Conclusion from a brief reading: Staffing cost is far too high and whoever is making decisions has failed to act before it became a crisis when the money reserve was nearly gone last month.
370 karma · joined February 24, 2022
If you let people deposit money by bank transfer then fraudsters will constantly do things like get gullible people to send a deposit to buy a second-hand car to the exchange bank account, turn the money into cryptocurrency and move it before the banks get a request to return the money.
A typical business bank account will soon get closed by the bank.
There are many stories from the early days. In the early 2010's there was a money transfer service called Dwolla. It was run by some young men who did not like how banks work and thought they could do better.
Dwolla promised "no chargebacks". They were used by a long-dead exchange called Tradehill. It ended in bankrupcy, lawsuits and fines.
Making a profit of a couple of percent on each transaction is easily turned into an overall loss when banks yoink money back out of your bank account.
The early exchanges had backend code written by wildly impetuous people and really basic security problems like SQL injection.
Leaking all your customers account details through one bug in back in code could get you a big fine.
People selling crypto for cash find that fraudsters will turn up in person with large amounts of high-quality counterfeit bills.
There is the risk of being kidnapped because you can be beaten until you type on your laptop and transfer cryptocurrency.
One screwup can sink an exchange. There was the Bitstamp hack in 2015.
Bitstamp said "we are super secure, only a few laptops can access the back end".
They had Skype and Microsoft office on the laptops! One of the staff opened a Microsoft Office document with macros from a phisher on Skype. That is literally running malicious software. With invisible control of the laptop, the criminals rapidly stole a fortune.
Consider spending three weeks reading the bitcointalk forums right from the start in 2009 to see what a wild-west you are considering getting in to.
In the first 30 seconds of reading the website it's not obvious if you are providing an email account ie email hosting, or charging a monthly fee for some software.
Nowhere does it say "this is an email client that can connect to your existing IMAP account to use your existing email address and has features you need" which is what I guess it is.
You appear to be in Canada so you would probably need your device certified by Industry Canada to meet technical standards for several classes of radio transmitter to be legal to use. (unless everyone using the devices learns some technical stuff, takes a test, personally holds an amateur radio license, does not use encryption and does not use it for business)
Even with a business radio license the letter of the law may require equipment certification.
In the USA some walkie talkies are "licensed by rule", meaning you don't need a license for things like FRS radios so long as the particular model of radio is FCC certified.
The FCC regulations for some kinds of no-license-required walkie talkies do not allow transmission of digital voice or data. GMRS radios can send data bursts for location information once every 30 seconds which is no use for your plan.
In the USA, there is VHF MURS radio and very low speed data is allowed but I believe that MURS is not legal in Canada.
You would probably end up on the 900MHz band, where you can get a useable data radio.
There is a fundamental tradeoff between range and data rate. On an FM radio channel where an analog voice is hissy but understandable, you can only get a few hundred bytes per second of data, see the shannon-hartley theorem.
The range of direct communication from one walkie talkie to another highly depends on obstructions in the path of the radio signal.
If one person stands on top of a hill then sometimes the range is miles, but quite often if the person walks a couple of hundred feet so that the top of the hill is between them and the other station suddenly no communication at all.
In a city the range of one walkie talkie to another is often less than 150 feet.
Buildings with metallized windows and steel-reinforced-concrete walls and floors block VHF/UHF radio signals.
The range of direct communication between walkie talkies is much shorter in a town than out on a lake where there is nothing in the way.
Systems such as police radio use repeater stations on top of tall buildings and radio towers.
A few walls or floors between two 900MHz walkie talkies can easily block the signal. 2.4GHz gets even worse range.
You number 2 desire is called "mesh networking". There has been a lot of research on mesh networking in the last twenty years. The reality is that with small portable devices near the ground it is just not worth the hassle. The quality of the connection between devices frequently wildly varies. Transmitting often enough to figure out who is in range of who is a huge battery drain.
There is an existing thing called "network radio". Basically devices that look like a walkie talkie but take a SIM card, are actually a 3G/4G cellular data device and which do push-to-talk VOIP.
A "network radio" walkie talkie works by pressing the button and speaking then your voice comes out of other walkies talkies, even if other people are on the other side of the world, provided that people have cellular coverage.
Some of the "network radio" devices also connect to the zello app on a smartphone.
Starlink is not the first system for data via low-earth-orbit satellites.
There is Orbcomm that carries short data messages. Orbcomm is used for things like getting a few bytes of sensor information from a pumping station in Siberia or tracking devices far away from cellphone network coverage. If a device is down in a valley it may have to wait for a satellite to be directly overhead to exchange messages.
