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Sunday, November 30, 2014
New 30 day challenge: “hermit mode”
I’ve been spending more time surfing the web on my laptop than I’d like to. I’ve also noticed more emails that lure me into short tasks, but eventually eat up a large chunk of my day.
I’d prefer to be spending more time working on projects, reading, and unplugging. So my new 30 day challenge will be to enter a sort of “hermit mode” where I don’t spend more than an hour a day on my laptop. I’m also going to try to say “no” more often. My hope is that if I turn down a few meetings for a while, I’ll end up working more on projects that I want to tackle. I don’t know whether that will work, but I’m going to try it. I might still write a few blog posts or say something on Twitter, but I want that to be a conscious choice, not just something I back into.
This challenge will be a hard one to judge for success, but my hope is that at the end of the month, I’ll be making more active choices about how I spend my time, and tackling more things that I want to do.
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30 day challenge wrap-up: writing
So how did I do on my 30 day writing challenge? Well, the picture tells the story:
Not too bad! I did miss one day, but here’s a secret about 30 day challenges: if you miss a day or two, you can just keep doing the challenge for another day or so at the end. Or don’t worry about it: you’re trying out something new, and you only have to answer to yourself.
What went well this time? Well, I finally wrote down a few things that I’ve been meaning to publish for years, from Scott Adams’ financial advice to my own hard-won financial tips, and from a piece about a level playing field to how to buy viagra online. Some posts were like hairballs that I just needed to get out of my system.
I also liked my running tips post, my post about dial tone moments, and my tips to protect your account security. I even got to pick on active.com for their Active Advantage membership program. I also enjoyed loosening up a little bit (“fuck Columbus Day”). It’s so much more fun to write when you don’t put as much pressure on yourself.
What didn’t go well? Well, I meant to do some journaling, short stories, and private writing, but somehow this challenge morphed into a public blogging exercise. That’s okay. I like that I wrote a bunch of new things. I still put too much emphasis on polish (or at least correct spelling/grammar) in my writing. Part of my goal was to lower my bar a little bit so that I could knock out a quick blog post whenever the mood strikes. I partly met that goal. Overall, I’m glad that I did this challenge.
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How Hollywood Portrays Alan Turing and Other Math Geniuses
By QUENTIN HARDY from NYT Technology http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/how-hollywood-portrays-alan-turing-and-other-math-geniuses/
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Saturday, November 29, 2014
Thanksgiving turkey hat
Because not every blog post has to be serious:
Special thanks to my friend Amy who crocheted this masterpiece! Amy also works with an awesome group of volunteers that crochets dolls for kids fighting cancer and other illnesses.
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A Salad Chain’s Surprise Ingredient: Tech Money
By NATASHA SINGER from NYT Technology http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/technology/a-salad-chains-surprise-ingredient-tech-money.html
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Friday, November 28, 2014
Nine hard-won lessons about money and investing
Any time you talk about money, you risk sounding like a jerk. I’m going to take that risk in this post. I’ll start out by talking about a couple ways I shot myself in the foot financially and what I learned as a result. Your mileage may vary. Before we start, you might want to review this financial advice from Scott Adams.
You are probably a bad stock picker
I moved to Silicon Valley in 2000, near the end of the dot com craze. Back then, an online broker was offering $400 for free if you opened up a stock trading account with a starting balance of $1000. As a grad student, I had a ~$14,000/year fellowship, so that was two weeks worth of salary for free. Thinking that I was investing with “house money,” I signed up.
All the business magazines recommended Cisco as a safe, conservative stock. So I bought shares of Cisco at about $60/share. Can you guess what happened next? The dot com crash happened, and shares of Cisco plummeted to $12/share. Shaken and nervous, I was able to sell at $18/share after a mild bounce.
Despite what all those business magazines said, the first stock I picked to invest lost 80% of its value almost immediately. On one hand, losing several hundred dollars of my own money, in addition to the “free” $400, was an expensive lesson. On the other hand, what a great lesson–I suck at picking stocks!
It turns out, almost everyone sucks at picking stocks. And the very, very few people who can do it well probably won’t take your money. If I could encourage you to read just one short article about picking stocks, read this one about why it’s a fools game. I may add a lot more references here–I’ve read a lot of books about this over the years–but if you’re trying to pick individual stocks then you’ll probably get creamed. Like, “amateur football player against professional NFL football players” creamed.
