His conversion is almost complete

I used to work with a guy named Haiping, a former developer at Microsoft who was hired just two people before me at Plaxo. He has some crazy C++ skills as well as is pretty damn good at that headshot thing in PC first person shooters. Last time I was in South Bay, I stopped by Plaxo and talked to him. Later that evening, I went to the Facebook Tech Tasting and met him again. Only this time, his tag said “Facebook.” Between those two times he had changed jobs!

The great thing about our former company, is that you get card updates. I like to accept/reject mine over the web interface and read this today. Read his Work Card Message:

My friend Haiping flips his job

A C++ engineer switches to PHP. A windows user switches to Mac. Now all I have to do is convince him to get a Nikon camera. Now all they have to do is port Day of Defeat to the Mac.

6 thoughts on “His conversion is almost complete

  1. Your blurring is insufficient to obscure…. if you want the information removed, DELETE it…

  2. I feel it is sufficent enough given that the stuff on the left is outdated, the information on the right is publically accessible, and I don’t think people will go to great lengths to try permutations to guess the stuff on the right (which isn’t as obvious as you make it out to be, trust me).

    Then again, I don’t wear a tin foil hat.

  3. So, I don’t get it. You take someone else’s info, post it to your blog, and only blur it because you’re pretending to care? Then again, I suppose it only matters if he cares.

  4. Because you don’t understand that security and privacy is not binary.

    Just the fact that it is possible to make a guess, doesn’t mean it is insecure. I put the bar as high as it is to get this information through other means, if not higher. It is certainly blurry enough for the casual observer; it certainly can’t be captcha’d.

    For instance, why don’t you search for his name on Google and find one e-mail address. Then add it to Plaxo and see if you don’t get all the information above? Then compare this to my blurring. Which was easier? Now that you know the information, which was more accurate? (I’ll bet that your initial guess of the data on the right is incorrect.)

    Does the fact that the answer to both is the latter make my blurring “sufficient”? I believe so. People like you may live in an absolute world in your own isolation, and thus there is only a single right way and many wrong ways. People like me believe “reasonable doubt” doesn’t mean “any doubt”—most statements in the world have some built-in statistical error component and there exists nothing that can reduce Type I error without Type II consequences.

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