BC BUSINESS
Saved by @jacobhtml

Republican North Dakota legislators have introduced #SB2333, a bill that prohibits large tech companies from locking their users into a single app store or payment processor.

https://t.co/PgyhgOhFAl

1/

 While his has implications for Android and other large tech platforms, its most immediate and far-reaching effects with be on Apple, whose Ios platform uses lock-in to monopolize both apps and payments (and another domain, not mentioned in the bill: repairs).

2/
Predictably, this has thrown Apple into a fury, with Apple's privacy chief @erikn telling the SD legislature that Apple uses its monopoly over the app store to protect its users' privacy and security.

https://t.co/q7laIpKMd2

3/
Neuenschwander makes a good, but incomplete, point. To the extent that Apple has the same interests as its users, it uses its app store monopoly to lock out bad apps (to the best of its ability).

4/
But when Apple's interests diverge from its users' interests, the prohibition on sideloading apps actively harms those users' privacy and security. Think of how Apple caved to Chinese state demands to remove working VPNs from the Ios app store to facilitate mass surveillance.

5/
This security model - surrendering your autonomy to a large company in exchange for promises of protection - is what Bruce Schneier calls "feudal security," though it should really be thought of as "manorial security."

https://t.co/zRPHpsSYzd

6/
In manorial security, a small elite of mercantalist warlords get all the property rights - the right to decide how the infrastructure is used - and the rest of us get tenants' rights, the right to make limited use of the warlords' property.

7/
The warlords promise to defend us from bandits and build high walls to keep the bandits out, but if someone suborns the warlord to acting against us, those walls lock us IN, leaving us helpless.

8/
Indeed, the walls aren't just a protection, they're a temptation: anyone who coerces or bribes a warlord into letting them inside the compound enjoys a smorgasbord of defenseless prey - the walled garden becomes a feedlot.

9/
Which is why Neuenschwander is more wrong than right: Apple keeps out the bad apps it finds, except when a powerful state makes it an offer it can't refuse.

The fact that users are held prisoner to those judgments is an invitation to states to make demands of Apple.

10/
Which suggests a corollary: if Apple's users COULD sideload apps that subverted harmful government orders, then those orders would be less effective - and governments would be less tempted to make them in the first place, and if they did anyway, users would have an out.

11/
I don't know enough about North Dakota state politics to weigh the bill's chances, but if it passes, it creates some fascinating possibilities. ND is one of America's fiber optic powerhouses, with much higher gigabit penetration than other states.

12/
If moving your company to ND means that you get to retain 30% more of your income - because you're no longer paying the app store tax - AND you get to save money on real-estate AND all your employees get fiber, well, that's pretty attractive.

13/
To get a sense of what this could mean, check out the testimony of @Basecamp CTO @DHH in support of the bill, describing how Apple shook down his company for 30% of the revenues for @heyhey, its innovative email reader.

https://t.co/VOjxbTiNuI

14/
"North Dakota has the opportunity to create this level playing field, such that the next generation of software companies can be started there.

15/
"If a team in Bismarck builds a better digital mouse trap, they won’t be hampered by abusive, extortive demands for 30% of their revenue from the existing big tech giants."

16/
As Heinemeier Hansson points out, the bill is very short - 17 lines, plus some recitals - and it's well-crafted...for the most part. One thing jumps out though:

> 4. This section does not apply to a proprietor of a special-purpose digital application distribution platform.

17/
What's a "special-purpose digital application distribution platform?"

It's "a gaming console, music player, and other special-purpose devices connected to the internet."

18/
That is a seriously weird carve-out. Consoles INVENTED the app store business model, and they use it aggressively today to screw games studios and gamers. Exempting them from this is like exempting printers from a ban on high-priced consumables.

19/
And all those other "special purpose" devices - smart speakers, medical implants, home automation systems, etc - are just as prone to being monopolized and produce just as many harms for their users through anticompetitive app store conduct as phones do.

20/
They're overwhelmingly made by the same companies that operate abusive app stores for phones, which means that if this carve out was created by lobbyists, it's weird that they didn't lobby for a carve out for phones, too.

21/
If you'd like to read or share this thread as a blog post, here's a permalink on https://t.co/iSBh8s9m7q, my surveillance-free, tracker-free, ad-free blog:

https://t.co/pZ8Z9cThrN

eof/

More from Cory Doctorow #BLM

Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
After the 9/11 attacks, airlines and public buildings adopted a flurry of "security" measures, like taking away pen-knives from fliers or requiring visitors to office buildings to be photographed or present a driver's license.

1/


Bruce Schneier's seminal 2003 "Beyond Fear" called these measures: #securitytheater.

Schneier pointed out that these measures would be easy to circumvent, and were thus providing only the comforting appearance of security - not security

Security theater is worse than nothing. Security theater gives people the false impression that their risks have been mitigated, when actually things are just as dangerous.

