Hackers are only interested in you
a) if you have deep pockets
b) they have a personal grudge against you
c) you are caught up in a mass caper, as in hundreds of names
We had some card/identity theft problem a while back. It wasn't much of a problem. The bank knows so much about us that a purchase of I think concert tickets caught a flag and they froze the card.
The bank knows so much about us that a purchase of I think concert tickets caught a flag and they froze the card.
That wouldn't bother me so much if I thought you never listened to music, but the implication is that they have software which tracks your taste, which is mildly scary.
Incorrect passwords are generally not stored, but if they're using some kind of a proxy, sure, why not. "If you find a password that somebody uses in one place, try it everywhere else" is generally rule number one.
Sorry, proxy or keylogged or whatever that snarfs the password before it gets to the system. As opposed to grabbing and decrypting (or, given the security on many crappy websites, just grabbing) the password file on the server.
1: Clarissa Bob exmansplains it all.
Ticket purchases seem to be fraud central. CA and I both had our card companies catch folks trying to use numbers (for cards that never left our possession) to buy +$1000 worth of tickets from university ticketing services. (I think his was MN and mine was WI. Weird.)
Ticket purchases seem to be fraud central.
Since the Monkees retired, nobody even plays their own instruments in live shows.
Oh ticket sales. Oh do I ever want to talk about ticket sales right now. Oh is there the most amazing ticket sale fiasco going on. But probably it's more interesting to me than to anybody else here.
9: figuring out a solution to that particular problem is I think generally interesting.
4: My understanding is that most decent sites use a one-way encryption on your password and only store the encrypted value. Every time you try to sign in they encrypt the password you typed and compare that to the stored, encrypted password. If they match, you are cool.
So stealing a file full of encrypted passwords doesn't get you anything, because you can not 'decrypt' those passwords back to their original state.
I should really get around to thinking up different passwords.
"Bcrypt was invented by two smart guys and PHK's was only invented by one smart guy. That's literally twice the smart."
9: Does it involve a lottery and a bunch of sand hippies?
Anyhow, if you're confident that the developer of whatever stupid website you're using knew enough to 1. never store cleartext passwords because they've heard of SQL injection attacks and 2. encrypt them with a hash function that 3. is meaningfully salted, and also that (given that your username of email is pretty much 100% stored in cleartext in the same database table) 5. your password is tough enough to guess that they couldn't brute force it through a login system that 6. is brute forceable because it doesn't have CAPTCHA or anything similar and finally that they 7. didn't roll their own hashing function because then they inevitably will have failed to do the cryptanalysis and will have NO IDEA how secure it, then yes, your only risks are proxies, keyloggers, phishing attacks, malware, other man-in-the-middle attacks, fake domain redirects or [ other, defined inclusively ].
I thought 20 meant the Crash Test Dummies were going on the road again.
Oh, well, if people actually want to read about here is an interesting link, and I can say from what I've heard that the people in charge are completely at sea about what to do, but still may be unwilling to admit that some attendees are more important than others, are possibly unwilling to admit to what the data is telling them (scalpers snarfed those bad boys right up) and that they have to preferentially award the remaining 10 or 15 thousand tickets they have left in order to have any chance of the event coming off. The basic problem is that there are 12 or 15 thousand people who are absolutely vital to the event, and no more of them got tickets than anybody else did.
Interesting. Although, I'm unclear: what happened differently this year that caused the shortage?
Possibly this was the first year enough people wanted to come that there was a constraint on the number of tickets?
The "rescind the entire sale" argument seems to me like the best one, except for the fact that no one is ever brave enough to do that.
24: I read up through Abraxis the Dragamuffin and had to stop. I clearly don't have the right attitude to be a burner.
24: but still may be unwilling to admit that some attendees are more important than others
DATELINE Indianapolis: NFL officials breathed a sigh of relief as catastrophe was averted when the last 13 Giants and 11 Patriots were able to locate tickets at highly-inflated prices to participate in Super Bowl XLVI. "Fortunately, the players are all highly paid and despite a lot of whining, in the end they all came up with the scratch", said a league spokesman. The NFL reluctantly used league funds to secure entry for several members of the officiating crew. A total of five assistant coaches will be watching from home rather than the sidelines as the teams optimized their cost-benefit strategies.
