There's incomplete data, as in "we only have 10% of the potential data points", and there's incomplete data as in "we simply didn't provide any information on this aspect". The former can absolutely be dealt with - everything from hard science through to opinion polls does so all the time. However, when you're missing an entire data set as is the case here, it's a little harder - if not impossible - to work around that and still have a suitably highly degree of confidence in the conclusions to convince others - especially when those others are going to be skeptical of the results. "Thousands of ads" tells us absolutely nothing about the number of times those ads were actually viewed (albeit likely a few orders of magnitude larger), let alone how much influence those ads might have had on those doing the viewing.
I wasn't suggesting that we should ignore the problem, just pointing out that it's not something that can easily be proven and people are highly likely to question any such findings. Studies have shown time and time again that the techniques used here are effective at influencing opinion in a general case, even though people continually claim that ads don't have any effect on them [1] and so are less likely to accept any such finding in the more specific case involving them specifically. As you say, the safest thing to do is try to make sure that it doesn't happen again, which does involve an understanding of problem, and bandaids like bans on "political" ads from outside that jurisdiction and mandatory banners citing who paid for the ad are only really scratching the surface.
[1] Potentially true only in two scenarios: the product isn't something that you would be interested in, or its for something a product that you would only purchase in a manner that will negate any subconcious influence from marketing - e.g. purely on evaluation of specifications.
Since TFS is suffering from incomplete data, we can't really draw that conclusion. What percentage of the ads submitted by Russian trolls or state agents do they believe this sample represents? 1%? 10%? All of them? There's a huge difference there, and that's before you take into account the number of impressions and how well targetted they were: if McDonald's were to scattergun 100 different ads across 100,000 random people and send a single ad to 10,000,000 people known to frequent fast food joints, I suspect the latter is going to provide a much greater RoI, even allowing for the higher cost.
Proving that the ads were actually effective in doing so though - in both the Russian and my fast food example - is entirely different matter of course, and far more subjective - especially given that people generally don't like to admit they might have been coerced into a course of action though some form of manipulation.
You get the link to the webpage, same as any other system that Google doesn't have 100% control over. You'll only get the original email through the GMail web interface, GMail App, or the click-through page. In otherwords this entire system hingles on the ability of Google to successfully block "Save As" functionality (e.g. an arms race with browser plugin authors that attempt to keep it enabled), convince people that it actually has value, and that mail admins won't simply start blocking the emails outright due to excessive abuse in phishing attempts.
He's a US blogger that spams every single post to his personal blog to the Slashdot submissions queue and then somehow manages to get it almost instantly upvoted to a red rating, presumbly as some kind of lame attempt at SEO and generating views. (Note that I'm assuming that the Slashdot config isn't so lame as to have the queue indexed due to the amount of spam that gets posted to it, presumably also for attempted SEO via backlink reasons). It's mostly opinion pieces, often misguided and/or misinformed, and cribbing off ideas posted by others, e.g. myself and several others raised and discussed this very possibility in the original Slashdot story on Confidential Mode. I'd say less like Jon Katz, and more Bennett Hazleton from back in the days when Slashdot was still owned by DICE, only even more desperate for page views.
Agreed; the part of the summary where it says "no individual has been arrested where a false positive alert has led to an intervention" implies that some of these false positives are resolved by an officer doing further checks, which might just be comparing the CCTV image with a mugshot and deciding it's not a match. Privacy issues of the surveillance state aside, as far as the member of the public that was incorrectly flagged is concerned, I guess that's no harm, no foul because they are none the wiser.
However, it then goes on to claim that "and no members of the public have complained", so presumably at least some of those manual checks also including getting an officer to stop some of the targets and verify their ID, otherwise the possibility of complaints wouldn't even be an issue. Without data on that split it's kind of hard to gauge the effectiveness of the system as a whole, and it would also be useful to have the other side of the coin; how many of the 173 people that were arrested as a result of the system does the South Wales Police dept. think might have otherwise been overlooked in the crowds? If that's a significant fraction of those 173 arrests, then that seems like it's a pretty good tool to help maintain law an order in a public space to me, at least until the criminals realise they need to avoid such places and/or provide a clear image to the cameras.
