It's more like owning almost every cafe in the world, having billions of unique customers per month, and trying to prevent the mob from meeting at any of your locations.
It's not just that they're letting the mob meet (which I agree is tricky to control) it's sending out flyers advertising that the angry mob is meeting and inviting people to come on down and join in.
So if I spend $250 on UberX rides I get $5 in credit? Hmm, that's going to be a pass on my end. In my city a local taxi company created an app similar to Uber, and it's typically 10% cheaper. Most people I know switched over to it, because it only takes a few seconds to do so. I'll take that 10% over 2% in Uber credit.
Also, isn't it already determined that Uber offers higher prices to frequent travelers, and people that take the same route on a regular basis? So, if I spend $250 on UberX, they probably added more than $5 in there because I'm a regular traveler. Now, they're just pretending to be a hero by returning some credit. If they had flat $10 trips in my downtown, and I would get a free trip after 10 rides, then it would make more sense. As of now, I don't trust them at all to provide equal pricing for different users, so I don't trust their entire concept of a loyalty program.
What about going back to the notebook idea? You give them a notebook that's called 'Passwords' and it sits on the desk beside their computer. They only write passwords in that notebook, and you can explain to them to write at least 20 random numbers and letters for new passwords.
When you visit, you can write those passwords down in your password manager. This way if the book goes missing or there is a disaster, you have a backup.
They lose the entire notebook. The thing is, they only need login credentials a couple of times a year or so. Things like social media and email are apps that are logged in all the time so they only need to reauthenticate when something is wrong or when a special event happens (like buying a new phone). So that only leaves a thousand different boring things that they only rarely access, like the government ID, the utility company account, the insurance company account, etc. So every time they have no idea where that particular notebook is among their tens of other notebooks, pieces of papers etc.
It seems like almost everything Google related is sluggish. The new Google AdSense, the new Google Analytics, the new Google DoubleClick for Publishers, and to a lesser extent, the new Google Maps. These are all products I use that perform worse now (on modern hardware) compared to a decade ago. I really don't understand how this happens. Does no one at Google notice some of these services literally taking 10 seconds to load simple pages?
They have invested so many billions in their pipeline and committed so much head space that it's incredibly difficult to change their tech stack to improve performance. Users suffer because of poor performance but at least management can brag about compliance, code reuse, being able to quickly push out production code, etc.
Users suffer because of poor performance but at least management can brag about compliance, code reuse, being able to quickly push out production code, etc.
I've seen this type of behaviour become more prevalent especially within the last 5 years or so, and it's just as irritating to me --- especially when resolving user-complaints take a backseat to improving whatever useless metric-of-the-week the management have thought of.
It doesn't have to be "the customer is always right", but I've found that companies are increasingly becoming more deliberately ignorant of user's concerns and instead focusing on furthering their own agenda.
> I've seen this type of behaviour become more prevalent especially within the last 5 years or so
It's much older, but previously you'd see it more in the desktop space.
As for the server, an interesting thing happened: the proprietary software used to follow similar trend (I'm talking to you, big fat database vendors), with some open-source projects behaving the same. But people are not stupid: you realize you win by serving your clients fast and that very often speed is more important than functionality. Hence the success of projects like Nginx or Redis.
I would believe it's a tech stack limitation a bit more if every web app they've launched in the last 5 years wasn't built on a totally different JS/CSS stack. Several use Polymer, but all very different versions of it. And Polymer is objectively bad if you care about non-Chrome usability at all.
They claim their site is for the above, and people can submit a notice to have content removed that doesn't fit that description. However, the reality is they want people to post and share content from other sites, and they'll happily remove their advertising, and add their own.
I searched site:outline.com on Google, because I wanted to see for myself what people are sharing, and if I might be mistaken. The first result was this article...
The source is The Free Thought Project. Hmm, I thought maybe this is some type of public domain news source, so I visit them. Nope, they're not. When I visited The Free Thought Project, I instantly get a popup saying, "Thanks to a coordinated attack on independent media by the establishment, this website is at risk of shutting down due to our ads being pulled and our social media pages entirely deleted. We need your help to survive, click below to see how you can make sure we stay around." This is the first Google result for an Outline article, and the company being stolen from has a popup that literally says they're struggling to stay afloat.
I haven't previously heard of Outline, but that is definitely a disgusting business model.
I wouldn't have a trust issue assuming there is a rating system. If people are getting sick from someone's kitchen, they're going to leave a bad review.
Think about taxi drivers compared to Uber drivers. Uber drivers know a few bad ratings can be detrimental to their income, so they typically try to put their best foot forward. They push hard for perfect reviews, offer bottles of water, try to be extra considerate with the choice of music, air temperature, etc. Taxi drivers don't have the same incentives. They're not going to be fired if a few passengers feel it's too cold in their car.
I imagine the same would apply to home chefs. They know one batch of food that gets customers sick could leave them out of work, and cost them their entire reputation. A few bad ratings and they're dropping down the recommendation list and watching 80% of their business disappear. I could see home chefs trying to go above and beyond like Uber drivers to secure better reviews. Did you order 6 cookies? Well, they're going to give you 7, and a little note that says thanks, here's a free cookie just for you.
It could actually be a great business for more elderly people. We all love our grandmother's specialties, right? Imagine a grandparent that could prepare big lasagnas, soups, and chilis at home, and a driver could come pick up portions to deliver to people around the neighborhood. Feel like takeout tonight? Instead of Dominos, you can see Ruth down the street prepared homemade cabbage rolls that you can get delivered. I wouldn't mind supporting that type of business.
