Claus.dahl

they should number it Room 641B  

When my co-founder, Dan Friedman, and I started our company in October, 2012, we had no idea Google Docs would drive our product past a $500,000 run rate. As an engineer for the past 15 years, I depend on code to solve problems. But the last nine months have proven that the most important skill an engineer working in a startup can have is knowing when not to build technology.

This is counter-intuitive because we are a technology-centric company with an online adult education school. When we launched, however, we had no curricula, experts, product, money, or students.

“No biggie,” I remember Dan saying. “Let’s just start a class.”

By the second week in November, we were furiously seeking friends of friends who wanted to learn programming. We started with programming, because it’s a skill best taught through apprenticeship, which is core to our thesis about the future of online education. After a few dozen student interviews, we learned that successful adult learners are looking for career advancement over everything else. While Dan reached into his alumni network (even though he wasn’t technically a graduate), I called companies that wanted to interview our aspirational students after they finished the program. The two of us worked together building “Unit 1” of a curriculum in a Google Doc titled “Front-end Web Development — prototype.”

The Tuesday before Thanksgiving, we sent invitations to eight precious (meaning they were paying) students who’d entrusted us with their education for the next three months. That students were willing to pay on day one was crucial to our customer validation. We used Lore as a community platform (another off-the-shelf tool) while splitting the mentorship of each student between the two of us.

Six companies, mostly in New York, were on board to interview students after graduation. That I was able to sign up businesses without any evidence we’d have anything to offer is a testament to how open the tech community of New York has become, and an indication of the tightness of today’s tech labor market. The faintest opportunity to hire qualified engineers was enough to get hiring managers on board.

In December, Citibank laid off 10,000 people across their technology divisions. I had just spent the better part of two months (not to mention the previous 10 years as a hirer) hearing how difficult it was to hire for technology. And that’s when lightning struck. As Dan and I were pitching an investor via phone, we were simultaneously mocking up a page enticing former Citibank employees to transition from finance into technology. Within four hours, our landing page neared the top of Hacker News, and other outlets picked up on it.

By the end of the week, more than 100 people had applied for our program, and a week later we started our second class with nine students. We had been using Google Docs in place of any product we could have created as quickly. It was painfully embarrassing, but students were succeeding and not complaining, so neither did we. We had plenty of other things to occupy our time.

For example, a lot of problems emerged, but this is when our tech strategy started to pay off. No custom software meant no technical debt. Virtually everything we had was a human-driven process, which at our early stage is easier to change than software. In hindsight, we were doing things that don’t scale, just as Paul Graham recommends. Not building technology was essential to how fast we were moving, and how agile we were, despite having “launched” a business from 21st St and 5th Avenue in Manhattan. Of everything else in the last nine months, this strategy for building an MVP is the one I most often repeat to new teams.

The problem with this iteration, as with many new products, was that we were trying to do way too much. The model was that students would learn with us, and we’d be paid recruiting fees by companies hiring engineers. But recruiting is a different business than education, and to be successful at it, we could only accept students that were already close to being ready for a job. This was both a major limitation for our growth and went against something we care about deeply: Learning on the Web should be about access to education, not exclusivity.

Also, application processes just didn’t feel right. The final nail in the coffin for our fledgling recruiting department was when Andrew McCollum, a member of the founding team from Facebook, asked during a partner meeting at Flybridge how many people there could possibly be who were almost ready for a job, but all they needed were three more months of part-time education.

All good insights are obvious in hindsight, and this was one of them. We don’t believe anyone can become a job-ready engineer in just three months. There are so many schools with just this promise, but not a single engineer at a hiring company that we spoke with actually believed it. Similarly, none of our students thought it was possible to learn so quickly either. Every successful learner of hard skills — like building websites — works at it for a long time before he or she becomes proficient.

Having both of these perspectives into our market (most business are two-sided markets in disguise) led directly to the next iteration of the company, which is basically where we are today. We’ve simplified our education to focus on exactly the type of learning we believe is the most successful: Long-term, at your own pace, helped by experts. It’s how I’ve always learned.

By March our “tech,” such as it was, really started failing, and that’s when we knew it was to build software. It was getting embarrassing to tell friends about our “stack,” which consisted mostly of a splash page on a $30 heroku site and about 20 Google Docs with email addresses and notes from each students’ mentor sessions. I swear, I’m an experienced engineer and this is the company I’m helping lead. We believed, and still do, that if we know what to build, we can do so quickly and for the long-term. But if we don’t, or aren’t sure, we shouldn’t build anything, or should build only as little as possible. It’s still embarrassing to talk about, and it’s still the best way to develop software for a company our size that I’ve ever seen.

When we announced our $1 million seed round we gained 400 prospective students over two days. One week later, we started using a customer relationship management to manage the now thousands of people who’d expressed interest in learning with us. This is the opposite of the “gear up” mentality of many startups, where tools and processes are put in place before an expected spike in traffic.

Most CTOs dislike press coverage, because it distracts from product development, which is a better long-term growth driver. Sometimes they’re right, but often they should rely more on human processes behind the scenes, which can be much more easily reassigned to coincide with unexpected (and positive!) events. Again, there’s really no such thing as technical debt for the members of a nimble founding team.

We’re only now replacing Google Docs with our own educational product. Still in the early days, many potholes lie before us, I’m sure. But when we roll out a new product, we’ll  know exactly what technology we must address, and thus how to measure its success.

I challenge any startup engineer to come up with a better and more efficient technology strategy.

Image: Google

Barely a day after Google Reader replacement Feedly began offering a paid version of its service, the company has sold out of the limited number of premium accounts it was making available. Feedly co-founders Edwin Khodabakchian and Cyril Moutran, say they had introduced 5,000 Pro accounts over the weekend in order to test an early version of the company’s premium product, which introduces secure browsing, Evernote integration, priority customer service, and most importantly, search.

Article search is one of the most highly anticipated features for Feedly, which currently competes against a host of alternatives, including Digg Reader and Newsblur, all of which have seen their user number grow in the wake of the Google Reader closure.

Feedly didn’t advertise the Pro version, which Moutran describes as a “v1″ product right now. Instead, the company allowed its most engaged users to sign up ahead of a larger, more public release. However, word got out when website Engadget spotted the addition on Sunday, helping to bring attention to Feedly Pro’s debut.

“It sold out much quicker than we thought,” says Moutran, who adds that users are coming from all over the world, including Brazil, France, Spain, Germany, the U.K., the U.S., and parts of Asia. “We thought the first users would be mostly in the U.S., but we’re seeing pretty much the same conversion across all counties,” he tells us.

The founders say the reason they launched Feedly Pro to only a limited number of users is because they plan on using the money the Pro accounts bring in to buy the hardware they need to roll out Pro accounts more broadly – something that’s planned for later this September, they estimate.

Today, the service has grown to over 13 million users, and now has 30 API partners live on its Feedly Cloud platform, which is what allows other news reading products and apps to utilize Feedly’s backend for their own purposes. Popular client apps like Reeder, Newsify, Mr. Reader, Byline and others already take advantage of Cloud today, and a number of other new additions will be announced in the next few weeks.

