Microsoft hires program managers (what other tech firms call product managers) straight out of college. Almost all of the PM-I employees I met at Microsoft were college hires with CS degrees who had taken few or no business or marketing classes.
1,743 karma · joined June 21, 2011
Regular readers know that a major theme of this newsletter is Everything Is Securities Fraud, so in that vein, let us consider a hypothetical. What if:
1. Everything in the Businessweek story is true, Chinese spies planted hardware backdoors in computers built and used by major American companies, and the FBI investigated along with those companies and discovered the backdoors.
2. It is a national-security secret and the companies were instructed by the FBI never to acknowledge it.
3. The companies are patriotically but falsely denying the hack.
If that is true—and I have no particular reason to think it is, it’s just the sort of hypothetical we like around here—then, obvious question: Is it securities fraud? (Assuming that the hack is potentially material to the companies’ business?) I do not think that the securities laws explicitly allow companies to make false statements of material fact if required for national security, but you could see giving them a pass here.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-10-04/computer-...
There are sometimes both “good” and “evil” ways to exploit security vulnerabilities in hard-to-update devices. After seeing a “good way” to hack vulnerable medical devices yesterday, I was wondering when we’d see an “evil way”. Guess I didn’t have to wait long...
> the first step is obvious: Restrict [apps] from getting any information from users' lists beyond phone numbers and email addresses. The next step is redesigning the controls of the list to allow users to encrypt or decline to share certain contacts. The names in a contact list could be benign, or they could be revealing—a doctor's patients, a dealmaker's network, a journalist's sources.
I don't know how good it is at preventing fake accounts, but in my experience, it does get the basics right, with no max password length or character restrictions, and 2-factor authentication through phone calls or texts.
(I don't file expenses often, but personally when I do so through Expensify, I find SmartScan so slow that I now assume all my "SmartScanned" receipts are going to a human.)
and here is the HN discussion of that paper from a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17448187
Bing still has this feature, though they've updated it (made it less discoverable, I feel) and removed older photos. If you go to https://www.bing.com/maps and point at the "Road" menu on the upper right, you will see "We have updated Bird's Eye. Learn more", which gives you the following information:
>Bird's Eye has changed
> New and crisp Bird's Eye imagery is available in many metropolitan areas. There are two ways of viewing the new Bird's Eye.
>1. In cards
>2. Right-click on the map
>Note: Bird's Eye may not be available in your area as outdated imagery is no longer available.
If I go to central San Francisco or Seattle, I can right-click the map as indicated and select "View bird's eye", and the picture will show up.
Access to FTP subresources inside http(s) pages has been blocked
I thought immediately: what about FTPS (FTP over SSL or TLS)? So I checked, and apparently Mozilla has had a 17 year old feature request for FTPS support!
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85464
This request was only definitively rejected a few days ago with note of “vague plans” to remove FTP support entirely from Firefox, but no more info than that.
In both cases, the book is by Julian Jackson.
[1] https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/178767/a-certain-idea-of-fra...
[2] http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674987210
Each core in those chips was seriously underclocked compared to a Xeon of similar vintage and price point (1-1.67 GHz; compared to 1.6 GHz to 3 or more), and lacked features like out-of-order execution and big caches that are almost minimum requirements for a modern server CPU. Sun hoped to make up for the slow cores in server applications with having more cores and having multiple threads per core (though with a simpler technology than SMT/hyper-threading).
However, Oracle eventually decided to focus on single-threaded performance with its more recent chips - it turns out that no OoO and < 2 GHz nominal speeds look pretty bad for many server applications. My suspicion is that even though the CPU-bound parts of games are becoming more multi-threaded, AMD will be forced to fix its slower architecture or lose out to Intel again in the server AND high-end desktop markets in a few years.
>Maybe the combination of operators and Helm charts covers this, but I don’t think that will cut it. Then we’re forcing developers to learn about two other things in addition to Kubernetes. Even if it’s just increasing the vocabulary and installing a new command line tool, it’s extra effort and thought. These things need to be first-class citizens and part of the Kubernetes out-of-the-box experience. They need to be accessible via kubectl.
with previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16821054
> Tesla Was Kicked Off Fatal Crash Probe by NTSB
> The National Transportation Safety Board told Tesla Inc. on Wednesday that the carmaker was being removed from the investigation of a fatal accident, prior to the company announcing it had withdrawn from it, according to a person familiar with the discussion.
> NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt relayed the decision in a call to Tesla’s Elon Musk that was described as tense by the person because the chief executive officer was unhappy with the safety board’s action. NTSB is expected to make a formal announcement in a release later Thursday, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
And if you go to Bing's website https://www.bing.com and set your browser to request webpages in Icelandic (via an "Accept-Language: is" HTTP header), then much of the website changes to Icelandic. However, the search query auto-complete suggestions and the search results will only be in Icelandic if you are in Iceland yourself.
From the article, it seems like the Guardian reporter either didn't know this, or doesn't think Microsoft is important (!):
> Online, however, is the biggest concern. Apart from Google – which, mainly because it has an Icelandic engineer, has added Icelandic speech recognition to its Android mobile operating system – the internet giants have no interest in offering Icelandic options for a population the size of Cardiff’s.
The person in charge of Windows Phone then was Terry Myerson, who had an entirely different reporting chain to Steve Ballmer from Sinofsky's. Myerson was later promoted to run R&D for all Microsoft operating systems in early 2014. (Yes, that means he was also the person responsible for killing Windows on phones most recently, at least for now.)
The death of XNA also didn't happen under Sinofsky's watch. XNA came out of the Xbox division and was abandoned by the same division, before it was combined with Windows under Myerson. If anything, Myerson kept XNA alive longer by making sure it was still supported on WP8.0 and WP8.1 when he ran Windows Phone, and by ensuring that Windows continued to fund MonoGame as an open-source successor/replacement for XNA.
I just don’t see why Transmit is worth it with all those other options.
Plus, Khosrowshahi told Softbank about the ongoing investigation 3 weeks before the rest of us - while this information was important to Softbank, it would also be important to any other potential investor, and we do not know whether any others were indeed told about it.
> Based on learning that people needed room for more styles of work and levels of collaboration, we added private rooms, shared offices, and flex spaces to our existing open layout.
Hopefully OpenJ9 will meet with better success. On paper, it seems to meet the restrictions that Oracle currently imposes for TCK access, namely that it is available under a GPL license and that its class library is derived from OpenJDK.[3,4] And it comes from IBM, which has been able to put aside its differences with Oracle on OpenJDK in the past, when it became clear that Oracle would never support Harmony (which IBM previously backed).[5]
But when it comes to Oracle and intellectual property, who knows?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Harmony#Difficulties_to...
[2] http://www.apache.org/jcp/sunopenletter.html
[3] http://openjdk.java.net/groups/conformance/JckAccess/
[4] http://openjdk.java.net/legal/octla-java-se-8.pdf
[5] http://blog.joda.org/2010/10/no-java-7-end-game_4619.html
It's possible that is happening, indeed, I suspect it's likely. The Microsoft developer "Orange" who the blog poster linked to is almost certainly Gov Maharaj (ORANGE),[1] a very prominent member of the Windows application compatibility team who has earned enough influence internally to be able to lean on hardware vendors like Synaptics through the hardware compatibility and partner ecosystem teams.
I used to work at Microsoft and saw Gov in action on internal email lists for people running daily Windows builds. He probably answered about a quarter to half of all the "this program is broken in this build!" emails.
You can see Gov (and perhaps be surprised by his technical chops) on the MSDN "Defrag Show" PC troubleshooting video series. [2]
[1] Origin of the name "Orange": https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20081021-00/?p=...
I am more than a little surprised by this. Fanconi syndrome, a kidney disease that can cause bone damage [1], has been repeatedly found in the medical literature to be caused by taking expired pills of the antibiotic tetracycline. [2]
That these people completely failed to remember these cases is distressing at best.
(I heard an interview with the author of this story on NPR Morning Edition today, and also scanned this story webpage. The only mention of tetracycline was by a web commenter on the story.)
[1] https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/000333.htm
[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=tetracycline+fanc...
Microsoft does have an internal Source Code Archive, which does the moral equivalent of storing source code and binary artifacts for released software in a underground bunker. I used to have a bit of fun searching the NT 3.5 sources as taken from the Source Code Archive...