Edward Snowden: The Untold Story - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/08/edward-snowden/ <comment><USER2> I read through all the comments here before beginning to read the article. The comments that say that the usability of the article format is very bad are correct. The online format is too cute by half, and impairs readability. But the article is well worth reading. As Danso points out, the journalist who did the reporting on this article is a renowned independent investigative reporter, James Bamford, who has broken many important stories about NSA in previous years. The writing is worth reading and discussing here, and it's too bad Wired's editors mucked up the reader experience so much with the strange user interface and formatting.

"I confess to feeling some kinship with Snowden. Like him, I was assigned to a National Security Agency unit in Hawaii—in my case, as part of three years of active duty in the Navy during the Vietnam War. Then, as a reservist in law school, I blew the whistle on the NSA when I stumbled across a program that involved illegally eavesdropping on US citizens. I testified about the program in a closed hearing before the Church Committee, the congressional investigation that led to sweeping reforms of US intelligence abuses in the 1970s. Finally, after graduation, I decided to write the first book about the NSA. At several points I was threatened with prosecution under the Espionage Act, the same 1917 law under which Snowden is charged (in my case those threats had no basis and were never carried out). Since then I have written two more books about the NSA, as well as numerous magazine articles (including two previous cover stories about the NSA for WIRED), book reviews, op-eds, and documentaries."

As a substantive comment on the article, let me say that I find it interesting that Snowden himself thinks it is appalling that NSA's internal security auditing is so poor that NSA can't even tell which documents Snowden disclosed to journalists, nor can it tell how many other leakers may still be on its staff. This seems to be a completely plausible claim, and that would be a reason why many American voters or leaders of countries allied to the United States might desire the current leadership of NSA to resign and be replaced with more competent leaders.

<comment><USER3> NSA started to move towards "two-man rule" system where system administrators work in pairs when accessing servers with highly classified information only after Snowden leaks. When you know that Russia and China have good track record of long running human intelligence operations in the US, this looks like really gigantic security lapse.

They are not stupid and they must have been discussing it. There must have been strategic decision where they prioritized the expansion of intelligence collection over internal security (effectively cutting the work that skilled people with security clearances can do to almost half must be real cost and resource bottleneck).

If I had to guess the situation, I would say that for every whistle blower there is two spies who spy for Russia or China and they have collected all documents they can. Russians&Chinese spying US spying the world. The cost of setting up good HUMINT must be fraction of the cost of the NSA infrastructure.

<comment><USER4> _> I would say that for every whistle blower there is two spies who spy for Russia or China_

That's an exaggeration, IMHO. This is not the Cold War, where many actors were moved by ideological considerations that crossed national borders (like the Cambridge Five, for example). Nowadays, national and cultural lines are extremely well drawn, so motivations for "traitors" boil down to money and/or blackmail, which are usually easier to defend against at the top level.

<comment><USER3> I think records speak against your IMHO.

1\. Ideology has not been the major modus operandi in long time (since 50's). Nowadays idealogical reasons are replaced by cultural and ethnic loyalties. Wast majority of people who spied for China have had Chinese heritage. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_intelligence_operation...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_intelligence_operations_in_the_United_States)

2\. Money and personal problems/reasons seems to be major reason for spying against US and for Soviet Union/Russia during and after cold war (Hanssen, Ames) According to American counterintelligence Russian espionage reached Cold War levels already in in 2007.

<comment><USER5> >Wast majority of people who spied for China have had Chinese heritage.

Though I also believe this to be true, what we know for sure are that most of the people CAUGHT spying for China had Chinese heritage.

<comment><USER6> Exactly, its easy to spot a Chinese spy when you investigate your Chinese workers.

The notion that a spy is only someone loyal to a country is just quite frankly, silly.

<comment><USER7> No one says that spies are always loyal to a country. It's not surprising that made-up positions are silly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Two key 'new' things from this article, that were previously unknown:

1\. The NSA exploited the firmware of a Syrian core internet router, and bricked it by mistake. This was an "oh shit" moment (sic). So in it's eagerness to scoop up all digital communications, it killed the majormost way for citizens to communicate while in the midst of a civil war. Great.

2\. There is a project called "MonsterMind", which 100% automates adversarial hacking in retaliation to detected attacks. Very Strangelove-ian, as the article says.

EDIT: Typo, thanks to not having had coffee in time.

<comment><USER9> It is in revealing things like this that make me question Snowden. While both points are interesting and maybe a little troubling, they are certainly not whistleblowing in the name of protecting the rights of American citizens. He has moved from simply exposing the breadth of the domestic spying apparatus to exposing the tactics the United States uses in legitimate espionage operations. Isn't trying to compromise the communication network of a country like Syria the exact thing the NSA is supposed to be doing? And what positive value comes from Snowden releasing something like that?

<comment><USER10> > Isn't trying to compromise the communication network of a country like Syria > the exact thing the NSA is supposed to be doing?

What is wrong with you; what the hell do you have against Syria? What if this was France? The UK? Germany?

This was a mistake that happened while "attempting to bug Syria". Knowing the NSA, they bug almost every country out there — so yes, this could have happened to any of the ones I've listed.

Internet is a public service, one as essential as water and electricity. How do you call a country that disrupts another country's public services? In my book, I call it an act of war.

So you tell me, slg, is it the NSA's job to randomly decide to declare war against other countries?

<comment><USER11> Getting intelligence out of a country in the middle of a civil war, in a powderkeg of a region, seems pretty critical to me. We also have spies and malware installed all over the world, and the world is doing its best to spy on and infiltrate us. This is the reality of espionage, intelligence, and counter-intelligence.

<comment><USER10> This school playground logic of "it's ok because they started it" sickens me. OK. I get it; espionage is a reality and only espionage can deal with it. But for god sake there's people in here commenting that Snowden is a traitor because he leaked information that didn't directly concern the american people.

Really, now.

Compare those two situations:

"A group of hackers have targeted Syrian ISPs and, in an attempt to wiretap the nation, have brought down internet services in the entire country" <\- Scum of the earth! How dare they! People have likely died as a result of this; in the midst of a civil war, too!

"The NSA has targeted Syrian ISPs and, in an attempt to wiretap the nation, has brought down internet services in the entire country" <\- Well it's OK because other countries are doing it too. Also, by revealing this, you are an unpatriotic traitor and have endangered the american people."

I call BS. Some people here either lack the most basic critical thinking skills, or are NSA shills.

<comment><USER9> No one is saying that it is ok because they started it. We are saying that we believe international espionage is a requirement for a country like the US and this operation seemed to be a standard and worthwhile one that happened to be a spectacular failure.

You are free to disagree, but I don't think any serious politician in the US would. Revealing something like this doesn't seem to advance Snowden's initial goals and makes it incredibly hard to gain any political support in the US. So my initial question stands, what positive value comes from Snowden releasing something like that?

<comment><USER12> It has positive value if you believe that non-American lives are as valuable as American lives, something a lot of people outside of the U.S. happen to believe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This mentioned the NSA's "Mission Data Repository" in Bluffdale, Utah. They mentioned it could hold 1 yottabyte of data.

Let's put into perspective 1 yottabyte:

All Gmail accounts (~500 million users * 10GB/user = ~5000 PB) + All Facebook photos (~2 billion users * 1GB/user = ~2000 PB) + All of Netflix's videos (1-5 PB) + Library of Congress (10-30 PB) + Wikipedia (0.0005 PB)

= ~7000 PB = 7 Exabytes. = 0.0007% of 1 Yottabyte!!!

1 Yottabyte = 250 billion 4TB hard drives.

A hard drive is about 4" x 1" x 5.75".

The Pentagon is a big building (6,636,360 sqft over 5 floors). If you started stacking hard drives inside the Pentagon it would take about 50 pentagons to hold 250 billion hard drives.

At scale you might be able to make a 4TB hard drive for somewhere between $10 and $100.

1 Yottabyte would be $2.5 trillion - $25 trillion in hard drives. That's a couple USA GDPs.

Okay, I think a yottabyte clearly can't be what they mean because that's just unfathomable.

They also mention a 1 million sqft facility.

In a 1 million sqft you can probably pack about 250 million 3.5" hard drives. If each drive was 4TB you'd end up with 1 million PB, or 1000 EB, or 1 Zettabyte

So by Yottabyte they might (maybe) mean Zettabyte. Only off by a factor of 1,000.

Even still, all of the data of Gmail, Facebook, Netflix, Library of Congress, etc is still probably only ~10% of this data center.

Nuts.

<comment><USER14> I know it seems crazy but they might have a storage technique that is unknown to the public.

<comment><USER15> That seems unlikely, considering that there is a massive incentive for private firms with tons of money to attempt to create such a storage technique. I doubt any government could beat them to the punch while keeping it a secret.

<comment><USER16> Especially given the NSA borrows an awful lot of its software inspiration from the private sector (eg Google's BigTable). There's little reason to think their hardware efforts would be dramatically more advanced if their software effort isn't.

What the NSA has are three things: a lot of money coming in every year; a lot of relatively intelligent and highly skilled people working for it; and a license to do terrible things and get away with it (ie they can take incredible risks, and try outrageous things, with minimum concern, and or certainly previously could).

