A friend of mine has been working here for the past year and bursting with excitement over the tech and design. They've been extremely silent in public, and even this close friend has given me zero insight into what they're working on. We're former Army intel and NSA guys, so I respect that, but it's cool to see them start to make some public overtures.
Interesting that Homeaway is trying to position itself between market segments. They are a sharing model, but they aren't sharing economy like Airbnb. They are a hospitality company but not like Hilton.
As funny as the video is, and while it addresses possible ickynightmare scenarios, it apparently does not reflect the sentiments of the millions (and growing) of happy repeat sharing economy consumers :)
On the one hand, there is nothing inherently wrong with the growth of an alternative to the USD as a global market currency, there are good arguments in favor of diversifying that function anyhow.
The dark side is that China has a history of being very good at economic subjugation in Africa. This feels a bit like a "lender of last resort" scenario, with a lot of contingencies and costly terms.
I'm so happy. My little sis is an o-chem major and OBSESSED with fungi, this will be a fun link to send her way, thanks for this completely oddball post!
Right, specific attribution is often challenging, but tactics, techniques, and procedures often have signatures or fingerprints common to the level of sophistication of the actor. Of course this also opens the opportunity to spoof attack vectors, but who knows.
With the inside visibility of the traffic across their network Twitter would be able to estimate (whether with their own internal security experts or an outside service) the sophistication of the attacker.
Would expect that at this point there was some discussion with FBI as well. Also, as pointed out, very common for a tech company to be notified by FBI/NSA/police in these situations.
I work with one of the people interviewed in the article, we've been having some fun on Slack with it :)
I agree, that's definitely part of the problem. "Closing ranks" to protect each other is, I think, an inherently loyal and noble response, but it has to be tempered by humanity and reason, and that does not seem to be happening.
There is probably also a strong element of fear- as mentioned in the article, many of these police really are trained in aggressive response, and that becomes both muscle memory and instinct, it genuinely does.
I think many great officers imagine the "what would I have done" and in their doubt and worry over that hypothetical, provide a unified front against the repercussions of justice for their fellow officers, in case the same should ever happen to them.
It's true. In both advanced individual training (the job specific one that follows the famous "basic training") and before deploying to Afghanistan, I underwent a good amount of tactical and combat training. In both situations we were not only taught proper protocols for "escalation of force" and "rules of engagement" but also threatened with doom if we didn't follow them.
It varies on many factors, but generally before pulling the trigger you have to visually identify a threat, yell a verbal warning, show your weapon as a warning, fire a warning shot, aim at the threat and repeat the verbal warning, then fire if necessary.
Obviously this doesn't apply to full-combat situations, but for instances of the type that our domestic police force encounter, it most certainly would. It's so ingrained that I always wonder how we have so many occurrences of police shootings.
Sad situation, especially because (imho) the vast majority of police are amazing, selfless, community minded heroes, whose profession is besmirched by these brutal thugs who share their uniform.
Just applied for the veteran opening and very excited about the prospect! It's encouraging and helpful to see a few initiatives like this spring up.
TechStars has been running a sort of primer on entrepreneurship for veterans (http://patriotbootcamp.org/) for a few years now, but that's aimed at people just trying to figure out what's going on.
The YC opportunity seems more appropriate for those of us who are all-in and already building great companies. A nice evolution, and an important gap filled- thanks YC!