asgaard

Uphold, Brave's BAT token, and fake reviews

Fri, 06 Aug 21 14:10:40 +0000

Uphold, Brave and BAT

If you're not aware, Brave is a desktop and mobile browser. It's very much like Chrome, except that it has an in-built ad-blocker. If you're super into privacy, Firefox and extensions like uBlock are your best bet, but I quite like Brave for mobile because I find Chromium based browsers a lot smoother on Android.

One of Brave's features is Brave Rewards, which grants you rewards for turning on its own notification based adverts. The reward it gives you are in the form of its Basic Attention Token (BAT), which is a cryptocurrency. In theory, once you've accumulated some BAT, you can exchange it into actual money (or another cryptocurrency).

Sounds good? Well, the devil is in the details. In reality, this doesn't work quite as well as it could. Brave forces you to use a service called Uphold, which is a cryptocurrency exchange.

Crypto exchanges have had a lot of bad press in recent years due to instances of incompetence and fraud leading to consumers losing money. With the crypto industry lagging behind traditional banking in terms of regulation and consumer protection, when using an exchange it's extremely important you trust both their ethics and their competence.

Uphold

So, in evaluating how useful Brave's BAT is, the key question is: do you trust Uphold?

My answer: No, I do not.

Uphold is very quick to close and accounts, sending a stock message:

We’re very sorry to tell you that we can no longer offer you an account. Sometimes we have to make difficult decisions as new information becomes available. Our automated systems aren’t perfect and, if you feel that we’ve made a mistake, please contact support.

Personally, I would not trust an organisation with my money which uses "automated systems" that "aren't perfect" to freeze the assets of its customers, without warning or explanation.

These are not isolated instances. A brief look at the Brave community forum reveals many people whose accounts have been closed:

https://community.brave.com/t/uphold-refuses-to-give-me-an-account/261657

https://community.brave.com/t/alternative-to-uphold/235216

https://community.brave.com/t/uphold-declined-my-verification-request/40086

https://community.brave.com/t/uphold-closed-my-creator-account/51200

https://community.brave.com/t/uphold-blocked-my-account/63805

https://community.brave.com/t/uphold-blocking-accounts-of-brave-users/239271

https://community.brave.com/t/uphold-is-blocking-the-accounts-now-where-will-we-receive-payments-enable-binance/239037

https://community.brave.com/t/alternative-ways-to-collect-rewards/241012/2

It seems to be a real risk that you'll either be unable to access your rewards in the first place, or one day you'll be locked out with no warning. Hopefully you won't have an outstanding balance when that happens.

Fake reviews on TrustPilot

Uphold's TrustPilot rating is currently about 2.6 out of 5. That's not great, but it's also not particularly good.

However, many of the recent positive reviews are a little bit suspicious.

On the most recent page there are 20 reviews. 17 are 5 star (the other three are scathing one star reviews - including mine, the first shown in the main page screenshot).

Out of those 17, 15 have written reviews for other companies too. What's strange is the names of those other companies. Those 15 reviews have written reviews for: EduHelpersArena, EduhelpersLeague, EducatorsLodge, EduHelpersWing, or EssaysPlot.

Links to screenshots: Main page, reviews: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14.

It's an incredible coincidence that Uphold's positive reviewers share such an interest in a narrow set of education services! Or is it more likely that Uphold are dealing with a company offering fake reviews, who re-use accounts between customers? Apparently, not even a particularly good review service!

Fake reviews are illegal in the UK under the Fraud Act 2006, Section 2 - Fraud by false representation.

This is not a good look for a financial services company hoping to gain consumer trust.

I am surprised and a bit disappointed that Brave hasn't been more selective in its choice of business partnerships. Unfortunately, this reflects on them as well as Uphold.

Update: 2021-08-14. I received an email from TrustPilot saying that Uphold had flagged my review as potentially "not genuine". My review quotes the generic support message I received, so this appears to me to be Uphold acting in bad faith to suppress a critical review.

TrustPilot invited me to reply with proof that I'd had dealings with Uphold, so I did. I also questioned a new batch of dubious reviews on the Uphold page. My email is as follows, and I'll update this with TrustPilot's response should I receive one.

from: Mark
to: Trustpilot Content Integrity
date: 14 Aug 2021, 11:20
subject: Re: About your review of uphold.com on Trustpilot - Ticket #10309860
Dear Trustpilot,

Please find attached two screenshots showing my contact with Uphold, and the response they gave which I referenced in my review.

