60407895
submission
reifman writes:
Last night at Ignite Seattle, the fifteenth and final five minute presentation "A Geek's Guide to Wedding Planning" turned into a huge surprise for the audience as what began as a normal talk turned into a full blown wedding. Teresa Valdez Klein & Noah Iliinsky, who'd met at earlier Ignites decided to bring their A game and get married in their five minute timeslot. Props and best wishes to the bride & groom. If they give a talk on "A Geek's Guide to Pregnancy", I will definitely skip it.
60046441
submission
reifman writes:
San Francisco's gender imbalance is so bad that a startup recently proposed flying women in from New York City for dates, but Seattle’s gender ratio is even more imbalanced. Amazon is building out enough space to employ 5% of the city population and its workforce is 75 percent male. By the end of 2014, Seattle will have 130 single men for every 100 single women.
60025017
submission
reifman writes:
San Francisco's gender imbalance is so bad that a startup recently proposed flying women in from New York City for dates. But, if you’re a straight male thinking of moving to Seattle to work in technology, think again. Seattle’s gender ratio is even more imbalanced and it’s about to get much worse for men. Amazon is building out enough space to employ 5% of the city population and its workforce is 75 percent male. By the end of 2014, Seattle will have 130 single men for every 100 single women.
58370433
submission
reifman writes:
From the apparently not April Fools department: Anders Helstrup went skydiving nearly two years ago near Hedmark, Norway and while he didn’t realize it at the time, when he reviewed the footage taken by two cameras fixed to his helmet during the dive, he saw a rock plummet past him. He took it to experts and they realized he had captured a meteorite falling during its dark flight — when it has been slowed by atmospheric braking, and has cooled and is no longer luminous.
58103721
submission
reifman writes:
Amazon's outsourced, semi-automated customer service makes it easy for unscrupulous buyers to prey on its marketplace sellers. Buyers just need to 1) request a return and then 2) file a claim alleging that the item was different than described. While Amazon says it retains emails between buyer and sellers 'to help arbitrate disputes and preserve trust and safety', it ignores the content of most email exchanges as it sends automated emails to sellers instructing them to issue refunds and threatening to withdraw the funds from their account. File this under 'our investigation team does not work according to case numbers.'
57062145
submission
reifman writes:
Recently my house was robbed and two Macs taken. Over the past week, I've learned a few things that I hadn't been aware of. Apple has a few helpful features that aren't enabled by default in OS X: primarily setting a firmware password and hard drive encryption. Here are a few simple steps you can take now to minimize the damage from theft of your Macs and to increase the likelihood they might return to you.
55550973
submission
reifman writes:
In a follow up to this 2011 Ask Slashdot post on self-hosted Gmail alternatives and recent NSA wiretapping revelations, I wrote this guided tutorial for running your own email server in the cloud. The emergence of iRedMail and Roundcube are great offerings but end to end encrypted privacy remains an afterthought. Self-hosting remains quite complex for even average techies; combining out of country mail services with GPG may be the best approach for most folks, at least until more sophisticated encryption-based services emerge. The Indiegogo-funded Mailpile client may also interest people.
55446167
submission
reifman writes:
Filtered is a new open source IMAP mail filtering application which lets you train, route and experiment with your email. Filtered can learn from the contents of your existing folders, respond to drag and drop events and be trained via the web. But, it's also a platform which programmers can use to create new features for email such as quiet hours which shuts off your inbox on a schedule, whitelisting, which challenges new senders to authenticate themselves as human and a secure folders which delete messages from your NSA-accessible Gmail account and stores an encrypted version on your server. Filtered is written in PHP and is available now on Github. There's a detailed installation guide for trying out the app with a cloud-based Linux server. You can also request a droplet for Digital Ocean for a faster start.
55292659
submission
55228705
submission
reifman writes:
Email innovation often lags other services because the big players (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo) control the client. Filtered is a new, open source server side mail filtering applet which provides a platform for evolving email. For example, Filter offers Do Not Disturb, which can delay email delivery during evenings and weekends (favorite contacts can be excluded), Secure Folders, which can delete messages from specific people from your NSA-accessible Gmail account and place encrypted versions on your server and Whitelisting, which sends challenge emails to unknown senders. Download at Github or test drive it in the cloud.
55172597
submission
reifman writes:
Email innovation often lags other services because the big players (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo) are cloud client gatekeepers with few incremental profit incentives. Filtered is a new, open source IMAP mail filtering application which provides a platform for experimenting with email. For example, Filter offers Quiet Hours, which can delay email delivery during evenings and weekends (favorite contacts can be excluded), and Secure Folders, which can delete messages from specific people from your NSA-accessible Gmail account and place encrypted versions on your server. Filtered is available now at Github. There's also a detailed installation recipe for Linux.
55164145
submission
reifman writes:
Filtered is a new open source IMAP mail filtering application which provides a platform for training, routing and experimenting with your email. Filtered can learn from the contents of your existing folders, respond to drag and drop events and can be fully trained through a web interface. But, it's also a platform which can be used by programmers to create new features for email such as Quiet Hours which shuts off your inbox on certain days and times, Whitelisting which challenges new senders to authenticate themselves as human and a Secure folder which deletes messages from your NSA-inhabited Gmail account and stores an encrypted version on your server. Filtered is written in PHP in the Yii Framework and is available now on Github. There's a detailed installation guide for trying out the app with a cloud-based Linux server.
52145207
submission
reifman writes:
Perhaps the reason the NSA's surveillance programs are so unpopular with Americans is that we haven't seen any of the potential consumer benefits that spying and big data can provide. Here are ten ideas for the productization and monetization of the NSA's spying infrastructure to inspire Americans to consider the bright side of the dark arts.
52140423
submission
reifman writes:
It's really just a lack of entrepreneurial focus that's left the NSA surveillance program so unpopular with the American people. Here are ten services the NSA could offer to make its spying more popular with Americans and offset the costs of its massive data collection.
50983419
submission
reifman writes:
In an unusual move, Amazon abruptly pulled the plug on its $100,000 Civic Apps contest for AWS, redirecting contestants to the AWS government site. All entrants through October 15th were to receive a $50 AWS credit. Amazon AWS PR says they, '...accidentally pushed this out early, but please stay tuned for more information on this program later this year.' The contest site, rules (pdf) and FAQ (pdf) of the apparently still upcoming contest can be read from the google cache. Contest prize winners would have had to 'spend' their AWS credits by December 2014.
