Also, make sure to use official website, not just Google search, or any chat agent question, the SEO are sometimes poisoned with scam phone numbers.
I consider myself always to be wary of scams and my trust-level is zero when they call me, but I recently almost got myself hooked on an airline support call. I google searched the support number and trusted the AI summary on top and called it, they asked me my reservation number and I happily provided. With the reservation number they have public access to the entire reservation details, they knew my name, my flight, my co-passenger details everything. I called to do a reservation for my pet which is normally not done online. their problem, they got greedy and asked me more than pet travel, iirc they said there was a problem with one of my flights, it wasn't paid and I had to repay on the call. If they just followed along instead of going by the script I would have paid the pet travel amount.
you don’t need to be an aviation expert to trust the plane will fly.
likewise e-voting systems pass through cryptography experts auditing to verify it does what it says it does.
said that the voting solution can also provide cryptographic proof that your vote was unaltered, and accounted for, without need to expose your actual vote.
the claims about database altering, are also false as the vote is cryptographically signed and unalterable.
also there is another feature where you can recast vote on top of your previous one and the last vote will be the valid one. This is crucial for countries where the bad guys can come at your place and under distress (gun) force your vote. you can then recast safely invalidating the forced vote.
e-voting solutions is really interesting and in an alternate reality I think we could have had a mainstream e-voting and more even direct-democracy vs our current democracy by proxy (elected officials)
each citizen gets an anonymized private key via a secure channel (eg. postal) and use that to vote.
votes are double enveloped:
outer envelop: anonymized id
+ inner envelop: vote.
mixnet separates the votes and cryptographically shuffles them to decouple relationships.
only at the end the shuffled votes are decrypted using the private key of the election itself that was split using shamir secret sharing (eg 5 out of 7 shares to reconstruct)
the thing that’s not clear from the article and it’s a shame is that it seems the failure was the hardware (the 3 USB keys) not the election software. This could be simply avoided by having redundancy on the hardware (2 USBs per share) or more shares themselves (5 out of 9 shares)
Weirdly this reminds me of the Raft consensus protocol: two nodes cancel each other when failing consensus as you can't tell which is the valid one, three gives you better chances, if one fails you have the other two that can get consensus. Of course in the off chance you have two failures you cannot get consensus with the only living node. Adding another two nodes make you robust to two failures.
Now replace fail with lying and you have the exact same problem.
this. Let’s not confuse meanings. There are multiple ways to improve quality of code. Testing is one, code review is another. this belongs to the latter
I'm located in Barcelona, and yesterday lot of transactions on mini markets / pharmacies were not possible because the item prices were unknown, adding to the fact there was no phone lines available to reach out.
That's because by definition it is not going to be "major" problem since the unit test acted as gateway before it got pushed to production, instead you'll probably be 'meh' and fix it once the unit test fails.
This reminds me the saying of a manager arguing why do we need so many SREs since the system is working fine.
I’ve actually talked with ChatGPT and asked it both to output mairmaid diagrams of discussed architecture (context was kubernetes clusters, namespaces and Pods) and also read diagrams and convert them correctly to kubectl commands to build the diagram.
I had an understanding that quantum entanglement can be used to for encryption and guaranty there are no man-in-the-middle attacks by making sure the entanglement is not broken. if we can’t know the collapse happened how can we make such claim (mitm can meassure stolen briefcase put it back and no one would know)
From the investor's perspective starting from Google is a lot better, and I bet this was done deliberately. It provides him the insight he doesn't need the CEO to find the articles.
This reminds me my father when I mentioned bad news he always referred to a saying; no need to worry, things you can't control you can do nothing about them, and why worry about things you can control.
I think the frustration often arise when we create the illusion of control and unexpected events shatter that idea, bringing ourselves in denial.
A good measure is to keep a buffer for unexpected events and prepare yourself sentimentally.
There is a point to be made here that is an important difference between web2 and web3+centralized apis. On the latter companies do not have lock-in of the data, which provides a big incentive to not be evil. the moment someone can make a case for bad play they have the advantage to shift the market to a different platform. Unfortunately this is not so easy on web2 because of the data that locks users on those platforms.
> Helium is very much centralised because it has to (by the nature of their offering) lock down the end-user devices heavily. They have a single approved manufacturer last I checked.
As far as I can see there are currently 19 approved device manufacturers [0].
> It essentially operates as a unregistered and unregulated ISP and that isn’t something to be taken lightly. It does that by pushing all legal and regulatory liability to operators. There’s also a lot of scams with operators faking their signal etc.
Scams faking their signal will only help improve the robustness of the network on the long run as these are fixable issues.
Regulation seems to be spurring on every web3 conversation. I believe regulation is lagging behind user adoption and is a pending conversation. As for the exact scenario (LORA network) what kind of regulation do we __want__ the network to have? I don't think blocking user traffic is something we want to have, as an example you mentioned with current ISPs.
I tend to look closely into projects that are outside of the echo chamber that can provide real world value and better economic models than web2 solutions.
My two favorites are:
helium where they build IoT global network, I use a helium GPS-alternative tracker for my moto which costs 10 times less than GPS tracker.
scPrime (although there are other storage alternatives) which build global S3-compatible storage using available disk space on HDs. There is a lot of real estate that is sitting right now that can be harvested for money easily with networks like this.