I've been researching why my cities public transport isn't available in Google Maps. Turns out that the (mostly public) transport company assumes itself in competition to app vendors such as Google Maps and Citymapper; the bus company "doesn't own the whole experience anymore". So, while they give access to static routes with some delay, real-time data or accurate data is out of reach.
How do companies like Citymapper approach that issue? Do they usually pay fees to the transport companies, or do transport companies in the supported cities all give API access?
A proper app would definitely benefit public transport in my area.
(word has it that my area's transport tariffs are way to complicated to be mapped onto Google's API)
[Edit: to be more concise; the transportation company doesn't want 3rd parties to offer an app. How does Citymapper approach that?]
If it's public transportation and run by a local government and the transit data isn't publicly available, then it's likely matter of civic engagement and using your power as a voter to make it happen.
Citymapper (and other similar companies) often have to establish contracts with transit organizations. They have a team of business folks who figure who and how to get API access. Basically boils down to partnerships in the case that there isn't open data. Most companies like this rely heavily on open data though.
When I interviewed at CM they said they actually provide data back to Google/Apple/TfL. I guess this for analytics, but I’m unsure if they charge companies for their data. As far I know, their Pass weekly transport card is now their biggest source of income.
The university website mentions student ID cards with chip. Is that not sufficient to provide strong authentication towards a self-service portal for password reset?
We have no real information on the systems targeted or the vector(s), so it’s possible that JLU is currently carefully running a black start scenario.
It is possible that even if the ID cards or something else could be used as a factor, what we don’t know, systems or certificates vouching for the student ID cards are now considered not trusted. This now seems like a painful but responsible way to hand out new credentials.
While a lot more information would be interesting, I gather the sysadmins involved have to priotitize as they are right now. I hope that there will be an interesting post mortem, though.
> The university website mentions student ID cards with chip. Is that not sufficient to provide strong authentication towards a self-service portal for password reset?
In theory it should be sufficient. In practice there is very little awareness of the capabilities of these smartcards and that they could, in theory, be used as a 2FA token. These cards are mostly used for physical access control, library pass and cafeteria payment.
There's left a lot to be desired in most (german) university networks. Yes, there is usually some sort of Radius and 801.1X infrastructure in place, but it's only used for WiFi login and eduroam, not for machines plugged into wall sockets. Yes, there usually is some sort of Active Directory and/or Kerberos infrastructure in place (yes, I am aware that AD is essentially LDAP + Kerberos), but it's often used only for the student computer pools, but not office workstations.
There seems to be zero awareness, that if you have AD and/or Kerberos authentication working in place (one can only dream of it being coupled to the student / staff smartcards), you can use it GSSAPI for web single sign-on which would instantly neuter any attempts of phishing.
Also you will still often find the preconception of there being such a thing as a "secure network" and an "insecure, hostile" internet. The notion of lateral movement and treating every network segment as insecure, no matter where or how it's managed in your org, is more or less nonexisting.
> There's left a lot to be desired in most (german) university networks. Yes, there is usually some sort of Radius and 801.1X infrastructure in place, but it's only used for WiFi login and eduroam, not for machines plugged into wall sockets.
When I was a student and later staff member at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern, Eduroam authentication infrastructure (801.1X) was also used to authenticate at ethernet ports in the walls of public rooms.
Does this let you neuter phishing? I'm not certain of all the moving parts but it's not obvious to me that it defeats proxy attacks of a sort now available out of the box to bad guys and effective against things like TOTP.
Thanks to the tremendous efforts! Whenever the GBoard is updated (on Android; the iOS version is just a subset), you can feel the progress that has been made.
If I remember correctly, cellphones with radio receivers tell you to plug in headphones whenever you're tuning in. My guess is the headphones cables act as the antenna.
[Edit: TIL AM stations seem to transmit at frequencies way smaller than FM]
That's one of the things that need to be solved, rather than celebrated. Commuting -- no matter which transport you're using, is a waste of time and energy.
I agree, but I also don't want to live like a sardine in a can, packed in with millions of others, living in a small box, having no green space, etc. I'm generally a social person, but don't like living that close to that many people. Many others seem to agree.
There are livable and afforable alternative to Manhattan style density and there are plenty of working examples. We just refuse to build that way.
Look at many continental European cities.
A mid-sized German city will be full of low to mid density buildings and walk up apartments, few skyscrapers. Mixed use of retail and residential, and very good transit by American standards, connecting to intercity rail transit. Highways frequently terminating or routing outside the city. Plenty of greenspace.
Even the US used to have this, though they are long drowned in sprawl. Any city that was of decent size pre-WWII usually has street car suburbs - a dense mix of single family homes, shops and apartments usually built around a transit node that connected to the core and region. Look at Shaker/Cleveland Heights and Lakewood in Cleveland. There is a healthy mix of uses and density centered around transit. You can see the pattern they developed around, even if it's vestigial at this point.
That's not low-density. Maybe not everywhere is as bad as Manhattan, but that is indeed very dense. Note that you twice described your ideal solution as dense:
"a dense mix of single family homes, shops and apartments"
"a healthy mix of uses and density centered around transit."
