If you can’t read the rest of this post, it’s because I’m not talking to you. Which is a little weird, since I can’t even read this without help from our Brazilian Community Manager, Gabe, who’s been kind enough to help me write this in Portuguese.

Depois de semanas em beta privado, nós temos o prazer de anunciar que hoje vai ao ar o nosso primeiro Stack Overflow internacional. E não se trata de um clone em português do site original, mas sim de uma comunidade completamente nova. Uma comunidade que vai poder decidir como ela quer ser, e como vai poder ajudar os desenvolvedores de língua portuguesa.

Tá esperando o que pra criar sua conta?

Sempre quisemos ajudar o máximo possível de pessoas

Quando lançamos o StackOverflow.com (em inglês), a ideia era ter um lugar onde todos os programadores pudessem resolver problemas juntos.

Queríamos um lugar onde desenvolvedores pudessem compartilhar seu conhecimento, num formato melhor do que os fóruns tradicionais. Queríamos que a melhor resposta tivesse destaque e que fosse fácil encontrá-la, tanto para quem perguntou quanto para alguém que pesquisasse sobre o mesmo assunto no futuro.

Construímos um lugar onde a comunidade pode editar e melhorar os posts, votar na melhor solução e trabalhar em conjunto para chegar na melhor resposta. Nosso objetivo era dar à toda comunidade as ferramentas certas e o poder de colaborar e ajudar uns aos outros.

E deu certo.

O Stack Overflow em Inglês tem hoje mais de 6,5 milhões de perguntas, e mais 8 mil delas são criadas todos os dias. Praticamente todas recebem uma resposta correta, que vem logo abaixo da pergunta.

E é a comunidade quem faz tudo isso acontecer. O conteúdo, a edição e até a moderação é feita pelos próprios usuários. Gratuitamente. Porque eles querem ajudar uns aos outros. Ou mostrar uma solução elegante. Ou retribuir a ajuda que receberam.

Mas é preciso saber falar inglês.

Nós não achávamos que o site em uma só língua seria um problema, afinal a maior parte dos programadores fala inglês, né? As próprias linguagens de programação são em inglês, não é mesmo? Mas nos esquecemos de algo muito importante:

Demorou um tempo, mas nós finalmente percebemos o que muitos de vocês já sabiam. É muito difícil fazer parte de uma comunidade que, literalmente, não fala sua língua.

Hoje o dia é dos programadores de língua portuguesa!

Agora vocês tem um lugar só seu, para construir do seu jeito. A melhor parte de participar de um site novo é que há um mundo de possibilidades pela frente:

Se você é jovem ainda, amanhã velho será… Então aproveite!

As perguntas básicas – aquelas que um dia atormentaram todo programador – ainda não foram feitas. Você pode escrever a pergunta ou resposta definitiva, quevaiajudardezenasdemilhares de programadores no futuro. (Ah, e não se preocupe se a sua pergunta já está no site em inglês. Vocês vão construir um site justamente para que os desenvolvedores que falam português não precisem mais recorrer ao inglês para aprender coisas novas!)

Você pode ser o que quiser quando crescer.

Apesar do site ser dedicado à problemas de programação, você pode decidir que sua comunidade realmente precisa, assim como aconteceu com o Stack Overflow. Durante o começo do site, sejam mais liberais quanto a perguntas de recomendação de ferramentas ou bibliotecas, perguntas relevantes à administração de sistemas ou outras áreas de TI.

Por que começar com português?

[Nota do tradutor: Porque português é a melhor língua, o Brasil é o melhor país e o Jay não consegue ler o que a gente escreve ;)]

Queríamos começar com uma comunidade que atendesse a dois requisitos:

• Um grande número de desenvolvedores talentosos, em que
• Grande parte deles se sentisse muito mais confortável em falar sua própria língua do que o inglês

Então a escolha foi muito simples. O Brasil conta com uma das maiores e mais fortes comunidades de programação do mundo, e isso sem contar Portugal, Moçambique, Angola e outros países menores que acrescentam ainda mais desenvolvedores talentos a esse grupo.

Esse site é de todos vocês. Vamos construí-lo juntos!

Crie sua conta. Ou faça o tour (e ganhe sua primeira medalha!)

In a previous article on QuantStart we investigated how to download free futures data from Quandl. In this article we are going to discuss the characteristics of futures contracts that present a data challenge from a backtesting point of view. In particular, the notion of the "continuous contract" and "roll returns". We will outline the main difficulties of futures and provide an implementation in Python with pandas that can partially alleviate the problems.

Brief Overview of Futures Contracts

Futures are a form of contract drawn up between two parties for the purchase or sale of a quantity of an underlying asset at a specified date in the future. This date is known as the delivery or expiration. When this date is reached the buyer must deliver the physical underlying (or cash equivalent) to the seller for the price agreed at the contract formation date.

In practice futures are traded on exchanges (as opposed to Over The Counter - OTC trading) for standardised quantities and qualities of the underlying. The prices are marked to market every day. Futures are incredibly liquid and are used heavily for speculative purposes. While futures were often utilised to hedge the prices of agricultural or industrial goods, a futures contract can be formed on any tangible or intangible underlying such as stock indices, interest rates of foreign exchange values.

A detailed list of all the symbol codes used for futures contracts across various exchanges can be found on the CSI Data site: Futures Factsheet.

The main difference between a futures contract and equity ownership is the fact that a futures contract has a limited window of availability by virtue of the expiration date. At any one instant there will be a variety of futures contracts on the same underlying all with varying dates of expiry. The contract with the nearest date of expiry is known as the near contract. The problem we face as quantitative traders is that at any point in time we have a choice of multiple contracts with which to trade. Thus we are dealing with an overlapping set of time series rather than a continuous stream as in the case of equities or foreign exchange.

The goal of this article is to outline various approaches to constructing a continuous stream of contracts from this set of multiple series and to highlight the tradeoffs associated with each technique.

Forming a Continuous Futures Contract

The main difficulty with trying to generate a continuous contract from the underlying contracts with varying deliveries is that the contracts do not often trade at the same prices. Thus situations arise where they do not provide a smooth splice from one to the next. This is due to contango and backwardation effects. There are various approaches to tackling this problem, which we now discuss.

Common Approaches

Unfortunately there is no single "standard" method for joining futures contracts together in the financial industry. Ultimately the method chosen will depend heavily upon the strategy employing the contracts and the method of execution. Despite the fact that no single method exists there are some common approaches:

Back/Forward ("Panama") Adjustment

This method alleviates the "gap" across multiple contracts by shifting each contract such that the individual deliveries join in a smooth manner to the adjacent contracts. Thus the open/close across the prior contracts at expiry matches up.

The key problem with the Panama method includes the introduction of a trend bias, which will introduce a large drift to the prices. This can lead to negative data for sufficiently historical contracts. In addition there is a loss of the relative price differences due to an absolute shift in values. This means that returns are complicated to calculate (or just plain incorrect).

Proportional Adjustment

The Proportionality Adjustment approach is similar to the adjustment methodology of handling stock splits in equities. Rather than taking an absolute shift in the successive contracts, the ratio of the older settle (close) price to the newer open price is used to proportionally adjust the prices of historical contracts. This allows a continous stream without an interruption of the calculation of percentage returns.

The main issue with proportional adjustment is that any trading strategies reliant on an absolute price level will also have to be similarly adjusted in order to execute the correct signal. This is a problematic and error-prone process. Thus this type of continuous stream is often only useful for summary statistical analysis, as opposed to direct backtesting research.