The NSA has a budget roughly the size of Microsoft's annual R&D budget, without needing an $80 billion highly profitable business to be maintained. It's amazing what you can do and or attempt with a 'free' $10 or $12 billion per year to burn.

<comment><USER17> > What the NSA has are three things: a lot of relatively intelligent and > highly skilled people working for it;

Do they though? I have sometimes wondered about this. In order to work for the NSA you have to make a lot of sacrifices. You have to be a US citizen. You have to pass a background check. You have to be contend with a government salary. You may never talk about your job (how does that look on a resume if you ever want to apply somewhere else? Prior experience: classified). You have to work in one of the few locations they operate in. You have to be a pretty hardcore patriot to put up with the things the NSA is doing and still be able to sleep at night.

In summary: it seems that the pool of potential employees should be severely limited. Hence my guess would be that the top talent ends up in the private sector instead of the NSA.

Or, just read the NSA quote from the movie Good Will Hunting again: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119217/quotes?item=qt0408102](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119217/quotes?item=qt0408102)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO—a division of NSA > hackers—had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the > core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the > midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to > email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something > went wrong, and the router was bricked instead—rendered totally inoperable. > The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to > the Internet—although the public didn't know that the US government was > responsible. (This is the first time the claim has been revealed.)

<comment><USER19> It's very interesting that TAO attempted to remotely compromise a core router. What happened to diverting Cisco boxes to an "undisclosed location" for installing implants?

<comment><USER20> It's illegal for US corporations to do deals directly with several governments. Syria most likely bought the gear used through gray/black market channels.

<comment><USER21> Where can I get me one of those sweet sweet black market routers?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "Programs like this had existed for decades, but MonsterMind software would add a unique new capability: Instead of simply detecting and killing the malware at the point of entry, MonsterMind would automatically fire back, with no human involvement. That's a problem, Snowden says, because the initial attacks are often routed through computers in innocent third countries. "These attacks can be spoofed," he says. "You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?""

This piece is pretty interesting.

<comment><USER23> It's fucking crazy. It means that the US could instigate either a "cyber-war" or a real war between two separate nations with no one being the wiser.

Truly terrifying, and probably the largest revelation in the article. This is was the major news outlets should be covering, right now.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, I'm surprised this didn't lead in the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What the hell. I start scrolling with my mouse wheel, but nothing moves. I'm thinking my mouse must be broken, until 30 seconds later, I notice the "cover image" fade in and out. I swear, crappy flash intros are alive and well. They just don't use flash anymore.

<comment><USER25> I think they might have been attempting to simulate a magazine-like experience, where the pictures that required more scrolling than normal were supposed to be like turning the page to a full page image. I feel like I've seen this attempted before but with flashing down arrows to tell you that you need to keep scrolling. Based on the reactions here, I don't think it was successful, but I do appreciate efforts to enhance the reading experience.

<comment><USER26> > but I do appreciate efforts to enhance the reading experience.

I don't. I just want the words. Ideally I want the words to be in a nice font and nice contrast and well laid out. In a perfect world there would be some diagrams and illustrations to support the text.

<comment><USER27> > _I don 't. I just want the words._

Me too. But I don't know what else to do other than reading longer articles through Pocket/Instapaper and sending everyone I know [0] as a reminder every once in a while.

[0] - [http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've made a reformatted copy for easier reading:

[https://github.com/pflanze/wired-snowden-untold- story/blob/m...](https://github.com/pflanze/wired-snowden-untold- story/blob/master/untold-story.md)

(Plain text version in the history, at [https://github.com/pflanze/wired- snowden-untold-story/blob/c...](https://github.com/pflanze/wired-snowden- untold-story/blob/c25c669f9c4b6cc57c117500dfe77c1f555c2307/untold-story.txt))

<comment><USER29> I find that harder to read. It's just one long wall of text.

<comment><USER28> The reason I did it was that (even with JavaScript off, as I always try to do) the layout made it hard to know how far in the text I was, and jumping back and forth was accordingly painful. Also, the huge pictures and "emotional" style of the layout distracted me.

The drawback of the Github formatting is that the lines are a bit too long, and narrowing the window size doesn't fix that (there's something in the layout that forces a certain width). I could have put the page on my own server, but I thought it's nicer for people to have direct access to the Github features in case somebody wants to edit or annotate it, also "integrating" it into my own website may violate copyrights, whereas this might not (IANAL).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> _> Indeed, some of his fellow travelers have already committed some egregious mistakes. Last year, Greenwald found himself unable to open the encryption on a large trove of secrets from GCHQ—the British counterpart of the NSA—that Snowden had passed to him. So he sent his longtime partner, David Miranda, from their home in Rio to Berlin to get another set from Poitras. But in making the arrangements, The Guardian booked a transfer through London. Tipped off, probably as a result of GCHQ surveillance, British authorities detained Miranda as soon as he arrived and questioned him for nine hours. In addition, an external hard drive containing 60 gigabits of data—about 58,000 pages of documents—was seized. Although the documents had been encrypted using a sophisticated program known as True Crypt, the British authorities discovered a paper of Miranda's with the password for one of the files, and they were able to decrypt about 75 pages. (Greenwald has still not gained access to the complete GCHQ documents.)_

FYI, Glenn Greenwald is denying that any of the claims in this paragraph are true, and says that Wired never even contacted him or Miranda about the article:

[https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499570835989213184](https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499570835989213184) [https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499570963638669312](https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499570963638669312) [https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499572407284563969](https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499572407284563969) [https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499587347630284800](https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/499587347630284800)

</comment><comment><USER31> Well.. I knew our(US) government downplaying Snowden's credentials was just propaganda(lies)... But wow, were they ever downplaying his credentials. And our media was mostly content to just spread the propaganda with a smile :|

<comment><USER4> As a European, I've always been somewhat aware of a certain degree of internal propaganda going on in US media (things like different magazine covers for international editions were always quite glaring), but since 2001 the situation worsened so much, I do feel for you guys. Lessons from the '00s were not learnt, US newsrooms are full of sycophantic _Judith Millers_ and people like Greenwald are still ostracized. EDIT: not that Europe is much better, eh -- just slightly (or it's just done more subtly over here).

<comment><USER32> > a certain degree of internal propaganda going on in US media

The movie industry is one of the very powerful tools for shaping the public opinion in the US. This obviously includes TV series ("24" is an example for not-so-subtle manipulative material).

<comment><USER33> Are the shows made because they are now more relevant, or are they made to influence? _shrug_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> A division of NSA hackers attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead, which caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet.

So in middle of a war zone, US conducted sabotage to core infrastructure of an other nation, with unknown cost to property or human lives.

It really should be seen as the obvious reason why hacking is not an acceptable tool to use in peacetime against other nations. Its not a defensive weapon, it hurt people, and it done with no responsibility what so ever.

<comment><USER35> > In middle of a war zone

> In peacetime

So which is it? There was (is) a war raging in Syria, the US has interests there -- like it or not -- and the NSA is a US intelligence agency. This story sounds like an example of the NSA just doing its job.

I have no problem with the NSA spying on foreign communications or disrupting them. After all, that's their job. What else would we use the NSA for?

What I do have a problem with is that the NSA makes apparently zero effort to disambiguate between foreign, and domestic, communications.

<comment><USER36> > I have no problem with the NSA spying on foreign communications or > disrupting them. After all, that's their job. What else would we use the NSA > for?

Really? You don't have an issue with a foreign intelligence agency disrupting core infrastructure for a nation in the midst of a civil war? Especially against a nation we are not even at war with?

What if the Chinese (or anyone else) did something similar? Would that not be considered an outright act of war?

We are not at war with Syria, we should not be disrupting _anything_. There could have easily have been numerous deaths directly resulting from that outage.

<comment><USER37> Do you really believe that France, China, and Israel haven't owned up US routers? Should we declare war on them?

<comment><USER38> That is some very weak whataboutery.

If there was a civil war going on in the US and disrupting the internet was likely to lead to loss of life then we might have a comparable situation. That isn't the situation though.

I am making a note of the fact that you view the Chinese government as a good barometer of morality in readiness for the next time you bring up their human rights record.

<comment><USER37> What a strange comment. You appear to believe that you can sum up the human rights characteristics of entire countries by the answer to a single question about routers.

Here's a characteristic of Chinese human rights that isn't captured by that question: it is the official policy of China that the police can convict and sentence its citizens to a year of labor camp ("reeducation through labor") without a trial. I find that characteristic more important in assessing Chinese civil liberties than the fact that they have _obviously owned up a bunch of our routers_.

<comment><USER39> International politics' favorite excuse for everything comes straight from the grade school playground: "He started it!" We ought to do better.

<comment><USER37> If you reread my comment, you'll see I didn't employ that logic at all. I asked a simple question. Should we declare war on France, China, and Israel?

<comment><USER34> If a french governemnt agency put a exploit in a nuclear reactor, and a bug caused a meltdown inside the US, should the US declare war on france?

let me ask your question with an other question: How many lives can a spy agency kill until it is no longer acceptable?

