jeffrey k eliasen

Sand art at a large scale

jeff — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 13:58:39 +0000

Link:

Sand Dancer

Drawing in the sand at a very large scale:

When big companies let their employees rant publicly

jeff — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 13:09:08 +0000

Link:

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

A few months ago, one of Google's employees posted a rant about how Google was messing up in a significant way in their overall strategy:

That one last thing that Google doesn't do well is Platforms. We don't understand platforms. We don't "get" platforms. Some of you do, but you are the minority. This has become painfully clear to me over the past six years. I was kind of hoping that competitive pressure from Microsoft and Amazon and more recently Facebook would make us wake up collectively and start doing universal services. Not in some sort of ad-hoc, half-assed way, but in more or less the same way Amazon did it: all at once, for real, no cheating, and treating it as our top priority from now on.

But no. No, it's like our tenth or eleventh priority. Or fifteenth, I don't know. It's pretty low. There are a few teams who treat the idea very seriously, but most teams either don't think about it all, ever, or only a small percentage of them think about it in a very small way.

Any employee at a normal company would have been worried about losing his job. He took down the post soon after he realized what he had done. Interestingly, though, Google didn't force him to; in fact, he says they weren't in any way negative about the public posting:

I contacted our internal PR folks and asked what to do, and they were also nice and supportive. But they didn't want me to think that they were even hinting at censoring me -- they went out of their way to help me understand that we're an opinionated company, and not one of the kinds of companies that censors their employees. That was cool and all, but I still didn't know what to do.

He took the post down anyway, but of course in this day and age it was shared and copied and, well, out there for good. Taking it down didn't do anything to minimize the sharing of the message.

But the coolest thing is this:

Amazingly, nothing bad happened to me at Google. Everyone just laughed at me a lot, all the way up to the top, for having committed what must be the great-granddaddy of all Reply-All screwups in tech history.

But they also listened, which is super cool. I probably shouldn’t talk much about it, but they’re already figuring out how to deal with some of the issues I raised. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, though. When I claimed in my internal post that “Google does everything right”, I meant it. When they’re faced with any problem at all, whether it’s technical or organizational or cultural, they set out to solve it in a first-class way.

In other words, this is a company that truly 'gets it' when it comes to idea sharing and the importance of differing opinions. Instead of firing him for publicly airing his frustration and internal strategy and behavior, they took the opportunity to self-reflect and decide what, if anything, needed to be done to make the company better.

If you generally understand tech and/or are interested in the business decisions being made in the industry, the rant itself is a fantastic read. If not, though, it isn't the point. The point is that Google's response was what any company should do: listen, assess, adapt. Contrast that with what most companies would have done: fire the employee and engage damage control.

The more I study Google, the more impressed I am.

Striking against SOPA

jeff — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:54:47 +0000

Link:

http://sopastrike.com/

I know I'm a little late getting the word out, but if you own a website, you should be striking against SOPA today. It's pretty easy to set up, just add a JavaScript snippet to your homepage and it will do the right thing both today (striking) and tomorrow (when it's over)... see the link for details on what to do.

Wikipedia (which, by the way, is striking by making all pages except two unavailable today) has more about SOPA and what it is.

Have you thought about your online password strategy lately?

jeff — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 04:14:52 +0000

Link:

Hacked!

OK, so you've decided that it's just too hard to do security right: to have strong passwords for important sites, to use 2-step authentication, etc. Well, here's one story of what happened during and after a Gmail account was hacked:

As email, documents, and almost every aspect of our professional and personal lives moves onto the “cloud”—remote servers we rely on to store, guard, and make available all of our data whenever and from wherever we want them, all the time and into eternity—a brush with disaster reminds the author and his wife just how vulnerable those data can be. A trip to the inner fortress of Gmail, where Google developers recovered six years’ worth of hacked and deleted e‑mail, provides specific advice on protecting and backing up data now—and gives a picture both consoling and unsettling of the vulnerabilities we can all expect to face in the future.

Maintaining privacy when crossing borders with your digital data

jeff — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:14:35 +0000

Link:

Defending Privacy at the U.S. Border: A Guide for Travelers Carrying Digital Devices

Most border crossings are uneventful, but if you have sensitive data on your electronic devices, you may be in for some surprises if you assume the data is private:

For now, a border agent has the legal authority to search your electronic devices at the border even if she has no reason to think that you’ve done anything wrong.

The EFF has a great guide for maintaining your privacy:

Different people will choose different kinds of precautions to protect their data at the border based on their experience, perception of risk, and other factors. There is no particular approach we can recommend for all travelers.

They go on to explain the options and make recommendations for many common scenarios.

Saying 'yes' more often

jeff — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 20:17:36 +0000

Link:

A Year Without Fear

Sometimes it's important to push your fears aside and experience the world. Scott Adams spent the last year doing just that:

As 2011 approached, I wondered what would happen if, for the next 12 months, I said yes to any opportunity that was new or dangerous or embarrassing or unwise. I decided to find out.

Defense against rare but cataclysmic events

jeff — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 14:56:17 +0000

Link:

Phil Plait: How to defend Earth from asteroids

A fascinating technical/scientific piece about the destructive power of asteroids and a simple strategy to defend Earth from them:

The true teacher...

jeff — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 14:47:28 +0000

The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-distrust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciple.