There is the Iridium satellite phone network.
AIUI, Starlink became practical a) because Musk can hurl lots of satellites into a pretty low orbit relatively cheaply, partially due to reusing booster rockets instead of letting them drop into the Ocean and building more.
and b) because you can have ten billion transistors in a silicon chip so the satellites can do high speed data stuff with the miserable amount of power available from solar panels.
The design of the satellites and user terminals can all be done and tested without hurling anything into orbit.
https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/rmhrisk/status/15749933380840...
I'm long past the stage of being angry about it. The big phone manufacturers are going to do whatever they think will make them most money. I carry a dumb phone.
I had several Nokia 9300 and 9500 smartphones because I wanted a qwerty keyboard. They used Symbian series 80. The software was infuriatingly buggy and trying to get an official Nokia service center to upgrade the software properly was more hassle than it was worth. (Upgrading the software properly required upgrading both the firmware and some included apps that were stored on the SD card, it could only be done by a service center.)
Most likely, the buggy software was mostly the fault of Nokia that made their own UI rather than the symbian consortium that made the base OS.
Eu citizens will have to first complain to a national body. Here is how I think that will go:
EU citizen: "Hey I think the American government has looked at my data in a way that is not intended to be allowed by GDPR"
Two years later: National body: "You can't prove the Americans have looked at your data, we will not process this complaint".
My biggest regret is that I allowed her to order me to go to the nearest university and continue to live with her. She had drained me of all confidence and was hostile to signs of me being an independent adult.
Getting away from her years earlier would have been much better for me.
At some point in the next year or two, up to 90% of that will be returned to the 25,000 creditors who filled in the paperwork to make a claim years ago.
Over twenty years ago reprehensible people could google "Welcome to IIS 4.0" and find lots of mostly-unpatched boxes running Microsoft's web server software. That stopped working while there was still lots of IIS 4 around.
There used to be lots more photographs of windows keys on google image search.
I have list of google dorks for finding certain types of compromised web servers, worked five years ago, don't work anymore.
First time was the nimbda worm in september 2001 which exploited a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 5.
Second time was due to an out of date java runtime, probably around 2008. It was a virtual machine that I was using for some testing. The malware spewed email spam for a short time until I noticed.
I consider it to be a good idea to use separate devices for work and casual web browsing.
They must have had to deal with a very large number of DMCA takedown requests.
Even with automation that takes down every blog entry that is reported through a web form, it seems very likely to me that just the staffing cost of dealing with emails and paper letters would outweigh the meagre advertising revenue from porn blogs.
I'v nominally worked for myself, as half-owner and company director.
I'm a huge geek, with mental health symptoms that could be mistaken for autism and ADHD but are actually due to trauma from having terrible parents who I removed from my life decades ago.
The customers were clueless disorganised nitwits. Their upper management was out playing golf, so we had to try to get their disgruntled office staff to stop looking at facebook for five minutes and cooperate with us to get things done.
I handled complicated technical stuff but had to leaving talking to the customers to someone else.
It depends on your personality.
I'm too honest and bad at manipulating people to be a good salesman or executive.
Sales is a totally different skill set and psychopathic personality disorder to making the technology work.
Copper will react with the chlorine in tapwater and make an insoluble green scum of copper chloride.
Electrolysis with stainless steel makes highly toxic hexavalent chromium.
Platinum is astoundingly expensive, even for plating.
How expensive a filter is needed to remove 99.999% of the chlorine?
The thing with electrodes is that a fiftieth of a millimeter of non-condutive crap on the surface hugely reduces the effectiveness. Around here the bottom third of my kettle has a tenth of a mil of limescale.
I'm not a chemist, but I messed around with electrolysis decades ago when I was a teen who was into chemistry sets.
I am not convinced that tapwater is anywhere near pure enough that this system can work without frequently changing electrodes and removing gunge, even with some filtering.
Electrolysis does not just split the water molecules, there is a chemical reaction with whatever else is dissolved in the water.
Propane does not concern me. A big tank of acetylene would be of concern to insurance companies, the fire brigade and the local safety agency.
I would want that to be in it's own separate brick outhouse or on a concrete pad twenty feet from anything that should not be sprayed with fire.
See this video of taking apart a USB power pack that runs on hydrogen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y48wCuC3KcA
Lavo seems to be claiming that one of their devices will last 30 years, which is better than a flooded lead acid battery system, if that is actually true.
I'm guessing that in this case it is "minimum viable product", as in "a service that is just barely useful and good enough that some people will pay money for it".
For me, I knew a lot of the electronics so it turn out to be mainly a refresher in doing algebra.