-
When your fear is my opportunity
I’m not saying the people around me here at Black Hat are malicious, or that the threats aren’t real. I’m saying that the industry, and everyone it, is strongly incentivized to make its customers and the wider world as frightened as possible, and people tend to follow the path of most incentivization, consciously or not, reluctantly or not. The security industry is the… Read More
-
Facebook’s CSO: the security industry needs to change
Every summer, suited and/or black-clad security geeks flock en masse to the sun-drenched surreality of Las Vegas for “Hacker Summer Camp”: a full week of various security and hacker conferences. Today Facebook’s CSO Alex Stamos gave its keynote address. He began by calling the infosec community a “family” — then gave a speech which felt a little like an… Read More
-
Dear tech dudes, stop being so dumb about women
I want to talk about a relatively little-discussed aspect of the venture-capitalist sexual-harassment revelations that have rocked the Valley of late. In their wake, I have seen, first- and secondhand, men react with statements which can be collectively paraphrased as “Now I’m nervous about hiring women / investing in women / being alone in a room with a woman, what do I… Read More
-
Google’s brave new friendless feed
It’s like Facebook without all those annoying “friends.” Instead of having to look at what weird things other people are interested in, like their babies, Google shows me the weird things I’m interested in, like Legend of Zelda and Elon Musk. It’s a fundamental shift in content consumption, and it could unlock our niche fascinations without us ever having to… Read More
-
Death to C, ++
The C programming language is terrible. I mean, magnificent, too. Much of the world in which we live was built atop C. It is foundational to almost all computer programming, both historically and practically; there’s a reason that the curriculum for Xavier Niel’s revolutionary “42” schools begins with students learning how to rewrite standard C library functions… Read More
-
Crunch Network
A people-first view of investing in innovation or entrepreneurs who take people for granted will fail
I have long been fascinated by the promise of the world of autonomous transport. However, as the conversation at a recent event turned to the complexities that autonomous cars might introduce to the urban thoroughfare, I had an insight: We need to think of people not just as consumers but collectively as the society that shapes technology just as much as technology shapes society. Read More
-
Facebook’s Messenger ads are bad and must be destroyed
When Facebook removed messages from the main app, I swore I would never download Messenger. That’s been a pretty easy promise to keep, especially since they introduced the idea of huge ads that take up half your screen while you try to use the service. Today Facebook redesigned them as part of a larger rollout — but fixed none of the reasons these ads are bad and should be destroyed. Read More
-
Converging consumer values in China and the U.S. are creating millennials without borders
Marketers love slicing and dicing by region: APAC, NorAm, LatAm, MENA, ANZ, etc. But what if the best way to slice is no longer by geography, but by age? Marketers may need to geo-locate for one-off campaigns, but as technology adoption influences our daily routines, forward-thinking entrepreneurs and investors can look to how generations across geographies are more similar than different for… Read More
-
Why so costly?
Technology makes things better. Not morally, of course: military technology kills and maims people more efficiently, surveillance technology invades privacy more pervasively, and so forth. But improved technology leads to more output from less input for any system. Almost a tautology, right? I mean, that’s the whole point. So why, in our technology-laced world, do certain domains… Read More
-
Crunch Network
Tech’s term sheets of harassment
It’s important that we acknowledge that the type of behavior we are reading, talking and tweeting about has been enabled. Read More
-
The need for industry-wide investor/founder sexual harassment policy
Startup founders deserve formal protection from sexual harassment by investors. Yet despite the clear power imbalance between these groups, traditional harassment law does not adequately shield founders because they are not technically employees of the venture capitalists. To fill this gap, VC firms should adopt formal investor/founder sexual harassment policies that can be enforced. Read More
-
A template for investor/founder sexual harassment policy
Venture capitalists need to adopt formal policies to protect startup founders from sexual harassment, assault, and discrimination throughout the fundraising process. The policy template below was created to facilitate the creation of comprehensive, enforceable investor/founder sexual harassment policies. It also seeks to lower the barrier so more people can courageously speak up against… Read More
-
Cry ‘Havoc!’, and let slip the dogs of lulz
Well, why not? I mean, you know, what the hell. Dave Aitel’s proposal over at The Hill for “a cyber investigatory setup funded by private industry” to react to hacks into the American government may not be a good idea, per se, but who can afford that kind of cost-benefit analysis when we’re already in the throes of de-facto high-seas Internet warfare? Let’s just… Read More
-
Manufacturing civility
Facebook’s task is unenviable. Two billion people, all yammering on about everything in the world — and hidden in that unending torrent are hidden an unknown number of abhorrent, hateful utterances better off unuttered. But the method Facebook has applied to this problem, a tangled system of ethical arithmetic revealed in a report from ProPublica, seems unsuited to the task… Read More
-
-
The Uber and the frog
How the mighty are fallen. Travis Kalanick is out, and Uber has become something of a headless horseman, with no current CEO, COO, CFO, CMO, VP of Engineering, or general counsel. Its alleged valuation has fallen by $18 billion and counting. How did this happen? Or maybe a better question is: how could this not have happened? It really wasn’t so long ago, believe it or not, that Uber… Read More
-
How to kill a golden age
So I was sitting in the Theatre of Salt in Florence with my friend Jo discussing golden ages, as one inevitably does when in Florence — it having been the birthplace of that most famous and most consequential of all golden ages, the Renaissance — and I found myself speculating that Silicon Valley’s own ongoing golden age is at real risk of ending soon. I don’t think… Read More
-
The new new things that weren’t
We’re always looking for the New New Thing in tech, since long before Michael Lewis coined the phrase. Often we are entirely too successful. There are so many New New Things — and so many of them fall from the sky like burned-out flares soon enough, to further litter the graveyard of Old New Things. Can we learn from them? Probably. Will we learn from them? Probably not. But… Read More
-
Crunch Network
Technologists in the era of Trump
If innovation is the religion of the technology industry, then industriousness is the religion for the rest of America’s workforce. Read More
-
Facebook is broken
The problem is this: Facebook has become a feedback loop which can and does, despite its best intentions, become a vicious spiral. At Facebook’s scale, behavioral targeting doesn’t just reflect our behavior, it actually influences it. Over time, a service which was supposed to connect humanity is actually partitioning us into fractal disconnected bubbles. The way Facebook’s… Read More
Message Us