Posts

Watch Yahoo’s security chief Alex Stamos talk about the state of application security AppSec is Eating Security. Brilliant, wide-ranging talk.

The Daily Beast reports on Uber’s argument that it is exempt from disability laws, because it’s a tech company rather than a transportation company. The other day I wrote about Uber, and I still have complicated thoughts about the company. What I think is that the market is full of companies that seek to save money by evading regulation, and it’s up to us as voters to elect politicians who are serious about enforcing them. ...

Trevor Timm tells the media to quit dismissing Seymour Hersh and to start following up on his reporting on the holes in the official account of how the CIA found Osama Bin Laden. While there are many elements of Hersh’s story that seem implausible, some details of the official account are implausible as well. The implications of the differences between the official’s account and Hersh’s reporting are important: Hersh’s assertion, which has by now been at least partially confirmed by multiple news organizations, that bin Laden was found thanks to a “walk-in” tip—rather than by tracking his courier as the government has claimed—should be a major scandal. For years, the CIA has said it found bin Laden thanks to information about his personal courier—information that was obtained by means of torture. ...

This week’s don’t miss article is Emily Guendelsberger’s look at what Uber drivers really make for the Philadelpha City Paper. The article is well-researched and well-reported. It’s also an entertaining read. Even if you don’t use Uber at all, its business model is being emulated throughout the service industry, and the company’s future is tightly entertwined with the future of ground transportation in general. The article also captures the conundrum that transportation consumers face. It’s very convenient to land in a strange city and know that you an get a ride wherever you want to go using the Uber app, and that successfully communicating with the driver about where you’re going is not necessary. There’s no excuse for ever drinking and driving if you are in a city where Uber is available. And, of course, thanks to cutthroat price competition, Uber is cheaper than ever in most places. ...

Here’s one thing I think about when I’m evaluating candidates after interviewing them – do I want to have 100 one on ones with this person? One hundred one on ones is roughly two years, which is probably roughly the minimum amount of time you’d expect someone to work with someone, assuming it isn’t a disaster. To me, this question is a reminder of the commitment one makes to a person’s professional well being when they hire them. ...

Here’s the answer to a question I always had, what shows like The Daily Show use to catalog the video clips they use. Their ability to put together segments containing salient clips from years of past footage consistently amazes. Turns out, there’s a server appliance called SnapStream that records and organizes the content.

Accomplishing big things takes a long time, even in the modern world of software. I was reminded of that today when I read Mike Kruzeniski’s post Jony’s Patience. Here’s the crux of it: I doubt that it took 20 years for Ive to come up with the idea for the Watch, or to find the right design for it. For the past two decades, Apple and Ive have been carefully building a company that’s capable of building the Watch. That’s 23 years of finding talent, hiring the right people, building the right teams, developing relationships, investing in skills and technologies, establishing manufacturing and distribution, and proving out the products and business models. Ive’s patience to grow with Apple over the last two decades allows him to design the greatest products in the world today. ...

One thing that becomes apparent as you progress through a career in software engineering is that the hiring process for software engineers is pretty bad across the entire industry. Some companies are vastly better than others, but in general, most don’t even do much work to evaluate the overall effectiveness of their hiring process. What I liked most about Thomas Ptacek’s post on what they’ve learned about recruiting at security consulting firm Matasano is that they have taken a deliberate and thoughtful approach to building a hiring process. You may disagree with some of the things that they do, but you have to respect their efforts to design a process that works for them. ...

It’s been a month since my last link blog post. That’s terrible. Why is Google interested in owning the entire “.dev” top level domain? Business Insider has a long piece on the downfall of Fab and its CEO. He turned a bad idea (yet another social network) into a good idea (flash sales of interesting goods) and then implemented a strategy that wasted tons of money and ultimately killed the company. Strategy matters. ...

Originally I was just going to post a link to Jon Ronson’s New York Times piece on the tendency of people on the Internet in general and Twitter in particular to pile on. His piece is mostly about Justine Sacco, who famously posted an offensive (and possibly widely misconstrued) tweet before her 11 hour flight took off, and landed to potentially the most epic pile on in recent memory. I had lots of thoughts when reading the piece, but one of those thoughts was that Sam Biddle is an irresponsible jerk. In fact, when I was done reading the piece, I wanted to tweet that Sam Biddle is an irresponsible jerk. The truth is that I don’t know whether he’s a jerk or not, and my opinion of him and his work is ill-informed and irrelevant. I didn’t even read the Gawker posts that were referenced in the article, and yet I was eager to pile on Sam Biddle to call him out for piling on Justine Sacco. I’m not sure what impulse that would have satisfied, but it wasn’t a healthy one. ...