In 2004, Android was two people who wanted to build camera software but couldn’t get investors interested. Android is a large team at Google today, delivering an OS to over 3 billion devices worldwide.
In this Help Net Security video, Chet Haase discusses his new book – “Androids: The Team that Built the Android Operating System.” This is a first-hand chronological account of how the startup began, how the team came together, and how they built an operating system from the kernel level to its applications and everything in between.
https://spinsafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/androids-book.jpg8161456SecureTechhttps://spinsafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/SS-Logo.svgSecureTech2024-03-01 12:30:112024-03-01 12:30:11Inside the book: Androids – The Team That Built the Android Operating System
As Russian bombs began to fall across Ukraine in February 2022, many faced a daunting choice: stay and fight or flee for safety. Among them was Ted, a tech entrepreneur living in Kyiv (who is using a pseudonym for security concerns). Initially taking his family to safety in Lviv, Ted wanted to fight. Lacking military skills, Ted like many other Ukrainians who had a tech background wanted to contribute on other battle fronts.
His wife was a public servant who was well-connected with the Ukrainian government. Through conversations with the Ministry of Digital Transformation, an idea arose to leverage people with tech backgrounds to defend the country on the cyber battlefield. What followed was the historic formation of a volunteer hacker army fighting on Ukraine’s behalf – the world’s first such group in cyber warfare.
The IT Army of Ukraine emerged just two days after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 as Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov issued a rallying cry to all volunteers willing to join the hacker ranks of the IT army to help defend Ukraine. He proclaimed, “We continue to fight on the cyber front.”
At its peak, the volunteer IT army’s Telegram channel reached around 300,000 members in March 2022.
Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov tells about the achievements of the IT Army of Ukraine during the results of his agency over 2023. Photo: IT Army of Ukraine/FB
Fedorov’s call to action resonates with the historical appeal of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during World War II – Winston Churchill’s famous directive to the SOE was to “set Europe ablaze,” inspiring a similar spirit of resistance in the digital domain.
“We tried to activate every part of society to resist Russia’s war,” Ted said of the early days of the war. Ukrainian officials and volunteers wanted to see how they could leverage the highly talented population of our society, “keeping in mind our software developers and people in the IT sector,” said Ted.
In the early days, organizers focused on the basics, such as creating a Telegram channel and doing the groundwork to get operations going….
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Proton, the Swiss company that develops privacy-focused online services such as email, has developed its very own CAPTCHA service to help discern between genuine login attempts and bots — and it touts the new system as the world’s first CAPTCHA that is “censorship resistant.”
The company said it has already been testing its CAPTCHA system for several months, and has now transitioned to its home-grown solution entirely.
“As we investigated available CAPTCHA options, we weren’t satisfied, so we decided to develop our own,” Eamonn Maguire, a former Facebook engineer who now heads up Proton’s machine learning team, wrote in a blog post. “Our primary goal was to provide a system that doesn’t compromise on privacy, usability and accessibility, or security.”
CAPTCHAs, a contrived acronym that stands for the decidedly less-punchy “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart,” have long been used on the web to prevent bots from creating multiple accounts with a specific service, or illicitly trying to access someone else’s account through credential stuffing. This is usually presented to the user in the form of a visual or cognitive challenge, one that is relatively easy for a human to complete but difficult for a machine.
CAPTCHAs, while generally effective, come with trade-offs in terms of usability, accessibility, cultural biases, and annoyances that businesses would prefer not to impose on their users. This is why companies such as Apple and Cloudflare have sought ways to tell the difference between humans and bots automatically using alternative mechanisms, such as through device and telemetry data.
https://spinsafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/GettyImages-1356934365-e1695303681636.jpg6761200SecureTechhttps://spinsafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/SS-Logo.svgSecureTech2023-09-21 15:30:052023-09-21 15:30:05Encrypted email provider Proton has built its own CAPTCHA service
Christina Cacioppo, 36, is the CEO and cofounder of security and compliance company Vanta.
Courtesy Christina Cacioppo
The Stanford graduate built a fast-growing software company to automate what had previously been a manual process. She’s now one of America’s richest self-made women.
About five years ago, Vanta CEO and cofounder Christina Cacioppo received a message from one of the customers of her nascent security and compliance automation company that something was wrong. The automated email the customer received each morning detailing what had happened in their Vanta account in the past 24 hours had the wrong company name in it. Cacioppo responded: “There’s a bug, we’re so sorry. We’ll fix it.”
What the customer didn’t realize was that the “automated” email was actually one that Cacioppo had sent early that morning. Cacioppo, who had founded Vanta just months earlier, set her alarm each day for 5:45 a.m. and crafted the emails by hand. She did this to make sure customers liked the emails before spending time writing code that would automate them. Once she knew what customers wanted, she and Vanta’s founding team sat down and wrote the code—and didn’t need to change it for a year and a half.
It’s just one example of the Ohio native’s scrappy approach—which also included everything from buying coffee in bulk from Costco to running Vanta without formal executive or staff meetings for its first two years. That hustle has helped her company land an estimated 5,000 customers including Quora, Autodesk and payments software firm Modern Treasury, with 600 new customers signing up each quarter, according to Vanta. Cacioppo has also helped score $203 million in funding to date from such venture capital firms as Craft Ventures and Sequoia, including $110 million raised in June 2022 that values the company at $1.6 billion. That’s enough to earn Cacioppo, 36, a spot on Forbes’ list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women with a $385 million fortune based on her stake in Vanta.
“Prior to Vanta, the way security and compliance was done was entirely with spreadsheets and screenshots of information that were collected in folders and shown to [certified…
https://spinsafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/1687786206_0x0.jpg9001355SecureTechhttps://spinsafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/SS-Logo.svgSecureTech2023-06-26 09:30:052023-06-26 09:30:05How Christina Cacioppo Built Startup Vanta Into A $1.6 Billion Unicorn To Automate Complicated Security Compliance Issues
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