If you're bored, have Claude pull apart your APK and do a privacy report.
Your banking app is almost certainly using a company like (horrible and evil) Yodlee, which is given data by your banking app under the guise of "organizing your transactions into categories". Yodlee then quickly de-anonymizes it, by the identifiers which are identical and given to firebase, and various other orgs. Yodlee has been caught doing this before, and they still operate.
Lots of other companies do this, so if your banking app has any callbacks to anywhere but the bank itself, it's nothing but trouble.
After deanoymoization, such data is of course sold to everyone, including intelligence agencies, domestic and foreign.
What does this have to do with the claim at hand which is ‘we need to keep our comms infrastructure secure because critical things like the primary way our population conducts economic transactions depend upon it’?
That you find the population’s choice to use such mechanisms questionable, or that you think it is foolhardy to do so, does nothing to disobligate the government from trying to keep that infrastructure up and running.
The point more is, this is one primary mechanism to spy on the populous. Primarily via 5-eyes, which means Americans are buying this data to spy on UK citizens.
It's classic what-aboutism though. Availability is part of security and that's what seems to be considered here. It's also the more immediate concern. Yes, the software supply chain and where your data goes has high potential for compromise. But I'm not actually seeing rampant fraud in my accounts or data leaks from my bank very often.
High potential for compromise? No, the point is that every single transaction you make is being sold on the open market, that's the problem. Using cash prevents this. Using debit cards, credit cards, banking apps ensures this.
The banks provide the data anonymized, but then provide means to de-anonymize it.
So yeah that sucks, but... what does that have to do with the concerns being discussed here?
Digital banking in some form is pretty unavoidable for me unless I want a "live in the woods" type lifestyle and all the consequences of it. And I don't even live in the UK where they've embraced it more. My mortgage was sold to a very distant company and we've had mail problems. My dog recently needed middle of the night surgery and they wouldn't start without payment that exceeded normal cash reserves + daily.
Yes, all these things suck, but shooting digital banking in the knee without a solution to all that isn't helpful.
You know, I didn't rush my laptop to the vet with me. If you're going to argue with the "mobile phones and banking app" line to this extent, I will freely admit: yes, if you want to be a Luddite, satellites are indeed unnecessary. You are absolutely right. But still not convincing me that's a weird thing for them call out here.
Realistically, paying your mortgage isn't giving any data a credit pull wouldn't. It's not a secret you live where you do. And one off emergencies aren't the problem.
It's foregoing cash for every single thing you do. That, combined with the telco selling data, Google linking that data to the number, and apps such as your banking app working in this same ecosystem, and companies such as Yodlee, your profile has a minute by minute location, plus what you spend and where.
It lets intelligence agencies, buying this data, create links between people. Who you know. Who you talk to. Where you go. What your hobbies are.
This gives the power of manipulation, for knowing who you are in the real world, combined with what you do online, means they know you better than you know yourself. And that's quite important, if you want to manipulate opinion.
All this may not matter to you, and if so, that's fine.
But this data is, quite frankly, what gives the Americans the power they have. The Americans aren't mighty due to guns, and weapons, and an army. They are mighty because of information.
Information is how you send a mere 40 dudes to kidnap the President and his wife from Venezuela. Information is how drone strikes perform targetted attacks. Information is how you manipulate elections in foreign countries. It's the sort of power that means you don't even have to fire a shot, to overthrow a government.
This information is what modern banking, and its apps, and companies such as Yodlee give to the Americans.
And as a Canadian, with the Americans blathering on about 51st state this and that, I am perhaps over sensitive to this fact. Because the last thing we need, is to give Americans power over us.
Any power.
Even the tiniest bit.
And information? Is more powerful than anything else they have.
Very unfortunate indeed. As a Canadian, I don't want to use Persona, which isn't legally bound by Canadian privacy legislation. I'll never install any Persona apps on my phone either, and the sad part is that domestic eid providers often use Canada Post to ID people for them. EG, if you don't want to install an app, or can't.
