Federated social networking is relatable to dasher...

Seems like it might be interesting to provision following for new users.

_5. To improve the experience of brand new users, we’ve added something in the old tradition of MySpace Tom — except instead of following some central Tom, new accounts will start off following their local admins (this can be adjusted by the administrator). That way, on your first login you are greeted with a populated home timeline instead of an empty one._

https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-and-the-w3c-f75f376f422?gi=5de3cfdbd29f

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GoogleCloud asks: *What was the first program you wrote that you were proud of?*

_Please include what language it was written in and a brief description. Feel free to go out of bounds if you have a creative answer!_

My response:

At age 17 I was published in Compute!'s Gazette. The small utility, named ML Runner, is tool written in Commodore 64 Basic and 6502 Assembly. It converted machine language binaries into easy to use BASIC programs. The result was a better, easier way for users to execute code.

You can see the actual short code on page 98 in the June 1987 Issue here:
https://archive.org/details/1987-06-compute-magazine

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdTVpBafCZghSvaYi6sf8JRbncaOqh153gwtxJE00D0pCcB7g/viewform?...

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60 days isn't a long time for people with lots of data. I have a feeling it's going to take legislation to get companies to do the right thing here (and that includes us too, Google Drive notice is 60 days as well...)

Also facepalm on the earnest CEO video at:
https://www.crashplan.com/en-us/consumer/nextsteps/

https://twitter.com/crashplan/status/899995190852820994

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Amazing to think how far we've come from the 2003 iTunes launch.

... and they started out with only 200k tracks.

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The memo damage has been done and now we're left with the mess. Here are some ideas on how to make amends:

- Everyone ever interviewed by Damore is offered an onsite interview.
- Everyone peer-reviewed for promo is given an automatic appeal.
- Everyone peer-reviewed gets their previous calibrations revisited, and comp retroactively adjusted.

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_Just move on up_
_Toward your destination_
_Though you may find, from time to time, complication_

Complicated week eh? Just remember we have each other and when we work together we can make the world a better place!

And thanks to the brave souls that communicate wisdom. (especially since I've been a bit absent from these discussions)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Z66wVo7uNw

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So decided to finish "Kill all Normies" to get my head around "what hath the internet wrought" and how technology has affected society.

The book is a little shallow, especially if you were paying attention during gamergate. Read on if you want a sickening tour of the worst that's out there.

Given Techs great power I believe it behooves us to expand our concern to the outsized level of influence we have. We all built this platform. Behold. (Including what may be the weirdest set of recommended books from Play.)

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If you could save *one* digital object forever, what would it be? Leave it in the comments.

Oh and have we planned a DiRT test for nuclear war? I couldn't find our classified secret list of bunkers on moma.

And a pity that we never built that moon-based datacenter....

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tired: drone delivery
wired: missile delivery

If you look back you'll see the parallels between Google and the Postal Service....

http://99percentinvisible.org/article/firing-off-letters-u-s-postal-services-cold-war-missile-mail-p...

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Question for Jungle Gym -- how does it stack up against the Q&A feature in Groups? It seems that there's some overlap here that needs to be shaken loose. Maybe something for Daniel when he returns from his travels..

https://support.google.com/a/answer/126169?hl=en#__sid=md0

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#smalltownnews

Now if only I could go back in time and reshoot my high school photos...

_“We’ve had high school students take their senior pictures with it and we even had someone take wedding photographs in front of it,” Horn said. “A lot of people contact me through its Facebook page (The Tardis) for scheduled photo shoots. I built it to make people happy, so we don’t charge for photographs with it.”_

http://www.bloomingprairieonline.com/news/sci-fi-comes-kenyon

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I read that we were going to participate in Net Neutrality protests today. I loaded up google.com to see if we were doing a home page promo. I didn't see the logo load and thought that this was a very sublime way of calling attention to content blocking. So I waited for a spinner and call to action...

haha; no. Instead it was this super heavy doodle that took forever to load over GBUS wifi.

Ah well. Looks like we're sending an "email" to our "listserve" (itsthe90s.gif) of committed diehards, and posting a video playlist hidden somewhere on youtube (couldn't find it, can you?)

https://sites.google.com/a/google.com/moma-news/july-2017/ourparticipationinthenetneutralitydayofact...

https://www.battleforthenet.com/

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Some 10 dimensional trolling by LinkedIn...

