Skimming through all (ok, not all, just a bit of) the wall of text, one thing caught my eye:
having never had any contact with illegal issues/people
Is there ANY adult who can say that? Heck, is there any KID who can say that, given that 1 out of 10 people have a juvenile record? And let's not forget everyone who was the victim of illegal activity, a scam, fraud, etc.
And with the history of the church, even nuns in a convent can't say that with any certainty.
The original summary didn't cover how easy it was to trace the guy. The FBI's "investigative prowess" was nothing more than a search for his email address on LinkedIn. That also yielded his business, which another search of available public government records would have yielded his home address, etc.
You can go here, click on "Find an enterprise" on the right, enter "EBX Technologies" as the search term, click on "accept terms", and it yields this:
Business number: 2265599250
Name: EBX TECHNOLOGIES
Address: 1731 rang Saint-Alexis Saint-Maurice (Québec) G0X2X0 Canada
Status: Immatriculée (registered)
Date: 2008-12-29
Status of name: En vigueur (active)
Date: 2008-12-29
Clicking on the link (embedded in the business number) gives this additional info:
Nom de famille (family name) CAZES
Prénom (first name) ALEXANDRE
... as well as that he was repairing computers and selling software out of his home when he started AlphaBay. He was due to file the latest declaration with the government on June 15th. Since he won't be doing that, in 2 years anyone who wants to can re-register the name as their business just for laughs (ISTR the fee was $60 if you filed it yourself at the courthouse) - though I personally wouldn't advise it. There's going to be a few people who are mightily pissed off at the guy, and they may think you're somehow related to him.
Anyone stupid enough to list his AlphaWeb email address in his LinkedIn profile is going to be to stupid to learn from this. This is a guy who sold fake identities but didn't think he might need one, all the while engaging in spending serious coin for flashy cars and real estate in his own name without a cover story to explain where he got the money from. If you don't want to be noticed, don't be conspicuous.
Wishful thinking, I'm afraid. There will be other scams, other victims (even some of the same victims). When people want to believe something, proof to the contrary is ignored, or all too often, not even looked for. Just look at all the people who are dependent on Obamacare who want it killed.
And they know they are going to get sued so they shut down instead.
Kind of like TrumpURichDadPoorDadStyleRealestate "schools", DaytradingForex "academies", and/or other unaccredited "learning" scams... Why people continue to fall for these predatory scams is beyond me...
People fall for them because they're desperate and they want to believe that being able to take out a "student loan" somehow is a sign the school is legit. Higher lending standards are anathema to these scams. And yes, they are scams because they don't give a realistic idea of what their job opportunities will be.
His laptop wasn't encrypted, he had a file listing all his accounts (including bank accounts) and passwords, and he bought real estate and fancy cars under his name, as well as spending 2 million Euros to try to buy a property in Cypress to get citizenship there. And that's only the beginning.
And just in case you had any doubt that this was not a criminal mastermind at work, Cazes had also used his Pimp Alex Hotmail address as well as an email address from his own business – EBX Technologies – to set up online bank accounts and crypto-currency accounts. How did law enforcement know that Cazes was behind EBX Technologies? It was on his LinkedIn profile.
This is a guy who sold fake identities; he should have eaten his own dog food.
It's a nostalgia kick. Remenber when web sites would play sounds in the background in IE4 using the tag? You're going to just LOVE those audio ads that will play when you go to a web site and you can't figure out which tab is the culprit. Makes as much sense as
The hottest part of the day is between 2 and 3 pm, because of thermal inertia. And now they're getting rid of the 3-hour break just as global warming is going to make it a smart move, or in some areas, a matter of life and death. A heat wave killed almost 15,000 in France. Not normally a place you'd associate with death by heat.
And it's just going to get worse, when you combine increased high temperatures and an aging population.
1 or 2 feet for a bike path? Next to traffic? Are you NUTS? Also, we have this thing called street sweeper machines. If your streets are accumulating debris, your city sucks and are endangering cyclists, cars, and pedestrians. This is especially true in the fall, when leaves on roads are a serious hazard to cars being able to stop, especially after a rainfall.