<comment><USER37> What?

<comment><USER34> The job of spies around the world is to infiltrate infrastructure. The intelligence value of knowing how much power is being produce, and the option to turn them off in case of war is of high military value.

So let say the French intelligence service decide to plant one on a nuclear power plan in the US. Sadly however it has a bug which goes off and partial shuts down the reactor. A meltdown happens, killing a few thousands and irradiate the surroundings.

Do you go to war over this? Would you classify it as an attack, a accident, or a act of war?

<comment><USER40> Are you seriously equating the internet going out for a few hours to a nuclear meltdown?

<comment><USER34> During extreme crisis, communication networks are _vital_ in order to minimize casualties.

Lets assume that radio and TV inside Syria informed the public where current fire fights happened, where people should go to seek shelter, and other warnings of dangers to the civilian population. Radio and TV get this information from sources inside government and reporters on the field, some using _The Internet_ to transmit this information.

You cut that communication line and radio and TV do not have current information to broadcast. People dies as a result. A lot of innocent civilians dies. This singular event could have killed more people than horrific event like 9/11 or a meltdown at a power plant.

This is why I ask: How many casualties is a spy agency allowed to inflict until it is no longer acceptable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> If the last straw to leak this information was when Snowden learned about this MonsterMind program, why are we learning about it more than a year later without any prior mention whatsoever? (and without documents to back up the claims) Also, if he learned about it after taking up his job with Booz Allen Hamilton in 2013, why was he contacting Glenn Greenwald in December of 2012?[1] Ditto with the excuse that Clapper's testimony in March 2013 factored into his decision to leak...

I'm honestly curious why so many people are willing to take Snowden's claims at face value. The NSA rightly got a lot of flack for the softball interviews on Dateline a few months back, but it feels like the general consensus is that the softball interviews with Snowden are beyond questioning.

[1] [http://us.macmillan.com/excerpt?isbn=9781627790734](http://us.macmillan.com/excerpt?isbn=9781627790734)

<comment><USER42> It was the "last straw" that broke the camel's back, not necessarily the "heaviest straw" to Snowden, or the one the public most needs/deserves to hear about. Besides, I think I have essentially read about this already (automated cyberdefense with offensive capabilities), minus the codename or apparent connection to the Bluffdale facility.

I can understand the timing suspicions. Frankly, I'm in the camp that tends to trust Snowden, but putting that aside, I think some discrepancies could at least be partially explained by one or more factors:

a) the journalist is putting some words in Snowden's mouth about "last straw" or "the time had come to act";

b) Snowden was still deciding what actions to take (yeah, he emailed Greenwald back then and was almost certainly going to share something, but may have been on the fence about how far to go);

c) Snowden has sort of unconsciously mentally revised the exact timeline -- I think this is not unusual for someone looking back on their "life-changing moments", difficult decisions, months-long transformations etc. Or, the quote about Clapper may have been Snowden using it as a microcosm for everything else that put him down the path he was already on (by contacting Greenwald.) Maybe as it happened he saw it as vindication of the decision he'd already made. Maybe he was going back and forth for months -- although he'd contacted Greenwald and started collecting documents, he had left open the option of turning back, but had his resolve renewed by "the Clapper event."

So yeah, it's fishy, but I don't think there are any smoking guns per se. It's not like they quote Snowden as saying, "After Clapper's false testimony, I contacted Greenwald for the first time" while Greenwald says it happened 6 months before.

Pro-NSA people say it's not a fair debate because the government isn't allowed to talk about the classified details. That applies to Snowden too, because it's difficult for him to communicate his side to the public, being filtered through journalists (who may be juggling his quotes around and mixing up the timeline for the sake of a better story) and not having many opportunities (or eschewing them, to avoid becoming the center of focus.)

I read an interesting and new (to me) statement of intense premeditation in "There was one key area that remained out of his reach: the NSA's aggressive cyberwarfare activity around the world. To get access to that last cache of secrets, Snowden landed a job as an infrastructure analyst with another giant NSA contractor, Booz Allen." So he took a job specifically for the access it would afford him, with the specific intent to steal and leak?

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Here is the article on Readability: [https://www.readability.com/articles/42wfcyub](https://www.readability.com/articles/42wfcyub)

<comment><USER44> Interestingly that link re-directs me to the original article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Just the copy: [https://www.readability.com/articles/42wfcyub](https://www.readability.com/articles/42wfcyub)

</comment><comment><USER46> The TAO killed the internet in Syria not to mention MonsterMind. Just when you thought it was safe to get back on the internet...

</comment><comment><USER47> This question: "Among other things, I want to answer a burning question: What drove Snowden to leak hundreds of thousands of top-secret documents, revelations that have laid bare the vast scope of the government's domestic surveillance programs?" .. hasn't it already been answered by now? Snowden did what he did because he feels the American people have been betrayed by their out of control government. He's said it enough times now for it to be perfectly clear.

Is this just lazy journalism?

</comment><comment><USER48> In that article, Snowden said that "We have the means and we have the technology to end mass surveillance without any legislative action at all, without any policy changes." The answer, he says, is robust encryption.

And that's exactly what I'm doing through JackPair, a low-cost voice encryption device that empower every citizen to protect their privacy over the phone:

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/620001568/jackpair- safe...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/620001568/jackpair-safeguard- your-phone-conversation)

It uses Diffie-Hellman key exchange and stream cipher with keystream from pseudo random number generator seeded from DH. It's similar to one-time key pad with no key management and zero-configuration.

As Snowden mentioned in the article, by adopting end-to-end encryption technologies like this, we can collectively end mass surveillance not just in the United States but around the world.

</comment><comment><USER49> Great article. Snowden's closing thoughts make me excited about the idea of mesh networking with all these mobile devices in our pockets. Hopefully Google or Apple will give it the push it deserves. (Apple is already taking baby steps in this direction with its Multipeer Connectivity API.)

</comment><comment><USER50> [http://pastebin.com/Rkf41XCF](http://pastebin.com/Rkf41XCF)

<comment><USER51> Thanks. If I were James Bamford, I'd be hopping mad at Wired about the stupidity they perpetrated on my article.

<comment><USER52> Why should he be mad? Think of it as a simple cryptogram, like ROT13.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I can buy that he saw a lot of things that made him mistrust the government. What I have a problem with is that it seems as though he took jobs and looked for positions that would give him access to even more data. If he was really just working and saw this stuff that is one thing to go in and try and steal it is another, whether or not he did the right thing is up for debate. Selling USA secrets to other governments is espionage no matter how you slice it. If it was just leak it to the USA and the world at the same time then sure I could buy the whistleblower if it is go run and hide in Russia or China and sell information that is a different story. I dont think anyone has all the facts about this though.

<comment><USER4> He didn't sell anything to any government. If you can prove otherwise, please do; but I note that not even the almighty US intelligence apparatus going into overdrive like a wounded animal could point to anything indicating any of Snowden's statements were false at any point in time. If you have better sources at your disposal than the US President, by all means feel free to share them with us.

He's stuck in Russia because no other government wants to compromise their relationship with the US, to our eternal shame (as in "us citizens of non-US countries"); and because if he had remained in the US, he would have been renditioned in Guantanamo on day 1.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> > He is living on New York time, the better to communicate with his stateside > supporters and stay on top of the American news cycle.

I hope he has Vitamin D stocked.

</comment><comment><USER46> written by James Bamford too

</comment><comment><USER55> Does anyone have a link to the text in a more readable format?

<comment><USER43> Here is the article on Readability: [https://www.readability.com/articles/42wfcyub](https://www.readability.com/articles/42wfcyub)

<comment><USER56> this link redirects me to the wired.com article...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> He is a fucking legend.

</comment><comment><USER58> So there's a bigger story here: good lord is the web-design here irritating.

They've overridden scroll events so they at best don't work properly. Scrolling on a laptop gives you a weird non-mapping slide animation.

This is seriously one of the most unreadable articles, from a design sense, that I've ever seen.

<comment><USER59> I actually don't mind this kind of scrolling - I think it can be useful for storytelling. In this example the scrolling over text doesn't seem to be messed with, which is good.

I think what's frustrating about this example in particular is that there is no feedback for scrolling when the page 'pauses' on an image. There should at least be an element moving so that the user knows the page isn't freezing.

<comment><USER58> I disagree but you really shouldn't be being downvoted for this opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I fear we will never realize the true freedom Snowden sacrificed himself for.

<comment><USER61> I fear we will never get to see Snowden hanged, despite having do endure years of all his internet fanboys swooning over his supposed "sacrifice".

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> wwwwwww

</comment><comment><USER63> I am not sure what part of the story was not already told.

<comment><USER4> TAO bricking the Syrian main router and MonsterMind implementing a sort of cyber-MAD system, are explicitly called out as exclusive revelations. They are important because:

* Until now, any loss of Internet connectivity in Syria has always been interpreted as "bad dictator censoring people". I'm not saying that's never been the case, but now we know the US can have more control on global internet infrastructure than we knew possible. Next time some "bad" middle-eastern country loses the internet, US propaganda will have a harder time making people believe it's all due to bad actors.

