World177

Google blocks ads from their competitors. [1] In the article, they state it’s because those companies are not following their standard, and are using too many resources. (Which they claim negatively impact device performance through metrics like battery performance)

In comparison, Microsoft implied in their advertisement that their browser is safer than Google’s because it has the “trust of Microsoft.”

[1] https://blog.chromium.org/2020/05/resource-heavy-ads-in-chro...

The vaccine is just unrelated to the article. It's about the people who have had Covid-19, not the vaccine.

Discord does have a revenue share. [1] Elon Musk also recently stated that he planned to add creator monetization to Twitter. [2]

From Discord

> Good news: It's a 90/10 split! This means you, the creator, get to keep 90% of each monthly Server Subscription you sell, minus some small processing fees for legal’s sake.

From Elon Musk

> Followed by creator monetization for all forms of content

[1] https://discord.com/creators/server-subs-101-earning-money-o...

[2] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589010272341340160

Crypto.com Holds 20% of its' reserves in SHIB. [1] There's something strange happening, but there's more to crypto than just these bizarre meme tokens.

[1] https://decrypt.co/114248/crypto-com-holds-20-of-its-reserve...

> Additionally, a structure with the ownership of OpenAI would be put in place. Microsoft would entail a 49 percent stake while other investors would take over the other 49 percent. The remaining 2 percent will reportedly go to OpenAI’s non-profit parent firm.

When OpenAI was funded as a non-profit in 2015, it raised $1 billion from investors that included YC Research. [1] Sam Altman was also the former president of Y Combinator. [2] How did OpenAI move from being funded entirely as a non profit to a for-profit company with less than 2% being owned by the non-profit?

[1] https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/

[2] https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/sam-altman-for-president

It looks like the EFF had one. [1] Though, the website currently does not load, and from archive.org, it looks like they killed the project sometime before July 2021. [2]

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/05/canary-watch-one-year-...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20210712025824/https://canarywat...

Did you not see Storj's canary? They used a cryptographic signature. [1] For the government to continue ongoing operations, they would either have to physically seize the relevant private keys, or compel release of them if they couldn't locate them. As far as I am aware, as long as the government fails to physically seize them, compelling is still not allowed under the Fifth Amendment. [2]

> The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution protects witnesses from being forced to incriminate themselves

Although, with Storj, the signatures didn't expire, so in the event that the government did setup operations, they could have just continued using one of the older signatures. (And only would have been unable to create new ones on request)

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20221021050048/https://www.storj...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#United_Stat...

> This actually does not sound like the start-of-the-art for cryptography.

I'm wrong. Review the paper Google provided as a source for more information. [1] There are also lectures available online from Ronald Rivest, [2] one of the researchers that helped to invent/discover the RSA cryptosystem. (If you are not familiar with how RSA works)

[1] https://www.hit.bme.hu/~buttyan/courses/BMEVIHIM219/2009/Cha...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4qaxSKTVlA

> Perhaps Google have some lightweight countermeasures against these types of attack (even a random some-milliseconds timing at the client side between receiving a signed blind token and using it to establish the VPN connection would help a tiny bit), but if they do, they weren't outlined in the report.

The client could pre-generate session tokens days or months in advance. Then, leave their house, head to public wifi, (to avoid traffic correlation on their home network) and even after unblinding the session token, it would not be feasible to determine who paid for VPN.

If Google's VPN used Tornado Cash's protocol, they wouldn't be able to take the proof of having a session key back to Zinc to determine who asked for that to be signed. (if we assume Zinc is malicious) The protocol used looks like it was to provide anonymity with third parties, but not anonymity to the first parties. Google also links to the paper from 1982 that they're referencing. [1]

[1] https://www.hit.bme.hu/~buttyan/courses/BMEVIHIM219/2009/Cha...

> The fundamental anonymity model Google have employed is that the VPN tunnel is authenticated using "blind tokens" which are signed by an authorization service "Zinc." The Zinc service validates OAuth credentials passed in from the client app to verify a user's subscription, then signs the blind token created by the client app to authorize the user's session with the actual VPN backend "Copper." Ostensibly, this will separate the user's Google identity from the VPN identity since the VPN service only knows that it got a valid, signed user token, not what user that token belongs to.

In case you needed even more information on how this works, Google provides on their page [1]

> The blinding algorithm employed was first described by Chaum in 19826, and is commonly referred to as ‘RSA Blind Signing’. The goal is to never use the same identifier in the Authentication server and the Key Management Service. To accomplish this, the client generates a token, hashes it using a Full Domain Hash, and combines it with a random value and the server’s public signing key to produce a blinded token. That blinded token is then signed by our authentication server. When the client wants to connect to the VPN, it can unblind the blinded token and its signature using the random value only it knows. The unblinded token and the signature are then verifiable by our Key Management Server.