We took a full lane and converted it to a bidirectional bike path because it is safe. We also allow buses to pull into the lane to pick up and drop off passengers, so they don't block traffic flow. That's why traffic flow was improved even after the loss of one lane in each direction.
Vehicles with a human operator don't need remote controls. They have everything they need, same as an individual who can take care of themselves without mobility restrictions is autonomous. There's more than one definition of autonomous, depending on context. In the case of a human operator, it also doesn't need external inputs. Get over it. Controlling cars via the internet is just repeating the dumb mistakes we've made with the IoT and home computers. The safest car will be one that has zero internet control connections.
And yet other cities build bike paths because it's cheaper to build a bike path instead of widening the road to carry more cars. Bike paths save on road costs, so if you're talking about making the most out of limited resources, bike paths should be investigated. Then there's sometimes the case that it obviates the need for a second vehicle - for example, if the kids can bike to school instead of being driven. That saves wear and tear, congestion, pollution, parking spaces, etc. Bike paths increase the quality of life, which makes a community more attractive and raises property values, increasing the tax base to pay for things like bike paths, so in many ways bike paths are not only self-supporting, but pay a dividend.
As for bike racks, parking meters downtown are designed with loops specifically to chain bikes to for free. It's a lot cheaper than installing bike racks. Restaurant owners and small shops like it because it increases foot traffic, as well as making it easier to attract help for part-time retail jobs that students can't afford a car to get back and forth.
The city actually backed a cyclist when one merchant to court for illegally removing a bike that was chained to a bus stop "because it was a visual deterrent to customers." It was attached to city property and the mall had no right to do so.
You'll see bikes chained to all sorts of city property. The citizens demanded it, and it became an election issue. Same as green space preservation. We have 4,660 acres of protected green space, lots of forests, as well as plenty of parks. The closest one is 390 acres, I can see it out the window, and there are two parks within a couple of blocks and another green space. The river is a 5-minute bike ride away. Public transit is efficient, carrying an average of 1.3 million passengers every day, removing lots of cars from the roads, which would have to be enlarged otherwise, costing more money, pollution, and loss of green space.
This definitely makes the community a more attractive place to live. It's not all about dollars and cents.
The argument here is not whether there will be no driver. We all agree on that. The argument is whether all driving computations will be done on-board.
There is no argument - driving computations WILL be done on-board. What won't be done on-board is ordering the vehicle to go from point A to point B. That can be done by the owner via their phone. "Pick me up at such-and-such an address" s not a high-data-transfer situation. The cell network handles that just fine, same as it handles text messages to remind you to pick up milk..
The applications from the manufacturers are for autonomous vehicles, not remote-controlled vehicles, which, without local autonomy, would be more dangerous in the event of a network disruption.
Those cabin filters are for filtering out particulates - not CO. Just carbon particulates. OEM filters are mostly paper, same as engine air filters. Some aftermarket ones are synthetics. You could probably make an activated charcoal filter, to try t remove hydrocarbon vapours and CO, but you'd have to remove it every day and heat it up in the oven to get rid of the accumulated CO - to "reactivate" it - not something you want to do indoors. And not something you'll find on any car.
If a vehicle cannot make reasonable decisions without external data, then that means it cannot safely drive unless another vehicle has recently driven the road to provide that data. Such a vehicle might pedantically be described as autonomous, but it is not usefully so.
Wow, you just keep proving how stupid you are. All cars driven by humans are autonomous, and don't need another vehicle to have driven the road before they do. We're talking about replacing the driver. That is perfectly doable without any internet connection whatsoever. It's also a current requirement.
The safety aspect is avoiding collisions - and even current vehicles can do a better job than humans. No high-speed internet required. Why? Because they are designed to eventually get good enough to replace the driver, and all they need are the same inputs a driver currently uses. You don't want a central computer to avoid collisions - you want the autonomous cars to exhibit "flocking" behavior - as each one dynamically reacts to the driving environment, optimal solutions automatically emerge. No more "trolley" problem.
