Not really - FINRA has issued guidance for those trying to stay legal; the government has made some high-profile arrests; the FBI has confiscated individual wallets through physical seizure of the machines they lived on. But overall, the government hasn't done (and realistically, can't do) a damned thing to substantially interfere with the core functionality of BitCoin.
Sure, they could impose some draconian "death penalty for using or posessing BTC or any of its associated software", but even that would only apply to those under US jurisdiction, and the system itself would keep chugging away merrily.
The way it's done with my bank is that you set a phrase that only you know, which is displayed when the page is spawned.
Bruce Schneier (IIRC) described the obvious hack for that the day Visa came out with it...
The attacker (whether a fake merchant, or a MitM) waits for a request for you to verify your identity. It then presents your information to the real site (keep in mind the attacker builds this connection, so encryption doesn't mean a damned thing). The real site responds with your known prompt-phrase, so you "know it's legit". Attacker then prompts you with that phrase, and waits (and records) your response. Attacker passes your response on to the bank, and the transaction goes through successfully.
Except, that the attacker now has everything he needs to produce as many fraudulent charges as he wants.
Great question! I had wondered about this myself - How does C&P really make the card more secure if you still basically just need a photocopy of it to use it? Or do they have an entirely different mode of operation when used online (like easy generation of disposable one-use card numbers)?
Not that it matters - US vendors will fight this to the bitter end. I already have cards with a chip in them (not sure about the "pin" part, since I certainly don't know any pin to use with them), one of which I've had for over five years. And I have *never* found a merchant that it works in any mode other than "swipe and sign". My local supermarket actually has readers compatible with them - And have intentionally disabled that feature because it "confuses" people - Damned straight, it confuses people! It confuses the hell out of me that you've intentionally made your readers insecure, and that after a major breach a few years ago!
Fuck the PCI, and fuck merchants. Give me security or pay me real penalty-money when your latest data breach results in my identity getting stolen. None of this "$50 maximum liability" bullshit - You lose my identity, BAM, $100k in my pocket. Anything less, and we'll keep hearing about the latest record-breaking breach-of-the-week.
That xkcd is just more of the recent bullshit Randall has started putting out lately
July 17, 2009 counts as "lately"?
I'll agree with you that every now and then, Randal seems to toss a turd directly at his core fanbase; but that hasn't really changed or gotten noticeably worse over time.
Most of the time, I just excuse it as a failed attempt at self-debasing humor and move on to the next comic - In many of his "preachy" ones like #610, he explicitly makes a point of including himself among the set of people guilty of whatever trait he has bashed.
I stopped using GOTO when I moved beyond GW-Basic some 25 years ago. And I've used plain ol' C for the majority of the code I've written in my life. And yes, FWIW, I've written firmware - Low-level coding, unless done in assembly, doesn't give you a pass on flagrantly breaking the built-in flow control devices of a language.
If you need to resort to a GOTO, you did something wrong before you ever typed your first "#include...". Simple as that. Yes, you can defend various uses of it, and no, most of them probably don't merit invoking Dijkstra's Wrath. Most of them don't count as outright harmful, just unneccessary. But for every use case you can come up with, I can give you a non-GOTO way of handling every... single... one. As I mentioned, I've re-written plenty of code to remove the GOTOs from it. You just don't need them, period.
The more copies you make of a block of code, the higher the probability that you'll miss one of them when you later have to modify that block of code.
Not sure what you mean by "copies" - In that example, you have only a single cleanup section, in the calling function rather than in the called function - You've basically split the problematic code into two pieces to let the stack itself unwind most of the problem naturally, rather than needing to jump around to various no-context error handling blocks.
Assuming we don't write this in a language with some variant of either "using" or "finally" syntax... You still have two alternatives in cases where you have cleanup that needs to occur unconditionally.
