121–130 of 529 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The wifi Mac address is obscured from native code
Didn't used to be and it's unclear what the exact timing is of this code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think he means the idea wouldn't have happened without him. It's his ability to disrupt an industry tightly coupled with government.
Kalanick is a Napoleonesque figure, a great conqueror who doesn't know when to pull back on the reigns, because he knows nothing else. Our memories are short, we're skewering him for being exactly the kind of animal that not to long ago most everyone was rooting for.
Anyone uncomfortable with these kind of profiles? I'd rather judge his business decisions in isolation rather than having this quasi psycho analysis where it's implied we can get better insight of his business by knowing he was bullied
Can someone explain to me the mechanics of how this happens? I use Lyft, which emails me a receipt. How does Slice get a hold of this? Does Lyft sell it to Slice?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Phone numbers can be trivially changed. In the article this is in the context of fraudsters buying used phones to fake rides in China and take advantage of incentive programs to make money. So they want to track these devices as they change hands.
Phones can change ownership too, so even if you can identify the phone it is dangerous to assume that you have identified a person.
So I think their goal is not so much about identifying people, but identifying devices in order to prevent this loophole.
It'd be nice if Apple had been less pragmatic and more principled and just yanked any version of the Uber app that broke the rules.
I'm off uber after a BS "5 minute" issue. I've been using it for years, they literally had to burn so much goodwill to get me to stop using them, it's almost impressive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have heard that it is quite possible. Supposedly if you measure enough characteristics of the phone, the combination of such characteristics is enough to uniquely identify a phone. May be able to poll such information you measure with those measured by other apps.
There are quite a bit of SKUs, but not enough to make the phone unique itself. You'd ultimately need something more special to do so, such as the MAC address. It's not clear if such code would work today on the latest iOS version but maybe. They probably used a private API to do so, and that itself was obfuscated in the compiled binary such that apples automatic analysis would fail to catch it.
My understanding was that Apple made those APIs return garbage anyway, so more hacky methods were required.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "to be clear, a # of companies practice 'fingerprinting,' and it is fully breaking the App Store rules. But also very clever fraud detection." https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/856180005977677825
wonder why Mike Issac gave that clarification immediately to his twitter-base but didn't put it in the relevant section? could it be because the article intentionally glosses over complex details in order to pump a specific narrative ... hmm. \s
Clever, but it's disappointing that even NYT is turning into this madness.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>regular taxi system as that's even more corrupt and despicable. The idea that the taxis are corrupt and despicable is 100% Uber/Lyft propaganda. The idea that a bunch of immigrants driving 12 hours a day to support a meager income for their families are a cabal of special interests is ridiculous. Uber and Lyft are better than taxis because of the on demand nature and they are cheaper because of better utilization. B…
they're cheaper because they can subsidize their fares via VC money