No one cares about your money as much as you do
On to my next mistake! I was very fortunate to join Google when it was small, so I did well in Google’s IPO. Research says that if you buy nice things, you adapt to those nice things pretty quickly and then you’re not much happier. I tried to avoid that trap by stashing my money somewhere and not thinking much about it. That’s not the mistake, by the way. I still think it’s pretty good advice if you win the lottery to park your money and take some time to get used to the idea.
My mistake was where I parked my money. Google worked out a deal with “full service” broker to give us free accounts. When I talked to this broker, they recommended that I part my money in “commercial paper.” I didn’t really know what commercial paper was, but the broker said it was safe, easy to pull my money out, and it would provide about 4-5% return on my money.
That worked great for a few years until the entire world financial system almost fell apart. In the early days of the financial crisis, I called my full service broker to make sure things were fine. I remember the phrase that the broker used was that “lightning would have to strike” for there to be any problems. It turns out, lightning did strike, and then the broker said that I couldn’t get my money back–the commercial paper market was completely locked up. The money was still all there, they claimed, but I couldn’t withdraw any of it.
In this case, I lucked out. Someone else filed a class action lawsuit against the financial company, and the financial company returned peoples’ money relatively quickly after that. How many stories have you read about a rock star or athlete who trusted their manager and got burned? It’s your job to pay enough attention to your finances that you don’t get burned. Don’t expect your stockbroker, bank, financial advisor, or really anyone handling your money to care about your money as much as you do.
Wall Street is not your friend
Fred Schwed wrote a book called Where Are the Customers’ Yachts. The title comes from a story about how brokers and bankers all seemed to have yachts, but somehow none of their customers did. Schwed wrote that book in 1940. Things on Wall Street aren’t really any better today.
Honestly, I consider this lesson pretty self-evident after the financial crisis. We’ve learned about companies packaging up toxic assets and betting against their customers. We’ve seen multi-billion dollar settlements for fixing foreign exchange rates and LIBOR (a rate that banks charge each for short-term loans). We’ve seen companies trading against consumers’ interest in dark pools with high-frequency trading. We’ve learned that Wall Street traders think of us as muppets, or worse.
Wall Street excels in taking simple financial instruments and making them more complicated. In that complexity, there’s plenty of shadows for financial companies to hide things that take advantage of you. If it sounds too good to be true, look out. If you don’t understand everything going on with your money, you’re increasing your risk.
So far, this has been a downer, so let’s talk about some positive lessons.
Think about working for equity vs. salary
As I mentioned in my post about Kevin Kelly’s talk at XOXO, there are many different kinds of success, and you should pick your own. One common financial aspiration is to make enough money that you can live off the interest and dividends from that money.
If you’re an employee working for salary, it’s going to be hard to reach that level of independence. That’s one reason I worry about franchises, because tilts the playing field toward more employees and fewer independent businesses. You can try to radically lower your financial burn rate, but few Americans have taken that step. Of course, starting a business completely on your own can be stressful and scary too.
One reason I like startups is that they represent a middle way: you can get some equity or ownership in a business that might turn out very well, but you also get a salary. You can pick your startup to match your personal profile of risk: from founder all the way up to companies with hundreds of employees or more. Especially if you’re young, it can be a good idea to try some more adventurous things like a startup.
If you’re investing, prefer index funds
Okay, let’s suppose you do win the lottery or do well at your own business or startup. Now what? Well, you could double down on new businesses like Elon Musk, but my advice would be to set aside enough money that you can live off the interest or dividends.
It turns out that investing in low-cost index funds in a diversified portfolio is a really good idea. In fact, it outperforms the vast majority of “active” investors. Simple is usually better, like many things in life. I’d also recommend investing in a bond index fund. Bonds tend to do well when stocks do poorly, and vice versa, so investing in both will tend to reduce your risk.
If you’re a regular person working for salary, you might want 60% of your money in a stock index fund and 40% of your money in a bond index fund. If you’re young or adventurous, you can tilt toward more stocks. You want to invest so that you can sleep well at night without moving your money around based on what you see or read in the news.
