Rebekah Campbell:
As our conversation drifted from an update of my company to a deep discussion about life itself, I asked him what he thought was the secret to success. I expected the standard “never give up” or some other T-shirt slogan, but what he said took me by surprise. “The secret to success in business and in life is to never, ever, ever tell a lie,” he said.
Fantastic read.
Brad Smith for Microsoft:
Effective immediately, if we receive information indicating that someone is using our services to traffic in stolen intellectual or physical property from Microsoft, we will not inspect a customer’s private content ourselves. Instead, we will refer the matter to law enforcement if further action is required.
Finally.
Interesting test of fake broken versus real. It worked better than I thought it would.
Probably the best VPN to use if you don’t really want to have to think about VPNs just got a lot better. I love the new UI, but more than that I think it does a very good job helping people understand their security level in a very basic sense.
Cloak 2 adds brand new one-time passes for when you need the security of Cloak but don’t want a full subscription. We’ve also made a huge price reduction to our Unlimited plan, which now costs just $9.99/month.
Unless you have a VPN already setup, it seems to me this is a no brainer to install and then just use hourly if you don’t think you will ever need it.
This is going to be huge:
Added support for Mavericks Tags.
I can wait for June to fully dive into this, but nothing about what I am seeing is exciting. Where is the collaboration — that’s critical these days and I fear OmniFocus may never add it. What, do they work in isolation?
Matt Gemmell:
I understand that slotting an article into someplace like Medium may be a quick way to get some readers, but using it as your regular outlet seems like a huge mistake to me. If you have enough to say that you want to publish something of substance for a wide audience, your ultimate goal surely has to be to publish it yourself, in your place.
Really interesting thoughts from Gemmell, and while I don’t wholly agree, he makes a strong case.
This is a simply fantastic new whiskey distillery in Seattle. My good buddy and I went and did a tasting (a generous tasting I might add) of all three of their whiskeys and I was genuinely blown away. The Deacon Seat was by far my favorite, but I also got a bottle of the American Single Malt.
Highly recommended.
The Panzer:
Facebook has announced plans to purchase Oculus VR, the company behind the Rift headset, for around $2 billion in cash and stock. This includes $400 million, and 23.1 million Facebook shares. An additional $300 million earnout will be paid in cash and stock if Oculus hits certain unspecified milestones.
Where does this money come from — this is bananas. Facebook sure is starting to feel an awful lot like Yahoo back in its prime.
Great tips and amazing photos. I've always wanted to be in Tokyo for the blossoms, but I've only managed October and January so far. Bucket list for sure.
Michael Maiello:
When the government operates in secret, there is little hope for change. The public can have no opinion about what it doesn’t know. Obama’s proposal is an admission that Snowden was right. It doesn’t make sense to insist that the citizen who prodded his recalcitrant government into action should be punished.
I wrote a little update about the new Dark Sky for The Sweet Setup.
Charlie Savage:
Under the proposal, they said, the N.S.A. would end its systematic collection of data about Americans’ calling habits. The bulk records would stay in the hands of phone companies, which would not be required to retain the data for any longer than they normally would. And the N.S.A. could obtain specific records only with permission from a judge, using a new kind of court order.
I'll believe I when it is law. Until then it's just empty words.
Only $51 with Prime. Nice.
Bruce Schneier:
Okay, so you say that you haven’t provided any data stored outside the US to the NSA under a national security order. Since those national security orders prohibit you from disclosing their existence, would you say anything different if you did receive them? And even if we believe this statement, it implies two questions. Why did you specifically not talk about data stored inside the US? And why did you specifically not talk about providing data under another sort of order?
Preshit Deorukhkar:
SellAFile involves no registration or set up. It just makes you connect with your Stripe account via OAuth, specify the details of your file that you want to sell and its price and you’re all set. SellAFile gives you a unique URL that you can share with your followers. Anyone who wishes to purchase the file can click to buy, enter his CC details and be done with it. An email is also sent to him. It’s really simple.
Very cool.
Robert McMillan:
All of the big web companies have detailed privacy policies, but they generally give themselves broad rights to access customer email if they’re protecting their own rights, says Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties policy director at the ACLU. “This situation should be a bit of a wakeup call,” she says of the Microsoft incident. “These email services are not free. We’re playing a high price for these email services when we click, ‘I agree.’”
If the aforelinked post best described San Francisco, then to me this item best describes Portland, OR.
I was cleaning up my home a couple of weeks ago and I came across two cheap watches that I like to wear, both with missing strap pins. I had broken them when my daughter was younger and never got around to repairing them.
I needed new watch pins and I found them on Amazon, they were $3-5 for a pair. Not bad, but then I found the linked item. $8, Prime, for 360 watch pins ranging from 6mm to 23mm. Sold. Comes in a nice plastic case too.
I shouldn’t need to buy any more watch pins for the rest of my life.
Nick Bilton:
(I know of one successful founder who owns an old beat-up 1985 Honda that he drives to his secret private jet.)
So what exactly is San Francisco?
Uh, I think your previous sentence pretty succinctly answered your question for everyone else in the world.