Bob West

Yes. That one.

Same song, different verse: WhatsApp cofounder is leaving Facebook

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When did they stop teaching this in Startup School? It should be in the first and last courses you take.

1) Visionary Founder creates Magical Startup™.
2) Magical Startup™ experiences explosive growth.
3) Big Corporation® throws mountains of money at Visionary Founder, while cooing “you will keep control… you will keep control…”
4) Visionary Founder sells Magical Startup™ to Big Corporation® and becomes insanely rich.
5) Magical Startup™ is shuttered. Hundreds of millions of users’ voices suddenly cry out in terror and are suddenly silenced.
6) Big Corporation® welcomes Visionary Founder to their corporate headquarters, locks the door behind Visionary Founder, and turns off the lights.
7) A shot rings out.
8) The lights come back on, and Visionary Founder’s Dream is found lying on the beautiful parquet floor, bleeding, dead.
9) Visionary Founder is shocked and appalled.
10) Big Corporation® pushes Visionary Founder – wearing a Golden Parachute – from top floor of Big Corporation® headquarters.
11) Big Corporation® dissects Visionary Founder’s dead Dream, removing vital organs and clumsily transplanting them into their machinery.
12) Big Corporation® users are confused by the appearance of yet another new feature that no one asked for, but which some begrudgingly use.
13) Big Corporation® shareholders see an extra penny in their next dividend check.
14) Repeat.

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Article: WhatsApp cofounder Jan Koum is leaving Facebook | VentureBeat

The Agency

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This is one of the most fascinating articles / pieces of reportage I’ve read in a very long time. And it’s unsettling: a Russian company with deep ties to the Kremlin spends $400,000 a month posting misinformation on the Net. And the NYT reporter who researched and wrote this story eventually became another of their victims after he was set up. Follow the cloak-and-dagger in this great read.

From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities.

Source: The Agency – NYTimes.com

The battle to keep servers safe … is sometimes funny

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WordPress dashboard

One of my responsibilities as a web designer and developer is to make sure all of the server software is constantly kept up-to-date. If it’s not, hacker-bots sneak in and take over. And that can get ugly, as it did for my server a few weeks ago.

For the first time since I started in this business in 1995, my server was partially compromised, and was used to send spam. The server was added to blacklists, and some of my clients had difficulty sending email. Not good at all for my clients. And for me — it was a nightmare. I felt horrible.

And once a hacker finds a vulnerable server, they keep hammering it.

So, my excellent admin and I fought repeated incursions over the following 3 weeks, finding nasty bits of hacker code and deleting them, tightening up various aspects of server security, finding and patching holes, and instructing clients on the things they must do to keep their websites secure — until the incursions were finally stopped.

At least for now. The battle is constant — so I sometimes joke that WordPress plugins have to be updated every 15 minutes.

Today, I got an automatic heads-up that a WordPress plugin needed to be updated: WordFence, a great security utility. So, I opened up my security update checklist and started in, updating WordFence itself from version 6.0.3 to 6.0.4.

Fifteen minutes later, as I updated the last of 17 websites, I noticed that the new plugin version that was available had changed to 6.0.5.

That meant that from the time I got the notice about 6.0.4, 6.0.5 had come out… and I had to start over and update all of the sites again.

It’s possible that the first notice I got was delivered as long as 24 hours after the update came out, but still, it was funny that I literally had to update again 15 minutes later.

Maybe I should stop making that 15-minute joke and “putting it out into the universe.”

In the meantime, we fight on, doing our best to keep clients’ websites and mail service running smoothly!