They use existing IED locations and layers of GIS data to determine where terrorists would be likely to place them. For instance, they use events as training data and then measure distance to light posts, distance from school, distance from whatever to create heat maps of high risk IED areas. The problem is the terrorists algorithm changes as we get better at stopping them. Cat and mouse.
When trying to bring about a big change, his point seems to be that sometimes new simple thinking is more important than old complicated thinking. That's very much in line with the MIT Media Lab and their way of looking at the world.
For a NOC they'll setup a shell corporation called "Southern Electronics Corporation, LLC" or some other discrete sounding name and have a real website, office address and phone number actually manned, but surely they register the corporations, domains, phone numbers at the same place, staff the phones with the same voices...
Makes me wonder if they fixed the problem or if it's just hidden one level deeper.
There are a lot of services which will act as the Registered Agent for an LLC or corporation. Those can have hundreds of corporations listed at their mailing address with the same phone number. It wouldn't be too difficult to put a few NOC shell corps into the buckets already existing legit businesses.
It is absolutely applicable. In fact this is pretty much how the whole "extraordinary renditions" program was (fairly easily) unravelled by journalists.
Dummy ("brass-plaque") corporations, recycled aircraft registrations, special landing permits at military airports... just a matter of connecting the dots, basically.
I can not be the only one whose faith in secure digital has been fundamentally and irrevocably altered in light of the past few years. In my estimation, anything that has been said or typed in the proximity of a connected digital device is compromised. There are just too many attack vectors.
I imagine if you had enough realtime keystroke data, you could even identify a user using nothing more than how they type on a keyboard. That's some scary stuff.
Privacy advocates would better serve the public if they instead educated people on how to communicate securely instead of producing yet another black box that users can blindly put their trust in. I suppose this is better than nothing when dealing with less capable actors, but for those who plan their future years ahead, doing something on this phone, only to have it bulk collected and stuck in a database for decryption and analysis later when it serves the political will of those in power is counter productive.
>I imagine if you had enough realtime keystroke data, you could even identify a user using nothing more than how they type on a keyboard. That's some scary stuff.
As an American who up and moved to China on a whim and more recently started a tech company split between Boston and Shanghai, I can only greet this news with jubilation. Life here over the last two years has become simply impossible. Good luck to you China.
In terms of policy, probably nothing. They have however become more competent, meaning the firewall isn't easy to hop anymore and I went to MIT. I don't know how non-technical foreigners can do anything here.
I have 4 (ExpressVPN, VyprVPN, StrongVPN, and a fourth I'll never tell anyone where it is). They do not reliably connect, are prone to attacks from the government and even when they do connect, you'll be throttled into oblivion. Before I discovered Shadowsocks (Chinese went to clouds house and made him remove it from github), my VPN would, within 3-5 minutes, be throttled to about 128k average speed. I would be elated if I could get a 1 MBps connection out. And for those wondering, I pay for 200MBps and I do get that in within the Chinese intranet.
That's a legitimate question, setting up an OpenVPN server is trivial. I am curious, have you tried using obfusproxy or an alternate way to obfuscate your vpn traffic?
Not exactly. If you use an standard VPN protocol right out of the box (read: OpenVPN), then yes it is automatically blocked. The OpenVPN SSL handshake is different to regular SSL.
There are certain ways you can disguise the traffic and the VPN companies that specialize in China do that- but the GFW is regularly updated so what works today probably won't work next month.
The other issue is that even if you do get a VPN working, they have a tendency to throttle your connection. VPN traffic is quite different to your regular http/https.
Not yet. Planning to write a small series of posts when I move back, but I do need some time out of this environment before I can judge things with less a biased mentality. Distance is great for that. Will post to HN when I do.
The reason why the Chinese middle class is booming is the rising labour cost. Without it there would be no demand for the products we westerners want to sell.
Essentially this. There have been entire weeks where I can't get a connection out I the country and as someone who can't speak Chinese that's a problem. I've learned the language a bit, but there's no way I can achieve business fluency in the time period necessary to be successful.
I'd be down to meet my doppelgänger., but if you want to meet at Window, we are not the same person. haha. How do I get ahold of you after my trip to the states?
>With all due respect, the problem is most likely a series of poor decisions on your part.
seems like he moved to china a while back and only recently started a tech company. Managing tech companies over several geographical regions is not rare, especially if your business model calls for it.
How exactly did you arrive at the conclusion that it is most likely a series of poor decisions on his part without knowing anything about him or his business?
With all due respect, you have no idea of what you are talking about.
As someone who lives in Shanghai, this is an interesting look at how it works. However, as an expat who can't speak Chinese yet, this website is one of the larger sources of my frustration.
Need something simple and don't know where to get it? If you ask anybody, the only answer you ever get is "TaoBao."
The issue is the way their page is coded, it's immune to machine translation. Images have critical text that isn't translated and often the page loads elements after translation has finished, leaving just enough Chinese to prevent a foreigner from using the page. I've set aside an hour before to make an account but I could not complete the task.
I wonder how much effort it would be to keep their site the way it is, but smooth out the experience just enough to allow machine translation.
> If you ask anybody, the only answer you ever get is "TaoBao."
LOL! That's exactly the answer I would give you :)
> Images have critical text that isn't translated
This is mostly down to the vendors themselves, who define the text and images that show on the item listing.
> often the page loads elements after translation has finished
Yes, you can't parse a Taobao page before waiting for JavaScript stuff to complete. I believe this is in large part to thwart scraping.
> I wonder how much effort .. to .. smooth out the experience
I'm sure they have the engineering capability to do it. They've built an amazing site (experience, scalability, reliability) and developed some cutting-edge stuff to do it (like tengine). The thing is, why would you make your site easier for robots to parse, thereby increasing your costs and polluting the data you use for analytics?
Thanks for the offer, though I actually prefer to only ask for help when I need it. Otherwise, my apartment will fill up with cheap Chinese goods, like the Shanzhai iPhone 6 I bought 2 months ago for absolutely no good reason. :P
It's not difficult language and I think what you really want to ask, without asking, is does anyone have a TLDR? At least that's what I'm asking because the PDF on my iPhone is on the fritz.
I often find myself having to display a wildly unpredictable number of images on a page. The image size ratio is about 3 height x 1 width and I can have anywhere from 1-40 images.
Carousel's do suck, but what other options do I have?
op uses textblocks with extremely fast autoscrolls to convince you of something he believes in.
that doesn't mean there is no place for carousels anywhere.
take the new youtube profile pages for example.
the carousels are used to show unpredictable number of videos in specific lines (recent videos, playlist) without littering the screen with videos, not creating empty spaces where video numbers aren't divisible by 4 or 5 (depending on how many elements are supposed to be shown on one line)
this makes it much easier to scan several playlists on one page.
