You're already tracked like that. I was building solutions to do it well over a decade ago. One customer was well known for their mouse themed hats. A famous hotel brand in a well known casino city used it to track employees instead. I no longer do that for obvious ethical reasons.
There may be a rare few legitimate uses for improving the accuracy, but it also makes those privacy nightmares worse.
My previous employer already had a product offering that could do this for a better part of a decade by triangulating with WiFi/BLE and cross referencing with surveillance footage. It was deployed in malls and retail chains.
It generated interesting information, but not interesting enough to be profitable.
We weren't the only ones with this capability either, most major retailers had this level of analytics through surveillance footage that previously existed for loss prevention purposes. Then simply link the data to a rewards number or credit card and you got a stable tracking identity.
I've worked with a major retailer on similar backend systems and can echo the post above - all of them are running these systems and they almost never discuss the specifics (until someone like Walmart sues Everseen and we get a glimpse behind the curtain from the court documents).
If you go to an org's website offering these tools (eg, Everseen mentioned above, RetailNext, etc), they don't directly advertise the full breadth of their capabilities until you have them in a room for a sales pitch. They can combine multiple data streams such that an individual can be traced throughout the store via cameras, wifi, and bluetooth, which gives the retailer an opportunity to sell that information. Did a customer pause in front of the corn chips but then decide not to buy? Print them out a Frito-Lay coupon at checkout and see if you can't get them next time, and Frito-Lay will pay you to do that.
I have no first hand experience outside of North America so I won’t speculate. There is a cost of entry so you need to be moving enough volume in a market already working on razor thin margins. I’d expect that this means it’s only for the regional/national players here.
Sorry, "cost of entry" meaning that the software and the supporting hardware platforms makes it cost prohibitive for a small org that isn't moving a lot of volume from their shelves. Grocer margins are razor thin already.
Theft is only one cause of loss. Stocking/admin/counting mistakes, accidental damage, spoilage, or simply people moving stuff around or misplacing items so they're not where it's expected all fall under loss.
The industry tends to use the even harder-to-understand term "shrink". Not always theft, just any loss of product versus what the books say they should have.
"Theft" is such a value-loaded, moralizing term. It collapses a wide spectrum of socioeconomic realities into a single criminalized label, ignoring the structural inequities that often shape people's choices. When we say "loss prevention", we're deliberately reframing the conversation away from individual blame and toward systems, environments, and institutional responsibility.
Loss prevention isn't about vilifying people - it's about acknowledging that harm occurs within a broader context. It centers the idea that organizations can design safer, more equitable spaces that minimize material loss without resorting to punitive narratives rooted in classism, racism, and centuries-old assumptions about who is "dangerous". Calling something "theft" externalizes accountability onto the most vulnerable actors; calling it "loss" recognizes that institutions have agency, too. And preventing that loss focuses on proactive, compassionate strategies rather than reactive punishment.
I work with retail stores who do exactly this in a number of different ways! Many chains are already populated with all kinds of BT sniffing(?) equipment. At least one pings RFID tags in everything every 5 seconds. It’s wild.
And guess what, that shop layout is not going to be optimized for the customer's convenience, but for the shop's profits. These kind of solutions tend to converge on the 'Hotel California' model: you can enter, but you can no longer leave.
It was apparently used to reconnect local cellular networks [1] to the Internet. In such a case, a single antenna scales better than if it is used by only one person. Still, the overall benefit was probably limited, otherwise we would have seen more reports about it.
Wozniak does everything to go down in history as a supposedly unrecognized genius.
Every time he makes headlines it is the same story with a slightly different twist.
You're getting downvoted, but I see where you're coming from. I have noticed as well that, perhaps a decade or so ago?, Woz began a sort of "recognition tour" where I would see him show up at an arcade game expo or vintage computer festivals and repeat a kind of history of his life.
At the time, Jobs was alive and getting all the accolades (and Apple was flying high), so it seemed justified in my mind that Woz should want to say, "Hey, what about me?"
(At the same time, I am comfortable that history will remember each of us as we deserve to be remembered.)
If you read "iWoz" I think he puts it all down in ink there. (But I don't know that I would recommend "iWoz", I found it fairly boring — but perhaps because I had heard it all before.)
Maybe Woz was just a social guy who was getting a lot of invitations to such events, as the vintage/retro movement grew? He certainly appears to enjoy talking about things he did in the past, in a way that Jobs did not.
