There are employers who insist that they be allowed to install this evil crap on the devices owned by the users. Apple is making a huge mistake allowing this.
This sort of crap is what helped bring down Blackberry. Pretty much anything that is good for a corporation is not good for the users.
This is one of those insidious things where they give a little for a bunch of corporate sales, then they give some more and more and more until they are kowtowing to the enterprise market and they are making Microsoft crap.
The iPhone is a very good phone. Keep it pristine, they kept the Telcos from installing bloatware and this is a huge part of the iPhone success. Corporations will be still forced to provide iPhones even if they don't allow paranoid IT people to turn them into shit.
Wow they found a study done by a company that sells auto accident insurance that doesn't like a self driving future. Wow. Stop the presses. What next Pop makes you thin? Cigarettes are good for healthy lungs. Vodka to help babies sleep?
I have repeatedly stated that the best part of Self Driving Cars will be the war on them declared by the many parties that are going to lose big when they come. Insurance companies are going to lead the charge, but I can even see traffic cops realizing that their days are numbered. Even the companies that paint lines on the road are going to hire lobbyists before this is done.
400 times might make a big difference when talking weight ratios and something like a PV powered aircraft. But for my roof. 400 times is misleading. Surface area is al that matters in that equation.
I really hope that this is not one of those things where they have a tiny postage stamp sized things freshly pulled from a beaker that can power an LED. Keep in mind that I can stuff some metal wires into a lemon and power an LED.
I want to see a demonstration unit that is doing something where I can calculate the power output. So a 5 KG battery boiling from room temperature a known amount of water. That is something where the energy efficiency is fairly high and the physics are boringly hard to fake.
I am sick of these battery breakthroughs not having any "proof" I am OK with a 10 minute video that shows one of their batteries doing something such as the boiling water thing sped up with a clock in the background. In fact I am far more interested in that than some MBA wannabe just sitting in a chair talking about how this technology will make people immortal on Mars.
But 5 minutes of blah blah, with 10 seconds in a lab showing some unknown motor or bulb running for a few seconds is not proof, it is nothing. Again, I can do stuff with a lemon. What will not happen is a few more developments that lets me drive a Tesla with that lemon.
Years ago they made great software that I relied upon to make my machines go. Now it produces bloated infestations of pain that are like getting Lyme disease, a bot fly, and Ebola from a single insect bite.
I would think the simple formula would be: If Symantec asks for something then it runs contrary to the public good. At this point if Symantec makes a large donation to fight cancer I would wonder if there are some benefits to cancer that they are hiding.
Yes, I over simplified by saying GT gets it wrong. What I should have said, is the simplistic application that most people take away from GT is that they will look at a prisoner's dilemma and forget about Mario and his flick knife.
If you look carefully NYC was very well designed with dickheads in mind. There are far fewer places where fairness, and politeness are required for the smooth flow of traffic.
In my old city there was a major rotary(roundabout or whatever) with 6 separate entrances/exits. It was all zipper merge. It basically worked for many decades. Finally they altered it to the classic car in the rotary has right of way.
I can say with complete certainty that a fairly important rotary with a perpetual zippier merge in the NYC would result in near endless rage.
OMG you have hit one of my white knuckled rage inducing pet peeves. It is not the BMW driving twat who just slalomed his way through a pedestrian crossing loaded with toddlers, or the bus that is driving 1km down the road, stopping strategically so that I can't pass, but the kindly person who stops at a two way stop where they don't have to stop, and waves a few cars through, or stops for the jaywalking pedestrian, or lets 8 cars turn left in front of them before going straight leaving me to a red light, etc.
These are some of the most dangerous drivers on the road. I suspect that what happens is that they aren't legally responsible for the accidents, but that there are a freakish number of accidents that happen around them as people don't expect their stupidity.
Here is a stat. Using this hail mary strategy, I got way more answers correct than incorrect. Maybe it is even a giant misapplication of GT. It may have simply played well with the type of questions on tests.
You are correct. The best strategy in theory is to study harder. But what amazing math superhero are you that you have never looked at a question on a test only to realize that it was not solvable by your toolkit. Either you study really really hard, haven't taken a challenging course, or have some pedantic aversion to taking wild guesses at otherwise hopeless questions.
My guess is that you are a third type. Someone who gets really pissed off when someone spoonfeeds people learning. You come from the school of where you must show off how fantastically masterful you are with esoteric language that is claimed to improve clarity and precision of speech when it not only does the opposite but has the primary goal of fluffing your ego.
