oretoz

There is an API available from many mobile operators called SIM Swap that can be called to find out if the SIM has been swapped. Often these calls are made by Banks to an aggregator (such as Telesign or Twilio) that finds out the mobile operator (e.g. Verizon or AT&T) that the customer belongs to and calls SIM Swap API on that operator. There is currently no universal app for that purpose but it can be developed. See CAMARA Project for latest specifications of this and many other APIs.

As others have mentioned, SIM Swap attacks are very common where the attacker impersonates the victim and convinces the mobile operator to transfer the victim’s phone number (known as MSISDN in telecom parlance) to the attacker’s SIM. If you Google SIM Swap, you will find many instances of it.

From that moment onwards, all the 2nd factor SMS OTP go to the attacker.

There are APIs that are provided by mobile operators via aggregators such as Telesign, Prove, Vonage, Twilio etc. that can be used to check if a SIM Swap has happened recently on that phone number. That API is used by fintech companies and others e.g. when they want to check if a fund transfer is to be allowed or flagged up.

After trying to reach out to several of their key people on LinkedIn, I tried to reach out to them via a form on their site. This was to GIVE THEM SOME BUSINESS. Never heard anything back. This was for Telco related product that we have so not sure if it is just the Telco people in GCP who are this bad or the rot is wider than that.

Exactly same for me too. I watched his interview with Aarthi and Sriram of a16z yesterday and the more I tried to understand him, more he seemed like not just a BS peddler but deluded as well. May be it is just the two of us?

ccache is used together with distcc at the current place I am working at. Started digging at how these two work as I thought there is still room for improvement in our build times that can vary between 10 minutes to 1 hour. It is a huge code base, easily more than a million lines and around 18k files. But had to stop as there were way too many features to develop and bugs to fix. Also, management does not see that kind of work as useful so no point fighting those battles.

Brings back memories. Fresh out of college, I was given the additional job of being the Clearcase and Unix admin for my team. Not that I had any special skills but others didn't know a few Unix commands (System V) that I did. But Clearcase was such a good product and was used in the Telecom companies that I worked for (Motorola, Lucent etc.) It was owned by Rational at that time and if memory serves me right, were acquired by IBM.

To this day, I find Clearcase's way of doing things is the better way to do version control. Git, in comparison, kind of feels alien and I could never really get the same type of comfort on it.

Here are the key differences between 5G and Wifi: 1. Dedicated vs shared spectrum. Though all big countries have shared spectrum initiatives for 5G too but it is still not a free for all like Wifi. So interference-wise 5G might be better for some use cases. Have heard about that in several shipping ports where Private 5G is deployed 2. Security. Due to the usage of SIM but Wifi security is good too 3. Range - though most of 5G is in comparable frequency ranges with Wifi, there is a huge range of powers at which 5G base stations can transmit so range is possibly larger for 5G

But it all depends on use-case and there is no clear winner for all situations.

Very interesting indeed. You seem to know about this. Do you have any links where I can find more details (which is not easily Googleable?

Rich Roll discusses this barrier in his podcast with Andrew Hiberman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwQhKFMxmDY

What an amazing quote! Thanks for sharing.

Thank you for these wonderful resources. I had no clue.

Thanks. Sounds interesting. Will google it.

Great. I had read about it but wasn’t sure if it was a better option than Scratch for younger kids. Mine are 6 and 7 and I they use something similar to Scratch. Does anybody know if younger kids use Snap! ?

Thanks

I have a big snoring problem. Did yoga help you with that?

There is documentary called General Magic which used old footage and interviews to describe their rise and fall. In one scene, Bill is said to have written a big chunk (don’t remember exactly what but I was in awe) of it very quickly. I saw it on a plane when browsing through Emirates’ catalogue.

Thanks for the detailed response. Point about treating math notation as a compact way of writing makes complete sense.

Such a detailed answer. Thank you. Unlike you, I registered for an MRes. (Masters in Research) degree at a UK but found that due to lack of taught courses I couldn’t plug the holes in my mathematical foundations. For the very few courses that were taught, quality of teaching was also an issue which presumably wouldn’t be the case at a university like Cambridge. Even though I finished with honours, I am still left with the nagging feeling that I didn’t get what I wanted out of my effort.

Interesting. Do you have sources for that? Genuinely interested to know.

Do you have an example writeup of how you used Plotly output in PPT? I would be very interested to learn that. Thank

Za

"In our times" is great too: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/37pR8YxRMhVwwZvX93r...

Key feature of cellular networks is mobility and if the user interaction is needed it would make it unwieldy

I have not really followed the fintech much but understand the Telecom side of things. You seem like an expert on this space in India and hence my questions: 1. Do you think making everything Aadhar based is a good idea? 2. How much awareness is there about privacy issues related to Aadhar? 3. What risk do you see which would derail the $500B projection for Fintech in India? Also it wasn't clear if that projection was the total payment transactions or the market opportunity for players (e.g. commissions etc.).

Excellent summary. Covers all the key points that I wanted to take away and put it so much better.

For me, the theme that runs through his work and talks is this: (Constantly ask) How to make use of computers to learn and create in ways better than we do currently?

Now yes, the above sentence seems like incremental and not so far out but lot of what he and some of the people he has worked with is trying to answer this.

And I completely agree with him that we haven't fully explored this new digital interface and in some ways have regressed.

His words are truly inspirational and at the same time it is slightly disheartening that I am not working on something great.

You have a valid point. Do you have pointers to learning Design for a programmer? I know about book 'Deisgn for hackers' and there are many resources on Photoshop/Sketch etc. but I haven't found nifty little projects like you have in programming where you design, say a toy compiler. Also Photoshop/Sketch are paid and/or platform specific. Any useful pointers would help.

What you say might be true in a lot of cases but I know of one case (Ubiquisys) where they were not hands off probably because it was too close to their core business and also because they had a similar internal product.

Now Cisco have given up on the whole small cells idea. And a lot of it is because of their botched management practices and some of it is also due to Ubiquisys' own inefficiencies.

Is there something on the horizon for graphics and GPU?

RISC-V is a general puspose CPU architecture. Does something exist which is open like RISC-V but for DSPs? I am asking because unless we have that, no smartphone can be truly open and infact you can argue that it is what runs in baseband that needs to be open rather than on the main CPU.

Ofcourse RISC-V is an architecture so not just applicable for smartphones but the point remains. RISC-V solves half the problem but what about the other half i.e. DSPs?