-to-end to be effective, though attack surfaces exist at many levels. Ultimately the viewing device itself may be compromised, but that's a rather unscalable attack.

2\. If you're using PGP _but nobody else you 're communicating with is_ then you're not gaining much. Keep in mind, I've been yelled at and/or chided by highly technical people _with strong security backgrounds_ over sending PGP- encrypted emails. Including senior Google technical staff and Gene Spafford, of recent memory.

Much of that is due to a wide range of email clients not playing well with PGP, which gets again to vendor issues.

I recently posted a long critique of email on HN, and ultimately it's the lack of privacy, security, encryption, authentication, and reputation which make me think it's time to scrap it and start over, _although learning from it and taking the best bits along_.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12620997](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12620997)

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Another reason for users and enterprises alike to avoid US companies and services. And another reason for entrepreneurs to start companies outside the US - escape the stigma, escape the potential clash with secret courts.

</comment><comment><USER65> Any large company should openly defy such an order.

What will they do??? Fine, court, shut down the company? If that happened would the public not outcry?

</comment><comment><USER66> So you really think that a free email service will "protect your privacy?" Any of them?

Why would you think that?

FWIW, SIGINT is a major part of the present festivities in the Woah on Terruh. It's simply unrealistic to expect anything transmitted through ordinary means to be remotely private.

</comment><comment><USER67> Any chance that this, and the recently announced historical account breach, are coming out as artifacts of Verizon's due diligence?

</comment><comment><USER68> This is not at all surprising! BTW, I don't know a single person that has an email account with yahoo, who is not older than 60!

</comment><comment><USER69> To be frank, the more I hear about those stories, the less I'm shocked.

There is nothing to be shocked about. Unless nobody else than intelligence officials are getting access to this, and if the investigations are legit, then what?

News like this are trying to ride the whole Snowden train, but that's not what Snowden what whistle blowing about. Snowden was trying to warn about the abuse of those tools.

Now people moan and yell each time agencies try to do their job.

<comment><USER70> This is not just another case of surveillance. This is a company betraying its own security chief and programming a backdoor to spy on its own customers on behalf of a bunch of agencies. It is unprecedented, overreaching and must not be tolerated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> That the usg attempted this is a sign of deeply seated incompetence at a philosophical level.

</comment><comment><USER72> I'm sorry, but have you _used_ Yahoo Mail?

I don't believe they are capable of writing the "siphon" they are accused of. To be honest, I don't think they actually have engineers. I think they just use summer interns.

</comment><comment><USER73> They moved heaven and earth to try to find Snowden.

</comment><comment><USER74> having my yahoo as spammailaccount for registrations, they probably scanned gigabytes of all sorts of stuff xD

</comment><comment><USER75> And it did not find any :-) !!!

</comment><comment><USER76> So, when do Americans exercise the right of the Second and liberate from this totalitarian government?

</comment><comment><USER77> Took them long enough ;)

</comment><comment><USER78> Thanks Obama!

</comment><comment><USER79> In China and Russia, it is well known that _all_ oligarchs are corrupt.

However, not all of them will go to prison -- only those who cross the politicians will ever be tried and convicted.

<comment><USER80> Which reminds me of this great passage in _Atlas Shrugged_ :

 _"Did you really think we want those laws observed? " said Dr. Ferris. "We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Reardon, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."_

― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

<comment><USER81> _" There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."_

\-- John Rogers

<comment><USER82> Responding with an ad hominem - whether at the author of the quote or the poster of it by association - is both an ineffective response (the appeal to emotion signals an inability to argue rationally) and lowers the quality of discussion (by taking it away from the point, into emotional territory).

Constant appeals to emotion and resorting to a wide array of fallacies allows for strongmen to build tribes which follow them blindly (no need to bother forming policy) and is how we end up with Trump vs Clinton in 2016 (see [1] for the impact on the legislative process). Reducing the quality of debate is therefore a harmful thing with real consequences.

One line of argument might be to criticise the paranoid nature of the quote: it is entirely possible that a mess of laws arises naturally from a mix of special interests doing some lobbying to preserve small advantages for themselves, and bad laws arising as a form of horse trading necessary to get policy enacted. Only then does this mess presents an opportunity to manipulators.

[1] [http://imgur.com/a/Wmoex](http://imgur.com/a/Wmoex) \- "Voting Relationships between Senators in the 101st through 113th Congresses"

<comment><USER83> > _Responding with an ad hominem - whether at the author of the quote or the > poster of it by association - is both an ineffective response (the appeal to > emotion signals an inability to argue rationally) and lowers the quality of > discussion (by taking it away from the point, into emotional territory)._

Thankfully, that was not an ad hominem. It was a quote against a particular BOOK.

> _Constant appeals to emotion and resorting to a wide array of fallacies > allows for strongmen to build tribes which follow them blindly_

So, kind of like Ayn Rand, which had a known history of blind following entourage?

<comment><USER84> > So, kind of like Ayn Rand, which had a known history of blind following > entourage?

Without any sort of quantification, that is a very hollow argument. All systems of ideas, and originators of such systems, have a history of "blind following".

Saying that Objectivists are less critical of their own and competing ideas strikes me as pretty laughable, especially when compared to the more popular ideas - like Marxism. Maybe Ayn just doesn't look as good on a T-shirt as Che...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> Can we merge [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12637302](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12637302) into this? Same exact headline

</comment><comment><USER86> So, is this correct, in this context?

Pass: Apple, Google

Fail: Microsoft, Yahoo

Unknown: Facebook, Twitter

<comment><USER42> Google is definitely in cahoots with the government and probably way deeper than Yahoo. Why would you even assume otherwise, given how much ties to the government they expose to the public these days?

<comment><USER86> As a European I have to I assume all major US companies in this area are either infiltrated or willingly participating in pervasive surveillance.

It's still interesting to know which companies have been actually exposed for this kind abuse of their customers' trust.

<comment><USER87> Quite - and the European Court of Justice basically agrees with you too. Hence why Safe Harbor was anulled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> Good riddance. I don't understand what is worth scavanging from the carcas.

</comment><comment><USER89> But continue to find themselves stumped?

</comment><comment><USER90> It should read "...Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer's decision to indulge the directive..." indulge, not obey.

