I have been analyzing the “shutdown†as politics as usual, which is to say, a fake conflict between the inner party and the outer party to give the appearance of democracy. I predicted the Republicans would roll over and wet themselves in a week. It has now been two weeks. I still think it is politics as usual, but the increasingly strident reaction of the inner party organs indicates that …
Lessons from the silk road.
As I said earlier, without providing evidence or explanation, the big flaw was that the server kept the messages in the clear. A recent news report has confirmed this from official sources:
CBO projects deficit under control.
Business insider points out the that the CBO projects the deficit to fall as a percentage of GDP over the next three years, neglecting to recollect that the CBO has been projecting the deficit to fall as a percentage of GDP for quite some time, while it has continued to soar as a percentage of GDP. The CBO has a record similar to that of Anthropogenic Global Warming models. Global …
Obamacare is not the law of the land.
Obamacare is not a law that Congress and the President negotiated together and passed. As Hayek pointed out: Socialism needs a central plan. There are an infinite possible number of different central plans, any one of which will step on the toes of quite a lot of people, so one can never get majority support for any one central plan, or even the support of a significant plurality for any …
The Shutdown problem
The republican party has a big problem: How to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The government has, without quite realizing it, accepted piecemeal funding of everything except Obamacare. There is no shutdown. There is just the government doing occasional bits of petty spitefulness and nastiness to express its hatred of its subjects. Since no shutdown, no reason for the Republicans to pass a bill funding Obamacare. The “shutdown” …
Republicans not folding yet
A week ago I predicted that the Republicans would fold like a cheap deck chair, and and issue a grovelling apology for their evil attempt to implement their election platform merely because they won the House of Representatives. Some of them are apologizing, but so far, no folding.
The underground economy continues
I, and others, have been assuming that the takedown of Silk Road represents competent action by the NSA. Outside In, however, points out the interesting coincidence that the takedown of Silk Road follows, rather than precedes, the appearance of competition to Silk Road. Atlantis, however, appears to have skedaddled with its user’s money, thus this looks like a successful shutdown of the online black market, hence likely to be primarily …
Technological failure of the silk road system
Silk Road servers stored all messages in the clear forever. The government placed malware on Tor exit nodes, located the Silk Road servers, raided servers, game over. Private messages should have been end to end encrypted, existing in the clear only on the computers of the sender and recipient, and should have been deniable, except for messages containing money, where the sender needed to be able to prove that the …
Cryptography standards
If everyone was to do their own thing in cryptography, that would be very bad. But committees are less intelligent than their individual members and are prone to evil and madness. Â IEEE 802.11 was stupid. If NIST was not stupid, it was because evil was calling the shots behind the scenes, overruling the stupid. Linux was a success because Linus is unelected president of linux for life. Let us follow …
Moving away from NIST
Jon Callas, a leading cryptographer, is issuing a new version of Silent Circle, which by default uses only non NIST cryptography. It was necessary to change the curves, since the NIST curves are probably backdoored. It was arguably not necessary to change the symmetric encryption and the hash, since they are unlikely to be backdoored. Nonetheless, he replaced AES with Twofish, and SHA with Skein-MAC. absolutely, this is an emotional …