One thing that has had some scratching their heads is how Feedly has been managing to build a service of this size and scale on its own, when so many new entrants have nearly buckled under the flood of users arriving after the Google Reader shutdown. The answer to that is that Feedly has been at this for quite some time. The company first launched back in 2008, which gives it several years’ head start on the majority of competitors. Notably, has been bootstrapped out of the founders’ own pockets to date. The lack of a revenue stream had begun to worry some, who wondered if Feedly could make it without a viable income stream. But the company had told us in April how it planned to make money: by going “freemium.”

This weekend, Feedly finally switched on its business model ($5/mo or $45/year – sadly, the discounted $99/lifetime account was a one-time only deal; future lifetime accounts will cost more.) But even though Feedly has paying users now, that doesn’t mean that it’s not considering raising funding in the future.

“The opportunity is a [building a] reading platform around intent. A lot tools have been built around casual reading over the last few years, but very few have the level of engagements that we get,” says Khodabakchian, who adds that many of Feedly’s users are professionals consuming news, doctors doing research, designers following trends, and much more.

“Our vision is to create a platform that can enable you to consume this data more effectively, not just in Feedly but in tons of different applications,” he says. There are definitely a few external investors who are interested in that, Khodabakchian notes. “We’re not excluding anything, but we’d only [raise funding] if we find someone who’s really aligned on our vision,” he says. (Unrelated side note? Feedly seems to like Ben Horowitz.)

McDonalds's partnered with Visa to make a budgeting website for their employees. On it, they included a suggested monthly budget. That seems helpful. But what's wrong with this picture?

The most egregious thing is that McDonald's admits the fact that you need a second job--on top of working full time for them--to earn enough money to hope to survive. But it's even worse than that. Robyn Pennacchia at Death and Taxes breaks it down further:

Also noticeably absent in this budget? Food. And gas. There's a line for a car payment, but not for gas. Which is suspect, because if you're working two jobs it's possible you will pay more for your gas than you'd be paying for your car.

Also... health insurance for $20 a month? There is really no such thing as health insurance for $20 a month if you're buying your health insurance on your own. I think the least amount is going to be about $215 a month- and that only covers hospital emergencies.

(via @bifurcations)

"a kind of pop culture Zelig"  

Craigslist short fiction [via] 

The team is rowing in a wild nighttime sea when a rogue wave the size of a small house hoists their boat, tosses it into a valley and crashes over it. The force of the water snaps one of the oars in Kreek's hand.

What happens when four guys try to cross the Atlantic...in a rowboat.

Tags: rowing   sports

Test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test. Test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test. Test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test. Test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test. Test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test. Test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test. Test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test. Test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test. Test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test. Test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test. Test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test. Test, test, test, test.

One of the more ridiculous claim's during President Obama's press conference on NSA surveillance today was the claim that he had already started this process prior to the Ed Snowden leaks and that it's likely we would end up in the same place. While he admitted that Snowden may have "accelerated" the process, he's also claiming that the leaks put our national security at risk. There is, of course, little to support any of this. Tim Lee has the best response to this so far, noting that it's clearly bogus that this debate would have happened without Snowden:

... the Obama administration showed little interest in subjecting the NSA to meaningful oversight and public debate prior to Snowden’s actions. When Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked for a “ballpark figure” of the number of Americans whose information was being collected by the NSA last year, the agency refused to give the senator any information, arguing that doing so would violate the privacy of those whose information was collected.

In March, at a Congressional hearing, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper answered “no sir” when Wyden asked whether the NSA had collected “any type of data at all on millions of Americans.” We now know his statement was incorrect.

Wyden and Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) had also been pressing for almost four years for access to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s legal opinions interpreting Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Until Snowden’s disclosures, the senators made no headway. Now, the Obama administration has announced it intends to release its legal interpretation of Section 215.

As Lee's colleague Ezra Klein points out in response, the fact that Obama is still attacking Snowden is simply ridiculous.

“What makes us different from other countries is not simply our ability to secure our nation,” Obama said. “It’s the way we do it, with open debate and democratic process.”

If that’s so, then Edward Snowden should be hailed as a hero. There’s simply no doubt that his leaks led to more open debate and more democratic process than would’ve existed otherwise.

Or, in the shortest possible form, NY Times' reporter Binyamin Appelbaum summed it up thusly:

Obama is really mad at Edward Snowden for forcing us patriots to have this critically important conversation.

This is an important discussion, but President Obama has had five years to have it, and has actively resisted it at multiple key opportunities to do so. To pretend that any of this would have happened without Snowden is ridiculous. At the same time, to insist that people who care about our civil liberties are patriots, while still trying to attack and demonize Snowden, just screams of insincerity on the issue. Snowden should be proud: he did this to start the debate and to create change, and it appears that's happening. But President Obama should be ashamed to pretend that this would have happened without Snowden. It's insulting the intelligence of the American public.

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Editor’s note: Ben Horowitz is co-founder and partner of Andreessen Horowitz. He was co-founder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was acquired by HP, and ran several product divisions at Netscape. He serves on the board of companies such as Capriza, Foursquare, Jawbone, Lytro, Magnet, NationBuilder, Okta, Rap Genius, SnapLogic, and Tidemark. Follow him on his blog and on Twitter @bhorowitz.

If I knew what I knew in the past
I would have been blacked out on you’re a** —Kanye West, Black Skinhead

Because I am a prominent advocate for founders running their own companies, whenever a founder fails to scale or gets replaced by a professional CEO, people send me lots of emails. What happened, Ben? I thought founders were supposed to be better? Are you going to update your “Why We Prefer Founding CEOs” post?  

In response to all of these emails: No, I am not going to rewrite that post, but I will write this post. There are three main reasons why founders fail to run the companies they created:

The founder doesn’t really want to be CEO. Not every inventor wants to run a company and if you don’t really want to be CEO, your chances for success will be exceptionally low. The CEO skill set is incredibly difficult to master, so without a strong desire to do so the founder will fail. If you are a founder who doesn’t want to be CEO, that’s fine, but you should figure that out early and save yourself and everyone else a lot of pain.

The board panics. Sometimes the founder does want to be CEO, but the board sees her making mistakes, panics and replaces her prematurely. This is tragic, but common.

The Product CEO Paradox. Many founders run smack into the Product CEO Paradox, which I explain below.

The Product CEO Paradox

A friend of mine led his company from nothing to over $1 billion in revenue in record time by relentlessly pursuing his product vision. He did so by intimately involving himself in the intricate details of his company’s product planning and execution. This worked brilliantly up to about 500 employees. Then, as the company continued to scale, things started to degenerate. He went from being the visionary product founder who kept cohesion and context across the increasingly complex product line to the seemingly arbitrary decision maker and product bottleneck. This frustrated employees and slowed development. In reaction to that problem and to help the company scale, he backed off and started delegating all the major product decisions and direction to the team. And then he ran smack into the Product CEO Paradox: The only thing that will wreck a company faster than the product CEO being highly engaged in the product is the product CEO disengaging from the product.

This happens all the time. A founder develops a breakthrough idea and starts a company to build it. As originator of the idea, she works tirelessly to bring it to life by involving herself in every detail of the product to ensure that the execution meets the vision. The product succeeds and the company grows. Then somewhere along the line, employees start complaining that the CEO is paying too much attention to what the employees can do better without her and not enough attention to the rest of the company. The board or CEO Coach then advises the founder to “trust her people and delegate.” And then the product loses focus and starts to look like a camel (a horse built by committee). In the meanwhile, it turns out that the CEO was only world-class at the product, so she effectively transformed herself from an excellent, product-oriented CEO into a crappy, general-purpose CEO. Looks like we need a new CEO.

How can we prevent that? It turns out that almost all the great product-oriented founder/CEOs stay involved in the product throughout their careers. Bill Gates sat in every product review at Microsoft until he retired. Larry Ellison still runs the product strategy at Oracle. Steve Jobs famously weighed in on every important product direction at Apple. Mark Zuckerberg drives the product direction at Facebook. How do they do it without blowing their companies to bits?

Over the years, each one of them reduced their level of involvement in any individual set of product decisions, but maintained their essential involvement. The product-oriented CEO’s essential involvement consists of at least the following activities:

Keep and drive the product vision. The CEO does not have to create the entire product vision, but the product-oriented CEO must drive the vision that she chooses. She is the one person who is both in position to see what must be done and to resource it correctly.

Maintain the quality standard. How good must a product be to be good enough? This is an incredibly tough question to answer and it must be consistent and part of the culture. It was easy to see the power of doing this right when Steve Jobs ran Apple, as he drove a standard that created incredible customer loyalty.

Be the integrator. When Larry Page took over as CEO of Google, he spent a huge amount of his time forcing every product group to get to a common user profile and sharing paradigm. Why? Because he had to. It would never have happened without the CEO making it happen. It was nobody else’s top priority.

Make people consider the data they don’t have. In today’s world, product teams have access to an unprecedented set of data on the products that they’ve built. Left to themselves, they will optimize the product around the data they have. But what of the data they don’t have? What about the products and features that need to be built that the customers can’t imagine? Who will make that a priority? The CEO.

But how do you do that and only that if you have been involved in the product at a much deeper level the whole way? How do you back off gracefully in general without backing off at all in some areas? At some point, you must formally structure your product involvement. You must transition from your intimately involved motion to a process that enables you to make your contribution without disempowering your team or driving them bananas. The exact process depends on you, your strengths, your work style and your personality, but will usually benefit from these elements:

Write it; don’t say it. If there is something that you want in the products, then write it out completely. Not as a quick email, but as a formal document. This will maximize clarity while serving to limit your involvement to those things that you have thought all the way through.

Formalize and attend product reviews. If teams know that they should expect a regular review where you will check the consistency with the vision, the quality of the design, the progress against their integration goals, etc., it will feel much less disempowering than if you change their direction in the hallway.

Don’t communicate direction outside of your formal mechanisms. It’s fine and necessary to continue to talk to individual engineers and product managers in an ad hoc fashion, because you need to continually update your understanding of what’s going on. But resist the attempt to jump in and give direction in these scenarios. Only give direction via a formal communication channel like the ones described above.

Note that it is really difficult to back off of any non-essential involvement yet remain engaged where you are needed. This is where most people blow themselves up: either by not letting go or by letting go. If you find yourself where my friend found himself — you cannot let go a little without letting go entirely — then you probably should consider a CEO change. But don’t do that. Learn how to do this.

In a bit of fortuitous timing, this week we had asked former deputy chief of staff for Ron Wyden, Jennifer Hoelzer, to do our weekly "Techdirt Favorites of the Week" post, in which we have someone from the wider Techdirt community tell us what their favorite posts on the site were. As you'll see below, Hoelzer has a unique and important perspective on this whole debate concerning NSA surveillance, and given the stories that came out late Friday, she chose to ditch her original post on favorites and rewrite the whole thing from scratch last night (and into this morning). Given that, it's much, much more than a typical "favorites of the week" post, and thus we've adjusted the title appropriately. I hope you'll read through this in its entirety for a perspective on what's happening that not many have.

Tim Cushing made one of my favorite points of the week in his Tuesday post "Former NSA Boss Calls Snowden's Supporters Internet Shut-ins; Equates Transparency Activists With Al-Qaeda," when he explained that "some of the most ardent defenders of our nation's surveillance programs" -- much like proponents of overreaching cyber-legislation, like SOPA -- have a habit of "belittling" their opponents as a loose confederation of basement-dwelling loners." I think it's worth pointing out that General Hayden's actual rhetoric is even more inflammatory than Cushing's. Not only did the former NSA director call us "nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twenty-somethings who haven't talked to the opposite sex in five or six years," he equates transparency groups like the ACLU with al Qaeda.

I appreciated this post for two reasons:

First of all, it does a great job of illustrating a point that I've long made when asked for advice on communicating tech issues, which is that the online community is as diverse and varied as the larger world we live in. Of course, we are more likely to come across the marginal opinions of twenty-somethings with social anxiety online because, unlike the larger world, the Internet gives those twenty-somethings just as much of an opportunity to be heard as a Harvard scholar, a dissident protesting for democracy or General Hayden himself.

Sure, it can be infuriating to read scathingly hostile comments written by troubled individuals who clearly didn't take the time to read the post you spent countless hours carefully writing (not that that has ever happened to me) but isn't one of the things that makes the Internet so darn special its unwavering reminder that free speech includes speech we don't appreciate? Of course, that's a point that tends to get lost on folks -- like General Hayden -- who don't seem to understand that equating the entirety of the online world with terrorists is a lot like posting a scathing comment to a story without reading it. You can't expect someone to treat you or your opinion with respect -- online or anywhere else -- when you're being disrespectful. And I can imagine no greater disrespect for the concepts of transparency and oversight than to equate them with the threats posed by terrorist groups like al Qaeda.

But my main reason for singling out Tim's post this week is that Hayden's remark goes to the heart of what I continue to find most offensive about the Administration's handling of the NSA surveillance programs, which is their repeated insinuation that anyone who raises concerns about national security programs doesn't care about national security. As Tim explains this "attitude fosters the "us vs. them" antagonism so prevalent in these agencies dealings with the public. The NSA (along with the FBI, DEA and CIA) continually declares the law is on its side and portrays its opponents as ridiculous dreamers who believe safety doesn't come with a price."

To understand why I find this remark so offensive, I should probably tell you a little about myself. While the most identifying aspect of my resume is probably the six years I spent as U.S. Senator Ron Wyden's communications director and later deputy chief of staff, I started college at the U.S. Naval Academy and spent two years interning for the National Security Council. I had a Top Secret SCI clearance when I was 21 years old and had it not been for an unusual confluence of events nearly 15 years ago -- including a chance conversation with a patron of the bar I tended in college -- I might be working for the NSA today. I care very deeply about national security. Moreover -- and this is what the Obama Administration and other proponents of these programs fail to understand -- I was angry at the Administration for its handling of these programs long before I knew what the NSA was doing. That had a lot to do with the other thing you should probably know about me: during my tenure in Wyden's office, I probably spent in upwards of 1,000 hours trying to help my boss raise concerns about programs that he couldn't even tell me about.

Which brings me to my next favorite Techdirt post of the week, Mike's Friday post entitled "Don't Insult Our Intelligence, Mr. President: This Debate Wouldn't Be Happening Without Ed Snowden," which is a much less profane way of summing up my feelings about the President's "claim that he had already started this process prior to the Ed Snowden leaks and that it's likely we would [have] ended up in the same place" without Snowden's disclosure.

"What makes us different from other countries is not simply our ability to secure our nation," Obama said. "It's the way we do it, with open debate and democratic process."

I hope you won't mind if I take a moment to respond to that.

Really, Mr. President? Do you really expect me to believe that you give a damn about open debate and the democratic process? Because it seems to me if your Administration was really committed those things, your Administration wouldn't have blocked every effort to have an open debate on these issues each time the laws that your Administration claims authorizes these programs came up for reauthorization, which -- correct me if I am wrong -- is when the democratic process recommends as the ideal time for these debates.

For example, in June 2009, six months before Congress would have to vote to reauthorize Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which the Obama Administration claims gives the NSA the authority to collect records on basically every American citizen -- whether they have ever or will ever come in contact with a terrorist -- Senators Wyden, Feingold and Durbin sent Attorney General Eric Holder a classified letter "requesting the declassification of information which [they] argued was critical for a productive debate on reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act."

In November 2009, they sent an unclassified letter reiterating the request, stating:

"The PATRIOT Act was passed in a rush after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Sunsets were attached to the Act's most controversial provisions, to permit better-informed, more deliberative consideration of them at a later time. Now is the time for that deliberative consideration, but informed discussion is not possible when most members of Congress - and nearly all of the American public - lack important information about the issue."

Did President Obama jump at the opportunity to embrace the democratic process and have an open debate then? No. Congress voted the following month to reauthorize the Patriot Act without debate.

In May 2011, before the Senate was -- again -- scheduled to vote to reauthorize the Patriot Act, Senators Wyden and Udall -- again -- called for the declassification of the Administration’s secret interpretation of Section 215. This time, in a Huffington Post Op-Ed entitled "How Can Congress Debate a Secret Law?" they wrote:

Members of Congress are about to vote to extend the most controversial provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act for four more years, even though few of them understand how those provisions are being interpreted and applied.

As members of the Senate Intelligence Committee we have been provided with the executive branch's classified interpretation of those provisions and can tell you that we believe there is a significant discrepancy between what most people -- including many Members of Congress -- think the Patriot Act allows the government to do and what government officials secretly believe the Patriot Act allows them to do.

Legal scholars, law professors, advocacy groups, and the Congressional Research Service have all written interpretations of the Patriot Act and Americans can read any of these interpretations and decide whether they support or agree with them. But by far the most important interpretation of what the law means is the official interpretation used by the U.S. government and this interpretation is -- stunningly --classified.

What does this mean? It means that Congress and the public are prevented from having an informed, open debate on the Patriot Act because the official meaning of the law itself is secret. Most members of Congress have not even seen the secret legal interpretations that the executive branch is currently relying on and do not have any staff who are cleared to read them. Even if these members come down to the Intelligence Committee and read these interpretations themselves, they cannot openly debate them on the floor without violating classification rules.

During the debate itself, Wyden and Udall offered an amendment to declassify the Administration's legal interpretation of its Patriot Act surveillance authorities and, in a twenty minute speech on the Senate floor, Wyden warned that the American people would one day be outraged to learn that the government was engaged in surveillance activities that many Americans would assume were illegal, just as they were every other time the national security committee has tried to hide its questionable activities from the American people. Fun aside: As you can see in the video, to underscore the point that hiding programs from the American people rarely goes well for the Administration, I had my staff make a poster of the famous image of Oliver North testifying before Congress during the Iran-Contra hearing. I really wanted to replace North’s face with the words “insert your photo here,” but we didn't have the time.

Did President Obama welcome an open debate at that time?

No. Congress voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act for four more years and the only point we -- as critics -- could raise that might be confused with debate was a hypothetical argument illustrated with a twenty-year-old picture of Oliver North. And, again, Senator Wyden couldn't even tell me what he was so concerned about. In strategy meetings with me and his Intelligence Committee staffer, I had to repeatedly leave the room when the conversation strayed towards details they couldn't share with me because I no longer had an active security clearance. "You know, it would be a lot easier if you could just tell me what I can't say?" I'd vent in frustration. They agreed, but still asked me to leave the room.

And that was just the Patriot Act. Did the President -- who now claims to welcome open debate of his Administration's surveillance authorities -- jump at the opportunity to have such a debate when the FISA Amendments Act came up for reauthorization?

No. Not only did the Administration repeatedly decline Senator Wyden's request for a "ballpark figure" of the number of Americans whose information was being collected by the NSA last year, just a month after the Patriot Act reauthorization, the Senate Intelligence Committee attempted to quietly pass a four year reauthorization of the controversial surveillance law by spinning it as an effort to: "Synchronize the various sunset dates included in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to June 1, 2015;" So, I guess if this was part of the Administration's plan to publicly debate the NSA's surveillance authorities, the plan was for the debate to take place in 2015?

And, as I explained in an interview with Brian Beutler earlier this summer, that is just a fraction of the ways the Obama Administration and the Intelligence Communities ignored and even thwarted our attempts to consult the public on these surveillance programs before they were reauthorized. In fact, after the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in which Wyden attempted to close the FAA's Section 702 loophole, which another important Techdirt post this week explains, "gives the NSA 'authority' to run searches on Americans without any kind of warrant," I -- as Wyden’s spokesperson -- was specifically barred from explaining the Senator's opposition to the legislation to the reporters. In fact, the exact response I was allowed to give reporters was:

"We've been told by Senator Feinstein's staff that under the SSCI's Committee Rule 9.3, members and staff are prohibited from discussing the markup or describing the contents of the bill until the official committee report is released. The fact that they've already put out a press release does not lift this prohibition."

That's right, supporters of a full scale reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act put out a press release explaining why this was a good thing, while explicitly barring the Senator who voted against the legislation from explaining his concerns.

Months later, the FISA Amendments Act, which the Administration contends authorizes its PRISM program, passed without the open debate that the President now contends he wanted all along. And, again, I'm only touching on a fraction of the efforts just Senator Wyden made to compel the administration to engage the American people in a democratic debate. I, obviously, haven't mentioned the Director of National Intelligence's decision to lie when Wyden "asked whether the NSA had collected 'any type of data at all on millions of Americans.'" (Btw: Given that Wyden shared his question with the ODNI the day before the hearing, I am highly skeptical that Clapper's decision to lie was made unilaterally.) Or the fact that the Obama Administration repeatedly fought lawsuits and FOIA requests for, again -- not sources and methods -- but the Section 215 legal interpretation that the Administration claims authorizes its surveillance authorities.

The below is an excerpt from a March 2012 letter that Wyden and Udall sent the Obama Administration urging them to respect the democratic process:

The Justice Department's motion to dismiss these Freedom of Information Act lawsuits argues that it is the responsibility of the executive branch to determine the best way to protect the secrecy of intelligence sources and methods. While this is indeed a determination for the executive branch to make, we are concerned that the executive branch has developed a practice of bypassing traditional checks and balances and treating these determinations as dispositive in all cases. In other words, when intelligence officials argue that something should stay secret, policy makers often seem to defer to them without carefully considering the issue themselves. We have great respect for our nation's intelligence officers, the vast majority of whom are hard-working and dedicated professionals. But intelligence officials are specialists -- it is their job to determine how to collect as much information as possible, but it is not their job to balance the need for secrecy with the public's right to know how the law is being interpreted. That responsibility rests with policy makers, and we believe that responsibility should not be delegated lightly.

But, as Mike's last post on Friday explains, "President Obama flat out admitted that this was about appeasing a public that doesn't trust the administration, not about reducing the surveillance." Mike's insight continues:

Even more to the point, his comments represent a fundamental misunderstanding of why the public doesn't trust the government. That's because he keeps insisting that the program isn't being abused and that all of this collection is legal. But, really, that's not what the concern is about. Even though we actually know that the NSA has a history of abuse (and other parts of the intelligence community before that), a major concern is that scooping up so much data is considered legal in the first place.

I'd go even further than that and argue that a big part of the reason the American people are having a hard time trusting their government is that the public's trust in government is harmed every time the American people learn that their government is secretly doing something they not only assumed was illegal but that government officials specifically told them they weren't doing. Hint: When the American people learn that you lied to them, they trust you less.

I think it's hard for the American people to trust their President when he says he respects democratic principles, when his actions over the course of nearly five years demonstrate very little respect for democratic principles.

I think the American people would be more likely to trust the President when he says these programs include safeguards that protect their privacy, if he -- or anyone else in his administration -- seemed to care about privacy rights or demonstrated an understanding of how the information being collected could be abused. Seriously, how are we supposed to trust safeguards devised by people who don't believe there is anything to safeguard against?

I think it's understandably hard for the American people to trust the President when he says his Administration has the legal authority to conduct these surveillance programs when one of the few things that remains classified about these programs is the legal argument that the administration says gives the NSA the authority to conduct these programs. This is the document that explains why the Administration believes the word "relevant" gives them the authority to collect everything. It's also the document I'd most like to see since it's the document my former boss has been requesting be declassified for more than half a decade. (A reporter recently asked me why I think the Administration won't just declassify the legal opinion given that the sources and methods it relates to have already been made public. "I think that's pretty obvious," I said. "I believe it will be much harder for the Administration to claim that these programs are legal, if people can see their legal argument.")

I think it's hard for the American people to trust the President when his administration has repeatedly gone out of its way to silence critics and -- again -- treat oversight as a threat on par with al Qaeda. As another great Techdirt post this week -- US Releases Redacted Document Twice... With Different Redactions -- illustrates, many of the Intelligence Community's classification decisions seem to be based more on a desire to avoid criticism than clear national security interests. And as Senator Wyden said back in 2007, when then CIA Director Hayden (yes, the same guy who thinks we're all losers who can't get laid) attempted to undermine oversight over his agency by launching an investigation into the CIA's inspector general, "people who know that they're doing the right thing aren't afraid of oversight."

Which reminds me of the Techdirt post this week that probably haunted me the most. Ed Snowden's Email Provider, Lavabit, Shuts Down To Fight US Gov't Intrusion. Mike uses the post to explain that Ladar Levison, the owner and operator of Labavit -- the secure email service that provided Edward Snowden's email account -- decided to shut down his email service this week.

Not much more information is given, other than announced plans to fight against the government in court. Reading between the lines, it seems rather obvious that Lavabit has been ordered to either disclose private information or grant access to its secure email accounts, and the company is taking a stand and shutting down the service while continuing the legal fight. It's also clear that the court has a gag order on Levison, limiting what can be said.

The part that haunted me, though, was a line Levon included in his email informing customers of his decision:

"I feel you deserve to know what’s going on," he wrote. "The first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this."

He's right, isn't he? If these aren't the moments the First Amendment was meant for, what are? Moreover, if the Administration is so convinced that its requests of Labavit are just, why are they afraid to hold them up to public scrutiny?

In his book, Secrecy: The American Experience, former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan included a quote from a 1960 report issued by the House Committee on Operations which I believe provides a far better response than anything I could write on my own:

Secrecy -- the first refuge of incompetents -- must be at a bare minimum in a democratic society for a fully informed public is the basis of self government. Those elected or appointed to positions of executive authority must recognize that government, in a democracy, cannot be wiser than its people.

Which brings me to my final point (at least for now) I think it's awfully hard for the American people to trust the President and his administration when their best response to the concerns Americans are raising is to denigrate the Americans raising those concerns. Because, you see, I have a hard time understanding why my wanting to stand up for democratic principles makes me unpatriotic, while the ones calling themselves patriots seem to think so little of the people and the principles that comprise the country they purport to love.

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that baby yoga video is, uh, something else  

Since 2007, [Jamie Mantzel] has been building a huge remote-controlled walking robot. If you’ve been following him on his YouTube channel and blog, you’ve seen the very beginnings of him building a lumber mill to create a workshop, making the legs for his robot, and improving his welding rig. This week, though, has been very special. [Jamie] has finally finished his giant robot project, bidding closed the fevered dream of a madman who awakes to a 10 foot robot in his yard.

The giant robot is constructed nearly entirely out of scrap aluminum. In the interest of simplicity, [Jamie] has come up with some interesting techniques to scale up conventional RC gear to power huge motors swinging giant legs: the steering motors are powered by manual switches, but these switches are activated by servos. A brilliantly simple solution to driving high-current loads if we do say so ourselves.

[Jamie]‘s robot has garnered a lot of attention over the years, so much so that toy companies have licensed his designs for a line of battling combat spiderbots. [Jamie] believes his robots should be more educational, so he’s launched a Kickstarter for his own version as a kit. With this kit, getting the bug tank robot up and running isn’t simply a matter of pulling it out of the box and installing batteries; [Jamie]‘s version is an actual kit with linkages that must be assembled. We know which version we’d want.

It’s an amazingly impressive project, and we’re glad to see such an awesome cat has finally realized his dream of a walking aluminum arachnid of death.

Filed under: kickstarter, robots hacks, toy hacks

This compilation of videos shot with Vine is surprisingly good and a nice illustration of what Mat Honan is getting at in Why Vine Just Won't Die.

Vine started from scratch. It built a ground up culture that feels loose, informal, and -- frankly -- really fucking weird. Moreover, most of what you see there feels very of-the-moment. Sure, there's plenty of artistry that goes into making six second loops, and there are volumes of videos with high production values. But far more common are Vines that serve as windows into what people are doing right now. Many of the most popular Vines appear to be completely off the cuff. They don't have to be great or slick or well produced. In some ways, its better that they're not, because it creates a lower threshold if you just want to, you know, share a video of your cat. They have something that trumps quality, which is authenticity.

