asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: let me know where on this planet I can get some milk w/out Sr-90 in it.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: sure. that grant money won't embezzle itself.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: perhaps we should all switch to hiring bacteria as developers: they don't fall ill, virtually immortal... pinnacle of evolution!
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: "The Colt '45 Health and Life Insurance Corp." ?
asciilifeform: also if your shop relies on 'human compilers,' your soul is damned no matter what.
asciilifeform: eh, no worries, they'll be getting cheaper soon enough.
asciilifeform: sort of like the 'was my CC # stolen?' one.
asciilifeform: somebody ought to put up a site where idiots are encouraged to submit their private keys for 'blessing.' Betcha there'll be thousands of takers.
asciilifeform: that last bit is actually happening over here
asciilifeform: ah, but at present the best infrastructure is the one built for 'persuasion' of the subjects. and liquidation, if required. the king can always import new ones.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: you might as well speak of Soviet laws and courts re: how that country was actually run.
asciilifeform: 'brain' is necessary (though not sufficient) for will.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: modern figureheads have impeccable manners, but none have taken an agrarian shithole from plow to nuke in a few decades.
asciilifeform: the ussr had a rather effective brain until 1953 or so.
asciilifeform: actually a bureaucracy is rather like an organism, in that it can in fact be equipped with a brain.
asciilifeform: if the fellow making 'the offer that can't be refused' had any brains, he'd write the script for Gavin, rather than letting him mouth off ad lib.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: it remains to be seen whether the userbase can be hijacked along with the 'official' project source.
asciilifeform: if the pwners of TOR were ready to ditch the deniability of their operation, they could have fed the same exploit to every chump connected to every exit node.
asciilifeform: Kleeck_: that was the payload. nothing to do with the actual compromise
asciilifeform: the gestapo probably got the login creds from a stoolie
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: nothing happened that would have required pwning the network. What we got was a perfectly-ordinary server compromise.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: there are quite a few serious problems with TOR, possibly including most of the nodes being NSA-owned. But last week's events had nothing to do with this.
asciilifeform: TOR is fairly secure against people who aren't its pwners.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: think of the gap between how the average fighting man lived in peacetime (lenin's cabin, etc) and the wartime conditions
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: do you know of any time or place where a revolutionary army successfully formed from people who had to forsake air conditioning and 'x box' ?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the edifice survives because the clever people over here are, by and large, well-fed.
asciilifeform: also was no one awake in the '90s? used to be that it was generally understood that if you put plaintext over the wire, someone, somewhere will read it. if only a bored sysop.
asciilifeform: now, somewhere in the bureaucratic jungle there still live a few old-timers who wish they could grab people and wire them to the mains to get the truth, etc. this must be so, or the whole edifice would've collapsed already.
asciilifeform: but no, the wankers send him nasty letters instead.
asciilifeform: take mr. levison's wife, dog, cat, whatever, hold them hostage while he dutifully operates his honeypot
asciilifeform: the 'lavabit' affair is hilarious. just think of how the kgb (or any other 'golden age' secret police) would've handled it
asciilifeform: see the now-famous 'TOR incident' as an obvious example. what does one need to have in place of a brain to rely on a winblows box for 'anonymous' naughties?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: cargo cult security isn't just for idiot bureaucrats
asciilifeform: way to go mr. s, tell the whole planet which lame web based email you used...
asciilifeform: wonder if anyone's though to combine a MMORPG and an altchain
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: your game is so massive, you could probably stuff a proper blockchain node in there, and no one would notice.
asciilifeform: if I were the author of the game, and struck with an inexplicable fit of compassion for noobs, I would pop up a dialog showing the user's BTC balance if the binary detects a running bitcoind on the box, saying "boo"
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: that's what I'll be doing
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: nah, the solution is to buy popcorn
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: yeah, but how many realize that they ought to?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: your Dr. Evil mountain vault is safe. I'm talking about 'normal people' and their humble toilet-in-the-kitchen linux boxen.
asciilifeform: pankkake: presumably you do at times enter the password.
asciilifeform: pankkake: an encrypted wallet does you little good when your machine is rooted and all keystrokes are logged.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: think of all the fools that will run it on their bitcoind box.