All of ecommerce is built on top of encryption with a non 0 chance of being cracked. The risk is much smaller than the benefit so people are willing to use it and then deal with whatever potential fraud comes from encryption being broken separately.
Technically a merchant could require meeting in person to exchange a OTP to avoid this and make it 0 but it is not worth it and you will get out competed by other businesses willing to take on a marginally higher amount of risk to unlock a lot of utility for the user.
Wouldn't the better guidance be to use different domain for official communication similar to sites where you can customize the subdomain? Attackers can always come up with something you didn't think to block.
Google doesn't let just anyone make a mail on the google.com domain for example.
Why stop at these people. You might as well reach out to Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and Jansen Huang. There's more to life than tech companies. Why not reach out to the president. It takes less effort than you might think to reach out to anyone in the world. It is truly a small place.
If you email a CEO or President, you're not emailing them. You're emailing a team of EAs who are filtering for them. Their fame leads to a lot of problems in the inbox: begging letters, death threats, and irrelevant noise more than you can imagine.
They also don't know much that you can probably make use of. They might think they do, and you might think they do, but they got there mostly through knowing how to talk to boards and investors, not by being able to engage deeply in expertise that is applicable to most people looking to make their way in the World - and if becoming a CEO of a major tech firm or President is the thing you need the help with, you probably know them or people like them already.
I've met quite a few famous people in tech over the years, particularly open source, and have had some short and some long conversations with many of them. I've found most people pretty approachable.
I also know through another side of my life quite a few people in the media and am an acquaintance of someone who is a household name in the UK. Through him, I've met famous sports people, writers, actors, etc., and through that and other networks I know people who have worked behind the scenes on major TV and theatre shows who have met hundreds of famous people.
The one thing that unifies all of them is obvious, but seemingly lost on a lot of people who "other" those whose names are known to them despite never meeting them: they're all just human.
They're not "other", they're us. Including everyone you see on TV, everyone you have read about in magazines, everyone you see on a stage.
They have to put up with being recognised and people dealing with them in strange ways (how would you really deal with a stranger asking for a selfie while you were eating dinner with your family in a restaurant?), but they still do all the things you and I do. As the old saying goes, they all have to put their trousers on one leg at a time in the morning.
I'd definitely encourage people to seek out experts (not just "famous people" unless those people are famous for expertise), and engage them as you'd want to be engaged about your expertise. You'll find most people will be approachable.
But emailing that specific list of people is unlikely going to get you much beyond a template reply from one of their army of assistants.
You don’t want to reach out to them, because you don’t want that kind of peiple in your life. You might as well start hanging with the local biker gang or start selling drugs on the corner.
(Maybe Cook and Huang are not that bad, but Musk and Trump I’d like in my life as much as cancer).
> Free AI like ChatGPT can assist with offering many different explanations personalized for someone to make it easier to learn.
What I can tell you is the following: a lot of academic topics are quite subtle - to get to more than a basic level, you have to learn things that are very subtle, and where you only can judge the correctness of the information years later (basically when you have finished your degree or even PhD).
Because of this, I would rather read the most renowned (and ideally hardest) textbooks in the respective area (if you really need to cheap out, download them at some shadow library) instead of trusting some AI.
I can tell you that for quite a lot of questions in my area of expertise, the answers that AIs gave were far from being sufficiently reliable for learners who want to get a deep knowledge about the topic, and the errors were often quite subtle.
In mathematics, for example, it is not uncommon to hang for hours over a page or even a paragraph, trying to understand why the statement holds - and this in a situation where the proof is for sure correct. Now imagine the situation of hanging over a page of text that you will need hours for understanding when you cannot even rely on the prior that the information in the text is correct ...
> Now imagine if AI can explain that page better so someone can understand it in a minute.
The problem is the "understanding" part: from my experience oneself is the huge bottleneck here: one realizes very fast that the lacking component is one's own brain capacity.
This is also why many mathematicians and physicists are so obsessed about IQ: mathematics and physics are disciplines where IQ points really can give you quite an advantage.
So, the really helpful thing to ask to the AI for is not better explanations, but methods for getting a huge increase in brain capacity.
Because of all this, your point is rather a mixture between a nice science-fiction story and a marketing pitch for an AI company.
The information is how to use a lab, so you can do research, you know, the thing that happens largely on university campuses. (Now why taxpayer funded labs end up patenting things for private corporations, that’s what’s peculiar to me!)
Another example is history. It's theoretically possible to become an academic historian through private study and there are certainly no legal barriers to it, yet amateurs almost never make the transition except through higher education.
This is what serious software distribution platforms do. Developers may think that they are special and they would never install malware, but that's just not the case.
Because you can't have both a difficulty with a reasonable page load time and a difficulty that stops bad actors. Attackers have stronger machines and are willing to wait as long as they need to.
And if the federated server you are on goes down. You lose everything. If the federated server you are on steals your information or censors you there is nothing you can do.
You have to choose a server that you trust. In centralized systems, you have no choice at all. If you can't find a trusted server, you can set up your own, ask a friend to do it for you, or pay someone to do this job. You are not bound to an artificial monopoly.
And Big Tech are the one who host your account on thousands of servers versus federation where it lives on one. If that one server host gets sued or ddosed you will be unable to lose your account. Meanwhile Big Tech can withstand DDOS attacks and lawsuits.
You're mixing things up. Thousands of servers (i.e., federation) are private servers, not Big Tech servers. (Probably with some exceptions.) You can't easily sue or DDoS them all. You may not even be able to find them all.
The Big Tech single server will experience a lot more attacks, some of which it can't withstand. Related example: Apple App Store was forced to delete a hundred VPNs after the pressure of Russian government.
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