Assange: Google Is Not What It Seems - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279447 <comment><USER4> Despite all the people that think he sounds like a lunatic, is any of what he is saying a lie? Lots of people who sound like lunatics but aren't telling lies are worth listening to, I think.

So, he's putting a lot of "these guys are all evil" spin on it, but then again, all the connections he is making seem to be true. Whether it means Google is in bed with the US government or not is up to the reader (with nudging from him, of course), but I don't anyone confronted with this many factual connections between a CEO of a mega corporation and government actors could simply write this off as "lunacy".

I think most people in the tech industry (and sadly not many people outside it) have already realized the Google is very very big-brothery.

<comment><USER5> How do you define a "lie"?

It is full of misinformation and omission of fact which then creates a false narrative. There are a few options then:

a) Assange is omitting important facts intentionally (which I don't think is the case). In this case you can call this misinformation a "lie".

b) Assange truly believes in the narrative and honestly thinks the important facts are not that important. In this case, well, he is a bit of a lunatic...

Some examples of omission/misinformation:

1\. DARPA funding. He omitted that perhaps 30-50% of all PhD students in one or another way get DARPA funding.

2\. "$2M contract with NSA in 2003". He omitted that Google was selling it's "Search Appliance" left and right in 2003 and NSA was just a small fish.

3\. "Caught redhanded with handing petabytes of data... via PRISM". He forgot to mention that Google was bound by law to comply with NSL and warrants and was one of the first ones among all the companies to push for more transparency.

4\. "Google Maps are shopped to Pentagon". He forgot to mention that Google sells access to maps to everyone and Pentagon is just a small fish.

5\. When talking about lobbying, he stops explaining why Google lobbies. It doesn't lobby for more contracts, like Lockheed, it lobbies for less regulation in search ;-)

I could go on.

Overall, I would say, the Lockheed-Google analogy is deeply flawed. Just follow the money. Google does not care for government contracts - <USER2> all of it's revenue is from ads. The key asset for Google is user trust, which as you can see, is very hard to retain. If user trust is lost, Google is toast. Why would it then have any incentive to bed with the government?

Disclosure: I work for Google. I sit next to security folks (not physical security, mind you). Everyone I know here is super super pissed about Keyscore, wiretaps, NSL, etc.

<comment><USER6> Omissions are not lies. Yes, it's true that a lot of PhD-Students get DARPA funding, but that doesn't make the fact less true that Google also gets this.

All you are presenting is different interpretations of facts and weighting them differently - which is completely okay and a politics standard.

I disagree with you on one thing: if the main asset of google is trust, how come it aggressively lobbies against german consumer rights and makes themselves a hated target in that country? Doesn't quite fit...

I don't believe that Assange is necessarily _dishonest_. I have different interpretations to a lot of his things, but I am convinced that they are his actual opinions.

<comment><USER7> You are correct that omissions are not lies. However, when you need to make decisions based on information you need all possible information, not half of it. So it's not presenting different interpretations, he's providing context.

If I tell you about somebody wearing a rain coat and using an umbrella on a sunny day, you might conclude that person is a nutcase. If I add the context that this person is highly sensitive to sunlight and is protecting himself, you will probably conclude differently.

Yes, this happens a lot in politics, but that doesn't mean it's ok.

<comment><USER6> I could argue that adding the fact that a lot of PhD students receive DARPA funding and trying to mingle it with corporate funding is problematic on the same grounds, as it adds context that I don't feel worthwhile, because it distracts.

The attempt to put all context into all discussions is obviously futile. Adding relevant context is a worthwhile way of debate, but not necessarily part of any particular statement. Assange doesn't see that piece of info as relevant.

Trying to turn this on the person is not a way to go in my opinion. Prove a lie before.

Interacting with his statements (and be it "I think he's overinterpreting and I won't further engage"), is the way to go.

(To add context: I live in Berlin, a person in a rain coat and an umbrella on a sunny day is nothing special.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I did not realize what a nut Assange has become. The more there is the danger that he might be forgotten, the more ridiculous his theories of the world.

However, you have to think about his target audience. The audience doesn't consist of people who are familiar with things like DARPA grants, and think tanks. For people in the know, this writing will read like lunacy, because they will understand that Assange sees demons behind every innocuous shadow. Some random college kid from middle America, on the other hand, won't know that his writing is lunacy.

For example, think about his casual implication that DARPA funding of Page and Brin's Stanford research might be a signal of their nefarious links to some cabal of elites in the defense industry. Anyone who has worked in a top-ten engineering program knows that nothing could be further from the truth. Those grants go out, in a bureaucratic fashion, to tons of people, without any such elites getting involved at all. In fact the worst thing you can say about those DARPA grants is that they are haphazardly doled out for some real stupid projects.

But think about how that accusation looks to some kid. It seems like there is this grand conspiracy because Larry Page and Sergey Brin took DARPA money ... of course they must be deep cover CIA implants right?

Its complete stupidity from start to finish, but its the type of stupidity that can only be debunked by actually being there and seeing that Assange speaks nonsense. This guy is an entertainer and self-promoter of extraordinary cunning. Think of the audacity it takes to write this gibberish with such confidence.

<comment><USER9> Calling someone a conspiracy "nut" is not an argument, and doesn't add anything to the conversation besides an ad hominem fallacy.

I do agree with your one point that DARPA funding is given out in a seemingly haphazard manner. However, giving companies money is an effective way of exerting influence over them in the future.

<comment><USER10> Simply calling somebody a nut instead of pointing out the flaws in their argument is a proper example of the _ad hominem_ fallacy. However, taking aim at the argument itself, successfully demonstrating its nuttiness, and concluding that one would have to be a nut to try making such a case is not a failure of reason. Quite the opposite.

After all, the _ad hominem_ rule is not some generalized prohibition against personal attacks. It is merely a prohibition against _baseless or irrelevant_ personal attacks – especially when used to deflect a justified charge, skirt a legitimate issue, or evade a properly vexing question.

This is a very important limit, and one that serves a valuable social function. Specifically, it's what allows us to derive positive utility from clear and direct condemnation of dubious personal characteristics in cases where those traits are producing or defending overt violations of reasonable and openly defensible social norms – like not gleefully spreading baseless FUD, for whatever reason.

I'll be the first to agree that killing messengers is bad policy. That said, I'm also a big fan of marginalizing unreliable narrators. In that regard, knocking Assange down a few pegs seems like a major boon to the mass surveillance conversation, which could really benefit from cooler, clearer heads prevailing.

<comment><USER11> In essence you are saying that you don't agree with Assange so his name should be smeared to keep his opinions from reaching the public. You are claiming that you are able to parse and analyze his statements for their truthfulness, whereas the rest of the public will be hoodwinked. What an arrogant and elitist way to think.

Arguments should stand or fall based on merit, not on labels like "nutjob" or "conspiracy theorist".

<comment><USER10> "In essence you are saying that you don't agree with Assange so his name should be smeared to keep his opinions from reaching the public."

Nope. And even if I did think smearing people was okay, there's no need for dishonest characterizations when the man is openly making a fool of himself. If honest discussion about what he's actually doing makes him look bad then the fault lies with him, and not the people who are simply noticing that he's losing the thread.

"You are claiming that you are able to parse and analyze his statements for their truthfulness, whereas the rest of the public will be hoodwinked"

Oh really? Do say where.

"Arguments should stand or fall based on merit,"

Well, at least you're right about one thing. And speaking of arguments falling on merit, yours begins by distorting something I said to assert something I neither said nor even implied, then departs even further from reality by asserting I'm "claiming" something about my own abilities in relation to those of "the rest of the public" even though I made precisely zero mention of either. Seriously, at this point you're just making shit up. So of all the faults in your position, I'd say basic dishonesty tops the list. And that's a bit rich coming from a guy who started by railing against "smears."

But thanks for playing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> He writes well, and it's an interesting look at how intertwined the government has become (was it ever not?) enmeshed with corporate empires. Unfortunately in the wider population, Google's image is nigh unassailable. The average user wouldn't know about their being saddled with military contracts through their Boston Dynamics acquisition, for example. For this, and other reasons, 99 times out of 100, "free market" consumer action such as boycotts have negligible impact. That's alright though, when you can trust the state to properly monitor and regulate ethical conduct, though it doesn't look like we'll be quite so lucky here.

Regulatory capture is one of the biggest problems in the government today, but the solution isn't decreasing the power of the government over companies, it's decreasing the power of companies over the government.

