271–280 of 366 posts
Former federal inmate here who was recently released from prison a month ago today (I did 18 months): The big deal here was the loss amount, which can be construed any number of ways whether we like it or not. This will jack up the points and tilt the scale for the sentencing guidelines, and believe me they are archaic. After all is said and done, Charlie Javice will be hanging out at a prison camp—probably down ther…
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A variation on this would work, but alas we don't have the math tools as yet. The idea (not mine) is that you can think of data as "very large numbers". So a 4096 bit number is just a big number. Well, we have a short way to generate big numbers. x^y. So given a big number (say 800 000 bits) we could generate a (Hopefully short) expression of the form a^b + (or minus) c^d + ... etc. Unfortunately the "factorizing" (a…
Aside from the factorizing cost, I suspect decompression will also be prohibitively slow. Exponentiation, multiplication and addition such large range numbers could still end up prohibitively expensive.
High compression rate schemes that actually work compress high likelihood inputs and expand low likelihood inputs by accounting for the characteristics that make inputs high likelihood--e.g., redundant highly patterned texts. Schemes that are agnostic about the input, like the one described here, are as likely to expand any given input as they are to compress it.
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Video codec compression scams remained popular even in early 2000s. I worked for a very large public tech company. One of the top 10 in that era. And they fell hard for scammers from Las Vegas that promised revolutionary audio/video compression. We had to sign all sorts of NDA and couldn't look under the hood of what they delivered to us under penalty of breach of contract and all that stuff. I "accidentally" ended u…
> I "accidentally" ended up looking under the hood and couldn't believe what I found. I reported the findings to my manager and told him to do what he wanted to with that information. What did you find? Low bitrates? Smaller resolutions? Enquiring minds want to know.
It was just an MPEG wrapper.
My favorite thing about this case is how she bragged to her lead engineer she wouldn't go to prison, "“Don’t worry — I don’t want to end up in an orange jumpsuit" when she was trying to convince the engineer to fabricate their user data. From the complaint: > In particular, CC-1 and JAVICE asked Engineer-1 to supplement a list of Frank’s website visitors with additional data fields containing synthetic data. > Engine…
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This is why, as an engineer, it seems futile to make an ethical stand against something. They'll just find someone else to do it. Early in my career I was asked to write code to cheat a benchmark, essentially to make it seem our software performed better than it really did. I agonized over it because I was a junior developer just starting out my career, and eventually got the courage to tell my manager I wouldn't do…
It's worth it just for sleeping better at night.
Another “30 under 30” grifter goes to jail. Separately, I hope a few folks at JPMC got fired over this. Even the most basic of due diligence should have caught this.
alleged that Javice paid a data science professor $18,000 for a list of more than four million fake student names to convince JPMorgan to purchase Frank."
My favorite thing about this case is how she bragged to her lead engineer she wouldn't go to prison, "“Don’t worry — I don’t want to end up in an orange jumpsuit" when she was trying to convince the engineer to fabricate their user data. From the complaint: > In particular, CC-1 and JAVICE asked Engineer-1 to supplement a list of Frank’s website visitors with additional data fields containing synthetic data. > Engine…
On top of everything else, Scientist-1 doesn't come off looking too good. He was contracted to make a synthetic dataset, based on a small set of records which were supposedly randomly sampled from a larger original dataset. He didn't really have any way of knowing he was being lied to at that point, or what his work would be used for. But when he invoiced $13k for his services, including a detailed breakdown of what…
> JAVICE responded to Scientist-1 that same day, “Can you send the invoice back at $18k and just one line item for data analysis?”
>
> Scientist-1 replied, “Wow. Thank you. Here is the new invoice.” Attached to this email was a new invoice, now for $18,000, with the previous specific descriptions removed and replaced by the one-line description, “Data science services”
Even if all of that weren't the case, this should be a case of innocence until proven guilty; it's easy to see the crime in hindsight, but if you suspect nothing that thought might just not cross your mind in the first place.