Yesterday’s column by John Naughton in the Observer revisited Nathan Myhrvold’s 1997 prediction that when Moore’s Law runs out — that is, when processors stop doubling in speed every 18 months through an unbroken string of fundamental breakthroughs — that programmers would have to return to the old disciplines of writing incredibly efficient code whose main consideration was the limits of the computer that runs on it.
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Tag: cryptocurrency
Karl Schroeder’s “Stealing Worlds”: visionary science fiction of a way through the climate and inequality crises
Karl Schroeder (previously) is literally the most visionary person I know (and I’ve known him since 1986!): he was the first person to every mention “fractals” to me, then “the internet” and then “the web” — there is no one, no one in my circle more ahead of more curves, and it shows in his novels and none moreso than Stealing Worlds, his latest, which is a futuristic roadmap to how our present-day politics, economics, technology and society might evolve.
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Weekend SIM-swapping blitz targets US cryptocurrency holders
SIM swapping attacks involve tricking or bribing a phone company into assigning someone else’s phone number to you; once you have the number, you can intercept SMS-based two-factor authentication messages and use them to take over accounts.
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Study finds 95% of all Bitcoin trading volume is fake, designed to lure in ICOs
A report from Bitwise — an investment firm lobbying for FEC approval for a cryptocurrency based exchange-traded fund — found that 95% of the trading volume in Bitcoin was fake, ginned up through techniques like “wash trading” where a person buys and sells an asset at the same time.
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Bowing to public pressure, Coinbase announces it will “transition out” the ex-Hacking Team cybermercenaries whose company it just bought
The cryptocurrency service Coinbase recently acquired Neutrino, a forensics startup founded by cybermercenaries who were left unemployed by the collapse of the company Hacking Team, following a dump of internal documents that revealed the company’s enthusiastic and highly profitable complicity in human rights abuses by the world’s most torture- and murder-happy autocrats and dictators.
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What it’s like to be a woman reporter on a cryptocurrency cruise where nearly all the other women are sex-workers
Laurie Penny (previously) got sent on the 2018 CoinsBank Blockchain Cruise — a four-day cruise filled with “starry-eyed techno-utopians and sketchy-ass crypto-grifters” who solved the fact that there almost no women signed up using the “free market”: they paid teen sex workers from Ukraine to ship out with them.
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Malware vector: become an admin on dormant, widely-used open source projects
Many open source projects attain a level of “maturity” where no one really needs any new features and there aren’t a lot of new bugs being found, and the contributors to these projects dwindle, often to a single maintainer who is generally grateful for developers who take an interest in these older projects and offer to share the choresome, intermittent work of keeping the projects alive.
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My keynote for Ethereum Devcon: without the rule of law, crypto fails
I was one of the keynote speakers at last week’s Ethereum Devcon in Prague, where I gave a talk called “Decentralize, Democratize, or Die,” about the way that bad tech policy (crypto backdoors, the DMCA’s ban on security disclosures, etc) come from weak states where the super-rich get to call the shots, and how things like money-laundering creates these weak states. The core message: if you don’t figure out how to make more pluralistic, less plutocratic states, you will never get the kind of information security you need for your blockchain systems to thrive.
French spy used darknet to sell access to national mass-surveillance databases
A cop working for the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure (the French national domestic surveillance agency) used the darknet marketplace Black Hand to sell access to France’s prodigious national surveillance apparatus to criminals: give him a phone number and he’d track its location; give him a name and he’d tell you whether that person was under police investigation and disclose the contents of the associated files; he’d also sell you everything you needed to forge papers and other official documents (he took payment in Bitcoin).
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Anatomy of a Reddit cryptocurrency spam-factory
A guy named “Aaron” has been pitching Reddit moderators and other influential Redditors on their participation in a lucrative scam to inflate the popularity of posts about different cryptocurrencies, using massive farms of bots that post and upvote through a network of proxies that make them seem like they’re distributed all over the world.
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