Having interacted with Comcast, I surmise that all of those 155,000 employees are maliciously incompetent.
Either to customers, intent aside, or intentionally to their own employer. Nothing else explains the pure Golgothan Demon that is Comcast.
Or they're all bots. Just some of them inhabit meat suits. Explains the whole "zombie" thing as well. And admit it, you'd like to take a shotgun and help fight that particular zombie apocalypse.
Before we know it, all the celebrities, all the politicians, all the billion/trillion/zillionaires will have their own versions of chatbot
In case you haven't noticed, they already do - but it's defective. It keeps contradicting itself on Twitter at 3 in the morning while munching cheeseburgers because twittering is easy, being president is hard.
First off I don't expect vehicles marketed as "autonomous" to actually be. Because I'm not naive.
Then you're being incredibly naive. It's going to happen because $$$. Long distance trucking is going to be the first to use it because there's no more mandatory downtime during a long distance run or after x number of hours so the driver can rest, so you get more miles covered every day, which means more revenue. No wages for drivers. No mandatory deductions for worker's comp, health care, etc. No more worrying about lawsuits for gender bias. No more calling in sick.
A 2018 Kenworth T580 is over $150,000. If you can sell fleets of autonomous trucks that can do twice as many hours a week, you can justify a $300,000 price tag. Fleet sales are going to generate lots of revenue.
The cycling paths here go through parks and woodlands - cars aren't allowed. As for traffic that's going 50-60 mph, that's prrobably a limited access highway, and bicycles aren't allowed, same as pedestrians.
Slashdot Mirror
Skimming through all (ok, not all, just a bit of) the wall of text, one thing caught my eye:
having never had any contact with illegal issues/people
Is there ANY adult who can say that? Heck, is there any KID who can say that, given that 1 out of 10 people have a juvenile record? And let's not forget everyone who was the victim of illegal activity, a scam, fraud, etc.
And with the history of the church, even nuns in a convent can't say that with any certainty.
The original summary didn't cover how easy it was to trace the guy. The FBI's "investigative prowess" was nothing more than a search for his email address on LinkedIn. That also yielded his business, which another search of available public government records would have yielded his home address, etc.
You can go here, click on "Find an enterprise" on the right, enter "EBX Technologies" as the search term, click on "accept terms", and it yields this:
Business number: 2265599250
Name: EBX TECHNOLOGIES
Address: 1731 rang Saint-Alexis Saint-Maurice (Québec) G0X2X0 Canada
Status: Immatriculée (registered)
Date: 2008-12-29
Status of name: En vigueur (active)
Date: 2008-12-29
Clicking on the link (embedded in the business number) gives this additional info:
Nom de famille (family name) CAZES
Prénom (first name) ALEXANDRE
... as well as that he was repairing computers and selling software out of his home when he started AlphaBay. He was due to file the latest declaration with the government on June 15th. Since he won't be doing that, in 2 years anyone who wants to can re-register the name as their business just for laughs (ISTR the fee was $60 if you filed it yourself at the courthouse) - though I personally wouldn't advise it. There's going to be a few people who are mightily pissed off at the guy, and they may think you're somehow related to him.
Anyone stupid enough to list his AlphaWeb email address in his LinkedIn profile is going to be to stupid to learn from this. This is a guy who sold fake identities but didn't think he might need one, all the while engaging in spending serious coin for flashy cars and real estate in his own name without a cover story to explain where he got the money from. If you don't want to be noticed, don't be conspicuous.
Aha - looks like they just added it :-) Enjoy.
And the stream of victims is drying up now. Good.
Wishful thinking, I'm afraid. There will be other scams, other victims (even some of the same victims). When people want to believe something, proof to the contrary is ignored, or all too often, not even looked for. Just look at all the people who are dependent on Obamacare who want it killed.
And they know they are going to get sued so they shut down instead.
Kind of like TrumpURichDadPoorDadStyleRealestate "schools", DaytradingForex "academies", and/or other unaccredited "learning" scams... Why people continue to fall for these predatory scams is beyond me...
