A couple of hours ago, that URL pointed to an article about yet another Bitcoin ripoff. It was a lot funnier then.
The ripoff was an exchange service run by someone who was totally not up to the job. All the rules and regulations banks follow to setup web services don't apply to BitCoin ( yet ) so there have been many cases of people setting up stuff only to get robbed because they don't follow sensible security precautions.
The problem is lone idiots setting up web services that effectively handle money.
So all the folks running the exchanges and other hacked services, if indeed they were hacked and not just subject to fraud by the owners, were all fools who hadn't taken 10 minutes to learn basic security?
BitCoin has now attracted a lot of greedy fools and a lot of conmen just like cash always has. One guy stole rather a lot of BitCoins by offering 7% interest a week. That was obviously a ponzi but very many people fell for it.
So basically, what you're saying is that a monetary system used almost exclusively for illegal transactions was designed to keep criminals from being caught, and the existing users would not like it if it was possible to catch the criminals. Interesting.
Actually that's almost right. Just keep in mind that criminals are whoever the governments of the world call criminals. Throughout history good people have been branded criminals for doing the right thing, having different ideas, opposing the status quo of the time, or simply for having the wrong religion.
Women who wanted the vote were criminals. Black people who wanted equality were criminals. People supporting homosexual rights still are criminals in lots of places.
I do disagree about bitcoin being used almost exclusively for illegal transactions. It's used for many legal things and there are very active marketplaces for all sorts of stuff on bitcointalk.org and bitmit.net.
The cartel attack you describe just won't work. You need a longer block chain than the rest of the network in order to get your block chain published and you can't generate that with less than 50% of the network.
Once a transaction is accepted into the block chain no other transactions that spend the same coins will be accepted. I may be wrong but I think every client on the network will see that transaction as wrong and not even forward it.
For the second part it's not hard to work out the IP behind any given BitCoin address as long as that address has sent, not just received, coins. Blockchain.info will give this info. Feel free to send your transaction though a proxy, TOR, a VPN, or a SSH tunnel. If you are buying a physical product you need to tell the seller your address anyway.
Jgarzik could give you more complete answers but you wanted the 3 second ones.
What you describe is far less of a problem than it seems at first glance.
If any large part of the network continues in isolation from the rest of the network both sides will still be viable, people in both parts will still be able to send and receive coins. When the networks join back the longest block chain, which will be the side with the most miners, will become the 'correct' block chain and be uploaded onto all clients orphaning the transactions that were on the shorter blockchain. The orphaned transactions are not lost but get integrated into newly mined blocks, the dependencies between the various orphaned transactions are sorted out nicely.
There are 2 problems remaining:
1) If the same coins are really spent on both sides of the network split the transactions on the losing side will become invalid and will be dropped. This should not be a problem in practice as clients will be on one or other side of the split, not both.
2) If coins are generated and then spent on the losing side of the two networks all transactions based on those coins become invalid. This is the reason for the 120 block ( 20 hour ) delay between mining a block and having spendable coins. In my opinion this delay should be longer, at least a week.
However entire continents can be bridged with a single VLAN, SSH tunnel, WIFI link, satellite link, dial up, etc. The entire network would be really hard to split and keep split in practice.
How invasive would this really be considered, and beyond privacy concerns, how are they going to deal with the humiliation that their employees feel as a result of this?
Maybe the first thing to do is figure out why some people would be "humiliated" if other people found out that they use the restroom.
I get paid hourly and it has crossed my mind that sometimes I'm being paid to take a dump at work. Realisticly an employer has to take account of the obvious fact that staff are human and need to use the bathroom every so often. We all breathe, drink, eat, and poop, I also don't see why the OP would be 'humilated' by the fact he does exactly the same as the rest of the human race.
It's part of the human condition to need a bathroom break every so often. Sure their time recording system might record you going for a dump or a pee, so what? They can't fire people for doing what they biologically need to do or they would have to fire everybody.
Also, please don't go running around installing CentOS servers in small offices. AD works just fine, don't fix what isn't broken. There is a time and place for Linux but trust me, it's mostly not in small offices.
AD works fine until the OS crashes at the first perfectly valid request it doesn't like the look of. I've seen this in a multinational's production environment and it cost a few million a day in downtime until MS finally patched it up. Your average Linux distribution isn't perfect but most of them are a lot more stable and secure than anything Microsoft have ever produced.
A small company with AD is going to end up a medium company who can't get off AD without serious pain and maybe a big company suffering from bad security, bad uptime, as well as huge costs from the ever increasing number of AD controllers.
Tried to install the latest ubuntu on a 733 MHz laptop, and it was slow as snails. Ended-up switching to LXDE (lubuntu) which runs fine.
Even on high end hardware I'd use LXDE, all the extra bloat in KDE and GNOME serves no purpose but to waste memory and CPU cycles and the extra graphical fluff is just pointlessly distracting.
