Posts from Web/Tech

A number of USV folks are using the Brave browser on their phones and thinking about using it on desktop too.

We are not the average internet users at USV. We tend toward early adopter.

So I polled my twitter followers (which also skews early adopter) to see how many of them are using the Brave browser:

I am curious to get a sense of the adoption of the Brave browser: https://t.co/qSXLwnryBj

— Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) April 24, 2018

I don’t want to bias anyone who wants to complete the poll, so if you want to see the current results, pls complete it and you will see the results after you do that.

It’s interesting. I will say that much.

Our portfolio company Cloudflare announced a consumer DNS service (a resolver) yesterday.

It was not an April Fools stunt.

If you want to use the Internet’s fastest, privacy-first consumer DNS service, then head over to 1.1.1.1 and click the install button.

What you will do is adjust your computer’s settings to change the DNS servers your computer uses to resolve DNS queries (what server address is google.com?).

Here are some mantras from the 1.1.1.1 web page:

Unfortunately, by default, DNS is usually slow and insecure. Your ISP, and anyone else listening in on the Internet, can see every site you visit and every app you use — even if their content is encrypted. Creepily, some DNS providers sell data about your Internet activity or use it target you with ads.

We think that’s gross. If you do too, now there’s an alternative: 1.1.1.1

and

We will never log your IP address (the way other companies identify you). And we’re not just saying that. We’ve retained KPMG to audit our systems annually to ensure that we’re doing what we say.

Frankly, we don’t want to know what you do on the Internet—it’s none of our business—and we’ve taken the technical steps to ensure we can’t.

and

So if you want speed and privacy, install 1.1.1.1 and you will get both.

Every year our portfolio company Stack Overflow surveys its developer community and publishes the results.

This year Stack had over 100,000 respondents to its survey from all over the world, making this survey possibly the most comprehensive view of the global software developer community.

There is a ton of data here. It’s a 30 minute survey. You can see the results here.

But since many of you won’t click that link, here are some highlights from it:

First, we know that software engineering is a largely white male profession. The data shows that:

If we look at the gender and racial/ethnic mix of the students who answered the question, there is some promising data on racial/ethnic diversity, but less promising data on gender diversity. Efforts like I blogged about yesterday are badly needed to change these numbers.

I found the technology questions interesting.

Javascript is by far the most common programming language.

But Python is the most “wanted” programming language. And Go and Kotlin are rising fast.

Some great news for our portfolio company MongoDB in this survey. Mongo was the most popular non-SQL database and was the most wanted database of them all.

Finally, some data on how important Stack Overflow is in these developers’ work:

Any service where 2/3 of its users visit daily is a big deal. And for developers, Stack is very much that.

This post is not about the tragedy that happened at Parkland or the gun safety debate that has been re-energized by it. Those are both worthy topics but I’m not opining on them today.

I do hope that this tragedy, among so many like it, will result in meaningful changes in our society in terms of how we protect our children in school and also how we allow responsible and healthy people to own and secure their weapons.

What I am going to opine on is how Parkland is re-shaping the debate about how social media and technology more broadly is impacting our culture, our collective conversations, and our politics.

In the beginning, the tech sector believed, and told everyone, that connecting the world via technology was going to be great, a technological utopia as it were.

That, of course, turned out not to be true and what we have are both vast improvements (truly global real time communications that everyone can tap into) and equally vast problems (you can’t believe and can’t trust anything you read on the Internet).

It is the classic good news/bad news situation.

In the past few years, but most notably last year, the discussion of this topic has focused on the bad side of these changes. Fake news, hacked systems, bots, ad systems gone haywire, and so on and so forth. We collectively lost trust in social media and technology and became angry about it.

Then comes Parkland. These amazing brave and vocal young adults, victims, with the same tools in their hands.

And we see, again, the good side.

The promise of Parkland, for me, is that this technology we have built and use every day can be an impactful tool for real people with real things to say to get their words out, and for the rest of us to see them, amplify them, discuss them, debate them, and understand them.

I feel the pendulum on this issue swinging back to center, where it belongs, and I am very encouraged by that.

I listened to Sam Harris talk to Niall Ferguson yesterday on Sam’s Waking Up podcast.

Niall is a historian, an author, a journalist, and an academic.