One of my uber back burnered goals in life is to write a math textbook where I don't show off my Latex skills. Something where it is a joy to read. Clear, plain English with apologies and sidebars the moment I am forced to use anything that isn't shockingly clear. Maybe it can't be done. But the number of math books that I have read that will start with a fantastically simple example in paragraph one and have skipped to graduate level math in paragraph two astounds. I don't believe for a moment that they were written as an "Intro" to this or that but were written to impress.
My math book, for instance would not mention a single mathematician by name, no blathering histories about Gauss adding 1 to 100 when he was a fetus. No mentions of dual mathematicians cut down in their prime. Just a big toolbox that would open people's eyes.
When I studied Game Theory and couldn't work out an answer I would simple posit "What would the biggest d-bag in the entire world do?" Not just some asshole, but the biggest dbag on the entire planet. This served me very well.
Often in GT there are questions where you will have something where the end question would be "How would the captain share the 100 gold pieces among his 5 sailors?" Obviously the biggest d-bag in the entire world would keep 95 and share only 5. This or something very close to it would be the answer most of the time.
Where Game Theory often gets it wrong is that there is a second tier of math that people will impose on a GT scenario. So in the classic prisoner's dilemma the whole snitching as a default strategy is rebalanced by Mario cutting your face off if you snitch.
Also Game Theory is balanced culturally. For instance in most parts of Canada a four way stop sign will work very well with everyone taking their turn 99% of the time. A cultural sense of fair play keeps it functioning even though game theory says to never take your turn. I have been in some third world cut-throat countries where a four way stop would just end up with a bunch of cars all jammed in place nose to nose with scooters weaving in and around the mess. In these countries everyone is a snitch in the prisoner's dilemma.
They rape the shit out our privacy, working on ML and AI tools that will violate it even better, then when we say, "Hello, how about no?" they get all pissed off. I love the endless analogies that people are making with robbers being pissed off with locks, peeping toms pissed off with curtains, bank robbers being angered by bank guards, polio being dissed by Jonas Salk, etc.
It boils down to a simple pairing. Anything that makes our lives worse such as egregious privacy violations and annoying marketing, is bad. Anything that makes our lives better is good.
But the above pairing is even better because one happens to be the cure for the other. What is even more ironic is that Google will yell things such as adblockers will drive quality content behind paywalls. Paywalls that keep them from stealing things like news and reviews to aggregate on their site.
I have a feeling that when this chapter of the history of the internet is written people will call it the great google pause; the time when google held everyone to their narrow and ever obsolete view of how the internet should be structured. When someone crushes google's search engine dominance and google suddenly can't afford to bully anymore, it will be a good day.
Think about what kind of world it would be if somehow intel and microsoft had continued their dominance into mobile technology.
I really really hate it when some group does things "for my own good" when I want the exact opposite. For instance I really hate the phone app on the iPhone. Yet I can't remove or improve upon it. I want fine grained control over what my apps have access to and what information they get from my phone.
For instance I don't only want to cut my apps off from access to things like my camera, phonebook, GPS, etc. But I want to lie to my apps about cutting them off. So the app will think that it has access to these things but will only have crap fed to it. This way the app can't even say, "I won't work without access."
I want a firewall on my phone that cuts off anyone I want including the device manufacturer.
I want to run apps in the background, or not.
I also want to install apps that the company really really really doesn't want me to. So adblocking is not something I want apple, or google to decide for me. Apple is sort of going in the correct direction but what if they change their mind under pressure from government or other large corps?
I also want the ability to have apps that really manage my communications. For instance when I tell the phone to silence a call then I want that person's calls silenced for a very long time, an hour, a day, etc.
Then we get things like the phone only remembering so many calls back. I want my phone to remember every call I have ever received. What kind of storage would that take? Not much.
I want to be able to easily record my calls. By default it would be nice to record them all and then at the end of the call say, "Erase"
I want to encrypt the shit out of my phone with no risk of a back door. I want whatever type of encryption I want.
They will make money if they are making actual purchases. Holding my bag against someone's pocket for 2-3 seconds wouldn't be hard in a crowded train. Also my entire bag could be one huge pickup or set up pickups. The multiple card issue would certainly be a problem except that I could see some really good hackers actually doing a better job of reading cards than then original designers; plus the thief could have his hardware give him a red light and he would move on. Also bluetooth sucks when it comes to latency unless you use it very well and would be the last technology I would use for this sort of transmission. I might even go analog if I were doing it in a short range. And as for meeting spec, that is a question. How much have the readers stuck with spec if spec wasn't enough. I know that when I am programming RF stuff I often set the hardware to the maximum number of retries with the longest delay that the hardware's built in code will allow. If I were building a contactless payment system I could see actually going into the RF hardware and redoing its firmware to allow for even longer delays and timeouts if that would improve the system. For instance I use one Canadian bank where my contactless payment doesn't seem to work very reliably. When it doesn't work the teller says, "Oh you must bank with..." So either my bank has stuck to spec and some readers have figured out a way to accommodate such silliness or other readers have been badly programmed.
