Hasnain says:

Yikes

“With the immediate threat thought to be over, Microsoft now faces scrutiny for its handling of the incident, thought to be the biggest breach of unclassified government data since the Russian espionage campaign that hacked SolarWinds in 2020.

As noted by Ars Technica’s Dan Goodin, Microsoft went to great lengths to do damage control in its blog post, avoiding terms like “zero-day,” referring to when a software maker has zero days notice to fix a vulnerability that has already been exploited. Whether or not the bug or its exploitation fits everyone’s definition of a zero-day, Microsoft went out of its way to avoid describing it as such, or even to call it a vulnerability.”

Hasnain says:

Come for the cool technical writeup, stay for the master class in how to be terrible at PR and treating a bug bounty report.

“Overall, this entire situation is very damaging to your reputation.

How would your users feel if they realise that actual real issues in your own product is met with abuse and ignorance? - you should know better, Josh, especially as you are the CEO of an Anticheat company - which requires the trust of your users to exist!”

Hasnain says:

Someone please explain to me how anyone thought this was a good idea. With just a few weeks notice too. Is it time for Meta to launch a Reddit clone too? (Groups are right there…)

“Mashable confirmed with Reddit that messages and chat history are no longer available if they were made prior to January 1, 2023. A Reddit spokesperson forwarded Mashable a changelog announcement(opens in a new tab) made on June 22 where the company shared that these messages would be removed.”

Hasnain says:

Mind you, in those 10 seconds the 66 year old man did stuff that is way way over the line (not mentioning it here). Wouldn’t surprise me if this judge has other suspect rulings / behavior.

“A Rome public prosecutor asked for a three-and-a-half year prison sentence but this week the caretaker was acquitted of sexual assault charges. According to the judges, what happened "does not constitute a crime" because it lasted less than 10 seconds.

Since the ruling, palpata breve - a brief groping - has become a trend on Instagram and TikTok in Italy, along with the 10secondi hashtag.”

Hasnain says:

“The lawyers who made the Venmo transactions were: Patrick Strawbridge, a partner at Consovoy McCarthy who recently successfully argued that affirmative action violated the US constitution; Kate Todd, who served as White House deputy counsel under Donald Trump at the time of the payment and is now a managing party of Ellis George Cipollone’s law office; Elbert Lin, the former solicitor general of West Virginia who played a key role in a supreme court case that limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions; and Brian Schmalzbach, a partner at McGuire Woods who has argued multiple cases before the supreme court.”

Hasnain says:

“One scientist familiar with the situation expressed a sense of frustration, saying that there is no way to counter the conspiracy theory suggesting they were part of an effort to censor conservative voices. They point out that researchers ran their studies openly and in full view of the public, and question why the judiciary committee is conducting its investigation behind closed doors, instead of allowing scientists to testify publicly about their work and their findings.

“I don’t think they want public testimony, because they don’t want those optics,” says the scientist, who requested anonymity so they could speak freely. “It’s political retaliation,” they say, and there is little that the individual researchers who are being targeted can do to fight back.”

Hasnain says:

“He spent the next two years bouncing around — switching teams, watching project leaders get promoted despite, he said, producing nothing of substance, and generally spinning his wheels. Graham was paid more than $300,000 a year but had little work to show for it. Feeling adrift with nothing to do, he gradually disengaged from his job and was eventually put on Amazon's formal performance-management plan.

Facing the threat of firing, Graham was finally put on a project to use machine learning to improve Amazon's music recommendations, which he described as "the first really interesting thing I worked on." He was happy to feel like a valuable member of the team, but Graham's manager told him something stunning: The finished project, which Graham worked on for more than a month, wouldn't see the light of day. It was simply an exercise to satisfy the terms of his performance plan and string out his employment, he was told. Graham left Amazon soon after.”

Hasnain says:

“The California Supreme Court just ruled against Kuciemba on the basis that a victory, while, in the court's words, "morally" the right thing to do, would create "dire financial consequences for employers" and cause a "dramatic expansion of liability" to stop the spread of covid.

There’s a few stunning details to note in this case. First, the court agreed that there is no doubt the company had ignored the San Francisco health ordinance. In other words, they accepted the company had broken the law. And then concluded “yeah, but, capitalism.””

Hasnain says:

“But, since the first step to fixing any problem is being able to clearly identify it, I'm gratified to hear more people recognizing the social and cultural factors that are shaping the otherwise-inexplicable choices of some of the most powerful people in the business world. Now here's hoping that those outside the bubble can gather together and organize an effective counter-response to the increasing dangers and harms posed by the radicalization of the loudest voices in tech.”

Hasnain says:

"Very little research, by contrast, is currently being pursued on lossless strategies, where transmissions are made smaller, but no substance is sacrificed. The reason? Lossless approaches are already remarkably efficient. They power everything from the PNG image standard to the ubiquitous software utility PKZip. And it’s all because of a graduate student who was simply looking for a way out of a tough final exam.

Seventy years ago, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor named Robert Fano offered the students in his information theory class a choice: Take a traditional final exam, or improve a leading algorithm for data compression. Fano may or may not have informed his students that he was an author of that existing algorithm, or that he’d been hunting for an improvement for years"