The first (which I often opt for, myself) - Put it in the caller:
foo = BuildUpFragileStatefulStuff();
result = myEasilyBrokenHugeBlockOfConditions(foo);
if(result==OhShit) {foo.unwind(); foo.cleanup(); foo.bar(); foo.close(); foo.dispose(); foo=null;}
And the second, for when you have lot of cleanup - Put it in its own function:
foo = BuildUpFragileStatefulStuff(); ...
if(ThisCondition==BadMojo) return(UnFuckify(foo));
I really cannot think of a scenario where one of those leads to less clarity or more redundancy than replacing them with "Goto OhShit"
How many levels of nested if blocks are you willing to tolerate solely in the name of avoiding a single use of the keyword goto?
If GOTO would actually alleviate that problem for you - You've already done something very, very wrong.
I have written a lot of code in my life - Thousands of projects, millions of lines of code (for whatever that means), across a dozen languages and twice as many platforms. And outside Assembly (and DOS batch, if you want to count that as a "language"), I have not ever encountered a situation where I thought to myself "gee, I could really improve this with a GOTO, if only everyone wouldn't laugh at me for it".
I have, however, removed some pretty heinous uses of GOTO from other people's code. The most common one I see, people can't quite bring themselves to "return" from an error handler in the middle of a function, so they instead GOTO the end of it. Really??? Talk about missing the forest for the trees!
I don't think I would so much call GOTO "harmful", so much as "completely unnecessary in any modern language".
Although we may agree on the need for less porous borders, the CDC actually has solid data on the causes of outbreaks like the current one. And, they don't typically start with "foreign invaders" - They start with unvaccinated legal US citizens going on vacation and coming back infected.
So yeah, idiots choosing not to vaccinate, whether because Jenny or Jesus said so, do count as the entire problem.
Ah, I've figured out where we diverged in our discussion - You refer to a secret law, whereas I only meant secret warrants.
In that case, I suppose you have a valid argument, but still, kinda tough to enforce secret laws - When Google gets an NSL, as its very first step it would have its army of lawyers decide the legality of the order. If its lawyers don't know about secret law X that compels a company to lie, they would advise Larry and Sergey to use it as toilet paper.
So even if that order held up in court (though, how do they find a prosecutor and defender who know the law well enough to debate it?), we would have heard about it already from the first few companies who told FISA to go pound sand. Since we haven't, we can conclude that at least that particular secret law doesn't exist (not to say others don't, of course).
Riiiight. Because it totally makes sense to let all comers string their own wires, bury their own fiber, etc. That doesn't need any regulation at all.
Funny thing about that... I currently use 4G as my primary ISP, because the local cable monopoly decided my town won't make them any money. Not "my town won't let them steal my front yard to run wires", but "no one wants to steal my front yard to run wires". Except, adding insult to injury, I still have my front yard "occupied" by a utility pole, for power lines. Wow, best of both worlds!
So in this case, yes, the market has actually managed to beat the government-sanctioned monopolies in addressing the "last mile" problem, for me at least. Though make no mistake, I don't consider Verizon any better than Comcast - Just a rare example of two once-upon-a-time monopolies in different markets accidentally managing to compete with each other in an otherwise-unexpected ballpark. Make no mistake, I'd give my left nut to have Google offer FTTP in my town, but that detail does more to *make* my point than refute it.
Yeah, I got that part - So what, exactly, stops every non-warrant-receiving hungry young JD fresh out of school from pointing out that the EFF has it (hypothetically) wrong?
The "indistinguishable" part only works under two conditions:
1) They can force people to lie, and
2) Every lawyer in the country has an NSL against them ordering them to lie about point #1.
Otherwise, my original point holds - Organizations the size of the EFF can't just make things up and get away without someone calling them on it.
Ahhh...so you only agree with government regulation when it supports your own agenda...I see.
Force AT&T and Comcast and PG&E to legitimately negotiate for the land they've stolen from my front yard, and we can talk about the merits of "no regulation" vs "undoing damage already done". Until then, don't waste my time setting up some "purist Libertarian" strawman.
