swartkrans (u/swartkrans)

swartkrans commented on The Tax Sleuth Who Took Down a Drug Lord nytimes.com/2015/12/27/bu... · Posted by u/e15ctr0n

swartkrans · 10 years ago

> "Both agents declined to comment for this article, but according to two people briefed on the investigation..."

What are the odds the "two people" are "both agents"? That's like the lamest off the record attribution ever. Also amazing that some random agent using Google broke the case. Apparently anyone could have figured out who DPR was.

swartkrans commented on U.S. Authorities Are Reportedly Gathering Data Using Fake Celltowers on Planes techcrunch.com/2014/11/13... · Posted by u/riaface

swartkrans · 11 years ago

> As ever, responses to this news will largely fall into two categorizes: those who believe that the U.S. — and other governments — should do everything within its power to find and apprehend criminals; and those who feel that the government is again running roughshod over privacy rights.

This is a false dichotomy. If you care about apprehending criminals actually responsible for crimes you should care about this too. A reoccurring subtext is that law enforcement cares more about quantity than quality, but data quality is hugely important. These dragnets are the equivalent of a House TV Series body scan, and the arguments that characters in the show made apply here.

One of the consequences of a dragnet and too much low quality data is the risk of circumstantial evidence leading to the conviction of the wrong individual. The minds of investigators and district attorneys are susceptible to all the biases that plague any other field including confirmation bias. Project Innocence has revealed heaps of wrongful convictions based on low quality data, even when police corruption wasn't at fault. Dennis Fritz and Ron Williamson for example were convicted for murder based solely on bad circumstantial evidence while the real perpetrator remained unpunished for over a decade.

It's not just privacy advocates who should care about stopping these kinds of surveillance techniques. That is unless the dragnet apologists don't care about who is being punished for crimes just as long someone is punished whether or not they actually committed a crime.

swartkrans commented on Typewriters are back, and we have Edward Snowden to thank washingtonpost.com/postev... · Posted by u/doctorshady

ericd · 11 years ago

The aggregate pain and aggregate loss of using cash for transactions in a credit-card dominated world is much larger than the concentrated pain of replacing a credit card once a year. I make significantly more than $30 here and $20 there on rewards - on the order of $500+/year

Sign up for Mint, and quickly scan all of your transactions on a monthly or bi-monthly basis. It's a good idea anyway, so that you can easily account and keep track of how well you're doing at saving.

swartkrans · 11 years ago

> The aggregate pain and aggregate loss of using cash for transactions in a credit-card dominated world is much larger

I have not found this to be the case.

> Sign up for Mint

I don't intend to increase the available surface area for attacks by giving my credit information to a third party. Nor do I need this kind of a monthly or bi-monthly hassle.

swartkrans commented on Open-Sourcing Our Analysis blog.modeanalytics.com/op... · Posted by u/Nonnormalizable

swartkrans · 11 years ago

I'm not a particular fan of pie charts or donut charts, but the visualization used in this tool is actually helpful at understanding and comparing nested amounts.

The reason I don't usually like pie charts or donut charts is because it is difficult to make comparisons between circular shapes. In most places people use a pie chart, I think a bar chart would be better. It's easier to compare different lengths of rectangles than guesstimate differences of pieces of pies or half circles.

Something about this type of visualization with nested depths seems to be an outlier. If this information was portrayed in rectangles I'm not sure it would be better.

swartkrans commented on Typewriters are back, and we have Edward Snowden to thank washingtonpost.com/postev... · Posted by u/doctorshady

xur17 · 11 years ago

Serious question - why do you very concerned if your credit card number is stolen? By law, credit cards have > 30 days (I forget the exact amount) of fraud protection as long as you report it. The only downside I can see is the pain of getting a new card. Your money really isn't at risk.

That said, I do agree that security is becoming a major issue in our world.

swartkrans · 11 years ago

Yeah there are laws, but you have to catch it, and you have to report it and sometimes you don't realize you've been defrauded until months later. Hackers in my experience don't empty your account out, they charge $30 here, $19.99 here, sign up for this thing for a monthly charge of $9 you didn't realize. My time and stress costs me. And you can lose money.

It's best to just not have to deal with it. My credit card number has been put up for sale twice now, twice. Because I used it at a Target and a Home Depot. Ok, I just don't want to go through that again. I don't care if there are laws, if I use cash, I'll be fine. It's no problem, cash is accepted everywhere. I'm not likely to be mugged where I live and I don't carry a lot of money.

swartkrans commented on Typewriters are back, and we have Edward Snowden to thank washingtonpost.com/postev... · Posted by u/doctorshady

joezydeco · 11 years ago

"Earlier this year, German politician Patrick Sensburg announced that Germany’s government officials might start using typewriters, as they are seen as being an “unhackable” technology."

Yeah, about that...

http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/07/using-old-school-typewr...

http://www.magicmargin.net/2012/12/silencing-chatty-selectri...

Unless they're going back to mechanical ones.

swartkrans · 11 years ago

> Unless they're going back to mechanical ones.

I've been going back to cash instead of using credit cards because I've been exposed twice now via Target and Home Depot. I want to even avoid using ATMs and go into the bank to get cash because you can't really even tell when an ATM has a malicious card scanner installed.

Once we have automated cars maybe we'll go be back to walking and riding bikes to avoid being victimized by remote car jacking.

Imagine the mess hijacked delivery drones might cause.

Your phone can be cloned remotely. You can't easily clone a rotary phone that plugs into the wall.

I'm definitely not looking to automate my home, especially after reading how Chinese hacker had installed back doors on wall mounted AC devices or whatever which had access to the internal network at the New York Times building to keep infiltrating and reinfecting all the machines on the network.

Maybe we jumped into the digital world a little bit too quickly.

swartkrans commented on Two Microsofts stratechery.com/2014/two-... · Posted by u/bobbles

mbillie1 · 11 years ago

> I don’t think any company should have both horizontal (i.e. services) and vertical (i.e. devices) businesses.

I find it curious that Microsoft is the target of this criticism, and I am further curious what the author thinks about Apple.

swartkrans · 11 years ago

NextStep was built with enterprise in mind but became wholly consumer in its next life as OS X and then iOS. The massive consumer success of the iPhone led to employers giving in to employees who wanted iOS devices instead of Blackberry devices, a phenomenon called BYOD, "bring your own device". BYOD has given rise to an entirely new Apple presence in enterprise which I think Apple is just getting started with. Prior to this Macs were used by designers and engineers, creators, but hardly the stuff of serious enterprise.

Right now the services Apple provides are all about fulfilling features that consumers want: email, cloud storage, being able to buy content, and apps. They're meant to augment and also perhaps cynically lock consumers into Apple's sphere. The hardware devices sold at high margins make the money. This may change, and we might also see a two Apples where apple starts selling its services with higher margins for enterprise.

Incidentally long ago Apple really dominated in education. Most of the 80's Apple IIes and macs were popular in K-12, but that went away in the later 90's. Now iOS, in the form of iPads, are making inroads in education once again, competing with Chromebooks. Education isn't enterprise, and I don't see any services Apple would offer schools, but it's related.

Almost every where you look though, Microsoft is under assault. I think the last remaining stronghold is the Windows PC workstation. I don't think Apple, Linux or Android have made any inroads here. I can see Chromebooks becoming more relevant in the future, but for now workstations are dominated by Windows and probably will be for the next decade. The enterprise level services Microsoft provides here with ActiveDirectory and sharepoint, and the sophisticated controls for deploying Windows workstations across big organizations is pretty unrivaled. Maybe RedHat is also in this space, but not at the level of Microsoft.