Anyone with a brain, having just invented a deliberately anonymous cryptocurrency that starts to take off, would NOT EVER touch the seed coins, especially once it became obvious that everyone was watching their movement.

The second that stuff moves, Bitcoin value tanks AND the ultimate destination of all those coins becomes international news. Hardly anonymous.

No, whoever they were, and for literally whatever reason they started the project, they would have created other additional accounts later on, capitalised on those, had no connection to the original accounts, and still be a billionaire now. But just one of hundreds / thousands of others that are all untraceable and not really being watched.

And when Bitcoin mixing services came out, they'd have been all over it - just to preserve anonymity if nothing else.

We know precisely one thing about Satoshi - and that's that they don't want to identify themselves. Maybe there is $138bn sitting in an account they could in theory get access to. But it would immediately reveal information about themselves that may well work against them - taxation authorities would be all over it, press, public, every penny would be traced to its final destinations, etc.

So even if they only had, say, a couple of million in another account... they'd use that. Not everyone wants to be a stupendous billionaire in the public eye. You have to be a bit of a sociopath to be a billionaire at all. And then think of things like security, press, public scrutiny, etc.

Maybe they've got enough to live a life of luxury, that they've properly declared, never have to work again and, ultimately... still stay absolutely anonymous.

The one thing we know is that they understand anonymity. Why on earth would we ever expect them to do the most stupid thing ever and reveal themselves, rather than just hide amongst a large crowd and enjoy the rest of their life?

Ever thought about moving the gaming PC? :-)

But seriously, there are cheap wireless KVM solutions for 1080p, and slightly less cheap 4K HDMI wireless extenders. I haven't seen any 4K + USB, but they probably exist. But I'd imagine anything wireless is going to be artifacty.

If you can run a single Ethernet cable in a crawlspace or attic, you can get a KVM extender for $153, and that presumably would be a clean, near-zero-latency HDMI and USB repeater (because it's probably just a bunch of level shifters).

Why would you use Steam Link for a TV and waste precious network bandwidth and suffer compression artifacts and lag just to avoid running an HDMI cable? Even if it is in different rooms, $90 plus a point-to-point Cat5 cable will solve the problem permanently without all the hassles associated with using software workarounds.

Steam Link makes perfect sense when you're talking about headsets that are mobile, but streaming to a fixed device like a TV set sounds like a niche use case that would be better served with dedicated hardware.

...the quantum kind and the PR kind. Assuming the sensor works as advertised, the magnetic signature of a Black Hawk's own avionics and rotor blade static would swamp a human heartbeat's magnetic signature by many, many orders of magnitude. Unless the CIA has figured out how to build a helicopter out of wood and plastic, the most believable version of what happened is something like this:

- intelligence narrowed the search area first
- manned aircraft or drones swept the region using standard sensors.
- AI fused and filtered these multiple sensor channels, narrowing the search area further.
- quantum magnetometry contributed only at closer range. A quantum magnetometer-equipped drone swoops in to get a closer look at an object of interest for signs-of-life, and by closer in, I mean less than a meter.

There's a real technology here, NV-diamond magnetometers, but the article is swapping out physics for PR vibes. NV-diamond magnetometry is absolutely legit. MIT, NIST, and others have shown you can detect biomagnetic signals like a heartbeat. No argument there. The catch is range, and the range problem isn't solvable by engineering, because the problem is physics and simple math.

Magnetic fields fall off as the cube of the distance from the source. That's a brutal curve. If you've got a picoTesla-level signal (typical of human neural anatomy at centimeter distances) by the time you're at a meter you're down in the femtoTesla range, and much past that, you now have to separate the signal from the Earth's magnetic field, the magnetic fields of nearby geological formations, and your own sensor platform noise. A tricorder does this all the time on Star Trek, yeah, but current technology? Nope.

Getting a clean lock at ~1 meter on a picoTesla field takes on the order of a minute or so of integration. Push that to a few meters and you're talking hours. Push it to anything that looks like "search from altitude" and the integration time goes from hours to geological epochs. AI helps, but it helps by integrating over time and rejecting noise. It doesn't repeal the inverse-cube law. So the most plausible reading of the article isn't "we found a heartbeat across the desert," it's "we used AI and quantum magnetometry for close-range confirmation of signs-of-life."