Rollover/Perpetual Series

The essence of this approach is to create a continuous contract of successive contracts by taking a linearly weighted proportion of each contract over a number of days to ensure a smoother transition between each.

For example consider five smoothing days. The price on day 1, $P_1$, is equal to 80% of the far contract price ($F_1$) and 20% of the near contract price ($N_1$). Similarly, on day 2 the price is $P_2 = 0.6 \times F_2 + 0.4 \times N_2$. By day 5 we have $P_5 = 0.0 \times F_5 + 1.0 \times N_5 = N_5$ and the contract then just becomes a continuation of the near price. Thus after five days the contract is smoothly transitioned from the far to the near.

The problem with the rollover method is that it requires trading on all five days, which can increase transaction costs.

There are other less common approaches to the problem but we will avoid them here.

Roll-Return Formation in Python and Pandas

The remainder of the article will concentrate on implementing the perpetual series method as this is most appropriate for backtesting. It is a useful way to carry out strategy pipeline research.

We are going to stitch together the WTI Crude Oil "near" and "far" futures contract (symbol CL) in order to generate a continuous price series. At the time of writing (January 2014), the near contract is CLF2014 (January) and the far contract is CLG2014 (February).

In order to carry out the download of futures data I've made use of the Quandl plugin. Make sure to set the correct Python virtual environment on your system and install the Quandl package by typing the following into the terminal:

pip install Quandl

Now that the Quandl package is intalled, we need to make use of NumPy and pandas in order to carry out the roll-returns construction. If you haven't got NumPy or pandas installed, please follow my tutorial here. Create a new file and enter the following import statements:

import datetime
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import Quandl

The main work is carried out in the futures_rollover_weights function. It requires a starting date (the first date of the near contract), a dictionary of contract settlement dates (expiry_dates), the symbols of the contracts and the number of days to roll the contract over (defaulting to five). The comments below explain the code:

def futures_rollover_weights(start_date, expiry_dates, contracts, rollover_days=5):
 """This constructs a pandas DataFrame that contains weights (between 0.0 and 1.0)
 of contract positions to hold in order to carry out a rollover of rollover_days
 prior to the expiration of the earliest contract. The matrix can then be
 'multiplied' with another DataFrame containing the settle prices of each
 contract in order to produce a continuous time series futures contract."""
 # Construct a sequence of dates beginning from the earliest contract start
 # date to the end date of the final contract
 dates = pd.date_range(start_date, expiry_dates[-1], freq='B')
 # Create the 'roll weights' DataFrame that will store the multipliers for
 # each contract (between 0.0 and 1.0)
 roll_weights = pd.DataFrame(np.zeros((len(dates), len(contracts))),
 index=dates, columns=contracts)
 prev_date = roll_weights.index[0]
 # Loop through each contract and create the specific weightings for
 # each contract depending upon the settlement date and rollover_days
 for i, (item, ex_date) in enumerate(expiry_dates.iteritems()):
 if i 
Now that the weighting matrix has been produced, it is possible to apply this to the individual time series. The main function downloads the near and far contracts, creates a single DataFrame for both, constructs the rollover weighting matrix and then finally produces a continuous series of both prices, appropriately weighted:
if __name__ == "__main__":
 # Download the current Front and Back (near and far) futures contracts
 # for WTI Crude, traded on NYMEX, from Quandl.com. You will need to 
 # adjust the contracts to reflect your current near/far contracts 
 # depending upon the point at which you read this!
 wti_near = Quandl.get("OFDP/FUTURE_CLF2014")
 wti_far = Quandl.get("OFDP/FUTURE_CLG2014")
 wti = pd.DataFrame({'CLF2014': wti_near['Settle'],
 'CLG2014': wti_far['Settle']}, index=wti_far.index)
 # Create the dictionary of expiry dates for each contract
 expiry_dates = pd.Series({'CLF2014': datetime.datetime(2013, 12, 19),
 'CLG2014': datetime.datetime(2014, 2, 21)}).order()
 # Obtain the rollover weighting matrix/DataFrame
 weights = futures_rollover_weights(wti_near.index[0], expiry_dates, wti.columns)
 # Construct the continuous future of the WTI CL contracts
 wti_cts = (wti * weights).sum(1).dropna()
 # Output the merged series of contract settle prices
 wti_cts.tail(60)
The output is as follows:
2013-10-14 102.230
2013-10-15 101.240
2013-10-16 102.330
2013-10-17 100.620
2013-10-18 100.990
2013-10-21 99.760
2013-10-22 98.470
2013-10-23 97.000
2013-10-24 97.240
2013-10-25 97.950
..
..
2013-12-24 99.220
2013-12-26 99.550
2013-12-27 100.320
2013-12-30 99.290
2013-12-31 98.420
2014-01-02 95.440
2014-01-03 93.960
2014-01-06 93.430
2014-01-07 93.670
2014-01-08 92.330
Length: 60, dtype: float64
It can be seen that the series is now continuous across the two contracts. The next step is to carry this out for multiple deliveries across a variety of years, depending upon your backtesting needs.
References
If you would like more detail in forming continuous series of futures prices then please have a look at the following links:

Related Articles

Kvazaar

An open-source HEVC encoder licensed under GPLv2

Join channel #kvazaar_hevc in Freenode IRC network to contact us.

Kvazaar is not yet finished and does not implement all the features of HEVC. Compression performance will increase as we add more coding tools.

http://ultravideo.cs.tut.fi/#encoder for more information.

Using Kvazaar

Currently most of the features are turned on/off from the code on compile time, but they are meant to be user configurable later.

kvazaar -i <INPUT_YUV> -w <WIDTH> -h <HEIGHT> -o <OUTPUT.BIN> -n <NUMBER_OF_FRAMES> -q <QP>

eg. kvazaar -i BQMall_832x480_60.yuv -w 832 -h 480 -o out.bin -n 600 -q 32

The only accepted input format so far is 8-bit YUV 4:2:0.

Compiling Kvazaar

If you have trouble regarding compiling the source code, please make an issue about in Github. Others might encounter the same problem and there is probably much to improve in the build process. We want to make this as simple as possible.

No external library dependencies.

Visual Studio 2010

• project files included
• requires external vsyasm.exe in %PATH%
  • run rundll32 sysdm.cpl,EditEnvironmentVariables and add PATH to user variables

Linux

• Simple Makefile included in src/
• Yasm is expected to be in PATH

Other

Contributing to Kvazaar

For version control we try to follow these convetions:

• Master branch always produces a working bitstream (can be decoded with HM).
• Commits for new features and major changes/fixes put to a sensibly named feature branch first and later merged to the master branch.
• Always merge the feature branch to the master branch, not the other way around, with fast-forwarding disabled if necessary. We have found that this differentiates between working and unfinished versions nicely.
• Every commit should at least compile. Producing a working bitstream is nice as well, but not always possible. Features may be temporarily disabled to produce a working bitstream, but remember to re-enbable them before merging to master.

Testing:

• We do not have a proper testing framework yet. We test mainly by decoding the bitstream with HM and checking that the result matches the encoders own reconstruction.
• You should check that your code encodes at least 600 frames without crashing, that HM can decode the resulting bitstream and produces no hash warnings.
• We would like to have a suite of automatic tests that also check for BD-rate increase and speed decrease in addition to checking that the bitstream is valid. As of yet there is no such suite.
• There are some unit tests located in the tests directory. We would like to have more.
• Compiler should produce no warnings with -W-all. It does now. We are working on fixing that.

