The Millions Silicon Valley Spends on Security for Execs

There’s plenty of talk about security when it comes to giant technical companies, like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple. But that’s all usually from the perspective of the software security and end-user privacy. Here’s a different perspective on the subject – “The Millions Silicon Valley Spends on Security for Execs“.

Apple’s most recent proxy statement, filed earlier this month, shows the company spent $310,000 on personal security for CEO Tim Cook. But that’s a fraction of other tech giants’ expenditures.
Amazon and Oracle spent about $1.6 million each in their most recent fiscal years to protect Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison, respectively, according to documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. And Google’s parent company, Alphabet, laid out more than $600,000 protecting CEO Sundar Pichai and almost $300,000 on security for former executive chair Eric Schmidt. In 2017, Intel spent $1.2 million to protect former CEO Brian Krzanich. Apple, Google, Intel, and Oracle declined to comment; Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was the costliest executive to protect; Facebook spent $7.3 million on his security in 2017, and last summer the company told investors that it anticipated spending $10 million annually.

Well, that’s pretty impressive in terms of money! But do they need it really? They do, at least, to some degree:

While Silicon Valley firms haven’t disclosed many threats to the safety of their executives or offices, they have good reason to take precautions. In December, Facebook evacuated its headquarters after the company received a bomb threat. Last year an unhappy YouTube user entered the company’s San Bruno, California, headquarters and shot three employees before killing herself. And in 1992 the president of Adobe, Charles Geschke, was kidnapped at gunpoint and rescued by the FBI.

Do you still dream of being an executive in a large company?

And now on to the Facebook Page


As I mentioned earlier, sharing of the posts from this blog to Facebook stopped working a while back, due to the changes in the Facebook API and polices.  Rather than completely giving up on it or continue with the annoying manual sharing, I’ve decided to try the Facebook Page approach (which I’d much rather not).

So, lo and behold, here comes the @MamchenkovBlog Facebook Page.  I’m sure it’ll take me a while to find the best way of using it, if there even is one.  Please bear with me until I figure this one out.  And, as always, if you have any tips or suggestions – do send them my way.

P.S.: This post is a test of the sharing to Facebook Page functionality.




Botwiki – an open catalog of friendly, useful, artistic online bots


Botwiki is an impressive collection of bots for a variety of social networks and collaboration tools – Twitter, Slack, Tubmlr, Facebook and Messenger, YouTube, Reddit, Telegram, Snapchat, and more.  You can browse all these by network or by category.

Here’s a random Twitter bot for you:

@holidaybot4000 is a Twitter bot that tweets holidays around the world for the given day, typically together with an image of the country’s flag.




The Internet in real time


The Internet in real time provides a visual insight into how much activity is happening on the web every second.  Counts for things like Facebook likes, tweets, and YouTube video views are updated every second, all on one page.

It fascinates me every time to see stuff like this, because, apart from the human activity in itself, I have a glimpse of an understanding of how much technology work is happening behind the scenes.




GraphQL – a query language for your API


GraphQL is a query language for the API.  It’s been used by the Facebook mobile app since 2012.  The specification was open sourced in 2015.  And now GitHub is getting on board as  well.  This looks interesting.