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The cover art is a gross error of judgement, and it stops me from buying this book for the next generation of hackers in the wider family.

Adults will understand that the "shush" gesture with the soldering iron is supposed to be a play on the "secret" in the title, but a large part of the target audience is 12-15 years old. There will inevitably be some who'll imitate the picture, with painful results.

If homomorphic encryption is not involved, how does Apple not have access to the raw image data being sent to PCC? (Genuine question)

Counterexample: Public transport throughout Luxembourg (the entire country, not just the capital city) is free. As in beer. Clean, safe, and reliable, too.

The positive "flywheel effect" where transport connectivity enables network effects does exist, but it does not follow that free public transport leads to negative effects.

So a single configuration mistake in a single place wiped out external reachability of a major economy. It happened in the evening local time and should be fixable, modulo cache TTLs, by morning. This will limit the blast radius somewhat.

Still, at this level, brittle infrastructure is a political risk. The internet's famous "routing around damage" isn't quite working here. Should make for an interesting post mortem.

Short answer: No. Apple already caved in advance.

Longer answer: In the UK, Apple already implements age "verification" at the OS level, starting with IOS/IPadOS 26.4. If Apple had not implemented this, it would still be in compliance with UK law. Apple is anticipatorily obedient.

A company like Apple has visibility of the legislative pipeline in its markets. Looks like the UK was a test bed.

Lots of OECD countries, all at the same time, are pushing for online age verification or OS-level age verification, both equally intrusive and implemented in privacy-violating ways by conflating identity verification and age verification.

The end result is not protecttion of minors, but abolishing anonymity on the Internet. Social media companies claim to want the former, but in reality just want to shift liability to OS and device vendors. Governments happily accept the "side effect" of being able to find and root out dissidents.

> but Apple needs to follow UK law

The Online Safety Act does not require device manufacturers to enforce age "verification" at the OS level. If Apple had not implemented this, it would still be in compliance with UK law. Apple is displaying anticipatory obedience here, which is the opposite of good citizenship.

Two things stand out from this fiasco:

1. Apple, and those who praise them for what they just did, don't appear to have learnt from history. Anticipatory obedience used to be known as "vorauseilender Gehorsam" during a particularly dark period in the history of a country a few hundred miles southeast of the UK. It was one of the factors enabling the darkness.

2. The UK is a small enough market for Apple to treat it as a test bed. Which it probably is in this case, and which means that removal of anonymity aka "OS-level age verification" is coming to a lot more devices in a lot more countries soon. See also the uncanny coincidence of lots of OECD countries pushing for online age verification at the same time.

That's exactly where the flaw likely is, on the side of the top surface layer which faces away from you. Air bubble in the plastic, or dust inclusion. If you really want to get to the bottom of it, put a 30x pocket microscope over the spot, you'll see the problem clearly. The bad news: It's neither fixable, nor covered by "dead pixel" / "stuck pixel" warranty policies.

(Source: First hand experience.)

The ID cards as realized in many other countries are comparatively benign, because they are a physical credential in the possession of the person concerned. The government cannot stop this credential from being used except by physically confiscating it or by waiting (years) for it to expire. Distributed storage in action.

The UK's proposal makes the "digital ID" a pointer to an entry in a centralized database. This database is the definitive record of what you are allowed to do or not do (like reside and work). Which can be changed or deleted at the stroke of a key, through human error or malice. Then what?

When (not if) the database becomes an attribute store across a wider scope, the implications are scary. The "digital ID" as set out today can't work for its ostensible purpose. Therefore its actual purpose isn't being declared. Not hard to connect the dots.

It only helps because the chaotic system under consideration has periodic components.

The attractor shown in figure 1e has such periodic components, and identifying these does help, but only with very near term forecasting. When the accumulated forecast error crosses a threshold, it suddenly causes a large phase error, best seen from about point 75 onwards in the x and y components. From that point onwards the forecast is useless.

Yes, you're right. Off by one error on my part caused by concentrating on the bottom half of figure 1a while trying to visualize this and formulating my question.

This is an utterly brilliant hack for dimensionality reduction leading to pattern recognition. That it even beats SVMs (albeit with a single carefully chosen example ;-) is icing on the cake.

One thing I don't understand is the addition of the constant 3 to the row index (in the paper just after formula 6). Intuitively this should be only 2, because the last row vector of the local topology lags the last state captured in the distance matrix by one row, and then we want to move ahead one more row to start forecasting.

What am I missing?

> If I understand the linked chart, there are discontinuities in the <i>marginal</i> tax rate, not the effective tax rate.

True, but they are harsh discontinuities, sufficiently so to have the effects I described. And yes, there is a common combination of personal circumstances (high income plus student loan repayments plus child care subsidies) which means that any gross salary between £100K and £117K means less net income than being on £99,999 gross. I've not been able find a graph for that, but the maths checks out.

The result of this particular combination is to effectively impose a ceiling on many employees at £100K gross, because they would have to receive a greater than 17% pay rise to be better off than before.