Code style:

We try to follow the following conventions:

• ANSI-C/C89.
  • Limited mainly due to poor C support in Visual Studio 2010.
  • // comments allowed and encouraged.
• Follow overall conventions already established in the code.
• Indent by 2 spaces. (no tabs)
• { on the same line for control logic and on the next line for functions
• Reference and deference next to the variable name.
• Variable names in lowered characters with words divided by underscore.
• Maximum line length 79 characters when possible.
• Functions only used inside the module shouldn't be defined in the module header. They can be defined in the beginning of the .c file if necessary.

Tips for studying HEVC:

• A good first resource is JCTVC-N1002 High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Test Model 12 (HM12) Encoder Description
• Many good articles regarding specific parts of HEVC can be found on IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, Combined issue on High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Standards and Research
• A definitive ansver to a question regarding the bitstream can often be found faster from the HM reference encoder than by reading the specification.

Dylan is a multi-paradigm functional and object-oriented programming language. It is dynamic while providing a programming model designed to support efficient machine code generation, including fine-grained control over dynamic and static behaviors.

Dylan is (and was) a vision of a different world: one with the flexibility of Smalltalk, the power of Lisp, while still allowing for compilation to efficient code.

During the 1990s, multiple teams of people at Apple, Carnegie Mellon University, and Harlequin (defunct makers of LispWorks, now a product of Xanalys) created and worked on Dylan for many years. Dylan fell by the wayside when its sponsoring organizations ran into financial troubles, and has been maintained by an open source project over the last decade as “Open Dylan”.

Open Dylan is the open source adaptation of the commercial Dylan tools that were developed at Harlequin. Open Dylan has a very sophisticated compiler, tools and IDE (although the IDE and some of the tools are currently Windows only). These tools were truly amazing for their time. Open Dylan is preserving, maintaining, and enhancing this powerful programming language.

We believe that Dylan has value in terms of the history behind it, the philosophy of the language design, and the unique perspective it provides for solving modern-day software engineering problems. The Open Dylan project brings all of these capabilities together in a free, open-source project that anyone can use.

Learn how to get started with Dylan by visitinghttp://opendylan.org/download/.

We have a number of projects where we currently lack the knowledge, experience, or available people to begin or complete them. This isn’t to say that we’ve been idle! We’ve been improving performance of our core libraries, optimizing our HTTP code, creating a stand-alone binary-data library and many other things.

We’re making a call to the community of interested people to say that we’re more than willing to help people get started with Dylan and to help deal with problems that arise in the course of making progress on some of our open projects.

We have a partial list of open projects in our wiki, but we’d like to call special attention to a subset of them.

If you’re interested in any of the below, please get in touch with us via our mailing list, IRC or ping us on Twitter. If none of the projects below sound interesting, feel free to check out the list on the wiki to see the others.

Read on to see how you can help!

letc=objc/get-class("NSObject");lets=objc/register-selector("alloc");leto=primitive-wrap-machine-word(%objc-msgsend(c.as-raw-class,s.as-raw-selector)()=>(obj::<raw-machine-word>)()end);

Pingjam is no more.
As tough as it is to write after 2 years of giving our all to make it – the reality is that we’ve failed.

First and foremost I want to thank Daniel and Ran, my cofounders, they are the best team I could have ever hoped to work with. You are each an unbelievably talented person and it was a great pleasure and privilege to work with you. As a team we were invincible (almost…). My irreplaceable wife and my co-founders’ partners were as much part of Pingjam as we were. I can’t begin to express how grateful I am for their support and tolerance for what we were going through. Daphne, Linda and Attar – your support meant the world to us. Thanks!

A huge thanks also goes to Eric Ries and Rob Khedouri, our incredible advisory board, that supported us throughout this journey and helped us think through the issues, connect with the right people and were our biggest cheerleaders and most thoughtful critics.

There’s countless other people that have helped us along the way. Friends, industry experts, attorneys, CPAs, suppliers, investors, and most importantly – customers.

Thanks to you all. We couldn’t have (almost) done it without you!

Some details:

• Pingjam was a monetization solution for Android app developers. Within 6 months of our public launch we had:
• Over 6,500 apps integrated our SDK into their apps
• 140k new installs per day
• 1,500 developers made money with us every month
• A run rate of over $500k earnings for year 1
• 60% monthly growth rate in users and revenue

We had bootstrapped our company to that point and hadn’t raised any external funds. We were one month away from “Ramen profitability”.

It all came crashing down in November. On November 1st Google Play kicked out over 1,000 apps that worked with us from their app store. That was the beginning of the tailspin that’s ending with our closing today.

In the spirit of helping other entrepreneurs learn from what we went through – here’s what happened and what I’ve learned:

Brothers in arms
Working with the right team made all the difference. Our ability to work together, back each other and argue fiercely and productively allowed us to deal with the challenges we faced. Our team had a developer, a dev-ops guy and a business guy. We complemented each other not only in skill set but also in temperament and attitude. The only things that we all had in common were a deep respect for each other, an unrelenting drive/hunger, a bias to brutal honesty (not to be confused with being assholes) and the desire and ability to support each other when needed. It took over 2 years of knowing my first co-founder before we started out. With the 3rd co-founder, we took 6 months of getting to know each other before he joined.

Lessons learned -
If you’re lucky, your partners are the only constant in your startup. Choose them wisely and make sure that you all have the ability to call each other’s bull**it without the team imploding.

Working with a team of extraordinary people means that you will be pushed out of your comfort zone. Just because you’re the subject matter expert doesn’t mean that your partners, that come from a different discipline, won’t have some brilliant ideas that you want to listen to.

Support network
Throughout this entire roller coaster of an experience we had a very strong support network of our personal partners, friends and colleagues. I can’t overstate how valuable that has been. It kept us balanced and focused and helped with advice and connections. All of the people that surrounded us added some value to us and to Pingjam.

Lessons learned -
Make sure that your partner, family and friends understand what you (and they) are getting into. They are the ones that will celebrate the large and small wins, help you deal with the stress and help you pick up the pieces when needed.

Surround yourself with people that have a vested interest in your success. It doesn’t necessarily mean financial interest. A shared vision, a sense of camaraderie or just bragging rights go a very long way.

Listen when the people you respect have something to say. You don’t have to like it, but you have to think about it. If you don’t respect that person’s thoughts – don’t consult with them.

When crisis hits
Saturday at noon and I was in the park with my family. I was very excited about the investment that was about to be signed when the weekend was over. Then I got the first phone call.

Within 3 hours from the first indication that there was a problem we realized that this was a major event. By 8pm we were already sitting together trying to figure out what was happening and trying to deal with the onslaught of emails and phone calls we were receiving from the developers that worked with us. The developers weren’t happy, they were angry, scared, confused and they blamed us for getting them into this mess.

Although we weren’t sure at the moment what was happening, we immediately decided to entirely disable our service in order to try and prevent any additional damage to our developers. As it became clearer that there was no effective way for us to communicate with Google, we did what we thought would be the best for our developers, we sent a blast email to all of our developers asking them to remove our SDK from their apps (effectively to stop working with us). We shared what little we knew about the situation and committed to them that we will work tirelessly to help the developers who lost their apps to get them back. We continued to communicate with our developers whenever we had anything new to share. Although a few of developers still think that we are bastards, most of the communications we received from our developers thanked us for our response to the crisis, for caring about them and expressed hope that we would continue to operate.

Lessons learned -
There’s no one else that can make the decision. You built the company, you got the customers and you’ll have to make the tough decision.

You can’t hide. You owe it to everyone that’s trusted you to communicate with them openly and to share whatever you can about the situation. It’ll also be worth it, done right, it helps everyone understand what you are facing and will take a lot of the pressure off.

