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shiado

2,075 karma · joined December 9, 2015

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shiado··on FTX hacker identity discovered by Kraken Exchange team?
Your impression was wrong. Zhu Su of 3AC infamy had the evidence sitting on Twitter since 2019 and nobody cared.

https://twitter.com/zhusu/status/1116945693946433536

shiado··on PayPal restores to its TOS $2,500 charge for any post they don't like
Is there a good ToS/EULA diff site? It would be nice to see how and when these things change across many services.
shiado··on US Treasury FAQ on Cyber-Related Sanctions
With FinCEN Notice 2020-2 it's clear that the US wants to treat crypto as foreign bank accounts to coerce disclosure but that severely limits the scope of regulation they can do as it would place public blockchains as strictly not being American jurisdiction, and it would make monitoring American activity on these blockchains outside of the scope of domestic agencies and spy agencies would not be legally able to spy on American activities on these blockchains. When you understand these facts it explains why the US pursued dubious NK sanctions over what would be a much stronger case of considering the Tornado Cash protocol an unregulated bank which it is. There is a very big technical and legal distinction between what centralized BTC mixers do with UTXOs to be considered laundering and how the Tornado Cash protocol exploits how ETH works on-chain to combine ETH in a single account without taking KYC.
shiado··on Blocking Kiwifarms
DDoS-Guard it is.
shiado··on A Bitcoin bust that took down the web’s biggest child abuse site
This article is terrible honestly. Statements like "tracing a cryptocurrency that once seemed untraceable". Excuse me what? Who thought this? Idiots at three letter agencies? Pedophiles and drug dealers?

Here's what the Bitcoin whitepaper itself speculated.

"As an additional firewall, a new key pair should be used for each transaction to keep them from being linked to a common owner. Some linking is still unavoidable with multi-input transactions, which necessarily reveal that their inputs were owned by the same owner. The risk is that if the owner of a key is revealed, linking could reveal other transactions that belonged to the same owner."

And here's an early Bitcointalk thread. Traceability was discussed and acknowledged from the very beginning.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=241

shiado··on Ask HN: Which algorithms based on biological ideas do you know?
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Slime_Mould_Algorithm
shiado··on Researcher uses 379-year-old algorithm to crack crypto keys found in the wild
Rapid7 has some very good datasets to play around with certificates. If you want a fun project try to find bad parameters.

https://opendata.rapid7.com/

edit: looks like public access is gone now, that's unfortunate.

