Latest news with #SettlersofCatan
Business Insider
20-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Meet the Yale student and hacker moonlighting as a cybersecurity watchdog
Alex Schapiro, a rising senior at Yale, likes to play Settlers of Catan with his friends, work on class projects, and lead a popular student website. But from his dorm room, Schapiro moonlights as an ethical hacker, uncovering security flaws in startups and tech companies before the bad guys do. Schapiro's bug-hunting work gained traction last week after Hacker News readers had thoughts about one of his recent findings: a bug in Cerca, a buzzy dating app founded by college students that matches mutual contacts with each other. The flaw could have potentially exposed users' phone numbers and identification information, Schapiro said in a blog post. Through an "internal investigation," Cerca concluded that the "bug had not been exploited" and resolved the issue "within hours" of speaking with Schapiro, a company spokesperson said. Cerca also reduced the amount of data it collects from users and hired an outside expert to review its code, who found no further issues, the spokesperson added. (The Yale Daily News first reported on Schapiro's findings in April.) A frenzy of venture investment, in part fueled by advancements in AI, has hit college campuses, leading students to launch products and close fundraises quickly. And with "vibe coding," or using AI to program swiftly, becoming the norm among even the most technical builders, Schapiro is hopeful that ethical bug hunters can help startups build and scale while keeping security a top priority. "These are real people, and this is real, sensitive data," Schapiro told BI. "It's not just going to be part of your pitch deck saying, 'hey, we have 10,000 users.'" Building Safer Startups Schapiro says he got his proclivity for programming from his mother, a former Bell Labs computer scientist. As many startup founders and AI researchers once did, Schapiro started building side projects in high school, using Spotify's API to curate playlists for friends and making X bots to track SEC filings. Teaching himself how to "reverse-engineer" websites led to breaking and making them stronger — a side hustle he now uses to poke holes in real companies before bad actors can. Ethically hacking is a popular side hustle in some tech circles. (A Reddit group dedicated to the practice called r/bugbounty has over 50,000 members.) It's a hobby that startups and tech giants stand to benefit from, as it helps them prevent data from getting in the wrong hands. Heavyweights like Microsoft, Google, Apple, and more run bug bounty programs that encourage outsiders to find and report security flaws in exchange for a financial reward. In his first year at Yale, Schapiro found a "pretty serious vulnerability" in a company he says generates billions of dollars in annual revenue. (Schapiro declined to disclose the company, citing an NDA he signed.) His discoveries have even led a company with "hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue" to start working on a bug bounty program of their own, Schapiro said. He has also been contracted by two other tech companies, including part-time work platform SideShift, to pentest their software. And last summer, he pentested Verizon's AI systems during an internship. "As someone who uses a bunch of websites, I want my data to be taken care of," he said. "That's my mindset when I'm building something. I want to treat all the data that I'm dealing with as if it was my own data." Joe Buglewicz for BI Slowing His Roll On paper, Schapiro seems like the archetype of a college-dropout-turned-founder: He has built and tested apps since childhood, and he runs CourseTable, a Yale class review database that receives over 8 million requests a month. Sometimes, Schapiro says, founders looking for a technical counterpart reach out to him, and VCs hoping to back the next wunderkind ask him when he's going to found a company. For now, Schapiro isn't interested. "The No. 1 thing stopping me from raising money right now is not funding," he said. "I would need to really invest a bunch of time in it, and I love the four-year liberal arts college experience." Recently, Schapiro has found himself learning how to become a smarter computer scientist — not in a machine learning class, but in a translations course he took for his second major, Near Eastern languages and civilizations. It helped him think about how he turns English into Python efficiently and effectively. "You meet so many interesting, cool people here, and this is a time in your life where you can really just learn things," he said. "You're not going to get that experience later in life." While he's not ruling out the possibility of founding a company in the future, Schapiro is fine slowing his roll until graduation next May. This summer, he's interning at Amazon Web Services, where he'll work on AI and machine learning platforms.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Lexie Hull Reveals Caitlin Clark's Heated Moment With Her Boyfriend