</comment><comment><USER91> Google overtly scans your emails for anything.

<comment><USER92> > Google overtly scans your emails for anything

This is a common argument here.

"Company A secretly collaborates with government agency to subvert their users' security."

"Yes, but Company B collects user data for their own commercial purposes, fully disclosed to the user. Same thing."

Not the same thing.</comment></comment>


Facebook roadshow video - <AUTHOR> http://facebook.retailroadshow.com/show/retail.html? <comment><USER2> This video is the best foot forward case from FB to buy their stock. That is its purpose.

Through that lens when demonstrating the product in the first 5 minutes, the amount of time that FB dedicates to 2 features - photo sharing and Timeline - is striking.

Instagram learned the $1b way just how core photo sharing is to FB.

But doesn't that acquisition demonstrate FB's inherent weakness - consumer's fickle behavior?

That in 18 months a <20 man start-up can terrify a multi-billion dollar behemoth?

And then the focus on Timeline just feels odd.

A "maybe" success from the user perspective, but either way seems more like a UI-update than a core product choice.

Two years from now does anybody believe timeline will be the default homepage?

Facebook is going to be a behemoth IPO no matter what, but I am less compelled to own the stock vs. investing money in another photo-startup that could swing hard @ facebook's core, despite how pedestrian that sounds!

<comment><USER3> I think the reason they mention the timeline is because it's great for advertisers. It doesn't seem unlikely that it has intentionally been designed to be disorienting which leads us to pay more attention to ads.

User retention (including engagement and growth) and monetization are obviously the two biggest concerns for a company like Facebook. Photos (sticky, long-living) and the map of users (if you are not in you are out) are for user retention. Timeline and platform (games, connect, pages etc) is for monetization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> youtube mirror (the original can't be skipped around in) <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btQIHSApV_0>

</comment><comment><USER5> This was brilliantly produced, but... the only thing interesting was: ads in the timeline. I used to care about FB hitting their $5B target this year, but that will be easy if they launch ads in the timeline. I am concerned whether Facebook is relevant 10 years from now.

I take positions and put my money where my mouth is. In this case, I'll sit on the side lines, though I am tempted to be short.

</comment><comment><USER6> This IPO is based as much as the 'dream' of what FB can be than what it is.

Here's something to think about: FB investments pre-IPO: $2.4 Billion, Google investments pre-IPO: $25MM. Google's IPO was much smaller ($25B market cap if I recall) but Google was financially a stronger company when it went public.

Therefore cue music and grandiose mission statements. Wait, Facebook will get to that 18 P/E ratio when?

<comment><USER3> Where did you see real/projected P/E ratios?

<comment><USER6> Its not listed but tech stocks like apple and google hover around 15-20 P/E. That means that the FB has to grow their earnings so their P/E ratio ends up being in line with the industry or their stock falls. I.e. either Price moves or Earnings move. This doesn't happen immediately - right now LinkedIn is around 1,000- but the market or company needs to correct itself overtime. While its "correcting" that means earnings will go up w/o the price doing the same thing. That means as a current shareholder, lots of future value accretion has already been priced in (i.e. the stock wont rise like Google or Apple in the last 10 years, which was being fueled by increased earnings). Of course P/E is only 1 metric, but its a really important one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In every scenario I see facebook involved in the future of the internet. So, not to sound too much like a fanboy, but isn't it almost a sure bet to buy facebook stock? If they initially offer the shares for around $30 it seems like a no brainer to get in on that.

<comment><USER8> FB is currently valued at 1/2 of what Google is valued at. Your call.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I hate to be "that guy" but view source on the page for lulz.

</comment><comment><USER10> The kind of video I'd send to my family when they asks why I invested in Facebook :) The domain name made me look thrice, looked like a fake at first ...

</comment><comment><USER11> feels almost religious</comment>


Flash, HTML5 and Open Web Standards - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2015/11/flash-html5-and-open-web-standards.html <comment><USER2> While it is good to see Adobe listening to customers, but I can't help the niggling feeling this is closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.

<comment><USER3> The horse bolted, joined a herd, sired offspring, those offspring grew up, the world stopped riding horses, cars became commonplace, roads and railways went up. Then Adobe saw the stable door was ajar.

<comment><USER4> Wait, flash is stable now?!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think in the normal human language this announcement means that while the new IDE will support Flash compiling, Flash is being switched into maintenance/security fixes only mode.

<comment><USER6> The VM/player has been like that for a couple of years. Their change list[1] has dwindling features, and their roadmap[2] makes it clear there's nothing coming in the future.

[1] [http://www.adobe.com/devnet/articles/flashplayer-air- feature...](http://www.adobe.com/devnet/articles/flashplayer-air-feature- list.html)

[2] [http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplatform/whitepapers/roadma...](http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplatform/whitepapers/roadmap.html)

<comment><USER7> OK, let's see those "dwindling features" of the last couple years

you have:

Workers for Android, Support Android x86, Support for iOS x64, Workers for iOS, Support iOS 9, Mac OS X 64bit

and soon (in beta): Windows 64bit, Support for Android TV

It's simple, every quarter since 2011, Adobe release a planed Flash player and AIR version update.

here the list: [http://www.adobe.com/devnet/articles/flashplayer-air- feature...](http://www.adobe.com/devnet/articles/flashplayer-air-feature- list.html)

and they don't even include everything (for ex: AIR v19 added support for iOS workers)

you can see more details in the release notes: [https://helpx.adobe.com/flash- player/flash-player-releasenot...](https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/flash- player-releasenotes.html)

if you read the v19 release notes [https://helpx.adobe.com/flash- player/release-note/fp_19_air_...](https://helpx.adobe.com/flash- player/release-note/fp_19_air_19_release_notes.html)

just scroll down to the part that list "Released Versions" that's 15 runtimes and 4 SDK.

So "dwindling" you say ? nope, not even close to it, quite the opposite in fact.

<comment><USER6> It is dwindling. Compare it to previous versions. Things like workers took 3 releases to mature. Previous point releases would add a lot more, not just in terms of features, but in terms of language features.

