malikNF

Ha! I didn't realize anyone was talking was watching this on mute. With my own background music.

Slightly off-topic, but I really love the video[1] embedded in the article. Just a slow motion video, no nonsense.

Most slow motion videos on youtube has a section on the setup, the backyard of the producer, the equipment etc. Just give me a slow motion video without all the interruptions.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQL25_hoQ1k

That crowed probably installed the app on their phone.

Why is this comment so heavily down-voted? The parent provides an alternative blockchain, that has been really well engineered by a world class team of developers. Is decentralized, has the ability to write smart contracts, has already implemented some of the features eth 2.0 is promising, currently sitting 3rd place in terms of market-cap right behind Ethereum (which we are talking about here).

Some of you people who down-vote without providing a proper reason are down right evil.

Usually I would agree. But not in this instance. It really is silly some isps are not doing this by default, just fixing this will reduce so many types of ddos attacks. The current size of ddos attacks are just insane. And thabks to these attacks decentralized nature of the internet is eroding everyday.

Wow sounds fun, the idea for the website sounds fun as well and congrats on the launch.

Small suggestion, could you not automatically display the pricing according to the location of the IP address of the user. My IP is being guessed as its from Indonesia and I see pricing that I am unable to read. And I don't see an easy way to look at the pricing in a more familiar currency.

Far too many websites do this, its so annoying :(

They mention TV license is needed to reactive the device if it stops working, and I remember back when I was in uni they told us we need to have a TV license to watch TV in the U.K.

So I am wondering would this mean any government that wants to collect money for people watching TV, Samsung TVs will provide these gov with the power to do TV licensing automatically?

Tim Sweeney has an interesting twitter thread on the matter.

https://mobile.twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/14284291853...

So has anyone ever used something like this on a unlimited sms plan for use with 2fa or something for their sites ?

Im guessing "unlimited" sms, is also similar to "unlimited internet", you start sending more than a 1000 sms messages a day you might get throttled?

I came across a video[1] where Paul Stamets and Steve Sheppard were experimenting on ways to save bees using mushrooms. Wonder how much effort it would take to implement it worldwide or if its even practical to implement on a world scale.

[1]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_lqIUlON1s (5.38mins)

And your point is ?

>>The pessimist in me likes to think this article is sponsored by the air purifier lobby.

Well that makes the two of us. For an article on a website called science, there's lots of info about the person doing research, his background and his life story than the actual numbers on what they define as "smarter"

In one part they mention the study was done in 2015 (no link to article) on 24 people where these people did 61-101% better on some test.

But then when they did the study on 100+ people the improvement was just 26.4%

Wut??

But like others have mentioned there is evidence better quality air helps with performing better on cognitive tasks. This article is just really badly written.

How on earth does google manage to still be one of the most valuable (in $$$) companies in the world with this kind of behavior. I just can't imagine treating my customers half as bad as the way google does and still continue to be in business.

Abruptly dropping support for products[1], violating their user's privacy [2] , working with organizations accused of human rights violations. Each passing year it seems google is trying to unlock all the badges under the "be as evil as possible" campaign mode.

Funny bit is how you can replace the words "ads" and "android app" in the title with any two other names of google products and this same situation would still apply.

[1]https://killedbygoogle.com/

[2]https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/google-sued-u-s-tracki...

>>but they've all been free things that they had every right to decide would never increase revenue

If my service provider were to hold this opinion, I would not be able to trust them, actually I would start to search for an alternative immediately. It sounds like a service provider who is okay with turning customers into lab-rats, to experiment on, and once done just discard them away.

Well how long before they tell us they are "a very different company" [1] and decide to pull the plug on 3rd party apps.

[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/6xfyfg/an_update...

We call it the Cartmanland[1] approach. Although I think CH is a really nice idea, that too much exclusive thing kept me away from getting an account there even if I have an invite to the platform.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartmanland

I am guessing, because of the complexity of the problem. With the previous way of doing things I am guessing youtube either push all the videos that get uploaded in to some queue to detect copyright violations, or once a video reaches a certain number of views the copyright algorithm gets triggered.

With the new system I am guessing they have to do this thing in real time and almost anything real-time is a complex problem to deal with right?

>> Miners don’t dictate protocol rules. Miners do one job - hash blocks. And they get rewarded for it.

What? Not really. Miners do indeed dictate the protocol rules, its is the miners agreeing to following a certain version of the consensus algorithm that makes a blockchain do what it does. So they are partly responsible for more than just mining blocks. Like I said initially it is hard to say who the actual decision makers of the chain are because it is not defined properly by eth.

>>Miners are only one participant in the ecosystem, there are also users, merchants and developers.

Like I mentioned in my previous comment, my whole disagreement with the OP of this comment chain is, their analogy calling miners bodyguards only, my argument is that its hard to tell, because anyone can play any role in this network, on eth the incentives are set up in such a way that each actor can be multiple actors, and there isn't any clear distinction as to who gets to decide what on the network.

>>If you justify such change by “majority of miners want it” - you’re basically handing over the protocol to their hands. Nothing will prevent miners to adopt changes that eventually centralize currency control, increase rewards(inflation), etc.

I am not trying to justify it as majority miners want it, my criticism of the eth chain is they have done this sort of nonese in the past (remember the DAO hack where vitalik and co decided to serve their own interests and rolled back a blockchain? )

It clearly shows eth hasn't grown or come up with a solution as to how to govern their blockchain in a decentralized manner. At the moment, a small select group of people, rather than the majority of its stakeholders get to decide what happens to the blockchain, and that to me doesn't look like decentralization.

Whats to stop a powerful government forcing vitalik and co to implement or remove what they want in the future?

