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> normalising people uploading identification documents and hence lead to people becoming victims of scams

We've long lost this war.

I'm in Italy, staying at my 3rd Airbnb. I was surprised when the first asked me, casually, to drop a photograph of my passport in the chat. I checked with Claude: yep, that's the law.

(I'll remind you that Italy is in the EU.)

On checking into this place last week, the guy just took a photo of our passports on his phone. At this point I'm too weak to argue. And what's the point? That is no longer private data and if I pretend that it is, I'm the fool.


I'm pretty sure in most places in the world if you are travelling from abroad you are asked to share your passport, and have been for a very very very very long time.

The difference between sending it over a chat and handing it over to a clerk (who then photocopies it or types in the data into the computer) feels almost academic. Though at least "Typing it into the computer" doesn't leave them with a picture, just most of the data.


> The difference between sending it over a chat and handing it over to a clerk (who then photocopies it [...]

The difference is that the paper copy is local and only accessible to the hotel (and any government employee that might come knocking).

The digital version is accessible to anyone who has access to the system, which as we know well on HN includes bureaucrats (or police) with a vendetta against you and any hacker that can manage to breach the feeble defenses of the computer storing the data. That computer isn't locked down because the information is not valuable to the person who holds it; they're paid to satisfy a record-keeping law, not maintain system security.

> at least "Typing it into the computer" doesn't leave them with a picture, just most of the data.

Agreed, except now uploading a scan is the easiest way to file the data.


Good points.

I do agree that "not without a warrant" is a pretty load-bearing thing and it _should_ be tedious to get information. When a lot of info is just so easy to churn through that can activate new forms of abuse, even if from an information-theoretical point of view the information was always there.

And it's not even just about public officials. All those stories of people at Google reading their exes emails or whatever (maybe it was FB? Still) sticks to me.


Yeah but previous attack vector:

- Fraudster has to bribe hotel staff, or get on staff and then work there and steal documents. Tricky.

New attack vector:

- Fraudster rents out Airbnb. Trivial.


Well, even there, you're doing a transaction worth hundreds to thousands of dollars probably.

This pretty much lowers the bar to any random website on the internet can ask for ID to do something as trivial as look at a photo.

In a world where social engineering is the last unsolvable security vector, this is significant even if it is just a matter of degree.


Yes. My partner got one in Morioka about 6 weeks ago.

Edit: very, very quickly after the quake, which we felt, I might add. I got a notification via the 'Safety tips' app long after. I think I was on Airplane mode at the time.


How hard could it be — genuine question — for, say, Apple (Nikon, Sony,…) to embed a QR code (optionally) into an image.

QR leads you to a page, you upload image to page, hashes are compared, image-from-sensor confirmed.

Surely at this point we need provable ‘photography’ for the mass market.


What system would you create that prevents a camera from being pointed at a screen? Because if you can't block the analog hole, any verification scheme is trivial to bypass.

None but it makes it more difficult. People could “photoshop” before digital but most didn’t. Perfect is the enemy of good enough, etc.

Perhaps, but in this case I'd worry that the workaround is so easy that the only result is people trust the system more and are easier to trick while not actually raising the difficulty.


you still need to check the bridge.

I could take a real image of the collapsed bridge, modify it somehow with AI, post it, you then say "hey, its not real, look, QR doesnt match, the bridge is safe"


You’re seeing commercials?

There’s your problem.


OTOH product placement is your "friend".

Sounds like he’s a twat.

Isn't falling for virtue signalling charity donations more of a twattery?

It is always enlightening when people criticizing "virtue signaling" accidentally reveal that the problem they have is not the signaling, it's the having virtue.

There was a time when one of the virtues was not to brag about how virtuous you were. I think that's why a lot of folks have a problem with virtue signalling. In their minds if you're signalling by doing something publicly it karmically negates what you're doing and almost alchemically turns it into something resembling vice.

I'm merely trying to explain how it is that people can have a problem with virtue signalling and to them it doesn't really contradict what is to them true virtue where you do something good and stay quiet about it.


This comment feels like it was made outside the context of the existing conversation. The comment I replied to was calling all charity virtue signaling and not just vocal giving.

But either way, I personally don’t think a library is any less valuable to a community just because it has Carnegie’s name above the entrance.


Society providing incentives for rich people to give money to charitable causes is good actually. An evil person doing good things for selfish reasons is still doing good things.

The real problem comes when you look up what charity actually does with the money.

It is hard to not get the feeling that outside of the local food bank, most charities are a type of money making scam when you dig into what they do with the money.


If you choose to classify all charity donations as "virtue signaling", yes.

If you reject that absurd false framing, no.


It's not virtue signally if you're tangible helping people. Like if I give away food, maybe I have the intent of signalling something, but I'm also giving away food. That actually happened.

The world would be a much better place if rich people virtue signalled much more and thereby donated more.