I'm actually surprised that there's a big enough market for tickets that there's a scarcity problem. That's an event where showing up at all seems like a real time/energy/discomfort/chafing committment -- I'm sure the people who want to be there do want to be there very badly, but I wouldn't have thought there were that many of them.
OT: The testing-taking advice that changing your initial answers on a multiple choice test is (usually) a bad idea is complete and total bullshit? Like, literally without any sort of substantiation or support whatsoever? I feel defrauded.
25, 26: last year was the first sell-out, so this year they tried to implement a lottery system to make things more "fair". Previously there had been 3 tiers of tickets awarded in a first-past-the-post way on the day of ticket release.
30: as the post says, 56,000 is really not that many people in the scheme of things.
28: oh, I didn't read the comments. I was talking about the post.
27: yeah, but then what. I've also heard that some of the legal language for the lottery would be hard to back out of.
33: couldn't they give purchase priority to people who've attended before? (Or, people who've attended at least 5 times before, or whatever it takes to target the 'key' people?)
I've also heard that some of the legal language for the lottery would be hard to back out of.
If you give poeple their money back, what's their claim?
but then what: what do you think of this?
31: Please tell me that the reason why is mumble mumble Monty Hall problem mumble.
If you give poeple their money back, what's their claim?
They signed a contract to receive a ticket and then don't receive a ticket in the next distribution? I dunno; you're the lawyer. If you sign a P&S for your house, and the person gives you the money, and then you change your mind, can you give them their money back and keep the house with no legal consequence? There has to be some point where you can no longer back out, right? Doesn't ebay have language along these lines? (Like, if you sell something at auction, you can't just refuse to take the money and not sell the thing.)
31: I'm perfectly prepared to believe that advice wasn't backed up by any data whatsoever, but I do wonder if the studies on the subject might be overbroad.
I received and tried to follow the advice but didn't take it to mean never change your answer - just that if you're wavering and aren't sure which is right, you should stick with the first and move on, because otherwise you'll get less and less sure as you keep thinking about it, and lose time to work on the other answers. The advice doesn't apply to the "oh, wait, how could I have put that, obviously it's B" type of revision.
Also, poor performers might tend not to revise at all, for any reason. So there could be an ecological fallacy at work - on average, those who revise do better than those who don't, but across your potential range of performance as an individual, revising could hurt you.
OT: Am on phone with that girl. We are arranging to attend a motion picture -- a "talkie," I believe -- the day after tomorrow.
31: Absent more information on what the studies actually found, I suspect that post is asloppily-reasoned bit of Slate-ish double-reverse contrarian fluff. The advice purportedly refuted is "The standard advice for multiple-choice tests is: if in doubt, stick with your first answer." While the abstract of the one survey of studies says:
Reviewed results from 33 studies published since 1928 concerning answer-changing behavior on objective tests. The analysis showed that, generally, only a small percentage of test items were changed by Ss, most of the changes were from wrong to right answers, most test takers are answer changers, and most answer changers are point gainers.On preview, what Minivet said.
36: well, I mean, there are reliance damages. So, if someone got their ticket and excitedly started building their giant desert puppet, or whatever the hell it is that people do for this thing, they yeah, they could sue to recoup their expenses, and also possibly the cost of their time. But how much would that be at this point? And I suppose in the extreme case the auction results might be specifically enforced, although if it's credibly threatening to ruin the event altogether I don't think a court would go there. And regardless I thought concert tickets usually had good language permitting refunds (and nothing but refunds) in the event of show cancellation, etc., so damages can't ever be more than that--and if they're willing to give back the money, that's the end of it. Maybe they didn't use the standard sort of language.
Maybe they didn't use the standard sort of language.
I'm almost certain they didn't. (Which has been a big part of the problem.)
Sátántangó! Pascal Laugier's Martyrs! Requiem for a Dream! I know all kinds of good date movies!
Doesn't ebay have language along these lines? (Like, if you sell something at auction, you can't just refuse to take the money and not sell the thing.)
This is probably hard to enforce, legally, except possibly in cases of valuable rare antiques, etc. eBay could suspend your account, of course, but it would be difficult to get the cops to your door to confiscate the pez dispenser you sold, then had a change of heart and refunded the money for.
