The guy had a wife and child. If your wife starts saying "Hey you should do this" it's probably hard to say no to her, even if you know it'll result in doom. After all, if you aren't the type who normally cares about or talks about civil liberties it's probably hard to come up with a negative response that doesn't sound fishy as hell.
Do the maths. If the entire world adopted Bitcoin for all transactions, everywhere, tomorrow, then the smallest payment you could make would be for about a dollar. A bit too high for comfort, but then, we're talking about 100% adoption by the entire world. 1 Bitcoin has 8 decimal places. So there's plenty of resolution.
Grow and grow as in usage, not volume of the currency. BTW the speed of issuance is still pretty high. It halves every four years. You can be an early adopter too, if you want. Buy some mining hardware and take part.
I think "Linux on the desktop" is an interesting analogy for Bitcoin, but it's not the only one available. If Bitcoin follows the trajectory of desktop Linux then it will grow and grow until it saturates its niche market, at which point usage will level off. Unable to tackle the challenges needed to advance to the next level, it will become something of a calling card for certain communities but will just be a curiosity to the rest of the world. The underlying ideas or philosophies, though, may have influence out of proportion to its usage (eg, Android being open source was certainly heavily influenced by Googles experiences with Linux).
That's one scenario. Another is that rather than being similar to desktop Linux, Bitcoin is more similar to the web. Bitcoin is about 3 years old, but really it's only more like 2 years old because for the first year it languished in absolute obscurity. If you think back to the internet in the early to late 90s, the net was this technically complicated and intimidating beast. You needed a crazy thing called Trumpet WinSock, and then you needed an ISP (only a few small ones existed) and then you needed even more software and often it just wouldn't work at all, and when it did there was no friendly start page or anything, you just had to know where to go. The de-facto standard for "normal people" was CompuServe and AOL. Movie trailers had AOL keywords at the end, not web addresses.
Despite that the web eventually triumphed and became the standard, replacing the sophisticated and well organized corporations that previously reigned supreme. Why? Well, it was an open and international system where everyone could take part. The protocols were documented, anyone could write software for it. Because it was open that's where the research was taking place. Then the existing institutions started to provide limited forms of web access alongside their walled gardens, lending it legitimacy. It's easy to forget that back then the net was frequently painted as swamped with immoral, degenerate or even illegal activity. In 1995 TIME Magazine ran with a cover story claiming the internet was completely dominated by porn, based on statistics about USENET that later turned out to be completely bogus. Parallels with some contemporary stories around Bitcoin are easy to see.
Anyway, there's no guarantees of success and either scenario is equally likely, IMHO (in the absence of a dystopian crackdown by governments that simply ban any financial system they cannot exert total control over).
If you go to Room 77 in Berlin you can buy burgers and beer with Bitcoins. You pay with your mobile phone. I've done it, it's easy. The guy who runs Room 77 is a huge Bitcoin fan and recently announced that 4 more shops in Berlin are now accepting Bitcoins too.
The new app store is only a problem for those who cannot market. If you were only ever relying on searches finding your app you were pretty well screwed anyway.
Huh? I admit I have no idea what Apple changed in the new app store, but this sentence seems absurd - why is it unreasonable for a developer to expect the search function to allow people to find his app? If his app fulfils a specific need, and the appstore has a search function, it seems like users should be able to find his app and relying on that shouldn't "screw" you. Otherwise why have it?
That is the one area Android has advantage in, quicker releases. But I'm not sure that's a user benefit as much as it is a developer benefit.
Er, developers benefit from quicker releases only if users do. After all, a developer does not need a release on the Play store to use their own app. The only reason to put an update on the market is to address user needs.
The wikipedia page you reference states explicitly that he was acquitted of all charges in the criminal suit (and is therefore NOT a known criminal), and he agreed to be banned from banking to make a civil suit go away. That suit was never resolved, so we don't really have any idea whether he was guilty or not - he might have agreed on the basis that he was tired of defending himself in court and didn't care much for being a banker anyway. Let's face it, settlements in the face of expensive yet questionable government prosecutions are hardly rare, especially in the USA.