WNBA fans have quickly become familiar with Caitlin Clark's fiery, competitive personality. In her rookie season with the Indiana Fever, she averaged 19.2 points, 5.7 rebounds, and 8.4 assists per game, while constantly playing with passion. Whether she advocated for foul calls or confidently directed her teammates on the floor, Clark's intensity was always on full display. Advertisement Off the court, she's grown close with teammate Lexie Hull and Hull's now-fiancé, Will Matthiessen. In a recent story by ESPN's Alexa Philippou, Hull opened up about their friendship and how often the two couples—Clark and her boyfriend, Connor McCaffery—hang out for game nights and dinner parties. Whether it's Monopoly Deal, Settlers of Catan, Gang of Four, or card games, Hull says Clark's competitive attitude is also present. Hull went into detail and revealed that she's seen Clark go "at it" with both McCaffery and her when they play. "You see her and her boyfriend going at it, her and I going at it," Hull said. "I don't know if she and her boyfriend talk on the ride home because it gets so competitive, but it's fun." Indiana Fever's Caitlin Clark (22) and Lexie Hull (10).© Kevin Jairaj–USA TODAY Sports Hull is entering her fourth WNBA season since being drafted sixth overall by the Fever in 2022. It also marks her second season as Clark's teammate. Advertisement Expectations are much higher for Indiana this year compared to 2024, when the Fever went 20-20 and lost in the first round of the WNBA playoffs. According to ESPN Bet, the Fever are tied for the second-best odds to win the 2025 WNBA title at +350. The New York Liberty lead the pack at +230, while the Las Vegas Aces also sit at +350. The Fever will open up the regular season on Saturday against Angel Reese and the Chicago Sky. Tip-off is scheduled for 3 p.m. ET. Related: Fever Coach Breaks Silence on Star Player's Concerning Fracture Related: Fever Star Sophie Cunningham Doubles Down on Her Relationship Status
Yahoo
19-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Zuckerberg's old emails reveal the CEO's rivals lived in his head rent-free
Prosecutors see Mark Zuckerberg's old emails as a key piece in their blockbuster antitrust trial. If the FTC wins, it may ask that Meta be forced to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp. In his once-private emails, Zuckerberg can be seen as ever watchful of his expanding empire. Mark Zuckerberg's own emails, some of them more than 10 years old, revealed he had antitrust concerns long before the FTC brought its case against Meta. During 10 hours of testimony, a lawyer for the Federal Trade Commission grilled the Meta CEO over his old emails. Zuckerberg's messages reveal near-nonstop concern about nascent rivals, blunt descriptions of some of Facebook's most pivotal deals. "While we believe our current trajectory will yield strong business growth over the next 5 years, I worry it will also undermine our global network, erode our corporate brand, impose an increasingly large strategy tax on all of our work, and then over time we may face antitrust regulation requiring us to spin out other apps anyway," Zuckerberg wrote in a 2018 email to top Facebook executives. Daniel Matheson, the FTC's lead lawyer, highlighted another portion of Zuckerberg's prescient warning about his company's future. "While most companies resist breakups, the corporate history is that most companies actually perform better after they've been split up," Zuckerberg wrote. "The synergies are usually less than people think and the strategy tax is usually greater than people think." When Matheson asked the billionaire to explain his thinking, Zuckerberg appeared flummoxed. "I'm not sure exactly what I had in mind then," Zuckerberg said in response to Matheson's question about what corporate history he had in mind in 2018. The trial, which began Monday and is expected to last up to eight weeks, had a high-profile start, with Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg as the prosecution's first witnesses. Matheson and his lawyers repeatedly turned to a 2012 message Zuckerberg sent Sandberg in which he bluntly summed up the need to acquire Instagram. In the same thread, he offered to teach Sandberg how to play Settlers of Catan. "Messenger isn't beating WhatsApp," Zuckberg wrote. "Instagram was growing so much faster than us that we had to buy them for $1 billion and Groups and Places, although smaller efforts, have made only a little progress. That's not exactly killing it." Facebook acquired WhatsApp roughly two