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Just a reminder that approximately 2.2 million people are incarcerated in the United States.

10% of 2.2 million is 220,000, and that is 220,000 more people than deserve to be a human sacrifice to a corporation and its bottom line.

> Dahua at first ignored ReFirm’s inquiries, then claimed the vulnerability was a simple error that had been fixed in the latest update. But when ReFirm looked through the updated firmware, they still found the same backdoor — just relocated in a different place in the code. (Huawei had done the same thing).

Regardless of which vendor we're talking about I fear that this simple admission of human error is going to repel any improvement justified by technological means. It is extremely easy, and entirely believable, to continuously blame human error, "junior devs", management, etc in the face of any discovered vulnerabilities.

The value of automated detection is to hopefully fuel a real boycott and/or government ban. I'm not specifically calling out Huawei here because I think it's entirely reasonable for other countries to do the same thing to U.S. companies. Hitting offenders in the only place it hurts, the bank account, is probably the only way inhibit this behavior.

While I wholeheartedly agree I mean to focus on the perception of a problem and not the presence of any actual problem.

Regardless of where the logo is acquired from what is more important is where it is shown and what it is shown next to. This is what I mean by brand sensitivity. The article makes it seem (to me) like the reviewer has a problem with a specific aspect of the app but is using a somewhat broadly interpretable part of the guidelines as the reason for rejection. This is why I suspect that a visual change regarding the logos might help the app pass review.

One has to wonder if what Apple actually objects to is the display of logos (from the favicons) in the list of links. They’re an incredibly brand conscious company and almost certain have people scouting for things that could get them sued by the owners of other brands.

A better point of view might be this: Microsoft is a huge company, not all the people that work there are (what we might consider) ethical engineers, and some of the adherents to the sleazy business practices of their past are still around.

It’s not a good reason, but it’s possibly the reason. Ultimately it’s not really useful to attempt to paint an entity as large as Microsoft as all good or all bad.

I believe Black Pixel took over NetNewsWire (which was originally developed by Brent Simmons). http://netnewswireapp.com

I conversed with the developer of Dash a while back and found him to be a rather cordial and frankly honest person. He's from Romania, and had you done a single Google search for "Popescu" you might have seen this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popescu

"Popescu (Francisized as Popesco) is a family name very common in Romania"

> I'm not really surprised that other companies aren't coming out of the woodwork to make themselves targets.

Not just targets of bad publicity, but probably lawsuits as well. The Feds don't want the dismantling of the 4th Amendment to be challenged in court and the companies complicit in said dismantling don't want it to hurt the bottom line.

About 4 years ago I was involved with a commercial software project attempting to do exactly this. What we built worked but it wasn't positioned in a way that interested our target audience (Enterprise customers).

First, bravo for making it happen in a way that is getting people excited. Second, I sincerely wish you the best luck in getting people to pay for it in a way that is sustainable for a business. We built a user interface that made truly secure group file sharing accessible to mere mortals and said mortals were uninterested.

About three months after we shut down the business Edward Snowden made his infamous leak(s) and it became obvious to me that commercial crypto products coming out of the United States would be met with extreme levels of skepticism for some time to come. Any remotely centralized solution to the problems of key distribution and encryption are probably dead on arrival because of the single point of jurisdiction/political failure. It really doesn't matter how open you are (unfortunately).

Two things really stand out to me about this implementation. 1) The trustworthiness of the key exchange doesn't appear to employ a mechanism that protects against a man in the middle. 2) They mention the possibility of in-browser Javascript crypto. These are not small issues. The people who need crypto require rigid, durable implementations that don't gloss over security concerns in favor of usability. Everyone else is just being trendy.

I wish you the best of luck.

There are 2^128 IPv6 addresses. The number of "gargantuan blocks" possible with that many addresses is quite large. The problem of routing the allocated blocks is solved incrementally as needed by network expansion. In the event we need to route more than we can now routers are upgraded or topologies are changed.

To learn.

Mike Ash is a well known developer with a lot of great things to say about Apple technologies (I believe his day job is with Rogue Amoeba). He regularly breaks down notable parts of the Apple software stack and reimplements them as a learning exercise. His entire blog is worth a read.