Net neutrality counts as a very small step in the right direction. Not because "these are the areas we believe should be regulated", but because we've already "regulated" them into nearly uncontrollable parasitic monopolies.
Unless you mean to suggest that "they" have forced every lawyer in the US to lie to the rest of us, you've missed my point - Those lawyers not under order to lie would call BS on the EFF's claims.
That said, yes, I will grant that if literally everyone had to lie, the results would look indistinguishable. Doesn't make it a very good conspiracy, though, if it includes everyone.:)
As a Libertarian fucktard - I support net neutrality.
Would I have preferred corporate America came to that decision on their own? Sure! And I'll take a unicorn, as long as you have enough for everyone.
Keep in mind, before you go whining about those more fiscally responsible than yourself, that that the very abuses that net neutrality address exist because of government interference - Giving the telecoms local monopoly powers, limited right of eminent domain (an outright abomination in any context), and in many states, flatly banning public competition even in towns (like my own) that won't see cable or DSL until the next infernal ice age because the telecoms have zero interest in serving the "last mile". Not to mention that whole "incorporation" bullshit in the first place.
Rant on, though! Never let facts stand in the way of demonizing your political enemies.
Graphene has the unfortunate property that transistors using it don't actually have an "off" mode - Just a "low" and "high". So although it might give us crazy-fast switching times, it will leak current worse than an XFinity modem. But hey, we all miss the good ol' days of using our P4 gaming rigs as space heaters, right?
Silicene, by comparison, does have a tunable band-gap, meaning that it should get around that limitation of graphene.
Although... if they *could* force us to lie, then they they could just be forcing people at the EFF and canary websites to lie about not being able to force them to lie.
Although these warrants may count as secret, the law itself does not. If the government had forced EFF to lie about this, a million hotshot lawyers fresh out of college would have jumped all over them - Either for making such a rookie error, or ironically enough, flagging that claim as itself a canary.
How about just casting "Imperius"? Unforgivable, or silly?
Does trying to cast "Dominate Monster" on a human count as racism?
If you tried to file a police report for someone threatening to "dispel [you] from existence", they'd laugh you out of the station - Right after they searched you for drugs.
it is teaching that threatening people, whether the threat is credible or not, is highly inappropriate, and won't be tolerated.
Mighty fine world you seem to live in... Can I borrow those cool pink shades?
"Do your homework or you'll fail the test" - Threat.
"Listen to your mother or no dessert" - Threat.
"Obey the speed limit or get a ticket" - Threat.
"Don't kill people or we'll execute you" - Threat.
"Don't threaten people or get suspended" - Threat.
We live in a world full of threats, both implied and explicit. "Don't make them" lacks utility as a lesson, because it presupposes the possibility of a world without consequences.
Learning the difference between credible and silly threats, however, counts as one of the more important life-lessons a kid should pick up - Because some day, they'll need to decide whether their employer really can make them work eighteen hour days, seven days a week; whether Officer Friendly really can search them for no reason; or perhaps most apropos, whether that chain letter really can curse anyone who breaks it.
Ubisoft just taught another generation of paying customers that piracy provides a superior product, regardless of price.
Congrats, Ubi! We haven't had a good DRM fuckup like this in a while - Without all your hard work, people might eventually forget how much it (and you) sucks. Keep up the good work!
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There. FTFY. The government has already meddled.
Not really - FINRA has issued guidance for those trying to stay legal; the government has made some high-profile arrests; the FBI has confiscated individual wallets through physical seizure of the machines they lived on. But overall, the government hasn't done (and realistically, can't do) a damned thing to substantially interfere with the core functionality of BitCoin.
Sure, they could impose some draconian "death penalty for using or posessing BTC or any of its associated software", but even that would only apply to those under US jurisdiction, and the system itself would keep chugging away merrily.
The way it's done with my bank is that you set a phrase that only you know, which is displayed when the page is spawned.
Bruce Schneier (IIRC) described the obvious hack for that the day Visa came out with it...
