navyrain
navyrain on Hacker News
Despite some well-publicized departures, I'm still bullish on Mozilla. As javascript becomes more capable, Mozilla's open-web mission becomes more attainable. Public awareness of widespread government surveillance increases the demand for trustworthy communication tools. Concretely, FirefoxOS is quietly reaching maturity, and Servo has a great deal of promise.
I think that Mozilla's strange position, being a non-profit that is at various times either in competition or in cooperation with the world's largest tech companies, makes employee departures all that more press-worthy that the typical corporate churn. I wouldn't read too much into it.
7 years at any organization is a long time, and with so few rungs above him on the ladder, it is only reasonable that he'd move on to something else.
I think you're right that UX and good security are often at odds, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that they _must_.
I view the current state of security in applications a a result of two forces:
1) The human dynamics of the roles involved: The disciplines of security and user interface design overlap very infrequently, and very rarely done alongside one another, collaboratively; one always tends to drive the other. For user-friendly and secure communication software to be written in an open source environment, too many stars have to align.
2) The market value of data: Software which can be monitored, and data of its users aggregated, analyzed, acted upon, and sold is more lucrative than making something which is truly secure, even from the authors.
I believe usable encryption is possible, but I don't expect it to come from grassroots open source efforts, nor from the big market players. If anyone, I expect to see it come a collaboration between large non-profits (such as Mozilla, EFF), and universities. In the current environment, they're one of the few with sufficient resources, organization, and motivation to get it done.
Have been using dokku on DigitalOcean since the 0.2.0, for personal projects. After bumping up against the poor quality of database plugins, I found "dokku-alt", which comes with pre-packaged well-functioning plugins for common use-cases, and seems to be good enough for my needs.
When evaluating the ecosystem, I got the impression Flynn has stalled out, and Deis looks to be too large for my modest requirements.
What I'd really like is ElasticBeanstalk or Heroku, but the per-app pricing quickly breaks the bank. My kingdom for a graceful way to host many tiny, low-traffic apps for cheap!
What is omitted from the article is the difference in the _size_ of the tech industry during the last 20 years. In 1995, the year the author romances, he emphasizes that doing anything in tech was hard. Two decades later, the hard problems have not gone away; the industry has broadened such that there are more opportunities across the entire spectrum of "noble challenge". There are more opportunities in making fluff, and more opportunities for even more difficult, admirable, and impactful undertakings than were ever possible before.
The industry has not been overtaken by the get-rich-quick charlatans, it has expanded enough that they can find a place.
When I see videos like this, or read other experiences of LSD, I wonder if I'm not missing out on something. LSD, uniquely amongst mainstream recreational drugs, seems to have the promise of an outright transcendental upside, with supposedly little downside.
It saddens me that there is no safe and legal way for me to try it.
It should be obvious that AT&T's "concerns" are simply a thinly-veiled threat to withhold high-speed access from the citizenry unless they get guarantees that they can manipulate said access with impunity.
The thing is that AT&T and others won't just pack up their broadband monopolies and go home; they'll respond to whatever market conditions the regulatory regime shapes. They can complain all they like, but the citizenry overwhelmingly wants more integrity guarantees for their internet connections.
This sort of threat is akin to a tantrum from a spoiled child.
In addition to the egrigious complaints citizens could make, wouldn't telecoms and cellphone manufacturers have grounds to sue over this? It sounds like these boxes are actively disrupting or reducing cell-phone service reliability by tricking devices to connect to them, despite not being a good tower.
It is a tricky issue, but I can see a good argument for increasing the amount of traffic going through TOR, even if much of it was from users without proper OPSEC.
As with all security, it is an education issue; just as "Private Mode" warns users that they might be tracked by ISPs or other agents, "Super-private mode" would have to warn users that supplying identifying information would jeopardize their privacy.
This sort of this is pretty exciting. Now that users are aware of NSA hijinks, and are familiar with the Privacy modes of their current browsers, I'd like to see Mozilla move towards a "Super Privacy" mode where they route over a built-in Tor client.
Of course, the dream would be to have all Firefox clients run Tor relay nodes out of the box, backed by Mozilla-supported exit nodes.
