This is an incredibly important article and Charlotte Cowles (@charlottecowles) should be praised for writing it. Everybody should read it.
People laughing at her for getting scammed are missing the point, such as what the following picture does. thecut.com/author/charlot…
No, I wouldn't have gotten scammed like her. For one thing, I believe every phone call is a scam, either a criminal one, or some vendor trying to waste my time getting me to pay for things.
But I hate to think what I might fall victim to.
The only real defense is reading articles like the one above. Forget advice about what you should/shouldn't do told to you in a vacuum, instead, read about such stories about what sorts of scams actually happen in the real world.
For example, I can tell you that one CERTAIN way to tell if something is a scam is if they tell you not to tell anybody else (which you can trigger by telling them you are going to talk it over with somebody). A second person can easily see the scam you are falling for.
And that's what happened in the story above.
But telling people this without context doesn't help. They'll just forget about it. You need to educate them on the entirety of the story, not just one part.
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Hi. Professional C/C++ programmer here. The open-source code I can find written by Adam Back and Satoshi Nakamoto don't look remotely similar.
Back's code looks typical of academic Unix programmers who also hack their code to run on Windows.
Satoshi code was written by a professional Windows programmer who also wrote for Unix.
Stylistically, they look nothing alike. There's not enough time between 2005 when I can find the newest Adam Back and January 2009 when Satoshi published Bitcoin/0.1 to account for the change. Both are perfectly competent programmers, but stylistically, they are completely different.
The NYTimes tried to compare their English language in posts/emails. I'm compare their C/C++ language in their open-source code. The NYTimes merely points out they both use C++ as if that's another corroborating detail, when the actual code seems to disqualify Adam Back.
I was a professional Windows C/C++ programmer throughout the 1990s that had to also make code work on Unix. Satoshi's code speaks to me -- that's exactly the sort of code I wrote, down to using 'printf' instead of 'cout'.
What I mean to say is that he's gotten rid of all the C++ class hierarchy nonsense and is primarily using C++ as a smarter C with lightweight objects.
It's a VERY distinctive choice. Conversely, the "style" (where he puts spaces and braces) is non-distinctive, looks like all other code.
Okay, here's how this lie works: 1. everyone agreed that Russians did not hack election infrastructure 2. everyone agreed Russia meddled with the election in other ways, such as hacking the DNC and releasing emails from Podesta et al
She correctly notes that the intelligence community concluded that Russia '"did not impact recent U.S. election results" by conducting cyber attacks on infrastructure'.
🧵So let's talk about the difficulties Netflix is having streaming the Tyson v Paul fight, how the stream gets from there to your TV/computer. This will a longish thread.
In 1985 on his first fight, TV technology was based upon "broadcasts". That meant sending one copy of a video stream to thousands, often millions of receivers. A city would send the signal to a radio tower and broadcast that signal across a wide area.
In today's Internet, though, everybody gets their own stream. There is no broadcasting, no sharing of streams. Every viewer gets their own custom stream from a Netflix server. That we can get so many point-to-point stream across the Internet is mind boggling.
By the way, the energy density of C4 is 6.7 megajoules/kilogram.
The energy density of lithium-ion batteries is about 0.5 megajoules/kilogram.
C4 will "detonate" with a bang.
Lithium-ion batteries will go "woosh" with a fireball, if you can get them to explode. They conflagrate rather than detonate. They don't even deflagrate like gun powder.
To get a lithium-ion battery to explode (in a fireball) at all, you have to cause physical damage, overcharge it, or heat it up.
Causing heat is the only way a hacker could remotely cause such an event.
I don't want to get into it, but I don't think Travis is quite right. I mean, the original 25million view tweet is full of fail and you should always assume Tavis is right ....
...but I'm seeing things a little differently.
🧵1/n
I'm a professional, so I can take the risk of disagreeing with Tavis. But this is just too dangerous for non-professionals, you'll crash and burn. Even I am not likely to get out of this without some scrapes.
3/n To be fair, we are all being lazy here. We haven't put the work in to fully reverse engineer this thing. We are just sifting the tea leaves. We aren't looking further than just these few lines of code.
The reason IT support people are so bitter is that YOU (I mean YOU) cannot rationally describe the problem:
You: The Internet is down
IT: How do you know the Internet is down?
You: I can't get email.
IT: Is it possible that the email servers are down and the Internet is working just fine? Can you visit Twitter on your browser?
You: Yes, I can visit the twitter website.
IT: Is there any reason other than email to believe the Internet is down?
You: The last time I couldn't get email it was because the Internet was down.
The fact that IT doesn't call you a blithering idiot on every support call demonstrates saintly restraint, even if a little bit of their frustration leaks through.
A lot of good replies to my tweet, but so far this is the best: