Nothing. This 'feature' is entirely designed to reduce the banks' liability. It shifts the onus of security onto you (from the banks and the merchants).
It sounds like in principle it might also reduce fraud overall. Thus, maybe 80% of the fraud goes away and 20% remains, but that liability is shifted to the consumer rather than the bank (who otherwise passes it to the merchant anyway). If the merchant has reduced fraud liability, they may be able to offer lower prices. So, in principle there might be a long-term win for the consumer. In practice, who knows.
I think the idea of a pin at checkout is a good one to reduce fraud. However this is more work for the consumer, and reduces the bank's liability. Most consumers would probably prefer this, as it makes their card more secure and reduces the possibility of fraud hassles, which are annoying regardless of liability. Having something that is more work for the consumer and could save the bank money switch the liability to the consumer is just obnoxious.
There is now Chip and pin fraud. With chip and pin the liability is now on the consumer to prove it wasn't their transaction. Customers have had to take the banks to court in the UK to get fraud losses removed. In these cases it has been proven that Chip and pin is infallible. Same applies online with 3-D secure.
> I think the idea of a pin at checkout is a good one to reduce fraud.
For in-person transactions, merchants can check your signature against the one on the card or alternatively ask to see a photo ID. The process is there, though it's hardly ever done.
Given the fact that your signature is on the card, this seem rather ineffective. Approximate signatures are easy to forge and no merchant will deny a transaction based on a different signature.
In fact, that is not the purpose of your signature. The purpose is that you are signing a contract and agreeing to pay. It has nothing to do with security or fraud and merchants are not supposed to check signature matches - only that you signed.
A smiley face is a valid signature, as long as it is you and you agree to the credit card contract.
Actually, signing the receipt has everything to do with fraud. If you use a credit card in a transaction you are required to pay regardless of whether you sign an agreement saying so. The difference is, if the merchant does not collect your signature, they are liable for any chargebacks AKA reports of fraud whereas the bank would be if the merchant did collect the signature. [1][2]
My point in bringing up the signature line on the back of the card is that, while it might not meet your personal standard of effectiveness, it is an example of "a pin at checkout is a good one to reduce fraud. However it is more work for the consumer, and reduces the bank's liability."
Signature verification is an old-fashioned, and perhaps imperfect, nonetheless established method of security.
If you have ever used traveler's checks, you will know that they also use signature-matching as the method of security/verification.
Because if you did not sign, there is no written contract for that transaction, so there is far less of a case that the charge is valid. Regardless of what the signature looks like, you are liable if it was you (or someone you authorized) who signed and you are not liable otherwise. You are even liable if you charged for the transaction but did not sign - there is just no written, signed contract, so you are presumed not to have agreed to the charge.
None of the above is legal advice as IANAL, however I do believe it is correct.
Do you really think a merchant can verify those electronic scribbles on a tiny, crappy pen input device? No. Any mark made by you with the intent to sign is a legal signature.
None really. A) Fraud liability effectively shifts to you, versus the often waived $50 limit, and B) it interjects an authorisation from your issuing bank into the checkout process oftentimes screwing it up.
You are not expected to keep a month sales, just some small percent that will vary by your customer's tendencies to chargeback. Since almost every merchant account will have some chargebacks, and high volume ones will usually have some persistent level of funds in chargeback limbo, having some billing process to ask for funds is expensive and unnecessary. And what would happen when Jason refuses to find his account because he didn't agree with the chargeback?
Square was out the funds immediately. Jason could have avoided fees by funding his account the same day, or by simply keeping some reasonable amount in the account for potential chargebacks.
Square should not be required to keep a person on call to handle special cases like this or to ask merchants nicely for funds for every chargeback to an unfunded Square account. Automated ECH transfer from a linked account is fair and efficient, and once it is initiated can't be stopped.
I have to land squarely on Square's side on this one. As far as I can tell, Square has handled this matter exactly as I would expect and hope. They communicated professionally and clearly with Jason. Jason responded with empty threats and demands, and clearly does not understand or respect his responsibilities in his business relationship. Getting money quickly from a merchant account is a privilege, not a right. That privilege is afforded in exchange for honoring the chargeback process, which for good reason initially favors the consumer by provisionally reversing the transaction. When a chargeback occurs - as clearly stated in Square's initial email - "The respective financial institution notifies Square and debits the funds from Square."
Chargebacks are not fun, but they are a fact of life. When a consumer challenges are credit card charge, the consumer is entitled by law and contract to have their case heard, and in the meantime the middlemen must make sure they won't be left holding the empty moneybag.
It is entirely reasonable for the Square to make sure funds are available to pay the consumer debt should the consumer prevail - Square will be out that money regardless of whether Jason pays up.
To be frank, based on his attitude, Jason seems like the sort of guy who would refuse to pay up if the dispute had been decided against him and he disagreed with the determination. This is exactly the reason Square was and always will be justified in freezing the amount associated with any chargebacks. There is a process for handling chargebacks that you submit your self to in exchange for the convenience of getting money quickly from the credit card system. That money is only yours if the consumer does not challenge the charge - usually they don't, but you are responsible to pay if they do, and you are responsible for funding your account to cover whatever level of chargebacks your business sustains.
It is entirely reasonable for:
1) Square to freeze funds associated with chargeback attempts. At this point, Square is out those funds.
2) Square to withdraw funds from a link account if the Square account is empty. It's the responsibility of the merchant to keep funds available to handle chargebacks, as I'm sure is clearly stated in their agreement. If the merchant has kept all funds out of reach of Square, by withdrawing all their money from the account and keeping the associated bank account empty, the merchant is indicating that they do not intend on fulfilling their end of the bargain on having a merchant account - namely honoring chargebacks and the determination process for chargeback disputes. If this withdraw results in NSF fees, particularly for a chargeback of such a small amount, that is the merchant's fault for not funding their account. Furthermore, NSF fees are easily avoidable by depositing funds the same day - why Jason did an electronic transfer is beyond me.
Based on Jason's ignorance of his own responsibilities, his refusal to keep money available to handle chargebacks, his empty and immature threats to "go to the press" among other things, and his general disregard for his role in the business relationship, I would expect Square probably wants to terminate his account, but will decide against that as it would be more bad PR than it's worth. They would be justified, however, holding funds for a longer period of time, since it's clear he refuses to keep funds available to handle chargebacks and to honor the largely fair chargeback process.
The only counter point I can think of is that, for a certain chargeback/total charge ratio, it does seem Square could take the risk and absorb any funds deficit. That is not traditionally how things work though, and since Square is doing their best to get merchants paid as quickly as possible, it only seems fair that merchants would do their best to ensure Square they intend to honor their end of the bargain. If Square did take on this risk for small chargeback amounts for merchants in good standing (say < 3% of total charges,) this would delay someone like Jason's understanding of the chargeback process until a real problem occurred - like a large number of customers demanding refunds. That might ultimately hurt Square more than it helps, both financially and in PR.
> Jason [...] does not understand or respect his responsibilities in his business relationship.
This is indisputably the most succinct account of what has transpired. I would have presumed there to be laws governing a minimal merchant balance -- placed on Square, then in turn passed on to its merchants -- to be maintained in good standing, good faith, and so as to be lawful.
Additionally, I find a poetic irony in his account with his own bank:
> At this point my bank has levied an insufficient funds fee on my account, however I was [surprisingly] able to [...] get the charges reversed.
To which I'm led to laugh: "So, Jason, you want it your way on both sides of the argument?"
It's all on him. He could have avoided the whole thing if he just had the foresight to keep a few hundred bucks in his account as a reserve against charge-backs.
It looks like Square adhered strictly to their end of the terms of service. They did exactly what they always said they would do. Jason is the one who screwed up and then demanded special treatment and then got huffy when they didn't give him special treatment.
Sort of. But I would have expected Square Support to be a bit more sympathetic, especially if it is true that the customer had been a long time Square user with a good amount of transaction volume.
Square defenders seem to think that Square was going to automatically lose the money when the reality in a case like this where the customer has a good track record is that 1) the chargeback may have been won and 2) Square may have been able to collect from the merchant had the chargeback stuck.
Generally speaking, the acquiring bank (working on behalf of Square, unless Square is a bank proper, I would presume they are just an ISO) takes all risk on a credit transaction, and then extends that risk back to the ISO, who then extends it back to the customer of the ISO.
The author's experience strikes me as naive, (which we all are on our first chargeback) but notably, yes, it is his requirement to have enough money in the account to cover any chargebacks he may receive. Depending on his volume, most ISOs and/or acquiring banks would require a healthy reserve as well, should they come and find his bank account dry after he just charged a bunch of people money and then went running to Mexico.
The fact that they contacted him -before- taking money out of his account is striking. The normal process is to deduct the money from your account, notify you, and then give you a period of time to respond. If you respond with sufficient evidence, the chargeback protection service clears it, the money is then re-desposited back to your account. The other party then has one more opportunity to dispute and the chargeback handler may decide that you're not going to provide any more viable of a defense, and simply give up - or may push back again, effectively ending the dispute. If the dispute doesn't end in your favor, the money is taken again. If you drained your bank account in the mean-time, you may find your ability to continue to process cards through that ISO, or that Acquirer has been terminated.
The truth is, for many years people have perfected scams on both sides of the card handling process, and these responses have been developed to minimize risk for the companies in the chain.
> Getting money quickly from a merchant account is a privilege, not a right.
What is this, a forum for dads of teenagers? "Getting money quickly from a merchant account" is a feature that services like Square can either try to provide insofar as the law allows, or not. I really don't see the point of making this a moral issue.
At the end of the day, square has to live within the existing system. The purchaser's bank deducts the money from square at the start of the chargeback. That is the system. They can't just foot the bill until things are resolved, so the choice is between holding the money until chargebacks aren't eligible or handing the money over with the agreement that you'll promptly pay them. Compared to having the money held, prompt transfers are a privilege.
If expecting people to understand and work within the established system for handling monetary transactions is paternalistic, then I suppose this is indeed a forum for dads of teenagers.
Sure, Square has to "live within the existing system"...in fact, from everything I've heard from them, their value-add is that while they live in it, they shield you from it.
They are very sympathetic with regard to how crappy banking technology is and try to shield you from that; however, it doesn't seem that this sympathy extends to the charge-back side of things.
They (Square) did shield him from as much of the hassle as possible. They provided pretty good support from an email perspective. And more importantly, they did NOT charge him the usual $25 fee any typical processor would charge him for the chargeback. Which I might add is charged to merchants regardless of them winning or losing a chargeback so again, Square "shielded" this guy from typical charges any business would always have in a chargeback situation.
The problem is this is "money" movement, not customer service "sympathy" issue. Square like any company moving money is as sympathetic as possible but when Square gets a chargeback notice, you are GUILTY until proven innocent. As stated multiple times elsewhere, in plain and simple language a chargeback means the card holder says they did NOT authorize the transaction which means they are saying "This is a fraudulent" transaction. If you ran square, just exactly how much sympathy will you have for any business when this happens? especially as stated, you'll have to cough up the money regardless of whether you get the money from the merchant or not. And, do all that work with no extra fee to offset the hassle and customer service for doing it. So, in the end, Square did a really good job overall from shielding this merchant from the situation.
>" Getting money quickly from a merchant account is a privilege, not a right."
No, it's a service, provided by Square, that you pay for.
Whether Jason is at fault or not, he's disgruntled and public. That's never good news, especially with companies who deal in something as sensitive as payments. Square built a great product, but they are in a very competitive space.