Sure, but again, the use of a blockchain helps with the ID verification process how, exactly? The problem here isn't one of linking the purchaser of a given ticket to that ticket which is trivial with unique serial numbers, it's demonstrating that the person the ticket seller thought they were selling the ticket to is actually the same person using it at the venue - and that means some form of ID verification, blockchain or no blockchain. You might be able to speed that up if you use NFC or QRCode based scanning on entry with an automated barrier like some metro systems and airline boarding gates, so perhaps that's their angle - they are using the blockchain to somehow link that code to the ticket's intended owner and make it non-transferrable.
The whole point of blockchain is to facilitate a indelible public ledger, e.g. you'd have the ability to track a given token (or ticket in this instance) as it's transferred from original seller through a chain of recipients to its eventual user and for everyone to have visibility of that process. For event ticket sales neither is a requirement as (in theory) the ticket should only be transferred once - from Aventus, TicketMaster, etc. to the venue attendee - and the latter might actually be a extra legal liability under legislation like the GDPR since it's not only likely to entail personal data being retained for verification, but also making that data public for verification - where's the benefit over a regular DB? Also, given that members of some alternative communities have been victimised for things as basic as musical preferences, there might also be people who might not be comfortable with their choice of events being a matter of public record.
Based on TFS I'm guessing they'll be recording the name of the purchaser of the ticket(s) in the blockchain and somehow using this to try and prevent resale or transfer of the tickets by comparing that info with an ID at the venue. I'm assuming they've got a system that allows for tickets bought for a group, as a gift, for use as a prize, or any other legitimate scenarios where the specific individual(s) attending the event might not be known at time of purchase and/or the actual purchaser might not be present, but that's not strictly necessary if they are prepared to accept the lost sales that might result if they don't.
Of course, they could do all that with just a regular database that links a unique ticket serial number to the ticket's purchaser or intended user at the original sale with no block chain required, but that wouldn't have quite the same effect at generating hype and (more importantly) investment money, would it?
As you say, there's no expectation of privacy at airports, nor is facial recognition tech at airports is nothing new - it's actually a staple of detecting anomalous behaviour patterns for individuals for many terminals - the novel application here is more the customer service angle (the customers of airports being the airlines, not their passengers). When you're facing extra gate fees and the possibility of having to offload baggage (more delays, fees, and potential knock-on effects with scheduling of subsequent flights for the aircraft and takeoff/landing slots) and something like this is going to be something that airlines are going to be all over. That the airports benefit by freeing up the gate for the next arrival promptly and all the other passengers on the plane don't have their travel plans messed around with as well, and what's there not too like?
If they have evidence of other breaches then we'll be hearing about it pretty soon, I expect. May 25th is GDPR day, and I'm pretty sure that the EU would like nothing better than to take 4% of Facebook's annual turnover in penalties if they are shown to have failed to meet the requirement that they disclose a breach within 72 hours of discovery. I also doubt that Cambridge Analytica was far from the only company that was (or still is) pulling personal data out of Facebook, so even if Facebook complies with the GDPR they're probably still going to be dealing with a lot of negative press.
They've had two years since the GDPR was signed to law to prepare, and arguably *ten* years since the working group tasked with creating the GDPR first started outlining what they were going to propose to assess the likely impacts. ICANN have had plenty of time to "adjust" - and that other WHOIS providers around the world have adjusted is evidence of that - but chose to stick their head in the sand and claim it had nothing to do with them then, when it became obvious that was incorrect, to rely on something even their own legal counsel and contracted registrars told them was not going to fly. GDPR might be a vague legal quagmire for those that have to comply with it, but this, and the contractual mess it creates for their contracted registrars, is entirely down to ICANN's mismangement of the situation.
