They should buy a Yubikey (a physical key) and keep their passkeys resident on that. Then they can truly keep that physical key locked up in their safe. And it is truly safer than their physical notebook because they are safe from being tricked into entering their password in the wrong place.
The right question to ask is if it is enabling us to do more interesting things or take on harder or bigger problems that seemed too daunting before. That's what all delegation of tasks (to other humans or machines) have enabled humans to do – scale.
Whatever creativity/thinking/effort bandwidth that's available will now get shifted to a different place in the problem-solving effort bottleneck.
That's the hallmark of any delegation being effective. Do we see that happening with AI tools? Personally, I do see that working for me. Is it as good as the hype makes it to be or I wish it to be? maybe not, yet, for me. But that's the case with most things in life.
All payment rails in India are RBI regulated directly or indirectly. NPCI is a non-profit section 8 company which is basically owned by the major PSU and private banks of India. And NPCI operates not just UPI, it also operates NEFT, IMPS, AEPS (aadhaar based payments), NETC (fastag), NFS (ATM network), Rupay debit/credit card network and BBPS (billpay). Only RTGS is operated by RBI directly.
Money serves its purpose while it's in motion. Increasing the velocity of money is good for economy. All the payment rails above do that 24/7/365 with lowest friction – by making all modes of payment possible and for free.
Digital payment rails is an order of magnitude cheaper (all inclusive) compared to cash rails. Accepting notes, counting, and depositing them, doing book-keeping and reconciling it against sales receipts, paying workers and vendors, avoiding leakage and theft etc – all cost time and money. For small merchants, it costs them time away from their business to handle cash.
UPI person-to-merchant (p2m) payments puts money instantly in their bank account. Their bank statements showing P2M deposits help them borrow for working capital at better interest rates.
Risk of theft with cash is much higher than digital theft from their bank accounts. RBI mandated 2FA, velocity checks, cooling-off periods, and awareness campaigns etc help people avoid scams.
W.r.t taxes, GST surveillance does catch merchants who accept high volume of P2M payments but aren't filing GST returns. Conversely, filing GST returns again helps with credit ratings and borrowing on better terms for working capital.
AFAIK banks don't charge for NEFT transfers when initiated via their mobile app or Internet banking website. Fees apply only when you do it via their physical branch.
Yep. Here's the accurate Month-to-date stats published daily by the network operator NPCI https://x.com/NPCI_NPCI. If you want official stats across all banks, across all payment rails, look at the central bank (RBI)'s website.
The right comparison for Nasdaq's order processing volume or messaging volume would be India's National Stock Exchange (NSE). It does more executed orders per day than nasdaq.
I worked on scaling UPI a few years ago. Real-time Payments is vastly more complex as it is much more distributed - each transaction involves the two banks holding funds, two end-user apps (and their banks), and the network (npci) – for the payment to complete end to end, multiple message exchanges need to happen between these parties while the user at both ends are waiting. So, if you measure the scale in messages/sec it would 10-25x higher.
Real-time payment rails that works 24/7 365 days a year from any bank to any bank (domestic, no exceptions) for free is truly a game-changer. Compare that to US payment rails which is slow and expensive. Apart from UPI, India has 3 more payment rails – NEFT (similar to ACH – batch settlement), IMPS (similar to UPI, instantaneous - but different user experience), RTGS (real-time, intermediated by the central bank RBI, but only for high-value transactions) – all are 24/7/365 and free. Then, there's credit card rails – apart from Visa and Mastercard, India also has RuPay which has much lower interchange rate.
Right now, almost all the incentives are to build very large models that run across many machines in huge datacenters. There is very little incentive to build models that can run well on a small machine under your desk.
So it is less about whether people will be “allowed” to own AI, and more about whether there will be anything useful to own in the first place.
The incentive for local models is mostly to make them good orchestrators or user agents. They may give you some privacy and control, but they will still depend on much larger models running in datacenters for anything difficult.
I remember all the excitement around OpenMoko and other open-source “BlackBerry killer” projects. BlackBerry did get killed, but not by any of those individual-first projects.
For AI regulation, I think we should focus on normal commercial rules: consumer protection, privacy, antitrust, liability, and so on. In other words, focus on where money changes hands and where companies have power over users.