years later for $19 billion. If the FTC wins the case, the government could ask Meta to sell Instagram and WhatsApp. Legal experts say the government faces a high bar in proving that Meta "cemented" its monopoly with its acquisitions of the two companies since the FTC already OKed those mergers years ago. (In October 2012, Facebook officially rebranded as Meta.) Meta has sought to downplay Zuckerberg's messages. Mark Hansen, the company's lead lawyer, said that Facebook's cofounder had to be worried — it came with the job. "Was it a constant joke at Meta that you were worrying and the sky was falling?" Hansen asked Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg replied that if it is a joke, "It's probably behind my back," but stressed that worry is a cornerstone of Silicon Valley. Hansen also said that while the government had numerous examples of Zuckerberg expressing fear about Instagram and WhatsApp's rise, there were also worries about defunct social networks like Path. In one email, Zuckerberg expressed worry that Dropbox could eventually become a competitor — that, too, never came to fruition. "I'm getting a bit more worried about Path," Zuckerberg wrote in 2012 to top executives in a thread named "Aquarium," the tongue-in-cheek name for one of the social network's real-life conference rooms at its Menlo Park HQ. "Out of all the new social startups, they're the only one that goes right to the core of what we're trying to do around identity and friend sharing." Zuckerberg's old worries are more relevant when they concern Instagram and WhatsApp. The FTC contends that Facebook gobbled up the companies because it worried that, with a large user base, either one could eventually pivot to become more like Facebook. "If Instagram continues to kick ass on mobile or if Google buys them, then over the next few years they could easily add pieces of their service that copy what we're doing now, and if they have a growing number of people's photos then that's a real issue for us," Zuckerberg wrote in a 2011 email. As for WhatsApp, the government showed multiple messages where Zuckerberg expressed concern about the messaging app that rose to popularity outside the US — and one where he seemed unmoved by its leadership. "I found him fairly impressive although disappointingly (or maybe positive for us) unambitious," Zuckerberg wrote in 2012 to colleagues after he met Jan Koum, the cofounder of WhatsApp. The Meta CEO seemed taken aback when Hansen asked Zuckerberg about the email. Zuckerberg said the point of his message was that he had learned Koum did not want to pivot or monetize WhatsApp in a way that would truly unnerve Facebook. In contrast, the FTC showed multiple messages in which Zuckerberg expressed frustration with Facebook's efforts to develop a competing camera app as Instagram skyrocketed in popularity. "What is going in with our photos team?" Zuckerberg wrote in a 2011 message that was partially redacted when it was presented in court. "Between [redacted] leaving and [redacted] being checked out/a bad manager as well as [redacted] also being checked out and [redacted] not wanting to work with this team because he thinks this team sucks. It seems like we have a really critical situation to fix here." Read the original article on Business Insider
Yahoo
18-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
From seminary to secretary: How Uri Monson balances Pennsylvania's budget and keeps Shabbat
Only in a family where nearly everyone is a rabbi does becoming a Cabinet secretary in one of the largest states in the nation make you a black sheep. That's the joke that Uri Monson, Pennsylvania's budget secretary, likes to make when describing his career as a public servant in the context of his family — a brother, father, grandfather and great-grandfather who were rabbis; a stepmother who was a lifelong Jewish nonprofit professional; and a mother who was a renowned Jewish academic and university administrator. But coming out of that kind of lineage (his great-grandfather was the first person to certify Coca-Cola as kosher!), choosing a career in public service was Monson's act of 'pseudo-rebellion,' he said in an interview with Jewish Insider earlier this month. He didn't stray that far from his Jewish values, though —during his first internship, at city hall in Philadelphia, he helped draft the mayor's speech for Israeli Independence Day. 'I grew up a mile from Independence Hall. Ive always been an American government junkie, and fascinated by and love[d] government and its ability to really help,' said Monson, 56. 