Nor mine

I'm not a very frequent beer drinker as I drink more wine, but I like beer strong when I make it myself. The last lot I made must have been around 10 % ABV or so based on a specific gravity of 1090. Closest thing available commercially are some of the Belgian monastery triples. So it might take me up to a year to finish off one of my batches. And the taste gets better, smoother and rounder for the first 6 months, and never gets any worse in the following 6 months. I never touch it at less than 2 months old - it's too sharp and the taste complexity hasn't properly blended before then.

Re: Words on paper

'someone finds a picture of your daughter and puts a caption in it that says "Meet horny girls who want casual sex right now!" and uses it to advertise their website. There's some unexpected commercial value.'

As how certain insinuations above might be construed, that's defamation - copyright law was never intended for that purpose, other laws were and have a much more severe effect when used. Some lawyers take on that kind of work pro bono.

On the scale of threats to $conventional

BC is no more a threat to the conventional currency game than any other casino using their own chips at the tables. If you want a greater diversion of economic activity away from conventional currency have a look at the network money WirBank in Switzerland accounts. Doesn't create any problem for the authorities though either, SMEs in Switzerland which trade in CHW still have to pay taxes in conventional CHF.

Re: So.....

I've also been running Linux since the late nineties, but that doesn't prevent us from being attacked by Javascript related vulnerabilities in our over complex web browsers operating cross site or across web applications. Firefox vulnerabilities will apply regardless of OS.

Insecurity results from a combination of complexity and complacency and while Linux is good it ain't no magic bullet.

Re: Good to see all the "heuristic malware scanners" are doing their job

Malware remaining active on many machines and undiscovered for 11 months emphasises that scanning for known bad stuff within an everything per user access-control context isn't an effective security approach any more. Making sure you only execute known good stuff other than in very secure, application and time limited sandboxes seems to make more sense, e.g. the sandbox in which you do online purchases and run associated web-supplied Javascript shouldn't connect to any other sandbox and needs wiping and resetting to a known good state at short and regular intervals.

Re: If you don't know who the sucker is...

" If you have a dept in Bitcoins then it will grow perhaps massively in real terms with the deflation over time."

Or you will be able to redeem it for nothing when the bubble goes the way of all such. Or it will be like being on the wrong end of a short sell, with unlimited liabilities. People don't contract such obligations, unless they can be recalled at the instant that the limited bond securing the unlimited side of it runs out. It's because BC is inherently unsuitable for denominating debt/credit book-kept contracts that it's likely to remain a networked gambling game, a kind of online poker with a limited chip supply, amongst those sufficiently interested to play it until they lose interest.

Re: Free trade?

"the anonymity of purchase from point A to sale at point B would be an auditors nightmare with respect to laundering practice"

Bitcoin, use of Linden Dollars and online gambling are very minor problems from this point of view compared to cash.

@Alex Brett

"As I understand it this wasn't actually a DNS amplification attack as you described in the article, instead they were sending DNS requests with the source address spoofed to be the target, causing the DNS servers to send its response directly to the target."

This aspect of the attack would be largely defeated by BCP 38, also known as RFC 2827 . Basically, spoofed UDP packets pretending to be from the party being attacked would not get through an ISPs customer-facing routers, unless sent from the same network as the party being attacked.

Sure, DNS configurations also need tightening up here as Trevor and some of the comments describe, but this is also something the ISPs need to get to grips with, and start offering worse peering terms to those which don't .

@Shannon Jacobs

"That is why I think there should be a larger focus on breaking the spammers' business models at the downstream end, not upstream where Spamhous and Microsoft have been firing their big cannons."

Fully agree with you there.

What we need are better tools to allow the large number of spam-haters more actively cut the spammers away from their small number of suckers and victims."

I've worked on developing anti-spam tools for some time. A problem here is that the primary motivation for doing so is to get a cleaner message stream without losing wanted messages. Putting spammers out of business has to be secondary to this primary objective. Spamhaus have done excellent research here also, which has led to prosecutions and jail terms. But the need to have a very low false positive rate means some false negatives inevitably get through, enough probably for the small proportion of suckers to support the spammer business model.

So I agree with what you are trying to achieve, but I think this probably needs to be recast as a social, educational and legal solution, because it probably can't be handled as a technical model without very major changes to the email model as it now exists. It might become possible to do more of the latter in the sense of requiring much higher authentication and reputation lookup standards when accepting SMTP over IPV6, and then everyone gradually letting IPV4 SMTP become marginalised before switching it off entirely.