People fall for them because they're desperate and they want to believe that being able to take out a "student loan" somehow is a sign the school is legit. Higher lending standards are anathema to these scams. And yes, they are scams because they don't give a realistic idea of what their job opportunities will be.
TFA headline is "Apple Flies Top Brass into Australia to Lobby against Australia's Proposed Encryption Laws" Looks like the word "Laws" got truncated.
He was using hotmail. It's not like it's hard to create a disposable email account elsewhere instead.
His laptop wasn't encrypted, he had a file listing all his accounts (including bank accounts) and passwords, and he bought real estate and fancy cars under his name, as well as spending 2 million Euros to try to buy a property in Cypress to get citizenship there. And that's only the beginning.
He had been using that same email address for personal stuff for years, including as the email address for his business
And just in case you had any doubt that this was not a criminal mastermind at work, Cazes had also used his Pimp Alex Hotmail address as well as an email address from his own business – EBX Technologies – to set up online bank accounts and crypto-currency accounts. How did law enforcement know that Cazes was behind EBX Technologies? It was on his LinkedIn profile.
This is a guy who sold fake identities; he should have eaten his own dog food.
... what is the current environment?
In considering the current environment, ...
Lack of loans for desperate people who think that they can learn how to be a crappy web developer and rake in the big bucks.
They're supposed to offer career counselling for the final cohort - how much do you want to bet it boils down to "learn a trade"?
He used the same email address in his LinkdIn profile.
It's a nostalgia kick. Remenber when web sites would play sounds in the background in IE4 using the tag? You're going to just LOVE those audio ads that will play when you go to a web site and you can't figure out which tab is the culprit. Makes as much sense as
The hottest part of the day is between 2 and 3 pm, because of thermal inertia. And now they're getting rid of the 3-hour break just as global warming is going to make it a smart move, or in some areas, a matter of life and death. A heat wave killed almost 15,000 in France. Not normally a place you'd associate with death by heat.
And it's just going to get worse, when you combine increased high temperatures and an aging population.
Of course you want emergent behaviour. It's the best way to deal with the unexpected because, by definition, it's unexpected.
1 or 2 feet for a bike path? Next to traffic? Are you NUTS? Also, we have this thing called street sweeper machines. If your streets are accumulating debris, your city sucks and are endangering cyclists, cars, and pedestrians. This is especially true in the fall, when leaves on roads are a serious hazard to cars being able to stop, especially after a rainfall.
We took a full lane and converted it to a bidirectional bike path because it is safe. We also allow buses to pull into the lane to pick up and drop off passengers, so they don't block traffic flow. That's why traffic flow was improved even after the loss of one lane in each direction.
Vehicles with a human operator don't need remote controls. They have everything they need, same as an individual who can take care of themselves without mobility restrictions is autonomous. There's more than one definition of autonomous, depending on context. In the case of a human operator, it also doesn't need external inputs. Get over it. Controlling cars via the internet is just repeating the dumb mistakes we've made with the IoT and home computers. The safest car will be one that has zero internet control connections.
And yet other cities build bike paths because it's cheaper to build a bike path instead of widening the road to carry more cars. Bike paths save on road costs, so if you're talking about making the most out of limited resources, bike paths should be investigated. Then there's sometimes the case that it obviates the need for a second vehicle - for example, if the kids can bike to school instead of being driven. That saves wear and tear, congestion, pollution, parking spaces, etc. Bike paths increase the quality of life, which makes a community more attractive and raises property values, increasing the tax base to pay for things like bike paths, so in many ways bike paths are not only self-supporting, but pay a dividend.
As for bike racks, parking meters downtown are designed with loops specifically to chain bikes to for free. It's a lot cheaper than installing bike racks. Restaurant owners and small shops like it because it increases foot traffic, as well as making it easier to attract help for part-time retail jobs that students can't afford a car to get back and forth.
The city actually backed a cyclist when one merchant to court for illegally removing a bike that was chained to a bus stop "because it was a visual deterrent to customers." It was attached to city property and the mall had no right to do so.
