On Monday I had the pleasure of speaking at a Workshop on Cryptographic Agility and Interoperability held at the National Academies by the Forum on Cyber Resilience. The assembled group of academics, policy-makers, and practitioners touched on a variety of problems around the practical application of cryptography in production software. The main focus was on the challenges and benefits associated with cryptosystems that can be updated or swapped out over time (and thus exhibit “agility”).
Chatbots, or conversational programs that simulate interactive human speech patterns, are a hot topic in UX right now. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently claimed that “bots are the new apps”, and that they are the interface of the future for tasks like ordering food and booking transportation. In San Francisco, tech elites use a multitude of oft-parodied services like Wag to find dog walkers and Rinse to have their laundry done.
For the past two years John Maeda (whose previous roles include Professor at the MIT Media Lab and President of the Rhode Island School of Design) has issued a Design In Tech Report. This influential analysis, which Maeda presents at SXSW and has also been picked up by outlets like Wired, has helped Silicon Valley understand how design is valuable to companies and their customers. It is situated in the context of venture capital, as Maeda is currently Design Partner at VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers.
When you're putting your heart and soul into designing, building, or improving a piece of software, tuning in to feedback from users can sometimes get you down. Imagine waking up one morning and finding your project is being mentioned on Twitter in a slew of messages like these: Thanks Snapchat. Your app officially sucks. — Michael (@michaellorelei) April 21, 2016 The Facebook app sucks — em (@emma0wczarzak) April 19, 2016 You know, the YouTube app really kind of sucks.
Simply Secure focuses its collaborative efforts on open-source, privacy-preserving software projects. In my conversations with designers, developers, and end users, I'm often struck by a divergence in their understanding of what "openness" means in software. For example, last December during a user study, participants reading app store descriptions of secure messaging apps consistently thought that "open source" meant that their messages were public. The distinction between "source code" and "content generated in apps"