This last might not be all readers but it is something where a gang of thieves would readily identify any hardware that "cooperated" with them.
This attack is actually quite easy. The "Pickpocket" has one end of a transmitter not a POS system. The other end of the transmitter is waiting at cashier to make a payment. Effectively the system is fantastically dumb, just relaying the transaction requests back and fourth between the the checkout and the person's card.
The "getaway" is that they are leaving with the goods. If the store doesn't get paid, it doesn't matter.
This completely end runs the entire smart card encryption and every other security measure on the card. It is just a pair of repeaters that are extending the range of the card from 3cm to potentially miles.
I suspect that there are timeouts on the cards but if the repeaters don't induce much lag the speed of light should not add much. Still, depending on how generous these timeouts have been set, it may be possible to fire these signals through an LTE pair of phones giving the pickpockets an international range.
In theory a pickpocket could be having the signals relayed in a nice message queue fashion to a series of people waiting at automated checkouts. So the pickpocket could walk down a train while a small group of purchasers ring transaction after transaction through. Assuming a $100 limit per purchase not only could the pickpocket feed an easy 20 cards from a single train, but he could wait a few minutes before returning for a second pass down the train making it appear that the users were making a second purchase, and then a third and a fourth.
Doing the math that could net $2,000 per pass with maybe 3 possible passes before the pinless swipe limit were hit.
Then step out and do the next train car. Now we are looking at no less than $10,000 in goods per hour during rush hour.
This is assuming that it isn't one long train. If it is a train where you can walk the length of a crowded train it could potentially be 100 cards in a single run if the queuing system is properly organized.
When I first saw someone swipe a card without a pin this scheme popped into my head. I have just been waiting the years since for it to become public.
I suspect the fix won't be that easy because merely being less generous with the timeouts will probably exceed the capabilities of many cards and many machines, causing them to become unreliable.
One of the most interesting freedoms that I see that off the scale robotic construction will allow for is the development of completely new towns and cities. Some interesting little bit of waterfront could be rapidly built up into a very attractive place to live. If some sort of basic income becomes the norm then the demand to live in traditional cities will wane. This could be a fantastic opportunity to rid ourselves of rent charging overlords along with sclerotic stratified cities.
For the above reason I suspect that there will be pressure from landowners in high value areas to prevent these sort of competitive developments.
For instance I lived in the city of Halifax. They amalgamated a group of municipalities in the area into what is now one of the largest cites in the world (in land area). This has resulted in a complete cessation in municipal competition. Before the different municipalities would effectively be competing to have the best balance of taxes vs services. So if one municipality could clear snow or maintain roads while charging lower taxes, people could compare apples to apples and figure out what the crappy municipality was doing wrong. If this sort of crap continued for long enough then smart people would leave(I'm looking at you Dartmouth).
This competition has vanished. Also with Halifax being the employment center of the Nova Scotia Universe no distant municipality could provide much of a threat. Once that employment part of the equation is removed then it will be interesting to watch how people begin to reorganize where they choose to live. I suspect that many cities will turn out to be so very broken that whole new neighbouring cities will be born once the cost of creating them is minimal. Where this will be most prevalent will be highly indebted cities that are forced to charge high taxes to pay for high debts including previously over-generous pensions.
Let's watch the rich elites who will be looking at land ownership as one of the few remaining wealth engines starts to vanish in an era of post scarcity; land being something that you can't 3D print.
All they have to do is add a code (*64 or something) that reports the last call as undesired. Then when a very small number of people have reported the last call as undesired anybody who has subscribed to the undesired service doesn't get that calls from that number.
This would then take the paternalistic element out of the equation such as allowing politicians or charities to have a pass. Pretty much anyone who makes calls people don't want would then be cut off. This would include any sales calls that might meet the terms of "legitimate" such as businesses that have a "relationship" that allows them to make cold calls; calls that people actually don't want. Collection agencies would be cut off. Even crazy girlfriends who keep calling people would be cut off. Numbers could potentially be warned that they are about to cross the threshold.
Ideally even whole countries or calling services could be included. So if a single service allowed more than a small set number of their subscribers to be cut off they too would just be cut off. This would force them to screen their clients a bit better.