The attacker (whether a fake merchant, or a MitM) waits for a request for you to verify your identity. It then presents your information to the real site (keep in mind the attacker builds this connection, so encryption doesn't mean a damned thing). The real site responds with your known prompt-phrase, so you "know it's legit". Attacker then prompts you with that phrase, and waits (and records) your response. Attacker passes your response on to the bank, and the transaction goes through successfully.
Except, that the attacker now has everything he needs to produce as many fraudulent charges as he wants.
Great question! I had wondered about this myself - How does C&P really make the card more secure if you still basically just need a photocopy of it to use it? Or do they have an entirely different mode of operation when used online (like easy generation of disposable one-use card numbers)?
Not that it matters - US vendors will fight this to the bitter end. I already have cards with a chip in them (not sure about the "pin" part, since I certainly don't know any pin to use with them), one of which I've had for over five years. And I have *never* found a merchant that it works in any mode other than "swipe and sign". My local supermarket actually has readers compatible with them - And have intentionally disabled that feature because it "confuses" people - Damned straight, it confuses people! It confuses the hell out of me that you've intentionally made your readers insecure, and that after a major breach a few years ago!
Fuck the PCI, and fuck merchants. Give me security or pay me real penalty-money when your latest data breach results in my identity getting stolen. None of this "$50 maximum liability" bullshit - You lose my identity, BAM, $100k in my pocket. Anything less, and we'll keep hearing about the latest record-breaking breach-of-the-week.
That xkcd is just more of the recent bullshit Randall has started putting out lately
July 17, 2009 counts as "lately"?
I'll agree with you that every now and then, Randal seems to toss a turd directly at his core fanbase; but that hasn't really changed or gotten noticeably worse over time.
Most of the time, I just excuse it as a failed attempt at self-debasing humor and move on to the next comic - In many of his "preachy" ones like #610, he explicitly makes a point of including himself among the set of people guilty of whatever trait he has bashed.
Yes, really.
...". Simple as that. Yes, you can defend various uses of it, and no, most of them probably don't merit invoking Dijkstra's Wrath. Most of them don't count as outright harmful, just unneccessary. But for every use case you can come up with, I can give you a non-GOTO way of handling every... single... one. As I mentioned, I've re-written plenty of code to remove the GOTOs from it. You just don't need them, period.
I stopped using GOTO when I moved beyond GW-Basic some 25 years ago. And I've used plain ol' C for the majority of the code I've written in my life. And yes, FWIW, I've written firmware - Low-level coding, unless done in assembly, doesn't give you a pass on flagrantly breaking the built-in flow control devices of a language.
If you need to resort to a GOTO, you did something wrong before you ever typed your first "#include
The more copies you make of a block of code, the higher the probability that you'll miss one of them when you later have to modify that block of code.
Not sure what you mean by "copies" - In that example, you have only a single cleanup section, in the calling function rather than in the called function - You've basically split the problematic code into two pieces to let the stack itself unwind most of the problem naturally, rather than needing to jump around to various no-context error handling blocks.
Assuming we don't write this in a language with some variant of either "using" or "finally" syntax... You still have two alternatives in cases where you have cleanup that needs to occur unconditionally.
...
The first (which I often opt for, myself) - Put it in the caller:
foo = BuildUpFragileStatefulStuff();
result = myEasilyBrokenHugeBlockOfConditions(foo);
if(result==OhShit) {foo.unwind(); foo.cleanup(); foo.bar(); foo.close(); foo.dispose(); foo=null;}
And the second, for when you have lot of cleanup - Put it in its own function:
foo = BuildUpFragileStatefulStuff();
if(ThisCondition==BadMojo) return(UnFuckify(foo));
I really cannot think of a scenario where one of those leads to less clarity or more redundancy than replacing them with "Goto OhShit"
How many levels of nested if blocks are you willing to tolerate solely in the name of avoiding a single use of the keyword goto?
If GOTO would actually alleviate that problem for you - You've already done something very, very wrong.