The fact that all the Out transactions from a demonstrable BGP hijaack and well implemented spoof site scam end up in this account isn't enough to convince you that it's shady as hell and the owner is just a (fairly serious) miner? Try taking a look at the transaction patterns, yes there are a lot of of them, but the patterns are pretty clear to spot; lots of transfers in a short timeframe, a pause, then another batch and so on. Yeah, I'm pretty sure this wallet's owner is almost certainly involved in mining, but I doubt very much that it's the kind with lots of GPUs or ASICs in a rack so much as lots of malware running on systems without their owner's knowledge and other scam campaigns like the one in TFA. Pretty sure that the wallet has now caught the attention of various authorities though, so might be interesting for the owner to extract their funds if nothing else
Try following the "Out" transactions. Eventually (five or six hops) you're going to end up at this wallet, which currently contains over $17 MILLION USD of ETH. Not bad for a couple of hours work...
2.) When they proceed as planned and and walk back those lipservice promises of protections made to get Congress off their back, it's easier if the non-EU users are already outside EU jusrisdiction.
Nor, I suspect, do many people who don't mingle with Silicon Valley types on a regular basis, which essentially turns the whole article into a meta example of what it claims. The author makes a claim that people in Silicon Valley (amongst other groups) are losing touch with reality because they are making vacuous statements, and then renders the article itself vacuous by failing to provide any supporting evidence or examples to back up his assertion. Or maybe it's just meant to be ironic?
It presently seems to be mostly western focussed, so the lack of Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE, or Korean ones like Samsung doesn't seem to much of an issue, and Amazon, Apple, and Twitter are also missing on the US front, so I'm not reading too much into the current membership. If the organisation starts to gain a bit of traction and they still don't sign up, that's when you can probably start reading a little more into it - I'd also like to see Intel and AMD on there , given the security issues surrounding their on-chip management engines.
Far more interesting to me is that despite the list being quite heavy on hardware and software vendors in the security sector, a couple of quite notable omissions are Checkpoint and Kaspersky Labs. The former because they're a company I've heard from multiple sources may have had some involvement with the development of Stuxnet, and as a perimeter firewall vendor someone you'd need to have absolute trust in (although Fortinet is another firewall vendor not on the list). The latter because you'd think they'd jump at a chance to try and further distance themselves from the allegations of their software being used as a government backdoor and restore some public trust via a little positive PR.
Of course, none of this is going to matter if the company in question is "requested" to assist via a NSL or some other secrecy bound court order.
FIFTH time. At least. You left off Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu which started in the 1960s (took a little longer to deliver a product though; Duke Nukem Forever has nothing on Ted), but even that referenced the hypothetical Memex system proposed by Vannevar Bush in 1945.
Depends on how accurate the reporting is. BTC wallet to BTC wallet transactions will, of course, be recorded in the blockchain, but if they actually mean the logs of customer transactions between Coinsecure's user accounts and the Coinsecure wallet(s), then that's entirely different and it's quite possible that someone with the right level of access within Coinsecure could erase all the logs. The trick would be to mask the BTC leaving Coinsecure's wallets, either through tumbling or by not getting greedy and only taking enough it would not be possible to determine which BTC passing in and out of Coinsecure's wallets were stolen and which are legitimate transactions. The latter might not be too difficult if there are enough transactions and all of the internal logs are gone, but you'd probably still want to tumble the stolen coins, just to be sure.
Since they specifically state "Americans", which almost certainly actually means "USians" rather than the entire continent or US/Canada, probably not. I'm not so sure you could extrapolate out very easily though, since while people in Europe are generally a lot more aware of their privacy and would probably head for the exits in even greater numbers, there are plenty of other areas where lack of privacy is just a fact of life and this could be seen as just more of the same. It also depends on usage patterns; if that 1% of global users are biased towards users that view the most ads, then that could well have a much larger impact on the bottom line than if 10% of global users who barely use Facebook at all were to stop doing so.
