Yeah that’s the biggest issue. I remember when it launched and it was invite only. If they indeed opened the registration at some point nobody knew about it. So they really failed at promoting whatever they were trying to do.
The only requirements are serving a lot of the same "kind" of content, enough such (or for some other business reason) that it doesn't make sense to send it all at once, and somebody willing to spend a bit of time to implement it. Map and local geocoding information comes to mind as a decent application, and if the proposed implementation weren't so hyper-focused on common compression standards you could probably do something fancy for, e.g., meme sites (with a finite number of common or similar background images).
Assuming (perhaps pessimistically) it won't work well for most sites serving images, other possibilities include:
- Real-estate searches (where people commonly tweak tons of parameters and geographies, returning frequently duplicated information like "This historical unit has an amazing view in each of its 2 bedrooms").
- Expanding that a bit, any product search where you expect a person to, over time, frequently query for the same sorts of stuff.
- Local business information (how common is it to open at 10am and close at 6pm every weekday in some specific locale for example).
...
If the JS, image, and structural HTML payloads dwarf everything else then maybe it won't matter in practice. I bet somebody could make good use of it though.
For something like $10k-20k I bet you could get someone (good lawyer?) to solve those problems for you, leaving you with $399-398k. Worth the deal, I think.
> puzzles where at least something of value is created when the puzzle is solved
What puzzles create something of value when they're solved today? A puzzle is typically a thing you do for fun and entertainment, not something you try to solve for the purpose of creating value.
I guess you're thinking more about logic/mathematical puzzles and alike? Would make sense in that case, but that's not the only type of puzzle.
> ACSL SOTEN [1] have LTE connectivity for remote control
LTE connectivity that would use US infrastructure (LTE towers) for its connection.
Unless the drones start shipping with satellite radio, I'm not sure what the scare is about, seems to be mostly about that Chinese products just shouldn't be available to the average American.
> Congress has repeatedly voted to impose new restrictions on Chinese technology and in April voted to require China's ByteDance to divest to sell its TikTok U.S. assets by Jan. 19.
Why are these restrictions happening in the first place? Went looking for reasons beyond "China may/may not be using DJI for spying" but beyond conspiracy theories, is there any factual arguments behind the ban?
Drones will dominate warfare going forward (see Ukraine). Having production capacity for drones concentrated in your primary geopolitical competitor country is a bad idea. Hence these policies (which make a lot of sense to me and equally apply to other fields like semiconductors).
Wouldn't it make more sense to try to develop your own production instead of trying to prevent import of someone else? Even preventing import doesn't stop your geopolitical competitor's production. But you never hear any public politician arguing the drones should be made in-house, only that the ones across the sea might be evil.
And since the US supposedly is pro-capitalism and free markets, wouldn't it make sense that someone in the US develops a superior consumer product and "defeats" the evil competitor products that way?
> Wouldn't it make more sense to try to develop your own production instead of trying to prevent import of someone else?
In a nutshell, what's happening here is that China is employing industrial policy strategically [1]. Drones are one example, but there are plenty of others like ship building, EVs, batteries, rare earths and many others [2].
The way this works is that industries are subsidized directly or indirectly to drive competition of the market and get to economies of scale. One sufficient scale is reached, it's very hard to for new companies to out-innovate incumbents (at least in capital intensive industries like manufacturing).
Now, to answer your question, protecting your domestic industry against unfair competition is giving local companies chance to innovate and establish domestic production - which in case of military conflict will play a decisive role [3] (noting that it doesn't have to be "domestic", but can be "friendshored" to allied countries, e.g. ship building in Korea and Japan).
For TikTok I assume it is protectionism. The Chinese government might be able to use TikTok to get personal information of Americans for free. Ban TikTok and then if China wants personal information of Americans it will have to buy it from American data brokers.
You mean the "war" where China builds apparently more popular and cheaper products than the US so tariffs were added so the US can improve their own GDP by banning competition?
China has drastic restrictions on the ability of foreign nations to operate within its domestic economy. Those drastic restrictions in various formulations have been in place for essentially eternity.
That spans from general context like real-estate, to specific context like social networks or search (eg Google and Facebook), to infrastructure (eg AWS), to Disney not being allowed to own its own parks, to McDonald's not being allowed to operate its own restaurants. In fact it's so bad, it's the exceptionally rare case where a business is allowed to own & operate its business fully in China.