<comment><USER13> _> >Unfortunately in the wider population, Google's image is nigh unassailable._

Well, for me I __still__ [1] think of Google as the good guys because I place the blame for this mess squarely on USgov, which perhaps ultimately leads to the public's lack of empathy - but I see this as a chicken-and-egg problem. I don't know if USgov laws created a socioeconomic setup that made people too stressed about day-to-day life not care, or people not caring resulted in our current socioeconomic setup. That's the cycle I'd like to break; but blaming Google solves nothing. What are they suppose to do? Just straight up say _" Screw you USgov, we're not obeying the law. Don't care about your gag-orders or your subpoenas. We're just going to flat out refuse. Do your worst, come at me bro."_ \--- I would think even Google must crumble under the full force of USgov that would swiftly follow such an act of rebellion.

Afterall, Google cannot dodge, bob and weave like say... Snowden.

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8443796](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8443796)

<comment><USER14> > _What are they [Google] suppose to do?_

Not have a business model predicated on datamining users' information, and build their systems in such a way that they are _unable_ to collect troves of unnecessary information.

But the only way we'll ever see any change is through users/developers: Detach yourself from such businesses. Don't build your dream on top of their corrupted platform. And if you must use some of their services for pragmatic reasons, consider them hostile governmental entities and thoroughly understand what you are giving away to be stored indefinitely.

Even if we demolished the NSA and put the traitors' heads on pikes, it would only be a matter of time until insurance companies robustly created similar chilling effects: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7928484](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7928484)

<comment><USER13> Basically, you're saying to just not create a business like Google. That's not a practical solution because... money. If there's an opportunity to make money, it will be taken. Even the illegal & immoral ones, not to even talk about perfectly legal avenues.

More tangible problems with your idea of never collecting huge amounts of userdata are:

\- If Google didn't collect userdata, I suspect their search wouldn't be working even half as good as it does now.

\- Gmail, or any email provider?

\- Amazon's shopping history with your address and CC recorded?

\- Youtube?

\- cellphone service provider? (yeah, you could avoid logging conversations & SMS but you're still the kind of company the NSA would come to for spying on a person simply because you'd be a major hub of communication)

<comment><USER14> Yes. Users wising up will hopefully put an end to that money. Your statement is similar to saying that ending the NSA is not a practical solution because "power". So our personal autonomy is fucked because money and power - I'm willing to admit that this may be the inevitable answer, but in what way is it productive?

It's indeed hard to imagine a world in which users control their data - <USER3> is the extent of how hard we've been pwned.

Some of these systems were in place long before the issue could possibly be on anyone's radar, and would/will take quite a lot of work to extricate ourselves. anonymous payments - hard, especially now with Bitcoin on the scene. cell service - a bit harder, TOR+wifi+bearer payment for programmatic wifi access. physical address obfuscation - even harder, physical package mix network backed by repu (fuck, I give up).

But Youtube? You could write a software frontend tomorrow that avoided being Google's slave by not sending cookies. Comments would be a little harder, but that's a feature - I think a recent study showed glancing at those _actually causes brain cancer_. Beyond that, I guess TOR to scrub IPs until a better (high-latency) mix network comes along.

Email is a broken naive protocol like HTTP which relies on centralized identities, and can thus never really be secured. But secure messaging itself is a low hanging fruit. The fact we don't have it already shows that we seriously need to invest effort into building the ladder.

<comment><USER13> When I said youtube, I meant the fact that people upload their lives to it. Not the cookie or IP tracking stuff. Speaking of uploading lives, let me add Facebook. So there just can't be a Facebook?

Devolving the internet & its services isn't the answer. You'd also have to just stop using cellphones too. There is no hiding from a corrupt government. You can't expect the general population to do all this stuff you're talking about. You have to fix the government. Focus on corruption-in-USgov and NSA, they are the enemy. Anything else is a distraction because it's not reasonable to say _" Don't make a useful service for millions of non-technical people"_. Somebody, something, will always be popular and become a major hub of communication. To prevent that, is to prevent the evolution of not only the internet... but even society in general. And you'd be doing all that to avoid a corrupt-government, which you will fail at because you cannot avoid a corrupt-government. Anyone who thinks they have is wrong; it's just that USgov/NSA isn't interested enough in them yet.

The only exception is Snowden, and we all see the sacrifice he had to make to do it. If we all did that then... well... there is no America anymore. If that's what you're advocating, then you're asking for a nationwide revolution. Which is fine, btw. I'm supportive[1] of that. I'm just saying that avoiding a couple of social sites doesn't put you out of reach of the NSA. You'd have to get a significant amount of US citizens to go completely off the grid and live like hermits... or Snowdens. If that happened, I will happily call that a revolution and celebrate.

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8458114](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8458114)

<comment><USER14> (for context, I hope for both the NSA and Facebook to go out of business, and was recently thinking Snowden might make a good Schelling point for a write-in candidate)

There's always going to be collection of selective disclosure. Some of that could be changed by a culture of secrecy (youtube videos in skimasks ^_^), but in general there will be people who post everything to the friendster du jour. And I don't see how one could ever stop assuming that information will be archived indefinitely. For this, my hope can only be for a symmetric Brinworld transparency where it ultimately doesn't matter (and to the extent some does, people learn to navigate these contours).

But for stuff that doesn't need to be shared, I think you're focused too much on the NSA, when it's really just the most prominent example. Any sufficiently-funded intelligence agency is going to have plants that work at significant corporate information troves. Exfiltration isn't terribly hard when companies setup geographically diverse data centers on purpose.

And as I said, insurance companies are a far more worrying threat to me as far as dictating everyday terms of your life - "we noticed you buy an awful lot of beer. Your auto insurance rates will be doubling unless you let us install a GPS-enabled breathalyzer in your car". I suppose this _could_ be held back with legislation if we had a working political process, but I also recognize that economics tends to win out regardless.

You say 'devolve' when talking about moving to non-centralized services, but this is a loaded term. I view web toys (also a loaded term, heh heh) as a stop off from the Internet becoming mainstream-recognized before its application technologies were really polished to withstand model precession. There's no reason privacy-preserving technology couldn't have a similar interface, yet be easily self-administered with the help of any friend who is just slightly savvy (besides that it's much harder to get such software funded when there's no point for capital to invest because it rightly takes the middlemen out of the picture).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A lot of innuendo and guilt by association, political conspiracy ala Kevin Bacon. I suppose isolation tends to produce conspiracy theories. I'll get down voted for this of course.

When Assange is raising concerns about a potential Google monopoly over the whole of the internet, he is of course, raising a legitimate concern. But the attempts by Assange, and people like Yasha Levine, to tie Google into the military industrial complex are weak sauce. The point about DARPA funding is particularly bullshit. Is any student who ever worked using research funds or equipment from DARPA at a university, and later goes on to found another company, beholden to the agenda of that organization? I worked on projects in college where I scarcely knew where the funds were coming from or who I should be paying my allegiance to.

<comment><USER16> _the attempts by Assange, and people like Yasha Levine, to tie Google into the military industrial complex are weak sauce_

The historical, current and future involvement of senior Google executives in US foreign policy, their self-description and in some cases their personal identification as middle-east focused was, I felt, well illustrated in the article. The DARPA point is tangential.

<comment><USER17> Though the article was focused on middle-east related activities, would your argument change if the article mentioned an equal number of South American or Asia focused conferences/think tanks, etc. etc.

It's interesting that we keep saying US foreign policy, but I wonder if it truly is US only, or if Google's connections in other countries have similar connections and activities? If they do, does that change how we feel about these?

<comment><USER16> _would your argument change_

This is a tangent. I don't think there's any argument. The statements were well supported.

<comment><USER15> The statements are mostly guilt by circumstance. IMHO, there's a lot of puffery and bullshit going on at these NGO conferences and meetings, where self-important people present platitudes in powerpoint slides about vacuous and abstract solutions for the world's problems. It's the same nonsense we've seen before. A bunch of bankers go to meet in secret, and all of a sudden people are talking about Bilderbergers/Trilateral Commission/Illuminati/FreeMasons secretly ruling the international scene.

If a bunch of Silicon Valley guys go to Davos and meet with say, the government of Burma, where they talk about how some technical internet thing is going to help their country, is it nefarious, or is it a naive belief by people passionate about technology and their own ability, that they can solve complex problems with stuff they're working on? (The State Department arranges lots of these "CEO tours" all the time. Are they secretly working on foreign policy, or, are they trying to open up exports, or sell people on American capitalism? And so what if the CEOs are talking about the benefits of the Web or internet technology for an open society? Just because the trip is arranged on behalf of the State Department doesn't make the agenda _wrong_ )

The desire for the ultra-successful techies to thinkt hey can solve the world's problems by exporting Silicon Valley is the kind of thinking Mike Judge lampoons in "Silicon Valley", the naivete' of techies that they can "change the world" by developing an app or distributing computers to people in a country with broken civil institutions.

