Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Index funds + more things

    Index funds may be conspiring against the very same investors who fund them | Quartz – interesting analysis on index funds, surely this would also be the issue with ‘shareholder value’ in general?

    Oracle’s cloud sales – Business Insider – short term numbers for long term losses

    Shanghai Street View: Wealth Explosion – high street wealth management products, explains a lot. This could all go wrong and explains China’s regulations against shadow banking. The problem is a lack of supply for Chinese consumers to invest in. Savings accounts give poor returns, the stare market is way oversubscribed

    Exclusive: Amazon planning drive-up grocery stores with first coming to Sunnyvale — sources – Silicon Valley Business Journal – it feels like a retrogressive move to me. I think of drive-thrus as being representative of 20th century America. The drive-in cinema, the drive-thru/drive-in fast food restaurant a la McDonalds or American Graffiti

    What Really Killed Homejoy? It Couldn’t Hold On To Its Customers | Forbes – which sounds very dot com in its nature

    Apple Watch to Be Sold at Best Buy – Digits – WSJ – interesting how this doesn’t fit with their initial luxury positioning

    Nike, Apple agree to $2.4M settlement in suit over false FuelBand claims, Apple to pay nothing – I guess tis scuppers Nike’s wearable ambitions and possibly Fuel being part of a wearable eco-system. More related posts here.

    If what you say is useful, people will pass it on | SiliconAngle – if they see it at the right time…

    Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Update on the Autocomplete API | Google Webmaster Central Blog – basically it was a drain on resources that didn’t provide Google with useful data

    Firefox is getting audio indicators to show noisy tabs, and will let you mute them | VentureBeat | Dev | by Emil Protalinski – brilliant for them auto playing videos in my RSS feeds

  • Hacknet + more things

    Hacknet

    Some Australian developers have made an immersive game about hacking that will be distributed on Steam when released. It’s called Hacknet and here’s the trailer.

    Key outtakes:

    • Misdirection: Matthews would allow surveillance teams to tail him, so that other colleagues would be tail free
    • Playing into stereotype and using them as a judo move; Warsaw Pact men tended to believe a woman’s place was in the home and didn’t think of Matthews’ wife as a potential operator
    • Interesting points on the problems that intelligence agencies have in understanding the motivations of ‘non state actors’ such as religiously motivated terrorists
    • During the cold war, Russians who spied for the US generally didn’t get to spend any money they made, as they would only survive 18 months on average
    • China’s approach is much more long-term ‘picking up grains of sand on the beach’
    • The most dangerous threats in his opinion: Iranian nuclear programme for the set of unknowns that it creates, China as a short, medium and long term threat, Russia as an ongoing but less serious threat than China and ‘non state actors’

    Matthews also took a New York Times journalist on the street to explain what surveillance infrastructure looked like now

    “You never try to elude or escape from surveillance,” he explained. “You want to lull them into thinking that you’re not operational on this particular day. You want to calm the beast.”

    Shadowing Jason Matthews, an Ex-Spy Whose Cover Identity Is Author | New York Times

    More posts on related areas here.