> It doesn't really seem to have made a difference.
Twitter is worth around a third of what Elon paid for it. I'm assuming you're happy to just assert that 2/3 of it's lost value is just those "who were leaving anyway" and changes like those to third party apps had no impact?
It’s mostly worth a third of what he paid for it because he paid way too much. But the actual value it’s lost is mostly around content moderation decisions and Elon’s own posting, not third-party apps.
1) You're correct in saying it clearly doesn't constitute Blackmail.
2) No, the opportunity cost for Reddit is the users using Apollo to browse Reddit as opposed to official channels. This prevents Reddit from effectively monetizing those users, because they cannot display them ads, track their usage habits, and all the other things social media companies do to monetize their user base. The reality is that using a user browsing via Apollo costs Reddit directly (server costs) and indirectly (missed opportunities aka opportunity cost).
3) Reddits bet is that the majority of the user base will be retained. The vocal outcry suggests they will not. Only time will tell which side is right. The other point many 3rd party advocates are making is that moderation tools, the majority of which are considered 3rd party apps, will also stop working. This will most likely significantly degrade the quality of many subreddits. People aren't necessarily angry saying "we demand our equal share", but rather "this is really short sighted and you're going to kill what we care about".
Honestly I have to say this is the type of security article that annoys me the most.
- Snarky and talks down about people not "in the know" about potential security issues.
- Supreme confidence that they are super knowledgeable about how it "should" be done.
- Fails to provide any actual demonstrable impact, but doing the old "left to the reader" as to how it's clearly exploitable.
But when you drill into the details, they are just fundamentally wrong about how the product is even working, what is possible with the attack surface, and how components are interacting with each other.
There are plenty of vulnerabilities out there, and companies do make stupid mistakes with regards to security in lots of situations. That doesn't mean that every pie in the sky idea you have (oh look, I did a kiosk escape, dot dot dot, clearly I can credit card skim now) is possible.
it's in the tradition of "posting the wrong answer to get the good one". within this genre the comment section ends up even more terrifying than the post itself!
> There are payment terminals attached to these kiosks. If someone installs malware on here - just insert a usb stick or use the recovery mode - then tada we have the next generation of atm skimming.
As has been mentioned through out this thread by others there is not this form of interaction between the payment terminal and the kiosk.
I guess it’s partly the tone of the article. It comes across as quite arrogant. Had he actually managed to break in to one of them, that would’ve been interesting.
The commenter wasn’t providing an explanation on how the kiosk works, they were giving a criticism of the tone and usefulness of the article. I thought their level of detail in their critique was perfectly appropriate.
After having read quite a few, security articles seem much like proposing Russel's teapot: as long as you as the authors don't demonstrate a viable exploit, it is unlikely that such an exploit exists.
> I remember vividly opening the door to the pig pen, and it was just a sea of people, 95% just responding to very basic customer queries/doing incredibly basic computation work and costing huge amounts of money...because, of course, there is no cost pressure from "customers"...a parallel that more people understand is US healthcare admin, huge inefficiencies, pension admin is like that
How does blockchain solve this?
There are always people pushing generalized "it will be good for this" statements, yet they can never seem to give concrete examples of where blockchain would be a better solution than the current implementation.
Because all of the operations that these people perform can be performed computationally (and the reason why they aren't now is not necessarily technological, all the technology exists to do this today but blockchain forces everyone to change all at once).
Blockchain solves it by making it so that all that goes away. In return if something fucks it up...well look at every crypto project that has ever crashed. I'm not being glib. That's the solution.
This is why you don't understand...the "customer" for pensions/fund managers is not the end-user, it is financial intermediaries (in most countries anyway, the level of disintermediation varies, some do market themselves to individuals i.e. Vanguard but most do not, the commission does not go to the customer).
All of the technology to do away with this exists now and existed before blockchain. But most of these companies haven't implemented because they aren't native tech companies (I don't think people understand on here, these places don't have any software engineers, they hire consultants, their idea of a "tech guy" is the guy who sorts out the Microsoft licences) and the cost saving is only realised if everyone adopts it.
With blockchain, it allows you to decentralise a whole set of computational logic that was previously performed by hand, and you change how people interact with that.
It all seems totally puzzling...because most people assume that these businesses are already using technology, when they aren't. Blockchain incentivizes business transformation across the supply chain, which allows you to remove cost from almost every level.
