HN user

hrehhf

855 karma
Posts1
Comments78
View on HN

Suppose Alice is a "victim of identity theft". BigBank gives $10k to Fraudster as a loan, thinking that Alice is the actual recipient. Experian, Transunion and Equifax report this loan as a debt which Alice owes to BigBank.

Who is the real victim? The credit reporting agencies want to convince people that the consumer is the victim, and so Alice bears the burden and risk of clearing her name. But it is the credit reporting agencies inflicting this upon Alice. BigBank is the victim who lost money, and BigBank bears the responsibility for making the mistake of giving out a loan in Alice's name. The Fraudster committed a crime against BigBank, not against Alice. It is Experian, Transunion and Equifax, by holding this fraudulent loan against Alice, who are victimizing Alice.

The idea that Alice was victimized by Fraudster is a concept being perpetuated by the credit reporting agencies as a way to absolve themselves of responsibility, and place the burden upon the consumer, and to avoid realistic identity-verifiction which might slow or complicate the practice of issuing large amounts of debt to the general public.

Off topic rant:

It bugs me when people mix our standard numerals with Roman numerals, such as 12MM to mean twelve million. They are different numerals and the meaning is not defined when they are used together.

And Roman numerals are not like SI suffixes, meaning they are not multiplicative; Roman numerals are additive, so MM is two thousand, not one million. Also, M is an SI suffix, so 12M means twelve million and 12MM just looks like a typo.

Obviously people do not use SI suffixes may not feel the same way, this is just my pet peeve because I use SI suffixes in science.

I'm surprised to learn this is such a common thing that it has a name "California No", and it also reminds me that there is something wrong with the people of California :)

In my experience, someone who can't say no is not being polite; they are being quite rude. Stringing people along is rude. It is far more polite to outright tell someone that you are not interested and then everyone can move along. Even for dating, I can't speak for other people, but a simple "not interested" is more polite than being ambiguous. There is no "growing number" of folks who react violently because violent reactions, in general, have decreased over time -- and if anything, a clear "no" is likely better than being unclear. In my experience someone would be more angry at being misled over a period of time.

both don't guarantee true privacy as we can't see the servers.

What do you define as true privacy? Why isn't other privacy "true"?

What do you mean by "see the servers"? Surely you can see them as computers at the other end of a TCP connection, and the server cannot read the cleartext of an E2E encrypted message.

Adults in poverty often need intensive counseling, psychiatry, substance abuse therapy, and a support network of caring individuals.

You have assumed poverty in adults is caused by mental health problems and, in general, that is false. What about the rest of the adults, without mental health issues, in poverty? Poverty is caused by lack of gainful employment. There are a great many people able and willing to work but do not have gainful work and that puts them in poverty.

It appears that they are finding the private keys for transactions that already occurred. Reusing an address is not part of Bitcoin's design and it was never intended for people to do that. By not reusing addresses (not reusing private keys) I think one would be immune to this attack. The article doesn't seem to have much detail; anyone have more detail on this?

Edit: The details are in the URL posted by alphydan; it looks like address reuse does not matter with their method.

I guess I didn't understand what you meant by "not in Europe." I thought you meant geographically.

I'm American and I live in the US. My parents are Turkish, and also US citizens. We do not like how things are going in Turkey and I agree that now there is no way Turkey will join the EU.

What about you?

Since Turkey isn't part of Europe.

Ok, this is a completely separate point, which was discussed early on in Turkey's application, but I think the fact that talks have gone on this long indicates that EU officials do consider Turkey to be "close enough" to Europe.

Its a bit ambiguous, geographically speaking. UK, Ireland and even Cyprus were accepted into the EU. Georgia, Iceland, and Greenland are all considered possible candidates to join the EU if they want to. [1] (I'm aware that Greenland is a territory of Denmark but officially Greenland is not part of the EU.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EU28-further_enlargement_...

How can you possibly expect things to speed up when the Turkish government is doing everything it can to put the brakes on the deal?

I was trying to say that Turks have, more or less, given up on joining the EU. Not because they don't want to, but because they feel like it has become hopeless. I agree that the past several years have done nothing to help the situation.

Remember, Turkey joining is supposed to be mutually beneficial, so if EU sees some benefit to Turkey joining, then probably there needs to be a concrete timeline (so that Turks see light at the end of the tunnel) and, obviously, Turkey will have to meet the requirements. For many years, Turkey was a free democratic country (though not perfect!) but still they did not join the EU.

edit: Turkey first applied for membership to the EU about 30 years ago. That is a long time; longer than any other applicant to the EU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlargement_of_the_European_Un...

I think a lot of Turkish citizens, and the Turkish government, are frustrated with the long time it has taken and now they have become ambivalent, feeling like they will never be allowed to join the EU. Its very easy to each side to blame the other, but from the Turkish perspective, there needs to be a concrete timeline for the process. Indeed for several years there are clear problems in Turkey that would block them joining EU, but those problems came up only after Turks became frustrated with the slow accession.

As for economic concerns, EU has many trade deals and many EU members would probably be quite happy to have some kind of trade deal without giving Turkey membership, and with how things are today, maybe Turks will just accept that.

a machine cannot own property, only a person can.

This is just not correct. There is the concept of a "trust" where property is not fully owned by any group of individuals, but rather is owned by a legal entity for the benefit of some person or some other legal entity. It is not uncommon for a wealthy person to create a trust to which they give their assets, which will be managed in perpetuity for the benefit of that person's heirs. Just as a trust can own stocks and give the dividends to the beneficiaries of the trust, a trust could wholly-own a company, which in turn owns machines and other property.

In my experience, I tend to like the natural spectrum lights better. Mine are around 5000 K to 6000 K. I have several bright (1600 lumens) fluorescent bulbs which I use all day. Some say the spectrum is not very important to help with SAD, that it is merely the brightness which matters. For me, it is just personal preference to use the bright white bulbs.

About an hour before I plan to go to sleep, I turn off the natural spectrum lights and use some dimmer incandescent or halogen bulbs, which have the soft white spectrum many people are used to. Supposedly the dimness and lower amounts of blue in these lights lead to better sleep. I'm not sure if it's true or whether it's just the dimness which makes it easier to sleep.

A search warrant does not really require the target to 'allow' the police to search; the target could choose not to cooperate and police would break into the home, for example. As far as I can see, it is lawful to the target to do this. Similarly, in Rawls's case, the government is free to attempt to bruteforce the passphrase without Rawls's cooperation.

I want to make big bucks 300k or more.

First of all, 130k is already 'big bucks'. If you want 300k+, go to medical school or start your own business. You're upset about the time you spend working, yet you also want to make more money? That is not going to happen soon. You can keep working and make more money, or work less and have more free time.

There are contractual stipulations, by companies such as netflix, for example, that preclude image sensing on screens.

So you're saying Vizio and Netflix have a contract such that Vizio TVs will not report to Vizio about what is being displayed on the screen if its a Netflix stream? That sounds dubious. Maybe they could have a built-in Netflix app ignore such content, but what about Netflix streamed from a separate device via HDMI?