It reminds me more of the old Windows firewall/IPS/IDS called Sygate. It was ahead of its time. I think Zonealarm came after since that is what I replaced it with after Symantec(?) bought Sygate and rolled the best functions of Sygate into their Professional firewall for a premium price. Sygate was free or you could buy a permanent license for a one-time fee. It was the best personal protection products available for pcs running Windows up to WinXP.
I had also tried a different firewall/privacy tool from a company in Canada I think called ZeroKnowledge. That was a great product that also allowed you fine-grained access to and control of all connections to/from your Windows pc. They had a product available for a short time but shut down suddenly. I think I read that they were bought out by another firewall company but can't remember which one. They may have been rolled into the Blackberry software line.
Both of these were available in the 90's lead-up to the dot com bust if I remember right. Sygate became obsolete when support ended around the time WinXP faded. ZeroKnowledge disappeared much earlier. I may have old executables and installers somewhere on antique backups.
Several of my family members and I have planted pollinator gardens in the hopes that we can provide fuel stations for all the migrating insects and birds. Since we are kinda scattered from hell to breakfast we ended up with small to large spaces available scattered across several states including Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. It is great to see these migration paths tracked in this article.
That confirms that we are in good locations along normal flyways. My own property includes lots of antelope-horn milkweed and a couple other milkweeds. I found monarch caterpillars in my garden last week. With the recent rains breaking the summer drought I have so much in bloom again - asters, sunflowers, milkweed, numerous grasses, coreopsis, native onions, salvia, sage, dalea, etc. My place is humming with bees and wasps and the birds cast their tunes upon the winds.
For the first time since we moved here more than 25 years ago I had a meadowlark on my place and I was able to grab photos. It's a common bird where I grew up but though their range extends to this part of Texas, I had never seen one until late last week. Along with all the other birds passing through, that meadowlark was like encountering an old friend. I recognized the call and walked the place until I found the bird. As a kid I used to walk the pastures imitating the meadowlark calls, trying to sow confusion amongst their ranks, or maybe to let them know I might be one of the good guys. Who really knows?
I normally go outside every morning to identify birds using Merlin. For a couple weeks now, as I sit and listen to the world going by, monarchs and other butterflies have been migrating past. They are generally flying above treetop level hugging the treetops and terrain. As I drove north yesterday on a nice two hour trip there was a steady stream of butterflies. Most were traveling a few feet higher than an automobile as they crossed the road though some were skimming the ground and undoubtedly tempting fate. Makes me wonder how many have tags or stickers and of those, how many are scattered in pieces along the highway after dipping a bit too low to the ground.
Thanks for this article. I'm passing this around so that others can see where they are positioned on the flyway.
The wife planted one this year. (Registered, got a little placard to place on a stake.)
We saw a dozen or so cocoons appear around her garden—on plants, on the trim of our house. And then we saw them empty out. The skies too around the neighborhood were frequented by monarchs last month—we'd see them all the time.
Funny how you start to notice a thing (that had always been there to some degree or another) once you start to invest some time and interest in it.
Hello Omaha! The gently rolling landscape in that region must be a lot like a kiddie rollercoaster for bugs like this that ride the winds just above the treetops.
Your wife started a lot like several of my relatives, by planting a pollinator garden and registering it. I think projects like that give people a reason to engage in outdoor activities and to break the connection to the living room couch or the gamer chair. This is something that all ages can really get involved with and learn from.
I have seen so many photo updates of caterpillars metamorphosing and finally launching. It is pretty awesome to see how a fat, tubular bug stuffed with plant material can dissolve into a bug soup and once the components settle out it will have added wings to a much improved tubular frame and only needs a few minutes to figure out how to turn those flappers into forward motion.
I agree that this becomes a real eye-opening exercise once you discover this in your own garden. There are so many things that I have been able to enjoy since beginning to reclaim my place by eliminating all the non-native plants that were introduced by previous owners. I still have a long way to go with a couple of the more invasive species of grass but I know that I will get there. I have a rototiller and Amazon, Fedex, and UPS bring new cardboard for weed block on a schedule that is disturbingly regular. Every new season brings another species that I haven't seen earlier into camera range. I'm feeling like the bugs and other animals see me as a normal part of the landscape that offers no threat to them now. That's the best feeling. Just like them, I belong there.
