laksjd

The companies and people that run the prisons and the prison phone systems are both very happy with a system where a) people spend a lot of time in jail and go back frequently and b) spend a lot of money on hyper-expensive phone calls since both of those things earn them very significant money.

The question should probably be: Why should any sane person in the prison industry be for it?

This just doesn't feel right to me. Firstly, what's a "Private Encrypted Browser" supposed to be? What's making it private? What's even being encrypted? There's a high density of buzzwords and a serious lack of explanation.

While it's not always fair to judge a book by its cover, statements like "Smart Incognito™ and Built In 256-bit Encryption" sure feel weird. Good security doesn't come from random trademarked buzzwords or providing a bit number without any context. Actually, those are major warning signs that the product is probably not nearly as secure as it pretends to be. The fact that this is not open-source just underlines that point nicely. Projects that are serious about privacy and security as their main goals always provide source code, not doing so is a sure sign that something other than privacy and security is the main goal.

The entire project seems very flashy but it just gives of an odd smell. The video,too, explains very little and leaves many more questions than it answers. All this seems to be is a somewhat convenient frontend for a proprietary vpn system which allows you to have multiple connections running and associate them to tabs. That's not bad but it's certainly not some world changing super-private thing and the fact that you're trying to present your proprietary VPN solution as your great gift to humanity just rubs me the wrong way.

It doesn't help that VPNs are basically pointless for anonymity since any browsing experience that's usable by normal people (e.g. executes javascript) can be trivially de-anonymised.

There have in the past been some ddos attacks that were most likely by a foreign actor, but they were directed against individual repo's that contained material that the attacker wanted to suppress.

See http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/04/ddos-attacks-that-cr...

Thanks, I thought it did phone routing, mostly because the Signal FAQ lists some odd restrictions on multi device usage (e.g. desktop can't be linked to the iOS app, cannot have iPad and iOS at the same time [1]

[1]: http://support.whispersystems.org/hc/en-us/articles/21324092...

The other signal/axolotl protocol based systems currently don't support true multi device solutions. It's not a limitation of the protocol, after all Wire is based on it, too, just that Signal/WhatsApp decided not to implement it.

Wire has true multi device support (basically multiple keys per identity)

That might be hard to enforce given that the open source client will make creating unofficial bots fairly trivial.

Given that they already have Spotify and giphy integration I'm going to predict Skype-like monetization with sponsored integrations (e.g. Skype has those sponsored animated emoji things)

They offer a password reset function. How does that work? Do they hold my private key in escrow? I'd certainly hope not! Or does the password reset work by creating a new keypair? If so, does this at least generate WhatsApp style security warnings for people chatting with me?

With some digging I've found a way to verify key fingerprints so that's nice, but it's manual, not QR assisted :(

It might be mostly marketing since the Swiss have long switched from a 'swiss banking secrecy' mindset to fairly open cooperation with EU and US investigators.

It's probably nevertheless better than being based in the US, just ask Lavabit ;)

But I guess that means that the prices are justified. If it's better for you to live in SF, even at the high rent/prices, than it is to move somewhere else, then the prices seem to be low enough.

The age verification question is a nice reminder of just how incredible the Internet is.

On mobile I immediately get a 'please enter your email address to continue reading' banner. It also seems to be clever enough to realise that 'annoying@washingtonpost.com' is not a valid email to enter. In addition it didn't accept made-up (random string)@gmail.com or even made-up (list of English words)@gmail.com. It seems like a lot of effort was put into this little tool.

Imagine you're given a problem that is completely novel in its description yet is actually reducible in some non-trivial way to a well-known NP-complete problem that has great probabilistic algorithms available for it.

Googling the original problem description will (for a novel formulation of the problem) not result in any advantage and implementing a standard algorithm will not work if you need n to be large for your application.

I will admit that it's a slightly contrived example ;)

I don't think the issue is that Tesla's cars are dangerous. The issue people are raising is that they pretend, at least through implications, that their cars can safely drive for you.

Tesla is also not doing any kind of super special research into self driving cars. The system their cars use is (afaik) an OEM component (provided by MobileEye) that powers the driver assist features of many other brands, too.

Instead of actually improving the technology they have chosen to lower the safety parameters in order to make it seem like the system is more capable than it actually is.

Such a value system would be a nightmarish thing so I hope that it doesn't exist yet.

Just imagine your car calculating that it should let you die in order to save a group of school children... except that the school children were in fact a bunch of sheep that the system mis-identified.

The danger of AI isn't in paperclip optimizers (at least for now), it's in humans over-relying on machine learning systems.

The article mentions that 'In some parts of England, you’d hear people use a phrase on the model of verbing: “The wine needs opening.”'

Is 'needs verbing' really that uncommon? 'Needs fixing' seems like a very common expression that fits that pattern. I guess the article might be trying to say that in some areas of England 'needs verbing' is the default form but I'm still a bit confused by that sentence.

There are already lots of great free (or very cheap) ways to educate yourself but all of them require time and energy. If you spend most of your time and energy working an awful job just to survive you can't take advantage of these opportunities.

Take away the need to invest time and energy into basic survival and you can suddenly take advantage of a lot of cool things that were previously not accessible to you.

There's actually a large exclusivity-style fight going on in the GPU world. It's not as bad as the console style exclusivity but when you develop a major game you often have to choose whether you invite Nvidia or AMD into the process. They'll frequently pay money and/or provide you with advanced middleware technology, resulting in games that perform much much better on the chosen vendor's GPU's. There are even features that are specifically designed to perform horribly on the other vendor's cards, making them de-facto exclusive. Usually it's unimportant stuff like special stuff like Hair simulation but Cloth simulation or advanced shading can feel like real differences in fidelity.

I think the next Scottish referendum will be a much harder decision for each voter personally. The previous one obvious wasn't a throw-away decision either but Scotland and England being separate EU member states would have meant little difference in daily live for most people.

Now the next referendum will be a lot more significant since it'll effectively be a UK vs EU decision. Either you follow the English into isolation or you suddenly have a very real border between England and Scotland with customs&immigrations checkpoints and similar things.

You don't need massive armies to reduce a region to a nightmarish place of death and destruction. The war in the Ukraine only involved around 100-150k combatants (the overwhelming majority on the Russian side) yet it certainly harmed the Donbass region and Ukraine in general.

I don't quite follow her argument there. Valve's push for a powerful platform will just mean that games that don't aim to be VR-Crysis have plenty of performance to work with, making development much easier.

The 'office simulator' example doesn't really seem to be about graphics, though, but about game length/most VR experiences being more tech demo than game.

I don't think people are going to be surprised by that. The HMDs are so expensive, and at least right now, so are the GPUs that can drive them, that people won't just impulse buy them. People who are spending that much money on a niche hobby like this will most likely know exactly what they are getting.

I'm going to guess this only works with sellers that aren't fulfilled by Amazon? It's an annoyingly effective scam: How can sellers protect themselves?

I'm sure many intellectuals are driven away from the GOP because of these issues, however the studies mentioned in the article seemed to be about people's actual political beliefs, not just which party they end up voting for.

Did OS/Hypergrid ever solve the avatar/inventory issues? I haven't followed SL/OS for the last few years so my information is probably out-of-date but when I last used it, it was still a hit-and-miss experience.

The ability to cheaply simulate environments is at the core of many VR education/training concepts. I hadn't heard of it being applied to language education, that's really interesting!

Second Life specifically excels at being a platform for roleplaying (in the educational sense as well as the D&D sense). The built-in creation tools allow people to very quickly create environments that have enough fidelity to be a significant step up from 'this table is now an airplane' and thanks to the marketplace one can often quickly and cheaply acquire ready-made props for virtually any scenario. Using the more advanced creation tools one can even create video-game-level fidelity however that is usually not necessary for educational environments.

I think this is the underlying cause for many of the failed projects from the 'Second Life bubble'. Many human activities, especially those related to information intake and processing have a long history of being 2D. From clay tablets to paper books, from the first photograph to 4K television, virtually all of the information designed for human consumption has been 2D. Only an incredibly small percentage is in 3D and even less is designed to be consumed in 3D (e.g. video games are often 3D internally but are designed for 2D consumption). This might or might not change in the future but if it does it will be changing neither soon nor rapidly.

Yes, one can use 2D interfaces inside 3D worlds but any 3D system short of the matrix will have a noticeable quality degradation (e.g. visual fidelity, haptic feedback, fatigue, etc) compared to directly using a 2D interface in real life. A few edge cases might become feasible much sooner, e.g. using VR to emulate large screens but that's hardly 'Virtual Reality'. Until we come up with meaningful ways to represent more kinds of information in 3D and/or create a matrix-style experience, VR will most likely be limited to applications that are inherently 3D.

This obviously includes entertainment (VR games, 'movies', 3D art) and CAD/CAM/3D modelling which are already very much 3D in nature and internal representation, even if they are currently usually projected onto 2D screens. Outside of that, the main 'educational' usage currently consists of building 3D environments (labs, buildings, factories, complex machinery) that emulate real-life environments in order to familiarize trainees with the workflows in those places. This can be surprisingly effective, especially considering how much cheaper VR mockups are compared to e.g. NASA's real-life 1:1 ISS training replica.

These applications are worthwhile in their own right and they will probably be able to sustain a decent market for VR hardware and development. However, I'm personally much more interested in seeing what kind of concepts that aren't already inherently 3D can be enhanced or revolutionized by adding another dimension.