'I felt, even at 18, that I could make it better, that it had to be able to be done better, and that started me on that path to public service.' Even if Monson didn't follow his family members into the Jewish professional world, growing up immersed in deep conversations about the weekly Torah portion over Shabbat lunch and spending his summers at Camp Ramah in the Poconos shaped his approach to public service just as much as his wonky fascination with fiscal policy and his master's degree in public administration. 'What weve seen all along is that that Jewish perspective has shaped his commitment to what government can do and the way that society should work,' said Rabbi Chaim Galfand, the head rabbi at Perelman Jewish Day School in Philadelphia and a close friend of Monson's. Monson attended the joint program at List College at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he earned a bachelor's degree from Columbia University and another, in midrash, from JTS. The intellectual curiosity and creativity that comes from his expertise in interpreting the Torah — Monson calls himself a 'midrash parsha junkie' — colors the way he approaches everything from budgetary policy to his weekly Settlers of Catan board games with Galfand each Shabbat. The biblical stories about Joseph are his favorite; Joseph's 'rise in the political world,' from slave to advisor to the Egyptian pharaoh, is particularly resonant for Monson. But he doesn't think there is only one way to engage with these stories, and that's a lesson that guides his approach to public policy, too. 'When you make that jump to learning that the Talmud is not a book of law, but that it's a book of how to think about law, it's a major change. It's a major jump in thought,' Monson said. 'To realize that you had people disagreeing over really complex issues of Jewish law —thats how they lived their lives, and what they actually record [in the Talmud] is the discussion and the back-and-forth and the debate. They were able to do it while living civilly together.' Monson started his career in Washington as a policy advisor at the Department of Education during the Clinton administration. He has friends from that era who have lost their jobs as the Trump administration slashes the federal workforce. Monson does not reflexively believe all public employees have a right to keep their jobs; his former boss, President Bill Clinton, also stressed efficiency and shrunk the federal workforce by hundreds of thousands of people. But he does think those workers should be respected. 'There are few of us who have a mantra, and I share this with the governor, that [we] cannot stand the phrase, 'Thats the way weve always done it.' There are always opportunities for change,' he said, referring to Gov. Josh Shapiro. 'The biggest difference for me between what I was a part of and what the current administration is doing is that that change was all about employee empowerment.' Shapiro has made a play for laid-off federal workers, encouraging them to apply to fill vacancies in Pennsylvania. Monson's time in Washington got him started on his path to Harrisburg — both because it was his first full-time gig in the government, and also because it was in this era that he reconnected with Shapiro, who was working on Capitol Hill at the time. 'Like most expatriate Eagles fans, we would find each other to watch games, that kind of thing,' said Monson. But their relationship goes back decades: Shapiro and Monson's younger brother, Ami, were in the same grade at Akiba Hebrew Academy, a pluralistic Jewish day school in the Philadelphia suburbs. (CNN anchor Jake Tapper was another classmate.) Shapiro's parents and Monson's were active in the Soviet Jewry movement of the 1970s and 1980s. 'Uri and I both lean on our family and our faith as motivation to serve the good people of Pennsylvania,' Shapiro told JI in a statement last week. 'We are both driven by the same Jewish principle of tikkun olam, and from the passage from the Talmud that teaches us that no one is required to complete the task, but neither are we free to refrain from it.' Shapiro's first video ad in his 2022 gubernatorial campaign showed him, his wife and their children celebrating Shabbat. Monson, who observes Shabbat and does not work or travel from sundown Friday until Saturday night, receives weekly 'Shabbat shalom' emails from Shapiro. 'When he offered me the job, I said, 'Im not going to be in Harrisburg on Fridays in the winter'' —when Shabbat begins in the late afternoon — 'and he said he understood,' Monson recalled. Over the years, his colleagues have gotten used to Monson's Shabbat observance, sending emails on Saturdays with the subject line 'read me first' to try to capture his attention after Shabbat ends. 