Not about the man so much but about the business he built up and then sold, Dick Smith is the Greatest Private Equity Heist of All Time [1] is a wild read into Australian private equity.
> Clearly just for entertainment and not information Facebook alternative, in which GPT bots produce a significant fraction of posts, impersonating users and making stuff up. Everyone quickly learns you can't trust it, but it can still be cute/fun/humorous.
Billy Chasen developed faux-social network called Botnet. Unfortunately, it looks like it's gone and I doubt that name would have lasted long in the App store let alone how he managed to get it through.
From their website [1]: "When you choose to connect your financial accounts to an app using Plaid, you will be prompted to enter the username and password associated with those accounts. Plaid then links your accounts to the app you want to use so you can share your data."
Disagree, they are hiding the fact by assuming ignorance of most users. A true “link” , would use something like OAuth to have the bank handle authentication and provide explicitly scoped subset of consumer data to Plaid. Instead they are taking the plaintext password and getting total access. Just taking that passwords itself is a security vulnerability. Google doesn’t even know your Gmail password, just the hash, but since Plaid can’t use a password hash to login, it must store your plaintext password to your financial accounts, some of THE most sensitive data. Furthemore they have access to way more data than they should rather than clearly defined scoped subsets of it.
The whole company is a privacy and security disaster. Of course it’s annoying that banks don’t provide reasonable OAuth APIs, but Plaid “disrupts” that by deceiving consumers into dangerous security vulnerabilities with their most sensitive personal data.
You speak idealistically, but the reality is that many of these banks did not having open banking standards nor APIs before. The scraping led to this movement and FSAs all over the world are starting to push for no scraping while financial institutions create APIs and contracts with these platforms.
The fact is pretty much hidden. I tried to link my Toshl (a budget app) account to my bank, to import automatically my movements. I saw that they were using Plaid, and I found that weird. I went to search the page you linked, and I still didn't know how was it connecting to my bank. I used an "application password" with limited permissions from my bank to use with Plaid, and funnily enough it didn't work. In fact, my bank locked my account because Plaid tried to login through the regular user interface with a wrong password several times. It was only then when I saw in forums and such that what Plaid does is to scrape HTML.
When you use Plaid, you don't get the impression that's what they're doing. We're used to dialogs to "give permissions to an app" that don't share our user/password with anybody. Plaid purposefully emulates those dialogs and gives you the impression that you're just logging in with your bank, instead of explicitly telling you "we will store your user and password and use that to log-i with your bank".
"link" to me implies something along the lines of a FB/Google/GitHub OAuth login, not that they steal my credentials.
I guess technically they just say, "you will be prompted to enter the username and password associated with those accounts" and don't specify that they (Plaid) will be using your credentials, but I don't think it's clear enough that you are giving your credentials away!
Yeah, question 1 it gave me was "What is 0+1?" and then it told me that 1 was the right answer, when that's what I typed. A few questions later and I thought "hmmm... something is up here"
Perform an audit on yourself. Both Facebook [1] and Google [2] have pages where you can check third-party apps that you have connected with. You might be surprised what you find.
Let's not forget that Flash was the backbone of the ad industry back in the day as it was leveraged to produce rich media in the form of banners and interactive ads.
And now seemingly every site out there has dozens of popovers, subscribe to a mailing list (amazed those still exist and are somehow pushed more than ever), cookie permission requests, "Like and retweet us!" banners that slowly scroll from the side, "It looks like you could use some help" clippy style bullshit that choppily moves on screen, autoplaying videos that seem to autoplay no matter how many times you try to disable it and no matter how many times browser developers say "Okay, we finally blocked autoplaying videos for real this time!", 15 megabyte gifs littered throughout random articles just to catch your eye or to be hip and radical and show the writer is the bee's knees and knows what the kids like, scroll hijacking that only serves to make it choppy and physically painful to scroll, back button hijacking that involves filling your past 100 pages with the current page and sometimes getting caught in a refresh loop so it's impossible to move, endlessly loading bullshit content whenever you think you've scrolled to the bottom... I can go on.
Dealing with the modern web is like reading an infinite run-on sentence because it absolutely overwhelms you with shit and it doesn't let up. It's not hard to go to any random site and find 75% of the above all at once.
Flash was bad. Somehow web developers took its demise as a challenge to make the web worse.
Everything you said is correct. I also find it remarkable that the web has always performed like total dogshit, no matter how fast my computer has gotten. 20+ years ago it was in large part due to bandwidth constraints. Then 10-15 years ago that was essentially solved, but they continued piling more and more crap into the browser, and now it's a fucking app platform, and instead of clean efficient native software, we're now shoehorning every goddamn thing into the browser through layers and layers of frameworks, abstrations and "transpiling" or whatever.
I detest the modern web, and I find myself using it less and less.
"The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) has created a list to show the approximate time you need to learn a specific language as an English speaker." [0] French ranks in Category I: you wonder if the same method would apply for a Category V language.
Facebook kept it a lot simpler: you can just iterate through integers. 1 - 3 have been deleted but if you navigate to https://www.facebook.com/4 it redirects to https://www.facebook.com/zuck and so on. All the original founders are sub 10.
[1] https://foragerfunds.com/news/dick-smith-is-the-greatest-pri...