Thank you for reading all that. I'm hoping to hear from several that they have installed the app so that we can participate in trying to track some of these monarchs. There are so few tagged that it would be really cool to have one butterfly show up on multiple family members' properties. There might be a cool family challenge in this somewhere with prizes handed out at annual reunions.
It's really hard to describe how exciting it was to hear that meadowlark out on land that I have been restoring as native prairie. When something like that bird appears after being here for more than 25 years without seeing a single one it feels like validation of my efforts. To paraphrase a movie - "If you unbuild it they will come". I've been unbuilding things across the landscape to make this place more attractive to all the things that should be here. It's pretty great.
Time for CashApp founders and C-levels to be held personally liable for creating a system with so few checks that it appears to be designed to facilitate fraud and theft.
Then you sue all the law enforcement officers and local officials who are attempting to lay the blame for this on someone they should know is likely innocent. Make all of the financial liability for this lazy investigation come directly from the pockets of the cops and prosecutors until they have nothing left to their names and then extract every thin dime that you can from the city that hired or elected these clods so that the whole city is bankrupted.
Money is obviously the only thing that talks in this society. Make all these assholes pay with everything that they have managed to accumulate in their lives and kick their asses to the curbs after pointing at a dumpster and telling them that they can likely find some cardboard suitable for beggar signage. They'll need to supply their own writing tools though.
I often think of this audio-skit, Identity Theft by Mitchell & Webb, wherein the bank is regretfully informing a customer that their Identity has been Stolen, which is totally not in any way the bank's responsibility or problem...
>for creating a system with so few checks that it appears to be designed to facilitate fraud and theft.
I'm too lazy to create and verify a cashapp account, but so far as what I can find online they do SSN/name check + id check + selfie (liveliness) check. What more do you want?
Almost everyone's info of the above kind is available on the dark web, as the original article about this case explained. That situation is the result of everyone collecting KYC information while also being too incompetent to properly guard it.
> + selfie (liveliness) check
I don't know what this is, but it protected nothing and it's apparently useless.
Then, after the fraud CashApp protected the fraudster by stonewalling the victim and the lack of exculpatory evidence led to the filing of formal charges.
If they put the match ratio value lenient enough to not reject a lot of people in bad lighting conditions you can make a dog match. So it's likely useless.
All I know is cashapp is designed in such a way that when I hear people want to use it I bail immediately because it's a strong signal a scam is about to happen, and my other financial services don't have that property. It's empirically good at facilitating fraud and theft. I'd be curious in someone doing a deep dive to figure out why.
Someone made a fake account -> we need "Whatever is needed" to make creating fake accounts harder is exactly the wrong way of thinking about it. It's the same kneejerk reaction that got us PATRIOT act and TSA after 9/11.
Or if you're more swayed by social justice, all these onerous checks also makes it harder for "unbanked"/"underbanked" people access to the financial system, which has real harms for them.
The person who is now facing charges for a crime she did not commit is experiencing ‘real harm’.
Absolutely shameful to defend a b$ company that doesn’t not have adequate protections to prevent this from happening. Imagine this happening to you or your own - whisked away and locked up for a month for the crime of losing your wallet and getting your identity stolen.
>Imagine this happening to you or your own - whisked away and locked up for a month for the crime of losing your wallet and getting your identity stolen.
You know what's worse than sitting in jail for a few days? Dying or losing a loved one from 9/11. So you better get used to more federal agents scanning your communications and more TSA groping you at the airport. No cost is too great to prevent losing a loved one to terrorist attacks!
> You know what's worse than sitting in jail for a few days?
You haven't read the article. The stakes are much higher than "a few days in jail" which isn't nearly as small of a problem as you make it out to be either.
> Dying or losing a loved one from 9/11.
Why do you have to repeat this nonsensical 9/11 strawman of an analogy which has nothing to do with the case in question? Nobody asked for government "scanning of your communications". What you failed to notice is the refusal of CashApp to provide information about the fraudulent account because the victim couldn't prove owning it while she was being investigated for owning it.