Furthermore, I would like to note that many of the recent 5-star reviews on Uphold's Trustpilot page do not appear to be genuine.

The following users have recently left a 5-star review for both Uphold and "smartwareco.com.au", which is an extremely unlikely coincidence if these are genuine users.

https://www.trustpilot.com/users/6018f58eed25de001a0f4270
https://www.trustpilot.com/users/5fe1dd72514907001959743a
https://www.trustpilot.com/users/603c8931d7c49c0019ae813f
https://www.trustpilot.com/users/61160eaa82f804001217d5ac
https://www.trustpilot.com/users/61164bacc82d920012514536
https://www.trustpilot.com/users/603739cae3e1a6001fefeed4
https://www.trustpilot.com/users/6116080f5ebf83001211d2e7
https://www.trustpilot.com/users/5fe1cfef80c5a900198ae502
https://www.trustpilot.com/users/6115f367935a640012d84aa2
https://www.trustpilot.com/users/6115ef655ebf83001211cc01

These comprise the majority of 5-star reviews currently shown on Uphold's page.

I hope that you will treat these with the same scepticism that you have treated mine, as fraudulent reviews erode trust in your platform.

Plusnet is a mess (packet loss)

Sun, 20 Nov 16 14:14:07 +0000

I have 40mb fibre broadband from Plusnet which for well over a year and a half was absolutely fine. Around the start of July I was promised a free upgrade to 55mb which didn't materialise. Instead, the connection began experiencing large amounts of packet loss during daytime and evening, but virtually none between midnight and 7AM.

Despite a very long and active thread on their forums detailing the same issue among a large number of people, when I submitted a fault report they appeared oblivious to any underlying problem and I didn't get anywhere. After several weeks exhausting their very support (which takes up to a week to respond and isn't helpful when it does), I disconnected for a few hours before reconnecting and ended up on a different part of the network, and all was fine again.

Until yesterday...

I noticed that the 55mb upgrade had been switched on at some point, but the reason I noticed this was because I did a speed test when trying to diagnose an unreliable connection. Yes, the packet loss is back.

So I disconnected again hoping to end up on a different part of the network, and it sort of worked in that I went from 200.* (or was it 209?) to 146.198.*, but unfortunately 146.198.* is getting around 20% packet loss.

Oh, and since reconnecting, I'm back on 40mb.

Plusnet packet loss and gaming lag

Thu, 04 Aug 16 12:27:11 +0000

A few people seem to be talking about this, but since the start of last week (25th July 2016, i.e. 10 days now) I've been getting unreasonable amounts of packet loss on Plusnet fibre. Sometimes it's fine, other time I'm losing 20% of my packets. It's making gaming impossible as latency shoots up to multiple seconds at random intervals. At one point, Planetside 2 was reporting a 90 second lag! Packet loss is visible on ICMP, and websites (TCP/HTTP) become unresponsive at random intervals too.

I submitted a fault report last week which doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

This isn't isolated to me:

https://community.plus.net/t5/Fibre-Broadband/High-packet-loss-and-other-DNS-issues/td-p/1354749
http://eu.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/17612893774?page=1
https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?p=29859356
https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/4vho1j/packet_loss_issues_in_eu/
https://community.plus.net/t5/Fibre-Broadband/Packet-loss-when-using-video-conferencing-service/td-p/1353723

The lack of any official response seems to indicate that Plusnet are employing an ostrich approach.

Using a VPN doesn't help either because I just get loss to the VPN.

(Unrelated:) They were also supposed to be raising my downstream limit from 40mbps to 55mbps on Monday, which hasn't materialised.

Overall: If you are currently wondering whether Plusnet are good for gaming, the answer up until two weeks ago was "yes". The answer right now is "definitely not".

Update: 2016-08-23: Two and a half weeks later this is still an intermittent problem, but it's occurring less frequently than it was. I got bored of pursuing Plusnet support because they take days to respond, don't read my responses properly and don't seem to be willing to admit there's a problem they need to fix. I am off contract now so if it continues the easiest course of action is a different provider.

Update #2: Forget that, it's worse than ever tonight.

Update #3: git clone through PlusNet: 10kB/s. git clone through VPN on the same machine: 400kB/s. Ouch.

The new Yahoo Messenger is a mistake for Yahoo

Sun, 06 Dec 15 12:01:52 +0000

Yahoo is a case study in how to do everything wrong by not caring about what your users want. A lot of tech companies make similar mistakes, but Yahoo seems to be the only one with enough capital to do it repeatedly. I've always found instant messengers interesting ever since I wrote a spam filter for Pidgin quite some years ago, so my ears perked up when I learnt that Yahoo is re-launching Yahoo Messenger.

With the rejuvenation of Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo is now playing catchup with a product that they've had for 17 years. They've largely ignored it for the past five, so their position somewhere at the lower end of the market is entirely their own fault. The way they seek to reassert their position is to appeal to new users, who are almost certainly already using a comparable service, while telling existing users they must change to fit the new vision. This will not work.

This may be a surprise to most tech hipsters, but many people still use Yahoo Messenger (and there is demand for desktop instant messaging applications). Maybe not as many people use it as they did 5 years ago (at least in part due to Yahoo's neglect of the product), and maybe not as many use it as use the newer mobile based messengers, but there is a core user base who use Yahoo Messenger because it remains convenient and useful.

The existing Yahoo Messenger distinguishes itself from most modern instant messengers by being a well featured, stable, and (reasonably) resource light desktop application. Web applications are often useful, but sometimes a desktop application is better and an instant messenger is one obvious place, because it easily ties the on/off or idle state of your PC to your availability, and real time messages come through passively while not getting lost in the noise of your other browser tabs. Desktop based social apps are still a good and sensible way to compartmentalise your life and control your own availability.

The new Yahoo Messenger is not the same product as it was, and does not solve the same use case. It is different in that it:

1. It doesn't retain your old contact list. I can't overstate how stupid this is. When Gmail next releases a new major version, I don't want to sign in and find out all my existing emails and contacts no longer exist. When Facebook releases its next major version, nobody wants to sign in and find all their friends have vanished from their page. Dumping the old contact list is simply idiotic - most people will sign in to an empty page, say "oh", and close it. It no longer works for them. This is astonishingly stupid.

2. Is not a desktop application; it's web and mobile only, which will interfere with how existing users want to use - mostly they don't want to use it - they just want it to be there when they're sat at their PC.

3. Is not an instant messenger. This is crucial. With a very minor UI change, the app is no longer designed for real-time conversations, it is designed to broadcast a message to a person and hope they pick it up and reply at some point in the near future. This is evident in the fact they don't provide an online status for contacts, so you can't choose to talk to someone that you know is available. You have to guess. And wait. It has more in common with email or text message. This represents a fundamental change in the dynamic of the users' interaction with each other, and so existing user's expectations no longer match what they experience.

Yahoo's strategy here is presumably to poach market-share from other similar mobile messaging apps. There are a lot of other mobile messaging apps, so it's a big market with lots of potential users.

However, they are late into the game and won't succeed in displacing any of the existing players because the new Yahoo Messenger doesn't have any strongly compelling advantages (gimmicky features aside, it doesn't make it easier to communicate with your friends), so Yahoo provides no real incentive to move away from other similar apps.

With this comes the seed problem - they have no apparent strategy to seed an initial user base. Seeding a user base is a difficult chicken and egg problem - nobody uses your app because nobody else uses it - but Yahoo is sitting on a huge advantage here which they are squandering: they already have existing users! Perhaps they are relying on their existing users migrating and re-establishing their own contact lists. Yahoo will be very disappointed if this is the plan.

I don't disagree that Yahoo Messenger is in desperate need of some kind of relaunch, but Yahoo is going about this all the wrong way. What they need to do is modernise the existing messenger while catering to existing users' requirements, not to change its focus to a different use case. They need to insert status indicators; an almost trivial change to ensure that the app remains focused on real time communication, and they need to make the existing desktop client at least basically compatible (for sending/receiving messages) with the new app. This would give them a significant stable user base at day 0, and for the future, those users need to be able to update to the new version and continue to use it with roughly the same pattern as they did the old version.

