Can you prove it?
1,849 karma · joined February 21, 2007
https://maurycy.com/
The AirBnB service depends on this simple premise. This is the first axiom of their business. No matter how insured everyone is, the axiom has to hold. Otherwise, you end up with an infinite streak of disputes.
If you invite strangers to your home, then you assume that people are good, either. It is that simple. Frankly, only a good person would invite strangers to her home. It might be slightly too naive, but it does not change the fact it takes a lot of good faith, and trust. (It might be too much, I agree, but it is not her fault, as it was not BitCoin begginers' mistake to commit into the idea of the digital currency _too much_. It is more experienced ones' responsibility to share their knowledge.)
Once you find the property destroyed, your world view is going to collapse. It turns out, basically, that some people are not good. What's worse, bad people were physically close to you, just few days ago.
It is _extremely_ stressful.
Here and there I've read comments suggesting that EJ extrapolates a bit. Even if so, so what? She is so distressed, I'm very surprised that there's so little understanding about her current position.
The way the AirBnB folks behave does not reveal that they do genuiely believe that people are good. The way the public sees it right now is that they're very cautious, as well as lawyers, and all that stuff, is rather a defensive, and unsafe, behaviour.
While I somehow understand them, the problem is that the service relies on the assumption that people are good. After all, it is about _sharing your property with complete strangers from Internet_ (no matter if it is your home, or the other one.)
The reason why the story reads so bad is that it mixes up the social context of sharing per se, with the formal context, relying on lawyers and PR firms. All comments points out that getting her a new property sets a precedence for further refunds are totally off the took. To come up with such comment, it takes to view the world as a distrustful place. The view that, basically, contradicts the whole idea.
To me, the whole story is about nerds facing social complexities. The business they've created is not about numbers (i.e. brokering rooms, without having to incur the costs of building a hotel), but about sharing. The sharing, in nearly all cases, of single most valuable thing in your life.
I'm so frightened with lack of common sense.
First of all, the AirBnB folks should ensure her that people are good. I mean, people _are_ good. That the unfortunate event was a nightmarish accident, not the correct image of the world (no BS here, as, statistically speaking, the event is an outlier.)
Ensuring someone that the world is a trustful place definitely does not involve communicating publicly, or privately, with lawyers, or PR companies. I don't know how to explain this but it is all about showing that you're a human (of course, it still makes sense to speak with a lawyer before, though to avoid some simple misunderstaindg.)
We don't know her. We have no idea what are the actions necessary in order to make her safe. I think, though, it takes nothing more than showing your real, not faked, care, and, what comes as a surprise, asking her, not a PR company.
Once this is solved, the community should be somehow informed about the solution. If she wants to, EJ could write the explanation. She would have control over the amount of private informations shared, giving her power she has lost due to the abuse. Also, the really case closed means a good story about the world within that people are good.
Personally, I think it makes a lot of sense to offer her a job. She is an extremely talented writer, and seems to care about people. The AirBnB business operates heavily in the social context, so so good person, coming from inside, would be priceless for a now a bit dry company.
Of course, meanwhile it makes sense to get constant updates on legal implications. This is mostly the internal process, though. It takes very little to commit an honest legal mistake, so it cannot hurt (keep in mind to ask EJ is she needs legal help, too.) The same goes with the PR firm. I'm under impression, though, they would recommend similar steps to me. The PR folks I know are really good people.
It might be that EJ does not want to speak with the founders anymore. There is already a lot of misunderstanding, and I would understand her if they've lost her trust. If so, either the investors or the directors should step in. I realize that it sounds _too much_. However, PG is already involved, and members of both groups signal that there is a more mature instance that overlooks the things to be fine.
I do not believe that the solution cannot be reached. It does. It takes, though, understanding that people are good.
(On a more formal side, the reason why it was really a bad idea to mention lawyers publicly is that the AirBnB itself operates within a grey area. Depending on the local laws, the service is either illegal or not covered with all hospitality laws.
It means that signing up the property to the service takes valuying the social relationships more than legal matters. It cannot be otherwise given that, it turns out, some guests were completely anonymous (guests of the guests?), to say nothing about lack of cameras in most buildings.
The lawyers, and formalities, raised so frequently create a state of understandable confusion. If renting the property is dubiously insurable (I'm not sure whether insurers were that happy if knew that they insure hotel rooms per se; the fact has to spread, yet, though), and there are no legal protections, there is nothing but the social trust to rely on.)
