I. Hate. DST.

Unsolicited product review: This basically blows all other network-connected speakers out of the water. My living room is pretty large, and right at the moment it’s filled to the brim with magnificent crystal-sharp treble and spine-straightening bass from one of these in the corner.

Thanks Sonos – this is amazing.

http://www.sonos.com/en-wo/shop/play5

ignore the real article, the correction at the bottom is top-notch:
‘Correction: Due to an oversight involving a haphazardly-installed Chrome extension during the editing process, the name Donald Trump was erroneously replaced with the phrase “Someone With Tiny Hands” when this story originally published.’
http://www.wired.com/2016/03/chris-christie-marginal-media/

http://www.wired.com/2016/03/chris-christie-marginal-media/

Dear Toddler,
  It’s very important to me that you’re not ashamed of your body.  We work hard in our family to avoid instilling those kinds of feelings, because I struggle with them and I don’t want you to have to bear that burden as you grow up.
  That said, for the love of God, PLEASE go put on some underpants.
        -Dad

I was going through some of my old Keep[1] notes, and I found this one: “Collagen and botox are the modern Hapsburg chin.”

As it happens, I remember exactly why I wrote myself that fairly cryptic note.  I was watching this year’s Super Bowl postgame show, and the presentation of the Lombardi Trophy really struck me[2].

A certain physical aesthetic has become totally normalized in the wealthier parts of American culture.  It seems to be very much the case that people aren’t pursuing “looking young” past a certain point (which makes sense, since that’s not really possible), but are rather conforming to a totally new set of beauty standards that aren’t “young” but are definitely “not old”.

The thing to note here is that attaining this aesthetic is time-consuming, irreversible, and incredibly expensive.  I can’t know if it’s intended to be a mark of status, or a claim on membership in a certain in-group, but I can say that as a cultural signifier it seems to carry a lot of the same weight that the Hapsburg Chin did in the 18th century.  It’s a mark of the Aristocracy.

[1] If you use G+ and don’t use Keep, you should rethink what you’re doing.  Keep is astonishingly useful.

[2] People have criticized Annabel Bowlen, the wife of the long-time owner of the Denver Broncos who recently retired because of debilitating Alzheimer’s disease, for being dim, or dumb, or dopey but I don’t think that’s at all fair.  She’s clearly taking on a responsibility that she wouldn’t have chosen for herself, and I think that as much as the organization seemed to have loved Pat Bowlen it was entirely appropriate for her to play this role.  I think the NFL is ~awful, but the professional entertainers and executives on that stage did a phenomenal job being gracious and caring in what was obviously a very difficult moment for her.

After being asked personally a few times and reading claims by others a few more, I thought I’d set the record straight….

Working at Google does not give you access to the data of users!

It’s an easy assumption to make.  After all, most companies don’t put internal access controls on data making it easy for every employee to access everything inside the firewall.  Google does not work that way.

Though there are many groups at Google, we’ll simplify it into Software Engineering (“SWE”) and Site Reliability Engineering (“SRE”).  I was the latter for 5 years and I’ve been the former for 3.

SWE, in general, has access to nothing.  They run their code on their own workstations and sometimes test clusters with test data.  A few get access to anonymized user data for their service — more on that later.

SRE is the group that owns the keys to the kingdom.  They’re the group (actually many small groups) responsible for running Google services “in production”.  They almost always have access to anonymized user data for their service and the ability to access “raw” logs if necessary, again for only their service.  The kicker is that, since around 2011, this latter access comes through a specific interface where you must explain with each request why you’re doing this.  All those actions are logged and those logs are audited.  Misuse of the access will get you fired.

What is “misuse”?  I can’t even look up my own queries.  I could be on-call for my service, have you on the phone fixing a problem with you saying, “go ahead” , and I still couldn’t do it.  In five years, I only used raw logs twice, both on myself during training just so we’d know how.

So, for any given service, there may be somewhere between 10 and 100 people worldwide who could potentially access Personally Identifiable Information (“PII”) of a user, but doing so without a good reason would be the end of them at the company.  And should that abusive employee somehow cause “material damage” to the company…  I don’t even want to speculate.

On top of that, any attempt to track a single user, whether the user can be identified personally or not, will also get you fired.  Every user with any form of logs access has signed a paper (real paper, even) stating that they understand all this and the consequences.

This is serious stuff.  My own team would turn me in without a second thought if I did any of this.  And I’d do the same to them.

What are “anonymized” logs?  They’re the requests that have had all PII stripped.  No IP address.  No account identifier.  No geo-locating finer than the city, etc.

Disclaimer:  I work for Google (obviously).  These thoughts are mine and mine alone.  Mine, I tell you!  Mine!!!

Seen in an Internet comment:

“Remember that our currency is propped up with oil. We will free the shit out of any country that tries to sell oil in euros or gold.”

It doesn’t astonish me that the Catholic church manages to maintain an aura of moral authority in the face of these continuing revelations.  The human capacity to ignore the unconscionable when it’s committed by their side lost its ability to surprise a long, long time ago.

Pennsylvania grand jury finds 50 Roman Catholic priests raped hundreds of children