241–250 of 440 posts
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I always thought the “you will own nothing” expression referred to a Gini coefficient of 1, not 0. The intent of abolishing private property would presumably be the latter.
Capitalists say "you will own nothing" and want a Gini coefficient of 1. Communists don't say "you will own nothing" - they say "abolish private property" and refer to a Gini coefficient of 0.
The backups got wiped together with the systems, so they were reachable from same network. A backup the attacker can reach is not a backup. Good they had an offline copy, but a system this important should have that as regular schedule, not depend on luck.
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You’re going to need more than just a claim to prove that, and anyone who did purchase land likely has some evidence in support, even if it’s testimony from others.
e.g. if you made a big buy there ought to be records of a bank transfer, mortgage, etc. "i paid for 30 acres here at $xx rate, and here is the mortgage docs from the bank dated March 19th that I signed, plus their valuation of the property and what went into it"
> Since the hack, officials restored their website and posted a message announcing they are rebuilding the agency's entire network from scratch. Even if the hacker claims they deleted backups, the agency appears to have had an offline copy, otherwise things would have gotten really messy over the coming months in Romania. So it seems not all has been lost. I was worried about the societal implications of being unable…
One more reason to to define the whole infrastructure in code and have offline backups. Recovering could be measured in hours.
Yes, even hundreds of them sometimes.
The most time consuming part of recovering from an attack is validating everything. It takes more than a few hours to validate the infra that stays put isn’t compromised, the IaC code itself isn’t compromised, deploy the infra, bring a copy of the offline backup of your data (your IaC can’t drive to another site and bring the backups, then make a copy, unless tou are really sure you removed any trace of compromise), validate that the backup is sound, then restore it.
In some cases the infrastructure part is the least time consuming. Some platforms are straight forward enough that even manual deployment is fast. But after a hack you can’t trust anything so you need to do the slow validation that takes longer than your projected “hours”.
> Since the hack, officials restored their website and posted a message announcing they are rebuilding the agency's entire network from scratch. Even if the hacker claims they deleted backups, the agency appears to have had an offline copy, otherwise things would have gotten really messy over the coming months in Romania. So it seems not all has been lost. I was worried about the societal implications of being unable…
I'm skeptical that they not missing at least a week's or so worth of land title registry transactions, if the only thing they have left is offline, because offline backups are not made after every single transaction. If the hacker was targeting the erasure of a particular recent transaction, they may well have succeeded. And by deleting numerous others, they have plausible deniability in the subsequent dispute over t…
Also, you still have paper documents, kept by parties to transaction, right?
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This happened in a 50k people town where my father is from in 1982 with a BIG flood that destroyed the town land registry documents (among a lot of the town). Since he's a lawyer, had first hand experience and I was always curious I asked many things about this a while back. Basically, what happened is that they rebuilt it from proof of ownership and testimonies of the people. You can never get to 100% recovery like…
> Basically, what happened is that they rebuilt it from proof of ownership and testimonies of the people In a similar vein, I was once curious how you would prove your identity if ALL of your relevant documents (passport, driver's license, birth certificate etc) were lost in some kind of cataclysm e.g. a house fire pre-digital etc Turns out there is actually a mechanism for this: - get multiple people to sign sworn a…
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Thus - one could assume that all transfers stored by the bank- before the update would not hold up in court.
One should assume the outcome of one's case in court is at least partially, if not heavily, influenced by one's political (influential-ness) standing.
Romanian friends have told me that this is really due to corruption. Specifically: - government gives IT/data contracts to cronies - cronies don't actually do any real security work to protect the data - things like this happen
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Disagree. We're talking real estate here. The time between transactions is months to years, not seconds to minutes. A git history will work fine. If there are racing transactions against the same piece of real estate, that's probably fraud, not something that should be automatically resolved.
git as-is is completely unfit for purpose and a huge security risk for this use case, because it uses MD5, which is no longer collision-resistant. If your proposal is 'something like git, with a few modifications to make it suitable for this use case', then that's exactly what I'm proposing. What you will need, once you've considered all requirements to the best extent feasible, will be a blockchain. Eg you do need t…
Firstly, git does not use MD5. It uses SHA1.
Secondly, since 2017 git has shipped with an implementation of SHA1 (sha1dc) that detects the collision attack you describe, which for this use case renders it a non-issue.
Thirdly, git supports `git init --object-format=sha256` which removes the whole issue for anyone who cares to do so.
I think git as-is solves the problem nicely. The only additional value blockchain provides is the ability for someone to point at it and say "look! A use for blockchain exists!" which isn't worth the downsides it'll bring.