samsonradu

Dogecoin actually managed to pull a pump-dump-pump? Its valuation looks quite good as we speak, even though I remember the dump (2015) [1]

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/78xqxb/the-guy-wh...

Still, it's alarmingly wrong. I mean the usual modus operandi for a government would be to assume the project themselves (to have citizen trust) and externalise it quietly to a 3rd party, bureaucratically so that people can't really tell who is doing what. But this really is too much "in your face", they don't even bother pretending.

Needless to say it shouldn’t be done, but if anybody...a 3rd party?

Failing to understand the logic behind this. How could the UK government possibly think letting an adult company collect user-data is for their own citizen protection.

Wouldn't it make more sense for the government/ISPs to take care of the AgeID product themselves? They are the gatekeepers to the internet basically isn't it?

I do see mentions of Soros from time to time in the local press (Romania). Usually happens when bigger institutions can’t be publicly blamed for interference in internal politics.

There’s even satire material which I find hilarious where he’s blamed for the cold weather and stuff like that.

Is WebRTC usable in iOS Safari with 2-way audio? Both playing and recording caused certain distortions, probably related to the audio sample rate.

Terrible offer for Prime Video in Europe indeed, but also very cheap as standalone, around 3EUR/month. I’m not sure what the long term plan is. I’d assume they will add live streaming content (football, olympics etc)? That’s what really brings people in front of the screen.

Yeah, heard this 100 times already. But why does it have to be like the dot com? What if it just stays a niche market for 50 years? What you say implies that crypto is as full of potential as the internet was to make it possible for businesses to grow as big as Google, Amazon. Not mentioning of course a lot of other factors that made Google, Amazon big like political influence, globalisation, lack of competition/regulation in certain areas etc.

Not trying to be pessimistic but genuinely curious why so many people make the analogy to the dot com period.

This 100 times. Crypto currencies can be both successful (read widely-adopted) and have a sane, stable valuation. It is harder and harder to argue around bitcoin since a lot of people have taken sides already and have “skin-in-the-game”.

Every time one says crypto is overvalued the reply looks like: “you don’t understand”, many times coming from somebody who barely understands what distributed and consensus mean. No pun intended.

Yes, I got the part where you can time if memory address X is in cache and X+128 isn't. But how does one read the data at memory address X?

> You fetch the secret data. You then fetch a different memory addressed based on the contents of the secret data ...

I was under the impression that there is no interface to read data from the CPU caches and that the cache is managed by the CPU itself only.

High-level programmer here. Can someone explain please (already read the ELI5 in previous threads) how does the attacker extract the actual data from the processor L1 cache after tricking the branch prediction and have the CPU read from an unauthorized memory location?

I understood the "secret" data stays in the caches for a very short time until the branch prediction is rolled back, which makes this a timing attack but don't get how you actually read it.

EDIT

So perhaps someone can ELI5 me "4.2 Building a Covert Channel" [1] from the Meltdown paper which is what I didn't understand.

[1] https://meltdownattack.com/meltdown.pdf

That’s a good question. I’d assume they have to little of a market share and is too fragile to piss off anybody. But this is just a guess so looking forward to other opinions on this.

I agree that it harms smaller companies (though some are not that small), but I see this as a big step in the right direction. I think the big players can only be stopped by legal means anyway.

Pop the champagne bottle on this news. The ad industry has been consistently sucking money out of smaller content producers and consolidated behemoths like FB and Google. Apple being the only browser player who can afford to do such a move, how is this not good news?

Edit

Waiting for Microsoft to move next

Oh they have gone nuts indeed. I see this pattern among my friends who are mostly financially uneducated. They have never traded stocks and have little understanding of how markets work.

They actually think they can read the “news” on reddit and buy/sell accordingly, outsmarting other players.

Rendering glitches when in Chrome are awful indeed and happen way too often

Started 2017 working remotely, from home, in a rather depressing environment. Through this year I rented an office space and hired 3 other people.

Wow, quite an elaborate scam to buy such a domain. Just curious, can anyone give a price estimation for ub.com?

Among other good reasons mentioned here lets not forget inequality went up and a lot of the progress is materialized at the top.

This is a rather perfectionist point of view, implying that our current day-to-day contracts are perfect and don’t have loopholes. Why do smart contracts have to be written perfectly to be usable by people.

In the end, what’s perfect in the world around us? Big banks fail and lose people’s savings, cars break and cause deaths and it has’t stopped people from adopting these on a large scale and keep on improving them.

I see real value in smart contracts despite the mentioned flaws above. The smart contracts can automate A lot of transactions that use intermediaries, see notaries, lawyers, judges that do a ton of bulk work to validate paperwork authenticity, all sorts of agents and middle-men that charge fees etcetera.

Ok, people say it’s not secure, contracts can be hacked, but why not back these smart contracts by law? And when issues/breaches happen have a judge decide. These tools should be complementary and should not eliminate each other. We can and probably will have smart contracts alongside the day-to-day bureaucracy to help us with the simple stuff at first. Like when I need to pay a couple thousand to a notary for changing ownership of an estate only because of trust issues. If that is not ripe for disruption then I don’t know what is.

It’s like trying to jump from manual driving to fully automated driving and complaining it’s not safe and it won’t work.

As a non-US tourist I find the NYC subway dirty (there was trash on the lines that nobody picked up in weeks), and terribly undocumented (few or misplaced info panels and directions). It’s also very crowded at peak hours but that’s understandable I assume.

https://coinbase.com/ is down.

Exactly. I, by no means, agree to a foreign company stepping over local taxi companies which spent huge amounts of money on licensing and operating rights. But the service plainly sucks for end-users.

Not sure if you're being sarcastic but that's a big overstatement. There are a lot of big cities (capitals) around the globe where the cab industry is a pure scam. There's no such thing as GPS tracking, price transparency, apps and whatsoever. No wonder Uber took over.

Too late to edit.

Now that I think of it this would make sense for the FED to actually use the blockchain tech to manage its currency supply. Instead of the printing press they issue cryptodollars which supposedly are better than paper because they can be easily and fastly moved around or whatever. But not for a 3rd party to just say: This is a dollar, but called differently, trust us, we issued it.

> Tether is just supposed to be a proxy for USD.

That would make sense indeed, so for every tether coin issued they’d normally have to pull a dollar out of circulation. Otherwise they re printing money isn’t it? Even if true, saying that they back it up is not enough.

But every tether "issued" is basically a dollar printed out of thin air if we're to trust Tether that it has the same value isn't it?

> Because most exchanges cannot and does not support withdrawals - they are virtual.

Can you elaborate? I'm not familiar with these exchanges, really curious. You mean exchanges accept cash for coins and don't allow withdrawals? :)

But why do I want tether in the first place? Why bother switching back and forth at all? I don’t see why would I want to hold tether.

Can I buy a can of coke with it directly? What if the coke seller is a bit skeptical of tether and asks for 1.2 tether instead of one usd, just to play safe. Isn t this pressure applied to the exchange rate?