> No, it's a service, provided by Square, that you pay for.
Just because you pay a company doesn't mean you have an unconditional right to do anything you want with a company's resources. You do not pay for unconditional money from customers via Square. Part of what you pay for, in fact, are the resources Square requires to defend disputed charges on your behalf. Part of what you agree to when you join Square is to comply with chargeback procedures.
You pay for the service, yes. You also agree to operate within certain parameters, and don't have a right to demand anything you want just because you are a paying customer.
This seems to be a common fallacy on HN - that any paid customer is deserving of bend-over-backward support, even if the payment amount was less than $1 - Square's net revenue from this transaction.
I agree with you completely. I was reading through the posting waiting for the "they did what!?" moment. I was ready to cast scorn on Square like I do regularly with PayPal. I got to the end was and think Square did a good job.
I didn't find any of the responses unprofessional. Not sure where the spammer accusation came from, they were just explaining how their ticketing system works.
The only thing to sort out is the response time. I would say any request for support on a payment issue is urgent. Even if it is a trivial issue like this. 6 hours would be far more acceptable than 24 though I guess there would be far higher cost to provide this service.
While you're post is indeed lengthy, it twists the facts a little bit.
1.) They did not reply in a timely manor. They did not honor their self imposed SLA of 24 hours response time.
2.) They threatened him that more mails from him would get him marked as a spammer so he should shut up.
3.) Although they told him repeatedly that he needs not do do anything to get his money back, they did not give the money back into his bank account in the end.
> "The only counter point I can think of is that, for a certain chargeback/total charge ratio, it does seem Square could take the risk and absorb any funds deficit."
Would attract fraudsters if they took this approach. The law of unintended consequences unfortunately.
Does it mean you know your site is broken in the browser?
Does it mean you block that browser?
Does it mean you intentionally broke your site in that browser?
None of the above. It means you don't want to waste your QA time testing and fixing minor quirks in the browser and you don't want your users having a degraded experience on that browser. To protect your users, you may or may not provide a warning or block the browser entirely.
Products are in constant development, and every CSS change or javascript feature has the potential to break a browser and require fixes. Just because it works now, doesn't mean it always will.
It appears they successfully attempted to support IE, but decided it was not worth continuing, perhaps because of some breakage OP did not discover. Should they have stripped out any IE supporting code? That seems unnecessary.
There's lots of enterprisey stuff out there that only "supports" various versions of IE, and bounces out other makes and models of browser. HN folks may or may not see much of that, because that stuff is typically in various corporate portal technology.
In health-care IT in particular, there's a popular radiology app that uses an ActiveX control that is bug for bug compatible with IE6 and doesn't work on IE7. That's an important reason for browser-upgrade inertia in that business. Another reason is the risk of hassles. What hospitals use now sorta works. An upgrade to IE7 might cause some patient-critical thing to break, and then all hell would break loose and the IT folks would get sacked.
It may or may not be good startup marketing to slam IE. For those of us who serve health-care and other institutional customers, it makes us green with envy, no doubt.
But it is definitely good startup engineering, if you can get away with it, to cut down the workload of qualifying various browsers by simply eliminating a vendor from the test matrix.
I don't notice Microsoft offering any labor or money to help developers qualify on their browser products, or to incent the big institutions (who provide substantially all their revenue) to upgrade.
Very true, but in some cases (such as mine) an individual working on an app can slowly work towards cross browser compatibility every time they touch a page. After a year, I'm almost there. :) There are several other apps... but you do what you can.
> It appears they successfully attempted to support IE
No, they wrote standards compliant HTML/CSS/Javascript which should work on any browser, then decided to write some server-side code to check for a user agent and serve different HTML to that user agent.
It seems unnecessary to straight up block potential customers from signing up because of their browser. Encourage them to get the full experience using another browser might be a better idea.