Military and offensive use is different. There, regulation is not much of a defense. The real defense is having enough capability and strength of your own.
Restricting AI because it can give dangerous knowledge to ordinary people is like restricting the printing press because it can be used to spread radical ideas.
I have not used voice mode much with chatgpt. I was surprised to learn that they were already not running the voice model like a UX orchestrator while utilizing other models in background for actual research/response etc. I guess it's good they launched what they could and got here in steps. I suspect in the near future my personal device (mobile/laptop) will be powerful enough to run any UX orchestrator model locally – and route to multiple frontier closed/open model providers in the background as appropriate. The battle is going to be platform owners (Apple/Google/Microsoft) wanting to lock-down the access to that local hardware and local interaction paradigms (ambient always-on full-duplex voice) and intermediate through their platform layers - rationalizing it as consumer security/privacy protection (which is right for most people, but sucks for the open market). Meanwhile I suspect OpenAI/Meta et al will try to build their own hardware and become platform owners themselves, though unsuccessfully. And it's going to take some company like epic games to get them to open that up. and that's probably what the next decade is going to be all about.
You can externalize the things you consider as taste by writing down generalized statements, but those statements need boundary conditions and exceptions to be also specified. Except, exceptions have exceptions and when to apply the rule vs when to use exception is contextual judgement. so, whatever residual that cannot be explicitly and unambiguously and generally spelled out, we call it as taste/judgement.
Even if you are on modern 5G network, and set your phone to never connect to 2G/3G network, your location is still compromised because the overall network is still backward compatible to support someone who might be trying to reach you from a 2G or 3G network which run on the insecure SS7 protocol. This enables protocol downgrade attacks. Only way to insulate yourself from this while still being on mobile networks is to use a "data-only" sim and stick to purely Internet based secure messaging and calling apps and not use the phone number for anything.
The way mobile radio/phone networks have evolved (trusted walled garden with backward compatibility) vs Internet has evolved (untrusted with end to end security) is in stark contrast to each other.
I'm not buying another expensive AirPods from Apple until they have their story straight w.r.t battery health and battery repair that is cost-effective. I'm done wasting money on these only to have battery issues, clicking noises etc in less than 2 years of continuous use.
Irritating thing is how Apple hides bluetooth headphones pairing 2-3 clicks deeper than AirPods pairing – on iPhones and Apple TV.
> that require legal to get involved and you do end up with documents that sound excessively broad
If you let your legal team use such broad CYA language, it is usually because you are not sure what's going on and want CYA, or you actually want to keep the door open for broader use with those broader permissive legal terms.
On the other hand, if you are sure that you will preserve user's privacy as you are stating in marketing materials, then you should put it in legal writing explicitly.
If cheap is what you are looking for, then yes, a wireguard running on your home server is the way to go. Instead of exposing your home-server directly to Internet, I would put it behind a cloudflare zero trust network access product (costs free).
Well, you are better off using Google Photos for securely accessing your photos over Internet. It is not a matter of securing it once, but one of keeping it secure all the time.
Interesting blast from the past. We built an oblivious p2p mesh network that did this in 2010. Back then, nobody cared about security as much as we thought they should. Since then, nobody still cares about security as much as they should. Devices have increased and their value has increased, and still, they are quite insecure. Truly secure endpoints with hardware root-of-trust and secure chains of trust for authn/authz and minimal temporary privileges is still hard, and network perimeter security theater is still ongoing in home networks, corp networks and even large production datacenter networks. Only reason we don't find these to be the primary root-cause for security breaches is because more easier attack chains are still easily available!
Find Zen in mundane daily repetitive tasks. Avoid all screens for first hour after you wake up (and the hour before you sleep). Stay focused in the moment – focus on your body and mind. First/last thing everyday, do these activities with mindfulness – personal hygiene, exercise, gratitude/prayer, set positive realistic intentions for the day, set intention to act, prepare, eat/pack fresh healthy food.
Then start your materialistic business end of your day. Learn to breathe and keep your mind calm and present throughout the day. Watch/catch yourself if your mind runs wild with background threads – try and disable background jobs in your mind for a few weeks.
If you have a spouse/partner, discuss these goals with them and ask for their cooperation while you are trying to change your habits. Have realistic expectations, and be generous towards others.
Coming to materialistic business hours of your day, focus on problem-solving and living in reality.
