The ACCC rejected the insufficient conditions w/ which DG Comp cleared Google-Fitbit. The EC decision shows a lack of courage and a refusal to learn from past mistakes. Having worked for months w/ @Caffar3Cristina trying to explain why, it’s time to put down a final marker. 1/

This is a (long) thread in four parts:

I.The Problem with Google
II.Google-Fitbit in a time of Digital Platform introspection
III.Google-Fitbit Theories of Harm
IV.The remedies are insufficient

2/

PART I: The Problem with Google.

We’ll start by agreeing that Google makes some great products. (That’s not the problem.) It claims: 3/

We have a very different view of Google’s true motives: 4/

To see this, divide Google’s product history into three parts. Part 1 is “Google as Traditional Media Company”. They launch Desktop Search (1998) and acquire YouTube (2006). Both are free services, monetized by advertising.

5/

@bitburner Here is the text version:

1/ Here is a description of what went down according to someone with far greater technical knowledge than me:

"so a group of developers latched onto the Press Release that Twilio put out at midnight last night. In that Press Release, Twilio

2/ accidentally revealed which services Parler was using. Turns out it was all of the security authentications that were used to register a user. This allowed anyone to create a user, and not have to verify an email address, and immediately have a logged-on account.

Well,

3/ because of that access, it gave them access to the behind the login box API that is used to

deliver content -- ALL CONTENT (parleys, video, images, user profiles, user information, etc) -. But what it also did was revealed which USERS had "Administration" rights,

4/ "Moderation" rights.

Well, then what happened, those user accounts that had Administration rights to the entire platform... The hackers, internet warriors, call it what you will, was able to use the forgot password link to change the password. Why? Because Twilio was no

5/ longer authenticating emails. This meant, they'd get directly to the reset password screen of that Administration user.

This group of Internet Warriors then used that account, to create a handful of other ADMINISTRATION accounts, and then created a script that ended up

Imagine being a German EV driver, not having to register with several of the 400+ EV charging operators just to get energy on the road, but paying with a “Watts” token accepted by any of them.

What would that mean to users and operators?
Thread 1/12👇

2/12 Based on IOTA “coloured coins”, “Watts” could be coupled to fiat currency or energy units (e.g. kW)

If "minted" by a consortium of EV charging operators, drivers would only have to register with ONE of them to get "Watts" but be able to use them to pay on ALL charging poles

3/12 "Watts" could additionally be sold in "gas" stations or supermarkets like todays' vouchers (cellphone credits, Google Play Store, PSN, Steam, etc).

Sold as vouchers for cash, buying "Watts" would even be (nearly) anonymous.

4/12 If “1 Watts” would be equivalent to 1 cent, minting tokens worth 5 billion € would cost the operators just ~1,500 €.

That’s "dirt cheap" in terms of infrastructure cost, especially when considering that “Watts” could be transferred infinitely w/o ever incurring any fees

5/12 A major headache when it comes to digital (cc) payments usually is "control".

With IOTA-based "coloured tokens", the operator consortium would stay in full control of their "Watts" token. In case they need more than 5 bn worth of them, they could create "Watts" v2 any time

@JugglingJelly Bridges are a perfect example of engineering.

The purpose of Engineering is Deskilling.

If you can build a bridge you can eliminate the skilled workers required to operate the ferries to get people across the river.

1/n

By eliminating the skilled ferries it means that the cost of crossing rivers is lowered, making it accessible to more people.

2/n

More accessibility is good for the economy because it means that more people can do business by crossing that bridge.

3/n

The single market was a economic engineering. It removed requirements by aligning and agreeing standards. It deskilled the customs industry by removing the requirement for expensive customs "ferrymen".

4/n

Brexit has had the effect that it has burned the economic bridge that we had with the single market meaning we're having to rapidly increase the skills of the customs agents in an unrealistic timeframe.

5/n

Here’s my framework for how I think about making career decisions, arguably one of the most important decisions we make in our lives.

I break it down into four categories, ranked by how important each is to me:

1) The People

My top priority is working with great people. Everything else is secondary to that.

1a) Are these smart, passionate, high EQ people that care about their work? Would I enjoy working with them? Do they lift the rest of the team up? Are they welcoming and inclusive? Do they strive to continue learning? Would I learn from them?