Assange wants to play "connect the dots" to imply something nefarious going on, but if Angelina Jolie were in the same meetings instead of Eric Schmidt, what would Assange be saying? Hollywood actors often have the same narcissistic view.

Nothing in his commentary actually zeros in on anything Google has done based on these supposed connections that's bad (leaving aside the wrong claims about how PRISM works)

What would be the incentive for Google to risk a tens of billion-a-quarter business on some quid-pro-quo for the US Government or Eric Schmidt's vanity? After all, it is a public company seeking to make a profit. It is not an oil company, it does not harvest raw resources from foreign companies, and it doesn't make hardly any revenue from selling services to the US government. There's not much US government favors can do for it's bottom line. It's biggest impediments are regulations that block people from using its services (mainly China). It doesn't have the same incentives that past American companies needed the American empire for -- to protect its _physical_ interests in oil or resource concessions abroad. You need the US empire for that, you don't necessarily need it to protect _virtual assets_.

A plausible theory for Google being in bed with the US Government in this regard would have to provide a compelling motive. You can make the case for Exxon, or Unilever, Halliburton, or say, companies with manufacturing plants abroad, that rely on US government protection and contracts, but the only theory about why Google would even want to be in bed with the US government would rest on some kind of threat, like the government putting a regulatory gun to the head of Google threatening onerous restrictions or anti-trust action that would destroy their business unless they comply -- a huge stick, not a carrot.

My point is, Google has more important things to worry about on a day to day basis. They're more worried about competitors like Apple, than some weak ass benefits some association with bureaucrats might provide.

I think Schmidt's post-Google-CEO career, from writing books, to trying to be a pseudo-diplomat and tech-utopian ambassador are really harming Google's brand by association. Bill Gates had the right idea, pick low hanging, high value, fruit, work on the boring stuff, stay mostly quiet about it while you get stuff done. Actions speak louder than words.

But I think it's just that -- association. Google Ideas isn't Google, this Cohen guy is irrelevent to Google's main business lines.

<comment><USER18> >The State Department arranges lots of these "CEO tours" all the time. Are they secretly working on foreign policy, or, are they trying to open up exports, or sell people on American capitalism?

What's the difference? They both support the agenda of the supporting governments.

>Just because the trip is arranged on behalf of the State Department doesn't make the agenda wrong

Right, but without transparency to indicate one or the other people are likely to perceive the meddling of a specific government within a company that deals with international business to be troublesome/worrying.

>Assange wants to play "connect the dots" to imply something nefarious going on, but if Angelina Jolie were in the same meetings instead of Eric Schmidt, what would Assange be saying?

Does Angelina Jolie have something to do with the world's largest store of personal information, or do you somehow think that Schmidt's influence comes from his celebrity rather than his influence inside one of the world's biggest economic powers?

Angelina Jolie, and celebrities like her, are used to influence the public. Celebrities like Schmidt are powerful because they are leveraging the power of their respective domains.

If I were Assange, i'd probably conclude that the use of a celebrity like Angelina Jolie was for the purposes of controlling a populous or influencing 'the masses' opinion -- but i'm not Assange, and Jolie is tangential.

> Nothing in his commentary actually zeros in on anything Google has done > based on these supposed connections that's bad (leaving aside the wrong > claims about how PRISM works)

Enduring Security Framework, NSA tool contracts, GeoEye-1 sharing(Both the gov and Google paid for half of the satelite, but the 16 inch resolution imagery is only available for gov use. How's that for fair?), Google's membership within the Defense Industrial Base ("products and services that are essential to mobilize, deploy, and sustain military operations."), the rental of Google's front page to the state ("Live! Secretary Kerry answers questions on Syria"), and the government support of Schmidt as some sort of official Ambassador for back-channel influence of negotiating parties.

Did you just skim past all that, or do you think that none of this is cause for concern?

>it is not an oil company, it does not harvest raw resources from foreign companies, and it doesn't make hardly any revenue from selling services to the US government. There's not much US government favors can do for it's bottom line.

Google harvests raw resources in the form of data-mining, and turns those resources into a product worth value. The value that it accrues from the US government is not in the form of revenue, but rather in the form of access -- access to those in power and access to business tactics and resources that are above and beyond the treatment of most businesses by the US government.

>You need the US empire for that, you don't necessarily need it to protect virtual assets.

That's far from true. Past large groups did not only depend on the US to protect their physical product, but also to protect their position in the market (if government subsidized usually), to protect their methodologies, and in some cases protect their IP.

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

an act, widely considered to have been unconstitutional, voted on by voice, which was created by the reasoning that "copyright industries are one of the largest trade surpluses for the state"

If lobbyists can succeed in increasing a held copyright by 50 years to a 120 year total it doesn't take much imagination to understand why a company may want to be in bed with their host government.

>What would be the incentive for Google to risk a tens of billion-a-quarter business on some quid-pro-quo for the US Government or Eric Schmidt's vanity?

the continued permission to exist as a company and not a fragmented post anti- trust mess?

>My point is, Google has more important things to worry about on a day to day basis. They're more worried about competitors like Apple, than some weak ass benefits some association with bureaucrats might provide.

Google does, but Schmidt doesn't. That's why the assertion that Schmidt is a puppet ambassador for the US government came about -- because he and his highly-political cadre of followers (cabinet?) go from country to country on state sponsored tours, apparently while espousing pro-US/surveillance talking points with the world's leaders.

>Google Ideas isn't Google

What? It may not be the _whole_ of Google, but isn't that a bit silly?

<comment><USER15> > Geo-Eye high res imagery. Everyone who owns an imagery satellite is pretty > much forced to give the government preferential access, and offer lower > resolution to the public. This is not Eric Schmidt wanting to do favors for > the government, I'm sure all of the competing mapping companies want to > offer the best, highest resolution maps, but are often regulated by the > state from doing so.

> Kerry ad on front page.

Seriously? So when YouTube hosts President Obama in a Hangout, you think this is some quid-pro-quo for foreign missions? You think Twitter hosting Presidential or Candidate questions, or Facebook doing the same mean something is going on? Red Bull's epic stratosphere sky dive also was promoted in the same way. Google wants to promote their services, like G+/Hangouts/YouTube and the government wants free advertising it's a win-win, and you don't need to concoct a story that this is payback for Eric Schmidt delivering a message to Kim Jong Un, or for Google getting a free-pass from the FTC.

This is what I mean by guilty by association. If YouTube hosts a Whitehouse press conference, there's a product manager in YouTube is supremely happy, but it is extremely unlikely they had to hand over the keys of their servers to the NSA to get it. YouTube audience size and demographics alone are reason enough. In the same manner, Obama went on "Between Two Ferns" not as a favor to the show because of a State Department mission.

Not every relationship between the government and the private sector needs a conspiracy. The government needs to buy toilet paper like everyone else.

"Defense Industrial Base"? Oh, you mean, if the US military opens a Google Apps account, uses Docs, Gmail, and Maps for it's internal planning, suddenly it's no different than Lockheed Martin? The military and government uses Powerpoint like crazy, does this make Microsoft part of the "defense industrial base"? It's a pretty meaningless label then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So Google does business with the U.S. government? No duh. It's not exactly a state secret, it's not like Google doesn't post job openings at the Washington D.C. and Reston, VA locations for people who want to sell and support the government.

Here's the contract awards

[http://www.usaspending.gov/search?form_fields=%7B%22search_t...](http://www.usaspending.gov/search?form_fields=%7B%22search_term%22%3A%22GOOGLE+INC.%22%7D)

[https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/search.do?indexName=awardfull&...](https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/search.do?indexName=awardfull&templateName=1.4.4&s=FPDSNG.COM&q=google)

Of course they want to sell to the government. The government has money.

<comment><USER11> The claim is not only that Google does business with the government, but that they also help push the US Government's agenda. Did you read the article?

<comment><USER19> Of course, that's how government acquisitions work. Do you think the government purchases things that don't help its agenda?

You can add up the dollar figures in the contracts yourself and guess if that's worth the CEO of Google adopting an unduly favorable tone about the government in order to continue to receive more contracts.

I know if I had a big enough customer for one of my products I'd probably talk nice about them also.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> That was interesting.

I've always been a bit curious about Schmidt and what sort of measure someone who is neither in awe nor seeking to impress might make of him.

I think the whole piece is probably best summed up with this line towards then end.

 _> "What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber- security companies will be to the twenty-first."_

That certainly makes sense.

<comment><USER21> Only sort of. "Technology" (by which I assume you mean the sort of things produced by Google - namely, software services) and cyber-security are different from Lockheed's products in one extremely important way: anyone has the capacity and reason to use them. Only the government and a handful of large entities (airlines, maybe a few research labs) have any need for the things made by Lockheed and Boeing. But almost every single American uses a Google service, and certainly the entire population of the Internet can use cyber-security solutions.

