netwanderer3

I loved many of their individual courses at the beginning but now everything is just bundled into their nanodegree programs.

While Udacity helped kick-start many similar online self-learning business models, but ultimately I believe they failed in their scaling effort.

Their nanodegree programs often feel a little overpriced. I remember their mission was to democratize online education, but at those prices I'm not so sure. I tried it once and their support really left a lot to be desired.

Many voting machines being used still have USB ports wide open. It's absolutely horrifying!

I also don't like the new design of Macbook in which they merged the USB port and charging port into one. This really opens up huge security risks in my opinion.

The only effective way, that I know of, to prevent someone to build a profile on you is by throwing a lot of useless data to confuse them. Blocking their access is not effective because they have multiple ways to get to you, especially when you're just part of a bigger target market. These conventional methods like VPN are simply too easy for them with million of other people also using it.

If you're constantly throwing useless data at them, adding irrelevant URLs or browsing patterns to the data stream then their system will be confused and unable to paint an accurate picture of your profile.

This is borrowed from a similar strategy used by professionals who have gone off-grid and wanted to avoid being tracked. They would pay multiple other people to use their credit/debit cards at various different locations around the world so the system tracking them would be confused and could not pin point their exact current location.

My point is if you are trying to prevent someone to build a profile on you entirely then VPN is useless.

For majority of the public who use a VPN provider, they are essentially shifting all the risks of their personal privacy from a highly regulated industry (ISP) to one that is much less regulated (VPN providers). This is a bit similar to all the ICO scams associated with an unregulated cryptocurrency industry. ISP at least will not sell your data to questionable buyers, but there's no law in preventing a VPN provider not to do so.

If you truly believe VPN providers can survive giving you unlimited bandwidth worldwide for only a few bucks a month, without relying on other sources of revenue, then I have a bridge to sell you.

Most of them don't operate with transparency, not being audited nor being accountable or required by regulation to keep your data safe but yeah let's trust them instead!

If you use Chrome browser or Android phone then Google is already able to build a profile on you. They have multiple ways to ID every session and individual browsing tab to link them back to your profile. VPN is completely irrelevant in their game.

You are literally the one that are trying very hard to hold onto the technicality of my wordings, and twisted it such a way to fit in your interpretation and criticism of my comment, while I have already given you more than enough explanation on my part regarding my message.

The wordings in my comment are completely irrelevant here, whether it should have been "always" or "generally". The main point being discussed here is you are obviously viewing "inconsistent viewpoints" as a negative trait while in fact it is positive and desirable in my personal interpretation.

My previous comments were simply an analysis of the current world trends which I have observed. I even clarified to you that I was referring to McKenzie Bezos so I am unsure why you were being so defensive and even aggressive in accusing me of such.

Let's just leave it here as we should never force our own personal views onto others. I have provided more than enough of my personal opinions on this subject. Everyone has the rights to interpret the world in whichever ways they wish that fit with their personal ideologies.

When I mentioned of "emotional intelligence", I was referring to Mackenzie Bezos, for her willingness to compromise because she clearly understood how important Jeff's shares and voting rights were to Amazon. Not everyone could have seen or acted in such manner. This was why I said she did the right things.

Your multiple attempts in replying, not only to my personal comment but also to others', indicated you were seeking a proper explanation for my "inconsistent viewpoints". That was what prompted me to address the issue of many people in today world who don't seem to possess the ability to pivot under special circumstances, only because they are just so rigid in holding to their previous beliefs, no matter it was right or wrong.

The wording that I used, "always" which according to you should have been "generally", has its own purpose of further solidifying and emphasizing the importance of being able to recognize the right acts, no matter how strong our previous beliefs might have contradicted it. The downvotes on my comment are merely the perfect illustrations, and an accurate reflection of current public trend displayed by those who possess such incapability.

Based on your last comment, I am not sure if you truly understood the benefits of such "inconsistent viewpoints", so I will leave you with a short link below. It also happens to be about Jeff Bezos the man himself:

https://www.lifehack.org/articles/work/do-you-change-your-mi...

This depends on each person's viewpoint and their perspective in life.

A family with children may have a husband being the main source of income while his housewife stays at home to look after their children and property.

Just because the husband is the only one working does not mean his wife is not contributing equally in raising their kids and maintaining their family. The husband himself is personally responsible for those same tasks his wife is doing at home, and should have been doing them himself too. We can't single out the money source as the only element in a relationship, while completely ignoring other efforts that might have provided even higher values than just monetary wealth. This again traces back to each individual's value and belief system.

The purpose of the law is to uphold justice. You really think they didn't consider it before drafting and implementing such laws?

People keep fighting for equal rights at work places or in society, but then conveniently turn around and say 50/50 is not fair when the moment comes to decide on their own portion of shares.

That's why the laws are flexible enough to allow people the ability to sign pre-marriage contracts for those who are too concerned with that. They can't bend the laws for their own mistake after failing to be responsible for themselves.