1b) It’s sometimes hard to get a good gauge of the people through just interviews. If you haven’t worked with the team prior or knew them for an extended period of time, values are a good place to start.

1c) Talking to past employees at the company and past colleagues at other companies can tell you a lot. Don’t skimp on reference checks. Ask questions like:
- Would you work with that person again?
- How did they resolve disagreements?
- How much did they care?

New from me: Co-op is quietly using facial recognition cameras to scan everyone entering shops. The tech is being in 18 stores and has been used for about 18 months. It's using tech from Facewatch, which says Co-op has the "best" watchlist in the UK

Adding some more details since this is getting some attention.

Here's how it works:

– CCTV captures people’s faces as they enter shops. These images are converted to a faceprint. This is basically a string of data, which is compared against a watchlist. Matches are flagged

– All the stores have signage about the tech, the company says
– The system doesn't retain everyone's data, it only keeps info about people who are added to watchlists

– The Co-ops in question are all part of the Southern Co-op franchise. It says the ones using FR are inner-city stores, with high crime levels
– The justification is crime against staff has risen. Since the tech has been used it says 3,000 incidents of theft have been diverted

– The watchlists used are created by Co-op and include images of people "known to have offended within our premises, including those who have been banned/excluded". Co-op decides who is put on the watchlist. Data on watchlists is stored for two years

In 2003's Pattern Recognition, @greatdismal discusses the role of "apophenia" - finding patterns where none exist - in paranoid thinking. We are a pattern-matching animal, prone to seeing faces in clouds and hearing speech in static.

https://t.co/lKHfKbvzLN

1/

Apophenia is omnipresent and weird. It's why 5G conspiracy theorists started circulating a guitar-pedal circuit diagram as a leaked 5G cancer-microchip design (the diagram has a segment labeled "5G

But this kind of hilarious idiocy doesn't occur in a vacuum. It's got a business model. Companies like Devon's @Energydots1 prey on people who've been sucked in by their own apophenic misfirings to sell them "Smartdots" - stickers to protect them from "radiation."

3/

It will not surprise you to learn that Smartdots don't work. Indeed, they don't do anything, except, perhaps, produce a hard-to-remove gummy

Energydots claims that their stickers are programmed with "scalar energy" - a study by the University of Surrey's 6th Generation Innovation Centre, commissioned by the @BBC, was unable to detect "scalar energy".

5/

"Working software is the primary measure of progress" is an enabling constraint. Sometimes, managers use the phrase as a club to get people coding. Coding, however, is a necessary driver of creating software, but it's not the only thing you have to do. 1/5

Standing in front of a whiteboard and discussing design, creating and running tests, just staring out the window and thinking, are all necessary parts of the development process; but if you don't get that software into your customers hands, you've accomplished nothing. 2/5

Using working software (the result of the process) as your measure of progress, puts natural limits on the entire process, including the staring-out-the-window parts. It forces you to work small (thus the "constraint") enough to deliver frequently. 3/5

I'll add that sometimes, progress does have to slow down so that you can think things through. That's fine. That's natural overhead in the process. Incorporate it into your planning. 4/5

But, if the overhead overtakes valuable work (creating "working software"), then you need to take a long hard look at how you're doing things. 5/5

For threat hunting, a non-trivial amount of the work is referencing, creating, and updating system and network inventory. This doesn't get talked about enough as a skill set that someone develops. 1/

Threat hunting is all about finding anomalies that automated detection mechanisms don't find. That means manual anomaly detection, which sometimes means weeding out things that are normal. 2/

For example, let's say you discover a binary that runs in the middle of the night on a host and that's weird! So, you eventually search for the prevalence of that behavior and see it running on other hosts in that department. 3/

At the same time, you find this host talking to a weird internal system on an odd low port you haven't seen before. In this case, that behavior is nowhere else on the network. 4/

Eventually, you talk to an IT person or user in that department and find out the process is some special software they use and the weird system is a dedicated server for it, and it's all legit. Job's not done, though. 5/

It doesn't matter if you're a Junior or Senior Developer, everyone uses Google to search for solutions.

What a lot of people don't know, is how to effectively search for the right answer.

