> Around $700,000 of the stolen assets were frozen thanks to intervention by a security firm called ZeroShadow
This represents only a small portion of the stolen funds. But my understanding was that the holder of the keys owns the crypto. How can the funds get frozen?
Does everyone's phone compass just work reliably? For me, it seems like the most unreliable part of navigation. I traveled to Italy recently and heavily used Google Maps with walking directions, and it was frustrating the number of times I started walking in the wrong direction, due to the compass saying I was facing a direction I wasnt.
If this device uses a similar technology as your phone, then I don't see it being reliable.
The magnetic sensor in your phone is actually pretty weak and requires regular calibration to pick out the true magnetic field lines from all the noise.
Your phone has many magnets inside, and structures that can be passively magnetized. Your local magnetic environment changes constantly.
It's a fundamental limitation of the technology, unfortunately. Generally we use GPS location as you move to infer direction and feed that back into the compass routines. It's not great but it does mostly work sometimes
One of the big tricks is to realize that magnetic north (where your compass points) is usually not the same as geographic north (where maps are drawn). The adjustment is local; here, I think magnetic north is 7 degrees off from north.
In the US, the USGS topographic maps contain the required adjustment for the covered area. Not sure about Italy.
I don't think that's it. For me sometimes my phone compass is (roughly) right, but sometimes points in a completely wrong direction, for example 90 degrees off. It calibrates after a while when I start walking but I guess this is what OP had in mind, not a few degree difference.
iPhones can regain the compass fix if you move the phone along a figure eight path while holding it flat and level. Worked pretty well for me in the past.
Thoughtful concept but agreed. I.i.r.c the phone can assess the inaccuracy of the compass and prompt the figure-8 movement. But that is not practical here.
Same at Amazon. Bezos often talked about "work life harmony" which he liked to say instead of "balance." His reasoning was that balance implies a zero-sum tradeoff in which more dedication to one takes away from the other (a characterization he didn't like).
But simply calling it "harmony" doesn't magically make those tradeoffs go away.
So, (a + b) must be a multiple of one of the factors of m. And (a - b) must be a multiple of the other factor of m.
> I've often wondered what each congruence in the quadratic seive reveals.
Each congruence reveals that the sum of the bases (a plus b) contains a factor of m. And the difference of the bases (a minus b) contains another factor of m.
The only thing you have to watch out for is the trivial case when one of the factors you find through this method is "1" and the other factor is "m". That case isn't very helpful.
It's not that each congruence gives you new information. You only have to find one single non-trivial congruence. But the other (trivial) congruences you find along the way only reveal that 1*m=m, which you already knew.
> It's not that each congruence gives you new information
So it's not that each congruence gives you N bits of information, and you want kN bits in total. It's more like each congruence has a 1/k chance of giving you the full kN bits.
But in some information theory sense those are the same! Or concretely, if you were testing a large quantity of numbers in parallel, you would get information from each congruence.
Well, if a+b and a-b are difficult to factor, finding more congruences might give you another pair x+y, x-y, and if that pair is nontrivial but also difficult to factor, you may be able to make progress by looking at x+y / a+b and x+y / a-b. As long as they're not integer multiples of each other, the combination of the two facts is more informative than either fact alone, in the sense that you're now trying to factor a smaller number.
No, not that congruence. I mean a row in the big matrix. A residue r = x^2 mod m factored over the factor base. When you get enough of these you can derive a^2 - b^2 = 0 mod m. What does each factored r provide prior to having enough of them?
It is my go-to vector editor as well. But a large pain point is that text elements cannot be vectorized or converted to paths or shapes. So your designs cannot be exported meaningfully because there is no guarantee that the receiving end will have the same fonts you designed with.
Exporting to svg may look completely different when opened elsewhere if your designs have any text elements.
This is why I dismissed Penpot as even the simplest tool for quick, basic prototyping. I could tolerate some visual and workflow bugs, but encountering this limitation was a deal breaker.
They want to to shut down large portions of the government. For example, they want to completely eliminate all public education, not make it more efficient.
hmm.. if you reduce latency from one second to a hundred milliseconds, could you celebrate that you've made it 10x faster, or would you have the same quibble there too?
Edit: Thinking about this some more: You could say you are saving 9x [of the new cost], and it would be a correct statement. I believe the error is assuming the reference frame is the previous cost vs the new cost, but since it is not specified, it could be either.
> if you reduce latency from one second to a hundred milliseconds, could you celebrate that you've made it 10x faster
Yes you can, because speed has units of inverse time and latency has units of time. So it could be correct to say that cutting latency to 1/10 of its original value is equivalent to making it 10x the original speed - that's how inverses work.
Savings are not, to my knowledge, measured in units of inverse dollars.
This represents only a small portion of the stolen funds. But my understanding was that the holder of the keys owns the crypto. How can the funds get frozen?