Came home from Christmas Eve shopping/sight seeing in Manhattan with my dad and baby sister to find that our mom had gone and gotten us a puppy! I’d never had a dog before. It remains one of the best and happiest memories of my life :)
Polar Bear! He was a Bichon Poodle mix and his tail hadn’t grown in yet so he looked exactly like one of the little polar bears from the Coca Cola commercials
It's FHE applied to solve a variant of oblivious transfer, called "private information retrieval" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_information_retrieval). PIR is very similar to oblivious transfer, except that in oblivious transfer, the privacy is mutual - the client learns exactly one element from the database; in PIR, it's ok if the client learns some number of 'extra' items other than the one it queried.
For a similar use case, I’ve been considering a combination of s3 exports of db views (mapping private schema to public) + lakeformation governed tables (which allow table, row, and cell level security via iam) + redshift or athena for querying + sts/cognito for authorization to give logged in users a temporary access key id and secret access key. Admittedly an AWS heavy setup, but in my use case that’s an advantage :)
Benepass (YC W20) | Software Engineers, Engineering Manager, and Customer Engineer | Earth (US Timezones) | Full-time | REMOTE (US timezones preferred) | https://www.getbenepass.com
Benepass is using modern software and a great UX to transform the $30+ billion benefits industry. We’re displacing incumbents running on manual processes and legacy technology, like fax, checks in the mail, and artisanal CSVs.
In the past year, we’ve grown to cover thousands of lives and signed big customers who are household names. We've found product-market fit and we’re growing at breakneck speed. Our investors include Gradient Ventures, Y Combinator, and awesome angels like Aaron Levie of Box.
We’re hiring great software engineers for multiple mission-critical roles. Our backend stack is Python, Django, Django Rest Framework, AWS, IaC, & Docker. On the frontend we use Javascript, Tailwinds CSS, React, and React Native (plus a bit of Objective-C and Java when it’s called for).
We offer competitive compensation + equity, flexible PTO, 95% coverage of medical/dental/vision, and fantastic benefits (of course ).
Benepass is using modern software and a great UX to transform the $30+ billion benefits industry. We’re displacing incumbents running on manual processes and legacy technology, like fax, checks in the mail, and artisanal CSVs.
In the past year, we’ve grown to cover thousands of lives and signed big customers who are household names. We've found product-market fit and we’re growing at breakneck speed. Our investors include Gradient Ventures, Y Combinator, and awesome angels like Aaron Levie of Box.
We’re hiring great software engineers for multiple mission-critical roles. Our backend stack is Python, Django, Django Rest Framework, AWS, IaC, & Docker. On the frontend we use Javascript, Tailwinds CSS, React, and React Native (plus a bit of Objective-C and Java when it’s called for).
We offer competitive compensation + equity, flexible PTO, 95% coverage of medical/dental/vision, and fantastic benefits (of course ).
Elixir gives you a lot of 21st century development tools: Async Tasks, Compilation environment (dev vs prod vs test out of the box), first class documentation and first class test suite. Sure you could implement these in erlang, but in Elixir, it's opinionated and everyone is basically on board with the same set of tools.
Some of these tools are making their way back to erlang, like telemetry, and some aspects of docgen.
There are also some under the hood features, too. I can run async tests where the test is given an id, the database gets a sandbox with that id, I can escape the vm (via chromedriver, eg) passing the id, and when the request hits the http server component, it and all child tasks is aware of the test that it's in, so all of the database calls are routed to the correct sandbox, resulting in concurrent and idempotent end-to-end tests. Again, you could do this from top to bottom in erlang, but elixir has support for this out of the box, and the good anointed and 3rd party libraries (Mox, ecto, hound) use these elixir features.
It's pretty nice to be able to run a full suite of unit and E2E tests in about 10 seconds.
Yes, AV is in a position where a) it needs regular full priv access to your files and unencrypted web traffic, b) is in a highly competitive, low-margin field where the players are literally attacking each other on your machine [1] to stay even, and c) have enormous motivation to seek other funding sources based on their desktop position [2-5].
I didn't say they created malware, no, but they certainly wave that flag when someone finds some. And it's certainly in their interest to pursue all of these alternatives, or even have a bad third party violate THEM to do so. The money is on the table. Do they take it? They'd be foolish not to.
If you refer to the theory that AV actually wrote viruses (it's not clear), that's as realistic as saying that police commits crimes so that they can get extra reward from the new tasks.
I've followed the VX scene for years (it died long ago) and there has never been shortage of new malware.
Even if we wanted to give some credit to the theory, which type of virus would the AV companies develop? Something trivial, that requires a variation of a signature to detect? Or something extremely complex, that requires month of work, and that slows down the AV engine because it's algorithmically complex to detect?
None of this makes any sense. The truth is very simple - malware has always been an interesting subject, and writing viruses always had a subversive appeal to young rebels.
As a victim of such a falsified crime, testified by half a dozen police officers who couldn't get their stories straight but whom "somehow" were believed, you're only adding credence to the claim with that analogy.
Not really. I'm not doubting that you have been wronged by the judicial system, as I've seen this first hand with a close friend. However, a bold claim like this requires solid evidence that such practices are the norm.
> If you refer to the theory that AV actually wrote viruses (it's not clear), that's as realistic as saying that police commits crimes so that they can get extra reward from the new tasks.
This analogy is not helping your case at all. It's not unheard of for police to plant evidence for such purposes. It's also been proven that law enforcement has been willfully using technology having high rates of false positives for things like drug testing to bring real charges against otherwise innocent people.
> that's as realistic as saying that police commits crimes so that they can get extra reward from the new tasks.
So very realistic then?
Or have you not encountered the numerous incidents where cops plant and manufacture evidence to frame people for various reasons such as increasing their numbers for a promotion or bad culture leading to quotas for arrests/tickets/etc.?
This is how mafia operates. They come to you and offer protection in exchange for a recurring "protection fee". If you refuse, they are the ones who commit crimes against you until you fork out a "protection fee".
This only really goes to the "don't entirely trust their statements regarding their product being the only effective barrier" part of the story. Reputable anti-virus companies do have a huge conflict of interest reporting on viruses they find and can tackle, but they also remain an important source of information about viruses. Disreputable anti-virus companies sell product which could be as simple as a "hollywood OS" green stripe animated GIF which says "virus cleaned" for all they really do: they probably install more malware rather than removing any.
Also, an anti virus company saying they can't understand how a virus remains infected after removal is interesting.
