jron

"Shortly after TrueCrypt version 1.0 was released in February 2004, the TrueCrypt Team reported receiving emails from Wilfried Hafner, manager of SecurStar, claiming that Paul Le Roux had stolen the source code of E4M from SecurStar as an employee. According to the TrueCrypt Team, the emails stated that Le Roux illegally distributed E4M, and authored an illegal license permitting anyone to base derivative work on E4M and distribute it freely, which Hefner alleges Le Roux did not have any right to do, claiming that all versions of E4M always belonged only to SecurStar. For a time, this led the TrueCrypt Team to stop developing and distributing TrueCrypt" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E4M

I never said banks don't know how to hedge.

Mike Hearn works for a bank. Gregory Maxwell works for a group of cypherpunks. I'll take my chances with Bitcoin.

Thanks for bitcoinj though.

Correct, lightning kills with electricity, not firearms.

The point is both incidents are incredibly rare. Your first two examples don't really work in this context; cows on the other hand - good example. http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5829a2.htm

Lightning Kills More People in the USA Than Terrorists Do

The minimum requirements are pretty low: https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/system-requirements/

I've only used it on mid-high end systems though. You should easily be able to launch a few small VMs (each AppVM is tunable) on a dual core machine with 4 GB of RAM though.

You might enjoy Nick Szabo's work on the subject: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html

Thanks for taking the time to post that. Many of those statements are surprising given how well designed Qubes looks on the surface. I wish more people nitpicked projects like this. Please consider trying Qubes 3.1 out and posting a review. I'd love to read it.

Do you have a link for that discussion? I've been using Qubes for awhile now and the GUI has always been in DOM0 with no networking.

TCB matters. If you have data to back that quality statement up, I'd very much like to see it.

Absolutely. It should also be mentioned that many of the Xen vulnerabilities are actually due to qemu and that emulation can mostly be avoided by using PV/PVH.

The Xen attack surface is then reduced to about 20 hypercalls (even less for ARM). http://xenbits.xen.org/docs/unstable/hypercall/index.html

Theo is wrong with respect to Xen. You might enjoy section 3.1 and 3.2 from the Qubes Architecture document: https://www.qubes-os.org/attachment/wiki/QubesArchitecture/a...

The attack surface of Xen is much smaller than a traditional kernel like linux. I'm guessing the same can be said for OpenBSD after looking at the number of system calls.

rsi_oww is one of the few users posting facts and his comments are grey...

Tim Kosse has really tarnished the reputation of FileZilla by ignoring the SourceForge malware problem.

Chrome and Firefox should add SourceForge to their malicious site list.

I'm not saying I would try it in court; I'm simply saying the argument could be made that bitcoin is actually the first form of money that is pure speech. Thanks for indulging me though.

Even if that form is speech?

Unlike bitcoin, nothing I say in this comment can change the ownership of a safety deposit box. A few more things:

1. Ownership of the deposit box is not define by pin holders

2. Deposit boxes are tangible

3. Deposit boxes and contents have intrinsic value

3. Forgetting a pin doesn't effectively destroy the box and contents

4. The security of a deposit box is not defined by only math

I'm not trying to be pedantic, I'm just saying it is more complicated than that.

What is really happening? I'm genuinely interested in your answer to this seemingly simple question.

Sure, you can represent private keys in many different formats and the keyspace is effectively 160-bit when brute forcing known addresses. I'm just making the point that unlike rocks and flags, bitcoin is intangible and more like speech.

If I posted a number which happened to have a value of $14,001 USD in this post, I would be breaking the law. If I sold t-shirts with bitcoin private keys printed on them, I would be considered an unlicensed money transmitter by FinCEN.

bitcoin is a 256-bit number. Today, governments would like to regulate the usage of approximately 33,437,921 of these magic numbers. I'm guessing most of community can at least find humor in this.

Bitcoin Builder started out as a way to trade against MtGox's internal ledger when they halted withdraws. Users could effectively bet on MtGox's future by using privately held bitcoins to trade with users wanting to sell their "Gox coins" at a fraction of the market price. Anyone that sold their Gox coins for less than 100% market value made out far better than those that didn't. It was a wild idea that basically created a functional market for the greedy and the desperate. I'm sure millions flowed though the site during its short lived existence.

Congrats on the new idea, Josh.

TrueCrypt password 'entered' by FBI

The RunUO code is a testament to how great the game was:

  http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.62  T=11.67 s (285.5 files/s, 47086.1 lines/s)
  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Language                     files          blank        comment           code
  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  C#                            3319         103315          12969         422223
  XML                              9              1            296           7097
  MSBuild script                   2              0              0           3517
  ASP.Net                          1              0              0             10
  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  SUM:                          3331         103316          13265         432847
  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

https://github.com/runuo/runuo/tree/releases/2.5

Some more discussion of this feature: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3a3z82/coinbase_lau...

I think this is worth repeating:

"I asked Microsoft if the company would be able to comply with unlocking a BitLocker disk, given a legitimate legal request to do so. The spokesperson told me they could not answer that question." - https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/04/microsoft-disk...

Bruce's comment is quite bizarre. Here is a slightly better quote from him in 2013:

"Be suspicious of commercial encryption software, especially from large vendors. My guess is that most encryption products from large US companies have NSA-friendly back doors, and many foreign ones probably do as well. It's prudent to assume that foreign products also have foreign-installed backdoors. Closed-source software is easier for the NSA to backdoor than open-source software. Systems relying on master secrets are vulnerable to the NSA, through either legal or more clandestine means."

The article would have been far better if they only included Microsoft's answers and ended the piece with the same line:

"Whatever you choose, if trusting a proprietary operating system not to be malicious doesn’t fit your threat model, maybe it’s time to switch to Linux."

"I asked Microsoft if the company would be able to comply with unlocking a BitLocker disk, given a legitimate legal request to do so. The spokesperson told me they could not answer that question."

Here is a fun talk given by the op in 2011: http://vimeo.com/27653912

The original presentation was given in 2010.