Was it needed in 1979?, only ones I could guess who needed that kind of cryptodisk software would have been governments at most?
Corporations need it too. Especially larger ones. Keep in mind that the famous Enigma machines of WW2 were derived from commercial crypto hardware developed for the commercial market, so that corporate headquarters could have secure communications with regional offices, people negotiating contracts at remote locations, etc.
Because there are probably known vulnerabilities actively being exploited by government agencies that they were told not to fix.
The TrueCrypt project is not dead, it is open source. It merely has lost its original developers.
An audit of the source code is underway. They are using the source for the last full featured create/read/write version released prior to the current read-only version. I believe they have confirmed the source matches the public binaries and that there are no backdoors. They are currently studying it for vulnerabilities and exploits. When they are finished this audited source code will provide that basis for continued work on the project.
Amazon's continued use is a good sign. Perhaps Amazon and other interested commercial entities will support future work on the project. Much like various commercial entities support the majority of the work on the Linux kernel.
A bitcoin is an entry in a financial ledger. A ledger that is open and transparent and verified by multiple independent (hopefully) parties.
A bitcoin wallet that a particular person may posses never contains any bitcoins. What it does contain is the digital signature that allows bitcoins associated with a particular account in the ledger to be transferred to another account.
I've seen a reasonable number of announcements regarding accepting Bitcoins, but am still looking for a good case where it accounts for a significant proportion of someone's business. People either seem never to report the numbers, or only those with relatively poor Bitcoin numbers report them.
To be honest most of the large merchants/service providers announcing that they accept Bitcoins never actually see a bitcoin. They contract merchant services where a bitcoin exchange acts as an intermediary that converts the price to bitcoins, accepts bitcoins and then pays the merchant in the currency the original price was stated in. And they pay the exact amount originally stated regardless of any bitcoin fluctuations.
All accepting bitcoins means for most of these merchants is that they work with a different payment processor, say Coinbase rather than VISA. The merchant still prices, receives payments and does all their accounting in dollars, euros, etc.
So you can't quite fly to Galt's Gulch to your newly Bitcoiin-purchased real estate without switching currencies.
For Christ's sake, stop hijacking the story and trying to show off your cleverness, especially if your snarky comment could've been written better by a ten-year old. A slow ten-year old at that.
The editor comments are generated by algorithms. The site beta tests algorithms for future Turing tests.:-)
Bitcoin lost 11.6% of its value this week ...
on
Expedia To Accept Bitcoin
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Unfortunately, American regulatory practices mean that for the foreseeable future, businesses will convert Bitcoin to cash as soon as they get it, and deposit it into ordinary bank accounts. As long as that goes on, Bitcoin will not fulfill its promise: keeping cash flow untaxable, allowing people to hold on to their hard-earned income instead of the state taking it away from them at gunpoint.
Its not American regulatory practices, i.e. the recent IRS advisory about virtual currency being an asset not a currency. It is, and has been since before the IRS spoke, bitcoins volatility that causes merchants not to **hold** bitcoins.
Also, merchants don't have to convert bitcoins to fiat currency. They may never even touch or see a bitcoin. Various bitcoin exchanges have merchant services where the merchant tells the exchange the price in fiat currency and the exchange calculate the equivalent number of bitcoins to display to the customer, provides an exchange payment address, and when bitcoins are received at this address the exchange credits the merchant's account the exact fiat currency amount they originally stated regardless of any bitcoin fluctuations. The merchant does all its pricing and accounting in fiat currency and receives the exact correct payment in fiat currency. It merely receives the payment from a 3rd party, the exchange rather than directly from the customer.
Again, all of this was in place **before** the IRS advisory. It was due to bit coin's price volatility, which continues today. This week bitcoin lost 11.6% of its value. Bitcoin acts much like an asset, i.e. gold, stocks, etc.
That said, bitcoin is an excellent payment system. It will probably replace paypal and such, put a dent in credit cards, but probably not compete with the US Dollar, the Euro, etc to a large degree. Bitcoin has to become a stable store of value before it can become a serious currency.
And of course if you are a speculator bitcoins have a value there too.
Its not that hard to recover data from a crashed drive most of the time.
Assuming you actually want to recover it. The crash seem to occur about the same time the controversial policy was coming to light and the emails might be considered incriminating. Just a coincidence I'm sure.