CashApp stonewalled the victim and prevented proper investigation before charges were formally filed and the prosecutor got involved, after that it was to late and the mess that followed resulted in great expenses, turmoil and further risks for the victim.
Doubling down on a weak argument doesn’t endear anyone to your position, especially when it’s trivializing actual tragedies. For what, even, for flawed systems to remain flawed? TSA is a joke made to harass innocents while PATRIOT was a consolidation of power. It is true 9/11 was used to ram legislation that hurt Americans. It doesn’t mean every response to an unfortunate situation is wrong.
Additionally, your argument is to do what, exactly? Apply zero pressure to the company which aids and abets fraud to the detriment of innocence because you find “social justice” and restrictions distasteful? Accessing money should be laborious and should require various verification forms (even if I disagree that photographing IDs and selfies are actual forms of verification), because as we see here laxness has resulted in an innocent person’s life being upended.
A b$ company putting in more protections for its customers and non-customers by doing more checks is equal to TSA groping you? Please make it make sense.
The simple fact is that you can't just open an app and then let it destroy the lives of people with absolutely no connection to it. The company itself must be responsible. Saying "the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero" is only acceptable if the cost of that "non-zero" amount is borne by the company itself; otherwise the result is plainly misaligned incentives.
In the swatting case we'd blame the SWAT team for not vetting the call properly and for not cooperating with the authorities after they'd killed the kid on the driveway.
You're the second person who doesn't seem to realize that fraud prevention requires proper actions before and after fraud is detected/suspected. Failing to react properly on fraud protects the fraudsters - like CashApp has done - and makes the platform a magnet for fraud.
CashApp failed to investigate and provide vital information to victim while she was being investigated - they did that too late only after they were compelled to do so by the court and lawyers, creating a very hard situation for the victim and allowing the fraudsters to cover their tracks.
Zero fraud is non-optimal because the effort required to achieve it would make transacting impossible.
I suppose I should have spelled it out, given that so many people didn't get it.
It would be like declaring that the optimal number of vehicle deaths is zero, but then not realizing that the only way to achieve that is to make sure nobody can drive. When faced with the realities, everyone backs off and acknowledges that some risk is necessary
I suppose you need it spelled out again, since apparently this is a difficult concept for you to grasp.
The optimal—defined by MW as “most desirable or satisfactory”—amount of fraud is zero. The optimal target—synonymous with amount in this context—of vehicle deaths is also zero. The realistic value for either statistic is non-zero. You even said “when faced with the realities”.
You’re the only one not getting what is basic logic and definitions. Or more accurately, you are getting it, but you’re refusing to accept that your imprecise language was incorrect. You misused optimal when you meant realistic.
The optimal _target_ for fraud is not zero. That's the aphorism. The optimal _amount_ of fraud is indeed zero, for most value systems. You had to spell it out because you were imprecise.
You come across as one borrowing patio11’s coat. He's a great blogger. You aren't.
> The optimal _target_ for fraud is not zero. That's the aphorism. The optimal _amount_ of fraud is indeed zero, for most value systems.
You got it backwards in your rush to squeeze your ad hominem attack in there.
The optimal target for fraud can be zero. It's okay to aim for zero.
The optimal amount of fraud cannot be zero, because the cost to get to zero goes asymptotic to infinity as it approaches zero. Therefore the optimal amount of fraud cannot be zero.
> You come across as one borrowing patio11’s coat. He's a great blogger. You aren't.
Please don't sling ad hominem attacks like this.
I don't know why you're trying to compare me to someone else. These concepts did not originate with patio11. Is your only exposure to these concepts through one HN user's blog posts?
You came across as arrogant in your comment to tourmalinetaco, as if you are a great educator let down by the intellectual inadequacy of your acolytes. In truth, your conflation of "amount" and "target" muddies the concept you are trying to convey. If you wish to be brief, be precise.
You are so determined for me to be wrong that you've tied yourself in a knot.
This is not an ad hominem, it is a direct criticism of your attitude.
