Simone Brunozzi

It has been a pleasure to meet my friend Paolo and his team at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco today.
They founded a startup called Pick1. Take an eye on them, they’re going to conquer the world :)
You can also vote for them here.

Now a very important task for you, my readers: try to guess who’s the Technology “Evangelist” in this photo here.
Got it? :)

(photo courtesy of Paolo Privitera)

I’m so happy to be at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon 2012, here in San Francisco (and at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference on Monday).
The location is great. A big space, right in the heart of downtown San Francisco.
This is how we’ve been greeted:

There are many cool startups, including one of my favorites, Ninja Blocks:

I met the Nokia team (I love Finnish people, they’re so nice and smart, all of them), and I had a chance to take a close look at their new Lumia phone. Nice!

The guys at Mashery are here, and they have great prizes for hackers:

This is a picture of the hall. Impressive.

I also took some of the gadgets and shirts that people give away.

Well, as you can guess, I’m super busy and can’t spend too much time blogging… But it’s a great event.
Hopefully I’ll be able to update you later.

I’m just back from two days in Seattle, where I met many colleagues.
Every time I go, I learn something new. A lot of it. And I like it.
Great times ahead. Can’t wait :)

Oh, and I just LOVE the new Kindles!

On Nov 27th-29th you should be in Las Vegas, and attend AWS Re: Invent.
Jeff Bezos himself will be keynoting, and we’ll have an amazing list of speakers, both from Amazon and external ones.
If you are a startup with a great story, I can provide you with a discount code. In case, email me here: simone @ amazon.com.

I will be speaking in the Startup track, and I’ll also organize a Hackathon on the road, called Cloud Riders. If you want more info or you’re interested in sponsoring it, email me. Thanks!

I love some special people (my Wife, Brother, Family, Friends), but that doesn’t prevent me from using the term “love” for things as well.

Therefore, I also happen to love a few pieces of software, and one of them is Dropbox.
What once was a problem on which I would spend countless hours, has been turned into an amazingly simple feature.
Your files, synced across devices, effortlessly.
It’s not a coincidence that they’ve created this drawing here, showing a happy Dropbox customer, with a little heart floating over his head.

However, a service like Dropbox shouldn’t just be simple to use, it should also be very secure.

Not surprisingly, the Dropbox team invests a lot in security, and they share some details on what they do to make Dropbox secure:
- They use modern encryption methods to transfer data to/from the Dropbox service, as well as to store data;
- Data transfer connections use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and AES-256 bit encryption;
- The Dropbox website and the client software are constantly being hardened to enhance security and protect against attacks.
- Lately they’ve also introduced a Two-step verification login mechanism (more below).
- Public files are only viewable by people who know the link to the resource.
- Last, but not least, they are (happy, as far as I know) users of Amazon Web Services. This means that they can benefit from a long list of security features (more details here). As an example, all files stored online by Dropbox are encrypted and kept securely on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) in multiple data centers located across the United States.

At this point, a question that you should ask yourself is: can I make it more secure?
The answer is YES.
This is my personal list of things you can do to make Dropbox even more secure.

1. Pick your devices carefully

If you login on Dropbox.com, and then click the “Security” tab, you can see the devices that can currently access your Dropbox account. This one below is a screenshot of my devices.

I found at least two devices that I don’t use anymore, and removed them from the list of authorized devices.
Even if you gave those devices to people that you trust, they can be stolen.
Therefore, assume that the iPad that you gave to your Dad will eventually be stolen, and that whoever takes it, has the knowledge to access your Dropbox account and steal your files.
Does your dad need access to your Dropbox? No? Then, remove the device. Simple as that.

2) Account email

In the same Security page, below your devices, you can see the details of your account sign in.

You shouldn’t use your public email to access Dropbox. Because your email address is public, it can happen that someone decides to attack it to gain control. I created a quite obscure email address, and assigned it to my Dropbox account (to give you an idea, something like: 5tj6yhrg03hf@gmail.com). It should be an email address that you use only for a few important accounts, and that you don’t use to send email to other people.
An email account like that is less likely to be the target of attacks, simply because attackers don’t have any way to know what the address is.

