enginn's comments

One more for https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/

Because they're Twitter and apt to invest in a panoply of diverse products to cater to different styles of learning.

Not that Twitter especially cares for learning, although it is no secret we tend to come back to products that we learn from. (Learning being an ingrained human trait that has not gone away)

My clipboard can still be gleaned with an arbitrary API call in other apps. Please leave my clipboard alone in other apps. They have no business being able to grab it without my permission

From what I've gathered, TOR is pretty robust at least on paper, and when explained in an academic way it has me almost convinced that the apparatus does what its supposed to, except for the part where it catastrophically fails when put into practice, like when:

1.) Custom Firefox 'Browser Bundles' which do not auto-update and ensure latent vulnerabilities are left un-addressed

2.) Trusted 'Third Parties' running exit nodes who we hope and pray are doing their job correctly

3.) Weird and non-innocuous looking domains on the wire that do nothing more than alert the neighborhood that somebody's using TOR (Unless everyone's using it you stand out like a sore thumb)

4.) Sybil attacks in the form of people-with-more-money-than-you polluting the network

5.) ???

6.) Any number of other issues (which have since been patched in the past), but still work if the TOR user is uneducated about how TOR works (traffic analysis / correlation attacks / zero-knowledge-proof attacks, etc)

Solve the problem first, and then write the code.

"Our digital lives are an accurate reflection of our actual lives"

Which of course presumes we have a digital life, and which of course has been proven repeatedly to not be the case. It is also not accurate.

Take data warehousing companies who are profiling home IP addresses and hoovering up any digital breadcrumbs people leave behind, like user agent strings, length of time spent on a page, any previous cookies stored locally on the machine: an enormous store of value for anyone who decides to purchase such information, except for the fact that it has no value.

The 'info' exists without any context, and could even be poisoned by a small portion of users who decide to stuff the system full of disinformation to control market share or lobby for certain products.

Also - IPV4 addresses (now more than ever) can be attributed to several hundred people because ISPs grant a subnet to multiple customers.

This is not saying everything's fine and our digital doppel is a fuzzy haze of nonsense. But it does say that privacy advocates are apt to overestimate how accurate such information is, and that the people who buy such information are finding out this too and have probably decided to pay more to other collection points to get a finer-grained doppel of some person.

I say let them spend more, but I will cry tears of joy when I find that money has been ill spent too and doesn't accurately portray a person digitally.

You see this now, whole paragraphs of a noteworthy book punctuating a timeline, people taking screenshots of text, or otherwise cluttering up my Twitter with textual soundbites in the guise of a JPEG

a.) These are not very accessible

b.) I am too lazy to transcribe / OCR these

c.) It defeats the purpose of Twitter

d.) It would be far more handy to have big text blobs like this in a Tweet's JSON schema Something like

    {  textBlob: '...book quotes galore...'}

b.) Images as text are a huge waste of resources. A lot of bandwidth could be saved by persuading tweeps to use a text-blob instead of an image (Free bandwidth people, that's what we all want is it not?!)

Nope..Cork sandals will produce the same effect. It's not highly individual, it is highly reported many times by many people, but usually cast off as irrelevant or unimportant to people's daily life...

Nature is self similar. I come from the school of thought that if something is prominent in my own nature, then it must resonate highly with something else just as prominent. Like attracts like and all of that.

Electrosensitivity as mystical? You could say that, but it genuinely is a case of intuition manually over-riding a brain with an otherwise high reliance on scientific surety.

Reading tends to fill my head with cognitive dissonance, and especially when it becomes a habit. It is no secret that information is just as addictive as any other vice and as with all vices, there will always be the urban legend of the person who finds it hard to over indulge (in this case, a bibliophiles). Ignore them and cut down on your reading when you can.

Unless you must increase your IQ at all costs because your life depends on it, or that everyone around you is getting as smart as you, so you have to up your game!

“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud”

― Émile Zola

A true artist is one who never calls him/herself an artist is my stance. It is usually when society sees a person's works and starts to give positive reviews that the inner artist is unleashed on the world. Sensitivity plays a part, but only insofar as the artist can channel art through the correct medium. If I'm electrosensitive (I constantly get electric shocks for example), then computers are probably the best medium. Someone with an ear for sound would likewise choose musical instruments to mirror back the sound of nature..

Equating crypto with armaments does nobody any favors. If crypto is an armament, then the banks can be said to be wielding guns at the criminals who are forever stressing their networks and trying to get in, or even their customers, who require a more-than-mathematically strong peace of mind that their money is safe from theft.

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System

The best way to change the behavior of any institution is to defund it and cut their income off at the root. The beauty of Bitcoin is that there is no such easy kill switch like this. This is the current money systems worst bug, and (sometimes) the current money system's greatest feature: the ability to press a kill switch on any organization, legitimate or otherwise. There are some organizations which by their very nature can be agreed upon to be truly unsavory and need to be be defunded at every opportunity. It's not so black and white. Wikileaks likes to complain about the banking blockade, but entirely overlooks how the banks can also cut off any number of unsavory organizations at the root which is why the banks have persisted for some time.

This is not rooting for the banks, but it is also not rooting for bitcoin either, where for it not for the criminals latching on to Bitcoin at such an early stage, it would not have gained the media hysteria it has in recent years.

In terms of the complexity here, it is quite substantial, and for the lay person to cache all the multi-layered exploits in their head is unexpected. It's disgustingly complex and multi pronged ex-filtration of data that has no bounds.

This industry is 1000 years ahead of the common UNIX neck beard / basement dweller type who probably owns no more than $10,000 worth of kit, but uses that kit on orders of magnitude more advanced levels than the catalog presented here.

If it is the case that 'they' are 1000 years ahead of us in terms of ex-filtration and their budget is apparently limitless, then this allows the citizen to dream of many strategies to avoid, overcome, and render such ex-filtration useless.

One strategy which I will announce (a public one I will give away because bragging in public forums is apparently safe) is to compartmentalize a digital life. A frustratingly common motif is the "Person A stores their life on their phone" and thus we have a central store of data about person A.

Bad OPSEC, you cry? Well the lay person is not familiar with spycraft terms like OPSEC and such a term has only flourished in use in recent times because of Snowden. Infact a great many spycraft terms have gained widespread use, like OSINT for example, which were so rare, that you would be red-flagged as a spy if you searched for those terms, or were using them in everyday conversation.

All that is needed is for the lay person to acknowledge that unless a spy-vs-spy tactic is employed, then it really is a disgusting grab fest for all one's data. Annoyingly this can lead to arms-race type scenarios where a citizen attempts to 'beef up' their digital life, and the cost can be substantial, and potentially turning citizens into digital Winston Smiths, which is never good, and the surveillance can be said to have failed.

Compartment-ed computing is but one of a whole cornucopia of techniques and strategies to reverse the Panopticon on itself though...