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China brings Apple and Amazon to their knees, cryptocurrencies are the new gold and the Hyperloop is
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August 4 · Issue #20 · View online
(Mostly) weekly curated articles at the crossroads of web marketing, development and technology.
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China brings Apple and Amazon to their knees, cryptocurrencies are the new gold and the Hyperloop is the future of public transportation đ
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WannaCry-Stopping Hacker MalwareTech Arrested For Helping Write Kronos Banking Trojan
BREAKING! Remember that guy everybody thought was a hero and a white hacker? Well, nope! And this is why we canât have nice things⌠Marcus Hutchins entered the pantheon of hacker heroes for stopping the WannaCry ransomware attack that ripped through the internet and paralyzed hundreds of thousands of computers. Now heâs been arrested and charged with involvement in another mass hacking scheme (âŚ) Yesterday authorities detained 22-year-old Hutchins after the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas as he attempted to fly home to the UK (âŚ) the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against Hutchins, charging that he created the Kronos banking trojan, a widespread piece of malware used to steal banking credentials for fraud. Heâs accused of intentionally creating that banking malware for criminal use, as well as being part of a conspiracy to sell it for $3,000 between 2014 and 2015 on cybercrime market sites such as the now-defunct AlphaBay dark web market.
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After Meg Whitmanâs exit, Uberâs CEO search is down to only male candidates
Itâs hard to spend a week without hearing about Amazon or Uber dramaâŚ
According to sources, that top leader is not going to be a woman, as the board of the car-hailing company struggles to move forward.
To add to the drama: Some directors worry that its former CEO Travis Kalanick â who was ousted â is trying to game the outcome in his favor, after he told several people that he was âSteve Jobs-ing it.â It is a reference to the late leader of Apple, who was fired from the company, only to later return in triumph.
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The Inside Story Of SoundCloud's Collapse
Fascinating (and sad) recollection of what happened to SoundCloud. SoundCloud was once a platform beloved by listeners and creators, whose leaders hoped to revolutionize the music industry. Hamstrung by management mistakes and fierce competition, they never did. Hereâs the story of how it all came crashing down.
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Reddit raised $200 million in funding and is now valued at $1.8B
Didnât see that one coming but curious to see what theyâll come up with. A redesign is definitely a good thing haha! Reddit has raised $200 million in new venture funding and is now valued at $1.8 billion, according to CEO Steve Huffman. The new funding round, the companyâs largest ever, should expedite a number of internal product and business efforts, including a redesign of its homepage and its first foray into user-uploaded video (âŚ)The money comes courtesy of a number of well-known Silicon Valley investors, including firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, and individual investors like Y Combinator President Sam Altman (also a board member) and SV Angelâs Ron Conway.
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How many people use Twitter every day?
On the DAU, front, Twitterâs user growth looks good, which is a key reason itâs focusing on that figure. When Twitter reported earnings Thursday, the company said its daily user base grew 12 percent in Q2 over the same period last year, marking the third straight quarter that DAU growth was in the double digits. (Twitterâs MAU growth, for comparison, was just 5 percent year over year, and the company didnât add any new users in Q2.)
Thereâs just one problem with this DAU focus: Twitter doesnât actually share how many daily users it has. Which makes 12 percent growth hard to appreciate. Thatâs 12 percent growth from what?
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Googleâs new program to track shoppers sparks a federal privacy complaint
It was just a matter of time before this happened.
A prominent privacy rights watchdog is asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate a new Google advertising program that ties consumersâ online behavior to their purchases in brick-and-mortar stores.
The legal complaint from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, to be filed with the FTC on Monday, alleges that Google is newly gaining access to a trove of highly sensitive information â the credit and debit card purchase records of the majority of U.S. consumers â without revealing how they got the information or giving consumers meaningful ways to opt out. Moreover, the group claims that the search giant is relying on a secretive technical method to protect the data â a method that should be audited by outsiders and is likely vulnerable to hacks or other data breaches.
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Joining Apple, Amazonâs China Cloud Service Bows to Censors
A Chinese company that operates Amazonâs cloud-computing and online services business there said on Tuesday that it told local customers to cease using any software that would allow Chinese to circumvent the countryâs extensive system of internet blocks. The company, called Beijing Sinnet Technology and operator of the American companyâs Amazon Web Services operations in China, sent one round of emails to customers on Friday and another on Monday.
âIf users donât comply with the guidance, the offered services and their websites can be shut down,â said a woman surnamed Wang who answered a Sinnet service hotline. âWe the operators also check routinely if any of our users use these softwares or store illegal content.â
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Amazon's new refunds policy will 'crush' small businesses, say sellers
Speaking of Amazon, here is your weekly update. Good news for customers but bad news for sellers and small businesses.
Amazon sellers are up in arms over a new returns policy that will make it easier for consumers to send back items at the merchantâs expense.
Marketplace sellers who ship products from their home, garage or warehouse â rather than using Amazonâs facilities â were told this week by email that starting Oct. 2, items they sell will be âautomatically authorizedâ for return.
That means a buyer will no longer need to contact the seller before sending an item back, and the merchant wonât have the opportunity to communicate with the customer. If a consumer is returning an electronic device because itâs difficult to use, for example, the seller wonât be able to offer help before being forced to pay a refund.
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Hyperloop One Successfully Tests Its Pod For the First Time
What a great time to be alive!
