There’s a whole chapter in the popular mathematics book “How to Not Be Wrong” by Jordan Ellenberg that covers successful lottery strategies and the math behind them. As I recall from the book, the basic strategy was very simple and had a few groups of practitioners. Optimizing for increased incremental returns was far more sophisticated, though. There were also the operational challenges of buying and tracking so many tickets.
I’m guessing DMs were the real loot. The public display with the BTC diversion validates any DMs that were stolen. Otherwise blackmail targets could deny them.
They potentially had access to any account they wanted. You don't know that they weren't snarfing DMs on interesting accounts while having the celeb accounts panhandle for bitcoin after.
You'd be surprised. Some celebrities might engage in salacious activities via DM but even the most boring corporation can have lots of customer information in support chats.
Or they were but it was kept secret. Twitter hasn't published a list, we only know of the BTC tweets. Maybe they actually were after other accounts' DMs and the tweets are just diversion to make it seem like an undirected attack.
Unless we hear from account holders that their credentials weren't stolen, there's no reason to believe that only those were hacked that sent tweets.
Except that is all the evidence we have to go on for this conversation. Verified fake tweets have been sent from prominent democrats, and not from any prominent republicans.
Of course you're right that we don't know is if this is political, or just a distraction from whatever their real goal is / was. But the optics are clear here, and there is no reason to muddy the waters.
They needed to reset credentials so this could've never been a stealth attack. By making it public, any later leak of DMs is much more likely to be accepted as authentic. Without that, most people would've doubted the authenticity of leaked material.
Precisely. And who's to say which leaked DMs are real and which ones are faked? If you're interested in this kind of stuff, I recommend the book Active Measures.
Perhaps it is a form of proof that they actually have access to the accounts and thus the DMs. Just posting claimed DMs that can be deleted and denied has a lower probability of being believed.
Interesting theory, but then why would they include Apple? Among others in the list, they’re almost guaranteed to be of no value and only increase the risk.
The apartment complex they’re talking about in the article is (educated guess, used to live there) one of the nicest and most expensive in the country. It’s overlooking the Saigon River and has luxuries and amenities that you wouldn’t have except at super luxury buildings the US.
You can live a pampered lifestyle that would not be even remotely within reach in the US on the same budget.
I read an article years ago about how urban design in China post-Tiananmen has deliberately incorporated features that prevent mass protests. Narrow, labyrinthine alleys are hard to clear out and control. With sprawling, eight-lane highways, it's relatively easy.
If you can find a link to the article about post-1989 urban deisgn in China, that would be great. I doubt any contemporary urban area anywhere in the world are built (or re-built) in the form of "narrow, labyrinthine alleys unless it's about preserving historical structures. The major roads of Beijing within the 2nd Ring Road were built mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, mostly inspired by Soviet urban planning. Perhaps you were talking about Haussmann's renovation of Paris?
And no, many Southern Chinese cities still have complex layouts in their historical districts (e.g. Suzhou, Nanjing, Yangzhou). Just check them out on Google Maps. No one in their right minds will build anything without following a grid pattern at least loosely in the post-WWII era. Having reasonably wide roads to accommodate traffic is just basic urban planning. Many rapidly growing Chinese cities suffer from chronic traffic congestion because even the roads built in the 90s don't have enough capacity to handle so many cars. Maybe the "eight-lane highways" were needed because of that?
The highways were not needed because there are a lot of cars. They are needed because the city is structured poorly and with a lot of segregation between functions so that anyone who wants to do something that is different from the function of the current block (e.g. they want to work but they are now at home, or they want to get a haircut but they're at work) requires a trip by car.
Lots of cars around in 1871. I think grids are useful layouts for cities that don't have any motorists. Most of these gridded cities were designed before cars. Modern suburbia loves the cul-de-sac.
I was thinking of natural structures like the branches of trees and the tributaries of rivers. Because cities rebuilt like that in the 20th c does not mean that it was a good idea or successful.
