It's good for pseudonymous worldwide transactions. Blockchain analysis software is now a thing, and while costs are high, there are companies that specialize in tracing BTC transactions. [1] It is possible to launder/mix BTC or play a shell game to/from other currencies and wallets and raise analysis costs enough to make it not worthwhile for many adversaries and many targets.
While this may seem pedantic, it is important that people do not rely on BTC transactions for anonymity. Perpetuating this myth may become dangerous for some Bitcoin users.
There are plenty of absolute crackpot petitions on there at this stage that undermine the legitimacy of this one by being placed alongside it. I believe this motion is futile as well.
I'm not very fond of Tim's product, but I agree with him in his perspectives on SF and the Bay Area in general. Too much of it feels toxic at this point, and it has felt that way (to me) since about 2011 or so. It pushed me further and further into a state of introversion. While I used to go out and talk to people, I got tired of people wanting to talk "the mono-conversation" as he called it. It's been great for professional development as I have a lot more time to tinker with things, but it certainly hasn't helped me too much socially. I don't really care about who's funding who, who paid for what, what shit that founder just bought in Hayes Valley, or who's sleeping with whomever. I just want to poke at things, find bugs, and make shit.
> The rock stars these days are rappers and DJs and they don't play guitar.
And nearly every kid can afford a shitty chinese USB->MIDI controller and a cracked version of Live/Logic/FL Studio. The DAW and a controller is the weapon of choice for today's pop music industry. The fact that guitar is dying as "mainstream" shouldn't come as much of a surprise.
We just need to wait a generation. Then digitally generated pop will be seen as"mom and dad's music" and real instruments will be novel and interesting.
Microsoft developed quite a few of these ideas internally with the TwC (Trustworthy Computing) initiative in the early 2000s, and built a protocol - and development workflow - around threat modeling and security awareness. Most of their internal security-oriented protocol is listed for free:
As are some of their tools. For individual developers wanting to have a better sense of what threats their applications may face during the design stage, there’s a good Wiley book on threat modeling:
If you’re really in a hurry, a lot of the typical OWASP vulnerabilities are mitigated by choosing higher—level, long-standing frameworks and abstractions (e.g. Rails, Symfony, ASP.NET MVC) that handle a lot of the things that can hurt you. From there, most of the low hanging fruit skids will find can be mitigated simply by following the security best practices documentation for your framework before you start writing code in it.
Anecdotally, auditing web applications for security issues is my day job. The majority of the time, ignorance is the real issue, not speed of development. They simply don’t have any idea what threats they are facing, or any real education in secure coding principles. Very rarely have I dropped vulnerabilities and had teams say “yeah, we know about that”. It’s way more “whoa, I didn’t even know you could do that”. Basic security education really matters.
Your story resonated with me because I had the same experiences with a 12” MacBook.
While I can’t really use you as an example, since you kind of need a Mac for a lot of the work you do specifically, I’ve heard the same complaints about Apple hardware from other long-time Mac users that don’t actually need to have a Mac.
I am curious how many of those of us that don’t need macOS day to day have voted with their wallet away from Apple’s pro line, and what they switched to. I still use a mid-2014 MacBook Pro at work, but at home when it was time to upgrade I took the same path you did and went for the 12” MacBook. It sucked in every way.
Now I’m the owner of a Dell XPS, the supposed most Mac-like PC, and I’m simply stuck with another set of problems: it’s developed a great amount of coil whine, thermal management is spotty to say the least, and the sound card drivers have to be reinstalled every few reboots else it will not detect when I have plugged or unplugged headphones, which has me carrying around a USB DAC. When I need macOS, I’m still running High Sierra on a quad-core Mac Mini server from 2011.
The sad thing is that I don’t think there is a good option at this point. All of the “alternatives” to the MacBook contain their own faults.
Also migrated to a Dell XPS 15 as new Macs stopped exciting me.
No coil whine in mine, but it was hell finding just the right bios version so sleep would work. And if you don't use a specific Intel you driver version you get screen flicker. Le sigh.
For all it's faults, the MacBook Pro is still the best computer for what I do, as someone who doesn't have to use a Mac. macOS being a big factor in favor of it.
Sure, I also bought the MBP, but for the first time in a decade I bought an Apple product grudgingly, getting it not because it's the best machine at a reasonable price, but because switching would be too expensive.
The MacBook Air was a great little nifty machine, powerful enough for my (modest) needs. The MBP is expensive (even the "cheap" "Escape key" edition) with a finicky keyboard and 3h battery life if you actually use the CPU.
I was very jealous reading about the announcement of the Surface Book 2 yesterday. I suspect it will be the ultimate as far as Windows laptops are concerned.
Sadly, iOS development is part of my work, so I'm stuck with Apple. I'm dreading the next laptop 'upgrade' I get.
I did the same as you and migrated away. I was looking at the XPS and ended up going with the Razer Blade Stealth. What's actually surprised me most is how much I enjoy having a touch screen. I could see checking out the new surface pro 2 at some point now.
