Month: June 2016

Brexit may not happen.

2010s, Business, Economy, Finance, Thought Provoking

Gideon Rachman in The Financial Times on why Brexit may not happen.

And what kind of new concession should be offered? That is easy. What Mr Johnson would need to win a second referendum is an emergency brake on free movement of people, allowing the UK to limit the number of EU nationals moving to Britain if it has surged beyond a certain level.

In retrospect, it was a big mistake on the part of the EU not to give Mr Cameron exactly this concession in his renegotiation of the UK’s terms of membership early this year. It was the prime minister’s inability to promise that Britain could set an upper limit on immigration that probably ultimately lost him the vote.

Sounds logical to me.

Mongolia about to use the most advanced location system in the world for its postal system.

2010s, Mobile, Tech, Thought Provoking

Who knew that Mongolia would be the first country in the world to adopt the most accurate location system in the world for its postal service?

Mongolia will become a global pioneer next month, when its national post office starts referring to locations by a series of three-word phrases instead of house numbers and street names.

The new system is devised by a British startup called What3Words, which has assigned a three-word phrase to every point on the globe. The system is designed to solve the an often-ignored problem of 75% of the earth’s population, an estimated 4 billion people, who have no address for mailing purposes, making it difficult to open a bank account, get a delivery, or be reached in an emergency. In What3Words’ system, the idea is that a series of words is easier to remember than the strings of number that make up GPS coordinates. Each unique phrase corresponds to a specific 9-square-meter spot on the map.

The next hacks are coming from the browser

2010s, Security, Social Networking, Tech, Web

I was reading this article on Tom’s Guide about how some Twitter accounts were exposed.
What was startling to me was that Chrome and Firefox store passwords in plain text. Eye opening for me. I used them a lot until I got a Lastpass subscription.

The upshot is that you should never let your web browsers save login credentials for important accounts, such as social networking, bank or other online financial accounts, webmail or online retail accounts such as Amazon.

Chrome and Firefox store login credentials in plain text, making them ripe targets for hackers. Internet Explorer, to Microsoft’s credit, stores then in encrypted form in a separate application.

If remembering passwords is a pain, use a dedicated password manager, such as LastPass or Dashlane, that encrypts and protects your passwords much more securely than a web browser can. And don’t forget to enable two-factor authentication on every account that allows it.

Silicon Valley

2010s, Tech, Thought Provoking, TV

I love the TV show “Silicon Valley”, especially the way it takes the piss out of some of the most ridiculous practises it finds. This is a really enjoyable article in the New Yorker about the parallels between real-life Silicon Valley and the tv show.

“I’ve been told that, at some of the big companies, the P.R. departments have ordered their employees to stop saying ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ specifically because we have made fun of that phrase so mercilessly. So I guess, at the very least, we’re making the world a better place by making these people stop saying they’re making the world a better place.