Mentioned in passing in a recent Practical Engineering video on tunnels. https://youtu.be/Ssw5bdx1HKw?si=DfOLWszK4erDPe3n

I wonder if there's a bet to be made on future 8K disclosures following quietly updated signing keys. A bet against F5 placed this morning would've only made 3.6%.

I think Shape Security qualifies for this list. They raised $100M before having a customer, seemed to die, quietly got adopted by a large pool of F50 companies, and exited to F5 for a $1B valuation. That’s a big chunk of change for a security play, especially back in 2019.

Their moat ended up being two fold. One, they were the only tech stack that could handle the scale needed back then. Two, they had a crazy culture of never letting adversaries win and would push daily updates to keep attackers off their customers. Both took a long time to iterate and build towards and nobody thought it was cool while they worked through it.

Same! Big shoutout to Dr Thuillier at UCSF. Really changed my life.

Rumor mill explanations range from flock of birds to Russian air defense systems. Pilots appeared to be trying very hard to safe it.

If you’re in San Francisco stop in at Derco. They’re underneath the Airbnb building.

Some of us prefer to enjoy sex as a beautiful act of human connection and condoms detract from being in the moment of joy.

This is like saying to someone killed in a motorcycle accident why didn’t you use a car. It’s a reductive, unempathetic and frankly unproductive take. Please think before asking this again.

I was concerned that the author might have been running into the Scunthorpe Problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem).

My last name contains a naughty substring. I feel for the author and their hyphen!

Or similarly a clbuttic mistake (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clbuttic).

That used to be a mbuttive problem.

I couldn't make changes to my USPS (United States Postal Service) account for years because it kept flagging my last name, "Cunnie", as an obscenity.

I used to have that problem but it has not been an issue since the early 2000s.

I ran into it about a year ago with Verizon. No Dickinsons allowed! Sadly the only FTTH around, so I had to have support give me permission to have my name.

I can vaguely imagine how someone would _think_ its a good idea (it's not, to be clear) on a website where users might see other users' names, something like CRM SaaS. I can't understand how anyone would think that validating users' real names on a purely customer-facing website is a good idea. Maybe frustrated customers (can't imagine why) have names like FuckVerizon on their account?

„ear“? „ar“?

I’m starting to think Bruno has been lying to us about being a bear all this time

It would be rather silly to assume all bears have the same last name "bear"! It's not as if people all walk around saying "Oh hi I'm Timothy Human" "Nice to meet you, I'm Rachel Human, are we related?"

Which, come to think of it, is kind of a funny notion, and a nice reminder that despite our differences we really are all related!

Schneier is wrong that "hey google" is always listening. Google does on-device processing with dedicated hardware for the wake-words and only then forwards audio upstream. Believe it or not, the privacy people at Google really do try to do the right things. They don't always succeed, but they did with our hardware and wake-word listening.

Am Google employee, not in hardware.

What he says is " Siri and Alexa and “Hey Google” are already always listening, the conversations just aren’t being saved yet". That's functionally what you describe. Hardware wake-word processing is a power saving feature, not a privacy enhancement. Some devices might not have enough resources to forward or store all the audio, but audio is small and extracting text does not need perfect reproduction, so it's quite likely that many devices could be reprogrammed to do it, albeit at some cost to battery life.