Maybe that's true, maybe it's not, but I'd nevertheless consider to be a genius anyone who was even doing modest tinkering with hobby computers back before personal computing was taken seriously. To think that in the time it takes me to finish a project with an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi, people like Wozniak were hacking together their own computers with reject factory parts, etc. Mad respect should go to the folks like Wozniak no matter their relatively minor flaws, especially when egotists like Jobs got so much credit.
I think his floppy disk controller for the Apple II was pretty widely recognized as real stroke of genius.
>The Apple II disk controller, designed six months after the Apple II itself was complete, was Steve Wozniak's crowning achievement. His five chip disk controller card out-performed competitive controllers that were four times as expensive by shifting most of the responsibilities from hardware to software.
And the floppy drives for the C64 were too, a whole computer that could do magic things on it's own. And dozen of other magic things, like Sophie Wilson who I admire most and who did magic things with the Acorns (and of course ARM).
The difference is that those people don't spend decades on bad mouthing others. Also the difference is Sophie Wilson does astonishing things all the way until today.
Everyone says Wozniak is humble, but someone nastily putting others down with "those were skills Jobs had to develop to compensate for not being a particularly skilled computer engineer" is not humble in my book, but passive agressive and toxic. I at least would not like to work with a person that talks bad about others all the time. This is a rule when I hire people, if they talk bad about their current employer, they will talk bad about me in the future.
Wasn't the C64's 1541 disk drive notoriously rubbish?
Not sure I'd use it as an example of something "magic".
It cost more than the computer it came with and was almost as slow as a tape deck. For no better reason than the Commodore marketing department thought it should be.
IMHO Woz is genius, Jobs was probably a genius too of a different kind but in the end it doesn't really matter.
To paraphrase Aurelius badly, you'll be lucky if anyone remembers you long after you're dead and even then they won't remember the real "you" anyway. So stop worrying about it.
"Wasn't the C64's 1541 disk drive notoriously rubbish?"
Not that I can remember my 1541 being rubbish.
"Not sure I'd use it as an example of something "magic"."
It had a 6502 CPU in it and when we run code on the 1541 and detached the cable and it did still run, it felt magic to me. Because it was forty years ago, I can't remember all the details but I think there was a copy program on two drives that run without the c64.
"and was almost as slow as a tape deck."
No it wasn't. When I loaded a game from tape, it was more: Start game, have lunch, play game (I really started loading before lunch quite often). With the disk drive it was: Load, Play. Most people used a fast loader on top of that (Can't remember but I do think I had an Action Replay, but it might that I had one for my A500).
"It cost more than the computer it came with"
That was the case with quite some floppy drives, e.g. the floppy drive to my Amstrad CPC back in the 80s costed as much as the computer too (and contrary to the 1541 I don't think it had a general purpose CPU in it).
[Update] It looks there is a fast loader from 2020 that can do 19k/sec just as an AppleII on a 1541, so it doesn't seem like it's the hardware https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Transwarp
Well I found it perfectly fine and such a relief after using tapes (speed, direct access, delete files,...). And I guess the reason is "Many commercial games had their built-in fast loading routines that often doubled as a copy protection. "
The 1541 was slow because the VIC-20 shipped with faulty hardware that couldn't move data on the serial port at full speed, so they patched their software to get it working at a much slower speed. The C64 didn't come with faulty hardware but still retained the same software routines for backwards-compatibility. Those fast loaders then replaced these slow compatible routines with full speed ones.
Maybe because jobs was a narcissistic prick who knew how to stay in the lime light and took credit from anyone and everyone he could. I personally find it a bit obscene the way silicon valley idolizes him. Lets be honest, if that guy was anyones first level manager, they would gtfo real fast.
Depending on the country, this may well be related to the fact that professors sometimes have to expect copyright warnings if excerpts from other sources are used and republished in the teaching materials. Therefore, some things are only available to enrolled students.
Probably, in addition to providing the containers, it is equally important to provide an uninterrupted power supply. You can imagine what a disaster it would be if the power were to suddenly fail for a somewhat longer period of time. Unfortunately, nothing is written about this in the article.
On the one hand, certainly to gain access to areas where non-vaccers actually have no access.
But I think that a big motivation is also to feel superior to the authorities, that want to give you the feeling of an unalterable proof of vaccination through cryptography.
If a citizen who is critical of the state actions now has the opportunity to deceive them, self-satisfaction will develop.
>"there will be two worlds, one before Covid, and one after."
However at the same time this cannot be applied to all areas of life. While a kind of awakening may have taken place at work, the importance of social interactions became particularly visible on the other side. I assume that the majority would rather like to return to the pre-covid era, and will strive for it.