Truth will out though. Facebook's next quarterly earnings statement is due after market cloe on the 25th April, which is probably not going to suffer from any appreciable impact from the Cambridge Analytica fallout, so the one after that - around the tail end of July - should be quite enlightening.
Also, does Amazon even share its mountain of data with third parties? They absolutely use it to help target products at potential customers within their store for Marketplace partners, but ultimately it seems that it's in Amazon's best interest to keep all that data to themselves as even meta access to it could potentially enable a competitor to profit at Amazon's expense. They're undeniably very good at what they do, and one of the largest players - if not THE largest - in many of the sectors they are in, but selling customer data wholesale doesn't appear to be even on their radar.
That gaming of the system does seem to work on Android at least some of the time (it's definitely not guaranteed that it will - I'd guess my success rate is 50:50), but there are a lot of variables so the testing methodology would need to be pretty good to pin down exactly who is going what. Google is almost certainly listening as well - even if only for the "OK Google" keyphrase - so you'd need to do a series of tests with various permutations of apps and services with microphone access enabled/disabled, then monitor which ad networks and data brokers are actually serving the ads related to whatever you talked about to try and game the system. Don't forget that there is a massive web of resellers at work here too, so it might not be at all obvious that a given ad served from a third-party server was targetted based on Google's data, Facebook's data, or some other source entirely.
My first thought was that was some kind of rhetorical headline that would lead into an analysis of what kinds of data Oculus was gathering and how they were funneling all of it to Facebook (and a long, long, list of other "partners"), but apparently there are still some naive people out there who really do think that companies with a business model of monetizing your personal data might protect some arbitrary fraction of it rather than profit of it. I can only assume they have spent the last decade or two living under a rock, in a cave, on a remote island, and have had no other contact with humanity apart from the occassional message in a bottle that washes up on the shore. Frankly, it's almost to the point of being a Betteridge type thing, isn't it? Any headline that asks "How much of your data is a company sharing?" can be answered "All of it - including a whole bunch of stuff you had no idea they even had."
Same way they do any other transaction that is subject to tax but might bypass channels they can readily track: require you to declare your profits (or losses) from the transaction (or "investment", if you prefer) coupled with some deterrance in the form of severe sanctions (fines, jail time, etc.) for anyone who thinks they can keep their profits hidden from "the man" but fails to do so. Typically, in nations that are implementing this, the approach seems to be to class it as a form of capital gains (e.g. just like stocks, shares, etc.) and tax accordingly at similar rates. YMMV but, speaking from experience, if you're converting a large chunk of crypto currency into traditional currency and want it all above board, you can expect "the man" to take quite a large bite.
Or to somehow try to pop the crypto-currency bubble so that people get burnt and go back to investing their remaning funds (if any) in more traditional funds, such as those managed by Soros and his partners, e.g. by using his political leverage to get various legislations passed with the aim of driving the privacy and anti-regulation types into increasingly more niche and sketchy alt-coins, thus undermining a lot of the original support. Whether such a scheme would even work is another question entirely, but as long as he *thinks* it will he may be prepared to give it a try. I guess it depends on whether Soros is personally involved in decisions at this level or it's up to lower-level management, has changed his view on crypto currencies, or - as you say - just thinks he can get in, make some money, and get out before the pop he's expecting.
Or perhaps you could arrange to go to one of the various warehouses that are/were conduits for discarded electronics being sent to China for recycling? Since the Chinese enforced their ban on the import of "foreign garbage", the stuff is supposedly just piling up there and they might be prepared to let you take some of it off their hands for a small handling fee, or even for free. For more useful stuff though, e.g. contemporary equipment that is still likely to be in working order, I've also had good luck with auctions of office surplus and assets recovered from companies that have gone bust and are being liquidated. I got a really nice iSCSI SAN chassis, plus some switches and servers - all almost new - for less than $500, all told that way a few years back that are still doing all the heavy lifting on my home LAN.
