What do you make as a manager?
Marc Hedlund on the less immediately tangible but in many ways more rewarding products of being a manager. The difference between good jobs and bad jobs is the manager you report to, a lot of the time. Most people spend more time at work on any other single thing. As a manager, your responsibility is to make that time more fulfilling, enjoyable, and productive. I find it’s a good gig.
Glenn Greenwald’s partner was returning to Brazil by way of London when he was detained under a terrorism law. He was then questioned not about terrorist plots but about Greenwald’s reporting work and the electronic media he was carrying. In their attempts to squelch reporting about how terrorism laws are abused, the UK is demonstrating the typical form that abuse takes.
Why code sharing sites are eliminating binary downloads
Simon Phipps reports on a trend I wasn’t aware of — sites for code sharing like GitHub and Google Code eliminating binary downloads. The risk of malware distribution and hassles from the copyright industry are making it more trouble than it’s worth.
persistent.info: Getting ALL your data out of Google Reader
Google Reader dies this weekend. Mihai Parparita, a former member of the Google Reader team, has created a tool to extract all your data from it. You should definitely look into the alternatives. I am using NewsBlur.
A Corollary to ExperimentCalculator.com (with examples)
There’s a lot of talk about A/B testing on Web sites these days, but most people don’t have a good concept of how many people need to see an experiment in order to produce a statistically significant result. It’s more than you probably think.
My favorite online feed reader, NewsBlur, launched a major redesign last night. NewsBlur’s biggest drawback has been that the JavaScript-heavy user interface occasionally got in the way of users rather than assisting them. This redesign attacks that problem head on. The upside of NewsBlur has been that it works really well at its core purpose, fetching feeds and displaying them for the user. It also has solid native mobile clients, enabling you to keep read status in sync across devices. Finally, the entire source repository is available through GitHub. You almost certainly won’t run your own NewsBlur instance, and you probably won’t be submitting patch requests, but the transparency is appreciated. Finally, it offers social features that are comparable to the ones that Google Reader killed some time ago. The clock is ticking for Google Reader, and I strongly encourage you to check out NewsBlur.
The New Yorker is the first publication to create an anonymous drop box for sources based on Strongbox, an anonymized document sharing tool by Kevin Poulsen and Aaron Swartz. What the architecture really shows is how difficult it is to achieve anonymity and security on the Internet, given the amount of data exhaust created by just about any action online. If nothing else, this underscores what an amazing technical achievement Bitcoin is.
How You Can Help Save Upcoming.org, Posterous, and More
Andy Baio on Archive Team, a distributed effort to scrape sites like Upcoming and Posterous before they are shut down. Don’t you want to participate in a guerrilla effort to preserve the Web?
Linode’s security incident report
Back on April 12, my Web host, Linode, sent me an email letting me know that I needed to reset my password without any further details. Today they announced that their user management application was hacked and that the hackers were able to download their full database, including hashed passwords and encrypted credit card information. The hackers also have the public and private keys to the credit card database. They can obtain the credit cards if they can brute force the passphrase for the private key. When it comes to security, taking shortcuts is death.
© 2024 rc3.org
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
The case against bombing Syria
Myth-Busting the Looming War With Syria
The basic case against bombing Syria. Read James Fallows as well.