As someone working at a very large bank. I strongly disagree.
The bank spun up a new business to experiment with blockchain technology and went hard at it for several years until they recently sidelined those projects...
In favour of AI
The amount of internal hype across all areas of the business (especially in the tech areas of the business) with regards to AI has been frankly stunning to witness.
My speculation on this is that China/Russia/whoever targets ISP's in order to identify people by IP that have come to their attention somehow.
Your credentials aren't the only point of interest, your credentials gives up subscriber information name/email/address/etc. That's pretty valuable from an intelligence standpoint.
You might be surprised to learn that a lot of the world uses polymer banknotes which are siignificantly more durable and last a lot longer than traditional 'paper' based currencies. The are incredibly hard to tear/break and they do not wear out or stretch. We've been using these in Australia since 1996.
Having handled a fair amount of US currency I can say it _feels_ disgusting to handle after a certain amount of wear and often reminds me of a moist tissue. It also doesn't help that visually the notes all look very similar (as opposed to on polymer notes which have significantly different appearances and colours)
I'm aware it's being done already. But I'm not sure it would be a good starting point when designing a new set of notes. Euro banknotes are mostly made from cotton, and a lot of thought and effort is going into reducing the environmental footprint. The most circulated denominations last on average four years, the rest significantly longer I presume. How does that compare to polymer based banknotes?
In Canada they last 8-16 years… polymer notes are unequivocally better. Corruption and inertia is the only reason they are not everywhere. As to plastic pollution, banknotes are already a closed, circular loop and hence you get the miracle properties of plastic without the downside.
I think the concern was with the plastic money shedding micro plastics or threads as it slowly degrades over time, like we're finding other plastic does like our clothing. Not saying enough to take out of circulation, but does it shed any particles during its life?
Does it shed particles? In a world of absolutism yes they would.
I don’t know if there are actually any studies but fyi cotton notes will also have plastic features and a synthetic, uv cured varnish to try and get some extra life (although far less than polymer) so also ’shed’. Banknotes are regularly inspected and worn or damaged notes are pulled - they really are the perfect product for plastic.
By weight though, it's a lot less plastic being put out there. Is it worse than clothing? Maybe not, but I'd continue to be skeptical about it until some studies have been done.
But the solid piece of plastic isn’t shedding, it’s encased in ink and will be removed with set levels of ink wear. The synthetic varnishes, features etc are the same with paper so you’re putting out 4x the amount of ‘at risk’ shedding material due to the longer life of polymer.
Plastic = bad is a disaster for co2 emissions and ironically microplastics since the alternatives are heavier and don’t last as long. Meaning more transport, distribution etc and tires are one of the biggest sources of microplastics.
This doesn't show anyone concerned about polymer money shedding microplastics and it doesn't show any numbers about how much polymer money sheds microplastics.
Not a euphemism. They're made out of polymer. This is pretty direct.
you don't have to accept if you find polymer cups ridiculous
I don't and I don't know why anyone would be upset over that.
You said they aren't called polymer notes, I showed you they are called polymer notes by linking evidence. What else is there? Are you still saying they aren't called that or does it just upset you for some reason? You can hate it but it's still true.
Because there is zero evidence of what you're saying. How much plastic are people surrounded by and how much of that weight is bank notes? How much do they shed? Show some numbers or just use some common sense that this doesn't matter.
If you have 10 bank notes in your wallet, you have 162,285 times as much plastic in your house.
I think most people would have had used some basic common sense that even their trash bags are many times more plastic than the polymer bank notes they use.
Why did you possibly think that anyone should be focused on microplastics from bank notes?
At what point do you go from "just asking questions" to "maybe this is a bizarre thing to focus on" ?
"eternal september" refers to when the internet became accessible to "normies," thus supplanting the old internet vibe (mainly hackers, engineers, etc) in favor of being useable by the general public.
Someone who went online for the first time in September, when college starts and students get a turnkey way to do that, as opposed to gaining the interest and working through the process themselves.
I had a vision of the experimenters being prosecuted for wasting police/people's time by causing problems on purpose.
Edit: the above was a joke, but had a grain of truth. The authors addressed this specific question in a reply to readers' letters:
We did not exclude Japan from our study because their reporting rate was too low (if anything, Japan would have scored relatively high among countries in civic honesty). Since our focus was on investigating the difference in reporting rates between wallets with and without money, our decision rule was to exclude countries where individual wallets could not be identified. Japan has a unique system with lots of small police booths (Koban system) where citizens return lost objects. While we found a large number of our wallets listed on official lost and found websites, we were not able to retrieve these wallets as it would have required proof of ownership and identification documents. As a result, we were not able to find out the unique email addresses or the original locations of the wallets and we could not ascertain (among other things) to which experimental condition the wallet belonged. As we were primarily interested in the difference between experimental conditions, we had to exclude Japan from the paper. By contrast, we do not have evidence of similar systematic behavior from other countries.
Actually one of our research assistants was temporarily detained (in Kenya, I believe) for suspicious activity. As you can imagine, having a bunch of "lost" wallets on hand required some explaining.
Uh. 50,000 Lumens?
That's a lotta lumens.
Which is awesome. But that's also gonna be running at
Imalent MS18 flashlights (which to be fair peak at 100,000 lumens) get well over 120 degrees C in temperature.
Your design seems to have cooling fins. But If it's radiating noticeable amount of heat, I'll only be running it in winter.
Hello. These look great. But a few things that I'd like:
1) The glass does not specify a volume.
2) I'd love a wine-glass, highball and old fashioned style as well.\
3) The Whisky & Spirits Tumbler does say 'lead free crystal' but doesn't specify it's titanium glassware. Is that correct?
Cheers!
Hello! 1) Full volume is about 6oz 2) Noted! 3) Correct, the tumbler skips the titanium because it's our more affordable product and it's less needed because the product does not have a stem.
>> Speaking with Vince (the administrator of the .ai zone) over WhatsApp, we confirmed that compromising this server would give us full control over any .ai domain:
>> Once administrative access is gained to the CoCCA application, it is possible to control the nameservers for every domain for that ccTLD.
The point is to control domains in a ccTLD. Arbitrary domain hijacking is bad...
Yes, as we were able to download the database for CoCCA's web application (from the box.com backups) for any of the ccTLDs managed by CoCCA, we could decrypt the admin hash and then login to the CoCCA administration panel and modify/transfer any domain inside a ccTLD's zone.
The scale of possibilities with this hack are enormous. You could easily redirect entire domains, generate valid SSL certs for those domains, then capture all the data including all login credentials for all users on those domains.
With exploitation of the right domains you would probably be able to extend this hack using stolen authentication information to take over basically the entire Internet.
Funny hack of my own once: a major web hosting company had a forum which failed to check uploaded profile pics were images, so I used it to upload a script so I could browse their entire filesystem. I eventually came across their root password stored in plaintext in a configuration file. The password? "internet" - all lowercase, just like that.
I kinda think these vulnerabilities were long exploited but no one made the move to actually make any harm is because 1) not profitable for private parties 2) state actors are waiting for a proper time to execute
> We spent a significant amount of time on Google's registry software and discovered an endpoint that we believe are not supposed to be accessed without authentication
Can you send me info on this to mcilwain@google.com ? Thanks.
Out of curiosity, at what point is this considered hacking? Aren't you afraid of getting into trouble with the law by accessing servers like this, downloading data, etc?
The amount of internal hype across all areas of the business (especially in the tech areas of the business) with regards to AI has been frankly stunning to witness.