Slashdot Mirror
There's incomplete data, as in "we only have 10% of the potential data points", and there's incomplete data as in "we simply didn't provide any information on this aspect". The former can absolutely be dealt with - everything from hard science through to opinion polls does so all the time. However, when you're missing an entire data set as is the case here, it's a little harder - if not impossible - to work around that and still have a suitably highly degree of confidence in the conclusions to convince others - especially when those others are going to be skeptical of the results. "Thousands of ads" tells us absolutely nothing about the number of times those ads were actually viewed (albeit likely a few orders of magnitude larger), let alone how much influence those ads might have had on those doing the viewing.
I wasn't suggesting that we should ignore the problem, just pointing out that it's not something that can easily be proven and people are highly likely to question any such findings. Studies have shown time and time again that the techniques used here are effective at influencing opinion in a general case, even though people continually claim that ads don't have any effect on them [1] and so are less likely to accept any such finding in the more specific case involving them specifically. As you say, the safest thing to do is try to make sure that it doesn't happen again, which does involve an understanding of problem, and bandaids like bans on "political" ads from outside that jurisdiction and mandatory banners citing who paid for the ad are only really scratching the surface.
[1] Potentially true only in two scenarios: the product isn't something that you would be interested in, or its for something a product that you would only purchase in a manner that will negate any subconcious influence from marketing - e.g. purely on evaluation of specifications.
Since TFS is suffering from incomplete data, we can't really draw that conclusion. What percentage of the ads submitted by Russian trolls or state agents do they believe this sample represents? 1%? 10%? All of them? There's a huge difference there, and that's before you take into account the number of impressions and how well targetted they were: if McDonald's were to scattergun 100 different ads across 100,000 random people and send a single ad to 10,000,000 people known to frequent fast food joints, I suspect the latter is going to provide a much greater RoI, even allowing for the higher cost.
Proving that the ads were actually effective in doing so though - in both the Russian and my fast food example - is entirely different matter of course, and far more subjective - especially given that people generally don't like to admit they might have been coerced into a course of action though some form of manipulation.
You get the link to the webpage, same as any other system that Google doesn't have 100% control over. You'll only get the original email through the GMail web interface, GMail App, or the click-through page. In otherwords this entire system hingles on the ability of Google to successfully block "Save As" functionality (e.g. an arms race with browser plugin authors that attempt to keep it enabled), convince people that it actually has value, and that mail admins won't simply start blocking the emails outright due to excessive abuse in phishing attempts.
He's a US blogger that spams every single post to his personal blog to the Slashdot submissions queue and then somehow manages to get it almost instantly upvoted to a red rating, presumbly as some kind of lame attempt at SEO and generating views. (Note that I'm assuming that the Slashdot config isn't so lame as to have the queue indexed due to the amount of spam that gets posted to it, presumably also for attempted SEO via backlink reasons). It's mostly opinion pieces, often misguided and/or misinformed, and cribbing off ideas posted by others, e.g. myself and several others raised and discussed this very possibility in the original Slashdot story on Confidential Mode. I'd say less like Jon Katz, and more Bennett Hazleton from back in the days when Slashdot was still owned by DICE, only even more desperate for page views.
Agreed; the part of the summary where it says "no individual has been arrested where a false positive alert has led to an intervention" implies that some of these false positives are resolved by an officer doing further checks, which might just be comparing the CCTV image with a mugshot and deciding it's not a match. Privacy issues of the surveillance state aside, as far as the member of the public that was incorrectly flagged is concerned, I guess that's no harm, no foul because they are none the wiser.
