Shaggar posted:

are you saying you have to weigh every item not just the ones that are priced by weight?

BangersInMyKnickers posted:

I think they have a weight estimate for the item in a database somewhere linked to the upc, and they can probably calculate it dynamically from previous people scanning and bagging the same item

BangersInMyKnickers posted:

I knew a girl in college who was all about shoplifting her rear end off. Came from means, didn't need to, still did it all the time. Loved those early self-checkout systems because it made it so much easier for her

Run through a stack of 3 DVDs at the same time, scanner deactives the alarm thinger on all three but only scans one, inside weight tolerance for the bagging scale

Shame Boy posted:

one of the asks from one of our own executives was if we could figure out a way to either "fix" the scale component to not suck, or disable it altogether but still retain it's anti-theft effects

since i seriously doubt it actually has any anti-theft effects i'm pretty sure we can just disable it and everything will be fine

BangersInMyKnickers posted:

yeah, its a theft control mechanism so you don't run through a stack of the same item but only scan the bottom one or whatever. that's why it yells at you to put the item in your cart and stops you from scanning the next thing

mystes posted:

Sorry, what I wrote was unclear. There are two different things: the scale by the scanner and a weight sensor in the bag area.

When supermarkets have the weight sensor in the bag area activated the whole process is really slow and finicky because you have to put each item on it and weight for it to (presumably) decide if the weight is within some sort of range of a programmed value, but it's very error prone.

If you can just keep the items in the cart and scan it's much, much faster.

mystes posted:

The home depot self-checkout scanners seem like they actually have some way to enter quantity but the interface is insane (there's no UI on the touchscreen and there are zillion unlabelled buttons on the scanner) so I couldn't figure it out the other day and I ended up entering the extremely long barcode for a bolt over and over again by hand (for some reason the barcode wasn't working either).

Shaggar posted:

yeah that thing, but its always off or set to not be so sensitive.

mystes posted:

I think a lot of this stuff is just annoying for normal users without actually stopping shoplifters.

Shame Boy posted:

one of our customers a/b tested other stuff to stop shoplifters that's a lot less inconvenient, and the most effective was just shaming them. like if you have a picture of a person looking them in the eye on your app or checkout koisk or screen or whatever, people shoplift much less even though it's just a picture.

Shame Boy posted:

there's a scale built in to the bagging area that automatically weighs every item as you pass it through. you have to wait for it to finish doing that before you can scan your next item, and if it gets the weight wrong or if your thing doesn't weigh what it expects it flags you and the attendant has to come over and override it, it's real dumb. supposedly it's there to prevent shoplifting but i'm really not sure how the gently caress it's supposed to do that. like are people going to put the stuff they're shoplifting on the scale area to weigh it?

mystes posted:

I honestly wouldn't mind having a person literally watching me over skype or something as long as I could actually get immediate assistance from them when needed.

ewiley posted:

I was at Home Depot checking out at one of these self-service kiosks and the camera had a little display next to it. The display had the camera's feed and also the feed of a dude watching a screen full of cameras.

Shaggar posted:

it should be harder. its too easy for old people to use and they clog up the self checkout lanes.

Volmarias posted:

Target just has a camera + screen attached to their self-checkouts at eye level pointed directly at you with a flashing red text of "RECORDING IN PROGRESS". It's loving dehumanizing and infuriating.

mystes posted:

Also, the idea of devices that you take around the store to prescan stuff (or a smartphone app) is good but in practice stores screw this up by making you wait in the same lines as assholes who get into the self-checkout line with 10,000 things in their cart and then sometimes making you have an employee come over to see if you've actually checked everything.

fishmech posted:

fairway app just lets you use your phone to scan as you shop and then you don't need to be in the regular lines to finalize and pay. p dece

fishmech posted:

fairway app just lets you use your phone to scan as you shop and then you don't need to be in the regular lines to finalize and pay. p dece

quote:

Here's how the new system works, as Apple describes it, step by step:

When you first set up Find My on your Apple devices—and Apple confirmed you do need at least two devices for this feature to work—it generates an unguessable private key that's shared on all those devices via end-to-end encrypted communication so that only those machines possess the key.