That authenticity is driving a distinct emerging culture. One that stars people like Riff Raff and Tyler, the Creator, and an army of kids whose names you've never heard of but who can still generate hundreds of thousands of likes and re-Vines, and even large scale in-person meetups. It's the triumph of the loop, yes, but it's also the triumph of youth.

Take a moment to stroll through Vine's "Popular Now" videos, and you'd have to be willfully ignorant to not notice that those on Vine are distinctly younger, distinctly blacker, and distinctly, well, gayer than society in general. In short, it's cool. It's hip. It's a scene. If Instagram is an art museum, Vine is a block party.

I was going to make a joke about this being what TV is going to look like in five years, but I think you could put 30 minutes of this on MTV2 or whatever, with six-second Vine-style ads placed seamlessly in the mix, and you'd have yourself a hit show. (via ★interesting)

Tags: best of   Mat Honan   video   Vine

It is good to have spent sometime reading this week and I had a tough task to pick through many dozens of shortlisted stories. I guess the ones here are those pieces that had a lasting impact.

• The curious genius of Amar Bose: Popular Science looks back at the life and times of the man who started Bose Corporation. Great profile.
• In praise of selfies. Casey N Cep looks into the curious phenomenon of taking self portraits and sharing them on the internet. I am all for people expressing themselves but, I am not going to be joining their ranks — I don’t look so good on selfies.
• Forget startups, the real bubble is in sports cable and it will burst soon. Kent Sterling takes a bat to the knees of the sports television business, which is in the process of a photo-app-like boom.
• Can redesigning workspace help Microsoft overcome its mid-life (talent) crisis? Metropolis asks the question. I can answer it with one word: no!
• Jack Shafer takes us down memory lane, talks about American journalism and puts the current handwringing over Glenn Greenwald in context. A great piece, that is worth reading.  (Bonus piece: Where is the journalism we need going to come from?)
• We live like gods and we don’t even know it. Great essay by Tom Streithorst on post-scarcity economics. One of the best things I have read this week.
• The bizarre town San Francisco has become. A wonderful essay in London Review of Books by Rebecca Solnit highlights the dichotomy of the city of the bay.

The Roots' Questlove has some powerful thoughts on the Trayvon Martin verdict:

I'm in scenarios all the time in which primitive, exotic-looking me -- six-foot-two, 300 pounds, uncivilized Afro, for starters -- finds himself in places where people who look like me aren't normally found. I mean, what can I do? I have to be somewhere on Earth, correct? In the beginning -- let's say 2002, when the gates of "Hey, Ahmir, would you like to come to [swanky elitist place]?" opened -- I'd say "no," mostly because it's been hammered in my DNA to not "rock the boat," which means not making "certain people" feel uncomfortable.

I mean, that is a crazy way to live. Seriously, imagine a life in which you think of other people's safety and comfort first, before your own. You're programmed and taught that from the gate. It's like the opposite of entitlement.

Reading about this case and the reaction to it has been a series of gut punches this week.

Tags: legal   Questlove   racism   Trayvon Martin

 

1. Ten Rules of the Internet (Anil Dash) — they’re all candidates for becoming “Dash’s Law”. I like this one the most: When a company or industry is facing changes to its business due to technology, it will argue against the need for change based on the moral importance of its work, rather than trying to understand the social underpinnings.
2. Data Storage by Vertical (Quartz) — The US alone is home to 898 exabytes (1 EB = 1 billion gigabytes)—nearly a third of the global total. By contrast, Western Europe has 19% and China has 13%. Legally, much of that data itself is property of the consumers or companies who generate it, and licensed to companies that are responsible for it. And in the US—a digital universe of 898 exabytes (1 EB = 1 billion gigabytes)—companies have some kind of liability or responsibility for 77% of all that data.
3. x-OSC — a wireless I/O board that provides just about any software with access to 32 high-performance analogue/digital channels via OSC messages over WiFi. There is no user programmable firmware and no software or drivers to install making x-OSC immediately compatible with any WiFi-enabled platform. All internal settings can be adjusted using any web browser.
4. Google Experimenting with Encrypting Google Drive (CNet) — If that’s the case, a government agency serving a search warrant or subpoena on Google would be unable to obtain the unencrypted plain text of customer files. But the government might be able to convince a judge to grant a wiretap order, forcing Google to intercept and divulge the user’s login information the next time the user types it in. Advertising depends on the service provider being able to read your data. Either your Drive’s contents aren’t valuable to Google advertising, or it won’t be a host-resistant encryption process.

Windows RT is a dog. We’ve been saying that from the beginning. We weren’t alone. It’s very hard to find a positive review of Windows RT, and more specifically, the nine-month-old Microsoft Surface with RT. And now Microsoft, in its latest earnings report, finally revealed that we were right.

The company took a massive $900M writedown last quarter because of unsold Surface RT’s. Even more telling is that Microsoft actually revealed this loss. It’s that big. The company had to tell investors why it didn’t meet Wall Street’s expectations.

Sadly, the Surface RT hardware is not at fault here. The tablet itself is actually a beautiful machine: sleek, solid and downright stunning. It’s hard to pick one up and not be impressed. The Surface RT’s designers and engineers should be proud of their creation. It’s not their fault.

Windows RT should not exist as a consumer-facing product. It’s a reactionary move against the iPad and the multitude of Android tablets flooding the market. It’s Microsoft punching down where it should have just walked away from the fight. While Intel is quickly bringing most of the advantages of ARM chips to its x86 line, Microsoft decided it couldn’t wait and built a product that ignored Windows’ main advantages of legacy software. The Surface RT was sadly part of the ecosystem that is predictably failing.

The Surface product line was a big risk for Microsoft. The company went all-in on a PC for the very first time. And in a way, it was successful. The Surface RT and Pro brought a lot of attention to Windows 8 tablets — much more attention than HP, Dell, or Samsung could have provided. The striking product line put a lot of consumer electronic companies on notice, especially since Microsoft — historically a software-first outfit — took on the task of creating their own first-rate hardware. These tablets are the standard for Windows 8 tablets even if it’s clear after today’s news that they failed to live up to Microsoft’s expectations.

Without the Surface Pro and RT, the Windows 8 tablet world would be as stale and lifeless as Windows 8 laptops.

All signs point to a new Surface line being announced in the coming weeks. And even with today’s news, it’s entirely possible that Microsoft will release a second generation Surface RT with a starting price point much lower. If anything, Microsoft is a company that does whatever the hell it wants even if no one is buying the products.

One of the key themes that has come out from the revelations concerning NSA surveillance is a bunch of defenders of the program claiming "it's just metadata." This is wrong on multiple levels. First of all, only some of the revealed programs involve "just metadata." The so-called "business records" data is metadata, but other programs, such as PRISM, can also include actual content. But, even if we were just talking about "just metadata," the idea that it somehow is no big deal, and people have nothing to worry about when it comes to metadata is ridiculous to anyone who knows even the slightest thing about metadata. In fact, anyone who claims that "it's just metadata" in an attempt to minimize what's happening is basically revealing that they haven't the slightest clue about what metadata is. Here are a few examples of why.

