Paul Lindner

*Needed: Tap Counter Job Ladder*

[Posting since most people had not heard of this...]

_"Thank you. What do you do here?" He said, "I'm a tap counter." I'm like, "You're a what?" He goes, "Well Jeff Hawkins, the CEO, says, 'If any task on the Palm Pilot takes more than three taps of the stylus, it's too long, and it has to be redesigned.' So I'm the tap counter."_

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

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Achievement unlocked. Google Now tells me about my own posts on my own site.

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No, please no. Treating omnipresent surveillance as normal at an early impressionable age feels like a step too far.

As such, there are some cringe-worthy quotes in this one...

"custom built AI with baby-centric features"

_"Aristotle was specifically designed to grow up with a child"_ -- [does anyone seriously believe that someone will be running this device 10 years from now?]

_"E-commerce functionality tied directly to key retail partners will enable Aristotle to automatically reorder or look for deals and coupons on baby consumables, formula and other baby products when it detects you are likely running low on the specific item."_

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mattels-nabi-brand-introduces-first-ever-connected-kids-room...

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“Digital objects last forever—or five years, whichever comes first."

You owe it to yourself to read "Through A Glass, Darkly: Technical, Policy, and Financial Actions to Avert the Coming Digital Dark Ages"  Saving the bits isn't enough.

A Christmas message from Björk.

Wishing everyone the curiosity, surreality and poetry of the season.

original: http://www.1500wordmtu.com/2016/a-christmas-message-from-bj%C3%B6rk

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Looks like I'm the latest to suffer from the 6p rapid battery drain hardware defect... :(

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Sad that they didn't call it G-Love and Special Sauce

https://sites.google.com/a/google.com/deepcompatibility/home

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Still riding the blindfolded roller coaster with my wife and her metastatic breast cancer. We got a good 18 months from the 1st treatment. Fingers crossed that this new wonder drug will be even better.

I had a whole rant queued up about cancer drugs, Google's specialty pharmacy and Pfizer pricing Ibrance at 0k/month. Alas, MacOS+Chrome ate it.

Instead you can read this article and understand how we end up with ridiculous 80 monthly ransom payments copays. (Seriously life-and-death isn't subject to price elasticity of demand!)

http://www.fiercepharma.com/sales-and-marketing/pfizer-s-ibrance-pricing-shows-multiyear-market-anal...

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Subject: Greetings from Dropbox; Yes, I'm working on a weeknight :)

Hi Paul,

They say, "The early bird gets the worm," well this early worm would really enjoy a conversation about your skills, goals, and interest. To be brief, you have an excellent educational and technical background and I'd enjoy the opportunity to discuss your expertise a bit further (Not tonight of course).

....

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This looks a lot like https://getvau.lt/

So good.

http://www.gifcities.org/?q=google

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Vint Cerf speaks today at noon! Via VC or in MTV-1950

_We create digital content in enormous and growing quantities every day. Much of this content requires software to be displayed (images, videos) or manipulated (e.g. spreadsheets and text documents) or executed (e.g. video games). In some cases, specific operating systems and hardware are needed for support. We face a challenge to preserve digital content over periods of hundreds or years because the software and associated hardware may no longer exist. There are legal issues associated with copyright of content and licensing of software as well as business models that must somehow be sustained for long periods of time. This talk will outline some of the challenges and possible solutions._

https://liveplayer.googleplex.com/view/2016-10-27-43705620-31

Location: MTV-1950-1-Bodega Bay Tech Talk

Reserved VC rooms:

RES-EXPL-10-Mount Rogers
NYC-9TH-15A239-Raft of Otters
DUB-1GC-4-Fangorn
This talk will be recorded

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Yeah, I was there... Back in May of 2006 Typepad, LiveJournal and TuCows got taken down by a massive (at the time) DDoS.  I recall it was 2-4 GBps of reflective DNS traffic.  Scott Berinato covered it pretty well in the Wired article Attack of the Bots.

For the record we were able to get back up using Akamai DNS Hosting, MCI/UUNet DDoS mitigations, and a cleverly placed GRE tunnel.  Oh and a bunch of great Ops work from Lisa Phillips, Matt Peterson, Peter Wohlers and others.  I think I still have the commemorative t-shirt we did with TuCows.

And here we are 10 years later.  Same stuff, yet in many ways worse.

It's high time we get to fixing the underlying protocols and infrastructure to make these types of attacks a thing of the past.  It's time to Redecentralize.

 [Fancy graph from: Netcraft, Blue Security Shuts Down, Citing DDoS Attacks]

Would people be interested in attending a *Google Talk* about the *Long Now* projects 10,000 year clock[1] and Rosetta disk[2]? I'm in touch with their staff and they expressed interest and I'd like to know if it's worth my time to organize the event...

Also I recommend joining and attending their events. Lots of interesting people and viewpoints that you normally don't get inside the tech bubble. Plus it feels like you're a member of a secret society and their bar _The Interval_[3] serves up damn fine cocktails.

[1] http://longnow.org/clock/
[2] http://rosettaproject.org/
[3] http://theinterval.org/

http://longnow.org/about/

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Code Next Opens in Oakland, creating diversity through Constructionism

"From a design point of view it is a truly unique experience that very much leans on an educational theory known as constructionism. This codified curriculum will soon be available to the entire world as an open source."

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Reading this passage from Ready Player One¹ I was reminded of a major influence that I had all but forgotten:

It was a Friday night, and I was spending another solitary evening doing research, working my way through every episode of Whiz Kids , an early-’80s TV show about a teenage hacker who uses his computer skills to solve mysteries.  Ready Player One, Ernest Cline, Chapter 18.

So I was prepared when I was recently asked "What brought you here?" (in relation to technology). My answer? ... The Whiz Kids. I can directly trace my interest in online services to that white-hat hacking, war dialing, speech synthesizing, BASIC programming gang of kids².  I can only hope that today's teens have something as good or better.

Trying to find the video also made me realize that Youtube is providing a vital preservation service.  You see the Whiz Kids episodes were never released, not on DVD, not even on VHS. You won't find them in any library. Anywhere. But there it is, in 10 minutes chunks³, captured and uploaded off a grainy, noisy videotape recording.

Cultural Artifacts, preserved... for now.

1. RP1, soon to be a major motion picture from Steven Spielberg.
2. It was also probably the first time I ever heard about the NSA ("No one knows if they even exist")
3. Here's a full Full Playlist

Of course I couldn't have done it without the entire teams that wrote the code and these specific products:

Firefox Toolbars
Google Gadgets, iGoogle, and OpenSocial
Hotstuff
Google Buzz and the entire Focus Frontend
Chili
Tacotruck
Mercury
Kraken
... and Oz

And big shout outs to abandoned experiments, never completed features and my agent, Klippy.

https://deletestats.googleplex.com/plindner#1286694000..1474786800!cdd

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A reminder from Vint Cerf about the importance of digital preservation

It seems inescapable that our society will need to find its own formula for underwriting the cost of preserving knowledge in media that will have some permanence. - vinton cerf  - We're Going Backward

I've seen this firsthand. Albums from some lesser known bands I listened to in the 90s are not available in digital format. When the CDs finally bit rot the music will be gone forever unless someone rips and uploads them. Some content never made the jump from VHS, also at risk of loss when the tapes degrade.

Support the Internet Archive and other efforts if you value this. Also work towards a future self-archiving decentralized web where content can live beyond the data silos they currently occupy.

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