It is in maintenance mode, and new features almost seem like a side project that produces results randomly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Adobe lost the trust of it's community when _Adobe_ killed Flash. THE END.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. But the Flash community needs to learn that hard lesson that any proprietary tech is bad in the long run, Macromedia may have been a different breed but Adobe just wanted to cash in on Flash and ultimately destroyed it.

And by the way thanks Elop /s Macromedia, Nokia, what a track record...

Ironically projects like Haxe will survive all that Fiasco, unfortunately, there was never a push for an Opensource flash authoring tool that could have replaced Adobe's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> >> Adobe will release an HTML5 video player for desktop browsers

Will this be some kind of Adobe AIR wrapper application to play "packaged" HTML5 games, similar to how the desktop SWF player opens swf files? I can't imagine a need for this except for offline content (such as installation intro screens when you pop in a driver CD, or download a standalone kid's game).

<comment><USER11> it's a video player. [http://blogs.adobe.com/primetime/2015/11/adobe- primetimes-co...](http://blogs.adobe.com/primetime/2015/11/adobe-primetimes- commitment-to-html5/)

<comment><USER12> Yeah. Looks like an html5 version of ye olde OSMF combined with a delivery platform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Flash continues to be used in key categories like web gaming and premium video, where new standards have yet to fully mature."

Can anyone elaborate on this? I can maybe understand premium video but games? What does the Flash runtime have that isn't mature yet in Web APIs?

<comment><USER14> Remember games like Farmville? They are all Flash-based. I don't think any of them have or even have plans to move over to HTML5 yet afaik. Flash made game development really easy with it's combination of AS and the wysiwyg interface for tweening and timeline motions. Currently, I don't think theres a definitive equivalent for HTML5 yet.

<comment><USER15> Some of the Facebook game developers may be able to use Unity's WebGL game tools as an alternative to Flash.

<comment><USER16> Except that in 2015, there are still more places where Flash runs than WebGL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just kill effing flash!

<comment><USER18> Here was me hoping that this was them announcing EOL for Flash all together.

<comment><USER19> I was also hoping that maybe at least they might officially take ownership of something like Mozilla's Shumway "Flash in HTML5" runtime and helping existing Flash users migrate away from Flash the plugin.

<comment><USER13> Or OpenFL/haxe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Big move, but it's curious that they're still positioning themselves for all- vector output when, animation-wise, that style looks pretty dated.

<comment><USER21> I don't see cartoons, animes and animated graphs dying anytime soon.

Take a look at some of Adam Phillips work if you want to see some glorious flash animations.

<comment><USER20> They're great! But they're great in spite of Flash's limitations, not because Flash is a great tool for animators. Adam Phillips' built-for-Flash examples are also fairly old.

A bunch of basic tooling present in other animation systems, like virtual cameras, motion blur & particle effects are missing.</comment></comment></comment>


French PM releases the G8 Open Data Charter Action Plan for France - <AUTHOR> http://www.etalab.gouv.fr/article-french-prime-minister-releases-the-g8-open-data-charter-action-plan-for-france-121016042.html

<comment><AUTHOR> At the last G8 Summit in Lough Erne, Northern Ireland this past June, the Chiefs of State had agreed on an Open Data Charter committing their respective governments to make efforts to bring more open data online in machine-readable formats.

Today France releases its action plan for the implementation of the Charter, and specifically commits to releasing more governement datasets and APIs for hackers and startups to experiment with.

Specifically, we're committing to:

\- progressing towards publishing data openly by default,

\- building an open platform to encourage innovation and transparency,

\- developing Open Data policy in consultation with citizensand civil society,

\- supporting open innovation in France and throughout the world.

I'd be very interested in HN's feedback on how useful this can be for you, and what else you'd like to know about our Open Data policy and how we're trying to improve it!

<comment><USER2> Could you point to the source of the "hackers and startups" quote? Didn't find it in the main article. (Edit: sorry if this is on a tangent) (Edit 2: well, I didn't think it was a downvote-worthy tangent, considering the word's connotations debate and this being an official govt url)

<comment><AUTHOR> Our objective to support "hackers" and the startup ecosystem is mentioned under Commitment #4 (supporting open innovation in France and throughout the world).

<comment><USER3> I know that nicknames are here because of anonymity and so on, but can I ask you who are you to say that ?

In the current context, I can hardly see any window for introducing disruptive innovation (I mean it, there is room for that) in France. Those who wants don't have money (mayors, univs, scientists), and those who have don't want it cause of so many reasons (employment would be the first).

Stays the middle-size societies, where the entry ticket is damn so high and who are busy too think about the next tax that will be created/canceled/rebranded/transformed/increased/wasted.

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course! My name is Romain Lacombe and I'm the head of innovation for the French Prime Minister's taskforce Etalab (data.gouv.fr) for Open Government Data, which was created in 2011 by the former government and was reinstated by the current one.

Whether or not there is room for disruptive innovation for France, only the future will tell -- and those who build it. :)

All I can say is that we're hard at work to make the most of the transformative power of open data and direct collaboration with hackers and startups, and this plan is a significant commitment from our government which I wanted to share with the HN community for constructive feedback.

(PS for what it's worth: I'm an entrepreneur myself, launched a venture-backed startup in the Valley in 2008-2010 myself which was later acquired.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's pure bs: www.data.gouv.fr is full of XLS and DOC documents. No raw data, only aggregated statistics. Useless.

Documents and data are not the same...

I'm french, and NOT proud of it

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Weddpros -- thanks for the feedback. As it turns out, we agree with you. That's why we've been working on a complete overhaul of [http://data.gouv.fr](http://data.gouv.fr) to be soft-launched soon, and we think you'll like it!

If you've followed [http://etalab.gouv.fr](http://etalab.gouv.fr) (mostly in French, sorry), you may have heard we launched an open and collaborative re- design process in the spring and summer, which lead to more than 60 substantial contributions and 9 events organized by our community of users throughout France.

We then brought in a team of hackers to work inside of government -- believe it or not, this is most likely the first instance of this in the French government; unsurprisingly it worked very well -- and redevelop the whole stack based off of CKAN.

Our code is live on [http://www.github.com/etalab](http://www.github.com/etalab) if you'd like to check it out. Stay tuned!

<comment><USER4> is there a hidden meaning ?

[http://imgur.com/34ui71g](http://imgur.com/34ui71g)

<comment><USER4> It was a temporary bug, your github is back online.