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Paul here from the Superfund Squad, where we're getting rid of the infrastructure you love to hate and paying off unfunded mandates with technical debt. And digging up the History of Google's Social Efforts in the attached collection.

I've been cranking at this social thing for almost 7 years at Google on Google+ and a long time before that at places Six Apart (home of Typepad and Livejournal), hi5 and LinkedIn. I did a lot of work on OpenSocial and other standards back then which is a big reason I'm here today.

Oh and this enterprise thing isn't my first rodeo. Way back at Critical Path we provided hosted email, calendar and tasks for Italian Telecoms, Major Universities *and* the Kiss Army. And at Red Hat we sold shrink wrap and services to all sales channels.

But I'm most proud of the work I did at the UN on telecom standards, relief efforts and publishing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 500 languages. (And the site is still standing to this day!)

http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/SearchByLang.aspx

And finally before that was the Internet Gopher.. Me, with Heavy Metal hair:

https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-gopher-protocol

Beyond all this tech I enjoy life in Oakland with my fabulous wife Julie and our Great Pyrenees Gus. You'll find us exploring the parks of the East Bay, checking out obscure music or cruising the rapidly gentrifying Valencia street in the Mission. I'm also heavily interested in building software and systems that last the long term. I'm a member of the Long Now (https://longnow.org) and I have a 20% project called Digital Vellum (http://go/digitalvellum)

Happy to be here with y'all and looking forward to our next adventures!

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A reminder that +1s *for web sites* are going away. You *can* export them to other places. I chose to move mine to Pinboard. One nice thing Pinboard does is archive the pages you bookmark, so now the content I +1'd is more stable long term.

In the process I found and fixed a bug where the timestamps on the plusones takeout export were wrong. It was broken for about 5 years and no one noticed :(

If you want a proper export file you can use https://ac-autopush-takeout.corp.google.com/settings/takeout for now. Prod push should be sometime this week...

https://pinboard.in/u:lindner/t:plusones/

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Never send a bill collector to do a recruiters job...

_Paul,_

_I wanted to follow up on two emails I sent over the past couple months, this will be my final attempt to connect in the best interest of our time. I came across your background and wanted to see if you'd be open to confidentially explore opportunities at Uber._

_Best,_
_Daniel_
_Director, Payments_

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So I hear that body slam GIFs are all the rage now. Of course back in 2011...

Many more cringe-worthy things here:

https://zahidlilani.com/2011/07/19/hilarious-google-plus-gif-animations/

https://plus.google.com/photos/107786897865850743842/albums/6438194510653877985/6438194508238025506?...

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SVL-MP5 has a stack of hardware in the lobby. Scary how many of these I've racked...

PowerEdge 2850, 2950
Sun Ultra 1, T1000,
Sun Storage Array
HP DL360, Procurve
Dell Powerconnect

Yikes!

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Something to keep in mind: fingerprints can be ephemeral too..

Latest _Healthy Stuff_ update: Julie only got 6 months off Pfizer's 0k/month wonder drug before progression. So we'll see if Xeloda will work next. Crazy side effects though.

Luckily there's a half dozen other treatments available and more coming.

As always props to my supportive coworkers and to our flexibility policies that make it possible to balance caregiver obligations with work obligations. And if anyone finds themselves in a similar situation I'm here for you too.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/05/28/cancer.fingerprints/index.html

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I have a mechanism that has enough crypto-theater to make me happier than just drawing numbers out of a hat and having someone pinky-swear that the process is legit
.

It uses a Random Beacon to seed a random number generator, which then chooses 5 winners from the 73 entrants. It's a silly perl script (might rewrite it in go if I
have time...)

https://plindner.users.x20web.corp.google.com/www/survey-drawing/README

------------------------------------------------

5 winners will be chosen on June 15th at noon Pacific Standard Time.

Read on to find out how winners will be chosen.

- Each of the 73 entrants is given a 'lot number', which is emailed to them.
- The file lot_to_username.txt maps the number to a hashed version of your username.
- You can verify that your lot is listed correctly. For example:

# Verify if your lot number is 12
sudo apt-get install apache2-tools
htpasswd -v -b /google/data/rw/users/pl/plindner/www/survey-drawing 12 lindner

- The http://winners.pl script chooses 5 random winners with a random seed.
- The random seed will be generated by the NIST random beacon on June 15th Noon Pacific Standard time. Results will be visible here:

https://beacon.nist.gov/rest/record/1497553200

- The seed value will be written to seed.xml at that point and winners will be
chosen!

