Pinboard (guardiantech)

Gox horror story thread - How much did you lose? >> Reddit

guardiantech — 2014-02-25T17:41:31+00:00

Lots of putative money lost, and lots of tales of losing.

I just chased him through a bitcoin tumbler, and when he came out with 96,000 BTC, I was waiting for him... : >> SheepMarketplace

guardiantech — 2013-12-03T22:04:32+00:00

It's not cyberspace-coining William Gibson, though he might feel envious, but a user trying to track the thief who emptied a Bitcoin exchange:

I've been a very busy boy. All day, we've been chasing the scoundrel with our stolen bitcoins through the blockchain. Around lunchtime (UK), I was chasing him across the roof of a moving train, (metaphorically). I was less than 20 minutes, or 2 blockchain confirmations, behind "Tomas". He was desperately creating new wallet addresses and moving his 49 retirement wallets through them, but having to wait for 3 or 4 confirmations each time before moving them again. Each time I caught up, I "666"ed him - sent 0.00666 bitcoins to mess up his lovely round numbers like 4,000. Then,all of a sudden, decimal places started appearing, and fractions of bitcoins were jumping from wallet to wallet like grasshoppers on a hotplate without stopping for confirmations.
Shit!
He was tumbling our stolen bitcoins a second time, and a tumbler is unbeatable....
Unless you guess which one it is, nearly all the coins belong to the person you're tracking, jump in with him, and get jumbled up through the same wallets using the same algorithm.

Bill Gates still helping known patent trolls obtain more patents >> Ars Technica

guardiantech — 2013-08-14T23:25:19+00:00

Gates's patent filings show that (at least as of 2012) he hasn't slowed down his involvement with Intellectual Ventures even as patent trolls are viewed in an increasingly negative light throughout the technology industry. Gates famously criticized technology patents and their impact on the industry in 1991, but he's displayed a much more favorable view of patents since.

We are the Engineering team behind Ubuntu for Android >> Reddit AMA

guardiantech — 2013-08-05T23:12:42+00:00

We are the Engineering team behind Ubuntu for Android. We're working on a truly converged device, where your PC can fit in your pocket, and make phone calls.

An AMA from Monday evening.

Games by platform and genre >> Imgur

guardiantech — 2012-11-23T23:08:37+00:00

Awesome collection by a Redditor of games by topic and by platform since 1975. Gaze upon it in wonder.

Man behind 'Jailbait' posts exposed, loses job >> CNN.com

guardiantech — 2012-10-19T17:11:45+00:00

CNN video interview with Michael Brutsch, aka "Violentacrez" - though to hear him describe it, Violentacrez was almost a different person. We'd love to know what a psychiatrist would make of this interview.

A few words on Reddit, Gawker, and anonymity >> Popehat

guardiantech — 2012-10-17T20:34:33+00:00

Let me put it this way: I would not let the moderators and fans of the Reddit creeper forums around my daughters; I'd worry they would sexually assault the girls. I don't worry about Gawker writers and editors molesting my girls. However, if my girls were molested, I'd expect Gawker writers and editors to try to find ways to monetize it, use it to drive traffic, come up with banal, weakly ironic hipster-douchebag quips about it, pay witnesses to offer lurid details about it, and try to find clumsy and demi-literate ways to connect it to politicians they don't like.
The Internet Is Not Private: You're a fool if you think it is. The internet makes it easier, not harder, to figure out who you are, because the internet preserves your activities and allows your critics to crowdsource efforts to identify you.

A fantastic post. If you only read one (other) thing today…

Unmasking Reddit's Violentacrez, The Biggest Troll on the Web >> Gawker

guardiantech — 2012-10-12T22:20:26+00:00

Adrian Chen:

Jailbait defenders would often argue that if 14-year-olds didn't want their bikini pictures to be posted to Reddit, they should not have taken them and uploaded them to their Facebook accounts in the first place. If Brutsch did not want his employers to know that he had become a minor internet celebrity through spending hours every day posting photos of 14-year-olds in bikinis to thousands of people on the internet, he should have stuck to posting cat videos.

An announcement about Gawker links in /r/politics >> Reddit politics

guardiantech — 2012-10-12T05:16:10+00:00

As some of you may know, a prominent member of Reddit's community, Violentacrez, deleted his account recently. This was as a result of a 'journalist' seeking out his personal information and threatening to publish it, which would have a significant impact on his life. You can read more about it here
As moderators, we feel that this type of behavior is completely intolerable. We volunteer our time on Reddit to make it a better place for the users, and should not be harassed and threatened for that. We should all be afraid of the threat of having our personal information investigated and spread around the internet if someone disagrees with you. Reddit prides itself on having a subreddit for everything, and no matter how much anyone may disapprove of what another user subscribes to, that is never a reason to threaten them. As a result, the moderators of /r/politics have chosen to disallow links from the Gawker network until action is taken to correct this serious lack of ethics and integrity.

Or "Reddit discovers censorship", as it's being described elsewhere.

Seven lessons learned while building Reddit to 270m page views a month >> High Scalability

guardiantech — 2012-09-06T08:37:37+00:00

The essence of this lesson is: don't worry about the schema.
[Reddit's builders] used to spend a lot of time worrying about the database, keeping everthing nice and normalized. You shouldn’t have to worry about the database. Schema updates are very slow when you get bigger. Adding a column to 10m rows takes locks and doesn’t work. They used replication for backup and for scaling. Schema updates and maintaining replication is a pain. They would have to restart replication and could go a day without backups. Deployments are a pain because you have to orchestrate how new software and new database upgrades happen together.
Instead, they keep a Thing Table and a Data Table. Everything in Reddit is a Thing: users, links, comments, subreddits, awards, etc. Things keep common attribute like up/down votes, a type, and creation date. The Data table has three columns: thing id, key, value. There’s a row for every attribute. There’s a row for title, url, author, spam votes, etc. When they add new features they didn’t have to worry about the database anymore.

Two tables for the whole of Reddit. That's Third Normal Form and decades of teaching about database optimisation thrown out the window.

How the professor who fooled Wikipedia got caught by Reddit >> The Atlantic

guardiantech — 2012-05-17T05:31:28+00:00

A great read, but important too for understanding why some parts of the internet are weak for fact-checking:

If there's a simple lesson in all of this, it's that hoaxes tend to thrive in communities which exhibit high levels of trust. But on the Internet, where identities are malleable and uncertain, we all might be well advised to err on the side of skepticism.

I'm Stephen Wolfram (Mathematica, NKS, Wolfram|Alpha, ...), Ask Me Anything >> Reddit

guardiantech — 2012-03-07T06:44:50+00:00

Fascinating and absorbing. Pretty much the first question: why aren't old versions of Mathematica made open source? His answer is smart.

What's new on reddit: Independence >> blog.reddit

guardiantech — 2011-09-06T21:19:09+00:00

"When reddit was acquired in October 2006 by Condé Nast, it was receiving about 700k page views per day. Now, reddit routinely gets that much traffic in 15 minutes."

Since you're wondering, 67m page views per day (assuming it's constant through the 24 hours.)

Intriguing how this happened while TechCrunch is imploding over its ownership by AOL.

reddit gold, one year later >> Reddit

guardiantech — 2011-07-18T05:46:32+00:00

A year ago, Reddit introduced a "subscription" program, Reddit Gold. Turn off ads, more comments visible, certain other interaction benefits, for $4/month, or $30 to start.

So, how has it gone?

Welcome to the baconreader alpha >> Reddit

guardiantech — 2011-04-13T08:33:38+00:00

Reddit tool for Android. In alpha, and you have to download and install. Geek quotient: high.