Ignore the outlier noise. We had 2 developers who continuously hammered us on everything we did. They called us names, accused us of various things and generally made us want to punch someone. We chose to ignore them. It was much better for our mental health and for our ability to focus on actually working.

Big corporations are not your friend
Throughout our product development process, we constantly consulted Google developer relations, sales teams, marketing, technical, etc’. We were consistently assured that we are fully compliant with Google’s Play store terms which governs our ecosystem. Our EULA was written by a senior Google employee and at the time that Google kicked us out – we were being hosted at one of their incubating facilities.

Nonetheless, on November 1st Google kicked out over 1,000 apps that worked with us from the Play store. Neither us nor the developers got a warning (thanks Sebastian). Our attempts to try and help the developers that worked with us or to get any response ended with our contacts telling us that they’d been instructed to disengage and not speak with us.

Google proceeded to send threatening emails to our remaining developers that unless they stop working with us their apps would be banned. They even kicked out apps that hadn’t worked with us in 3 months. That’s right, apps that had tried working with us and then stopped working with us as far back as 3 months before November were also removed or threatened.

To this date, I don’t know what made Google suddenly not like us. I don’t know whether we got kicked out because 24 hours before banning our apps Google launched an almost identical feature in Android 4.4 or if it’s something else. The messages we did receive stated conflicting reasons. Beyond the obvious damage, the lack of communication caused us to assume the worst and that whatever we do in the space will be killed by Google.

Lessons learned -
Don’t operate in a market where a single player can arbitrarily decide to kill you. Especially don’t work in a market that’s controlled by an entity that explicitly refuses to communicate with you (or anyone else) or to explain their guidelines.

To stress the point, if your startup has one point of failure that is controlled by one entity – do what you can to not be totally dependent on that single entity. Develop for other platforms, decouple from the ecosystem. Do whatever it takes to get out from under their thumb.

When dealing with big corporations – don’t assume that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing. It’s a big organization and speaking with people who’s job it is to know the answers to your questions doesn’t necessarily mean much. Don’t forget that even if you speak with the right people – the organization can still change its direction in a heartbeat.

Until the money is in the bank – you’ve got nothing
On November 1st we had finalized an oversubscribed investment round for $1 million led by a prominent VC fund and other investors. The final documents were ready for signing that was supposed to occur after the weekend. As soon as the s**t hit the fan we immediately shared what was happening and our investors took a “let’s wait and see what happens” stance. Some of them were great and tried to help us figure out the next steps. Regardless, as the picture unfolded the deal fell apart. I have no bad feelings towards them. If I was an investor I’d probably do the same and I really appreciate their support and willingness to invest in us in the first place.

Nonetheless, in anticipation of the impending funding round and the “Ramen profitability” we substantially increased our burn rate. This left us with no oxygen and no room to maneuver.

Lessons learned -
Until the money is in the bank you don’t have an investment. Don’t increase burn rate until it’s done.

Work as hard as you can to get the deal done as fast as possible. Ride the attorneys, the investors and everyone else that’s involved in the process. Don’t be a pest or cross the line to seeming desperate, but call them 3 times a day if needed. Get it done!

Valuation and terms aren’t as important as actually getting the money. The difference between having money in the bank and not is huge, it’s the difference between surviving or not. The deal terms may be onerous, but in most cases they won’t kill you. Not having money in the bank will. If the deal is dragging on because you’re insisting on terms – cut it out and get it done.

Being a hot commodity today means nothing when trouble begins. Unless they are already in – investors will not support you as you try to figure out the path forward.

Always be truthful and forthcoming with your investors. It might hurt in the short term but it’s the right thing to do.

What now?
I don’t yet know precisely what either of us are going to do next. I do know that we will all do something meaningful. We will carry the lessons we learned with us to whatever we do and we will do better next time. In spite of what we’ve been through, we’d love to continue working together and I hope that we will be able to do that soon.

So long and see you in our next venture!

one more thing, if you need a kickass team that can move mountains or need help or advice with your endeavor – feel free to reach out.

Hi Naoki,

Just read your story about how your Twitter username was stolen. Sadly, the story was all to familiar to me, and mine has a couple implications that are far worse. Just thought I’d share the story in case you were interested.

I’m @jb on both Twitter and Instagram. So you can imagine my username is a very heavy target. It used to be primarily because of the Jonas Brothers but of course now it’s all related to Justin Bieber. As you can imagine, with the marketing power behind his name, there’s thousands if not more companies/hackers/etc… who’d love to get their grubby hands on it for profit.

It started when I received a forgot password email from Amazon. Forgot password emails are regular for me, because of my @jb username, but this was the first I had ever received from Amazon. “Why in the world would someone want that?” Twitter released feature awhile back ago that turns off the forgot password feature unless you have some specific information about the person. This was a godsend. Unfortunately Instagram has yet to implement something similar.

I of course ignored the first email from Amazon like I normally do with any forgot password emails I get that I didn’t initiate. Imagine my surprise when I received a second email about an hour later saying that my password had been successfully changed! I also had 3 fresh forgot password emails from Apple. It was clear I was being targeted.

I got lucky. I still had access to my Amazon account because I was able to do an automated forgot password request and reset it myself. I had caught everything just in time —the limbo between when the attacker had gained access to Amazon but had yet to gain access to my email. After I changed my password through their website, I called Amazon, found out that they had given access over the phone, and then asked them to lock my account and make a note not to allow any requests to change it again over the phone.

My next step was to call iCloud support and ask them if they had given out any of my information. Sure enough, I finally was able to talk to a representative who was able to tell me that there had been 4 support calls in the last hour regarding my account. The attacker was calling Apple, pretending to be me by giving them any information he had about me, and trying to gain access. I gave them the same instructions I gave Amazon, that this was not me and to please not allow any requests over the phone.

As I was on the phone with them, I received an email from iCloud support with instructions on how to reset my password. It was clearly an email from a representative and not an automated message. And what stood out to me was that the email was “To” a random gmail address and my email address was only CC’d. That was it, I had the email the attacker was using. I quickly sent an email to the attacker, assuming I would never hear a response. But I did get a reply a few minutes later.

The attacker was very open about what he was doing. He was after my Twitter username, @jb. He explained that he first started by doing a little research and learning every piece of information he could find on me through public records. My Twitter profile linked to my website, my website had WHOIS information. I use a very very old address on all my public WHOIS records, but it happens to be the address of my parents, and since I’ve shipped gifts to my parents through Amazon, they had that address on file.

He then called Amazon with what little information he had gained and cried that he had lost his password and didn’t have access to that email address anymore. The representative caved and reset the password over the phone giving him full access to my Amazon account. His plan was to then gain as much information he could with Amazon (last four of credit card numbers, current and previous addresses, etc…) and use that as ammunition to do the same thing with Apple. And it worked. He had an email in his gmail inbox with instructions on how to reset my iCloud account.

Luckily I had been online when all this was happening and was able to call Amazon and Apple respectively to lock my accounts and prevent access. Had I been even 5 minutes later, well…

The scary thing was that I only thought of the true implications of this attack days later. As I was contemplating what had happened and how I could prevent it in the future, a very frightening thought occurred to me. This attacker started with Amazon because he knew that an commerce shopping site’s customer support would be relatively easy to convince and gain access. However, that same site offers cloud services that many startups (including mine) rely on to host their data. Droplr, the startup that I am a founder of, is completely based on Amazon’s stack, from using EC2 servers where we host all of our technology to S3 which we use for file storage. This attacker had access to all of it. I was extremely lucky that in his rush to gain access to @jb, he didn’t think to check if my account had anything under AWS.

