Posts by pertayter

Re: Plot For A Film

"Couldn't he have offloaded some bitcoin and bought another, dedicated, PC to create bitcoin ?"

The first real-world transaction with Bitcoin spent 10,000 Bitcoin to buy 2 pizzas. Satoshi wouldn't be able to buy a slice of pepperoni, definitely not a new laptop

Re: Plot For A Film

This plot doesn't work, because Bitcoin is uncensorable by being a world-wide network of independently operated nodes. There is no world government. Freezing the blockchain is impossible, because every node independently stores its own copy. My government might find me and freeze my node's blockchain. The other 40,000 nodes ignore my node because it is now non-compliant

Also, the real Satoshi never mined that much Bitcoin. His story is mundane. His computing resources were limited to one laptop supplied by his employer. Mining Bitcoin was a heavy load on this PC, making it useless for its normal work

He offloaded the mining work to collaborators, willing volunteers, in the first few days, and never mined again. The 700,000 unspent Bitcoin from 2009 mining belongs to those dozens or hundreds of collaborators, all of whom discarded their keys when Bitcoin was so hard to sell that nobody knew if it even had a price, another mundane story

If anything, Wright's courtroom drama makes a good movie plot. How far can a liar push a lawsuit without ending in prison for perjury? All the falsely sued Bitcoin developers having to fly into London to appear before a judge on a fraudulent claim, with the stress of an unpredictable outcome, and constant demands on their finances to fund their defence costs. If Wright wins, the movie becomes the ultimate true parody of a corrupt legal system

Re: OK something I've never understood in this case

<blockquote>Is he also claiming that Hackers stole his keys to the original Bitcoin wallet too?</blockquote>

They're the same keys. And yes, he filed a suit in 2021 against a list of Bitcoin developers to code an exception so that a specific list of old, unspent coins can be accessed by himself without using the private keys to sign the transactions. This is technically trivial, but a gross breach of governance (except that the court is responsible for the breach, and the developers are unwilling servants of the court, if Wright wins the suit)

The doormat is too obvious. That's what those hollow stone key frogs are for

Re: Javascript

Re DLL-hell RPM-hell

Somehow over the years, these were magically fixed

The question remains, what happened in this case in the npm repository?

Also, what do other open-source Git-controlled projects do to avoid similar problems

The only obvious process error is that the original developer handed the package to the malware developer

In other free software projects, the normal way a stranger takes control of an abandoned package is to fork a copy in his own repository. I sympathise with the original developer wanting to abandon his package, but he should have either deleted it (with consequences for dependent apps) or just stopped updating it

Your point about testing is valid, to a point

In this specific case, is it reasonable for a developer to anticipate the introduction of malware which leaks confidential keys to a thief, and test for it? Until the theft actually occurs, the app works perfectly in a normal testing scenario

Do any other Bitcoin wallet apps test for leakage of secret keys?

Google in China

Do not be optimistic about the behaviour of corporations

See the recent press about Google returning to the Chinese marketplace, in compliance with Chinese regulations

Re: Access

The intention is to force companies to provide access to data which is encrypted in transit using SSL, but stored in plaintext

and to force companies to provide access where data is stored encrypted, where the company, not the user, controls the encryption key. A lot of cloud storage works this way. The company uses the same key to encrypt everybody's data

Re: VPN

Remember your data is accessible in plaintext form at the VPN gateway

Be aware that if the VPN service has an Australian gateway, they will be subject to the proposed law requiring them to cooperate with law enforcement and security services

So, when visiting Australia, do not use an Australian VPN service, and do not use an Australian gateway of any VPN service