If you’re fortunate enough to win the lottery, you might want an allocation more like 80% bonds and 20% stocks, or 70%/30%. After all, it’s pretty safe to protect your money and live off the dividends/interest.
Don’t get paralyzed over choosing your allocation between stocks and bonds. There’s a great book called The Lazy Person’s Guide to Investing to walk you through some easy ways to structure your investments. Honestly a 50/50 mix of stocks and bonds (the so-called “Couch Potato Portfolio”) will beat many “active” portfolios where you or someone else tries to pick stocks.
For that matter, you can buy a Vanguard LifeStrategy fund that will give most of what you need with a single purchase. Such funds tilt toward stocks when you’re younger and then transition toward bonds as you get older. You can pick whatever retirement target would make you feel most comfortable in terms of risk.
Prefer credit unions over banks
Earlier, I basically said much of Wall Street is like carnival sideshow designed to separate you from your money. So is there anybody on your side? Well, credit unions can be pretty cool. Credit unions are like banks, except instead of trying to turn a profit on you, credit unions are controlled by their members. That means that they can often provide better rates, have better policies, and generally will try to exploit you less often than megabanks will.
Note that not every credit union is perfect. I once belonged to a credit union that started adding a $1 monthly fee that went to a foundation that the credit union ran. The foundation funds a bunch of semi-random things ($3M for a walkway?). I called up and asked how to remove the fee. “You can’t remove that charge, the foundation fee is mandatory,” came back the reply. I closed my account with that credit union and now I don’t pay that fee.
Do your research on any financial institution’s fees, prices, and policies. In the worst case, check out their website–if the website looks clunky or hard to use, consider skipping that organization. If a company supports two-factor authentication, that’s a bonus point in their favor.
Prefer Vanguard over almost anyone else
Instead of a regular stock broker, I highly recommend Vanguard. Go with Vanguard whenever you can.
In the same way that credit unions are controlled by their members and usually better than banks, Vanguard is owned by their clients and provides a much better deal than almost any other financial company. Even better, their incentives are aligned with yours. Vanguard provides well-balanced indexed funds at a very low cost. You can also buy stocks through Vanguard. At some point, I may write more about Vanguard, but I consider them one of the only companies on your side in the financial world. Check them out.
You probably don’t need a “assets under management” financial advisor
There’s another way that some people take advantage of you: some financial advisors charge outsized fees for what they do. Many financial advisors charge a percentage of “assets under management” (AUM). A 1% fee of assets under management might not sound like much, but that 1% can take a serious bite out of your returns. Instead, I recommend making an appointment with a fee-based financial advisor. Or if you put enough money into Vanguard, they may provide access to a financial planner. A good financial planner can help you determine your risk tolerance and other special factors and recommend a good portfolio allocation for you.
Some newer firms like Wealthfront, Betterment, and Personal Capital offer to provide “robo-advisor” services for lower fees than a human financial advisor. But you’re still paying ~0.25% of your assets for things like rebalancing your portfolio when you can do it yourself in 15 minutes a year.
I use such a simple plan that I don’t pay a financial advisor. I just buy low-cost stock index funds (US and rest-of-world) and bond index funds (US and California). Don’t let anyone make you feel like you need to pay a financial advisor. Remember: they don’t care about your money as much as you do, and with a little reading, you can understand the simple strategies that make up almost all of a diversified, low-cost, low-risk portfolio.
Bonus tip: consider municipal bonds
I have some friends who have left California and moved to lower-tax or no-tax states. For the most part, I don’t mind higher California taxes–I rationalize it as a “sunshine” tax for warm, beautiful weather. Plus California provides the atmosphere where things like Silicon Valley can happen.
But there is a simple trick to minimize your taxes: buy municipal bonds for the state where you live. For example, Vanguard offers municipal bond funds for many states, including a bond fund for California. The interest from a California municipal bond fund is tax-free at the federal and state level. If you’re in a high tax bracket, getting interest tax-free is like getting a much better interest rate.
I hope some of the mistakes I made and the subsequent lessons are helpful. If you take this post along with Scott Adams’ financial advice, I think you’ll be more prepared than most people. Are there other financial lessons or advice that you would add? Let me know in the comments.
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Thursday, November 27, 2014
Thankful
I’m thankful for family and friends and good health and so many wonderful people I’ve had the pleasure of working with at Google.
But I’m also thankful for airplanes: “You want to see your family? It would take months to walk to them, but come sit in this metal tube and thanks to some interesting properties of physics, you can see them later today.”
And I’m thankful for the internet: “Oh, you can’t or don’t want to sit in the metal tube for hours? Press this button and you can see your family instantly from thousands of miles away. You can talk or just enjoy each others’ company.”
Our society and world still needs to improve in lots of ways, but I’m thankful for how far we’ve come in the last century, and I hope we can make things even better in the coming years.
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Wednesday, November 26, 2014
Election Day should be a holiday
I’m looking at this list of federal holidays, and you know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking fuck Columbus Day. Who the hell cares about Columbus Day except for mattress stores?
Instead, let’s scratch Columbus Day and make Election Day a national holiday. Turnout on Election Day was only 36.6 percent in 2014, according to Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont. If we made Election Day a holiday, it would be easier for people to vote. People would actually start to look forward to Election Day, too. By the way, you know you else would like to make Election Day a holiday? Senator Bernie Sanders. I like that guy.
If push comes to shove, I’d be willing to keep Columbus Day as a holiday and just add a new holiday. But really, do you remember what you did on Columbus Day a month ago? No? Me neither.
I’m thinking we can make Election Day a pretty fun holiday. Vote in the morning, BBQ in the afternoon, and drink or set off fireworks in the evening. That’s a holiday that a lot of people could get behind.
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Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Premortems
Google has a pretty good culture of doing postmortems. When something fails, someone close to the failure tries to document what happened and why. A good postmortem document should also point the way to avoid similar mistakes in the future. Mistakes happen, but you don’t want to make the same mistakes over and over again. Instead, it’s important to try to get to the root of a problem and fix it there. Failure can be a good thing if you learn valuable lessons along the way.
But it’s also a rule of thumb of software engineering that it’s 10x harder to catch a problem at each new level of deployment. That’s why solid tests (e.g. unit tests) are so helpful; it’s much easier to fix a problem when you catch it earlier. Likewise, requiring code reviews before submitting code changes can avoid lots of stupid mistakes. Once buggy or poor code is checked in, debugging a problem can get much harder. And if a problem makes it out into production, it’s typically even more difficult to fix.
When you take a solid practice like postmortems and think about going further upstream, you land on the idea of a “premortem.” An example of a premortem would be going to each member of a team before a product launches and asking them: “What’s going to break or fail? What’s the mostly likely thing to go wrong?” After all, the people who have been working hard on a project have been steeped in it and are intimately familiar with potential weaknesses and failures.
I first heard the idea of a premortem from a Freakonomics podcast, but the idea is so simple that it practically explains itself. However, there are a couple subtleties. First, don’t bring everyone into one big room and ask “Hey, what’s going to go wrong?” That’s a recipe for groupthink unless there are a small number of glaring problems.
Instead, you want to collect the initial feedback independently and privately so that people won’t be biased by hearing what others are saying. With private feedback you might end up hearing opinions that people are afraid to express in public. If you do have to settle for a big group meeting, ask people to channel their personal voice of doom on their own before opening up the public discussion.
The second subtlety is that “dogfooding,” the process of testing your own product internally before introducing them to the world, is almost like a premortem if you can get good feedback internally. The touchy issue here is authenticity: people want their feedback to be taken seriously, but internal feedback might be biased or skewed for various reasons. Even if you disagree with internal feedback, it makes sense to take a clear-eyed look at what people are saying. And if you do disagree, it helps to explain your reasons for adjusting to feedback or not.
Could a pre-mortem help your next project avoid a massive failure? Why not give it a shot to find out? Premortems can be an easy and fast exercise, and you might get some really useful insights. Just ask the people close to the launch to brainstorm “What’s most likely to go wrong?” before the project launches.