Suppose you are the proprietor of a physical retail business.
You're the only employee, so on Sundays you close the shop because otherwise you'd be short-staffed.
Do you listen to potential customers who complain that you're not open on Sundays by (a) offering them a degraded experience by letting them shop while you aren't there, (b) hire additional staff to support the shop on Sundays, or (c) tell them to come back during normal business hours?
If the amount of revenue you'd make by expanding the number of hours the store is open per week is less than the costs of supporting the additional staff, you ought to pick (c); otherwise, pick (b). It's bloody irrational to pick (a).
Did you mean to post this comment to the previous article and not this one? The article shows that the site works in IE9 and IE10.
Not to mention that the author not only chose (c) but also posted the equivalent of saying closing the shop on Sundays is a feature because Sundays suck for shopping(which is obviously wrong) and basically advised other sites to do the same.
> The article shows that the site works in IE9 and IE10.
To return to the analogy, a closed store will have stocked shelves and a cash register on sundays. The problem is that the store owner doesn't want to pay someone to work sundays making sure things are ok and stay that way. Likewise, supporting IE is not just a process of running through a site once and saying, "looks good." It requires continual testing, and this testing happens every time the site changes.
Also, Chick-fil-a is closed on Sundays and they claim it is a feature. And some people are religious about browsers too.
You may be able to increase your expected value by choosing numbers that are less popular. It would be interesting to research the psychology behind number selection and choose combinations less likely to have a multi-payoff outcome.
Interestingly, this means that common "lucky" numbers are actually unlucky, to a degree inversely proportional to their perceived luckiness across the population.
What's more likely: nearly infinite sentient universes complete with false memories of human experiences emerging from entropic chaos, or that we don't quite understand the nature of entropy?
The Boltzmann theory is one of those thought experiments that should draw into question it's assumptions out of the pure absurdity of its logical conclusions rather than be taken seriously itself.
Isn't this just a simple matter of probability? Given an event, however unprobable it is, it can happen given infinite time? From a purely mathematical standpoint, this is correct.
Just because something has a nonzero probability doesn't mean it will ever occur.
Entropy is just dS = dQ/T. It's simply a thermodynamic property that measures where system energy is. All of these grand notions extrapolated from thermodynamics are crazy.
Thermodynamics is/was just a first approach at studying macroscale systems because we didn't yet grasp the underlying quantum behavior. It's incredibly useful when applied to chemical and physical problems, but you can't use it to make wild claims like this.
Its certainly possible that the universe will end in a crunch or a rip, and all this speculation will be for naught. But thermodynaics is still a perfectly valid way of looking at these things, and hasn't been changed much by the addition of quantum mechanics except that we now talk about probability distributions within phase space instead of points. Its basically the same stuff, with the same consequences.
Entropy is much more than just dS = dQ/T. I mean, that equation is mostly valid the same way that Newton's laws are mostly valid, but you won't be able to get any sort of feel for it approaching the subject that way. Imagine a mathmatical space with six dimensions for every particle, three for position and three for momentum. The state of the universe is a single point moving in this space according to pre-defined rules. Now, we don't know which point or microstate corresponds to our universe, because we can only make crude measurements of statistical aggregates of particles like temperature and pressure and so forth. So by making these measurements we can narrow which universe we're in to a set of these microstates, a 6N-k dimensional region of the 6N dimensional space that we'll call a macrostate. The entropy of an observed macrostate is proportional to the log of the number of microstates that a macrostate contains, S = k log W. In a sense, Entropy is a measure of our ignorance of which universe we're in, which is ultimately why Maxwell's demon doesn't work.
Please note, the above does contain simplifying assumptions which don't change the main point. For the full story, go get a physics minor at a good university or start reading Wikipedia[1] and asking your physics major friends questions until you can re-derive the laws of thermodynamics yourself.