Some things will change for the long term, for example increased remote work.
However, there will be definitely a ton of people wanting go get their 2-3+ years back and to take advantage of life especially since so many have seen or been around death for so long.
If anything I have seen communities come together more than before. The fact that everyone now shares a somewhat similar challenging experience, we can choose to relate to each other more easily.
This is indeed something I assume people would use a lot. The Windows snipping tool is already pretty neat, but the capability to record video and save as gif/webm would be really helpful.
A bit OT, but I just looked at the Wikipedia on the high-speed rail plans. It states:
>As of 2020, the California High-Speed Rail Authority is working on the California High-Speed Rail project and construction is under way on sections traversing the Central Valley. The Central Valley section is planned to open in 2029 and Phase I is planned for completion in 2033.
At the pace that the world is changing, isn't that a little slow. I dont know if it could be called an achievement to have an approximate travel duration of about three hours between LA and SF.
For comparison the transcontinental railroad was completed in less than 7 years.
Of course, there weren’t property disputes to deal with but they still had to blast their way through the Rocky Mountains a decade before the f*cking light bulb was invented
The actual tasks were different. Back then they built a railroad, but now we don't just build a railroad. We also have to employ armies of lawyers to fight each other, and they consume more time and money laying the legal groundwork for the railroad than the railroad itself.
It would be a wonder to see the spending breakdown
Maybe this could have been avoided if the original bond had legal fees capped at something like 100 million - the people voted for a railroad, not a legal battle!
This whole problem could have been avoided if IPv6 would be easier to memorize. I feel like especially when setting up networks, the v6 part is not as natural as v4. It is simply additional overhead and causes a lot of "scratching my head" moments.
Otherwise there would be no reason to not leave v4 behind and just move on.
> This whole problem could have been avoided if IPv6 would be easier to memorize.
Thankfully, we have DNS. A lot of ISP issued consumer CPEs now automatically create lan-local DNS entries for clients based on hostname provided by the client at dhcp time, a lot of clients also natively support mDNS, and there are plentiful free DNS providers if none of the above applies to you, and you can't host your own.
Remembering IPs isn't something that people should need to do at this point in our networks maturity.
Agreed. If, in 1997/98, the ipv6 spec had been "prefix 2 more 8 bit values at the beginning" - and all existing addresses moved in to 0.0.a.b.c.d - we could have had a much easier path for migration (imo). And yes, it wouldn't have been "128 bit!" but we still would have had 255 more address spaces of 4 billion each, which would have bought us some more time. I think we'd have been further along that migration path than where we are now, after 23 years.
I mean we've managed to stretch v4 for 20 years longer than anyone thought possible. Adding one more bit to the address would have doubled the size of the v4 space, so another 8 bits would have been plenty.
Yep. But... "now every star in our galaxy can have their own /16 block!". That's a paraphrased recollection I have from some networking colleague in '98 when this all was coming down. It seemed a strange goal, and I'm presuming he was just trying to illustrate how 'vast' IPv6 was.
IPv6 addresses theoretically should be easier to memorize & work with than IPv4 thanks to the double colon shorthand acting as a wildcard for zeros and due to it being hex grouped rather than octet grouped.
As an example 2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:0000:0370:7334 could be written as 2001:db8::370:7334 instead (notice that leading zeros were also culled). This paired with the fact that hexadecimal tends to be easier to memorize and doesn't have the strange subnet masking logic like IPv4, gives it a lot of advantages over IPv4's address notation.
The problem is that it's almost like router firmware and ISPs go out of their way to make their addresses harder to work with by filling out all 8 hex groups in the addresses they grant. Considering the sheer amount of available IPv6 addresses, it's from my understanding, completely unnecessary and I'm really curious if they have any kind of justification or technical reasoning for doing this.
1. easier routing tables if you can add meanings to specific bit ranges of your ipv6 address. In the tightly assigned ipv4 networks we have arrived at this is a bit annoying.
2. If the ipv6 conventions were that you set, say the highest 5 hex groups to 0, and use the lowest 3 hex groups for addresses, it would still be 65536 times as large as the ipv4 space and would suit most needs for the mid term future. You could even write ipv6 addresses nicely using e.g. ::ef13:2.1.7.100. This is a valid ipv6 notation! If this space ever got too tight one could open another one of the available hex groups and use two hex group prefixes. But I think when this happens, a lot of configurations would break because they'd assume that only 48 bits are used of the total 128. To prevent router,switch,firewall, etc. vendors from putting any such assumptions into their devices, using the full 128 bits from the start is a good option.
