Posts by abetancort

Binance and CEO admit financial crimes, billions coughed up to US govt

The cost of a jail-out card

It seems that $10 billion in the US buys you a nice jail-out card.

FTX crypto-villain Sam Bankman-Fried convicted on all charges

Re: Whats wrong with crypto

Pounds are only useful in England, anywhere else there are not useful even if some banks are willing to exchange it at a deep discount because they have other clients willing to purchase it at a high premium because they are going to England where they can exchange it for good or services.

But bitcoin is worthless everywhere because it can be exchanged readily for good or services. You need a greater fool that is willing to exchange them for real currency.

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Re: "supposed expert who turned out to be anything but"

A real computer wiz will never raise a support ticket even if the machine is totally bricked. They will find a way to fix it or die trying before surrendering and asking for help from anyone. The nightmare are those that think they are wiz kids but actually aren’t.

The battle between open source and 'sort of' open source is as old as software

Re: Most of these companies only exist because of OpenSource

Everything run on software and you are ether paying it bundled or unbundled with any hardware. Software companies won’t stop making big bucks ever.

Twitter further restricts free tier with option to limit replies to verified accounts

Re: Not true..

Social networks are garbage and will produce garbage as long as it continues to be gamified around followers, likes and reposts. The only place where you can find useful information about other that pursue your hobby is Reddit, a shame it doesn’t have a powerful search function.

Stolen Microsoft key may have opened up a lot more than US govt email inboxes

Learn from Apple. End to end encryption and the unique key on the customer devices.

First of Tesla's 'bulletproof' Cybertrucks clunks off production line

Re: Are people seriously buying these?

If the rest of the car isn’t bulletproof, I understand it isn’t, having pseudo-bulletproof widows won’t be of very helpful when confronted with semiautomatic assault rifles. So there won’t be much demand from Mexican cartels and the like.

A toast to being in the right place at the right time

Re: He's toast

Buy him a smart toaster. A more user friendly alternative to confiscation.

Australia to phase out checks by 2030

Re: Checks?

Check mate, my friend.

Japan's ubiquitous convenience stores now serving up privacy breaches

Re: Something something pun about Horizon

What you are talking is a well known genetic situation that is called chimerism, rare, but well studied. A person or animal born out of two fused embryos that would have produced twins but in this case one embryo absorbs the other and the resulting fetus and afterwards person may have cells with the DNA of the absorbed embryo and cells of the prevailing embryo. The DNA changes usually in certain organs but it doesn’t have to.

If North American geneticists do not know about this circumstance then it’s a problem with American experts and not a problem with proper made DNA tests

Tesla Semi, out since December, already facing a recall over brakes

Lucky Elon

There aren't that many to recall. Most of them are still in the hands of Tesla and its partners.

Australian bank stops handling cash at the counter in some branches

Re: Uhhh...

In Spain, it has been going on for a while too. CaixaBank, the largest Spanish bank, has a lot of offices that don't handle common transactions in person but you can still do them, if you know you are young enough and savvy, using the ATM present in these offices.

Euro privacy regulators sniff Italy's ChatGPT ban, consider a pizza the action

Extreme Right or Left Politicians...

Extreme Right or Left Politicians like to regulate what we do or can't do. Both extremes feel the need to ban stuff. The extreme right in Italy prohibits ChatGPT and in Miami tries to burn books in public and school libraries. The extreme left in China tightly controls what portions of the internet their citizens can access. I guess it is because both extremes have inherent authoritarian tendencies.

Paid and legacy Twitter verification now indistinguishable

You wish the NYT didn't generate enough money to pay for anything it wanted. Yeah, continue wishing.

Russian developers blocked from contributing to FOSS tools

Re: Iraq (and Afghanistan)

Weapons of mass destruction. Hahaha!!

IT phone home: How to run up a $20K bill in two days and get away with it by blaming Cisco

Re: I had the reverse: a legit bill being refused

My rule for business if you don’t have a company phone and there are going to be charges, call collect or call me back procedure. It avoids all after the fact discussions about any bill with company.

Now collapsed SVB's parent files for bankruptcy as Biden calls for stiffer penalties

Re: too lazy to look

Depositors should not suffer from bank mismanagement and failure of proper oversight from the government. Depositors just put cash in a bank without an expectation of great returns but stable and low ones and the ability to withdraw on-sight their balances.