I was obviously infuriated with Amazon. I spoke to someone high up on the phone and they promised that it was a priority for them to train their representatives better. There were a couple other very public cases of this happening around the same time so they were just at the beginning of a PR fallout from their lack of security.

So what did I learn?

Providing access to education for everyone has always been at the core of Coursera’s mission, and it is with deep regret that we have had to make a change to our accessibility in some countries.

Certain United States export control regulations prohibit U.S. businesses, such as MOOC providers like Coursera, from offering services to users in sanctioned countries, including Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria. Under the law, certain aspects of Coursera’s course offerings are considered services and are therefore subject to restrictions in sanctioned countries, with the exception of Syria (see below).

Our global community is incredibly valuable to us and we remain committed to providing quality to education to all. During this time, we empathize with the frustrations of students who are affected by this change and we have made it a top priority to make rapid progress toward a solution.

What will happen to students attempting to access Coursera from sanctioned countries?

As of this week, students attempting to log into course pages on our site or create new accounts will be restricted from access to these resources. It will still be possible to browse the course catalog and explore the Coursera website and blog, which are considered public information rather than services and therefore not subject to restrictions.

What is Coursera doing to address this issue?

Coursera is working very closely with the U.S. Department of State and Office of Foreign Assets Control to secure permissions to reinstate site access for students in sanctioned countries. The Department of State and Coursera are aligned in our goals and we are working tirelessly to ensure that blockage is not permanent.

Why has this not been an issue in the past?

Until now the interpretation of export control regulations as they relate to MOOCs has been unclear and Coursera has been operating under the interpretation that MOOCs would not be restricted. We recently received information that has led to the understanding that the services offered on Coursera are not in compliance with the law as it stands. Accordingly we have instituted a restriction in compliance with the current export controls to ensure that our business remains in good standing with the law.

How is Coursera identifying students in sanctioned countries?

Coursera has implemented an IP address block that prevents users in sanctioned countries from logging into a Coursera account. When attempting to sign in, these users will see a message explaining that we cannot allow them to access the site due to U.S. export control restrictions. In rare instances, students with IP addresses bordering on but not geopolitically within the bounds of these countries will be affected. Our engineers are working to mitigate this issue while pursuing a broader solution to the restrictions.

What is being blocked in Syria?

Coursera has received notice from the Department of State that the services we provide fall under an exception (according to OFAC’s Syria General License No. 11A), which authorizes certain services in support of nongovernmental organizations’ activities in Syria, particularly as they pertain to increasing access to education. This came to our attention after we initiated the blockage, however since learning about the exception, we have restored full access to students in Syria.

During this difficult time, we thank the Coursera community for your patience and continued support as we work to ensure that students worldwide have access to a great education.

The image you get if you are in Iran, Syria, Cuba or Sudan

I’m following a Coursera course entitled “Constitutional Struggles in the Muslim World” and just received a rather odd email. All students from Syria, Sudan, Iran and Cuba will no longer be able to access Coursera. As some of you may know, Coursera is an online website that offers free courses from many of the world’s top universities.

Here’s the email, which can also be viewed on the Course’s main page.

Dear All, I write this email under protest and with a considerable degree of anger and sadness. Few things illustrate the bone-headedness, short-sightedness, and sheer chauvinism of the political structure of the United States better than the extent to which its ideologues are willing to go to score cheap domestic political points with narrow interests in the pursuit of a sanctions regime that has clearly run its course.

You might remember the Apple ad from a few years back, in which the company proudly announced that their machines were now so powerful that they fell under export restrictions: “For the first time in history a personal computer has been classified as a weapon by the US government …”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4dDuocAXTY

Well, that was a tongue in cheek quip at their Wintel competitors, but a few years after that same company decided that also an iPad apparently could now a weapon, in a rather cowardly anticipatory cow-tow to an ever expanding and aggressive sanctions regime, when they stopped selling any of their products to anyone who happened to SPEAK Persian in their stores (the company has since lifted that idiotic policy):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18545003

But you will now be interested to hear that also my course (and anything else Coursera offers) has been classified, if not a weapon that could be misused, then at least a “service” and as such must not fall into the hands of anybody happening to live in the countries that the United States government doesn’t like. I have thus been informed that my students in Cuba, Syria, Sudan and my homeland will no longer be able to access this course. I leave it to you to ponder whether this course is indeed a weapon and if so against what and what possible benefit the average American citizen could possibly derive from restricting access to it.

Be this as it may, I invite those students affected to use services such as hola.org or VPN routers to circumvent these restrictions.

Let me reiterate that I am appalled at this decision. Please note that no-one at Coursera likely had a choice in this matter!

At any rate, rest assured that these are not the values of the University of Copenhagen, of its Faculty of Law, and most assuredly not mine!

Let me end on a personal note: as a recipient of a McCloy Scholarship created to foster trans-Atlantic friendship and as someone who spent some of his most formative years in the United States, I have to admit that I am worried about the path this country is descending to. Blocking teaching (and medicine) from people whose government one doesn’t like is a fallback into the darkest hours of the last century. As my teacher at MIT, Prof. Stephen Van Evera would have told the people responsible for this: your mothers would not be proud of you today.

Your instructor,

Prof. Dr. Ebrahim Afsah
Faculty of Law
University of Copenhagen

PS: Below an excerpt of the communication I received from Coursera; I know from previous engagements that there is absolutely nothing they can do in the current legal climate in the United States:

“As some of you already know, certain U.S. export control regulations prohibit U.S. businesses, such as Coursera, from offering services to users in sanctioned countries (Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria). The interpretation of the export control regulations in the context of MOOCs has been ambiguous up until now, and we had been operating under one interpretation of the law. Last week, Coursera received definitive guidance indicating that access to the course experience is considered a service, and all services are highly restricted by export controls.
In particular, the notion of “services” includes offering access to human grading of quizzes and assessments, peer-graded homework, and discussion forums. Regrettably, Coursera must therefore cease offering MOOC access to users in certain sanctioned countries in order to ensure compliance with these U.S. laws and to avoid serious legal ramifications.”

PPS: I don’t think it is very constructive to voice your opposition to Coursera, as they can’t do anything about it anyway. If you feel you must voice your discontent, direct it at the political representatives who are responsible for this situation, i.e. your congressman or -woman if you are a US citizen or the local US representation if you are not.

An Iranian student has already posted on Coursera’s Facebook page:

What possible good can come out of this? The US government is effectively telling the rest of the world that it does not view education as a right, but as a weapon that can be used for political reasons. Ordinary students from Cuba, Syria, Sudan and Iran, who might have once viewed the US favorably thanks to such extraordinary American websites as Coursera, would now view it negatively.

33.88862935.495479

Google today launched Chrome apps for Android and iOS. The company is offering an early developer preview of a toolchain based on Apache Cordova, an open-source mobile development framework for building native mobile apps using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Developers can use the tool to wrap their Chrome app with a native application shell that enables them to distribute it via Google Play and Apple’s App Store.

Today’s announcement builds on the company’s launch of Chrome apps in September that work offline by default and act like native applications on the host operating system. Those Chrome apps work on Windows, Mac, and Chrome OS, but now the company wants to bring them to the mobile world.

Last month, we broke the news that the company was working on bringing Chrome packaged apps from the desktop to the mobile world. At the time, Google developer advocate Joe Marini said the beta toolkit for porting and building such apps would be ready in January. In the last week of the month, Google has delivered as promised.

Google offers two developer workflows for the aforementioned native app packaging process. You can run your Chrome app on a device or emulator using the command-line or an IDE, and you can also use the Chrome Apps Developer Tool to run your app on an Android device without the need to install the mobile platform’s SDK or an IDE.

