I think you're right about keeping the long-term goals of the company in mind when doing the equity split. A couple months in the span of 6-10 years is nothing. We'll stick with the 50/50 split based on this.
On the vesting part IANAL so we'll stick to what works and not try to monkey with the vesting schedules.
It sounds like Cellebrite employees are largely ex unit 8200 members (Israel's SIGNIT program).[1] The article really doesn't seem to talk about Cellebrite's history much at all.
Any tech company in israel is largely ex unit 8200 members, along with other military tech units such as Mamram, Lotem, Matzov, Ofek and more.
The Israeli military enlists every 18 year old in the country, and if you've studied computers in high-school or at home as a hobby, you're more than likely to spend 3-6 years in a technological unit.
I'm not sure I buy the idea of email as a private alternative to Facebook. To keep your message content private, wouldn't all parties need to be hosting their own servers or using encryption?
There's also the problem of knowing who you're contacting and when. Hiding that would probably take some kind of anonymous remailer program.
Normal people would probably just have a free email account from companies like gmail or yahoo and not use any encryption. Wouldn't services like TinyLetter then be transferring the data from Facebook to other email hosting companies? This takes care of some privacy issues but still doesn't seem to solve all of problems for private communication.
It doesn't sound like it's meant for private social media, it's an alternative to the ultra-public social media that's gotten popular in the last few years. It's about broadcasting yourself, not contacting a small subset of people (hence why you can only publish to the entire set of subscribers). If you need secrecy, then a system billing itself with the term 'newsletters' is probably not for you.
The real benefit, as the article points out, is that the empty room problem is solved. Everyone already has an email address, it's your online identity, and email addresses aren't tied to one provider like a facebook account or a twitter account. If gmail dies, TinyLetter still lives. If TinyLetter dies, there's nothing stopping someone from creating an alternative version that imports old newsletters to reconstruct everything.
There was a good talk back in 2012 from ex NSA that laid out some of the
details for how the US surveillance keeps track of online behavior
too[1]. I think (as awful as it is) we can expect most governments major
governments to do this if it's within their technical capacity.
To get out from under this, I think we'll need 100% encryption of
everything, open source devices, and ways for companies to make money
without ads or data brokering. Basically, this will stop when hell
freezes over.
Have you been following the news with regard to the Defense Department and Silicon Valley?
There is a concerted effort now, through government compulsion and money, to funnel venture capitol towards start-ups with cyber security (offensive and defensive) and away from those offering encryption and privacy services and communications solutions.
The sum total of the following links: DoD will be investing, through parterships with executives of companies that acquire technology from startups, like Facebook, and with partnerships with Silicon Valley Venture Capital Firms to invest in companies that increase the national cybersecurity posture of the US (attack and defense) and to limit funding to technology that it thought to harm the national security of the US (E2E encryption solutions are specifically mentioned). The past few months have seen many defense officials making their way through silicon valley to meet with executives and VC firms, including the Admirial and soon-to-be-representative of the State Department.
There are a number of reasons that I can tell - but no one 'killer' reason. The first is that sequestration has been cutting the defense budget so that the normal methods of technology development and acquisition are more limited in what they can fund. The second is that the pace of investment in the public sector, while very good, isn't always able to complete with the private sector - especially when the size of the private sector is so much larger than public innovation. There's also that the direction of technological change right now in SV is toward personal consumer products. Another reason is that more broadly the internet and cybersecurity has been a much larger problem for the US than it had anticipated. While the US has state of the art surveillance capabilities, built with its Five Eyes allies, it does not have the best cyberattack and defense teams (Russia is a notable leader). Obama characterized cyberwarfare as being more like basketball - everyone is scoring all the time and the one who scores the most wins. This is exacerbated by asymmetries. The US has the most to lose from cyberwarfare in terms of IP, wealth, and political secrets.
There is a new term being traded for what warfare is like today. Modern warfare exists simultaneously on multiple fronts, including the cyber domain and propaganda and information warfare. This term is hybrid warfare.
Finally, DARPA has new programming models it would like the private industry to adopt but no way to compel them to do so (Probabalistic Programming). This is a nice way for them to encourage the private industry to adopt and play with some of these new publicly developed technologies.
The last link I posted elsewhere in this conversation tree is the overview for the 2015 DoD cyberdefense planning. They are making investments on ALL fronts. Cybermilitary training, international partnerships, technology acquisition and investment, cyberwarfare simulation and modeling, diplomatic approaches, information sharing, etc. In other words, this is just one way that the DoD is 'getting serious' about cyberwarfare.
If you want to create an analogy, I think chans are more like user
group meetings that happen in public spaces (e.g. a public park). Nobody
would kick members out of the park because they heard that they're
pro-ISIS (that's just their opinion). However, display of illegal
content or illegal actions would get members removed via someone calling
the cops. Off topic comments that detract from the spirit of the group
could also get members suspended or kicked out of the group
permanently.
Is it up to park police to monitor the user groups? Sure, but they
cannot take action unless it violates the law.
I understand the state's fear after the Mt. Gox fallout but their effort seems too overreaching. How could they possibly enforce _all_ citizens and businesses involved in cryptocurrencies to have licenses, hold 10 years of records, etc.?
OTOH, would there be a way to hold currency exchanges legally accountable without breaking cryptocurrencies?
There are too many stupid exchanges that scam peoples' coins and this seems like a barrier to adoption for lots of people. It would be nice to just push $100 from a bank account into a bitcoin account (like paypal does).
The one thing I still like about AppleScript is the GUI scripting. I don't know of any other way to control the mouse position, clicking, and keyboard input using a programming language.
One time I had to fill out a few thousand pdf files and print only select pages from them (like pages 2-4 and 14-22) for a client. I used applescripting because it was easy to write (took about half an hour) and worked consistently. Are there any other ways to do GUI scripting in OSX?
It might be fun to look at LOGO (maybe UCBLogo[1], free books included) for a first programming language. This has a first-person (turtle) view on a GUI that you move around to make shapes and do math/physics. The idea is that when programming it will be easier for the programmer to associate themselves with the turtle and interaction/exploration in the language will be natural.
The Logo way is pretty different from conventional programming models because it was tailored to be more intuitive than conventional languages like C, JavaScript, or VB. It still offers access to complex, higher order programming concepts like algorithms, AI, automata, etc. Harold Abelson from MIT (SICP) wrote a cool book that covers math/physics in Logo, too.[2]
The creator of the language has an awesome book[3] on how computers can enhance pedagogy and someone wrote a cool blog post on programming for children that mentioned it too[4].
LISP is still a great language for web programming! [1]
Lately it seems like more people are doing compile to JS (like asm.js and Mozilla's emscripten work in Odin Monkey [2]) which fits in perfectly with LISP dialects. Programmers can still create their own DSLs, macros, compilers, etc. in LISP and use them for modern web apps today. Just because this is a less popular/documented route doesn't mean it isn't possible. I hope we'll see a rise in LISP web programming pretty soon.
It would be fun if someone could write a compiler for a new ClojureScript dialect that targets asm.js and takes advantage of CPS for recursion like Scheme does.
There was a pretty good talk at 29C3 about side-channel analysis and how it can break secret keys of wireless devices and smartcards. [1]
With knowledge of cryptanalysis and lots of free time I think it's conceivable that someone could have cracked the system. I wonder if car companies test their crypto very rigorously?
On the vesting part IANAL so we'll stick to what works and not try to monkey with the vesting schedules.
Thank you for the advice!