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 state action. So, contrary to the headline, the underground economy …
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 recipient account had received a message with a particular hash, …
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 Jon Callas as unelected president for life of symmetric cryptography, …
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 response. It’s protest. Intellectually, I believe that AES and SHA2 …
The fake shutdown confrontation
Whichever party yields, winds up being blamed for any disruption caused. Therefore, the party with the weaker hand should always yield swiftly, and the party with the stronger hand should never yield. And since the constitution gives the party that controls the house of representatives the overwhelmingly stronger hand, the Republicans would win – except that the whole thing is staged. They intend to lose, in order to persuade their voters that they have no choice but go along with …
Australia wins the right to remain white.
Since Europe has been flooded with non whites, Australia is close to being the whitest remaining country, possibly is the whitest remaining country.  This is of course illegal under international law – since the Cathedral writes international law. The Cathedral holds that international law requires that if a boatload of third worlders shows up, the first world country where they show up has to take care of them and put them on welfare for the rest of their lives. (It …
Putin deals with Civil Disobedience
When someone claims to be engaging in “Civil Disobedience†he means “We are the state. You have to obey our laws, but we do not have to obey our own laws.†Observe that Bill Ayers, Obama’s bomb making pal, never spent a day in jail despite having organized the bombing of numerous buildings to “protest the war†– actually of course, he was a state department proxy making war on the Pentagon, hence, no jail time. If you try bombing …
Google is evil
With phones becoming more capable, an obvious way to make money was to create and sell a suite of productivity apps, so Quickoffice, the company, produced Quickoffice, the product, to allow you to edit your Microsoft Office documents on your phone, which product they sold very cheaply. Quickoffice, the company, sold lots and lots of copies of Quickoffice the product. They rapidly became the leading productivity phone app, with three hundred million installs. Google, the company, purchased Quickoffice, the company, …
On Fractional Reserve Banking
Fractional Reserve Banking is not the problem. Â Term Transformation is the problem. Australia and Singapore ban substantial term transformation, came through the recent financial crisis without problems.Â