I immediately thought this too, but you try ringing one of these corporations and see how far you get.

Eh? My experience doesn't match yours at all. Do you have some kind of meta filter on?

You might wanna have a look at Minion Rush.. either people on the top of the high score charts are *regularly* forking out $1000 to run up massive scores, or they're using a hack to get them tokens/bananas.

I've seen a lot of games that can "restore" purchases, but that's a lot different to confirming your current in-game balance as accurate every time you start the game.

It was this for me: http://gizmodo.com/373748/crea...

They had a weak point about the donations, but what they were really pissed about was not being able to force Vista users to buy a new sound card...

I hate this Facebook straw man.

Just because a bunch of teenagers and housewives don't care about their privacy doesn't give the government/corporations carte blanche to monitor everything I do at all times.

Yeah, that video was enough to wipe this company from my buy list for all time.

BTW, the actual 2001 report from NASA on PED's admits that all the evidence is purely anecdotal and the ONLY thing that attempts to lend the data any credibility is pilot flying hours:

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/n...

So flying hours makes one an electrical engineer? That's some pretty piss-poor science.

Are you living on the planet of the Chromebooks? I have a LOT of media on my tablet/phone/notebook that I can watch/listen/read without any kind of network connection....

Except that there's no proof that it was PEDs, just a general suspicion that they couldn't work anything else out so it must be that.

I will bet you a gonad that the Malaysian flight had nothing to do with PEDs.

First thing I thought of too. It's only a 30 year old problem :)

I don't have a sample of the full dataset, or really the time to get/assess it fully :) If I was going to hazard a guess, your method would be closely related to timestamps on the data?

I think your assertion is quite possible, but it involves a lot more work and third party data sources to correlate back to otherwise properly anonymised IDs than the fairly pedestrian realisation for a 100% result in the source article.

Regarding work, short answer is probably; DevOps in a company that spends a lot of time thinking about security ;p

Your point holds if say, the cab driver's home address is listed as one of the data points, since that's personally identifying.

So if you're saying the point that "you can't convert a OTP back to the original data" is moot, then you're arguing a different position to everyone else in the conversation. The original article was entirely about being able to reverse the hashing algorithm.

Yeah, no. You're wrong, though entertaining.

Tiny Key Space: Bob, Alice, Claire
Anonymised Key List: A, B, C

Resultant Data:
A travelled between points X and Y
B travelled between points P and Q
C travelled between points Q and Y
A travelled between points Y and Q
C travelled between points Y and Q
A travelled between points Q and P

I maintained the hash table in memory long enough to know which person is which so that you can determine A travelled from X to Y to Q to P, B from P to Q, and C from Q to Y and return. But there is not enough data to know who A, B, or C are. And no, A != Alice, B != Bob, C !=Claire.

The original OTP proponents point is that you can't recreate the algorithm to convert from Name to Hash, and since this is anonymisation and NOT password management, you don't need to. /hands you back the shovel

Fair enough, NRT sounds a better long term strategy then.

I only discovered I was capable of quitting because the government started to get stupid about the amount of tax they wanted to punish 15-20% of the community with since it's a nice elastic market and they could pretend it was a health initiative.

As an aside; however, they've finally managed to find the elastic point for a lot of people, either quitting or buying chop-chop. They upped the tax 25% in 2010 and got a 19% increase in revenues, then put it up again and got a 19% reduction in revenues. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that wasn't 30% of the smokers quitting...

The drama is most people who give up with an "aid" fall back to smoking within the first six months.

You definitely get a benefit from switching from cigarettes to ecigs, but you're not quit, and if you did quit it would be just as bad as from cigarettes. I've seen similar reports of people that had their doctors tell them they should consider their nicotine replacement therapy life-long medication.

I didn't use any aids this attempt purely on the basis that I've found they're replacement and have no effect on the eventual cessation at the end of their use, so I got that hellscape out of the way immediately instead of in a few months time.

I wasn't nearly as cranky as I thought I would be, I'm usually crankier on the aids... and 12 months in I don't feel like a smoker any more, albeit I still occasionally want one, but it's mostly when the topic is discussed like now ;)

If it helps at all.. what I found was that the craving for nicotine had replaced all other cravings, so when I was tired I'd think I wanted a smoke, and when I was really tired I'd chain smoke. I think most smokers would resemble that remark... the food/drink triggers are more subtle, but the "it's late, I really need a smoke, so I guess I'll go to the store at 2am" shit is really obvious.