Just a few months ago, Nature published a study all about how much a little metadata can reveal, entitled Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility by Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, Cesar A. Hidalgo, Michel Verleysen, and Vincent D. Blondel. The basic conclusion: metadata reveals a ton, and even "coarse datasets" provide almost no anonymity:

A simply anonymized dataset does not contain name, home address, phone number or other obvious identifier. Yet, if individual's patterns are unique enough, outside information can be used to link the data back to an individual. For instance, in one study, a medical database was successfully combined with a voters list to extract the health record of the governor of Massachusetts27. In another, mobile phone data have been re-identified using users' top locations28. Finally, part of the Netflix challenge dataset was re-identified using outside information from The Internet Movie Database29.

All together, the ubiquity of mobility datasets, the uniqueness of human traces, and the information that can be inferred from them highlight the importance of understanding the privacy bounds of human mobility. We show that the uniqueness of human mobility traces is high and that mobility datasets are likely to be re-identifiable using information only on a few outside locations. Finally, we show that one formula determines the uniqueness of mobility traces providing mathematical bounds to the privacy of mobility data. The uniqueness of traces is found to decrease according to a power function with an exponent that scales linearly with the number of known spatio-temporal points. This implies that even coarse datasets provide little anonymity.

Some of the figures they presented show how easy it is to track individuals and their locations, which can paint a pretty significant and revealing portrait of who they are and what they've done. In an interview, one of the authors of the paper basically said that your metadata effectively creates a "fingerprint" that is unique to you and easy to match to your identity:

"We use the analogy of the fingerprint," said de Montjoye in a phone interview today. "In the 1930s, Edmond Locard, one of the first forensic science pioneers, showed that each fingerprint is unique, and you need 12 points to identify it. So here what we did is we took a large-scale database of mobility traces and basically computed the number of points so that 95 percent of people would be unique in the dataset."

Others are discovering the same thing. Ethan Zuckerman, who recently co-taught a class with one of the authors of the paper above, Cesar Hidalgo, wrote about how two students in the class created a project called Immersion, with Hidalgo, which takes your Gmail metadata ("just metadata") and maps out your social network. As Zuckerman notes, his own use of Immersion reveals some things that could be questionable or dangerous. He discusses some bits of metadata that are "obvious," which would make him easily identifiable, but which probably aren't that "questionable." However, he also notes some potentially problematic things as well:

Anyone who knows me reasonably well could have guessed at the existence of these ties. But there’s other information in the graph that’s more complicated and potentially more sensitive. My primary Media Lab collaborators are my students and staff – Cesar is the only Media Lab node who’s not affiliated with Civic who shows up on my network, which suggests that I’m collaborating less with my Media Lab colleagues than I might hope to be. One might read into my relationships with the students I advise based on the email volume I exchange with them – I’d suggest that the patterns have something to do with our preferred channels of communication, but it certainly shows who’s demanding and receiving attention via email. In other words, absence from a social network map is at least as revealing as presence on it.

Separately, more than two years ago, we wrote about how a German politician named Malte Spitz got access to all of the metadata that Deutsche Telekom had on him over a period of six months, and then worked with the German newspaper Die Zeit to put together an amazing visualization that lets you track six months of his life entirely via his metadata, combined with public information, such as his Twitter feed. While this all came out over two years ago, just recently, Spitz wrote a NYT op-ed piece about how this "just metadata" situation means that it's tough to trust the US government.

In Germany, whenever the government begins to infringe on individual freedom, society stands up. Given our history, we Germans are not willing to trade in our liberty for potentially better security. Germans have experienced firsthand what happens when the government knows too much about someone. In the past 80 years, Germans have felt the betrayal of neighbors who informed for the Gestapo and the fear that best friends might be potential informants for the Stasi. Homes were tapped. Millions were monitored.

Although these two dictatorships, Nazi and Communist, are gone and we now live in a unified and stable democracy, we have not forgotten what happens when secret police or intelligence agencies disregard privacy. It is an integral part of our history and gives young and old alike a critical perspective on state surveillance systems.

"Just metadata" isn't "just" anything, other than a massive violation of basic privacy rights.

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Gentlemen, this is how clothes should fit.

A suit jacket's length -- like a good lawyer -- should cover your ass.

(via ★interesting)

Tags: fashion

1. ansible — Model-driven configuration management, multi-node deployment/orchestration, and remote task execution system. Uses SSH by default, so no special software has to be installed on the nodes you manage. Ansible can be extended in any language.
2. The Golden Age of RSS — One of the things I expected least to see in 2013 was that this year would mark the greatest flourishing of RSS reader applications in the decade since it first came to prominence on the web.
3. JSONiq: the JSON Query Language — expressive and highly optimizable language to query and update NoSQL stores. It enables developers to leverage the same productive high-level language across a variety of NoSQL products. Implemented in Zorba, an Apache-licensed virtual machine for JSONiq and XQuery queries.
4. Bret Victor on Doug Engelbart — If you attempt to make sense of Engelbart’s design by drawing correspondences to our present-day systems, you will miss the point, because our present-day systems do not embody Engelbart’s intent. Engelbart hated our present-day systems. Poetic, articulate, and bang on the money.

Oregon Looks at Way to Attend College Now and Repay State Later

Uh, so, you mean like a tax system?

This week, the Oregon Legislature approved a plan that could allow students to attend state colleges without paying tuition or taking out traditional loans. Instead, they would commit a small percentage of their future incomes to repaying the state; those who earn very little would pay very little.

Yup, good ol’ taxes. Oregon, you should try it. It really works. It made sure I, without putting myself nor my family in crushing debt, were able to get a full college education.

Heck, while you’re at it, bump up the tax rate juuuuust a tad bit more, and you might even find that you can give everyone access to health care.

But that’s just an old socialist Dane talking nonsense, I guess.

♺

Many years and jobs ago when I was at BusinessWeek, I wrote about how the early Facebook was more Microsoft than Apple. While MySpace and later Twitter were about self-expression, music, celebrity, and cool, Facebook was built to be a utility. The new operating system of the Web as it used to be called.

Then when Facebook accepted an investment from Microsoft at a $15 billion valuation, Mark Zuckerberg and I had a conversation about how much he’d always admired Bill Gates. Not exactly what you heard from every entrepreneur in his young 20s in a Steve Jobs-obsessed world.

I’ve been thinking about that conversation a lot lately, because several people in the Valley are griping that that’s exactly what Zuckerberg has become — a latter-day Bill Gates for the Internet world.

Microsoft in its most powerful days was one of the most feared companies in the world. Because it had a lock on the operating system, it could wield monopoly-level power over which programs succeeded and which ones failed. It was known as a platform partner you couldn’t quite trust. It might give you massive distribution one day then cherry pick the best ideas and build a competing product to put you out of business the next. Above all, it wasn’t seen as an innovative company. But because of its lockbox control over desktops, it didn’t have to be.