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Monday, November 24, 2014
Watching Anita Sarkeesian at XOXO
I had one more experience at the XOXO Festival that I wanted to mention. I really enjoyed Anita Sarkeesian’s talk. You can watch it here:
Sarkeesian explained her experience with humor and grace, and that really resonated with me. I don’t want to join the tone police–passionate voices have a role in this discussion too, and passion may work well for others. But I know it can be hard to take abuse while making your case with civility, and I admired Sarkeesian’s ability to rise above the fray.
As part of my job, I’ve unfortunately become somewhat of a connoisseur of vitriol and threats. My first death threat was over a decade ago in a situation involving the DMCA and the Church of Scientology (before you jump to assumptions, the death threat came from the anti-Scientology side). I got a threat at a 2002 search conference that I considered credible enough that I started carrying a cell phone with me after that. I got an open-ended threat against my family just a couple weeks or so ago, even though I haven’t been working on webspam for months.
But here’s the thing: I’ve never received threats as pointed, menacing, or explicit as Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, and others discussing GamerGate have. No one should face threats of physical harm for expressing their opinions. No one should be doxxed or have their personal information posted just for expressing their opinions. That should be the starting point and the bare minimum for any discussion. If you disagree with someone, win them over with your ideas, not with threats.
I should mention that I’m a big fan of clear disclosure of potential conflicts of interest, and I’ve posted my own disclosure page at the top of my blog for over five years. I’ve also been playing computer games since Pong in the 1970s. As a kid, I wrote a script to solve Colossal Cave Adventure on a local university’s PRIMOS system. I subscribed to Electronic Games magazine back when people called them “coin-op” games. By the way, check out that Electronic Games link to see how Nintendo tried to avoid sexist language in games back in 1993. Hell, I feel bad for people who never got to play Raiders of the Lost Ark on an Atari 2600, or Infocom games on a Commodore 64, or marvel the first time they saw the parallax effect in Moon Patrol:
The gaming world is changing, and in my opinion for the better. We’ve got browser-based games like Kingdom of Loathing or Candybox2. We’ve got absurdist wonders like Progress Quest and games you play outside like Ingress. Playing Depression Quest was important for me, because I have friends who are deeply affected by depression. I can’t wait to see where gaming goes next–how about we make virtual and augmented reality work this time around! I hope that gaming can be even more welcoming to new ideas and experiences than it was when I was a kid. I also hope everyone can agree that doxxing and threats aren’t ever welcome.
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Sunday, November 23, 2014
Fostering open source services
Open source is really good at creating products. Almost any commercial software package or product like Word, Excel, Windows, or Photoshop has a great open source equivalent. However, open source has been less successful at creating services. Where’s the open source version of Google, or Facebook, or Twitter, or Gmail, or Craigslist?
You could sum it up with this drawing:
Now to be fair, the bottom-right box isn’t completely empty. There’s Wikipedia, which is a phenomenal service/website supported by donations. There’s Tor, where many companies and people volunteer to run relays and bridges. There’s BOINC, which is the open source software used by volunteers for SETI@home and Folding@home. There’s also OpenStreetMap, which is a wonderful resource.
But why aren’t there more open source services? Let’s run down some differences between products and services.
“One and done” vs. ongoing support
With open source products, it can take a lot of work to create something great like Linux or Firefox, but then everyone can download that product and use it immediately–there’s no extra cost for the producer or the consumer, other than maybe a bit of bandwidth for downloading.
Once a product is done, it’s often done–frozen until the next major update. A product might take a year or more to reach a milestone, but it can often be used for years after that. In contrast, services may change from week to week, which implies strong product leadership to determine priorities.
Abuse
If you download a copy of LibreOffice, you might write some unpleasant things or even hate speech, but that doesn’t hurt LibreOffice itself. However, if someone sets up a “free as in beer” translation API or geocoding API, you often see multiple levels of abuse. For example, some people might use a service so much that it overloads the service provider. Or people might scrape the translation API in an attempt to generate spammy text in lots of different languages. When you offer a product, potential abuse is usually less of an issue.
User Experience and Speed
Products don’t have to be perfect; often “free as in beer” is enough of a feature that someone will use GIMP as opposed to paying for Photoshop. But user experience and speed do matter, and commercial services have a strong incentive to nail both of those issues. It takes a ton of work to be fast, for example. Commercial services are often “free as in beer” as well as fast and pleasant to use.
