Swipe to Unlock: The Primer on Technology and Business Strategy

by Parth Detroja

What’s the difference between SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS? Let’s use an analogy: food. SaaS is like a restaurant: you just tell the waiter what food you want, and they’ll bring it to you. IaaS is like renting a kitchen: you have the space, but you have to bring your own ingredients and utensils and cook the food yourself. PaaS sits in between SaaS and IaaS: you give someone your ingredients and recipe, and they’ll prepare the food for you.

This is how Tor works: it wraps your communication in several layers of encryption and bounces it around many intermediate “relay” computers, each of which only knows the previous and next computers in the chain.[620] This way, it’s nearly impossible for anyone to trace communication over Tor; even the NSA reportedly has trouble with it.[621]

This is what’s called a “man-in-the-middle” attack.[696] Once the hacker made Sarah communicate over unencrypted HTTPS, he could sit in the middle of Sarah and Bank of America and “hear” everything they were saying to each other. By getting Sarah’s unencrypted password, the hacker could log into Sarah’s account himself and, say, send funds to his account!

Each time you charge your phone, that counts as a “charge cycle,” and after 500 charge cycles iPhone lose about 20% of their original capacity.[768] (So if you’ve noticed that your battery life gets worse as your phone ages, you haven’t gone crazy.)

To prevent random crashes, Apple decided to start slowing down older iPhones to reduce peak power usage, which would reduce the chance of crashes and improve battery life.[771]

Great Firewall of China, a set of restrictions on the internet put in place by the Chinese government to restrict the flow of information in and out of the country.

In 2009, Amazon noticed an up-and-coming online retail startup called Quidsi, which sold baby products on Diapers.com. Amazon sent an executive to have lunch with the Quidsi founders and offered to buy the company. The founders said no.[1440] But then Amazon started aggressively undercutting Diapers.com’s prices[1441] and rolling out a competing “Amazon Mom” program. It cost Amazon millions, but it ruined Quidsi, which was eventually forced to sell to Amazon at a steep discount.[1442] So it wasn’t all that surprising when Amazon aggressively entered the grocery market by buying Whole Foods in 2017 — which made the grocery chain Kroger’s stocks tumble 8% overnight.[1443] (Notice a pattern?)