HashThis

Hackers are going to hack (a solution).

Please recommend Silent Circle's Blackphone. We need to promote phones that secure the second operating system in every phone (BaseBand radio processors). We need to encourage open source and security hardened by people dedicated to make it completely secure.

https://www.silentcircle.com/products-and-solutions/devices/

Please do NOT use sourceforge.net

What do people think about Telegram's (https://telegram.org) security vs Signal?

When the voting lines require 3 hours to vote, single parents with small kids skip voting. Voting booths are expensive and during cutbacks, people have to travel far and have 3 hour lines. This happened in Arizona and other places in primaries this year. Friction equals far less voting. Vote at home electronically on your phone means far more voters.

Far more voters is worth complexity. Security should just something we must engineer and deliver. Maximizing people voting is the real goal, outside of engineering excuses and worries.

The truth is that we can't trust INTEL. Their CPU micro-code or ME (Management engine) can and does "phone home" to the internet, grab updates and update the CPU. They don't allow the customer to turn this OFF, which betray's the customer who purchased the CPU. Anyone who can sign the update and intercept the download channel can update your CPU with you having no ability to protect yourself. We can't trust intel.

Intel needs to allow 3rd parties to build a small piece of hardware for private key storage, generation, signing and encryption, with self-distruction upon tampering. Then customers need to be able to go to the store, pick which vendor they want, and they plug it into their motherboard. By selling them in the store when the customer can make a surprise purchase, then that prevents tampering upon shipping withe ecommerce deliverables.

How does Signal compare to Telegram? Would you recommend Telegram as better or worse then Signal.

Thanks for the details

I'd love people's opinion on this. From my understanding, HFT (High frequency trading) firms are front running stock orders. NYSE sells them data on stock orders. They buy data center space in order to front run stock orders. That is how the HFT guys make a profit when Day Traders can't make the same kind of profit. Is that true?

Microsoft is incredibly messed up on passwords and logins. Office 365 is password hell. They ask to login with a Microsoft account and I login with an Office 365 account, and they reject it. I stopped using my Hotmail account because their password problems blocked me. I had to take my Surface into their Geneius bar because I couldn't login because of password reset problems. I couldn't use my Surface at all for 4 months because of password problems and I gave up on it.

People will flee Microsoft because they fkup being an internet company or internet feature based company. They block their own customers and force them to flee away.

This is 100% true. I worked on Longhorn at Microsoft.

The problem has gotten infinitely worse lately. I think the 2008 recession from a rigged economy was the first half of the problem. The NSA surveillance state uncovered by Snowden broke the last half of trust in government. This is why voters didn't revolt in 2008 or 2012 elections, but they are in 2016 elections (with Snowden's release in 2013).

The wrong doing in the 2008 recession plus the illegal surveillance state combined to shatter trust in government. Evidence is seen in the Bernie Sanders voters and non-establishment republican voters in 2016.

I know a ton of people like this. 70% of the people I know didn't stay at Amazon past 4 years.

The government actions are immoral. When an entrepreneur has raised capital from investors, his personal reputation is on the line to be a good shepherd for their investment. Shutting down their company destroys the entrepreneur's personal investment and betrays their ability to keep their investors investment safe. This all comes back to the immorality of the government's actions in this area.

I know the Unicorn market is making a massive pull back, and about time. What is happening to the Valley valuations and number of deals completed?

I'm curious on if this has any effect on seed companies with valuations at $4m to $6m pre in valuations or number of deals funded?

Is this only impacting unicorns (which I don't care about)?

They used Dual Elliptic Curve, which is what they are removing.

People should really understand how revolting what is happening. Watch the congressman indignant about spying on Israel. What is happening here is that they are putting the privacy of a foreign country higher than US citizens. Politicians and the establishment actively force privileges for a PRIVILEGED CLASS.

They treat foreign countries and corporations as being more important that US citizens. People need to see that there are fundamental problems with the establishments. This congressman never worries when the constitutional right of privacy is stripped from US citizens, but not from the privilege classes.

That is because Jerry Solinas works for the NSA. Jerry Solinas @ NSA @ jasolin@orion.ncsc.mil.

