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fortune
16 days ago
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What are you doing this weekend?
- Pnut.io hackathon Saturday
- Monday Night Dance Party anniversary prep (get a keg, check on the screen for screen printing, maybe redesign the website)
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I may get around to biking to locations around me I’ve been meaning to find, like a lighthouse, some parks, and this hidden farm in the middle of downtown that restaurants supposedly use produce from that includes an apiary.
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“Essential Worship” by Greg Sheer. It’s a little shallow and broad but still good. Churches in my sphere have been struggling with diversity versus identity politics. Music is a natural battlegrounds.
I really enjoyed You Are Not A Gadget. Dystopic technologist non-fiction is a favorite genre for me.
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To be honest I don’t think the book brings much to the table. Almost through it, and he seems to believe there’s a dichotomy to be clarified as false at every intersection, and is a general-use book for worship leaders. Our worship leader asked us to read it. But I’ve had a couple hard conversations with others about diversity/outward appearance/who I’m worshiping with not being foundational to my faith, and I’m looking forward to more!
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The worst part about this for me, is that this happens so often I’m starting to ignore/be nonchalant about it like it doesn’t matter. You become numb to the idea that your information is being leaked somewhere on the internet.
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There is little to no reason to trust most companies with providing personal data at this point, based on their (in)actions. I tell my friends and family this, but there that doesn’t seem to make a difference. So numbness all ’round.
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I go further to discourage people even submitting data leaks or code-level vulnerabilities to sites like Lobsters. There’s tons of them with most teaching us nothing except people don’t focus on security. I’d rather only see one if it has a new, root cause or something that breaks almost all previous models of defense. ROP or the A2 analog attack come to mind.
About the only data breach I’d like to hear about is one where attackers almost exclusively used emanation attacks that could’ve been beaten with TEMPEST shielding. Then a bunch more did it. After enough damage, people would question why it was illegal for Americans to buy computers that protect them. Homebrew attempts would spring up done by EE’s with other in the know critiquing them anonymously online. Some changes in those regulations might follow. Ideally, it becomes more a commodity with standard 1U or 2U enclosures becoming available that knock out lots of the risk.
Note: More on hardware attacks done in software that bypass MMU’s and virtualization extensions could similarly be helpful as they’ll lead to more secure CPU’s in theory. I’ve seen lots of research like that, though. So, I’m not sure about the theory coming true.
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Naming and shaming is going on, but it doesn’t have to happen here.
Additionally, the vast majority of folks just kinda harumph harumph on social media and keep using the services. In the cases where they do migrate they usually just pick a site with the same security issues. People don’t learn.
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Shaming is about getting their management to change their practices often due to reputational effects or financial losses. Stories in mainstream, media outlets or high-profile, social media widely read by Panera customers or investors can have that effect. This is a low-noise, slow-moving site with a tiny, niche audience focused on tech. Posting about Panera’s management decisions here will have no effect on them. So, naming and shaming attempts on Panera are just noise here.
This is also true for any other company whose CEO and/or board won’t notice the losses from people on tech forums not buying their products. The few that would stop that is: those taking action are often small percentage of those who don’t approve of something. These are true for most of the large players in industry. If you want to achieve that action, you’d have to create messages targeted to company executives or their customers submitted to places whose readership can generate the massive losses in money or reputation necessary to cause change. For social media, Facebook or Twitter plus articles from popular outlets are your best bets.
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We had a hackathon and another release for my little social network, pnut.io, over the weekend.
Now I’m organizing my thoughts about our next improvements, and helping developers implement the changes. It looks like we’re already set for GDPR. Not sure how I’m going to improve our search back end yet.
And if at all possible I’m going to feed the bees in between the rain!
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A user pointed me to http://www.davidfroud.com/gdpr-compliance-step-step-part-1-prerequisites/ for a good start, specifically the “GDPR in Plain English” link in the first item.
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I observed this behavior on App.net, and it was trivial to inspect the entire network for accounts guaranteed to be bots. In the last year, some 30,000 bots were suspended because of it, and new measures put in place. The rate limits were very friendly, though…
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I have a feeling with recent events in the USA, we may start seeing more legitimate 451’s. That’s just speculation though.
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The RFC itself pretty much says as much. I don’t read this as being about political censorship so much as DMCA takedown notices. Not that I’m claiming a crisp line between the two! Just pointing out that there are plenty of “unimportant” cases where the legal authorities would be just fine with users knowing that they are the reason some content is missing.
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Finally picked up a motorised treadmill last night on fleabay, so this week will be attempting to build and use a treadmill desk. Compounded by the fact I don’t have room in the house, so it will be setup in the back yard. I do currently have an outside standing desk, so it shouldn’t be too hard to bodge. I suspect the main issue is going to be dodging the UK’s rainy weather to make use of it.
Also need to service my bikes, as the disk brakes on both of them are being noisy again. Great stopping power, but require just as much fiddling as cantilever brakes, and replacement pads & disks are way more expensive. Ach well.