Amazing how ineffective these intelligence agencies are when the issue in question goes against the absolute power agenda...
What makes you think the intelligence agencies are ineffective? They are effectively using the missing emails to ensure future IRS/administration/political-party cooperation.:-)
I'd love to see what she would say to a taxpayer "losing" 2 years of receipts during an audit.
Its better than that. Imagine if you only lost the receipts that were of interest to the IRS, that you still have many receipts that they are not interested in.
From the article:
"Camp's office said the missing emails are mainly ones to and from people outside the IRS, "such as the White House, Treasury, Department of Justice, FEC, or Democrat offices.""
Can we just have a flat tax (that phases in at the poverty line, not literally flat) and no deductions? Then the IRS can be scaled down to a small fraction of its current size and have very little power, no deduction no power to interpret things. As an added bonus it removes a major source of political corruption, the creating of those deductions for influential constituents.
Interestingly the Brat upset over Cantor in Virginia demonstrates the point, its votes not money that controls politics. Brat spent around $100,000 in this congressional primary campaign. The key to change is educating and motivating voters.
An API that a whole lot of software can be compiled for. Having these apps and utilities from day 1 can be quite important.
... a machine with a nonvolatile memory system makes the idea of a filesystem delusional...
The file system is a metaphor from the app and utility code's perspective. They don't real care if data is stored on platters or in RAM and when stored in RAM there still needs to be some method of organization. So the new machine has a persistent RAM disk, the existing filesystem code will still be useful.
Again, I'm referring to v1.0.0. Further improvements and customization for the new architecture can take place in later versions.
What's the point of running *nix on it? If the architecture is so much different that they have to rewrite tons of OS code to support it, why not just build their own?
*nix is the fastest path to a stable and highly usable platform. Only a small portion of *nix interfaces with the architecture. They only have to rewrite that small portion.
Plus with *nix you have a rather large base of application software to run as well.
That said, could other parts of *nix or apps be reworked to take advantage of the architecture, possibly. But such efforts do not need to be part of v1.0.0. They can be part of subsequent versions if and when profiling indicates an issue or opportunity.
People don't buy the highest performing video cards for gaming, they buy them mining virtual currency.
Keep that in mind when you see that great price for a used high end card. The card probably ran for an extended period of time over clocked to just under its "melting point" and just got replaced by an ASIC miner.
Best calculus book ever was Calculus Made Easy. It really makes the subject as clear as possible. Everything since is filler.
"Thus [integral symbol] dx means the sum of all the little bits of x; or [integral symbol] dt means the sum of all the little bits of t. Ordinary mathematicians call this symbol “the integral of.” Now any fool can see that if x is considered as made up of a lot of little bits, each of which is called dx, if you add them all up together you get the sum of all the dx’s, (which is the same thing as the whole of x). The word “integral” simply means “the whole.”"
I may have to revise my earlier statement that a good freshman calculus text can last decades. This book may demonstrate that one can last over a century (1910 publication date).
In the 90s I was visiting an uncle and we were chatting while he was doing something in the garage. I noticed some old books and checked them out, they were his university textbooks from the mid 50s. I was surprised at how small his freshman calculus text was compared to mine. It was very concise and it did not contain all the fluffy graphics and sidebars. Just necessary graphs and charts and illustrations to supplement the core lessons. Occasionally there was a paragraph or two demonstrating a practical application.
I don't think textbook getting worse is a new phenomena.
That said, I recognize that things can vary from subject to subject, freshman calc probably being a subject where a good textbook could last for decades.
South Africa, welcome to ridiculously marked up pdfs of textbooks, no way to "sell back" or "buy used," and licensing/broken device issues. Enjoy!
What "sell back" or "buy used"? K-12 schools seem to buy books and use them year after year until they disintegrate, well at least that was my experience.
The K-12 book market is very different than the college book market.
Well, mostly because pretty much everything he has announced has been admitted to be true. I don't think I've seen any stories with Snowden-released information where it was disproven, although I could be wrong on that.
That is normal in deception campaigns. Release accurate information to build credibility so that the eventual strategic deception will be more likely to be believed. Don't read too much into past info being true, remain skeptical of each and every new piece of info when dealing intelligence agencies and people involved in that world.
