I‘ve been wondering whether the contact tracking features introduced for Covid 19 could be used to verify that pictures of an event where taken by people who were actually around the scene. That way you‘d have some reassurance that a given picture was actually from the event. Combined with pictures from different angles from different people and some
kind of verified photography should make alterations harder.
I’m fairly sure that the contact tracing feature has been removed now. And it wouldn’t be needed anyway, the iPhone location services are far more useful. I imagine the geotag could be included with the verification.
Location services is quite hard to trick. To the point people have gone to the lengths of putting iPhones inside a microwave for RF shielding and setting up fake phone tower signals inside to trick the phone in to unlocking the hearing aid feature on AirPods for unapproved countries.
Indeed, that may simply be it. You would want to verify time and date. When coming up with the thought I was looking for ways to crowd verify real world events.
The functionality included time-based rotation of the identifier that supposedly at least notably increased the effort to identify/track people over a longer time frame. I never dug into the details, but I figure that works better with short-term contacts and may break if you are in contact with many people over a longer time frame.
Also, like contact tracking, it should be opt-in, so that you explicitly could act as ‚eyewitness‘.
I guess this is popular because of the 'oh-so-stupid-government' vibes. Yet (almost) everybody buys the cheap meat (which the non-alfalfa farmer is also selling in reality) subsidized by not growing alfalfa. And when the subsidiaries eventually are withdrawn and the local farmer cannot compete with some other guy at the other end of the world who externalizes cost, then everybody buys from the other end of the world and complains that the local economy is going down. There would be more to this story, but currently it ends with (almost) everyone buying cheap meat and complaining about taxes.
edit: maybe my story is the same as the alfalfa one
> ...the local farmer cannot compete with some other guy at the other end of the world who externalizes cost, then everybody buys from the other end of the world and complains that the local economy is going down.
This is exactly why I do my grocery shopping at my local Demoulas Market Basket instead of a European grocery conglomorate named Aldi's.
The easy one first: The Matt Levine piece quotes the story linked here, so he's definitely not the original source...
And then, yes: If you can make more money by not using your big resistor than actually using it, then economically you would be better off not using it. If you can make money by not using it, then someone is willing to pay you because they get value out of it or they can avert some damage. If you threatened to use your capacitor without obvious use other than destabilizing the grid, that might just look a little too much like blackmail...
If you believe in markets, then someone coming up with the means to improve grid stability (here: by overall less consumption) should somehow be able to turn it into a profit. The issue here seems to be, that American Efficient didn't actually give any guarantees that they could reduce consumption. So it rather looks like whoever admitted them to the auction didn't do their due diligence. The whole market thing breaks down when there is actual fraud or when the identical thing gets sold more than once (actually, energy savings could probably be sold once for grid stability and once for reduced emissions - I'd say they're disjoint to first order, but might be connected indirectly).
That being said, there should be limits to markets.The whole market thing breaks down when there is actual fraud, when a party/faction has a disproportionate amount of power or when there are externalized costs that are not accounted for in the pricing.
Jake VanderPlas also has an article on Understanding the Lomb-Scargle Periodogram [1] which I can recommend if you want to get into the details (it also includes a treatment of fourier-pairs + convolution to explain the 'artifacts' in DFT). There's a module for it in scipy, so it should be rather straightforward to try your analysis using timestamps for x and an array of ones for y. That algorithm is essentially a least-squares fit with sinusoids at pre-selected frequencies.
I've tried to use Lomb-Scargle to reduce the number of sampling points in magnetic resonance experiments, but had another dimension to take into account (similar to doing the analysis for each network port separately in your case). I got some spikes on some of the 'ports' which I couldn't reason about or reproduce when I did the same with periodic sampling and FFT. But the individual periodograms looked reasonable, if I remember correctly. Maybe we have a more regular user of LS around, who can point out common pitfalls. Otherwise you could generate some data from known frequencies to see what kind of artifacts you get.
You could maybe also take a look at the auto-correlation of the packet timestamps to see whether you can extract timescales on which patterns arise.
It appears that the ruling regarding the rapes was not so straight forward [1], certainly not something that you can use as a one-line argument. There are also other articles describing what presumably happened there in 2020.
Regarding the case of 'Maja R.', here's a summary [2] (e.g. she didn't show up for the first two hearings [3] - that would certainly raise the anger of the righteous if somebody not in their favor did that).
