bascule

48 ms·

331.
by bascule 13y ago
You claimed: Actually, going by 10-20 sites I'd put my money on spying on non-US Tier 1 provider traffic. If you really believe that, why do you think Binney risked his entire livelihood to reveal what he believed to be a domestic
332.
by bascule 13y ago
Your expert analysis flies directly in the face of the testimony of former NSA analyst turned whistleblower William Binney. Given he wrote the software that underlies Stellar Wind, I'm going to go with his assessment of the situation. His c
333.
Whistleblower William Binney on NSA Internet surveillance program Stellar Wind(youtube.com)
9 points by bascule 13y ago|1 comments
334.
by bascule 13y ago
We know exactly what's being collected: all the Internet traffic they can get their hands on. They have installed beam splitters on Internet backbones at facilities around the country: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A And are funnel
335.
by bascule 13y ago
Yes, you know that the Internet that exists outside the US is connected to the US, right? Which belies one of the most insidious parts of Stellar Wind... that the NSA could've just tapped the cables which link the US to other countries, but
336.
Stellar Wind (code name)(en.wikipedia.org)
404 points by bascule 13y ago|167 comments
337.
by bascule 13y ago
Thanks for posting this! That part of the article bothered me as well. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_Wind_(code_name)
338.
by bascule 13y ago
A company whose incentives are aligned with its consumers truly has the power to not "be evil". Google was not that company. It doesn't mean that company is impossible.
339.
by bascule 13y ago
It's text... frozen in an image, to where it can't be copied/pasted except via OCR. Seems bad
340.
by bascule 13y ago
Confirm, I don't think I've heard anyone even use the term "Beowulf cluster" since the late '90s/early '00s
341.
by bascule 13y ago
I really hate posts like this. It's full of vague statements like: "When we found that Java did not seem to fit the project requirements (no offense), we began exploring the world of Node.js" and "By the end of the ex
342.
by bascule 13y ago
Umm, great reporting Ars. Schwab actually has a limit of 8 characters, not 6: http://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/nn/legal_compliance/schw... Still crappy and their password policy is terrible, but it's better than what Ars is reporting.
343.
by bascule 13y ago
> Is their Github account a good indication of the state of their Rails setup? No. Source: former employee
344.
by bascule 13y ago
This video is ancient. I think it came out shortly after the 2004 election
345.
Any data structure can now be automatically "Merkelized" via new compiler(blog.gmane.org)
2 points by bascule 14y ago|0 comments
346.
by bascule 14y ago
Frank Luntz didn't rebrand "global warming" as "climate change", the climate science community did. The phrase gives a more accurate impression of what is happening: while global mean surface temperature is rising, climate change may caus
347.
by bascule 14y ago
Since these tests seem to be all about JSON serialization, it would've been interesting to see the tests with rails-api instead of the standard Rails stack: https://github.com/rails-api/rails-api What webserver were you using on JRuby? Wa
348.
by bascule 14y ago
Github Enterprise?
349.
by bascule 14y ago
You seem to be confused. Clojure startup time is actually worse than JRuby, especially when you throw a tool like Leiningen into the mix: http://martinsprogrammingblog.blogspot.com/2012/02/why-is-cl...
350.
by bascule 14y ago
Are you using bundle exec instead of binstubs because you don't know about binstubs, or because you like things going slow?
351.
by bascule 14y ago
Their goal is to collect and archive the data, much of which is plaintext anyway. With plans to archive it for 100 years, they can just simply wait until vulnerabilities in block ciphers are discovered (possibly by the NSA) and hold on to t
352.
by bascule 14y ago
Meanwhile the NSA is spying on the entire world's Internet communications, including those of all US citizens, without warrant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_Wind_(code_name)
353.
by bascule 14y ago
They didn't say why Ruby was using a lot of CPU either. Some basic investigation into the root cause might've revealed some intractable problems that are tied to Ruby (or at least the MRI interpreter) like long GC pauses (something which
354.
by bascule 14y ago
I also started with Ruby (well, after a number of other languages) and used Clojure for a time, and I just can't sympathize with this: "And—if you like avoiding unnecessary frustration and boilerplate—it will make you happy." Didn't get thi
355.
by bascule 14y ago
I'm sorry, did I miss something since aphyr's analysis? http://aphyr.com/posts/278-timelike-2-everything-fails-all-t... Why is Heroku "in the wrong" exactly?
356.
by bascule 14y ago
Keyczar is a library with similar goals to NaCl: relative ease-of-use for authenticated encryption. NaCl is using more modern cryptographic algorithms (e.g. XSalsa20, Poly1305, and Curve25519). These provide faster encryption with smaller k
357.
by bascule 14y ago
Just a note on the approach taken here: I can't say djb would approve of Sodium, but when I asked him about NaCl's portability, he had this to say: "The real work here is making everything PIC. Of course, if what matters is the API rather t
358.
by bascule 14y ago
Yeah, ASM is also probably the only realistic way you can guarantee constant time (i.e. guarantee a C compiler won't do something crazy behind your back) In the meantime, people continue to use OpenSSL because using NaCl is too hard
359.
by bascule 14y ago
> Say what? NaCl supports Windows just fine – it's just djb's 'do' build script that doesn't, along with how to get a random number You realize you're describing exactly what Sodium fixes (portable build system + randombytes for Windows
360.
by bascule 14y ago
djb's NaCl and Google's NaCl appeared around the same time. The naming conflict is unfortunate, but it happens. Hopefully Sodium doesn't suffer from the same namespace collision.

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