sohamsankaran

Would you consider accepting a hardware based internet-of-things/robotics startup?

Interesting. If the author is still around, I have a question - would the whois data have given you away, or was this faked/spoofed in some way?

Speaking as an Indian who's had the opportunity to try this sort of thing on various Americans (and a lone Australian), it would've worked. The success of the attack probably has more to do with the susceptibility of each individual victim than their specific native language, though (and this is a sweeping generalization) many Indians do tend to have greater deference to authority (real or imagined) than their American counterparts.

Speaking as someone just graduating high school in India, this sort of unintuitive convention discrepancy often flummoxes people at the 9th grade level, causing them to drop out of Physics altogether. Once you drop Physics, it's essentially impossible to get onto the Engineering or CS tracks in India, and U.S. universities are often too expensive.

MIT Emergency Update: "MIT Police have determined that the suspect in this evening’s shooting is no longer on campus. It is now safe to resume normal activities. Please remain vigilant in the coming hours"

Someone should start a whitheouse petition to question the anachronistic laws that allowed the threat of this sort of ludicrous punishment to be within the realm of possibility....

Just a suggestion, but you might consider trying to get the news media to cover the case: if the general public are aware of the details, its more difficult for the police/judiciary to push through nonsensical judgements on a bogus case (note the case of Aseem Trivedi, for instance). In essence, they can't make a moderately well known person or case 'disappear', as it were.

I suspect that in the author's situation, with "thousands of contacts" in his list, scrolling to the top might be a rather time consuming enterprise. And of course you can disable keyboards you don't want, but the author seems to be questioning the purpose of having the Internationalization button in a prime (and extremely accidental-touch prone location) on the keyboard at all.

Several of the article's points really resonate, specifically the ones concerning iPhoto, the Internationalization 'feature' of iOS and iChat/iMessage. It does seem, to me, that Apple has begun to sacrifice usability at the altar of aesthetics, or worse, are unable to engineer stable and resilient applications.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but wouldn't it be relatively easy to defeat a timing attack by sending an HTTP response with the standard "Email has been sent" message BEFORE the db lookup, irrespective of the data received?

Not anymore. Samsung claims that position now. http://www.slashgear.com/samsung-knocks-nokia-from-global-ph...

Add this to the fact that the U.S. legislature is considering making copyrights potentially infinite(edit: infinitely extendable) in length, and you have a recipe for total disaster.

Right, but I suspect those who would find advantage would be the incumbent market leaders in their respective fields. The truly disruptive startups, the innovators, would be weighted down considerably by such legislation, since they might unknowingly replicate an obvious part of a copyrighted API. The situation would quickly spiral out of control. If that were the case, the copyright-ability of APIs might result in the stagnation of software development itself, in the absolute worst case, though I suspect, as I have previously stated, that people would get around that by relocating to more friendly legislative environments.

A local cellphone company called Micromax has been offering a projector phone in India since last year, and its been doing rather well. Anecdotally, people [in Mumbai] seem to be using it as a TV replacement, both due to the lower cost and higher portability (important because of the impermanence of the chawls and slums that house just under half of the city's population).

Assuming the US court does end up ruling (even partially) in Oracle's favour, this would serve to make the U.S. an even less attractive location to start a startup than it already is due to current and proposed violations of basic human and civil rights by the government in order to protect content copyright holders (i.e. the interests represented by the MPAA and RIAA)[Citing Kim Dotcom/Megaupload, SOPA/PIPA/CISPA]. I postulate that this might result in a perfect storm of conditions that result in the shifting of the centre of gravity of the startup, and eventually wider entrepreneurial/financial worlds off American shores for the first time in more than a century, perhaps to Europe, due to a more conducive legislative environment, or, more intriguingly, to India or perhaps Brazil (assuming they get their governments in order). The advantages of the Silicon Valley ecosystem are still massive, but they would, in such circumstances, erode over a (not necessarily very long) period of time.

Edit: The page appears to be down, so I've posted the full text on pastebin - http://pastebin.com/6G5vqLj5

soham [at] sohamsankaran [dot] com

supermeatboy.com seems to be down

Interesting. Where would these be physically located?