sunshine-o

> Am I wrong that this feels at a totally different scale and audacity?

I believe the difference is that now it is really "in your face" because the internet is dominant.

The world of money/finance/banking always had a lot of money and the best thing they can buy are the people in charge. There are plenty of books explaining it decades ago and and I read a lot of them. 2008 was when it started to become mainstream for the first time, now it is free to read on substack.

The difference is also today we have an open battle between an old guard and the tech/crypto challengers, and it seems the newcomers have outbid the old guard in the current administration.

Should you side with WellsFargo/Visa/Mastercard or Circle/Tether/Strip ?

Here is the problem:

Yes Tether is shady and shouldn't be trusted, we've known for about 10 years (see articles and comments here on HN)

But guess what, look into most banks it is probably worst and connected to Epstein. The rabbit holes don't end.

Blame the mismanagement, corruption, deficit, debt that has been going on for a long time.

You can't rely on your national currency and will be left juggling between USDT, XAUT, Bitcoin and tokenized stocks on some blockchain and apps.

It is either this type of farwest or some enforced, worthless CBDC like they might do in the EU.

Once national currencies have been destroyed by decades of mismanagement there is no good solution.

It seems Alex Jones was right again

I believe that we established all those government systems are fairly easy to hack. I remember some French military naval construction network got owned about a year ago, much worst in a sense.

My guess is since a global conflict is ramping up this is only the beginning and we are about to see some real damage.

It is fairly easy to create chaos in a country for a few weeks if you start disrupting the grid, payments or internet access.

I was talking about running a public IPFS gateway. This is what the deny list is for.

The question is why IPFS did not get the traction something like Tor had for decades?

I believe the fundamental problem of those protocols is everyone fear ending up serving child porn just by running a "node" and taking a chance at explaining the future P2P internet to a judge.

IPFS got a CID deny list [0] but it was too little too late

- [0] https://badbits.dwebops.pub/

A few years ago they got into the AI bandwagon and stoped funding the P2P/Web3 stuff from what I remember.

> I wonder if it could happen at some point that an alternative Android becomes so big that OEMs start supporting it.

I think this is the huge battle GrapheneOS won with Motorola. There are probably a few manufacturers of phones unhappy or nervous regarding Google.

The next battle is really on the app front. Once a country says our government and bank apps need to run on the fork of AOSP then you will start to have a real alternative to the Google/Apple (and now Huawei) duopoly.

My guess is there are a lot of candidate countries for breaking out of the American/Chinese grab on every smartphones.

So in a way the future could look bright as long as we support GrapheneOS and Motorola.

The era of big tech cooperation around free software is obviously over.

Those kind of moves are petty but there are worst tricks they can pull unfortunately.

It seems Grapheneos is the rare actor willing to put up a fight nowadays, and their "partnership" with Motorola seems to be a first step. They need to ensure a hardware platform.

My guess is at some point they will have to fork AOSP, just because Google will take it in directions that go against Grapheneos principles.

Beautiful !

Big government, big surface attack.

Spyware and bloat ain't cheap these days.

Linux users don't rejoice too much, the Fedoras and Ubuntus were eating so much of my RAM I had to take refuge in Alpine.

> The grass is always greener on the other side ... until you actually dare to find out.

Yes this is the core problem.

The grass used to be very green in the "first world" (North America and Western Europe) but it is now getting dangerously yellow.

Instead of asking themselves the hard question why the grass is getting yellow the people in charge try to prove it is fine by bringing cows (it is an image here) from the "the third world", and say look the grass is not getting yellow because those cows like it.

This is why you usually see the collapse of the rose-colored glasses effect in third generation of immigrants.

So yes the grass can still been seen as relatively green in Germany, but I have regularly traveled there for decades and I can tell you as an external observer the country looks like it is going to hell over time.

You get a similar effect with westerners going to East Asia. A lot of them like it very much there wearing rose-colored glasses and can't figure out why the locals believe the future is dark for them.

This is very interesting !

Yes and it is very unclear to me what are actually the risks...

I am unfamiliar with "coldcard" but can hackers find out which wallet is used for which account? or maybe it can be inferred by analysing the transaction (if any)?

If the hackers do not know which accounts to attack first there is probably no need to panic right now.