Though I do agree that a rigid 50/50 should not be applied to every situation as there will always be special cases that are outliers.

In normal circumstances which applied to most public population, a 50/50 split of shares is fair.

But Jeff Bezos doesn't belong to a normally distributed population, his is an outlier case statistically, with Amazon being an extremely important asset that not only affects their personal lives, but also has enormous impacts and responsibility to the public.

Jeff Bezo's personality and leadership are crucial for the organization. You can't apply the same principles to his case vs. the majority of public.

The key to being effective is the ability to recognize the differences in special circumstances, and knowing how to be flexible so you can adapt to those situations. I can tell it's not easy for most people.

One of the biggest problems today is most people only perceive the world as either black or white, and there are no "in-between", or "grey-zones", or "outliers". But the real world in our lives has never worked like that. This viewpoint is producing a lot of narcissists and their "you are either with me or against me" attitude, which subsequently contributing to a lot of hatreds around us.

Emotionally intelligent people are the ones who truly understand the meaning of the word "compromise", in order to produce a win-win result. That's what separates them from the rest.

I always believe in 50/50 but i think she did the right things here because Jeff Bezos = Amazon. There comes a point in which having more money just does not make any slightest difference.

Before social media came along, nobody really put much effort or invested into data mining. Yes Google existed but it was more or less serving as an information aggregator only, without the ability to connect the dots and identify individuals.

The rise of all these trends of big data was corresponding to the wave of social media, and these companies are now holding so much public information that grant them an enormous power and opportunity to shape our world.

With great power comes great responsibility. Their current capability potentially allows them to manipulate the world and our information at will, if they choose to do so. It can become extremely dangerous and open for abuse if not kept in check.

Nobody is auditing their data so everything is a just a mystery black box with no transparency. You either choose to believe in what they say, or you don't. The data is irrelevant by itself, it's their intentions that could become dangerous.

Does anyone even trust social media companies? Even their own employees don't let their kids come near it. I wonder what happens on their bring kids to work day?

Facebook's basic concept is not bad. It's precisely their business model relying on advertising as the main source for revenue that is causing all sorts of interest conflicts.

Due to the nature of this business model, Facebook no longer serves its users, instead the platform has been tailored and customized in every possible way to exploit their users for its own profits, by selling their personal data/information to the highest private bidders, very often done behind the scene without much public awareness.

Having said that, the frequency of bad news about Facebook that seemingly keeps popping up every day is suspiciously abnormal. There must be an external force that is being dedicated to digging all the shit up at Facebook right now. You literally cannot go through a day without seeing new scandals from them on your news feed. An organization with security measures like Facebook's is incapable of leaking bad news at such rates by itself.

Don't want to mention their names here, but are these retaliation actions coming from those who had been previously wrong by Facebook?

I remember watching a video in which it said how most current engineering jobs these days are really just destructive jobs.

They basically take an existing natural resource from the environment and turn it into another form of resource that human could make use of. But this in turn destroys that very same environment we human also live in, effectively wiping out ourselves in the process.

Those engineering jobs basically only convert one form of resource/energy into another, but they actually didn't create anything new out of thin air themselves.

This would create an unprecedented case, all future lawsuits will reference back to this one in attempting to hold more CEOs accountable. Never going to happen!

I would love to take a peak into the meeting where they formulated this idea.

With all the shit being fired at Facebook from all directions these days, I just want to see the faces and reactions of those who thought "Yep, that's a good idea!" when this concept was originally brought up. It's really stretching my curiosity and imagination to the point where I start wondering what type of people they are hiring at Facebook these days.

Is there a name for this phenomenal in psychology where one would insist on doing the exact same things other people are criticizing them, but with an increasingly higher intensity the more they get criticized for it? This is exactly what it is.

There's no denying that Google of today is no longer the same as Google of the past, however the values their services provide to society are still enormous and far greater than most other corporations out there.

We have learned that Facebook were indeed running various online campaigns to smear Google's reputation, just to take the public heat and focus off themselves. Many people fell for those traps during that time. I personally feel that those effects are still lasting, or at least still lingering around the community even until this day.

Companies that strive to improve their effectiveness can develop a methodology to apply this principle from top to bottom.

A good manager will identify the optimal point for each of his team members. This optimal point will serve as a target performance ceiling for managers to motivate and encourage their staffs to work toward to. If we try and push them over this point then we will begin trading output quality for needless productivity.

For someone at the top, it’s important to determine the optimal point for your organization’s current equilibrium state as well. The goal is to always operate within this state, but slowly and incrementally move the equilibrium point up over time as your organization develops and increases its capacity.

Depending on each industry, the degree to which this principle will affect organizations will vary. For example, it would be more decisive to those who produce creative content as their main output since the negative impacts can be very noticeable and highly detrimental, whereas a manufacturing business relying on human labor can be quite flexible in re-adjusting their capacity.