For this specific case I'd argue that a switch which severs the power from both the camera and the mic simultaneously is the right solution. A physical sheath could also cover the camera for peace of mind. As others have pointed out the mic is probably the more dangerous of the two.

This is a testament to how helpless the average person is when it comes to using, much less understanding, modern computer technology. It is the equivalent of "duct tape and WD-40" to repair a broken down vehicle.

As a software developer I'm regularly ashamed by the inaccessibility of computer technology. The non-technical individual's inability to control what happens to them and around them in regards to electronics and software is rapidly outstripping their capacity to act in their own self interest.

It's kind of depressing.

And thus the pendulum of fashion swings in the other direction. Maybe.

I never understood the obsession with large screens on phones until I was confronted with the idea of using a phone for literally everything. Using a computer 5+ days a week makes me want a reasonably sized mobile device that strikes a good balance. Were I only to have a mobile device I imagine I would want the largest screen I could get for watching video and handling my day to day miscellanea.

Those of lamenting the loss of smaller mobile devices will probably be forever outvoted by the average consumer.

In your case, no. It sounds like you're designing, not building, the app. Letting your contractors use the technology they are most familiar with and that has the most mature tooling (for the platform) is in your best interest. Apple will be supporting Objective-C for a long time to come so you lose nothing from sticking with what works.

I say this as someone who has written many thousands of lines of Swift over the last few months. In an effort to learn the language and explore some user experience ideas I decided to write as much of my app as I could in Swift (it stands at about 95%). Since starting in September of last year I've alternately loved and regretted choosing Swift. For reference, I'll list the pros and cons.

Pros:

- Greater productivity through new "safety" features (lots of caveats here, see the Cons section for why).

- The expressiveness of Swift often means less code to read than with Objective-C. Hopefully that also means less bugs.

- Swift code is (to me) much easier to reason about than equivalent Objective-C.

- The language is just plain nice. This is subjective, and not relevant to your particular case.

Cons:

- The tooling is very immature. I have encountered multiple situations where the compiler itself crashes during a build.

- The static analyzer for Swift code reports erroneous problems. Until you learn the situations it doesn't understand it can lead you down the wrong path to resolution.

- Certain build problems are very difficult to diagnose. I have lost multiple days just searching for code changes that caused the compiler to crash.

- Xcode error reporting for Swift build problems can be vague, ambiguous, or non-existent.

- Xcode crashes, a lot. Technically this is nothing new, but since Xcode 6 I'd argue it has gotten measurably worse.

Swift is clearly going to be great, and it is clearly the future. Unfortunately the future isn't here yet.

They certainly biased their own readership by announcing the editorial agenda ahead of time. It would have been far more interesting to do this unannounced and then inspect the results. Given how nearly universally conditioned the general population is towards "negative" news people probably just took this to mean no "real" news would be published that day.

I lived there for several years, and yes lots of people also live there. The view from Google Maps should make it clear that it is definitely not a suburb of Denver.

Once you get there you realize that the two towns are worlds apart. It has a decent tech-scene and extremely beautiful outdoor environment. Good food and beer can also be had very easily.

Do you care to elaborate a bit? This is a pretty extraordinary claim.

> This is a perfect example of why a monopoly is infinitely better than having competition

This is a grossly over simplified assumption that does not stand on its own. The type of monopoly that Google has was not handed to it, but resulted from "nasty" competition. Google (currently) is literally too competent to beat in the search engine space. Perhaps Lyft will die off or by purchased by Uber, but it's not a given that it should, or even that it will.

More importantly, what happens when there is no competition between companies for drivers? Are we assuming that once (Uber|Lyft) has the market wrapped up they're going to benevolently maintain favorable driver pay rates? Are we really assuming that in the absence of incentives to do so that (Uber|Lyft) will favor drivers or riders instead of its own bottom line? Since this flies in the face of common sense and a mountain of empirical evidence to the contrary, why in this case is a monopoly preferred to competition?