The new app will alienate their existing users while failing to acquire more. The end result of this is that Skype will see a short term bump to their sign up figures as existing Yahoo Messenger users are forced to migrate, while in two to three years time, Yahoo will have even less presence instant messaging.

Google docs spreadsheet shortcomings

Sun, 12 Jan 14 22:08:09 +0000

I've been using Google docs spreadsheets to log my runs since about September. I just wanted something to record when I ran, how far, how fast, etc, give me somewhere to note down anything of, er, note, and generate a few weekly/monthly summaries.

It is useful and I like the fact it has let me do some things I didn't consider to begin with, like creating a report telling me the mileage of my shoes, but then it makes other things frustrating. Things that don't seem like they should be too hard.

1. I want the ability to sort my pivot tables strangely.

Let's say I have a have a pivot table that lists my running shoes and displays their mileage. I don't want it sorted by name. In a few years I might well have gone through 10 shoes and retired or almost-retired 7 of them. So I want it sorted by which shoe was used most recently, which would be possible were I able to sort by an expression.

2. I want to be able to use the data calculated by a pivot table in the same pivot table. If I have columns A and B in a pivot table, I should be able to create a column C, using A and B

Let's say I want to see a weekly average of my mile pace. If one week I run a mile at 7:00 pace and a marathon at a 9:00 pace, my average is not 8:00/mile, but the pivot table will average them so. If I want a proper average, I have to add a lot of redundancy into my data set to sum the number of miles for that week, the total time for that week, and then divide the two to determine the real average pace. I am using a sumif() in my raw data to group by week, even though the whole point of the pivot table is to group by week! Then I add the pace field to the pivot table, so I can see it there, aggregated by min/max/avg (they should all be the same).

This adds three extra fields in every single record in my dataset, when in reality all I wanted was to be able to add a new field =A1/B1 or something in my pivot table.

I also have a group-by-month pivot table. So now I need another three fields...

Silk Road

Thu, 03 Oct 13 22:23:59 +0000

The Silk Road events are exciting!

Here's a summary for people who don't know much about Silk Road (including me).

Silk Road is a hidden website (only accessible via an anonymous network called Tor) which is kind of like a black market Ebay, and is used primarily (or at least famously) for selling drugs. Exchanges there are done in a digital currency called BitCoin (whose value is now likely to tank, at least temporarily, as SilkRoad was one of relatively few places that you can actually use them). Silk Road was interesting for being a strange little centre of crypto-anarchism. Although the focus was drugs, the people selling were supposedly regular-ish people making them in smallish quantities and selling them to recreational users. Supposedly. Certainly a lot different than buying it on the street from your local crime lord, anyway.

It was run by the Dread Pirate Roberts (~~[SPOILER] aka Westley~~ aka Ross Ulbricht) who has now been arrested. The DPR engaged in a battle of wits with a user called ~~Vizzini~~ FriendlyChemist, who somehow got hold of a large list of SR users and tried to blackmail DPR. DPR tried to hire a hitman to have FriendlyChemist killed for a third of the blackmail price, but did so in a rather blasé way that suggests he might have known that the hitman was in fact FriendlyChemist, and thereby convinced FriendlyChemist to accept a smaller sum of money than originally asked for in exchange for not having a real hitman after him.

(Or maybe DPR didn't know and really did want to kill FriendlyChemist. I have no idea. You have to admire his dedication to his users' privacy, anyway)

According to the documents, it looks like ~~Prince Humperdinck~~ the FBI didn't compromise Tor. It looks like DPR was sloppy and left enough clues lying around to paint his real identity as being an interesting individual. Apparently he ordered some fake IDs which were intercepted at the US border and resulted in a visit from a law enforcement agency, whom he told "Anyone can buy order IDs from Silk Road with Bitcoin". Nothing suspicious there, just an average citizen mysteriously targeted for a batch of fake IDs who also happens to have a surprisingly good knowledge of online black markets. Perfectly normal.

Regardless, relying on Tor is a bad idea, because:

The FBI might have compromised Tor and used this to discover the circumstantial evidence which they then presented as their investigation in an effort to keep their knowledge of Tor quiet
Tor is a relatively small network and a well funded agency could learn a lot about the network simply by putting a lot of the machines on it.

The overall point is: If you've got something to hide, don't get sloppy (hint: you will) and don't use Tor.