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[WealthyRadish]

I have a few Nortons that I took back as a souvenir from a visit to LA (no bills, it's all coins in various denominations of Bummers), but at least here in Colorado we're drowning in florins from all the yuppies moving here (most places even prefer them over local Kopecks). I know the empire schism is still politically dangerous back east; I have a friend who was almost detained at Dulles just for joking whether the ticket counter would take Nortons.

[Max™]

aluminum

* Teneb twitches

Molybdenium, platinium, lanthanium!

Also the coin was struck as a "1974 Aluminum Cent" so even if I did feel like using the weird sounding alternate version it would be incorrect unless you were saying "this 1974 Aluminum Cent was struck from aluminium" or some such nonsense.

[martinuzz]

I have a few Nortons that I took back as a souvenir from a visit to LA (no bills, it's all coins in various denominations of Bummers), but at least here in Colorado we're drowning in florins from all the yuppies moving here (most places even prefer them over local Kopecks). I know the empire schism is still politically dangerous back east; I have a friend who was almost detained at Dulles just for joking whether the ticket counter would take Nortons.

Florins? Why are you using ancient Dutch currency?

[Starver]

No, no, no. In the line of the alumin(i)um coins, those are similarly elemental coins. Fl(u)orin(e)s are coins minted specifically not to be kept in one's pockets for too long. Or, indeed piggy-banks, mattresses, safes, safe deposit boxes, etc, etc.

[Max™]

Plus there was the awkward run where a mint employee took a comment about "getting these coins some air" and took it to mean "add some oxygens to those flourine coins" which is why we had to build a new mint three miles downwind from town.

[wierd]

And all because some local politician bought into the rhetoric that they could literally stifle the competition, and once they joined the market, could not be easily removed. Of course, their corrosive and difficult to contain nature was never mentioned once.

[Reelya]

Here's an interesting idea. Researchers are working on an AI app that uses machine learning to predict the age of the current user, through usage data. The idea is that your phone could detect that your kid is fiddling with your phone and lock down certain features, such as using your credit card on online portals or something. Currently, the app can tell children from adults 84% of the time after just one swipe, going up to 97% of the time after 8 swipes/gestures:

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/18/02/10/1925259/researchers-are-developing-an-algorithm-that-makes-smartphones-child-proof

This opens up an interesting area. e.g. just like humans can tell each other apart by "speech patterns", a device could learn your "interaction patterns" and be able to tell when a different person is using the device. This would open up a whole new area to explore for digital security.

[Starver]

I suspect that as adults become more expert in using their device, they'll start to 'feel' more and more like a child's 'easy and naive' swiping.

(No obvious information on what the AI, if unpicked, found to be its indicators. It would be interesting to learn what the key points might have been, if extractable from the mess of the internally-evolved data. Like the thing where the AI "tank image friend-or-foe" actually discriminated only based on sunny or non-sunny source photos, or somesuch. (The issue obviated perhaps by the exact same training tasks, in this instance, but could the sharper brains of one cohort solve the simple number-tasks quicker and this influence the swipey interactions?)

[Reelya]

I don't think that is the full explanation, given that the system scores pretty well (84%) even from one swipe. it measures size of impact area, pressure, speed etc.

One thing I'm thinking of looking at is whether you can tell who's using a website based on telemetry from their mouse movements. That way you could maybe discern whether someone was using multiple accounts in a browser MMO.

[Maximum Spin]

Looks like I have to change my earlier statement anyway, as of 1965 private companies are no longer strictly required to accept the U.S. dollar for a transaction, which renders the whole argument incorrect.

It should also be noted that there are around twenty or so currently circulated 'community currencies' in use in small sections of the U.S., though we're talking about used in a single town or county for those.

Sometimes I really wish that legal information like this was distributed more widely, I only found out about the 1965 change to the laws from the treasury department's page directly.

I mean, I said that before you, but.

[Starver]

I don't think that is the full explanation, given that the system scores pretty well (84%) even from one swipe. it measures size of impact area, pressure, speed etc.

Yes, what I meant. The awkwardness vs unawkwardness of the swipe. Does the finger alight and glide, or bash down and judder across the screen? Does it land just in the exit zone of the first hotspot and depart immediately it is drawn over the final spot, or resolutely brought to the exact centres/is over-dragged beyond? In a complex (single) gesture, are the angles sharp stops and redirections or do they swoop in a perceptible curve?

All possible diferentiations that could be amplified by age (or lack of), but then in which direction does experience now go?   Does learning to be more flamboyant and 'easy' send either age-group towards looking like the other?

(Was it all a function of the test they set up? Same tablet set flat upon the same table with the same chair, meaning littler bodies operated the device more obliquely¹ compared to the more top-down stabbings of the adult digits. Loads of speculation to be had, no doubt addressed in a more comprehensive review of the research results, but drifting around conspicuously unanswered in that initial report.)


¹ Smaller fingers, also, don't forget! Surely they accounted for that? Did a side-experiment with a stylus (pressure, positioning and tracking effects, losing the size aspect) reveal detectible differences?

[Max™]

I don't think that is the full explanation, given that the system scores pretty well (84%) even from one swipe. it measures size of impact area, pressure, speed etc.

One thing I'm thinking of looking at is whether you can tell who's using a website based on telemetry from their mouse movements. That way you could maybe discern whether someone was using multiple accounts in a browser MMO.

https://panopticlick.eff.org/

[Reelya]

Yeah, I've seen that before, but i'm more interested in measuring the actual mouse inputs to see whether a system can tell you from me based on just that, even using the same machine.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/02/the-car-of-the-future-is-taking-shape-and-it-will-know-how-we-feel-about-it/

Robo-cars getting that much closer, with CES 2018 journos being driven around town by self-driving cars. They feel confident enough to put humans who can write bad reviews in them now.

[Max™]

It could tell that I'm not you because it isn't getting telemetry from me, so maybe it would be better if you disabled yours as well so we're anonymizing each other again.

[wierd]

Reelya has an interesting idea there though, (sadly, such interesting ideas are used to SUBVERT user control, rather than PROMOTE it, 9.9 times out of 10). If the touch sensor is sensitive enough to pick up slight "wobbles" (or jitters) in the touch area, such as from pulse rate, or arm-specific twitch responses in movement patterns, it could very well be possible to ID a person just by having them poke their finger down on the touchpad/screen for a few seconds, assuming you have sufficient historical data to perform heuristics against.

But again, such a novel idea will be used to positiviely identify you so that you can be serve another hot batch of annoying advertisements targeted at you, for your passive clicking on a clickbait article, or your passive interest in a piece of technology. (god, the number of strange adverts for things I sometimes get after doing a quick "see, this product totally exists!" in casual conversation at work... I would really rather that this not be a thing. I remember when it wasn't.)