Convopage
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1/ Much about accountability missing/required by global-scale services. Sea change upon us. Changes right, but…
Democratic senators preparing bill to deal with online political advertising
Amid growing concern over Facebook's sale of political ads to Russians, two Democratic senators are calling for legislation.
money.cnn.com
29 replies and sub-replies as of Sep 24 2017
2/ Successful technology platforms always rooted in “tools” mindset. Platform as tool: exciting, interesting, wild things get built by many.
3/ Tools mindset key to success. Guard rails, restrictions, rules run counter to experiments, trial & error, and “let’s see what happens”.
4/ As journey progresses some will always see the platform as something to “exploit” —decidedly different than “use”. These are bad actors.
5/ At first platform makers aren’t so quick to act b/c they’re working to get more and more activity not to restrict or structure.
6/ Responsibility sinks in, plus as platform begin to see how to better accomplish what you set out to make. Change makes sense, but hard.
7/ My example from Office. Office always open as a platform—Marcos, VBA, add-ins, automation and more. ❤️ it all. Books, conferences, APIs…
8/ One Sunday morning ☎️ rang. Reporter hyperventilating saying “I love you”. I was like wtf is going on. Uh oh, Outlook and Word hacked.
9/ Suddenly everyone on earth was getting email with subject “I LOVE YOU”. Simple macro in Word automating Outlook working as designed.
10/ Front page every paper & 6pm TV news 😱 —‘I LOVE YOU’ costing 10 billion $$. Yikes. Something had to change.
"Love-Bug" virus damage estimated at $10 billion
It is estimated that the so-called "Love-Bug" email virus has caused some $10 billion in losses in as many as 20 countries.
wsws.org
11/ My first engineer training in 1989 was about “TSR viruses”—how clever they were. That was what we studied—cleverness and engineering.
12/ Decade later reality of networks and 10X number of users meant viruses were not badly behaved, clever platform hacks but immensely bad.
13/ It was our fault now. We huddled. In one swift meeting we changed rules/mindset: attachments blocked, macros prompted, APIs changed.
14/ It was a huge shift. It broke line of business apps everywhere. Tons of negative feedback over how handled internally and externally.
15/ Many thought we had broken the platform contract by “closing off” features. It was very tough. Ex: sales had to tackle Customer sat.
16/ Viruses got worse. Company had to change security mindset. Not about individual responsibility but our platforms. Would this cost biz?
17/ Clearly recall line—Bill’s ‘02 memo “Trustworthy Computing is more important than any other part of our work.”
Bill Gates: Trustworthy Computing
This is the e-mail Bill Gates sent to every full-time employee at Microsoft, in which he describes the company's new strategy emphasizing security in its products.From: Bill Gates Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2002 5:22 PM To: Microsoft and Subsidiaries: All FTE Subject: Trustworthy computingEvery few years I have sent out a memo talking about the \[…\]
wired.com
18/ That statement summed up a massive change in how the platforms thought about responsibility and how products would be built and used.
19/ Change was huge because openness, flexibility, etc were hallmarks of platform—the core values and approaches changed. Huge and tough.
20/ Today w/ social platforms some similarities. Platforms confronted w/ bad actors that require revisiting approach assumptions. // END
PS/ Worth noting, security is not done, never finished, and still subject of many trade offs/debates/tensions in platform and customers.
Security is a neverending fight. The dark side is always waiting to find even the tiniest hole in the wall and exploit it. Tough 🤔
A foundational moment essential to understanding #audiences created through content/software & networked #marketers who reach them.
Out of curiosity, when you first started out in your career, how much were you working to get to the level you are today? 😀
Thank you!!! All I ever tried to do was the best I could. I feel more luck than anything else.
That’s great! From what I have read, an incredible career in tech doesn’t come easy. Long works and six day work weeks for a long time.
That's all perfectly legitimate. Still, the responsibility to deliver a safe product is part and parcel of the huge success a platform gains
There's no disagreement about it being difficult. That difficulty is part of the responsibility that comes with product as big as they come.
Virtually everything you said in this post could apply to Bitcoin et al. May prove doubly prescient.