Entries Tagged 'Links' ↓

If you aren’t following Troy Hunt (and you care at all about information security — which you should) you should be.

A recent post of his went into detail on a poorly-secured server which left thousands of Indian citizens’ health care data exposed to the world.

I posted not too long ago about our expectations of privacy. This is exactly the sort of situation where nobody was hacked or infiltrated, but sensitive information was out there for the taking for months before anybody noticed.  This got a lot of attention (once it got into the right hands) because it was medical data — if these had been chat logs, it would probably all still be available for download.

The time has just about come to officially enter my favorite season of the year — autumn!  Football season, malty seasonal beers, crisp mornings, sweatshirts and campfires … the brief respite between air conditioning and heating.

Some links harvested from my RSS feeds for your in-between season consumption, even if none of them are particularly work-related….

• Unique hotels (nice photos).
• Fancy money.
• An exercise in controlled luddism, partying like it’s 1986.
• Job growth in the next decade.
• A nice elementary school project.
• Take back the Internet?

Welcome to Football season, ladies and gentlemen.  Summer is quickly turning into a memory — and I’m thrilled.  While you enjoy the brief lull between lawnmowing season and leaf-raking season, enjoy some links from my RSS feeds:

• Freedom of speech, just watch what you say: lie detector flaw instruction illegal in some cases?
• Google’s analysis of food input of employees, and how they shaved calories off people’s intake.
• Facebook pays a bounty for a security flaw.
• A great writeup on fear of risk.
• New words from the 90s and how they fared.  Nerkish, anyone?

Have a good weekend!

In place of actual content, I give you this.

It’s been a busy week; I celebrated my 40th birthday with a small vacation up to Portland, Maine, and came back to the kind of “Everyone Must Change” insanity that everyone at EMC is familiar with.  But, I didn’t forget you.  Links I stumbled on via RSS this week:

• There are reasons to like and dislike using external identity providers like Facebook, but recent changes in what apps must ask permission to do will help tip that balance.
• How to research your blog posts.  Nice breakdown!
• I can’t wait to get this into a Words With Friends game.
• Management issues for terrorist organizations.
• Sad report of an assassination in India.

Until next week….

Last week I took the Scrum Certified Product Owner course, and I’ve got some ideas of content to share here from that, but in the mean time, enjoy some information I’ve stolen from my RSS feeds….

• Is impactful business jargon … or something even weirder?  I love Language Log for posts like this.
• Want to raise prices?  Tell a story.  Does this factor in with salary negotiation, I wonder?
• This visualization of sorting algorithms put a smile on my inner CS geek’s face.
• Yes, there are fake likes on Facebook.  I didn’t quite picture it like this, though.
• What happens to your data validation code when employees have names like “Null”?  A real question or a thought experiment?

That’s all for now….

A bit less than I had hoped to share this week, but since it’s Friday I’ll widen my scope a bit and give some links which don’t directly map to the subject matter of my blog but which I think you might be interested in anyway…

• CNET offers a fairly low-content report on requests from the Federal Government for user passwords.
• Facebook wants to know why specifically people hide certain ads.  Isn’t the answer usually “because they’re ads”?
• Haliburton admits to destroying evidence in Gulf oil spill probe.  This isn’t interesting to me, but the question of what we’d all do if our managers said “Remember that test you ran?  Can you delete that from the results database?” is.

Enjoy your weekend….

After a weekend spend camping, I’m back and scouring my RSS feeds for links to share with you this morning.  Here’s what I’ve got:

I’m not sure what to make of the idea of Granny in the cloud helping with education, but I do find it interesting to keep an eye on what our technological innovations are leading to in this space.

I enjoyed reading Robin Hanson’s piece on questions being more important than answers.  This is going in my folder to review next time I’m dealing with the interview process.

I enjoy reading about how other people work.  I could never answer email just once a week, but it was an interesting read in any case.

The article quickly turns into talking about the specifics of Stack Overflow, but I like the push to really examine the re-usability of our code.   This is something I’ve been thinking about lately as a technical manager, about the obvious (and hidden) costs of doing something poorly because we know we should be doing it well but don’t really know how to.

Sorry not much for a Monday; I’ll be back later this week….

As I said, I’m trying to get back into the habit of providing content here on a regular basis, and starting by just presenting links I gather from my RSS subscriptions (in an attempt to prove to myself that I’m still getting value from those feeds).

Today’s links:

• Seth Godin asks “Not even once?” and reminds me of an old blog post I wrote about lessons from poker.
• Johanna Rothman talks about the kind of work managers do, and why it’s not as easy at it looks from the outside, in a post that would serve new managers well.
• Gina talks about using engineering development tools to manage other kinds of tasks.  I’m reminded of my iterative approach to writing performance reviews.
• AllFacebook summarizes a conversation about users’ visibility into who is reading their Facebook updates.  I found this quote interesting as relates to what users think they like and what they actually like: “We’ve run many tests showing that any time we stop ranking and show posts in chronological order, the number of stories people read decreases and the amount of likes and comments people produce decreases.”