@TheBitterman: Good call on the date representation, I hadn't seen that one before.
Not to say that Stuxnet couldn't be some Israeli superweapon targetting Iranian nuclear plants, but we are all jumping into bed a little bit hastily. None of these claims is very convincing.
IN ORDER:
1) Yes, "myrtus" could be the genus for "myrtle", which could be a reference to Hadassah, which could mean something about Israel. (It must be true, they found one linguist who thinks it's plausible!) Or, perhaps, "myrtus" could just be "My RTUs", as in "My Remote Terminal Units". RTU as an acronym is actually used in SCADA environments such as the ones that stuxnet infects.
2) Could also be a birthday, but I have no real counter-argument here, as this is the most plausible of the set.
3) 0xDEADF007 (since I am assuming these are hex digits) seems equally likely to be "Dead Fool" than "Dead Foot", but I'm not really sure it matters. Hex mnemonics are an extremely common (and very old) programmer's trick: you stick a known (and easily identifiable) value in memory somewhere so you can see if it gets clobbered or changed by a bug, or so that you can find it later when scanning through memory. The most common of these sentinel values (at least among American programmers) is 0xDEADBEEF.
The main reason think Stuxnet is targetting Iran is because we know it has infected things in Iran, and because it would be an exciting story. But it's also infected things in lots of other places! Just a few months ago, people seemed convinced this was an Indian job: [www.securelist.com]
More later. twig OUT.
IN ORDER:
1) Yes, "myrtus" could be the genus for "myrtle", which could be a reference to Hadassah, which could mean something about Israel. (It must be true, they found one linguist who thinks it's plausible!) Or, perhaps, "myrtus" could just be "My RTUs", as in "My Remote Terminal Units". RTU as an acronym is actually used in SCADA environments such as the ones that stuxnet infects.
2) Could also be a birthday, but I have no real counter-argument here, as this is the most plausible of the set.
3) 0xDEADF007 (since I am assuming these are hex digits) seems equally likely to be "Dead Fool" than "Dead Foot", but I'm not really sure it matters. Hex mnemonics are an extremely common (and very old) programmer's trick: you stick a known (and easily identifiable) value in memory somewhere so you can see if it gets clobbered or changed by a bug, or so that you can find it later when scanning through memory. The most common of these sentinel values (at least among American programmers) is 0xDEADBEEF.
The main reason think Stuxnet is targetting Iran is because we know it has infected things in Iran, and because it would be an exciting story. But it's also infected things in lots of other places! Just a few months ago, people seemed convinced this was an Indian job: [www.securelist.com]
More later. twig OUT.
This code is probably a bit of a wreck, and I have a lot of doubts about how this all ends up, but they're doing the right thing. These kids took $200k in seed funding from the community in large, so they're demonstrating that they actually plan to produce something. It's a good-faith gesture.
The final paragraph of this post is so willfully ignorant of software that it is not really worth correcting.
I lost all sympathy for this guy when he attacked Joe Hewitt.
Adam Corolla once spent about thirty minutes on a Bill Simmons podcast outlining the plot of an imagined action thriller called "Pedoph-Isle".
Hilarious. This is the sort of story Valleywag should be dining out on, and of course Tate isn't even the byline. (Hi Adrian! You're pretty good!) Although, as usual, TechCrunch has the scoop.
Sort of ironically, Calcanis was one of the earliest 'Wag targets. In those days, a lot of the stories were meh, but this was one case where the original instincts were right.
@PoBoyNation: I think this is basically all right.
Also, the Ray Nagin case is HILARIOUS. You forgot the part where he fired the forensic team after they produced a result he didn't like. It's a shame that case hasn't gotten more national coverage.
Non-story. This is pretty standard behavior for executives at any company with any sort of serious liability exposure.
Email holds for discovery in litigation are common, and when they are in effect his email is probably archived regardless of what he does to it. But it would be unusual if all of his deleted email was being saved if there was no hold in place.
Also, whether the data is truly destroyed or just deleted from the file system is mostly irrelevant. Litigation discovery basically never reaches the level of computer forensics.
Enough. This woman was not very interesting to begin with. Reading daily updates about her wedding drives me to drink.
Can someone explain the point of this obsessive coverage? She's a woman, and that is somehow remarkable? Oh wait, she works for Google! Why yes, that means that completely boring things are suddenly fascinating. THANKS!
For every new media company that allows uploaded photos, there's an unlucky SOB or two that gets to go through the ones that people flagged.
That facebook has these isn't really a story -- 100 is a lot, but after all, they get 2-3 billion photos uploaded a month.