The rest of the wild claims you assert aren't supported by any of the wiki pages either. Maybe it's all true but it's impossible to tell from your post. At any rate, it has nothing to do with the fact that DOOMs artwork and level data is still under copyright. If you want to get pissy at somebody about that, go complain to Carmack - he's the one who decided to open source the code but not the game data. Or not: he does a lot more for open source than most game company CEOs do.
Wuala is a service that provides this (cloud storage of client-side encrypted files). The UI is a bit ugly but it works fine. Oh, and at least you used to be able to pay for storage with Bitcoins!
I think that page is wrong, most TPMs do have EKs. Infineons certainly do and IIRC they're the most popular model. However this does not change your point that the DRM use case was never really functional and work on it seems to have been largely abandoned, perhaps due to the staggering complexity involved.
Making DRM work for things like movies was probably always going to be a non-starter on platforms as heterogenous as the PC. To make it work there'd have needed to be not only unbelievably tight synchronization between what are effectively two different operating systems running in parallel (using hardware virtualization) but also trusted paths through to the video and sound chips, that is, you have to be able to encrypt video/audio data to the hardware without the drivers or OS controlling access being able to actually read that data. Then if you want to close the analogue hole the hardware has to enforce that you play audio via some kind of Cinavia like watermarking engine. It's just an incredibly difficult engineering problem and in the end Microsoft (who was driving most of that use case) lost interest and focused on the Xbox 360 instead, which implements basically the same thing but without the need to support lots of random hardware and software combinations, or work with standards bodies. It works a lot better as a result.
Don't be ridiculous. You don't have to modchip your motherboard. The TPM chip is, and always has been, something that provides services to the CPU on demand. It can't control your computer. The computer you're using now probably has one already and it may be used for such nefarious purposes as making disk encryption more secure.
Trusted computing has a needlessly bad rap because of kneejerk reactions like this one. In fact it's a flexible and general tool that can be used for many purposes. For example, you can use it to do sensitive operations on a computer compromised by malware. Games can use it to kick out cheaters. Things get especially interesting when you throw Bitcoin in the mix. It makes feasible autonomous agents, a form of evolutionary AI in which programs maintain their own wallets and rely on trusted computing technologies to protect them from potentially malicious humans who want to steal their money. You can also use it to make sensitive financial platforms like exchanges more secure against hackers. The actual cryptography needed to move money can be done inside the secure world with the root keys being held in the TPM chip. The secure code (PAL) verifies and sanity checks the requested operations. Even if the host machine is completely rooted and starts submitting false orders, it can only submit requests to the secure subsystem, it can't directly steal the money.
Remote attestation is useful any time somebody might want to trade or interact with you but have some assurances around how your computer may behave. DRM was one of the original driving motivations indeed, but even here the way the system works is not "evil" in any sense unless you have a truly warped idea of human relations. The technology lets you prove to some online store that you will follow the rules around using the stuff you're buying - like not simply uploading it to a file sharing network. But if you don't find the terms that store requires acceptable, you just don't shop there: they can't actually force you to run any software or put your computer into any particular state. In other words it lets you prove you are doing what you said you'd do, alternatively, it is designed to make it hard to lie - just a mechanical way to enforce contracts. Unless you're routinely in the habit of defrauding people you enter into contracts with, such a capability should not concern you. And the standards are completely open. You can run such an online store on your own Linux box in your bedroom if you like - there's nothing that tips the playing field in favor of Microsoft or other companies (which is why Bitcoin agents can use it).
Glitching attacks were being used decades ago against satellite TV smartcard chips. Anti-glitching circuitry and techniques are well known, probably the PS3/Xbox360 designers felt that it would never get to that point because nobody had ever successfully defended the security of something as complicated as a full blown computer before. There had always been software exploits (and in the PS3 case it turned out that there were indeed software exploits, they were just very hard to spot).
Given that both Sony and Microsoft were able to defend their platform for most of the consoles lifespan, and Microsoft is in fact still going, I'd be willing to bet that the next generation all have significantly ramped up electronic security systems to defend against glitching attacks.
It can be both ways. If Samsung made it clear to Apple that they would ship them panels only for as long as the contract required them to, and would then terminate the relationship, obviously Apple is going to reduce the size of their orders as fast as possible because transitioning to an alternative supplier takes time and you need to ensure everything runs smoothly with the new factories, etc.