This is an easy way to understand how this works. This actually does not sound like the start-of-the-art for cryptography. In their example, the client has to provide the secret, which, then corresponds to a hash that was encrypted using this secret key along with Zinc's public key. Zinc knows who provided it the blinded token that it signed. On revelation of this secret key, Zinc could immediately determine who is the owner.

Tornado Cash bypasses this leak of information by using a zero knowledge proof involving a Merkle path [2]

[1] https://one.google.com/about/vpn/howitworks

[2] https://github.com/tornadocash/tornado-core

You are correct, I just misread it.

edit: It should be fixed now.

From their recent 10Q for investors, they list a revenue of $7.8 billion for "Google Network" in revenue for the preceding 3 months before September 30, 2022 [1] There are 90 days in 3 months, so their revenue for a day is approximately

$7.8 billion / 90 days = ~$87 million/day

$87 million / 24 hours = ~$3.64 million/hour

$3.64 million / 60 minutes = ~$60,740 thousand/minute

$60,740 thousand / 60 seconds = ~$1,012/second

And, depending on their agreements with their advertising partners, they might be liable for some of the profits lost by their partners.

[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/20221025_alphabet_10Q.pd...

edit: It was initially using the wrong row, it should be correct now.

Water treatment at home isn’t difficult as long as it isn’t polluted with something bad like hydrocarbons. A distiller can be purchased for less than $100. There are many homes in Texas that are using heaters that aren’t heat pumps, so in the winter, it probably is economical if excluding the original purchase price. A reverse osmosis system can also be purchased for less than $500, but requires more maintenance.

I don't really find this suspicious. It would probably be better for him legally if they found a way to raise the funds to keep FTX solvent. He has also already stated the SEC killed his attempts to save FTX. [1]

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/14/kevin-oleary-sa...

archive.org also offers a way to save a snapshot of a page. [1] I just do not use it frequently because it takes more effort to navigate to it.

[1] https://web.archive.org/save

> The 60M+ user base for ENS-enabled browsers is a genuinely impressive number. But at the same time it's about 1.1% of the world's total internet users. In terms of reach, it's basically like making your product a desktop Linux app — it might be the right choice for some niche, but not for any mass market.

It took time to for ENS to build this userbase and it had to start with nothing. I don't know what the final result will be with this, but I think this is a good starting point.

> For the actual ENS lookup, I presume Brave and Metamask actually call a service like Infura? It feels like that's a step back for decentralization compared to plain old DNS.

Yes. It seems like many people who are creating in this space do not actually care about decentralization.

The internet has mostly existed in peace with the governments in most democratic countries. Though, at the same time, I think even with Tor, the average person in China probably struggles to get around the firewall.

It's possible to set the RPC node for MetaMask and Brave browser. There are also extensions on GitHub that resolve from a local node. Though, this solution is probably too unrealistic for the average user. I think in the past I've seen discussions about querying nodes directly, but, I'm doubtful there's going to be more solutions soon.

> To my knowledge, the Chrome Web Store user count represents the number of users with the extension installed who have opened Chrome in the past 7 days. So the 10M+ number for MetaMask includes everyone who installed the extension but isn't actually using it.

It's active by default on all websites. As long as it is active, a user can resolve linked ENS domains.

Brave Browser states 50M monthly active users [1] and MetaMask states 30M monthly active users. [2] The Chrome extension shows 10M+ [3] which is the source I used. It seems like Daily Active Users (DAU) is more often used than Monthly Active Users (MAU), so I maybe should have stated that in my comment.

[1] https://brave.com/2021-recap/

[2] https://decrypt.co/95039/metamask-consensys-30-million-users

[3] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/metamask/nkbihfbeo...

There are really interesting use cases of "Web3"

As an example, consider domains.

Ethereum Name Service domains are currently one of the most popular. If you use these domains, you instantly have access to the 10,000,000 people using MetaMask, and the 50,000,000 people using Brave Browser. They're actually very powerful when considering the centralization of normal domains.

They allow you to create decentralized domains that are

- Easy to remember

These are better than onions because they're easy to remember. There's no centralized host that can try to change the address to trick other people.

- Censorship resistant

I don't think people here are unaware of how domain seizures have impacted services. The domains are controlled by records on a blockchain.

