This is a story of how an afternoon causing mischief with a little bug in a video game led me to on a quest to purge a potentially dangerous exploit from software used by businesses and governments around the world, and also provided me with a practical lesson on why to report issues you find in code, even if they seem small at first.
It all started one afternoon this past Fall in an undergraduate class on entrepreneurship I was taking at Harvard Business School. …
Use this app to see your friends on Venmo publicly revealing their failed dates, late night food runs, losing poker streaks, and more…
This blog post was adapted from findings in my recent paper.
As a college student in the U.S., Venmo has become an app that is hard to live without. Whenever I end up owing someone money for a meal they covered, a bet I lost, or even rent, Venmo is there to help settle the tab instantly. By simply typing in a name, an amount to send and a message describing what the payment is for, I can send almost anyone money using nothing but my phone. It’s just so easy to instantly settle debts on the go.
After a…
Edit: At Facebook’s request I have again deactivated the *official* version of the extension. Furthermore, Facebook has deactivated location sharing from the desktop webpage so the extension will not work.
When I came to college Facebook Messenger became an integral part of my digital life. I quickly found that it was the easiest way to keep in touch with old high school friends, contact people I had just met, organize impromptu poker games with people I hardly knew, and everything in between. …
I have always found it fascinating how fundamental results from math can be applied to solve concrete computational problems that I encounter when writing software. However, while I love math I often find that many recent results are increasingly abstract and not in any way applicable to problems that I can imagine running into. …
