121–130 of 147 posts
Make coins paid in ransom subject to seizure wherever they may be found. It’s not a silver bullet but it would help and it’s an easy change to make.
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This is just an ad hominem response to Stephen's argument.
It shows a clear bias on the part of the author and a reason to believe they would argue in bad faith. The author being a founder a company for which cryptocurrencies are competitors makes this doubly true.
I totally missed this. That makes it worse. The company's tagline is "[company name] digitises cash and settlement processes for multinational corporates [sic?]", which is a pretty clear overlap. I don't necessarily see any evidence he's doing anything in bad faith, though - I just think he's extremely biased and narrowly agenda-driven.
My main issue is just how much he seems to viscerally hate cryptocurrencies. It makes it harder to take it seriously. Like how incredibly snarky and spiteful he comes across in his most recent ostensibly-about-programming blog post: https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/fpt.html
cryptoBusinessLogic = bid $ 10000000 $ do
profits edit: Side note, just to counter-balance the criticism. I knew his name seemed familiar; he wrote one of the most useful and formative tutorials for me when I started programming about a decade ago: https://sdiehl.github.io/gevent-tutorial/. (Although it's a bit gauche now, I still use gevent for new projects to this day.) It's more due to serendipity than anything else since there's not anything too special about it, but in my case it's actually possible I never would've become a developer if not for his tutorial - I used it to build my first programming project at a time when I was kind of struggling with many concepts and unsure if I wanted to go through with it. It goes to show that there isn't necessarily much correlation between (one's perception of) people's technical and non-technical attributes.
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so long as encryption-as-we-know-it holds-up, there's no rescue for orgs that repeatedly get hit and can't get their backup strategy together. Sure, you make a regulatory mis-step and you have friends in high places, they will look the other way. This indeed, is how the world works. If your entire infrastructure is encrypted into a solid block of nothingness it doesn't matter if your dad is a senator, you're done.
Name a single company that has died due to data breaches. Meanwhile, I'll name a dozen that got breached/leaked data, and got away with it: Experian, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Marriott, Yahoo, First American Financial Corporation, Deep Root Analytics, Court Ventures (a subsidiary of Experian), Capital One, Anthem. Go on, search "list of largest data breaches" and then see how many of those companies are still in b…
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But that only applies to targets who are "in the game." If you are a government entity or listed company or act as their agents, then you know that security is an issue and are paid well enough to make a decent effort. Whether you do or not is a different issue. Grandma doesn't have security audits, wouldn't know how to do one, and couldn't afford it if she did. She is the victim here. She might call the police but t…
I believe that subversion of the democratic process and economic efficiency hurts everyone, if not initially or obviously. Recent election cycles have been tumultuous. Grandmas are currently targeted by scammers who ask for iTunes gift card numbers and not Bitcoin, I'm not sure that much will change. I've yet to hear people call for a ban on iTunes gift cards, but maybe we will get there.
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I see nothing there that invalidates any of those points. At best it weakens points 1, 4 and 5 on the basis that companies will get away with it by paying ransoms [0], and ransomers have a incentive to not be so extractive that they kill the hosts they're parasitising, but that's still a idiot tax for said companies. 0: rather than their previous strategy of ignoring the problem entirely because other poeple's privac…
Indeed, I'd need to explicitly address each point to explain exactly why and how I disagree. They're not exactly wrong in a general sense (which I know sounds a little contradictory given I said "every single point is completely inaccurate, irrelevant, and/or nonsensical"), but I think they're wrong in a fundamental way when talking about the ransomware problem. And point 1 is a total non-sequitur in at least three d…
Huh? If anything, they're too optimistic; as you pointed out, it's likely many companies will continue to ignore this and either make backups without improving their security, pay ransoms after the fact or quietly implode when they can't.
I agree that 1 is a bit useless (although I took it to mean PGP-for-example, not PGP-specifically), but I didn't see anything particularly relevant to it, aside from what I mentioned above.
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It shows a clear bias on the part of the author and a reason to believe they would argue in bad faith. The author being a founder a company for which cryptocurrencies are competitors makes this doubly true.
>The author being a founder a company for which cryptocurrencies are competitors makes this doubly true. I totally missed this. That makes it worse. The company's tagline is "[company name] digitises cash and settlement processes for multinational corporates [sic?]", which is a pretty clear overlap. I don't necessarily see any evidence he's doing anything in bad faith, though - I just think he's extremely biased and…
I'm not an unequivocal fan of cryptocurrencies or any particular cryptocurrency by any means, but it appears this author really hates cryptocurrency and this is just an opportunity for them to argue that governments should ban cryptocurrency. Which is completely understandable and obviously in good faith given ransomware is bad and they think cryptocurrencies are bad, but I just wanted to point out their stance and t…
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>The author being a founder a company for which cryptocurrencies are competitors makes this doubly true. I totally missed this. That makes it worse. The company's tagline is "[company name] digitises cash and settlement processes for multinational corporates [sic?]", which is a pretty clear overlap. I don't necessarily see any evidence he's doing anything in bad faith, though - I just think he's extremely biased and…
I've followed Stephen Diehl for awhile got the idea that he hated Bitcoin and proof of work because it's a climate change disaster for the amount of electricity it uses. I feel he is sincere in that. I happen to agree with him, so maybe that makes him more credible to me.
From what I can tell, that's only one of his many criticisms, if you read his blog. I'm sure he's sincere about all of the criticisms, and I agree with many of them in a general sense, but I don't agree with the conclusions or the (IMO) hyperbolization.
FYI, the author has a huge conflict of interest whenever he writes about cryptocurrency, seeing as he's the founder of Adjoint, Inc, a company which digitizes cash and settlement processes for multinational corporates. So it's easy to see why he hates a technology that renders his entire company useless.