Monday, October 14, 2019
Apple Responds to Criticism for Sending Some China Browsing Data to Tencent
China's Huawei Says Open to 'No Backdoor' Agreement With India
Facebook's Libra Announces Board as Support Shrinks Further
Amazon sale, Day 4: OnePlus 7 Pro, Samsung Galaxy Note 9 and other smartphones with discount in ‘Deal of the Day’
DNS over HTTPS can increase user privacy by obfuscating web traffic, but it's no silver bullet as DNS resolving services will still see unencrypted requests (Lily Hay Newman/Wired)
DNS over HTTPS can increase user privacy by obfuscating web traffic, but it's no silver bullet as DNS resolving services will still see unencrypted requests — The road to routing all Domain Name System lookups through HTTPS is pocked with disagreements over just how much it will help.
ETtech Top 5: Paytm eyes new financing, Apple's India manufacturing plan & more
SC junks plea seeking to link Aadhaar with social media accounts
Docs and interviews show that ~44 US universities work with outside companies to data mine and rank prospective students, including tracking their web activity (Washington Post)
Docs and interviews show that ~44 US universities work with outside companies to data mine and rank prospective students, including tracking their web activity — Before many schools even look at an application, they comb through prospective students' personal data, such as web-browsing habits and financial history
Microsoft Defender's Tamper Protection antivirus feature hits general availability and will be enabled by default for all users in the coming weeks (Catalin Cimpanu/ZDNet)
Microsoft Defender's Tamper Protection antivirus feature hits general availability and will be enabled by default for all users in the coming weeks — Tamper Protection prevents malware from disabling Windows Defender features. — Today, Microsoft announced the general availability …
AMC Entertainment to unveil AMC Theaters On Demand, an iTunes-like online video store, in the US, will offer ~2,000 films for ~$3-$6 to rent and ~$10-$20 to buy (Brooks Barnes/New York Times)
AMC Entertainment to unveil AMC Theaters On Demand, an iTunes-like online video store, in the US, will offer ~2,000 films for ~$3-$6 to rent and ~$10-$20 to buy — LOS ANGELES — In a sign of just how much streaming is changing Hollywood, movie fans will soon be able to rent and buy films …
Apple aims to make India one of its key global production hubs
Surfing the reverse mullet with Alexis Ohanian
For many years the allure of Silicon Valley was contingent on the ability to move here. Its ecosystem didn’t work remotely. “We see a very strong indication that where you’re located does matter… come to Silicon Valley,” intoned Joe Kraus of Google Ventures at the first Disrupt conference I ever intended, speaking for essentially all VCs, including Y Combinator.
Easy enough if you’re American. Much, much trickier if you need a visa to get there. Is it still true that the Valley doesn’t work remotely? Or is there another path for startups from faraway countries these days? Last week I sat down with Alexis Ohanian in his ancestral homeland of Armenia to discuss this.
Every nation seems to have its own set of incubators and seed investors these days. Armenia is no exception: I met Ohanian at the launch event for Aybuben Ventures, a VC fund “for Armenia and The Armenians.” (As I wrote last week, the Armenian diaspora is a big deal.) But what happens next, when you need to raise a serious Series A, but your local market realistically isn’t big enough to support your company?
Even five years ago you would have had a lot of trouble tapping into the Valley. Since then, though, things have changed. The price of Bay Area talent — and real estate — has led to the rise of “mullet startups,” as coined by Andreessen Horowitz’s Andrew Chen. Such comapnies have their headquarters in the Bay to take advantage of the Valley, but their tech teams somewhere cheaper and more spacious. “Business up front, party out back.”
Ohanian’s point is that there’s no reason the mullet model can’t work backwards: launch a company with a strong tech team in some remote location, then, when you hit the inflection point, open a Bay Area office, move the executive team there, and turn yourself into a mullet startup. (Aided by the fact that if coming as a company, your visa options widen to include e.g. the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Visa.) Call it the “reverse mullet,” exemplified by e.g. PicsArt.
This model is especially viable for nations which have deep engineering / tech talent, so that the “party out back” tech team becomes an ongoing competitive advantage. (This is part of why Ohanian keeps hammering home the importance of learning to code during his visits to Armenia, something which is probably easier in a nation which already features compulsory chess education.) All of which sounds great in theory —
— but it’s not like we see a herd of unicorns with reverse mullets out there … yet. If we do, though, that will be an exceptionally interesting new growth model, with significant ramifications — a way for Silicon Valley to essentially metastasize to the rest of the world. This in turn will, ironically, reify its primacy as the center of the global tech industry, the sun around which all the faraway planets orbit, after so many prophecies of decentralization. Count the reverse mullet unicorns in three years, and if there are more than a mere few, we’ll know the answer.
Bengaluru traffic police booked 17K+ cases against delivery personnel in a single week of November 2024, as Swiggy and others rolled out rapid delivery services (The News Minute)
The News Minute : Bengaluru traffic police booked 17K+ cases against delivery personnel in a single week of November 2024, as Swiggy and ...
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Jake Offenhartz / Gothamist : Since October, the NYPD has deployed a quadruped robot called Spot to a handful of crime scenes and hostage...
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Lorena O'Neil / Rolling Stone : A look at the years of warnings about AI from researchers, including several women of color, who say ...
