They look really legitimate on the outside, to the point that there's a fair chance they're not aware what their extension is doing. Possibly they're "victim" of this as well.
If that looks use-italics "really legitimate" to you, then you might be easily scammed. I'm not saying they're not legitimate, but nothing that you shared is a strong signal of legitimacy.
It would take a perhaps a few hundred dollars a month to maintain a business that looked exactly like this, and maybe a couple thousand to buy one that somebody else had aged ahead of time. You wouldn't have to have any actual operations. Just continuously filed corporate papers, a simple brochure website, and a couple virtual office accounts in places so dense that people don't know the virtual address sites by heart.
Old advice, but be careful believing what you encounter on the internet!
Don't be rude. "Real person" here might live in any country of the world.
And also, why extension for vpn? I live in country where almost everybody uses vpn just to watch YouTube and read twitter, and none of my friends uses some strange extensions. There are open source software for that - from real vpn like wireguard, to proxy software like nekoray/v2raytun. Browser extension is the last thing I would install to be private.
> What, there's an issue because I'm not being underhanded about it like [that] guy?
Wow you’ve put something into words here I never consciously realized is an unwritten rule. Sounds silly but yea you’re 100% right; that seems to be exactly the game we play.
> you'll have a better shot at dragging an actual person in front of a judge than for 99% of the other crap that's on the chrome web store
Based on what? The same instinct that told you having an address and phone number makes an entity legitimate? The chance the people behind this company live in the US is incredibly low. And even if they do live in the US what exactly would they be getting charged with and who would care enough to charge them?
You run a business from home but do not want to reveal you personal address to the world.
You are from a country that Stripe doesn’t support but need to make use of their unique capabilities like Stripe Connect, then you might sign up for Stripe Atlas to incorporate in the USA so you can do business directly with Stripe. Your US business then needs a US physical address ie virtual office.
That you don’t need an office if your company works remotely? Kind of overkill with a whole office for a company with 3 people working at it and everyone works remotely.
Obvious option would be the law firm handling your business license. But can we also take a minute to appreciate the absurdity of a PO box ever being deemed unacceptable? It literally exists for this exact purpose, and there are any number of "PO box except not a PO box" schemes out there due to this issue. It ought to be illegal to treat PO boxes differently IMO.
Mainly they want an address if they need to serve legal notice to you. You can't deliver that to a PO box, it has to be handed to someone at a physical address.
> Urban VPN is operated by Urban Cyber Security Inc., which is affiliated with BiScience (B.I Science (2009) Ltd.), a data broker company.
> This company has been on researchers' radar before. Security researchers Wladimir Palant and John Tuckner at Secure Annex have previously documented BiScience's data collection practices. Their research established that:
> BiScience collects clickstream data (browsing history) from millions of users
Data is tied to persistent device identifiers, enabling re-identification
The company provides an SDK to third-party extension developers to collect and sell user data
> BiScience sells this data through products like AdClarity and Clickstream OS
> The identical AI harvesting functionality appears in seven other extensions from the same publisher, across both Chrome and Edge:
Hmm.
> They look really legitimate on the outside
Hmm, what, no.
We have a data collection company, thriving financially on lack of privacy protections, indiscriminant collection and collating of data, connected to eight data siphoning "Violate Privacy Network" apps.
And those apps are free... Which is seriously default sketchy if you can't otherwise identify some obviously noble incentives to offer free services/candy to strangers.
Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three (or eight) times is enemy action.
The only thing that could possibly make this look any worse is discovering a connection to Facebook.
Judging from their website, all links eventually point to either the VPN extension download website, or a signup link. I'm not surprised if some nation state supported APT is behind this shit.
AppleTV is pretty random and only vaguely incidental to the solution. Tailscale runs on computers. Basically anything will do. If you don't have a home server, just grab a cheap RPi or an old laptop. Or in a pinch drop it onto an old phone from your old phone drawer.
I have been thinking about it but it is tricky from a legal standpoint. What I'm trying to arrange next time I visit is to have a secondary line installed at my parents place that is in my name. So that when I pull heavy traffic from that line it doesn't impact them and I can't get them in trouble for posting a message that isn't government approved.
In practice most monoliths turned into "microservices" are just monoliths in disguise. They still have most of the failure modes of the original monolith, but now with all the complexity and considerable challenges of distributed computing layered on top.
Microservices as a goal is mostly touted by people who don't know what the heck they're doing - the kind of people who tend to mistakenly believe blind adherence to one philosophy or the other will help them turn their shoddy work into something passable.
Engineer something that makes sense. If, once you're done, whatever you've built fits the description of "monolith" or "microservices", that's fine.
However if you're just following some cult hoping it works out for your particular use-case, it's time to reevaluate whether you've chosen the right profession.
Microservices were a fad during a period where complexity and solving self-inflicted problems were rewarded more than building an actual sustainable business. It was purely a career- & resume-polishing move for everyone involved.
Putting this anywhere near "engineering" is an insult to even the shoddiest, OceanGate-levels of engineering.
I remember when microservices were introduced and they were solving real problems around 1) independent technological decisions with languages, data stores, and scaling, and 2) separating team development processes. They came out of Amazon, eBay, Google and a host of successful tech titans that were definitely doing "engineering." The Bezos mandate for APIs in 2002 was the beginning of that era.
It was when the "microservices considered harmful" articles started popping up that microservices had become a fad. Most of the HN early-startup energy will continue to do monoliths because of team communication reasons. And I predict that if any of those startups are successful, they will have need for separate services for engineering reasons. If anything, the historical faddishness of HN shows that hackers pick the new and novel because that's who they are, for better or worse.
We've barely found 1-2 ways to make useful AI and there's already professors who've incorporated those into their view of the field to such a degree that they cannot even imagine we might discover another way down the line.
You usually see this lack of imagination in the crusty old sciences, not in something as fast moving as this field. Props to the guy for being ahead off the curve though.
I'm the first to shit on anyone who thinks current LLMs will take us to AGI, but I'm far from insane enough to claim this is the end of the road.
This is such an uncharitable reading. "Housewifes" were extremely common then and were marketed to quite extensively in those product categories. Acknowledging them in some form is not the same as saying "I have deeply thought about the state of our society and have come to the conclusion that all is as should be."
Not quite then as well, since a lot is typically executed in parallel and the implementation details of most number representations make them sensitive to the order of operations.
Given how much number crunching is at the heart of LLMs, these small differences add up.
The majority of treatments people ever thought up and think up today are somewhere between useless and terrible ideas. Whatever you think is looking so exciting right now, there have been a million other things that looked just as exciting before. They do not anymore.
We didn't come up with these rules around medical treatments out of nowhere, humanity has learned them through painful lessons.
The medical field used to operate very differently and I do not want to go back to those times.
Mildly amusing if true, but I can't help but notice that some things the article mentions, like "fact-checking", are never in fact a direct quote from the supposed memo.
Is it so hard to reproduce the entire damn thing so readers can form their own opinion of what it says?
The chose you are given is to either not listen to anybody and stay uninformed or listen to "experts" and become mis/disinformed.
It's incredible that in some cases people who know nothing about the topic have way less (in percentage) stupid and incorrect facts than people who try to actively educate themselves through "experts".
There are other options besides those. You have two pieces of information: If you trust experts or "do your own research" and if you are correct or not. This leads to four choices:
- You trust experts, and the experts are right -> You are right
- You trust experts, and the experts are wrong -> You are wrong
- You do your own research and are right -> You are right
- You do your own research and you are wrong -> You are wrong
Now, if I had to guess, the people who are more knowledgeable on a subject would likely have a better idea on the truthiness of a statement regarding that subject. Your argument appears to be the opposite.
> It's incredible that in some cases people who know nothing about the topic have way less (in percentage) stupid and incorrect facts than people who try to actively educate themselves through "experts".