* As Snowden eloquently says, an automated response system has very serious ethical challenges. Automation is not flawless, we've learnt it in the '70s and '80s through a number of very close calls with nuclear missiles; and in such an ethereal world as the internet (where bits can be faked almost at will), aggressive response should probably never be automatic.

The article also fleshes out Snowden's career in a better way than most similar pieces, and heavily suggests that the "second leaker" theory has some legs (at one point, personally I thought the second leaker was actually a USgov operation to distract reporters from the Snowden trove and/or spend some capital to re-establish relationships with them; but if Poitras really lawyered up when asked, chances are that there's something else as well).

<comment><USER64> > if Poitras really lawyered up when asked, chances are that there's something > else as well).

Or it is in her (and Snowden's) interest to not say exactly what came from where. If there is a second leaker, confirming it could create or increase the intensity of a witch hunt. If there is not, it would confirm that Snowden may have took more material than he claims.

Either way, there is no benefit to her answering either in the affirmative or negative.

There is also no benefit to answering herself, as she's likely already retained the lawyer because of handling this sensitive material.

<comment><USER4> _> If there is not, it would confirm that Snowden may have took more material than he claims._

That's not really in their interest -- they have been very good at making the most out of the story, both from a political and personal point of view, so it would be in their interest to claim ownership of anything actually related to the leaked documents. The only reason I can see for covering the fact that there might not be another leaker, is if they (accidentally?) passed on the documents to somebody else and don't want to be legally accountable for that particular transaction. As long as Snowden was the only one moving stuff around, Greenwald and Poitras are mostly in the clear from a legal point of view, they are just reporters; the moment they provide them to third parties, they lose that protected status. However, this would not matter if their aim was just to involve another journalistic outfit like _Der Spiegel_ (unless German law does not provide the same cover to journalism activities as US law), so I can't see why they'd want to have such a charade going on.

I personally find much more likely that there is a second (or even third) leaker but they don't want to put him/her under pressure, as you say.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> "Among other things, I want to answer a burning question: What drove Snowden to leak hundreds of thousands of top-secret documents, revelations that have laid bare the vast scope of the government's domestic surveillance programs?"

if the article presents a different answer than what's already known, through snowden statements communicated to laura poitras and greenwald, then they're probably not true, and if it repeats the same stuff, this is obviously a stupid question to ask and the article's just marketing b.s.

<comment><USER66> Exactly. Snowden has answered this many times. He has said (and I paraphrase) that the public of the USA needs to know what is being done to them and in their name so that they can get to choose and have a decision on the scope and limits of these programs. In other words Snowden has said effectively that if the public could get a direct vote on these issues and the public chose the status quo then he'd go along with that.

I don't doubt that Snowden doesn't want the status quo, he'd like to see the more (in his opinion) egregious civil liberty over-stepping practices rolled back but if his views differed from public majority he'd go along with that. He just wants the public to know and have a say, he's made this point a bunch of times and I'll cite it for you if you really insist :)

<comment><USER61> Right, but that's what's called a "lie" and everyone knows it, hence the question is still seeking an answer. No way did Snowden read hundreds of thousands of documents and decide that _all of them_ were relevant to his personal crusade against whatever it was.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Can someone remind me why Snowden became a public figure in the first place? The second leaker is anonymous and practically invisible, and here Snowden is, constantly getting more press. It's like he wants to be as visible as possible while other leakers want the opposite.

Edit: Can somebody tell me what was downvote-worthy about this comment? This is getting ridiculous.

<comment><USER68> You are downvoted because you imply Snowden was not wise for becoming a public figure, and it looks like you think he didn't want to be as visible as possible. This is exactly opposite to his strategy.

He wants to be visible as much as possible for two reasons.

The first is that this is the way for him to make the release of documents as effective as possible, something which he has been very succesful at.

The second is that being in the public eye makes it more difficult for organisations to lock him up or assassinate him quietly. The same reason why you'd arrange to meet up with a stranger at a busy public location.

<comment><USER67> People are reading too much into my comment, then. I didn't imply anything, actually - I made a comparison and provided no detail that could lead a conclusion, other than the idea that he wants to be visible, and questioning that decision.

Your first reason doesn't make sense because all the other leaks by secret leakers have caused uproar and changes, so a person behind them isn't necessary, clearly.

Your second reason doesn't make sense because as long as nobody finds out who you are, they can't kill you. Other leaks in the past have been done with anonymity. And honestly, they'll rendition him regardless of the public outcry because he's broken the law.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Ed Snowden acting out his WhiteHouse situation room fantasies

[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10328969/rolledupsleeves...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10328969/rolledupsleeves.png)</comment>


Ask HN: Are personal sites/portfolios important and how should you build one? - <AUTHOR>

I'm an incoming senior in college studying CS and Finance and one of my colleagues in the Valley mentioned that having a personal site with a portfolio makes candidates look exponentially more impressive when applying for jobs (e.g. organized code samples with explanations and context).
How important is it to have your own website or portfolio?  Does having a blog component add significant value or is a collection of static pages sufficient?
Also, when creating a site is it acceptable to use a CMS like WordPress or do employers prefer if individuals build their sites from the ground up or use different web frameworks? <comment><USER2> As I am neither a hiring manager, nor can I point to my own website and say "that helped me get a job", I offer the words of Philip Greenspun:

 _A big salary can evaporate quickly. Between March 2001 and April 2004 roughly 400,000 American jobs in information technology were eliminated. Many of those who had coded Java in obscurity ended up as cab drivers or greeters at Walmart. A personal professional reputation, by contrast, is a bit harder to build than the big salary but also harder to lose. If you don't invest some time in writing (prose, not code), however, you'll never have any reputation outside your immediate circle of colleagues, who themselves may end up working at McDonald's and be unable to help you get an engineering job during a recession._

<http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/writeup>

In my own opinion, a blog component only makes sense if you wish to write short (3-paragraph) posts. Use Wordpress if what Wordpress offers is what you want. On one hand, writing your own web framework can be a good learning experience and a good portfolio piece in itself; on the other hand, good programmers reuse existing code when possible. NOT writing your own web framework can be just as much of an indicator of your skills as writing one.

<comment><USER3> "Many of those who had coded Java in obscurity ended up as cab drivers or greeters at Walmart." Are you kidding around? Java is one of the most desired language and companies are dying to find Java developers. You must not be a programmer, definitely not a Java programmer. Java programmers are respected highly and their skills are all time desired. Java is just going to get bigger and bigger in all kinds of devices and technologies. The one's who are driving cabs and working at Walmart are the fine art's/history/english etc majors (no offence but that's what it is).

<comment><USER4> The quote explicitly states this was occuring in 2001-2004. In 2012 you are right that Java developers are in very strong demand. However, in 2002 that was definitely not the case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In kind of reverse order:

\- It is absolutely acceptable to use an existing blog engine or CMS to post with. Many of the most respected developers use Wordpress, Blogger.com, Posterous or even just Google Plus to blog. There is nothing wrong with this whatsoever.

\- As for how important it is to have your own website / portfolio, it depends on wat you intend to do. Career-wise, consider it a form of marketing. If you want to run a startup, or be a freelance developer or designer, then having a blog / portfolio, with the potential to get leads, is absolutely critical. If you want to work at a startup, showing knowledge on a subject is a good (though not guaranteed way) to get you to the front of the interview line faster, and can definitely get you hired over the next guy. In simple terms, if you have a portfolio, you can _prove_ that you can do the work, and that you _have_ done the work. The guy without the portfolio has to convince potential employers that he can.

If you're planning to do development, I would suggest putting your code on Github. That's something you can point potential employers to to show that you've done programming. Bear in mind that MANY applicants at programming jobs can't even complete FizzBuzz. Just showing what you can do is more likely to get you where you want to be. Also, Github is a great way to run into other people in the field. People can see your code, be impressed by your code, or use your code. Back before a lot of my old applications were purchased (long story) I had a company call me and offer me a job, out of the blue. They were using my code in their products already, and figured since they were already using my code, they might as well hire me to make the changes they were hiring for.

The other caveat that I always make with Github is that your code doesn't have to be good. It's usually never 'good enough'. Unless you're specifically building a portfolio application (which there is nothing wrong with), it doesn't matter whether or not your code is 'clever' or not, so long as it builds / works / is useful. If you have free time, it's great to go back and polish up old code for viewing, but 'works in progress' have no standard, in my opinion. Working code is worth gold.

The last point I'll make that you didn't really ask about regards blogging. For me, blogging is invaluable. Even if you never _publish_ your blog posts, the act of writing them is self-affirming.

It's so much easier to write a widget that fetches RSS feeds than it is to explain to a child how to write a widget that fetches RSS feeds. The simple act of forming that explanation, even if only in your head, will cause you to be a better developer no matter what you do. Also, if you do publish your code, it'll open it up to critique by your peers. The biggest regret of my professional life is that I've spent too much time coding in isolation. Coding in isolation is fine, but learning takes longer and you're more likely to develop bad habits that don't get fixed. Show your code to your peers, to the world, and they'll give you tips back that make you better.