3) Account password

How many people use the SAME password for multiple accounts? Yes, many. Perhaps even you!
If you don’t want to learn how to use a proper password tool (such as Roboform everywhere, Kaspersky Password Manager, DataVault, etc), at least follow these two simple but very effective tips:
a) Use multiple passwords: one for your primary email; a different one for your computer; a different one for your Dropbox account; a different one for your Facebook account; a different one for everything else.
b) Use tough passwords, difficult to “crack” or guess: if you don’t have a good memory, try passphrases instead of simple passwords (e.g. “MyLifeIsNice5″ is a passphrase, and it’s quite tough to guess or crack, compared to “dolphin74″ or “john55″).
Also, read this: choosing a good password.

4) Enable Two-Step Verification (TSV) for your Dropbox account

Very recently, Dropbox introduced TSV: it allows you to add a second step to verify your identity when you want to access your Dropbox.
Using a Two-Step Verification, also generally called Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), greatly improves your security.
In fact, it’s something that we recommend for Amazon Web Services.

So, in essence, if you enable it, in addition to the (tough, I hope!) password, Dropbox will require an additional six-digit security code whenever you sign in to Dropbox or link a new device. You can choose to receive security codes by text message (SMS) on your phone, or via any Time-Based One-Time Password (TOTP) apps, such as my favorite, Google Authenticator.
To enable it, under the “Account sign-in” section that you see above, click “change” on Two-Step verification.
You will see this nice picture:

After going through the few simple steps necessary to enable it, at the end you will receive an Emergency backup code:

It’s important that you keep this code in a safe place. You need it if you lose your phone, and want to regain access to your Dropbox.

Note: Writing a code or a password on a piece of paper might be sufficient or not, depending on how “paranoid” you are in terms of security.
Me, every time I write things on paper, I apply a simple but powerful string cipher (no, I won’t tell you which one).
You can try a Caesar cipher, just for fun. Here’s how to write it in Python:

>>> import string 
>>> alphabet = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" 
>>> key = 2 
>>> tr = string.maketrans(alphabet, alphabet[key:] + alphabet[:key]) 
>>> "hellothere".translate(tr) 
'jgnnqvjgtg' 

In short, you can pass a string, and this program would “shift” the letters by two. It’s called Caesar cipher because Julius Caesar used it as a simple but effective way to cipher his military messages.

5) Enable notifications

Make sure that you receive an email every time a new device, or new application, is connected to your Dropbox account.
The reason for this is obvious: if you receive an email, and it wasn’t you, somebody else is accessing your Dropbox account right now. Take action.

6) Periodically check your web sessions and your apps

Take a quick look at the latest web session (again, in the “Security” tab). If something looks wrong, immediately change your password and notify the Dropbox team.

Same goes for the applications that have access to your Dropbox account. I use none, but if you do, take a look and remember to remove the ones that shouldn’t access your account anymore. There’s no reason to add unnecessary risks.

That’s it.

I hope that this list helps. Feel free to comment if you have suggestions, etc.

(Note: Please remember that opinions expressed here are my own, and they are based solely on publicly available information. If you want to know more about Dropbox’s security, don’t base your judgement solely on this blog post, but reach out to Dropbox directly. Similarly, if you want to know more about Amazon Web Services and its security, start from the AWS Security Center.)

It’s Friday, there’s still a lot to do, but I need a quick break, and I decided to read some of my feeds and take a casual look at my twitter stream.
This is how I found this interview with Jason Fried, CEO of 37signals.

There are many interesting points in the interview, but in short they can be summarized as:
1) love your company and your employees
2) do what’s best for them
3) don’t overburn; plan for the long term

This is one of the parts that I loved the most:

I’m a fan of growing slowly, carefully, methodically, of not getting big just for the sake of getting big. I think that rapid growth is typically of symptom of… there’s a sickness there. There’s a great quote by a guy named Ricardo Semler, author of the book Maverick. He said that only two things grow for the sake of growth: businesses and tumors. We have 35 employees at 37signals. We could have hundreds of employees if we wanted to–our revenues and profits support that–but I think we’d be worse off.

Isn’t it amazing?

I also loved the part about the cleaning lady, and the fact that she brings flowers.
I started buying flowers every week, from a super nice and super smart Polish florist that works just nearby my office in San Francisco.
I find flowers to be a great way to relax. You watch them, and for a few seconds you forget about being in a rush, or being busy.

See below the flowers that I have at home, right now. (Yes, I work from home often)

What do you think of the interview? Any comment?

Update: this short video from the guys at Vooza, on company culture, is also very inspiring. You need humble shoes.