When McDonalds can't even operate their restaurants in your country properly, you're blatantly on a particularly bad list of very authoritarian nations.
The opposite is overwhelmingly true in the US. You are free, at any time, to set up and fully own a business within the US (as a foreigner). You can even pick the state based on legal structural preferences. Almost anyone on HN can do it whenever they feel like it, it's fairly simple all things considered.
The US is a nation that allowed companies like Toyota to come in and hammer the domestic competition. It allowed foreign operators to hammer huge domestic employers in industries such as steel. The US has far more often than not tended to allow very friendly access to its gigantic market.
The mistake the US has made for decades is to go too easy on China in regards to how they block access to their domestic market. This is the era of reciprocation, as such China should be increasingly blocked from easy access to foreign markets until they reciprocate and open up access to their economy.
How, exactly, is national security even a reason? Ok, so the drone has a camera, but that doesn't mean someone can magically transport the data. Ok, so the drone has a LTE modem, that still has to be connected to US infrastructure once connected somewhere within the US.
So how is it supposed to be a national security issue? Sounds as harmful as a calculator.
> that doesn't mean someone can magically transport the data.
The drone (and controller) needs internet connectivity to download firmware updates. The drone and controller both have wifi and both automatically connect to wifi when it's available.
> Sounds as harmful as a calculator.
More like a wifi-enabled calculator that self-installs firmware updates, and whose every use is controlled and tracked by a Chinese company who operates at the mercy of the Chinese government.
Neither of these things are true. You don't have to update firmware, firstly.
Secondly, the fact the drone and the controller "use wifi" doesn't mean that they're connecting to arbitrary wifi access points. The drone controller (at least for the two drones i had) is a WAP, itself, a real strong one, and the drone connects to the controller. You don't need a phone to fly a DJI - the phone connected to the controller via USB cable provides telemetry and real time video. If you just want to fly the drone around and maybe capture some cool video, that doesn't require a connected phone.
Source: owned a dji mini and own a DJI mini 2, very close friends with people who own the mini 3 and other, more expensive ones (with the video screen built in to the controller). I fly mine and use an old oled android phone as the video/telemetry screen - no sim card or cellular connectivity. I can take the whole setup to the middle of a forest with no connectivity at all and it will connect, fly, and record telemetry and video on the phone and on the SD card in the drone.
Maybe my perspective is biased - I live on a river and fly my DJI Mini 4 Pro 1-2x a week sitting in my back yard, connected to wifi.
The threat vector for my usage pattern is basically, a rogue firmware update could transmit the video feed, telemetry, etc via controller wifi connection to DJI/China in real time.
For people flying in remote locations with no connectivity, the threat vector is a bit more complicated.
I don’t see what I get out of companies forced to store my data in the US. I don’t want to be treated differently. And having data stored abroad is a feature. KYC for data sounds insane.
I've read the reporting about TikTok, yes. Not sure if you linked the wrong article here, it doesn't mention DJI at all it seems.
> I'd prefer they pass something similar to GDPR requiring all US user data be stored and operated on in the US and not transmitted to other countries.
GDPR doesn't require all EU data to be stored in EU, it requires companies that do store EU data to follow specific guidelines and regulations regarding transit and storage.
Before wanting something to be implemented in your country, you'd do yourself a service to read a bit more about it first :)
A whitelist/allowlist is a system that defaults to rejecting everything, but allow someone to override that rejection.
A blacklist/denylist is a system that defaults to allowing everything, but can on-demand block/deny something.
Banking system for individuals today mostly have a blacklist/denylist for the common use case. Walk into a bank and ask to open an account, and they'll most likely allow you.
If you manage to trip up any alerts (big deposits for example), they'll ask you for more info, citing KYC/AML for the reason why.
> This is why everyone is always asking everyone to demonstrate the sources of funds in finance.
This usually happen after the funds have touched some account you own, hence it's a blacklist system. A whitelist system wouldn't allow you to deposit those funds until after you got verified somehow.
Only the your onramp/offramp would need to know who you are (because of KYC/AML), otherwise you can be as anonymous as you want and it really isn't hard, assuming you don't want to hide from your onramp/offramp.
First one maybe but definitely not the second one.
Have you actually thought of it?