Fwiw, It seems pretty clear that the Trump administration's marketing department turned this sidebar on a successful SAR op into a gee-whiz story to impress the local yokels. Quantum sensors are real, but long-range heartbeat detection is still science fiction.

It might be a hallucination, or it might be a real problem. And there are other possibilities. (E.g. earlier it was suggested that MS noticed a bad bug *somehow* and the government didn't want the bug to be fixed.)

If you want to be fair, it's been headed that way ever since the 1860's. And prior to that the individual states were headed that way.

People in power like to make their jobs easier.

"Security by obscurity" doesn't work by itself. It's a necessary component of every security policy, however. You can't just pick one. (It's called "defense in depth", but that's not really a good metaphor.)

I think you have the right framing here: the tech is real, the range claim is where things get sketchy. For something like a cardiac signal, you're dealing with ~pT at centimeter scale, and then you take a 1/r^3 hit. By 1 meter you're already down in the few fT range, which is at or below the noise floor of anything you'd be able to loft on a drone, especially outside a shielded lab. At that point detection becomes an exercise in integration for your pet AI.

- sub-meter: plausible with enough dwell time
- 1 meter: maybe, with tens of seconds to minutes
- several meters: hours, assuming ideal conditions
- dozens of meters: not happening on any realistic timescale

AI can absolutely help tease out periodic structure from noise and improve confidence over time, but it's working with whatever signal is physically present. It can't conjure amplitude that isn't there. As the article points out, "it took some time" because they were accumulating weak signals via multiple sensor platforms. I'd ignore the PR blurb from the government and interpret this as sensor fusion with quantum magnetometry in the stack, not stand-off heartbeat detection. The former is believable; the latter runs straight into the inverse-cube wall.

Make illegal phone calls (e.g. fraud, harassment, unsolicited commercial spam, etc.) and they'll cut your telephone off.

Far closer in terms of analogy and technology. And extremely viable.

The electricity company are not directly facilitating or have knowledge or would have reasonable knowledge of your Internet activites.

But your phone number is actively facilitating your phone service, the same way your ISP Is actively facilitating your Internet service. And you would get cut off by your ISP if you were sending spam, or hacking people, etc.

Either the ISP has NO business doing that (and thus they couldn't cut you off for sending spam) or they are monitoring and able to cut you off (in which case they could cut you off for piracy).

If you kept sending spam email, your email account would be terminated. If you used your ISP connection to do it, they would start terminating your connection. Whether that was personal, business, paid or free.

How is that different to keeping using your ISP connection to download illegal stuff, once the ISP has been notified of that?

Are we saying that unsolicited commercial email is somehow significantly more damaging to people and incurring a greater commercial cost than pirating movies?

>"I agree with the decision handed down."

I do too

>"I do not agree with legislating from the bench. The courts need to apply the laws as written, not make up new laws. We have a branch of government for making new laws."

The problem is that the laws are often not well written and too flexible, generic, undefined, or even contradictory. The other problem is when the legislature is too chicken s*** to make a stand on anything and do their jobs. Instead, they just shove all their responsibilities onto unelected agencies with nebulous, overly-broad mandates. That way the legislators can't be held accountable for anything.

Ah, yes, the same cautionary notice they have to put on psychics, palm readers and tarot readers in my country.

Because even the government realise that they're just talking bollocks.

You are pretty close. I honestly can't even remember why, it was so many years ago. I only remember hating the messaging app and hating what Google offered and heard about Textra. Tried it, and it solved all my problems. I paid a few dollars to support it. And over the years, it just kept getting better.

Since I have no interest in social media or other DM, all I need/use is SMS. It is possible there are better options now, but I have no motivation or need to explore anything else yet.

>"Why would you want SMS app with "ads and in app purchases" when so many fully featured ad free with no in app purchases SMS apps exist?"

I have been using it for many years. Long before there were any good other options. There might be better options now, I don't know. I have been happy with Textra, though. Updated regularly, lots of features, and reliable.

>"Everyone has their own message app, and outside US, almost no one uses it for anything other than SMS. For everything else, it's Whatsapp, Telegram, WeChat, Signal, etc."

I have never used Samsung's, although it is on my phone. Or any other manufacturer's (LG, Moto, etc). But I also don't use Google Messages. I use Textra with every phone, regardless of brand. But I also don't use any other messaging except SMS. I just want something that works and does what I want.

https://textra.me/
https://play.google.com/store/...