More like "USA morale down after Edward Snowden revelations, much of U.S. population says," I'd say.

That happens when you do something most people would feel shame for.

A major difference between NSA employees and the rest of us is that they can easily stop what they're doing. Let's hope their pitiful loss of morale leads them to develop a conscience, respect for the law, or whatever it takes to stop doing things that lead to feeling so bad.

> “They feel they’ve been hung out to dry, and they’re right.”

Bullshit. They're adults who chose to do what they did and work where they work.

We have emotions to guide our behavior. If they feel bad for the environment they chose to work in and the work they chose to do, maybe they should look in the mirror and ask if they ought to reconsider their choices and do something that doesn't draw shame and contempt from the rest of the world while undermining their county's interests.

I would love to hire people like you... people who are willing to take a paycut and small stock grants in order to fulfill my grand mission: to make myself as rich as possible.

I was in a Hadoop course with a person who had just left the NSA in mid-June (right when the Snowden bomb dropped). She was in complete denial about his allegations, and was outright hostile to the rest of the room for "actually believing he was telling the truth". A key quote: "Do you really think they just let people access these systems without rules? You really believe that?" (the tone was beyond condescending, implying that we were all naive and ignorant) My argument to her was that my experience dealing with intelligence agencies is that they build stuff very quickly, focusing on capabilities. Anytime systems are built like this, safeguards are an afterthought.

As it turns out, we were all right, and she was all wrong. I would love to talk to her today and wipe that smug look off her face by pointing out that the "safeguards" were nothing more than policy and rules with zero enforcement mechanisms. Hence the guy who spied on his ex for years without being caught.

The fact that, on a personality level, she was one of the more awful people I've been stuck sitting next to in a class, makes me question who the NSA hires. She was hired straight out of college, so I guess the culture was sucked right into her. And man does that culture suck.

This compromise was detected by Google because they have hard-coded "certificate pins" in Chrome which specify which CAs the browser should expect to see when connecting to Google.

This type of "pinning" is the only technique that we know of which has actually detected a CA-assisted MITM attack in the wild (a few times now). So it works really well, but only if you're running Chrome, and only if you're connecting to Google (or the few other pinned sites hardcoded in Chrome).

It doesn't scale well because not every website can (or is willing to) hardcode their CA information in browser binaries, the pinned information has to expire at some point (otherwise you can never change your CA), sites are still vulnerable to their own CAs, and it only works in browsers which are willing to maintain this hardcoded list of pins in their client binaries.

Trevor Perrin and I developed a dynamic certificate pinning solution called TACK (http://tack.io) that is designed to address all of those issues. It's a fully specified TLS extension; all we need are browsers to support it.

If you're interested in whats been going on with the CA system, "SSL And The Future Of Authenticity" is a Defcon talk where I discuss some of the problems with CAs, and even interview the original SSL protocol author about them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8N4sb-SEpcg

When I got on the intertubes, oh-so-many years ago - the rules were simple: the ONLY piece of information you could freely give on public forums, or IRC, was your nick. Now, the only piece of information you are supposed to withhold is your credit card number.

I'll say this about the new ways: I'm extremely glad that I didn't have my teenage years documented and archived. Dodged that bullet!

This is a remarkably sensible speech.

The idea that the market will solve such things as environmental concerns, as our racial divides, as our class distinctions, our problems with educating and incorporating one generation of workers into the economy after the other when that economy is changing; the idea that the market is going to heed all of the human concerns and still maximise profit is juvenile. It's a juvenile notion and it's still being argued in my country passionately and we're going down the tubes. And it terrifies me because I'm astonished at how comfortable we are in absolving ourselves of what is basically a moral choice. Are we all in this together or are we all not?

I see a lot of libertarian and anti-government sentiments expressed on HN. People like to construct arguments like "more government vs. less", "higher taxes vs. lower", "less regulation vs. more", but those debates are missing the forest for the trees. The question - and only question - should be what David Simon asks: are we all in this together or are we not?

To me, the answer is blindingly obvious. It's demonstrated by what societies are flourishing - with high economic and social equality, healthy democratic government, protected personal liberties, well-cared-for populaces, and resilient economies - and what societies aren't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model

A foreign Stanford student was denied boarding, presumably due to the no fly list. Conjecture is that the root cause is confusion between a terrorist organization "Jemaah Islamiyah Malaysia" and a professional organization "Jamaah Islah Malaysia".

Inability to fly to return to Stanford/Silicon Valley has obviously caused a lot of complications and trouble for her, which can be interpreted as monetary damages, and she has filed suit for compensation, and also to be removed from the no fly list.

A few days ago, the government appears to have prevented her daughter (a U.S. citizen) from flying to America to testify about it. The government claimed in court that they did not prevent her daughter from flying to America with the no fly list, but apparently the airline provided the daughter with a copy of the no fly order. Generally, the airline is instructed not to provide said orders to the traveller, so the traveller has no way to know why they aren't allowed to fly.

This sort of lawsuit is difficult to make - the government has argued it should be dismissed because she can't prove the problem is that she is on the no fly list.

> The Man Who Does Not Exist tells me he is a libertarian, an Ayn Rand disciple, and, in the parlance of Silicon Valley, views himself a disrupter.

Making money by breaking regulations and lease terms is hardly the stuff of the heroic inventor. What other criminals count as "disrputers"? Insider traders? Identity thieves? Insurance fraudsters?

This guy is sociopath and I hope he ends up in prison.