That said, I wish all the parties involved the best.
I wish EJ only good things from now. ;-) And, I wish AirBnB more luck, as they've faced a huge sh*t-storm, and I like their service for the reason it relies on _good_ behaviour.
In my opinion, the actual reason is slightly gentler. There is a lot of research that says that people behave more responsibly under their real names.
(I'm short on time right now, but please let me know if you're unable to find the papers within five minutes.)
[1]. There is a huge difference in the privacy laws between the US and the EU. Shortly, in the EU you own your data, not the company hosting it.
"Running fast" is a subset of "moving your legs up and down."
The headline says that Facebook bans advertisers pushing Google+ follows. Obviously, no one reads anything but the headline. News by a news, and the audience spreads the news as a fact, really.
It's _very_ harmful for Facebook.
Few days ago there was a meme that Mark Zuckeberg has stepped down. It was a rickroll. Interesingly, it surprised me. After a minute, I've realized that, actually, I _expect_ him to resign. Google+ is _that_ good.
Why? The university should not pursue cheating. It hurts the credibility. All the teachers do so. On your own, it makes no sense to waste your time, others will take care of. Once announced, the news spreads and everyone losses.
My guess, Firefox have gotten that big because of the developers that installed the browser everywhere. It's the same story as Twitter, which flourished the same way.
That's why the Chrome developments do not come as a surprise, as well as the Google+'s API, which is already in closed beta (how many years it took Facebook to create their own "platform" that, effectively, alienated many regular users, not interested in the farm news?)
To put aside the ego matters, I'm curious if there are any interesting correlations for writings published in magazines. For instance, between the estimated vocabulary size and the average price for ads (I bet that there is a huge correlation.)
Obviously, take all responses with a grain of salt, especially mine. No one, except you, is going to experience the wrong decision, and people tend to extrapolate their own experience too much. Let me reassure you, though, that things change. You are going reinvent yourself at least few times in the next decade, or so.
It's very easy to get trapped into thinking that you have to come up with the right decision about your future now. You do not have. You are very lucky you face it now, not ten years later, waking up one day with a mortgage, a well paid job you hate and no time for yourself.
What is really important, though, is to avoid any actions hard or impossible to revert. Specifically, I mean things like becoming seriously addicted to hard drugs, a marriage, a mortgage or a child (and, if you care, everyone will be better off because of a thorougful decision ;-)).
It's impossible to make an informed decision without, well, having some information. Feel free to experiment, as long as you keep in mind the previous point. Your really concious life counts only few years, and it is entirely possible that you have not experienced what you truly love, yet.
It's a cliche but try to follow your instincts, not social pressure or guilt imposed onto you. Everyone knows what is best for everyone, but, at the end of the day, no one will suffer, except potentially your family, from your depression if you decide to go against yourself. A healthly dose of egoism is healthly. You are a free man, and you can do whatever you fucking want, as long as you do not break the law.
When it comes to the drive, try to not confuse your temporary emotions and the long-term ones. Be especially warned about compensating what looks like an eternal unhappiness with other people or any substances. It ends up with junk food, drugs, and staying too long in an eventually destructive relationship.
On the other hand, do not underestimate what I call the instincts, the drive or the things you love. They sound naively, but are pretty powerful. After all, your days are already counted so it makes no sense to waste them because of being afraid not to.
Don't use the inevitable as an excuse. The future is going to surprise you. No one knows what is going to happen in next three, five or ten years. I mean, a decade ago the Internet was nearly non-existent, and journalism was considered a reasonable career. It gets even more puzzling on a microscale, like hurting other people with not meeting their expectations might be exacerbated.
And, with all that praise of listening only to yourself, be a good human being.
The FTP protocol uses plain text. Taking into account that it is most frequently deployed by web hosting companies, that lack of encryption implies a real risk for everyone.
It's not a rocket science to launch a network sniffer in an airport, a Starbucks or any other shared network, and capture the FTP credentials of a designer making quick changes to client's ecommerce site.
What makes it really bad is that nearly all web apps today include full database credentials, enabling an attacker to either wipe out the data or just copy it.
As we have already learned many times, the passwords are rarely stored securely, and users tend to routinely reuse their passwords. A database of any moderately succesful service makes it really easy to get access to hundreds of email, or Facebook, accounts.
Of course, this is just an example. There are few other attack vectors relying on that inherent weakness of the FTP protocol.