Here is an example of a basic to-do list Chrome app running on OS X as well as Android:

For those who don’t know, Chrome packaged apps are written in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, but launch outside the browser, work offline by default, and access certain APIs not available to Web apps. For these mobile apps, developers have access to Cordova APIs as well as many of the core Chrome APIs, including:

• identity– sign-in users usingOAuth2 without prompting for passwords.
• payments (currently Android only) – sell virtual goods within your mobile app.
• pushMessaging– push messages to your app from your server.
• sockets– send and receive data over the network using TCP and UDP.
• notifications (currently Android only) – send rich notifications from your mobile app.
• storage– store and retrieve key-value data locally.
• syncFileSystem– store and retrieve files backed by Google Drive.
• alarms– run tasks periodically.

If you’re a developer interested in building Chrome apps for mobile, or porting your existing Chrome apps to mobile, you can get started by checking out the readme, as well as the links below.

➤ Sample apps | Stack Overflow | Developer Forum

See also – Google is building a Chrome app-based development environment called Spark and Google’s Chromium team is building a way to launch apps without installation by just clicking a link

Top Image Credit: Kimihiro Hoshino/AFP/Getty Images

Vringo is a tiny company that purchased some patents from Lycos, an old search engine, in 2011 and then used those patents to sue Google. In December 2012, Vringo won $30 million in a jury trial, but that was far less than the hundreds of millions it was seeking.

Today, Vringo got the payout it was looking for: a 1.36 percent running royalty on US-based revenue from AdWords, Google's flagship program. US District Judge Raymond Jackson had already ruled last week (PDF) that the AdWords program, which was tweaked by Google after the Vringo verdict, wasn't "colorably different" from the old infringing program. He gave Google and Vringo one last session to hammer out a royalty rate, and when they couldn't, he went ahead and set it (PDF)—at almost exactly the rate Vringo was seeking.

Because some aspects of Google's revenue are opaque, it's impossible to know exactly what Vringo's win would be worth—and the company is a long way from cashing a check. But if the royalty rate were to be upheld on appeal, Google would surely have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars.

Whatever its worth, the victory will lift the hopes of patent-holding companies around the nation. A 2006 Supreme Court decision makes it almost impossible for so-called "patent trolls" to get an injunction that would knock a product out of commission; in the context of 2014 case law, a solid running royalty is a troll's dream come true.

Jackson followed the methodology laid out in an East Texas case in which Yahoo was found to infringe an online advertising patent owned by famed patent troll Acacia. The math is a little confusing. Today's order sets a royalty rate at 6.5 percent, on a "royalty base" of 20.9 percent, for an overall rate of 1.3585 percent. The royalty base is supposed to calculate what the Vringo-owned patents add to Google's search system.

"My reaction is pretty darn positive," said Jeffrey Sherwood, the lead lawyer on Vringo's trial team. In Vringo's view, the patents describe Google's ad-filtering system, which ranks various possible advertisements against each other in an auction. "They have a huge inventory of ads, and they have to get it down to the few that are the most relevant to their users. These patents describe a way to do it. And our position is, that's the way Google does it."

Jennifer Polse, Google's lead patent lawyer on the Vringo case, said that the company has already appealed the jury verdict and will appeal today's royalty award as well. "We believe strongly in our pending appeal in this matter, and we anticipate seeking Federal Circuit review of today's decision as well," said Polse in an e-mailed statement.

AOL, Gannett, Target, and IAC were named as co-defendants in the lawsuit for their use of AdWords. However, they've been indemnified in this case by Google, which is handling the litigation. Vringo brought the case under the name I/P Engine, a subsidiary it created to hold the two patents it purchased, numbered 6,314,420 and 6,775,664.

Vringo also sued Microsoft over ads in its Bing search engine. Microsoft settled that case in May, agreeing to pay $1 million plus 5 percent of whatever Google ultimately pays.

While publicly traded Vringo also has a "video ringtone" business, its financial statements describe its business as now being focused on patent assertion. The company has 28 full-time employees, has generated "no significant revenue to date," and had more than $10 million in legal expenses in 2012.

Vringo stock rose 13 percent before trading was reportedly halted.

Redesigned system wasn't different enough

In today's order, Jackson awarded Vringo almost exactly the royalty it wanted. The company's expert argued for a royalty of 5 percent, and Jackson chose to award 4.6 percent. Vringo wanted a 40 percent increase on the rate because Google was found to be a willful infringer, and Jackson agreed that was reasonable. Knocking up 4.6 by 40 percent comes out to 6.44 percent, which the judge rounded up to 6.5.

That's significantly more than the 3.5 percent royalty that the jury suggested, which was "only a starting point in the analysis," wrote Jackson in today's order.

Even though there was no evidence of copying—Vringo admitted as much—a willfulness adjustment was still appropriate, the judge found. "Defendants' misconduct continues presently and Defendants have taken no remedial action," wrote Jackson. "In fact, they have redesigned a system that clearly replicates the infringing elements of old AdWords."

In last week's order, Jackson said that Vringo had proven infringement of both the old and new AdWords systems. While he didn't go into the details of changes Google made, he did write that all Google had done was apply the "LTV" or "long-term value" score at a different point in the ad-selecting process. It was basically the same: "[I]t is undisputed that new AdWords continues to use a candidate advertisement's LTV score that includes a predicted click-through rate in the process of choosing which advertisement will ultimately be shown to the individual performing the query."

Becker, the Vringo expert who convinced the judge on most points, has testified as a patent damages expert in many cases, including past cases over AdWords. In 2010, he argued that Google should pay patent-holding company Bright Response LLC between $64 million and $128 million, because AdWords infringed its patents, as well. Google won that case. Last year, Becker served as the damages expert for TQP Development, which won a patent trial against Newegg.

Back-of-napkin math on the Vringo win

Google doesn't break out AdWords revenue clearly, but the company made $9.39 billion from "Google-owned sites" in the last quarter. The company will likely make more than $35 billion in 2013 in this area. The majority of that is surely AdWords, since estimates for YouTube range from $3.7 billion to $5.6 billion. Around 55 percent of the company's overall revenue comes from the US.

Accepting those estimates, an extremely rough calculation suggests US AdWords revenue is somewhere in the range of $15 billion to $18 billion annually. If that's right, it would place the Vringo royalty win somewhere in the realm of $200 million to $250 million annually. The patents expire in 2016, and Google is liable from November 2012, which is the date final judgment was entered after the trial.

And of course, if Google loses, it will owe interest on the whole shebang.

It's all pretty academic at this point; the numbers are clearly high enough that Google is likely to fight this tooth-and-nail through the appeal process, and the parties have agreed to stay earlier judgments until the appeal is resolved.

Still, a royalty award that could potentially push the billion-dollar mark—on old search technology that not even Vringo believes Google actually copied—could become additional fodder in the ongoing patent debates in Congress.

In an interview today, Sherwood emphasized that debates in Congress over "patent trolls" don't apply to Vringo.

"The criticism doesn't relate to cases like this," he said. "There are situations where plaintiffs are filing cases that have no merit and extorting money out of defendants, because it's cheaper to settle. Obviously, in this case, we had a very good federal judge and jury come to the opposite conclusion."

Statistics released by the Union ministry of health and family welfare show that life expectancy in India has gone up by five years, from 62.3 years for males and 63.9 years for females in 2001-2005 to 67.3 years and 69.6 years respectively in 2011-2015. Experts attribute this jump — higher than that in the previous decade — to better immunization and nutrition, coupled with prevention and treatment of infectious diseases.