I don't see any reason any organization should be given a pass. Quite simply if a number of other people think that they should be cut off, I can't be bothered getting a call from them; no matter how legitimate they think their reason for calling me is. If other people didn't want to get a call, neither do I.
A simple example of this would be when I continuously report the hotmail emails from team hotmail as spam. They of course give themselves a pass. I checked with my friends and they were all "Hey, I report those too in the hopes that they would go away." There are all kinds of people who think that they are so very important, things such as charities and politicians, but the reality is that I and most other people want them out of their lives. If you do want to get these calls then you could not subscribe to the service.
That one was my initial thinking. Since then I have heard all kinds of stories about how he craved consistency. My thinking is that your theory is how it started but that his obsession with consistency is what made him different than the many traders who bite the bullet and send out statements that say, "You lost money this time around."
The vast majority of the time my GPS will give me an identical or better route than I planned. Once in a blue moon it suggests an identically named city that is about a 20 hour drive away. Once in a while I doubt the strange routing it will suggest but out of curiosity I will follow its suggestions and it is mostly correct. The key is to have a GPS program that shows you the overall routing instead of just the next turn. This way you can see if it is driving you back and fourth across a river, or taking you for a loop mid trip.
To understand the why can improve detection and prevention. A different ponzi scheme from the same time frame, Stanford, smells more like old fashioned greed. I have talked with Enron people and they told me that there was this insane culture of WIN. Apparently a huge amount of time was spent doing sporty things that were competitive. They both were driven to compete at all levels, but also hired and promoted people who were driven to win. So while greed and broken moral compasses were at work there, they were pushed to take risks so that they could be winners. Risks as in things with prison as a penalty, not just financial risks.
So detecting and preventing Madoff, Stanford, and Enron from both the perspective of regulators and investors it is good to understand the stories behind these goons.
This is why I love science articles like the above. They both help shape my world view and can confirm/refute some observations that I have made.
For instance an interesting one that I have seen is when people have regular access to insider information and make many successful trades, they tend to delude themselves into thinking that they are great traders. Then when the inside information supply dries up they often continue to trade with the same apparent reckless abandon that was previously supported by ill-gotten information. The consequences are pretty straightforward.
From what I read Bernie Madoff had a compulsion for consistency. When he played golf (and he was pretty good) he would apparently turn in an 80 every time. So I suspect that the vagaries of the market just went against his grain. This then begs the question. Did he run a Ponzi scheme because he was a crook, or did he pretty much have the wrong compulsion for the wrong industry.
I am pretty sure that I see this in other areas. For instance I was at an industrial company some years ago where an IT guy cut himself on the inside of a computer to the point where it may or may not have needed stitches. The company people freaked out. They were hinting that they would even bribe him not to report it. This got my curiosity going thinking that this injury would cause their worker's compensation rates to go up, or that it would spawn some kind of outsized investigation, but then a secratary said something like, "No, Dougie is obsessed with the fact that it has been 400 days accident free." I asked if that were true and she said it wasn't and that now for any minor injury he would hand out a week's vacation to not report it. So there was a huge sign that said 400 days accident free and everyone knew it was a lie except for Dougie's superiors.
So like most things in life I suspect that most people lie somewhere on a spectrum ranging from, "I couldn't give a shit about cheating, to, look at me the most consistent winner in the universe."
So while Madoff might have been scared that a bad report would result in fewer sales and higher redemptions, it was probably a situation where he would feel that he had somehow personally failed if he were to have to say that this year was 11% instead of 12%.
How about we eliminate the whole idea of staying on one side for each direction. Just let cars spread out and pass on the left or right. Everyone would slow way way way down
.
We could paint people's windshields so that only a small patch remained. That would slow people down. We could just put limiters on people's cars to keep them below 10mph.
We could ration fuel so that few people are able to drive.
We could make cars out of foam so it didn't really matter what they hit.
Or we could actually set minimum safety standards for cars on the road and make sure that there are no roadblocks to self driving cars which looks like the most promising safety technology to have ever hit the market.
Then when SDCs are actually a reasonably available thing, we could begin phasing out manually driven cars if it is shown that they are where they danger lay.
The theoretical price of the zero is $5, or about $7 Canadian. I am willing to bet that the walk in price for a zero will be $29 and the total delivered price will be about $40. Then we have the fees that some of the major shippers will ladle onto anything where they smell internet-order. These fees typically start at $40.
So I am not exaggerating that a zero will potentially cost $80.00 (60usd) in Canada. That is a lot of zeros.
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There are employers who insist that they be allowed to install this evil crap on the devices owned by the users. Apple is making a huge mistake allowing this.
This sort of crap is what helped bring down Blackberry. Pretty much anything that is good for a corporation is not good for the users.
