It's classic what-aboutism though. Availability is part of security and that's what seems to be considered here. It's also the more immediate concern. Yes, the software supply chain and where your data goes has high potential for compromise. But I'm not actually seeing rampant fraud in my accounts or data leaks from my bank very often.
High potential for compromise? No, the point is that every single transaction you make is being sold on the open market, that's the problem. Using cash prevents this. Using debit cards, credit cards, banking apps ensures this.
The banks provide the data anonymized, but then provide means to de-anonymize it.
So yeah that sucks, but... what does that have to do with the concerns being discussed here?
Digital banking in some form is pretty unavoidable for me unless I want a "live in the woods" type lifestyle and all the consequences of it. And I don't even live in the UK where they've embraced it more. My mortgage was sold to a very distant company and we've had mail problems. My dog recently needed middle of the night surgery and they wouldn't start without payment that exceeded normal cash reserves + daily.
Yes, all these things suck, but shooting digital banking in the knee without a solution to all that isn't helpful.
You know, I didn't rush my laptop to the vet with me. If you're going to argue with the "mobile phones and banking app" line to this extent, I will freely admit: yes, if you want to be a Luddite, satellites are indeed unnecessary. You are absolutely right. But still not convincing me that's a weird thing for them call out here.
Realistically, paying your mortgage isn't giving any data a credit pull wouldn't. It's not a secret you live where you do. And one off emergencies aren't the problem.
It's foregoing cash for every single thing you do. That, combined with the telco selling data, Google linking that data to the number, and apps such as your banking app working in this same ecosystem, and companies such as Yodlee, your profile has a minute by minute location, plus what you spend and where.
It lets intelligence agencies, buying this data, create links between people. Who you know. Who you talk to. Where you go. What your hobbies are.
This gives the power of manipulation, for knowing who you are in the real world, combined with what you do online, means they know you better than you know yourself. And that's quite important, if you want to manipulate opinion.
All this may not matter to you, and if so, that's fine.
But this data is, quite frankly, what gives the Americans the power they have. The Americans aren't mighty due to guns, and weapons, and an army. They are mighty because of information.
Information is how you send a mere 40 dudes to kidnap the President and his wife from Venezuela. Information is how drone strikes perform targetted attacks. Information is how you manipulate elections in foreign countries. It's the sort of power that means you don't even have to fire a shot, to overthrow a government.
This information is what modern banking, and its apps, and companies such as Yodlee give to the Americans.
And as a Canadian, with the Americans blathering on about 51st state this and that, I am perhaps over sensitive to this fact. Because the last thing we need, is to give Americans power over us.
Any power.
Even the tiniest bit.
And information? Is more powerful than anything else they have.
Look, I'm a big believer in the importance of cash as an option in our society and the importance of keeping a supply on-hand for emergencies, but my mortgage company, employer, and a lot of other financial concerns are hours away from me, so yeah - my banking app is pretty fucking important to my daily life, and I don't even live in the UK where they have embraced digital banking even more.
It's light on the details of what they're disrupting and how, but there is zero suggestion in the article that they are disrupting digital banking, the Internet, or consumer services at all for for other countries.
Asbolutely. Tap to pay options, and the better ones have stopped pushing SMS for 2FA and they will prefer their own apps over third-party ones. JPMC, Capital One and E-Trade (now Morgan Stanley) definitely all do this.
Tap to pay is also doable with a credit/debit card, but paying via phone is a legitimately useful feature although also not remotely critical or something that would be world ending if it were disrupted.
I'm thinking back to some of my interactions with corporate lawyers and you know what? My bar (<- pun) for trusting Astra more than a lawyer is pretty low.
Visit a developing or corrupt country and you will realise the LLMs of today analyse better than the judges from purely precedence and literature review POV
"The “threat model” section of a security paper resembles the script for a telenovela that was written by a paranoid schizophrenic: there are elaborate narratives and grand conspiracy theories, and there are heroes and villains with fantastic (yet oddly constrained) powers that necessitate a grinding battle of emotional and technical attrition. In the real world, threat models are much simpler (see Figure 1). Basically, you’re either dealing with Mossad or not-Mossad. If your adversary is not-Mossad, then you’ll probably be fine if you pick a good password and don’t respond to emails from [email protected]. If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU’RE GONNA DIE AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. The Mossad is not intimidated by the fact that you employ https://. If the Mossad wants your data, they’re going to use a drone to replace your cellphone with a piece of uranium that’s shaped like a cellphone, and when you die of tumors filled with tumors, they’re going to hold a press conference and say “It wasn’t us” as they wear t-shirts that say “IT WAS DEFINITELY US,” and then they’re going to buy all of your stuff at your estate sale so that they can directly look at the photos of your vacation instead of reading your insipid emails about them." -- James Mickens
It's a direct quote, formatted as written. And actually so many people read it that he got invited to do conference key notes on his articles. Nice flex, though.
