As the pedestrian began walking away, the gunman, wearing a black hat and a black and white striped jumpsuit, parked on Canal Street and began following the 42-year-old before pulling out a handgun and shooting him in the left leg, police said.

He’d best get used to wearing that kind of clothing for a while.

Contabo is cheap but has some weird quirks. I pay about five euros a month. My server got mysteriously rolled by two days and they denied anything happened to it. I restored from backups but it was odd.

Luna is the only moon in the Solar System which is appropriately-sized relative to its planet’s distance from the Sun and its own orbital distance to create impressive total solar eclipses. If a moon is too small, it won’t cover up the Sun fully, and if it is too big, it will cover up all the light and you would see nothing but darkness.

“Socialism with Chinese characteristics” is just capitalism with extra steps and a red paint job.

If you’re talking about the Mao Zedong era, that was also a disaster but at least they did try to run the country according to communist principles. They were just very bad at it.

leader of a communist party warns against starting a communist revolution

mrw

I initially thought this was Wikipe-tan. The design is quite similar.

This is to combat money laundering and tax fraud. I’ll give three examples.

I saw an episode of Border Security Australia where a woman has previously claimed a VAT refund on a pair of earrings worth tens of thousands of dollars. As you may know, many countries allow you to claim a refund of VAT on products intended for export, as VAT is intended to be a tax on consumption. But customs agents caught her wearing the earrings, meaning she had not actually exported them and essentially cheated the tax authority out of thousands of dollars in VAT.

Last year, during a trip to Hong Kong, my mother withdrew 20,000 USD in cash from her American bank and took it with her in person, and then deposited it in her Hong Kong bank account. It was just easier to do it this way since an international wire transfer would have been expensive and slow. She declared it to both US customs and Hong Kong customs, and in both cases they just checked her passport, noted down the transaction, and let her through with minimal questions. It’s intended to be an anti-money-laundering check. If that money has been obtained through crimes, most criminals would not willingly disclose that to customs, and it’s such a large amount of cash that anyone doing so must be trying to move money internationally and not just pay for a holiday. There is literally no penalty or tax and minimal hassle to declare it, so pretty much whoever is trying to sneak large amounts of cash or gold or whatever through customs is either (1) very ignorant or (2) up to no good. Further questioning usually allows customs agents to separate the first category from the second.

On the topic of China, there are strict capital controls in place to prevent wealthier Mainland Chinese individuals from moving all their money abroad. This policy is to encourage domestic spending and investment and it also has the effect of drastically lowering borrowing costs for the Chinese government. Moving large amounts of cash or gold in person is the most obvious way to evade these limits so Chinese customs has to take a strict stance against such behaviour in order to prevent China’s airports from becoming a massive hole in their capital controls. Being caught with undeclared cash provides an easy excuse for customs to confiscate the money in question, where the passenger can’t really argue over their guilt, since, again, anyone carrying such a large amount of cash pretty much has to know what they’re doing.

This is not “one country, two systems”. This is “one nation, two countries”. It’s not an irrelevant distinction.

The words are phrased extremely carefully to avoid subjugating Taiwan to Beijing. Perhaps it makes more sense to those who know Chinese. The entire situation is basically a word game at this point. Nobody really seems to want to disturb the status quo, but words have to be said.

Honestly, I don’t know what China has to gain from taking Taiwan by force versus what they can gain much more cheaply by just befriending and trading with it.

They could arrange an on-paper reunification. The key is to choose your words carefully to avoid upsetting anyone and give as much lip service as possible to Beijing while giving many of the “real” benefits to Taipei.

• The Republic of China is dissolved. The government in Taipei will continue and is renamed to just “Taiwan”. All legal documents will be issued under the name “Taiwan”. Former officials of the Republic of China continue in office as officials of Taiwan. The leader of the Taiwanese people is the president of Taiwan (台湾总统) and the administrative organs that govern their portion of Greater China (大中华) is the Government of Taiwan (台湾政府). Other than that, the status quo is acceptable and shall continue indefinitely.
• Taiwan acknowledges it is a part of Greater China (大中华) and that Taiwanese people are members of the Chinese nation (中华民族). Note that the Chinese terms used here refer to the cultural idea of “China” and not the country.
• In international affairs, all instances of “Chinese Taipei” (中华台北) are replaced with “Chinese Taiwan” (中华台湾). Note the use of the cultural “Chinese” rather than “Chinese” referring to that which relates the People’s Republic of China. All mainland publications will adopt the Xinhua News Agency’s style guide recommendation of referring to Taiwan as merely “Taiwan” rather than “Taiwan Province” (台湾省).
• The People’s Republic of China recognises that Taiwanese people have a right to self-government and disclaims all rights of government (政权) to the people of Taiwan. Taiwan does the same to the mainland. Sovereignty (主权) is held collectively by the Chinese cultural nation (中华民族) as a whole and cannot be exercised unilaterally, but the respective governments have the right to defend the Chinese nation’s sovereignty on their respective territories against external threats.
• Taiwan’s right to build up its military for the purposes of deterring external threats is recognised. Taiwan and China agree that their respective militaries will not be used against each other. Each military defends its own side of the strait and neither is obligated to help the other in any conflict whatsoever.
• The Taiwanese people will decide when they would like the adopt the socialist system. There is no deadline for this to occur. The mainland respects the right of the Taiwanese people to choose and will not force the matter nor will it interfere in the internal politics of Taiwan.
• Taiwan agrees to publicly support Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea, agrees that such region belongs to the Chinese nation, and disclaims all interests whatsoever beyond 22 km from its coast (note: equivalent distance to a country’s territorial waters). The portion of the exclusive economic zone of China east of the island Taiwan and west into the centre of the Taiwan Strait is reserved for the sole use and benefit of the Taiwanese people. Anything more than 22 km south of Cape Eluanbi is disclaimed by Taiwan and for the exclusive use and benefit of the mainland. Taiwan is not obligated to use its naval forces to enforce any claims laid to portions of China’s EEZ not reserved for it.
• The People’s Republic of China will respect the Taiwanese government’s ability to interact with foreign nations even if such interacts disagree with the way mainlanders choose to relate with that nation. To that end, the PRC will support Taiwan’s participation in international organisations as a member non-state entity. If such a designation is not allowed by the organisation’s rules then Taiwan will apply as a state but never style itself as such once admitted, always referring to its delegations as representing “Chinese Taiwan” (中华台湾).