We don't, but if you read the linked article the sort of replies she was getting sound pretty legit. There are two Michael Murphys on LinkedIn working for Amazon in some kind of customer relations role, so that also lends credence.
I work in anti-abuse at Google. This sort of thing happens from time to time. They clearly believe she is an abuser of some kind and for all we know she might be, I've seen plenty of very obviously bad users write public stories before, often about closed AdSense accounts. In fact the article states explicitly that she was buying content from the UK site whilst in another country, perhaps using proxies to bypass geo IP blocking? Stonewalling is standard in these cases because you don't want abusers to figure out how they got caught. On the other hand she can also easily be a false positive. It's often hard to tell from the other end of the screen.
What surprises me about this story is that the account termination results in wiping of her Kindle. This is remarkably severe. I find it hard to believe Amazon would do this without cause. I think it can only be explained by Amazon believing she should not have been able to buy the content on her device in the first place. For instance if she was buying content Amazon is only legally allowed to sell in the UK and they noticed she's actually in Norway, they may feel that if they don't do a remote wipe they'd be liable for breach of contract. This is often the root cause of such apparently bogus action.
That's great but it didn't stop the EU rolling over and handing all financial data for the whole world to the Americans, did it? Search for: TFTP. And it didn't stop the EU rolling over and going along with insane flyer ID manifest requirements for the USA either.
I'm a citizen of the EU and the biggest threat to peoples privacy is government, period. You could say I'm biased by my employer (Google), but to me CNIL seems way out of line and ridiculously out of touch with technology. I didn't get to vote on whether they spend their time on this. If CNIL want to get aggressive about privacy policies then why aren't they ensuring the EU has a policy as straightforward and easy to read as Googles is? Why can't I opt out of having my financial and flight data sent to the USA at the drop of a hat? Why can't I get new government identities as easily as I can get new Google accounts? Why can't I ensure all the data EU governments have on me (all of them) is deleted by pressing a button?
OMG. Undoing moderation in this thread to post more gems from those reviews:
5.0 out of 5 stars. A *must* for Iall computer users!... Companies should be buying this book by the boxload. It will save them a world of aggravation.
If a company wishes to survive in the current environment where predators of all types are everywhere, then they must protect their assets. It only takes one mistake to open the protective dikes and let a person with malicious intent to gain access to important company information..... The twenty points presented are unquestionably those that would be in everyone's top twenty list of actions that the standard employee should perform..... Given the recent virus and terrorist threats, government mandated rules for privacy, and the exponential increase in Internet usage, computer security is rapidly becoming the most serious and dangerous issue faced by many businesses. The solution is to educate all employees in the basics of computer security, which can be done using this book as a resource.
I think we know that there are constant threats to our computer systems. Confidential information can be grabbed from us, and computer viruses can slow down or stop processing, as well as introduce plenty of unwanted material. As Ben Rothke explains, that means that we need to use great caution in downloading (or even "upgrading") software. By the way, you may want to be really careful when you log into any system. Some systems keep track of your login name and this record may be accessable by all sorts of people. If you accidentally type in your password instead of your login name, you really ought to change that password.
Each topic is covered in a double-page spread with about 400 words. That's actually quite a lot for an awareness booklet meaning that some employees may need `gentle persuasion' to read it.
Each chapter is short and to the point. Exactly what a end-user needs. We got 25 copies and saw immediacy in the benefits.
Having read the results of a previous unrelated consulation (on anti-money laundering powers), that unfortunately sounds way too accurate. In that case actually most of the responses were for additional state surveillance and law enforcement powers, largely because it didn't get noticed by any groups like 38 Degrees or ORG so most responders were, eg, regulators, people who run compliance training firms, law enforcement themselves, companies that already paid the huge cost of compliance and wanted competitors to have to pay it too and other organizations that were by and large a part of "the system".
In that case the consultation was triggered because a survey of "government activities that infringe civil liberties and individual freedom" highlighted the oppressive AML regime. Several years later, the results of the consultation concluded that the laws should be made even more intense! The government did get some dissenting submissions (such as mine). However the response was largely along the lines of, "we recognize the highlighted potential for abuse and you can rest assured we will be proportionate and reasonable in our application of these powers". Which is obviously stupid. The whole point for separation and limitation of government powers is you cannot assume reasonability over the long run! But despite that being pointed out they did not understand or care.
