Good observation by @streetsofboston:

Just to be clear, it is *very* easy to fall for such a cam if you have never experienced it before. A family member of mine who is pretty savy and would not think they can get scammed got caught up in one. This person simply wasn’t aware of the concept of call spoofing: trusted…

One good way to reduce changes of being scammed: Refuse to take *any* action on the phone (share no information) Tell them to send you an email / a letter or that you will contact them via customer support. Legit providers will contact you via these means (email, post) anyway.

These social engineering scams are all similar: Attackers obtain some personal information that could make it sound they are legit. Then use pressure tactics (“we’ll have to suspend your account” or similar) to get you to hand over what they need: 2FA, CC info over phone etc.

This thread describes a more advanced social engineering scam. It has nothing specific about Coinbase, can be used w any other service. Never trust someone calling on the phone regardless of phone number: assume it can be a scammer. NEVER hand over 2FA authentication codes.

Interesting detail on how Agoda is moving from HDFS to VAST, partially to store their data in a way that could make it very easy to move to AWS, thanks to using S3 as an access protocol, making future AWS interoperability trivial. From @Pragmatic_Eng at

There's a lot of thoughts on whether to move to the cloud, or to move out of it. Here's another take from Agoda CTO @idanzalz: "We want to get to the 'we don’t really care where we operate (cloud or not cloud)' state; this is our strategy." More:

There's a lot of thoughts on whether to move to the cloud, or to move out of it. Here's another take from Agoda CTO @idanzalz: "We want to get to the “we don’t really care where we operate (cloud or not cloud)” state; this is our strategy." More:

The article is out, with more context and details on the learnings:

Here are ways to message me (for free, of course):

I dislike how Twitter takes away the opportunity for anyone to send messages. Sure: there’s a spam problem. So let people decide if it’s a big enough problem for them. It’s not for me: I want to keep DMs open. I pay for Twitter. So why does Twitter take this away fro me?

On LinkedIn, I pay for LI premium to keep messages open (so anyone can send them: it’s LinkedIn’s tactic to generate revenue from people). Is Twitter really about to do the opposite: not allowing people to message unless they also pay? No way to truly keep DMs open?

On Twitter we had the front seat of this playing out when George Hotz committed to fixing search at Twitter in 3 months: a simple thing to do, an outsider might think. Then got more information and context previously outsiders have no access to. It was no longer simple.

This is to say that while it's tempting to assume that you, as an outsider, have superior understanding of problems (and great solution ideas): The reality is that people usually make good decisions with the information and constraints they have. You might just not have access.

There are few tech decisions that don't make sense once I understood information I had no access to, before. Before working at Uber, I would have just handwaved and said surely Uber doesn't know what they're doing with eg 1M LOC for a simple app. I missed lots of details.

For developer tooling, I really get a sense that large tech companies do *not* want to get locked into SaaS vendors that have no self-hosting option (aka license the solution, but control your own infra). But pure SaaS is where high margins + venture-scale business is.

Show me another industry like tech / software engineering, where so many companies encourage employees to share *how* they operate (practices; often via blog posts & talks) and *what* they built (open sourcing). To share so much in public, in such an easy to access way.

Oh look: Designing Data Intensive Applications being pirated is such a big problem that the @nypost wrote about it a year ago! And *nothing* changed a year later. The only way to get a legit copy for sure is to NOT shop on Amazon, but via the publisher.

Designing Data-Intensive Applications costs $47.94 if bought from the source (the one markets as Sold by: There are several hijackers who will sell a pirated copy for much cheaper, though. Even those who *want* to buy the original stand little chance.

This is a seller with the business name "Carlos Andres Esquinca Lopez," based in Mexico. Odd how they sell O'Reilly books, no? And when someone complains they got a fake book, Amazon simply removes this review (?!) This is why, as a customer, you cannot trust Amazon, for books.

And no, this is not just Alex. If you try to by @intensivedata by @martinkl in the US right now, here: Then you do not by from O'Reilly. It's from a pirate seller called "CarDreE" who took over this listing. Let's check their details, shall we?

Some people are saying they can get chat support on the web. In my region (Netherlands) this is not an option: I get this redirect (Google translated from Dutch)

Amazon is customer obsessed. Between a seller pirating books & printing poor quality ones vs a buyer wanting to buy an original book, which one of them does Amazon consider their primary customer? My feeling is it's not people wanting to buy legit books.

Wanted to get customer support from AMEX. Curious enough, chat is only available on mobile, not web. But the chat functionality is pretty neat. When sending over numbers (eg phone numbers) it gets hidden from the conversation. Custom prompts to enter security information. Nice!

See the full talk here: