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I have some hope that the EU will outlaw promotional push notifications that are not opt-in, similar to email spam. As it stands, push notifications are almost entirely useless because of all the noise.


What apps do you use?

I'm an iPhone user, I have a lot of apps on it, I receive a lot of notifications and I get no promotional notifications. I hope the "almost entirely useless" line was hyperbole :)


Lyft is the abuser on my phone. I'm close to removing all notifications for it, but they are kind of an important part of using the product...


Ah, I don't use Lyft. In my city in addition to Uber we've got Bolt (Estonian, ex Taxify), Yandex Taxi (russian) and Clever Taxi (something local).

If you have the possibility ditch them, because promotional crap in the context of a payed service, with no way to easily turn it off, is an abuse IMO.


Yep this is the biggest annoyance for me too.


On iOS at least, you can control which apps can send you notifications.

I see no unwanted ones as a result, because I only let well-behaved apps use notifications.


Newer cars do see around corners (relative to the driver), using the rear cameras. When backing out in my newish car, I can see up and down the road in both directions, from the cameras on the rear bumper.


Bitcoin has a great use case as internet native money, which can be thrown around programmatically, without being reliant on any private, corporate, or nation controlled services. Considering how much of a shitshow the payments industry is, I think this is a huge opportunity for bitcoin. Sure there are cases where regular payment methods are preferable, perhaps even most, but that doesn't mean that there is no place for true peer-to-peer permissionless money transfers.


This to me is the real value. I'm not a huge believer in Bitcoin, but try moving > 10k USD between bank accounts (just operating a small business I run into this several times a year) and you will quickly see the appeal. High fees, multi-day settlement times, raised eyebrows. It's just a mess. With cryptocurrencies you can move millions of dollars for less than a dollar in fees and it executes in as quickly as 10 minutes. There is definitely a downside in terms of price volatility, and other cryptocurrencies offer much better settlement times (beyond the network effect, they seem to offer more long term value here than Bitcoin), but having what is essentially gold that can teleport is very appealing. Sadly the ecosystem is not quite to where I would actually operate my business in this manner, but I can definitely see the value.


Transactions are about 10 minutes because that is the average block time, but you want at least 6 confirmations (blocks) too pass to really solidify things. So, it is more like 60 minutes. It is this reason (and volatility of course) that people dislike bitcoin as a regular payment mechanism. Nobody is going to wait 60 minutes at the counter to buy something.

But, if you have 1 trillion USD of value (insert the actual value that is meaningful to you) that you want to transfer around the world, you certainly want to do it in the most secure way possible. Especially without having to get permission from your local bureaucrat first. Bitcoin certainly makes that possible. The problem being that buying up 1 trillion USD worth of bitcoin is going to obviously move the market and anyone holding enough to do that OTC, makes it pretty centralized.

I do feel like there is a middle ground here and that is to look at it as more of a store of value. Just buy and hold it in the same way that people hold onto gold. If you look at the 100yr charts for gold, they are all over the place. 2008 was one of the largest dips that set things back at least 30 years! Now things have bounced back... but it is all on speculation and really has nothing to do with some sort of 'intrinsic value' of gold.


It's just not super clear to me that there is a huge need for this. Its been ten years and what services have btc integration? AliPay is outrageously more successful despite centralization, which seems to not bother most people.

Further, btc works precisely as well as a payment platform whether the price is $1 or $1,000,000. This makes the discussion of the price of btc suspicious to me.


> without being reliant on any private, corporate, or nation controlled services

Sounds good in theory until one is faced with a fraudulent vendor, a suddenly empty wallet or a transfer error due to some "fat fingers" mistake. Then people somehow get nostalgic for "how much of a shitshow the payments industry is" and how quickly it acts on chargebacks, scams or unauthorized spending.


I don’t think it’s use case for this is very good due to its extreme price volatility. Dai - sure, maybe (if you didn’t have to always convert to USD to buy something).

This plus bitcoin’s inability to handle transactions in a timely way makes it kind of useless for this.

From the other commenter I think bitcoin as a store of value could be possible, but it’d have to stabilize in the end which remains to be seen. I’m also not sure scarcity itself guarantees value, but I probably just don’t know enough about this.


Well, if the police was asking for the private keys that protected my million-euro stash of drug money... I would have 'lost' them too. In that vein, I wonder if they keep an eye on the wallets, and for how long.


If I were in their position, I would sign up for one of those services that alert you when coins move. I run one [1].

I'd then set the alert to go to coldcases@police.ie saying "new evidence on case number xxxx". That way even if the current staff retire, it'll be followed up on.

[1]: https://serverthiefbait.com


The chance that some random service run in the Bitcoin space exists in even a years time is vanishingly small.