You'll see bikes chained to all sorts of city property. The citizens demanded it, and it became an election issue. Same as green space preservation. We have 4,660 acres of protected green space, lots of forests, as well as plenty of parks. The closest one is 390 acres, I can see it out the window, and there are two parks within a couple of blocks and another green space. The river is a 5-minute bike ride away. Public transit is efficient, carrying an average of 1.3 million passengers every day, removing lots of cars from the roads, which would have to be enlarged otherwise, costing more money, pollution, and loss of green space.
This definitely makes the community a more attractive place to live. It's not all about dollars and cents.
As I said elsewhere, you've been caught. You used the exact same tactic of accusing someone who disagrees with you of self-modding, on the same day. Not too smart, are you now? If you're going to try trolling, at least don't be quite so pathetically obvious.
The argument here is not whether there will be no driver. We all agree on that. The argument is whether all driving computations will be done on-board.
There is no argument - driving computations WILL be done on-board. What won't be done on-board is ordering the vehicle to go from point A to point B. That can be done by the owner via their phone. "Pick me up at such-and-such an address" s not a high-data-transfer situation. The cell network handles that just fine, same as it handles text messages to remind you to pick up milk..
The applications from the manufacturers are for autonomous vehicles, not remote-controlled vehicles, which, without local autonomy, would be more dangerous in the event of a network disruption.
Those cabin filters are for filtering out particulates - not CO. Just carbon particulates. OEM filters are mostly paper, same as engine air filters. Some aftermarket ones are synthetics. You could probably make an activated charcoal filter, to try t remove hydrocarbon vapours and CO, but you'd have to remove it every day and heat it up in the oven to get rid of the accumulated CO - to "reactivate" it - not something you want to do indoors. And not something you'll find on any car.
If a vehicle cannot make reasonable decisions without external data, then that means it cannot safely drive unless another vehicle has recently driven the road to provide that data. Such a vehicle might pedantically be described as autonomous, but it is not usefully so.
Wow, you just keep proving how stupid you are. All cars driven by humans are autonomous, and don't need another vehicle to have driven the road before they do. We're talking about replacing the driver. That is perfectly doable without any internet connection whatsoever. It's also a current requirement.
The safety aspect is avoiding collisions - and even current vehicles can do a better job than humans. No high-speed internet required. Why? Because they are designed to eventually get good enough to replace the driver, and all they need are the same inputs a driver currently uses. You don't want a central computer to avoid collisions - you want the autonomous cars to exhibit "flocking" behavior - as each one dynamically reacts to the driving environment, optimal solutions automatically emerge. No more "trolley" problem.
Having interacted with Comcast, I surmise that all of those 155,000 employees are maliciously incompetent.
Either to customers, intent aside, or intentionally to their own employer. Nothing else explains the pure Golgothan Demon that is Comcast.
Or they're all bots. Just some of them inhabit meat suits. Explains the whole "zombie" thing as well. And admit it, you'd like to take a shotgun and help fight that particular zombie apocalypse.
Before we know it, all the celebrities, all the politicians, all the billion/trillion/zillionaires will have their own versions of chatbot
In case you haven't noticed, they already do - but it's defective. It keeps contradicting itself on Twitter at 3 in the morning while munching cheeseburgers because twittering is easy, being president is hard.
First off I don't expect vehicles marketed as "autonomous" to actually be. Because I'm not naive.
Then you're being incredibly naive. It's going to happen because $$$. Long distance trucking is going to be the first to use it because there's no more mandatory downtime during a long distance run or after x number of hours so the driver can rest, so you get more miles covered every day, which means more revenue. No wages for drivers. No mandatory deductions for worker's comp, health care, etc. No more worrying about lawsuits for gender bias. No more calling in sick.
A 2018 Kenworth T580 is over $150,000. If you can sell fleets of autonomous trucks that can do twice as many hours a week, you can justify a $300,000 price tag. Fleet sales are going to generate lots of revenue.
The cycling paths here go through parks and woodlands - cars aren't allowed. As for traffic that's going 50-60 mph, that's prrobably a limited access highway, and bicycles aren't allowed, same as pedestrians.