shiado··on Twitter's new Tor onion service
Everybody should browse the internet on Tor from time to time to get an understanding about how the web works on a second class IP address and a slow connection. On some exit nodes reCAPTCHA actually enters an endless selection where it's impossible to pass.
shiado··on The decline and fall of Java on the desktop
On the other hand Minecraft is the best-selling PC video game of all time and it was originally written in Java and the Java client is the definitive experience of the game.
shiado··on Chernobyl power plant captured by Russian forces
Theoretically the whole area could be turned into a dirty bomb with a few strategic strikes and it would be carried down a river destroying vast areas of Ukraine for millennia.
shiado··on Ask HN: Why don't more software projects use BitTorrent for downloads?
Many ISPs give customers much better download speeds than upload speeds. I remember personally having problems using bittorrent and seeding too much destroying the network for all using it.
shiado··on Current hardware trends make C++ exceptions harder to justify
This somehow reminded me, wasn't there a competition years back to see who could generate the most compiler error output with the least amount of C++? A few too many templates and you could generate terabytes. Edit: don't think it was this but this is still a fun read https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/1956/generate-t...
shiado··on Coinbase CEO tweets how they came up with Super Bowl ad, lied about it
Americans by and large aren't able to trade crypto in any meaningful way to impact the markets, unless they are an American institution operating on foreign exchanges. Look at trading volumes by pairs and exchanges. The US occupies a small portion of overall spot trading and is absent in derivatives trading, which is almost all of the crypto markets. It's no wonder superbowl ads have no impact on price.
shiado··on Ask HN: When did computers get 'fast enough' for you?
Same here. It was criminal how long Apple sold 5400rpm drives in macbooks.
shiado··on Ask HN: Recent computer hacking convictions and employability?
Trace your family ancestry and look for any types of citizenship by descent you are eligible for. If you can get another passport leave, then change your name and start fresh. If you have the means you could even try citizenship by investment. For a few hundred grand you can get a new passport, but it might be tricky if they look into criminal past. Move to the Caribbean and work remotely.
shiado··on Breaking 256-Bit Elliptic Curve Encryption with a Quantum Computer
The 10 minutes also isn't accurate because the ability to obtain private keys from public keys would completely destroy the incentives of the Bitcoin network. Miners are incentivized and compensated for including transactions in a block due to fees. The ability to steal the coins from an incoming transaction would create incentives not to include transactions in a block and to instead spam the network with as many malicious nodes as possible to halt the proliferation of transactions.
shiado··on Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds
It never ceases to amaze me how incompetent some high profile criminals are. Encrypting a file is simply too difficult apparently. The entire purpose of crypto is that the exclusive holder of a private key cannot have funds seized. A 15 year old kid probably has better opsec with their crypto wallets than these people. Astonishing really.
shiado··on CSVCHAIN - NFTs backed by CSV technology
Has anybody ever thought of something like a real world NFT? Imagine if you took a bunch of dried plant pigments and mixed them with oil and smeared them onto a canvas. Because it is physical it couldn't be duplicated or double-spent and it has a simple materials-based minting cost. I don't think anybody has done this before and there is probably a large market for buying and selling something like this. These are early days.
shiado··on NFT Replicas: An app to mint a replica of virtually any NFT
NFTs are essentially a technical fraud that combines the failures of DRM technologies with the failures of perceptual hash functions. Whereas blockchains provide a novel solution to the double-spending problem through distributed consensus to enforce scarcity and have real applications based on proven technical merit, NFTs tokenize digital media which can be copied through analog means as with any other piece of digital media hence zero scarcity and zero need for tokenization, and the uniqueness of an NFT is impossible due to the limitations of hash functions hence scarcity also fails in this respect. NFTs aren't actually technically possible. Imagine going to an art gallery and seeing hundreds of Mona Lisa prints next to each other that look the same and taking pictures of them with your DSLR good enough that you don't need to buy a print and some guy says they are all unique and special because they are one pixel different, that's NFTs.
shiado··on I found that college fails to live up to being “The Great Equalizer”
A crazy stat is that 85% of autistic college grads are unemployed. Being "normal" really is the most important thing in life to fit in.
shiado··on NY Man Pleads Guilty in $20M SIM Swap Theft
SMS-based 2FA needs to be eliminated completely. Authenticator apps need to come preinstalled as an essential utility on every OS. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of pressure to improve 2FA security.
shiado··on Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
Yandex is the most entertaining search engine. Not always the best results but it reminds me of Google from 2003. Just look at these insane results, not a single DMCA takedown or SEO spam result to be found https://yandex.com/search/?text=free+movies
shiado··on Project Euler
Years back I did a couple hundred problems on this site. It's very good at making you learn about important results in basic math and algorithm complexity. It forces you to write your own library of efficient functions for factoring, etc... because you have to use them so many times and as the problems get harder anything brute force will take too long.
shiado··on Psilocybin clinical trial to treat anxiety disorder receives approval
The worst anxiety I have ever experienced was from a bad trip that caused intense panic and days of anxiety and paranoia after. Can anybody anecdotally attest to psychedelics helping anxiety?
shiado··on Long-dormant Bitcon wallet comes online
It can be fun to look at high value addresses and see the quantities and transaction dates. Hard to say how many old ones are lost or if they are dormant long term holders.

https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses....

shiado··on Twitch source code and customer data has reportedly been leaked
The IP issues with the leak are interesting. There's got to be some Stack Overflow copy/pastes, perhaps some variable name changed license violating code, and I wonder if patent trolls or even rightful patent owners can now sue based on how backend code works in a way where they had no way to sue if they didn't know how it worked from interacting with a frontend.
shiado··on Google CEO allegedly sought to keep Incognito mode issues out of spotlight
I only use Youtube in incognito mode to avoid the Youtube algorithm and recently I think they have started to preserve suggestions between incognito sessions. Not in the way the algorithm usually works, but much more subtly. It's probably some minor region-based suggestion that triggers but who knows. In the future I think all algorithm driven content sites will use uniquely fingerprinted undeletable algorithmic suggestions. Companies are leaving money on the table by letting users reset the state on algorithms that increase content consumption.
shiado··on China declares cryptocurrency deals ‘illegal’
Oh China is definitely cracking down on crypto, what I'm pointing out is that Western financial rags print the story late on expiry day to manipulate the market.
shiado··on China declares cryptocurrency deals ‘illegal’
Some China FUD on the last Friday of the month that is an almost verbatim reprint of headlines printed a couple months ago... You surely realize the purpose of this right? Just look at all those 40k strike puts...
shiado··on Consolidation of the VPN industry spells trouble for the consumer
AWS is my favorite VPN in the few cases I have had to use one. Rent the cheapest instance in the region you want, then SSH tunnel your connection. Very simple and quick. Services never blacklist AWS IPs, in fact in many cases they have extra rules to be more permissive because their infrastructure runs on AWS.
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