They're similar in the sense that the government might spend incomprehensible sums of money on them, but that's where it ends, and in that sense airplanes are the same as potatoes. The potential issues with something like Google are very, very different from the steel-and-gears military industrial complex (which is also still going strong), where the companies and government seem to exist solely to justify each other's existence.

<comment><USER18> > Only sort of. "Technology" (by which I assume you mean the sort of things > produced by Google - namely, software services) and cyber-security are > different from Lockheed's products in one extremely important way: anyone > has the capacity and reason to use them.

No. Lockheed and Boeing are defense companies. They sell safety to citizenry in the form of defense through government as a proxy. Anyone enjoying the safety of well maintained national borders employing equipment by either of those groups are 'using' their 'product'.

They (as defense contractors, and not private plane builders) are dependent on capitalization funding -- provided by the people through a vote for elected officials -- who will have the chance to provide a positive or negative pressure on the party in question with regards to allotted subsidies and funding towards that effort.

One way that both groups (both Google and the defense contractors) are much alike is that there is no way that they could have naturally grown to such proportions without anti-trust/monopoly/power-grab laws kicking in. Their (the companies) size is the largest indicator, to me personally, that they are playing ball with the world's governments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > By mid-August we discovered that a former German employee—whom I had > suspended in 2010—was cultivating business relationships with a variety of > organizations and individuals by shopping around the location of the > encrypted file, paired with the password's whereabouts in the book

I remember reading Daniel Domscheit-Berg's (or was known as Daniel Schmidt, I think) book "Inside WikiLeaks", which talked about Assange's increasing paranoia.

I'm sad to read that the former German employee was once someone very important to Wikileak's early days and, if you read the book, someone who was very close to the man himself.

I'm suddenly more worried about Julian Assange and his paranoid/conspiracy theory view of the world

<comment><USER23> Paranoia is one thing. But I don't think it's paranoid to state that conspiracies exist. 5 years ago, people were called crazy for suggesting that the NSA were eavesdropping on the entire internet.

This particular article outlines the well-known links between NGOs and the US administration, and the probable ulterior motives underlying NGOs' stated objectives (i.e. 'human rights' etc). I don't think this is a paranoid theory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is interesting to read other people's suppositions on this stuff. In a similar vein, I tend to think of Facebook as being just another government agency, but Google has always been much more curious. Google seems to have ambition beyond getting close to power, Google has since the very earliest days seemed that it is interested in being a power in and of itself. The International Olympic Committee has this unusual designation of being a non-geographical state-like entity. I suspect Google would also like that designation.

</comment><comment><USER25> It is not that I believe that Google and Eric Schmidt along with the government are part of some kind of conspiracy. And I do acknowledge that someone like Assange probably is much more paranoid than he should be.

It is simply that we should not voluntarily give so much power to a single company.

<comment><USER26> It's stupid that you are being down-voted but I agree profusely.

Google might stand for a better way of doing things (from what we had before) but at the end of the day it is a global and impersonal corporation with thousands of employees.

What our governments must due is keep a close eye on them. What we must do is compete with them and do everything in our power to beat them to market or circumvent their walled garden. If they go down in the process then too bad, we will take all their engineers - the _real_ value of Google.

I would expect any startup and government to approach a huge conglomerate like Google, Apple, or Microsoft without fear and with much integrity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't see the point. Just read the original text. [https://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange- Schmidt.htm...](https://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt.html)

<comment><USER28> Because the linked article includes a lot more than just the details of that meeting.

<comment><USER27> I'm not sure if they're details or opinions. I find the original meeting much more interesting. It's a legitmate exchange between two smart people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The last section reads like the ravings of a conspiracy nut. From associating the DARPA grants that fund many university computer science projects with nefarious spy collaboration to repeating PRISM is the long-debunked full take program of Greenwald's fantasy, it's straight lunacy.

<comment><USER30> > _reads like the ravings of a conspiracy nut._

As do all the articles about the information Snowden made available to us.

Imagine it's somewhere in 2005-2010 while reading... you would be nuts if you didn't think _they_ were conspiracy nuts.

<comment><USER31> ECHELON was an open secret much earlier and the European Paiament had written reports on it in the 1990s.

People claiming it was conspiracy theory were fucking idiots given all the reputable evidence. The stuff about Boeing and McDonnal Douglas was late 1999 / early 2000.

<comment><USER16> European Parliament report was issued in 2001. The difference back then was that everyone in the general population considered you a nutcase if you described it to them. These days, only perhaps 60% of people consider you a nutcase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I noticed something curious in the comment section:

DARPA is mentioned exactly once in this article and then mostly as a tangential point. Despite this, it's mentioned several times in multiple critical top-level comments here in the comment section.

<comment><USER29> Perhaps because that is the one thing that anybody with even the slightest academic computer science background in the US will immediately recognize as utter nonsense.

There are many other ridiculous associations in Assange's essay, some of which have been pointed out by others in the thread, but that one jumps out of the page, grabs you by the ears, and screams crazy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Any time you read an article by Assange you have to read it in context and using his meaning for some key concepts:

Some further reading: [http://estaticos.elmundo.es/documentos/2010/12/01/conspiraci...](http://estaticos.elmundo.es/documentos/2010/12/01/conspiracies.pdf)

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/urizenus- sklar/understanding-c...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/urizenus- sklar/understanding-conspiracy-_b_793463.html)

</comment><comment><USER34> I suggest that people reading these comments look through the posting histories of the people bashing Assange and make a judgement about whether or not they're real people.

You be the judge.

<comment><USER17> We're all real people, you're the one who created a throwaway account to question other peoples motives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> A lot of what he writes has nothing to do with the facts but rather adds to the general "evil theme".

Somehow he was able to paint having "analyticity" as a bad thing: "Schmidt's dour appearance concealed a machinelike analyticity".

And acquisitions are conveniently renamed into takeovers: "In 2004, after taking over Keyhole"

And then this. I don't even:

"The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."

<comment><USER36> Those interested in geopolitics have their own cultural references. The last is a reference to Thomas Friedman's "A Manifesto for the Fast World" (NYT, 1999). The more complete context is:

> It's true that no two countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought > a war since they each got their McDonald's. (I call this the Golden Arches > Theory of Conflict Prevention.) But globalization does not end geopolitics > -- the enduring quest for power, the fear of neighbors, the tug of history. > What globalization does is simply put a different frame around geopolitics, > a frame that raises the costs of war but cannot eliminate it.

> That is why sustainable globalization still requires a stable, geopolitical > power structure, which simply cannot be maintained without the active > involvement of the United States. All the technologies that Silicon Valley > is designing to carry digital voices, videos and data around the world, all > the trade and financial integration it is promoting through its innovations > and all the wealth this is generating, are happening in a world stabilized > by a benign superpower, with its capital in Washington, D.C.

> The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist -- > McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the > F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's > technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine > Corps. ''Good ideas and technologies need a strong power that promotes those > ideas by example and protects those ideas by winning on the battlefield,'' > says the foreign policy historian Robert Kagan. ''If a lesser power were > promoting our ideas and technologies, they would not have the global > currency that they have. And when a strong power, the Soviet Union, promoted > its bad ideas, they had a lot of currency for more than half a century.''

See [http://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/28/magazine/a-manifesto- for-t...](http://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/28/magazine/a-manifesto-for-the-fast- world.html?src=pm&pagewanted=8) for the McDonald's/McDonnell Douglas quote, but I started the context from the end of the previous page to show why McDonald's was relevant in the first place.

The 'Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention' is from Friedman's 1999 book "The Lexus and the Olive Tree". See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lexus_and_the_Olive_Tree'](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lexus_and_the_Olive_Tree') .

<comment><USER37> The Golden Arches Theory (even before it was disproven by the Russia-Georgia war of 2008) -- and similar theories like the "democracies don't fight wars against each other" theory -- have always been silly things that take rely on people not understanding math. You've got a feature that (at the time the theory is articulated) is historically fairly recent and that, when you take the number of pairs of countries that have been in wars that have occurred in any given time frame and the total number of pairs of country that have existed in the same time frame, and the total number of pairs of country that share the feature in question, where the expected value of number of wars between countries sharing the trait that is supposed to protect against war would be closer to zero than one if wars were randomly distributed and the feature had no effect, and then the theory uses the (utterly unsurprising) fact that the actual number of wars between countries sharing the trait is zero as the whole basis for an argument that sharing the trait prevents war.

<comment><USER36> If you read the Wikipedia page about the book you'll see Russia-Georgia listed as 1 of 5 such counter-examples, going back to the US invasion of Panama in 1989.

You'll also see his responses.