I have written a lot of code in my life - Thousands of projects, millions of lines of code (for whatever that means), across a dozen languages and twice as many platforms. And outside Assembly (and DOS batch, if you want to count that as a "language"), I have not ever encountered a situation where I thought to myself "gee, I could really improve this with a GOTO, if only everyone wouldn't laugh at me for it".
I have, however, removed some pretty heinous uses of GOTO from other people's code. The most common one I see, people can't quite bring themselves to "return" from an error handler in the middle of a function, so they instead GOTO the end of it. Really??? Talk about missing the forest for the trees!
I don't think I would so much call GOTO "harmful", so much as "completely unnecessary in any modern language".
Flu shot hoax admitted
GMO front man exposed
Mercury still in flu shots
Vaccines sterilize women
CDC scientist confesses to vaccine fraud
But wait! Let's not limit ourselves to just their headlines...
Essential vocabulary for the medical police state descending upon America
Six preventable disorders America has manufactured, perpetuated, and propagated
Tetanus vaccines found spiked with sterilization chemical to carry out race-based genocide against Africans
And my favorite,
Gun-free schools in America now training children as resistance militia forces armed with cans of soup
Great site you've found there, friend! I've added it to my "humor" bookmarks folder!
Although we may agree on the need for less porous borders, the CDC actually has solid data on the causes of outbreaks like the current one. And, they don't typically start with "foreign invaders" - They start with unvaccinated legal US citizens going on vacation and coming back infected.
So yeah, idiots choosing not to vaccinate, whether because Jenny or Jesus said so, do count as the entire problem.
Ah, I've figured out where we diverged in our discussion - You refer to a secret law, whereas I only meant secret warrants.
In that case, I suppose you have a valid argument, but still, kinda tough to enforce secret laws - When Google gets an NSL, as its very first step it would have its army of lawyers decide the legality of the order. If its lawyers don't know about secret law X that compels a company to lie, they would advise Larry and Sergey to use it as toilet paper.
So even if that order held up in court (though, how do they find a prosecutor and defender who know the law well enough to debate it?), we would have heard about it already from the first few companies who told FISA to go pound sand. Since we haven't, we can conclude that at least that particular secret law doesn't exist (not to say others don't, of course).
Riiiight. Because it totally makes sense to let all comers string their own wires, bury their own fiber, etc. That doesn't need any regulation at all.
Funny thing about that... I currently use 4G as my primary ISP, because the local cable monopoly decided my town won't make them any money. Not "my town won't let them steal my front yard to run wires", but "no one wants to steal my front yard to run wires". Except, adding insult to injury, I still have my front yard "occupied" by a utility pole, for power lines. Wow, best of both worlds!
So in this case, yes, the market has actually managed to beat the government-sanctioned monopolies in addressing the "last mile" problem, for me at least. Though make no mistake, I don't consider Verizon any better than Comcast - Just a rare example of two once-upon-a-time monopolies in different markets accidentally managing to compete with each other in an otherwise-unexpected ballpark. Make no mistake, I'd give my left nut to have Google offer FTTP in my town, but that detail does more to *make* my point than refute it.
Yeah, I got that part - So what, exactly, stops every non-warrant-receiving hungry young JD fresh out of school from pointing out that the EFF has it (hypothetically) wrong?
The "indistinguishable" part only works under two conditions:
1) They can force people to lie, and
2) Every lawyer in the country has an NSL against them ordering them to lie about point #1.
Otherwise, my original point holds - Organizations the size of the EFF can't just make things up and get away without someone calling them on it.
Ahhh...so you only agree with government regulation when it supports your own agenda...I see.
Force AT&T and Comcast and PG&E to legitimately negotiate for the land they've stolen from my front yard, and we can talk about the merits of "no regulation" vs "undoing damage already done". Until then, don't waste my time setting up some "purist Libertarian" strawman.
Net neutrality counts as a very small step in the right direction. Not because "these are the areas we believe should be regulated", but because we've already "regulated" them into nearly uncontrollable parasitic monopolies.