If your assumption is infinite time and complete entropy, yes it's correct. It's also why some level of common sense (e.g. Occam's razor) should be applied before such silliness is seriously proposed. I don't think Boltzmann assumes infinite time and entropy, just enough for the completely random emergence of sentient life that thinks (perhaps falsely) that it lives in a universe populated by similar beings who created iPads from dirt and water.
Does it seem more reasonable that there is infinite time and every possible state of matter and history exists at some point, or that we simply haven't figured out the balancing forces of entropy and order?
Infinity is an interesting thought experiment, but it so thoroughly ridiculous that it should cause us to question our assumptions, not believe in absurdity conclusions based on faith in mathematics and unproven postulates that got us there.
We might as well believe the Bible is true. Not only is it less absurd, but given the infinite theory, there must exist a universe where it is true, and this could be it (unless it is truly contradictory and impossible even with infinite states of the universe, which we have no reason to believe.)
The absurdity heuristic is not a good way to decide what is true. People once thought that the idea of humans being descended from monkeys was absurd. Or that the earth going round the sun, rather than vice versa, was absurd.
Occam's razor is more sensible than the absurdity heuristic, but it applies to the fundamental building blocks of a theory, not to the outputs it predicts. So it would cut against a hypothetical unknown set of "balancing forces of entropy and order", since that's an entity not required by our current best known theories.
If a theory implies an absurd outcome, I think it is a reasonable heuristic to question the theory and it's assumptions. I am not saying absurd implications indicate the theory is flawed, only that they should cause one to suspect so and perhaps find a theory that explains reality with less broadly absurd implications.
The Bible as historical non-fiction is most certainly absurd, no implications about that. Not saying so out of sensitivity to those who believe otherwise does reason a disservice, just as not calling out Bolzmann because I don't want to offend him. If this makes anyone unwelcome, they should avoid places where their fragile ego might be challenged by rational conclusions. In a place like hacker news, I see no reason to let sensistivity toward faith restrict my speech any more than sensitivity toward programming language choice. Invite me for dinner and I will respect your religious and any other beliefs. Have a scientific debate in a web forum with me, and I will speak without concern for challenging you. It's not a personal attack to say the Bible is absurd - it's the truth.
By the same standard, "SOPA sucks. Just like PHP/Java." is appropriate. "PHP/Java sucks" may be appropriate when discussing programming languages, but dragging it into a thread about SOPA does not help.
I'm not sure I understand your point. "SOPA sucks. Just like PHP/Java" is a useless statement, since the only thing the two have in common is "sucking."
The Bible is an alternative theory of the origin and purpose of existence, and is directly analogous to the matter of this thread.
Occam's razor says that we should give more credence to the simpler theory, not the more commonsensical one, and I assure you that statistical mechanics is elegant in its simplicity. I hope you don't also go around telling biologists that its absurd that we're descended from Apes, or astronomers that its absurd that the Earth goes around the sun? How about atomic thoery (which Boltzman was an important proponent of)? Unlike the Bible Botzman was working from quantitative theories backed up by scientific experiments. You might say that being a famous scientist is almost the same as being someone who has said things that were regarded as utterly absurd, but which were true.
> Occam's razor says that we should give more credence to the simpler theory, not the more commonsensical one
Yes, and I find Occam's razor itself to be common sense, which is what my point was. If a theory seems to reflect more closely observable reality, I would bias my investigations toward that theory over one the projects something non-sensical.
> I hope you don't also go around telling biologists that its absurd that we're descended from Apes, or astronomers that its absurd that the Earth goes around the sun...
Evolution and Earth's orbit are explanations for observable reality. They do not lead us to conclude outlandish things that are conveniently not observable.
I am not saying Boltzmann was necessarily wrong, only that common sense should direct us to look for what we are missing, and for theories that direct us toward more sensible scenarios. Sure Boltzmann, could be right. I find the Bible more compelling, and Bolzmann's theory doesn't seem to preclude them both being correct.
