overheadnoise

WhatsApp works so well because it is tied into the same contacts that you already have on your phone. Without access to your phone’s contacts you would need to set up and manage an entirely separate set of contacts. Right now, Grandma could download WhatsApp and instantly start chatting with her granddaughter without having to remember what her phone number is because it’s already there. That’s a major selling point of WhatsApp.

Then you need to realize that you are a special case and not representative of the general public.

Most people who meet each other in real life and want to exchange contact information exchange… you guessed it… a phone number. Maybe you exchange email or twitter handle, but again you are an exception here. So imagine we meet for the first time and we exchange phone numbers. Now I can WhatsApp you, just like that no other account info needed.

That’s wild. I had no idea that the original feature of WhatsApp is a feature that I have literally never even looked at and forgot even exists lol

What about just “apping” is that a word? On a business trip earlier this year my colleague told me (in English) “I’ll meet you down at the bar after apping with my daughter.”

Now that I think about it I’m not sure if “apping” implies texting, voice call, or video call. Lol

It’s really simple, really.

When WhatsApp first came around sending SMS in many places like in Europe was not free. It wasn’t free to send SMS to other people from the same country, and Europeans, especially European Students going to university will typically have friends or contacts with different country codes because they didn’t get a new SIM card for various reasons. It wasn’t free to SMS people in the same country, and it was not free to SMS people from other countries.

WhatsApp changed that, without needing you to sign up for an account somewhere and telling people “my AIM is this” or “my email is that.” You were already giving people your phone number when you met them, and WhatsApp was compatible with that. So it requires no extra steps. Just download the app and go and now you can SMS people for free using the contact information you already have, using the contact information you were most likely to give to people you just met.

That was the appeal.

I got my first smart phone around 2011.

In 2011 I was a student in university and I had friends in my circle from Erasmus so they kept their phone number from their own country. In 2011 it wasn’t even free for me to send a sms to people from my own country so I couldn’t even imagine sending sms to people internationally even though they were physically in the same city as me.

Well one day a friend told me to download WhatsApp. So I did. All it wanted me to do was verify my phone number and that’s it.

Now suddenly all of my friends with smart phones could just sms me for free. And I could sms them back too. For free.

That was the value of WhatsApp. The fact that all you needed was a phone number, which you already had saved in your phone. Now instead of opening your phones messages app, you just open whatsapp.

There was no extra step of signing up for a new account or telling people “search for my name on Facebook my profile picture is blah blah.”

In my experience as a researcher in computational numerics, the “standard library” is going to be defined by the in-house code that I use. That code is going to use other scientific libraries like for example PETSc, Atlas/blas/mkl, MPI in the background, but the typically researcher isn’t going to be exposed to that because their focus is on setting up the equation Ax = b and writing the algorithm to solve it for x.

I’m not sure if that holds. Every university I’ve ever done research in has no issues paying for software like MATLAB, ANSYS, Mathematica, Intel MKL, Intel Compiler Suite, and the like. The people I know that still use Fortran (including myself) are all heavily focused on computational numerics and the fact that ifortran is closed source vs gfortran being open just does not even factor into the equation. If it’s available to me, and I can show that a program compiled by ifortran and MKL is faster than one compiled by gfortran and BLAS then I will use the faster one.

I moved to Germany in 2010 and experienced a winter for the very first time. I remember having to wear “pants under my pants” (thermal layer), I bought a thick wool coat, I wore scarves for the first time in my life. (I grew up in Southern California.) I remember one day looking out my window and seeing it start to snow and I could see the snow build up higher and higher on all the bicycle seats outside my window. I remember coming back indoors and how everyone just knew to instinctively stomp their feet outside the door and again inside on the mats, to knock out whatever bits of snow was stuck on shoes. I remember thinking how every time I walked out the door I had to suit up properly like I was gearing up for battle in a video game. This happened again the next year and I slowly got used to it and none of that routine stood out to me anymore.

What stood out though was a few years back I remember thinking one day “where’s the winter?” because the weather was just cool but not cold, and snow amounted to just a few mm if it even stuck around.

Two years ago I finally couldn’t deal with it anymore and bought a portable AC unit. It made living in my flat bearable and was something for me to look forward to at the end of the day since my office wasn’t air conditioned.

My energy bill is higher now in the summers and I feel bad for contributing to climate change, but without the AC I just can not live, merely survive.

I think the attackers had Mitch’s bank card and PIN and was making those fraudulent charges to see if Mitch would notice. If he did, the attackers would have been shut out then and there.

Mitch didn’t notice, so the attackers called Mitch pretending to be the bank. They didn’t ask him for any details so no red flags were raised, they just said “we noticed fraudulent charges and rest assured we are fixing it.”

Next day, attackers call the bank and Mitch at the same time. They needed the code the bank would send to the # on the account, so the attacker requested it from the bank, the bank sent it to Mitch, Mitch read it to the attacker, and the attacker repeated it to the bank.

At some point, Mitch got suspicious and called the bank to ask if they were on another call with him. The bank was on a call with the attacker pretending to be Mitch, so they said yes. Mitch thought the other Mitch was himself.

Mitch was satisfied thinking that the bank was already looking into it, since the attacker pretending to be the bank didn’t ask for any details /raise any flags.

I think the attacker called the bank and Mitch at the same time. The attacker knew that the bank would send Mitch a SMS code so the attacker asked the bank to send it, Mitch told the attacker, the attacker told the bank.

The bank was on the phone with Mitch and the attacker at the same time. Mitch thought the “other Mitch” was himself on the other line.

I don’t know if I’m just really tired or if the post was just badly written, but I’ll go with the latter since you were confused too.

My understanding is this happened:

1. Attacker got a hold of Mitch’s bank card, PIN, and some personal details.

2. Attacker starts pulling out money and buying things here and there to see if Mitch ever notices.

Mitch never notices so...

3. Attacker calls Mitch on Friday and pretends to be Mitch’s bank. Attacker doesn’t ask for any details, just alerts Mitch that something was going on with his account to get him to think the bank was looking into it.

4. Attacker calls Mitch’s bank and also Mitch at the same time the next day.

5. Attacker asks the bank to send the SMS verification code to Mitch.

6. Mitch gets the code and reads it back to the Attacker.

7. Attacker repeats code to the bank.

So in German the number “21” is spelled “einundzwanzig” which means “one and twenty” compared to “twenty (and) one” in English. If you were to say “einundzwanzig” to me I’d most likely write down the 1 immediately and then put the 2 in front of it, if it’s utmost important to get the number right. This is really common also among the Dutch (they have the same thing) as well.

And one of our most common mistakes when speaking English is saying the number wrong. For example, 85 is pronounced fünfundachtzig, five and eighty, but it would not be uncommon for a German to misspeak in English and say fifty-eight.

I wonder if this has anything to do with what you wrote?