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User: pantaril

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Comments · 405

  1. Re:A Great Experiment! on Ecuador To Forge Ahead With State-Backed Digital Currency · · Score: 1

    This is a great experiment that I hope the whole world is watching closely.

    What is so great about it? Isn't it just another government-issued currency?

  2. Try jitsi on Ask Slashdot: Bulletproof Video Conferencing For Alzheimers Home? · · Score: 1

    Jitsi looks realy nice. I want to try it myself when i need videoconferencing later this year. There is also Jitsi videobridge which you can deploy on your server and use Jitsi meet web client to connect to it. Or you can use 3rd party maintained instalation of videobridge available at https://meet.jit.si/

  3. Re:IPv6 routers on Comcast Carrying 1Tbit/s of IPv6 Internet Traffic · · Score: 1

    Can anyone recommend a SOHO-level router that properly supports IPv6?

    If you understand networks and are not afraid to setup your own router from scratch, i recommend mikrotik router boards. For home use, i'd use something like RB951G-2HnD

  4. Re:Advantages? on Comcast Carrying 1Tbit/s of IPv6 Internet Traffic · · Score: 1

    The problem with that is how many home users know how to configure the firewall?

    Probably the same amount who knows how to configure NAT. Fortunately the routers manufacturers usualy take care of the configuration for them.

  5. Re:Advantages? on Comcast Carrying 1Tbit/s of IPv6 Internet Traffic · · Score: 0

    The big advantage is that all my computers are reachable through the internet

    Depending on your point of view, that may also be considered as a down-side.

    With IPv4 you have only one option - hide your network behind nat and be unreachable from internet.
    With IPv6 you can choose between your network being reachable from internet and your network protected by firewall from outside connections.

    I fail to see how IPv6 which gives you more freedom can be considered down-side from any reasonable point of view.

  6. Re:04.10.2010 on Russia Prepares For Internet War Over Malaysian Jet · · Score: 1

    Russia already has a history of, at the very least, being a prime suspect for taking down a plane. The only difference now is that the world is actually watching this show more carefully.

    Our local Czech news reported yesterday about Putin saying that Ukrainian government is responsible for the accident because it happened in their territory. I wonder if it means that he has taken responsibility for all aircraft shootings which happened previously in the russian/soviet territory:)

  7. Re:Anonymity makes sense for special cases. on Pseudonyms Now Allowed On Google+ · · Score: 1

    Whistleblowing, witness protection, for example. For most other cases anonymity degenerates into a cesspool of behavior that is not accepted in normal society. See every unmoderated anonymous internet forum ever.

    We are talking about pseudoanonymity here, not anonymity. And we are talking about moderated discussion. I disagree that it is only usefull in special circumstances. Using real name is big security risk for anyone. Internet is vast and you never know what deranged individual will take interest in your person. If you provide your real name, you are opening yourself to several identity theft related attacks which can be very nasty. This is very old topic which was perfectly explored for example in this article Anonymity and privacy on the network from 1992.

  8. Re:That does it on Researchers Develop New Way To Steal Passwords Using Google Glass · · Score: 1

    Yeah if you had it on all the time and mounted on your face.

    There are no such requirements for this method of password stealing to work.

  9. Re:bitcoins on Banking Fraud Campaign Steals 500k Euros In a Week · · Score: 2

    OMG lets make banks illegal, it is the next bitcoin.

    This story nicely ilustrates that even the old financial system with it's chargebacks and deposit insurances is not imune to scam and theft.

  10. Re:It's just human nature... on Bitcoin Security Endangered By Powerful Mining Pool · · Score: 1

    Not to mention the environmental damage is huge. They use a ton of electricity to basically do nothing...

    They don't do nothing. They try to secure (so far quite successfully) the first and biggest distributed cryptocurrency and payment network.

  11. Re:Bitcoin stopped being distributed a long time a on Bitcoin Security Endangered By Powerful Mining Pool · · Score: 5, Informative

    The original idea was millions of end users running Bitcoin mining as a background job on their CPU. That's totally dead.

    The author of the original idea bets to disagree:

    Long before the network gets anywhere near as large as that, it would be safe
    for users to use Simplified Payment Verification (section 8) to check for
    double spending, which only requires having the chain of block headers, or
    about 12KB per day. Only people trying to create new coins would need to run
    network nodes. At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the
    network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to
    specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would
    only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with
    that one node.

    That is from Satoshi Nakamoto's post from 2008: http://www.mail-archive.com/cr...

