111–120 of 147 posts
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I think there’s an aspect of your question that deserves sincere engagement, but I also think there is a very overblown idea of “the best in their field” and a misconception that if you were “good enough” to get hired into top private sector jobs, it somehow means you are better than peers. For one thing, people grow & change. Out of some hypothetical cohort of peers in year X, some few may have been the “best” in sc…
> The main question I have is why the agencies are able to pay such low salaries, sometimes even in urban areas, no bonuses, etc. I grew up in DC and have a bunch of friends that went to work for the Federal Government. Not in these types of agencies, but nonetheless instructive I think. The incentives at these places are completely different. Pay is somewhat low at start but it's rock solid stable and grows predicta…
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This is an unfortunate downside of onion URLs and a restriction imposed by Zooko's triangle (the CAP theorem of naming systems)[1]. One possible solution would be to issue a TLS certificates for both the clear-web and .onion domain (for services which are offering .onion services to provide better anonymity for users not their servers). Unfortunately, the CAB forum has decided to not allow this -- only EV certificate…
I was looking for the name of the CAP theorem, thanks for posting this! HN discussed ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14038013 ) about the issue and the post ( https://blog.torproject.org/cooking-onions-names-your-onions ) outlines some of the ways in which you can mitigate right now. Cloudflare is using the 'alt-svc' header ( https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-onion-service/ ).. The CIA is not, I'd have lo…
It should be noted that alt-svc is an HTTP header returned which means you have first made an HTTP request before the onion request which affects anonymity. It's not a big deal over Tor because that HTTP call is on an exit node, but still should be noted.
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Unless your an actual spy you could probably say you work at the NSA as an SE, linguist or something more mundane. I doubt you could talk about your actual work. I’ve known people with clearances at Govt contractors. They could say what they do, EE/ME for X project but not many details beside that.
When you work at the NSA, you are not allowed to say that you work for the NSA. Full stop. (Contractors are a different story for some complex reasons, but are still at risk) It's like this for many gov agencies working with intelligence because labeling yourself as an intelligence worker makes you a target for foreign intelligence agents. That may sound a little strange if you aren't part of that industry, but it is…
That seems like a difficult to keep secret
The year before I completed an aptitude test which predominantly focused on abstract reasoning. It was a strange experience and part of me wants to discuss it in a responsible/de-identified sort of way, but on the other hand, the take-away I got from the experience itself is kind of holding me back from following through with that desire to discuss it....I'm not sure if what I just wrote makes any sense to me now that I just typed it out.
It was still an interesting experience though which did have a positive impact on my life.
EDIT: Sorry, edited for a spelling mistake
I have a question for the HN audience. Many here have gone to top schools and studied crypto, ML, etc with the best. And are probably the best in their field. Do you currently work for any three letter agencies? Did your smartest colleagues go to work at three letter agencies? I am trying to gauge the quality of talent at CIA, NSA, FBI, etc. All of my best colleagues went to the private sector, usually tech or securi…
This sounds sill, but I have a really serious question -- how accurate are the Bourne type films w/r/t how things are at these three lettered agencies? If you are to believe even half the movies, it seems the workers are burned left and right as regular consequences of seniors' political battles. Is that how it is? I know this sounds silly, but i've been at big companies before (Fortune 10) and have seen some pretty…
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These would be great mental exercises for me to complete while I fill out paperwork, unlike the other millennials who are too afraid to step up to the plate (printer?).
>> unlike the other millennials who are too afraid A serious consideration for recruiters working for these agencies is that millennial truly fear the interview process. They believe that the NSA/CIA has their entire browsing history on file, that the interview process may see them confronted by some awful website they visited late one night in their teens. Or they fear any examination of their past may be shared wit…
I am genuinely baffled why they wouldn't fire up XKeyscore to double-check the accuracy of the SSBIs.
> ciadotgov4sjwlzihbbgxnqg3xiyrg7so2r2o3lt5wz5ypk4sxyjstad.onion How does one store links like this? You'd need a bookmark file, which would sort of give the game away, I'd have thought. How do you make sure you notice when you visit a URL with the same readable prefix?
What can you do when there is no central DNS to trust. I suddenly felt that I couldn't trust anything at all. I started to question those around me and spiraled into existential philosophical crisis of truth testing even my own senses.
I eventually found a real solution, but I'm on mobile and don't feel like typing the whole thing out.