The other huge thing that surprised me was how easy development is becoming with the new Windows Linux Subsystem. The only thing i haven't gotten to play nicely with it is Postgres, but I just set it up in windows and have the wls connect to it and I'm on my way.
That's the thing, even if I wanted to there is nowhere to go to but Apple, the closest I've seen is a Dell XPS or one of the MS Surface models, but they seem to have there own problems, not to mention I heavily use the Mac trackpad and the gestures, which I've yet to see so well done on a Windows laptop :(
I am going to give the Dell Precision 7520 a whirl. Xeon processor. ECC RAM. No mic/camera. Full size keyboard. Decent discrete graphics. Comes with Ubuntu.
How much is this based on the libsignal-protocol-JavaScript code? Where does it differ from it? Where are the tests to test protocol steps?
I actually love seeing things like this, but it’d be nice if there was some more documentation on the project. Crypto libraries generally aren’t the kind of thing you want to pick up when they’re new unless they are both heavily audited and developed by those with backgrounds in crypto work.
It's ported directly from the javascript lib so most of the interfaces are exactly the same (async differences in some cases and a couple storage interface differences, see: <https://github.com/ForstaLabs/libsignal-node/issues/1>). The commit history is intact as well. Haven't had enough time to port tests but she works.. We use it for various bots in our signal based message platform.
The Symantec CEO has been in that position only since Symantec acquired Blue Coat last year, where they were CEO previously. The Symantec CA happened well before their current term.
What a fantastic website is that! To add to your point: Amazing how skewed ones morals can be if they believe they're doing the right thing by providing those countries these kinds of tools.
There is little to no way Amazon is going to be able to import their workforce to live in the city of Detroit. A whole lot of the housing options there are extremely outdated or require extreme renovation, the city’s infrastructure is in crumbles, and blight is still a problem.
Source: I have some friends that live in Detroit. Like, the actual city, not the Detroit Metro area.
Housing is not the issue in Detroit. There's no major city with more room to grow housing / office space than Detroit.
The only thing that would hold us back is infrastructure. We have virtually no public transportation, and the influx of all the Amazonians would take traffic to hellish levels. But to me, I see that as a positive. We need a wakeup call to finally overhaul our public transport.
Room to grow housing and office space requires a whole lot of development to happen. My greater point is that there is very little incentive for most people to move to Detroit compared to other locales that are further along on actually having a lot of the type of housing that is popular on the west coast, some semblance of working public transport and infrastructure, etc. The M-1 Rail is a good start, but I think we are still years from Detroit being a truly viable choice.
There are better options than Detroit for this largely just because Detroit is very far behind other cities that can offer some of these needs now and grow into the future ones. Detroit is still at the stage of needing to grow a bit more to support the influx.
I don't see any lack of incentive outside of poor infrastructure but hey, it doesn't seem to stop LA.
The M-1 rail is a joke. It goes from New Center to downtown, which is like a 4 mile stretch. It's the People Mover 2.0, public transportation lip service. It doesn't connect the burbs to the city, which is what we need. Not a personal shuttle for Quicken Loans employees living in midtown.
Our problem is that the northern suburbs get to vote on public transportation and they always vote against it. People who live in the burbs closer to Detroit (Ferndale, Royal Oak, Oak Park, Hazel Park, Roseville, etc) want to be able to ride something into the city so they don't have to deal with traffic and parking.
I can't say I care very much one way or another wether Amazon comes here, I just disagree with the sentiment that Detroit is unworthy of it.
Nevermind that rail in LA waits for cars, cause we can't delay cars more than 50 seconds, oh no!
Seems ridiculous to me, when a train approaches an intersection, you should have bollards come up and the train should always take priority. Moving hundreds of people is a higher priority than moving a few dozen, but yet the train is the lowest priority in LA intersections, and grey crossings aren't properly defended against idiot drivers crashing into trains.
As sfbay demonstrates, merely creating very high need for good public transport does not come close to guaranteeing said public transport will be created.
Also, IIRC, a lot of the "cheap" property in Detroit has substantial back taxes any new owner has to pay on top of the hassle that comes with basically replacing a house from the foundation up.
Merely being difficult to do does not mean something should not be done. Having a root canal done is hell but it’s better than the alternative. The economy has been pushing resources where its easiest. That’s why Detroit lost its industry and ultimately at root of all the economic struggles in the US. It’s much more easy to advocate to locate somewhere difficult than any UBI implementation, as an aside.
Further, to my understanding of Detroit's current situation, the city/local government could grant Amazon entire zip code blocks of commercial/industrial real estate for its purposes. Repurposing and renovating/rebuilding already existing structures will always be cheaper than going from the ground up.
As one senator once said. “I don’t need you when it’s easy if I don’t have you when it’s hard”.
While this may seem pedantic, it is important that people do not rely on BTC transactions for anonymity. Perpetuating this myth may become dangerous for some Bitcoin users.
[1] https://www.chainalysis.com/