we are talking about propagation here. its built so that the person who receives the image is then unable to forward it to somebody else. or at least they can, but that person won't be able to unencrypt.
its pretty standard, and working with e-commerce for a while now.
no, it would work. it doesn't have to be DRM per se, just automated public key encryption and signing using something unique such as the phones IMEI number.
it is very possible to implement encryption and signing without having the user go through key generation etc. make it all transparent and give them a lock to click on if they want to make the message and attachments secure. PGP already has a similar product, and hushmail is pretty easy to use.
I don't really care about upvotes, I just voice my opinion based on my own experience.
The other replies to your post have already covered what I would have said, I would just add that having a fixed belief that if something is illegal, that it must be bad for you, is ignorant at best.
Almost all of the illegal drugs are also prescribed in some form of the other. There is the massive painkiller industry built on opiates, ADHD and amphetamine salts, Air Force pilots in the USA are given 'go pills' as were SS troops during WW2. There is a terrible double-standard in our society when it comes to drugs, where for some reason we are expected to believe that these use cases are somehow fine, or are somehow safer, than an individuals own experimentation with using the same substances for their own performance gains.
The human body was designed thousands of years ago, and evolved its capabilities based on having enough energy to gather enough food to survive that day. With no additional substances to give us an extra push, we simply weren't designed to be able to concentrate on complex tasks for 16-18 hours in day.
If you are able to with just coffee and cold showers, then good for you - there are some of us who, like the Air Force pilots, seek a bit more of a push. I don't distinguish between coffee, vitamin supplements or any other drugs, they all have a purpose and we all should be free to use or not use each as we choose.
It is a shame that so many of these drugs are illegal and have been demonized, because they do have benefits for people at smaller doses as discussed. Some of the greatest work and innovation in the world has been created by people under the influence of one substance or another (from Picasso and his wormwood/absinthe to Steve Jobs and LSD).
In my own experience, I have used small doses of either amphetamines (both prescription and not), cocaine or various other narcotics (usually just dropped into a coffee) to take me through some big, demanding and complex projects. I know that this is not the 'correct' thing to say, but with self-control and knowledge about dosage, I can't think of a single downside to them being used in such a manner.
I can imagine that daily small doses would add up to a dependency which has its own ill effects.
Obligatory Bill Hicks quote:
“See I think drugs have done some good things for us, I really do, and if you don't believe drugs have done good things for us, do me a favor: go home tonight and take all your albums, all your tapes, and all your cds and burn 'em. 'cause you know the musicians who made all that great music that's enhanced your lives throughout the years.... rrrrrrrrreal fkin high on drugs.”
here is a case where we actually need DRM. the girl should have been able to secure the content and allow access to only those people she wished to grant it to - there is both nothing legally or morally wrong with that.
there is a tech angle to this story - and its about how we need solutions to stop unauthorized propagation of private content. DRM systems as already built into Windows and other systems would work perfect - it just needs to be standardized and rolled out across mobile and web platforms (most of it is based on open protocols)
It's a shame because we have the technology, it is just currently being applied in the wrong places
all 3 founders leave at the same time, only two years after being acquired? there is more to this than simply leaving to do other things. founders of sites like last.fm don't just let their babies go so easily, acquisition or not (think myspace, facebook, bebo, etc.)
I would say that it is connected to the RIAA drama and CBS sending them user info. If they resigned because of that, then full props to them (they just owe TC one big apology).
If the data sharing with the RIAA did happen and they didn't resign - then shame on them.
if we could measure influence, Mashable wouldn't even come close.
It seems 55% of Mashable traffic is coming in from search engines. If you look at their homepage, they are obviously heavily optimized for keywords like 'youtube', 'myspace' etc. (I got my stat from compete pro, cant link)
As a tech/valley person, I keep up with TC a few times a day but Mashable doesn't interest me at all. I am sure I am not alone.
It is always tempting to point to a big company and to try and argue how stupid they are and how they waste money etc. but as most of the comments here have already pointed out, there are fatal flaws in their argument.
I will add one more to the list. The difference in click-through rate for the top result from the second result is 3.5x. ie. Top result gets 43%, second place gets 12% CTR. Ranking first means a lot.
