A more "rational" explanation is that Grayshift is sitting on (or at least wants people to believe they are sitting on) a few-zero day exploits that they think will keep them in business for the foreseeable future...

Given the fact that the principals working at Grayshift are ex U.S. intelligence agency contractors and ex-Apple security engineers, I wouldn't be so quick to bet against them having a few zero-days lying around...

And hope your phone doesn't have the blueborne vulnerability which renders all of your efforts moot.

Something like this? ;^)

Even this report is a dupe of a report from the exact same MIT research group back in 2013...

https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...

The Weissman score is fiction (a product of HBO screenwriter request to a professor make up something "tech-sounding").

It isn't even an absolute score (because it depends on the unit of time you use to measure it and that isn't defined so if you happen to use something that results in the value 1, your score is infinite). Using a Weissman score in real life is like how fanbois convolute a Hollywood-ism like... "made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs" into something that isn't totally gibberish (when it actually is gibberish)...

Even if it were actually somehow useful to measure compression, it doesn't measure anything useful for video which is generally compressed off-line...

I think your analogy is somewhat flawed. Public key cryptography was in somewhat of the same "rut" as video codec. Video codecs have been stuck on hybrid block techniques and Public key cryptography has been stuck using modulo arithmetic (RSA, and Elliptical curves both use modulo arithmetic although they depend on the difficulty of inverting different mathematical operations in modulo arithmetic).

There are of course other hard math problem that can be used in public key cryptography (lattices, knapsack, error-correcting codes, hash based) and they languished for years until the threat of quantum computing cracking the incumbent technology...

Similarly, I predict hybrid block techniques will likely dominate video encoding until a disruption (or in mathematical catastrophe theory parlance a bifurcation) shows the potential for being 10x better (because 1.2x or 20% better doesn't even pay for your lunch). It doesn't have to be 10x better out of the gate, but if it can't eventually be 10x better, why spend time optimizing it as much as hybrid block encoding. Nobody wants to be developing something that doesn't have legs for a decade or more. The point isn't to find something different for the sake of difference, it's to find something that has legs (even if it isn't better today).

The problem with finding something with "legs" in video encoding, is that we do not fully understand video. People don't really have much of a theoretical framework to measure one lossy video compression scheme against another (except for "golden-eyes" which depend on what side of the bed you wake up on). Crappy measures like PSNR and SSIM to estimate the loss-ratio vs entropy are still being used because we don't have anything better. One of the reasons people stick to hybrid block coding is that the artifacts are somewhat known even if they can't be measured so it is somewhat easier to make sure you are making forward progress. If the artifacts are totally different (as they would likely be for a different lossy coding scheme), it is much more difficult to compare if you can't objectively measure it to optimize it (the conjoint analysis problem).

So until we have better theories about what makes a better video codec, people are using "art" to simulate science in this area, and as with most art, it's mostly subjective and it will be difficult to convince anyone of a 10x potential if it is only 80% today. If people *really* want to find something better, we need to start researching more on the measurement problem and less about the artistic aspects. It's not that people haven't tried (e.g., VQEG, but simply very little has come from the efforts to date and there has been little pressure to keep the ball moving forward.

In contrast, the math of hard problems for public key cryptography is a very productive area of research and the post-quantum-encryption goal has been driving people pretty hard.

Generally speaking, if you measure it, it can be improved and it's easier to measure incremental progress than big changes on a different dimension.

Dust sticks electrostatically. I think the panels are fixed, but the rover can tilt. Unfortunately you really you can't shake it enough to overcome the electrostatic attraction of the dust.

To actually clean the panel (rather than just leave it to occasional opportunistic car washes by martian dust-storms) the only ways appear to be: to actually smack it (vibrate it) enough to overcome the electrostatic dust attraction OR use some sort of electric field to manipulate the dust.

https://www.technologyreview.c...

What about this one?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Because if you are the first to invent, but did not file, you do not necessarily get a patent retroactively.

Best case not-filing-first: if the time expired to file (e.g., someone publishes or makes known your idea the clock starts ticking) it is likely nobody gets to patent it as the filer's patent would be invalid because of prior art (which is the same result as if the first to invent declines to patent the idea because they think it is "too" obvious).

Worst case: the first-to-file gets the patent even if they are not the first-to-invent because the first-to-invent can't show that their invention wasn't published or sold to the public before the priority date to be considered valid prior art.

The theory is that this first-to-file system give people incentive to file and get the idea out there quickly rather than hold on to ideas (via a first-to-invent priority date) and only attempt to patent them when other people stumble upon them. Because if you wait to file, you are risking some public disclosure which precede your first-to-file priority date and cause your patent application to be invalidated by your own prior art, or someone else will file and beat you to the punch.