Re: too lazy to look

They grossly mismanaged the durations of their portfolios and their diversification of clients. The government should not let them fall but should not allow them and any related corporation to enter chapter 11. All assets and liabilities of any associated companies should be auctioned to other banks and financial institutions to make the government whole. Management, directors, and activist shareholders should be liable for the difference.

US officials probe Tesla's incredible detaching steering wheel

Re: They're not the only one - Nissan has the same problem

Doesn't Nissan make way more vehicles than Tesla? Two in how many million vehicles made by Nissan since Tesla shipped its first car? I guess odds are against Tesla vehicle owners... Be aware that Telas has a new nonoptional mode called wheel-less drive

Kremlin claims Ukraine hackers behind fake missile strike alerts

Re: Probably one good reason for the UK not to have such a system.

Every country has an emergency broadcast system set in place, not only for misil warning but natural emergencies too. I supposed if hackers can get to the system and trigger it, they can also modify the messages that will be announced. I believe that UK isn’t inmune at all to that type of tampering.

Scammers steal $4 million in crypto during face-to-face meeting

Re: The entire operation used a clone phone

I’m sorry but you seem to know very little about how https’ encryption and authentication works. Spoofing the MAC address of a device doesn’t allow you to perform a MiM attack over wifi if the app uses https encryption and certificate authentication.

No more free API access, says Twitter: You pay for that data

Re: They just did this in the wrong order

His way is to get Twitter to get into chap. 11 and then buy it again for pennies on the dollar. ¡Uy! I forgot he already bought it for 44 billion.

Should Google location data be a tool for cops?

Re: Cellular data isn't precise enough

Depends on the number of towers the phone pings, the more towers the better the resolution. Moreover a mobile will not only ping towers from its own mobile provider but any and all the towers of any telco that it can reach.

Re: Why Google?

Your phone acts as an electronic transponder even when not in actual use. It pings the surrounding cell towers every few seconds transmitting its IMEI (that resolves to your cell number and subscriber data whenever the telco wants) since it pings all surrounding towers and the signal gets to them with different power they can easily triangulate its position both in real time and after the fact.

Re: Why Google?

This is news because the one handing the data is Google, if it were the telco it would not make it to news.

Tesla admits it was asked to hand over Autopilot, Full Self-Driving docs to investigators

Mercedes self driving has been certified to level 3 while Tesla is still a mere level 2. I think that traditional automakers could easily end eating Tesla’s lunch.

Its still high stock price is sustained mainly by the hipe that Tesla will be able to make a full self driving car while other manufacturers won’t but chances of that scenario happening look dimmer every day.

French lawmakers say oui to Olympic video surveillance, but non for faces

Re: Drones?

Transponders in authorized drones. They check for the transponder signature.

Intel cuts some workers’ pay to fund its future

I don’t think engineers at Intel will be put under the poverty line if they take a 10% pay cut.

I’ll rat them out and testify what ever you want if I get immunity

You rather have your teammate being sacked than losing 10% in compensation. I bet your colleagues love you for the team spirit. As long as you’re not touched you could not care less about what happens to anyone else.

BT in tests to beam down 5G coverage from the stratosphere

Re: Possibly a sensible solution

Easy to shutdown but even easier to restore service.

Letting too much power in the hands of Musk is dangerous as we have seen in his handling of Twitter’s acquisition. It’s time someone showed that there could be competition in Starlink’s turf.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence

Or in the civilized metric world, a five by ten. That’s is the beauty of a decimal system being used by people that use a base 10 number system. You can go up or down in the scale of units to the one that makes sense by easily dividing or multiplying by 10 . Not weird divisions and multiplication nonsense that you have to do with American units.

OpenAI's ChatGPT is a morally corrupting influence

Re: Moral Guidance

Your conclusion is right, there is no right yes or no answer, it depends on what ethics school of thought you belong. Any answer will could be right or wrong depending on the supporting arguments you give.

Re: A tool for the devil, perhaps

I bet if they wanted chatGPT could be modified to give you a trove of bibliography on any answer that it produces. I will never be able to give you “the definitive correct” answer but if refined it’ll be able to give you the consensus response to whatever you ask it.

