Top Secret #23: The One Where Ned Bakes For The First Time Ever
This week, we talk about our OAuth client for social login, AuthN vs. AuthZ, panicking Italians, spider discovery, and more.
Previously I promised that I’d make cookies for people who signed up and started using Tesseral in July. I am now on the hook to make a bunch of cookies. (As context, I don’t know how to bake anything; I have never made cookies before.)
It’s been a learning experience for us all. Check out some behind-the-scenes footage of my baking adventures here.
A bunch of fun things are happening at Tesseral this week. We’re continuing to polish the product and we’re focused on making it way easier to use. Before long, we’ll land our revamped onboarding experience. As part of that effort, we’ve also built a default OAuth client for social logins, which means that our customers can just get Login with Google working out of the box – no extra configuration required.
Other things landing soon include expanded SDK coverage. We still have a lot of work to do, but it’s fun for us! Thanks for following along.
From The Blog
We’re trying to work on some accessible resources for folks who are trying to make sense of the identity and access management landscape. More to come soon!
What We’re Reading
DOGE Denizen Leaked API Key for xAI: this stuff happens – security is hard, and people make mistakes – but the article correctly observes that this is part of a pattern. That’s not super great.
How to Panic Italians? Jack Up the Price of Espresso: Italians love coffee. From the article: “Mr. Facchinetti, who lives in Genoa, called two espressos a day his ‘bare minimum,’ though that day he had already had four, and some days he has six.” That habit is getting expensive. People like Mr. Facchinetti and the Italian Espresso National Institute are sounding the alarm.
Ad Blockers for Real Life Are Now a Thing, Thanks to AR Glasses: wondering if I’m allowed to wear these while driving up the 101. It’d be nice to imagine away all of those billboards.
The $11,700,824 Contract That Plunged the NFL Into Chaos: lots of weird stuff going on in the NFL these days. The free agency market is totally broken. Consider the ongoing collusion scandal plaguing the NFL Players’ Association.
Albemarle County, Va., IDs Group Behind Ransomware Attack: looks like Inc. Ransom was behind this one. There are some good examples of their methods here from SentinelOne.
The Secret to Better Airplane Navigation Could Be Inside the Earth’s Crust: okay, this one is cool. I had no idea GPS interference was such a big issue. I had absolutely no intuition that the solution would be something called quantum sensing. This is a great read.
Nerd CornerTM
Earlier this week, I was wondering how many kinds of spider there are. I promise there was context; if you do the New York Times Crossword on the weekends, you might know what I’m talking about.
It turns out that there’s a website called the World Spider Catalog that keeps track of all the spiders. It says there are about 53,000 different species of spider.
One graphic caught my eye on the website. This is a graph of today’s currently recognized species (i.e., of the 53,000) based on when they were first described. Overall, we’re finding spiders at an increasing rate, but that’s not that interesting. For some reason, there was a huge spike in the number of spiders that people were finding at the end of the 19th century. And then things slowed down.
I really want to know what was going on.
Other Cool Stuff
Here are some neat links for you:
From The Archives
(2005) Gmail is opening up
(2012) The age of big data
(2015) Welcome to the AI conspiracy: the ‘Canadian Mafia’ behind tech’s latest craze
(2018) The overlooked wonders of Soviet-era industrial design
Thanks,
Ned