Presidential candidate website tech, compared

Today, Hillary Clinton announced that she’s running for president. She also launched a new website. Over the next year, political pundits will spend far too much time dissecting the horse race, scandals (real or imagined), the electoral college and more polls than you can shake a stick at. I’m doing none of that. I’m just …

Declaring independence … from the dictionary

Be careful when you give people a freeform text field. They’ll get creative. Here are 28 — yes, 28 — ways people spelled “independent”: endapendent IDEPENDENT Ind. Indenpent indepant Indepdendent Indepedent indepenant Independance Independanr Independence Independent independiant independient independnt Indepenent indepent Indepentant indepented Indepentent Indepependent Indipendant indipendent indopenit indpendant Indpendent Indpndt undependent

Thirty-one ways to leave your lover

If you run any sort of text messaging service, you’ll have to process unsubscribe requests. The standard such messages is “STOP.” To make things easier for customers, in addition to “stop”, I wrote code that also looked for “unsubscribe”, “quit”, “cancel”, “end”, “delete” and anything beginning with the word “fuck.” (Messages merely containing the word fuck often wanted something …

Bruce Schneier briefed congress on the NSA

I suggested that we hold this meeting in a SCIF, because they wanted me to talk about top secret documents that had not been made public. The problem is that I, as someone without a clearance, would not be allowed into the SCIF. So we had to have the meeting in a regular room. This …

Ellen Miller’s brilliant vision for open government

Let’s imagine in for a moment what it would be like if everything the government can share publicly were made public as it happened. If every law, report, inspection, regulation, enforcement action, budget and meeting that we should be aware of is actually made available online and in real time. It would be nothing short …

M-KOPA, mobile tech startup in Nairobi, Kenya is hiring a hardware engineer

Introduction M-KOPA is a mobile technology company based in Nairobi, Kenya. Since 2010 we have helped Kenyans acquire solar power products by offering innovative payment plans and a distribution model tailored to the needs of our customers. M-KOPA Solar provides affordable solar-powered lighting and mobile charging to rural Kenyans on a pay-as-you- go basis, with …