exw

<<Tesla pulled a fast one on the morons at GM and Ford, who signed stupid deals that handed the future back to Tesla>>

It's always curious to see someone with such strong conviction that somehow they have an insight, without access to any of the information involved in negotiating this partnership, that the various folks at GM and Ford failed to see.

This comment is either neither a constructive criticism of him, nor does contribute anything substantive to the discussion. Please review the site guidelines against name calling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26687330

This is by far the most important point in this discussion. According to this article (https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1107109_teslas-own-numb...), Tesla's statistics are deliberately wrong, and Tesla compared its Autopilot crash rate to the overall U.S. traffic fatality rate—which includes bicyclists, pedestrians, buses, and 18-wheelers.

You could argue that Tesla should be compared to luxury vehicles (which have more safety features), but even if you just compare their crash rate against U.S. drivers of cars and light trucks, the Tesla Autopilot driver fatality rate is almost four times higher than typical passenger vehicles...

<<Actually it is not what we're talking about, because they're not blind, they can use usual means of inquiry, and the technology. How comes already there are no firearm firing sound detectors, or remote-controlled drones with tasers in major streets to react instantly, ect...? There are ways to act which don't strip citizens from their power, as information nowadays is power.>>

That's actually exactly what we are talking about. The police's job is to enforce the law, and as technology changes, they need to adapt, the same way firearms now have serial numbers, and they collect DNA samples / fingerprints (all of which have met similar resistance before they became a broadly adopted technology, and are also open to abuse).

It's totally fine to have a rational discussion of where, as a society, we want to draw a line, but let's please keep our own rhetoric in check - there are lots of scenarios (outside the high visibility of this case) where, with proper legal controls, enabling the police to be able to access someone's phone is the equivalent of a traditional search order that allows the police to enter someone's premises and search for evidence.

<<Was hoping Gates would be less naive in thinking this legal precedent has anything to do with this specific case which has close to 0% chance of providing any real-world information and more to do with the fact that this tragedy is used as political theatre and being exploited for maximum PR and political influence.>>

Regardless of the merit of the case, I think it's pretty inappropriate that you are calling BillG naive. You really think that somehow you have more insight into the situation than BillG, who has access to pretty much any resource and source of information?

<<The FBI is the opposite in every way, mostly because of budget constraints and the subsequent lack of training. I hope that this is a good learning opportunity for them and a chance for them to increase their training budget in this area.>>

Besides the legal precedents and other associated drama, I think is one of Apple's major concerns, and one of the reasons they implemented the "we don't have the keys" approach to their encryption. If the FBI can always just call on Apple (or Google) to fix whatever mistakes they made, there is little motivation for training / getting better on this front, effectively making Apple the computer forensics arm of the government.

I think you are mixing up the law enforcement and intelligence community.

These request are coming from the law enforcement side of the government, not the intelligence community. Given their mission, the intelligence community has no interest in having a public discussion around backdoors, since the last thing they want is for the people they are targeting to be aware of any backdoors in their mobile devices.

I did not downvote you, but I think people might feel that you seem to let your personal disdain for Apple color your response regardless of the facts of the case vs. having a real discussion.

Even this point is a bit disingenuous - your quote from the article in no way supports your position that Apple would deliberately brick your phone - and in fact, there is a quote further down in the article you cited that further undermines this claim:

<<a user identified as ansuz07 said, "The percentage of iPhones that have become bricked from hacks is very low. Even those that experienced problems could be fixed by a simple restore. Apple is going to make it sound a lot worse than it actually is since they are the ones who don't want you to do it in the first place">>

Regardless of the merit of the FBI's request and Apple's refusal, this is rather hypocritical response from the FBI, since their insistence to make the request public is what triggered Apple's public response in the first place:

<<Apple had asked the F.B.I. to issue its application for the tool under seal. But the government made it public, prompting Mr. Cook to go into bunker mode to draft a response, according to people privy to the discussions, who spoke on condition of anonymity.>>

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/19/technology/how-tim-cook-be...

In this case, the Justice department is clearly the one with the bigger 'marketing strategy' agenda here by trying to market the merit of their request to the American public and congress.

