nhf

This is a specific instance of a more general service called dynamic knowledge-based authentication (dynamic KBA).

I wonder what would come out of Daniel filing a FOIA request about himself to CBP. FOIA is a nice law in that "any person" (as written in the statute) has standing to file a request, regardless of relationship to the U.S.

$99 per year.

If your area has a Chinatown or large Chinese grocer, you can get your fondue meat by asking for "hotpot meat" there.

One might argue that your company doing the "custodial" data work over the past few weeks and building in the mechanisms in order to handle that data in a more nuanced way is something that should have been done beforehand, and that the fact that you had to take time out to look at it means the law is doing exactly what its drafters wanted it to do.

Many flights in Dubai happen late at night / very early morning due to a combination of time zone alignment and daytime heat making it harder to service large planes.

The contracted top secret cloud is connected to JWICS. JWICS and SIPRnet (the secret counterpart) are both government internets (but are not the Internet with a capital I).

A lot of Exxon/Mobil stations do now.

Apple's 12 watt USB power adapter* still has the same design. Swappable plugs compatible with all of the laptop power brick international plugs. It comes with the iPad Pro these days (and probably others, too).

* https://qmart.pk/image/cache/Accessories/AppleAccessories%20...

A PhD student of his told me that he's seriously considering going on sabbatical and writing a watchmaking text book. No kidding.

Delta's IT is pretty decent for a large airline. Their scanners have little built in receipt printers. If you scan the wrong boarding pass (e.g. first leg of your flight boarding the second leg), it'll make the connection and pop out a little receipt telling you where to go. If your seat gets reassigned at the last minute or you get upgraded, you get a receipt giving your seat number.

This sounds a lot like the on-demand(ish) bus service called Bridj which just shut down here in Boston. [1] They promised popup bus routes just like Citymapper has, but it ended up that a lot of the "routes" they constructed were essentially missing gaps in the MBTA's bus/subway system.

The bus route generation tool that they mention seems to be very promising. Hopefully the realtime demand data is the piece that Bridj was missing, as it would be very cool to see this kind of stuff take off in other areas. I wish them all the success in the world - hopefully this works out for them.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/1/15501764/bridj-on-demand-b...

Economists like to use natural experiments—when comparable populations are exposed to different conditions through policy or chance. It would be interesting to compare Austin (no Lyft/Uber) to a similar city in the vacuum between the locally-grown solutions coming in and U/L leaving. I'm not sure how robust the findings would be though.

Patagonia is famous for this in the clothing industry. They are a premium brand so they can get away with higher prices and a lot of it gets reinvested in supply chain sustainability /ethics.

You could use it like economists use the consumer price index - all relative to year. So you could have the Apollo, or human space year, or something and reference HSY_{1969}, or HSY_{ion thruster}, etc.

If you're feeling crafty, you can create your own: https://github.com/conorpp/u2f-zero/wiki/Building-a-U2F-Toke...

Google supports the U2F standard for logins through Chrome. It's a theoretically standardized browser API, but it's only been implemented in Chrome so far.

You can use it as 2FA for your SSH installation too[1].

[1] https://www.yubico.com/why-yubico/for-businesses/computer-lo...

I get your point, but that's a slightly inconvenient comparison. Shenzhen - Beijing is ~1200 miles, SF - NY is ~2600 miles. At the highest passenger rail speeds out there, the trip would probably end up being 12-18 hours.

I live about 30 minutes from BOS by bus/rail. Let's say everything is timed perfectly: I get TSA Precheck, 10 minute curb-to-gate, 5 minute wait, boarding commences at T-20, first in line for takeoff.

That means I leave for the airport 75 minutes before my flight, fly for 1 hour, arrive in JFK/LGA/EWR, and then take about 30-40 minutes of public transit to my destination in Manhattan. And that's the ideal.

There's some break-even point for travelers between the more relaxed pace of train travel as opposed to the efficiency of air travel, but BOS - NYC is still within the realm of the train, even at Amtrak speeds.

They're working on a beacon-based train time system now [1]. Bluetooth beacons are installed on cars with trackside sensors as trains enter and exit stations. Station wi-fi is used to relay data about entering and exiting trains. Since the MTA already has train speed and track length data, it gives a pretty accurate guess at where the train is between stations.

It's not as accurate as full trackside sensors throughout the tunnels, but much faster and cheaper to spin up. Pretty clever overlay IMO.

[1] http://www.metro-magazine.com/rail/article/715387/nyc-transi...

90% of what's present in the boarding pass barcode (PDF417) is visible in plaintext on the actual document. The other 10% is relatively meaningless without access to the airline's systems (perhaps with the exception of FF numbers which are sometimes redacted).

QNX was ahead of its time. I think it underpinned most versions of the BlackBerry OS and is used in cars / infotainment systems, but I think they would have made a killing in the IoT space if they had developed in another era.

On a tangential note, "The robust beauty of improper linear models in decision making"[1] is probably one of my favorite papers on modeling and decision research.

> Improper linear models are those in which the weights of the predictor variables are obtained by some nonoptimal method; for example, they may be obtained on the basis of intuition, derived from simulating a clinical judge's predictions, or set to be equal. This article presents evidence that even such improper linear models are superior to clinical intuition when predicting a numerical criterion from numerical predictors.

[1] http://www.niaoren.info/pdf/Beauty/9.pdf

Estonia has tried to do that with varying levels of success

http://www.id.ee/public/The_Estonian_ID_Card_and_Digital_Sig...

This was likely someone running a test / dev network using OpenBTS, which is open-source software for GSM base stations. The exact phrasing of that message is the default registration message for the software: https://github.com/ttsou/openbts-p2.8/blob/master/apps/OpenB...

It's more like a "proxy" for your SIM card where it can act as its own SIM, or as a passthrough, depending on software settings.

A point of clarification: you are able to use the car with a human operator in any ridesharing service. Tesla is saying that you can't share out your car on Uber's platform, with it operating at full autonomy, while you chill on your couch.

I remember iDEN phones! I had a Motorola i355 for a while. Software sucked but the thing was an absolute tank. Plus, it was one of the rare "dumbphones" of the time to have integrated GPS, so I remember using it as a GPS tracker for a while afterwards.

From that contract that was linked elsewhere, the equipment being provided includes:

> One (1) VX680 GPRS Terminal w/battery, thermal printer

The VX680 is a mobile credit card terminal (http://www.verifone.com/media/413350/VX680_2_lg.jpg) made by Verifone, much like the type that restaurants use most places besides the USA. If I had to speculate, maybe they try putting varying charges/holds on the card and see when it gets rejected in order to divine the balance?