For example in WW2 the British double agent Joan Pujol Garcia, "Garbo", had sent real info to the Germans for a while. This culminated with actually sending the Germans real info about the Normandy invasion immediately before the invasion, about 3am - as paratroopers were landing but several hours before the 6am beach invasion, too late for the German's to decode, process and use the info. However this solidified his credibility with the Germans with respect to having high level access to information, it was confirmed that he transmitted hours before the invasion. Then a couple of days later he sent info that the Normandy landing was a diversion and that the main forces were still in England getting ready to land at the Pas de Calais. Mr Garcia is credited with keeping 2 armored divisions and over 12 infantry divisions out of the battle at Normandy. Sending true information was key to the eventual big deception.
It is not impossible to break the entrenched system. The vast majority of voters simply do not want to break the system. The voters really do have the power, however they toss it away with things like party loyalty. If you are loyal to a party then your party can ignore you since they have your vote and the other party can ignore you because your vote is not attainable. Only when the vast majority of voters are not loyal to their party, when they will vote for a candidate not a party, will their be politicians who are truly responsive to the voters.
You are wrong. As long as it is one person on vote it is a democracy. Don't confuse voters not caring with party control. Voters could toss out any politician **if** they cared to. The sad fact is that voters do not care to. In part because voters choose to be loyal to their party, not because the party has any control. The party merely whispers the right things into their ears.
My bank's website generates temporary credit card numbers. These temps lock to the first vendor to use them and I can specify a dollar limit. I only use these temps on the web. I doubt someone calling in with one of these numbers will get very far.
it's 2 billion less taxes, or roughly 1.3 billion. if the actual value of the team is 2 billion market. then a private conversation cost him 600+million... that's what's inadequate.
Except that if its a forced sale then he pays no taxes. Forcing him to sell is a $600M gift.
Slashdot Mirror
Was it needed in 1979?, only ones I could guess who needed that kind of cryptodisk software would have been governments at most?
Corporations need it too. Especially larger ones. Keep in mind that the famous Enigma machines of WW2 were derived from commercial crypto hardware developed for the commercial market, so that corporate headquarters could have secure communications with regional offices, people negotiating contracts at remote locations, etc.
A lot of espionage is industrial in nature.
Because there are probably known vulnerabilities actively being exploited by government agencies that they were told not to fix.
The TrueCrypt project is not dead, it is open source. It merely has lost its original developers.
An audit of the source code is underway. They are using the source for the last full featured create/read/write version released prior to the current read-only version. I believe they have confirmed the source matches the public binaries and that there are no backdoors. They are currently studying it for vulnerabilities and exploits. When they are finished this audited source code will provide that basis for continued work on the project.
Amazon's continued use is a good sign. Perhaps Amazon and other interested commercial entities will support future work on the project. Much like various commercial entities support the majority of the work on the Linux kernel.
WTF is a "Bitcoiin" anyway?
A bitcoin is an entry in a financial ledger. A ledger that is open and transparent and verified by multiple independent (hopefully) parties.
A bitcoin wallet that a particular person may posses never contains any bitcoins. What it does contain is the digital signature that allows bitcoins associated with a particular account in the ledger to be transferred to another account.
I've seen a reasonable number of announcements regarding accepting Bitcoins, but am still looking for a good case where it accounts for a significant proportion of someone's business. People either seem never to report the numbers, or only those with relatively poor Bitcoin numbers report them.
To be honest most of the large merchants/service providers announcing that they accept Bitcoins never actually see a bitcoin. They contract merchant services where a bitcoin exchange acts as an intermediary that converts the price to bitcoins, accepts bitcoins and then pays the merchant in the currency the original price was stated in. And they pay the exact amount originally stated regardless of any bitcoin fluctuations.
All accepting bitcoins means for most of these merchants is that they work with a different payment processor, say Coinbase rather than VISA. The merchant still prices, receives payments and does all their accounting in dollars, euros, etc.
So you can't quite fly to Galt's Gulch to your newly Bitcoiin-purchased real estate without switching currencies.
For Christ's sake, stop hijacking the story and trying to show off your cleverness, especially if your snarky comment could've been written better by a ten-year old. A slow ten-year old at that.