Notice that the company "Clyde Frog" doesn't have a company website. Notice that Jerry Solinas don't have a Linked-In profile.

I agree. Please get security software off of sourceforge.

I disagree. I had a startup in the recruting space. Companies only have about 3% to 7% of their jobs filled by head-hunter placement fees. This company is smart.

Most of existing head hunter placement fees were obtained because a head hunter getting a 20% to 33% placement fee was only able to be obtained by a lot of manual sales labor. This company automates that with a low 5% placement fee winning over competition and not requiring the high manual sales labor.

Second, this company is trying to find companies that will hire most of their engineers through their system, instead of only 5% of their company hires. Also placement fees at 20% to 33% are only paid on: a) exec positions, or b) when a position takes a very long time to fill. That small category limits the percent of employees able to be hired with a contingency fee (from 3% to 7%). This company being cheaper means that companies can hire all levels of engineers and do it for quality reasons, since the 5% is no longer a blocker.

I know a VC who makes $400k in base salary. FYI on that side

Mac App "Sketch" and "Hyper 3".

I wish they can turn their fuzzers and similar tests that they build into an open source test suite that can be run by anyone, and into the future. That would be a great public contribution from this work.

Microsoft would hire someone like this back in a hot minute. For lower level Microsoft people who leave, they can come back at a higher level.

Microsoft needs great people. He will just have more experience in new and unique ways, so he will be more employable.

For Microsoft employees who hit a level and can't get higher, they can probably go to a startup for 2 years and come back at a higher level at Microsoft.

Obama can ask to curb or limit the NSA. But the NSA will tell him 'no'.

This won't end well. Microsoft is a bubble with an echo-chamber internally. Their employees are in the 1990s era, which is making DVD application software (Word, etc.). The problem is that they still think that way. Senior managers are from the 1990s. Or they hired from colleges and sheep dipped people in the same thinking. People from startups and industry don't last long there, and definitely don't rise in management.

The reason startup or industry people don't rise in Microsoft is that they are rejected as not matching the 1990s way of doing things.

Examples: Their UI innovation was in WPF because someone forgot to tell them that UI dev now happens on web pages and iPhone. Hotmail is a joke. MSN is a joke. Web hosted office 365 is a joke. Exchange web UI and client main usage is for 1990s customers and not 2010 customers. C# is charging in the opposite direction of the entire webapp industry's development platforms. (aka, they were late to MVC, Hadoop, Linux server hosting, etc.) They push Windows OS lock-in to win (but that fails).

The right leader comes from Silicon Valley in a startup gone big. That right leader will then replace many of the other leaders in MSFT with Silicon Valley highly strategic leaders. When the CEO is a Microsoft person, they will keep the same Microsoft 1990s style internal leaders and nothing will change in the category of what needs to change.

EarthEconomics.org is and they are great. They are Zillow (house valuations estimator), but for undeveloped land. They put a value on the property if it's natural state is removed. They use academic research data to calculate the value of wetlands, wild life, erosion control, regulatory compliance, etc.

Yikes. They better turn this around quickly, or they may no longer be the country's best technology company.

I used to work at Microsoft from 1996 to 2006. Here is a pattern that I've seen, which explains so much of the problem with Balmer.

The strategy in 1990's was that software was sold in stored (EggHead). People would compare the BULLETs or CHECKMARKS on two competing packages. Microsoft's goal was to always have more and better checkmarks. That sold more software in the 1990's.

Notice their newest re-org. They are making two big pushes DEVICES and SERVICES. The entire company is becoming "functional" (devs vs testers vs program managers, etc.). They all report to Balmer. Balmer is trying to be like Steve Jobs.

Balmer talked about having "efforts" selected by him and execs in his office. Those would be the major efforts of products. This is the same as picking FEATURE BULLETS for the back of packaged software.

Microsoft does NOT have a strategy. They focus on packing feature bullets, like it is a box of software. Watch them do that with XBox ONE, Windows Phone, Windows 8, etc. Until they pick a strategy, they won't find a way to use leverage to pull ahead.