For every Tweet that goes out on the company account and every blog on the company blog. But that's not what we're talking about here - we're talking about vague sources like low-impact social media snippets getting cited on low-reputation blogs until someone more reputable comments on the apparent trend. There are absolutely marketing people who do that "unofficially".
No, but they have marketing people, and marketing people in my experience (even in "big" corporate America) have personal (anonymized, but just created themselves) accounts they do stuff like this on all the time.
I often chuckle at the observation that Tim Curry and Michael Caine's respective roles in the Muppet films were so beloved because Michael Caine acted like all the muppets were real actors, and Tim Curry acted like he was a muppet. He would have an impressive range of serious / comedic roles anyway, but I admire the ability for an actor that successful to be able to put himself be in such a silly role that well too.
> Curry emphatically denied that interpretation. “I saw the Muppets as actors with distinct personalities,” he said. “It’s astonishing how quickly you see them as people.”
There's a video that expands on Tim Curry's time with the muppets: The Muppets Brought Out the Best in Tim Curry https://youtu.be/XzU8f4HaQw0
> In this video, we look at why Tim Curry’s Long John Silver works so well in Muppet Treasure Island, not just because he’s funny, theatrical, and completely larger than life, but because he understood the real magic of acting with the Muppets.
> There’s a popular idea that Michael Caine treated the Muppets like real actors, while Tim Curry treated himself like a fellow Muppet. But according to Curry himself, that isn’t quite right. He didn’t see Kermit, Miss Piggy, Gonzo, Rizzo, or the rest of the Muppet crew as props or puppets. He treated them as fully formed characters with their own personalities, timing, and emotional lives. That may be the key to why his performance feels so alive.
> This video essay explores Tim Curry’s casting as Long John Silver, his love for the Muppets, his larger-than-life theatrical style, and the behind-the-scenes energy of Muppet Treasure Island. We also look at how the Muppet performers stayed in character, how Curry approached the songs and comedy, why the “A Professional Pirate” number works so well, and how one surprisingly heartfelt scene with Jim Hawkins revealed a more vulnerable side of Curry’s acting.
Both Tim Curry and that video seem to misinterpret the "popular idea", at least as it is stated in this thread.
It doesn't say anything about how Tim Curry viewed the Muppets, but rather about how Tim Curry treated himself. It stands to reason that if he was, say, method acting as an actual Muppet, that he too would view the other Muppets as fellow actors with their own identities etc.
That was my reading of it too - Curry's response seems to seek to refute something that the original quote didn't actually say!
I can definitely see how someone could interpret it that way, assuming it's implying that he didn't see them as real, but I think that's an incorrect assumption and the quoted observation wasn't actually implying that at all.
Watch the actual film at is obvious he isn't doing that. He shows way more emotional range and subtly than a Muppet is capable of, plus "[his] only number" is not very Muppetty either.
Yeah, I've never understood this observation. The entire shtick of The Muppets was that every celebrity they ever had on the show treated them like real actors and celebrities. Not even "famous Muppets", just straight up celebs.
There’s a difference between the script calling for the actor to treat the Muppets as real, and the actor actually thinking of the Muppets as real actors. In a Muppet production, that’s often what separates a good performance from a great one.
This is common in the hype era of AI models that can look for security bugs. An open-source project I used to work on that is basically "distributed code execution as a service" keeps getting reports that the job submission function is a vulnerability. The reporters don't even understand what the project does.
I've seen plenty of systems along the lines of what you're describing where unauthenticated clients can submit jobs. Sometimes the developers even claim that's intentional. Either way, it's a vulnerability, because it compromises the underlying hosts.
I really can't see where the 0.7nm is coming from. The white line looks like it's just an edge of a feature that is "15 rows of silicon atoms", which by some quick arithmetic on Wolfram Alpha has to be AT LEAST ~1.6nm, and the way the rows of atoms appear to be packed in that image and by the provided scale, it seems to be significantly more. Using the white line as a meaningful measurement seems to me to be more misleading than any other interpretation here.
A 0.7 nm planar transistor made of silicon has no performance, because a device so small cannot function as a transistor.
The intended meaning of "0.7 nm" is that if you compare the transistor density per area of a "0.7 nm" manufacturing process with that of a "350 nm" process (like used for some Pentium II CPUs, at a time when "350 nm" was a real length), the ratio between the transistor densities is (350 nm / 0.7 nm)^2 = 500^2 = 250,000.
Comparing with the number of transistors of a Pentium II, a 0.7 nm CPU should be able to contain about 5000 billion transistors. This is consistent with the fact that the latest 3 nm NVIDIA Rubin GPU has 336 billion transistors and a 0.7 nm circuit must have a density around 16 times greater than a 3 nm circuit.
However, for many of the modern node names used by some companies even this computation is not really true, because marketing may have chosen an arbitrary name that is smaller than for the last process of the main competitor.
For now, IBM has not provided any kind of information that could prove their claim that their new CMOS process has the transistor density corresponding to "0.7 nm" (i.e. 16 times greater than the TSMC "3 nm" CMOS process).