Houses are different. Because they're special.
She suggested the film in question.
The relevance of this fact is not obvious.
Not to you, perhaps, but the related facts that she suggested the day and time and the film is one by Terrence Malick are relevant to me.
Can I really be the first one to link to this? (The ending is no longer so funny.)
44 I once did a double feature date at my place of the Decalogue death penalty and voyeurism segments. And I got lucky. So Flip, I think you should do that when you finally invite her over to your place.
Damn now I'm gonna have to change my Password
48: You're going to see Tree of Life? Well, okay ....
No, they're going to see The New World.
42, 36 -- if you are the winning bidder in an auction, and the auction has completed, you can usually get specific performance* unless the seller has reserved the right not to perform. So, more than reliance damages.
*i.e., have a court force the seller to go through with the sale.
But what happened to the museum date, anyway? It's only Tuesday, for heaven's sake. Perhaps Lunchy [who needs a better pseud] is just booking Flip solid.
Lunchy is a near-perfect pseud.
Or so ACORN would have you believe.
We're going to the museum on Saturday. Try to keep up, people.
Then we could affectionately refer to her as App: Flip and App. Work well as a team!
(Flip, I am totally teasing.)
My friends were all complaining about the Pulp concert selling out instantly, but I can see that Burning Man is a bigger deal. It's really astonishing that they didn't see this coming.
54: I don't think the general auction analysis applies here, though. Usually, in the caselaw you're referring to (I think), "the winner of an auction" isn't 50,000 people. And also usually, ordering specific performance on the auction is merely forcing transfer of a good, not requiring someone to move forward with the planning and hosting of a large scale event (that they don't think can be successfully carried out given the results of the auction).
I have apparently never seen a Terence Malick-directed film. Looking at the list, I guess I might watch one or two at some point. I think I had Thin Red Line on my netflix queue years ago, maybe Badlands too.
Further to 62.2: I feel badly, and fear that I sound like I'm criticizing. I'm not. This is all going swimmingly, from the sound of it. Enjoy.
I don't see the connection between "flip" and "app". I confess!
To the extent that I can piece together the shape of things from Sifu's link in 24, this does indeed sound like a colossal screw-up. Shit, man.
Certainly, Burning Man would change quite a bit were the lottery system kept in place, which it basically can't be. I assume they'll piece together some solution this year; the procedure for next year and following is key. I hate to say it, but the mainstreaming of BM (and its monetary nature) has always been a problem to my mind.
Well, I have faith that a nice economic anthropology article or two will come out of this mess.
67: They're opposites in some sense. (Leave aside the IT connotations of "App" and keep the sense with "Appointmenter", which suggests a fairly controlled, disciplined person. Flippanter has never seemed strongly uncontrolled or flippant to me, granted, but he chose his pseud.)
Oh, yes. "Appointmenter", how transparent now that you mention it.
64: I don't really understand what's at issue here. Is the issue that the Burning Man organizers want to still hold the event, but rescind on the people they sold the tickets to in the badly-managed auction, and then sell new tickets to other people (who are more authentic or build better paper mache sculptures or whatever)? If that's so, I'd think the first buyers would have a good case for a court ordering their tickets as enforceable and also ordering that they can attend the event.
Or is it that the organizers want to cancel the event entirely and refund the tickets? If that's so, I'd agree that a court wouldn't order them to put on the event.
Well, people are suggesting that the organizers do 73.1. I don't think the organizers are at all tempted by that plan for a number of reasons, some good, some bad.
Although the idea that the people who don't have tickets are "more authentic or build better paper mache sculptures or whatever", which is why it's important that they attend, is beyond stupid, but of course halford knew that.
72: I know. It was just supposed to be in parallel to the construction of "Flippanter", awright?! I never said it was graceful.
Ah. Well, without knowing anything about the facts, I'd say there's a very good chance that trying the strategy in 73.1 would lead to a legal clusterfuck.
I think Appointmenter is just as graceful as Flippanter, and the pairing of the two is very aesthetic indeed.
Anyhow, 77 is my sense too, except I'm hella not a lawyer. At the very least it would make a lot of people extremely angry, which is an outcome they're still (perhaps rather naïvely) hoping to avoid.