But I'm not trying to justify either which way. My point is that there are certain concepts in geopolitical dialog that are used as short-hand to express a larger concept. Expressions like "McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas" are to outsiders as meaningless as "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" or "information wants to be free".

In other words "[Schmidt] struggled to verbalize many of [his politics], often shoehorning geopolitical subtleties into Silicon Valley marketese or the ossified State Department micro-language of his companions" can be turned around - Assage uses a different language than you or I, though he doesn't struggle to verbalize his politics.

<comment><USER37> Your point about context was well made, my response was a tangent inspired by your post, not an argument against it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Personally, I do think asking Eric Schmidt to leak this kind of stuff was a horrible idea. But this reminds me of the anti poaching scandal:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7623873](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7623873)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8156005](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8156005)

</comment><comment><USER39> In all of Chrome, Firefox and IE, after a few moments the page background turns black, and then it's unreadable (black text on black background). Is this happening to anyone else? Is there a readable link? :P

<comment><USER40> Try:

        jQuery('#cboxOverlay').remove();
        jQuery('#colorbox').remove();

There's a modal that pops up with a black overlay. Opacity is 0 for me, but that might not be registering for whatever reason for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Not a single occurrence in the 154 previous comments of the words rape or rapist. I remember when that number would be 30 or higher. I guess it's not so believable anymore?

edit: voted down to zero but with no responders. :-)

/me waves to the NSA propagandists & apologists among us. I remember when many of us would have labeled that a whacky conspiracy theory, not so very long ago. Now we have the evidence that we were wrong we should remind each other of it whenever these stories come up.

</comment><comment><USER42> Here you might have the real explanation for why Eric Schmidt stepped down.

</comment><comment><USER17> Sadly, I found the following pieces gave Assange so little credibility that if he had just written about the last 3rd of the article, it would seem more credible to me.

If a suspended employee was shopping around "the location of the encrypted file, paired with the password's whereabouts" and in "two weeks most intelligence agencies, contractors and middlemen would have all the cables", wouldn't you just move the files and change the password?

He then goes on to say "Not only had Hillary Clinton's people known that Eric Schmidt's partner had visited me, but they had also elected to use her [Lisa Sheilds] as a back channel." However, he never mentions who Lisa Sheilds is, just that was Schmidts 'partner'.

I had to research it, but apparently she works for the "Council on Foreign Relations" [http://www.cfr.org/staff/b5862](http://www.cfr.org/staff/b5862) They do a horrible job explaining what they do. But I find it odd that Assange would have left out this details. Sheilds is a conduit to Clinton as well as Schmidts partner. This is an important detail.

"While WikiLeaks had been deeply involved in publishing the inner archive of the U.S. State Department, the U.S. State Department had, in effect, snuck into the WikiLeaks command center and hit me up for a free lunch." Assange blames Google, but he was naive enough to take a meeting, not knowing who the people setting up or attending were? I find this doubtful.

"The last forty years have seen a huge proliferation of think tanks and political NGOs whose purpose, beneath all the verbiage, is to execute political agendas by proxy." Which direction is this statement going? The state is influencing the political agenda's of corporations? or vice versa. Was it any other way, and is this a problem as Assange seems to assume it is?

Google and the Council on Foreign Affairs put together a conference to 'workshop technological solutions to the problem of "violent extremism."' This sounds like a good thing to me, but Assange condescendingly and rhetorically asks "What could go wrong?", ok, I'll bite. What went wrong? Unfortunately, he never answers.

"Google Ideas is bigger, but it follows the same game plan. Glance down the speaker lists of its annual invite-only get-togethers, such as "Crisis in a Connected World" in October 2013. Social network theorists and activists give the event a veneer of authenticity, but in truth it boasts a toxic piñata of attendees: U.S. officials, telecom magnates, security consultants, finance capitalists and foreign-policy tech vultures... " Invite-only ? Really? Is this surprising for such a gathering? If so, what are the activists doing with the foreign-policy tech vultures? Who's calling them vultures?

"I began to think of Schmidt as a brilliant but politically hapless Californian tech billionaire who had been exploited by ... U.S. foreign-policy types". He again here is assuming that Schmidts agenda and that of US Foreign Policy are not aligned.

If this article didn't have Julian Assange posted all over it, I almost think it would be more credible. What I've never understood about those who praise Assange (not WikiLeaks as an idea, but the way Assange runs it) is that he's as bad as many of the actions of people reported in the leaks. He has his own political agenda, and is given a huge volume of classified information by a third party, and he then decides what of these classified information gets published and what doesn't. What makes him the deciding factor in all of this? If you think you're doing good publishing information that others think is classified, than publish the information. Don't pick through it, see what you think will make headlines or embarrass people you don't like, and publish only that which you feel is fit to press.

<comment><USER43> "The last forty years have seen a huge proliferation of think tanks and political NGOs whose purpose, beneath all the verbiage, is to execute political agendas by proxy."

This one is _especially_ ironic, given that WikiLeaks has been reduced by now to a proxy political action arm for the Kremlin. The world is _still_ waiting for the WikiLeaks "secrets on Moscow" that Assange threatened to release in 2010.

RT at least got smart and finally stopped "The Julian Assange show" ([http://rt.com/tags/the-julian-assange-show/](http://rt.com/tags/the-julian- assange-show/)) so that the connection isn't _quite_ so obvious, but it is there, even today.

<comment><USER44> "WikiLeaks has been reduced by now to a proxy political action arm for the Kremlin"

Seriously?

<comment><USER43> Yes, seriously. Assange himself stated bluntly that he _told_ Snowden to go to Russia (not Cuba, nor any of the leftist South American nations).

DDB left WikiLeaks due in part to the ongoing association of WikiLeaks with authoritarian figures like Israel Shamir.

WikiLeaks could choose to start today and bring "transparency" to an increasingly opaque Russian situation, especially since Russia has recently passed laws requiring all media outfits to have no more than 20% foreign ownership, passed laws requiring bloggers to register themselves with central authorities, passed laws legalizing Internet surveillance even more extensive than is legal in the U.S. (and even U.K.) and much more.

WikiLeaks could do this today, there are half a million civil liberties organizations in the Western world focusing on the Western democracies and seemingly no powerful groups in Russia.

But despite their stated pro-transparency aims, WikiLeaks refuses to do this.

If it's because Russia has threatened WikiLeaks with _actual_ physical harm (something the U.S. government has never done) then WikiLeaks shouldn't have acted as collaborators with Russia by telling Snowden to go there instead of South America.

But I don't think it's a physical threat at all, the cooperation of WikiLeaks with Russia since 2010 has gone on for so long (and Assange has been cooped up in Ecuador for so long) that one would think the physical threat has subsided, at least enough for WikiLeaks to quietly stay _away_ from Russia instead of actively assisting them, as they did in 2013.

The most charitable explanation for all of this is that a common enemy (for WikiLeaks and Russia) makes strange bedfellows... but that doesn't change the fact that WikiLeaks has been actively collaborating with the Kremlin

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> To any "outsider" unfamiliar with Hacker News, it's heavily populated with Google employees, contractors, and developers that build on to Google products and services.

Keep that in mind when you read the comments here.

<comment><USER46> It is unfortunate that so much effort in this thread is being put into suggesting that anyone who disagrees with Assange must be a tool of the government or Google. We must not allow ourselves to fall prey to the military intelligence complex and actually _think critically_.

But I suppose when you agree with the premise then it's not actually propaganda...

<comment><USER45> An ad hominem attack voted up to the top is one giveaway that the rebuttals are emotional, rather than counter-arguments supported by facts.

<comment><USER46> The suggestion that the thread must be full of Google shills and that critics can be dismissed out of hand as part of the conspiracy is also an emotional argument unsupported by evidence.

<comment><USER47> We can agree this thread is full of shills, just possibly not google shills.

<comment><USER46> How do you tell the difference between a shill and someone who actually holds an opposing point of view?

It might be true, but Hacker News has a diverse userbase and it might as well be false. Using the term seems to me to be just a way to dismiss the credibility of critics - it's a thought terminating cliche.

<comment><USER11> Shills are easy to detect, as they out of character with the typical tone and style of messages on a particular forum. They also tend to have egregious flaws in reasoning and use emotional and heated personal attacks against the person or topic in question. The posts often get pushed to the top more quickly than usual.

It has already been revealed that government agencies use sock puppets and other techniques to manipulate popular and influential message boards, such as Reddit and Hacker News:

[https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/14/manipulating-o...](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/14/manipulating- online-polls-ways-british-spies-seek-control-internet/)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party)

[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy- ope...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation- social-networks)

Also, as many of you here on Hacker News should know, marginally ethical marketing techniques are commonly used by tech and other companies, including bought articles and opinion pieces, astro turfing, sock puppets, guerrilla marketing, software to assist in targeting specific forums and message boards, vote brigading etc. See:

[http://www.blackhatworld.com/](http://www.blackhatworld.com/)

<comment><USER43> > Shills are easy to detect, as they out of character with the typical tone > and style of messages on a particular forum. They also tend to have > egregious flaws in reasoning and use emotional and heated personal attacks > against the person or topic in question.