However, it then goes on to claim that "and no members of the public have complained", so presumably at least some of those manual checks also including getting an officer to stop some of the targets and verify their ID, otherwise the possibility of complaints wouldn't even be an issue. Without data on that split it's kind of hard to gauge the effectiveness of the system as a whole, and it would also be useful to have the other side of the coin; how many of the 173 people that were arrested as a result of the system does the South Wales Police dept. think might have otherwise been overlooked in the crowds? If that's a significant fraction of those 173 arrests, then that seems like it's a pretty good tool to help maintain law an order in a public space to me, at least until the criminals realise they need to avoid such places and/or provide a clear image to the cameras.
Sure, but again, the use of a blockchain helps with the ID verification process how, exactly? The problem here isn't one of linking the purchaser of a given ticket to that ticket which is trivial with unique serial numbers, it's demonstrating that the person the ticket seller thought they were selling the ticket to is actually the same person using it at the venue - and that means some form of ID verification, blockchain or no blockchain. You might be able to speed that up if you use NFC or QRCode based scanning on entry with an automated barrier like some metro systems and airline boarding gates, so perhaps that's their angle - they are using the blockchain to somehow link that code to the ticket's intended owner and make it non-transferrable.
The whole point of blockchain is to facilitate a indelible public ledger, e.g. you'd have the ability to track a given token (or ticket in this instance) as it's transferred from original seller through a chain of recipients to its eventual user and for everyone to have visibility of that process. For event ticket sales neither is a requirement as (in theory) the ticket should only be transferred once - from Aventus, TicketMaster, etc. to the venue attendee - and the latter might actually be a extra legal liability under legislation like the GDPR since it's not only likely to entail personal data being retained for verification, but also making that data public for verification - where's the benefit over a regular DB? Also, given that members of some alternative communities have been victimised for things as basic as musical preferences, there might also be people who might not be comfortable with their choice of events being a matter of public record.
Based on TFS I'm guessing they'll be recording the name of the purchaser of the ticket(s) in the blockchain and somehow using this to try and prevent resale or transfer of the tickets by comparing that info with an ID at the venue. I'm assuming they've got a system that allows for tickets bought for a group, as a gift, for use as a prize, or any other legitimate scenarios where the specific individual(s) attending the event might not be known at time of purchase and/or the actual purchaser might not be present, but that's not strictly necessary if they are prepared to accept the lost sales that might result if they don't.
Of course, they could do all that with just a regular database that links a unique ticket serial number to the ticket's purchaser or intended user at the original sale with no block chain required, but that wouldn't have quite the same effect at generating hype and (more importantly) investment money, would it?
As you say, there's no expectation of privacy at airports, nor is facial recognition tech at airports is nothing new - it's actually a staple of detecting anomalous behaviour patterns for individuals for many terminals - the novel application here is more the customer service angle (the customers of airports being the airlines, not their passengers). When you're facing extra gate fees and the possibility of having to offload baggage (more delays, fees, and potential knock-on effects with scheduling of subsequent flights for the aircraft and takeoff/landing slots) and something like this is going to be something that airlines are going to be all over. That the airports benefit by freeing up the gate for the next arrival promptly and all the other passengers on the plane don't have their travel plans messed around with as well, and what's there not too like?
If they have evidence of other breaches then we'll be hearing about it pretty soon, I expect. May 25th is GDPR day, and I'm pretty sure that the EU would like nothing better than to take 4% of Facebook's annual turnover in penalties if they are shown to have failed to meet the requirement that they disclose a breach within 72 hours of discovery. I also doubt that Cambridge Analytica was far from the only company that was (or still is) pulling personal data out of Facebook, so even if Facebook complies with the GDPR they're probably still going to be dealing with a lot of negative press.
They've had two years since the GDPR was signed to law to prepare, and arguably *ten* years since the working group tasked with creating the GDPR first started outlining what they were going to propose to assess the likely impacts. ICANN have had plenty of time to "adjust" - and that other WHOIS providers around the world have adjusted is evidence of that - but chose to stick their head in the sand and claim it had nothing to do with them then, when it became obvious that was incorrect, to rely on something even their own legal counsel and contracted registrars told them was not going to fly. GDPR might be a vague legal quagmire for those that have to comply with it, but this, and the contractual mess it creates for their contracted registrars, is entirely down to ICANN's mismangement of the situation.