I guess there's an interesting question here about the value that the scalpers in the auction will receive. If the ticket price was valuable, but that value was based on the notion that cool/likeminded people would be there, and then everyone learns that the tickets belong to scalpers who will sell them to uncool/nonlikeminded people, I guess the value of the tickets drop. Of course from the scalpers' point of view they got the ticket for nothing, so they don't care that much. It does seem like a pretty good way to ruin the event. The organizers' best move might be to buy up a block of tickets from the scalpers and then resell them with a better method, but that would also drive up the cost of the tickets.
Why do they need to sell tickets at all? I thought the whole point of the thing was that you just showed up in the desert and built your own space or whatever.
My guess is that the BM Org is in a bad position, because expectations have been raised tremendously over the years about the scale, quality, and sheer "Whoa, dude!" aspects of projects put together by various teams and camps. In the absence of those full teams and camps, it's a bunch of people camping out in the desert together, just doing this and that, which reduces the Wow factor that a lot of people have come to associate with BM. It's sort of a branding problem.
Isn't that what it is though?
(I loved Hatherley's proposed subtitle for his Pulp book: the cash-in book for the cash-in reformation.)
Art isn't free, Halford. It requires infrastructure, and investment! Ok, I'll stop now.
I'd bet even if on analysis the Burning Man folks had an airtight case, it's still a novel enough situation that they'd want to avoid having to even think about going to court.
fake accent, "Badlands" and "Days of Heaven" are two of the best films ever made. They are unbelievably, heartbreakingly beautiful in ways that you won't expect. Not everyone can stand them, though. The other three T.M. films are less good and have many flaws.
Maybe the Burning Man organizers are kindly giving the lawyers the opportunity to burn the last Burning Man. It would be one of the few cool things the lawyers ever get to do.
Why do they need to sell tickets at all? I thought the whole point of the thing was that you just showed up in the desert and built your own space or whatever.
It was, and it still sort of is. But it would have ended years and years ago if it had stayed free; they have to pay a shit-ton of money to the BLM, the county, the state, and several dozen law enforcement agencies, among other things. Then there's the (substantial) infrastructure, the (mandated) complete, leave-no-trace cleanup that has to happen in two weeks, the cost of the land where they store the bigger infrastructure pieces the rest of the year, the art grants. So, yeah, it's not really like that anymore. But they are massively dependent on 1. free labor and 2. huge expenditures from the people who build/assemble the theme camps (which, in the larger cases, can be basically like ibiza style-nightclubs combined with small villages, assembled and disassembled in a week's time), all of whom have to buy tickets (all told I think there are probably less than two hundred non-law-enforcement people who don't).
Also. It isn't just that BM will be full of unlikemined people. What I imagine a lot of people are scared of is that it will be full of likeminded people.
Anyhow, re: the scalpers, they don't actually operate with much overhead in their budget, I don't think, so they couldn't buy the 45k or so tickets they've already sold back if they wanted to.
I guess what I don't understand is why the ticket supply is limited, or at least dramatically limited in relationship to demand. I get it that the event needs funding (welcome to my life), and if no one's gonna sponsor it you need ticket sales, but why would you limit the numbers (especially if you are getting tons of free volunteer labor in addition to what you have to shell out for).
91: the BLM forced an attendance cap on them as a condition of permitting.
Actually I think what they forced is a cap on attendance growth. So it's 56k this year, but will be more (around 60, I think?) next year.
Ah. That makes sense. In that case, they should have just priced like a normal venue, or maybe a little bit higher with charity tickets for the volunteers.
On the off-chance this has not been linked here already -- hands down the most blunt, funny and courageous response to the Komen debacle I've seen.
(NSFW if your work is uptight about mastectomy scars or mild profanity.)
Believe me, if it were up to the organizers, it would be as close to free as manageable and unfenced.
A bunch of old school burners go out to the playa every year on July 4th for an event that is much more similar to the way BM used to be (guns, fire, you drive everywhere, sound camps way the hell off on their own instead of kinda in the middle of everything. No rules, generally) but in order to stay under the BLM radar you can't camp in groups of more than five or six, which makes it much less of a city and much more of a bunch of crazy-ass people distributed somewhat evenly over an enormous desert.