Not a big fan of that kind of density, nor are many others. I'd at least like to have my own backyard, and not have my neighbors peering in from a second story.
It's a difference if you make a 30 min walk, pass by a bakery in the morning and the supermarket or a restaurant in the evening. You can't have that in the car, or train.
I have a 40 minute work to work that passes by a bakery. Sometimes I take the bus which passes right by that same bakery. Sometimes I drive which passes by the same bakery. I have stopped in that bakery while driving, and while walking, it make no difference. In fact the car is more flexible because a 5 minute detour lets me stop by a supermarket that is an extra 15 minutes while walking. (the bus only comes every 30 minutes so stopping in the middle to run errands isn't practical even though it detours to that supermarket)
You pass by the bakery. You're not hungry… but it does look delicious. You go back, look through the windows again -- and decide you are hungry!
If you're in a car, you don't stroll around. You drive where you want to drive. Even discovering new things is hard since the people behind demand you don't slow down.
(this is loaded with personal experience and preference, I can perfectly understand this doesn't match yours.)
It's a surprisingly weird experience when you've been driving a particular commute for a long time, and then someone else does the driving one day.
As a passenger, suddenly you become aware of all these objects and sights that you simply couldn't spare the time or attention to look at when busy in the driver's seat.
I agree a car is more flexible and it scales UP very well to allow for longer distances but it scales OUT very poorly. For a unit of sidewalk or road, you can support an order of magnitude more people walking to their work, or stopping by the bakery, vs driving to their work and filling up the parking lot. ie. It works great if you or a few people are the only ones doing it. But if everyone is doing it, you all end up miserable sitting in a traffic jam, or frustrated that you cannot find a parking spot at the bakery.
Part of it could be estimated to be stopping, parking (or drive thruing); accumulating several minutes.
Fun recent anecdote, a coworker passed me in his car while I was walking to work, because of the time for him to park, we arrived at the coffee machine at the same time.
The "Too Good To Go" app became quite popular in Germany now. Restaurants, hotels and alike offer leftovers for a dime. You buy a voucher and collect a meal usually just after closing time.
Besides, we use "to container sth." for grabbing good food from the supermarket's trash. Is that something common in the US?
I’ve used non-Google devices most of the time, now trying out an iPhone.
Just did a factory reset and restore via iCloud. My fear of loosing my phone, incomplete backups and messed up restore is gone. Works.
Might be possible with Google phones, too. For all the others it’s just messy.
(I‘d agree with you, until I tried it three weeks ago. Working with computers all day, I need others to take care of my personal and pocket computers...)
I have upgraded from Nexus 4 to Nexus 6p to Pixel 3 and have never started off fresh. Have factory reset my phone a couple of times and have been able to restore where I was. So I can't relate to you to what you are saying.
Sort of unrelated - I hate these kinds of comment chains. One clarifies something, other comes up - what about this though. And this whole chain itself when the article is about RCS.
If you were talking about yourself only, I'd agree. But since you name humanity, one thing must be very clear: most people don't like keyboards. That's something that holds in "the developed world". Outside of the ASCII-world, that might be even more so.
Smartphone keyboards with glide typing function very well for language (i.e., no passwords and no programming). They have an important feature: they provide the input you want, not exactly characters for the keypresses you did.
If you consider the Chinese language, many people use the input either by drawing (elderly people) or with Pinyin, a phonetics script. In both cases there's a lot of software involved to figure out what people want.
The point is: programmers are a tiny minority who need exactly the characters for the keys they presses. Most other people just need text in their native language.
> Smartphone keyboards with glide typing function very well for language (i.e., no passwords and no programming). They have an important feature: they provide the input you want, not exactly characters for the keypresses you did.
If only. Because when people write nonsensical sentences and you ask what’s going on, the reply is usually "sorry, on mobile".
Indeed, I have been caught out so many times with the word I want initially appearing on screen, and then auto-"corrected" to something else when I input the next word and I am no longer looking.
First thing I do is disabling autocorrect. It introduces more errors than it fixes. Also it's changing a correct word in language A to another correct word in language B. But I need the language A word.
Not claiming it's foolproof, but after years of using GBoard, the multilingual keyboard mode now feels like it corrects far more than it corrupts. Or maybe I'm just too accustomed to it.
On the other hand you will never get my proper keyboard for work away from me.
While mobile keyboards are "alright" for messaging where you can get away with errors, they're not the kind of thing you want to be using for prolonged periods, ie. writing documents or long emails. They're slow, error prone, and tiring because of the unnatural thumb movements.
For any significant amount of typing and where accuracy is needed (a single letter wrong is more understandable than being replace with a similar dictionary word), keyboards are still preferred.
The authors mention the headline attacks in a side note only. Their paper is about formal verification of the standard. That is indeed something new. Their framework finds a couple of new issues -- and also old ones, which made it to the headline.
How do companies like Citymapper approach that issue? Do they usually pay fees to the transport companies, or do transport companies in the supported cities all give API access?
A proper app would definitely benefit public transport in my area.
(word has it that my area's transport tariffs are way to complicated to be mapped onto Google's API)
[Edit: to be more concise; the transportation company doesn't want 3rd parties to offer an app. How does Citymapper approach that?]