My rule: if a company, in any way, forces you, the user, within reason to do anything you don't want to do, or prevent you from doing anything you would want to do, then ditch that company ASAP.
I'm not sure if I would consider tech demos like this state of the art. They look impressive and they do show promise but there's a huge gap between an impressive demo and a usable product. This goes for Google Gemini as well.
Not in my, admittedly limited, experience. I've stayed in hotels in at least a dozen countries and under half of them wanted my passport. In the UK it's usually enough to just say my name to the receptionist, they confirm how long I'm staying, ask me to sign a form and tell them my car registration number and then they hand me the key. Quite often there isn't even a form to sign, just a terminal to enter my car registration number to avoid parking fees.
I was asked for my passport in a Premier Inn this summer because they thought I was a foreigner but when I pointed out that I was a UK citizen they dropped the requirement.
In Europe it was mostly Italy and Poland that wanted to see my passport.
Yeah, it's old-school people control. This said, these days it could be done electronically, without the hotel storing physical information: at check-in, you put your passport in goverment-issued, (hopefully) tamper-proof machines, the hotel confirms length of stay, police server gets the info and that's it; early checkouts, the hotel must notify via some web portal. It would be relatively easy to implement.
But nobody really cares enough to spend money modernising this sort of system.
> This said, these days it could be done electronically
Are you 'avin a laugh mate?
A photocopy of my passport is going nowhere and is shreadded afterwards. An electronic copy..... God lord.
The GDPR also requires data deletion once you no longer need it; physical as well as electronic. This is common sense, and why some organisations don't do this is simply mind boglling.
The whole point is that the hotel would not even get a copy, the machine would just send hashes around and the hotel would only get an anonymous transaction ID to store. It would probably be even more secure than what you have today at the airport.
If you think photocopies kept in some folder accessible to anyone working in the hotel, with a promise to delete it at some point, is "secure" in any way, I don't know what to tell you.
When paper data is breached, the crooks don't steal the paper and put in their own locked file cabinet. They take pictures of the documents and sell the data on the dark web. So the end result is the same.
the will need to take a picture everytime they are lazy but stealing all the people who ever stayed at that hotel is a simple copy past taking less than 10 minutes
Ironically, that would enable tracking much more than the normal case, which is a hotel stores the scans on a hard drive on the closet that nobody every looks at unless they get a subpoena.
That's not what happens in Italy, at least - the documents are scanned and uploaded to a police portal in less than 24h. I expect that's roughly the same elsewhere. (I honestly did not know until today, I just knew the police would come every night to collect copies - good to see some modernization...)
I know, and it's really the trade-off whenever this sort of system is centralized: you can better secure the leafs, but the central repository becomes an even juicier target.
This said, the police already has a database with these info, and it likely is somehow already on the network, so adding an api (if done properly) would not dramatically alter the exposure profile.
I politely refused the data collection a couple times just to confirm my understanding, expecting to trigger some discussion in case I was wrong. But hotel staff was perfectly aware of the applicable local rules and just skipped ahead to explaining the most convenient route to my room. Apparently the general assumption among visitors is that they would not ask if they were not required to collect it.
I just tell them they can look at it but not copy it and that's satisfied them, for now. Sometimes had to get a manager in, but never had them deny me fully. I'm sure sooner or later I'll run into a stubborn one and have to scramble for a day-of replacement hotel, and that just adds to my list of reasons to avoid travel.
If democracy really worked, and your desire to spy on politicians is shared by enough people, supposedly, you should be able to create your own party which has that explicit goal. Maybe find a few other goals, or you will end up like the pirates :-)
I am writing this because I don't think democracy works as advertised.
Well, the "you" now is not the same "you" 10 minutes from now. The only thing the new "you" inherits is your code, but otherwise it could be a different person. So in a way we are code too.
When my system starts using swap space, I've already given up all hopes of a decently running system, so IMHO this particular "bug" doesn't matter much.
I'm being downvoted, but honestly, is anyone always testing their software while swap is active?
> When we first came up with the puzzle we also saw that the latest models could be given a single prompt and, in 30 minutes or less, come up with the final solution
The entire iOS/MacOS schism already says enough.
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