Yes this has been a known problem of crypto/self custody since its inception. The 1 private key -> public key -> address is elegant but an horrible single point of failure.

When people create a wallet, the quality of the entropy and seed is always: I guess good, for now...

So far the only mitigation for that have been multi-signature but it has its own potential vulnerabilities.

My understanding is the next big Ethereum upgrade might include "Frame Transaction" [0] which will bring a "native multisig" capability to accounts so you can easily always have 2 addresses with different seeds origin to mitigate the risk.

- [0] https://forkcast.org/eips/8141/

I can explain what is my (maybe irrational) fear:

I am working on my desktop or laptop, I get a power cut or the laptop battery run out, when I reboot the filesystem is unrecoverable and I loose 4 hours rebuilding the system and recovering from backup.

So it is not really about loosing recent files but the potential time lost (usually at the worst/busiest moment).

There must be a fascinated industry dedicated to cracking old, orphan, lost and forgotten accounts with bad seeds and entropy.

I am tempted, how do you deal with the non journalized filesystem?

This is the one "modern" comfort that makes me hesitant to try.

About "cybercrime" in general my feeling is there is a status quo between the criminals and countries. Something like we do not take down your economy and you do not go after us.

I know for a fact that even the most powerful organizations are powerless to have some relatively unsophisticated group caught and put behind bar.

The idea we would need conventions to start acting is a joke.

My guess is this really show how all our "advanced economies" and sophisticated "democracies" react to various threats and risks.

We spend a lot of money on those threats and there is probably a ton of surveillance involved (satellites, etc.) but somehow there is not way to prevent 50k unsophisticated looters to literally take over your border on a summer day.

For it's own survival I would really advise Europe against starting a war with Russia. Because we can all imagine the pathetic debacle that we will have.

> but I can not help but feel that this has been externally coordinated.

All those things are (externally) coordinated. We've been forced to believe by romanticized narratives that things like revolutions or invasions begins with one guy shouting and everybody following him and changing history but it is not. This behaviors only exist in bad history book or fiction.

Also isn't it strange that we've seen so many insurrections being started against trump in the last 10 years, but suddenly when he literally starts a war with Iran against the will of most of the population nothing happen?

> We are not in the business of mass massacres.

Those are unarmed but aggressive foreigners. There are way to stop them entering your country in mass in a few hours without committing a massacre.

Western Europe has no problem using crowd control methods against their own people when they are protesting for good reasons (remember the gilets jaunes?).

But states like Spain are totally incompetent and corrupt. They won't hurt a few foreigners literally invading their country for the optics and do not care their own citizen get hurt as consequence.

I used to be very fond of Scala 10-15 years ago.

I also had to move on for professional reasons and haven't kept up for a long time.

I am very surprised that there is not much traction anymore for Scala. I see about 10x more Clojure news or projects on Github so it is not just about the JVM...

Could someone point to why?

They should go negative because the gigantic amount of CO2 being released right now because of the obvious incompetence of the authorites is criminal.

Also I can understand fires in gigantic forests in Canada or mountainous area are almost impossible to prevent but just looking at the Gironde/Bordeaux area on Google Maps it just looks like an absolute failure by the state.

And this is not an earthquake, it happens every years at the same time.

It is too easy to blame climate change.

I am always puzzled by those fires in those type of area (just looking on Google Map).

I have lived in risky area and fires are unavoidable at some point. But at least we had mandatory 30 or 50m wide breaks to really slow the spread.

There are about 8k validators [0].

Validators are low requirements, in the RPI ballpark and and a lot if them are combined on a single host.

Then you also need some full nodes to access the data or submit transactions. So you can consider them part of the core infrastructure and those have higher requirements in terms of bandwidth and speed/capacity of storage but also CPU. But still a mini PC is fine.

Let's say a bank have 10k employees, you already might need more computer power just with their "laptops".

Now Ethereum is a global network competing with all the network of banks all around the world. So you can do a quick calculation its footprint is magnitude lower.

- [0] https://probelab.io/ethereum/

Yes if you compare a proof of stake blockchains (most of them) and the banking industry, crypto has a far smaller environmental footprint.

Ethereum (since PoS) was designed to allow anybody to run a validator or even a full node out of modest hardware. The result is that the entire network probably has a smaller footprint than a single small/medium size bank.

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