jitendranp - Tumblr blog

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#painting #programmer

“Sysadmin grants sudo privileges to developer on production web server” - Andrea del Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci, 1425-1475, Oil on wood

(collaboration from Joseph )

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Why We Support Apple

By Ron Bell, General Counsel

Today Yahoo joins Apple and many others across the technology industry and the security community to argue against the U.S. government’s efforts to conscript a company’s own engineers to undermine its products’ data security features.

Let’s be clear about what’s at stake.

This case isn’t simply about letting the FBI pick the lock to a dead terrorist’s phone. It’s about whether governments can conscript private companies to disable security features built into their devices. Should the U.S. government prevail in its arguments, the All Writs Act—a statute enacted 50 years before the telegraph—could be used to compel companies to write code to defeat their own security protocols. Once courts open that door, as FBI Director James Comey said just days ago, the case would become “potentially precedential.” More is at stake than a single iPhone.

Although we deeply respect the important role that law enforcement agencies play in protecting the public, such agencies already have access to important information to help them advance their investigations. Existing laws allow agencies to compel companies to respond to lawful data requests—as Apple already did in this case. But the FBI cannot secure through the courts a compulsory power never granted by Congress. It cannot read unprecedented new authority into an 18th century statute to compel 21st century companies to act in ways that undermine user security.

We felt shock and fury at the slaughter of innocent Americans by the user of the iPhone in question during a terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California. We mourned the loss of life and recognize the need for governments to protect their citizens. Yahoo’s commitment to security compels us to both thoughtfully respond to lawful requests, and to build products that create a more secure user experience.

Yahoo has a long history of objecting to government conduct that we believe undermines users’ interests: Our company challenged the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) from 2007 - 2008 in response to a request we viewed as unconstitutional and overbroad. We became the first major tech company to launch a Business and Human Rights Program to protect and promote freedom of speech online. We co-founded Reform Government Surveillance, a coalition dedicated to ensuring that government law enforcement and intelligence efforts are rule-bound, narrowly tailored, transparent, and subject to oversight. And we fought in court for the right to publish a semi-annual transparency report to share which governments request data from us, and how we respond. 

Our interest in this case is clear. More than 1 billion users entrust their personal information to Yahoo. We have built these relationships over our more than 20 years in the business, and the security of our users’ information is of paramount importance to them and to  our company. This case will set critical precedents, and we’ll continue to lend our voice to the debate.

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Yahoo Stands By Nepal: Stand With Us

By Olivia Khalili, Director, Yahoo For Good

The people of Nepal are coming to grips with their new reality following the deadliest earthquake their country has seen in more than 80 years this past Saturday.

Yahoo stands by the people of Nepal. We ask that you join us in helping to ensure the Nepalese have the vital assistance they need right now.

When you visit our homepage, you’ll see a link: “Nepal Quake: How to Help.” Click on this link to help us raise critical funds, which aid organizations will deliver in the form of assistance to the Nepalese people.

The American Red Cross, International Medical Corps, UNICEF, Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam and Save the Children are helping to lead search and rescue missions, providing blood supplies and delivering life-saving aid. Your gift will enable these aid organizations to help people recover from this disaster.

Thank you for joining us in this critical effort to stand by the people of Nepal.

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One of my pet theories about why I could never actually produce anything of brilliance was that I was cursed with a comfortable existence. What might have been my creative prime was spent in New York City in the 1990s, a flush time for the young and college-educated. Magazine-editor jobs paid O.K. and were relatively easy to get, especially compared with now. Maybe I would’ve been better off in the 1970s, when a young person with ambitions like mine had to take a hard job as a means to his artistic ends. Would such sacrifice, I wondered, have sharpened my desire to make it as a writer? Ideas, in a sense, are overrated. Of course, you need good ones, but at this point in our supersaturated culture, precious few are so novel that nobody else has ever thought of them before. It’s really about where you take the idea, and how committed you are to solving the endless problems that come up in the execution.

Be Wrong as Fast as You Can (via vivekhaldar)

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Complex regexp worked exactly as expected

Submitted by Leprosy

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Calculus nerd dance moves! (via freddiebenjamin )

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IT'S CALLED MINDSET

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Gtk+ 3.0 applications in a browser!

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“The difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships”

Linus Torvalds (http://lwn.net/Articles/193245/)

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Recent scholarship suggests that good teachers, even kindergarten teachers, increase their students’ earnings many years later. Eric A. Hanushek of Stanford University found that an excellent teacher (one a standard deviation better than average, or better than 84 percent of teachers) raises each student’s lifetime earnings by $20,000. If there are 20 students in the class, that is an extra $400,000 generated, compared with a teacher who is merely average.

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For what it's worth: it's never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There's no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.

Benjamin Button

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This may be the best resume I have ever seen

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A Programmer's protest in Egypt (via @nepaleeidiot)

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From a bit to a few hundred megabytes, from a microsecond to a half an hour of computing confronts us with completely baffling ratio of 10⁹! The programmer is in the unique position that his is the only discipline and profession in which such a gigantic ratio, which totally baffles our imagination, has to be bridged by a single technology. He has to be able to think in terms of conceptual hierarchies that are much deeper than a single mind ever needed to face before.

E.W. Dijkstra (via fooyeahcode)

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“Intellectual workers don’t need academic freedom to service the status quo, which is what they’ve been hired to do, but they do need academic freedom to do what they should be doing, which is questioning what they’ve been hired to do and working instead in the public interest. If salaried intellectual workers want to make a difference in the world, if they want to make the world a better place, then they have to do things beyond the service work that they’ve been hired to do. That’s what activists do: things that they weren’t hired to do.”

Jeff Schmidt on Academic Freedom | Keyvan Minoukadeh (via ushaft)

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Big O

(via fuckyeahcomputerscience)