Silicon Valley’s Caste System Has Been Exposed -- NYMag. "I'm not surprised at all," the ex-Googler told me. I'd asked him about the class-action lawsuit that had been filed on behalf of roughly 64,000 tech employees (including him) against firms like Google, Apple, Intel, and Adobe. The suit alleged that the executives at these firms – people like Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, and Sergey Brin – had colluded with each other to form no-poaching agreements, thereby keeping their employees from jumping ship to competing firms.
It had long been an open secret in the tech industry that certain companies had made these backroom arrangements to keep their most valuable employees in place. But until recently, nobody knew how explicit the deals were, or that the executives involved had put the details in ink. "I never felt as though we were unfairly compensated," he said. The news of the Silicon Valley wage-collusion suit – written about most prominently by PandoDaily's Mark Ames – hasn't made much news outside the tech industry. Why the future belongs to Google — Mobile Culture. When I first read that Google, the company that seems to know everything about us, was swooping in to acquire Nest, the company that strives to make home automation a cinch, for a hefty $3.2 billion, it wasn’t the money that left me stunned, the amount is now only a sixth of what Facebook recently splurged; it was something else.
A company which began operating out of a garage 15 years ago, with a humble search engine as its only offering, has suddenly become the epicentre of our digital universe. Even before I could realise, Search was omnipresent, Chrome was my gateway to the web, Gmail was my go-to email service, YouTube was called upon to catch up on missed episodes, Maps was summoned every time I stepped into an unknown territory, Drive was backing up my photos as soon as I clicked them, and my brilliant Nexus 5 simply became an extension of myself.
Google had taken over, even before I could press pause. This one though, this particular one, seems to be nailing it. Ingenious. Shrewd. Hundreds of Start-Ups Hope to Be a Copycat Start-Up. Thieves, Spies, and Silicon Valley Startups: A Cautionary Tale. Last Christmas Eve, a man broke into Adara Networks’ San Jose headquarters, using copies of both physical and electronic keys. He seemed to know exactly what he was looking for. The thief left rows of desks untouched as he cruised toward the lab holding the source code for Adara’s proprietary data-center networking software. Fortunately for Adara, he triggered an alarm on the lab door and fled.
“Snatch and grab” crimes, in which crooks enter an office and carts off a few loose laptops, happen occasionally in Silicon Valley. Chief Executive Officer Eric Johnson sensed that his case was more serious, though. Silicon Valley has a long history of thievery and espionage. In decades past, KGB spies lurked at bars such as Walker’s Wagon Wheel in Mountain View, Calif., where semiconductor engineers hung out and talked shop.
To make it harder for the thieves, some companies are paying for “penetration testing,” hiring security consultants to probe their defenses. Everything You Need to Know About Silk Road and Dread Pirate Roberts. On Wednesday the federal government raided and shut down online drug marketplace Silk Road and arrested its alleged proprietor, Ross William Ulbricht. Silk Road had been in operation since roughly January 2011, but was obscured from normal web traffic because it was hosted on something called the “Deep Web.” If you’ve never heard of Silk Road or the Deep Web, or have heard of them but have trouble grasping the technology or concepts involved, this explainer is for you.
So what is Silk Road? Silk Road is an online marketplace where users can purchase everything from illegal drugs to unlicensed firearms. It is hosted on the “Deep Web,” a collection of websites that are not indexed by search engines and thus hidden from public view. The deep web is accessible only by downloading special software called Tor, which anonymizes web traffic. [More: Feds Raid Online Drug Market Silk Road] How does the Deep Web work? Who uses the Deep Web? Who made the Deep Web? Okay, so what can you buy on Silk Road? Surf through the web's past on the internet history timeline.
Most Influential Emotions on Social Networks Revealed. One well-known feature of social networks is that similar people tend to attract each other: birds of a feather flock together. So an interesting question is whether these similarities cause people to behave in the same way online, whether it might lead to flocking or herding behaviour, for example. Today, we get an interesting insight into this phenomena thanks to the work of Rui Fan and pals at Beihang University in China. These guys have compared the way that tweets labelled with specific emotions influence other people on the network. And their conclusion is surprising.
These guys got their data from Weibo, a Twitter-like service that has become hugely popular in China. During six months in 2010, Rui and co collected some 70 million tweets from 200,000 users and constructed a social network in which users are linked if they mutually interact by sending messages to each other or retweeting each other’s tweets, for example. The results were something of a surprise. Is The Web Dying? The Evolution of Facebook - In Photos: The Evolution Of Facebook. Welcome to Forbes. 14 Infamous Computer Virus Snippets That Trace a History of Havoc. Space boffins, oil giants, nuke plants 'raided' by MYSTERY code nasty. @ murph Japan? I very much doubt that, as it's been a long while since they had an agressive foreign policy, and there's no history of Japanese cyber espionage that I've seen any reference to. Israel would seem a more probable actor, although Iran or the Norks could be to blame.
Also, don't forget that somebody on the most infected list could equally easily be the source. Worth noting that the infected list largely appears to reflect the extent of illegal Windows/Office installs, which means they can't patch them. On these IT security threads we sometimes come across the idea of whether Windows has US government backdoors. If you were clever enough to do this and get away with it for almost a decade, then it follows (for me) that you'd be clever enough to build in some false leads to direct suspicion away from you, and disguise any elements that might give you away. This Is What Your Favorite Political Websites Looked Like 10 Years Ago. The Evolution of Facebook News Feed. Last week Facebook unveiled its first major update to the news feed since the feature launched nearly seven years ago. Like every change the company makes to the site, it's been met with mixed reactions.
Some praise the introduction of multiple news feeds, mobile consistency and a bigger focus on pictures, as well as a cleaner, more organized look. Others claimed it borrowed too much from competitor Google+'s design — in fact, a Mashable poll revealed 87.5% of respondents said the new design resembles Google's social network. If history is any indication, many users will resist the changes once it rolls out to more accounts soon. In fact, when news feed was first launched in 2006, founder Mark Zuckerberg even wrote a blog post called "Calm down.
Breathe. Zuckerberg noted when people called the news feed "overwhelming" and "cluttered," and some joined Facebook groups on the site protesting the changes. The Beginning More Control Getting Smarter The Latest. [Rétrospective] Designs de facebook entre 2005 et 2010 | Hugues Valentin. Bonjour à tous, On entend crier tout le monde à chaque fois que facebook change de design et j’ai entendu une personne IRL dire hier encore : « Mais facebook était tellement mieux en 2007 ! ». Je dois avouer que je ne me souviens plus du tout ce à quoi pouvait ressembler facebook à cette époque ! Alors, je me suis dit : tiens, je vais retracer un historique des différents designs du réseau social le plus grand du monde et essayer de vous donner les améliorations majeures que ces interfaces ont apportées. C’est parti… Avant 2005 : Le néant ! Hé bien figurez vous qu’il m’a été impossible de trouver sur internet une capture d’écran d’un profil facebook de 2004 !
A la fin 2004, le site internet n’était disponible que dans certaines universités américaines et des fonctionnalités aujourd’hui basiques comme le wall ou la gestion des groupes commencent à être implémentées. Début 2005 : Et bah, c’était bien moche ! En 2005, le web était encore assez moche et thefacebook n’échappaient pas à la règle.