The World Health Organization defines life expectancy as "the average number of years a person is expected to live on the basis of the current mortality rates and prevalence distribution of health states in a population". In India, average life expectancy which used to be around 42 in 1960, steadily climbed to around 48 in 1980, 58.5 in 1990 and around 62s in 2000.

The overall health indicators have also shown significant improvement across the country in the past 10 years. Infant mortality ratio has come down to 42 in 2012 from 58 per 1,000 live births in the 2005. "Maternal mortality ratio has declined from 301 per 100,000 live births in 2001-03 to 212 in 2007-09," the health ministry said.

"A steady supply of food is the prime reason for increased life expectancy," says Dr George Thomas, editor of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics. Since the time of Independence, famine has reduced dramatically in our country and people have a decent supply of nutrition. However, the real challenge lies in taking the numbers beyond this."

Disease control

Thomas pointed out that increasing life expectancy beyond 70 years would depend on environmental factors. "Supply of clean drinking water and better control of non-communicable diseases would play a major role. However, India is still grappling with communicable diseases," he said.

Dr S Balasubramanian, joint director of Tamil Nadu public health, said the increase shows health policies are in the right direction. "Earlier, people had more children, and the chances of all the kids getting a balanced diet were low.
Family planning has helped. Childhood vaccination has checked epidemics and saved lives," he said. Life-threatening diseases like diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough have been eliminated completely. "India has also been recently declared a polio free nation, which is an added feather to the cap," he said.

Some experts still advocate caution. "With increased life expectancy, the disease burden would increase," said geriatrician Dr B Krishnaswamy. "Yes, we will live longer, but the big question is how healthy our lives would be," he said.

Iceland let its banks fail in 2008 because they proved too big to save.

Now, the island is finding crisis-management decisions made half a decade ago have put it on a trajectory that’s turned 2% unemployment into a realistic goal.

While the euro area grapples with record joblessness, led by more than 25% in Greece and Spain, only about 4% of Iceland’s labor force is without work. Prime Minister Sigmundur D. Gunnlaugsson says even that’s too high.

“Politicians always have something to worry about,” the 38-year-old said in an interview last week. “We’d like to see unemployment going from where it’s now — around 4% — to under 2%, which may sound strange to most other western countries, but Icelanders aren’t accustomed to unemployment.”

The island’s sudden economic meltdown in October 2008 made international headlines as a debt-fueled banking boom ended in a matter of weeks when funding markets froze. Policy makers overseeing the $14 billion economy refused to back the banks, which subsequently defaulted on US$85 billion. The government’s decision to protect state finances left it with the means to continue social support programs that shielded Icelanders from penury during the worst financial crisis in six decades.

Of creditor claims against the banks, Gunnlaugsson says “this is not public debt and never will be.” He says his main goal while in office is “to rebuild the Icelandic welfare state.”

Though bank creditors, many of them hedge funds, are still trying to recoup their money, Iceland’s approach has won praise from the International Monetary Fund and from numerous economists, including Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman.

Successive Icelandic governments have forced banks to write off mortgage debts to help households. In February 2010, 16 months after Kaupthing Bank hf, Glitnir Bank hf and Landsbanki Islands hf failed, unemployment peaked at 9.3%. The rate was 4.2% in December, according to Statistics Iceland. In the euro area, unemployment held at a record 12.1% in November, Eurostat estimates.

“Even though the situation is a lot better here than in many other countries, having over 4% unemployment is something we don’t want,” said Gunnlaugsson, whose government was elected in April.

The government’s 2014 budget sets aside about 43% of its spending for the Welfare Ministry, a level that is largely unchanged since before the crisis. According to Stefan Olafsson, a sociology professor at the University of Iceland, the nation’s focus on welfare has been key in restoring growth.

The economy will expand 2.7% this year, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That’s better than the average for the OECD-area as a whole, which will grow 2.3%, the Paris-based group estimates.

Still, Iceland’s efforts to resurrect its economy have been far from smooth, Olafsson said. Inflation, which peaked at 19% in January 2009, has hurt Iceland more than most other countries because most mortgages are linked to the consumer price index. Though the set-up protects investors, households see their debt burdens grow as prices rise. Inflation was 4.2% in December.

“Although we’re spending more on welfare matters today than before, we have to keep in mind that purchasing power has gone down since 2008,” Olafsson said in an interview. “On top of increasing spending in the health care and education systems, the government should place emphasis on increasing people’s purchasing power. That’s the biggest single task.”

Most of Iceland’s inflation has come via the exchange rate, which has been protected by capital controls since plunging 80% offshore against the euro at the end of 2008. Gunnlaugsson says any efforts to scale back existing currency restrictions will only take place at a pace that safeguards krona stability.

“It is a problem that can be solved, and can be solved quite fast,” Gunnlaugsson said.

The krona has appreciated around 10% against the euro over the past 12 months. Still, today’s rate of about 157 per euro compares with an average of 88 in 2007, a year before the island’s financial collapse. It slid 0.04% to 157.02 as of 12:50 p.m. in Reykjavik.

To support households, Gunnlaugsson in November unveiled a plan to provide as much as 7% of gross domestic product in mortgage debt relief. The government intends to finance the plan, which the OECD has criticized as being too blunt, partly by raising taxes on banks.

Iceland’s hard-line against banks and their creditors has prompted warnings that the nation may struggle to find an investor base once capital controls are lifted. That hasn’t stopped the government issuing two dollar bonds since 2008.

Gunnlaugsson’s welfare pledge comes as other Nordic governments reassess their commitment to state-funded programs. Denmark has scaled back its universal welfare program as more citizens are means tested. In Sweden, a government that has delivered multiple rounds of income tax cuts looks set to lose elections this year as voters pine for a return to more state spending. Krugman this month cautioned Scandinavian governments against pushing through further cuts. According to Gunnlaugsson, government support and economic growth go hand in hand.

“First and foremost we of course want to see stability,” Gunnlaugsson said. “Increased political stability will mean more investment, more jobs, more creation of wealth, so that we can continue to maintain the Icelandic welfare state.”

Bloomberg.com

My $50,000 Twitter Username Was Stolen Thanks to PayPal and GoDaddy

I had a rare Twitter username, @N. Yep, just one letter. I’ve been offered as much as $50,000 for it. People have tried to steal it. Password reset instructions are a regular sight in my email inbox. As of today, I no longer control @N. I was extorted into giving it up.

While eating lunch on January 20, 2014, I received a text message from PayPal for one-time validation code. Somebody was trying to steal my PayPal account. I ignored it and continued eating.

Later in the day, I checked my email which uses my personal domain name (registered with GoDaddy) through Google Apps. I found the last message I had received was from GoDaddy with the subject “Account Settings Change Confirmation.” There was a good reason why that was the last one.

I tried to log in to my GoDaddy account, but it didn’t work. I called GoDaddy and explained the situation. The representative asked me the last 6 digits of my credit card number as a method of verification. This didn’t work because the credit card information had already been changed by an attacker. In fact, all of my information had been changed. I had no way to prove I was the real owner of the domain name.

The GoDaddy representative suggested that I fill out a case report on GoDaddy’s website using my government identification. I did that and was told a response could take up to 48 hours. I expected that this would be sufficient to prove my identity and ownership of the account.

Let The Extortion Begin

Most websites use email as a method of verification. If your email account is compromised, an attacker can easily reset your password on many other websites. By taking control of my domain name at GoDaddy, my attacker was able to control my email.