Whenever I think about the popular demonization of Microsoft at its peak, I think of a skit on the Simpsons where Homer created an Internet company and Bill Gates showed up to “buy him out.” A gleeful Homer thought his ship had come in until Gates said, “Let’s buy ‘em out boys,” and his goons trashed Homer’s would-be office. Some of Microsoft’s sins have been exaggerated, but that was the company’s reputation after the Netscape anti-trust trial.

There are only a handful of companies that would regularly go up against Microsoft and win — Intuit being an example that won on small business software time and time again. As recent as the early 2000s, Microsoft saying it was about to get into your market was enough to tank the stock. Just ask Intuit or Symantec or myriad of others.

The analogy isn’t quite fair or accurate, though. For one thing, it’s hard to point to a surging company that Facebook has outright tanked. No one controls the user’s computing experience as much as Microsoft did back then. Rather there are a handful of walled gardens we willingly lock ourselves into, including those made by Facebook, Google, and Apple. The gardens are walled, for sure, but they are also semi-permeable walls. While Facebook — and Google — have been called the “OS of the Web,” and Apple and Google control the OS of the mobile Web, there is no one single dominant operating system.

That said, there are reasons people draw the similarity, and it’s not just because Zuckerberg and Gates are both Harvard dropouts. It seems to me there are three pretty fair knocks on Facebook that hearken back to the Gates’ era of Microsoft.

The first is that Facebook hasn’t always been the best steward of an open platform. It has continually changed the rules of how its platform works, and while Facebook Connect is becoming a default way that people sign up for services on the Web, how many third party Facebook apps do you actually use, compared to Apple or Android apps? When Facebook first opened its platform, it hoped to give rise to several billion dollar companies. There’s been one: Zynga. And its stock is in the tank, partially because it relied on Facebook for so long and wasn’t aggressive enough about mobile.

Connected to that is the idea that Zuckerberg & Co. just aren’t leading the market anymore when it comes to features and products. It’s become an “if you can’t beat ‘em, buy ‘em” mentality, although there are plenty of attempts to beat companies first. This goes back to Facebook’s days as a private company. Remember when it adjusted feeds to be more FriendFeed-like before buying FriendFeed? Facebook also allowed status updates to be customized to be more Twitter-like and launched Places to combat the then-surging Foursquare.

Once going public, the practice became more egregious, or at least attracted more attention. Facebook was roundly panned for its SnapChat rip-off, Poke. It followed that up with adding hashtags and today has launched what many see as “The Instagram of Video,” something that startups had been trying to nail for more than a year, and which Twitter’s Vine has come closest to succeeding at. Sources have also said that during the negotiation with Instagram, Zuckerberg let it be known that Facebook was working on introducing photo filters as well.

The one time Facebook released something truly new was Home, and that’s largely failed to excite consumers. It may not be that Facebook doesn’t want to lead the market. It may have simply lost the mojo to know how.

Is all of this bad? Not really. Unlike Microsoft, Facebook isn’t engaging in anti-trust issues. It’s competing in the market given its reach, which it built fairly. What a sulky Silicon Valley developer may call a copycat could also be called a company living up to its fiduciary duties. Facebook’s edge is its reach to 1 billion people. It should use that strength to continue to dominate the consumer and mobile markets. If it weren’t, we’d be comparing it to Yahoo. While calling someone a current Bill Gates may not be a compliment, comparing a company to Yahoo is a put-up-your-dukes insult.

Indeed, MySpace failed, in part, because it couldn’t see how Facebook’s clean interface and innovations like the newsfeed made it a superior social network. Having benefitted from going up against an arrogant market leader who was blind to a surging up-and-comer, Zuckerberg has always been wise to pay attention to potential threats early and often.

That’s why Zuckerberg once tried to buy Twitter for some $500 million and paid $1 billion for Instagram, the two companies that have come closest to actually competing with Facebook. The former not happening may come back to haunt him. The latter happening has been widely lauded as one of his best moments as Facebook’s CEO, taking out a potential competitor, keeping Instagram out of the hands of Twitter, and solving Facebook’s mobile problem in one master stroke. Zuckerberg would be a fool to ignore these threats and not continue to tweak his product to do what users want social and mobile sites to do.

But what’s interesting is the narrative that the moves have started to take on, gaining steam when the company ripped off SnapChat to build Poke. Part of this is Facebook’s dominance. Nothing makes you a target like 1 billion users.

But part of it is a lack of trust in Facebook that continues to grow the bigger the company gets. At the D11 conference last month, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg was asked about the trust problem the company has, and rather than rebutting that it was an issue, she chose her words carefully, saying “I would say trust is one of the most important things we have to get right. When we get it wrong it’s a huge problem, and when we get it right it’s a huge opportunity.”

Increasingly it’s not just privacy-worried consumers who don’t trust Facebook. It’s Silicon Valley developers and entrepreneurs.

1. Ant-Sized Computers (MIT TR) — The KL02 chip, made by Freescale, is shorter on each side than most ants are long and crams in memory, RAM, a processor, and more.
2. Some Thoughts on Digital Manufacturing (Nick Pinkston) — Whenever I see someone make a “new” 3D printer that’s just a derivative of the RepRap or MakerBot – I could care less. Only new processes, great interfaces or super-low price points get my attention anymore. FormLabs being a great example of all three – which is why they were a massive hit. If you’re looking for problems: make a cheap laser cutter, CNC mill, or pick-n-place machine. See the Othermill.
3. The Dictatorship of Data (MIT TR) — Robert McNamara epitomizes the hyper-rational executive led astray by numbers. (via Wolfgang Blau)
4. A Field Test of Mobile Phone Shielding Devices (PDF) — masters thesis comparing various high-tech fabric-type shielding devices. Alas, tin-foil helmets weren’t investigated. (via Udhay Shankar)

“Britain’s spy agency GCHQ has secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world’s phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National Security Agency (NSA).”

- GCHQ taps fibre-optic cables for secret access to world’s communications | UK news | guardian.co.uk

experimental project that calls you randomly at 2am and records it for a podcast  

It’s hard to let go of the narrative surrounding Instagram’s billion-dollar sale to Facebook, which is said to have been orchestrated personally by Mark Zuckerberg and, according to the New York Times, might have come directly after the company turned down a competing offer from Twitter. The story is simply begging to be written like a Valley-centric thriller: What might have happened if things had turned out differently between a photo-sharing service and the companies willing to spend hundreds of millions — or billions — of dollars to get their hands on it?

According to Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, the stakes might have been even higher than you’d think. Speaking at our PandoMonthly New York event last week, Wilson said that Twitter’s failure to cinch Instagram was a “huge, enormous” mistake. “If they had Instagram they would be better than Facebook,” Wilson said. “They’d have tweets; they’d have photos; and they’d have videos. And I think that would be the trifecta that would kill Facebook.”

The fact that Mark Zuckerberg realized this and started wooing the company was “genius,” Wilson said. Combine that with Facebook’s looming IPO, and what you end up with was a force against which Twitter simply couldn’t compete. ”There wasn’t a price Twitter could pay that Facebook couldn’t match, and Facebook could pay with currency that Twitter couldn’t,” Wilson said. “I think there was just no way that Twitter could win that deal.”