When a petty law is frequently violated and overlooked, law enforcement officers can use it as a tool to confront a citizen who would be otherwise entirely innocent. Often other underlying suspicions motivate investigation of citizens, and these laws are simply used as a pretense. Sometimes these suspicions have merit, but it seems like officers too often use these enforcements as a basis to act out their own prejudices.
If an arbitrarily-enforced law has fundamental merit, then the enforcement is the problem. As much as I shudder at the thought, it sounds like the solution here is complete enforcement of every law. The hope would be that the ensuing uproar would cause removal or revision to the laws to ease up the resulting oppression.
I've been using Freckle:
http://letsfreckle.com , which is promoted primarily as a time tracking tool, but has good invoicing built in as well.
Until there is open source and deterministic builds, this is just as functionally "secure" as Skype.
The brief, insipid blurb does very little to incentivize me to register to see the rest.
Ruby is the lingua franca of devops; it is an entirely sensible choice for that purpose.
This is where the article starts to show its bias. Of course ruby can do everything mentioned as well. Python has a leg up in scientific computing and stats. Ruby has a leg up in web and devops. Saying one "can do" everything, and the other "only does web" is misleading.
As the grandparent said, it really depends on your goals.
Privacy will be the hot topic of this decade, if not century. Now, when violent crime is at a historical low, is not the time to give law enforcement new and invasive capabilities.
If you are truly paying 100k for a 4 year (120 weeks) university education, then it works out to be $833 per week. My education at an in-state university cost far less than that. Claiming that "bootcamps" are superior in value or rigor is mendacious.
There is a substantial difference between freely sharing knowledge to any inquiring mind, and sharing knowledge with only those people who have paid gobs of money, while receiving none yourself.
Coming from the webapp world: How do you work with a team of people committing to the same repository? How do you review code? How do you find solutions to problems when they're not being spoon-fed to you in a bootcamp? What makes an application reliable? Well-designed? Scalable? When should something be improved upon, and when should it be chucked and rewritten? How can an application be hacked? How do you design DB schemas, and query them efficiently?
These are the sorts of things you implicitly trust a developer to know. The bootcamp students I've seen fail to realize that these are even issues, and get a big wake-up call to when they come up short in their first job. As a result, they struggle at the lowest rung in the ladder, as their coworkers cannot trust them to do any reliable work.
These "bootcamps" delude students into believing they can be placed in a good job if they pay up. I've worked with graduates of these programs, and found them to be eager and optimistic, but woefully ill-prepared for professional software development.
I'd love to see more programmers, but this cash-grab bootcamp practice makes our entire industry look bad.
DNSCrypt is a cool utility, but somewhat of a mixed bag, since OpenDNS serves up responses for invalid DNS records, in an effort to send you to website-unavailable.com
This hijacking (I am blanking on the technical term for it) really rubs me the wrong way. Is there a way to get around it?
If AT&T is successful, it is the beginning of the end of an equal internet, where the little guys have little chance to disrupt the establishment. If AT&T fails, it will dissuade other ISPs from attempting the same.
Companies, _especially_ startups, who sign on to this scheme harm the very ecosystem which granted them the opportunity to succeed in the first place, and make it more difficult for others. Those who do so should be shunned.
Certainly any encryption system which cannot at least be publicly audited should not be trusted.
Certainly SoCla is tired of everything being a "ninja" by now?
It should be noted that all we can know about an arbitrary transfer like this is BTC was moved. We do not know if ownership of said BTC changed; people can own many bitcoin addresses.
I've mined bitcoins, and have made a reasonable profit (~20ish BTC or so?). I mined in the GPU days, and while I currently run a small ASIC miner (BFL Jalapeno), it will likely barely be profitable.
The considerable risks and costs of getting into modern ASIC mining make it pretty unattractive at the moment. Until that changes, I'd advise anyone with a profit motive against investing a lot in BTC mining.
If you're confident that Bitcoin will go much higher, and are willing to wait a long while for it to happen, maybe it still could be worth considering. If you just like the idea of Bitcoin, getting a little ASIC miner for fun is entirely respectable. On the grand scale of things, bitcoin is still just a curiousity, and it doesn't hurt to dabble.
It seems pretty clear that the NSA engages in bulk collection of databases which _might_ someday contain something interesting, and only considers it "interception" when they query their own DBs.
These creative redefinitions of seemingly benign terms are at the root of the problem.