  12. Re:Where's the guns to their heads? on Bitcoin Security Endangered By Powerful Mining Pool · · Score: 1

    I believe the issue isn't so much whether one group can counteract another. Rather, it is something happening that the promoters of Bitcoin claim should not happen. It doesn't instill confidence in a crypto currency when what you say is impossible (or extremely improbable) is proven to be false and your only backup is relying on parties to "play fair".

    I see that only bitcoin haters are incorrectly claiming that bitcoin promoters say that 51% attack is impossible. But that is simply untrue. The 51% attack is clearly described in the original whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto in the proof-of-work section and it is well understood by bitcoin enthusiasts. How are we saying that 51% is impossible when we describe it in our core specification?

  13. Re: Fear mongering much? on Bitcoin Security Endangered By Powerful Mining Pool · · Score: 1

    It does have severe ramifications for other crypto currencies. The other crypto currencies are modeled on Bitcoin, with just some parameters different. If Bitcoin can be compromised, this nearly immediately means the other currencies can be compromised as well. The end of Bitcoin would thus also signify the end of most, if not all, other crypto currencies.

    Not all cryptocurrencies use proof of work like bitcoin, some of them use proof of stake, combination of proof of work and proof of stake or maybe some completely different mechanism.

    Yes, other currencies which use proof-of-stake are also vulnerable to 51% attack but this is nothing new, this is a fact known from the beginning, it is explained in the original whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto.

  14. Re:What happens if on Bitcoin Security Endangered By Powerful Mining Pool · · Score: 1

    I wonder what happens if someone with more than enough CPU power to get 99% of the mining jumps in one night. What kind of Damage could they do in a short interval before people notice? What if their goals were not to steal bitcoins but rather to snatch all the coins from, say, Kim Jong Un, or Al Queda. E.g. for example the NSA or Samsung or Saudi arabia. They would not care about the loss of value in their stolen coins, the point is to deprive an adversaries use of them.

    First it is highly improbable that someone with 99% of current hashing power would suddenly emerge out of the blue. He would need pretty big and completely secret hardware factory for making ASIC mining chips.
    Second you can't steal third-party bitcoins even with 51% attack because you don't have control of the private keys necessary to sign the transaction. Only thing you can do is try to double-spend your own bitcoins - craft one fake transactions which sends your coins to merchant than overwrite it with another transaction which sends the money back to your own address.

  15. Re:This is what we've warned you about on Bitcoin Security Endangered By Powerful Mining Pool · · Score: 1

    But all the early-adopters / ponzi-schemers kept insisting that it was impossible.

    No one except trolls like you claims that 51% attack is impossible, on the contrary, the danger of it is explicitly mentioned even in the original bitcoin white paper. Maybe you should read it before spreading misinformations:

    Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote. The majority
    decision is represented by the longest chain, which has the greatest proof-of-work effort invested
    in it. If a majority of CPU power is controlled by honest nodes, the honest chain will grow the
    fastest and outpace any competing chains. To modify a past block, an attacker would have to
    redo the proof-of-work of the block and all blocks after it and then catch up with and surpass the
    work of the honest nodes. We will show later that the probability of a slower attacker catching up
    diminishes exponentially as subsequent blocks are added.

    https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pd...

  16. Re:Restaurants etc. on Credit Card Breach At P.F. Chang's · · Score: 1

    Or, if your in good standing with your bank, don't worry about it. The banks are good about fraudulent charges in the civilized world.

    But who eats the loss? I seriously doubt it's the bank. AFAIK they bill the merchant which means there IS problem (because the merchant will project those chargebacks into the price of his goods).

    The right solution is payment system where you don't give your secret keys when you make a payment. For example bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.

  17. Re:Good on Theater Chain Bans Google Glass · · Score: 1

    If they're banned in enough places, and enough people get their jaws cracked when they insist on wearing them in other places, then it will sink in: a lot of us DON'T FUCKING WANT some asshole recording us in public and putting it online with not even a chance to consent.

    Why is everyone complaining now about visible camera in google glass when secret spy cameras are available for years?
    I think that the loss of privacy is inevitable. Your eyes are basicaly making constant record of your visual input into your brain. It's just matter of time before our brain is enhanced with non-degrading memory able to store photorealistic data forever.
    I can imagine legal regulations which would prevent publication of recordings made withous the subject consent. That would make sense for me. I can't realisticaly imagine how you want to prevent enyone from recording you because you have no chance to find about it.