Funding models
Thanks for staying with me so far, because I think this is the most important difference. I believe what might be missing is a good funding model for open source services. With a finished product, if you can find someone to donate bandwidth for downloading and maybe a simple website, you’re close to done. But with a service, there’s typically an ongoing cost involved with every API call. For something like web search, there can be a lot of processing work going on behind the scenes.
So what are the major funding models that might support an open source service? Right now, I can think of ads, occasional pledge drives, grants, subscriptions, or micropayments. From that list, my guess is that ads are the least appropriate. If ads are easily separated or can be blocked, then you might get a “free rider” problem where someone could take your service, remove all the ads, and offer it up as their free service. Personally I think advertising can be incredibly useful and responsive to a user’s needs, but some other individuals dislike ads. Ads can be the foundation of a freemium or hybrid approach; for example, I think Automattic offers free blogging on WordPress.com and funds itself partly through ads.
Regarding pledge drives, Wikipedia is a notable success, but it’s a lot of work on both the producer side and the user side, much like public radio (by the way, you can donate to Wikipedia here). Grants can work well, but grants tend to end after a few years, so they aren’t a complete solution to sustainability.
That leads me toward subscriptions or micropayments. I’m excited to see some movement in this area. Patreon lets you support your favorite creators and does at least a couple smart things. First, they only take 5% of donations. That puts them in the “doing it for the love” category. Patreon can be beloved while still making some money ($1M in donations each month * 5% cut * 12 months means >$600K/year). Second, they attempt to minimize payment fees by charging only once a month for all the people you support. So if you’re supporting four creators, then the credit card charges are split four ways. The first move is brilliant, and the second is very smart.
Bitcoin is another possibility for micropayments, although it’s still early days for that. I’m also excited to see Google Contributor launch. The idea is that a user contributes a certain donation each month. As the user surfs around a participating site, they don’t see ads on that site, but the site still gets paid from the user’s contribution.
Ultimately, I don’t know how to foster more open source services. I just know that I want them. In the same way that Firefox pushed Internet Explorer to improve or Apache pushed IIS, I personally would like having an open source search engine to push Google as well. Wikia Search was an attempt at that, but it didn’t get much traction.
Maybe the answer isn’t funding. In a recent talk, Melody Kramer floated the idea that people could support public radio in *tons* of different ways like volunteering their time or experience, not just with money. Maybe we need better ways for companies or regular people to volunteer their CPU, storage, or bandwidth. If we all kicked in 10% of our free disk space, could we come up with open source versions of Dropbox, Box, or Google Drive?
So I don’t have the answer. I just think it’s an interesting and perhaps an important problem. Do you agree? How would you foster more open source services?
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Powerful USB chargers
If you’re a geek like me, there’s probably a bank or cluster of micro USB chargers somewhere in your house for recharging phones, tablets, Kindles, headphones, etc. Lately I’ve been playing with a couple USB chargers that I really like.
One is a USB charger with 3.5 amp (!) output. Just for context, a typical micro USB charger might be one amp. So this adapter has the potential to charge USB devices much faster than a conventional charger.
The other USB charger is 4A, but with dual micro USB plugs. So each micro USB plug puts out 2 amps–which is still quite a lot. I especially like this charger because it only takes one power outlet, but provides two very capable outputs.
If you haven’t levelled up your USB chargers recently, it might be time to take a fresh look. Or this could be a good gift or stocking stuffer for any geeks on your holiday shopping list.
Come to think of it, what other geek gifts would you recommend?
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Friday, November 21, 2014
Improving your account security
Every year or so, it’s worthwhile doing an audit of your online security. The most important accounts to protect are your bank accounts and your email accounts. Here are some things to consider doing:
– Choose strong passwords. Just as important: don’t re-use the same password across web services.
– Add two-factor authentication to your important accounts. Certainly your Gmail account, but also your Twitter account, domain registrar, etc.
– Put a PIN or unlock code on whichever phone has Google Authenticator or would receive two-factor SMS texts. Consider enrolling your phone in Find my iPhone or Android Device Manager.
– Let’s get specific on your Gmail/Google account now. Click into your account’s security settings. For Google, print out backup codes for your 2-step verification and put them somewhere safe. Add a recovery email account and phone number to your account. Check to make sure that everything looks locked down tight, e.g. no app passwords that you don’t remember.