TECHNICAL DETAILS FOLLOW

- The original names are stored one username-per-line in names.txt
- The lot_to_username.txt file containing bcrypt hashed usernames was generated using this command:

cat -n /tmp/names.txt | xargs -n 2 htpasswd -b -B -C 20 ~/contest.file

- Note that you could brute-force the usernames with moderate compute capacity. Please be polite and don't do that.

TAMPER VERIFICATION

You can verify that the usernames, script, and contest draw date have not been modified by verifying the PGP signature of the date and sums.

You can verify this message by using keybase https://keybase.io/lindner or looking up my PGP key lindner@inuus.com

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

sha256sum lot_to_username.txt http://winners.pl

6a86aadf90310cb83b2cadcf820d3b3a0ea0bfbd175822ebcfb44a55a1fc1e0f lot_to_username.txt
bf45ed9e504d51934261610bf69153c0f0646dfbe0b58c1fe044803a90dd3ff3 http://winners.pl

Contest Seed: https://beacon.nist.gov/rest/record/1497553200
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

wkYEAREIABAFAllBLkYJEPhZKFJz9YBUAADv9gCgkHEiWKjs7RlfM3G5U4NsYNmK
rqUAoBpiZrhGAy/SMPUqzX+Wl/6AuQdD
=XjMK
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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"Heirloom" [1] - you keep using that word, I don't think you know what that means.

The sad thing is these folks are pivoting to an Alexa Task product. It tries to create a spoken story based on a set of photographs. Least compelling product ever...

At some point we're going to need to find a way to allow people to use new products without losing data.

[1] http://www.heirloom.net

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I spend the weekends pruning tabs..

There must be a better way.

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Okay, I have 72 submissions to my photo backup survey. And I promised prizes, so I need to give out prizes. But you shouldn't trust me since I might be evil. Of course I'd like to preserve the privacy of individuals, yet allow anyone to verify that I didn't give someone a prize. Help!

Some things I've thought of:
- Create 1-72 buckets.
- Use the NIST random beacon to pick random bits at a specified, agreed upon time in the future. https://beacon.nist.gov/home
- Use reservoir sampling to use those random bits to pick 5 items from the 72 total. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservoir_sampling

Now the question is can we mask the participants in the survey yet have everyone know with accuracy that the above is on the up-and-up.

- I could just publish a signed document with the number->ldap mappings, but that reveals everyone who participated.
- I could send each participant their participant number. However then how would anyone know that I had awarded the prizes?

Might need to read up on secure election protocols to make this happen.

Suggestions welcome!

https://beacon.nist.gov/home

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I didn't find my sound search within Google Play Music, but it appears that my 91 year old future self is still using GPM..

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Good news: Monoliths can be eliminated. Bad news: it took over 10 years...

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Digital Vellum is working on a project to help people store Photos for 100+ years.

That means I'm thinking about how to build a long-term, stable, resilient systems and business. I'd also love to see this applied to Google so it too can be a very very long term entity.

So I'm not an expert in this area but it seems that there are some ways that we can focus the business on long term value. Some are structural, others based on rethinking existing systems. I'm not an economist or an MBA by any stretch, but here goes:

- Sell annuities that pay out in storage/access "dividends" spread out over a long time.
- Create a wholly owned Mutual Society to manage storage and serving. Google can then become a Lloyds of London-stye "Name". [This entity could sell long-term/perpetual bonds that also have storage dividends]
- Create a customer-owned collective to manage long-term assets. Think of it as "Vanguard for Storage".
- We already store Photos for iPhone users, why not have each company back each other up and come up with coordinated storage systems with rights of survivorship.
- For the crytpocurrency angle use something like Streem (http://steem.io) or Storj (http://storj.io) Allow anyone to participate in a long-term storage system. This might be more adaptable.

And also remember to take our Photo Preservation Survey if you haven't already:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfBR7omZ1SDgpgO05W4UD70cITmBk6zqS1xvxyU1t-rtV0Vkg/viewform?...

https://www.ted.com/talks/martin_reeves_how_to_build_a_business_that_lasts_100_years#talk

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We have what, three or more internal Kanban tools? go/kanban, go/plananizer, and now go/scrumboard

None of them really do everything I want.. Trello or Jira+Grasshopper both worked better in the past, and I'm sure they're even better now.

I wish we could merge all three internal projects and then add the UI from this simple opensource sandstorm app WeKan.

https://wekan.github.io/

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