MrAureliusR

Interesting, I'll have to check that out. Can you reference any particular chapters/pages?

Hindsight is 20/20 -- at the time it must have seemed like a slap in the face to the researchers who opposed the demo. Not only do we have to show them the tech, they want money from us too?

There's something in this article that all the reading and research I have done contradicts: "For this reason, the researchers at PARC were, understandably, extremely impressed by Jobs’s desire to finally use that technology, therefore, on the Team’s second visit, they were shown even more of PARC’s new and exciting discoveries, alongside another look at Smalltalk."

This, from what I can tell, was at least mostly untrue. The woman who helped create most of the technologies, Adele Goldberg, stated on film more than once that she _strongly_ opposed showing the Apple team anything, as she knew they would just take the technology (in return for giving Xerox the _opportunity_ to invest in Apple, wow, what an incredible deal /s). She specifically said that she would NOT give the tour unless ordered to in writing, and her boss did indeed write that order.

So she and her team very reluctantly gave the entire GUI desktop concept away for free. Not to mention they also demonstrated object-oriented programming and a networked office, things that Apple (and NeXT) would capitalize on later as well.

In later years, Jobs even admitted as much -- he said Xerox could have been IBM or Microsoft. They had everything needed to start the home computer revolution but squandered it. While it's true that Xerox execs didn't want to market the research done at PARC, and they wanted to focus on their very lucrative copier business, that doesn't mean they had to give the technology away!

Yeah, cloudflare.com is working and the website that first clued me in to the outage (chess.com) is also working.

well that's the thing, such a huge number of companies route all their traffic through Cloudflare. This is at least partially because for a long time, there was no other company that could really do what Cloudflare does, especially not at the scales they do. As much as I despise Cloudflare as a company, their blog posts about stopping attacks and such are extremely interesting. The amount of bandwidth their network can absorb is jaw-dropping.

I've said to many people/friends that use Cloudflare to look elsewhere. When such a huge percentage of the internet flows through a single provider, and when that provider offers a service that allows them to decrypt all your traffic (if you let them install HTTPS certs for you), not only is that a hugely juicy target for nation-states but the company itself has too much power.

But again, what other companies can offer the insane amount of protection they can?

Oh man, the shelf is famous! Awesome article my man.

Everyone talking about security and not replacing locks with smart locks seems to forget that you can just kick the fucking door down or jimmy a window open.