Apathy is the main thing allowing this to be a fantasy result. Maybe if enough people are caught up in bullshit like this where their lives and reputations are tarnished due to fraud perpetrated by someone else then we can energize some societal changes that pin the reputational damage and financial penalties on the correct donkey.
Those Palestinians in that leading photo don't have nearly enough guns. Probably a good thing too since they would likely be droned before they got to the top of that hill if they did have any.
1824th of 1824. Dead last with a score of 60 that your game handed me on a misspelling. I typed Windy's and it changed it to Wendy's and awarded a correct answer.
What is "deranking"? Is that where mods pull a post from the list before it gets too popular because the subject matter of the post makes the parent company uncomfortable by highlighting truths when it is better for the parent company if they leave those truths greyed out?
OP's post dropped from the front page after about a dozen comments until it was completely absent from a list of over 650 posts.
Uncomfortable truths - like Sam Altman's relationship with YCombinator; his "leadership" of OpenAI and ChatGPT; credible accounts of his long-term rape of his sister, etc.
At some point ordinary people will get really tired of seeing stuff like this and they will band together, regardless of political affiliations, etc, and will restore sane regulatory infrastructure with serious penalties and full accountability to the live people who decide that hiding behind a corporate veil will protect them and their families from legal consequences. The whole concept of "move fast and break things" will finally have a pendulum effect when the bob topples their empires on the other side of the swing cycle.
It's funny that this OP's post was on the front page minutes ago but is rapidly being buried. I had to use the search function to comment on this thread. It has dropped completely off of the list of over 650 posts.
OpenAI and ChatGPT evidently have a ridiculous number of supporters willing to bury anything this uncomplimentary and disturbing.
Maybe they feel responsible.
Hopefully they are held responsible. This incident is the catalyst for changing laws in Canada that may lead to individuals and corporations being held personally responsible when bad things happen. [1]
Wouldn't it be great to see the day when the C-levels who decide to deploy hardware/software/other solutions that obviously will cause deaths and destruction can be held liable in a real court and suffer severe sanctions as a result? I'm okay with the death penalty in these cases, for the corporation and the management that allowed or encouraged the destructive outcome in order to protect profits or solidify market advantages.
OT - This is pretty interesting research in understanding the flow of information through the brain. The correlation with similar research using mice appears to confirm these flow modes.
My thoughts on reading this article were not about how the information or electricity flows while the brain is engaged but more about whether this may help understand the origin of and the sensations associated with migraine or cluster migraine type headaches. I have relatives who suffer from migraines and they are debilitating, very painful experiences. As a geophysicist I understand waves, frequencies, sample rates, array design, and lots of other things.
The research here took advantage of more dense arrays implanted in the brains of epileptics and allowed reconstruction of wavefields detected much as one would use a stationary seismic array in earthquake detection and signal propagation studies.
I am left wondering whether a migraine trigger could occur when brain wave amplitudes interfere constructively at specific synapses (?) causing the signal amplitudes which are normally well-handled to swamp the region where the migraine is triggered. In many cases, light is a trigger and sufferers need to get to a dark place and cover up while the headache reverberates. I guess I would love to understand how to help dampen the severity of the headaches so that they can return to normal function as quickly as possible.
In summary - are migraine headaches related to wavefield interference such that impinging waves from the sensory organs (eyes, ears, etc) form a high amplitude standing wave focused on the region where these waves would normally arrive out of phase with little or no interference and the standing wave generates a physical sensation of deep pain in the skull sometimes with visual auras preceding the migraine event.
Y'all are some pretty smart guys. Ignore this OT post. I was just thinking.
I had also tried a different firewall/privacy tool from a company in Canada I think called ZeroKnowledge. That was a great product that also allowed you fine-grained access to and control of all connections to/from your Windows pc. They had a product available for a short time but shut down suddenly. I think I read that they were bought out by another firewall company but can't remember which one. They may have been rolled into the Blackberry software line.
Both of these were available in the 90's lead-up to the dot com bust if I remember right. Sygate became obsolete when support ended around the time WinXP faded. ZeroKnowledge disappeared much earlier. I may have old executables and installers somewhere on antique backups.
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