Hacker News: law

Security expert said he accessed plane controls mid-flight

law — Mon, 18 May 2015 21:55:58 +0000

Article URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/security-expert-said-he-accessed-plane-controls-mid-flight/2015/05/18/eb3275d0-fd9e-11e4-8c77-bf274685e1df_story.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9567089

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by law in "Google Play Store: Browsing with Firefox is no longer supported on Android"

law — Tue, 10 Feb 2015 14:19:26 +0000

I tested it with Cyanogenmod's stock browser customized with an iPhone user-agent, and it also works fine. It seems like Google is trying to coerce "eligible users" into using the Google Play app, but won't prevent others from accessing the site.

How Ross Ulbricht's Defense Was Derailed

law — Tue, 03 Feb 2015 15:44:44 +0000

Article URL: http://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahjeong/2015/02/03/the-silk-road-trial-that-wasnt/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8990955

Points: 8

# Comments: 0

New comment by law in "Show HN: QuoDB – Movie quote search engine based on subtitles"

law — Tue, 05 Aug 2014 09:24:35 +0000

This is very likely the Enron corpus that was used: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~./enron/

Feds' Silk Road Investigation Broke Privacy Laws, Defendant Tells Court

law — Tue, 05 Aug 2014 06:48:11 +0000

Article URL: http://www.wired.com/2014/08/feds-silk-road-investigation-violated-privacy-law-sites-alleged-creator-tells-court/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8135834

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by law in "FCC approves plan to consider paid priority on Internet"

law — Fri, 16 May 2014 13:38:04 +0000

> What happens when say a company like Comcast owns a stake in a company like Netflix and conspire to extort a competitor like Hulu (asking for exorbitant amounts of cash for speed).

Comcast actually owns part of Hulu, but its a purely economic ownership interest (See https://www.fcc.gov/transaction/comcast-nbcu for more information)

New comment by law in "How Emacs changed my life"

law — Wed, 24 Jul 2013 09:52:38 +0000

One of the best purchases that I have ever made is the Kinesis Advantage keyboard.[1] In fairness, I was tempted to return it shortly after purchasing, but opted to give it one full week of use before making my decision. It took a couple days to become comfortable using it, and now I can't think of myself using another keyboard. It's designed for optimal physical placement of ctrl, alt, delete, backspace, and spacebar, among other keys.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000LVJ9W8

New comment by law in "Wednesday Night’s Human Matchmakers Take Some Of The Work Out Of Online Dating"

law — Tue, 14 May 2013 00:35:26 +0000

For how long do you keep the information?

New comment by law in "Show HN: Built a FeedBurner replacement in a week"

law — Thu, 09 May 2013 17:28:06 +0000

> It's important to understand that when FSF talks about "freedom" they explicitly mean keeping the users free - not the developers. As a developer, I'm personally biased towards being free to other developers, and I think GPL (v2 and esp. v3) are very much pro-user at the cost of being anti-developer.

I don't think that's what the FSF means when they talk about freedom. Freedom is about keeping everyone free--developers and users alike. Copyleft licenses ensure that all derivative works be subject to the same licensing terms as the original work. It's a way to protect the self-perpetuating nature of free software that more permissive licenses fail to achieve.

New comment by law in "Show HN: Built a FeedBurner replacement in a week"

law — Thu, 09 May 2013 17:07:07 +0000

Would you mind expanding upon why you presumably prefer GPLv2 over v3? Additionally, if you prefer the MIT/BSD licensing model, why not choose Apache v2?

New comment by law in "Show HN: Built a FeedBurner replacement in a week"

law — Thu, 09 May 2013 16:44:00 +0000

> FeedSnap's goal is simple: to provide a reliable, capable, and actively maintained FeedBurner replacement for your beloved RSS feed.

In keeping with that goal, is there any chance that you will open source the work you've done under a GPLv3 license? Perhaps the largest problem is that every service claims to be "reliable, capable, and actively maintained" until it isn't.