This is one of those insidious things where they give a little for a bunch of corporate sales, then they give some more and more and more until they are kowtowing to the enterprise market and they are making Microsoft crap.
The iPhone is a very good phone. Keep it pristine, they kept the Telcos from installing bloatware and this is a huge part of the iPhone success. Corporations will be still forced to provide iPhones even if they don't allow paranoid IT people to turn them into shit.
Wow they found a study done by a company that sells auto accident insurance that doesn't like a self driving future. Wow. Stop the presses. What next Pop makes you thin? Cigarettes are good for healthy lungs. Vodka to help babies sleep?
I have repeatedly stated that the best part of Self Driving Cars will be the war on them declared by the many parties that are going to lose big when they come. Insurance companies are going to lead the charge, but I can even see traffic cops realizing that their days are numbered. Even the companies that paint lines on the road are going to hire lobbyists before this is done.
400 times might make a big difference when talking weight ratios and something like a PV powered aircraft. But for my roof. 400 times is misleading. Surface area is al that matters in that equation.
I really hope that this is not one of those things where they have a tiny postage stamp sized things freshly pulled from a beaker that can power an LED. Keep in mind that I can stuff some metal wires into a lemon and power an LED.
I want to see a demonstration unit that is doing something where I can calculate the power output. So a 5 KG battery boiling from room temperature a known amount of water. That is something where the energy efficiency is fairly high and the physics are boringly hard to fake.
I am sick of these battery breakthroughs not having any "proof" I am OK with a 10 minute video that shows one of their batteries doing something such as the boiling water thing sped up with a clock in the background. In fact I am far more interested in that than some MBA wannabe just sitting in a chair talking about how this technology will make people immortal on Mars.
But 5 minutes of blah blah, with 10 seconds in a lab showing some unknown motor or bulb running for a few seconds is not proof, it is nothing. Again, I can do stuff with a lemon. What will not happen is a few more developments that lets me drive a Tesla with that lemon.
Years ago they made great software that I relied upon to make my machines go. Now it produces bloated infestations of pain that are like getting Lyme disease, a bot fly, and Ebola from a single insect bite.
I would think the simple formula would be: If Symantec asks for something then it runs contrary to the public good. At this point if Symantec makes a large donation to fight cancer I would wonder if there are some benefits to cancer that they are hiding.
Yes, I over simplified by saying GT gets it wrong. What I should have said, is the simplistic application that most people take away from GT is that they will look at a prisoner's dilemma and forget about Mario and his flick knife.
If you look carefully NYC was very well designed with dickheads in mind. There are far fewer places where fairness, and politeness are required for the smooth flow of traffic.
In my old city there was a major rotary(roundabout or whatever) with 6 separate entrances/exits. It was all zipper merge. It basically worked for many decades. Finally they altered it to the classic car in the rotary has right of way.
I can say with complete certainty that a fairly important rotary with a perpetual zippier merge in the NYC would result in near endless rage.
OMG you have hit one of my white knuckled rage inducing pet peeves. It is not the BMW driving twat who just slalomed his way through a pedestrian crossing loaded with toddlers, or the bus that is driving 1km down the road, stopping strategically so that I can't pass, but the kindly person who stops at a two way stop where they don't have to stop, and waves a few cars through, or stops for the jaywalking pedestrian, or lets 8 cars turn left in front of them before going straight leaving me to a red light, etc.
These are some of the most dangerous drivers on the road. I suspect that what happens is that they aren't legally responsible for the accidents, but that there are a freakish number of accidents that happen around them as people don't expect their stupidity.
Here is a stat. Using this hail mary strategy, I got way more answers correct than incorrect. Maybe it is even a giant misapplication of GT. It may have simply played well with the type of questions on tests.
You are correct. The best strategy in theory is to study harder. But what amazing math superhero are you that you have never looked at a question on a test only to realize that it was not solvable by your toolkit. Either you study really really hard, haven't taken a challenging course, or have some pedantic aversion to taking wild guesses at otherwise hopeless questions.
My guess is that you are a third type. Someone who gets really pissed off when someone spoonfeeds people learning. You come from the school of where you must show off how fantastically masterful you are with esoteric language that is claimed to improve clarity and precision of speech when it not only does the opposite but has the primary goal of fluffing your ego.
One of my uber back burnered goals in life is to write a math textbook where I don't show off my Latex skills. Something where it is a joy to read. Clear, plain English with apologies and sidebars the moment I am forced to use anything that isn't shockingly clear. Maybe it can't be done. But the number of math books that I have read that will start with a fantastically simple example in paragraph one and have skipped to graduate level math in paragraph two astounds. I don't believe for a moment that they were written as an "Intro" to this or that but were written to impress.