I understand that, but right now people are able to get by with IPv4 only, and aren’t going to switch until they have to. The long term reality isn’t going to make someone voluntarily switch.
It's impossible to make an addressing scheme that's both memorizable, and abundant enough for the foreseeable future of the Internet. The human brain just isn't capable of dealing with numbers on that scale, which is why we invented computers in the first place.
> It's impossible to make an addressing scheme that's both memorizable, and abundant
Not really. In fact, pretty much anything would have been easier to memorize than this colon-separated nonsense, which makes URL parsing more difficult, and which is so stupidly complex that it has a special syntax to ignore repeating zeros.
An IP address is fundamentally a 32-bit or 128-bit binary number, and hexadecimal is the most human-friendly base to represent those. Decimal gets pretty hairy once you introduce CIDR prefixes that aren't 8-bit aligned.
The [IPv6]:port syntax is unfortunate, but I'm not sure what they'd have done instead. Dotted hexadecimal would be ambiguous, because "1.2.3.4.5.6.beef.de" looks like a DNS hostname.
Zero compression exists because it's more convenient than writing all those zeroes, especially with CIDR prefixes like "2000::/3".
I think browser are advanced enough to parse [IPv6]:port.
Note that they can even distinguish octal and decimal IPs, for example this is working in Chrome, Firefox and the Windows ping utility:
I mean, when you start a new VM on Hetzner (or AWS/GCP/Azure/DO/whatever) you don't memorize that address.
But cloud or not, if you setup a private network with v6 you can get a nice /48 prefix, and you give out /64 prefixes to VMs, so you'll have 48 unchanging bits to memorize (or put it into a .txt to have it near). And most of that will probably be zero anyway.
For example 2a00:1450:4001 is a /48, and 2a00:1450:4001:082b /64. Only change is "082b".
I know, it's not the same as just remembering 1.1.1.1, but most of the people working with v4 never had so simple addresses to work with. (And if we're talking about 10.0.0.0/8 and other private addresses, well, folks can continue to use them, if they want to endlessly debug NAT and static routing hacks.)
Not necessarily remembering cloud adresses, but it is fairly easy to design v4 networks. Subnet masks for example are short and understood with a brief glance at them.
If v6 would be simpler, it would also be the first choice for more local networks, hence more widespread.
Plenty. If you expect to access it from IPv4-only networks, you'll have to provide a gateway. Additionally, things like Docker interoperate very poorly with IPv6.
The issue would be more or less the same. You'd have to buy new hardware and check all software anyway but would drop many of the benefits of the IPv6 we have. E.g. in enterprise networks, it is very nice you don't have to think about the size of a subnet for a VLAN anymore, you just give every VLAN /64 and it will suffice. The extra address space is also nice for autoconfiguration and much more we don't even think about yet. I think, IPv6 is ok as it is. A practical protocol is never perfect and will not please everybody but IPv6 stood the test of time, there is considerable traffic over IPv6 and we are slowly, but surely getting there.
Adding IPv6 support has never really been the issue. It's in every single piece of hardware or software I have. The problem is that people don't want to use it, as evidenced by the fact that people avoid it on overlay or virtual networks and use IPv4 if possible.
The very slight convenience you mention is far outweighed by 32+ digit IP addresses.
Also please don't bring up DNS. Anyone arguing that DNS is a solution to this problem has never done devops or IT.
Actually, IPv6 addresses cannot be longer than 32 digits. Some practical ones can be rather short, usually just slightly longer than a comparable IPv4 address. Such addresses would be used where remembering/ recognizing the exact IPv4 or IPv6 is relevant, such as the DNS servers or the network hand-off IP/ floating-IP on a firewall cluster or something like that that are used for the bring-up of other services. I have done my fare share of devops/ IT/ administration and engineering of largish enterprise and campus networks.
You would be surprised how much hardware and software doesn't support IPv6 properly. Sometimes it is the basic things, sometimes the more advanced stuff but that just means it takes a second or multiple days to find out. The problem is, it just is a similar but different protocol so you have to be quite diligent and check everything you need for the device/ service to work.
People do all kinds of stuff on underlay and overlay networks. E.g. some Dell VxRail hyper-converged appliances use IPv6 for the management network https://i.dell.com/sites/csdocuments/Shared-Content_data-She.... This is basically just link-local addresses for L2 reachability if I remember correctly but they could've gone with IPv4 there as well. It certainly would be more common for enterprise appliances to not rely on IPv6 for anything even when it shouldn't make a difference whether you do.
BT hardware is also rather affordable.