So in other words, you're claiming that non-accordance with the groupthink of that particular forum implies that the poster is a shill.

Furthermore, you claim that using "proper" reasoning and unemotional informational content is evidence that the poster is likely _not_ a shill, as if it's that hard to actually shill for something without resorting to crackpottery or emotional appeals.

I don't accept either premise, and nor should you.

> Also, as many of you here on Hacker News should know, marginally ethical > marketing techniques are commonly used by tech and other companies, > including bought articles and opinion pieces, astro turfing, sock puppets, > guerrilla marketing, software to assist in targeting specific forums and > message boards, vote brigading etc. See:

The fact that "Commonly-used" techniques exist implies absolutely nothing by itself about whether a given comment is from a shill, unless you're willing to believe that the base rate for shill/non-shill is significantly biased towards shills and sockpuppets on a normal basis.

For instance, Ebola is "common" in Liberia, but someone coming in with the symptoms of fever and headache are still at least as likely to have flu (or even Lassa fever) as they are to have Ebola.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Partnerships with US Corporations has always played a role in US Foreign Policy. Right now the military is talking about replacing large parts of its active forces with private companies. For information systems and telecommunication, launching rockets, building planes, creating munitions, researching weapons, it is the same.

Eisenhower gave his famous speech in 1961 on the forming Military-Industrial Complex. Military-Industrial because it partners the Military and Industry. (He warns America that if it goes unchecked, it could have dire consequences. I'm not saying it's gone unchecked - that's a different discussion.)

[http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html](http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html)

I go to my earlier point, the partnerships are not limited to munitions. Using Google to spy on foreign countries already shows that they have an intimate relationship. The question is whether Google is involved in Foreign Policy in other ways.

From GCHQ to NSA: "Let's be blunt - the Western World (especially the US) gained influence due to drafting earlier standards:

* The US was a major player in shaping today's internet. This resulted in pervasive exportation of America's culture as well as technology. It also resulted in a lot of money being made by US entities."

[http://hbpub.vo.llnwd.net/o16/video/olmk/holt/greenwald/NoPl...](http://hbpub.vo.llnwd.net/o16/video/olmk/holt/greenwald/NoPlaceToHide- Documents-Compressed.pdf) (96)

The US would have a lot to gain if they could use Google to 'prioritize and export US culture'. Google's CEO sounds an awful lot like he's saying that.

From the intro text:

"They outlined radically opposing perspectives: for Assange, the liberating power of the Internet is based on its freedom and statelessness. For Schmidt, emancipation is at one with U.S. foreign policy objectives and is driven by connecting non-Western countries to Western companies and markets."

The US keeps an eye out on US Companies, too. Seems like an easy trade for me if I were a CEO. It will also help you expand your international base. Win- win.

[https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/09/05/us- governments...](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/09/05/us-governments- plans-use-economic-espionage-benefit-american-corporations/)

</comment><comment><USER49> I really dont like google or they "dont be evil" lies. I believe they are the one of the most dangerous organization.. Call me skeptic or negative, I hope people would use they head and tey to avoid googles services..

</comment><comment><USER50> It wasn't until this article that I realized that Eric Schmidt of Google was the same Eric Schmidt of Sun Microsystems that famously said "you have zero privacy anyway. get over it".

Why am I supporting Google?

<comment><USER51> It was actually Scott McNealy who said that. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_McNealy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_McNealy)

<comment><USER50> I stand corrected. thank you.</comment></comment></comment>


Fedora and Ubuntu 0-days show that hacking desktop Linux is now a thing - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/12/fedora-and-ubuntu-0days-show-that-hacking-desktop-linux-is-now-a-thing/ <comment><USER2> Neat. Some steps that I take on my desktop linux on machines like my work machine that mitigate this attack:

\- always run your browser in a restricted firejail. this prevents browser exploits from reading your ssh keys. It also makes it much harder to pivot to a root shell or maintain a persistent backdoor because the filesystem is deleted upon jail exit.

\- don't install multimedia applications on sensitive machines. My default install is ubuntu server with i3-wm,vim,git and other dev tools. No mplayer, no vlc, no multimedia. I listen to music on my phone if I want to jam out. The work computer is for work.

\- use snapshotted VMs for interacting with sketchy files such as word docs, xlsx, mp3s, etc.

\- default deny rules in iptables to block inbound connections

\- static arp entry for the default route to prevent MITM on lan if possible. I do this on my work machine where the network is well known.

<comment><USER3> > always run your browser in a restricted firejail

No persistent cookies, no extensions, no cache.

Having a LastPass browser extension is the biggest step up in my personal security in a long time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, this is exploitable if you're running an SNES SPC backend in gstreamer, on a linux workstation.

That's a big stretch, and a lot of hype for this "0-day". How many people are going to be realistically affected by this? Why is arstechnica making such hype about it?

Yes, it's novel that someone's been able to break out of gstreamer's sandbox using unimplemented (or poorly-implemented) 65816 opcodes, but that's about as far as it goes.

Thankfully, my Calculate (Gentoo) Linux KDE desktop with a VLC backend is completely unaffected by this "0-day", and everything on my network is safe.

<comment><USER5> This SNES SPC backend is installed by in Ubuntu and Fedora (afaik, almost every distro that ships Gnome, since Gstreamer is a Gnome dependency).

So yeah, kinda of a hype however the target is pretty big.

<comment><USER6> The base problem is that browsers are trying to be friendly by auto- downloading or auto-playing media files.

If neither of those happened, these exploits could not be automated (though social engineering would always be an option).

Heck, the download itself is not a problem. The problem is that the DEs, in an attempt at being "helpful" detect and parse every new file for inclusion into their search functionality. And the parsing in this instance gets done by passing the file through gstreamer, and away we go again.

This is idiocy on par with autorun!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > While Evans' attacks won't work on most Linux servers, they will reliably > compromise most desktop versions of Linux...

Nope, patched already in debian and ubuntu.

</comment><comment><USER8> So it wasn't a thing before? But the couple of exploits developed by this guy made it a thing.

How come it wasn't made a thing by similar exploits developed by others in the past decades?

Ars writes the strangest things sometimes.

</comment><comment><USER9> Can properly setup apparmour/selinux profile help migitate this vulnearibility?

</comment><comment><USER10> This is good for linux!

Right?

<comment><USER7> been pretty jealous of my windows and mac friends getting all the nice viruses lately.</comment></comment>


Need help with Beef installation problem? - <AUTHOR>

I am trying to install the PHP version of BEEF and I've pretty much done everything I was supposed to. So when I go to the beef installation page which is localhost/beef I get this error: array("min_range"=>0, "max_range"=>65535)); return filter_var($port, FILTER_VALIDATE_INT, $int_options); } function valid_url($url) { if( preg_match("/\.\./", $url) ) return FALSE; if( ! preg_match("/^[a-zA-Z0-9\._:\/]*$/", $url) ) return FALSE; return filter_var($url, FILTER_VALIDATE_URL, FILTER_FLAG_SCHEME_REQUIRED); } function valid_url_without_query($url) { if(filter_var($url, FILTER_FLAG_QUERY_REQUIRED)) return FALSE; return valid_url($url); } ?> Fatal error: Call to undefined function valid_url_without_query() in C:\xampp\htdocs\beef\index.php on line 40
Well line 40 is this: $url = "http://" . $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']. $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; 	if(! valid_url_without_query($url)) $url = "";
I don't know if this is enough info but can someone help me figure out how to fix this error? <comment><AUTHOR> Help? Anyone?</comment>


STM8S-Discovery: Microcontrollers reach a new low - <AUTHOR> http://hackaday.com/2009/11/23/stm8s-discovery-microcontrollers-reach-a-new-low/

<comment><USER2> ST did not do much on the software, tool and community side lately. The Atmel ATmega processor, which has been well accepted by the open source in Arduino moves ST to this subsidizing PR and marketing approach. An interesting example how influential open source can get and how careful a chip company has to be with the overall system of the product, not only the silicon.

</comment><comment><USER3> Buy it from DigiKey for $6.65 - [http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?WT.z_ci...](http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?WT.z_cid=sp_497_0928_buynow&site=us&lang=en&Enterprise=44&mpart=STM8S-DISCOVERY)

Looks like it would be useful to have one or two lying around for misc. projects.