My math book, for instance would not mention a single mathematician by name, no blathering histories about Gauss adding 1 to 100 when he was a fetus. No mentions of dual mathematicians cut down in their prime. Just a big toolbox that would open people's eyes.
When I studied Game Theory and couldn't work out an answer I would simple posit "What would the biggest d-bag in the entire world do?" Not just some asshole, but the biggest dbag on the entire planet. This served me very well.
Often in GT there are questions where you will have something where the end question would be "How would the captain share the 100 gold pieces among his 5 sailors?" Obviously the biggest d-bag in the entire world would keep 95 and share only 5. This or something very close to it would be the answer most of the time.
Where Game Theory often gets it wrong is that there is a second tier of math that people will impose on a GT scenario. So in the classic prisoner's dilemma the whole snitching as a default strategy is rebalanced by Mario cutting your face off if you snitch.
Also Game Theory is balanced culturally. For instance in most parts of Canada a four way stop sign will work very well with everyone taking their turn 99% of the time. A cultural sense of fair play keeps it functioning even though game theory says to never take your turn. I have been in some third world cut-throat countries where a four way stop would just end up with a bunch of cars all jammed in place nose to nose with scooters weaving in and around the mess. In these countries everyone is a snitch in the prisoner's dilemma.
They rape the shit out our privacy, working on ML and AI tools that will violate it even better, then when we say, "Hello, how about no?" they get all pissed off. I love the endless analogies that people are making with robbers being pissed off with locks, peeping toms pissed off with curtains, bank robbers being angered by bank guards, polio being dissed by Jonas Salk, etc.
It boils down to a simple pairing. Anything that makes our lives worse such as egregious privacy violations and annoying marketing, is bad. Anything that makes our lives better is good.
But the above pairing is even better because one happens to be the cure for the other. What is even more ironic is that Google will yell things such as adblockers will drive quality content behind paywalls. Paywalls that keep them from stealing things like news and reviews to aggregate on their site.
I have a feeling that when this chapter of the history of the internet is written people will call it the great google pause; the time when google held everyone to their narrow and ever obsolete view of how the internet should be structured. When someone crushes google's search engine dominance and google suddenly can't afford to bully anymore, it will be a good day.
Think about what kind of world it would be if somehow intel and microsoft had continued their dominance into mobile technology.
I really really hate it when some group does things "for my own good" when I want the exact opposite. For instance I really hate the phone app on the iPhone. Yet I can't remove or improve upon it. I want fine grained control over what my apps have access to and what information they get from my phone.
For instance I don't only want to cut my apps off from access to things like my camera, phonebook, GPS, etc. But I want to lie to my apps about cutting them off. So the app will think that it has access to these things but will only have crap fed to it. This way the app can't even say, "I won't work without access."
I want a firewall on my phone that cuts off anyone I want including the device manufacturer.
I want to run apps in the background, or not.
I also want to install apps that the company really really really doesn't want me to. So adblocking is not something I want apple, or google to decide for me. Apple is sort of going in the correct direction but what if they change their mind under pressure from government or other large corps?
I also want the ability to have apps that really manage my communications. For instance when I tell the phone to silence a call then I want that person's calls silenced for a very long time, an hour, a day, etc.
Then we get things like the phone only remembering so many calls back. I want my phone to remember every call I have ever received. What kind of storage would that take? Not much.
I want to be able to easily record my calls. By default it would be nice to record them all and then at the end of the call say, "Erase"
I want to encrypt the shit out of my phone with no risk of a back door. I want whatever type of encryption I want.
Basically I want to actually own my phone.
They will make money if they are making actual purchases. Holding my bag against someone's pocket for 2-3 seconds wouldn't be hard in a crowded train. Also my entire bag could be one huge pickup or set up pickups. The multiple card issue would certainly be a problem except that I could see some really good hackers actually doing a better job of reading cards than then original designers; plus the thief could have his hardware give him a red light and he would move on. Also bluetooth sucks when it comes to latency unless you use it very well and would be the last technology I would use for this sort of transmission. I might even go analog if I were doing it in a short range. And as for meeting spec, that is a question. How much have the readers stuck with spec if spec wasn't enough. I know that when I am programming RF stuff I often set the hardware to the maximum number of retries with the longest delay that the hardware's built in code will allow. If I were building a contactless payment system I could see actually going into the RF hardware and redoing its firmware to allow for even longer delays and timeouts if that would improve the system. For instance I use one Canadian bank where my contactless payment doesn't seem to work very reliably. When it doesn't work the teller says, "Oh you must bank with ..." So either my bank has stuck to spec and some readers have figured out a way to accommodate such silliness or other readers have been badly programmed.
