You can also get cheating devices [1] where the edges of all the cards are printed with IR barcodes, then a special camera (concealed in a modified phone or car key fob) can tell you upcoming cards by looking at the edge of the deck.
Of course, you need to convince people to play with your deck of cards first, so you can't just walk into a casino with these things.
Wow what a crazy device! That link led me to Elie Bursztein's youtube channel where he posts all of his defcon talks (or at least a lot of them). They're all really good!
This is the plot device for an actual novel about a detective hired to solve a casino scam. Don't want to completely spoil it, but it's the main plotline.
A more low-tech version of a casino scam was the subject of a 1966 Warren Beatty film called Kaleidoscope. Here the main character broke into a Swiss card manufacturer and marked the plates for the playing card decks used in all the casinos, with marks only visible via 'special' glasses. The technique being discovered, Beatty's character is coerced into participating in a Scotland Yard sting operation targeting an international smuggler with an addiction to gambling. Tedious movie.
The author said most of the scams in his book come from real life, so it's possible someone did it in the past.
James Swain is the author, the series is his "Tony Valentine" books. Not fantastic writing, but packed full of scams and cons if you enjoy that kind of thing.
In Germany, garbage is considered a serious issue. There are various levels and ways of mandatory recycling that need to be implemented by everyone, including private households. For example, depending on the city, paper, "Gelber Sack", organic material, and everything else besides special disposables like for example batteries must be seperated, and compliance may be checked, and fines may be handed out in case of violation. Some people moving to Germany are surprised about how serious it is.
This explains why the garbage was checked, and why it was possible to track down the source.
The garbage companies are burning that stuff because nobody wants to buy it from them. Because often making something by way of recycling uses more resources than the alternative.
Radioactive material messes up certain types of fire detectors, and more advanced detectors detects also when they go outside their working parameters.
A plausible explanation would be that the garbage made some fire detectors in a power plant's loading bay to go offline.
I used to have a friend with a masters in biochemistry. Once he tested a glowstick and determined that the components were completely nontoxic. (He couldn't vouch for all glowsticks, don't try this at home.)
He put each liquid component in a test tube and went out for beers. He poured one tube in a buddy's beer when he wasn't looking, and another in his next beer. Then he went in the restroom and unscrewed the lightbulb.
I think that your friend was pulling your leg. The oxalate esters and hydrogen peroxide in a glow stick shouldn't be ingested, though the actual dye that gets excited to fluorescence would be relatively harmless. I also wouldn't expect the concentrations of active materials to remain high enough in urine for the glow reaction to be noticeable, even if all the chemicals were excreted unchanged.
Plus hydrogen peroxide is not that stable in acidic condition (i.e. your stomach) and your body is fully of peroxidases that catalytically breakdown peroxides quite quickly.
He was referring to the military version, would that be the same?
It would not be surprising if he was pulling my leg, we were a group of practical jokers. And this story made me swear off ever doing anything to him; in retrospect maybe that was the intent.
Yes, military glow sticks use the same basic chemistry: hydrogen peroxide, diphenyl oxalate or analogs, various excitable dyes that actually produce the different colors.
Check out NileRed's video [0] for some great info. He is a young chemist who produces chemistry videos on youtube and goes into detail of things while still being understandable for someone who did well in high school chemistry
I always thought a cool substance to invent would be something that makes methane visible i.e. non-colourless. Sneak it into people's food and see who is trying to break wind discreetly until a large green cloud appears behind them.
I'm having a hard time imagining how this hustle works. With the luminous ink or daub the idea is to see the markings from a distance. Here you would think you'd need to be fairly close with a geiger counter to detect the marking. So maybe it was a self-deal game or the dealer was colluding with the cheat? In that case maybe it's more like peeking with a shiner.
I was similarly curious; I think your guess about "peeking" is reasonable.
Assuming an unsophisticated house that doesn't switch decks, I was also thinking that you could even have a tiny bit of isotope-mixed-substance on one finger and "mark" cards that come into your hand on the back in some magnitude.
If the detector is near your wrist/in your sleeve you might be able to get some approximate magnitudes of various hands/face down cards in your proximity; or as you say, if the dealer was involved/the one doing the cheat it would be even easier since they could "listen" to the cards as they dealt them. You might not even need it to be directional in this case.
I wonder if you could build something to detect gamma rays which it sounds like the iodine emits, into a watch, possibly making use of a PIN photodiode.
Lol oh god, Gary Larson would be proud. Still humor aside I think that you could deploy a partner to be the second point. Still, added complexity and new (albeit less awkward) questions.
There is no definite point, but usually names are usually kept secret until conviction. For people of public interest (e.g. pro soccer player) names can be published earlier. For juvenile criminals names can be made secret even after conviction (including e.g. Google data).
Germany seems to balance personal rights and freedom of press differently, giving more weight to the former.
Coincidentally, the german Grundgesetz starts "Human dignity is inviolable", while the Bill of Rights starts "Congress shall make no law [...religion...] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press".
If the press would be a bit more aware of/sensitive to the damage they are doing to people's lives rather than to chase the money that would be a great thing. For now though the press can hide behind their freedoms in order to gleefully ruin people's lives with abandon.
Good solutions to any problem require consideration of interests, 'unlimited' does harm as well as good and such lack of balance is hard to deal with when you're on the receiving end of it (say as the victim of a false accusation or a crime that eventually leads to acquittal).
Also, those freedoms without limits were made long before the Internet and Google came along and those are game changers. Not to be able to adjust to changing times is a bad thing for any legal system.
It seems that consumers will not punish the press (enough) for transgressions like this. It seems reasonable that law steps in. I'm quite happy how Germany handles it.
interesting question in general about what identifying information is usually shared: apparently age, sex, and occupation are fair game. Race is maybe, name definitely out. Previous criminal arrests are worth noting too.
Really depends on the outlet. Yellow tabloids often release names, ages, and addresses with no regard to people's privacy.
Case in point: www.bz-berlin.de has an article about this case listing the full name of the suspect, the businesses in question and even a picture of one of them. For those who really need to know: She's Vietnamese.
Weird part being that her name is only mentioned because she supposedly gave an interview to the paper (while opening her door..), yet the only quote from her, in the whole article, is "I can't say anything, I don't know anything".
The police explicitly commented that you play with those circular cutouts and confirmed it again after confused questions by users but that could be wrong of course.
The older generation of vietnamese immigrants came due to the german democratic republic siding with communist vietnam because of the vietnam war. The traditional social order is patriarchal, so I would be surprised if the woman in question wasn't a strawpuppet to some extent.
This sort of thing is why I would never play cards for nontrivial money outside a regulated club. It's a lot less likely to happen when the owner stands to lose a license worth millions.
Of course, you need to convince people to play with your deck of cards first, so you can't just walk into a casino with these things.
[1] https://www.elie.net/blog/security/fuller-house-exposing-hig...