We launched an app with $500k annual revenue, and then Apple copied it

We launched an app with $500k annual revenue, and then Apple copied it

The key question at that time was: Was there a way to automatically determine how much time a user spends on Facebook or Instagram and block those apps once a limit was reached? We could set up a VPN service and analyze the traffic passing through our servers to learn which social media services mobile devices were communicating with, and using this data we could estimate the time spent on different services and block access to them when users exceeded their self-determined limits. Since Sense was a background process and performed most of its functions with very little interaction with the user (tracking time spent on social media, displaying notifications about exceeding the limit, blocking access to monitored apps), we could not use app launch as the reference event for retention.

Source: gopractice.io

Receiving Dead Satellites with the RTL-SDR (2014)

Receiving Dead Satellites with the RTL-SDR (2014)

Happysat has been using the RTL-SDR together with a QFH antenna to detect old decommissioned satellites in the 136-138 MHz and 150-400 MHz frequency ranges. Most are not transmitting any usable telemetry or weather images but they still use the original frequencies to sent out a unmodulated carrier, which interferes with the current operational Satellite’s in the 136/138 MHz band. But this will not always goes as planned, sometimes due solar radiation or other technical failures it will not respond again to the ground station commands, which leaves the Satellite in its current orbit.

Source: www.rtl-sdr.com

Classes vs. Data Structures

Classes vs. Data Structures

In the data structure scenario the two implementations of the function are together in the same function, they don’t “belong” (however you mean that word) to the type. The caller of the function depends upon the source file with the switch statement which depends upon all the implementations. A change to any one of the implementations will cause the source file with the switch statement to be recompiled, which will cause everyone who calls that switch statement – the function in our case – to be recompiled.

Source: blog.cleancoder.com

Demon Core

Demon Core

The experiments conducted at Los Alamos leading to the two fatal accidents were designed to guarantee that the core was indeed close to the critical point by arranging such reflectors and seeing how much neutron reflection was required to approach supercriticality. [6]

On August 21, 1945, the plutonium core produced a burst of neutron radiation that led to physicist Harry Daghlian’s death. [9]

On May 21, 1946,[11] physicist Louis Slotin and seven other Los Alamos personnel were in a Los Alamos laboratory conducting another experiment to verify the closeness of the core to criticality by the positioning of neutron reflectors.

Source: en.wikipedia.org

Interview with the creators of levels.fyi

Interview with the creators of levels.fyi

The crowdsourced data on levels.fyi shows that software engineers get paid extremely well at companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. Levels.fyi estimates that a Level 3 at Google, or an entry-level engineer who likely just graduated from college, should make $189,000 in total compensation, or about $124,000 in salary and $43,000 in stock compensation. “As a general trend, I think what happens is every time Google and Facebook realize they’re losing too many mid-level career folk, they bump the compensation level up,” said Harj Taggar, the founder of Triplebyte, a software company that places engineers at tech companies like Apple.

Source: www.cnbc.com

The New Wilderness

The New Wilderness

Writing in a similar vein in the Washington Post this March, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called for Congress to pass privacy laws modeled on the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Ambient privacy is not a property of people, or of their data, but of the world around us. Ambient privacy is particularly hard to protect where it extends into social and public spaces outside the reach of privacy law.

Source: idlewords.com

SACK Panic – Multiple TCP-based remote denial-of-service issues

SACK Panic – Multiple TCP-based remote denial-of-service issues

Three related flaws were found in the Linux kernel’s handling of TCP Selective Acknowledgement (SACK) packets handling with low MSS size. When two parties wish to communicate over a TCP connection, they establish a connection by exchanging certain information such as requesting to initiate (SYN) a connection, initial sequence number, acknowledgement number, maximum segment size (MSS) to use over this connection, permission to send and process Selective Acknowledgements(SACKs), etc. A remote user can trigger this issue by setting the Maximum Segment Size(MSS) of a TCP connection to its lowest limit of 48 bytes and sending a sequence of specially crafted SACK packets.

Source: access.redhat.com

Abusing the CPU’s Adder Circuits

Abusing the CPU’s Adder Circuits

Let’s write out the truth table for that:

Right, if we’re going to expand this to add numbers with more than one bit, we’re going to need to do something about this carry output. By adding to the input, we’re essentially ensuring that the carry signal is not asserted until we hit the first one bit, but after that it will be asserted for all the rest of the bits (travelling from right to left). If we extract the relevant parts of the adder truth table we can see how the addition operation will produce the mask that we need:

What that gives us is a number which is (from right to left):

Source: giannitedesco.github.io

Scooter Madness

Scooter Madness

Last month, the inevitable happened: Brady Gaulke, a 26-year-old Nashville man, was killed in a collision with an S.U.V. while riding a scooter. “[E]-scooters are unsafe at any speed, and we are calling on Mayor David Briley and the Metro Council to ban them from the streets immediately,” the petition reads, arguing that Mr. Gaulke should be “the last victim of an epidemic that the e-scooter companies and local government both refuse to acknowledge.” And while there is no question that this country needs a micro-mobility revolution, it takes years to build the kind of infrastructure that would make it safer for people to ride scooters on city streets: Dedicated lanes protected by medians don’t magically appear with an emergency city council vote.

Source: www.nytimes.com

Minnesota court decision means doctors can be sued by patients they don’t treat

Minnesota court decision means doctors can be sued by patients they don’t treat

But in this case, Warren v. Dinter , the court held that a hospitalist [1] who refuses to admit a patient to the hospital may be sued for causing the death of the patient even though the hospitalist never laid eyes on the patient. After hearing Simon’s summary of Warren’s symptoms, Dr. Dinter declared her symptoms were due to “a diabetes that’s out of control” (as the Court of Appeals put it) and recommended that Simon send her home with some diabetes medication, and schedule a follow-up visit for next Monday, three days later. Dinter and Fairview argued to the trial court that Justin Warren could not sue Dr. Dinter and Fairview because Dinter was not in a physician-patient relationship with Ms. Warren at the time he refused to admit her.

Source: thedeductible.com