'Once in a while they're like, 'Maybe I want to be Jewish too,' because they need a break,' Monson said, laughing. Uri Monson wears a kippah with the commonwealths outline and crest on it Monson returned to Philadelphia in the late 1990s for the first in a series of increasingly powerful jobs dealing with municipal and school district budgets. In 2012, when Shapiro was chair of the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners, he tapped Monson to serve as chief financial officer of the commonwealth's third most populous county. Monson then spent seven years as chief financial officer of the School District of Philadelphia, which has a budget of $4.6 billion, helping shepherd the district through the tumult of the COVID-19 pandemic. He joined Shapiro in Harrisburg in early 2023. 'Uri had a very calming presence of being able to lead with certainty in very uncertain times,' said Larisa Shambaugh, the former chief talent officer in the Philadelphia school district, where she worked closely with Monson. She saw him take a forward-looking approach to budgeting, thinking not just about cost but about how to advance the interests of the school district. 'What was truly a joy about working with Uri is that he wasnt a CFO that was focused only on finances and only on the bottom line,' Shambaugh explained. 'When we would be thinking about proposing a new initiative or a new policy or a new staffing structure, the first question wasnt, How much would this cost and can we afford it? It was, Why is this best for students?' Shambaugh also benefitted from another skill Monson brought with him to his next job: his baking skills. He baked lemon squares for a meeting with new school board members. When he found out Shambaugh loved challah, he baked her one. In his new job, he's baked cranberry walnut muffins twice — once to relax before a budget hearing and once to get rid of flour before Passover — and brought hamantaschen to the capital during Purim. ('We've all been on the receiving end of his largesse,' said Galfand.) Monson has spent the spring testifying at Statehouse hearings about Shapiro's $51.5 billion budget proposal. This is the forum where he allows his Torah discussion skills to shine: keeping his cool under sometimes hostile questions from Republicans, and disarming them by actually being willing to engage. (When he sat down at this year's budget hearings, he wore a custom kippah showing the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, made by an artist his wife found on Etsy.) 'I will never claim to have a monopoly on good ideas, and I think thats something I certainly learned from around the table and from growing up among the rabbis,' said Monson. 'I want to learn from everybody, because you can learn from everybody, and be open to the discussion.'
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
8 revelations from Mark Zuckerberg's 3 days on the witness stand in Meta's antitrust trial
Mark Zuckerberg testified for more than 10 hours in Meta's blockbuster antitrust trial. Internal emails from Zuckerberg were presented by the FTC while the Meta CEO was on the stand. One showed Zuckerberg considered spinning off Instagram in 2018 over antitrust worries. Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg spent more than 10 hours on the witness stand in the social media empire's landmark antitrust trial. The trial opened on Monday in a Washington, DC, federal courtroom and the Federal Trade Commission called Zuckerberg as its first witness in its high-profile case against Meta. The FTC alleges Meta "helped cement" its illegal monopoly in the social media market with its acquisition of Instagram and the messaging app WhatsApp more than a decade ago. Zuckerberg, at times, faced intense grilling by the FTC's lead attorney as he tried to defend his company's purchases of the two platforms. If the FTC wins the case, Meta could be forced to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp. Here are eight revelations that emerged from the tech mogul's court testimony over three days: Two years before the FTC initially sued Meta over allegations that it violated US competition laws, Zuckerberg considered breaking Instagram out into its own company to avoid potential antitrust scrutiny, according to a 2018 internal email revealed by the government at trial. "I wonder if we should consider the extreme step of spinning Instagram out as a separate company," Zuckerberg wrote in the email to company executives. Zuckerberg added, "As calls to break up the big tech companies grow, there is a non-trivial chance that we will be forced to spin out Instagram and perhaps WhatsApp in the next 5-10 years anyway." If a break up were to happen, Zuckerberg wrote, history showed that companies could end up better off. Asked about this view at trial, Zuckerberg said, "I'm not sure exactly what I had in mind then." Zuckerberg's "crazy idea" for Facebook in 2022 involved purging all users' friends. The CEO — fearful that Facebook was losing cultural relevance — made the proposal in a 2022 email to the social network's top brass, according to internal