A better story would be to find one of these people and do an interview. It's really not that hard. Their jobs are not, in my experience, any kind of secret.
TechCrunch covers the industry gossip better than almost anyone else, but there's one way they get this story right. So come on, Ryan, show us what you're made of. Arrington's post is fishy as hell.
The NSA has a long history in advising to non-government security standards. Schneier's "Applied Cryptography" notes that several of the fundamental constants of the DES algorithm were contributed by the NSA; they were viewed with some suspicion until many years later, when it was discovered that they made the algorithm suspiciously resilient in the face of a cryptanalytic attack that was not publicly known at the time of the standard's creation.
More recently, there was this: [en.wikipedia.org]
The purpose of this collaboration is unknown, but it is not new news.
You've been doing fairly well, Ryan, but you're falling into one of the classic 'Wag traps: you, like your predecessor, consistently misinterpret the connection between engineers and execs. This is especially important at Google, where the work experience for engineers is different than the experience in other divisions of the company.
This is not to say that bad execs and good execs have no effect on engineers, because they do -- particularly the bad ones, who can very easily spoil a development environment. But the factors that determine a "good" or "bad" exec from an engineer's point of view are frequently not the same as the factors that cause the business press to draw conclusions about their quality.
So what did GoogNYCers really think of Armstrong or your other gossip targets? It's astonishing that in a company that employees thousands of engineers, you can't find a single decent tipster. They are out there, I am sure.
Marsden was, for a mercifully brief period of time, a frequently Valleywag comment. Calling her a Coulter knock-off doesn't even really do justice to how tired her act is.
Weren't these new rules published today? Most of these "offenses" would predate them, then.
So wouldn't the better story be that the WSJ had to create these rules because their twitter-happy employees were tweeting all sorts of stupid shit?
I'm sure Owen Thomas is a nice guy, and I wish him well. But let's face it: he was not very good at this job. Better, perhaps, than Nick Douglas, but really, what is his legacy at the 'Wag? A steady stream of posts trying to interpret every financial move made by Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, and Twitter. What a snoozefest.
Why was there no liveblog of the Hans Reiser trial? Why is no attention paid to the utter hilarity of the Ruby on Rails "community"? (Pound for pound, Rails blogs have replaced LKML for the highest density of quotable insanity in the programming world. Even TechCrunch knows this.)
Owen's problem was the he saw himself as an analyst, rather than an anarchist. It was a problem for two reasons. First, the 'insider' approach is at odds with everything Gawker has ever done successfully. But more importantly, Owen doesn't know anything. He's divorced from both the technical realities that frequently influence business decisions in the Valley, and from the madness of the engineering community.
Because that is where the meat falls off the bone: it's not in the comings and goings of a couple of mid-level Valley execs (which are amply covered by about 900 other media outlets), but rather in the engineering teams and the mid-level management. These are the dark places; where a multi-billion dollar industry is built on the backs of talented but basically crazy people:
- Smart engineers who have been Peter Principled into management positions where they are no longer effective
- Open source projects who have "rejected" traditional industry power structures by replacing them with even more byzantine social constructions of their own devising
- Fairly gross, persistently male-dominated communities that don't understand where all the women went
- A narcissistic toy culture which is different in focus, but not degree, from that of the Manhattan elite
There is material enough for a dozen weblogs, if anyone had the gumption (and the sources) to make it happen. So best wishes to Owen, and best of luck to Ryan Tate. The Valley desperately needs a better 'Wag. We deserve the abuse.
Hey, it would be pretty sweet if a rhino fought a whale! Or a panther!
This post is a trainwreck; let me count the ways.
1. The conversation is a remarkable non-story. If Sergey Brin showed up and offered him a case of money at the party, it would still be unsurprising -- bees is really, really smart, and an obvious catch as a developer/architect. The idea that Google is the only company who would want him (or that their interest is necessarily tied to flickr) is almost willfully ignorant. Oh, and I've heard that recruiters are fairly chatty (that's why they're good at recruiting people!), but when they go to parties they never talk to anyone. So clearly, this conversation was an extraordinary occurrence.
2. You've buried the lede -- Henderson was at a party with "some folks from Six Apart". Six Apart is AKA the current employer of his ex-girlfriend Leah Culver (founder of the now-defunct Pownce). Was she there? Was she not there? Infoz plz.
3. While I'm on the subject, despite your obsessive coverage of the Henderson/Culver romance in the past, you may have missed the real story there as well. The rumor on the street was that Cal began his dalliance with the Belle of Bloomington while he was still dating another girl, and that his ex found out about it from reading Valleywag. Awk-ward!
Valleywag =~ s/Valley/Twitter/