Also the spikes in trends for the caveman keyword being linked to Geiko is very speculative at best.
no. since it is gzipped, there is no progressive download of the page and it is all downloaded at once and then executed. so startTime and endTime are measuring processor execution rather than download speed.
it is a flawed method. a better method would be to make an xmlhttprequest to an object of known size and compare the time to known times for known connection speeds. this method also has the advantage that you don't interrupt the page being loaded and don't interrupt the user experience since it is run in parallel.
WAY over-rated story. The network is built using a script kiddy tool called Gh0st RAT, which relies solely on social engineering to propagate. There are no new exploits here, or nothing as sophisticated as confiker especially since Gh0st RAT is a simple client/server model that is very easy to block (infact, most firewalls should already be blocking it).
The security company that wrote that report probably charged hundreds of thousands of dollars for information that any competent network admin could have found online or would already know if they kept up to date with the 'latest' (ie. 10 year old) threats.
It just happens that one of these networks hits a high-valued target, and then propagates. Note that most of the victims are incredibly unsophisticated and from poorer countries or organizations without a clue.
The lesson here should be about training computer users and having competent administration and support of IT infrastructure, rather than a scare campaign about Chinese government hacking. ('oh the host server is a Chinese IP, it must be the government! (300M net users in China.. durgh)).
The article is about how it negotiates NAT using forged UDP packets. What is more interesting is how it actually gets past firewalls.
It exploits common default rules in firewalls. ie. to allow web surfing, a firewall will allow port 80, but most of the time it will allow both outbound and inbound 80, rather than just outbound. Skype will listen on a bunch of common ports (80, 25, 110, 443, etc.) and blast out connection requests, and then wait to see which port it actually receives a response on. It will also fall back on using UPnP to find a way through - a protocol that is often overlooked by network admins.
If you netstat while running skype, you will see it listening on a bunch of ports. It often prevents a local web server from starting up. The way it does this is a lot more interesting than the actual NAT punching - skype and kazaa will almost always find a way in and out of a network and they are a pain to block. Joost is also using the same tech stack.
"A 30% return (the minimum needed to give LPs a return commensurate with venture risk after the GPs have taken a 20% performance cut) on $1 million is $300,000. A 30% return on $1 billion is $300 million. Basically, unless you land a Google-like winner, it is very, very hard to get a $300 million return."
The writer has no idea how a fund works or how to calculate returns. That statement assumes the lifespan of the fund is one year, which it isn't. The lifespan of a fund is usually 5-9 years. When you hear about Sequoia returning 140% on their 2001 fund, that is per annum over the life of the fund.
So going by the $1B example. If you have $1B to invest, and have set a target of a 30% return, you need to return $300M each year to your investors. That is almost impossible in years one and two (and even three) so its usually a curved path of returns (that dies down towards the end as the last investments are either killed off or sold for scrap).
As for fee's:
"Ahem, 2% of $1 billion is $20 million, which should be enough for a coupla Partner Ferraris. "
The 2% fee is also per annum. Most funds are not $1B, but they are $150M - $500M, so the fees can really build up. The better funds wont charge fees in years where there were no returns or heavy losses, or in the later years of a fund.
As for the actual interview - not much substance there either.
some people may have noticed that only Elon Musk features on the frontpage for Paypal while Peter Thiel and Max Levchin are not.
Apparently there is a lot of politics behind this, with Thiel and Sequoia having been at odds over funding, the IPO and then selling to eBay.
Also, supposedly one of the big motivations for Thiel and Founders Fund was to compete and out-do Sequoia.
Sean Parker from Plaxo also isn't on the front page. Moritz had him locked out of his Plaxo office by changing the locks, and then fired him. Funnily enough Parker now works with Thiel at Founders Fund.
you should auto-gen an email address for every new visitor, makes it easier than having to check. people don't care what the username is for a throw-away email address anyway.
after auto-gen, set a cookie so if I do have to come back for something, I don't need to remember the username and I can click a link to see the inbox (or just put the inbox on the frontpage as well)
otherwise, pretty cool! a neat hack would be a bookmarklet that auto fills-in a reg form with the email address (say some javascript that searches for an 'email' text field and inserts a new unique email).
edit: come to think of it, I would probably pay money if you did this as a service for my own domain. eg. I could point a catch-all for all my email to you, which you can use to generate throw-away emails from my domain name (in that case the emails are less likely to be blocked by services).
execution speed is more important than lines of code in this case