The fact that all the Out transactions from a demonstrable BGP hijaack and well implemented spoof site scam end up in this account isn't enough to convince you that it's shady as hell and the owner is just a (fairly serious) miner? Try taking a look at the transaction patterns, yes there are a lot of of them, but the patterns are pretty clear to spot; lots of transfers in a short timeframe, a pause, then another batch and so on. Yeah, I'm pretty sure this wallet's owner is almost certainly involved in mining, but I doubt very much that it's the kind with lots of GPUs or ASICs in a rack so much as lots of malware running on systems without their owner's knowledge and other scam campaigns like the one in TFA. Pretty sure that the wallet has now caught the attention of various authorities though, so might be interesting for the owner to extract their funds if nothing else
Try following the "Out" transactions. Eventually (five or six hops) you're going to end up at this wallet, which currently contains over $17 MILLION USD of ETH. Not bad for a couple of hours work...
FTFY
Nor, I suspect, do many people who don't mingle with Silicon Valley types on a regular basis, which essentially turns the whole article into a meta example of what it claims. The author makes a claim that people in Silicon Valley (amongst other groups) are losing touch with reality because they are making vacuous statements, and then renders the article itself vacuous by failing to provide any supporting evidence or examples to back up his assertion. Or maybe it's just meant to be ironic?
It presently seems to be mostly western focussed, so the lack of Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE, or Korean ones like Samsung doesn't seem to much of an issue, and Amazon, Apple, and Twitter are also missing on the US front, so I'm not reading too much into the current membership. If the organisation starts to gain a bit of traction and they still don't sign up, that's when you can probably start reading a little more into it - I'd also like to see Intel and AMD on there , given the security issues surrounding their on-chip management engines.
Far more interesting to me is that despite the list being quite heavy on hardware and software vendors in the security sector, a couple of quite notable omissions are Checkpoint and Kaspersky Labs. The former because they're a company I've heard from multiple sources may have had some involvement with the development of Stuxnet, and as a perimeter firewall vendor someone you'd need to have absolute trust in (although Fortinet is another firewall vendor not on the list). The latter because you'd think they'd jump at a chance to try and further distance themselves from the allegations of their software being used as a government backdoor and restore some public trust via a little positive PR.
Of course, none of this is going to matter if the company in question is "requested" to assist via a NSL or some other secrecy bound court order.
FIFTH time. At least. You left off Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu which started in the 1960s (took a little longer to deliver a product though; Duke Nukem Forever has nothing on Ted), but even that referenced the hypothetical Memex system proposed by Vannevar Bush in 1945.
Depends on how accurate the reporting is. BTC wallet to BTC wallet transactions will, of course, be recorded in the blockchain, but if they actually mean the logs of customer transactions between Coinsecure's user accounts and the Coinsecure wallet(s), then that's entirely different and it's quite possible that someone with the right level of access within Coinsecure could erase all the logs. The trick would be to mask the BTC leaving Coinsecure's wallets, either through tumbling or by not getting greedy and only taking enough it would not be possible to determine which BTC passing in and out of Coinsecure's wallets were stolen and which are legitimate transactions. The latter might not be too difficult if there are enough transactions and all of the internal logs are gone, but you'd probably still want to tumble the stolen coins, just to be sure.
Since they specifically state "Americans", which almost certainly actually means "USians" rather than the entire continent or US/Canada, probably not. I'm not so sure you could extrapolate out very easily though, since while people in Europe are generally a lot more aware of their privacy and would probably head for the exits in even greater numbers, there are plenty of other areas where lack of privacy is just a fact of life and this could be seen as just more of the same. It also depends on usage patterns; if that 1% of global users are biased towards users that view the most ads, then that could well have a much larger impact on the bottom line than if 10% of global users who barely use Facebook at all were to stop doing so.