> I wouldn't have a trust issue assuming there is a rating system.
That was the original free-market rationale for not having food or medical regulation at all: reputation will take care of it!
Unfortunately, unsafely prepared food can literally kill you. So the country wised up and requires food safety certification.
Ratings are great for pushing up average quality. They're a non-starter when it comes to guaranteeing minimum quality, i.e. the product won't make you sick or kill you.
Honestly, I don't trust someone's grandmother who thinks it's fine to cut the cooked chicken with the knife she used when it was raw, because she was never certified in a food safety course, even if it only happens 1% of the time. It's not fair to make people get sick so enough of them leave 1-star reviews.
Because again, there's a world of difference between an Uber driver who doesn't know the route (minor inconvenience), and food that makes me ill for days.
We allow strangers that haven't had their driving or eyes tested in 50 years drive us down the highway (Uber). We allow strangers to operate hotels out of their homes (Airbnb). However, we can't allow a stranger to cook us a chicken breast or prepare a soup?
There isn't a world of a difference here. They all present minor dangers, and I'm willing to take the risk of buying a piece of lasagna from my neighbor.
Cash creates the same conflict of interest. If someone shows up at your door with a "free" wheelbarrow full of cash, you're going to feel like you owe them in return. This could be looking out for their business interests, or as you said, ensuring code compatibility. And, in the back of your mind you might consider that keeping them happy could lead to another wheelbarrow at your door.
It's not the same conflict of interest, but of a different class.
It's all about managing future expectations. Equity implies future profits being predicated on the success of the stock. And so current actions are influenced by future expectations.
A wheelbarrow of Free Cash Today does not imply anything about future expectations, unless you may be expecting another wheelbarrow in the future.
Still, it's common in practice for people to feel like they are indebted to their donors. But should you feel like you owe someone for them giving you something for free? Well, if so, then it wasn't free.
Agreed. For a service that is about security, it honestly leaves me feeling very vulnerable, and I wouldn't consider it for that reason. I'm concerned about my emails being delivered, increased spam, a thief (or government employee) walking out of my home with my email server, my modem needing a reboot while I'm on vacation and not being able to send or receive emails, and my neighbor accidentally burning down my apartment, taking my email with it.
I'm a Fastmail user and pretty happy with the service. But, what's the real world benefits of Helm over an encrypted email service, like ProtonMail?
Using a hardware root of trust, secure boot and a Secure Enclave for managing keys used for full disk encryption, it will be very difficult to extract decrypted data from a Helm server. The keys never leave the Secure Enclave, they aren't available to the application processor or memory.
Most cloud-based email services hold email in the clear - we believe this means you don't really own your data. Encrypted email services have challenges around search, access via proprietary protocols and the risks of running highly sensitive operations in client-side javascript.
I mean, sure? You can use encryption to get security and privacy features but "FDE" isn't it. FDE is more important for Helm but that's a problem of their own design: suddenly the e-mail is in a box in my kitchen and it's a lot easier to walk out with a box in my kitchen than it is to walk out with a drive from us-east-2a :-) For anything in the cloud it's a belt-and-suspenders/compliance thing.
How many people have access to drives in us-east-2a? Do you know? Can you verify?
Assuming the software works flawlessly (if it doesn't, it doesn't matter where it runs) you'll need RAM and storage access to recover the keys and the data. If you're in the cloud, you won't notice when insiders or state agencies take a peek. If the device is in your home, you can set it up so you notice.
> How many people have access to drives in us-east-2a? Do you know? Can you verify?
AWS, like every non-clownshoes provider, is transparent about the security controls on its datacenters. It has those verified by independent third parties and auditors (for relevant compliance standards). They have published whitepapers and compliance/audit reports, and continue to.
The odds that someone compromises a Helm update and the odds that someone walks out of us-east2a with a drive are not in the same ballpark.
To reiterate, because somehow I'm in the "FDE is an important threat model!" corner: it is not. Walking away with a Helm is not the easiest way to read e-mail on that thing, especially not for an organization capable of dragnet surveillance in general.
> The odds that someone compromises a Helm update and the odds that someone walks out of us-east2a with a drive are not in the same ballpark.
Sure, but why are you comparing a software compromise against physical access? There are attacks that work against cloud providers which don't work against Helm. If somebody can compromise a Helm update they essentially got root. And that is a step up from just read access to storage.
Here's how I see it: There is a provider that runs my mail infrastructure. They can either run it on AWS, or host it at my home. If the data is in my home I don't have to trust Amazon. I still have to trust my mail provider ultimately, but using AWS doesn't improve on that.
I'm curious about how you arrived at the conclusion that we are capable of dragnet surveillance. Connections to/from the Helm server use TLS end to end.
What if the object was already traveling in our rough direction and aliens decided to simply take advantage of the free ride? They tweaked the direction with a few thrusters to pass by Earth, and they left the rotation to help camouflage the object with its natural tumble through space. Finally, they deboarded the object when they reached their desired location nearest to Earth.
It's fun to speculate, but I'm sure the reality of the situation is far more boring.
Do the links ever expire? Or, if i get access to a single Facebook email belonging to someone, I can access their account for life, regardless of whether years have passed, and they changed their password?