After al, if you know that danger exists, you can take some steps to mitigate or avoid it.

3/

But if you have the false impression that you've been made safer, you might unwittingly engage in risky behavior.

4/

Like, if you know your car's brakes are flaky, you might nurse the car along to the mechanic at low speed on side-streets.

But if you don't know about the brakes, you're apt to discover their flaws at 75mph on the freeway.

5/
FOR LATER READ
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Surveillance companies assure us that they employ safeguards to ensure that their customers aren't abusing their products to engage in unlawful or unethical surveillance. And yet, inevitably, these companies abuse their tools THEMSELVES.

1/


It's almost as though being the kind of person who dreams of achieving incredible wealthy by spying on people makes you kind of an asshole.

2/

Like the people at @VerkadaHQ, "a fast-growing Silicon Valley surveillance startup" whose male employees used its own products to sexually harass their female colleagues and received the barest wrist-slaps for

Male Verkada employees maintained a private Slack channel where executives posted photos of female employees - captured with the company's own surveillance tools - and made sexually explicit remarks about them.

4/

When this came to light, the company's founder and CEO Filip Kaliszan called an all-hands meeting, expressed disappointment in the harassers, and told them that they could either quit...or lose some stock options. They chose the latter and remain employed there to this day.

5/
TECH
Advertisement
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
20 years on, #BushVGore is back in our discourse - an election stolen by mobs at the polling places, a media blitz, and a Supreme Court at its most antidemocratic and antimajoritarian.

1/


We remember this as an election that the plutes stole, but it's also an election that the Dems gave to them. That's why we're talk about it now. There will be an attempt to steal next month's election. Will we surrender again?

2/

The last surrender led to a war being fought today by the children of the soldiers who were sent into battle on day one. It led to climate inaction, monopolistic concentration, erosions to our right to vote and to our right to protest.

3/

Thanks to that surrender, voter suppression was expanded and reinforced, leading to the election of a fumbling liar who got to appoint more SCOTUS judges in 3.5 years than all Democratic presidents did in the previous quarter


You may be wondering how the Dems surrendered in 2020. For a detailed account of what surrender looks like, read @rsgexp's @jacobin memoir of her time as an @AFLCIO organizer sent to Florida during the
POLITICS
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is a founding member of the EU, but it's also a rogue state, enabling massive corruption throughout the trading bloc; while Cyprus and Malta will sell any corrupt robber-baron EU citizenship, it's Luxembourg that leads in laundering their money.

1/


As the @TaxJusticeNet's @nickshaxson memorably put it, Luxembourg is "a criminal enterprise with a country attached" - a country where corporations are guaranteed "an easy ride on taxes, disclosure, financial regulations, and criminal

2014's #Luxleaks exposed some of the worst corruption, whereby @PwC worked with Luxembourg officials to secure illegal tax benefits for major corporations and the world's richest

Luxleaks lead to a 2018 EU directive that required member states to publish registers of the true owners of the companies they registered.

4/

Luxembourg published theirs in 2019, and @lemondefr partnered with ten media orgs for a year-long analysis of the register, which was published this week: #Openlux. The findings reveal that Luxleaks was just the tip of the
ALL
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Ring - Amazon's surveillance doorbell division - has 4,000 "partnerships" with US police ("public safety") orgs. The company has lied about how these work for years, but the basic deal is that they give cops free stuff to buzz-market their products.

https://t.co/716iaXUXWR

1/


Ring tells its customers that they get to choose whether to share the footage from their street-facing cameras with cops, but that's a lie, too. If you say no, the cops still get to look through your

That's why cops debase themselves to serve as buzz-marketers for Ring - in exchange, they get an off-the-books, free-to-use, warrantless, city-scale, video surveillance grid.

3/

It's an investment that pays off. Back in July, @EFF documented how the @SFPD was able to commandeer 200 Ring cameras to produce surveillance data on #BLM

And in a new blockbuster report, EFF's @maassive and @mguariglia document how @LAPDHQ did the same thing, fraudulently using "unusual occurance" protocols to gain access to last summer's BLM
AMAZON

More from Business

Savukku_Shankar
Savukku_Shankar
@savukku
Sources : This author has been continuously maintaining that the Brahminical hegemonic forces are surrounding Tamil Nadu from all sides and they are seeking revenge for Periyar’s social justice.

One Sridhar Vembhu, @svembu is the CEO of Zoho Corporation. He is 1/n

High Net Worth individual. He is the founder and CEO of Zoho Corporation. According to Forbes, he is the 59th richest Indian in the world with a net worth of US$2.5 billion as of 2020

Vembu runs the in-house Zoho University, which provides training to students who have 2/n

completed 12th grade and have certain math and tech skills.
Vembu has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton and started his career at Qualcomm in 1994. Zoho is building a new 375-acre campus in Austin, Texas, which will also house its Zoho University. 3/n

Recently, he announced the release of a new Messaging App called “Arattai” and said this is an alternate to WhatsApp.