(As a side note, most of the non-tech folks I talk to seem to be siding with the FBI's request, so at least at some level, the government seems to be winning the marketing battle.)

<<Haha, really? Isn't that how Uber started out, and the quote could well be verbatim from a taxi driver in 2011?>>

Yes, This this is completely disingenuous... They did not only start out like this in the US, but this is the ONLY way they were able to buy their way into China. When Uber started in China, their competitors had most of the chinese local drivers, and it was Uber who started the subsidy war to gain market share.

<<Yes I do think that they would attempt to discourage unauthorized repairs in such a way for less-than-noble reasons.>>

I have added some additional information to the parent comment (i.e., only bricked updates via iTunes, not OTA) that further undermine the theory that this was a deliberate change. I realize that you could still argue that the actual bug was that the OTA update did not brick the phones, but Occam's razor really starts applying...

<<If you think it was a mistake, then can you explain why Apple wasn't bothered to do anything until someone ran an article on it and publicized it?>>

I do agree with you that Apple has a long record of dragging their feet to issue fixes for pretty significant bugs, so it is possible that the press caused them the issue the patch faster.

Anybody with common sense. Do you really think that Apple, who prides themselves on having outstanding customer satisfaction, would deliberately try to brick their customers phones through something this obvious?

Apple definitely looks out of their own interests, but they jump through a lot of hoops to protect their customers from bad experiences, especially since the obvious implementation was to just disable the fingerprint sensor if can't be trusted.

Edit: additional info from the TC article: <<The update is not for users who update their iPhones over the air (OTA) via iCloud. If you update your phone that way, you should never have encountered Error 53 in the first place.>> Your conspiracy theory would really require that they brick phones through both the OTA and iTunes update.

No, that information was already mentioned in the second BuzzFeed article:

<<That was how executives discovered the macro, which Conrad had created based on a belief that 52 hours was too long to spend in training, the lawyer for Sacks said.>>

http://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/zenefits-program-let-in...

I understand your concern, but depending on what product(s) you are selling, startups (and by startups I am referring to the PG definition of startups) are actually great customers for a couple of different reasons:

- Willing to try new products that help them focus their (limited) resources on their core product.

- No legacy integration issues.

- Generally high quality employees that provide strong product feedback.

- Willing to move quickly.

The downside is of course that they may not have a lot of money and in total, usually represent only a very small part of the market, so you have to use the initial feedback / momentum you got from your work with startups to move into more traditional customer segments, but they are still a great way to get started. The risk is of course that you end up building a product that only works for startups, but as long as you understand that risk and validated that the problem you are solving is not exclusive to the startup community, in my experience you should not avoid working with (reasonable) startups.

<<purchased by professional buyers at Japanese auctions>>

How did you find these buyers? Are these just auto brokers (e.g., these guys are popular in SV: http://www.hammerauto.com/) or is this something different?

According to the article, Sacks discovered the issue in January, and then forced the company to report it to the California regulator - if you believe that sequence of events, he can't really be held accountable for the action of Conrad.

Let's say you are an engineer, take a new role at a company to work on their database, and then discover that one or your managers has stolen money, do you think you should be held accountable, assuming that you report the issue immediately when you discover it?

While there may or may not be a darker side to having an entire engineering team in the 25-30 age range, according to the reporter that wrote the article, this hacking came straight from the CEO, who also set the tone for this type of behavior:

https://twitter.com/williamalden/status/697898496314077185

<<I’m told that Conrad created this program based on a belief that 52 hours was too long to spend in training>>

I both appreciate and agree with your point, but in this case I think the issues was that their new CEO had to assume that, given the high visibility of the company, whatever message he was going to send out to his internal team was also going to get leaked to the press.

If you are in that type of situation, you have to chose between your employees and external parties, and looks like he decided that creating a trusted relationships with his employees was more important...

