Recent Articles

My wife:

> With a little understanding and patience, using your “little” phone camera, you can create some strong, print-worthy images.

I’d say so.

The only item I care about:

> The CIA didn’t defeat Signal/WhatsApp encryption. The CIA has some exploits for Android/iPhone. If they can get on your phone, then of course they can record audio and screenshots.

Also, Apple seems to believe they have patched the exploits mentioned in this leak already. To me this is the most interesting fact: that you *can* exploit something like an iPhone if you have possession of it. It will be really curious to me to see if Apple takes more hardware measures to protect the next generation of iPhones from this.

Matthew Green:

Since I couldn’t find a perfect layperson’s reference anywhere else, I’m going to devote this post to providing the world’s simplest explanation of why, in the threat model of your typical journalist, your desktop machine isn’t very safe. And specifically, why you’re safer using a modern mobile device — and particularly, an iOS device — than just about any other platform.

Greyball was approved by Uber’s legal team.

The company is shady to the core. This isn’t some bad actors, this is systemic and cultural.

Personally, I like Questbars for energy bars — they are OK tasting but they really fill me up. I travel with them all the time.

The exposed data included more than 800,000 emails and passwords, which are secured with the strong, and thus supposedly harder to crack, hashing function bcrypt. Unfortunately, however, a large number of these passwords were so weak that it’s possible to crack them, according to Troy Hunt, a security researcher who maintains Have I Been Pwned and has analyzed the CloudPets data.

shocking

This is why I cover all internet enabled cameras with tape. You can’t trust any of this crap.

Ben Bajarin:

I’m still as bullish as ever on the tablet’s potential. However, my concern is consumers may be extremely stubborn and lean heavily on past behavior and familiarity with PCs instead of going through the process to replicate the workflows and activities they did on their PCs and transition to tablets

My concern is not that at all. As Bajarin mentions, the buying cycle for computers is shifting to 6 years — and anecdotally that feels about right. I think this is driven by the smart phone.

General consumers seem to see and use their smartphone for almost all their computing needs — and that means they want a “real computer” which they feel confident can handle any other task. They don’t have that confidence in a tablet just yet.

This is what is driving slowing sales of iPads/tablets. It’s not that the PC is better competing with a tablet, it’s that for many people they don’t see the value in a tablet which is essentially a bigger screen phone — they love their phones and want a new one every year. For most people that means they cannot afford a phone + tablet + PC (even if the buying cycle is 6 years) and there is no way they are giving up their phones.

Ben Thompson:

“Evolving” is a word that has never really applied to Twitter. Consider the Oscars: according to Twitter’s statement of strategy the ideal outcome for Twitter apparently would be live-streaming the Oscars, much as the service live-streamed a few NFL games and the Presidential debates, making the service the “first-screen” instead of the second. In other words, Twitter wants to make a better banner ad (that, as noted above, will in reality actually be worse). What makes this so frustrating is that Twitter’s goal of owning “live” could mean so much more: how might the product evolve if Twitter had the sort of product mindset found at company’s like Amazon, Netflix, or Airbnb?

Brutal.

I’m a big fan of the third method listed. Super fast and stays put the best.