Amos Bronson Alcott

Santa's list leaked

jeff — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 13:40:24 +0000

Link:

Santa Gets Hacked!

The Naughty List

Apparently, bad security has led to the naughty list being leaked on the internet:

Think about this while you travel this Christmas

jeff — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 20:04:44 +0000

Link:

Smoke Screening

Here's another commentary on the uselessness of most of the security programs in place in airports:

To a large number of security analysts, this expenditure makes no sense. The vast cost is not worth the infinitesimal benefit. Not only has the actual threat from terror been exaggerated, they say, but the great bulk of the post-9/11 measures to contain it are little more than what Schneier mocks as “security theater”: actions that accomplish nothing but are designed to make the government look like it is on the job. In fact, the continuing expenditure on security may actually have made the United States less safe.

A billion here, a billion there...

jeff — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 15:09:30 +0000

Link:

Excellent Video on the Tax-the-Rich Mentality.flv

"Let's just tax the rich, that will pay for everything!"

Nope, it doesn't work like that:

Chance of a lifetime

jeff — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 14:35:45 +0000

Link:

Moran Cerf - Moth GrandSLAM winning story - Theme: Big Breaks

Do you say 'yes' to opportunities in your life?

Yoga Girl

jeff — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:50:21 +0000

Link:

Yoga Girl - Music Video [HD]

From the guys who brought us "Whole Foods Parking Lot", a song about the yoga culture:

Bottled water is evil

jeff — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 10:21:25 +0000

Link:

Bottled Water: Satan Juice

Science, sort of:

Merry Christmas!

jeff — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 18:34:07 +0000

Link:

2011 Christmas Letter

We wish you a merry Christmas, and a happy New Year!

Hallelujah, the vow-of-silence remix

jeff — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:58:58 +0000

Link:

St Francis de la Sissies

If you're a monk but haven taken a vow of silence, how do you sing joyfully?

Europe rejects 'Protect IP'-type law

jeff — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 14:25:20 +0000

Link:

A voice against Protect IP

European high court rejects Internet traffic filtering as violation of fundamental rights

I recently posted about Protect IP, a law that would make it possible for the government to force search engines and other internet utilities to block results related to companies believed to be in violation of copyright law. This is a bad idea on many levels, primarily because it won't actually stop the very thing it is intended to address.

The European Union recently rejected a smaller-scale but similar law, pointing out that large-scale filtering infringes on basic human rights with respect to "receiving or imparting information" (the EU's version of freedom of speech):

In its ruling, The Court of Justice upheld the right of copyright holders to file injunctions against intermediaries over illegal file sharing. But it struck down the provisions of the Belgian court ruling that required filtering, finding that the filtering provisions violated European Union e-commerce laws, and infringed on the rights of Scarlet and its customers. The broad monitoring required to filter file-sharing would "infringe the fundamental rights of [Scarlet's] customers, namely their right to protection of their personal data and their right to receive or impart information, which are rights safeguarded by the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU," the court panel wrote.

Hopefully, our courts will come to a similar conclusion if Protect IP becomes law.

Our Black Friday experience

jeff — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 14:47:54 +0000

Link:

Chuck & Beans

Early-bird Black Friday turns ugly with 'shopping rage' incident

Black Friday is a strange American phenomenon: millions of people line up in the middle of the night in order to take advantage of the opportunity to shop in a giant crowd. I don't really get it:

Here in Los Angeles, the sparring opened with a civilian re-creation of the recent UC Davis protest fiasco:

But not all went smoothly. Ten minutes after the Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch opened, a female customer used pepper spray on other shoppers at the Black Friday sale, injuring at least seven people and forcing employees to evacuate a portion of the store, police said.

Is any of it really worth fighting the crowds, the traffic, or the insanity?

I understand the draw to great bargains, but I don't get the event-ness surrounding it... why are people so crazy about getting out on that particular day? In my experience, the sales are predominantly on items I wouldn't want in the first place. This year, especially, everything I've seen advertised is stuff that stores are trying to clear out of their inventory. This is about clearing the warehouse of all the crap nobody would buy earlier in the year.

J and I did go out this year, because she wanted to see the mayhem first-hand. We were actually surprised at how empty the shopping mall was. Most stores didn't have much in the way of bargains, just a few items heavily discounted so they could claim they were having a Black Friday sale. Yet people were lined up to get in Old Navy, and Best Buy looked like a tornado had come through. It was trying to be an event, but instead it was basically a dud.

Money

jeff — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 14:04:52 +0000

Link:

Money

Think you have a good handle on the economy? If not, here's a breakdown to put things in perspective:

(click the image for the full-size version... and then get ready to do a lot of scrolling)

My school makes a video

jeff — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 17:03:32 +0000

Link:

Thomas Techie - NMT Blinded Me With Science

Home For Deranged Engineering Scientists

My alma mater made a recreation of the video "She Blinded Me with Science":

And, in case you're wondering, Thomas Dolby takes no issue with this:

These guys took my video, shot for shot, and recreated it on their own campus. This kind of appropriation I don’t mind at all!