<<Currently, as long as people are online, there's a certain guarantee that they will see it.>>

I understand your concern, but this seems to contradict reality... According to this article, only a small percentage of your followers actually see your Tweets: http://marketingland.com/facebook-twitter-impressions-90878

<<The reason why most communiques are generic is because there's very little upside to being abrupt publicly.>>

You are quite wrong, if anything, employees appreciate openness and decisiveness, vs. sweeping changes under the rug with generic language. There is actually a ton of upside to creating honest communication, but it's much harder than hiding behind empty phrases, which then builds a culture of speculation (of what "really happened"), politics, and distrust.

I have no idea what really happened behind the scenes and why exactly the new CEO used this language, but I can assure you that any email from David Sacks will not be clumsy, but very deliberate and written to achieve a specific purpose. (There is some speculation on earlier threads around of why it might have been written this way).

We ended up going with Trinet as well after looking at them. If you look what Zenefits is really doing, they appear to be just another rent seeker - their entire goal seemed to be to get you to use their software, and in exchange become the insurance agent of record vs. cutting the actual cost of the insurance.

<< It wasn't possible to get from point A to point N (where Parker took the company) without breaking these "rules" but he didn't actually break any rules because this is all new territory.>>

This is complete nonsense. It's not hard to become a licensed commercial insurance agent, and the rules around selling commercial insurance are very clear - you have to be licensed. This is neither new territory, nor disruptive, it's simply sloppy and not something that would be tolerated by the CEO of a 20 person startup, let alone a billion dollar unicorn.

Looks like the WSJ article has some additional information, including this rather telling quote about the current company values, which seem rather different than the set of values Sacks espouses:

<<Mr. Conrad, 35 years old, is known for his brash style and the company’s operations reflected that. His company’s mantra — “ready, fire, aim” — is followed by many Silicon Valley startups meant to encourage aggressiveness.

Such a cavalier approach often works well for tech companies, such as Facebook Inc., whose motto in the past was famously “move fast and break things.” But it may have served Zenefits poorly as it operated in the regulated insurance industry.>>

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2016/02/08/zenefits-ceo-parker-c...

I don't know that this is even a particularly strong conspiracy theory - when Sacks joined, A LOT of people were predicting that he would be the CEO within 12-18 months. Parker always felt like he was the wrong person to operate such a large and complex company. Great example of his immaturity here: http://www.businessinsider.com/zenefits-ceo-rescinds-job-off...

This is a great question, especially since it seems like he would have been in charge of the salesforce (where a lot of these issues happened).

So unless he wanted to change these processes and Parker stopped him, it does feel like there is another side to this story... (modulo many of the other issues that must of driven this change)

Do you work in a larger company? This is crystal clear (if you know what to look for) vs. the usual generic communication that happens in larger companies around these types of changes...

<<Which is interesting because most companies spend ages coming up with the correct values for the company and it usually involves feedback from employees. >>

"Operate with integrity", "put the customer first", and "make this a great place to work for employees" seem like pretty generic / good values (that are probably based on a lot of experience Sacks has from Yammer).

The fact that they are called out in this email seems pretty telling of why Parker had to go...

2. Play it up as a huge problem that could threaten the company.

It absolutely was a HUGE problem. Even if he was set up, Conrad created a toxic culture that had to change.

Parker never seemed to understand that he could not flout laws & regulations like Uber; Uber has leverage because consumers love their product, and is able to put pressure on the incumbents and regulators; in contrast, NOBODY would stand up to defend Zenefits, and regulators will shut them down unless they clean up their act asap.

Edit: fixed typo (thanks @gingerrr)

If you look through the comments on this article, somebody else made the same point, and claimed that it was actually cerium-141, and not Iodine-131:

<<Tim, Thanks for this article and I think you did a great job on a very important but little known topic. I've researched this quite a bit and I'm certain it was cerium-141, not iodine-131, that was lodged in Kodak's packing material that fogged their film, and the packing material was strawboard, not corn husks. (There's some disagreement on the internet - even a U.S. senator who had misspoken on the facts - but if you really dig deep, you'll find it was strawboard.) >>

Seriously? Given the many challenges that Twitter deals with right now, you think they are doing this because of an election year? Pls take your conspiracy theories to reddit, they don't belong on HN....