miguelpais

Is Uber trying to be another real world enactment of Animal Farm?

The resemblance doesn't seem to be a coincidence.

Well, the portuguese navigators did have a lot of trouble crossing it. This was due to the fact that they mostly always sailed with the coast in sight, but when they reached the equator, there was just no winds or currents to keep pushing them, so they would just get stuck.

It took them a couple of years to find a way out of that point, by making huge turns westwards into the atlantic (which eventually led them to end up in Brazil, but that's another story...)

>> "Live departure data is fetched from the TfL API, and then it does a bit of maths and magic"

Even though this actual service is probably not so accurate, it does give an interesting view on what the transportation information services can become in the future!

The transportation companies probably do already have the data anyway...

To be quite frank I wonder what is better for the country: staying there, working your ass off and getting just enough to survive, or being outside, opening your horizons, maybe being exposed to new ways of thinking, technologies or ideas, and one day come back and strive to offer to the country what you learned outside.

These people that are leaving, they still love they country, and I'm sure most of them still think about returning to it sooner or later.

I'm one of those about to graduate students from a technical university in Lisbon, and for me, there is no doubt anymore, I'll start to work outside of Portugal.

When you look at it from one side, South European countries have everything: they have the food, the weather, good universities, kind and welcoming people (not to say that other countries don't), talent. They have the potential to be the best countries to live at. What's missing then? For me what is missing in Portugal, and what makes me want to go away from it is mostly bad working conditions: the notion that the IT guy is the new slave. I have had older colleagues saying to me that they were working on a Sunday at 11pm and have seen people from consulting companies coming to my university and proudly saying that when we would be working at their company "we could say goodbye to that cinema evening with friends". These consulting companies, some of which are always eager to hire (which leaves us wondering what is happening to their workforce), exploit the fact that these graduates are used to semesters of constant crunch time and exploit them by putting them in the same state in their companies. People are expected to work past their time, and most of them do... and for what? 1200 euros before taxes and you are considered lucky. If you don't accept that paycheck someone else will.

I did in my last college year an Erasmus in Sweden that came now to an end, and I'm not coming back to Portugal. I've found things to be very different here. There is a huge respect for life outside work, and the jobs actually pay the graduates with the salaries that reward them for their effort and knowledge.

The problem is maybe precisely this one: graduates feeling that there is no reward waiting for them by the end of college.

If the salt is the same for all the users you can have it on the source code that hashes the passwords. Not always being SQL injected means having the back-end code leaked.

>> "And if the passwords were salted before the hash is applied? Well, more than a third of the passwords were easily found in a common dictionary so it’s just a matter of having the compute power to brute force them and repeat the salt plus hash process."

Well, assuming that you know the hash, because if you don't, things don't get that easy. I'm assuming systems that salt passwords don't store the salt in a row of their database, but with security, or the lack of it, everything seems to be possible.

That's why I have friends lists. Just some weeks ago some girl I didn't know that happened to be the designated driver of the group of friends I was with on the new years eve sent me a friend request on facebook.

I don't want to be rude and accepted it, but she went to my list of people that I don't consider friends, but people that at some point in my life I had some interaction that as now ceased. That list doesn't have access to my photos, only some personal information and the majority of my status updates are invisible to them unless I explicitly set otherwise.

So yeah, they're my fake friends. If your friends list is already big setting this up and checking if there are no backdoors into your information will be painful, but I think it pays off. I did it mostly because I didn't want to bring the family and friends sides of my life together in a single website, with all the potential problems that could come from that, but I ended up creating more than just the friends and family lists.

Funny thing, right now Facebook privacy is more about protecting your information from your "friends" than from the outside world.