Category: Uncategorized

Google launches another video calling app. It’s not the app that caught my eyes though, but comments on Hacker News about Google’s culture:

Google culture is hiring the smartest or most motivated college grads, paying them to babysit legacy money printing systems built by the generation before them, then occasionally encouraging them to team up and clone popular services from other companies and startups.

The clones get passed around the campus for dogfooding until enough interest builds up and the project goes up the chain of command until a VP (at the time Marissa) signs off on it with notes on what to improve along with granting the necessary resources to spin it up.

Then if someone decides the project has legs they figure out how to engineer it for Google’s audience and launch. If it doesn’t work then the team disperse and move on to another project. Or it works and the team gets a moment in the sun.

Every single popular thing on the internet has a Google clone somewhere in the intranet.

The irony is killing: a product that is supposed to protect your enterprise contains severe security problems making your enterprise hackable through a carefully crafted email – which doesn’t even need to be opened!

The rabbit hole can be really deep. The tl;dr version is this: this guy encountered an apparent bug in emacs in his work, but you will never guess what’s the cause of it.

Source: The Universe of Discourse : Don’t tug on that, you never know what it might be attached to

Finally an affordable drone with decent specs and battery life? Will be waiting for review when it launches in July.

It’s a lot of drone for a (relatively) little price.

Source: Xiaomi’s Cheap New Drone Achieves Impulse-Buy Airspace | WIRED

Another example where software can kill. Thankfully tragedy was narrowly avoided as the device crashed before the procedure.

Medical procedure continued without harm to the patient

Source: Medical Equipment Crashes During Heart Procedure Because of Antivirus Scan

Incredible story about the purported author of the popular encryption software Truecrypt – made famous by Edward Snowden – and the back story behind its creation. Truly amazing.

Like the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who sells a company for $100 million, only to start another one in hopes that it will sell for a billion, Le Roux made the pursuit of more money, and more power, an end in and of itself. But the kid who had once locked himself in his bedroom, losing himself in code, had gone as far as his technical skills could take him. He wanted to be a different kind of businessman, a lord of the real underworld, not just the virtual one. “He made money on the pharmacies, and then he decided that he wanted to make more money, fast,” the Israeli associate told me. Le Roux wanted to diversify, to be bigger, he said. “The only way to do that was illegal. He was living inside a movie, you could almost say. He always had a dark side, it just developed more with money.”

Source: He Always Had a Dark Side

Run Linux in Windows?? Yes please!

This is quite insane – yes even though we know Microsoft is changing and becoming more open under new leadership. From HN comments, it does seem to be a welcome move by developers. I may finally “upgrade” to Windows 10 just because of this.

Source: From the Canyon Edge: Ubuntu on Windows — The Ubuntu Userspace for Windows Developers

Goodbye Firefox OS. We’re back to the duopoly of Android/iOS.

We will end development on Firefox OS for smartphones after the version 2.6 release

Source: Firefox OS/Connected Devices Announcement – Firefox OS Participation – Mozilla Discourse

This is an interesting project – running Android as the primary OS for your PC. And why not? It promises the ability to install and run apps from Google Play store, not unlike some of those cheap knockoff set-top boxes that we see. However the OS (called Remix OS) feels much more “desktop-like” – multiple windows, taskbar etc. Those who likes the Android ecosystem might appreciate something like this.

A PC experience unlike anything on Android. An Android experience unlike anything on a PC.