There is a QR code drawn in Elliot's journal that leads to www.conficturaindustries.com (one of the URLs linked to the same SSL cert) - the same company name that is on the front of the journal. And the meticulous zoom-in on the apple skin left on the floor looks very similar to the logo of the company. Looks like they had fun making this :)
I think it depends on the primary use case (for accounting vs banking) - I know a lot of people who are earning barely livable wages as 1099 employees and they are often tempted to spend everything they earn (need to make rent and feed themselves) but then come April they haven't saved enough for their taxes and get screwed. Having a separate bank account that withholds the taxes for them first and then deposits 100% spendable money (just like a W-2 employee) would be really helpful for people in this position.
If you're coming at the problem with this use case in mind primarily, the approach they took makes sense. I think those people can benefit from this service the most too.
strict password requirements are usually a requirement for regulated businesses (such as those creating back accounts). Having a secure password for an account that manages your money is a good thing!
A CS degree obviously is not meant to give people 100% of the skills they need to work in the real world. It builds a foundation of core knowledge about the field that does not usually come from a hacker bootcamp or independent web dev study.
Having a few friends from the school of "who needs college?! I taught myself everything I need to know about coding and I'm on the cutting edge of the field and I have a great job!", I sometimes see a lack of understanding of general principles. Sure, people who really love computing often dive deep enough to learn this stuff themselves, but there are a lot of people who love development that just don't even know what they don't know about it. Most development jobs don't require this knowledge, but you'll sure miss it if you're in a position that does.
looks like Blank Slate can also do that (notes start as private but you can "publish" them, giving you a public URL). Other cool things about this one are that it is open source (https://github.com/tomasienrbc/notes) and that there are extensions, for instance to turn your note into a Google Doc. It also works with markdown so you can make bulleted lists and such.
Seems to me like the layout is basically as minimal as possible, so that would lend itself to looking similar to others that don't have the normal bells and whistles.
I think the point is that this is a site where you can just click the link and start typing. Optimized for loading fast and getting your idea written down as quickly as possible. You don't have to create a user if you don't want to, and you can save as a temp user. Draftin.com (and most other notes sites) take too long to set up for this use case.
The keys used by KMS are stored in an AWS-managed hardware security module (HSM) on-site and never go outside that data center. This means that even if the person had physical access to the data center, they should not be able to extract the decryption keys because HSMs are specifically designed to prevent that. If it was an Amazon employee that had super-user privileges over that HSM for management purposes...who knows.
(from regular Microsoft employee perspective):
this article does make them seem like that. Usually, in my interactions with Legal Compliance, they make sure everything we do is 100% legal, and prevent us from even coming close to the border of legality. They assume that we programmers don't think about complicated legal matters, so they go over a lot of the projects we work on and make us adhere to very strict privacy compliance that most of our competitors breeze over.
Thanks for chiming in. I'm sure that's how legal departments work in most companies, and I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. Yes, just in this case TFA is talking about an isolated situation where my comment happens to be pertinent.
I have no experience with Microsoft, but my experiences with equivalent legal departments in other big tech. companies matches his view - they play it safe to the point of being insanely anal about it. These guys aren't there to make sure the company can do as much as possible, they're there to make sure there's no way anything can go wrong legally, and given its their asses on the line if they take too big a risk, they'll always stray way away from the edge.
