pupbiru

cc companies

best to say card networks, as cc companies both include a lot of other things (like issuers), and doesn’t include some things (like debit cards, which still use the card networks)

again, that’s a choice you made… you can make your own clothes out of linen and the tools to do it are more available to you because they’re not hand crafted, but you choose not to because you want to save time

heck, you can buy a shirt that’s 5x the price that will last but you choose the cheap shirt so you can have 5 of them

this is the same argument that we don’t build the coliseum any more and therefor we’re not as good at making concrete as ancient romans… modern society is built on engineering, and engineering doesn’t build things that lasts 2000 years that’s true, but that’s not what engineering is for

engineering isn’t about building bridges that don’t fall down: engineering is about building bridges that barely stand up so you can have more of them

the same goes with clothes… modern clothes aren’t made to last your entire life because they’d cost 5x more… people don’t actually want a shirt from their 20s when they’re 70 - people don’t even really want a shirt from their 20s when they’re 30! they want 5 shirts in their 20s and 5 more in their 30s, and they want to be unique and personal and they want to spend no time to acquire them

that’s absolutely the main thing yup… in almost every circumstance where people implement blockchain, a trusted entity is involved so there’s no point to the blockchain

almost always there’s a single entity issuing a thing, and then that same entity also consuming that thing

we are absolutely right now in the trough of disillusionment with blockchain (well, among people who actually understand anything at all - as usual let’s not count trump and his base as rational actors), and at some point there will be useful solutions remain

(and side note too, we’re in the peak of inflated expectations with AI… i can not wait for that crash and to be left only with useful things)

great! the world is a shithole because of assholes, so let’s just all be assholes… what an asshole self-fulfilling thing to say

personally, i prefer to leave the world a better place than what i found it, and people better off for my presence in it

Dunno if "gay" makes people LGBTQ

calling people gay as a slur implies that it’s a bad thing to be avoided… when kids start to think they might be gay, if it’s had trauma and bullying attached it absolutely leads to self hatred

and that’s a self-reinforcing cycle

do you want to explain why not?

the self harm rate for trans people is relatively huge, so the mental health toll on them is clearly enormous… just because they’ve only recently felt strong enough to start fighting for their rights doesn’t mean trans people started to exist recently… trans people have always existed, and just lived in anguish and shut up about it because they didn’t have the collective words to describe their experience

nobody is saying they’re comparable - the experience of black people in america is completely different to the experience of trans people

but let’s not say that either is worse than the other: both have suffered hugely for long periods of history, and both continue to suffer

judging by the votes you’re far from alone

i’ll give it a crack

in australia, we have various credentials provided by the government to attest to a persons fitness to work with children (i’ll just refer to these in bulk from now on as WWCC: working with children checks). there are many of these - one per state for individuals, plus teacher’s accreditations per state, and a few more. they’re ongoing certifications, so can be revoked if anything happens

it’s a legal requirement for businesses who engage in activities involving kids to ensure anyone they employ - including volunteers - is appropriately vetted

needless to say, this gets quite complex for national organisations!

i was the engineering lead for a startup that organisations could add their workforce into the system, with the credentials, and the system checked periodically to check that everyone’s credentials are valid, about to expire, etc and notify people if something goes awry

of course, that doesn’t need blockchain BUT

in cases of child sexual abuse, things tend to only come out after 30+ years on average (according to the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse). organisations need to be able to prove that they were doing everything they possibly could to protect the kids under their care. 30 years on that’s no small task! our company might not even exist in 30 years!

along with our automated checks, we also published an event to the eth blockchain: a hash of the card details as an index (ie if you know the card details, you can look up all instances of validation), and a hash that proves the check took place

what’s that hash? well, i won’t get too into the weeds but essentially we push a payload to IPFS which contains:

• a link to a kind of “template” of an HTTP archive for a typical request to the validation service
• a diff that allows you to reconstruct the HTTP archive of this instance of the request given the original template
• various pieces of the HTTPS handshake with the validation service that allow you to essentially validate after the fact that the content of the HTTP archive was exactly what the validation service sent at the time - HTTPS is essentially signed information after all, so we have a chunk of HTML attesting to the validity of a card that’s been signed by the government! cryptographic proof - not just “take my word for it”

we also published a page on IPFS that allows people to enter card details and load all this information and produce all the technical details to prove what happened (we also had plans for some kind of hardware pack with pinned versions of things because browsers and technology change)

you might be able to do this by relying on the date header that the server sends, but to be really sure, writing the hashes to the blockchain proves that the event given happened at a very specific time and date

blockchain shouldn’t be big and flashy: it’s a very niche use-case, but for those niches there’s really nothing like it

it does still hold value, but the value is super niche and generally shouldn’t be exposed to the user… it’s an implementation detail

that’s because it’s privacy first… in that case, privacy is really the only reason they offer the option. in this case, it isn’t about privacy. they want a system with stable value that can be transferred quickly from consumer to creator in the creators preferred currency

i’d argue that any serious company wouldn’t really bother with MAC identification… they’re so easy to spoof that it adds to operational overhead far more than the benefit it brings

more likely with these things you’d have a VLAN mapped to a physical port, and if that port were disconnected you’d instantly get a notification and send someone to check it out

i’d have said that’s less important than TLS or something on your ATM, a VLAN for ATMs that can only access specific services, and all ports not on a VLAN just disabled

really you just want to stop traffic from being sniffed (stolen credentials) and spoofed (“correct - dispense $10000”), and then to make sure it and nothing adjacent to it can access less robust services… beyond that, you just have to assume nothing. the services that an ATM connects to should be robust enough that they do all the validation - the ATM is pretty dumb (kinda in the same way as your browser on your computer: it gets no decision making to access your bank; just is input and output)

MAC addresses are easy to spoof, and physical security is pretty difficult on something like an ATM that’s publicly accessible… plugging into a switch should honestly be a nothing burger… having it publicly accessible - even on the same VLAN as an ATM - shouldn’t be a problem other than defence in depth