log☇︎
265000+ entries in 0.13s
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: care to elaborate?
asciilifeform: wouldn't bet on it
asciilifeform: 1944 level.
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: jurov: correct.
asciilifeform: almost anything else has to be done at the local end - it would leak secret.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: https://factorable.net/keycheck.html tests for some very basic weaknesses. ☟︎☟︎
asciilifeform: btc <-> metals, ok; BTC <-> physical cash; ok; btc <-> electronic fiat: gasenwagen...
asciilifeform: Namworld's troubles support the argument for firewalling one's paper fiat finances away from the BTC world
asciilifeform: every time you think of U.S. politicos, the alien slug attached to the back of your head goes 'mmm, yum.'
asciilifeform: pine is a thing of beauty. i threw out a CRT once with a pine menu burned in...
asciilifeform: gesell: entirely true. 'wear levelling.'
asciilifeform: good mindfuck for the uninitiated: modern HDDs have big fat EEPROMs.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: network card isn't the only thing in there with a ROM, you know.
asciilifeform: all you need to know for the HID trick is what keyboard commands the victim's box responds to.
asciilifeform: the HID stick, on the other hand, works everywhere.
asciilifeform: works great on fully-patched modern winblows.
asciilifeform: http://j00ru.vexillium.org/?p=1272
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: https://www.securepla.net/dont-stick-that-in-there-hid-human-interface-device/
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: and, for that matter, so did most of the Nazi middle management.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: bad example, most of the boring, everyday Germans survived the war.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: quite true, the uniforms and pomp are decorative. think of the 'Zetas' instead. more bang, fewer bucks.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: what leads you to think that they won't be immediately replaced by very similarly-equipped people who can afford gas?
asciilifeform: how do you ask them to 'go away' ?
asciilifeform: remember these fellows? http://original.antiwar.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/923074_10151463429718859_2120246264_n.jpg
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: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57597726-38/silent-circle-follows-lavabit-in-shuttering-encrypted-e-mail/
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: after that it was just a body.
asciilifeform: and a body made of bureaucrats
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: and BTC doesn't use them.
asciilifeform: there are mathematical methods of carrying on a blockchain-like affair without keeping a trawlable ledger of every transaction.
asciilifeform: Menoetius: I've suggested it. And so have many other people.
asciilifeform: like, how exactly is 'end to end encryption' supposed to save you if the enemy controls one of the endpoints
asciilifeform: quite a few people need to go back and learn the basics of crypto before they try to understand a widget like TOR
asciilifeform: dexX7: the 'honeypot-by-design' hypothesis is considerably stronger for TOR than for Bitcoin.
asciilifeform: one can also inject.
asciilifeform: Menoetius: sniffing is only half the fun
asciilifeform: has anybody considered how easy it is to run arbitrarily many doctored TOR exit nodes?
asciilifeform: the general rule is 'once they can, if they can, they will.'
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: standard on certain dell, apple, other machines.
asciilifeform: a la printer cartridges.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: wait till you meet with the laptops having crypto-chipped power bricks.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: if it hadn't been for the edison monopoly, this could have actually happened.
asciilifeform: lose yer brick, go crying back to the vendor like a good consumer.
asciilifeform: 'market economics' !
asciilifeform: turn the freezer off, you get the obvious result
asciilifeform: the u.s. right now is sort of like a slice of meat sitting in a freezer. no flies, bacteria sit and wait, and so on
asciilifeform: like the chechens coming out of the woodwork in post-collapse ussr.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: there won't be 'fight' in the usual sense, more of a one-sided clobbering
asciilifeform: 'human lite' won't fight. and if he did, the results would be comedic.
asciilifeform: or been outdoors for more than a few hrs at a time
asciilifeform: people who have never so much as swung a fist
asciilifeform: they didn't have 'homo sapiens lite' in 1777. or 1917.
asciilifeform: quite a bit smaller then, vs. now
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: mircea_popescu: elaborate
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: rather than just snarfing packets.
asciilifeform: if this weren't the case, the gestapo would have to send an actual physical gasenwagen to round them up
asciilifeform: it is also for script kiddies
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.