Consultation processes do seem like little more than an exercise in box ticking, especially when the consultations are often so obscure or (too often) simply canvassing opinions only from people who stand to directly benefit.
Screw solving the patent system mess, how about not having somebody who believes evolution is a lie in charge of science funding? That seems like a fairly ambitious goal!
I suspect this boils down to inadequate controls on data scraping, ie an API that's meant to surface data for an interactive UI can be scripted to enumerate every possible user and they don't have any automated controls on it.
Only source for this appears to be the Daily Mail, not a publication noted for its accurate reporting. How easy is it to accidentally send a text message to an entire contact list on Blackberries? I've never used a phone that made such a thing possible.
That's incorrect. The codebase uses the term "coin" to refer to a transaction output, ie a discrete unit of value that can be claimed by the holder of a private key. There can be multiple outputs/coins sent to the same address. Internally Bitcoin has almost no notion of balance - the balance you see in your wallet app is merely the sum of unspent outputs.
The US has in the past defined the word "militant" to mean anyone killed by drone strikes, so I'd take any reporting on the proportion of "militant leaders" killed with a gigantic pinch of salt. No, scratch that, I'd just not believe it at all.
Anyway, by definition you can't really prove somebody was guilty of being "a militant" (whatever that means) without safeguards like evidence, a trial and so on, otherwise you really have no idea if they were or weren't. As being blown up remotely offers no such safeguards, there's no way to know who is dying out there, especially as the double-tap strategy means nobody dares go near a strike zone to find out who got killed.
I assume you're also American? You just made the posters point about not being allowed to the grown-ups' table.
The number of Americans who supported the IRA consequence-free is one of the reasons the "war on terror" has made the word American synonymous with hypocrisy.
I believe in one of the Bitcoinica hacks they did in fact figure out who did it and recovered quite a large amount of the money. I don't know the details, I didn't follow that story much. I don't think it involved prosecution. But at any rate, you have switched the argument mid-discussion: the point I made is that you can't say "if somebody robs you of your cash they will face criminal charges". That's just false. I did not claim the prosecution rate for Bitcoin was higher than cash.
Go research it yourself. MtGox is run by Tibanne, Co, a Japanese company and thus falls under Japanese regulations. You can read up on what they entail. Are deposits ensured? I doubt it. MtGox is not a bank and you should not use it as one. The point of Bitcoin is you don't need banks, just withdraw your own money and insure it yourself if you like.
eGold got into trouble because they knew exactly which accounts were engaged in criminal activity (to the extent of having notes against those accounts detailing the type), but did not shut them down. MtGox doesn't make such mistakes, as far as I know, but if they do get into trouble it won't affect me much because *drumroll* I don't use them as a bank, so I have no money to lose there.
Actually it's the merchants problem. If you ever tried to accept credit card payments for something you'd know that. And what makes you think cash thefts are resolved with a 100% prosecution rate?
Slashdot Mirror
The guy had a wife and child. If your wife starts saying "Hey you should do this" it's probably hard to say no to her, even if you know it'll result in doom. After all, if you aren't the type who normally cares about or talks about civil liberties it's probably hard to come up with a negative response that doesn't sound fishy as hell.
Do the maths. If the entire world adopted Bitcoin for all transactions, everywhere, tomorrow, then the smallest payment you could make would be for about a dollar. A bit too high for comfort, but then, we're talking about 100% adoption by the entire world. 1 Bitcoin has 8 decimal places. So there's plenty of resolution.
Grow and grow as in usage, not volume of the currency. BTW the speed of issuance is still pretty high. It halves every four years. You can be an early adopter too, if you want. Buy some mining hardware and take part.
I think "Linux on the desktop" is an interesting analogy for Bitcoin, but it's not the only one available. If Bitcoin follows the trajectory of desktop Linux then it will grow and grow until it saturates its niche market, at which point usage will level off. Unable to tackle the challenges needed to advance to the next level, it will become something of a calling card for certain communities but will just be a curiosity to the rest of the world. The underlying ideas or philosophies, though, may have influence out of proportion to its usage (eg, Android being open source was certainly heavily influenced by Googles experiences with Linux).
That's one scenario. Another is that rather than being similar to desktop Linux, Bitcoin is more similar to the web. Bitcoin is about 3 years old, but really it's only more like 2 years old because for the first year it languished in absolute obscurity. If you think back to the internet in the early to late 90s, the net was this technically complicated and intimidating beast. You needed a crazy thing called Trumpet WinSock, and then you needed an ISP (only a few small ones existed) and then you needed even more software and often it just wouldn't work at all, and when it did there was no friendly start page or anything, you just had to know where to go. The de-facto standard for "normal people" was CompuServe and AOL. Movie trailers had AOL keywords at the end, not web addresses.
Despite that the web eventually triumphed and became the standard, replacing the sophisticated and well organized corporations that previously reigned supreme. Why? Well, it was an open and international system where everyone could take part. The protocols were documented, anyone could write software for it. Because it was open that's where the research was taking place. Then the existing institutions started to provide limited forms of web access alongside their walled gardens, lending it legitimacy. It's easy to forget that back then the net was frequently painted as swamped with immoral, degenerate or even illegal activity. In 1995 TIME Magazine ran with a cover story claiming the internet was completely dominated by porn, based on statistics about USENET that later turned out to be completely bogus. Parallels with some contemporary stories around Bitcoin are easy to see.
Anyway, there's no guarantees of success and either scenario is equally likely, IMHO (in the absence of a dystopian crackdown by governments that simply ban any financial system they cannot exert total control over).
If you go to Room 77 in Berlin you can buy burgers and beer with Bitcoins. You pay with your mobile phone. I've done it, it's easy. The guy who runs Room 77 is a huge Bitcoin fan and recently announced that 4 more shops in Berlin are now accepting Bitcoins too.
Huh? I admit I have no idea what Apple changed in the new app store, but this sentence seems absurd - why is it unreasonable for a developer to expect the search function to allow people to find his app? If his app fulfils a specific need, and the appstore has a search function, it seems like users should be able to find his app and relying on that shouldn't "screw" you. Otherwise why have it?
Er, developers benefit from quicker releases only if users do. After all, a developer does not need a release on the Play store to use their own app. The only reason to put an update on the market is to address user needs.
The wikipedia page you reference states explicitly that he was acquitted of all charges in the criminal suit (and is therefore NOT a known criminal), and he agreed to be banned from banking to make a civil suit go away. That suit was never resolved, so we don't really have any idea whether he was guilty or not - he might have agreed on the basis that he was tired of defending himself in court and didn't care much for being a banker anyway. Let's face it, settlements in the face of expensive yet questionable government prosecutions are hardly rare, especially in the USA.
The rest of the wild claims you assert aren't supported by any of the wiki pages either. Maybe it's all true but it's impossible to tell from your post. At any rate, it has nothing to do with the fact that DOOMs artwork and level data is still under copyright. If you want to get pissy at somebody about that, go complain to Carmack - he's the one who decided to open source the code but not the game data. Or not: he does a lot more for open source than most game company CEOs do.
Wuala is a service that provides this (cloud storage of client-side encrypted files). The UI is a bit ugly but it works fine. Oh, and at least you used to be able to pay for storage with Bitcoins!
I think that page is wrong, most TPMs do have EKs. Infineons certainly do and IIRC they're the most popular model. However this does not change your point that the DRM use case was never really functional and work on it seems to have been largely abandoned, perhaps due to the staggering complexity involved.
Making DRM work for things like movies was probably always going to be a non-starter on platforms as heterogenous as the PC. To make it work there'd have needed to be not only unbelievably tight synchronization between what are effectively two different operating systems running in parallel (using hardware virtualization) but also trusted paths through to the video and sound chips, that is, you have to be able to encrypt video/audio data to the hardware without the drivers or OS controlling access being able to actually read that data. Then if you want to close the analogue hole the hardware has to enforce that you play audio via some kind of Cinavia like watermarking engine. It's just an incredibly difficult engineering problem and in the end Microsoft (who was driving most of that use case) lost interest and focused on the Xbox 360 instead, which implements basically the same thing but without the need to support lots of random hardware and software combinations, or work with standards bodies. It works a lot better as a result.
Don't be ridiculous. You don't have to modchip your motherboard. The TPM chip is, and always has been, something that provides services to the CPU on demand. It can't control your computer. The computer you're using now probably has one already and it may be used for such nefarious purposes as making disk encryption more secure.
