swartkrans

> "Both agents declined to comment for this article, but according to two people briefed on the investigation..."

What are the odds the "two people" are "both agents"? That's like the lamest off the record attribution ever. Also amazing that some random agent using Google broke the case. Apparently anyone could have figured out who DPR was.

> As ever, responses to this news will largely fall into two categorizes: those who believe that the U.S. — and other governments — should do everything within its power to find and apprehend criminals; and those who feel that the government is again running roughshod over privacy rights.

This is a false dichotomy. If you care about apprehending criminals actually responsible for crimes you should care about this too. A reoccurring subtext is that law enforcement cares more about quantity than quality, but data quality is hugely important. These dragnets are the equivalent of a House TV Series body scan, and the arguments that characters in the show made apply here.

One of the consequences of a dragnet and too much low quality data is the risk of circumstantial evidence leading to the conviction of the wrong individual. The minds of investigators and district attorneys are susceptible to all the biases that plague any other field including confirmation bias. Project Innocence has revealed heaps of wrongful convictions based on low quality data, even when police corruption wasn't at fault. Dennis Fritz and Ron Williamson for example were convicted for murder based solely on bad circumstantial evidence while the real perpetrator remained unpunished for over a decade.

It's not just privacy advocates who should care about stopping these kinds of surveillance techniques. That is unless the dragnet apologists don't care about who is being punished for crimes just as long someone is punished whether or not they actually committed a crime.

> The aggregate pain and aggregate loss of using cash for transactions in a credit-card dominated world is much larger

I have not found this to be the case.

> Sign up for Mint

I don't intend to increase the available surface area for attacks by giving my credit information to a third party. Nor do I need this kind of a monthly or bi-monthly hassle.

I'm not a particular fan of pie charts or donut charts, but the visualization used in this tool is actually helpful at understanding and comparing nested amounts.

The reason I don't usually like pie charts or donut charts is because it is difficult to make comparisons between circular shapes. In most places people use a pie chart, I think a bar chart would be better. It's easier to compare different lengths of rectangles than guesstimate differences of pieces of pies or half circles.

Something about this type of visualization with nested depths seems to be an outlier. If this information was portrayed in rectangles I'm not sure it would be better.

Yeah there are laws, but you have to catch it, and you have to report it and sometimes you don't realize you've been defrauded until months later. Hackers in my experience don't empty your account out, they charge $30 here, $19.99 here, sign up for this thing for a monthly charge of $9 you didn't realize. My time and stress costs me. And you can lose money.

It's best to just not have to deal with it. My credit card number has been put up for sale twice now, twice. Because I used it at a Target and a Home Depot. Ok, I just don't want to go through that again. I don't care if there are laws, if I use cash, I'll be fine. It's no problem, cash is accepted everywhere. I'm not likely to be mugged where I live and I don't carry a lot of money.

> Unless they're going back to mechanical ones.

I've been going back to cash instead of using credit cards because I've been exposed twice now via Target and Home Depot. I want to even avoid using ATMs and go into the bank to get cash because you can't really even tell when an ATM has a malicious card scanner installed.

Once we have automated cars maybe we'll go be back to walking and riding bikes to avoid being victimized by remote car jacking.

Imagine the mess hijacked delivery drones might cause.

Your phone can be cloned remotely. You can't easily clone a rotary phone that plugs into the wall.

I'm definitely not looking to automate my home, especially after reading how Chinese hacker had installed back doors on wall mounted AC devices or whatever which had access to the internal network at the New York Times building to keep infiltrating and reinfecting all the machines on the network.

Maybe we jumped into the digital world a little bit too quickly.

NextStep was built with enterprise in mind but became wholly consumer in its next life as OS X and then iOS. The massive consumer success of the iPhone led to employers giving in to employees who wanted iOS devices instead of Blackberry devices, a phenomenon called BYOD, "bring your own device". BYOD has given rise to an entirely new Apple presence in enterprise which I think Apple is just getting started with. Prior to this Macs were used by designers and engineers, creators, but hardly the stuff of serious enterprise.