Yes, even yours.


It is plausible to run a service on a $5 VPS. Pay $120 ahead of time and you have it for two years. I don't know why you think it would be so fragile. It wouldn't be difficult to run locally either.


Until it gets owned by an unpatched CVE, anyway.


Pretty hard to own a VPS which has no external ports open, even if the software on it is years out of date. In fact, updating software is probably a bigger security risk than not doing so, because you never know when someone manages to package a malicious bit of code into a common debian package.

Also, if it did get owned, I'd just have to spend a few hours rebuilding it - no bitcoin wallets or anything to steal on there.


Fair point about updates being a mixed bag. But “no ports open” doesn’t always mean safe. Maybe someone can pass some evil bits inside transaction metadata? (Disclaimer: no idea what I’m talking about w/r/t transactions, or how much parsing you’re doing)


If that were possible it would be exploited on every instance of the insecure software. Luckily what you are saying is far fetched. Why is it that you think a VPS is some fragile thing that is sure to be exploited? There are literally millions of instances chugging away, serving up files. Let's use our best judgement.


Sound like FUD, what reason do you have to think a VPS set up correctly would have such a high probability of being exploited? What numbers do you have that show this is common?

(Also, again, someone could easily run something locally)


If I close down, I have to refund all my customers.

And it isn't a limited company, so those refunds come out of my personal bank balance.

You can bet I'll be running it for 10 years.


I’ll hold you to that.


Just another example of the army readily experimenting on soldiers with novel 'treatments'. Want to test some new unproven medical technology? The army will hook you up. Thousands of hapless subjects who will do as they're told, no questions asked.


They are not forcing or coercing anyone with that specific intent unlike many commercial actors. In fact, when we compare for example DARPA's TCDS research - it has beaten a lot of competetive initiatives in the private sector when it comes to pushing high quality ethical neuro science and it's tech forward. I'm not a military ethics fan and of the opinion it lacks all over the world but the matter at hand surely ain't as gloomy black & white as you present.


So some questions:

> with the privileges of the Bluetooth daemon

Which priviliges is that? Can it access user data? Snoop on input/output?

> For some devices, the Bluetooth MAC address can be deduced from the WiFi MAC address

So if wifi is off, I'm safe?

I have bluetooth on all the time, because it automatically pairs with my car for cellular and audio, and turning it on and off would be a hassle. I rarely, however, use wifi unless I have to download a very big amount of data, which is almost never.


> Which priviliges is that? Can it access user data? Snoop on input/output?

This is somewhat addressed in a comment/reply by jorge:

https://insinuator.net/2020/02/critical-bluetooth-vulnerabil...

> Hi, the Bluetooth daemon is a process on the Android system that runs in the background (daemon) that is responsible for managing the Bluetooth controller and handling of various Bluetooth related protocols, such as HCI, L2CAP and GATT. As it has to process attacker-controlled input it is susceptible to attacks. In addition, it has to run with high privileges (not as ‘root’ like on Linux) to support features like: – file transfer => read files – share Internet connection => configure network and VPN – Human Interaction Devices => emulate keyboard and mouse


> So if wifi is off, I'm safe?

No, the connection packets can still be sniffed from the air once your device connects to your car. Then the attacker knows your mac address and can initiate the exploit.


Have you compared with other BT headphones?

Because in general, BT headphones are great and I understand that people love them. But Airpods are not among the better ones in my experience. They drop out more than my other BT headphones, and the fact that they have no volume control is just unbelievably stupid to me.


Yeah. Alarm systems are all on cellular and trigger on loss of power.


I honestly couldn't see much difference. I did not study it in detail to find the differences, just a casual view of both clips. I did look at the comparison clips at the end of the 4K version but still didn't see much of a difference.

A problem may be that the source material is simply too high quality to begin with? I watched the original first and thought "wow, 1896, this enhancement is great", only turns out that was the original clip. They should have chosen something that has more room for improvement (which would also give them a lot more interesting material to choose from).


> A problem may be that the source material is simply too high quality to begin with? I watched the original first and thought "wow, 1896, this enhancement is great", only turns out that was the original clip.

Funny, I did the same


Wow, downvotes. The hate for gold is strong, never really understood why.

The fact is that gold is one of the few asset classes that are safe.


Gold has the volatility of the stock market, with lower returns than bonds: https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-asset-class-all...


I wouldn't be so sure, it is only worth much because we believe so. (Likewise platinum.) They will bubble and crash.

As opposed to say steel and copper which are tied to industrial supply and demand.


Money is shared fiction too. The difference is we can print an infinite supply of it but only have a finite supply of gold in the world.


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