260 karma · joined February 18, 2013
It's always curious to see someone with such strong conviction that somehow they have an insight, without access to any of the information involved in negotiating this partnership, that the various folks at GM and Ford failed to see.
You could argue that Tesla should be compared to luxury vehicles (which have more safety features), but even if you just compare their crash rate against U.S. drivers of cars and light trucks, the Tesla Autopilot driver fatality rate is almost four times higher than typical passenger vehicles...
That's actually exactly what we are talking about. The police's job is to enforce the law, and as technology changes, they need to adapt, the same way firearms now have serial numbers, and they collect DNA samples / fingerprints (all of which have met similar resistance before they became a broadly adopted technology, and are also open to abuse).
It's totally fine to have a rational discussion of where, as a society, we want to draw a line, but let's please keep our own rhetoric in check - there are lots of scenarios (outside the high visibility of this case) where, with proper legal controls, enabling the police to be able to access someone's phone is the equivalent of a traditional search order that allows the police to enter someone's premises and search for evidence.
Regardless of the merit of the case, I think it's pretty inappropriate that you are calling BillG naive. You really think that somehow you have more insight into the situation than BillG, who has access to pretty much any resource and source of information?
Besides the legal precedents and other associated drama, I think is one of Apple's major concerns, and one of the reasons they implemented the "we don't have the keys" approach to their encryption. If the FBI can always just call on Apple (or Google) to fix whatever mistakes they made, there is little motivation for training / getting better on this front, effectively making Apple the computer forensics arm of the government.
These request are coming from the law enforcement side of the government, not the intelligence community. Given their mission, the intelligence community has no interest in having a public discussion around backdoors, since the last thing they want is for the people they are targeting to be aware of any backdoors in their mobile devices.
Even this point is a bit disingenuous - your quote from the article in no way supports your position that Apple would deliberately brick your phone - and in fact, there is a quote further down in the article you cited that further undermines this claim:
<<a user identified as ansuz07 said, "The percentage of iPhones that have become bricked from hacks is very low. Even those that experienced problems could be fixed by a simple restore. Apple is going to make it sound a lot worse than it actually is since they are the ones who don't want you to do it in the first place">>
<<Apple had asked the F.B.I. to issue its application for the tool under seal. But the government made it public, prompting Mr. Cook to go into bunker mode to draft a response, according to people privy to the discussions, who spoke on condition of anonymity.>>
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/19/technology/how-tim-cook-be...
In this case, the Justice department is clearly the one with the bigger 'marketing strategy' agenda here by trying to market the merit of their request to the American public and congress.
(As a side note, most of the non-tech folks I talk to seem to be siding with the FBI's request, so at least at some level, the government seems to be winning the marketing battle.)
Yes, This this is completely disingenuous... They did not only start out like this in the US, but this is the ONLY way they were able to buy their way into China. When Uber started in China, their competitors had most of the chinese local drivers, and it was Uber who started the subsidy war to gain market share.
I have added some additional information to the parent comment (i.e., only bricked updates via iTunes, not OTA) that further undermine the theory that this was a deliberate change. I realize that you could still argue that the actual bug was that the OTA update did not brick the phones, but Occam's razor really starts applying...
<<If you think it was a mistake, then can you explain why Apple wasn't bothered to do anything until someone ran an article on it and publicized it?>>
I do agree with you that Apple has a long record of dragging their feet to issue fixes for pretty significant bugs, so it is possible that the press caused them the issue the patch faster.
Apple definitely looks out of their own interests, but they jump through a lot of hoops to protect their customers from bad experiences, especially since the obvious implementation was to just disable the fingerprint sensor if can't be trusted.
Edit: additional info from the TC article: <<The update is not for users who update their iPhones over the air (OTA) via iCloud. If you update your phone that way, you should never have encountered Error 53 in the first place.>> Your conspiracy theory would really require that they brick phones through both the OTA and iTunes update.
<<That was how executives discovered the macro, which Conrad had created based on a belief that 52 hours was too long to spend in training, the lawyer for Sacks said.>>
http://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/zenefits-program-let-in...
- Willing to try new products that help them focus their (limited) resources on their core product.
- No legacy integration issues.
- Generally high quality employees that provide strong product feedback.
- Willing to move quickly.
The downside is of course that they may not have a lot of money and in total, usually represent only a very small part of the market, so you have to use the initial feedback / momentum you got from your work with startups to move into more traditional customer segments, but they are still a great way to get started. The risk is of course that you end up building a product that only works for startups, but as long as you understand that risk and validated that the problem you are solving is not exclusive to the startup community, in my experience you should not avoid working with (reasonable) startups.
How did you find these buyers? Are these just auto brokers (e.g., these guys are popular in SV: http://www.hammerauto.com/) or is this something different?
Let's say you are an engineer, take a new role at a company to work on their database, and then discover that one or your managers has stolen money, do you think you should be held accountable, assuming that you report the issue immediately when you discover it?
https://twitter.com/williamalden/status/697898496314077185
<<I’m told that Conrad created this program based on a belief that 52 hours was too long to spend in training>>
If you are in that type of situation, you have to chose between your employees and external parties, and looks like he decided that creating a trusted relationships with his employees was more important...
I understand your concern, but this seems to contradict reality... According to this article, only a small percentage of your followers actually see your Tweets: http://marketingland.com/facebook-twitter-impressions-90878
You are quite wrong, if anything, employees appreciate openness and decisiveness, vs. sweeping changes under the rug with generic language. There is actually a ton of upside to creating honest communication, but it's much harder than hiding behind empty phrases, which then builds a culture of speculation (of what "really happened"), politics, and distrust.
I have no idea what really happened behind the scenes and why exactly the new CEO used this language, but I can assure you that any email from David Sacks will not be clumsy, but very deliberate and written to achieve a specific purpose. (There is some speculation on earlier threads around of why it might have been written this way).
This is complete nonsense. It's not hard to become a licensed commercial insurance agent, and the rules around selling commercial insurance are very clear - you have to be licensed. This is neither new territory, nor disruptive, it's simply sloppy and not something that would be tolerated by the CEO of a 20 person startup, let alone a billion dollar unicorn.
<<Mr. Conrad, 35 years old, is known for his brash style and the company’s operations reflected that. His company’s mantra — “ready, fire, aim” — is followed by many Silicon Valley startups meant to encourage aggressiveness.
Such a cavalier approach often works well for tech companies, such as Facebook Inc., whose motto in the past was famously “move fast and break things.” But it may have served Zenefits poorly as it operated in the regulated insurance industry.>>
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2016/02/08/zenefits-ceo-parker-c...
So unless he wanted to change these processes and Parker stopped him, it does feel like there is another side to this story... (modulo many of the other issues that must of driven this change)
"Operate with integrity", "put the customer first", and "make this a great place to work for employees" seem like pretty generic / good values (that are probably based on a lot of experience Sacks has from Yammer).
The fact that they are called out in this email seems pretty telling of why Parker had to go...
It absolutely was a HUGE problem. Even if he was set up, Conrad created a toxic culture that had to change.
Parker never seemed to understand that he could not flout laws & regulations like Uber; Uber has leverage because consumers love their product, and is able to put pressure on the incumbents and regulators; in contrast, NOBODY would stand up to defend Zenefits, and regulators will shut them down unless they clean up their act asap.
Edit: fixed typo (thanks @gingerrr)
<<Tim, Thanks for this article and I think you did a great job on a very important but little known topic. I've researched this quite a bit and I'm certain it was cerium-141, not iodine-131, that was lodged in Kodak's packing material that fogged their film, and the packing material was strawboard, not corn husks. (There's some disagreement on the internet - even a U.S. senator who had misspoken on the facts - but if you really dig deep, you'll find it was strawboard.) >>