Right now the services Apple provides are all about fulfilling features that consumers want: email, cloud storage, being able to buy content, and apps. They're meant to augment and also perhaps cynically lock consumers into Apple's sphere. The hardware devices sold at high margins make the money. This may change, and we might also see a two Apples where apple starts selling its services with higher margins for enterprise.

Incidentally long ago Apple really dominated in education. Most of the 80's Apple IIes and macs were popular in K-12, but that went away in the later 90's. Now iOS, in the form of iPads, are making inroads in education once again, competing with Chromebooks. Education isn't enterprise, and I don't see any services Apple would offer schools, but it's related.

Almost every where you look though, Microsoft is under assault. I think the last remaining stronghold is the Windows PC workstation. I don't think Apple, Linux or Android have made any inroads here. I can see Chromebooks becoming more relevant in the future, but for now workstations are dominated by Windows and probably will be for the next decade. The enterprise level services Microsoft provides here with ActiveDirectory and sharepoint, and the sophisticated controls for deploying Windows workstations across big organizations is pretty unrivaled. Maybe RedHat is also in this space, but not at the level of Microsoft.

What's the benefit of using fastmail if you just forward to gmail?

That's great to hear. Regarding the Android app having just checked it out, my first request, if you're taking them, is multiple account support. I can only log into one fastmail.com account at a time with what is here now. The reason I have two accounts is because I have two domains that get emails. Otherwise seems like a solid app. I'll probably start using this as my calendar app. :)

http://jmap.io/ seems pretty awesome, I guess I can use that to build my own fastmail app integration?

Thanks for all the hard work on fastmail!

I have been using fastmail for a month now after switching from gmail. I quite like it, but the two drawbacks are that it's just a little bit more likely to let spam in than gmail, even with aggressive spam options enabled, and with fastmail I'm missing out on the growing gmail ecosystem (Streak, Dropbox mailbox app, others).

It's fine though, I really am happy to be paying for an email service instead of depending on Google. I am quite happy with everything else. Really easy to set up and integrate. Works well with Android's email app and Mail.app. The webmail isn't terrible but I just use it to report spam. Having an Android app now is super exciting.

Well it's patched now, but it didn't affect you unless you were running a "Windows Server" although all recent operating systems were affected. If your Windows machine is behind your home router and you were not forwarding ports to it you're probably fine. I doubt this vulnerability was known well enough that enough people were scanning for vulnerable IPs to exploit them.

ssh into a box that is set up to use tor, install squid, set up firefox to use your squid/tor box as a proxy. Your home is no longer broadcasting that you're using tor. Your box could be outside of the country.

Of course it's about the money. Where does the engineer working on the open source software get money from to work on the project?

How do you charge for something that can be freely redistributed? How can I charge you $50 for software that you can then take and give to everyone for free because of the open source license? Where are people going to get that software from? From me where it costs $50 or from you where they can get it for free? The GNU website says you can charge for distribution, but that was written back when people distributed CDROMS. Now that it's all over the internet, that model doesn't work anymore.

You put binaries up for download, charge $50, and anyone can pay you the $50, take that binary and legally redistribute it for free. Or they could just take the source and build it for nothing and do the same thing. Talk to me about the economics of making that viable. Please, because if you can I would love to do it that way. I would prefer the source code I write to be open source, but I have to eat and my children have to eat and we need to pay rent, and so I have to capture the value too. Software firms with modest sales can't afford to lose a dime they make, so how could they go FOSS?

>It's a nice concept but I'll start using it as soon as someone creates a FOSS clone.

I like FOSS, and am grateful for the work open source engineers put into software, and I have also contributed, but this attitude right here where you wont even consider something because it's closed source? What's the point of that? Why shouldn't an engineer be paid? It's very difficult to capture value with open source software. Please explain to me how they could monetize this on par with the effort put into developing this and still have it be open source. This isn't a service that runs in a website, this is something you download and run.