I soon realized, based on my previous experiences being attacked, that my coveted Twitter username was the target. Strangely, someone I don’t know sent me a Facebook message encouraging me to change my Twitter email address. I assumed this was sent from the attacker but I changed it regardless. The Twitter account email address was now one which the attacker could not access.

The attacker tried to reset my Twitter password several times and found he couldn’t receive any of the reset emails because it took time for the change of my domain’s MX record, which controls the email domain server. The attacker opened issue #16134409 at Twitter’s Zendesk support page.

Twitter required the attacker to provide more information to proceed and the attacker gave up on this route.

I later learned that the attacker had compromised my Facebook account in order to bargain with me. I was horrified to learn what had happened when friends began asking me about strange behavior on my Facebook account.

I received an email from my attacker at last. The attacker attempted to extort me with the following message.

Shortly thereafter, I received a response from GoDaddy.

My claim was refused because I am not the “current registrant.” GoDaddy asked the attacker if it was ok to change account information, while they didn’t bother asking me if it was ok when the attacker did it. I was infuriated that GoDaddy had put the burden on the true owner.

A coworker of mine was able to connect me to a GoDaddy executive. The executive attempted to get the security team involved, but nothing has happened. Perhaps because of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

Then I received this follow-up from the attacker.

I asked a friend of mine at Twitter what the chances of recovering the Twitter account were if the attacker took ownership. I remembered what had happened to @mat and concluded that giving up the account right away would be the only way to avoid an irreversible disaster. So I told the attacker:

I changed my username @N to @N_is_stolen for the first time since I registered it in early 2007. Goodbye to my problematic username, for now.

I received this response.

The attacker quickly took control of the username and I regained access to my GoDaddy account.

PayPal and GoDaddy Facilitated The Attack

I asked the attacker how my GoDaddy account was compromised and received this response:

It’s hard to decide what’s more shocking, the fact that PayPal gave the attacker the last four digits of my credit card number over the phone, or that GoDaddy accepted it as verification. When asked about this, the attacker responded with this message:

But guessing 2 digits correctly isn’t that easy, right?

He was lucky that he only had to guess two numbers and was able to do it in a single call. The thing is, GoDaddy allowed him to keep trying until he nailed it. Insane. Sounds like I was dealing with a wannabe Kevin Mitnick—it’s as though companies have yet to learn from Mitnick’s exploits circa 1995.

Avoid Custom Domains for Your Login Email Address

With my GoDaddy account restored, I was able to regain access to my email as well. I changed the email address I use at several web services to an @gmail.com address. Using my Google Apps email address with a custom domain feels nice but it has a chance of being stolen if the domain server is compromised. If I were using an @gmail.com email address for my Facebook login, the attacker would not have been able to access my Facebook account.

If you are using your Google Apps email address to log into various websites, I strongly suggest you stop doing so. Use an @gmail.com for logins. You can use the nicer custom domain email for messaging purposes, I still do.

In addition, I also strongly suggest you to use a longer TTL for the MX record, just in case. It was 1 hour TTL in my case and that’s why I didn’t have enough time to keep receiving emails to the compromised domain after losing the DNS control. If it was a week-long TTL for example, I would have had a greater chance to recover the stolen accounts.

Using two-factor authentication is a must. It’s probably what prevented the attacker from logging into my PayPal account. Though this situation illustrates that even two-factor authentication doesn’t help for everything.

Conclusion

Stupid companies may give out your personal information (like part of your credit card number) to the wrong person. Some of those companies are still employing the unacceptable practice of verifying you with the last some digits of your credit card.

To avoid their imprudence from destroying your digital life, don’t let companies such as PayPal and GoDaddy store your credit card information. I just removed mine. I’ll also be leaving GoDaddy and PayPal as soon as possible.

Wayne Gretzky once said “skate where the puck is going, not where it’s been” and, in the fast-evolving world of technology, this is sound advice that we have taken to heart as we launched the new NursingJobs.us job board. The new site uses a more modern interface that supports the mobiles and tablets that our users increasingly prefer.

Unfortunately, this also means that we have had to make the decision to leave Internet Explorer 7 users behind, a decision we did not take lightly (after all, we have been supporting even IE6 till recently!) but that we are convinced is the right thing for us to do at this time.

IE7 users make up 1.22% of our traffic right now, and this will decline as more computers are upgraded and can use modern browsers. However, we know that some of our clients are still stuck with IE7 so we decided to make a bold offer, one that initially seemed crazy to us but now makes a lot of sense.

We are offering to buy a new computer with a modern browser for any of our customers who are stuck with IE7. We determined that it would cost us more to support a browser from 2006 in 2014 and beyond than it would to help our clients upgrade their legacy hardware.

To any of our clients still using IE7, we are sorry that the site doesn’t work as well as we would like it to in your browser. Contact us to redeem our offer to provide you with a new computer to upgrade your browser. We want to make sure all our customers are well served by our new product and we are serious about making this right if our ceasing to support IE7 becomes an inconvenience.

AMD announced plans to build ARM server CPUs back in 2012. Today the company took a big step toward making those chips a reality, announcing that an 8-core ARM System-on-Chip would begin sampling in March.

Codenamed "Seattle," the processors will be branded Opteron A-series and built on a 28nm process. The first of these will be the A1100. This will have four or eight cores based on ARM's Cortex-A57 design. This is a high performance, 64-bit ARM core, and it will run at clock speeds of at least 2GHz. The chips will have up to 4MB of level 2 cache and 8MB of level 3 cache, with both caches shared across all the cores. They'll support dual-channel DDR3 or DDR4, with up to 128GB RAM. The chips will also include a bunch of connectivity: eight PCIe 3 lanes, eight SATA 3 ports, and two 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports. Rounding out the SoCs, they'll also include dedicated engines for cryptography and compression. The whole thing has an expected power usage of 25W.

While these chips are aimed at high-density, low-power servers, AMD is also putting together a micro-ATX development kit built around the A1100. This will include a Fedora-based Linux environment with development tools, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Java 7 and 8. This software stack is consistent with the goals of these low-power servers: running Web applications is likely to be their primary role.

AMD has grand ambitions for ARM in the server room. The company estimates that by 2019, 25 percent of the server market will use ARM processors with widespread use of custom designs in large datacenters. AMD believes that it will be the leader of this ARM server market, as it brings its existing server processor expertise to bear.

However, it can't be taken for granted that ARM will make itself a big force in the server room. Calxeda, an early pioneer of ultra high-density, low-power ARM servers, announced that it was closing down late last year in spite of tens of millions of funding and a partnership with HP.

Thanks to technology, people can create more wealth now than ever before, and in twenty years they’ll be able to create more wealth than they can today.  Even though this leads to more total wealth, it skews it toward fewer people.  This disparity has probably been growing since the beginning of technology, in the broadest sense of the word.

Technology makes wealth inequality worse by giving people leverage and compounding differences in ability and amount of work.  It also often replaces human jobs with machines.  A long time ago, differences in ability and work ethic had a linear effect on wealth; now it’s exponential. [1] Technology leads to increasing wealth inequality for lots of other reasons, too—for example, it makes it much easier to reach large audiences all at once, and a great product can be sold immediately worldwide instead of in just one area.

Without intervention, technology will probably lead to an untenable disparity—so we probably need some amount of intervention.  Technology also increases the total wealth in a way that mostly benefits everyone, but at some point the disparity just feels so unfair it doesn’t matter.

Wealth inequality today in the United States is extreme and growing, and we talk about it a lot when someone throws a brick through the window of a Google bus.  Lots of smart people have already written about this, but here are two images to quickly show what the skew looks like: