Welcome to the latest edition of Bacon Bytes. Summer is here, which means it is fashionably acceptable to be sans pantalones. This week we discover why you can’t trust movie reviews and a reminder that Bitcoin is a scam.

0

That’s the number of SAT scores the class of 2023 will need to submit as part of their application to the University of Chicago. Oh, it’s also the amount of money that they will need to pay, as the school has expanded it’s financial aid package to pay tuiiton as well as room and board for families earning less than $60k a year. This is huge news for higher education. It’s also a chance for me to remind you that Harvard has a $32 billion dollar endowment and currently costs about $250k for 4 years. And while Harvard does have similar programs in place for students that meet income requirements, the Harvard endowment is so frakkin large they could float their entire student body 4 years of free tuition, room, and board and they would be left with $30.5 billion dollars.

50

The percent of Americans that don’t know what the term “op-ed” means in journalism. There is a large disconnect between journalists and the public as highlighted in this survey. Maybe we could get rid of dozens of opinion columns posing as news programming and help clear up the confusion. But of course, it’s strong opinions that help drive ratings and, in turn, revenue for the networks as well as the talking heads.

64

That’s the percentage of critics at Rotten Tomatoes that are white males, revealing a bias in the ratings as a whole. Turns out that movie critics are overwhelmingly white and male. I’m now wondering if we could get similar demographics for Amazon reviews, maybe even include “robots” as a category.

140

The amount in USD that it would take for you to create your own custom Lego brick mosaic of any photograph you want. While it may be too late for Father’s Day, you have plenty of time to get this done for Christmas shopping.

249

The costs for an Amazon Deep Lens, which shipped this week. I’m waiting for mine right now, a gift for attending AWS re:Invent last year. Not sure what I will build first, but likely a “Bacon, not bacon” app of some kind.

600

The number of homes that could fit on an average sized 150-acre 18-hole golf course. Golf is a declining sport, and the opportunity to convert dead courses into affordable housing is meeting resistance by neighbors who would rather see the land converted to a park instead.

42 billion

The amount of value lost by the Bitcoin market after it was revealed Coinrail was hacked. I don’t know how else to tell you this, but Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are scams. Don’t waste your money on them.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my weekly Bacon Bytes posts. I’m going to start putting these into a newsletter format. You can sign up for my newsletter here to receive “Data on the Rocks”, coming soon!

The post Bacon Bytes for 15-June appeared first on Thomas LaRock.

Welcome to the latest edition of Bacon Bytes. The big news this week is Microsoft buying GitHub. This immediately caused a panic with the developer trolls that can’t forget what life was like in 1998.

12

Microsoft announced they will offer 12TB of RAM for virtual machines hosted in Azure. This is 3x larger than VMs offered hosted at AWS.

20

The number of years Yahoo Messenger existed before it is shut down this coming July. I can still recall a time when Yahoo Messenger was the choice for a corporate messenger service. Looking back, it seems a shame that Yahoo wasn’t investing more in this service. They could have invented Slack a decade early.

864

The number of servers contained inside the data center that Microsoft put on the bottom of the ocean off the coast of Scotland. The culmination of a 4 year effort code named Project Natick, these units reduce the time for data center deployments from 2 years to just 90 days.

40,000

That’s the fine handed out by the EPA to Chip and Joanna Gaines of ‘Fixer Upper’, for their failure to handle lead paint properly during renovations. The agency discovered the violation by watching the reality show.

9.5 million

The amount of money that the city of Atlanta must add to their budget to recover from a malware attack this past March.

80 million

That’s the number of iPhone expected to sell this Fall, down 20% from 2017. Apple told suppliers to order 20% fewer components, and as a result their stock price dipped immediately on the news.

7.5 billion

That’s the price Microsoft paid for GitHub, a nice discount from the 8.5 billion they spent on Skype. Here’s hoping they do better with GitHub than they did with Skype. I’m certainly hopeful they will.

See you next week!

The post Bacon Bytes for 08-June appeared first on Thomas LaRock.

Welcome to the latest edition of Bacon Bytes. We are one week into GDPR, which means we are about three weeks away from finding out which companies are not able to comply with requests. Today we talk about that as well as student debt, what to do with your ashes, and the sexiest job on the planet.

5

The number of secret Twitter accounts allegedly belonging to Philadelphia Sixers president of basketball operations VP Bryan Colangelo. Colangelo claimed that someone is “out to get him”, and then it was discovered that the accounts were all tied to phones owned by his wife. While it is possible that this may be her way of getting back at him for leaving the toilet seat up, I’d suggest that there are better ways to communicate than through fake Twitter accounts.

40

The length in miles of the tornado path through our region seven years ago today. I didn’t believe the reports at first because tornados are rare for us here. So of course, I was outside grilling pork for dinner while the twister was passing less than two miles from my house. I’m still waiting for on my Darwin award for that.

101

That’s the number of people who owe more than $1 million in student loans, up from 14 people only five years ago. Mike Meru is one of those 101, having borrowed more than $600k during his seven-year education at USC.

500

More than 500 emails addresses were exposed in the “to” field from ad-blocker company Ghostery last week as they made an effort to tell everyone they were “on top” of GDPR compliance. Ghostery wasn’t alone, lots of companies were struggling with email in their hurry to send out information on GDPR. If you can’t get something as simple as email correct, maybe you should consider a different line of work.

$4,500

That’s how much it costs to have your ashes scattered in the jet stream, about 15 miles above the Earth. 2015 marked the first year where more Americans were being cremated than not. With this rise in popularity comes a rise in the number of options for your remains. It’s not the same as being launched into space, but it’s close and cheaper than a casket in the ground.

$119,000

That’s the average midpoint salary for a data scientist right now, with $168k at the 95th percentile and some jobs earning $300k (or more). The “sexiest job” right now is data science, as there is a dearth of people that can analyze data properly and companies are willing to pay top dollar to someone that understands the importance of a p-value.

See you next week!

The post Bacon Bytes for 01-June appeared first on Thomas LaRock.

Welcome to the latest edition of Bacon Bytes. This week we talk a bit about how Amazon, Alexa, and why you shouldn’t photocopy your behind at office Christmas parties.

Alexa and Siri Can Hear This Hidden Command. You Can’t.

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about when it comes to Alexa commands and security, now we have to worry about dog-whistle commands being sent to our devices. Fun fact uncovered in this report: It is not illegal to send subliminal messages to another person, or device. Broadcast networks discourage the practice, but there is no law on the books. Yet another example of how technology moves too fast for lawmakers. Well, in this case, it’s only been 70+ years for television. Makes me wonder what the networks have been doing that we don’t know about. Time to watch “They Live” again, I guess.

EFAIL describes vulnerabilities in the end-to-end encryption technologies OpenPGP and S/MIM

Nice write up describing the flaw in email encryption along with possible mitigations for you to try right now. Here’s another idea: stop thinking that anything you do online is protected. When you send an email, a copy of that email is likely sitting on every server involved in routing the message. Encrypted or not, that’s a lot more exposure than you wanted to know about today.

Digital Photocopiers Loaded With Secrets

And with pictures from the office Christmas party, I’m certain.

You can find whereabouts of any cellphone within seconds

There are many legitimate cases where you would want law enforcement to be able to track a person to a specific location through their cellphone. The trouble with this service is that it can be abused by law enforcement officials, as is the case in this story. But it’s a good reminder that no matter how smart you are with your smartphone privacy, it is likely reporting your location in ways you are not allowed to disable.

Amazon has finished visiting the top 20 contenders for its new HQ

Worst episode of The Bachelor, ever.

Amazon Prime customers to get discounts at Whole Foods

Looking to justify their $20 annual membership fee, Amazon is adding services and benefits for Prime members. I’d be excited for this perk if there is a 10% discount on meat but I suspect it’s going to be on items that aren’t selling and nobody wants.

The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now. Enjoy It While You Can

This article outlines the business model for 98% of every idea that comes out of Silicon Valley. In an effort to build up as many customers they give away their product at a loss. Once they show how many new customers are signing up, they get more funding. They then attract more customers, allowing them to collect more data, which they can then sell in order to recover some of their losses. Then, they alter their product offerings, due to “rising costs”, and hope they get more funding, or just bought.

See you next week!

The post Bacon Bytes for 18-May appeared first on Thomas LaRock.

Welcome to the latest edition of Bacon Bytes. This week we talk a bit about how you can’t trust anything on the internet and how to make money playing the ponies.

Using statistical models to win almost $1B in horse-race gambling

The next time someone tells you that data science isn’t a real thing, show them this article about Bill Benter. He built a predictive model that allowed him to maximize his winnings at the horse track, amassing almost one billion dollars.

Amazon’s Fake Review Problem

I’m starting to think I can’t trust anything I find on the internet. Amazon is almost worth a trillion dollars now, and with millions of product reviews, it’s easy to understand that a percentage of them may not be legit.

Tidal accused of deliberately faking Kanye West and Beyonce streaming numbers

As I was just saying, it’s getting hard to trust anything I find on the internet. In the “Likes” economy, we are going to start discovering more occurrences of where people are manipulating the system to be seen as more successful or popular than they really are. To some people, this is just called marketing. To the rest of us, it’s dishonest.

GM plans to spend $1 billion to develop self-driving cars

With projections of a $285 billion dollar market by 2030, it makes sense that companies such as GM are investing heavily in autonomous vehicles. Waymo is still the leader, though. Which means humanity may have driverless cars because two kids from Stanford wanted a better way to search the internet.

Airlines earn $4.6 billion from baggage fees last year

Which means we can expect baggage fees to increase because airlines enjoy making money.