The editor comments are generated by algorithms. The site beta tests algorithms for future Turing tests. :-)
Unfortunately, American regulatory practices mean that for the foreseeable future, businesses will convert Bitcoin to cash as soon as they get it, and deposit it into ordinary bank accounts. As long as that goes on, Bitcoin will not fulfill its promise: keeping cash flow untaxable, allowing people to hold on to their hard-earned income instead of the state taking it away from them at gunpoint.
Its not American regulatory practices, i.e. the recent IRS advisory about virtual currency being an asset not a currency. It is, and has been since before the IRS spoke, bitcoins volatility that causes merchants not to **hold** bitcoins.
Also, merchants don't have to convert bitcoins to fiat currency. They may never even touch or see a bitcoin. Various bitcoin exchanges have merchant services where the merchant tells the exchange the price in fiat currency and the exchange calculate the equivalent number of bitcoins to display to the customer, provides an exchange payment address, and when bitcoins are received at this address the exchange credits the merchant's account the exact fiat currency amount they originally stated regardless of any bitcoin fluctuations. The merchant does all its pricing and accounting in fiat currency and receives the exact correct payment in fiat currency. It merely receives the payment from a 3rd party, the exchange rather than directly from the customer.
Again, all of this was in place **before** the IRS advisory. It was due to bit coin's price volatility, which continues today. This week bitcoin lost 11.6% of its value. Bitcoin acts much like an asset, i.e. gold, stocks, etc.
That said, bitcoin is an excellent payment system. It will probably replace paypal and such, put a dent in credit cards, but probably not compete with the US Dollar, the Euro, etc to a large degree. Bitcoin has to become a stable store of value before it can become a serious currency.
And of course if you are a speculator bitcoins have a value there too.
Its not that hard to recover data from a crashed drive most of the time.
Assuming you actually want to recover it. The crash seem to occur about the same time the controversial policy was coming to light and the emails might be considered incriminating. Just a coincidence I'm sure.
I work for a large law firm.
So your emails are protected by attorney/client privilege and are not subject to discovery?
Amazing how ineffective these intelligence agencies are when the issue in question goes against the absolute power agenda...
What makes you think the intelligence agencies are ineffective? They are effectively using the missing emails to ensure future IRS/administration/political-party cooperation. :-)
I'd love to see what she would say to a taxpayer "losing" 2 years of receipts during an audit.
Its better than that. Imagine if you only lost the receipts that were of interest to the IRS, that you still have many receipts that they are not interested in.
From the article:
"Camp's office said the missing emails are mainly ones to and from people outside the IRS, "such as the White House, Treasury, Department of Justice, FEC, or Democrat offices.""
Can we just have a flat tax (that phases in at the poverty line, not literally flat) and no deductions? Then the IRS can be scaled down to a small fraction of its current size and have very little power, no deduction no power to interpret things. As an added bonus it removes a major source of political corruption, the creating of those deductions for influential constituents.
Interestingly the Brat upset over Cantor in Virginia demonstrates the point, its votes not money that controls politics. Brat spent around $100,000 in this congressional primary campaign. The key to change is educating and motivating voters.
That said, I am not endorsing Brat.
... what is left when you remove ...
An API that a whole lot of software can be compiled for. Having these apps and utilities from day 1 can be quite important.
... a machine with a nonvolatile memory system makes the idea of a filesystem delusional ...
The file system is a metaphor from the app and utility code's perspective. They don't real care if data is stored on platters or in RAM and when stored in RAM there still needs to be some method of organization. So the new machine has a persistent RAM disk, the existing filesystem code will still be useful.
Again, I'm referring to v1.0.0. Further improvements and customization for the new architecture can take place in later versions.
What's the point of running *nix on it? If the architecture is so much different that they have to rewrite tons of OS code to support it, why not just build their own?
*nix is the fastest path to a stable and highly usable platform. Only a small portion of *nix interfaces with the architecture. They only have to rewrite that small portion.
Plus with *nix you have a rather large base of application software to run as well.
That said, could other parts of *nix or apps be reworked to take advantage of the architecture, possibly. But such efforts do not need to be part of v1.0.0. They can be part of subsequent versions if and when profiling indicates an issue or opportunity.
