arkem

Hey that's me! I was being a little too cute and flippant when I said that (I forgot I was in interview mode and not talk to colleague mode) but I stand by the idea that from a regular user perspective the security difference between a kernel driver and any other piece of software is minimal!

You're not wrong about GC becoming more common in games, as you say Unreal has a GC and so does Unity.

Unreal Engine's GC at least is pretty custom. A lot of effort has been put into it to allow developers to control he worst case run time. It has a system that allows incremental sweeps (and multi-threaded parallel sweeping) and will pause its sweeps as it approaches its allotted time limits.

That said, in my experience with Unreal most large projects choose to turn off the per-frame GC checks and manually control it. For example one project I've seen only invoked the GC when the player dies, a level transition happens or once every 10 minutes (as a fallback).

Wanted to jump back in here now that new public information is available, for August 2019 there was a daily average of 8MM peak concurrent players.

https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/news/game-updates/special-...

In 2014 Riot released numbers of 7.5MM peak concurrent players for League of Legends (off a MAU 67MM) and in 2016 reported a MAU of 100MM (but no new concurrency figures). Those are old stats but still useful for comparison.

Disclaimer: I work at Riot but don't have any internal numbers to share.

For context the current CCU makes it the 1,898th most played game on steam right now (out of 10,772 games that have at least one player).

The drop off comes very quickly!

1st most played game has 694,472 CCU (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive)

25th most played game has 19,744 CCU (Terraria)

50th most played game has 13,172 CCU (Counter-Strike)

100th most played game has 4,367 CCU (Sims 3)

500th most played game has 529 CCU (Octopath Traveller)

1000th most played game has 167 CCU (Shadowrun Hong Kong)

10000th most played game has 1 CCU

It looks like autocorrect wasn't sent in the clear at least according to one report.

This[1] report on this incident (commissioned by the wallet creators) makes me skeptical that autocorrect or Google was involved at all. I think some sort of malware or phishing to steal the seed was a much more likely attack.

[1] https://medium.com/@cipherblade/how-not-to-react-when-your-c...

Some podcasts do algorithmic auction style ad sales with targeting based off geolocation on the downloading ip address. This works by generating a new audio file for each download. I think the industry calls it "dyanmic ad insertion".

I'm in a similar position. I was thinking about finding a new smaller place in the west side perhaps one with an in unit laundry or better air-conditioning.

Looking around I've realized that rent control has me paying significantly less than market and that even if I downsized I'd probably end up paying $1000/month extra if I moved. After realizing this I'm unlikely to move until/unless I decide to leave LA.

I'm happy I'm getting a good deal but it doesn't feel very efficient for the housing market over all.

I wonder if this could be more easily adopted by Silicon Valley style startups if this ownership was of what would normally be the employee option pool rather than the whole company.

That way you'd still be compatible with venture capital, quarantine the hours worked dilution to the pool and you can treat founders differently to employees if you want by having founders shares outside the option pool.

I wrote a short paper about propaganda and spy antics in Eve Online in 2009: http://memeover.arkem.org/2009/12/information-operations-in-...

Though if you're after Eve Online war stories I'd instead recommend the books and podcast Empires of Eve (not by me): https://www.empiresofeve.com/

Australia's superannuation is more like the US 401k but with a Government mandated minimum contribution level.

Individuals are free to pick their own fund providers or even create their own superannuation funds (with some caveats).

It's the same in Australia, New Zealand, UK and probably other places too. 30 year fixed rate mortgages are probably the exception rather than the rule in most places.

Riot Games does, we're hiring: https://www.riotgames.com/en/work-with-us/welcome

At the game studios that I'm familiar with the term "game developer" refers to anyone working on the game and not just the programmers. So an artist or writer would generally be considered a game developer but the studio's accountant and CEO would probably not be considered game developers.

I don't think it's a problem at all except for the small issue that PUBG is an Unreal Engine game and there's a possibility that Epic's inside information about PUBG benefited their development of Fortnite. It's all just speculation (and a settled lawsuit?) but it's an awkward piece of the genre's history.

It's an escape room: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_room

This is both for people using tools and people accessing servers and databases directly.

Logging into production servers is audited and triggers alarms. There's basically no-one who has "root" level access to a large number of boxes (when I left in 2013 there were only a handful of people who could login to arbitrary boxes and systems were being built so that their access would no longer be necessary). Logging into a server that holds live data would be investigated and so would running a custom query against a production database. The goal was to have it basically impossible for an engineer or admin to directly access data on boxes to force people to use the tools.

The tools themselves had a great permission system as well as a way for users to elevate their permissions in emergency (triggering an investigation). It worked well because it was also easy to create dummy databases to develop on (for example by requesting a database extract of your own location data).

In my career to date I have yet to see a more privacy conscious / secure approach to handling customer data.

Google has amazing controls and audit capabilities around access to customer data. When I worked on the security team there the number of people who could access a specific person's data without an audit record and an alert being triggered was zero.

For interest here's where you can find the relevant motions being referred to in the article: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000130817918...

