>1.d) This agreement is not intended to create any legally enforceable rights and shall not be construed to be either an international agreement or a legally binding instrument according to international law.
Hey Israel, we're totally against you violating the constitutional rights of American citizens --to say nothing of the human rights of all people-- but it's not like this is a "legally binding instrument" or anything. Just don't be bad, m'kay?
Why is it that some people are flagging these stories? The NSA surveillance topic is highly relevant as it intersects with technology. What does plugging ones ears and looking the other way solve?
Maybe if these people are so 'sick' of hearing about it they should do something to stop it. Or is willful ignorance bliss?
Just because people don't want to hear about it on Hacker News doesn't mean they're trying to avoid the topic. I read about it everywhere else I go: it's a topic on google news for me along with drones and a couple other things, on reddit there are plenty of subreddits that discuss NSA stuff daily.
Not saying all NSA stuff is off-topic, just that it's irritating to open a thread about something interesting and wade through tangential political discussion. We used to punt that stuff elsewhere and for good reason.
I agree with you that it's relevant to technical news, but I don't think it has anything to do with "plugging ears" or "willful ignorance."
I don't flag them (it's pointless I think), but I think the people flagging these stories are doing so because they're tired of hearing about it, and because one interpretation of the HN Guidelines supports it.
Flagging to often will cause you to very quickly lose the ability to flag at all (the 'flag' link is removed for you entirely). If people are flagging heavily and are allowed to continue to do so, then it seems to me that HN is in some form approving of their flags.
I sure do! Do you realize this forum is primarily full of white males that work in nothing but technology (some who have developed the privacy-eroding tools that the NSA now slurps)?
Discussion of NSA surveillance is certainly something 'that good hackers would find interesting' - hence the current thread being on the front page and the hundreds of tech stories submitted and upvoted here daily.
Amdocs' main product is billing software, so it aggregates raw Call Data Records (CDRs) from telco switches, and turns them into customer and peer billing data amongst other things.
Just like Narus' main product was aggregating raw Internet Transmission Records from telco switches and turning them into customer and peer billing data for network usage?
No, Amdocs does billing software, which is precisely as unexciting as it sounds. CDRs contain a motherload of metadata (who called whom, how long etc), but have zero content about the actual content of the call, and they're generated by the other systems that feed into the billing system so their contents can't be changed.
Note: I'm not flagging down any of these stories, but I think there's some "spook fatigue" settling in with so many NSA stories, with only a fraction of them saying anything new.
For what it's worth, at this point I simply assume the NSA is as evil as it can possibly be. There are really only a few revelations that I would still find surprising and deem HN worthy (for example, they secretly solved P=NP or have developed technology for mind reading).
Are you serious? Mass surveillance means people will refrain from expressing their thoughts freely. And that is part of the foundation of every democracy.
I'm mostly serious. There are two ideas that feel implicit in your statement:
1. Democracy only works if we have access to unmonitored electronic communications, which doesn't really stand up because democracy predates electronic media.
and/or
2. When people know they are being monitored, there is a profound chilling effect around politically important speech. That hasn't exactly been proven. If anything, I've seen more expression of free thoughts since the NSA stories broke.
Have to remember that it's their rules as HN isn't a democracy by any means (not saying I agree with it). It's not open, it's not bias-free (see the top level domain name of the company that owns this site?), it has strict moderation and has its own shills and sock puppets like any forum (not saying these are approved by HN).
There seems to be a faster decay for stories related to Snowden/NSA. I guess that got "hard coded" after a little while ago the front page was almost completely based on NSA related stories. Therefore the stories often staying longer on the front page seems the one that do not have Snowden or NSA in its title.
There's voting ring detection stuff that could probably be triggered if a largely overlapping bunch of people are upvoting each story. Of course it could be that people are just tired of the articles, outlets are re-reporting more often than not.
I think it's more accurate to say HN enables rather than supports the communication of news, the content is moderated and prohibits explicitly and implicitly many topics.
Well, this story is about intelligence agencies exchanging information. Afaik, intelligence agencies often spy on third parties interesting for other countries, just to have data for exchange.
I am far from an expert, but this seems like saying water is wet (inside certain temperature/pressure limits). Of course countries get a lot of access, if they have something to give back (it helps if they are democratic).
I tried to submit a NSA* story a couple days ago about how the N S A(1) is snooping on iPhone that directly related to the FSF article(2) today while connecting it to something I read on HN 2 years ago...(3). While it isn't startup news, it does directly show and relate to EFF that the iPhone can't be a trusted platform.
It seems that you directly removed the ability to add comments as well as see articles that are related to any N S A information. Why? Are you trying to control HN and dictate the direction?
I wish there was a more active discussion on the NSA being able to tap into any phone to access users data. That HuffingtonPost link also linked to a story with a bit more detail[1].
>"The U.S. National Security Agency is able to crack protective measures on iPhones, BlackBerry and Android devices, giving it access to users' data on all major smartphones....in which the agencies describe setting up dedicated teams for each type of phone as part of their effort to gather intelligence on potential threats such as terrorists."
This is news to me, I assume they could pull any data from an iPhone/Android/Blackberry, maybe even activate the camera if "need" be.
So why didn't you post this information in the relevant FSF thread yesterday? There was an entire thread of commenters defending Apple to the bitter end.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/7854...
My favorite part:
>1.d) This agreement is not intended to create any legally enforceable rights and shall not be construed to be either an international agreement or a legally binding instrument according to international law.
Hey Israel, we're totally against you violating the constitutional rights of American citizens --to say nothing of the human rights of all people-- but it's not like this is a "legally binding instrument" or anything. Just don't be bad, m'kay?
M'kay.