Tantek writes on the 10th Anniversary of XFN.
Category Archives: Asides
Lean Startup Talk
I spoke with Sarah Millstein at the Lean Startup Conference earlier in the week. After a bit of intro we talk about how Automattic iterates, approaches hiring, and management.
Another Sunday, another round of stories from the Snowden files. I hope people don’t become fatigued of these continuous revelations, and it leads to change. Another good read is from the Atlantic How Americans Were Deceived About Cell-Phone Location Data. Precise but misleading language is a dangerous tool.
Very honored to be on Time’s 30 under 30 list alongside some amazing folks across a number of fields. I only have about another month of being under 30, so good to be on these lists while I still can. 
Technology is thus enabling arbitrary numbers of people from around the world to assemble in remote locations, without interrupting their ability to work or communicate with existing networks. In this sense, the future of technology is not really location-based apps; it is about making location completely unimportant.
From Balaji Srinivasan’s Software Is Reorganizing the World.
Have you seen the famous Automattic / WordPress shuffleboard? That and more in this excellent profile and interview by Debra Winter in SOMA Magazine.
Through a series of online and offline puzzlesThe internet mystery that has the world baffled, a series of online puzzles designed for recruiting. Hp oz estd dzxpetxpd le Lfezxleetn ezz, mfe lcp wzzvtyr qzc xzcp tq jzf slgp lyj topld.
Why Hanukkah and Thanksgiving Will Never Again Coincide, with lots of fun calendar geek information. Colbert has a funny take too.
Peter Beste and Houston Rap Scene
As written about by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Techdirt, Automattic is fighting back against two cases where we feel the DMCA has been used abusively for censorship and bullying. Read more about it here.
It’s kind of a sobering thought that mobile communications, the cornerstone of the modern world in both developed and developing regions, pivots around software that is of dubious quality, poorly understood, entirely proprietary, and wholly insecure by design.
Thom Holwerda writes about the second operating system hiding in every mobile phone.
KRNFX Get Lucky
Very cool looped version.
Comscore, whose accuracy is generally between a Lotto Quick Pick and a drunken dart throw, says Google Maps usage has fallen since Apple Maps came on the scene. The Guardian has a good overview: How Google lost when everyone thought it had won.
We shouldn’t be surprised that in the absence of choice, people take the path of least resistance. What’s missing in these discussions is how it’s criminal Apple gets away with not allowing alternative defaults for maps, browsers, calendars, and any number of other areas, which means every time you click a link or address in the OS it opens Safari or Apple Maps, in my opinion inferior apps. Some developers get away with this by having settings to set Chrome or Google Maps as your default, like Tripit just added, but this is implemented in a hacky, per-application way, and every app puts their setting in a different place if they support it at all.
If Microsoft did this a decade ago we’d call for the DoJ to reopen their investigation. Apple has the best phone, best tablet, and in many ways the best operating system — we should not give them a pass for this blatantly self-interested and user-hostile stance. Defaults matter.
As engineers have long recognized, many simple devices do not age. They function reliably until a critical component fails, and the whole thing dies instantly. A windup toy works smoothly until a gear rusts or a spring breaks, and then it doesn’t work at all. But complex systems—power plants, say—have to survive and function despite having thousands of critical components. Engineers therefore design these machines with multiple layers of redundancy: with backup systems, and backup systems for the backup systems. The backups may not be as efficient as the first-line components, but they allow the machine to keep going even as damage accumulates. Gavrilov argues that, within the parameters established by our genes, that’s exactly how human beings appear to work.
An oldie but a goodie from the New Yorker: The Way We Age Now.
Julie Bort at Business Insider writes How Automattic Grew Into A Startup Worth $1 Billion With No Email And No Office Workers. Includes a short interview with me at the end.
You can now view the inside of Automattic’s office on Google Maps street view and walk around inside. To get downstairs go by the stairs and press the back arrow, a bit unintuitive but gets you to the main floor. Check out the custom shuffleboard upstairs.
The story around badBIOS, the mysterious Mac and PC malware that jumps airgaps, is fascinating and surprising. The capabilities of sophisticated attackers right now vastly outstrip the defenses of any computer user or company. The news that the NSA had broken into the networks of Google and Yahoo, unfortunately, wasn’t surprising given Google’s move to encrypt traffic between datacenters early in September.
Alx Block writes about his evolving understanding of the role of support, and the “support” label itself.
New Virgin America Safety Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtyfiPIHsIg
Virgin America is giving Delta a run for their money with this amazing safety video — who has ever said that before? — directed by Jon Chu, who also did two of the Step Up movies. (Which sound cheesy but are actually awesome.)