In general, we accept that the Government already knows who you are, how old you are, and where you live. That’s already a given. The purpose of a zero-knowledge age verification scheme is to allow a third party (not the Government) to be confident that a person is an adult, without being given any additional information or being able to deduce any additional information from what they’re given. So essentially, they get only 1 bit of information: whether the user is an adult (true/false). In practice, a perfect system is not possible, since the fact that you receive a response also means you get the answer to related questions, like whether the user possesses a Government-issued ID (obviously “true” if they can successfully complete the verification).

So, here’s how such a scheme might work. There are many possible implementations.

In the United States, we have (optional) digital ID cards. These are added to one’s digital wallet in a similar manner to payment cards and can be used for things like buying alcohol, getting through airport security, and driving. This digital infrastructure can be re-used.

1. An organisation which wants to perform digital identity verification generates a cryptographic key pair and registers the public key with a Government server ahead of time. The public key is published to a Government-run public keyserver.
2. A website who wants to verify a user’s age sends a verification request to a Government server, digitally signed with their private key. The server responds with a request ID, which is a random, but unique, string of characters.
3. The website provides this string to the user. The user copies the string.
4. The user opens their digital wallet, selects their ID card, and then opens the age verification feature. The user pastes the request ID into their digital wallet, which fetches information about the request from the Government server. Because the request which the request ID is associated with was signed using the organisation’s private key, the Government can tell the user who initiated the request.
5. The user is asked to confirm/deny the age verification request. If the user confirms the request, then a biometric will be required to access their private key (these are stored in the device’s keystore), sign the approval response, and then sent that response to the Government server. The Government server checks that the signature is valid and tied to the key associated with that ID before marking the verification request as completed.
6. After confirming, the user returns to the website and clicks a button which says “I’ve completed the verification.” The website then queries the request ID with the Government server (again, signing the request with their private key). The Government server responds with “completed” if the user has accepted the request, or “not completed” if the user has either not yet accepted the request or denied it.

It’s not a guarantee, but generally, digital ID systems live on the phone of one person only and require a screen lock to use. You’re right though, that there is nothing preventing someone else from borrowing another’s identity.

It is possible to construct a zero-knowledge proof using cryptography and adapting existing digital ID infrastructure. A user can prove that they have knowledge of a private key tied to an adult’s identification card without having to reveal the key, or the associated public key.

But that being said, whether something is possible and whether it is a good idea are two different questions.

It’s possible to construct an age-verification system that allows a user to verify they are over the age of 18 without divulging any other information whatsoever.

But that would defeat the point of “age” verification for these goons.

Sidenote here: Has anyone noticed that the push in recent years to force law enforcement to wear body cameras has resulted in a rather large increase in the amount of body camera footage content on sites like YouTube? Don’t get me wrong, the body cameras are definitely a good thing, but a cottage industry starting around publishing people’s worst moments to the Internet as cheap entertainment certainly seems a bit crass to me.

They should make a “Firefox Core” which contains only the browser with basic features, and then make another version which contains all the “fun” stuff.

I’m not the parent commenter. But I’m Chinese and I can confidently say that living in the United States for your average citizen is far more comfortable than living in China.

You can say all you want about how unfair the US economy is to the average working-class citizen but at the end of the day, it’s still a high-income country, and we have running water, electricity, unfiltered Internet access, good public sanitation, and reasonably-modern housing. There are some villages in China that I’ve been to with a total of six electric plugs, toilets that need to be flushed with a bucket, a barely-working 3G cellular connection, and where you can’t drive faster than 20 km/h without destroying your car.

Don’t take these things for granted, because you don’t know what it’s like to live without them.

The required input for the computer is usually inscribed on the chassis at the bottom. However, the text is usually faint and can be easily rubbed off after the computer has been used for some time. Mine says 20 V 2.25 A.

If you are using the laptop at the same time, there is a chance that the charger may not provide enough power to the computer to operate and force it to temporarily draw from the battery to supplement the power from the charger. This causes additional wear on the battery.

For example, if you plug in a 15 W charger and the computer wants to draw 20 W, it will draw it from the battery. Spikes in power consumption are not uncommon during ordinary use as the CPU will temporarily engage turbo mode during certain tasks, such as when it is loading a Web page or starting a program. Depending on your operating system, plugging the charger in may also cause the OS to disable battery conservation features which leads to more frequent spikes in power consumption.

None of this would be a problem if, for example, your charger delivered 45 W of power, because during those spikes, it just means the battery receives slightly less power as more of it is consumed by the computer.

If you are not using the laptop at the same time as you are charging it, I can’t think of any potential negative effects.

Okay, so let me put it this way:

Housing might, in theory, be guaranteed in your home town. This is a strength of China’s system, I grant, and it’s one of the few examples of one of their socialist policies which actually somewhat works. Their national pension scheme is the other thing I can think of that functions decently well.

But it’s certainly no Soviet Union where if you go up to local officials and say “I have no job and I want to work”, they’ll find something for you to do pretty quickly.

sanctions evasion? In my drug-buying app?