"Hey, that's a nice car you have there" "Uhh, hi, yeah, thanks" "What do you do?" "I'm a software developer" "Looking for a job? My name is X and I work for...." I've verified that those I didn't immediately blow off were indeed mgmt at software companies.
So, ya'll have fun bashing bmers!
Are you making this up? Basing recruitment decisions on the car someone drives sounds crazy to me but this is one crazy world.
My point was that sometimes standards are relaxed for things that are known to be true but difficult to find documentation for.
Have you read WP:TRUTH? Wikipedia has open contempt for truth. Wikipedia is a bureaucracy where the people with the greatest knowledge of the rules and the greatest amount of time to spend pushing their viewpoints always win.
The admins claim it's not like that but anyone who has spent time editing WP will tell you it's exactly like that. The only changes I now make are totally self-evident ones in articles editors and admins have forgotten about.
Find someone who goes both ways or he/she will be constantly running around behind your back lobbying for more windows machines.
Depends on the person. But I did find that Microsoft's answer to almost any performance related question is add more AD controllers. If you do what MS's consultants advise then you would end up with 3 windows machines for every Linux machine on identical hardware. This is not because windows is that bad but because MS try to get you to buy as many licenses as possible.
Who the fuck even goes to corporate webpages anyway?!?
Investors, regulators, competitors, and job hunters.
And crackers apprently.
A better question is who the fuck runs internet facing webservers on production networks? You crack my webservers you get the webservers, that's it. you don't get keys to the entire company.
Split your internet network into seperate sub-networks and put firewalls in between. Stop being 'tards oil companies and let your IT people do the job you are paying them to do!
It's just too great a quantity of punishment for the crime being punished. It's not about the punishment being cruel or unusual, only that there is too much of it.
Slashdot Mirror
A couple of hours ago, that URL pointed to an article about yet another Bitcoin ripoff. It was a lot funnier then.
The ripoff was an exchange service run by someone who was totally not up to the job. All the rules and regulations banks follow to setup web services don't apply to BitCoin ( yet ) so there have been many cases of people setting up stuff only to get robbed because they don't follow sensible security precautions.
The problem is lone idiots setting up web services that effectively handle money.
So all the folks running the exchanges and other hacked services, if indeed they were hacked and not just subject to fraud by the owners, were all fools who hadn't taken 10 minutes to learn basic security?
BitCoin has now attracted a lot of greedy fools and a lot of conmen just like cash always has. One guy stole rather a lot of BitCoins by offering 7% interest a week. That was obviously a ponzi but very many people fell for it.
So basically, what you're saying is that a monetary system used almost exclusively for illegal transactions was designed to keep criminals from being caught, and the existing users would not like it if it was possible to catch the criminals. Interesting.
Actually that's almost right. Just keep in mind that criminals are whoever the governments of the world call criminals. Throughout history good people have been branded criminals for doing the right thing, having different ideas, opposing the status quo of the time, or simply for having the wrong religion.
Women who wanted the vote were criminals.
Black people who wanted equality were criminals.
People supporting homosexual rights still are criminals in lots of places.
I do disagree about bitcoin being used almost exclusively for illegal transactions. It's used for many legal things and there are very active marketplaces for all sorts of stuff on bitcointalk.org and bitmit.net.
The cartel attack you describe just won't work. You need a longer block chain than the rest of the network in order to get your block chain published and you can't generate that with less than 50% of the network.
Once a transaction is accepted into the block chain no other transactions that spend the same coins will be accepted. I may be wrong but I think every client on the network will see that transaction as wrong and not even forward it.
For the second part it's not hard to work out the IP behind any given BitCoin address as long as that address has sent, not just received, coins. Blockchain.info will give this info. Feel free to send your transaction though a proxy, TOR, a VPN, or a SSH tunnel. If you are buying a physical product you need to tell the seller your address anyway.
Jgarzik could give you more complete answers but you wanted the 3 second ones.
What you describe is far less of a problem than it seems at first glance.
If any large part of the network continues in isolation from the rest of the network both sides will still be viable, people in both parts will still be able to send and receive coins. When the networks join back the longest block chain, which will be the side with the most miners, will become the 'correct' block chain and be uploaded onto all clients orphaning the transactions that were on the shorter blockchain. The orphaned transactions are not lost but get integrated into newly mined blocks, the dependencies between the various orphaned transactions are sorted out nicely.
There are 2 problems remaining:
1) If the same coins are really spent on both sides of the network split the transactions on the losing side will become invalid and will be dropped. This should not be a problem in practice as clients will be on one or other side of the split, not both.
2) If coins are generated and then spent on the losing side of the two networks all transactions based on those coins become invalid. This is the reason for the 120 block ( 20 hour ) delay between mining a block and having spendable coins. In my opinion this delay should be longer, at least a week.