Desktop mail server

You can certainly run a mail server on a desktop if you wish, but you'd do well to relay outgoing email from it through a smarthost which Spamhaus doesn't block, e.g. your ISP's smarthost, and which doesn't block you due to not knowing your address as one of theirs or if it can't authenticate you, or due to you sending more than the smarthost operator policy allows. It also helps greatly if you have a static IP address, or one which changes very, very infrequently for incoming mail. You'll have to ensure the incoming domain MX record is pointed at your IP address, preferably dynamically if you IP changes.

I've done this experimentally and successfully for small volumes for years, but I put my production email server and services for non-experimental work on a £15/month hosted virtual machine which has a static IP. I use the production email server as my own smarthost, and use authenticated SMTP from my home system to relay outgoing.

@Big John

"So why has Bitcoin continued for so long? Simple stupidity? I mean yeah, it was fun and cool when it was new, but that's long past. Is it just momentum?"

It's a pyramid, and those in the lower layers seem still to believe there is money to be made by recruiting further layers. Pyramids can go up as well as down. They have to go up before they collapse spectacularly. For various technical reasons, it's also in the interests of large botnet operators to keep it going, because it helps monetise their botnets.

Re: In other news... first new UK nuclear power station approved

In other news England hit bit a magnitude 9 earth quake and 40.5m high tsunami!"

An earthquake of that magnitute in a place of such relative geological stability seems to require meteorite impact, and such a tsunami is more likely, given that tsunamis can impact coasts and estuaries thousands of miles away from an earthquake or meteor impact and historical evidence for such incidents exists. .

Locations such as the Severn Estuary are also favoured sites for the location of nuclear power plant,due to the need for cooling water and having a coastline which isn't subject to silting up or coastal erosion.

large asteroid deflection

Various approaches have been proposed. To be realistic you'd need a 10 year plan and execute period, preferably 20. Given that it's theoretically possible to cover a side of one of these with white or black paint, enough to use solar radiation to change its course ever so slightly, given enough years to change the course, a flyby at 100 km from the earth's surface resulting in a slingshot well out of range is much better than a direct hit.

What's important is to detect and catalogue everything above about 100 metres across in near earth orbit, starting with 500 metres across, which needs more and better telescopes on the job. Technology available is already nearly there, and it's something all advanced economies have a reason to contribute towards in connection with international scientific and space collaborations. If you think how much money is being spent in maintaining the ability to nuke the planet many times over, this one is much smaller change.

Re: Cluster...

Yep. ICANN, by giving themselves a license to print money at everyone else's expense creating massive confusion in the process, and subject only to the laws of the State of California, have just created the perfect argument for the ITU to setup a competing root, and for DNS resolver admins everywhere to point at the ITU root version. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot, but that's what too much greed and arrogance always does I guess.

Re: Away from the real problem: Who PAYS for the zombies?

The spam rejection load on my email server has reduced last couple of years, but the spam that gets through seems mostly people I've dealt with in the past illigitimately selling on the custom addresses I gave them to others they think interested, before I shut down said custom addresses. Bots which start spewing will get blacklisted on zen.spamhaus.org within hours in the unlikely event they're not already on it, so not much problem there for a well configured email server.

More likely large botnets are being used more for Bitcoin mining these days when they're not stealing identities or propagating themselves to pwned contact lists. Running other people's compute power on their leccy bills sure must be cheaper than paying for your own, whatever they say about GPUs and dedicated ASIC Bitcoin mining rigs.

Re: The customer defines value

"In ten years you've never had a single new idea, PyLETS. I am not surprised you dislike people who do have new ideas, and want don't want (sic) the ideas to be ripped off."

That's called an Ad Hominem. When someone whose argument is exposed as weak attacks the messenger of the unwelcome news instead of addressing the issue.

"Property is property, and rights are rights: and activists who want to rob people of their rights (as the UK Coalition Government is doing) find that it's expensive and ends in defeat."

So you'll be telling us who to vote for next. Property and rights exist because lawful or unlawful coercion defend these. But you'd prefer to forget, as do most big media lobbyists, that we are living in a society where the means by which laws are made theoretically uphold the interests of those who don't own property as well as those who do. Clearly the coalition, post Levenson, isn't going to continue delivering the best laws the big media lobby can buy. So which party is big media going to be supporting at the next election, so we can all decide who not to vote for ?