Building on the OpenSource CKAN project is a good thing. Similarly, you should thrive to help people build on OpenData.

What really concerns me is the actual data that's made available, more than the technology used to serve it.

For the time being, it looks more like electronic document management than OpenData to me. The philosophy behind OpenData is not just "let's put office documents online", it should be more "let's see what they'll do with our data". Otherwise, where's the innovation? (except for the ideology)

<comment><AUTHOR> Completely agree with the "let's see what they'll do with our data" philosophy!

The three stated objectives of France's open data policy are: 1\. to make government more transparent and accountable, 2\. to improve public policies and public service delivery, and 3\. to enable entrepreneurs and civic innovators to develop create new services based on this data.

That's why we've brought together more than 30 key players in the French innovation ecosystem (VCs, angels, research institutions but also media, larger French corporations, Google, Microsoft etc.) and organized a series data-driven startup contests called DataConnexions.

You can check the best projects from the first 3 editions (from early 2012 onwards): [http://www.etalab.gouv.fr/recherche/?query=dataconnexions](http://www.etalab.gouv.fr/recherche/?query=dataconnexions)

My personal favorite is an app developed jointly with the Greater Paris transport authority that uses context-based modeling to predict train occupancy levels at each time of the day, in real-time, taking into account any perturbation on the network and live feedback from users: [http://tranquilien.com](http://tranquilien.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Link to the license under which the data will / is being released. Pretty ok!

[http://ddata.over- blog.com/xxxyyy/4/37/99/26/licence/Licence...](http://ddata.over- blog.com/xxxyyy/4/37/99/26/licence/Licence-Ouverte-Open-Licence-ENG.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

We developed the "Open Licence" in consultation with citizens, the Open Government Data community in France (Wikimedia Foundation, Regards Citoyens, etc.), and governments worldwide (the Transparency Team at the Cabinet office in London) during a series of more than 50 workshops and meetings in 2011.

Glad you like it. Feel free to send feedback and/or <3 to my team mate Alexandre Quintard (@AlexandreQK) of Etalab (data.gouv.fr).

<comment><USER5> Using it on the recent public feed of data from JCDecaux on the latest iteration of my project [1], hope I am referencing the license accordingly! On the source I am referencing the link to the JCDecaux website, but could to etalab easily :)

[1]: [http://staging.citybik.es/networks/velib](http://staging.citybik.es/networks/velib)

EDIT: Forgot to add, I should also release my data under a license and have contemplated using the "Open Licence", but I am not yet sure on what will suit best.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's a nice ethos to adopt as a government, but he can't ignore the crippling taxes his government have instated since taking up office. I feel very sorry for business owners in France at the moment.

<comment><USER7> Open data and open source encourage the commons and sharing. Taxes goal is to have everyone contribute to common good. I see more of an alignment than a contradiction. Remember that taxes are poured back in public transportation, hospitals, social security, etc. (Not measured by PIB). Also remember that what you read about in the media is biased by those that are unhappy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's great, but with tax rates of 75-100% for the rich I have a hard time believing they'll attract a lot of serious entrepreneurs.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure there's a lot of entrepreneurs starting with an income greater than a million € though!

<comment><USER8> Nobody starts a company for the initial salary.</comment></comment></comment>


Viceroy Query, A query language developed for Viceroy ORM - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Battlefy/Viceroy-Query

<comment><AUTHOR> Viceroy ORM is as of yet unreleased, but here is our query language and implementation to use as you wish.</comment>


Dissolving patterns - <AUTHOR> http://robey.lag.net/2011/04/30/dissolving-patterns.html <comment><USER2> So what other (GoF) patterns can be 'dissolved' with first class and anonymous functions?

The following come to mind immediately:

\- observer (a.k.a. listener/delegate) \- visitor \- command

What else?

<comment><USER3> See Peter Norvig's Design Patterns in Dynamic Languages: <http://norvig.com/design-patterns/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think he wants javascript :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Shhh! Nobody say the M-word!</comment>


Cold spell comes to Germany following heat wave - <AUTHOR> https://www.thelocal.de/20190705/germany-sets-record-low-july-temperature <comment><AUTHOR> > Rotenburg (Wümme) in Lower Saxony recorded a record low July temperature of > 2.9C on early Thursday morning, according to Wetter.com, breaking a station > record which had stood since 1946.

The record low came only four days after Germany logged a record high June temperature of of 39.6C in Bernburg an der Saale in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday.</comment>


Ask HN: Are YC events open to every startup? - <AUTHOR>

We are EU startup that will apply for (YC S12), but if we are not selected can we still participate in some YC event during the 3 months cycle? We would love too! <comment> jan-hocevar We would love to meet people that helps startups with their feedback!</comment>


Ask HN: can you get arrested for just attempting to "hack" a website  - <AUTHOR>

So basically, I got caught injecting stuff in my school's website and got caught by their logs and they want to take me to court (In Canada). Are they allowed to do that  ? I didn't manage to grab any info or data at all and my Intentions was to test their webserver for vulnerabilities. Thanks. <comment><USER2> Obviously, I'm not a legal expert - talk to a lawyer.

However, I believe they do. As you said, you were "injecting stuff," which is malicious activity.They don't know that you didn't have a malicious intent, and unfortunately you have now way of proving that. In general, you should get "approval" for penetration testing from the website's owner.

For example, I'm close friends with the Systems Administrator at my school, so whenever I feel that there's a vulnerability in the network, I just tell him and he either allows me to show him, he tells me that I'm wrong and explains the precautions they take against that attack, or he tells me that it would work, but not to do it.</comment>


Jacob Appelbaum's response to accusations by the Tor community - <AUTHOR> http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1soorlp <comment><USER2> So far, the only thing I'm fairly sure of is the "jacobappelbaum.net" and "@DieJakeDie" social media efforts are doing more harm than good, and were a horrible idea.

They might make a not-extremely-guilty person look worse than he is, or make a horrible person somehow sympathetic to people who think he's "also a victim", but they don't help.

<comment><USER3> OK, what would you do, then?

If the people he's exploited stay silent, then he can keep doing it!

Going through the legal system isn't much help in a community which is distrustful of it.