94: that would certainly have been one solution. But they also don't want it to be all rich people (and still have no particularly good a priori way to figure out who the volunteers are), which is already sort of a problem (the people who bankroll the theme camps? Not a bunch of commune-living hippies), and they also want to avoid elitist insiderism as much as possible. But basically they just weren't at all prepared for tickets to be a scarce good.
I think the argument that they would have been okay if they'd done something like glastonbury (picture on your ticket, no transfers but you can sell back to the org at full face value) has a lot of truth to it; there's more demand than supply, but not that much more.
(guns, fire, you drive everywhere, sound camps way the hell off on their own instead of kinda in the middle of everything. No rules, generally)
Hmmmm, that doesn't sound that bad. I like guns, fire, "you drive everywhere" and "no rules." Not sure what a sound camp is.
It's a camp with giant-ass speakers that they play extremely loud whenever they want to.
picture on your ticket, no transfers but you can sell back to the org at full face value
That might have worked.
Anyhow, sure, you would find some of the old-school burners very simpatico in some ways. So do I, in some ways, although the "grr I am grumpy and listen to skynrd and have a flamethrower" schtick can get fairly tiresome sometimes. But yes, if you ever want to meet the kind of fruity desert hippies who enjoy flinging kerosene-soaked-rag-wrapped propane canisters half a mile with a trebuchet or incinerating cars by igniting large blocks of magnesium in them, I'm sure I can point you in the right direction.
Honestly, all that stuff is still at burning man. It's just a little bit less insane than it used to be (if you want to have a flamethrower, you have to ask the guy in charge to help you make it safe if it isn't already), and there's lots of other stuff that people wouldn't have been able to manage the scale of before (that crazy big rig sculpture, that kind of thing).
I just want to say, this is an good thread.
I have friends who enjoy Burning Man a great deal, but I've never thought about it much, and learning more about the logistics is interesting.
96.last: You mean regular Arizona?
You mean regular Arizona?
Nah, they're not distributed evenly at all, although they are certainly crazy.
Sifu did once describe Quartzsite, AZ as "Geriatric Burning Man," though, which sounds about right.
Last time I was in Quartzsite the guy we were camping with was testing his homemade pulsejet. Holy shit that was loud.
I just want to say that 102.1 does not describe hippies.
Hippie fight!
Being someplace hot and dry with loud people and no running water is something I'd have to be forced to do.
Oh, I don't doubt it could potentially be a legal clusterfuck. I just sort of doubt it would end up there, in reality, if they went down the "refund and start over" path. But I can understand why they may not want to risk it.
108: believe me, I'm aware. I was playing to the audience who thinks Burning Man is full of hippies, whereas I am aware that, while there are hippies there, and they seem to enjoy it, that really doesn't describe the population in any meaningful way.
111: Oh, thanks. We're on the same page. I didn't really want to start a fight, of course.
I don't even really know what "hippie" is supposed to convey, these days.
OT: Which Irish whisky is least Protestant? I'm always forgetting.
Yeah, I don't really know. I hang with the party nerds.
http://www.jeffreymorgenthaler.com/2010/ask-your-bartender-protestant-vs-catholic-whiskey/
Thanks. Sometimes I need to know these things.
There is a guy who looks like David Broods if he got a real job and another guy talking loudly about calculus. Bars are better after the hockey ends.
I got a Rusty Nail instead. It's cheaper because of bottom-shelf Scotch.
But yes, if you ever want to meet the kind of fruity desert hippies who enjoy flinging kerosene-soaked-rag-wrapped propane canisters half a mile with a trebuchet or incinerating cars by igniting large blocks of magnesium in them, I'm sure I can point you in the right direction.
There's a woman at the periphery of Mrs. K-sky's BM tribe who's known for transforming sweet campfire moments with the toss of a propane canister into the campfire and yelling, "fire in the hole!"
For the bachelor party of another one of her friends we drove out to a dry lake bed about halfway between LA and BRC and had Roman candle fights. Pyromania: it's not just a week in late summer, it's a lifestyle.
These people are either hippies or idiots. The link is up for only a short while, since I don't have permission for it.
Thundersnow has been to BM and (I think) knows people still or recently involved in the organizing of the event. I keep forgetting to ask her about this ticket mishegas.