Unless you mean to suggest that "they" have forced every lawyer in the US to lie to the rest of us, you've missed my point - Those lawyers not under order to lie would call BS on the EFF's claims.
:)
That said, yes, I will grant that if literally everyone had to lie, the results would look indistinguishable. Doesn't make it a very good conspiracy, though, if it includes everyone.
As a Libertarian fucktard - I support net neutrality.
Would I have preferred corporate America came to that decision on their own? Sure! And I'll take a unicorn, as long as you have enough for everyone.
Keep in mind, before you go whining about those more fiscally responsible than yourself, that that the very abuses that net neutrality address exist because of government interference - Giving the telecoms local monopoly powers, limited right of eminent domain (an outright abomination in any context), and in many states, flatly banning public competition even in towns (like my own) that won't see cable or DSL until the next infernal ice age because the telecoms have zero interest in serving the "last mile". Not to mention that whole "incorporation" bullshit in the first place.
Rant on, though! Never let facts stand in the way of demonizing your political enemies.
Graphene has the unfortunate property that transistors using it don't actually have an "off" mode - Just a "low" and "high". So although it might give us crazy-fast switching times, it will leak current worse than an XFinity modem. But hey, we all miss the good ol' days of using our P4 gaming rigs as space heaters, right?
Silicene, by comparison, does have a tunable band-gap, meaning that it should get around that limitation of graphene.
Although... if they *could* force us to lie, then they they could just be forcing people at the EFF and canary websites to lie about not being able to force them to lie.
Although these warrants may count as secret, the law itself does not. If the government had forced EFF to lie about this, a million hotshot lawyers fresh out of college would have jumped all over them - Either for making such a rookie error, or ironically enough, flagging that claim as itself a canary.
or dispel someone from existence
How about just casting "Imperius"? Unforgivable, or silly?
Does trying to cast "Dominate Monster" on a human count as racism?
If you tried to file a police report for someone threatening to "dispel [you] from existence", they'd laugh you out of the station - Right after they searched you for drugs.
it is teaching that threatening people, whether the threat is credible or not, is highly inappropriate, and won't be tolerated.
Mighty fine world you seem to live in... Can I borrow those cool pink shades?
"Do your homework or you'll fail the test" - Threat.
"Listen to your mother or no dessert" - Threat.
"Obey the speed limit or get a ticket" - Threat.
"Don't kill people or we'll execute you" - Threat.
"Don't threaten people or get suspended" - Threat.
We live in a world full of threats, both implied and explicit. "Don't make them" lacks utility as a lesson, because it presupposes the possibility of a world without consequences.
Learning the difference between credible and silly threats, however, counts as one of the more important life-lessons a kid should pick up - Because some day, they'll need to decide whether their employer really can make them work eighteen hour days, seven days a week; whether Officer Friendly really can search them for no reason; or perhaps most apropos, whether that chain letter really can curse anyone who breaks it.
the school is teaching the kid that threats have consequences.
Credible threats have consequences. Threatening to magically make someone magically vanish lacks credibility.
and a pretty good lesson
"Good" lessons have a point to them. Teaching kids to fear imaginary threats does not.
Or maybe it would be an idea to not buy from the cheapest seller
What a great moral to the story! "Quit price-shopping, assholes - Pay full retail, or we... will... fuck you!"
Glad to see people feel just peach about that.
Simple, really:
Ubisoft just taught another generation of paying customers that piracy provides a superior product, regardless of price.
Congrats, Ubi! We haven't had a good DRM fuckup like this in a while - Without all your hard work, people might eventually forget how much it (and you) sucks. Keep up the good work!
So will the Tesla-haters (other than the self-serving parasites Elon has made obsolete) like this, or hate it even more?
If only I could think of a car analogy to help me decide!
can anyone name any Scientific discipline that has been built on models that have been shown by empirical evidence to be wrong?
Newtonian physics?