People are just suggesting that someone give him a Special Political Hug. He's been so tense these days....

It sounds like all this "CrossCheck" system is, is a flag that exempts a given account from any automated enforcement, and requires a manual review to action any TOS or community standards violations, possibly as far disabling checks that might auto-remove posts. It's even possible that there is a dedicated team to review any reports as promptly as possible.

The problem isn't the existence of such a system, it's the response time and bias of the manual reviews.

One of the most effective attacks against social media accounts is report bombing. You don't like the politics or opinions of a particular person (Trump, Biden, Zuckerberg, etc...)? Organize a large group of people to log in to Facebook (or whatever platform) and report a few of the targets posts for objectionable content, child porn, copyright infringement, spam, etc, etc. Most platforms will lock out an account automatically after some number of such reports. Depending on the actual popularity of the account, such a lockout might be permanent. Popular and polarizing users are going to attract this kind of attack on a day-to-day basis, and would be essentially non-functional under the standard automated enforcement.

It becomes an issue when there are so many fake reports to filter through that it can take hours for something to be seen by someone and actioned. And there is also a clear risk that while the review team should be impartial, and interpret the various rules and guidelines equally, this is unlikely to be the case, and things that a "normal" person might not be allowed to post might be permitted by the review team. Or permitted only by some members of that team, and the outcome dependant on who gets the ticket.

There are lots of fundamental issues with Facebook and social media in general, but the simple existence of a "safe harbour" for popular and/or controversial accounts is not one of them. It is a feature essential to the function of those accounts.

The next few years are going to be very damaging for companies developing self-driving technology. Mostly (but not entirely) because people are stupid.

With the increases in processing power, software capability and other innovations, it will not be much longer (a few years, and likely less than a decade) before self-driving tech is at the point where you can leave your house, and have your car take you to a destination across town, or across the country on roads that the vehicle as no prior knowledge of, in any volume of traffic, and never have to touch the wheel. And have the risk of collision be an order of magnitude (if not two or three) less than if you were the driver. It's coming.

But, that level of technology is not here yet. But even now, and for the last few years, we have had drivers treating the current technology like it is at that level. There are endless news stories and images online of people napping, or climbing out of the driver seat of (usually) their Teslas. And other news stories of accidents and fatalities where it is confirmed that the driver was not properly monitoring the vehicle. And going forward, as the tech improves, can start to handle almost (but not quite) all situations, this is going to increase. If your mostly-capable car has gotten you to work and back a hundred times without touching the wheel, you're going to get complacent, even if the manufacturer warns that you must always be ready to take over.

And this last couple of years of "Almost good enough." is going to cause a lot of consumer distrust. And that is going to lead to a lot of emotion and regulation that will hamper adoption of tech that will make the steering wheel and gas pedal obsolete.

Yes, I'm sure autonomous systems will sometimes fail, resulting in near-misses, crashes and even the occasional fatality.

However, the incidents per mile driven for computer-driven vehicles are going to be a (Small!) fraction of the rate for those vehicles under meat-bag control.

As it stands, this will enable the same issue with EV fires on a much wider scale -- ~500 ICE vehicle fires in the US per day, and no one cares. One Tesla burns (with no injuries) and it's international news.

It might be useful to be able to say "Of the 40,000 deaths in vehicles in the last 12 months, 28 were in vehicles using autonomous or semi-autonomous control.". It could be even more useful and interesting to see "Of the 40,000 deaths in the last 12 months, here is the breakdown by brand." :)

You're confusing gasoline with diesel fuel. Unless gasoline is chilled to around -40 degrees, it will absolutely ignite with a match.

That would be a "capital loss", which is the opposite of a capital gain, and you absolutely can use it to reduce the tax you owe from other income.

Sort of. Beanie Babies have no other functionality other than to be a collectible Beanie Baby. They can also be counterfeited, and the market has no way to know if Ty is going to decide next year to manufacture 10 million new copies of this years most popular designs.

The primary functionality of Bitcoin is that it can be securely traded over the internet. If I send you an amount of Bitcoin, you can verify the transaction has taken place, and have absolute confidence that the transfer cannot be reversed. Further, Bitcoin cannot be counterfeited and the number of current (plus or minus an hour or so) or future coins is exactly known, and cannot be changed.

Technical question.

Any idea where to look in the phones filesystem to determine how many contacts have been recorded over a given period? For us curious nerds.

Before buying do some research, though. Some don't.

I've seen at least one Brother colour laser (which only had a touchpad interface, and no physical buttons) where I was not able to activate the Reset Menu.

But other than that, no argument from me. I have replaced only one Brother laser over the last 15 years or so -- because it was black and white only, and I wanted colour.

What is Huawei being pilloried for again?

Agreed. And it's not just the VR headset that is expensive -- to run an Oculus or Vive headset to it's full potential, you need a top shelf video card and a decent CPU. And consoles simply don't (yet) have the power -- the PS4 VR system makes a number of compromises, and runs at a low framerate to accommodate the hardware. Maybe in another 10 years when the capabilities of a 1080 Ti+ are matched by the on-board video chipset on the cheap off-brand motherboards, and a (lightweight and wireless) VR headset can be had for $150. Maybe. And probably double the resolution (ie: 4 times the current number of pixels per eye.) And make sure everything (including the games available for sale at the time, not just old stuff) runs at 120+ frames per second, with no drops. Then maybe. Maybe.

EBay used to allow TOTP 2FA, but they removed the feature a couple of years ago to "Improve the security of your account.".

:facepalm:

Dave Kleiman was a computer security and cryptography expert. The odds of one of his passphrases being brute forced is negligble.

But it does prove ownership of the keys.

Anyone who is Satoshi should be able to produce such a signature. Anyone claiming to be Satoshi who cannot produce this is virtually certain to be a fraud.

Yes, there is a slim chance that those keys could have been stolen, and someone who is not Satoshi could have them. However, this is not very likely.

Each Bitcoin address is essentially a symmetric digital key. The private key for that address can be used to sign a message that can then be verified with the public Bitcoin address.

All a person needs to do to prove they are Satoshi is to produce a contemporary message, signed with a private key belonging to one of the early Bitcoin blocks known to be associated with Satoshi.

Signed message == irrefutable proof.

Otherwise, STFU.