So the private sector solves the problem itself? :-)
These cards should have been tested from the perspective of high performance computing or scientific application.
Nah, virtual currency mining. :-)
People don't buy the highest performing video cards for gaming, they buy them mining virtual currency.
Keep that in mind when you see that great price for a used high end card. The card probably ran for an extended period of time over clocked to just under its "melting point" and just got replaced by an ASIC miner.
Best calculus book ever was Calculus Made Easy. It really makes the subject as clear as possible. Everything since is filler.
"Thus [integral symbol] dx means the sum of all the little bits of x; or [integral symbol] dt means the sum of all the little bits of t. Ordinary mathematicians call this symbol “the integral of.” Now any fool can see that if x is considered as made up of a lot of little bits, each of which is called dx, if you add them all up together you get the sum of all the dx’s, (which is the same thing as the whole of x). The word “integral” simply means “the whole.”"
I may have to revise my earlier statement that a good freshman calculus text can last decades. This book may demonstrate that one can last over a century (1910 publication date).
Thanks.
In the 90s I was visiting an uncle and we were chatting while he was doing something in the garage. I noticed some old books and checked them out, they were his university textbooks from the mid 50s. I was surprised at how small his freshman calculus text was compared to mine. It was very concise and it did not contain all the fluffy graphics and sidebars. Just necessary graphs and charts and illustrations to supplement the core lessons. Occasionally there was a paragraph or two demonstrating a practical application.
I don't think textbook getting worse is a new phenomena.
That said, I recognize that things can vary from subject to subject, freshman calc probably being a subject where a good textbook could last for decades.
South Africa, welcome to ridiculously marked up pdfs of textbooks, no way to "sell back" or "buy used," and licensing/broken device issues. Enjoy!
What "sell back" or "buy used"? K-12 schools seem to buy books and use them year after year until they disintegrate, well at least that was my experience.
The K-12 book market is very different than the college book market.
Well, mostly because pretty much everything he has announced has been admitted to be true. I don't think I've seen any stories with Snowden-released information where it was disproven, although I could be wrong on that.
That is normal in deception campaigns. Release accurate information to build credibility so that the eventual strategic deception will be more likely to be believed. Don't read too much into past info being true, remain skeptical of each and every new piece of info when dealing intelligence agencies and people involved in that world.
For example in WW2 the British double agent Joan Pujol Garcia, "Garbo", had sent real info to the Germans for a while. This culminated with actually sending the Germans real info about the Normandy invasion immediately before the invasion, about 3am - as paratroopers were landing but several hours before the 6am beach invasion, too late for the German's to decode, process and use the info. However this solidified his credibility with the Germans with respect to having high level access to information, it was confirmed that he transmitted hours before the invasion. Then a couple of days later he sent info that the Normandy landing was a diversion and that the main forces were still in England getting ready to land at the Pas de Calais. Mr Garcia is credited with keeping 2 armored divisions and over 12 infantry divisions out of the battle at Normandy. Sending true information was key to the eventual big deception.
It is not impossible to break the entrenched system. The vast majority of voters simply do not want to break the system. The voters really do have the power, however they toss it away with things like party loyalty. If you are loyal to a party then your party can ignore you since they have your vote and the other party can ignore you because your vote is not attainable. Only when the vast majority of voters are not loyal to their party, when they will vote for a candidate not a party, will their be politicians who are truly responsive to the voters.
You are wrong. As long as it is one person on vote it is a democracy. Don't confuse voters not caring with party control. Voters could toss out any politician **if** they cared to. The sad fact is that voters do not care to. In part because voters choose to be loyal to their party, not because the party has any control. The party merely whispers the right things into their ears.
My bank's website generates temporary credit card numbers. These temps lock to the first vendor to use them and I can specify a dollar limit. I only use these temps on the web. I doubt someone calling in with one of these numbers will get very far.
it's 2 billion less taxes, or roughly 1.3 billion. if the actual value of the team is 2 billion market. then a private conversation cost him 600+million... that's what's inadequate.
Except that if its a forced sale then he pays no taxes. Forcing him to sell is a $600M gift.
I don't get all of the talk about how this is a reward. He could have sold the team at any time of his choosing.
The reward comes from the IRS, if he claims this is a forced sale then he saves $300M on taxes.