New comment by law in "Machine Learning and Link Spam: My Brush With Insanity"

law — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 05:33:48 +0000

You can estimate the likelihood that a particular sentence is spam by calculating the log sum of n-gram probabilities of sub-sequences in a sentence. These probabilities are obtained from a sufficiently general training set, such as Google's n-gram viewer[1]. You can estimate the probability of a particular sequence of words by summing the log probabilities of each n-gram within that sequence. Using a trigram language model (n = 3), you could estimate the likelihood as follows:

Sentence = "This sentence is semantically and syntactically valid."

P(Sentence) = log(p(START,START,This)) + log(p(START,This,sentence)) + log(p(This,sentence,is)) + log(p(sentence,is,semantically)) + log(p(is,semantically,and)) + log(p(semantically,and,syntactically)) + log(p(and,syntactically,valid)) + log(p(syntactically,valid,.)) + log(p(valid,.,STOP)) + log(p(.,STOP,STOP))

where START and STOP are special symbols that aid in determining the proximity of a word to the beginning and end of a sentence.

If your training set fails to sufficiently generalize, you could use Bayesian inference to estimate the likelihood that the sentence is spam. Under this framework, you'd be calculating the posterior probability of the sentence being spam given the observed sequence of n-grams, which combines (i) the inherent likelihood that any sequence of words is spam and (ii) the compatibility of an observed sequence with (i), which is proportional to the impact it has on (i).

[1] http://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2....

New comment by law in "Wish I was here by Zach Braff"

law — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 03:19:46 +0000

It depends on the context. When combined with other subjective pronouns to form the subject of a verb, "I" is correct (as in "You and I are commenting on this topic"). However, when combined with other objective pronouns to form the object of a verb/preposition, you should use "me" (as in "Others are commenting on this topic along with you and me").[1]

[1] http://oxforddictionaries.com/us/words/i-or-me

New comment by law in "Keeping People"

law — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 07:34:33 +0000

Why not GPLv3?

New comment by law in "The Patent Protection Racket"

law — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 22:13:42 +0000

So does GPLv3.

New comment by law in "FBI wants real-time Gmail, Dropbox spying power"

law — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 07:02:42 +0000

This article is absolute trash. The 4th amendment doesn't apply to your data hosted on Google's servers, and ECPA and CALEA are essentially meaningless here. The truth is that Facebook and Google can give away (or even sell) your data to the government, and they have your consent to do so.

Reading the terms of service and privacy policy of each site you visit daily is a good exercise. Nearly all will contain some ambiguous catch-all provision that they can use your data to "improve [their] services." Then, if they're sued, the question is whether they have the resources to hire a law firm that can convince a court that selling data to the FBI/CIA/etc. improves their services. They do.

New comment by law in "Google Says the FBI Is Secretly Spying on Some of Its Customers"

law — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 23:58:10 +0000

Right, I'm not arguing that. My point is that it's considerably more difficult for them to go this route; they need to convince a judge to affix his signature (and his credibility) to a warrant by demonstrating the existence of probable cause.

New comment by law in "Google Says the FBI Is Secretly Spying on Some of Its Customers"

law — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 13:06:27 +0000

Not without a warrant, which is presumably useless against good encryption. Moreover, the dominant view is that a judge can't compel you to disclose the encryption key unless the authorities have already seen what was encrypted.

New comment by law in "Google Says the FBI Is Secretly Spying on Some of Its Customers"

law — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 13:02:28 +0000

They can, and they do. It's not a violation of the Fourth Amendment if a private company hands over (or sells) data to the government.

New comment by law in "Show HN: Our Vancouver based web agency just launched. We'd love your feedback."

law — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 01:04:09 +0000

It's a wonderfully designed site; I love how the splash page draws your eyes to where they belong, without being overly obtrusive. One criticism: on http://redstamp.ca/development/, you may want to change the menu that changes position as you scroll. Maybe keep it fixed to the top of the screen as you scroll down, but when you scroll up, it should stay in position until it hits the bottom of the screen, and then begin to move up once it's out of the viewable area. When you're at the top of the page, it can move back to its home. That's just a suggestion on top of what's already very nice work.