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Links for 2015-01-17

  • Misogyny in the Valley

    The young women interns [in one story in this post] worked in a very different way. As I explored their notes, I noticed that ideas were expanded upon, not abandoned. Challenges were identified, but the male language so often heard in Silicon Valley conference rooms – “Well, let me tell you what the problem with that idea is….” – was not in the room.  These young women, without men to define the “appropriate business behavior,” used different behaviors and came up with a startling and valuable solution. They showed many of the values that exist outside of dominance-based leadership: strategic thinking, intuition, nurturing and relationship building, values-based decision-making and acceptance of other’s input. Women need space to be themselves at work. Until people who have created their success by worshipping at the temple of male behavior, like Sheryl Sandberg, learn to value alternate behaviors, the working world will remain a foreign and hostile culture to women. And if we do not continuously work to build corporate cultures where there is room for other behaviors, women will be cast from or abandoned in a world not of our making, where we continuously “just do not fit in,” but where we still must go to earn our livings.

    (tags: sexism misogyny silicon-valley tech work sheryl-sandberg business collaboration)

  • Are you better off running your big-data batch system off your laptop?

    Heh, nice trolling.

    Here are two helpful guidelines (for largely disjoint populations): If you are going to use a big data system for yourself, see if it is faster than your laptop. If you are going to build a big data system for others, see that it is faster than my laptop. […] We think everyone should have to do this, because it leads to better systems and better research.

    (tags: graph coding hadoop spark giraph graph-processing hardware scalability big-data batch algorithms pagerank)

  • BBC uses RIPA terrorism laws to catch TV licence fee dodgers in Northern Ireland

    Give them the power, they’ll use that power. ‘A document obtained under Freedom of Information legislation confirms the BBC’s use of RIPA in Northern Ireland. It states: “The BBC may, in certain circumstances, authorise under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 and Regulation of Investigatory Powers (British Broadcasting Corporation) Order 2001 the lawful use of detection equipment to detect unlicensed use of television receivers… the BBC has used detection authorised under this legislation in Northern Ireland.”‘

    (tags: ripa privacy bbc tv license-fee uk northern-ireland law scope-creep)

  • Australia tries to ban crypto research – by ACCIDENT • The Register

    Researchers are warned off [discussing] 512-bits-plus key lengths, systems “designed or modified to perform cryptanalytic functions, or “designed or modified to use ‘quantum cryptography’”. [….] “an email to a fellow academic could land you a 10 year prison sentence”.
    https://twitter.com/_miw/status/556023024009224192 notes ‘the DSGL 5A002 defines it as >512bit RSA, >512bit DH, >112 bit ECC and >56 bit symmetric ciphers; weak as fuck i say.’

    (tags: law australia crime crypto ecc rsa stupidity fail)

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