Swipe to Unlock: The Primer on Technology and Business Strategy

by Parth Detroja

(Fun fact: this is how the Roman Empire ran its censuses![530]

MapReduce

The popular big data tool

Hadoop

MapReduce...

The idea is that you store all your data on a bunch of normal-sized servers — no supercomputers needed! — and then run the Hadoop software to crunch the numbers. The beauty of this approach is that the computers don’t need to be physically connected, and to add more data you just need ...

Hadoop.

Hadoop

data science.[539]

Amazon changes product prices 2.5 million times a day,[540]

With all this data,

Amazon analyzes customer’s shopping patterns, competitors’ prices, profit margins, inventory, and a dizzying array of other factors every 10 minutes to choose new prices for its products.[547] This way they can ensure their prices are always competitive and squeeze out ever more profit.[548]

Amazon can even use the words you highlight on the Kindle to predict what you’re going to buy.[551]

“Anticipatory Shipping Model.”[553]

they can ship that item to a warehouse near you, so that when you ultimately buy it, they’ll get to you quickly and cheaply.[554]

Big data lets companies create targeted ads and recommendations, which can be very profitable. Google and Facebook rely on targeted ads for most of their revenue,[558]

In 2013, thieves stole 40 million Target customers’ credit card numbers and 70 million customers’ personal information, including names, emails, and mailing addresses. Those 70 million customers were at high risk of identity theft.[563] And it’s not just Target: all of Yahoo’s 3 billion accounts were hacked in 2013, letting thieves steal birthdates and phone numbers,[564] and in 2017 hackers got access to 143 million Americans’ social security numbers when they hacked the credit reporting agency Equifax.[565]

reverse engineer

“reidentifying”

For instance, an MIT study found that just knowing the dates and locations of four credit card purchases was enough to determine the identities of 90% of people tested.[567]

Like many things about technology, there’s no black-or-white answer.

While big data makes companies and products more effective, it can create problems for privacy. But whether or not you like it, big data will only keep getting bigger.

This has, strangely, led to scammers having excellent customer support, even sometimes having call centers and online chats with sales representatives.[589] Some even hire designers to make their websites look attractive.[590] They know that they need to build up a reputation of “trust” with their victims[591] — even though trust is a strange word to associate with someone who is extorting you and threatening to ruin your livelihood.

Google’s ChromeOS, which powers Chromebooks, has become especially popular for the security-conscious because it is literally just a web browser; there are no conventional installable apps (which are a major entry point for malware). Plus, each Chrome tab runs in a “sandbox,” meaning that the contents of a webpage can’t touch any other parts of the computer.[600]

But Chromebooks still have security holes like malware-loaded add-ons, and scams like

phi...

will never go aw...

Silk Road,[602]

Deep and dark web

The “normal” internet that we browse every day doesn’t work like that. Instead, Silk Road and other illegal marketplaces have had to turn to a pair of related concepts, the “deep web” and “dark web.”[608]

Dark websites have long, strange URLs that end in .onion,

In fact, you can’t even figure out where dark websites’ servers are, making them very difficult to take down.

However, programming errors can

leak the servers’ IP addresses — which, incidentally, is exactly what led to ...

Tor

Normally, when your computer connects to a website, your computer broadcasts its identity and which website it wants to visit, which makes it easy to track what websites everyone is visiting.[618]

This is how Tor works:

it wraps your communication in several layers of encryption and bounces it around many intermediate “relay” computers, each of which only knows the previous and next computers in the chain.[619]

The Hidden Wiki.

Google for darkweb

Whac-A-Mole.[630]

Silk Road 2

AlphaBay

OpenBazaar,

OpenBazaar is fully decentralized:

every transaction happens directly between buyers and sellers. It’s like going to a flea market instead of a supermarket. Flea markets are decentralized: shoppers and merchants exchange money directly. Supermarkets, on the other hand, are centralized: merchants sell their stuff to supermarkets, who then distribute items to shoppers. If you destroy the supermarket, no one can buy or sell anything. But the only way to take down a flea market is to take down every single vendor.

If the Silk Road was like a supermarket, OpenBazaar is l...

OpenBazaar

The founders of OpenBazaar say they won’t police what’s sold on the site[636] — in fact, given the distributed model, they probably couldn’t police it anyway.[637] It’s a radical idea, but a dangerous one.

Legitimate uses for the dark web

2014 Facebook made its website accessible over the dark web,