Great short post on Minimal Mac:

Rather than say: “I am too busy, I don’t have any time for X.” I realize I can be honest and say I am not interested enough in X to do it.
Saying no is saying yes to other things.

I agree.
We all say we’re busy, all the time. I meet people and I ask “How are things?”, and they quite always answer “Busy”.
I usually reply that I’m busy too.
It’s true, we’re busy… But just because we can get busier than ever, doesn’t mean that we have to.
Let me repeat it:

Just because we can get busier than ever, doesn’t mean we have to.

Let me close this post with a nice picture. This one below my Brother Marco (on the right), who visited me recently here in San Francisco. I love him, and despite being super busy with my life, I spent some time with him and don’t regret a single “wasted” second.
Now he’s back in Italy, all is well.

Saying yes to the time with him meant saying no to other things.
And that’s how it should be.

Fred Wilson works at Union Square Ventures.
A few days ago he wrote a blog post titled “blogs we read“.
Quoting from him (bold is mine):
“Blog discovery is still too hard. There are so many great blogs out there and it is still too hard to find them.”

I agree!
Therefore, I decided to write my own list of blogs to follow.
But first… Why these blogs should be important to you?
Well, this time I want to list blogs that are important mostly from a work perspective. If you are into Startups, Technology, Innovation, Cloud (STIC) then these blogs will make a lot of sense. I might write another blog post on “other” types of blogs, such as food blogs and the like.
But for now… This is my golden list of STIC blogs. Yeah, I came up with the acronym. Maybe it will “stick”, maybe not.
The order is meant to be a mix of a proper ranking, and a random list, so don’t think that #1 is necessarily better than #2, etc.
Here they come.

#1: Paul Graham

Tags: #vc, #technology, #business (#vc means Venture Capital)
Paul is one of the most respected entrepreneurs and VCs in technology. He blogs quite rarely, but when he does he writes “essays” that are incredibly inspirational.
My favorite recent post: Be good. (well, not really recent)

#2: Werner Vogels

Tags: #aws, #technology (#aws means Amazon Web Services)
I know our CTO Werner Vogels personally, and I can’t praise him enough. He doesn’t blog often, and he often talks about AWS-specific technologies. However, what’s interesting is that he explains the reasons why a certain technology is interesting, and why a product or service has been designed that way. Given his deep roots in technology and distributed systems, you can guess that it’s really an interesting read.
My favorite recent post: Amazon DynamoDB

#3: Fred Wilson

Tags: #vc, #business, #technology
Fred is a VC based in New York City. This gives him a slightly different perspective on technology, deals and such. He blogs very often, and I sometimes discover new things or startups through his blog.
My favorite recent post: Retaining your employees

#4: Brad Feld

Tags: #vc, #technology
Brad does many things, one of which is being involved with TechStars, one of the most respected technology incubators. Because of this, and many diverse experiences as entrepreneur, investor, technologist, his blog posts are profound and stimulating.
My favorite recent post: The vomit moment

#5: James Hamilton

Tags: #aws, #infrastructure
James is a VP and distinguished engineer at Amazon Web Services. I can’t say much, but in short he’s one of the main guys behind the AWS Infrastructure around the world. His blog has been, for many years, the De Facto reference for innovation in infrastructure and data center design. I personally know him, and can guarantee that he’s super smart, humble, and an amazingly good speaker.
My favorite recent post: I/O performance (no longer) sucks in the Cloud
Bonus: read this if you want to know what an MV Dirona (and just a Dirona) is.

#6: Ben Horowitz

Tags: #vc, #technology
Ben writes long, intense, inspiring blog posts. It’s useful for startuppers, entrepreneurs, or people involved in technology. Highly recommended.
My favorite recent post: One on one (freshly baked!)

#7: Steve Blank

Tags: #vc, #startup
Long-time entrepreneur who is now retired and teaches entrepreneurship. Highly respected.
My favorite recent post: Panic at the pivot

#8: CuteGeek

Tags: #technology, #female (it might be my fault, but it seems there aren’t many STIC blogs written by ladies. I’m sure you know some, please add them in the comments. There are also a few that are not active anymore, such as Jess Lee’s blog)
I read it every once in a while, as I find the content a bit too “shallow”, compared to heavily technical blogs that I follow. However, it’s a good source of inspiration.
My favorite recent post: n.d.

#9: High Scalability

Tags: #multiauthors, #technology
I like that they talk about various challenges that companies face today, especially when scaling BIG. It’s very technical.
My favorite recent post: n.d.

#10: Google official blog

Tags: #multiauthors, #google, #technology
It’s all about Google products and services (which might be a limiting factor if you’re interested in more general discussions), but posts are usually technical and detailed, and they cover topics that are interesting and relevant.
My favorite recent post: n.d.

#11: JP Rangaswami

Tags: #salesforce, #innovation
I met JP Rangaswami in 2009 at a conference, and I was blown away by his ability to inspire, clarify, and stimulate our brains. I started reading his blog, and never stopped. His posts are long, and sometimes tough to follow if you’re just reading your feeds between a bite and a drink. You need to put some effort to keep up… But it’s worth it.
My favorite recent post: Doing by learning

#12: TED blog

Tags: #multiauthors, #innovation, #technology
Everybody knows TED, and following the blog is a great way to keep up with the latest talks, videos, etc.
My favorite recent post: Design a life with intent

#13: Tim Brown

Tags: #design
Tim Brown works at IDEO, one of the companies that I admire the most (they also have a wonderful office here in downtown San Francisco).
Despite being more about design than technology, I often found that his posts have a lot in common with technology.
My favorite recent post: we apologize for the interruption in service

##

Well, that’s it for now. It took me a while, but I really hope you’ll like the list and make the most out of it.
Of course, it you have suggestions, just comment below.
Ciao.

Update: it seems that there is a very interesting “female” blog on technology. Let me add it below.

#14: Rashmi Sinha

Tags: #technology, #female
Rashmi is the Co-founder of Slideshare.com.
My favorite recent post: n.d.

Yesterday I had to install a few things from scratch on my Macbook air with Mac OS 10.7.
It was ages since the last time I’ve installed the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse.
What is Eclipse? A software development environment, which you can run on Windows, Mac OS X and any Linux flavor.
What is the AWS Toolkit? A plugin for Eclipse that makes it easier to develop Java Applications that use Amazon Web Services.
You can also use Java without Eclipse, with the appropriate SDK for Java.
Instead, if you’re not into Java, we have an SDK for PHP, Ruby and other languages, as well a detailed section for Python developers.

Back to Eclipse.
There are different flavors of Eclipse, and it’s important to pick the EE version (“Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers”) to be able to use the AWS Toolkit, otherwise you might encounter some errors.
After installing the “plain” Eclipse (EE version), you have to download the AWS Toolkit by going to Menu -> Help -> Install new software:

Figure 1: Getting started with Eclipse

In the “Work with” field, you should enter http://aws.amazon.com/eclipse, and then Eclipse will find its way to get the Toolkit. You can even specify if you want to download the Toolkit for all services, or only for a selected few.

Figure 2: Install new software.

During installation, you will notice that some content is unsigned. You can proceed, or uncheck the part related to Amazon Simple WorkFlow (SWF).

Figure 3: warning

You complete the installation, restart Eclipse, enter the path of your workspace (where Eclipse will save all your projects), and then you need to complete a couple more steps. Open the Amazon Web Services icon on the top left:

Figure 4: The AWS menu in Eclipse

From there you go to Preferences, and enter your AWS credentials, in order to be able to “call” APIs properly.

Figure 5: Entering your AWS Credentials

Nice, you’re all set. Now you can use the AWS Explorer and start playing around with the services that you want. Here below you can see some simple actions with Amazon DynamoDB:

Figure 6: playing around with Amazon DynamoDB in Eclipse

When using Amazon Web Services, you might want to use Eclipse to develop your applications, especially if you use Java.
Many python developers prefer a text-based editor, or Eclipse plugins such as PyDev, (and, yes, the discussion around which one is best is quite hot), but sometimes these solutions don’t integrate well with AWS, and require you to do things manually.
I’m not an expert coder (I was quite good years ago, but now I simply don’t code often enough), therefore I’ll leave the answer open.

Well, this was a rather simple, but hopefully clear, introduction on how to get started with Amazon Web Services, using Eclipse. You might also take a look at this official AWS document on how to get started with Eclipse.

I plan to write a follow-up blog post specific to DynamoDB. Would you like it? If so, what would you like me to cover?

I’m launching a new initiative: Cloud Riders.
Hackathon + Cloud + Travel.
The first one will be San Francisco to Las Vegas, in conjunction with our first global conference, AWS Re: Invent.
Check the link.