While it is not a backdoor technically, it comes pretty close to it, as it provides an effortless method to gain an unauthorized access.
In the past, FTP daemons were buggy and used to run as a root, making them pretty handy to exploit. Now, with privilege separation enabled, it's much better for the administrators but regular users are still at risk.
FTP tweaks, like FTP-SSL, are nice in theory but, in practice, they are provided as an option, some FTP clients do not support them, and they do not work well with many standard firewall configurations, due to the secondary data connection port.
They have created a long needed seamless service, approaching quickly a huge number of people praising them nearly religiously, as well as exceptionally good press. Then, surprisingly, it took them few months to revert their perception completely.
To put aside whether they should receive so harsh words now, I think that all startup founders, and managers, should try to understand what happened, in order to avoid similar mistakes.
I do not have a clear answer but I do not think it is only a matter of unclear Terms of Service, or blog posts. If I would have to guess, they have overpromised hugely.
For everyone with a basic understanding of security, it's obvious that no remote storage can be both extremely secure and so easy to use on so many channels. The idea of managing encryption private keys is beyond regular users' intuition.
If I'm right, the best thing they could have done was stating clearly, from the beggining, that the data is as secure as possile, and they do their best to ensure (as I'm sure they do), but it will not be a military grade. The latest authentication bug did not help, too.
With the previous bold security statements, likely slightly misunderstood by a less tech savvy folks, it's not a suprirse that some of their users feel angry and feel somehow cheated.
What is very odd, the security itself was never Dropbox's the most important feature. The easy to use interface, and seamless synchronization between on many channels, was.
There is a potentially infinite number of actions one has to do right, in order to succeed with the next big thing. Facebook have had, and still have, some competitors.
It might be that it is actually harder to create a company that way. By definition, the next big thing is not fully understood, what increases the probability of screwing up badly.
And, it's not that obvious whether such model yields the highest returns, to put aside the risk reward equation. We still don't know whether Groupon or Facebook will become long-term profitable companies.
Also, in so fuzzy environment, it's extremely hard to get the timing, and assets, right. The idea of consumer cloud, as syncing the data automatically between many dummy clients, was obvious since 70s, and it actually took enormous efforts from Apple, like iPhone and iPad.
On a much broader perspective, I remain unconvinced that the next big thing is what gives the society the most innovative fruits. The idea of tablet was so cliche everyone gave up, and I'd say that iPad itself is worth much more than the Apple's cloud.
One thing that I cannot find mentioned neither in the article nor in comments, is the confusion related to the idea of state.
While REST is, by definition, stateless, it merely describes the session, not the manipulated data. There's no way to avoid, at least implicit, object's state. For example, if user's password is not empty, it means that the user already set the password.
More comprehensively, with /users/1/edit, or whatever, it is frequently expected to get a different validation error, depending on the flow, such as a paid account might require more billing related details than one without email confirmed.
Of course, it is a nightmare to maintain such matters implicitly. That's why Ruby on Rails plugins like acts_as_machine, and similar, come handy. They do provide an explicit description of the object's behaviour, easy to transform into documentation, depending on the current state.
The idea shows its full potential with multipage forms. Each step of the form might be described with a different state, stored in the state attribute, leaving the controller RESTful, and the model's validations easy to understand.
A yet another confusion comes with too close database mapping. To stick with Ruby on Rails, there is nothing preventing the developer from creating his own setters and getters, like def vattr=(); end; def vattrr(); end.
The framework passes the value of a virtual attribute, using params, to #update_attribute, and other methods, the same way it does for regular attributes created automatically from the database's schema.
Very frequently such attribute provides a much cleaner way to represent the model, rendering either the HTML or the API much more easier to write or understand.
On a side note, I fully agree with Conrad Wolphram that basic calculus is conceptually rather easy to grasp and use on daily basis, but the focus on calculations by hand makes the subject completely inaccessible.
http://www.ted.com/talks/conrad_wolfram_teaching_kids_real_m... http://www.computerbasedmath.org/
It's a great idea worth spreading.
http://phk.freebsd.dk/pubs/timecounter.pdf http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/
The only solution against it, which I'm able to come up with quickly, is Google Plus adding subtle watermarks identifying uniquely each recipient.
A much harder question, though, to ask is what, after all, is currency?
Right now, BitCoins ignore the output. Even if there is no limit, it links the amount of money with either the computational resources or number of miners. There is no way to fix it. The limit is an ironic bounty.
EDIT: style