ransford

Check out the English audiobook, read by Herzog himself.

If you're in Seattle, consider supporting Unloop, https://www.un-loop.org/, with donations of time or money. [EDIT to add detail:] They help people re-entering society establish tech skills and find work.

I've been volunteering with Unloop for a few months, as both a guest speaker and 1:1 coach. I feel myself becoming less cynical about tech with every interaction.

Immersion. Work in the industry at a position where you're likely to encounter inefficiencies. In healthcare, for example, you can't spit without hitting an optimization opportunity. Working midlevel can mean you get to see low-level workers hacking around bureaucracy and management wringing their hands about money and budgets and such.

Taking a job in an industry to get access to its seedy underbelly isn't super appealing to most founders, but for some ossified industries there's really no other way to find those golden opportunities.

Oh, and be patient. Practice being a mouthless set of ears.

It's a nice concept. Your webpage says "Sqreen blocks attacks without false positives." What's behind that claim?

Kudos for interrogating your values and seeing your way to something you feel good about!

Startup Hall in the U district has a nice community, is well located & well run, has lots of optional events, and is a great place to set up shop if you're going to hire UW students.

Related in name/title only, but just seeing the word gave me a happy memory of my favorite web grimoire to date: http://grimoire.computer/ (https://github.com/lifewinning/grimoire.computer)

Feynman mentions the physicist Julian Webb in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" [1]. The staff at Oak Ridge were generally kept in the dark about their role in the Manhattan Project, including the fact that the stuff they were producing (purified uranium isotopes) was extremely dangerous if handled improperly. Oppenheimer tasked Feynman with ensuring the integrity of the supply chain and sent Feynman to Oak Ridge for a frank safety discussion with the "big shots," and apparently Oppenheimer knew Webb to be technically capable enough to trust with the technical implications.

Feynman doesn't say what, if anything, he told Webb, but it's an interesting backstory -- it's possible Webb knew more than this article suggests.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=_gA_DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT125&lpg=...

Not an answer to your question, but: this is how Meraki started in the previous decade, as RoofNet at MIT [1], then as an independent company building wonderful idiot-proof mesh networking gear. I keep hoping another team of students somewhere will come up with RoofNet's spiritual successor, but interest in stitching together community meshes seems to be waning as everyone gets excited about 5G.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20060831053126/http://pdos.csail...

Was the $100K mentioned in this article the total amount Facebook gave Snopes? Because that's, like, one new-grad signing bonus.

FWIW, Wi-Fi is generally considered a poor source of harvestable RF for little doodads you might want to power passively. Among other issues, there's a lot of "quiet time" as radios on the same Wi-Fi network negotiate who gets to use the channel at a given moment.

If you are interested in the challenges of harvesting energy from Wi-Fi and some ways to address those challenges, here's a nice paper (originally in CoNEXT 2015) from a team I was fortunate to be on: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2017/3/213830-powering-the-ne...

[Edit: the relevance here is that, even with an awesome antenna like the one in the news, the Wi-Fi protocol kinda works against you, which raises a bunch of interesting questions.]

I've been getting perfectly adequate IPv6 via their 6rd gateway (on fiber, in Seattle). I wrote some nerd notes on using one's own wifi router and setting up IPv6: http://b.tra.in/2015/07/notes-on-centurylink-fiber.html

It's good to see attention paid to the day-to-day challenges hospital IT folks face when grappling with medical devices. These folks deserve better.

As an industry of thing-makers, we've done a pretty poor job of supporting use cases involving big diverse populations of devices that aren't centrally managed. Devices don't identify themselves in any consistent way; device makers don't allocate MAC addresses predictably from their assigned ranges; security folks often don't have link-layer visibility into their own networks; and so on.

Result: hospitals are desperate to "secure" their medical devices, yet they don't know what those devices are, what patch levels they're at, or what their "baseline" behavior is supposed to be, among other things that are crucial for security.

The security industry has decided that medical devices are a special case of IoT, and you can now choose from a wide variety of AI blinky boxes to send you anomaly alerts. That has been going about as well as it does in other domains.

Two things that may help hospital tech workers in the coming years are: efforts like IETF's MUD [1] to make devices state their purpose clearly; and efforts like the NTIA's software transparency initiative [2] that are aiming to make manufacturers say what's in their devices. The FDA is also cracking the whip on medical device makers to incorporate security into their development processes, and they love comments from nerds who can help.

</soapbox>

(I am one of the academic researchers behind the defibrillator hacking [3] that inspired the Homeland episode mentioned in this article, and I've been cutting my fingers on innumerable sharp corners in hospital wiring closets on and off since then.)

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-opsawg-mud/

[2] https://www.ntia.doc.gov/SoftwareTransparency

[3] https://www.secure-medicine.org/hubfs/public/publications/ic...

Marriott's incident page [1] links to a Q&A page [2]. Apparently the forthcoming sorry-we-lost-your-data notifications will come from "[email protected]".

"Let's immediately set up a separate domain name that looks like ours" remains one of the weirdest antipatterns in incident response.

[1] http://news.marriott.com/2018/11/marriott-announces-starwood...

[2] https://info.starwoodhotels.com/