Each device also generates a public key. As in other public key encryption setups, this public key can be used to encrypt data such that no one can decrypt it without the corresponding private key, in this case the one stored on all your Apple devices. This is the "beacon" that your devices will broadcast out via Bluetooth to nearby devices.

That public key frequently changes, "rotating" periodically to a new number. Thanks to some mathematical magic, that new number doesn't correlate with previous versions of the public key, but it still retains its ability to encrypt data such that only your devices can decrypt it. Apple refused to say just how often the key rotates. But every time it does, the change makes it that much harder for anyone to use your Bluetooth beacons to track your movements.

Say someone steals your MacBook. Even if the thief carries it around closed and disconnected from the internet, your laptop will emit its rotating public key via Bluetooth. A nearby stranger's iPhone, with no interaction from its owner, will pick up the signal, check its own location, and encrypt that location data using the public key it picked up from the laptop. The public key doesn't contain any identifying information, and since it frequently rotates, the stranger's iPhone can't link the laptop to its prior locations, either.

The stranger's iPhone then uploads two things to Apple's server: the encrypted location, and a hash of the laptop's public key, which will serve as an identifier. Since Apple doesn't have the private key, it can't decrypt the location.

When you want to find your stolen laptop, you turn to your second Apple device—let's say an iPad—which contains both the same private key as the laptop and has generated the same series of rotating public keys. When you tap a button to find your laptop, the iPad uploads the same hash of the public key to Apple as an identifier so that Apple can search through its millions upon millions of stored encrypted locations and find the matching hash. One complicating factor is that iPad's hash of the public key won't be the same as the one from your stolen laptop, since the public key has likely rotated many times since the stranger's iPhone picked it up. Apple didn't quite explain how this works. But Johns Hopkins' Green points out that the iPad could upload a series of hashes of all its previous public keys so that Apple could sort through them to pull out the previous location where the laptop was spotted.

Apple returns the encrypted location of the laptop to your iPad, which can use its private key to decrypt it and tell you the laptop's last known location. Meanwhile, Apple has never seen the decrypted location, and since hashing functions are designed to be irreversible, it can't even use the hashed public keys to collect any information about where the device has been.

Shame Boy posted:

i assume they can adjust it on a per-store basis because i've been to some that are fine and like you describe, and i've been to some that are absurdly sensitive and get mad very easily if you don't carefully put the thing in the right place and make sure its full weight is resting on the sensor thing. now i get to be the person who decides that i guess


one of our customers a/b tested other stuff to stop shoplifters that's a lot less inconvenient, and the most effective was just shaming them. like if you have a picture of a person looking them in the eye on your app or checkout koisk or screen or whatever, people shoplift much less even though it's just a picture.

BIGFOOT EROTICA posted:

Trabisnikof posted:

so im very curious how this is going to play out from apple


that sounds theoretically pretty cool and also potentially full of secfuck

Shaggar posted:

wrt the rotating public key could you take the base private key that they all share and then do like a totp thing to generate a new private key based on time? if all devices generate the second key on the same schedule they should have the same secondary private key which can be used to generate the same public key. that public key could be used to encrypt the data and then when you go to find the device you just need to look back thru ur list of keys to find the matching one.

Subjunctive posted:

“doesn't correlate with previous versions of the public key” is doing some confusing work in that piece

mystes posted:

Doesn't that just mean you can't associate the same phone's public keys from different points in time if you don't have the corresponding private key? Otherwise apple would basically be tracking all phones all the time.

mystes posted:

Doesn't that just mean you can't associate the same phone's public keys from different points in time if you don't have the corresponding private key? Otherwise apple would basically be tracking all phones all the time.

The whole point of this complicated approach seems to be that apple never knows the locations of any phones, even when you use the system to locate them.

Subjunctive posted:

I have no idea what they intend “correlate” to be. neither can be computed from the other? they are not equal?