A merchant is not allowed by visa/mc to know the credit rating of the card holder. Basically a merchant is required by the visa/mc rules to take payment or deny payment on a non-discriminatory basis (in fact they aren't even supposed to ask for your id).

A payment processor is contracted by the merchant to accepts charge request from the merchant and clears them (usually by contacting the issuing bank through the visa/mc network). The bank who does know the credit rating and charge history of the card holder and presumably knows whether it should accept or reject the request based on credit limit or fraud detection metrics.

However, there's always a risk of a chargeback (the cardholder claims that the charge was fraudulent, or that they didn't get the merchandise or service they paid for), and then it gets into a dispute resolution. At some point, since the payment processor cleared the original charge with the bank and credited the merchant's account, the bank and the payment processor need to fight it out if the card holder refuses or cannot pay. Because payment processors operate on slim margins (the banks are gettting the interest payments from the card holder, the payment processors have to split the transaction fees with visa/mastercard/amex), and they have already paid-out to the merchant account they want to mitigate their chargeback risk, so instead of providing payment processing services to anyone, they rank the merchants they do business with and set their rates based on how many chargebacks they are likely to have to eat if the merchant goes belly up and can't refund the money that the payment processor advanced them and they set their merchant fees accordingly.

For "high-risk" merchants, payment providers may also have contract terms that limit payments to merchant that exceed certain chargeback percentages so the merchant doesn't get any money until the bank pays (so the payment providers don't have to waste lawyer-budget fighting with the bank and/or card holders) so the payment processor can withhold payments to the merchant. As you might suspect merchants in this situation might not want to accept too many credit cards...

Similarly with "low-risk" small-payments, payment processors have different merchant terms (e.g., you don't have to sign for small payments at a coffee shop or lunch counter, and they clear charges at a lower merchant fee rate).

FWIW, right now the big banks are also considering a restriction and/or ban on using credit cards to purchase guns as well. Citigroup has already required all of their corporate customers that sell guns limit sales of bump-stocks and high-capacity magazines.

Also, the New York Comptroller is pushing for BofA, Chase and other banks to reclassify merchants that sell guns as high-risk merchants on par with those that sell drugs like opiods. Merchants considered high-risk have to pay significantly more to payment processors and are generally subject to tight limits on chargeback ratios leaving many to abandon accepting credit cards for purchases because of the risk that the "intermediaries" won't pay the charges that their customers will rack up...

Wells fargo is not alone in banning cryptocurrency purchases. BofA, Chase, Citi, Discover, CapitalOne, Lloyds, and TD already have bans on cryptocurrencies...

FWIW, I seem to remember visa and mastercard already banned charges from known gambling sites after the UIGEA passed... Also several states have laws against buying securities/stocks using credit cards.

Depends on what you call the "middle". Median? Mean? I doubt that neither the median nor the mean income in India can support full-time maids and live-in child care.

Certainly a person with a job in India that has a job internationally-competitive comparable to a "middle" class job in the US or Europe will be able to afford those kinds of things. However, people that have that kind of job in India are definitely not middle class in India, they are definitely in the upper 1% of income earners... The upper 1% of income earners can afford all those types of things in the US and Europe too... Strange how that is...

One small problem in this is that many countries who claim to have this "solved" weren't counting on an aging population. That will make it incredibly difficult to simply collect "fucking" taxes to pay "fucking" retirement pensions.

As far as I know, only the following countries have universal pensions: Bolivia, Botswana, Brunei, Guyana, Kosovo, Namibia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Samoa, Suriname, Seychelles.

The others that do have some sort of public pension have some sort of means-test for their pensions and pensioners often rely on private pensions in these countries. This is the case of many of the countries in Europe.

Unfortunately, because of population dynamics and budgetary indiscretions, some countries which have massive shortfalls in their public pensions have taken drastic steps such as seizing private pension funds to make up for public pension shortfalls (like Argentina, Poland, Portugal, Russia, and Hungary). Expect to see more of this as the aging population dynamics put more pressure on public pension funds. This will of course delay the day of reckoning for government pension plans and they will eventually need to choose between lower benefits (angering the current pensioners) or higher taxes on an increasingly smaller working population (compromising the future).

Of course voters can (and will) remain blissfully ignorant of stock vs mutual funds, compound interest or stock versus public debt evolution and vote accordingly (as they generally do)...

Perhaps a few members of the *real* greatest generation might want to respond to you with an immortal *telegram* ;^)