- Controllable by a single person or smart contract

Domains are controlled by private keys or smart contracts. A small group of 10 people could democratically control a domain when they don't trust each other. A DAO could control vote out the CEO that controls where a domain points, and elect a new CEO. There's lots of use cases here.

-----

I could write more, but I'm just trying to show that it provides use cases that Web2 does not currently.

They definitely lost money with Luna/UST. [1] I wonder if we'll ever find out how much they lost

[1] https://twitter.com/AlamedaTrabucco/status/15233819532395233...

Y Combinator also backed a failed company [1] that was trying to take advantage of the high APR (20%) for UST staking. [2] I don't think there has been confirmation yet about how much UST Alameda was holding, but if true, it would add more context to CZ's tweet "liquidating our FTT is just post-exit risk management, learning from LUNA. We gave support before, but we won't pretend to make love after divorce." [3]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31686140

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-23/terra-s-p...

[3] https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1589374530413215744

It’s too early to believe they’re going to collapse. They managed to shrink the market capitalization by 15~ billion USDT after the LUNA collapse [1] while intermittently losing the peg by about as much right now for a month. I wouldn’t store money with them though

[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/

License takes precedence when you don’t own the copyright. ToS takes precedence when legally allowed and you do own the copyright.

In my memory, when GitHub released it, they were explicit that using data like this “is common practice in machine learning.” Though, I tried to find the quote and couldn’t, so maybe my memory is wrong and I am remembering a blog post from another organization.

edit: The exact quote was “Training machine learning models on publicly available data is considered fair use across the machine learning community” if you want to search for it.

edit 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20210629142841/http://copilot.gi...

> Frequently Asked Questions -> Training Set -> Why was GitHub Copilot trained on data from publicly available sources?

> Training machine learning models on publicly available data is now common practice across the machine learning community. The models gain insight and accuracy from the public collective intelligence. But this is a new space, and we are keen to engage in a discussion with developers on these topics and lead the industry in setting appropriate standards for training AI models.

I wouldn't be so sure. The monopolist had a $100,000,000 theft last month, [1] after a $1 billion dollar loss from LUNA in the summer. [2]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/business/binance-hack.htm...

[2] https://decrypt.co/100530/binance-ceo-says-exchange-never-so...

> The point of attribution and copyright is to create a creator/inventor-friendly environment.

They're building a class, but, beyond that, I'm not really confident there are any parties that feel like they've been harmed by what they're claiming is a violation. Microsoft didn't just copy repositories from GPL licensed code, but from other companies too. Why didn't these companies care?

It is a good counter point though, as Waymo has released datasets that can only be used under a license. While at the same time, GitHub did not initially use discretion for people who had agreed to their terms of service and were using their hosted repositories.

While I think the legal system might lean towards enforcing consent to use the data in certain circumstances, on the technical side, if it's really a generalization that is resulted from training, the initial data is meaningless in the final model. It could be argued that it did not harm this company economically because the model trained without the data would still have an almost equivalent financial impact.

> It’s okay to vote for or against that, but the potential systemic effect of that vote should also be kept in mind.

My position above was clear, I do not think the law should be changed yet. The systematic change is from someone stating a violation happening when I do not believe that it is a violation. This lawsuit could result in models like Stable Diffusion becoming illegal, which I view as incredibly harmful to the future of artificial intelligence research.

> At this point, most people agree that investment for retirement generally involves putting money in an index fund and that's what people are doing. A percentage of their paycheck goes here.

Withdrawing at retirement does create sell pressure though. The market has to continue attracting new investors for cash out all of the people who are withdrawing later at retirement.

The first tweet is easy to understand

https://www.newtraderu.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Burry-...

He's stating that too many people blindly believe investing in the top 500 companies in the United States is a good plan. This strategy was recommended by Warren Buffet after he won a very unscientific bet.

Michael Burry believes that these people will later want to exit their positions, and won't be able to because the amount of people entering these positions will be lower than those exiting. At which point, the bubble will pop, as the market won't produce buy offers as fast as people attempting to exit their position.

> Incrediblest full of all the harmfulsts! Not only Machine learning:

I do not agree that it's a good idea to make using copyrighted data for training illegal. The people who are upset that GPL code was used for training should be happy that a large corporation believes that training on copyrighted works is fair use. It's a more democratized position.

> It is illegal as the attribution is missing. Also copyright applies etc. see the lawsuit. Its less a technical thing, more a legal one.

I think in reality, this is just a lawyer or group of lawyers who realized they had a case and a reactionary audience to possibly make them millions of dollars.