lemax

From my observations, for data vendors "anonymization" generally just involves replacing a name or credit card number with some other identifier. That's the reality and that's all they are required to do by regulators. People on both sides of the market know and leverage this. There are legitimate use cases that people are after that can only be achieved by having the ability to correlate pseudonymous entities with some kind of history. Lots of data sets would be significantly less valuable, and lots of industry standard analyses unachievable with those identifiers out of the picture. As long as there is no Personally Identifiable Information (which, no, metadata, location history, medical claims, transaction details, don't count). I would imagine that this is something regulators are aware of and that the privacy tradeoff has just been shrugged off so that the market can carry on and do its thing.

I’ve been using S3 static hosting and CloudFront for all of my static sites recently and it’s fantastic (and nearly free). This is not a hacky solution by any means, S3 buckets support static file hosting out of the box and CloudFront sits in front caching your content across the CDN. Throw in AWS Certificate Manager and you get TLS solved too. Low traffic sites cost literally nothing. S3 runs $0.004 per 10k requests and Cloudfront comes in at $0.001 per 10K.

This sort of journalism feels capricious. Is this supposed to be surprising? The way it’s presented makes it seem like something should really be questioned here and that readers should walk away with some kind of unnecessary ideological reaction about the evils that be in Big Tech. What is the point of this?

Services with absent engineers should be breaking left and right this month due to changes to SameSite attributes on cookies that hit browsers in early Feb. The intention of the change is to provide some long overdue changes to defaults on cookies with better privacy.

This is a change that’s been underway for years but came as a surprise when it actually shipped. I coordinated updates to ~40 packages owned by 5 different teams at my company, and had to put aside a good amount of other critical product work for about a week to ensure we didn’t encounter any customer issues.

The crux of the issue for maintainers is that Auth flows that require cookies to be sent around different origins (e.g. OAuth with form_post) will no longer work unless they update the cookies to explicitly be SameSite=none and Secure=true. Chrome led the pack on shipping the changes to browsers, but also implemented a special timeout rule that temporarily allows cookies that don’t meet the new spec to be set anyway to try to ensure auth flows don’t break. Eventually they will lift this timeout. Firefox has shipped support but has not implemented such a timeout.

Not really, it depends on the revenue strategy. Shareholders would likely be more displeased at initiatives that could end up breaking user trust and harming core revenue (e.g. the sale of peripheral hardware). Blindly leveraging everything in a way that doesn't align with vision or strategy generally leads to disappointing returns. Smart leaders know this.

Plaid and the broader explosion of white-label fintech infrastructure is great. Ultimately, it increases the number of companies that can enter the space and provide more competitive loan management tools, decision engines, identity verification, credit, wealth management, and so on to consumers. License the most complex/costly infrastructure, and then progressively swap out those vendor provided capabilities with internal platforms as they scale up (e.g. Revolut).

There's still lots of problems to solve in the connectivity space that Plaid sits in, and the pursuit of some kind of unified open personal finance data standard isn't really on the table for those steering the big initiatives (e.g. FDX). This is mostly due to the variety of the data and number of players (tens of thousands of institutions). For more on that, this interview with Jeff Leathers, founder of Quovo, a similar company that was acquired by Plaid in 2019 is not a bad listen:

https://medium.com/wharton-fintech/podcast-with-lowell-putna...

“The simplest way to view SoftBank is as an indebted holding company that owns a basket of assets, which are of mixed quality and often themselves indebted”.

For more context on Mr. Son and the fragility of SoftBank’s model, below recent Economist article is a good read

https://www.economist.com/business/2019/11/07/hard-times-for...

Given that Ms. Thompson is transgender [0], it's likely a lot was stacked against her emotionally. 40% of trans-identifying individuals to attempt suicide [1]. This is a disappointing omission from the reporting and the road that lies ahead for Ms. Thomson in the hands of the federal prison system is surely horrifying.

[0] https://twitter.com/0xA3A97B6C/status/1152518528907354112 [1] https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/usts/USTS...

Hi! Creator of fantyde here. We're launching a platform to enable influencers to monetize their following beyond strategies like sponsored posts.

Influencers are an inventive crowd that work hard interacting with their fans and creating content. However, their monetization options are limited. The most common approach to monetizing a following after spending months/years working to build it is through pursuing brand partnerships. Advertisers will generally pay 4 figures for posts made by people with 500K to 1M followers.

We think that strategies beyond sponsored posts could present a huge opportunity for influencers to profit and for their followers to connect more meaningfully with them.

fantyde will allow influencers to offer a paid feed that their followers can subscribe to on a monthly basis to access exclusive content. fantyde acts as an extension of an influencer's Instagram/Twitter/etc. where their most dedicated followers can come to access more content.

Influencers set their own monthly subscription prices, and can interpret the opportunity however they want to (barring a few content restrictions). A few examples of premium content could be: exclusive recipes, daily video advice from an expert (e.g. a stock trader), a heartthrob offering access to more selfies, a digital nomad offering city guide videos, etc. Beyond the paid feed, we also want to build in complimentary capabilities like paid private messages and even 1:1 video chat priced by the minute.

We want to provide a medium for influencers to build revenue streams that compliment their core competency of creating original content and provide a solution to capitalize on the fact that their most dedicated fans want more of it.

Most companies in my experience will refund you fully with an email to support. SaaS companies expect a lot of churn even with auto-renew, and I think the cost of a bad rap outweighs a lenient refund policy.

Zoom’s UX has always come off as invasive. An application default that allows hosts to enable automatic camera join is an overstep, and the lengths they go to facilitate this while ignoring long standing, industry standard appsec guidelines to prevent XSS is relatively unsurprising yet hopefully not inconsequential to their enterprise customers.

The length limit is high in most browsers (100k chars) except for IE, which will eventually be killed by MS Edge on Chromium.

"The Machine That Changed the World" is a wonderful title on this. Kiichiro Toyoda invented the lean production model after coming to the states and studying the inefficiencies of the assembly lines of Ford. This was a process dependent on modularizing every manufacturing component due to a demand for the Toyota company to serve a market with a need for an immense variety of vehicles, and giving teams ownership of the entire production process rather than one error check at the end a lá Ford. Introducing a vehicle with a steering wheel on the opposite side might take a year to implement in lean production, while handling that kind of variation in the assembly line model could take years (generally double the amount of time); The net result of this being that Toyota could offer 2x the vehicles of GM at half GM's size. Toyota was able to make extremely reliable vehicles and modify them as consumer demands shifted. By 1990, the Japanese were making cars with 4 year product lives and 500k total units (125k per year) while the Western companies were building 2M over 10 year product lives.