  18. And there's also the copy from short-term to long-term memory that occurs in your brain when you read an article and actually remember it the next day. Soon they'll be quizzing readers about last-weeks news, and every correct answer means they can charge for the extra copy in your long-term memory.

    This would be yet another principal problem with copyright in the future, when photorealistic 100% accurate memories will be made possible by computer-brain interfaces and silicon data storage implants. Imagine the cinema warnings: "please turn off your digital memory while watching this movie".

  19. Re:Copyright on Virtual DVDs, Revisited · · Score: 1

    no one would create beautiful works which costs tens of millions to make and sometimes hundreds of millions without copyright protecting their work from being stolen and resold by someone else.

    This is bullshit, everyone would create new works if they get money for it. There is no need for copyright, copyright is counterproductive. It actualy seriously limits sharing of information, it wastes money by preventing us from optimaly utilizing our comunication networks and data storage, it wastes money on useless IP lawsuits, it makes works artificialy and needlesly unavailable to large part of our population.

    Artist need money, not copyright. We need to abolish copyright and come up with a system/regulation which will ensure money for creators without artificial limits on distribution of creative content.

  20. Re:Europe is shortsighted; the USA oblivious on The US Vs. Europe: Freedom of Expression Vs. Privacy · · Score: 1

    Equating privacy protection with censorship misses the point. There's an old saying that your right to swing your fist ends at the bridge of my nose. It's not strictly true from a modern legal perspective, but the point that you need to balance many rights and freedoms for everyone is just as valid as it ever was.

    In this particular case people seems to sympathize with the court decision but i wonder if they'd equaly support for example the right for privacy of a politician who would ask google to remove references to articles about his past coruption scandals or other inconvinient facts which are no longer "valid" (because the politician in question was never convicted or because he already served his sentence).

    I see this decision as higly problematic. Even if google removes the references it could be technicaly chalenging to prevent it's search engine to crawl and index the public data again. I think that the right course of action is to determine if the published data were illegal and if yes then remove them from the source web page.

  21. Re:I wish I'd saved that link on UN: Renewables, Nuclear Must Triple To Save Climate · · Score: 1

    We can not afford, on many levels, and do not need: nukes. This has been shown.

    Maybe not for energy production on earth. But how would you propell space craft in deep space or a lander on dark side of the planet? How would you create elements needed in research, medicine etc. which are products of fission reactions?

    I think it is foolish for greens to call for complete abandonment of nuclear technology. We certainly need to research and test it, we need to build specialized reactors for various purposes.

  22. Re:Idiots: on China Cracks Down On Bitcoin, Cuts Off Exchanges' Bank Access · · Score: 1

    Anyone keeping coins in an exchange for any longer than necessary to exchange them is an idiot.

    If nobody kept their coins on the exchange it would be not very usefull because there would be nobody to exchange with.

  23. Re:Well actually he's pretty solidly anti-gun too. on Anti-Game-Violence Legislator Arrested, Faces Gun Trafficking Charges · · Score: 2

    Could we please stop with the endless pro-drug commentary? Not all of us are drug addicts, and it's tiresome when people like yourself have to bring up drug issues in nearly every thread. I know it's important to you, but normal people don't care about such matters.

    If normal people realy don't care about such matters why are the drugs banned? Stop the ban on production and consumption of drugs and i'm sure the "drug addicts" will stop bothering you about it. If you realy don't care about it it should be no problem for you.

  24. Re:how on Operation Wants To Mine 10% of All New Bitcoins · · Score: 2

    How do they know the current value of BitCoin? Who is considered the primary exchange now? Are there any that are considered even remotely trustworthy?

    The value is determined on exchanges by suply and demand. You can use site like bitcoinaverage to get price index based on more exchanges and their volume.

    There is no exchange considered primary at this time. The biggest ones are probably: bitstamp, btc-e, huobi and btcchina.

  25. Re:I admire their spunk, but... on Operation Wants To Mine 10% of All New Bitcoins · · Score: 4, Funny

    When I see how much hardware and electricity is being wasted on these various mining processes, I can only shake my head.

    The hardware and alectricity is no more wasted than hardware and electricity and employees used by your bank to secure your account.

    I'm not sure when BTC is slated to have all of its coins mined, but it will be instructive to see what happens to it at that point.

    The last BTC should be mined sometimes in 2140 but the miners will carry on because they are needed to verify transactions. The'll get their profit from transaction fees.