These days most calls are just VoIP data, phone companies don't really have the infrastructure to track incoming calls; I mean sure they know that a call came in and how long it was. But they only know it came from IP x.x.x.x.x they don't know where it came from before that, not really. If the packets are properly formatted they just connect them to their destination. Similar to how an email server has to rely on self-reporting of e-mail headers to verify authenticity, phone companies are trusting that information being sent to them from an outside carrier is accurate.

There's also a lot of reasons that a caller ID wouldn't match a phone number being dialed, a prime example is for a call center to have a central call in number; but each phone has it's own extension if you need to directly reach a particular person.

Now with some regulation it would be possible to require a company verify they own the number they're self reporting on caller ID, and that would help cut down on/block a lot of robocalls.

I get calls at least twice a day from some variation of 'Canadian Online Pharmacy' or 'US Online Pharmacy' trying to sell me viagra or cialis. It's continued for close to 8 years. They pull every trick you can think of, ignore requests to "Do not call", spoof caller IDs, etc.

Unfortunately my phone number is used for business so I can't easily change it or ignore calls from numbers I don't recognize as that could mean potentially lost business. But I really don't need their dick pills. Occasionally if I have time I'll mess with them, I remember once telling the guy on the phone I lost my penis in a boating accident. I gotta give credit to his persistence he still tried to sell me Viagra anyways. . .

It's an extreme example of what happens when you allow the rich to dictate financial policy against all bounds of sanity.

What!? You mean you don't automatically needlecast your D.H.F. every 48 hours to a secure location. It's almost like you're asking to get your data lost to ransomware.

The analogy of driving with eyes closed is not quite accurate, it's much more accurate to suggest that inadequate sensors is the equivalent of having large blind spots in the car where a driver cannot see a pedestrian. Mirrors and other technology have certainly improved this, but even the most modern car has some areas that cannot be monitored by a driver without looking away from others. A computer with 360 sensors should arguably be better equipped than a human with their two eyes and a bunch of mirrors.

Dunno how I feel about the law over all, like a lot of things in China it seems pretty oppressive and overly broad. But it sounds good to punish employers that try to skirt stuff like social insurance. Employers should take care of their employees, might make labor conditions a little less crappy.

uTorrent is pretty garbage these days anyways, ever since the original creator sold it. I switched to Deluge long ago

Cortana already has my heart. Might as well make it official.

They say that it needs to be replaceable by an 'independent repair provider'. So not by yourself, but by someone presumably trained and familiar with the device, but not necessarily associated with the original manufacturer.

The lion's share of my coins were in my own personal wallet. I don't exactly remember why I had those ones in Coinbase, but it wasn't like I was storing them there, I think I had plans for them, I just don't remember what they were now.

I over simplified my above explanation, what I said was technically accurate, but I should mention that they used the hijacked phone account to create an Authy account 'in my name' that Coinbase implicitly trusted even though I had never used Authy with them in the past. I'm not exactly sure why the Authy account was necessary for whatever scheme those assholes were pulling to get into accounts; but the fact that they used it soured me to the service. Not terribly worried about the google auth since I have a lockscreen set up. And if I hand my phone to a friend unlocked and they start trying to steal my account info then I think I have bigger problems.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

About 3 years ago someone stole roughly 2.45 BTC from me.

The event was a real wake up call for me security wise. They hacked e-mail address to access a password reset form on coinbase and they used social engineering on my cell phone carrier to forward SMS messages (which I used as 2FA on coinbase) to steal that money from me. Ever since then I've had all my 2FA set up through google authenticator instead and 2FA set up on literally everything I can.

It was only worth about $700 at the time, but now . . .

At one point the hashing requirements were gentle, but people put more an more research and investment into doing it efficiently so the difficulty rose, so they put more effort into doing it better, and the cycle perpetuated. The original white paper envisioned mining to be done by individuals, but as it turns out the particular algorithm BTC is based on happens to be possible for dedicated ASICs to process thousands of times faster than a CPU or even GPU can. Frankly even if the algorithms in use were such that only CPU mining was possible, you still need to provide enough incentive for people to mine or you risk a dedicated adversary destabilizing the network with a 51% attack.

Then you'll start getting weird formats and protocols like Uuencode that extend existing protocols in ways that they were never originally designed to do. Like binary files over usenet. The new protocols will introduce additional (and arguably unnecessary) overhead, but allow you to use the whitelisted services to do things they weren't intended for. Heck I remember back in the napster days of the late 90s using steganography to put arbitrary binary files into a valid mp3 container, because napster wouldn't share non mp3 audio files.

You can use a windows 7 key to install Windows 10. Now this is something they may disable after this 'free upgrade' period ends, but I've found it very convenient when reinstalling on client machines.