jilt | 13 years ago | on: How Google Builds Its Maps
jilt's comments
jilt | 13 years ago | on: Ask HN: How do you verify the identity of your users?
Make them upload a picture of themselves next to today's newspaper, where today's date is legible, and you need to be able to verify the paper is legit. That would be possible but not easy at all to fake.
The second best way is credit card, and use a third-party service that doesn't require you to store any cc info locally.
Unfortunately, people have more than one cc, more than one email, and you can't ask for ssn, but even if you could, that isn't guaranteed to be unique:
http://ssa-custhelp.ssa.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/79/~/req...
DNA is unique, but that is too expensive and can be faked unless checked immediately, and depending on type of test, can be faked even in person if blood not taken (difficult to fake otherwise), and can't do online.
Vocal recognition for determining whether a user is unique and for relogin later can be faked online easily.
Visual recognition online may be decent way to do it, but probably too expensive, and could be faked by someone holding up someone else's picture, or a video of someone from YouTube (although could check for artifacts indicating is from video source).
Retinal scan can be faked.
Gait + body/facial recognition isn't too bad, but you can't do that online. That is what the government uses with street cameras in cities, etc.
jilt | 13 years ago | on: Amazon: We're no Apple
“We want to make money when people use our devices, not when they buy our devices.”
Apple made money both ways, on device sale and much more so when they used the devices, and bought mp3s, and movies, and apps...
jilt | 13 years ago | on: Internet For Obama - This Seat's Taken
How about this instead?:
http://www.zazzle.com/government_did_not_build_my_business_t...
jilt | 13 years ago | on: Raspberry Pi moves manufacturing to the UK
Great news! However, it would be even better if everything were made in the UK. Would be nice if the US could follow suit. Unfortunately it usually isn't good for business. But I don't believe that the government should interfere with free trade to promote such things.
jilt | 13 years ago | on: Y Combinator Founder Paul Graham Issues New Warning to Start-ups
Isn't common or even expected for founders and 1st round investors to get diluted by subsequent investment? This comes off to me looking like YC just doesn't want to get diluted, but that happens. Is that not the case?
jilt | 13 years ago | on: Scientists getting ever-closer to developing mind-hacking tech
jilt | 13 years ago | on: Logins without logins.
Can't do this for at least two reasons.
1. If your phone is dead you can't login. 2 factor auth can authorize a login such that secondary authentication via phone is not always needed, reducing this problem significantly.
2. It invites those wanting to break into your account to attempt to auth so much that you either get a ton of texts or it stops trying to text you at some point, effectively keeping you from being able to login.
It is a nice idea, but it doesn't work.
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'Not to detour too much, but what you see above is just the beginning of how Google is going to use Street View imagery. Think of them as the early web crawlers (remember those?) going out in the world, looking for the words on pages. That's what Street View is doing. One of its first uses is finding street signs (and addresses) so that Google's maps can better understand the logic of human transportation systems. But as computer vision and OCR improve, any word that is visible from a road will become a part of Google's index of the physical world. Later in the day, Google Maps VP Brian McClendon put it like this: "We can actually organize the world's physical written information if we can OCR it and place it," McClendon said. "We use that to create our maps right now by extracting street names and addresses, but there is a lot more there." More like what? "We already have what we call 'view codes' for 6 million businesses and 20 million addresses, where we know exactly what we're looking at," McClendon continued. "We're able to use logo matching and find out where are the Kentucky Fried Chicken signs... We're able to identify and make a semantic understanding of all the pixels we've acquired. That's fundamental to what we do."'
That is scary. They could read license plates and tie them to addresses. They could read bumper stickers and determine your politics, whether your kid was an honor student at what school, etc.