Complaining to the person in question, well, they've tried that, and it did nothing.

And if they don't group their stories together, then it's harder for people to find the accusations against him. There is strength, and more importantly in this case, credibility, in numbers.

<comment><USER4> > And if they don't group their stories together, then it looks like there's > few accusations against him.

As long as the accusations on that site are made anonymously, it doesn't look like there are any concrete accusations against him.

<comment><USER5> I'd be surprised if acquaintances of Appelbaum can't piece together who are making these accusations. That's the point too, they probably want to warn people without outing to the world exactly who suffered what.

But that also means there's enough info that the same people could easily speak up in Appelbaum's defense if the allegations are untrue - since they're a lot about stuff he's done in public. They haven't so far.

<comment><USER4> Without specifics, there's not enough information in the allegations to attempt to speak up in defense - if you didn't personally witness one of these alleged assaults, you would be loath to say they didn't happen on a different occasion. Perhaps Appelbaum is careful in choosing victims, perhaps the assaults never happened. You just don't know, so you say nothing.

Putting specific details to the allegations on the other hand would make that quite possible - a lack of defense in that case would be an indication that the accusations were true. But without specifics that's not the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Former Tor Project Executive Director Andrew Lewman's perspective might be interesting on this topic, but the DailyDot story was the only one for which I've seen him quoted ([https://www.dailydot.com/politics/jacob-appelbaum-tor- projec...](https://www.dailydot.com/politics/jacob-appelbaum-tor-project- sexual-misconduct/)).

Notably, Lewman volunteers at Transition House ([http://boston.cbslocal.com/2014/10/01/technology-used-as- wea...](http://boston.cbslocal.com/2014/10/01/technology-used-as-weapon-in- domestic-abuse-cases/)), founded IPVTech (Intimate Partner Violence tech), and appears to work/volunteer with other organizations associated with victims of domestic and/or sexual abuse ([http://wiki.lewman.is/CV#work-with-trauma- victims-including-...](http://wiki.lewman.is/CV#work-with-trauma-victims- including-victims-of-domestic-abuseintimate-partner-violence)).

Perhaps Lewman was unaware (this seems unlikely given the DailyDot article's reporting of "mishandling" or "botching" the situation), but it would surprise me if someone with that orientation turned a blind eye to the alleged behavior.

</comment><comment><USER7> In cases like these, most people (like me) who read these exchanges have no idea what is true and what is not. Either there is rape or not. If not, there is libel and slander. In any case Internet publicity is not correct place to get justice.

<comment><USER8> There is a pretty clear common theme displayed on the Twitter accounts of people that are in this community and know each other personally. These are also not outsiders but trusted members of the community. So far the response is either silence or acknowledgement of the accusations. This is not a trail but it looks like the attempt to remove a toxic person from this community to prevent harm to others. This does not mean that he is guilty of the accusations but a lot of persons related to CCC congress, hackers, Tor members univocally agree that it's a good idea to have him step down and exclude him. There seems to be enough personal backstories that everyone seem to agree it's the right thing to do.

At least that's my impression from the outside. This is not some kind of government orchestrated smear campaign, rather an effort to prevent harm.

<comment><USER7> >At least that's my impression from the outside.

It has no value. We who are outsiders in the drama can't contribute and our impressions can be false. Some of use are just drawn into the drama and can't avoid taking sides.

Creating impressions is how internet drama works.

<comment><USER9> If outsiders can't contribute, why are you commenting on it (twice!) here?

<comment><USER10> Fine, contributing in the form of saying "we can't contribute here" is the one way in which we can contribute. Happy? That seems pretty obvious, no need to call people out for supposed double standards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In cases like this where it is word against word, I think it is important as an outsider to hedge your bet. Act as if the allegations are true and false at the same time.

Assuming they are true: make sure to create a safe space (virtually, in real live, and in discourse) for potential victims. Don't put the accused person on sensitive community functions. Take (this and further) accusations very seriously. If someone doesn't want to deal with him, don't push the matter and don't ask why. You want to avoid retraumatization of potential victims, and you want to create a climate where affected people can feel safe. You should give people raising these accusations the benefit of doubt, and resist the urge to dig for proof or to argue about what actually happened or not. Especially given how hard it is for victims to get recognition and justice by going through the "official" channels, i.e. court. (This is basically the idea that is discussed as "power of definition" among feminists in Germany; I'm not sure how it's referred to in other countries, a quick search didn't come up with much.)

Assuming they are false: It's rarer than most people think that accusations of sexual abuse are falsely raised, but it is still a possibility. Especially given that he is a exposed public figure and possible target for "character assassination". Any scenario could be possible, from personal revenge to a smear campaign by an intelligence agency. One should protect oneself from this possibility, whether it is real or not. Don't exclude him from your communities. Don't stop using his software, don't judge or punish him. Don't give him the punishment of shunning.

Basically you have to do an impossible balancing act. You don't want to perpetuate this patriarchal shit that lets men often get away with sexualized violence. But you also don't want whoever might be _abusing_ this claim (agencies, personal enemies, ...) to win. So the only sane course is to be all about protection of victims, providing a safe space etc., but not punishing anybody.

<comment><USER12> > _Any scenario could be possible, from personal revenge to a smear campaign > by an intelligence agency._

It's also worth being aware of the possibility that Jacob Appelbaum is _himself_ an agent of an intelligence agency (either a plant, or someone turned informant once they realized they could blackmail him and that a creep is a useful informant), and his behavior is a way to maintain his power and in turn the intelligence agency's.

Argument 1: [https://inciteblog.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/why- misogynists-...](https://inciteblog.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/why-misogynists- make-great-informants-how-gender-violence-on-the-left-enables-state-violence- in-radical-movements/)

Argument 2: [https://medium.com/@nickf4rr/hi-im-nick-farr- nickf4rr-35c32f...](https://medium.com/@nickf4rr/hi-im-nick-farr- nickf4rr-35c32f13da4d)

 _" But really, I thought, why would Jake be so defensive about some random [lightning talk] that might have otherwise gone completely unnoticed? If I were a government operative hell-bent on destroying the global hacker community, what would I do differently from what Jake is doing now?"_

I don't think this is particularly likely over the simpler explanation that he's a non-government-affiliated creep, but if we're going to give credence to "A government agency that hates Tor was behind this," it's worth looking at all the possible ways a government agency might get an advantage out of the situation.