Microsoft’s new IntelliCode is a smarter IntelliSense

One of the announcements at Build this week was IntelliCode, which is the next generation of IntelliSense. Using machine learning, developers can now get more insight into the code they are writing. Here’s hoping InetlliCode makes its way into T-SQL tools at some point.

See you next week!

The post Bacon Bytes for 11-May appeared first on Thomas LaRock.

Welcome to the latest edition of Bacon Bytes. This week we’ve got a mix of topics, from AI and job markets to erasing your Facebook history so people don’t discover you dated your cousin. I’m not joking.

Facebook to release dating service

Someone needs to tell Mark Zuckerberg that the time to build a dating app is *before* you get married, not after.

Many people think AI will destroy jobs, but just not theirs

File this under the “it will never happen to me” department. The survey results are head-scratching: 73% of adults believe AI will destroy jobs, but only 23% have concern for their own job. That same group thinks AI will destroy over 50% of current jobs, but 91% think their job is safe. So, as a whole, we recognize that AI will change job markets. Our human minds know this to be true. But what we can’t imagine are the creation of new jobs. And we have faith in ourselves that we will be able to find work in the new economy. The results of this survey matches the sentiment I’ve found with data professionals. Many people cannot imagine a DBA role lost to AI. History suggest this will happen. History also suggest those humans will find new jobs.

Volunteers needed for DNA research project

The National Institute for Health is asking for one million Americans to submit their DNA to a research project. What could possibly go wrong?

GDPR phishing scams increasing

With GDPR compliance looming over everyone on the 25th of May, it is not a surprise to see a wave of GDPR phishing attacks. This is one of the reasons security remains difficult. With the flood of email to wade through each day, combined with FUD around GDPR, you know that people will click.

Cambridge Analytica to shut down operations

Cambridge Analytica, the company behind the Facebook election scandal, is going out of business. That sounds great until you realize that they are re-opening under a new name. The use of information to influence opinion is not so0mething new. The people behind Cambridge Analytica are always going to be with us, looking to walk the line of data ethics in pursuit of a dollar.

Nearly half of adults want to delete part of their Facebook history

In other Facebook news, users of the platform will be allowed to clear their history. I think the 50% estimate is a bit low. What we really need is a Time Stone to avoid signing up for Facebook to begin with. And if Facebook builds a dating app that matches you up with your cousin, this delete function will be the most popular feature, ever.

Twitter says bug exposed user plaintext passwords

I’m not saying there was a breach, but, if it was me…I would announce it in this exact same way. “Sorry, looks like nothing happened, but something could, so you should change your passwords, thanks.” Breaches take months before they become known. If these logs appear on the dark web in three months then Twitter is in the clear for telling us now and not waiting. I’d like to know more about this “bug” that output passwords in plain text though, that seems weird to me. There shouldn’t be a need to ever have a password in plain text. Twitter has a great chance to earn some trust and respect if they are able to disclose technical details.

May the 4th be with you, and see you next week!

The post Bacon Bytes for 04-May appeared first on Thomas LaRock.

Welcome to the latest edition of Bacon Bytes.

If you tell people the metrics being used to judge them, they alter their behavior to gain an advantage. You might think this doesn’t matter much to you. It’s not as if your life depends upon this bit of information. Until it does. A recent survey shows that one in three heart surgeons will refuse difficult operations to avoid poor mortality ratings. I have mixed feelings about this one. I want a doctor to do what is best for the patient, before doing what is best for themselves.

Here’s an interesting story about how the Golden Gate killer was tracked down using DNA information submitted to a public website. At first, you might think “hey, this is great, we caught the guy”. But the fact is that DNA testing is not always 100% accurate. There are lots of variables involved, not the least of which is the timeline (the DNA could have arrived prior to, or well after the crime). The data being collected by these genealogy websites could be manipulated in a way to frame someone for a crime. If hackers breach one of these companies it could make a mess of criminal investigations for years.

It’s easier to do nothing than something. That is why software migrations are such a headache. But migrations are the best way to tackle technical debt. This article helps break down migrations into a simple process: derisk, enable, and finish. I wish I had read this article ten years ago when I needed to migrate a majority of our database servers to newer versions.

Here’s a story about how Microsoft helped imprison a man for ‘counterfeiting’ software it gives away for free. I think the author is missing a key point here. The man was charging people for software and made the disks look like they were authentic reinstall disks. That’s the issue. Microsoft can’t allow someone to conduct business in this manner. Don’t blame Microsoft for protecting their software.

Companies spend thousands of dollars a year for snacks in the breakroom but can’t afford to do proper asset management. If you’re not doing continuous asset management you’re not doing security. It’s not unusual for a company to spend thousands of dollars to hire a database expert to help with some edge case performance problem. That same company can’t spend a dime to track all the devices on their network to make sure they are secure. With the industry shifting towards a more security focus, I wonder if we will see a shift in spending, too.

See you next week!

The post Bacon Bytes for 27-April appeared first on Thomas LaRock.