Work through your own personal Maslov's hierarchy of needs. Be strategic, be realistic, and try to build a reasonable position of confidence. Then, launch yourself further from there. Don't overextend yourself.
The most common lock and key ergonomics that everyone is familiar with is the following:
1. You have a lock, you have a corresponding physical key. You can have more identical physical keys. All of them will unlock the lock. If you lose the physical key, you can call the locksmith to change the lock. Physical key is anonymous. Only you know which key unlocks which lock. If a random person finds your physical key on the street, they shouldn't be able to find their way to your lock to try and unlock it.
2. That's all well and good. Now, comes a magic key. That's your personal magic key. Any lock you are permitted to unlock, your magic key can unlock it. Any key you are not permitted to unlock, your magic key cannot unlock. Now, you can more than one magic key – where only some of the locks you are allowed to unlock can be unlocked by one magic key vs another.
And if you happen to lose your magic key, you can call your locksmith to cancel your magic key – actually, that's a keysmith than a locksmith!
3. Your magic key is still anonymous. Only you know which magic key can open which locks. A random person who finds your magic key shouldn't be able to find their way to all the locks it can unlock.
4. When you see a lock, you are prompted to insert a key. The prompt doesn't say which key. You try one of the magic keys have that you think should unlock it. If it happens to the wrong key, not a big deal. You just try another magic key you have, and if that's the correct key it will unlock it.
5. When you buy a new lock (sign-up), you decide which magic key you have that should be the one to unlock it. This pairing of the key to the lock is done simply by asking pair a key to the lock. You are not being told to use a specific vendor of magic keys. You are not being peddled only magic key vendor over another!
6. If you want to change the magic key paired to a lock, you can do so at anytime on your own as long as you are in possession of the current magic key.
7. And of course, you can have multiple magic keys paired to the lock, so that you can unlock with any of the keys.
8. When you use a key to unlock a lock, the lock can tell which paired key was used – you can give nicknames to the paired keys that the lock remembers. The lock will tell you which nicknamed keys were used to unlock it previously and when.
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Here's where I think passkeys went awry. They became yet another platform war. The OSes and browsers are supposed to be neutral and provide an unobtrusive prompt for user to pair a key or use a key, that's it. And the user should invoke a keyring against that prompt. If the keyring provider has features – like portability or non-portability of keys etc that's unique to each key ring provider and as long as the user is comfortable with it, everyone should be good with it. The prompt needs to be unassuming. Today it is very assuming and that's the problem!
When someone puts a significant and useful software under an open license (like BSD) and nurtures a vibrant open-source community around it, sure, everyone else can definitely take it and use it for free. But nobody serious will use it just because it is free. They will consider other intangible but critical aspects like risks to themselves w.r.t future viability of the project, ability to get custom work done to it or around it, keeping up with hardware and software ecosystem trends etc. These things have second order implications – how healthy the broader developer ecosystem is, is there a broad base of core committers we can hire, how easy it is to upstream our changes, who else is using it at similar scale, criticality, cost efficiency; is commercial support available (sometimes 3rd party commercial business support ecosystem is essential due to regulatory/compliance reasons), do hardware vendors actively participate in the open-source community and ensure it runs well on their hardware etc.
Apart from free users, even the contributors have very similar considerations for their participation.
But the starting point is the license – it has to be a clear and unambiguous open-source license that is widely well-understood – especially w.r.t the blast-radius or infection radius of the license. Does it infect the library code that is linked/loaded into it? Does it infect the independent binary/processes that scaffold around it (say, control-plane, orchestrator, proxy etc)? What are the obligations if it does?
If we have to get lawyers involved to answer these questions because it is a custom license that is vaguely written or it has never been challenged in a court or the license holder is of unknown reputation, these are huge red flags.
Another equally important consideration is the motivations of the stewards of the project. While this isn't explicitly stated, one cannot be naive about it. Contributors and users will have to consider a gamut of scenarios – best/base/worst scenarios and make their judgement. With smaller steward organizations, there are one kind of risks while with larger organizations open-sourcing there are other kinds of risks. If they are competitors in some way that's another challenge. If there is no natural alignment of use-cases functionally or non-functionally, that's another issue etc.
With recent changes in Redis, all these things have become less clear and straightforward.