Sorry for the rant, but I hope it helps.</comment>


'Game changer:' Tourniquet for abdominal wounds is already saving lives - <AUTHOR> http://www.stripes.com/news/game-changer-tourniquet-for-abdominal-wounds-is-already-saving-lives-1.235791

<comment><USER2> Great product, I'm sure. CAT's should be mentioned too, they're used on arms and legs and can be applied quickly. Hope I'll never have to need one (not serving)

'preventable death'... Policy and politics has the ability to prevent death by greater numbers even before we feel the need to rupture the aortas of our fellow human beings.

I'm curious, I was told most use cases of tourniques would require subsequent amputation. Is this the case here, as well? Do you amputate the pelvis? What would the life of a soldier look like in the hours, days after he received an injury to the abdomen and being saved by a device like this?

<comment><USER3> For most practical purposes, use of a tourniquet implies a choice between death of patient and loss of limb.

Part of the emphasis on this choice in first-aid classes is to keep people from over-using tourniquets for injuries which do not pose a risk of loss of life.

A laceration to the hand can look awful, but some pressure and elevation can minimize blood loss even if definitive care is hours away without risking loss of the hand or forearm by using a tourniquet.

In a massive trauma situation, such as from multiple penetrating wounds, if the patient bleeds out and dies, other tissue damage does not matter much.

If the patient survives injuries that make it a good idea to block the abdominal aorta - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdominal_aorta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdominal_aorta) then there is a good chance he/she has survived due to good and rapid field treatment, and rapid evacuation to a definitive care facility that can manage any other tissue damage caused by lack of circulation below the diaphragm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is undeniable, but of real regret, that many major medical advances are made during wars. Even so, this is fantastic.

<comment><USER5> Wars mean lots of money is spend on stitching up people (and blowing them up in the first place).

Without wars, we could save the resources used for the blowing up part.

<comment><USER6> Yes, but we'd spend the savings on curing erectile dysfunction.

<comment><USER5> Beats being blown to pieces.

Also, please don't pretend erectile dysfunction is not a real problem to the people affected.

<comment><USER6> Of course it is, but a far greater proportion of medical effort goes into fixing problems like ED than would be prescribed according to the utility of fixing them. The reason these things get the focus they do is because they're profitable.

And that's the point: war makes research into treating basic trauma profitable in a way that everyday life doesn't. It's not _worth_ it, but those are still the apparent facts. I mean, look at how low hanging the fruit described in the article is. If that were a device for making a man's penis hard, it would have been invented 15 years ago.

<comment><USER7> Sildenafil was invented for angina, for which it was ineffective. However, it was noted to cause erections (as a side-effect). This side effect was then approved as the primary indication for the medication.

So the historical research into the drug was actually for the purpose of curing "serious" diseases, although I agree with eru that ED is a meaningful problem for those who are affected by it, and there is some serious utility gained from fixing the problem.

<comment><USER6> That's true, although while noticing the effect from a drug gets a good chunk of the way there, there's still a huge amount of effort after that which goes into getting it approved and to market. And vardenafil seems to have been researched purely with ED in mind.

That said, ED isn't really a perfect poster child for the kind of medical research I'm talking about. It's just the best one to use with a one-liner because it conveys the point effectively, and because penises are funny. Other examples include treatments for male pattern baldness and second/third generation antihistamines.

With the former, the pharmacological options are all again opportunistic situations, although the point about investing in getting them to market still applies. With the latter, that is not the case. And although there's no denying that they have vastly improved the quality of life for people with serious allergy problems, there's also no denying that the main reason for the investment put into them was helping people with the spring sniffles (as evidenced by the fact that their approved doses are set so low that they are barely of any use to anyone (otherwise they wouldn't have passed muster for "non-drowsy" so that they could get fast track approval from the FDA)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If this works as reported, this is truly great. But you know what would save even more lives? If we got the f&ck out of Afghanistan. What are we even doing there? When is this last time a reporter asked the President about the Afghan war and when it will end? The tolerance of the current situation just baffles me.

<comment><USER9> I don't know if the sunk cost fallacy applies to politics and war but I suspect that comes into play here.

Recent (July) articles indicate he's considering a withdrawal in 2014.

This article is interesting as well [http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/08/08/obama_s...](http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/08/08/obama_sidesteps_afghan_war_ --_with_medias_help_119533.html)

<comment><USER10> And just this morning in the news I heard about bigger plans for Syria than just a few air strikes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Black Hawk Down has a scene where the difficulty of containing such injuries is illustrated very graphically: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gixRgsPFR7g](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gixRgsPFR7g)

It's incredibly difficult to stop such bleeding and having such device will undoubtedly save lives on and off battle fields. For example in bad car wrecks.

</comment><comment><USER12> Huge!! It's crazy how something so deceivingly simple took so long to invent.

</comment><comment><USER13> Unfortunately what works in war doesn't necessarily work in peace. We though a couple decades ago that anti-shock garments (basically inflatable pants) save lives after trauma by redirecting blood to the core, but in reality it's likely that the practice causes harm, and you just never see them used anymore at all. ([http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD001856/no-evidence-that- medi...](http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD001856/no-evidence-that-medical-anti- shock-trousers-improve-survival-for-people-with-trauma-and-some-suggestion- they-may-worsen-outcomes-but-more-trials-are-needed))

</comment><comment><USER14> As amazing as this is I can't help feeling a tinge of horror that it's even required.

<comment><USER15> it doesn't have to be a gunshot wound. it could just as easily save lives of people in car accidents.

<comment><USER16> Might be useful in some surgeries as well; like total hips.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This could save many people back in the country as well, it would turn out to be impressively useful for car accidents or similar events, every ambulance should be required to carry it imho</comment>


Ask HN: Do i have to give technical support if i sell source code of my app? - <AUTHOR>

I have a very popular android app on the google play store. An OEM firm wants to buy this app's source code. We agreed on te price and now they have sent me a contract and they want my reviews about it. In the contract they say that i should provide technical support for them and their clients etc. I was wondering if this is the normal case or not. Also how can i find legal advice about this contract? <comment><USER2> Without the contract we can only guess as to their intentions. Best to seek out a lawyer to protect your interests and ensure they don't take advantage of you.

Having said that, they seem to have pulled a fast one on you. They bundled the cost of the code with the cost of support. Do you really want to support their changes to their code? Feel free to counter with a support contract if you wish to continue to be involved.

<comment><USER3> This. Do NOT take support as bundled into the cost-of-code contract. Have a separate maintenance/support contract, and make sure you get paid enough to deal with the hassle of on-going support for a product whose marketing you no longer have control over.

I'd push for a high enough maintenance amount such that you can hire a few people to help with the support so it's not all on you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Many years ago, I designed and ran a developer relations program. Companies would license our tech for a quarter million dollars and up, sometimes multiple times for multiple products. We used to hand it over with basically no knowledge transfer or support at all, and I came in and changed all of that.

1\. Do you _want_ to provide technical support? Often (but not always) there's knowledge transfer: you spend hours or days or weeks helping them get it building correctly and showing them your structure and explaining why you made certain technical choices. Sometimes (but not always) there's a period after that where you're available to answer questions (by some defined method and for some defined amount of effort and possibly [but not always] for a defined fee). Occasionally they won't have a staff at all, and want to buy it, rebrand it, and have you do all the work; it's like a regular consulting job at that point.

But, what do you _want_ to do?

2\. Talk to a lawyer. That's what they're _for._</comment>


How mobile networks flunked my summer roaming spend - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/?p=833

<comment><USER2> It looks like this guy went to Spain, so a few things that may interest you if you're going to travel there and use data:

There's a virtual operator (simyo, <http://simyo.es>) which offers a reasonable rate of 1€/first 100mb of the day, 9ct/megabyte after those first 100mb/day, and a cap of 5€ if you don't exceed 500mb in a month (if you use 300mb in a day, you don't spend 1€+0.09*200=18€, but 5€.

Vodafone also offers prepaid internet offers: 1GB for 7 days (19€), 15 days (29€), 30 days (49€). Locked modem costs 50€, but you can use those cards with any 3G modem and most smartphones (I tether with a soft-unlocked iPhone).

It's hard to get a SIM card: anonymous SIM cards (even for data traffic) don't exist there, and it can be a pain to get a pay-as-you-go if you're a visitor (that's because of the 11M terrorist attacks, yeah, gbye privacy!).

Also, be aware of internet coffees. A good price is 1€-1,5€ for 1h..

Starbucks don't have WiFi, but some McDonalds have it. You have to buy something (I love McFlurrys!) and ask for a WiFi card (if they have wifi, of course, you'll see a sticker outside). Just connect to the open Wifi and type the number that is in the card (that will give you 30 minutes of navigation).

And... good luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> Only $10 per MB? Wow, I wish I lived in europe. Even if you're in your local calling region, it's $35 per MB here in Canada.

<comment><USER2> With spanish operators, roaming is about 10€ (~15$) for each megabyte... So 3,5€ for each megabyte is "cheap" for me.