Tbh, I don't get your analogy, why should the miners be looked at as bodyguards? While I agree the miners are responsible for protecting the network, I don't think you can draw a distinction that easily between an eth holder vs a miner, because anyone can become a miner and anyone can become a holder and an entity can be both a miner and a holder. Everyone who participates in the eth network should have the power to vote in this blockchain, if its actually decentralized.

The problem here is with the design of eth, eth was a rushed blockchain from the start, now vitalik is trying to rush the release all of a sudden because the people managing his network are not happy with the up coming changes?

What the hell kind of decentralization is this if vitalik can escalate major decisions about network? Eth is not a decentralized project if one individual(or a few) can decide to go against 51% of the stakeholders of the network.

What's a "legally valid digital signature" in the context?

OVH actually does a really good job when it comes to DDoS protection. They can take some really big attacks and slow it down just enough so you firewall rules can take care of the rest.

From all the hosting providers I have used, they are the only ones who don't null route you as soon as you get a attacked, and considering the cost of their service OVH is a real life saver when you really need the help.

----

Just realized this sounds like an advert for OVH, lol I have no affiliation with them whatsoever, just a really happy old customer.

I see. Now that makes it worse.

Not runescape, it was an old MMO that got abandoned, we modded the game kept it alive for almost 8 years before most of the Admins quit and we started our own company, last I heard the game is still running.

As for the DDoS tools, after writing the parent comment just did a quick ddg search and you can still find several websites advertising services to DDoS. Some I recognize from back then.

On a side-note doing a nslookup shows some of these sites are behind cloudflare haha.

>>Also there was another kind of attack where you would start thousands of bot clients at once that would spam messages. The hopes would be that you would (a) shut down the server, (b) attract the players to the server your bots were advertising

Oh man.. some people..

We used to run a game server for a small community of around 400-500 people and DDos attacks were something we had to face almost every week, whenever someone got upset with the admin team, the go to solution was was to DDos, you get scammed by another player? DDos. Got banned for saying racist things ingame? DDos. You figured out a new way to cheat in game and the admins fixed it? DDos.

We were kids back then and those were kids that were attacking us with just a 5-10usd budget. Yes they were relatively small (ranging from 10-60Gbps) attacks compared to the Tbps attacks that are happening to some companies, but good god it was so annoying when all it took was just 5 usd from some idiot to take down your server.

We moved to gcp got null routed (or reduced network bandwitch to the node under attack) every-time there was an attack. Bought azure's 3000usd a month anti DDos protection, was worthless for a tcp/udp service. Tried to have a network load balancer in the cloud that auto-scaled, still some players got effected when an attack came in.

Finally we moved over to OVH and placed a few really powerful servers in-front of the game server and applied some ipfilter rules to reduce common attacks. That ended up being the cheapest option out of all the options. When you have a very small community its not like you have the biggest budget to work with. But it was really fun and taught all of us a lot. Looking back its kinna sad we had to end things. But it was a lot fun.

DDos attacks are one of those things that really makes me worried about the future of the internet. The only way to win it is to throw money at it and cross your fingers that the attacker will run out of resources before you do.

Definitely companies like cloudflare does an incredibly good job of stopping some insanely big attacks when it comes to http/https (I recently saw they were supporting udp and tcp based services now, never tried it).

But one thing that's weird is having to rely on some 3rd party company. Yes cloudflare so far has been a company I can trust, but, I once loved and trusted a company that said "Don't be evil".

If you are a developer for some IOT device manufacturer please do your best to makesure someone wont turn your light bulb in to a part of a botnet. When you guys fuck-up the rest of us have to suffer.

Wont just post it from an official social media account belonging to that journalist fix this issue ?

It starts off with opt in, then they do an update to now opt out, then then do an update to make it harder to opt-out and next thing we know this is something everyone has to live with.

When ad-tech is mentioned we are not just talking about selling toothbrushes or cat food, its about how this technology can be used by companies and special interests groups to do damage to society, say for instance trying to target people who might be more likely to listen to an ideology that would inevitably fail our democracies.

The Cambridge analyticas and the Russian bots happened because the average internet user was not paying attention to ad tech.

We need better education around ad tech, we need more people to understand what these ad companies are enabling so more average internet users can stay better protected, and make better and more informed choices.

So what do you propose we do? Do we create the energy police and tell people what you can and cannot do with energy? Do we stop people from mindlessly browsing the internet?

This argument really annoys me because, bitcoin has a purpose, I can buy things with bitcoin, just take a walk in Huaqiangbei and see how many shops accept bitcoin, talk to the people who's governments failed their national currency and they will agree the energy we spend on bitcoin helps them.

Until btc is replaced with a POS crypto currency like cardano[1] the energy we spend on btc is worth it for the people using it.

[1]https://ucarecdn.com/8673f817-d83b-441a-8281-45e8ae68bbec/-/...

I like the idea, I also like how light the webpage is.

Not a fan of the way the usernames and the scores are arranged though. Having the username first before the score causes the scores to not align properly, and therefore it makes it really hard to scan the page for topics worth reading.

Yes regulations and fines will have an impact on crime prevention, but not when those fines have any impact on the ones doing the crime.

Also, I agree with the OP, I feel HSBC is a criminal organization because there is so many ethically questionable actions taken by this org[1] and even after getting caught and being fined for aiding criminals they still repeated it. [2]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC#Controversies

[2]https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/hsbc-moved-...

The tech sounds really cool. But cant help but feel its going to be a a privacy nightmare. Also, just like how fingerprints are a weak signature, imagine people trying to use this chip's signature as a means to sign for something.