Why my Mother's maiden name is nonsense and yours should be too
Last week, I spoke to one of our service providers on the phone and had to clear security prior to actually having a conversation with the rep at the other end of the line. This wouldn't usually be a cause for comment, but the conversation left me thinking about why we still use such archaic se
Hasnain has not yet written a summary for this.
Posted on 2016-03-02T07:24:34+0000
The Most Dangerous Writing App
Write. Don't stop. If you stop typing for more than five seconds, all progress will be lost.
Click to view the original at themostdangerouswritingapp.com
Ghost in the Shell, over two decades old, remains our most challenging film about technology
The first questions about the loss of human identity in a tech-filled world were raised in Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 hit film.
Dan Grossman | Mandrill’s Betrayal
Mandrill, MailChimp’s SMTP-as-a-service offering with 800,000 customers and a $12MM ARR is essentially shutting down. They’re merging it into MailChimp, but updated the TOS and AUP with immediate effect in ways that essentially banned what was the service’s raison d’être: sending bulk mail programma…
How We Built Uber Engineering’s Highest Query per Second Service Using Go
How the Go programming language helped Uber Engineering build and scale our highest queries per second microservice, for geofence lookups.
DROWN Attack
DROWN is a serious vulnerability that affects HTTPS and other services that rely on SSL and TLS, some of the essential cryptographic protocols for Internet security. These protocols allow everyone on the Internet to browse the web, use email, shop online, and send instant messages without third-part…
How to Deploy Software
Things Zach Holman said.
The collective insanity of the publishing industry - Gene Doucette
Unless you’re a writer, I imagine you haven’t been paying quite as close attention to the publishing industry and all its weirdness as I have, and that’s a shame, because it’s been really entertaining. Actually, entertaining isn’t the right word. It’s been insane, but the kind of insane that’s unre…
Hasnain says:
"Soon after that contract was signed, the other Big 5 contracts came due, and they all asked for the same Agency Model arrangement. Thus, the finest minds in publishing—or one might assume—negotiated themselves out of an arrangement whereby they sold more units at a lower cost without suffering the financial impact that comes with a lower unit cost.
On purpose."
"I mean it. One article after another, from the New York Times on down came news pieces declaring that print was making a comeback at long last, and the long national nightmare was over.
All it took was the biggest publishing companies in the world deliberately murdering their own share of the market. And it wasn’t even true."
"The only problem is this: the largest seller of print books right now happens to be Amazon. Guess who saw an uptick in print sales in 2015?"
Can I please have some of whatever they are smoking
Posted on 2016-03-02T06:21:38+0000
Cryptography Pioneers Win Turing Award
In the 1970s, Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman invented the technology that underpins web commerce.
The Unbearable Asymmetry of Bullshit
Science and medicine have done a lot for the world. Diseases have been eradicated, rockets have been sent to the moon, and convincing, causal explanations have been given for a whole range of forme…
Hasnain says:
"As the programmer Alberto Brandolini is reputed to have said: “The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” This is the unbearable asymmetry of bullshit I mentioned in my title, and it poses a serious problem for research integrity. Developing a strategy for overcoming it, I suggest, should be a top priority for publication ethics."
Posted on 2016-03-01T09:08:56+0000