The Los Angeles company leading the race to fulfill Elon Muskâs dream of tubular transit tested its pod for the first time last weekend. That pod is 28 feet long and made of aluminum and carbon fiber. It looks a bit like a bus with a beak.
A fast bus with a beak. Once loaded into a 1,600-foot-long concrete tube in the Nevada desert, the pod hit 192 mph in about 5 seconds, using an electric propulsion system producing more than 3,000 horsepower.
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Why the heck Bitcoin âmightâ split in two?
I realize that many people were a little confused about what that Bitcoin split and âcivil warâ meant. Here is a very clear explanation, in plain English :)
Thereâs a lot of fuss in the bitcoin community about what will happen on August 1. Will the cryptocurrency split into two new ones? Will it not? What is BIP 91? What is BIP 148? What is SegWit? The incredibly significant date is just around the corner but there are still so many unanswered questions!
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The Top 10 Cryptocurrency Resources for Non-Technical People
Again, I know non-technical people sometimes struggle with cryptocurrencies so here are a couple of great resources to get started! It starts with a high level overview of Bitcoin and the associated blockchain, getting into the basics of how it works technically, and looking at the long-term implications. It then branches into blockchains more generally, Ethereum and eventually other cryptocurrencies and âappcoins.â
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AMD shares are soaring: Ethereum miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship graphics cards to mines
Insane modern age gold rush, crypto miners are trying to get as many GPUs as they can. (AMD) share price jumped after it beat revenue estimates thanks to cryptocurrency miners snapping up the firmâs graphics cards. Shares rose 11% after the chip company announced earnings on July 25, but the firmâs stock is up 152% over the last 12 months, making it the fourth best performer on the S&P 500, CNBC reported. (âŚ) Crypto minersâin particular those mining ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency by market valuation behind bitcoin (âŚ) are racing to take advantage of ethereumâs exploding price by adding more processing power to their mines. Some of them are even resorting to leasing Boeing 747s to fly the increasingly scarce graphics processors from AMD and Nvidia directly to their ethereum mines so they can be plugged in to the network as quickly as possible.
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Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck. Hereâs How to Move It Forward.
Artificial intelligence is trendy and cool but we still have a long way to go before computers can truly educate themselves. To get computers to think like humans, we need a new A.I. paradigm, one that places âtop downâ and âbottom upâ knowledge on equal footing. Bottom-up knowledge is the kind of raw information we get directly from our senses, like patterns of light falling on our retina. Top-down knowledge comprises cognitive models of the world and how it works.
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In a Robot Economy, All Humans Will Be Marketers
Interesting perspective on how robots will force a lot of people to switch to marketing jobs. The fear that robots, or more generally smart software, will put us all out of work is one of dominant economic memes of our time. But that fear is misplaced. Weâre unlikely to see mass unemployment; rather, workers will shift into new economic sectors (âŚ) The real risk is that the robots will push too many of us into less socially productive jobs â especially those in marketing. (âŚ) Consider the general logic of labor substitution. Machines and software are often very good at âmaking stuffâ and, increasingly, at delivering well-defined services, such as when Alexa arranges a package for you. But machines are not effective at persuading, at developing advertising campaigns, at branding products or corporations, or at greeting you at the door in a charming manner, as is done so often in restaurants, even if you order on an iPad. Those activities will remain the province of human beings for a long time to come.
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Data Structures for Coding Interviews: Computer Science in Plain English
Finally, a dead-simple explanation of CS data structures (linked lists, hash maps, etc.). No CS degree necessary. No proofs, and no confusing academic jargon.
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Cracking the Lens: Targeting HTTP's Hidden Attack-Surface
Modern websites are browsed through a lens of transparent systems built to enhance performance, extract analytics and supply numerous additional services. This almost invisible attack surface has been largely overlooked for years.
In this paper, Iâll show how to use malformed requests and esoteric headers to coax these systems into revealing themselves and opening gateways into our victimâs networks. Iâll share how by combining these techniques with a little Bash I was able to thoroughly perforate DoD networks, trivially earn over $30k in vulnerability bounties, and accidentally exploit my own ISP.
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Chrome automation made simple. Runs locally or headless on AWS Lambda.
Chrome automation made simple. Runs locally or headless on AWS Lambda. Chromeless can be used to: run 1000s of browser integration tests in parallel; crawl the web and automate screenshots; write bots that require a real browser; do pretty much everything youâve used PhantomJS, NightmareJS, or Selenium for before.
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Docker vs. Kubernetes vs. Apache Mesos: Why What You Think You Know is Probably Wrong - Mesosphere
There are countless articles, discussions, and lots of social chatter comparing Docker, Kubernetes, and Mesos. If you listen to the partially-informed, youâd think that the three open source projects are in a fight-to-the death for container supremacy. Youâd also believe that picking one over the other is almost a religious choice; with true believers espousing their faith and burning heretics who would dare to consider an alternative. Thatâs all bunk.
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Build an 8-bit computer from scratch
For the true nerds only but FASCINATING. I built a programmable 8-bit computer from scratch on breadboards using only simple logic gates. I documented the whole project in a series of YouTube videos and on this web site.
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A Wi-Fi Analyzer Inside of a Tic Tac Container
Another very geeky but amazing project. For an easy way to find out which channels are available, YouTuber âmoononournationâ came up with a Wi-Fi analyzer that not only runs on the inexpensive ESP8266, but is small enough to fit inside of a Tic Tac container. This makes a great enclosure, as not only is the LCD screen protected behind clear plastic, but the charging socket is revealed by opening the (former) candy door!
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