May 18, 2018

There were 5 posts published on May 18, 2018 (this is page 1 of 1).

Is Silicon Valley done?

The headline is bombastic, of course, but there is a grain of truth to the idea that Silicon Valley is imploding. By this I don’t mean that business there is dying out; on the contrary business there is booming. The issue is these companies are victims of their own success, boosting Valley wealth so high that they’re pricing themselves out of their own backyards.

Apple is rumored to be inking a real-estate deal in Cary. San Francisco-based Slack is opening a Denver office. Word from folks I know who are working in Bay-area companies tell me there is a push for these companies to expand in other cities because the talent competition on their home turf is intense. I keep reading stories about people escaping from Silicon Valley and these stories seem to keep coming.

Amazon may be Seattle-based but it’s in the same boat with its search for a secondary headquarters. The ever-rising prices in Seattle have made it more attractive for Amazon to invest away from its birthplace.

Of course, it could all be a blip, or nothing at all, but lately there seem to be lots of reasons why not being in the Valley is a competitive advantage.

Exclusive: CIA ‘Leaker’ Josh Schulte Posted Agency Code Online—And CIA Never Noticed

This is supposed to be the latest on Joshua Adam Schulte, the former CIA worker suspected of passing hacking secrets to WikiLeaks. This case raises so many questions:

  • If Schulte is suspected, why hasn’t he been charged?
  • Did what Schulte post online to GitHub qualify as classified information?
  • There’s nothing worse than child pornography. Doesn’t it seem convenient that Schulte was found with a bunch of it on his computer? His job was to break into computers. He almost certainly worked with expert colleagues whose job was also to break into computers. How could we possibly know that he wasn’t framed?
  • If Schulte is allegedly into child porn, how did he ever get a security clearance?
  • Did the government really think that quoting IRC logs of one of Schulte’s friends mentioning child porn was proof of anything other than a joke?

All of these parts mentioned in this case seem like they’ve been carefully chosen to paint a picture. Bottom line: If Schulte did leak the classified material, he should go to jail. If he willingly collected child pornography, he should go to jail. The onus is on the government to prove these charges (or possible charges) and so far I have not seen much to convince me.

Joshua Adam Schulte, the former CIA worker suspected of passing the agency’s hacking secrets to WikiLeaks, previously posted the source code for an internal CIA tool to his account on the public code-sharing site GitHub, The Daily Beast has learned.That potential red flag was apparently missed by the spy agency just months after Edward Snowden walked out of the National Security Agency with a thumb drive of secrets in 2013. A spokesman for the CIA declined to comment.Schulte, 29, worked at the CIA from 2010 to 2016. He was raided by the FBI on March 23, 2017, roughly two weeks after Julian Assange began releasing 8,000 CIA files under the rubric “Vault 7.” The files had been copied from an internal agency wiki sometime in 2016, and contained documentation and some source code for the hacking tools used by the CIA’s intrusion teams when conducting foreign surveillance.

Source: Exclusive: CIA ‘Leaker’ Josh Schulte Posted Agency Code Online—And CIA Never Noticed

Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index – Digiconomist

According to these numbers, a single Bitcoin transaction uses the same amount of electricity as thirty-one U.S. households use in one day. Insanity.

Bitcoin electricty consumption

The continuous block mining cycle incentivizes people all over the world to mine Bitcoin. As mining can provide a solid stream of revenue, people are very willing to run power-hungry machines to get a piece of it. Over the years this has caused the total energy consumption of the Bitcoin network to grow to epic proportions, as the price of the currency reached new highs. The entire Bitcoin network now consumes more energy than a number of countries, based on a report published by the International Energy Agency. If Bitcoin was a country, it would rank as shown below.

Source: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index – Digiconomist

A Haka is an excellent funeral send-off

I’d seen this when it first got shared but I watched it again after a recent video was shared of the New Zealand women’s rugby team doing a haka. The 2/1 RNZIR Battalion of the New Zealand Defense Forces staged a haka for their fallen Afghanistan comrades which is incredibly moving.

I am not Maori nor am I a New Zealander but I have to admit it would be pretty cool to have a haka performed at my funeral!

Much respect to my New Zealand brothers in arms.

For the Comedy Iconoclasts of ‘SCTV,’ a Joyful Reunion Tinged With Loss – The New York Times

I loved watching SCTV. It was a brilliant, funny show.

On a warm Mother’s Day afternoon here, sunlight streamed into the gold-filigreed lobby of the Elgin Theater, where traveling vaudeville acts passed through a century ago. A troupe from the more recent past, though also tinged with nostalgia, would soon take the stage: the cast of the cult TV show “SCTV.”

The afternoon of clips and conversation, hosted by the “SCTV” fan Jimmy Kimmel, will be part of a Netflix comedy special directed by Martin Scorsese, set for release in 2019. As a sellout crowd of 1,300 pushed by, the 40-year-old friends Jeff Maus and Eric Makila stood finishing their beers, having a fanboy moment about the show, which debuted more than 40 years ago.

“This is hometown love,” Mr. Makila said.

“I gave a speech to my class on ‘SCTV’ in Grade 3,” said Mr. Maus, who grew up in nearby Paris, Ontario. “It was the only hip Canadian show we could lay our hands on back then.”

Source: For the Comedy Iconoclasts of ‘SCTV,’ a Joyful Reunion Tinged With Loss – The New York Times