The ones being referred to are:

Proposal Number 6 Stockholder Proposal Regarding a Report on Gender Pay

Proposal Number 9 Stockholder Proposal Regarding Board Diversity and Qualifications

Proposal Number 10 Stockholder Proposal Regarding a Report on Content Governance

I'm not that familiar with corporate motions so I might be misinterpreting what I'm reading but it looks like the motions are for Alphabet to produce a report about gender pay discrimination, to disclose the qualifications of the board (including ideological leanings and biographical data), and to produce a report on the efficacy of Alphabet's terms of service enforcement (in particular around user uploaded content).

Alphabet's disagreeing statements on the first one is largely of the form "we think gender pay is an important issue (see existing published reports) but we don't think this is motion is a good idea". The second one they actually support saying "sure, a diverse board is a good idea". For the third one their response is along the lines of "We take this seriously to the tune of hiring thousands of people to enforce our terms of service".

My biggest surprise after seeing the article and reading the materials myself was that the second proposal (board diversity) claims that Alphabet is known to "operate in ideological hegemony that eschews conservative people" which is not the impression I took away from the article.

I don't think that the officers did anything wrong.

I didn't like that the officers only decided to search my vehicle after they knew I wasn't a US citizen and then abandoned the search once they saw my visa but I don't think that these decisions exceeded the discretion that the offices are authorized to use during a stop.

I also didn't like that the officers made me uncomfortable and nervous during the stop but again I don't think the officers were acting inappropriately. It's on me that even with my government background I get nervous interacting with officials in situations like this.

I guess if anything my complaint is that I would prefer that border patrol checkpoints only stop people who are in the process of crossing a border rather than random highway checkpoints (in this case I was probably an hour away from the border) and if you are stopping people without reasonable suspicion or probable cause I'd prefer that the same stop procedures be applied to everyone.

I had an experience with a border patrol checkpoint in Arizona in 2009. I was driving from Yuma, AZ towards Vegas (probably on US-95) in a rented brown Prius with Washington state plates as I was flagged down by the border patrol.

At the checkpoint the officers looked at me with disinterest (probably a combination of the dull routine and because I looked like a white US citizen). First they asked me if I was a US citizen and I said no, and suddenly they were looked far more interested. They asked to see my passport and informed me they'd need to search my vehicle and I was to open the trunk. I complied, opening the trunk and passing my passport to one officer while the other went to the rear of the vehicle to start a search. A few seconds later the officer with my passport notices something and urgently signals the other officer. At this point I was worried that my paperwork must not be in order and that I was in trouble. Once the other officer rejoins the first they briefly confer and then they hand me back my passport and apologize profusely for the inconvenience saying that they didn't realize that I was a diplomat before sending me on my way.

The kicker is that I wasn't a diplomat, merely a bureaucrat on an official trip to the US and any "diplomatic immunity" I had was the thinnest kind of intergovernmental courtesy.

At first this story was funny to me as the time I accidentally wielded diplomatic immunity. However, more recently I find it less amusing as instead I consider it a tale about how the changing assumptions of the officers significantly affected the nature of the interaction and how different the interaction could have been if their assumptions had been less favorable.

Not all games jobs are like this. I entered the games industry just as I was turning 30 and it has been rewarding both in terms of type of work and compensation. Maybe I'm not typical but I also don't think people should write off a whole industry based off of anecdotes.

Really I'd just generalize your advice and say that any job where you're not invested in the product, have unfavorable hours and aren't paid well is uncool and should be avoided.

This is great advice for information security professionals as well, especially vulnerability researchers and other appsec types!

Maybe they're referring to the 200k income threshold for the other accredited investor test?

In a somewhat similar vein in 2009 I wrote about how useful Twitter is for spreading disinformation.

Some of the points I made were somewhat mitigated by Twitter product changes but I still think it holds up as an article/paper.

http://memeover.arkem.org/2009/12/twitter-as-vector-for-disi...

He wasn't paying down any of the principal, presumably because the loan forgiveness program would take care of it.

Because of his 8.25 percent interest rate, which he could not refinance due to loan rules, even those higher payments weren’t putting a dent in his principal. So the $70,000 or so that he did pay over the period amounted to nothing, and he’ll most likely pay at least that much going forward.

Doesn't seem too far fetched[1] if you read it as a nice house under 200k within an hour of Chicago.

I don't know enough about Chicago to know exactly how far our an hour's drive is or to know exactly what 'nice' means in this context but it seems like there are areas where the median price is quite a bit lower than 200k.

[1] https://www.trulia.com/local/chicago-il/type:home_prices_sal...

I'm pretty sure Stripe and Paypal are Patreon's two payment processors, so I'm not surprised that they're having the same issues.

Maybe not on the same scale but there's the Australian Government Future Fund[1] which is a sovereign wealth fund founded in 2006.

It's about 10% of the size of Norway's so not especially impressive but it does exist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Government_Future_F...

I've read the reporting of Snowden's leaks and I have at least as much exposure to the inner workings of the five eyes as Snowden did and I have come to a different conclusion.

I do not believe that Google is voluntarily handing over any sensitive customer data to the NSA without legal compulsion. I would not be surprised if intelligence agencies around the world including US based ones target Google's communications (probably in full accordance to each agency's authorization) but that would not be with Google's cooperation.

I believe that Google is taking steps to protect customer data from all bad actors, including Government agencies. One initiative that was underway around the time I worked at Google was to encrypt all the data-center to data-center traffic at Google in an attempt to frustrate anyone who was tapping Google's backbone links.