This last might not be all readers but it is something where a gang of thieves would readily identify any hardware that "cooperated" with them.
This attack is actually quite easy. The "Pickpocket" has one end of a transmitter not a POS system. The other end of the transmitter is waiting at cashier to make a payment. Effectively the system is fantastically dumb, just relaying the transaction requests back and fourth between the the checkout and the person's card.
The "getaway" is that they are leaving with the goods. If the store doesn't get paid, it doesn't matter.
This completely end runs the entire smart card encryption and every other security measure on the card. It is just a pair of repeaters that are extending the range of the card from 3cm to potentially miles.
I suspect that there are timeouts on the cards but if the repeaters don't induce much lag the speed of light should not add much. Still, depending on how generous these timeouts have been set, it may be possible to fire these signals through an LTE pair of phones giving the pickpockets an international range.
In theory a pickpocket could be having the signals relayed in a nice message queue fashion to a series of people waiting at automated checkouts. So the pickpocket could walk down a train while a small group of purchasers ring transaction after transaction through. Assuming a $100 limit per purchase not only could the pickpocket feed an easy 20 cards from a single train, but he could wait a few minutes before returning for a second pass down the train making it appear that the users were making a second purchase, and then a third and a fourth.
Doing the math that could net $2,000 per pass with maybe 3 possible passes before the pinless swipe limit were hit.
Then step out and do the next train car. Now we are looking at no less than $10,000 in goods per hour during rush hour.
This is assuming that it isn't one long train. If it is a train where you can walk the length of a crowded train it could potentially be 100 cards in a single run if the queuing system is properly organized.
When I first saw someone swipe a card without a pin this scheme popped into my head. I have just been waiting the years since for it to become public.
I suspect the fix won't be that easy because merely being less generous with the timeouts will probably exceed the capabilities of many cards and many machines, causing them to become unreliable.
When calculating how much was lost when people are torrenting music they would be: one stream one sale.
One of the most interesting freedoms that I see that off the scale robotic construction will allow for is the development of completely new towns and cities. Some interesting little bit of waterfront could be rapidly built up into a very attractive place to live. If some sort of basic income becomes the norm then the demand to live in traditional cities will wane. This could be a fantastic opportunity to rid ourselves of rent charging overlords along with sclerotic stratified cities.
For the above reason I suspect that there will be pressure from landowners in high value areas to prevent these sort of competitive developments.
For instance I lived in the city of Halifax. They amalgamated a group of municipalities in the area into what is now one of the largest cites in the world (in land area). This has resulted in a complete cessation in municipal competition. Before the different municipalities would effectively be competing to have the best balance of taxes vs services. So if one municipality could clear snow or maintain roads while charging lower taxes, people could compare apples to apples and figure out what the crappy municipality was doing wrong. If this sort of crap continued for long enough then smart people would leave(I'm looking at you Dartmouth).
This competition has vanished. Also with Halifax being the employment center of the Nova Scotia Universe no distant municipality could provide much of a threat. Once that employment part of the equation is removed then it will be interesting to watch how people begin to reorganize where they choose to live. I suspect that many cities will turn out to be so very broken that whole new neighbouring cities will be born once the cost of creating them is minimal. Where this will be most prevalent will be highly indebted cities that are forced to charge high taxes to pay for high debts including previously over-generous pensions.
Let's watch the rich elites who will be looking at land ownership as one of the few remaining wealth engines starts to vanish in an era of post scarcity; land being something that you can't 3D print.
All they have to do is add a code (*64 or something) that reports the last call as undesired. Then when a very small number of people have reported the last call as undesired anybody who has subscribed to the undesired service doesn't get that calls from that number.
This would then take the paternalistic element out of the equation such as allowing politicians or charities to have a pass. Pretty much anyone who makes calls people don't want would then be cut off. This would include any sales calls that might meet the terms of "legitimate" such as businesses that have a "relationship" that allows them to make cold calls; calls that people actually don't want. Collection agencies would be cut off. Even crazy girlfriends who keep calling people would be cut off. Numbers could potentially be warned that they are about to cross the threshold.
Ideally even whole countries or calling services could be included. So if a single service allowed more than a small set number of their subscribers to be cut off they too would just be cut off. This would force them to screen their clients a bit better.
I don't see any reason any organization should be given a pass. Quite simply if a number of other people think that they should be cut off, I can't be bothered getting a call from them; no matter how legitimate they think their reason for calling me is. If other people didn't want to get a call, neither do I.
A simple example of this would be when I continuously report the hotmail emails from team hotmail as spam. They of course give themselves a pass. I checked with my friends and they were all "Hey, I report those too in the hopes that they would go away." There are all kinds of people who think that they are so very important, things such as charities and politicians, but the reality is that I and most other people want them out of their lives. If you do want to get these calls then you could not subscribe to the service.
That one was my initial thinking. Since then I have heard all kinds of stories about how he craved consistency. My thinking is that your theory is how it started but that his obsession with consistency is what made him different than the many traders who bite the bullet and send out statements that say, "You lost money this time around."
I was a bit puzzled. It is sort of like: people get cancer, get over it, you're wasting your time trying to explain why.
The vast majority of the time my GPS will give me an identical or better route than I planned. Once in a blue moon it suggests an identically named city that is about a 20 hour drive away. Once in a while I doubt the strange routing it will suggest but out of curiosity I will follow its suggestions and it is mostly correct. The key is to have a GPS program that shows you the overall routing instead of just the next turn. This way you can see if it is driving you back and fourth across a river, or taking you for a loop mid trip.
To understand the why can improve detection and prevention. A different ponzi scheme from the same time frame, Stanford, smells more like old fashioned greed. I have talked with Enron people and they told me that there was this insane culture of WIN. Apparently a huge amount of time was spent doing sporty things that were competitive. They both were driven to compete at all levels, but also hired and promoted people who were driven to win. So while greed and broken moral compasses were at work there, they were pushed to take risks so that they could be winners. Risks as in things with prison as a penalty, not just financial risks.
So detecting and preventing Madoff, Stanford, and Enron from both the perspective of regulators and investors it is good to understand the stories behind these goons.
This is why I love science articles like the above. They both help shape my world view and can confirm/refute some observations that I have made.
For instance an interesting one that I have seen is when people have regular access to insider information and make many successful trades, they tend to delude themselves into thinking that they are great traders. Then when the inside information supply dries up they often continue to trade with the same apparent reckless abandon that was previously supported by ill-gotten information. The consequences are pretty straightforward.
From what I read Bernie Madoff had a compulsion for consistency. When he played golf (and he was pretty good) he would apparently turn in an 80 every time. So I suspect that the vagaries of the market just went against his grain. This then begs the question. Did he run a Ponzi scheme because he was a crook, or did he pretty much have the wrong compulsion for the wrong industry.
I am pretty sure that I see this in other areas. For instance I was at an industrial company some years ago where an IT guy cut himself on the inside of a computer to the point where it may or may not have needed stitches. The company people freaked out. They were hinting that they would even bribe him not to report it. This got my curiosity going thinking that this injury would cause their worker's compensation rates to go up, or that it would spawn some kind of outsized investigation, but then a secratary said something like, "No, Dougie is obsessed with the fact that it has been 400 days accident free." I asked if that were true and she said it wasn't and that now for any minor injury he would hand out a week's vacation to not report it. So there was a huge sign that said 400 days accident free and everyone knew it was a lie except for Dougie's superiors.
So like most things in life I suspect that most people lie somewhere on a spectrum ranging from, "I couldn't give a shit about cheating, to, look at me the most consistent winner in the universe."
So while Madoff might have been scared that a bad report would result in fewer sales and higher redemptions, it was probably a situation where he would feel that he had somehow personally failed if he were to have to say that this year was 11% instead of 12%.
Those are the cheapest Pi's that I have seen in Canada. Still wildly overpriced when compared to the theoretical prices, but still, by far the lowest.
How about we eliminate the whole idea of staying on one side for each direction. Just let cars spread out and pass on the left or right. Everyone would slow way way way down
. We could paint people's windshields so that only a small patch remained. That would slow people down. We could just put limiters on people's cars to keep them below 10mph.
We could ration fuel so that few people are able to drive.
We could make cars out of foam so it didn't really matter what they hit.
Or we could actually set minimum safety standards for cars on the road and make sure that there are no roadblocks to self driving cars which looks like the most promising safety technology to have ever hit the market.
Then when SDCs are actually a reasonably available thing, we could begin phasing out manually driven cars if it is shown that they are where they danger lay.
The theoretical price of the zero is $5, or about $7 Canadian. I am willing to bet that the walk in price for a zero will be $29 and the total delivered price will be about $40. Then we have the fees that some of the major shippers will ladle onto anything where they smell internet-order. These fees typically start at $40.
So I am not exaggerating that a zero will potentially cost $80.00 (60usd) in Canada. That is a lot of zeros.