Re: The customer defines value

The usual moral argument behind a capitalist market requires the existence of open competition. But copyright isn't competition, it's a monopoly by definition. In this case a legally created one, and with some justification, but in any monopoly market, especially a state created one as in this case, balances need to be struck between the conflicting interests of producers and consumers. Balances which havn't yet been successfully struck concern boundaries between:

a.when the content goes into the public domain, where all economic analysis suggests terms are longer than needed in comparison with pure incentive requirements for content to be produced and

b. where the business interests of the producers outweigh the reasonable privacy rights of the consumers.

Re: And when it all gets hacked...

As evident from some of the above posts, there are many different kinds of security and hacking to consider:

a. The cars' and other nodes' firewalls to prevent these being hacked into by outsiders.

b. Ability using crypto signatures and registers (maintained by whom and accessible to whom?) securely to identify originators of malicious messages without leaking confidential data to unauthorised parties or for unintended purposes.

c. Ability to check whether client X is authorised to perform action Y on server Z.

d. Denial of service, through jamming, overloading etc.

e. Issues to do with differences of interpretation of standards by foreign vehicles on local roads.

That's just for starters - list by no means complete.

Very nice set of features suggested in the article, but the security engineering and architecture of this all is going to be very far from trivial, even if it ever gets a coherent security architecture. If it doesn't we'll see much more of this as the threat landscape evolves and engineers spend years trying to patch something up for issues which should have been foreseen by system and standards designers but weren't.

Re: If you have any interest at all in the subject...

The crib equivalent to successfully guessed plaintext, e.g. "All quiet, nothing to report" or preferably something a bit longer - obviously in German with spaces removed and using military acronyms - would have massively reduced the number of keys needing to be searched based on the rule that a letter never encrypted as itself, which would have excluded most of the remaining keyspace to be searched.

They alligned the guessed plaintext against the typically longer ciphertext message until no letters corresponded between the 2. A crib longer than 50 characters or so would give a higher probability of a match (based on no matching letters) not occurring by accident. If the crib was long enough and guessed correctly, this match gave the initial settings for the keysearch, based on the correspondence between plaintext and ciphertext letters in the matching section.

I wonder how this aspect of the Enigma crack can be simulated in the modern cryptanalysis challenge based on use of the same cipher ? For this to work, the cryptanalysts need to know part of the plaintext.

I couldn't agree more about Bletchley Park being an excellent daytrip.

Re: Run for the hills

If transactions can stand a tax of somewhere between 0.1% and 1% there must be some value in it for the rest of us. If they haven't, such transactions have no inherent right to exist. Charging such a tax would have a dramatic calming effect on these hyperactive markets. Professor James Tobin didn't get a Nobel prize without good reason.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobin_tax

Re: Why not just build a solar panel that covers half the world....

"What do the French know that the rest of the world doesn't? Why aren't they afraid of it?"

Don't know what they know that we don't, but maybe the Fukushima or Chernobyl evacuees know something the French don't.

Re: AV is a malicious Peril

"There's only ONE operating system that needs AV. Windows."

Not true. My Linux server hosting email lists for various community and charitable groups needs AV for good reason. Not because the digital diseases of end users who subscribe to these (all confirmed opt in) lists are likely to infect my Linux host. They aren't. My server needs AV to detect viruses present in email attachments which end users send each other through my server. My server is designed to replicate these messages but not emails attached to them.

From the end user point of view, the distinction between the viruses replicating because my server is infected, and the viruses replicating because my server is designed to replicate email is academic and moot.

Bible and copyright

wow after googling it looks like a lot of shady Christians come out with their own translation of the bible with a few words different and then copyright it as well. Greed even before God these days in America."

As you say, there's plenty of copies being given away and most major translations available gratis on the Net. As to 'a few words different' new translations are needed all the time as the languages used by those who might want to read it evolve. The Bibles most likely to be read by everyone except a few highly specialist scholars are translations, of the ancient books which were written in Hebrew and Greek, with arguably some Aramaic thrown in. Copyright law isn't something done as an act of the publisher, law makes it inherent in the publication, and as it's difficult to make money when competing against free, and for other reasons also, money and greed are unlikely to be the motivation for many new translations and editions.

Scientology also isn't a new phenomena. There were con men making money out of claimed 'hidden knowledge' since at least AD300 . The so called 'Gospel of Thomas' was very likely to have been created by a Gnostic sect, probably very similar in pyramid-selling business model to the Scientologists.