zacksiri

You should read this article[0]. It outlines clearly that victims are downloading .apk files

[0] https://www.nationthailand.com/thailand/general/40024972

Also your comparison of people 'working on their own cars' is a bit off here. Most people buy cars to drive, and give the car to the mechanic to 'work on'. It's much much harder to repair your own car than to click a link that can scam you.

Believe me they’re trying. They’re now mandating biometric authentication, and I don’t mean on device, I mean implemented by the banks app / backend. If you read the articles you’ll see.

Each year the central banks up the ante on security protocols to implement to stop the fraud. I should know I used to work for a finance app here in Thailand.

We have to go through strict security audits, and procedures that costs a lot for any financial institution to implement.

Doing 2 FA is already a mandate for doing transactions. However 2FA in Thailand is mostly done using SMS which is still not that secure.

Forcing everyone to use a token or a 1Password app is also not viable since that’s going to shut a lot of people out of mobile banking.

It’s a complex problem, which I think Apple has already solved. Disabling sideloading reduces so much costs downstream and made things simple and secure for the lay man.

Usually the cases show up on social media in our country. The victims post that they’ve been frauded and generally blame it on the banks.

The banks then reply and say “the fraud transaction originated from customer’s device”. When you look at the screenshots of victims giving example it’s all Android as far as I can see.

Generally after talking to the banks and customers discover that it was their own fault for clicking on a seemingly harmless link they shut up and go quiet.

This is a story that plays out often here.

I don’t particularly have a link because these cases get deleted from social media (by the customer themselves) after the bank has proven that it’s the customers fault.

Edit: You can try searching the internet for “mobile banking fraud Thailand” you’ll find these links, here is one example.

https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/2524469/mobile-banking-...

Edit: here is an example the article mentions downloading of .apk on android

https://www.nationthailand.com/thailand/general/40024972

Believe me the central bank puts out social media posts to inform the public on a regular basis, however a lot of people still fall for these frauds because the fraudsters prey on their greed and fear.

I’ve seen even the most educated tech savvy people fall for these frauds. So I would say “educating people” is insufficient.

Another problem is because the law works extremely slowly, by the time any legal action can be taken to take down the destination bank accounts the fraudsters have already gained and taken the money.

Sideloading is the thing that works because the legal infrastructure simply can’t keep up with the fraudsters.

I would be inclined to agree with you if I know that the legal system immediately stops fraudsters and returns the money to the people without damange. We’re far from that.

Well aware, as I mentioned I had a safety net baked in.

You can see this video.

https://youtu.be/v-n8L-DiPL4

Update: Thx for going through it! You got the idea.

Yeah. Couple of days. To be fair Elixir and Nebulex library did most of the heavy lifting. I had been using Nebulex for a long time before implementing this solution. But as our system scaled we ran into more and more problems so I decided to try it.

Check out this video https://youtu.be/v-n8L-DiPL4

I implemented something similar to the approach in this article. I was building a payment transaction system and ran into the issue of having locks and transactions in the database causing higher and higher latency as the queue got larger.

I never coined a term, but I implemented an “ALTP” using in memory cache library in elixir. The library is called nebulex. It was so simple to implement. Since the library supported distribution out of the box. I had a distributed in memory transactional guarantee that worked well in a short amount of time.

The cool thing was I also wrapped the database lock under the distributed in memory lock so in the case of a net split the database’s lock’s got my back. In normal circumstances it made things scalable because the in memory lock would prevent the client from connecting to the database until the in memory lock was let go.

In elixir doing these things are really intuitive and enjoyable and without requiring an external dependency. I think it took me only a couple of days work design / implement and solved the problem.

This is something I’m going to be buying for sure. I saw the site also has a “Build your own Redis”.

I’ve always wanted to understand how databases work so I can build my own.

Excited about this!

Yes! This is where I'm at!

Maybe something new needs to be invented? Or utilize something we already have? Anyway I think this is the next leap in AI.

Operative Language Models. Where the model is trained to do specific tasks very well. In a reliable way. I don't anticipate them to be 'large' and expensive also.

Then we have lots of these models and some kind of 'orchestration' layer that makes them all work together. This I believe will be the future. Micro Operative Language Models.

Yeah that's awesome. I honestly think the next 'leap' in AI will come from these 'domain specific' models.

Also I'm not talking about just 'prompt' output model. These ones are great and I'm sure they will be extremely impressive. However I'm talking more about being able to 'operate' something.

Imagine this, an AI able to operate some specific API in a deterministic / reliable way. I'm talking about complex operations.

SO the output is not so much a text prompt but an SOP and then actually Operating the SOP.

Imagine going into an app and say "can you boot up a cluster on AWS and run a wordpress site, point domain example.com to the site".

Imagine this "you know my database for app X, what was the latest snapshot", it replies with the date / time of the snapshot, and you reply with "can you move that snapshot from google cloud and create a new database from that snapshot on AWS cloud?", and it does it for you.

That's what I look forward to.

This is interesting. I think the future of AI will not be re-creating something like ChatGPT, but using variations of these methodologies to train AI models for specific tasks.

There are some advantages to not having to make an LLM that impresses every human being on the planet. Imagine training the AI to be good in only one specific thing. I think it will become much more precise and deterministic.

This is just my hypothesis. I'm excited to see where this goes.

I may be wrong but, “designed for WebAssembly” might be the key selling point here.

I imagine we would be able to write elixir on the frontend with this.

When heroku first came out they introduced so many wonderful new things that blew the development community away. Many people including myself were inspired by their work. They did serverless before serverless even existed as a marketing concept.

But I guess having salesforce buying them out pretty much stalled their progress, and over time leading them to where they are today.

Anyway this is why we're building something to continue to innovate in this space, there is a lot to do. https://instellar.app

That’s smart. I like it.