<comment><USER4> I ordered 2 from them last night, right after I saw the OP and before there were any comments here. I figured at that price they were well worth experimenting with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The STM8S-DISCOVERY is among the items offered as free samples by ST. You can request one here: <https://my.st.com/esample/app?page=basket>

If it builds a community it could really stand to challenge Arduino, especially if someone develops an intuitive software environment for it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Indeed the community will be created. In fact I know ST is planning to generate a lot of examples</comment>


Ask HN: Our Startup is meeting with Amazon Corporate, what should we expect? - <AUTHOR> We are a small (10 person) midwest based startup that has been working on applying deep learning to audio processing for the past two years. About a year ago we released our first product and have had great traction with a handful of large companies across the US.
A mutual connection introduced us to some Principals and "Category Leaders" and as a result we built an internal beta test that they have been evaluating for a few months. We just received an invite to come to Seattle and meet with 8 of their team members at the beginning of April.
We haven't worked with a company this size before, but we have gotten approached by Corp Dev from some other category leaders in our vertical and always passed on those deals. We haven't signed any documents or NDA's at this point with Amazon and they don't have anything in their hands that they could reverse engineer.
We are a little worried that they are going to just drill us with technical questions and if we answer them they will just build it on their own. At the same time if we don't answer their questions, we figure they will pass/tell us to go away.
We are worried that if that happens it will kill our momentum in the market and also our opportunity to raise money in the future. People will just say "oh well Amazon passed, forget a deal" etc... Seems lose/lose, but if they want to do a licensing deal or investment/acquisition that would totally blow everything open for us.
So what should we expect? <comment><USER2> Go to Harvard's Program on Negotiation website and practice a few of the role plays, particularly those focused on 2-party dialogues.

www.pon.harvard.edu

This will help you all get a bit more familiar with how to discuss options, not get anchored around a single point, and the power of information (which you seem to be worried about).

The role simulations, together with debriefing notes, can be downloaded here: [http://www.pon.harvard.edu/shop/category/role- simulations/](http://www.pon.harvard.edu/shop/category/role-simulations/)

</comment><comment><USER3> The internal post meet discussion will have stakeholders who say, "this technology is no big deal, we could build it in-house in six months." And yet it won't happen because there's no resources available to allocate and the idea would probably not get prioritized above existing plans during the OP1/2 process.

So: A: if someone tries to pressure you with the idea that your business is not innovative and 'we could build this ourselves' just say 'OK go ahead and hire those 10 engineers that pass the hiring bar, you have two months to get the OP1 document together, and btw who's going to own this and push this ahead of their current priorities, you?'

B: I don't see the benefit to sharing, please see the Silicon Valley episode where the Pied Piper engineers start white boarding during a meeting with investors.

C: BATNA. Know what this would be for your negotiating adversary. And know your own.

D: Be confident, be strong, don't show weakness (they would love that). It's likely the acquisition is the only way this becomes part of Amazon's business because they won't be building it unless they suddenly can hire enough people for all the other projects that are already approved.

Also, Amazon passing shouldn't be a usable sign to other investors, they pass on most things.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't know what business experience you have on your team, but make sure someone with enough of a business mind is the one driving the process on your side.

The technical details are just that - implementation details. Talk about features & benefits. How you do it is not relevant to a corporate development discussion.

There's no reason to allow that kind of detailed conversation to happen, especially not before figuring out what your stuff is worth to THEM.

They are clearly interested, play your cards carefully. There's very little to gain from oversharing, despite how hard they made try to persuade you otherwise.

Share strategicially. If you've already got credibility and traction and prototypes, demonstrating your competence can be "it works".

</comment><comment><USER5> If you tell me what your thing does, I can probably get a working prototype together within six months, even absent any more technical detail than "applying deep learning to audio processing." That's the nature of the thing. Once you show people that something can be done, they can probably figure out a way to do it themselves. If they really wanted to, they could probably even toss a bunch of patents in your direction and work out the specific details later.

So while I would avoid spelling everything out & focus on practical / business details...you're mostly worrying about the wrong stuff.

PG's essay about corpdev might be worth your time. [http://paulgraham.com/corpdev.html](http://paulgraham.com/corpdev.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Hit me up when you are in town (Seattle) we can grab a pint and talk startup!

I also host an Open Coffee at Surf Incubator on Tuesday AM, come meet other founders and angels.

Prepare with a mutual NDA and be sure of what you want before starting conversation.

They might grill you but, its more than tech. Team and Traction are very important as well.

If party A passes on your deal it doesn't necessarily make everyone else sour. YC passes on many who still get funded later, loads more examples of this in the market.

</comment><comment><USER7> You might get a lot talking and stalling that makes you spend a lot of energy on something going nowhere.

Or you might get an offer.

Do it on your terms, not theirs.

</comment><comment><USER8> It doesn't sound like you know very much about Amazon. First, Jeff Bezos is a libertarian and so is Amazon. What that means is if they can take your shit they will and they'll feel good about it and totally justified because after all it was you that was weak and allowed it. Just read this to get a taste:

[http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/10/amazon_bo...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/10/amazon_book_how_jeff_bezos_went_thermonuclear_on_diapers_com.html)

<comment><USER9> I've stopped using amazon, their business, work and tax arrangements leave a lot to be desired and I'd sooner not re-enforce the monopoly.</comment></comment>


Twitter confesses to more adtech leaks - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/07/twitter-fesses-up-to-more-adtech-leaks/ <comment> move-on-by There is no shortage of good reasons to block ads. Passive ads no longer exist, if they ever did. They are all actively exploiting, tracking, and selling you- even if you never interact with them.

Some might say, "Stop using twitter", but how is any American supposed to do that when the President of the United States uses it as his platform? Beyond Twitter, there is no shortage of school systems, police departments, and other small public interests that use their Facebook page as a sole means of announcements. They shouldn't be - but it doesn't change the fact that they are. The Ad industry needs strong and enforceable regulation, and quickly.

<comment><USER3> Blocking ads won't stop your info from being shared during the auction. That's a back end data transfer.

<comment><USER4> Depends on the block really. If you are using a blocker that just removes it from the UI, then yes the auction is still occurring. If you are blocking the JS code from even executing, then no data is transmitted. Unless I'm totally misunderstanding things, if the code doesn't run, then nothing happens.

<comment><USER5> For 3rd party ads, that is sometimes correct. What blocking js does is prevent cookie stitching, ie the joining of the first party id with the 3rd party cookie id. This is necessary for external ad networks.

Twitter runs mostly their own ads afaik, so they don't face this problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "We are committed to providing you meaningful privacy choices" -> "We are committed to selling your data if you let us"

I hate this sort of pseudo-friendly weasel-wording that's getting increasingly popular these days.

<comment><USER7> My favorite is from Amazon, when selling Prime.

"We are sorry to hear that you do not want FREE two day shipping."

It really agitates me. I wish it didn't bother me so much but it cuts pretty deep sometimes.

<comment><USER8> I think there's a linguistic study in there somewhere, tracking how US commercial culture ended up settling on stilted, awkward, passive-aggressive delivery mixed with robotic Gee-Golly Isn't Everything So GREAT phrasing for all communication with the cattle.

I mostly find it ridiculous. Reminds me of stock phrases used by grubby bureaucrats asking for a bribe. But then just about everything about Amazon (and related automate-everything customer service shops) reminds me of the worst sorts of governmental dysfunction. If what you want is what they want or they have some reason to care about you, things are great. Otherwise, you don't even get indifference; you're literally arguing with a machine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So there are essentially remnants of our browsing history linked to our devices shared among numerous ad companies.

They then serve relevant ads for us all over the web depending on where they are being paid to display relevant ads.

Twitter is at it. We've experienced the same behavior from Google & God knows Facebook is at it too.

I've even had conversations where the only connection we had to the web was our locally running Alexa only to see ads relating to our specific conversation 10 minutes later on the web.

Can anybody think of a technological approach to flagging this behavior?

<comment><USER10> Amazon's code is not secret internally. If Alexa was targeting ads on your speech, someone from Amazon present or past would have confirmed it by now. Your conversation was probably influenced by the web ads campaign, or it was a coincidence, there are a lot of people seeing a lot of ads every 10 minutes.

<comment><USER9> I like your point as I can relate to that opinion. However my outlook has changed in the last year or so.

There has been several occasions where my conversation somehow turned into relevant web ads. I don't think I'm making a mistake here.

A friend of mine told me of his good friend who left Amazon recently as his job was to listen to what users say to Alexa and ensure Alexa responded correctly. FYI that's both when users say Alexa first and also when they do not. More on that here [1].

I would love some more clarity into what's going on here.

[1] [https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/05/tech/alexa-amazon- human-v...](https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/05/tech/alexa-amazon-human-voice- review/index.html)

<comment><USER11> Alexa does not send data unless you say "Alexa". This happens at a hardware level. This is confirmed by hardware schematics and by security researchers who have sifted through every piece of data that leaves the device.