> Time has proven again and again that humans are really bad at memory management

Well until AI write garbage collectors I'm not sure I see how your comment doesn't also apply to them. And lots of great software manages memory quite fine, like that browser you used to write your comment and the operating system it runs on, so not sure the use of "proven" is appropriate in your comment.

I also encourage people to use evil-leader with evil mode and check out other evil plugins, like the * to select all instances of the word under a cursor. Evil is very good, in some ways even better than vim, for example the live updating search and replace is pretty awesome.

I don't know if they're shutting down, they have to feel the heat somewhat from Microsoft's free IE testing service[1] though. modern.ie still has references to browserstack, but I wonder why.

[1] https://remote.modern.ie/

Some great pictures of the place before its demolition can be found on this article:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2139914/A-rare-insig...

What an interesting place it used to be. Basically a 1898 agreement between Britain and China created a legal limbo for a military base. Over time the military base became a refuge for squatters. After Japan's surrender in WWII the area grew into a dystopian-like lawless city that was ruled by criminal gangs until police raids from 1970's to 1980's cleaned it up. From 1987 to 1992 everyone was evicted and in 1993 it was demolished.

> About two weeks ago I was unable to switch to Street View in the android app. It simply wasn't accessible through dropping the pin, as it was in the past.

The first thing you should have seen after updating and adding an address is a message telling you to pull up to get more detail. It took me 2 seconds to figure out how to get street view in the new UI. So as I said subjective.

> In this case Google Maps has been steadily getting worse, so no worries.

Whether the UI changes are worse is a subjective claim, but the data Google has has not gotten worse. I've found all the alternative mapping solutions (Here, Bing, OpenStreet, and Apple maps) to be inferior when it comes to data quality which is the more important factor, unless you think getting directed through non-existing streets is a small concern. I'm not a Google fan, I've given up a lot of Google, but I can't quit maps or google search, although I use ddg quite a bit. Google has the most reliable map data, there is no competition and no good alternative.

> they used large non-atomic bombs

America was dropping napalm on Japanese cities filled with civilians[1]. Firebombing was a popular tactic in the 1940's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napalm#Military_use

You're liable for clawbacks. Madoff investors who pulled out early and received more than they should have at the expense of others were all sued by the trust responsible for recompensing victims. Best to just stay out of it.

> This is also true for Enemy of the State.

Uh, no? None of what happened in the movie is based on a real story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)#Real...

I've never used uber or lyft, but I used sidecar yesterday for the first time, and given this was my first experience with this kind of service I have to say this is so much better than having to hail a taxi. It sucks that you have to have a smartphone, (what do you when battery is out) but otherwise it's easy to see how transformational this kind of new service is. You can pick your driver, your driver can accept or reject based on your destination, you can see how much they will charge up front, and you can tip right from your phone making the thing entirely cashless. It's pretty amazing.

I like the post and agree with dcurtis about the abysmal phone. However I like my Fire HDX. It works for what I want to use it for: reading books and watching stuff. It isn't the best tablet, but it is not bad. It's the best for buying books and videos from Amazon. Ecosystem is subpar, but that is ok.

Here's a recent image of the person charged from his instagram:

http://instagram.com/p/uyqRk1CXWk/

Prophetic.

> the biggest one is probably performance, `new Foo` will always outperform `Object.create(FooProto)`.

He's right, `new` is more than 10x faster in Chrome and Firefox for me at least:

http://jsperf.com/create-new

Why would it `always outperform` though? Seems like an implementation detail. Object.create should be faster since it doesn't run a constructor.

Any kind of internal service that listens and accepts an API. Like you could put a bunch of monitoring agents on all your machines and those agents get information about your machines and report back to the service that makes use of Proxygen. Your service would use Proxygen instead of hiding behind an nginx or apache server and running via some kind of fcgi setup. The agents themselves could be using the Proxygen client to talk to the service using Proxygen server pieces.

From what I understand Tinder was never actually a startup, just a side project at IAC, and IAC has owned the company from the start. I'm not sure there are actually any legitimate "founders" or if the early engineers on the project ever had any equity beyond just employee based stock compensation.