Trusted computing has a needlessly bad rap because of kneejerk reactions like this one. In fact it's a flexible and general tool that can be used for many purposes. For example, you can use it to do sensitive operations on a computer compromised by malware. Games can use it to kick out cheaters. Things get especially interesting when you throw Bitcoin in the mix. It makes feasible autonomous agents, a form of evolutionary AI in which programs maintain their own wallets and rely on trusted computing technologies to protect them from potentially malicious humans who want to steal their money. You can also use it to make sensitive financial platforms like exchanges more secure against hackers. The actual cryptography needed to move money can be done inside the secure world with the root keys being held in the TPM chip. The secure code (PAL) verifies and sanity checks the requested operations. Even if the host machine is completely rooted and starts submitting false orders, it can only submit requests to the secure subsystem, it can't directly steal the money.
Remote attestation is useful any time somebody might want to trade or interact with you but have some assurances around how your computer may behave. DRM was one of the original driving motivations indeed, but even here the way the system works is not "evil" in any sense unless you have a truly warped idea of human relations. The technology lets you prove to some online store that you will follow the rules around using the stuff you're buying - like not simply uploading it to a file sharing network. But if you don't find the terms that store requires acceptable, you just don't shop there: they can't actually force you to run any software or put your computer into any particular state. In other words it lets you prove you are doing what you said you'd do, alternatively, it is designed to make it hard to lie - just a mechanical way to enforce contracts. Unless you're routinely in the habit of defrauding people you enter into contracts with, such a capability should not concern you. And the standards are completely open. You can run such an online store on your own Linux box in your bedroom if you like - there's nothing that tips the playing field in favor of Microsoft or other companies (which is why Bitcoin agents can use it).
Glitching attacks were being used decades ago against satellite TV smartcard chips. Anti-glitching circuitry and techniques are well known, probably the PS3/Xbox360 designers felt that it would never get to that point because nobody had ever successfully defended the security of something as complicated as a full blown computer before. There had always been software exploits (and in the PS3 case it turned out that there were indeed software exploits, they were just very hard to spot).
Given that both Sony and Microsoft were able to defend their platform for most of the consoles lifespan, and Microsoft is in fact still going, I'd be willing to bet that the next generation all have significantly ramped up electronic security systems to defend against glitching attacks.
It can be both ways. If Samsung made it clear to Apple that they would ship them panels only for as long as the contract required them to, and would then terminate the relationship, obviously Apple is going to reduce the size of their orders as fast as possible because transitioning to an alternative supplier takes time and you need to ensure everything runs smoothly with the new factories, etc.
We don't, but if you read the linked article the sort of replies she was getting sound pretty legit. There are two Michael Murphys on LinkedIn working for Amazon in some kind of customer relations role, so that also lends credence.
I work in anti-abuse at Google. This sort of thing happens from time to time. They clearly believe she is an abuser of some kind and for all we know she might be, I've seen plenty of very obviously bad users write public stories before, often about closed AdSense accounts. In fact the article states explicitly that she was buying content from the UK site whilst in another country, perhaps using proxies to bypass geo IP blocking? Stonewalling is standard in these cases because you don't want abusers to figure out how they got caught. On the other hand she can also easily be a false positive. It's often hard to tell from the other end of the screen.
What surprises me about this story is that the account termination results in wiping of her Kindle. This is remarkably severe. I find it hard to believe Amazon would do this without cause. I think it can only be explained by Amazon believing she should not have been able to buy the content on her device in the first place. For instance if she was buying content Amazon is only legally allowed to sell in the UK and they noticed she's actually in Norway, they may feel that if they don't do a remote wipe they'd be liable for breach of contract. This is often the root cause of such apparently bogus action.
That's great but it didn't stop the EU rolling over and handing all financial data for the whole world to the Americans, did it? Search for: TFTP. And it didn't stop the EU rolling over and going along with insane flyer ID manifest requirements for the USA either.
