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EMM_386 commented on The new Google Pay repeats all the same mistakes of Google Allo   arstechnica.com/?p=174706... · Posted by u/feross
kahirsch · 4 years ago
Google Pay was a great way to send money to my kid in college. Since we both had debit cards, it was instantaneous and free. It was easy to use from the web interface. Now they're doing away with the web interface. They don't say why, so the reason has to be pretty shady.

There was some bad UI with the web. It would pop up a window to warn you to only send money to people you know, but it was a window you couldn't move to see who you were sending money to, in case you clicked the wrong person!

But that's better than the experience I had with the app when I paid at a McDonald's recently. I was expecting a screen which said something like "You are about to pay $9.72 to McDonald's Corporation. CONTINUE/Cancel.

Instead, when I put my thumb on my phone's fingerprint sensor, here's the feedback I got: (vibrate)

No information on who I was about to pay or how much I was about to pay. And afterward, absolutely no information about who I just paid or how much I paid them.

I went into the payment history screen and they payment wasn't there either, although it showed up about a minute later.

How is that acceptable?

I would NEVER use the app unless I lost my wallet!

Using the Google Pay app at a point of sale was a terrifying experience.

EMM_386 · 4 years ago
> Now they're doing away with the web interface. They don't say why, so the reason has to be pretty shady.

The article explains why.

> Just like with Google Allo, SMS-based authentication means there's no desktop support at all. The Google Pay website is being stripped of all its useful functionality because a browser does not have a carrier SIM card and therefore can't be authenticated by the SMS-reliant system.

eternalny1 commented on Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?   washingtonpost.com/outloo... · Posted by u/apollinaire
mcv · 4 years ago
It doesn't just raise questions about the self, but also lots of legal questions. Imagine you would transplant a brain in a different body. Who is that person now legally? Technically, only a single organ got transplanted, and everything else is still the body donor. But of course the person has the memories and presumably the sense of self of the brain donor. But the finger prints, iris scan and DNA of the body donor.

Of course we don't even know whether this sense of self is really purely attached to the brain. That brain is still connected to the rest of your body, and who knows what the body chemistry of the body donor will do to the new brain? Maybe we'll end up with a completely new person. Maybe not all memories will survive the transplant, but even if they do, you'll have a person who has the memories of the brain donor, but will be recognised by everybody as the body donor.

Mind you, if you transplant the entire head and not just the brain, this issue will lean a lot more strongly towards the head donor.

eternalny1 · 4 years ago
> Of course we don't even know whether this sense of self is really purely attached to the brain. That brain is still connected to the rest of your body, and who knows what the body chemistry of the body donor will do to the new brain?

Imagine just one aspect of this. A thyroid disorder.

If the donor body was hyperthyroid, the head transplant would result in someone with the symptoms of hyperthyroidism. Angry, irritable, racing pulse, etc. If they had hypothyroidism, they would be depressed, lethargic, etc.

And that's just one organ in the body. It could radically alter the "person" who they are presuming lives only in the head.

eternalny1 commented on Binance Smart Chain DeFi Project Hacked for $31M   cryptobriefing.com/binanc... · Posted by u/capableweb
eternalny1 · 4 years ago
Fascinating that using a 0 (zero) instead of an O let them backdoor this.

function _setAdmin(address newAdmin) internal { bytes32 slot = ADMIN_SL0T;

    assembly {
      sstore(slot, newAdmin)
    }
  }
https://obelisk.medium.com/meerkat-finance-and-the-0-that-wa...

EMM_386 commented on Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea   eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03... · Posted by u/wyldfire
Noughmad · 4 years ago
I really don't understand the problem here. It looks like FLoC will entirely depend on the browser (which Google controls if it's Chrome). So the browser will analyze your browsing history (and since it's Google, it will probably connect to everything else Google knows about you) to request targeted ads.

But, what about the people who don't use Chrome? I would hope that most people who know what EFF is already don't. Firefox will surely come with a way to disable it, or you'll configure it to always send "my little pony" or something like this.

In the end, this seems to really be about Google (with a browser) competing against Facebook and other ad providers (who don't have a browser).

EMM_386 · 4 years ago
> Firefox will surely come with a way to disable it

What's interesting is that since these "FLoC cohort" identifiers are generated by the browser itself, it's even easier than "disabling" it.

They just won't implement it in the first place.

eternalny1 commented on Google to stop selling ads based on your specific web browsing   wsj.com/articles/google-t... · Posted by u/ghshephard
eternalny1 · 4 years ago
This is not true, they say they are switching from third-party cookies to FLoC.

The EFF calls FLoC "bad for privacy". More information here:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/dont-play-googles-priv...

eternalny1 commented on “This destroys the RSA cryptosystem”   eprint.iacr.org/2021/232... · Posted by u/renaudg
muricula · 4 years ago
The website is being hugged to death, but archive.org has scraped the PDF: https://web.archive.org/web/20210302215033/https://eprint.ia...
eternalny1 · 4 years ago
This is a different paper.

The linked one is: received 1 Mar 2021

The PDF is: work in progress 31.10.2019

eternalny1 commented on Chrome does not respect autocomplete=off (2018)   bugs.chromium.org/p/chrom... · Posted by u/nikanj
banana_giraffe · 4 years ago
I was asked by my users of an internal tool to disable autocomplete. I added autocomplete="off" and autocorrect="off" (spell checking makes no sense for this field), and it was disabled, including for chrome users.

Am I missing something? Is there some sort of heuristic to when it actually disables that I just got on the good side of by pure luck?

eternalny1 · 4 years ago
> Am I missing something? Is there some sort of heuristic to when it actually disables that I just got on the good side of by pure luck?

Yep, you are.

Chrome will fill in fields by not just looking at the autocomplete attribute, but also by trying to magically infer it based off the name attribute (and other heuristics).

For example, if you have a text entry box for a filename, and happen to set "name='name'" on it, even with autocomplete off you will get a pick list of people's names.

https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and-ux...

EMM_386 commented on Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? and How to Play   medium.com/@williamson.f9... · Posted by u/niDistinct
drzaiusapelord · 5 years ago
Pre-90s dial-up MUDs sound fascinating to me. Do you know of any others?
EMM_386 · 4 years ago
Check out MUD1, which eventually became British Legends on CompuServe and was rather popular in the late 80s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD1

eternalny1 commented on Firefox replaces Google Analytics with fake no-op in strict tracking protection   twitter.com/__jakub_g/sta... · Posted by u/crazypython
eternalny1 · 5 years ago
I've been using Firefox since the Phoenix/Firebird days, and I fear the day that Google ends their search funding to the project.

They are absolutely on the right track with Mozilla improving the actual -browser- with all of these new privacy features and core improvements. This could put them in a position to create a revenue stream independent of Google, where people would actually be willing to pay to have a browser wholly decoupled from these ad companies.

eternalny1 commented on 'New car smell' is the scent of carcinogens   sciencealert.com/a-20-min... · Posted by u/samizdis
civilized · 5 years ago
A bit off-topic, but I hate, hate, HATE the smell of airports and airplane cabins. I don't know if it's jet fuel or what, but I am certain we will one day discover that the fumes cause all sorts of maladies.

I feel vaguely nauseous for the entire day after getting off a plane, and don't feel myself again until a good night's sleep.

eternalny1 · 5 years ago
> I don't know if it's jet fuel or what, but I am certain we will one day discover that the fumes cause all sorts of maladies.

A lot of it is oil and jet fuel. This is a known hazard, even to the flight crew.

In the industry these are referred to as "fume events" or "contaminated air quality events" (CAQE).

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47740523

u/eternalny1

KarmaCake day1850December 30, 2017
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