What you are saying isn't true. It cannot be.

<comment><USER12> How reliable is the keyword detection? Last week we had this story about Apple where Siri heard the word "Siri" out of random noise like creaking furniture.

<comment><USER9> My point exactly.

Just last night myself and my girlfriend were talking and Alexa decided to activate itself without us saying Alexa first.

<comment><USER13> Alexa rarely, but quite regularly activates from my TV in the same room.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Reminds me of an ex-Amazon ad exec, Kivin Varghese, 'fessing up about the wrongs in the business dealings there and eventually getting the boot [0]. The only difference is that perhaps Twitter, as a company, is 'fessing up and not any individual working against the interests of a company.

Seems like all sides of the ad-industry is a giant cess pool, and no one's playing it fair.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8600716](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8600716)

</comment><comment><USER15> There's a way to nearly eliminate all Twitter ads from your feeds. Whenever you see one tap / click the drop down arrow on the top right of it and select "I don't like this ad."

After you do it enough Twitter will drastically reduce the volume of ads it shows you. I see one every day or two and it's usually Twitter's "you've been selected to fill out a survey" ad.

</comment><comment><USER16> For me, it looks like the European GDPR - that received a lot of harsh words here, on HN - is a little bit improving the situation for everybody on the net, at least regarding the Big Players.

Maybe some regulations is not bad after all (at least for de facto monopolistic business like Google, Amazon & co)...? ;-)

<comment><USER17> It's super effective and is making all companies pretty damn privacy conscious all of a sudden - except they also still violate it. The problem is that they will find ways to skirt around the edges of the GDPR as much as possible - <USER2> straight violate it in the hopes that nobody will find out.

<comment><USER18> > " _The problem is that they will find ways to skirt around the edges of the > GDPR as much as possible_ "

Many companies like to believe that, however the GDPR is pretty strict in certain regards. And such companies continue to operate only because no data protection authority has targeted them yet.

There's also the matter that many US companies have ignored GDPR due to not having a legal entity in the EU, but unfortunately for them there are trade agreements in place between the US and the EU, which makes the GDPR enforceable for companies having EU users / customers, even without a legal entity in the EU.

Give it time. And send complaints to your local DPA about violations that you see, because it does help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> With the way the internet works and the tech they have built, it's harder not to collect stuff. All of these companies have all sorts of stuff they shouldn't, and I wouldn't trust anything they say about opting out.

</comment><comment><USER20> "Confesses"? I'm not a fan of everything Twitter does, but this headline is so biased. I'm actually angry now. Twitter is "disclosing" these on their own, afaik, and I take that as a morally good thing. Also, it's a bug, not intended behavior in the first place. So if I understand this whole thing correctly, they never had to tell anyone they fixed these bugs, but they did anyway and people are still writing articles trying to drum up anger at Twitter for it. _Please._

<comment><USER21> The article says:

> It suggests this leak of data has been happening since May 2018 — which is > also the day when Europe's updated privacy framework, GDPR, came into force. > The regulation mandates disclosure of data breaches (which explains why > you're hearing about all these issues from Twitter)

So, at least according to the article, they _did_ have an obligation to disclose this.

<comment><USER20> Thanks for pointing that out. Maybe this is moving the goalposts, but I'm still happy they're at least disclosing the issues and following the mandated procedure, instead of trying to hide it and save face.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> GDPR is a huge win for user privacy. All these have been going on and getting worse for years and finally getting surfaced.

</comment><comment><USER23> they need to asked to shut up with pi-holes !

</comment><comment><USER24> Regulation is not the answer. GDPR has not done much good. A way to pay for content without relying on ads is the only way

</comment><comment> phoe-krk > 'fesses up

Can we have proper English at least in the HN submission titles? I know that this is a direct quotation of the original, but "confesses" is much clearer and more readable than the original slang term.

<comment><USER25> _> Can we have proper English [...] , but "confesses" is much clearer and more readable than the original slang term._

I can't speak for non-native English readers' difficulties but as an fyi... _" confess"_ is not an exact replacement for _" fess up"_ because both have different _connotations_.

Therefore, if the (USA) writer is deliberately using connotations to shade the text, then the more informal _" fesses up"_ is also _proper English_. E.g. respectable publications such as The New York Times have had writers and editors using the the phrase "fess up" for decades: [https://www.google.com/search?q="fesses+up"+site%3Anytimes.c...](https://www.google.com/search?q="fesses+up"+site%3Anytimes.com)

<comment><USER26> Both "confesses" and "fesses up" seem like improper English here. The article does not provide any evidence to suggest that Twitter was reluctant about sharing this information or lied about it previously.

"Disclosed" seems like a more sensible and less sensationalist word to describe an entity sharing new information. The writer knows this: "Twitter has disclosed" are the first words of the article.

Twitter also apologized, said they're taking steps to avoid making this mistake again, and provided a way to contact their Office of Data Protection for questions. That part didn't make it into the headline, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Here's an idea. Stop using twitter.

<comment><USER17> You don't need to use Twitter (or Facebook, google, etc) for them to collect your data. Any site with a Twitter embed, a FB Like button, and/or Google Analytics will gather and process your data.

<comment><USER28> You can block that, though I'm sure some gets through. Pihole and an add blocker work pretty well for me, and it's really surprising to me that people tolerate browsing without some form of protection.

<comment> 52-6F-62 I use the DDG extension for Firefox and it does a decent job as well. It regularly catches Google's and FB's trackers for me.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Traders with Pockets Full of Crypto Quit Wall Street - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-30/traders-with-pockets-full-of-cryptocurrencies-quit-wall-street <comment><USER2> >he invested all the savings he had available from six years working for an investment consultancy in Northern England, or 10,000 pounds ($13,250)

He saved just $180 per month?

>he said Ether cost about $10 when he invested

So he got lucky by buying in early... not because of successful trading. Yet he gives advice as if he was an expert trader.

<comment><USER3> There's a lot of that on Wall Street too.

<comment><USER4> Bingo; if you've ever met successful traders they're usually not that smart. Most were just in the right place at the right time.

They try to justify their exceptionalism by giving advice, but it boils down to "be a WASP and get a job at an investment bank".

<comment><USER5> I suggest you go on a trading floor and revisit your wasp comment.

<comment><USER6> There's no trading floor any more, mate. Well at the very least said floor is a quiet place. Its all hft and electronic trading these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "You've seen a bifurcation internally at many larger houses where senior > managers are very skeptical about crypto, while graduates and younger team > members are very positive," said Grimsley. "The youngsters may have less > intellectual baggage and may be more open-minded, but they also have less > responsibility for managing risk and working out the practicalities of > bolting on crypto to the existing business."

It's a very telling quote and you are left wondering to which extend bitcoin suffers from youthful exuberance instead of the sometimes boring pragmatism of making it profitable.

<comment><USER8> The universal single currency for a truly global and peaceful world is an intriguing prospect for many but we are so far politically it can't enter the mainstream just now. It's almost there technologically, though, so in the long run, maybe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> They made enough money in a volatile unregulated market that their salaries seem minuscule. So, they go and burn more of their money in the same volatile market at this time. What can go wrong?

May be they took some money out of their quick earned profits, and saved enough for their life. The rest is what they are going out to gamble with. Now that doesn't seem unreasonable.

</comment><comment><USER10> Lottery winners quit day jobs

</comment><comment><USER11> How do you trade crypto? I'm not well versed in this but find it fascinating. I mean, you can make a good profit of volatility on the way up but how do you profit when the markets are bearish? You go long/short on currency pairs? I bet there are dozens of different ways of profitably approaching these markets but I have no idea how people actually find a strategy and then decide to quit their jobs and day-trade all day every day without needing institutional money from accredited investors. Do you use machine learning to obtain insights that create those strategies?

If anyone knows good books on this subject, please do recommend them!

</comment><comment><USER12> The brightest minds of our time dedicated to getting something for nothing while, according to recent statistics, nearly half of the American population has less than $400 in savings. Says everything about our sick society.

<comment><USER13> > The brightest minds of our time

Would you rather they went back to doing what they have been for the last 15 years? Pushing adverts and hoarding data.

<comment><USER14> Yes - if nothing else that burns much less of our limited energy supplies.

<comment><USER15> Are you aware that many coins don't involve mining the way that bitcoin does? There's more than one way to skin a cat with just about every aspect of crypto.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Political Initiative That Had 80,000 Users On Launch Day - <AUTHOR> http://eyinghang.com/how-my-friend-and-i-launched-a-political-initiative-that-almost-crashed-our-servers/

<comment><USER2> Nice

</comment><comment><USER3> awesome</comment>