That article recommends Tor for browsing without mentioning the dangers involved. Malicious exit nodes are not hypothetical. It's easy to make mistakes with Tor, so I'd be wary of a general recommendation to use it. People who know more about this than me seem to agree: https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/797608924606173184
edit: I'm also unsure about the warning against fingerprint authentication. I use Touch ID with a long passcode and consider that the best trade-off. It prevents everyday attempts to get into the phone and offline cracking. The passcode is required after a longer time of inactivity. If you're paranoid you can touch your pinky against it five times in predictable situations (border controls etc). It's not perfect, but I think it makes the best tradeoff between convenience and security for most "normal" people.
An alternative is to just turn the device off before you walk up to a potential issue. That way you're assured that the TouchID won't be accepted (last thing you'd want is to learn it only registered X presses rather than the Y required to disable). In the event you are caught off-guard, disabling TouchID is as simple as just holding in the power button until the screen goes black. If you practice this a few times, you could accomplish this even in a stressful situation.
The exact same dangers exist with normal browsing. Intermediate nodes on your route can do whatever they want unless you use proper encryption. In fact, things like sniffing your traffic are routinely done by $ThreeLetterAgency.
Your argument is a classical example of "correct in theory, wildly misleading in practice". As you can see on https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/badRelays (list isn't updated any more, so the real list is likely much longer) or http://www.cs.kau.se/philwint/spoiled_onions/techreport.pdf, there have been several cases where relays actively interfered with user traffic in a malicious way. Malicious exit nodes are used to MitM connections and sniff sensitive data.
Note that Tor doesn't mitigate the three-letter agency problem, as they can just sniff the exit node's target (I certainly would, there's bound to be lots of interesting traffic there).
What's interesting is that BKK>JFK is a cheaper itinerary than BKK>KBP so if you wanted to travel BKK>KBP you are better of booking BKK>JFK and throwing away the last leg.
I feel bad for piggybacking like that, but I'm planning a trip (probably WAW-BKK) and this kind of insight would help me a lot. If you could copy me on that email at notabing --at-- gmail.com, I'd be mighty grateful. :)
Any flight in particular? I can't give it all away as that would be unfair to Flightfox, as well as other experts. Flightfox really is a very good site where experts work hard finding you the best price for your particular needs.
I'm New Jersey - would love to know how you found the JFK-BKK flight as well, please e-mail me usmanc---at----gmail. No need to give it all away - I plan to use Flightfox in the future for complicated travel. I just did a crazy complicated Middle East and Asia trip, it would have been worth $50 to me just to see other options than what my travel agent booked.
Hi,
The price above doesn't hold for the opposite direction. Everyone asking me for flight prices, go to flightfox and I'm sure you'll be happy with the results.
Thanks,
Michael
Just wow, unbelievable!
Though I have a question: How have you confirmed the last two steps (BKK to KBP to JFK)? I tried Aerosvit site, Hipmunk and Skyscanner and haven't been able to replicate this result.
Actually, according to Cialdini's Influence, complimenting works even when people understand that it is, in fact, flattery: "First, the evaluator who provided only praise was liked best by the men. Second, this was the case even though the men fully realized that the flatterer stood to gain from their liking him. Finally, unlike the other types of comments, pure praise did not have to be accurate to work. Positive comments produced just as much liking for the flatterer when they were untrue as when they were true." [1]
[1] Specifically, he cites Drachman et al. (1978) study.
So, does that mean you are worse off providing genuine feedback if it is negative, if it is in your best interest to just flatter someone with false goodiness?
As to APM:
"Actions per minute is the number of actions (such as selecting units or issuing an order) completed within a minute of gameplay in real time strategy games, most notably in Starcraft. High APM is often associated with skill, as it can indicate that a player both knows what to do in the game and has the manual dexterity to carry it out. Software has been developed to analyze players' APM in these games. Beginners often have low APM counts, typically below 50. Professional e-athletes in South Korea usually have average APM scores around 300, but often exceed the 400 mark during intense battle sequences. Notable gamers with over 400 average APM include Lee Young-Ho and Lee Jae-Dong. Park Sung-Joon is noted for the record APM of 818."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actions_per_minute
APM trivia: there was a brief moment in-between two patches in Heroes of Newerth - a popular DoTA clone - in where moving your "hero" to a new location on the map counted as an action. Players simply stepping around rapidly right where they were standing would increase their APM indefinitely.
I believe technically this would be considered APM in all games. In starcraft 1+2 even selecting a control group is considered an action, so simply hiting 1 2 3 4 5 in succession without building units or changing rallies or really doing anything would count as 5 actions.
eAPM, or effective APM is a more advanced attempt to filter out spammy actions (as you describe) and was made up a bit after APM first came out as a statistic and people started gaming the APM stat to try and inflate their egos.
In SC2 there is a bug on the live patch where the APM tab in replays or live games shows the eAPM stat, and the eAPM tab shows the APM stat due to some silly mixup that made it past QA.
The point is that all of my experience tells me that you really have to be an asshole and stand on the backs of others to get that far. Nobody is born nor becomes such a savant that people shower you with billions of dollars. You have to be smart, devious, aggressive, and abrasive. That just isn't me. It's not you either. That's OK.
edit: clarification