Linked List: February 25, 2015

Wednesday, 25 February 2015

Farhad Manjoo Interviews Dick Costolo 

Interesting interview:

Q: You recently sent a memo to employees saying, “We suck at dealing with abuse.” And you said that you lose users because of it.

A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of all the emails I’ve ever sent to the company, that’s probably the first one where I said “we suck at” instead of using more eloquent language. My parents aren’t delighted about that. But I meant what I said. One of the reasons I was so blunt about it was that I wanted to really send a wake-up call to the company that we’re going to get a lot more aggressive about it, and it’s going to start right now.

Q: For years people have called on you to do more. So why did you need that wake-up call?

A: Well, it’s a complex issue. By way of example, in the wake of the news of that internal memo going out, I’ll get emails from people that say, “I agree, and here’s a great example of someone being harassed on the platform” — and it’s not at all harassment, it’s political discourse. And, in fact, fairly rational political discourse. So you know these things have lots and lots of varying degrees: Was that really harassment and abuse? Or is that discourse?

Google Plans New Headquarters 

Conor Dougherty, reporting for the NYT:

Google owns or leases about 7.3 million square feet of office space in Mountain View — roughly equivalent to three Empire State Buildings. That includes most of the property around its headquarters on the north side of the city near Highway 101, which cuts the length of the valley, according to Transwestern, a commercial real estate brokerage.

“Three Empire State Buildings” really puts their holdings in scale. For comparison, Apple’s new spaceship campus will have about 3.5 million square feet of office space.

Mountain View, about 40 miles south of San Francisco, has close to 80,000 people; with its strip-mall thoroughfares and streets of single-family homes, it looks like a sleepy suburb. But since hiring has boomed, the city’s roads swell with commuters during the morning and evening rush.

The Times used a brief video instead of a still photo to illustrate rush hour traffic in the area. A great idea that works very well.

Tim Cook on Apple Watch Water Resistance 

Mitchel Broussard, writing for MacRumors on this report from French-language iGeneration (Google translation to English) about Tim Cook’s trip to Germany:

While on a trip in Germany to visit with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and meet with a few German-based Apple staff members, Apple CEO Tim Cook told Apple Store employees in Berlin that he wears his Apple Watch constantly, “even in the shower”, according to iGen.fr.

The new piece of information from the Apple CEO could mean the company’s been working on adding more water resistant features to the upcoming wearable, since at its early-September reveal event the company warned off wearing the device in the shower.

Good news, if this means Apple is going to officially describe it as water resistant.

Gemalto Doesn’t Know What It Doesn’t Know 

Jeremy Scahill, reporting for The Intercept:

Gemalto, the French-Dutch digital security giant, confirmed that it believes American and British spies were behind a “particularly sophisticated intrusion” of its internal computer networks, as reported by The Intercept last week.

This morning, the company tried to downplay the significance of NSA and GCHQ efforts against its mobile phone encryption keys — and, in the process, made erroneous statements about cellphone technology and sweeping claims about its own security that experts describe as highly questionable.

To say security experts are skeptical is an understatement:

“Gemalto learned about this five-year old hack by GCHQ when the The Intercept called them up for a comment last week. That doesn’t sound like they’re on top of things, and it certainly suggests they don’t have the in-house capability to detect and thwart sophisticated state-sponsored attacks,” says Christopher Soghoian, the chief technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union. He adds that Gemalto remains “a high-profile target for intelligence agencies.”

Matthew Green, a cryptography specialist at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute, said, “This is an investigation that seems mainly designed to produce positive statements. It is not an investigation at all.”