123: Probably both. But notice that they went somewhere green with trees, so they can't be complete idiots.
125: That's mostly my thought, but I'm biased that way.
There is no big fight between Rainbow types and BM types. Mutual respect, and a different aesthetic, with some degree of overlap.
I've killed the URL to that pic now. It didn't come with permission to disseminate.
But notice that they went somewhere green with trees, so they can't be complete idiots.
Hey now.
Tundra is out, but I'm fine with snow covered trees.
I was raised in short-grass prairie, I think. Maybe mixed grass prairie. I'm fine with it (as long as I'm not supposed to tell one type of grass from another), except that I'd want to plant shelter belts near the house.
Anyway, there was a fucking great deal of grass around.
David Broods
red lobster chowder cooling creamy speaks to me
"what have you achieved since last we met"
I cannot reply
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Santorum won all three of the states that voted today? WTF is up with this primary season? It's like every time Romney wins anything there's an immediate and drastic anti-Romney reaction in favor of whoever seems like the most viable not-Romney at the moment.
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re: 114 and 117
I think the best way to resolve that problem is to drink Scotch, rather than the [controversy] flavourless Irish stuff.
Yes, if you want to get away from idiotic sectarianism, Scotland is better than Ireland. Not much better, but better.
surprised that there's a big enough market for tickets that there's a scarcity problem
Clearly not FB friends with the same circle of suburban moms that I am.
Re 137
Sectarianism-lite. All of the taste, etc.
Yeah, it seems to me that Romney is pretty fucked. The Republican elites have said he's it, and he will be it, but the base? Nah, they aren't buying it.
(Now, here's a horror story. Romney loses in '12, 'cause you know, Romney/Obama. The Republicans decide that the lesson is: you need the Tea Party to win. They nominate someone properly crazy. Meanwhile, the Democrats fuck up somehow and lose. Then, you know, everything turns to custard.)
It seems hard to see how Romney can win, but at the same time it seems impossible that either Gingrich or Santorum (each of whom is a national joke in his own way) could beat him. Romney seems to be able to win when he can spend the money to remind voters that when they cast their Not Romney vote, they're actually voting for a specific national embarrassment.
Also, I worry about the scenario in 140.2.
everything turns to custard
As opposed to what everything's like now?
in many ways, Scottish sectarianism is to Irish sectarianism what Irish whiskey is to Scotch whisky.
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Mr. Squared, would you care to elaborate on your briefly-mentioned position that the Irish assumption of bank debt was a really good idea? I'd not heard that one before and am curious.
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TBH, not really, not in any kind of public forum (or more specifically, not in one that I don't have control over). I do think it was probably the least worst of a very bad set of options but so many people want to BACAI (on this and so many other issues) that I just can't be bothered with explaining why if it means that some cock is going to spend another afternoon accusing me of wanting to take bread out of the mouths of disabled Irish children in order to fatten the pockets of German bankers.
Those Germans with their pocket bread.
Oh, please please: Tell me BACAI is "be a cunt about it"? Have I just missed its use before?
152: I can confirm that this is the case. It's not very popular slang, but that's the joy of it.
Fair enough. I myself have never been tempted to blame Atlantic City artificial intelligences, but I could see how they could make an easy scapegoat.
140: (Now, here's a horror story. Romney loses in '12, 'cause you know, Romney/Obama. The Republicans decide that the lesson is: you need the Tea Party to win. They nominate someone properly crazy. Meanwhile, the Democrats fuck up somehow and lose. Then, you know, everything turns to custard.)
That's close to the doomsday/revolution scenario I predicted a few years ago. Obama gets a second term, crazy GOP backlash in 2016, peak oil, dollar kept artificially high, ultra-rich become uber-filthy rich, then people take arms.
But who knows, maybe instead things get marginally better, weird things like downtown Detroit community gardens actually work, broadband for everyone, legalized drugs for the seniors, pot for everyone else, and virtual sex to pacify the nutjobs.
Hey, it could happen.
150
... I do think it was probably the least worst of a very bad set of options ...
Aren't you the one who claims that good ideas don't need to be sold with lies? And wasn't the Irish bank guarantee sold with lies about how much it would cost?
