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HPSHELTON

Programming, Privacy, Politics, Photography

Sep 22, 2021

Leaked documents reveal the special rules Facebook uses for 5.8M VIPs →

"For a select few members of our community, we are not enforcing our policies and standards," reads an internal Facebook report published as part of a Wall Street Journal investigation. "Unlike the rest of our community, these people can violate our standards without any consequences."

Sep 21, 2021

Microsoft in standoff with Amazon over big hire, names Charlie Bell to lead 'bold' new security group →

I'm thrilled to join Microsoft to take on one of the greatest challenges of our time, leading a newly formed engineering organization: Security, Compliance, Identity, and Management. As digital services have become an integral part of our lives, we're outstripping our ability to provide security and safety. It's constantly highlighted in the headlines we see every day: fraud, theft, ransomware attacks, public exposure of private data, and even attacks against physical infrastructure. This has been weighing on my mind and the best way I can think to describe it is "digital medievalism," where organizations and individuals each depend on the walls of their castles and the strength of their citizens against bad actors who can simply retreat to their own castle with the spoils of an attack. We all want a world where safety is an invariant, something that is always true, and we can constantly prove we have. We all want digital civilization. I believe Microsoft is the only company in a position to deliver this and I couldn't be more excited to work with this talented team to make the world safer for every person and organization on the planet.

Sep 20, 2021

Microsoft accounts can now go fully passwordless →

Passwordless accounts improve security by taking passwords out of the equation entirely, making it impossible to get any kind of access to your account without access to whatever you use to verify your identity for two-factor authentication.

Sep 19, 2021

Broadway's Biggest Hits Reopen in Festive Night of Theater →

During the last full Broadway season before the outbreak, from 2018 to 2019, 14.8 million people attended a show — that's more people than the combined attendance for the Mets, Yankees, Rangers, Islanders, Knicks, Liberty, Giants, Jets, Devils and Nets, according to the Broadway League. And that attendance translated to real money — the industry grossed $1.83 billion that season.

This was really surprising, but caused me to learn that Yankees Stadium is half the size of my high school football stadium.

Sep 18, 2021

Tim Keller on Social Media, Identity, and the Church →

So social media is not primarily a place of public discussion of ideas. The ideas are ways to define oneself and signal belonging to a group, as well as to assign identities to others by associating them with groups you oppose.

Jesse Rice in The Church of Facebook noted that building one's identity in the social sphere was a form of co-creation, or of participating in God's management of the world, dispensation. That thought has always stuck with me and is here echoed in Chris Bail's book Breaking the Social Media Prism.

Aug 25, 2021

The Way the Senate Melted Down Over Crypto Is Very Revealing →

I want to explain why crypto matters, even if you think Bitcoin is just goldbuggery for nerds. The technology is evolving to be much more than a digital currency, and Silicon Valley sees it as the digital infrastructure atop which the next internet will be built.

A discussion on crypto, distributed finance, digital asset ownership, and the societal and political ramifications from Ezra Klein.

Aug 24, 2021

Building Microsoft-powered native video meetings on LinkedIn →

Azure Communications Services is built on the same technology that powers Microsoft Teams, which already supports millions of users daily. When a LinkedIn member wants to start a video meeting, LinkedIn services will communicate with Azure Communication Services to generate a user token and call token for the occasion. LinkedIn apps then join the call by using the Azure client library, providing the specified call token and identifying the LinkedIn member with the user token. Once LinkedIn members are in the meeting, the service handles all communication for the video call using their own network and protocols.

So excited to see my org's services powering hero scenarios for even more products, endpoints, and customers, and proud to have been a part of it.

Aug 23, 2021

Azure Government Top Secret now generally available for US national security missions →

Launching with more than 60 initial services and more coming soon, we've achieved the Authorization to Operate (ATO) of Azure Government Top Secret infrastructure in accordance with Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) 503 and facilities accredited to meet the ICD 705 standards. These new air-gapped regions of Azure will accelerate the delivery of national security workloads classified at the US Top Secret level.

Today's announcement also expands the options available for government agencies and partners to utilize Azure Space solutions from their native network environments to unlock new capabilities across any data classification.

Aug 8, 2021

Visualizing Olympic Champions, Present vs. Past →

See how the fastest swimmers and runners from Tokyo 2020 compare with past champions, plus watch visualizations of more than 40 Olympic races.

Very neat infographics from The New York Times.

Jul 28, 2021

Inside Facebook's Data Wars →

A look inside Facebook's struggle between being accessible and transparent to journalists and academics and its desire to project a positive image.

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H. Parker Shelton

I'm just an ordinary thirty-something who's had some extraordinary opportunities. I graduated from Johns Hopkins University, work for Microsoft in Silicon Valley, code websites and applications, take the occasional photograph, and keep a constant eye on current events, politics, and technology. This blog is the best of what catches that eye.

 
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