But was this in the late 90s/early 00s? I mean … it was kinda different then, no?

I - 49 - also had boomer parents who didn't monitor my internet back then. I really don't think it can be compared to today.


My parents didn’t monitor what I was doing on the internet when I was growing up in 00s. I saw a lot of shit and wasted a lot of money on GPRS and WAP portals. I learned from my mistakes and I’m glad I did. I wouldn’t want to monitor everything my children do either.


don't know if you had a similar experience, but my folks didn't pay much attention to ANY of the stuff I ingested, data, chemical, or otherwise.

My partner, a gen Xer, had it even looser. Talks about just hanging out in a patch of random dirt until the street lights came on.

Notably, I haven't heard anyone use the terms 'helicopter' or 'bulldozer' parenting lately, and I kind of wonder if it's because that's just the norm, now.


Whitehouse.com, Goatse, Lemonparty, wondering what results you will get if you type fuck into Dogpile, public and private chat rooms etc all existed on the early Internet.

There was way less advocating that slavery and Nazis weren't so bad and it was much harder to upload a photo of yourself, but nearly everything these censorship laws are trying to block existed in some form on the early Internet. Parents need to parent and we have an entire generation that grew up fine with the Internet and video games.


Frankly the amount of outrageous deranged shit I saw on IRC and Usenet as a preteen kinda makes me conflicted on this point, whether the internet is "worse" today. Like, I had already seen the gaping asshole of goatse probably hundreds of times before I graduated high school so... lol


every generation thinks they live in unique times. that there existed some idyllic lost time innocence. it’s a fantasy.


The internet was pretty fucked up in the 90s / early 00s.

Much less regulated, you could find all sorts of weird stuff (and yes, also porn) in it.

And it didn't mess us up. Before that, we teens had access to naughty magazines. I had a friend who managed to rent porn movies from the local videoclub (before Blockbuster).

"Life, uh, finds a way."


> And it didn't mess us up.

Honest question: If it did, how would we know? Here is a thread on incels.is where a dude tricked a woman into flying to another country because he "knows she deserves it". https://incels.is/threads/i-just-made-a-woman-fly-from-spain...

With reproduction rates falling, and people having all sorts of trouble with relationships, what does "messed up" look like, and why are we so sure that we actually aren't when the world is increasingly polarized and having trouble with authoritarianism? How can we prove those things aren't actually linked?


To be honest I think incels as a full-blown phenomenon came after my generation. In any case, as my sibling commenters point out, there are so many variables you cannot really isolate which one is responsible for the incels. Did porn play a part? Maybe. I bet there are lots of things that played a larger part, including other aspects/platforms of the internet which spread hateful and misogynistic rhetoric.


How can we be sure that it isn’t the result of the US leaving the gold standard? Or the increase in automotive recalls? Or the increase in the number of hot dogs consumed at hot dog eating competitions? I’m sure there’s a connection. https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations


Hating women and having her waste money on a flight is way better than burning her at the stake, stoning her, or chatting her up because you are a serial killer.

Theres a long history there. It is already a good thing that most people identify that behavior as weird and awful instead of it being socially acceptable or even the law.


I love your `?` mechanic. Brilliantly simple. Thank you from a very happy customer.


Seconded, I love that the AI feature stays away from me until and unless I specifically ask for it.


Meanwhile have you used the latest Excel for Mac?

1. Open a sheet. Type anything.

2. Hide Excel (Cmd+H).

3. Bring Excel forth.

4. Stare at a blank screen where your grid should be for anywhere from 0.5 to 3 seconds.


> 4. Stare at a blank screen where your grid should be for anywhere from 0.5 to 3 seconds.

It is because is drawing the 3D surface with your Excel cells. It's not Microsoft's fault that you didn't buy a decent graphics card. /s


Naked robotic core.


> the puck mouse?

My mate Tim, professional graphic designer, used it for years. Loved it. He might still have it for all I know.

> The "you're holding it wrong" iPhone?

Was always nonsense. None of the Apple team used 'the bumper' and neither did I.

> The "unusably slow after two years" 11in MBA?

Are you seriously here criticising one of the most revolutionary hardware products of the last 20 years?

FWIW I used mine for years and had a corporate Windows image running under Parallels. Everyone was massively envious. (I was a Domain Admin, I could add my own machine to the network.)

> The Cube?

I'll give you that one.


Calling the 11" MBA "the most revolutionary hardware" of anything is one for the books.


Say hi to your friend Tim Theoutlier for me.

Also good to know the iPhone 4 thing was people lying instead of holding it wrong, I guess.

What exactly was revolutionary about the 11" MBA? Looking better than an equally performant netbook?

The notion that things were so much better under Jobs is just revisionist history.

Saying "Steve Jobs wouldn't have let today's Apple be this way" while ignoring what Apple was like in his day is just rose tinted glasses (or worse, cult of personality nonsense).


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