– Make sure you put a PIN on your phone number or cell phone voicemail. Why? If Google or another service leaves a recovery code in your voicemail, you don’t want hackers to access your voicemail easily by spoofing caller ID.
– In Gmail, check for any unexplained filters or forwarding rules where a hacker could be forwarding your email to a different email address.
Advanced techniques
If you’re a CEO, high-profile individual, or at much greater risk of being hacked, consider these additional steps:
– If you already enabled two-factor authentication, consider getting a Security Key. Why? Because a Security Key should stop almost all phishing, even extremely targeted “spearfishing.” Security Keys are still new, but the protection they provide against phishing is extremely good.
– You might actually want to remove your phone number from Google or other account recovery systems. Why? Humans and customer service are usually the weakest link in a security system. Hackers may use social engineering to convince your cell phone provider to add a forwarding number, then attempt to hack your account by sending a recovery code to your phone number and listening on new/additional number.
To be clear, the vast majority of users will be more protected by adding a recovery phone number to their account. I would only remove the recovery phone number if 1) you are tech-savvy and 2) you believe that someone is likely to attempt to hack or stalk you.
Those are my major tips. What am I forgetting, or what advice would you give to protect your online accounts?
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Thursday, November 20, 2014
Open Access
When I was in grad school in the late 90s, not very much scholarly work was on the web. I had to walk over to the campus library to access scholarly papers, and sometimes make photocopies of the physical papers I wanted.
Things have gotten better, but it’s still harder to do research than it needs to be. One potential improvement is called Open Access. Open Access is about making peer-reviewed papers available online where more people can benefit from them.
This topic has a lot of details and nuances that I’m going to skip over. Suffice it to say that I support Open Access strongly. Across the nation, the Open Access movement has been gaining momentum across the nation as well.
Two tidbits crossed my radar screen this week. The first was a piece by Alexander L. Wolf, president of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). In that piece, Wolf states “there is a sense among a portion of our community that we have still not done enough” regarding Open Access. To which I say: damn straight.
The ACM is an organization that has and should be focused on the future. I remember the first time I got to touch and play with a Macintosh computer. It was at a college ACM event and I was only twelve years old at the time. I still remember the sneaker demo. The fact that the ACM has not done more to embrace the future and to encourage wider dissemination of research through Open Access is shameful.
Luckily, a piece of much bigger–and happier–news about Open Access also emerged this week. The Gates Foundation announced that they will support a strong Open Access policy.
Under the new policy, the Gates Foundation will pay for publication costs, but after a two-year transition period, the papers must be accessible immediately upon publication. The underlying data must also be open and accessible. This is critical to help other researchers verify results.
So while the ACM continues to drag its heels, the Gates Foundation has made a big move to encourage Open Access. That should make it faster and easier to build on important research in order to make the world a better place.
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Wednesday, November 19, 2014
Some thoughts on XOXO
The week before XOXO, a festival dedicated to independent artists and creators, I was in Juneau, Alaska for a cruise with my wife and my parents. I got off the ship with my Dad and we walked around town. We kept walking, past the touristy stores selling smoked salmon and tanzanite. We walked for a long time, and right when we were about to turn around, I saw a small gallery/comic store called Alaska Robotics. The door had a sticker that said “We accept Bitcoin!” I thought “these are my people” and we walked in the store.
Have you ever had a dream where you walked into a software store, and they have every game and piece of software you ever wanted, and everything costs $3.99? Legacy of the Ancients, Below the Root, The Bard’s Tale, and everything else–just $3.99. I had that dream sometimes when I was a kid. It was one of my favorite dreams.
Walking into Alaska Robotics was kind of like that. It’s a collective of different artists, but you could see their love in the curation–less superhero stuff, more stuff like Watchmen, a graphic novel about Richard Feynman, and Penny Arcade books. I bought several things, including a cool dinosaur shirt because it’s not hard to get me to do dinosaur impressions.
I didn’t know what to expect at XOXO. I’ve been to one artists’ conference where I didn’t know anyone and I felt pretty awkward a lot of the time. So when I flew up to Portland for XOXO a week later, I thought to myself “Okay, worst case I have a fun T-shirt to wear that no one else has probably seen.” Sometimes a good T-shirt can feel like a protective shield.