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Arr! My tires are worn to bits, and my brakes need replacing. On top, got a flat this morning… and I’ve been limping along with a broken spoke for a few weeks now… Haha. I’m ridiculous. Time for a top-to-bottom tune-up for me. I’m told disc brakes don’t have as available servicing, but I doubt that’s really a problem. Still, I’ve stuck with traditional pad breaks. :}
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I’ve been chipping away at the next version of pnut.io, that other other social network you haven’t heard about, and catching honey bee swarms. It’s that time of year!
The current priority is a Files API and a way to pay for it.
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Has OpenSSL significantly improved since the debacles in the last couple years? I know a handful of large companies gave funding to improve, get rid of old code or something, but I’m not really privy to its workings.
Or, should I be using LibreSSL and don’t know it? :)
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Relatively straightforward to compare now that there is competition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreSSL#Security_and_vulnerabilities
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Nice summary - this just highlights how hard it is to implement good crypto.
For me, the high-level benefits of using LibreSSL are twofold:
- It’s simpler, with a lot of cruft stripped out, giving a smaller attack surface
- Even though it’s a fork, applicable fixes from OpenSSL can still be applied
OS X/macOS now includes LibreSSL, BTW.
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I am foolishly building a short messaging social network a la App.net or Twitter. Have the basics done. Need to document it, test, and let somebody in. I want to rebuild in Rust over the years, tackling pieces of the API incrementally. It’s a hobby project, with no intention of becoming a professional outfit.
Oh, and feeding the bees. They’re doing great. Love working with them. Italians are very calm.
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That’s great! I myself bought two of these machines off Ebay for work, a couple weeks ago. Don’t even have a use for the second one, but they were so cheap, he couldn’t help it.
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Awesome, hope your (eventual) build is as fun as mine was! :)
The units were very pleasant to work with, and performance has been great so far. The only major downside that I can see are the non-standard rack sizes and the lack of much documentation / BIOS updates.
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evaryont
2 years ago
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Amazon just removed encryption from the software powering Kindles, phones, and tablets
I think the DailyDot is incorrect, or at least confused. There was never, to my knowledge, a way to enable any sort of device (full or not) encryption for the eReaders. (Kindle Whitepaper, DX, etc) The Android-based tablets? Yeah, and as the screenshot shows, Amazon no longer supports it. The only encryption I know of on the eReaders is the DRM for the ebooks themselves, which I doubt Amazon is too keen on removing any time soon.
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They’ve since updated the article and posted a correction at the bottom.
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Haha. Low-hanging fruit.
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[Comment removed by author]
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this should really be held up as a model for how to shut your acquired startup down gracefully. complete migration guide, including tools to migrate the db and an open sourced server, and a blog post that is genuinely respectful of their customers and acknowledges the difficulty this will cause them (no “our incredible journey” crap).
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Yeah, way better than FoundationDB
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Trusting companies with your data is fine if:
1. You can create a complete backup from a command line at least hourly.
2. You can restore from backup onto another service with no data loss, within either a few hours tlor up to a week depending on how important your data is (eg. customer data vs dinky personal blog)Facebook is just the worst when it comes to both of these points.
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One of my favourite fortune databases.
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What’s the deal with fortune? I know a great fortune bot, but don’t know where this stuff comes from. Is there a heritage?
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Yes. It was an old Unix program, distributed alongside what at the time must have seemed like an amusing set of quotes and one-liners. I shouldn’t have been surprised that Wikipedia has more details.
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Gradually switching languages to something “better” (e.g. to a language with a better domain fit), seems like a very reasonable approach that I see quite often. Frequently stories present the migration to a different stack almost apologetically, as a tale of “we should have done this first”.
However, I think starting off in a language that your team has competency in, and/or a language that is easy to hire for, and optimizing for early development speed, is often the right first choice. Later when needs/requirements change (such as you need higher performance, or higher concurrency), switching to a new tech stack makes sense. Hopefully you have more resources at your disposal at that point as well (funding, more engineers, etc).
Coupled with the old adage of “throw the first one away”, I think people should more often feel good about this decision, instead of almost feeling bad about it and/or making excuses about the historical choice.
This article seemed pretty positive about the historical choices made, which I found refreshing.
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To be fair, your description of the consequences is subtext, not what they actually announced. :)
I’ve listened to a lot of people’s war stories on community building. Like probably everyone here on Lobsters, I’ve also participated in a lot of online communities. One of the first choices to make in trying to affect the atmosphere of a new place is how much should be stated formally, vs. how much should be left to everyone’s presumed good will.
Too many rules become, like driving laws, usable against anyone at any time because nobody is ever fully in compliance; I would describe Reddit and Hacker News as being in this category, full of in-fighting by people treating the rules as a tool they can use to improve their personal influence.
Too few guidelines and people get away with anything, and when they do get noticed it’s hard to enforce anything on the grounds that everyone else is doing it too.
