Friday Four

1. Andrew Chen, on "Why Investors Don't Fund Dating" web site startups:

You read that right. At 20% monthly churn, over the course of a year you'd end up re-acquiring your customer base 8 times over. Scary.

Oh, and there's more.

At first glance, such a huge market might seem to be a no-brainer. Once you read this, though, you may wonder why anyone even tries.

2. Walter Williams makes a serious point humorously:

Far more important for me in all of this is that liberals unintentionally treat me like a white person. Unlike their response to other blacks, they demand that I back up my statements. For that, I thank them.

And this he does in the process of answering a challenge to a recent statement.

3. Do your notes need a link to a specific line of a file somewhere? It's easy in Emacs Org-Mode, and doesn't entail changing the document in question. Also, this video, by its creator, is a good general introduction to that Swiss Army Knife of organizational tools.

4. The good news is that a new computer worm affects only devices with "weak authentication", to turn them into social network bots. The bad news is that there is at least one drug infusion pump on the market that fits that description.

While not intended to target Internet of Things devices specifically, Bilodeau and Dupuy found that [the] Moose [Linux computer worm] could infect a number of such devices, including medical ones. "Based on recent security research, we have evidence to state that even medical devices like the Hospira Drug Infusion Pump could be infected with Linux/Moose," the pair wrote. While these infections were essentially just "collateral damage," the worm could have an impact on the safe operation of these devices.

Hmmm. 

-- CAV