I assume this is just an anecdote but could you extrapolate on this point a bit?Is there a study you could show me where they tested "do your own research" people's knowledge vs domain experts? What topics do you think have the highest chance of the "experts" being stupid and incorrect?
I did not mean that those 2 choices I mentioned are the only ones. I meant that the "deep legacy media"/"experts" are trying to convince you that only these two choices (listen to the "experts" or not to listen to anybody; "don't trust anybody else, trust me when I tell you that") exist. This leads to the 2 outcomes I painted: being not informed or being misinformed. Everything else that doesn't fit the current official narrative is branded with bad words.
Obviously, this is a false dichonomy and one should do the right thing (educating oneself with different sources, to form a full picture) despite the namecalling.
I don't have any study (I don't know if they exist) and was purely talking about the topic dear to my heart that I have following on for 25+ years: the Finnish expertise on Russia/Putin. It is horrendous. And I am not even talking about crazy expert opinions that one can disagree with, but core problems with logic and basic facts.
It is even sadder because Finland is trying to brand itself as The Russia expert in EU, is succeeding and this incompetence has real consequences.
The quality of expertise in this example is so terrible that we get the incredible situation when not informed people, using only their common sense, have a higher percentage of reasonable/truthful takes than people who are trying to be informed using "homegrown talent". This is an unbelievable consequence!
I am not saying that this is a general trend or that "experts bad". It's just in this particular case I know the topic and have the knowledge to access the correctness of people who are performing as experts on Russia. I have been having presentations on this topic.
Also, obviously, political "sciences" is different from actual sciences.
This reminds me of the Onion's expert panel on Nigeria, with the difference of journalists also being clueless (not their fault, they can't ask critical questions and challenge "experts", if their whole world view also comes from these "experts").
https://youtu.be/Pwom49awRKg
What these proposals like to forget (even if addressing everything else) is that you need to slow down once you arrive if you want to have any time at all for useful observation once you reach your destination.
What's the point of reaching alpha centauri in 30 years if you're gonna zip past everything interesting in seconds? Will the sensors we can cram on tiny probes even be able to capture useful data at all under these conditions?
If we shoot a thousand probes at 0.1c directly at the Alpha Centauri star, they should have several hours within a Jupiter-distance range of the star to capture data. Seems like enough sensors and time to synthesize an interesting image of the system when all that data gets back to Earth.
Any mass that it fires would have a starting velocity equal to that of the probe, and would need to be accelerated an equal velocity in the opposite direction. It would be a smaller mass, so it would require less fuel than decelerating the whole probe; but it's still a hard problem.
Be careful with the word "just". It often makes something hard sound simple.
Not trying to oversimplify. But suppose 95% of the probe's mass was intended to be jettisoned ahead of it on arrival by an explosive charge, and would then serve as a reflector. That might give enough time for the probe to be captured by the star's gravity...?
It seems to me that building a recording device that can survive in space, that it's very light, and that can not break apart after receiving the impact from an explosive charge strong enough to decelerate it from the speeds that would take it to Alpha Centauri is... maybe impossible.
We're talking about 0.2 light years. To reach it in 20 years, that's 1/10th of the speed of light. The forces to decelerate that are pretty high.
I did a quick napkin calculation (assuming the device weighs 1kg), that's close to 3000 kiloNewton, if it has 10 seconds to decelerate. The thrust of an F100 jet engine is around 130 kN.
IANan aerounatics engineer, so I could be totally wrong.
> Urban Cyber Security INC
https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_de/5136044
https://www.urbancybersec.com/about-us/
I found two addresses:
> 1007 North Orange Street 4th floor Wilmington, DE 19801 US
> 510 5th Ave 3rd floor New York, NY 10036 United States
and even a phone number: +1 917-690-8380
https://www.manhattan-nyc.com/businesses/urban-cyber-securit...
They look really legitimate on the outside, to the point that there's a fair chance they're not aware what their extension is doing. Possibly they're "victim" of this as well.
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