A gridded street system is also quite useful for inhabitants/businesses that want to go to an address without a map (or even with one). You can easliy go to a place you have never been to before. This is probably a highly undervalued property of grid layouts for cities before the invention of telephones, GPS, etc.
I kind of doubt that’s specifically a feature of post Tiananmen urban design. Baron Haussmann’s redesign of Paris during the second empire did the same thing, making central Paris a city of wide boulevards that are impossible to blockade. There’s debate over the extent to which this was a deliberate attempt to make suppression of urban revolt easier but there were six such revolts between 1830 and 1848 and only one afterward, the Paris Commune, which was comprehensively crushed.
Urban planners just like big wide straight roads and with automobiles they can really indulge themselves. They look neat and tidy on a plan and impressive in real life. Building for officials and planners, not for living. That said the party-state is very much alive to the possibility of revolt and I’m sure some people thought about the military implications of urban planning but I’d say the primary motivation was ease of planning and building more than crowd control concerns. A competent military force would be quite capable of crushing an urban revolt even if both sides were armed with nothing but rifles. Professionals beat amateurs at everything and when the professionals have not just drill, discipline and training on their side but overwhelming fire power, air support and better communications the difference in capabilities becomes comical.
Xinjiang is an autonomous region, too. Tibet has been thoroughly “Hanified,” though you’re right that it hasn’t been as dramatic as in Xinjiang. The same is true for other ethnic minorities, too. Traditional costumes are kept to pay lip service to plurality, and there are some parks that feel more like Epcot Center exhibits. It’s not all due to government intervention, but China’s ethnic minorities are disappearing.
I would guess that the Chinese government is worried (rightly or wrongly) about outside (armed) support for Muslims in Xinjiang, and less concerned about the Tibetans tapping into international support, which to date has been fairly ineffectual. To my eye they are making such foreign involvement more likely, not less, with this overt campaign of imprisonment and mistreatment.
Maybe block-chain can actually be useful this time, it is quite easy to create a news forum that even the most powerful government can not bring down. where educated individuals are rewarded to vote on articles just like HN.
Here in JP we see people holding cardboard stating how they are miss-treated in front of the ward office.
Letting these voice be heard means more leverage to the citizen. like pressuring law changes.
A large part of the world is not like America.
In Chinese twitter there are quite a few words you simply can not type.
That is ignorant of me, I know it existed but can't recall any popular ones that wasn't knocked down eventually, do you mind linking some source? thanks.
Having worked in a meat processing plant, I can assure you that no humans would want to eat anything that goes into "rendering" for use in pet food.
I'm not talking about offal, tripe, small goods, etc., all of which have markets for human consumption. Some of those items are high margin, too.
There are markets somewhere in the world for just about every last bit of an animal. The only stuff that goes into pet food is stuff that has been contaminated or that has no higher margin use in other applications. Basically, pets get the waste.
Fun fact -- The highest margin product in a beef house is fetal calf blood. It typically goes for about $400/liter and can sometimes spike up to $1000/liter.
No doubt. But there are huge qualitative differences between good and bad animal food, by and large reflected in the price, but higher price being negatable by buying in bulk.
Everything sold in supermarkets - at least where I live - is junk with a clear and immediate negative impact on health and wellbeing. Why anyone would feed that stuff to anybody is beyond my comprehension.
Interesting fact, thank you. I didn't know anything about the use of animal blood in medicine. Good to know we can find uses for most things to reduce waste.
I've read an anecdote about McDonalds in the Soviet Union. They were selling meat scraps to dog owners, but they did it covertly, because of concern that poor people would buy it for consumption (meat was in deficit at the time).
What you consider as waste, someone would gladly eat.
I realize transportation is a problem, these people live mostly in developing countries.
Many humans do not want to eat the cheap meat I eat.
If you are saying that the responsibility of killed cow should be distributed by costs and not by kilos of meat, I'm probably as virtuous as vegan with three dogs.
