Years ago, I worked at Apple at the same time as Ian Goodfellow. This was before ChatGPT (I'd say around 2019).
I had the chance to chat with him, and what I remember most was his concern that GANs would eventually be able to generate images indistinguishable from reality, and that this would create a misinformation problem. He argued for exactly what you’re mentioning: chips that embed cryptographic proof that a photo was captured by a camera and haven't been modified.
It does. I just checked mine today. I can see exactly which individual email addresses in my domain where exposed and in which data leak. I have never paid for it.
Interesting. I'd love to see where you're seeing that. I'll go poke at the site a little more.
Edit: When I try to do a domain search I get told:
> Domain search restricted: You don't have an active subscription so you're limited to searching domains with up to 10 breached addresses (excluding addresses in spam lists).
Yep, if you have the good fortune of having many breaches while using companname@example.org, the service requires that either you pay up or you have to guess and check.
Does that make sense though? It seems appropriate to me that only citizens of a country can vote in the elections of such country (US or elsewhere). It’s definitely more complicated than “no taxation without representation”.
Some counter arguments from the top of my head:
What about tourists? They pay taxes while they are here too.
What about electoral interference? It’s way easier to pay taxes than to gain citizenship; this would create a perverse incentive.
What about allegiance? When you become a citizen you pledge allegiance to the US. Not when you pay taxes. Would incentives be aligned?
What about citizen only duties? (male) Citizens have to sign up for selective service and might have to go to war. Not so with H1Bs (though, to your point, permanent residents have to do it). Would it be fair to offer voting rights to everyone even if they don’t have the same duties?
I still have mine with rockbox installed. I had to replace the battery, and the clip broke years ago, but I haven’t found anything like it to replace it.
You can't have both a paid app and an app with billions of users.
You can use WhatsApp to talk to people across the world, you bet your ass that nobody would be using it in Indonesia and Brazil if it costed one dollar, vastly diminishing its value.
If you want a free app that only part of users worldwide can afford there's already iMessage.
In most of the world SMS ("texting") was (or still is) a paid service per message (~5/10/20 cents per message or so, I can't remember exactly and would have to factor in inflation). But it was costly enough that people flocked to WhatsApp to avoid texting costs. Paying 1 USD or 1 EUR per year was a great deal to send unlimited texts.
> You can use WhatsApp to talk to people across the world, you bet your ass that nobody would be using it in Indonesia and Brazil if it costed one dollar, vastly diminishing its value.
WhatsApp had payments (or a pilot) pre-acquisiton. At $1/year, it was an amazing value proposition even for those earning $1/day. IIRC, this was when WhatsApp had 3-500M users globally. Interestingly, they allowed people to pay the subscription on behalf of a contact, so the Indonesian expat in Australia could pay for friends and family in Indonesia, and the aervice could have reached a bullion users and 500M/year revenue with about 200 employees
Did you know people below the poverty line would by $20 S40 feature phones just to be able to run WhatsApp? The other 2G phones cost less than half that amount, but you had to pay $0.1-$0.2 per SMS sent, in that light, spending $1 per year for WhatsApp's unlimited messages on a PAYG data package was a steal.
So no, I am not nuts, you just didn't think through the value proposition.
Network effects, similar to present-day Facetime in the US. There's Zoom and Google Meet, but if your family and friends are already FaceTiming, you're pressured into buying a iDevice.
There's a surprisingly number of people whose usage of the Internet is exclusively through WhatsApp, and may not even know what a "browser" is or how to use it to get in touch with their contacts.
Nonsense, it was very popular in my low-income country even back then. They charged something like half a day of income of a manual laborer per year, and everybody was happy to pay since it made your life so much easier. Of course, there's no going back now that everybody is accustomed to using it "for free".
If you read other top-level comments, you'll find that many people are simply allergic to paying for software. A lot of people don't have cards or even bank accounts so it's just not possible.
It replaced SMS, which was costly, so the deal was pretty clear. Back in those days people were quite aware of SMS prices and 1 EUR/year to replace SMS was a no brainer. It was very popular despite the price. For many people, it was the only app they actually bought.
I think lately I look at anything new with my guard up.
In this case, first the FAQ gave me those vibes. Why? Hard to tell. If I have to force myself explain it, it has the kind of didactic and dumbed down tone that I usually get from chatgpt when I ask questions about complex topics.
Then I went to your blog and saw the entries were mostly (I assume) AI generated as well. I know it doesn't necessarily follow that because of that this website has been mostly created by ChatGPT as well. But I saw it as some kind of weak confirmation.
Finally some of the JS code comments such as "Plot Charts" right before a "PlotChart" also made me think this.
As I said, I'm just extra cautious about this stuff lately. You are the creator, you know how you did it. If my intuition was wrong I wholeheartedly apologize for making that statement. I could probably have expressed it in a kinder way. I know that it's not easy to create it something now and put it out there for people to see it and criticize it.
Counterpoint, it has happened to me twice, once with Lufthansa and another time with a low cost airline (Vueling). Both times I was paid without fuss. Both times I filed for it myself.
I had the chance to chat with him, and what I remember most was his concern that GANs would eventually be able to generate images indistinguishable from reality, and that this would create a misinformation problem. He argued for exactly what you’re mentioning: chips that embed cryptographic proof that a photo was captured by a camera and haven't been modified.
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