Michael Air

You have another reason to be worried about your privacy on Facebook. A new investigation reveals the company's founder hacked into the personal profiles and email of both his personal rivals and journalists.

The origins of Facebook have been in dispute since the very week a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg launched the site as a Harvard sophomore on February 4, 2004.

A few things from this article: Zuckerberg didn't steal the idea of facebook from ConnectU however does sound like he hampered their efforts though no formal arrangements were in place.

Let's assume this is all true, how it happened. What we can take out of this is that while facebook is in Zuckerberg's best interests, the masses are probably OK for now. As long as you aren't taking on Zuckerberg directly...

Google has perhaps more than any other company become “The Internet Company.” It’s grown hand in hand with the internet and its entire business model has from the start been totally focused on the internet as a delivery platform.

And let’s face it, Google is a pretty interesting company. In fact, we think it’s so interesting that we put together this infographic with a ton of facts and figures about Google. We’ve been digging through Google’s SEC filings, news articles and the trusty old Wikipedia to get plenty of interesting data to include. We hope you like it!

A mere 7.2 billion pageviews / 20 petabytes / day according to Royal Pingdom. I imagine they could just fire up a couple of EC2 instances to handle that right? ;)

A few days ago, I exchanged emails with a journalist friend. She said the following, "I'm just wondering which sectors/investment areas/types of start-ups you think will be exciting investments in 2010, and which you're staying away from because they're over-hyped, not yet ready, etc." 

Today I sent a friend in the VC business an email outlining some areas I wanted to focus on this year so we could find some things to work on together.

In thinking about those two events, I decided I should just post the answers right here. So here goes:

Fred Wilson talking about what areas he'll be focusing on in 2010. He's listed mobile as number one - I can remember every year at least back to 2000, people have been saying mobile is going to get big, just about to crack it. Maybe 10 years later we're actually at that point though I remain sceptical. It'll be bigger than we've ever seen now that android and iPhone are in full swing but it won't be as big as some suggest.

In a 10-point press release issued today Oracle has listed a series of "commitments" regarding their acquisition of MySQL by way of acquiring Sun.

I am not impressed.

As a former employee of a large Internet company (the largest at the time, in fact) that used both Oracle and MySQL, I'm utterly puzzled by this. I can't think of why we should trust Oracle to do right by the users of MySQL--especially the non-paying users.

You see, for years Oracle worked agressively behind the scenes to discredit MySQL and tried hard to understand how their customers could ever consider using such a "toy" instead of their flagship product. In fact, it was so important to Oracle that they offered some very substantial discounts to customers who were using MySQL and Oracle. In some cases the discounts were so impressive that their motivation was clear: cut off the opportunity for MySQL to grow and spread in such organizations. (Remember what happened to Netscape when Microsoft gave away Internet Explorer for free?)

Although I agree with Jeremy's sentiment, part of me hope's Jeremy is wrong here.. MySQL really needs some momentum and focus put back into it.

Our plan was to debut the CrunchPad on stage at the Real-Time Crunchup event on November 20, a little over a week ago. We even hoped to have devices hacked together with Google Chrome OS and Windows 7 to show people that you could hack this thing to run just about anything you want. We’d put 1,000 of the devices on pre-sale and take orders immediately. Larger scale production would begin early in 2010.

And then the entire project self destructed over nothing more than greed, jealousy and miscommunication.

I completely missed this new from a few days ago... wow

Murdoch himself was responsible for dealing the company the first in a series of blows. On a 2007 News Corp earnings call, a punchy Murdoch told analysts that Fox Interactive Media would generate $1bn in revenues for the 2008 fiscal year (up from about $550m in 2007). With MySpace representing almost all of Fox Interactive’s revenues, the implication was clear: Murdoch thought MySpace’s meteoric rise would continue. There was only one problem: the MySpace management team had no idea Murdoch had set them a new target until he opened his mouth. “It came out of thin air,” says a former MySpace executive. At a stroke, the site’s free-wheeling, entrepreneurial days were over: it had to perform exactly as expected – or else.

“Without permission of the authors, Scribd maintains copies of authors’ works for use in a copyright protection system,” according to the suit. “Once a copyrighted work is uploaded to Scribd without the copyright holder’s permission, the infringement is ongoing and permanent. Even if the work becomes unavailable for download by users, Scribd illegally copies the work into its copyright protection system, without permission or compensation to the author.”

Scribd is willing to take down any content reported as breach of copyright as well as using technology to prevent future violations... for this they are being sued? The mind boggles as to why an author would want to sue a company in support of copyright protection...

Ruby on Rails 2.3.4: Security Fixes

Posted by michael September 04, 2009 @ 06:04 AM

We’ve released Ruby on Rails 2.3.4, this release fixes bugs and introduces a few minor features. Due to the inclusion of two security fixes, all users of the 2.3 series are recommended to upgrade as soon as possible.

Security Fixes

2.3.4 contains fixes for two security issues which were reported to us. For more details see the security announcements:

• CVE-2009-3009 – XSS vulnerability
• Timing Weakness in MessageVerifier and the Cookie Store

Bug Fixes

Thanks to the success of the BugMash we have around 100 bug fixes as part of this release. Of particular not is the fix to reloading problems related to rack middleware and rails metals when running in development mode.

New Features

• Support for bundling I18n translations in plugins, Rails will now automatically add locale files found in any engine’s locale directory to the I18n.load_path. commit
• Added db/seeds.rb as a default file for storing seed data for the database. Can be loaded with rake db:seed commit

Upgrading for security is reason enough though I'm happy that seeds finally made it out the door.

Desert 0.5.2 focuses on speed improvements and bug bixes.

Pivotal Tracker Stories:

• "Fix mailer templates -- very slow with Desert": ActionMailer::Base.view_paths are now cached. This speeds up ActionMailer tests/specs.
• "Plugin schema migrations should successfully convert from the 'old' scheme to the 'new' scheme": Pulled cauta/desert at master and fixed specs.
• "Add sweepers to Desert's load path": Pulled willcodeforfoo/desert at master and fixed specs.
• "Specs should handle Rails version incompatibilities"

If you're upgrading or installing desert 0.5.2, you'll need to update the manifest before you can use script/generate desert_plugin - errors out.

In generators/desert_plugin/desert_plugin_generator.rb:

It's already a bug logged in their tracker so this be a temporary workaround until the next version.