Ultimately, a community must be composed of people who actually want to interact with each other, and moderators must mean what they say, be willing to enforce it, and pay enough attention to actually have it happen. I generally argue in favor of less being written down, because when those things are true, no amount of writing is going to provide any further benefit.
(I do advocate codes of conduct with regard to harassment of the types usually motivated by sexism and other forms of prejudice; but once a venue is launched it’s quite infeasible to get agreement on those as the audience already includes people on opposing sides.)
I don’t think HN’s move has any meaning for Lobsters whatsoever. As sac pointed out, HN did not manage to say this in a way that is clear and easy to apply; it’s just the latest addition to the HN motor vehicle code, which is already immense. The membership over there appears to like this sort of thing, and that is their choice and their privilege.
It’s also not a rule that, even if written more precisely, would be a good thing. Negative feedback is expressing a real sentiment, not the same thing as a consistent pattern of provocation. And the latter already gets treated harshly here; I was extremely impressed by the civility of almost every participant in one of the discrimination threads about a month ago.
Lobsters doesn’t need anything like this. :)
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Lobsters doesn’t need anything like this. :)
In my experience, many small communities rarely need such rules stated explicitly. I’m not sure what it is exactly, but when a community gets beyond some magical size, it ceases to be a group of people and becomes a sort-of-mob. When it’s just a group of people, it seems we can see and treat each other as humans—and that’s usually good enough to maintain civility.
Anecdotally and not universally, one can tend to see this phenomenon on reddit. Many (including myself) will tell you that there’s plenty of good left in reddit, but most of it is found in the smaller subreddits. The larger subreddits seem to have little left to offer in the way of “community.”
As sac pointed out, HN did not manage to say this in a way that is clear and easy to apply; it’s just the latest addition to the HN motor vehicle code, which is already immense.
I suspect the imprecision was intentional. (And I don’t think that’s altogether a bad idea either.)
I’m not trying to defend HN—they certainly have their problems like any community—but HN is much much bigger than, say, Lobsters, so I’d be careful before drawing any meaningful comparisons.
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In my experience, many small communities rarely need such rules stated explicitly. I’m not sure what it is exactly, but when a community gets beyond some magical size, it ceases to be a group of people and becomes a sort-of-mob. When it’s just a group of people, it seems we can see and treat each other as humans—and that’s usually good enough to maintain civility.
I do a fair share of community building and I’d say: It depends on what your aim is. Small groups tend to self-moderate better, I agree. They are often very focused and it’s pretty easy to keep in the back of your head how a certain person speaks and reacts. But that’s on the inside. If you want to grow a community, writing down your goals and intentions and the way you expect things to work can be quite powerful, even at an early stage. This is an incredibly good way for outward facing communication. And this is also where community driven moderation breaks down: you need to put a face on those rules for them to help reaching out. Moderators are also ambassadors.
I’m not trying to defend HN—they certainly have their problems like any community—but HN is much much bigger than, say, Lobsters, so I’d be careful before drawing any meaningful comparisons.
HN has crossed the line where moderating everything as it happens is possible. I moderated a bunch of bulleting boards and there is a certain boundary: before, discussions tend to be slow, so if you moderate a discussion with a lag of 2 hours, people are still find with it. At a certain critical point, the board life gets faster and you need to have a moderation team around most of the time. HN is way beyond this point.
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I think this effect happens because communities need shared values, but over time, as you add random people, you lose that set of shared values.
You can have big communities, they just need to be communities.
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I agree. Unless you work in a playground/sandbox or new tech is your product.
Anecdotally, as an indie dev, I am looking at things like Rust to build tools. But at work, I’m using PHP and MySQL (OK, I admit: mariaDB) for web dev. Python for embedded hardware. My recovery strategy is focused on being able to install an OS and copy some files back. It’s hard to KISS with a moving target.
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I’m somewhere in the middle on this article but I hear you.
But I think you’re onto something with Rust at home, PHP at work. For me it’s more C# at work, Go at home. I want to stay ahead - I just don’t want my client to have to pay for missteps.
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That’s a pretty prevalent bonmot, but it has issues. It assumes people get fired over technology choices.
No one ever got fired for choosing Elasticsearch or MongoDB. That might be a bitter pill to swallow for most technologists. They get fired because the project failed to reach expectations. Careless choice of technology can be an issue here and is rather often also at the core of the issue. Obviously, if a project fails horribly, you will search for the easiest approach angle to relieve a person off their post, and careless tech choices can be one of them. And pretty often, a risky choice and inability to master is also one of the actual issues.
If the project succeeds, no one will question all that.
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Yes, of course.
But when a project fails, some people will point to the unproven technology stack that was selected. Whether or not it was the cause of the failure or not.
At this point, you are on the defensive trying to validate your choices and shift blame. If you’d have picked safe, conservative bets over new frontiers, this choice would have been easier to justify.
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