I'm a citizen of the EU and the biggest threat to peoples privacy is government, period. You could say I'm biased by my employer (Google), but to me CNIL seems way out of line and ridiculously out of touch with technology. I didn't get to vote on whether they spend their time on this. If CNIL want to get aggressive about privacy policies then why aren't they ensuring the EU has a policy as straightforward and easy to read as Googles is? Why can't I opt out of having my financial and flight data sent to the USA at the drop of a hat? Why can't I get new government identities as easily as I can get new Google accounts? Why can't I ensure all the data EU governments have on me (all of them) is deleted by pressing a button?
OMG. Undoing moderation in this thread to post more gems from those reviews:
Having read the results of a previous unrelated consulation (on anti-money laundering powers), that unfortunately sounds way too accurate. In that case actually most of the responses were for additional state surveillance and law enforcement powers, largely because it didn't get noticed by any groups like 38 Degrees or ORG so most responders were, eg, regulators, people who run compliance training firms, law enforcement themselves, companies that already paid the huge cost of compliance and wanted competitors to have to pay it too and other organizations that were by and large a part of "the system".
In that case the consultation was triggered because a survey of "government activities that infringe civil liberties and individual freedom" highlighted the oppressive AML regime. Several years later, the results of the consultation concluded that the laws should be made even more intense! The government did get some dissenting submissions (such as mine). However the response was largely along the lines of, "we recognize the highlighted potential for abuse and you can rest assured we will be proportionate and reasonable in our application of these powers". Which is obviously stupid. The whole point for separation and limitation of government powers is you cannot assume reasonability over the long run! But despite that being pointed out they did not understand or care.
Consultation processes do seem like little more than an exercise in box ticking, especially when the consultations are often so obscure or (too often) simply canvassing opinions only from people who stand to directly benefit.
Screw solving the patent system mess, how about not having somebody who believes evolution is a lie in charge of science funding? That seems like a fairly ambitious goal!
I suspect this boils down to inadequate controls on data scraping, ie an API that's meant to surface data for an interactive UI can be scripted to enumerate every possible user and they don't have any automated controls on it.
Only source for this appears to be the Daily Mail, not a publication noted for its accurate reporting. How easy is it to accidentally send a text message to an entire contact list on Blackberries? I've never used a phone that made such a thing possible.
That's incorrect. The codebase uses the term "coin" to refer to a transaction output, ie a discrete unit of value that can be claimed by the holder of a private key. There can be multiple outputs/coins sent to the same address. Internally Bitcoin has almost no notion of balance - the balance you see in your wallet app is merely the sum of unspent outputs.
The US has in the past defined the word "militant" to mean anyone killed by drone strikes, so I'd take any reporting on the proportion of "militant leaders" killed with a gigantic pinch of salt. No, scratch that, I'd just not believe it at all.
Anyway, by definition you can't really prove somebody was guilty of being "a militant" (whatever that means) without safeguards like evidence, a trial and so on, otherwise you really have no idea if they were or weren't. As being blown up remotely offers no such safeguards, there's no way to know who is dying out there, especially as the double-tap strategy means nobody dares go near a strike zone to find out who got killed.
I assume you're also American? You just made the posters point about not being allowed to the grown-ups' table.
The number of Americans who supported the IRA consequence-free is one of the reasons the "war on terror" has made the word American synonymous with hypocrisy.
I believe in one of the Bitcoinica hacks they did in fact figure out who did it and recovered quite a large amount of the money. I don't know the details, I didn't follow that story much. I don't think it involved prosecution. But at any rate, you have switched the argument mid-discussion: the point I made is that you can't say "if somebody robs you of your cash they will face criminal charges". That's just false. I did not claim the prosecution rate for Bitcoin was higher than cash.
Go research it yourself. MtGox is run by Tibanne, Co, a Japanese company and thus falls under Japanese regulations. You can read up on what they entail. Are deposits ensured? I doubt it. MtGox is not a bank and you should not use it as one. The point of Bitcoin is you don't need banks, just withdraw your own money and insure it yourself if you like.
eGold got into trouble because they knew exactly which accounts were engaged in criminal activity (to the extent of having notes against those accounts detailing the type), but did not shut them down. MtGox doesn't make such mistakes, as far as I know, but if they do get into trouble it won't affect me much because *drumroll* I don't use them as a bank, so I have no money to lose there.
Actually it's the merchants problem. If you ever tried to accept credit card payments for something you'd know that. And what makes you think cash thefts are resolved with a 100% prosecution rate?