> a handful of people, sometimes only one or two. If I could only ignore them, the computer conferences were still valuable. Alas, it's not always easy to do.
> This is what killed Usenet,
You've got to be kidding!
The fact that Usenet was a protocol, with no favored UI (not even a web UI) meant that you could implement "only ignore them" in a totally reliable way. Indeed, this feature was so commonplace that it even had a name: a "killfile".
Killfiles were local to each user which is good since each person could control what they saw. It was bad because new users who didn't know about killfiles would see the bad actors. It also meant that could have disjoint conversation so it felt like each thread was its own thing. You would have to keep telling people to not respond to the trolls.
The ideal is to have a global filter by moderators for the bad actors, and user killfile to tune that.
Usenet killfiles are not "totally reliable". Nym shifting has always been a thing, even before Google Groups-based commercial mass spamming using constantly changing From: lines industrialized the problem. Killfiles also do nothing for people quoting the person you are trying to ignore, unless you use a thread-based killfile, which of course means you won't see a lot of non-killfiled people's comments.
At the end of the day, there is no satisfactory solution to the problem of warped and damaged online personalities other than actually preventing them from being online, which of course has its own difficulties and consequences.
I used to think that ESR had slid slowly into the lunatic fringe, but it sounds like he was a crank from the start. He pursued fame but seems to prefer notoriety to compromise. I think there’s a lesson here, but I’m not sure what it is.
Humility maybe? No matter how right you think you are, beware: you might be ESR.
Yeah if you want to talk about sliding slowly into lunacy, it'd be a once-respected computer scientist who now haunts online discussions looking for anything which could be obliquely linked to one of his personal betes noires and flooded with semi-irrelevant copy-paste.
We like self-checkout because there's hardly ever a line.
An idle self-checkout machine costs the store almost nothing. An idle cashier costs the store wages. So the stores will always skimp on cashiers, leading to lines, wasting my time.
Bitmessage is/was awesome, but it fundamentally doesn't scale.
Every user has to attempt decryption of every message sent by any sender. Later they cobbled on some kind of hokey sharding mechanism to try to work around this, but it was theoretically unmotivated and an implementation minefield (very easy for implementation mistakes in the sharding mechanism to leak communication patterns to an observer).
Bitmessage would be great if we had something like Schnorr signatures (sum of (messages signed with different keys) = (sum of messages) signed with (sum of keys)) that could tell you if any of the sum of a bunch of messages was encrypted to your secret key. Then you could bisection-search the mempool.
They get political clout from it. They're keeping the people corralled into a payment system that politicians can easily influence.
Jamie Dimon is the most popular banker in Washington because Chase has (by far) more retail depositors and retail deposits than any other bank. That's power.
It all boils down to the tradeoff between convenience and security.
I don't think it is particularly easy to replicate a living hand with all the blood vessels.
And it is not particularly easy to get a NFC ring with a secure element compatible with payment terminals.
I thought that the engineering team at Amazon did a great job with Amazon One. I wish someone could pick up the tech and carry on.
For 2020's-era palm scanners you don't have to replicate a 3D hand -- just like a video chat doesn't replicate my 3D face. You just have to emit photons (some of them infrared, yes) in the correct pattern. The hack won't look like a 3D-printed hand, it'll look like a display panel that works beyond visible wavelengths. It'll probably be some device developed for a totally unrelated market, and then one day "whoops, all those palm scanners are 0wn3d" (natürlich auf Deutsch) will be a talk title at CCC.
But all this is academic. The real problem with biometrics is that when your password is a body part, you can't change your password.
I agree and I get it. But at the same time, it is only used for payment and discounts at grocery store. Payment with a card is even less secure here in US. So, I do not think that Amazon Go was particularly unsecured since it was just for credit card payment.
If someone manages to replicate my pulsing blood vessels from my hand and trick the scanner, that would be fine. I would dispute the purchase, and the store would not even pull the camera footage, and just refund.
Amazon Go was not used to hold access to bank accounts or crypto wallets. I think it was a good technology and balance between convenience and security, for the purpose (grocery loyalty and payment).
A twin or even sometimes a relative (son and mother) can open an iphone and its banking apps using the facial recognition. That is more concerning to me than Amazon Go palm scanning for groceries.
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