Vembhu owns a palatial house in Pleasanton California. With such huge money and wealth, the said Vembhu is purchased 4 acres land in Mathalamparai, Tenkasi under the guise of improving villages. In an interview to Forbes India, the said Vembhu had this to say 5/n
BUSINESS
Ankur Warikoo
Ankur Warikoo
@warikoo
No one is going to do it for you

A thread...

As a founder, if you won't show up every single day, despite how you are feeling, or how the startup is doing or what the press is writing about you, or your cofounders not working out, or your product failing or your customers shouting

No one is going to do it for you

As a student, if you won't do things that scare you, that make you feel nervous, that challenge you, that intimidate you, that you have always wanted to do but never gathered the courage to

No one is going to do it for you

In your first job, if you are not going to make an effort to know how things have happened before and why, to meet new people, to seek help, to ask for feedback, to be patient with results, to not seek "impact" in the first month itself

No one is going to do it for you

If as a son/daughter you are not going to realize what your parents went through while growing up, that they want the same things from your life that you want for your self, that their path is different but there are reasons why

No one is going to do it for you
BUSINESS
Advertisement
Travis
Travis
@coloradotravis
It's endlessly fascinating how economic datapoints get interpreted.

When I was in charge of a P&L, the guy who ran Finance for us and I had what we called the 'shelf plan.'

There were maybe 3-4 of us who knew it existed.

What's a shelf plan?
1/

Well it's a plan you keep on the shelf (full FP&A model), that you hope you never have to use.

It reduces forward hires, cuts back various line items (typically ad spend, travel, that sort of thing).

Oh, it also has a big fat RIF in there.

That's why we don't talk about it.
2/

Why have a plan instead of winging it?

Because this is where companies (particularly young companies) sometimes err. They do little cuts - 2-3% here and there, preserving as much headcount as they can, that sort of thing.

This is incorrect.
3/

If you're at the point where you need to make material changes to your forward P&L, at 2-3% RIF will be followed by another.

And another.

And this series of progressive cuts will cripple morale, incrementally reducing the productivity of the staff you retain to survive.
4/

And so the shelf plan cuts deep.

Your goal is to go from being a peacetime machine to a wartime machine, so you gotta lean out quick. Can't do that without a plan, hence the need to have one.

~30% cut is what you need.

And then you need to tell everyone left they're safe.
5/
BUSINESS
Aloke Bajpai
Aloke Bajpai
@alokebajpai
It is hard to build a profitable internet business at scale in India, but not impossible. Let me talk about ixigo's FY2020 performance. But first, the back story (with @rajnishkumar)

It was 2016. We had 3 Million MAUs (mostly organic) and were getting closer to 20 crores annual revenue. We were trying to raise money because we had just 12 months of burn left in the bank.

Out of many conversations, I remember one with a VC in our office who asked us our CAC-LTV ratio. TBH, we didn't track it in those days because we always made money on the first transaction itself and didn't spend a lot on customer acquisition, but I remember the look we got !

Yet another one gave us advice - "Look it's been 10 years since launch, travel is done and dusted, why don't you guys try doing something else". We felt dejected for a bit but went back to work the next day - not the first or last time we would face rejections.

I met @shaileshlakhani (after many years) at an Unpluggd event in Bengaluru in early 2016, and we sat down to chat about ixigo. He was the first investor we met in a long time who saw us not for who we were but for who we could become.
BUSINESS
Andrew Finn
Andrew Finn
@finnscave
Young, early stage founder asked for any hiring thoughts - figured worth sharing with the twitter-verse if they can be helpful.

1a) Make people do the work they are going to do for you during the interview process.

1b) People talking about work and experience is basically useless, except to evaluate whether this job "makes sense" for someone at this stage of their life - do the dots connect or not? If you can convince people to do a contract project for a month first, even better.

2) Optimize for IQ/horsepower. Talent overruns experience in like 3-6 months and never looks back. If you love someone, but they are missing a skill, you're better off getting them to learn it than hiring someone more skilled but with less upside.

3) Optimize for low drama and ease to work with, in all ways. You want people who just want to get shit done and enjoy themselves, not people who want to bring their personal drama into the workplace.

4) People who went to the best state school in the state they are from, and were overqualified for that school, tend to be undervalued and have a great low ego/high execution/high IQ ratio. They have ivy league brains with middle class values.
BUSINESS

You May Also Like

Professor
Professor
@DillikiBiili
So friends here is the thread on the recommended pathway for new entrants in the stock market.