This is indeed called managing expectation.

There are various strategies one can "manage" their boss in return so that their expectation always remains at an optimal level, allowing them to easily satisfy their boss or even exceed all their expectations.

Everything can be manipulated, hacked, or "managed" as we professionally call it, as long as things continue to be operated by human. Even the largest corporations are susceptible and WILL succumb to this. Facebook and fake news are real evidences.

Their weaknesses just need to be identified so it can be exploited. External forces can even join together with more resources combined to execute their plans. It's not very difficult to identify weaknesses for many targets today, GREED and PROFIT.

Many corporations today only focus on their quarterly growth reports and would do absolutely anything to satisfy their investors. They don't even pay attention to their own customers, let alone those external forces.

There's a general misconception between being productive and being effective.

One can fill their days by completing many mindless tasks and consider themselves as productive, but in the end hardly any of those tasks really matters.

On the other hand, another person may only complete one or two tasks in a very short time during their day but these were critical tasks that could generate much higher values. This subsequently makes the person more effective than their peers.

The output values must be weight in determining if one is really productive. Effectiveness triumphs mindless productivity.

This is quite similar to the cognitive and decision fatigue principle which indicates that each of us only has a limited pool of cognitive resources and so we must be very selective in choosing what activities we engage in.

To remain highly effective, not just being productive, particularly for a project manager, it's imperative to spend time only on tasks that require critical decisions to be made, and to delegate the rest. When you take on more tasks than you can handle, like some are misunderstanding this may help them appear as productive, it will undoubtedly affect the quality of each of your decisions and the project will suffer.

In China they banned all stores from selling butcher knives simply because it was commonly used as a weapon in a fight or to kill someone. If you happen to need to chop some meat at home then you are out of luck as this knife just cannot be purchased legally in store. This case here is pretty much using that same stupid logic.

Info sec industry is a rabbit hole. Just ask Jeff Bezos.

I love Google for the service values they provide, but if this were to come from another company then I might have believed it was in fact an error.

Privacy has always been an important factor when people consider any Google products, and they are fully aware of that so this topic must have always been on their list of priorities. For a company like Google with rigorous testing/approving processes in place before a product is even launched, to come back and say that it was an accident is pretty hilarious, though realistically what else could they have said?

I still like them. It's a love-hate relationship, we have passed the denial phase and entered the acceptance stage long time ago.

Seriously can any company in this world even sustain a 20% monthly growth rate? That seems like an impossible target to achieve and set you up for failure right from the beginning.

I have come across Gumroad a number of times as a customer and unfortunately some of the products sold through there were often either low quality or grossly overpriced. After numerous occasions, eventually any products that use Gumroad would immediately appear as a turn off for me. This was just my personal experience.

Which I think precisely is reason why so many people are suffering with depression and anxiety. People just cannot cope with the speed of change everywhere around the world.

Compared to the 80's or 90's in which life was much more slower and calmer, today everybody is living life on steroid. Everyone constantly feels they must optimize every detail of their life to increase productivity and yet it's still not enough.

Things will get more chaos everyday and there is no way for us to avoid it. We just need to let it all go and accept the fact that nobody can change this world, especially not by these politicians who are completely useless. Don't cling onto the life of the past, embrace the state of entropy and do not fight it.

The law of the universe dictates that our world is always moving toward entropy (chaos) no matter what, and things will keep getting more and more chaos everyday.

These so called "elite" politicians are after all just homo sapiens, thus limited by human capabilities. They are nothing more special than you and me. Nobody really has any fucking clue what's going on or how to fix it. Nobody has been more wrong throughout the history than those expert economists. Everybody sort of just wings it and hope they will get lucky. Even a broken clock is correct twice a day.

This shows you what a clusterfuck we are all in. Stop fighting, go get a drink and just enjoy the ride as there's nothing we can do to fight against the force of entropy. Shit will sort itself out.

It sounds like parents are really the ones who need to be treated, not those kids.

Agree. The Infosec field is a rabbit hole. It's a cat and mouse game. As long as it's run by human, everything is bound to be hacked eventually.

Microsoft were able to leverage their Office 365 cloud products that most companies are already using to gain momentum. Google have shifted their focus toward AI in their recent years and I believe once it is ready, Google will come out with a breakthrough AI application on its cloud platform that will make a lot of businesses flock to them. Right now they just really don't have a way to differentiate themselves among other providers yet. It's still early in the game but that time will come.

Great article! This explains the reason why Google started receiving so much shit since last year. Typically you would see them appearing gradually but for anyone who live on the internet, I'm sure they noticed the sudden sharp increase in Google attacks starting from the end of last year.

It is incredible that the NYTimes were able to obtain some very private information that was presented in this article. It must have been leaked through someone at a very high ranking within Facebook executive team.