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Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs'

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131–140 of 318 posts

Re: Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs'

#132
post #11

Incredible how out of touch the Silicon Valley elite is with the real world.

???

SV elites have understood that you can wrangle money and control out of unsuspecting and uninformed consumers for decades. Which is exactly what they are doing here via. a new shitcoin; they get both control and money!

I'd say they are very much in touch with the real world.

Re: Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs'

#133
post #106
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Then again, even PoW coins with no premine can be unfair [...] It's "fair" if you're referring to equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.

Late adopters do not have equal opportunity when the coin distribution is heavily biased toward initial years. Imagine if half of all gold on earth was already mined in the first 4 years (and over 99% in the first 27 years) of gold mining millenia ago.

Correct, but that does not mean its unfair. It just means being late, in the same way that I didn't buy early Apple stock. Nothing prevented me from buying that stock, the opportunity was equal at the time.

Whilst anybody is forgiven for not knowing about the very start of BTC at some obscure mailing list, since then there has been a decade of mainstream media exposure, a huge amount of time to acquire BTC. Failing to make use of this enormous time window is on the individual.

If I have to believe the below articles, miners own less than 10% of supply, so the gold comparison is misplaced:

https://insights.glassnode.com/bitcoin-supply-distribution/

Re: Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs'

#134
post #105
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Then again, even PoW coins with no premine can be unfair [...] It's "fair" if you're referring to equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.

It's not even fair in opportunity since not everyone starts from the same place. For example, It's based on your already existing resources (computing power).

Computing power, or capital to buy the coins. But I don't think this level of "fairness" is productive to discuss. Every human being on the planet having the exact same amount of wealth is an impossibility.

Re: Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs'

#135
The worst privacy honeypot of all times.

You should never let your minors or relatives or friends close to this app. If somehow they scanned their eye with this Blockchain app, it will stay.

Your personality and opinions may change but this will be a mistake you will always regret.

Re: Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs'

#136

I thought I'd look at the actual company after hearing about this. I'm just not a silicon valley person. Here's their how it works page - https://worldcoin.org/how-it-works . It includes a projection graph that has a scale in 500m user increments and 2 years. Then you have the real data: over 6 months they've signed up 120k users. Or to put it another way - their real data doesn't even appear on the scale that their…

To protect the device getting cracked, couldn't you just have it send a message if/when the device is opened in a way it shouldn't (e.g. for inspection) and thus make that key invalid?

Re: Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs'

#138
If this is supposed to be a real currency, isn’t it awful for privacy?

If your wallet is unique to your person (eyeball) and the public key is ever leaked, everyone can see your account balance and transactions.

Would that be the case or am I missing something?

Re: Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs'

#139
post #48

RIP Sam Altman's reputation

Genuine question: what is Sam Altman's reputation based on? I'm aware that Paul Graham had a serious mancrush on him, and that he somehow managed to turn a failed startup into a $40M acquihire, which is nothing to scoff at -- but is his success mostly based on his genius of selling himself and whatever he's involved in, or has he actually said or done anything that shows some deeper form of insight or ability?

I’m not sure, but I really miss the optimism of PG here on HN. It’s too bad that he retired so early, he was a lot of fun to listen to. I felt the same when Larry Page ,,took back’’ Google from Eric Schmidt who understood that fun and exploration is an important part of software engineering.

Re: Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs'

#140

I just need to write a GAN to generate plausible looking irises, then - Profit!

I imagine this attack is more difficult than is assumed.

The device itself is likely tamper resistant, has built in DRM and will have a high fidelity camera + signal processor. So you will need a system to write a 200MP image on the surface the size of an eye ball.

Also, since the light passes through a lens in your eye, there are probably optical tricks that can validate the surface is curved like a retina and has been distorted by a lens.

Oh yeah. And the vascularization of the retina means that you can view heart rate pulses. So your image will need to pulsate too.

One could also imagine marrying this with a stereoscopic camera to image detect that a real face is. It could even ask you to smile or frown to validate it's a real face.

Lots of ways to harden this technology to the point where even intelligence agencies would struggle to defeat it.

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