The silver lining here is that as these breaches become more and more common businesses and financial institutions will be forced to get more serious about security. Chip and pin can't come to the U.S. fast enough.

After considering this and other comments saying the same I would tend to agree. There could certainly be a PR angle to the whole thing.

> Or they just want criminals to think that all they have to do is buy an Apple or Google phone, and they can't be caught.

There is a greater incentive to let Apple or Google do that kind of marketing and quietly exploit the vulnerabilities (ie, what's been happening with the NSA for some time now). If it had the appearance of working but actually didn't you wouldn't hear a peep from any government.

Outside of having a plethora of security experts audit and certify these services I'd say this is about as close as you can get to a ringing endorsement. The only way it gets better is if other governments follow up with the same complaints.

Ultimately I'm pleased that this kind of thing even makes the news. Ideally government becomes almost totally transparent and private matters become nearly opaque (there will always be the investigative aspect of law enforcement). Any reasonably sharp person can now see that the exact opposite is happening. Governments are demanding an ever increasing amount of secrecy while simultaneously requiring that the public give up all hope of privacy. Just to have had this idea escape the realm of conspiracy theory seems like a miracle to me.

I'm curious to know what you'd recommend for people who are looking to build applications around novel network protocols that aren't interested in the the certificate authority aspect of TLS?

This is a security problem for Project Euler and should have been disclosed to them as such. Dropping what amounts to a zero-day on their submission form is not acting in good faith.

The right way to go about this would have been to break the captcha, submit the problems, and then email them a polite writeup. Claim the glory after they fix it.

> A while ago I really wanted to build a bot farm, not to do anything particular malicious (farm reddit upvotes and push content to the front page).

You and I have very different definitions of the word "malicious".

Assuming this is true by not pursuing legal action he does two things which make the situation worse.

1) He is allowing someone to diminish the voices of those who have actually suffered rape and need justice. He is also giving ammunition to those who attempt to make the argument that most purported victims of rape are "crying wolf".

2) He makes himself look culpable. This kind of thing is serious and if he's in the right he needs to make it known. The damage to his reputation is already done.

By standing up for himself he'd also be standing up for real victims. Engaging this kind of thing in the legal courts and the court of public opinion can't be easy. I hope at least there can be some resolution.

Assuming you did this in a day or less I think your prospective employer kind of missed the point of the exercise. Turning out a (fairly well put-together) working prototype in this timeframe shows that you can code, your first-pass level of quality, and that you know how to prioritize.

The output of this project should have been a starting point for further discussion. Instead what you describe tells me the company you interviewed with is probably a "one-pass" (it's expected to be perfect the first time) shop and likely have loads of technical debt. Competent software shops understand the long term nature of development and the tradeoffs involved. They missed an important opportunity to learn about your true depth and ability to work with others by not having you do a paired refactoring of some aspect they didn't like.

Just as people are often bad at being the interviewees people can be equally as bad (or worse) interviewers. There are loads of jobs out there for you. Don't let things like this discourage you.

> The Northwest suburbs (Boulder, Louisville, Lafayette, Broomfield, Longmont) got quite screwed over in this deal

No kidding. Last I heard the proposed Light Rail extension might not even make it to Boulder. Longmont and Lafayette are most likely screwed. Personally I'd like to see a justification for how the rail west to Golden (which stops short no less) got priority over the airport or Boulder.

> The Denver area really does have good mass transit, though

Agreed. As far as American mass transit systems go RTD is pretty good. At least it's an integrated system unlike the mess in the SF Bay area.

As a Sketch user myself I still recognize downside for some is that it isn't cross platform. There are still a lot of people that have to use creative tools on Windows for one reason or another. Data exchange is also a big deal. Sketch does make an excellent alternative to Illustrator for my purposes.

I'd argue that alternatives to Photoshop and After Effects are the killer apps needed for getting most people out of Adobe's ecosystem. The OS X specific alternatives for Photoshop (Acorn, Pixelmator, etc) just aren't quite there yet. I really, really want them to be though because I've held off on upgrading from CS4 for about as long as I can.