So there are literal avenues to identify yourself, very cheaply, with a human. Theoretically, a company with its own AI, should be able to support more than just Persona, after all.. SDK integration should be simplistic for them.
Anthropic? Support domestic eID providers, you can even use it as advertising "See how easy AI makes it?" and "We care!" and so forth.
At one point, I may simply get locked out. This saddens me, I've been reasonably happy so far.
You can order genes online, and some say you can assemble using stuff cobbled together in a home lab rather easily. For the last 20 years, I've personally felt that bio-terrorism is the highest possible risk, well above nuclear, or chemical warfare. But it does take training, expertise, or, it did.
It’s like saying you sell ammonium nitrate and fuel oil online and then saying it’s too risky to let people have computers in case they use them to make ANFO. They can only make bioweapons because you’re selling them bioweapon components! They can’t make genes at home!
The companies selling genes online already scan the orders and do not fulfill anything considered a possible hazard (presumably unless it is to a known and certified lab at a serious organization).
And, this is not the only way to make genes at home.
It was a different time. Everything from movies to stories at the bus stop were longer, more relaxed, less rushed. www probably didn't seem like a big deal at the time.
Alternates seem... bad. Instead of 'double u', you could say 'sexta-u', but that could lead to a slap in the face. Possibly the same for sextuple-u, which sounds like someone's going to tackle you then do some strange all over you.
If it wasn't for U and V switching in the middle ages, it'd be like the french language which says 'double v', and then 'sexta-v' could be OK.
> It was a different time. Everything from movies to stories at the bus stop were longer, more relaxed, less rushed. www probably didn't seem like a big deal at the time.
Hmm, and yet, though of a different era, we got `cp`, `ls, `mv`, `rm` ....
This will blow your mind, but it actually is pretty close to being unbounded. :)
Consider the 'MMA N matrices' primitive modern CPUs are starting to support. For the current generation of CPUs, N is a constant like 16 or 32, but there's nothing preventing it from being 1024 or larger if we have more memory bandwidth.
Nah his point is a bit simpler. Vector units can process a limited amount of data per time unit. Memory can load a limited amount of data per time unit.
If you have infinite memory bandwidth you just move the bottleneck back to compute so both have to grow simultaneously in lockstep.
What you should have said is that CPUs have so much compute headroom for matrix vector multiplication that simply adding more memory bandwidth would make them faster so every improvement in memory bandwidth is welcome.
The "move the bottleneck back to compute" bit is changing rapidly though. The first time a major hardware company ships a PIM chip, you can push for a few orders of magnitude more data through without being compute bound.
In general, joking that people's promotions are due to their names is thinly veiled racism, especially considering it's a very real phenomenon[0].
Jokes in general are, if not explicitly against site norms, discouraged: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." [1]
I have no idea what the person's real name is, their ethnicity, where they come from. How on earth could you make a racist statement about someone, if you don't know any of those things?
If you have no idea what their real name, and their user name doesn't seem to be related to their real name, then the "joke" doesn't make any sense and would fall flat.
So either you made a joke that isn't funny or one that is offensive. Either way, there's your answer to why people didn't react positively.
I know a dude with a traditionally female name. Dude just job hops. The wide "HR bins 99/100 resumes" part of the filter doesn't seem to apply to him...
He's a fine guy, and a fine coworker, but he's not the hot shit his resume progression would suggest.
I guess that's worth being taunted in graded school.
Your banking app is almost certainly using a company like (horrible and evil) Yodlee, which is given data by your banking app under the guise of "organizing your transactions into categories". Yodlee then quickly de-anonymizes it, by the identifiers which are identical and given to firebase, and various other orgs. Yodlee has been caught doing this before, and they still operate.
Lots of other companies do this, so if your banking app has any callbacks to anywhere but the bank itself, it's nothing but trouble.
After deanoymoization, such data is of course sold to everyone, including intelligence agencies, domestic and foreign.
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