<comment><USER13> While conspiracy theory is a risky proposition, in this case the agencies involved _are_ known for such things. COINTELPRO, prism etc, so it's no entirely implausible to raise such concerns.

<comment><USER14> First: no, this is not plausible.

Second, a question: exactly what is it that people think Jacob Appelbaum did to make him Public Enemy #1 of any government? He's not an especially important Tor contributor. Tor is not only funded by the US Government, but it began as a project at the Naval Research Lab.

He's a spokesperson for Wikileaks, and Wikileaks has gotten itself engaged in serious legal issues with the US Government, but he's far from the only person who's done that, and it's not at all clear why anyone should believe he's ever had an important operational role with WL (as opposed to being an advocate).

Why would Appelbaum be singled out for "black ops" like this while Glenn Greenwald is spared? Greenwald had an operational role in leaking intelligence secrets from the US Government; not only that, but he's still sitting on a large cache of documents and gradually leaking them out.

A Wired article today suggested that Appelbaum had "close to rock-star status" in the hacker community. Which community would that be? His reputation in the _security_ hacker is minimal; he's known primarily for being known.

What's so important about Appelbaum that he'd be a state-level target? For _any_ government?

<comment><USER12> I think you've conflated the conspiracy that I'm suggesting with the conspiracy suggested by the comment above me. To be clear, I don't think either of these conspiracies are plausible: the simplest theory that fits the evidence is "He's a creep". But I'm suggesting a very different conspiracy from one Appelbaum is insinuating: not that the government has beleaguered him with false accusations, but that the accusations are true, and that the fact that they are true is somehow related to him working for the government.

It's clear that his force of personality -- his "rock-star status", his "known for being known", etc. -- was able to censor talks at 30C3 (if Nick Farr's story is true, which I think it is). Is it so unlikely that this is the only time he did something like that? There are other reports of him passing off research as his own when it was actually by other people, and people being advised to let it go and not draw his ire. He's able to silence people in the security community, which is very powerful.

It's implausible that he _himself_ is an enemy for his own work, but that's not what a mole or informant is for. It's somewhat more plausible (though, again, I think still unlikely) that he was a long-time informant, and his goal was to provide coercion about specific things being done in the security community and to silence specific voices.

<comment><USER15> > There are other reports of him passing off research as his own when it was > actually by other people, and people being advised to let it go and not draw > his ire.

Where are those reports though?

<comment><USER12> There's this one:

[https://twitter.com/quinnnorton/status/739672273783652353](https://twitter.com/quinnnorton/status/739672273783652353)

[https://twitter.com/quinnnorton/status/739672512720576513](https://twitter.com/quinnnorton/status/739672512720576513)

I recall seeing a few other claims along these lines on Twitter, but Twitter's ability to search your own timeline is atrocious.

<comment><USER14> There is perhaps no journalist on the entire Internet less trustworthy.

<comment><USER16> Why? What's your beef with Norton?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Previously:

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11831629](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11831629)

2\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11837901](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11837901)

<comment><USER17> 3\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11842301](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11842301)

with this [0] notable comment "Now that Nick has written his story however, it goes back on the front page of HN and the comments here basically support it as totally credible. ... Don't get me wrong, I very very much think that Nick should write up his story and feelings. But I think a lot of people need to examine themselves closely for why they couldn't believe the women who shared their stories yesterday, but now can today."

Jake doesn't mention Nick Farr's accusation. I've been missing Nick the last years at C3 too. Now I know Nick's side of the story, I wonder how the CCC Vorstand [1] and Jake react to censoring the Lightning Talk?

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11842977](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11842977)

[1] [http://www.ccc.de/vorstand](http://www.ccc.de/vorstand)

<comment><USER4> > "But I think a lot of people need to examine themselves closely for why they > couldn't believe the women who shared their stories yesterday, but now can > today."

I think this shows how putting your reputation on the line when you accuse someone makes the accusation itself far more powerful and likely to believed; remember that no-one has yet publicly and non-anonymously(1) accused him of rape directly, but rather, have only said that others have accused him.

I hope that if these allegations are true, people in addition to Nick Farr will have the bravery to go public with them - that's what's needed to actually put a stop to abusers.

1) In this context, "non-anonymously" includes commonly used pseudonyms of course - the legal names of people aren't what's important, but rather the identities they commonly use.

<comment><USER18> > I think this shows how putting your reputation on the line when you accuse > someone makes the accusation itself far more powerful and likely to believed

I agree, but that has to be balanced with the costs, and especially the costs to rape victims.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What is strange:

First, both the accusers and the accused should have their day in court. It should not be debated any other way.

That being said the TOR project had an obligation to be transparent about this situation and failed to do so..

Some of us do in fact run open source projects and should we abide by TOR's example when we are confronted with the situation of accusations of illegal acts by a project contributor?

<comment><USER20> Courts aren't about truth finding, they're about establishing whether there's enough evidence that a specific crime was committed. Something like Nick Farr's story[1] is, if true, not against the law, but it does display behaviour that can be really detrimental to a community.

1: [https://medium.com/@nickf4rr/hi-im-nick-farr- nickf4rr-35c32f...](https://medium.com/@nickf4rr/hi-im-nick-farr- nickf4rr-35c32f13da4d)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> jacobappelbaum.net is hosted on github at:

[https://github.com/cephurs/jacobappelbaum.net](https://github.com/cephurs/jacobappelbaum.net)

Cephurs was an op in a channel run by the law enforcement folks who took down LulzSec:

[http://www.xeroflux.net/uploads/Operation_Anon_Rat.pdf](http://www.xeroflux.net/uploads/Operation_Anon_Rat.pdf)

Kinda suspicious.

<comment><USER22> Totally can't be law enforcement, they forked the repo "FuckNSA".

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Quite frankly, why is this on Hacker News?

Maybe Jacob Appelbaum raped someone, maybe he didn't. That's not anyone's business except Appelbaum's, his accusers', and the legal system's. It _certainly_ is not a public concern, and it's irrelevant to Tor.