Here I will share what I believe are essentials for anybody who is interested in stock markets and the resources to learn them, its from my experience and by no means exhaustive..

First the very basic : The Dow theory, Everybody must have basic understanding of it and must learn to observe High Highs, Higher Lows, Lower Highs and Lowers lows on charts and their

Even those who are more inclined towards fundamental side can also benefit from Dow theory, as it can hint start & end of Bull/Bear runs thereby indication entry and exits.


Next basic is Wyckoff's Theory. It tells how accumulation and distribution happens with regularity and how the market actually

Dow theory is old but
SCREENERS , ALL , MARKETESSENTIALS
Loren Brichter
Loren Brichter
@lorenb
So it turns out that Google Chrome was making everything on my computer slow *even when it wasn’t running*, because it installs something called Keystone which is basically malware.

I made a website because this shouldn’t

Wired first reported on how bad Keystone was 11 years ago when they put it into Google Earth (they seem to put it in all their popular

The fact that Keystone hides itself in Activity Monitor is bizarre. (The only sign of it was excessive CPU usage of WindowServer which is a system process).

I don’t know if Google was doing something nefarious with Keystone, or a third party figured out how to (which Wired warned about). But either way, I’m not inclined to give Google-the-organization the benefit of the doubt (despite the many good people who work on Chrome)...

...since it's been a decade+ and this still hasn't been "fixed".

There is no reason for auto-update software to need to do what Chrome/Keystone was doing. It also has a long history of crashing Macs.
TECH
Advertisement
The New York Times
The New York Times
@nytimes
Stan Lee’s fictional superheroes lived in the real New York. Here’s where they lived, and why. https://t.co/oV1IGGN8R6


Stan Lee, who died Monday at 95, was born in Manhattan and graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. His pulp-fiction heroes have come to define much of popular culture in the early 21st century.

Tying Marvel’s stable of pulp-fiction heroes to a real place — New York — served a counterbalance to the sometimes gravity-challenged action and the improbability of the stories. That was just what Stan Lee wanted. https://t.co/rDosqzpP8i


The New York universe hooked readers. And the artists drew what they were familiar with, which made the Marvel universe authentic-looking, down to the water towers atop many of the buildings. https://t.co/rDosqzpP8i


The Avengers Mansion was a Beaux-Arts palace. Fans know it as 890 Fifth Avenue. The Frick Collection, which now occupies the place, uses the address of the front door: 1 East 70th Street.
CULTURE
Vibhu Vashisth \U0001f1ee\U0001f1f3
Vibhu Vashisth 🇮🇳...
@VIBHU_Tweet
Did you know?

Rani Bhabani was the Queen of Natore, Bengal or 'Natorer Rani' as she was famously called. She made great contributions in Tarapith & renovated Benaras.

In Varanasi, Durga Kund Mandir was constructed by Rani Bhabani in the 18th century.


Born in Chhatimgram village, Bogra District,Her father's name was Atmaram Choudhury.Bhabani was married off to Raja Ramkanta Moitra,the then zamindar of Rajshahi.After his death, Bhabani became the zamindar, and started being referred to as Rani.She was known as Ardhabangeshwari.

A woman as a zamindar was extremely rare in those days, but Rani Bhabani managed the vast Rajshahi zamindari most efficiently and effectively for over four decades.
Maharani Bhavani was very pious in her personal life. She passed her life in a strict disciplined way.


She conducted the administrative work skillfully. As a Maharani she was an impartial judge. Rani Bhavani had a very hard time during the fag end of her life. The Zamindari (estate) incurred serious loss due to the change of the revenue policy of the company.

In spite of being the owner of a large Zamindari (estate), she had to depend on the stipend of the government in the later part of her life. The amount of this stipend gradually decreased and became Rs. 1000/- only in the end.
ALL
Jaya_Upadhyaya
Jaya_Upadhyaya
@Jayalko1
SRI THIRUNARAYANA PERUMAL, MELKOTE (KAR)

Known as Dakshin Badri, Thiru Narayanapuram is one of the four famous Swayambu Kshetrams, the other three being Srirangam, Kanchipuram and Tirupati.
The presiding diety is Cheluva Narayana Swamy/ Selva Pillai/ Rama Priyan.


Once, Sri Rama gave his aradhana murthi of Sri Ranganatha, to Raja Vibhishana on his request. So he was left without a murthi for his daily pujas. Brahma is said to have provided the murti of Selva Pillai to Rama who later passed this on to his sons, Lava and Kusa.


When Kusa’s daughter married a Yadava prince, this murthi moved to the lunar dynasty from solar.

It is said that the utsav murthi got the name Selva Pillai due to Sri Ramanuja.
Once, a Sultan took away this murthi and Sri Ramanuja went in its search to the Sultan’s palace.
ALL