However entire continents can be bridged with a single VLAN, SSH tunnel, WIFI link, satellite link, dial up, etc. The entire network would be really hard to split and keep split in practice.
Toilet Office Chairs (http://www.bored.com/photos/toiletofficechair.html)
Wow. That's a new one.
If you dont like it find another job....
Maybe he can't. But he has nothing to be embarrassed about., every single IT professional takes bathroom breaks.
How invasive would this really be considered, and beyond privacy concerns, how are they going to deal with the humiliation that their employees feel as a result of this?
Maybe the first thing to do is figure out why some people would be "humiliated" if other people found out that they use the restroom.
I get paid hourly and it has crossed my mind that sometimes I'm being paid to take a dump at work. Realisticly an employer has to take account of the obvious fact that staff are human and need to use the bathroom every so often. We all breathe, drink, eat, and poop, I also don't see why the OP would be 'humilated' by the fact he does exactly the same as the rest of the human race.
It's part of the human condition to need a bathroom break every so often. Sure their time recording system might record you going for a dump or a pee, so what? They can't fire people for doing what they biologically need to do or they would have to fire everybody.
Also, please don't go running around installing CentOS servers in small offices. AD works just fine, don't fix what isn't broken. There is a time and place for Linux but trust me, it's mostly not in small offices.
AD works fine until the OS crashes at the first perfectly valid request it doesn't like the look of. I've seen this in a multinational's production environment and it cost a few million a day in downtime until MS finally patched it up. Your average Linux distribution isn't perfect but most of them are a lot more stable and secure than anything Microsoft have ever produced.
A small company with AD is going to end up a medium company who can't get off AD without serious pain and maybe a big company suffering from bad security, bad uptime, as well as huge costs from the ever increasing number of AD controllers.
Tried to install the latest ubuntu on a 733 MHz laptop, and it was slow as snails. Ended-up switching to LXDE (lubuntu) which runs fine.
Even on high end hardware I'd use LXDE, all the extra bloat in KDE and GNOME serves no purpose but to waste memory and CPU cycles and the extra graphical fluff is just pointlessly distracting.
I hate Unity.
Everyone on Slashdot seems to hate Unity.
The rest of the Internet seems to hate Unity too.
Is there anyone that actually likes Unity? Or are Canonical just trying to piss everyone off?
"Hey, that's a nice car you have there"
"Uhh, hi, yeah, thanks"
"What do you do?"
"I'm a software developer"
"Looking for a job? My name is X and I work for...."
I've verified that those I didn't immediately blow off were indeed mgmt at software companies.
So, ya'll have fun bashing bmers!
Are you making this up? Basing recruitment decisions on the car someone drives sounds crazy to me but this is one crazy world.
My point was that sometimes standards are relaxed for things that are known to be true but difficult to find documentation for.
Have you read WP:TRUTH? Wikipedia has open contempt for truth. Wikipedia is a bureaucracy where the people with the greatest knowledge of the rules and the greatest amount of time to spend pushing their viewpoints always win.
The admins claim it's not like that but anyone who has spent time editing WP will tell you it's exactly like that. The only changes I now make are totally self-evident ones in articles editors and admins have forgotten about.
Not to be a complete smartass, but what day doesn't end with a 'y'?
Christmas. Oh and Easter.
The point is she forgets her password a lot.
Find someone who goes both ways or he/she will be constantly running around behind your back lobbying for more windows machines.
Depends on the person. But I did find that Microsoft's answer to almost any performance related question is add more AD controllers. If you do what MS's consultants advise then you would end up with 3 windows machines for every Linux machine on identical hardware. This is not because windows is that bad but because MS try to get you to buy as many licenses as possible.
They keep typing ls -l as they did on the VAX of the university when they were 30 years younger, those lazy hippies.
My VAX's ran OpenVMS. The command was 'directory' not 'ls'.
There is no letter U in Qatar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar
That's right. Most of slashdot are in the US.
Sorry. Could not resist.
Who the fuck even goes to corporate webpages anyway?!?
Investors, regulators, competitors, and job hunters.
And crackers apprently.
A better question is who the fuck runs internet facing webservers on production networks? You crack my webservers you get the webservers, that's it. you don't get keys to the entire company.
Split your internet network into seperate sub-networks and put firewalls in between. Stop being 'tards oil companies and let your IT people do the job you are paying them to do!
Sabu is selling out his former comrades for the lulz.
I doubt lulz come into it. I'm sure he is scared into submission and will do whatever he is told to.
It's the FBI's turn to have lulz now.
Because one pleaded guilty and the other "surrendered to authorities." I don't know about you, but if I was framed I would be fighting the charges.
Actually lots of people plead guilty to things they didn't do. There are lots of reasons people do this not just pressure from the police.
I agree, cruel and unusual punishment.
It's just too great a quantity of punishment for the crime being punished.
It's not about the punishment being cruel or unusual, only that there is too much of it.
That is the best argument I've read all week.