Truth will out though. Facebook's next quarterly earnings statement is due after market cloe on the 25th April, which is probably not going to suffer from any appreciable impact from the Cambridge Analytica fallout, so the one after that - around the tail end of July - should be quite enlightening.
Also, does Amazon even share its mountain of data with third parties? They absolutely use it to help target products at potential customers within their store for Marketplace partners, but ultimately it seems that it's in Amazon's best interest to keep all that data to themselves as even meta access to it could potentially enable a competitor to profit at Amazon's expense. They're undeniably very good at what they do, and one of the largest players - if not THE largest - in many of the sectors they are in, but selling customer data wholesale doesn't appear to be even on their radar.
That gaming of the system does seem to work on Android at least some of the time (it's definitely not guaranteed that it will - I'd guess my success rate is 50:50), but there are a lot of variables so the testing methodology would need to be pretty good to pin down exactly who is going what. Google is almost certainly listening as well - even if only for the "OK Google" keyphrase - so you'd need to do a series of tests with various permutations of apps and services with microphone access enabled/disabled, then monitor which ad networks and data brokers are actually serving the ads related to whatever you talked about to try and game the system. Don't forget that there is a massive web of resellers at work here too, so it might not be at all obvious that a given ad served from a third-party server was targetted based on Google's data, Facebook's data, or some other source entirely.
My first thought was that was some kind of rhetorical headline that would lead into an analysis of what kinds of data Oculus was gathering and how they were funneling all of it to Facebook (and a long, long, list of other "partners"), but apparently there are still some naive people out there who really do think that companies with a business model of monetizing your personal data might protect some arbitrary fraction of it rather than profit of it. I can only assume they have spent the last decade or two living under a rock, in a cave, on a remote island, and have had no other contact with humanity apart from the occassional message in a bottle that washes up on the shore. Frankly, it's almost to the point of being a Betteridge type thing, isn't it? Any headline that asks "How much of your data is a company sharing?" can be answered "All of it - including a whole bunch of stuff you had no idea they even had."
Same way they do any other transaction that is subject to tax but might bypass channels they can readily track: require you to declare your profits (or losses) from the transaction (or "investment", if you prefer) coupled with some deterrance in the form of severe sanctions (fines, jail time, etc.) for anyone who thinks they can keep their profits hidden from "the man" but fails to do so. Typically, in nations that are implementing this, the approach seems to be to class it as a form of capital gains (e.g. just like stocks, shares, etc.) and tax accordingly at similar rates. YMMV but, speaking from experience, if you're converting a large chunk of crypto currency into traditional currency and want it all above board, you can expect "the man" to take quite a large bite.
Or to somehow try to pop the crypto-currency bubble so that people get burnt and go back to investing their remaning funds (if any) in more traditional funds, such as those managed by Soros and his partners, e.g. by using his political leverage to get various legislations passed with the aim of driving the privacy and anti-regulation types into increasingly more niche and sketchy alt-coins, thus undermining a lot of the original support. Whether such a scheme would even work is another question entirely, but as long as he *thinks* it will he may be prepared to give it a try. I guess it depends on whether Soros is personally involved in decisions at this level or it's up to lower-level management, has changed his view on crypto currencies, or - as you say - just thinks he can get in, make some money, and get out before the pop he's expecting.
Or perhaps you could arrange to go to one of the various warehouses that are/were conduits for discarded electronics being sent to China for recycling? Since the Chinese enforced their ban on the import of "foreign garbage", the stuff is supposedly just piling up there and they might be prepared to let you take some of it off their hands for a small handling fee, or even for free. For more useful stuff though, e.g. contemporary equipment that is still likely to be in working order, I've also had good luck with auctions of office surplus and assets recovered from companies that have gone bust and are being liquidated. I got a really nice iSCSI SAN chassis, plus some switches and servers - all almost new - for less than $500, all told that way a few years back that are still doing all the heavy lifting on my home LAN.