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vabole | 15 years ago | on: G8 agenda calls for "civilized Internet": monitored, governed, controlled, taxed

Tell Chinese government how impossible it is to control the internet. The Great Firewall of China (GFC) is advancing very fast. Just a few years ago even an unencrypted proxy abroad would do the trick, and yet most people did not know how to set it up and did not care enough to find out. Nowadays even VPNs and SSH tunnels are commonly blocked. It is not trivial to bypass the GFC and it is only getting harder by the time.

vabole | 15 years ago | on: G8 agenda calls for "civilized Internet": monitored, governed, controlled, taxed

I am writing this from China and unfortunately it is the other way round. Tor is beaten by the Great Firewall of China. Since the list of nodes is available to anyone who connects to the Tor network, blocking them is trivial. So most of the time it is not possible to connect. And when you do manage to connect the speed will make 14.4 kbit/s modem feel fast.

vabole | 15 years ago | on: Javascript Bitcoin Miner

This is the strategy of cornering the market and according to wikipedia [1] "very few attempts to corner the market have ever succeeded; instead, most of these attempted corners have tended to break themselves spontaneously"

In fact, I think such attack would only create a short term volatility spike but make bitcoin market sturdier in a long term.

In first phase of the attack you would pour in huge amounts of liquidity which would attract more people to bitcoin market.

In the selling phase of the attack you would cause a temporary market panic but only for as long as you sell. And if bitcoin market players managed to find out about what you are doing, they would profit from it.

Finally, when you are out of money, the market would return to its normal course.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornering_the_market

vabole | 15 years ago | on: Javascript Bitcoin Miner

What would a scenario of such financial attack look like? Suppose I had $100M - twice the bitcoin market cap. What would I be able to do to destroy the bitcoin?

I can think of ways to manipulate bitcoin market with large sums of money, but nothing that would make bitcoin unusable.

vabole | 15 years ago | on: Javascript Bitcoin Miner

Not even that much. On my old laptop I get a little more than 1000 hash. Assuming that average computer is twice as fast as mine we get 2 khash/s. Inserting it in the calculator [1] shows that it would take 6068212 days on average to calculate one block of 50 bitcoins. That is 332.5 years per bitcoin. At current rate it means $0.02 per year.

[1] http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/old_calculator.php

vabole | 15 years ago | on: Javascript Bitcoin Miner

I wonder when will the bitcoin mining viruses appear. If done stealthily they could use spare resources and fall back when other GPU/CPU intensive task is launched. Such virus could be quite profitable if it spread widely enough.

vabole | 15 years ago | on: Why Skype is Evil (2007)

1. Skype is not blocked in Russia. Federal security officials voice their concerns about Skype every once in a while, which causes rumors about possible blockage in media. Although nothing came out of it yet.

2. In China all skype servers redirect to their Chinese partner http://skype.tom.com/ Tom Skype has everything that you would expect in QQ or other Chinese IM's, namely intrusive ads and content filtering. There is research showing how much data is leaked by the Tom Skype and how insecurely it is stored. http://www.nartv.org/mirror/breachingtrust.pdf

It is quite worrying that Skype has a such partner. Although it makes me think that Google would have more success in China if it found a Chinese partner like Tom Google.

vabole | 15 years ago | on: Why Skype is Evil (2007)

Even if you can not read and understand the code you are still better off with the open source. Due to the fact that independent researchers or programmers unaffiliated with developers will be able to audit the code. While with the closed source software, the only information you have about the inner workings of the software is provided by the developing company.
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