Spoiler alert: everyone at XOXO was superfriendly, working on interesting things, and just happy to talk. It felt like Andy Baio and Andy McMillan curated the XOXO experience as carefully as the group of artists up in Alaska curated their gallery. Even the conference volunteers were nice–I spent an entire break talking with a volunteer and Nelson Minar about business models for sustaining open source services (not just code, but web services). Or you’d be in line talking to someone and realize “Oh right, he’s the guy that does usesthis.com!”
I have a joke that I never turned into a blog post about how few people actually create things on the internet. Like you’ll stumble across a version of the U.S. tax code online for some reason, and then you realize that the guy who did that is named John Walker and he also founded AutoDesk. Or when you find out that the guy that built Upcoming also served as the CTO of Kickstarter back in the day.
So XOXO was a creator-rich environment. People were friendly enough that you could walk up to someone and say hello on the assumption that they’d enjoy talking. And if you dug a little bit, they were usually trying something different, weird, or fun, like biking across Oregon the following week.
One night, I was playing a 10-player (!!) indie video arcade game called Killer Queen and one of the people on my team said “Hey, nice shirt.” I was wearing my Rawr! dinosaur shirt that I’d bought up in Alaska the week before. And I said “Thanks!” and then a couple minutes later I looked at his badge, and it said “Patrick Race.” Hmm. That’s one of the people that does Alaska Robotics. And then it clicked–I’m playing a video game with the artist who drew the dinosaur. On the shirt. That I’m wearing.
It was just an awesome, bizarre moment. Like when you say you’re from Kentucky, and they say “Oh, do you know Drew?” And you say “Okay, not everyone in Kentucky knows everyone else, you know.” But it’s still kind of funny, so you play along and ask Drew’s last name. And then they’re like “Uh, I think his name is Drew Curtis, maybe?” And you’re like “whoa, Drew Curtis from Fark? Strangely enough, I do know Drew!” So there were a few moments like that at XOXO. I think it goes back to my joke/non-blog-post about how few people on the internet actually create things.
If this were a conference write-up, I’d summarize the talks. Screw that. Go watch them yourselves–XOXO is posting the videos of the talks on the web. I think you’ll enjoy them.
But I will share a few things that stuck in my mind from the talks. One is Kevin Kelly’s talk:
The whole talk is worth watching, but I especially enjoyed some things he said about halfway through the talk.
Kelly said this:
“One [type of success] is not better than the other. We think of evolution as a ladder but it’s really kind of a radial explosion, and so every single species alive today is equally evolved and is equally successful. They’re all successful. The dandelion and the cockroach are as successful as the bird of paradise, if they’re surviving. So what I’m suggesting is that all these different three million species that we have catalogued on Earth already, are all figuring out and all have their own definition of success.”
Kelly drew a parallel to the “Cambrian explosion” of technology and all the different types of success that enabled. Rather than imitating someone else’s success, technology enables new types of success that are measured in different ways. For example, the “fast growth” model of a startup is just one kind of success. Kelly talked about being liked (broad but shallow popularity) vs. being loved (deep but narrower engagement). Or things that succeed on the axis of longevity. Kelly also talked about how if you can find 1,000 true fans willing to pay $100 for your work, that’s $100,000, which is pretty darn good.
Kelly concluded by asking the audience “What do you want to optimize?” In other words, given that everyone can have a different opinion of what success looks like, what does success look like for you? Kelly said that what he was trying optimize in his own life was “opportunities to learn and time to make cool and useless stuff.”
It was a great talk. I highly recommend that you watch the whole thing, or at least the second half. Kelly’s points echoed Socrates for me: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Because if you don’t have a clear idea of what you want to do (and that’s something only you can decide for yourself), how do you know how you’re doing?
I also especially enjoyed talks by Gina Trapani, Hank Green, and Darius Kazemi, along with many others. Really, there were just a ton of great talks.
My main takeaway though was that XOXO an interesting group of people trying to create awesome things and help each other out. The XOXO conference also brushed up against GamerGate, but I’ll save thoughts about that for a future blog post.
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