I'm in doubt whether this one case is sufficient to prove the downward spiral that some people claim to perceive (it was also brought up in context of migration here on HN recently, and from the sources which I could find I‘m not sure it fully qualifies there either).
Maybe [the UK is not on the list] because this article focuses on technical aspects of overcoming blocking of the global internet in those countries that benefit from improvements to the TOR infrastructure. Maybe there are no problems circumventing DNS-level blocking with TOR in the countries which you mentioned. Maybe those people arrested (source?) were actually able to technically access the platforms on which they raised whatever they had to say. So maybe, the post is simply about a completely different topic.
Looking into the situation in the UK specifically, I found a description of the potentially underlying issues [1] and those are indeed worrisome. I still fail to see why one would raise it in the way GP did to comment on the TOR post.
Others have pointed at the funding of TOR through the US. If there is actual evidence that this impacts the stated purpose of TOR (non-discriminating access to the internet, I‘d say), please share. Otherwise, my impression is still that TOR works as advertised and is working on solutions where it is not.
> I still fail to see why one would raise it in the way GP did to comment on the TOR post.
It's started cropping up in almost any thread related to free speech or censorship, and comes directly from the mouth of right-wing darling Tommy Robinson [0].
I‘m acting a bit naïve of course ;)
The comments are simply dominated by the root comment, which does not even try to put it into context of the linked post.
On top, it‘s a comment riding the outrage wave. There’s no contextualization (a number is only the beginning of a story, not the end). Not a substantiated starting point for an exchange on the matter.
I‘d just like to see better on HN.
Now I’m thinking that I have missed the point of the article. I didn’t read it as an introduction to vector spaces, but rather that the introduction served as to give an intuition how functions may be viewed as vectors (going back to the article, it’s even in the section heading).
I found the next parts well written and to the point, leading along the steps to show that indeed the requirements for a Hilbert space are met by L^2 (even though those requirements are only spelled out in the end).
I’m not actively working with mathematics any more, but I didn’t notice any major corner cutting. It’s not text book rigorous but lays out the idea in an easy to follow way.
I took something away from it - or not, depending on whether I missed some inconsistency.
No the relays are run by the community the Torproject doesn't run any relays. You could donate to a relay associations if you don't want to run a relay yourself.
Check out this post, but its better for the health of the network for there to be a diversity of exit node providers, so its better for folks to run one themselves, especially if they are in an under-represented country, or not in the cloud etc.
I support the Tor project but I have to admit that I am far too much of a coward to run an exit node on any network associated with me.
I know most usage of Tor isn’t illegal, but I don’t think it’s much of a secret that there is a fair amount of illegal stuff available on Tor, and I don’t want the FBI knocking on my door because my IP has been tied to some kind of kiddie porn site.
You don't have to run an exit. A middle node is as important as an exit. And running a non-exit relay is pretty hassle free. You will get blocked by some sites, especially banks and governments unfortunately so be aware of that if you want to run one at home. There is a list for ISPs that allow Tor nodes [0] but diversity is important so if you know an ISP with generous traffic allotments that's better. Just check the TOS that they don't explicitly forbid running a relay. Or you could run a bridge to help censored users connect to Tor.
There is also some information on the community site about running and setting up all kinds of relays or bridges [1]
Having run an exit node for a couple of years, the worst part for me was the spam associated with torrent traffic. I got several notices per week of copyright requests, which I responded to with a form letter fuck off, but it was still obnoxious because my upstream required me to do so, creating a ticket that they would not close until I had responded.
As far as dark websites, you are supporting them whenever you create any node, because any node can act as a hop for onion sites. On the balance, I think that it is worth having anonymity through Tor, but I will admit that that balance often seems a razor's edge.
In this particular case, it's not about supporting them, so much as I am just scared of being questioned by the FBI or something, or having my bandwidth throttled because people are stealing porn or movies.
I might still run a middle node at some point, because I do support Tor and want to help.
I don’t think it’s “weird fear mongering”, but I would actually like to hear how I am wrong.
ETA:
From the posted article:
> While it is relatively easy and risk-free to run a middle relay or a bridge, running an exit can be tough. You have to seek out a friendly ISP, explain Tor to them, and then navigate a laundry list of Internet bureaucracies to ensure that when abuse happens, the burden of answering complaints falls upon you and not your ISP.
This seems to me that what I was worried about is actually perfectly rational.
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