<comment><USER20> I found it interesting to read. Appelbaum is relatively well-known in tech circles, and I use HN to keep me updated on "what goes on in tech circles" \-- whether that's gossip or new technological developments.

<comment><USER23> "I found it interesting to read" is not a particularly good reason to drag someone's name through the mud for crimes he hasn't been convicted of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Jacob was an asset to the community. I really want to believe him (hopefully time will tell)

<comment><USER25> If he was plagiarizing original research and raping other community members, he was most certainly _not_ an asset to the community.

<comment><USER26> He was an invaluable and founding member of the TOR community. I have deeply seated suspicions that something fishy is going on.

<comment><USER25> I'm curious how he was 'invaluable' if the accusations of plagiarism are true. Other people are responsible for his contributions, in that case.

The technically incompetent but socially competent taking credit away from where it is due ought to be a well understood phenomenon here at HN. Why give him a pass if this is the case as well?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't know who to believe anymore.

</comment><comment><USER28> jacobappelbaum.net is a fake:

[https://twitter.com/ValbonneConsult/status/74046605073149952...](https://twitter.com/ValbonneConsult/status/740466050731499520)

[https://twitter.com/ValbonneConsult/status/74046629719723212...](https://twitter.com/ValbonneConsult/status/740466297197232128)

Also whatever he might have done will now be drowned out by these false accusations. Mob mentality is as bad as whatever he might have done.

<comment><USER29> aren't you easily persuaded…

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Personally I don't even think these stories should be on HN... nothing good can come from them because all anyone can offer is pure speculation.

Now, in the interest of speculation, I have some conspiracy theories to suggest. Normally I wouldn't post conspiracy theories, but I think conspiracies have _way_ more validity when you're talking about the security community.

So, check out these links:

\- [https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig- manipulation/](https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/)

\- [https://theintercept.com/document/2014/02/24/art- deception-t...](https://theintercept.com/document/2014/02/24/art-deception- training-new-generation-online-covert-operations/)

Then consider these conspiracy theories:

1) Jacob Appelbaum works for an intelligence service and was compromised, and this is their way of pulling him from the field

2) Jacob Appelbaum works for an intelligence service and was compromised, and this is _a rival intelligence service 's_ way of pulling him from the field

3) Jacob Appelbaum does _not_ work for an intelligence service, but rather is the victim of a smearing campaign by an intelligence service

My personal opinion is that the guy is an asshole, his (ex-)friends are fed up with him, and they severely overstepped their bounds in attacking him. The line about "what you have to do with a sociopath" (paraphrasing) was particularly alarming for me; that was a clear signal of desire for vindication.

</comment><comment><USER13> > It's rarer than most people think that accusations of sexual abuse are > falsely raised

How do you determine this?

<comment><USER31> According to this essay, about 3% of men will get falsely accused of rape in their lifetime: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/17/lies-damned-lies-and- so...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/17/lies-damned-lies-and-social-media- part-5-of-∞/)

The real number is impossible to determine, but is uncomfortably high.

<comment><USER32> May I argue that it is uncomfortably low? The estimated percentage of women that are the victims of sexual assault is an order of magnitude higher.

(See for instance [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_assault_in_the_United_S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_assault_in_the_United_States_military#Recent_statistics))

> _23 percent of women and 4 percent of men reported experiencing unwanted > sexual contact_

Even worse, 3% of false positives is a twenty-eighth of the percentage of unreported rapes: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics#United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics#United_States)

> _Only 16% of rapes and sexual assaults are reported to the police_

<comment><USER23> >> According to this essay, about 3% of men will get falsely accused of rape in their lifetime: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/17/lies-damned-lies-and- so...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/17/lies-damned-lies-and-so..).

>> The real number is impossible to determine, but is uncomfortably high.

> May I argue that it is uncomfortably low? The estimated percentage of women > that are the victims of sexual assault is an order of magnitude higher.

If I'm reading you correctly, you seem to think the solution to the problem of rape is to falsely report _more_ men?

How does arresting non-rapists for rape prevent rapists from raping?

<comment><USER33> I don't think you're reading the comment correctly. The comment is not proposing that falsely accusing more people will solve any problems.

EDIT: gender agnostic phrasing

<comment><USER23> Can you propose an alternate meaning to the part I quoted that makes any sense?

<comment><USER32> "The problem is not the number of false reports of rape. The problem is the number of true non-reported rapes."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Why did this post disappear from the front page? Can't find it on the first 20 or so pages listed neither.

<comment><USER35> It was flagged by users and set off some software penalties.

I'm not convinced that this story belongs on Hacker News. The mandate of the site is "stories that gratify intellectual curiosity", and it seems pretty clear that both the curiosity and gratification here are more voyeuristic than intellectual. Arguably the appropriate scope for the story would be the smaller online community of people who are personally and professionally affected by it.

On the other hand, the HN community is clearly interested, Tor is a longstanding topic here, the discussion has been better than it might (edit: though it has now gotten significantly worse), and if we're going to have it at all we shouldn't have only one side of it. So I've turned off flagging on this post and reduced the software penalties.

<comment><USER36> But this doesn't have anything to do with Tor. A story that says "X is no longer working for Tor" would be fine, but this is clearly just dragging out the Paparazzi nature of famous people in a scandal.

<comment><USER37> If you go back to the submission where it was just the "X is no longer working with Y" story, then a good portion of the commenters on that story felt that it wasn't a good story for HN and if there was a real story to share it would be in follow up posts.

I can't imagine what a story on this topic would look like for everyone to agree it belonged on HN.

Maybe that means that none of them do, but I'm not sure that conclusion is right. I think it is best to generally prefer sunlight to silence, even when the sunlight doesn't produce as much value as we'd like to see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> > Not only have I been the target of a fake website in my name that has > falsely accused me of serious crimes, but I have also received death threats > (including a Twitter handle entitled 'TimeToDieJake').

Credit where credit is due - the guy has learned his lesson about how to properly play the part of the social media victim.

</comment><comment><USER12> There's a good analysis of this statement at [https://medium.com/@frabyn/decoding-jake- appelbaum-9fa75d060...](https://medium.com/@frabyn/decoding-jake- appelbaum-9fa75d060310) that decodes the statement and points out what it says and doesn't say.

