TOTP can be used today to authenticate a couple to each other over an untrusted medium.
It’s rather high friction; you have to set it up in advance, and then read a six digit number over the phone. And I am not sure that it mitigates the threats… in this situation, I suspect it wouldn’t. It could even make the situation worse if the daughter is genuinely in trouble but can’t access the authenticator.
But I can’t think of a better solution. Any other ideas?
> A language model trained from scratch exclusively on data from certain places and time periods to reduce modern bias and emulate the voice, vocabulary, and worldview of the era.
I had a similar experience with eBay. The problem is that “unlocked“ typically refers to being able to use it on a different carrier—not related to the bootloader.
So I bought an “unlocked” Pixel that had a locked bootloader. Returned it. Felt bad because the seller correctly classified it.
Ultimately I found an eBay seller (thegizmotrader) that explicitly lists the bootloader as unlockable.
When buying secondhand, I suggest looking for Pixels not associated with any particular carrier (as are sold by Google online store), and especially not Verizon.
I am a fan of Rackspace Spot, and use it personally. It started out being a pure play Kubernetes cluster provider, but recently they added support for VMs.
I was so impressed by its pricing and efforts at transparency that it motivated me to learn Kubernetes. I finally achieved the "cattle, not pets" nirvana. My Kubernetes cluster running a demo service costs me $14/month: $4/month for the spot instance, $10/month for the load balancer, and $free Kubernetes control plane (non-redundant; not intended for production). $14/month is an amazing value, as long as you know the limitations.
Although this article greatly emphasizes Rackspace's market-based prices, they do have some price controls. First, they have a reserve (floor) price on their compute. In their older data centers, it's $0.001/hr ($1/mo), while in their newer data centers it's 10x higher: $0.01/hr ($7/mo). Second, their bidding UI supports bids only in increments of $0.005/hr, so you actually can't bid $0.001: $0.005/hr ($4/mo) is the lowest supported. If everyone bids $0.005/hr to start, then is $0.001/hr even achievable as a market-clearing price?
Secondly, their pricing is not as sweet on everything else beyond spot compute. Load balancers are $10/mo each. On-demand instances are comparable to on-demand pricing in other cloud providers. (A 2 vCPU / 4 GB RAM instance in the older data center costs $27/mo; almost equal to AWS t4g EC2 instance with the same vCPU/RAM combo.)
Today I run a POC web service on Rackspace Spot, and I pay $14/month; this is the lowest achievable price on Rackspace Spot, and it is not production-quality.
If you run a production web service, your costs grow to $40/mo (redundant Kubernetes control plane) + $27/mo (on-demand cheapest instance) + $10/mo (load balancer) = $77/mo at a minimum. You'll also be paying for storage, but I don't include that. Spot instances don't even play a role here.
Is that still a great value compared to other providers? I am not sure. If it is, then Rackspace Spot marketing is focusing on the wrong thing. And if it's not a great value anymore, then it makes sense only if your workload is heavily dependent on interruptible compute.
I was also infuriated by this, so much so that I switched to TIDAL. Migrating was easy— I used their recommended webapp ti migrate all my playlists. Have been using TIDAL happily ever since. Never any popups or ads.
Amazon and its Delivery Service Partners (DSPs) employ thousands of drivers. These drivers are overworked and are owed thousands in wages a year, sacrificing their safety for speed and efficiency.
Our report focuses on this workplace surveillance technology, and how it makes these jobs worse for drivers and our communities.
It’s rather high friction; you have to set it up in advance, and then read a six digit number over the phone. And I am not sure that it mitigates the threats… in this situation, I suspect it wouldn’t. It could even make the situation worse if the daughter is genuinely in trouble but can’t access the authenticator.
But I can’t think of a better solution. Any other ideas?