It is not unusual for web apps to check browser versions for optimization and compatibility purposes. The ephemeral versions of Edge are no doubt falling outside YouTube's expected range. Anyone using a developer build should be expecting this exact sort of quirk.

From the article: The blockchain can’t protect the information as it travels over the internet, and doesn’t guarantee that a user’s choices will be reflected accurately.

So yes! Publicly verifiable output! ... of dubious veracity.

And also, the company can pull a 51% attack with a mere 5 nodes: The company says that in a general election pilot, its system will use eight “verified validating nodes,” or computers (all controlled by the company) (emphasis mine)

But at least no one else can... so there's that? Of course they are too honest to consider doing so in exchange for a little padding on the bottom line...

I think there's been some misunderstanding. "They" in my statement is the person who finds in practice they actually cannot do better than the existing law enforcement system.

If you can do better, have you signed up for police work yet?

The current tense climate will only improve when people who can do better do, or come to understand why they and others can't.

Children went to school in pitch darkness and bitter cold, and people drove to work in the dark.

So change the times those things happen and leave the rest of us and our clocks alone.

Changing a MAC may not be enough to gain access to a local network. wi-fi access can also require a local software token to register the host,

From the article: "Tufts said she stole a librarian’s password to assign a mysteriously created user account, “Scott Shaw,” with a higher level of system and network access."

Apparently librarian has the power to create network administration accounts so I suspect we're not dealing with a paragon of information security here. It would be mighty interesting to see all the MAC address logs from all the on-campus wi-fi routers and see if this MAC address was ever observed being in two places at once.

The times the fitness tracker recorded her being asleep are meaningless - anyone could've been wearing it. But the times she was being physically observed, and particularly the instance of physically observed + not on computer are intriguing. It would also be interesting to profile the interaction of the times she was being physically observed versus the interactions taking place in the "hacking". If you're being physically observed to create an alibi, then you're using a script to do your hacking in the background and that's generally going to look much less stochastic than live human interaction.

None of that evidence proves that she didn't get a friend to hack into the system, look at the answers, and change her grades for her.

This is unfalsifiable. Nothing could prove that short of omniscience.

Note that other students' grades were also changed; there was likely a "psst, pay me $500 and I'll give you better grades" type of scheme going on here.

That's only the most obvious possibility. Here's another one: The hacker is amongst that group. He/she possesses MAC address+name combinations for all of those people and adjusted all of their grades in order to create uncertainty about which of them was the hacker. Cloning MAC addresses was one of many tactics the hacker used, but the methods used by the school to track the hacker happened to seize upon that particular countermeasure.

If a store does not accept cash, it is weakening our society.

Can you expand on this idea? The reasoning is unclear to me.

But five weeks ago GM announced that it was finally ending small-car production and closing its Lordstown Assembly plant in Youngstown, Ohio.

So what went wrong? ... Quartz argues that GM's decline "began with its quest to turn people into machines," as "the company turned assembly work into an interlocking chain of discrete tasks, to be executed by robots whenever possible."

So the author here seems to think that GM should be keeping its Ohio plant open, producing small cars and employing more people and less automation. This is self-contradictory.

Most people who choose to buy a small car (ignoring enthusiast/performance cars - which are unchanged) over an SUV do so because of price. So if you employ more people you make the small car more expensive and most everyone opts for the SUV. If you employ more automation and fewer people (and foreign people) you can produce the small car cheaper, but the article (and the American public) doesn't want that either.

I'm not sure I follow the flowery language (pun intended). A 7 figure insurance policy when you're working at an 8 to 9 figure scale is completely reasonable.

Speaking as someone who does a bit of trading, this actually makes complete sense and was a prudent strategy. There exist quite a few strategies in trading that require purchasing options you expect to expire worthless and I can explain what we're seeing here without even getting into anything exotic:

He stated explicitly that he sold bitcoin at the same point as purchasing these options. That he sold means he was expecting the price to drop. One move you can make to cash when you expect a price drop is to borrow shares, sell them, and then replace them after the price drops. This called selling short (I'm actually holding such a position in my portfolio right now). If you're wrong when you sell short, you cash out at a loss - and if bitcoin had kept skyrocketing that could have been a devastating loss - potentially unlimited, in fact. If you buy call options, however, your loss is capped because replacing the shares you sold cannot cost you more than the strike price.

If you subscribe to the idea that the price of bitcoin isn't tied to anything in particular and is solely determined by what people believe it's worth then this is probably a good short-term indicator of where the price will be headed. This crowd is probably more likely to deal in bitcoin than the average Joe.

No one, in any line of work, should be expected to sacrifice their family for their job.

"Crunch time" is an intentional policy decision in pursuit of maintaining a cheap labor force. It's obvious companies are getting more labor than they're paying for. What's more subtle is they're also selecting cheaper workers through the same policy. Creating job obligations that require sacrifice of family obligations selects for people with fewer family obligations and people willing to give away labor to maintain employment. People with no spouse, kids, family functions to attend, no savings to live on between jobs, etc. Young workers and foreign workers tend to fit that profile - generally recognized as the cheapest groups to hire. The policy attempts to ensure that they eventually self-select to free up the position for someone cheaper/younger. This raises fewer red flags than firing everyone who gets married.

This.

And this is limited isn't limited to contracting situations (where you typically hear the word "client"). I have seen this in companies that sell products on the open market, to whole industries. The company takes the approach that development schedules are dictated by what features customers say they want. Since the customer doesn't know the security problem exists they can't say "I want this fixed". It is therefore not a priority.

Communism by any other name is still communism

Wouldn't UBI only be equivalent to communism in the case that the UBI level is set to something like GDP / population? Anything above that must necessarily be debt funded and unsustainable. Anything below that would allow anyone earning wealth in excess of their tax bill to keep it, which provides the motivation you suggest is necessary.

We also need to solve the impending problem of massive unemployment as we make it illegal to buy or sell human labor at rates that compete with automation. UBI ensures that wealth continues to flow within the economy as the value of human labor is competed out of the market. If we allow all the wealth to accumulate at the top and stagnate (which seems to be where our current configuration is leading), the economy breaks down. This is in no one's best interest.