Let me help you improve your Google search skills with these 16 tips!

🧵🧵🧵

1. NOT Logical operator:

You use this operator to exclude results if it contains the operand using "-" e.g.

javascript -frameworks

2. OR Logical operator:

This is a binary operator that returns a result if it contains both operands or one of them e.g.

(angular OR react) javascript tips

3. AND Logical operator:

This is a binary operator that returns a result containing it's operant on the left and right hand-side e.g.

html AND css

This returns a result if both terms are in the search result.

4. Exact match:

Use quotation marks to return an exact match in your search result e.g.

python tutorial "full course"

1/ The minimum viable thesis (MVT) is the precursor to the minimum viable product (MVP). Understanding your customer's MVT is at the core of technology adoption.
A thread.

2/ This a concept that was first inspired by conversations with @infoarbitrage while we were going through @techstars He was the first investor that had a questionnaire to drive a rigorous thesis framework.

3/ A minimum viable product (MVP) is the smallest thing that you can ship to solve a customer problem

4/ A minimum viable thesis (MVT) is the smallest belief that you have to hold to take adopt a technology

5/ More than 100m people have adopted cryptocurrencies. What is their MVT?

LIVE at 1pm: @AjitPaiFCC joins @AEItech for his final speech as Chairman of the FCC. He'll discuss the tough choices he made that shaped U.S. communications policy.

Tune in:

.@AjitPaiFCC: I'll "walk you through four of the most challenging calls I had to make over the past four years.
The details and circumstances of these episodes vary, but I think it’s important to say up front that the underlying principle guiding my decisions never changed."

"I said repeatedly that every decision I would make at the FCC would be an independent one, based on the facts and the law. Nothing more. Nothing less. In my view, that must be the lodestar for any FCC leader." - @AjitPaiFCC

"Net neutrality advocates approached the issue with a religious fervor, and the press corps covering the issue was broadly sympathetic to their position." - @AjitPaiFCC

"It was clear that there was no real political upside for me to re-open this fight. ... But investment in high-speed networks had declined for two straight years for the first time outside of a recession in the Internet era." - @AjitPaiFCC

So Salesforce is the grandperson of SaaS software

The first to hit $100B in market cap
The first to do $10B+ in ARR (and only so far)

And yet, in many ways we know >less< about Salesforce that we used to

It's not just a CRM anymore

5 Interesting Learnings:

#1. 73% of Salesforce’s customers come from the installed base. Let that sink in.

This is why in the end, Net Revenue Retention is the #1 most important metric in SaaS.

This also means that Salesforce could basically still hit 73% of its plan with 0 new customers.

Put differently, their 2017 customers have, as a cohort, grown 2.1x

#2. Salesforce’s upsell is split about 50/50 between new seats and new products.

In the early days, you’ll probably only have new seats to sell.

But eventually, you’ll probably need a second or third product to sell. We talked about this re: Veeva, Twilio and more here:

#3. The more products you sell, really, the more problems you solve — the more you make.

This is something a bit non-obvious. Salesforce’s customers that buy > 1 product overall, spend a stunning 10x more.

YouTube’s ad business is officially bigger than Netflix.

YouTube ads at ~$35B run-rate vs Netflix at ~$31B run-rate

Deconstructing AH’s ‘bot’ list - A Thread 🤖
#JusticeForJohnnyDepp
#AmberHeardIsALiar

First things first here’s Amber’s first claim of ‘bots’ included in her Counterclaim (Aug 2020)

“Smear and harass Ms.Heard while simultaneously promoting and praising Mr Depp’s agent and attorney, Adam Waldman.” - This part is specifically important.

There’s 209 accounts listed so I broke them up into 7 groups:
• No Longer exists
• No Connection at all
• P*rn accounts
• Depp Fan accounts
• Only 1 tweet with any link
• Other
• and finally @adam_waldman 🤣

Side note - When I searched the accounts that didn’t obviously show JD tweets (eg fan accs) I searched with the words/#’s
#JusticeForJohnnyDepp, Justice, Johnny, Depp, Amber and Heard

I used all the most commonly used terms with this case so it would throw up anything connected

I can’t search what people have Retweeted but on accounts where there were no tweets to be found, I scrolled back through their profiles for a while to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.