He has just published a new book on a topic that is near and dear to me, USV, and many of you; networks and hierarchies, and how these two forms of information flow and management have impacted society over the last five hundred years (or so).

The book is called The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook.

I bought it for our Kindles today and will get into it asap. But just hearing Niall talk about the ideas in the book tells me that this is going to be an important read for many of us.

We may think that the power of information networks to shape society is a new thing (Facebook, fake news, Trump, etc, etc) but Niall argues that there is nothing new here and these sorts of things have been going on in analog networks for hundreds of years. As Shakespeare said, “what’s past is prologue” and we should learn as much from the past as we can. That’s what historians are for, after all.

I plan on doing that and you may want to join me.

Our portfolio company DuckDuckGo which offers a search engine that doesn’t store your search history or track you announced some new offerings this week.
Here’s a quote from the announcement:

Over the years, DuckDuckGo has offered millions of people a private alternative to Google, serving over 16 billion anonymous searches. Today we’re excited to launch fully revamped versions of our browser extension and mobile app, extending DuckDuckGo’s protection beyond the search box to wherever the Internet takes you.

As I understand it, you can get this browsing protection via the DuckDuckGo mobile app and from their browser extensions.
You can get them here:

Firefox, Safari, Chrome, iOS, and Android

DuckDuckGo is moving beyond search into a broader suite of privacy offerings. They have built up the trust of users over the years and can now apply that to a wider set of problems.

Along the way DuckDuckGo has built a great business too. As founder/CEO Gabe Weinberg explains in this interview with Techcrunch, DuckDuckGo has been profitable since 2014.

It’s very satisfying to me to know that in an era where billions are being made walking all over our privacy, a great business can be built protecting it.

This was seven years ago. I went back and watched it recently and it has stood the test of time.

I saw the news today that HuffPo is shutting down their “contributor network.”

we are ending the HuffPost contributor platform. The platform, which launched in May 2005, was a revolutionary idea at the time: give a megaphone to lots of people ― some famous, some completely unknown ― to tell their stories. At that time, social networks barely existed. Facebook was a nascent dating site for college students. Twitter had not been invented. The platforms where so many people now share their views, like LinkedIn, Medium and others, were far in the future.

While that is sad news, it is not the least bit surprising.

I said this on Twitter about this news:

you have to blog on your own domain. medium, facebook, linkedin, huffpo will do what are in their interests, not yours. i have been doing it every day for 15 years this year. feels great to own my archive, my brand, my content, myself.

— Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) January 18, 2018

I would never outsource my content to some third party. I blog on my own domain using open source software (WordPress) that I run on a shared server that I can move if I want to. It is a bit of work to set this up but the benefits you get are enormous.

I have been asked to blog at Medium, LinkedIn, HuffPo, and many other places. I always tell them that I am not going to do that. If they want to repost something I have written here on their platform, that is cool with me. The content here at AVC is creative commons licensed and freely available for reposting with a few reasonably constraints.

But this is part of a much larger and more important narrative. We are in the “Internet Two” phase as Steven Johnson called in it his piece that I blogged about yesterday. Internet One was an open network, open protocols, open systems. Internet Two is closed platforms that increasingly dominate the market and own and control our content and us. We need to get to Internet Three where we take back control of ourselves. It is high time for that to happen. The HuffPo news is a small example of what that is so important.

So the chips we use in our personal computers and cloud computers have some newly discovered security holes. One is called Meltdown. The other is called Spectre.

My first reaction upon hearing the news yesterday was “so what do we do about this?”

The answer is you can’t do much on your own.

For Meltdown, we need the operating system and hardware manufacturers to issue patches and firmware upgrades. I am sure they are furiously working on them.

The Verge has a good piece on what we can and should be doing about this.

Here’s the key part of that post:

• Update to the latest version of Chrome (on January 23rd) or Firefox 57 if you use either browser
• Check Windows Update and ensure KB4056892 is installed for Windows 10
• Check your PC OEM website for support information and firmware updates and apply any immediately

I expect Apple will be issuing an update shortly for their OS.

Apparently Microsoft, Google, and Amazon’s cloud services are already patched for Meltdown.

As for Spectre, apparently there are no fixes for it as of now, but it is also a lot harder to implement hacks using that one.

Finally, my partner Albert has some optimism about all of this. We should expect some good to come of this mess.