messages presented by the FTC. "Option 1. Double down on Friending," Zuckerberg wrote in the message. "One potentially crazy idea is to consider wiping everyone's graphs and having them start again." Tom Alison, the head of Facebook, responded with some hesitancy. "I'm not sure Option #1 in your proposal (Double-down on Friending) would be viable given my understanding of how vital the friend use case is to IG," Alison wrote back, referring to Instagram. Zuckerberg once offered to give Sheryl Sandberg, the former chief operating officer of Meta, a tutorial in the board game Settlers of Catan. The lesson offer came up in 2012 messages in which the two discussed the fresh $1 billion purchase of Instagram, partially redacted missives presented by the FTC during Zuckerberg's testimony showed. "We would love it. I want to learn Settlers of Catan too so we can play," Sandberg told Zuckerberg in the message. He responded: "I can definitely teach you Settlers of Catan. It's very easy to learn." Zuckerberg told Sandberg in the notes that Facebook Messenger wasn't "beating" WhatsApp, which Meta, then called Facebook, would buy two years later. "Instagram was growing so much faster than us that we had to buy them for $1 billion," he said in the message. "That's not exactly killing it," Zuckerberg wrote. Sandberg was called as the government's second witness on Wednesday. During his testimony, Zuckerberg hammered home Meta's argument that the tech giant faces massive competition from other apps, especially TikTok. "TikTok is still bigger than either Facebook or Instagram," Zuckerberg testified. "I don't like it when our competitors do better than us." He said he's determined to grow Meta. "You can sort of bet that I'm not going to rest until we are doing quite a bit better than we are doing now," said Zuckerberg. Instagram's early rise shook Zuckerberg. As his company struggled to mount its response with the Facebook Camera app, the CEO began to lose his patience. "What is going on with our photos team?" Zuckerberg wrote in a 2011 message to top executives, as revealed by the FTC in court. Zuckerberg then described a number of individuals, whose names were redacted, as being "checked out." He added another person didn't want "to work with this team because he thinks this team sucks." Later, Zuckerberg downplayed his concern about Instagram. He said the photo-sharing app was "adjacent" to what Facebook was trying to do. As for Facebook Camera, Zuckerberg sent an email to Sandberg, the then-Facebook COO, weeks after the company acquired Instagram in 2012 listing a handful of efforts that could be "scaled back or canceled" "Mobile photos app since we're acquiring Instagram," was one of the items on the list. Zuckerberg's failed bid to buy Snapchat was highlighted by the government as the Meta chief executive was on the stand. Meta, then called Facebook, offered to buy Snapchat for $6 billion in 2013 just two years after its launch, according to an email from Zuckerberg revealed at the trial. It was widely reported at the time that Snapchat rejected a $3 billion takeover attempt from Facebook. "At this point, we should probably prepare for it to leak that we offered $6b for them and all the negative that will come from that," Zuckerberg wrote in the email. While being questioned by an FTC attorney, Zuckerberg said he thought Snapchat "wasn't growing at the potential that it could" and believed he could improve it. The government introduced the email to try to bolster its argument that Meta sought to maintain its dominance in the social media market through acquisitions rather than competition. While under questioning by the FTC, Zuckerberg said that Facebook had greatly evolved since he launched the platform more than 20 years ago and that its main purpose wasn't really to connect with friends anymore. The FTC argues that Meta monopolizes the market for "personal social networking services." "The friend part has gone down quite a bit," Zuckerberg testified. He said the Facebook feed has "turned into more of a broad discovery and entertainment space." Zuckerberg wasn't too impressed with one of WhatsApp's cofounders after a 2012 meeting he had with company leadership. "I found him fairly impressive although disappointingly (or maybe positive for us) unambitious," Zuckerberg wrote in an email to colleagues after the meeting, it was revealed at trial. Jan Koum and Brian Acton cofounded WhatsApp in 2009. Zuckerberg said in his testimony that he thinks he was referring to Koum. Asked about his email, Zuckerberg seemed uneasy. He said that Koum was clearly smart but that he and Acton were staunchly opposed to growing their messaging app enough to be a real threat to Facebook. Zuckerberg would go on to buy WhatsApp in 2014 for $19 billion. Read the original article on Business Insider