Anyway, it's still really-really expensive. And they really could lower the price, as the home operator (the operator you're roaming with), and not the "roam operator" is getting most profits from data roaming.

I think Vodafone offers in Europe a rate of 200MB-60€, that's about 0.3€/megabyte. Veredict? Operators have really inflated prices for data roaming...

... In fact, it wouldn't be expensive (for them) to offer a flat rate of unlimited (or with a reasonable data limit) mobile internet, at least in Europe.

But money is money.</comment></comment>


The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: A Special Report, Pt. 1 - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/inside-the-artificial-intelligence-revolution-a-special-report-pt-1-20160229 <comment><USER2> > We may be on the verge of creating a new life form, one that could mark not > only an evolutionary breakthrough, but a potential threat to our survival as > a species

This is exactly what's wrong with the press and peoples expectations about AI. That single paragraph set the tone for the article to me, and know I'm totally biased to thinking "this is just sensationalism media".

Edit: I expand a bit after reading, and totally agree with seiji's comment.

> But gradually it rises, and begins to stumble-run toward the goal. _You can > almost see it gaining confidence_ , its legs moving beneath it, now picking > up speed like a running back.

(emphasis is mine) No, it's not gaining confidence, it's just optimizing a function. Despite what magical words have been used by those explaining to the journalist the works of the algorithm, there robot doesn't feel or pursue anything other than what it is being programmed to do: optimize an energy function with respect to some parameters, which are set ahead of the training sesion.

Like others commented, the journalistic quality of the article is on the low end of the spectrum. I wonder how this made it to the front page. I began reading expecting something of a certain quality, and that expectation was certainly not met.

<comment><USER3> How are gaining confidence and optimizing a function not descriptions of the same process expressed in different mediums?

<comment><USER2> Confidence, in the sense that what used in the article (not as in the grade of confidence in a probabilistic sample), has an emotional component. Optimizing a function is adjusting the free parameters to maximize a desired output.

<comment><USER3> How is emotion not a feedback system for optimization other than the European prejudice against taking it seriously?

<comment><USER4> Why should it be a "feedback system"? Maybe it is an unnecessary side effect of our complicated brains?

For all we know, consciousness is a prerequisite for emotions, and I seriously doubt that a simple optimization algorithm exhibits consciousness.

<comment><USER5> There's no need to doubt - you can see the algorithm written down, there are no symbols spent on consciousness. There are no surges in the network in response to anything apart from the inputs. The sheep, it does not dream - although sometimes I observe them writing on HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's a much better commentary on AI for popcorn reading.

[http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence- revolu...](http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence- revolution-1.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> I get nervous when tech trends start appearing in popular publications with little history of covering tech. My spidey sense suggests that this signals an approaching peak in the covered technology.

Frankly, I think the expectations around AI are outpacing the realities that are attainable in the next 5-10 years. Now after that? Who knows. But I'm starting to get the sense that a lot of people are going to be disappointed in the next 5-10 years.

<comment><USER8> This is a really fascinating perspective. Thinking of publications based on their probability of covering tech (based on past coverage) and subsequently low probability publications covering tech more frequently, suggests evidence of a "bubble". Love it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Self driving car, image / voice recognition, or even getting the classification / meaning of language texts is a far simpler task than a full self-conscious AI, or even an AI that can simulate a conscious mind but not really have one (e.g. a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie), i.e. such an AI can talk about art all day, perhaps even create art and pass a turing test, but it never "experienced" art). Were there any advances in cognitive AI that justify all this "AI revolution" talk? didn't we simply get really good at deep learning and better at image recognition / voice recognition / language translation that is definitely laudable but still far from the "Ex Machina" depiction?

<comment><USER10> > Self driving car, image / voice recognition, or even getting the > classification / meaning of language texts is a far simpler task than a full > self-conscious AI, or even an AI that can simulate a conscious mind but not > really have one

I disagree. Self-driving cars, image/voice recognition and classification/meaning-extraction for text are well-defined problems, with associated benchmarks, competitions, etc. These are hard problems.

On the other hand "full self-conscious AI" and "AI that can simulate a conscious mind but not really have one" are collections of words whose main reason for existence is to allow their user to keep redefining them arbitrarily in order to win arguments (see, for example, John Searle).

I define "self-conscious" as being able to reason about onesself, where "reason" means performing some nontrivial computation and "onesself" means the pattern of information consitituting the agent (human, device, program, etc.). Hence, I declare the multi-quines at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)#Ouroboros_pr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_\(computing\)#Ouroboros_programs) as examples of "full self-conscious AI".

Further, I define "mind" as a computational process taking place in physical matter, and a "conscious mind" as a mind capable of reason. Hence I declare that the text "1 + 1" is an AI that can simulate a conscious mind (when given to an interpreter like python) without really having one (since the text performs no computation).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children." – Marvin Minsky, [http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/sciam.inherit.html](http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/sciam.inherit.html)

<comment><USER12> And what do children do? They replace their parents. Is it possible that robots will enter the fray of evolution and only time will tell if they are more fit for survival.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Robots don't like to be anthropomorphized.

</comment><comment><USER14> replace the terms AI/DL with (non)linear regression. still hyped?

<comment><USER15> Entirely so. Non-linear regression sounds like a tool that can be used without any ethical repercussions or philosophical angst about human obsolescence in the face of machine capabilities. It also sounds like a tool that anyone can use...either learn math or find a library that will do the (non)linear regression for you. I mean, you already heard about linear regression in high school, right? It doesn't sound as exotic as AI/DL either...

If the barriers to entry are low, then that means anyone can take advantage of the __Power of Math __to do Great Things(tm). Said "Great Things(tm)" might include humans trusting their models way too much and end up doing stupid stuff as a result of them, but people have been misusing statistics for generations and we haven't killed ourselves (yet).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I make a point of never visiting RollingStone for anything after they dragged my school's name through the dirt without a second though to journalistic integrity for the sole purpose of pursuing some agenda they had. Call me biased but I refuse to believe that they are capable of producing anything of quality and I would love to watch this magazine crash and burn.

<comment><USER17> I would be interested in learning more about this, or their agenda, what school or article is being referred to here?

<comment><USER18> He's probably talking about the University of Virginia rape story -> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_on_Campus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_on_Campus) (wich was discredited)</comment></comment></comment>


Sensors Slip into the Brain, Then Dissolve When Their Job Is Done - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/biomedical/devices/siliconbased-sensors-slip-into-the-brain-then-dissolve-when-their-jobs-are-done <comment><USER2> The article is mute on one key element: how do the dissolved components get back across the blood-brain barrier?

I can see how it could dissolve and its remnants be carried out via the bloodstream and/or lymph system if it was elsewhere in the body... but how does it get out of the brain?</comment>


Show HN: Visualizing the iOS App Store via D3.js - <AUTHOR> https://appstorerankings.net/visualizing-the-ios-app-store <comment><USER2> It is surprisingly fun to play around with the filters and see correlations unfold. If you restrict only a narrow band for number of downloads and leave everything else open, you'll see ratings go up, down, and then up again.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is really awesome. Great way to get an overview of which apps are popular. Can you make the names of the apps link to the app on the app store?!

</comment><comment><USER4> The green line showing the average is very helpful to see the distribution in each dimension. A box plot would provide even more information.

The bezier curves look beautiful on the quantized dimensions: ratings, keywords, price.

diziet's example is released under BSD if you want to adapt it to your data. If you're interested in adding parallel coordinates to an existing application or start from scratch, I'm working on a library here:

<http://syntagmatic.github.com/parallel-coordinates/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Fantastic visualization - the filters really make it interesting!

Could I suggest an extra column - Downloads * price

<comment><USER5> For anyone interested - using the console & a quick bit of js the top "profiters" (dowloads * price) were:

        Cut the Rope - $26433990
        Infinity Blade - $15340390
        Ski On Neon - $15246990
        Minecraft – Pocket Edition - $12519090
        Infinity Blade II - $11680290
        Cover Orange - $9712890
        Tap Tap Revenge 4 - $8061490
        Air Penguin - $7762590
        Fruit Ninja - $7633890
        Draw Something - $7268690

            data.forEach(function(d){
               d.profit = (d["Est. Downloads*"] * d.Price);
            })
            data.sort(function(a,b){return b.profit-a.profit});
            for(i = 0; i < 10; i++){
               console.log(data[i].name + " - $" + data[i].profit);
             }

<comment><USER6> nice! We thought about displaying profit from downloads * price but we found that for most of the big apps, they tweak around prices constantly so the profit would vary too much based on when you poll their prices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sorry for coming down harsh but I don't understand how to interpret any of the individual curves, since it looks like they are five points on five different axis with a curve fit through them. What's the significance?

<comment><AUTHOR> Each curve/line is an individual app with each point representing that app's stats in downloads, reviews, etc. You can use the different axis to see trends. Ie, there is (obviously) a correlation between number of downloads and reviews. You can check out a bit about the history of the visualization at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_coordinates>

<comment><USER4> If the axes were reorderable, you could move Downloads next to Reviews and see the relation without filtering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thats a smart way of implementing a parallel coordinates chart. I like the selection.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Funny tidbit: on firefox especially, forEach and Map functions have a big performance hit compared to doing a native for loop when you're handling a lot of data!

</comment><comment><USER9> It's really interesting to play with this stuff!

</comment><comment><USER10> Brilliant!</comment>


Verizon has no excuse for its planned cloud outage - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/article/2865815/cloud-computing/verizon-has-no-excuse-for-planned-cloud-outage.html <comment><USER2> Why does Verizon have an enterprise cloud? And why is anyone using it?

Is it somehow related to their main business? Do the servers run deep within their network allowing quicker access for mobile users? What is their unique selling proposition?

They have a whole "why Verizon" section[1]. I don't feel like it answers this question.

[1] [http://cloud.verizon.com/why-verizon](http://cloud.verizon.com/why- verizon)

<comment><USER3> Verizon Enterprise is the service lineup that they inherited from acquiring MCI some years ago. MCI, of course, having been kind of a Big Deal as it relates to the internet way back when.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Enterprise_Solutions](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Enterprise_Solutions)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This articles misses the point of the cloud. The argument for "live migrations" and lambasting of AWS for bouncing servers for the Xen exploit are both completely misguided.

The point of the Cloud is not that a server never restarts or has downtime. It's that your app runs on many servers in different AZs and regions such that any one server failing is not going to have a real impact and can be easily and quickly replaced.

AWS, when bouncing their servers, did them one az and one region at a time. Because of that, if you ran across multiple AZs you would get to test your failure scenarios, but not be down.

The author's focus on other cloud providers having restarts makes it sound like he's saying "Verizon is bad, but in bad company". There is no comparison to be made between taking down your whole cloud, and losing a server here and there.

<comment><USER5> Spot on. A random server could go down at any moment, either by a hardware failure or because your cloud provider decides it needs maintenance. The latter actually gives you an up-front warning, the former is just "bang". So any well designed system independent of running on a cloud or on your own hardware should be able to deal with this, since it's the reality of servers: sometimes one breaks.

All of the bigger Clouds (Amazon, Rackspace, SoftLayer) handle their security related restarts this way, one area/region/DC at a time carefully making sure that well designed systems don't notice downtime.

What Verizon does is a totally different thing and something most "important but not life threatening" systems do not design for: Taking down the whole cloud with all servers at the same time.

<comment><USER6> What hasn't really been said well is that there's constant incidents that are going on in large cloud providers and you don't need to have a maintenance period like this to experience failures. I work in a place where people are still used to individual machines being up constantly by IP alone and aren't practicing high availability architectures in their cloud environments. I had to explain to an architect that VMs can simply just hiccup in AWS or any other provider and that just relaunching the instance is fine. The idea of random failures may be foreign, but I was certainly a bit surprised that someone with such rudimentary understanding of infrastrucure wouldn't be familiar with the idea of "have you tried turning it off and on again?"

With that said, I have zero hope that most enterprises will be able to get a decently solid failover strategy for their cloud applications because an awful lot of them are barely able to get anything to even one cloud provider setup at the most basic layout. Half the folks I'm aware of don't even have cross AZ redundancy let alone cross region failover. When people are turning off 3-4 VMs to save money, you're in no position to think about cross provider load balancing.

Most of the enterprises I'm familiar with would throw Verizon more and more money in the blind hope that it'll make their service more reliable. They'll do this to an incredible dollar amount partly because it'll still be cheaper than their old, traditional in house IT that cost multiple orders magnitude more but got way worse availability. Stuff like this scheduled maintenance shows how foolish it is to believe that someone will magically become ultra reliable by you virtue of you paying them to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Two whole days of zero service. In this one moment I have lost all expectations of good service from Verizon's cloud.

It doesn't look like customers were given much warning either. This story was originally published on the 6th of Jan. Could you imagine trying to find alternate hosting setup by the weekend if you have any kind of availability expectations? It seems like madness to me. Even if you did move yourself to another host to cover this 48 hours of downtime how likely are you to move the majority of your business over to AWS, Google Cloud, Azure etc.

The lack of notice on this seems to be a bigger issue to me than the fact that Verizon is taking their whole cloud out of service for 48 straight hours.

<comment><USER8> At the start of Google Cloud they had planned outages lasting _weeks_. Now, you could (with a bit of hassle) move your instance to another region, but it was very annoying and off-putting.

<comment><USER9> Really? Is there a link about this? I can't find anything.

<comment><USER8> I can't find a source, this is only what I remember. I was an early beta tester of GCE and I think these were scheduled shortly after public launch.

<comment><USER9> According to the other person, it is that individual zones may be offline for a week. That makes sense. A whole cloud being offline for a week doesn't make sense, but yea, sometimes datacenters need new network fabrics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The big print giveth, and the small print taketh away. When the reality fails to live up to the marketing and hype, folks are naturally going to be upset. However, those of us who actually work in IT for a living expect downtime and architect for it. In a perfect world, Verizon's customer reaction should have been one of mild annoyance - "Oh well, guess we'll fail over to our secondary for that weekend". Anyone who drank the 'zero downtime' kool-aid will hopefully treat this as a (deserved) wake-up call that marketing does not excuse poor engineering on their part. Don't like the fact that your 'immortal' cloud provider goes down in planned (and sometimes unplanned) ways? Buy your own iron and do it yourself. It's the only way you can be completely 100% certain it's done right.

<comment><USER11> Two hours is sufferable. Two days is insane. Not everyone has the engineering talent or time to have auto-deploy multi-cloud failover.

Not to mention that if you buy in to certain services, say, any AWS architecture beyond EC2, failover to another provider becomes a lot closer to impractical if not impossible.

Two hours is sufferable...

<comment><USER10> This is where good sysadmins, and teams thereof, earn their high salaries. You shouldn't _have_ to suffer through a two-day outage, but it happens. A good sysadmin will insist on multi-provider hosting, be able to advise you on how not to get locked into $vendor's precious snowflake cloud implementation, and myriad other things.

<comment><USER12> Yup. Hurricane Sandy should have been enough to remind folks of this.

Natural (and unnatural) disasters happen, and you have to be prepared for this contingency. There are many tools out there which can help with this, but a competent sysadmin will help a hundredfold ensure that your business continues when the unthinkable happens.

Heck, only today one of Amazon's new datacenters on the east coast had a 3 alarm fire[1]. Didn't end up having any instances fail, but we did notice some of our services have problems that coincided with the fire, and we were ready to fail over the moment instances started dropping.

[1] [http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/09/technology/amazon-data- cente...](http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/09/technology/amazon-data-center- fire/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Although I never expect 100 percent uptime, planned outages aren't needed if > the cloud platforms are designed correctly. It's quite possible to do live > migrations without a server reset these days, yet the cloud providers seem > to be missing the boat here.

It is slightly more complicated than that.

> There should be no cloud outages, ever. Got that?

Really? That's not how the real world works. This "article" is pretty crap.

<comment><USER7> Yeah I agree the hyperbolic sentences are over the top. The only way for anyone to reliably get 100% uptime is to use two or three cloud providers or their own dedicated boxes somewhere. Even AWS don't provide 100% uptime guarantees. Though I think the author's underlying point that good design should lead to fewer/smaller planned outages. However, his statements are over the top in the extreme.

<comment><USER14> Two _days_ down, by a world-scale provider, is also over the top.

Nobody expects 100% uptime. They also don't expect 100% down for _days_.

<comment><USER13> Understood. His main point is that no cloud provider should ever have any downtime which is idiotic and no reputable company would ever promise zero downtime.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Rethinking State Management with React Agent - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@awesometom/rethinking-state-management-with-react-agent-e3000c8c2393 <comment><USER2> It's probably the natural trajectory to start using WebSockets. Seems to be the trend with Apollo with GraphQL, now React with React Agent

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks very useful for a few of my projects I've been having trouble debugging, thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER4> Seems interesting... just a way to make writing rest routes easier?

<comment><AUTHOR> React Agent actually removes the need to use REST -- that's one of the big features of the library. Instead, communication between the client and server is accomplished through WebSockets and keys. The client can run('getMessages'), which triggers the server to run 'getMessages' and return a response to the client.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very interesting, looks like a well thought out api.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice that time travel debugging is incorporated!

</comment><comment><USER7> Does this only work with postgres like in the test site?</comment>


Really Random Number Generator - <AUTHOR> http://makezine.com/projects/really-really-random-number-generator/ <comment><USER2> Way cool, saved for later so I can build my own!

The one reaction I have to share is neither here nor there, but there's a sentence suggesting this is great for games. The two problems you'll have applying something like this to games are 1- the bandwidth of this RNG is much slower than your laptop CPU. It'd pair very well with a game running on the Arduino you build the RNG with though. :) 2- I've done a _lot_ of game programming, and came to the conclusion that I almost never wanted a random number stream. They cause repeats way too frequently. Every time I want "random" behavior in a game nowadays, I generally either pre-generate a set of behaviors randomly and then shuffle them (guaranteeing you see each behavior once before any repeats) or use an even uniform sampling in a cycle. It was a little surprising at first, but I definitely have a better appreciation now for why game mechanics with some repetition (or maybe "predictability" is a better word) are more fun than true technically 'random'.