The question of actual customer support is not going away, it will never go away. That is what financial advisers are for, they are actual customer support.
Classic HN though, a bunch of people who don't work in an industry pontificating about how that industry works...genius.
There's nothing to support. The block chains immutability means no takebacks. The phone line can just have a message on repeat "Sorry, nothing can be done. The Blockchain is the source of truth." Customers can then just hang up knowing that it's the real world that is wrong and not a thing on chain. This is blockchain realism at its finest.
Fucking lol. I can just imagine a company sending a package to the wrong address. The customer rings the company to ask what's going on. "Sorry the blockchain is immutable, we can't change where your package is going, deal with it".
Yes, blockchain totally solves all these problems...
Then look at _why_ you don't have it in today's financial services. Is it because there is some technology lacking that only blockchain and cryptocurrencies can solve?
No, it's because in the years of financial market experience, people realise the risks don't outweigh the rewards.
Cryptocurrencies and block chain isn't solving a problem, it's just spruiking the pro's side of a pro's and con's decision.
I never said blockchain was a solution. I literally just said there are features of cryptocurrencies that are useful.
There are features of cryptocurrencies that would actually be useful in today's financial services.
The main one would be near instant settlement.
PayPal makes billions offering this service, when it could be a feature of the financial system.
You seem to be doing this weird thing where you're trying to imply cryptocurrency is solving a problem, but still wanting to have take backs when people say "cryptocurrency doesn't solve this problem".
If your position is that instant transfer would be useful, there is no reason we don't have that already at a technical level. It's purely a financial system construct that we wait and have settlement periods for the ability to reverse transactions, have added security, etc.
If your position is that cryptocurrency somehow solves a technical problem, I'd be interested to hear what you think that technical problem is.
Taking Bitcoin as an example...it's an open and free alternative to those private systems.
Sure it has limitations, but the base network layer is there and functioning (with 100% uptime) for anyone to use without needing to ask for permission. That's the value.
The bait and switch with this comparison is you're comparing something you have no control over (bread slicer which randomly malfunctions) against something you have full control over (my own cutting abilities). No one thinks their cutting ability is inferior, so of course they don't want to give up control, because they are (obviously) better than the average human.
If I posed the question as: Would you prefer to place your hand next to a machine which will accidentally cut your finger off once every 100,000 cuts, or a human chef that will accidentally cut your finger off every once every 50,000 cuts, which would you prefer?
I don't know about you, but I'd give the machine a crack.
Ok, maybe a different, well known example - the radiation Theraphy Therac-25 machines which would sometimes(extremely rarely) deliver a lethal dose of radiation instead of the one entered. Undoubtedly those machines saved more lives than they took, and also it's without question that they did so more accurately than any human operated machine could ever do. Yet they are considered one of the biggest failures of medical engineering ever.
I see it the same way - the current "self driving" systems shouldn't be allowed on the road, period, no matter how much safer they are than a statistical driver, unless they can be demonstrated to be completely 100% perfect in all scenarios(other than actual hardware failure - they shouldn't for instance run into a truck that's turning across a highway just because the system chose to ignore it).
Yeah, I guess my comment was kind of off the cuff.
What I was thinking about, was that seatbelts are hardly "100% perfect in all scenarios." I mean, they can make it a more difficult to get out of a burning vehicle quickly, just as an example. Even ignoring the possibility of malfunction, or jamming and such, they're not perfect.
The fact is, even if seatbelts decrease your risk overall, they are nowhere near 100% perfect. Nevertheless, many of us choose to use seatbelts, and indeed even chose to do so before widespread legislation.
The statistics we have about self driving are kinda useless though. Teslas don't do intersections… which is where most accidents will happen. So yeah good they don't crash because they give up in the difficult situations.
Just to clarify, my company is under an NDA and not personally me. It also encompasses only the actual project details so a post like this is legally compliant. (Not a lawyer, might be wrong)
In every contract I've ever signed, part of the NDA clause with my employer is that I'm also bound by NDA's my employer is bound by, so if the employer signs an NDA with a customer, I would also be bound by that. It might be worth checking your contract, otherwise having a company sign an NDA doesn't hold much weight if their staff are free to go around sharing the information themselves.
Twitter is worth around a third of what Elon paid for it. I'm assuming you're happy to just assert that 2/3 of it's lost value is just those "who were leaving anyway" and changes like those to third party apps had no impact?