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The Pragmatic Engineer
The Pulse #97: Lone hacker takes down North Korea’s internet
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The Pulse

The Pulse #97: Lone hacker takes down North Korea’s internet

Also: what NVIDIA becoming the world’s most valuable company says about AI, controversy at Slack and Adobe about terms and conditions in the GenAI era, and more

Gergely Orosz's avatar
Gergely Orosz
Jun 20, 2024
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The Pragmatic Engineer
The Pulse #97: Lone hacker takes down North Korea’s internet
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The Pulse is a weekly series covering insights, patterns, and trends within Big Tech and startups. Notice an interesting event or trend? Send me a message.

Today, we cover:

  1. Industry pulse. Cuts at startups are finally trending downwards, social network, Microsoft Recall delayed infinitely, Adobe executives sued for deceptive pricing patterns, and more.

  2. A lone hacker took down the internet in North Korea. How? A Florida-based cybersecurity entrepreneur was targeted by North Korean hackers, and decided to get his own back. With uncomplex denial-of-service attacks, he throttled internet access across all of North Korea for a week. This feat cost just $5,000, spent on virtual machines!

  3. NVIDIA is the world’s most valuable company; what does it mean? NVIDIA has overtaken Microsoft as the world’s most valuable company, like router manufacturer Cisco did back in 2000 – also from Microsoft. Is this the peak of an “AI Boom,” like 2000 was the peak of the dotcom bubble?

  4. Slack and Adobe controversy: update T&Cs for “GenAI.” Both companies suffered public backlashes and canceled subscriptions after users scrutinized outdated terms and conditions written before GenAI models existed. Adobe’s now updating its legally binding contract, and other companies will likely follow.

1. Industry pulse

Fewer layoffs at startups, finally?

Unfortunately, news of startups slashing headcounts has been pretty constant since early 2022. But new data from equity platform Carta suggests this trend may finally be cooling.

Source: Peter Walker at Carta

It’s not just numbers of layoffs which are falling; more people are leaving jobs by choice, instead of being let go. Around 60% of workers in Carta’s figures left by choice, versus 40% being let go. A year ago the split was 50/50.

But Carta still finds that hiring is lagging, even though more recruitment is occuring than a few quarters ago. Peter Walker, who compiled this data, summarizes: “fewer layoffs is better than more layoffs — I'll take it.”

Microsoft Recall delayed indefinitely

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