> If a theory seems to reflect more closely observable reality, I would bias my investigations toward that theory over one the projects something non-sensical.
I don't understand your basis for saying one theory matches observable reality more closely than the other. I mean, have you observed the heat death of the universe? And how can you say that what is being projected is non-sensical, except to the extent that people reliably find arguments involving infinity hard to make sense out of?
It might be that theory of evolution and the heliocentric theory purport to explain the world we observe, but the much more sensible seeming theories that they replaced also purported to explain the world.
As for the Bible being more compelling, well, I'm not surprised since many other people who prize gut feelings over abstract reasoning feel the same way.
Error in Boltzman brains theory is that he assumes that universe with brains randomly fluctuated into existance into its current form , and concludes that this form is more complex than just brain and therefore brains without environments are more common (maybe iPhones or Bible are even more common then), and assumes that brain can exist without environment.
also second law of thermodynamics states that resulting entropy would never be decreased. and doesnt tells us about entrophy dynamics in intermediate steps.
iPhones or Bibles probably are more common. And an isolated brain without an environment really is much more likely than a brain and body and environment, at least if we're talking about random fluctuations rather than structures created as a consequence of the the availability of useful energy in the environment.
If you think about it in terms of the Canonical Ensemble the regions of states that correspond to "a brain and body" are obviously a small subset of the regions that correspond to "a brain". The incompressability of phase space means that this translates directly to the world being less likely to wander into those smaller regions via random fluctuations in direct proportion to their size.
In the end, the second law of thermodynamics is only a (very strong) statistical likelihood. If you mix some salt water and fresh water, then wait long enough you'll eventually find all the salt in one side of the glass (in time proportional to 2^N where N is the number of salt ions). Its not something written into the fabric of the universe directly, but a consequence of more fundamental laws and if you take Statistical Mechanics in college you'll get to re-derive it and see why it works that way. In fact, I'd really recommend taking a Stat Mech class to anyone considering it, it was probably the most interesting class I took in college.
This is simply not possible (maybe in star trek), because self-aware brain requires certain kind of environment to exist into. so if there is brain there is organized environment. probability that boltzman brain exist is 0%. probability that self-aware brain in an orginized environment exists : 100%
probability that Bible exists in a some unimaginable place far far away: unknown.
Anyway what is the point of this (Boltzman brain paradox)? (or point that was supposed to be?)
Brains, per se, don't require any sort of environment. If your head was somehow teleported into interstellar space it would take tens of milliseconds for the nerve impulses indicating that everything was not all right to be acquired and processed, and your consciousness would probably last for seconds beyond that.
The horror of the Boltzman Brain idea is that the vast majority of the conscious beings that will ever exist will be created in environments that cannot support them, and will promptly go insane and/or die.
Still this paradox is too detached from reality, maybe for its time it was smart. How can we know what is the chance of universe create brain and how many brains there will be per universe? How can we know that universe fluctuation is less likely than brain fluctuation? without this numbers we know nothing.
Universe filled with many brains fluctuation can be more simple than brain fluctuation. Fluctuations may also happen in environment that doesn't even have atoms that are needed for brain , but will have atoms that are needed for universe. Maybe this atoms needed for brain can only be created by universe fluctuation.
If we assume all this unknowns and create our imaginary universe yes there can be more brains in it than universes.
Yes, and such strange happenstance that all the human brains we've found so far have been in humans. We must be incredibly lucky to have picked this universe at odds of 1 in infinity where no human brains are suffering bodiless in space.
On a Mac, shift with caps-lock on doesn't toggle to lower-case, so they would need to store a fourth version for this to work.
OPERATI@NGERONIMO
Overall it's a clever UX hack, though I worry they came to it by observing invalid password attempts which seems slightly outside of appropriate, although it doesn't particularly bother me in this case.
That would make all passwords essentially case-insensitive (all uppercase would work) and that would make it much easier to brute force than the inverted version.