University of Texas latest US school to ban TikTok

Keep worrying about the China while welcoming with open arms the “legal” eavesdropping of everything you do online by NSA and a trove of US federal, state and local agencies. The former can’t lay a finger on you outside mainland China but the latter agencies can use anything they eavesdrop to really f*ck up your life while in the US or in any other friendly country (most of the world). So don’t worry, be happy with it.

Surely you can't be serious: Airbus close to landing fully automated passenger jets

An step in the path to reduce the number of pilots needed to fly commercial.

I think that airbus is aiming at allowing its new planes to be certified to be operated with just one pilot onboard. If the plane advanced autopilot allows the pilot to do the checklist by himself and in case of an emergency takes over the plane safely, it will allow the pilot to concentrate in solving the emergency (engine fire or malfunction) or if the sole pilot is disabled it’s able to safely land the airplane in the nearest airport, it will allow the airplane to be safely flown with one just pilot reducing the crew cost of operating the plane.

How to track equipped cars via exploitable e-ink platemaker

Re: Stick them on a Tesla.

You meant Tesla’s users using their FAD tech (full auto-driving), you shouldn’t call Tesla’s FSD anything but a FAD.

Re: Stick them on a Tesla.

Speed-cams are expensive, they take pictures and don’t record video. On the other hand, cctv records video and the cameras are inexpensive when compared to speed-cams.

Should open source sniff the geopolitical wind and ban itself in China and Russia?

Once something has been published on internet, trying to block it from someone is like trying to contain the sea with just your hands. Impossible.

Re: Open source software today is playing a critical role in bad things!

It’s what they do. They celebrate the new year in their own time.

Re: Code is speech

Who is the enemy? You start to see them when a country like China can topple the US from the top economic power.

Which one is this war?

Seeing how successful has been the war on drugs, and the war on terror, I think it would be better to stop forcing wars on anything because it won’t be successful as the previous wars weren’t

That is what Chinese economic central planning is trying to do. Most of their efforts in defense won’t see the public light, if they need to manufacture anything they will try to do it and probably succeed at it. Will you know it, in the short term you probably won’t.

You are probably right. If you see who you view as your enemy get rich, you start to worry and try to sabotage his growth anyway you can’t. That was probably what happened to the US during the last decade, it started to worry China was going to displace the US as the biggest economy in the world and that got a few people in US’s establishment very worried and afraid.

Southwest Airlines blames IT breakdown for stranding holiday travelers

They are upgrading their Excel from 2000 to 365.

Re: Blame the Computer

Southwest was the inspiration for Ryan Air operation model but Ryan Air failed to take notice of Southwest's customer service.

LastPass admits attackers have a copy of customers’ password vaults

Re: The cloud is just someone else's computer

1Password can be compromised and the only thing standing between the hackers and you passwords would be you master password.

I prefer systems where the a very long private key residing only in your devices is standing between the compromised passwords and the hacker. Like Apple Passwords in iCloud.

But if Apple and Google have their way we won’t be using passwords and 2FA much longer. Passkeys are the future.

Re: The cloud is just someone else's computer

How log before 1Password is breached too? I trust a lot more Apple iCloud and their E2EE encryption not with a password but a de unique long key that sits on your devices.

To protect its cloud, Microsoft bans crypto mining from its online services

Why? Credit Risk Management from Cloud Providers

It is simply credit risk management. Miners have high default risk due to their lack of tangible assets other than the extremely volatile crypto. Most miners using third party resources to make money need to bet that the crypto will increase in value overtime and thus they will tend hold-on to the crypto. If you allow them to mine without paying in advance or posting cash colateral in advance for resources capped in advance, you run the risk of finding after the fact that they have racked up massive invoice that they can’t honor because the crypto took a downturn and nobody is willing to lend to them to meet their short-term obligations. The most common outcome is for them to default in all their obligations leaving the cloud provider hanging with in the best cases only recourse to a bunch of highly devalued crypto with liquidity problems.

Halvings as stock splits don’t imply an increase in price, they are done to increase just liquidity of Athena stock or crypto.

SEC charges crew of social media influencers with $100m fraud

Re: Little new in this world

But riding the wave is not illegal as you are not pumping the stock. Without insider info from the main conspirators it is usually a losing strategy anyways.