<comment><USER3> I was confused by the "great for games" comment as well, but following the link shows that the author was thinking of simple hardware "games" such as this fortune teller consisting of LEDs and fairly simple circuitry. So I think the clock speed is more than fine for the application he had in mind...

[http://makezine.com/projects/electronics-fun-and- fundamental...](http://makezine.com/projects/electronics-fun-and-fundamentals- the-ching-thing/)

<comment><USER2> Ah, in that case, my comment's nearly rude! Sorry, I had software video games in my head. :P I'm still gonna build it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The problem with noise-based random number generators is that you have to be sure your noise source isn't picking up interference. Interference may have structure, from power line hum to radio carriers to noise from other digital components.

Here's an alternative which is slightly more paranoid.[1]

[1] [https://www.tindie.com/products/WaywardGeek/infinite- noise/](https://www.tindie.com/products/WaywardGeek/infinite-noise/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me of the Lavarand, the random number generator by SGI, built out of lava lamps:

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

And its site in all its Web1.0 glory: [http://web.archive.org/web/20010926221159/http://lavarand.sg...](http://web.archive.org/web/20010926221159/http://lavarand.sgi.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> OK but where's the statistical testing to verify it?

For microelectronics there are better ways for true digital random number generators, e.g. [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.99....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.99.5781&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

<comment><USER7> No need. If that sequence is not random, quantum mechanics is in big trouble.

<comment><USER8> You're not sampling the signal directly on the transistor. There are lots of places where the randomness could be biased.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's my favorite random number generator for use in games :)

[http://gamesbyemail.com/news/diceomatic](http://gamesbyemail.com/news/diceomatic)

<comment><USER10> how about this one :)

[https://github.com/id- Software/DOOM/blob/77735c3ff0772609e9c...](https://github.com/id- Software/DOOM/blob/77735c3ff0772609e9c8d29e3ce2ab42ff54d20b/linuxdoom-1.10/m_random.c)

<comment><USER11> This is how it's really done. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> An RTL-SDR [0] commodity hardware device paired with rtl-entropy [1] seems to have great potential for filling this need. It has some nice write-ups [2][3][4] and ongoing development.

0: [http://www.rtl-sdr.com](http://www.rtl-sdr.com)

1: [https://github.com/pwarren/rtl-entropy](https://github.com/pwarren/rtl- entropy)

2: [http://blog.cros13.net/2014/08/cheap-entropy-using-your- rtl-...](http://blog.cros13.net/2014/08/cheap-entropy-using-your-rtl-sdr- as.html)

3: [https://pthree.org/2015/06/16/hardware-rng-through-an-rtl- sd...](https://pthree.org/2015/06/16/hardware-rng-through-an-rtl-sdr-dongle/)

4: [http://blog.krisk.org/2013/12/high-quality- entropy.html](http://blog.krisk.org/2013/12/high-quality-entropy.html)

<comment><USER13> Until the NSA parks outside your house with a transmitter :-) How do you know it's really random?

<comment><USER12> I bet if you wave your antenna around, pointing at some bright stars, while doing a few of your favorite dances, that ought to make that gathered data stream pretty hard to replicate.. As far as I understand, in terms of practicality, "randomness" isn't important, only obscurity and/or unpredictability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You probably shouldn't trust this unless you can validate the randomness of the output with tests like Diehard or others [http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/toolkit/rng/batteries_stats_t...](http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/toolkit/rng/batteries_stats_test.html)

<comment><USER15> While it's definitely a good idea to run it through something like Diehard, it's interesting to note that [this principle has already been the subject of a lot of research]([https://www.kernel.org/doc/ols/2014/ols2014-mueller.pdf](https://www.kernel.org/doc/ols/2014/ols2014-mueller.pdf)) (granted, the CPU time jitter uses _time_ noise as an entropy source where the post uses electrical signal noise, but it's a fairly similar principle all the same).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is informative, and looks like a fun project! But if you're simply looking for random bits on the Raspberry Pi, don't overlook that it already comes with a HW RNG built in.

</comment><comment><USER17> Why would I want to use this over chacha20 seeded properly?

<comment><USER18> The Cryptech TRNG uses ChaCha as CSPRNG. ChaCha is seeded using two separate noise sources of which one is based on the same principle as the one described in the article.

The output from the entropy sources are mixed using SHA-512 before being used to seed ChaCha.

The Cryptech TRNG has been and is continiously tested. The current development will add test functionality to provide online monitoring of the entropy sources as well as the final output from ChaCha.

There will also be a specific test mode to allow user applications to insert its own "entropy" and extract generated seed as well as providing test vectors for ChaCha. In this way it will be possible to verify that the TRNG works during production, but also verify that the digital chain is in fact working as specified.

For more see: [http://wiki.cryptech.is/wiki](http://wiki.cryptech.is/wiki)

(Disclaimer: I am the main author of the Cryptech TRNG.)

<comment><USER17> Is gathering 256 bits of entropy a problem that justifies a dedicated piece of hardware?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Optocoupler to step 5v logic down to 3.3v for the raspberry pi is madness. Just use a voltage divider!

Still, very cool project though!

<comment><USER20> Paranoia? Wouldn't things get rather ugly if you accidentally fed a voltage divider the 18V in that circuit?

<comment><USER19> Yes, but the attitude just rubs me the wrong way. If they suggested the voltage divider, it would have been a good opportunity to instill careful engineering and testing practices. They could have said something like "this will fry your GPIO if you accidentally send 18v, so make sure to test the circuit with a multimeter or scope!" Instead, they suggest throwing an expensive part at the problem, supporting the attitude that you can't trust your own engineering. At least they mention that there are other ways to do it.

I dunno, maybe it's two different, equally valid attitudes. I guess I dislike it for the same reason I prefer C++ over Java.

<comment><USER21> Speaking as a developer, I think the attitude that you can't trust your own engineering can be a healthy one :-) Defensive coding and all that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you want something cool without building yourself,

NeuG is an implementation of a true random number generator, a tiny USB 32-bit computer based on a free (as in freedom) hardware design.

[http://shop.fsf.org/product/usb/](http://shop.fsf.org/product/usb/)

<comment><USER23> Here's Alea 2 USB TRNG: [http://www.araneus.fi/products/alea2/en/](http://www.araneus.fi/products/alea2/en/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This kind of post is why I love electronics... and why I clearly need to learn more about it.

</comment><comment><USER25> Good lord, who taught these guys to draw schematics?

<comment><USER26> As someone new to schematics, my question is -- how would you improve it? Genuinely curious...

<comment><USER25> In addition to what mindslight's saying, a schematic should be drawn to make the signal flow as evident as possible, usually from left to right and top to bottom. Sometimes this isn't practical or reasonable, such as when everything's hooked up to an 80-pin IC or something like that, but for a project this simple it wouldn't have been a problem.

This diagram is a dog's breakfast. The draftsperson apparently thought this style would make the circuit easier to construct, and perhaps it does, but their real job was to make the circuit easier to _understand_ , and that definitely didn't happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> 2 Gbps of true random numbers:

[https://qrng.anu.edu.au/](https://qrng.anu.edu.au/)

</comment><comment><USER28> the video output of a moving camera mounted on a quadcopter pointing at a crowd might also be a pretty good source for a random number generator

</comment><comment><USER29> this seems like a lot of work compared to an LCG, which is blindingly fast and more than good enough for game purposes.

<comment><USER30> LCG is a pseudo-random number generator.

The electronic design described in the article is a _true_ random number generator.

<comment><USER31> For gaming purposes, a standard pseudo-random number generator is faster, more reliable and has better statistical properties (!) than this hardware random number generator. It is also cheaper (cheap as in free software).

<comment><USER30> > has better statistical properties

[http://www.cryogenius.com/hardware/isarng/diehard.txt](http://www.cryogenius.com/hardware/isarng/diehard.txt)

The hardware generator passes more diehard tests than the LCG. In any case, a true-RNG scheme is supposed to feed into a PRNG. True RNGs feed into sources of entropy, and then you use entropy sources as part of PRNGs to extract more randomness out of them (if you need speed).

Or not... if you need "security". (Stay slow, so you get tons of entropy)

> a standard pseudo-random number generator is faster

This hardware RNG doesn't require a CPU at all. Its an electronics project that can feed into anything.

It makes almost no sense to compare a hardware solution against a software one.

<comment><USER29> you don't seem to understand the very low requirements for all of the practical use cases in games. having dedicated hardware for that is going to require more work for games developers for no detectable benefit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Is it a quantum random number generator ?</comment>


Open Source Politics: The Radical Promise of Germany's Pirate Party - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/09/open-source-politics-the-radical-promise-of-germanys-pirate-party/262646/

<comment><USER2> Compare and contrast: [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/19/german_pirate_attack...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/19/german_pirate_attacks_pirates/)

<comment><USER3> That was just her publisher doing that without her consent.

<comment><USER4> She said that the publisher did the right thing.</comment></comment></comment>