I'm not sure where the the article summary got its notion about the costs. The article doesn't address that- instead it spoke to how much could be made selling the service. From the article:

Assuming a selling price of $2 per 1,000 solved captchas, our token harvesting attack could accrue $104 - $110 daily, per host (i.e., IP address). By leveraging proxy services and running multiple attacks in parallel, this amount could be significantly higher for a single machine.

I think the authors of the article were trying to communicate how much money they could make selling this 'service' to other unsavory agents. It could be a lucrative business given the assumed market rates of $2 per 1k, and the mentioned optimizations could make it even more attractive. It makes me wonder if you could set up the whole thing in a cloud computing environment like AWS and come out ahead.

I was curious about your comment, and I think I found the article you were referring to. It was a 7/19/15 NYT article ( http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07... )

Here is a direct quote from it regarding the efficacy of the Zappos holacracy:

"Pressed for instances of Holacracy’s achievements at Zappos, employees could offer only pedestrian examples. Mr. Hsieh had shut the bridge connecting the office to a parking garage, hoping staff would experience more serendipitous encounters if they all used the same entrance.

But that meant employees had to venture onto the seedy streets to get to and from their cars, leaving some, especially those working late shifts, feeling unsafe. So one employee proposed that the bridge be reopened, a motion that was accepted by the circle that controlled campus operations, essentially overriding the C.E.O.

Or as a Zappos spokesman described the process, using Holacratic terms: “An employee (unknown) brought it to the road block role with safety being the tension. The road block role then took it to the grease and disrupt circle where it went through the process and was eventually passed with no objections.”

Unfortunately, that's a crime even if you didn't already commit one.

It depends what you mean, and I think a lot of people are conflicted about it. If "science" means to make predictive theories about the way the natural world operates, then no, CS isn't science. If "science" means to make claims in a verifiable, empirical, and unbiased fashion (that is, the scientific method), then CS theory proofs and industry debugging seem a lot like science to me.

Frankly, yes. Art of the most beautiful kind.

I don't think the author is making the claim that RFID is the best way to ID Americans. I agree with you that there are much better ways for a human to ID an American. But what about an explosive device, as shown in the video? Modern terrorists use remote explosives to time an attack for most destruction and/or destruction of Americans as opposed to sympathetic locals.

It would be much easier to build a device that will only blow up if X number of Americans are in its kill range. This device could be constructed, dropped, and forgotten about. This means you have no risk of being caught once you plant the device. Sure it could make plenty of collateral damage, but it would always get at least X Americans along with it. The author's claim is that faulty RFID shielding on passports makes this possible to do. I don't have a cost analysis, so perhaps it is still farfetched, but for the right price I think this would be a very practical exploit.

Yes, there are so many textbooks out there with only one author and no sources cited. And find me a Nobel laureate who never collaborated with anyone.

I believe there are states which require you to divulge your legal name and permanent residence, but I don't know about any where you actually have to show ID. That would mean you must be in possession of an ID at all times, which is certainly not true.

You realize our Congress can't raise taxes in other countries, right?

I actually presented a poster next to Ramesh Raskar at CHI earlier this month. While a very interesting project, he seemed to indicate that it was still very much a work in progress.

In an MMO, the central server provides a service in addition to authenticating your client.

Well DUH. My patience is getting cut short. How are you supposed to play an Internet online game, without the Internet in the first place, that your steam account can connect to!!??!

What are you talking about? My point is that if Steam's servers are offline, I cannot play my online games even though *my* Internet connection works *fine*. Obviously if I have no Internet I can't play online :P

Become educated instead of braying along with the masses. Its cool.

Try it yourself.

Steam can be run in offline mode, yes, but networkable games cannot access the Internet when Steam is in offline mode. That is not "do whatever you want", it is DRM.

Yes, Gabe said that, but when the day comes he'll have no incentive to do so. He might not even have the money to push the patch out.