How would the platform know who sent what. They can't. So it's definitely not shared on the deposit side. And I doubt they'd move the money around because of fees so I doubt it's shared on the withdrawal side too.
From my experience, of course it depends on the blockchain used, but they all have static addresses per user
Why unless? Say you have 1 ETH in Wallet A, if you transfer it to your on/offramp (the exchange) and then do Wallet B, the only link between Wallet A and B is only known by the exchange, so you'll remain private (publicly, again assuming you don't want to hide from the exchange).
You can't trust the exchange to not inadvertently leak the information. A substantial leak could include personally identifying information along with account balances and or deposit and withdrawal totals.
Somewhere along to lines, if you want USD, you need to trust someone, it's inescapable. So once you know this, you can act accordingly.
But still, the original argument was that you have to worry about chain analysis because everything is public, but obviously that isn't true, no matter if an exchange may or maybe not inadvertently leak something.
> I'd imagine it's pretty easy, too. You've already got the assets in a poorly-accountable and liquid state
Alright, so walk me through it because I don't see how it's easier to wash than other ill-gained funds like cash.
You robbed someone and now you sit on $200M worth of Bitcoin. How you unload them so you have cash you can use, when every transaction is traceable and any exchange willing to trade for those amounts do KYC and follows AML?
any exchange willing to trade for those amounts do KYC and follows AML
This is not true AFAIK and it used to really be not true. There were plenty of no-KYC exchanges or exchanges that offered no-KYC accounts if you had the right connections.
Tell me one big exchange that'll accept a deposit of $200M USD worth of cryptocurrency without asking questions.
> exchanges that offered no-KYC accounts if you had the right connections
Yeah, and plenty of taxmen that will let you wash money if you pay them X amount, but lets try to stick to verifiable facts instead of imagining/assuming a bunch of things.
with clean funds launch a new token and create a liquidity pool on uniswap
with another set of clean funds in a second address you buy that token in the liquidity pool
with the dirty funds in the third address you also buy the token and dont stop buying, you use all the dirty funds
the second address sells, and you just are another lucky crypto trader with another 10,000% gain, indistinguishable from any other crypto that’s mooned that much. You, along with all the bots and copy traders and momentum buyers. Just sell into liquidity, withdraw the more liquid crypto on exchanges. Pay taxes.
If you do this, the dirty funds need to connect to a different RPC server than your clean funds
dont use infura or a node in a data center on the same IP address
if youre not using your own node on your own network, you need to mask your IP address and think about who knows it. Tor works better than VPN for this
All the indictments I’ve seen involve basically zero OPSEC while all the others go unindicted
Its not about the chain analysis, its about proof. Any random charting site will raise flags about the token buyers, but can the prosecutor use that? The cases arent being brought
you still have to do the actual laundering at some point. just because you have $200 million now in monero (which you also need to get to first) doesn't mean you can just transfer them to your bank account. exchanges will KYC you for that, and you will definitely get flagged for a source of wealth / source of funds check to prove where you got it from
It's really easy. Use casinos in 3rd world countries to certify your money as gambling winnings. There must be underground network for this. So it looks like you're gambling and you got lucky. Very dangerous though. I heard that they charge 13% total fee. You come in at 5M$. You play for 1 week.. Leave with 160M or something. Bring that cash into the bank and deposit it.
I still think you’d get under an investigation (at least from the tax authorities, but I can imagine police too) after years of years consistently depositing millions of wins in your bank account.
I do not think shady people put their loot in bank. Most illicit activities and tax avoiding folks rely heavily on cash or other expensive exchangeable goods(rolex/jewellery/gems/gold bars/gold watches etc).
> any exchange willing to trade for those amounts do KYC and follows AML?
Binance paid U.S. regulators a $4.3 billion for violating U.S. anti-money laundering laws a year ago. There are many crypto exchanges that have poor KYC or deliberately do it in a way that can be circumvented - Bitzlato was one example. I imagine if you have some dirty Bitcoin you can find an exchange today running in a non extraditable jurisdiction that will trade it for cash for cut.
It's easier because mainstream cryptocurrency services support money laundering for privacy reasons, and will happily process withdrawals from known money laundering services like Tornado Cash until OFAC orders them to stop. Even if you trust that they're doing an honest inquiry into the source of large amounts - and I do not - they can't know that an arbitrary mixer output didn't come from casino winnings or Ethereum mining in the early days.