</comment><comment><USER9> This Medium post summarizes my take on this statement better than I can. TLDR "I can't directly say the allegations are false."

[https://medium.com/@frabyn/decoding-jake- appelbaum-9fa75d060...](https://medium.com/@frabyn/decoding-jake- appelbaum-9fa75d060310#.fxsslnv0k)

<comment><USER39> That dissection is pretty poorly made. First, the author "paraphrases" Applebaum's use of "vicious and spurious":

> I can't directly say the allegations are false.

Then, a few lines below, the author quotes Applebaum as saying:

>> I want to be clear: the accusations of criminal sexual misconduct against me are entirely false.

I'm not taking sides here (it's important that possible abuse is brought to light!) but this lawyer is straining his credibility.

<comment><USER40> If you quote Appelbaum, quote the Bynum's "translation" too:

> Appelbaum: I want to be clear: the accusations of criminal sexual misconduct > against me are entirely false.

> Bynum's translation: I'll never be convicted of a crime.

That is, Bynum claims that Appelbaum never claims "I haven't done it" and instead intentionally uses "criminal" (versus "civil," for example).

[http://litigation.findlaw.com/filing-a-lawsuit/civil- cases-v...](http://litigation.findlaw.com/filing-a-lawsuit/civil-cases-vs- criminal-cases-key-differences.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Seems like the only way to work on privacy projects in the future is to become voluntarily castrated...

<comment><USER42> "Don't rape anybody" is probably an easier way.

<comment><USER41> Given false claims epidemics you have in the US these days my solution seems the only feasible one that can stand up in court. Guess why Linus is never allowing a lone female to be alone with him even for a few seconds?

<comment><USER43> > Given false claims epidemics you have in the US these days

Citation needed.

<comment><USER44> I don't think its an 'epidemic' as the poster exaggerated, but it does happen.

I don't know about the US, but in Canada the Jian Ghomeshi trial is one recent example that comes to mind. Both the Ghomeshi trial and the Canadian trial of Gregory Alan Elliott show that there are indeed types of people out there who lie to bring charges, or increase the weight of charges bought against someone. And it shows they will lie all the way up to and through a court case, until cross examination (or in Elliott's case an insider tip off of conspiracy) unravel the lies.

I don't know what to think in this case but it is not something you can rule out completely.

<comment><USER29> I'm not sure bringing up Gomeshi's case as an example of false accusation is such a very good idea, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I guess I'm just trying to understand why police weren't involved. There a story on the blog he refers to of him taking advantage of a woman when they were completely intoxicated and allegations she was raped by him and his friends.

<comment><USER46> Look how how rape victims are treated by police and the courts.

It's not surprising that people are reluctant to report rape and sexual assault.

Here's one, where the perpetrator was seen by other people assaulting someone who was passed out drunk: [http://www.theguardian.com/us- news/2016/jun/06/stanford-sexu...](http://www.theguardian.com/us- news/2016/jun/06/stanford-sexual-assault-case-victim-impact-statement-in- full?CMP=twt_gu)

He still said the sex was consensual, and his lawyers put that women through hell.

<comment><USER47> I guess you mean they're treated badly?

The legal system in western countries is very biased in favour of rape accusers. Shield laws are a concrete manifestation of that. Often police are told to automatically believe any rape accusation even if their common sense is telling them it's likely to be false. And so on.

Yes, if you make a serious accusation against someone, their defence lawyer is going to ask difficult questions. You're attempting to make _their_ life literally hell, by jailing them for a long time. Being asked a few questions is in no way comparable.

<comment><USER48> >The legal system in western countries is very biased in favour of rape accusers.

This is patently false. Conviction rates for rape are far lower compared to other crimes[1]

>Shield laws are a concrete manifestation of that

Shield laws make it so news reporters cannot be forced to reveal their sources, I don't see what this has to do with rape cases.

>Being asked a few questions is in no way comparable.

Being forced to re-experience a traumatic event by a party determined to discredit you is pretty horrible.

Also, you should look at the case linked. The accused was found assaulting the girl in an alley by third party witnesses, and received six months probation.

[1]Kelly, Lovett and Regan, A gap or a chasm? Attrition in reported rape cases, 2005

<comment><USER47> Conviction rates don't mean much by themselves because anyone can cause conviction rates to rise or fall by adjusting how many complaints are accepted and turned into cases at the police reception desk. The fact that conviction rates are lower than for other crimes just means that people are more likely to report unprosecutable cases: either because the accusations are false, or because there is no evidence.

There are 'rape shield laws' which is what I was referring to:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_shield_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_shield_law)

> Being forced to re-experience a traumatic event by a party determined to > discredit you is pretty horrible.

So what? Being accused of rape is also pretty horrible and being jailed for it is VERY horrible. People who aren't willing to go in front of a judge and jury for these cases are one source of dropouts and the low conviction rate, but they must have known that'd be a part of the process when they made a complaint.

<comment><USER48> > The fact that conviction rates are lower than for other crimes just means > that people are more likely to report unprosecutable cases: either because > the accusations are false, or because there is no evidence.

If there routinely isn't enough evidence to convict an accused rapist, that would imply that the system isn't biased against the accused.

>There are 'rape shield laws' which is what I was referring to:

Sorry, I should have caught that. It appears this term refers to a bunch of different laws pertaining to rape cases in different jurisdictions. The general idea, that the victim's sexual history is not admissible evidence, makes sense to me. Whether or not the victim had multiple sexual partners or was promiscuous is irrelevant to the facts of the case, and serves only to hurt the victim's reputation. In many of these cases all we have to go on is the testimony of the accuser and the accused, so it is easy for these cases to devolve into character assassination. Obviously this has to be done in such a way that it does not infringe on the rights of the accused to mount a defense. Is there some specific provision in these laws you disagree with, or the entire concept?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The socioeconomics of sewage: Analysing waste may assist census takers - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/07/18/analysing-waste-water-may-assist-census-takers <comment><USER2> This is apropos but...

Sewage, or rather, highly accurate analysis of sewage... can yield all sorts of data. Theoretically, you could probably determine the number of contributors with genetic analysis. Consumption levels of drugs and such.

It might even have applications at the personal level. Auto Diagnosing toilets.</comment>