171–180 of 218 posts
I hope this ransomware called itself the Da Vinci virus? Because this sounds a whole lot like the plot of Hackers [1]. The greatest movie of all time, btw. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_(film)
More movie recommendations please
Based on a true story, though it's debated endlessly. Clifford Stoll's Cuckoo's egg deals with the same material.
In a twisted sort of way I am happy to see these types of ransomware attacks making headlines. Before it was much harder to quantify how much a breach might cost but with ransomeware you get a fuzzy lower bound. Also the prevalence of these attacks might actually make us all safer in the long run.
Absolutely, it's better to have a ransomware attack against the workstations instead of a more developed attack that blew the pipeline up.
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Do I want security cameras/metal detectors/metal doors and other police state security measures everywhere? No. Do I want to have all that in electrical plants/pipelines/nuclear reactors and other objects of critical infrastructure - yes. If that means employees there would need to spend more time for annoying security checks(additional password prompts, 2FA, metal detectors, etc) - sure, I did all of that when worki…
Those things already exist in electrical plants/pipelines/nuclear reactors and other objects of critical infrastructure. Eliminating the ability of people to casually enter and access/alter/destroy this infrastructure isn't the issue. And yeah... we exactly can say that. We do it all the time. We almost blew up the world because Russia sent some missiles to Cuba. There's no reason the digital war can't have physical…
> Simple as that.
Do you think people would support a nuclear war ( because if the US bombs Russia or China, the response could very well be nuclear) as a response to hacking? And are you aware that the US is one of the most active countries on the cyber warfare front? ( Snowden, the various NSA toolkit leaks, etc.) Should Iran respond with bombs when Israel and maybe the US sabotage it's nuclear industry? Should Russia respond with nukes when the US disrupts GRU operations?
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Yes, we need to ban math. Math is the root of cryptography; which is the root of cryptocurrency. Ultimately it’s numbers. They are the worst. Everything bad comes from the interaction of points on elliptic curves. Get out of here with this.
Cryptocurrency, not math and cryptography. Cryptocurrency is a bunch of people thinking their bets are more important than the government's control levers of monetary and fiscal policy. They'd rather make a quick buck and disregard the fact that this takes away our government's sovereignty. Our government's ability to bail out the economy, protect its most vulnerable. It's more important that the Winklevosses and ear…
This isn't true. For every person buying Bitcoin thinking they are hedging themselves against inflation there is someone who sells Bitcoin because they think the exact opposite. So this doesn't take the government's sovereignty because someone ends up with a lot of USD at the other end and you can still apply things like negative interest rates on accounts with huge balances.
Ironically Bitcoin is a very poor inflation hedge because of its periodic bubbles and extreme volatility. The bubble can pop exactly the moment inflation goes up and ruin the "hedge" until the next bubble exceeds the current all time high again.
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Cryptocurrency, not math and cryptography. Cryptocurrency is a bunch of people thinking their bets are more important than the government's control levers of monetary and fiscal policy. They'd rather make a quick buck and disregard the fact that this takes away our government's sovereignty. Our government's ability to bail out the economy, protect its most vulnerable. It's more important that the Winklevosses and ear…
> Our government's ability to bail out the economy, protect its most vulnerable. How did the bailouts in 2008 help the vulnerable people who were subjected to predatory loans and lost their homes? > Nevermind the fact that cryptocurrency is destroying the environment. That's just a minor detail. Can you back this up with any data? Just went through a paper published on this topic by a couple of environmental research…
They didn't but they kept the banking infrastructure alive. What I never understand however is that the government doesn't give that bailout money in exchange for newly issued shares which they then sell for a profit once the bank is back on its feet.
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Cryptocurrency, not math and cryptography. Cryptocurrency is a bunch of people thinking their bets are more important than the government's control levers of monetary and fiscal policy. They'd rather make a quick buck and disregard the fact that this takes away our government's sovereignty. Our government's ability to bail out the economy, protect its most vulnerable. It's more important that the Winklevosses and ear…
It isn’t, and you might be a little misinformed. But it’s ok, you can scream into the abyss as long as you like. We don’t want to cure cancer (don’t know how). We want to free the world of the tyranny of central banking, debt-based economies and theft of savings through inflation. It is a noble endeavor. Selfishness is continuing along the old broken road. There are new, better ones.
You've been living the last 20 years under the tyranny of lack of fiscal stimulus. The biggest problem with the Fed is that it's the job of the government to distribute the money fairly for everyone and since Obama nobody did the necessary fiscal stimulus but this is changing thanks to Biden.
>debt-based economies
That just means more unemployment than necessary.
> and theft of savings through inflation.
What about theft of future potential through deflation? Does the future generation really owe you more than you worked for yourself?
>It is a noble endeavor.
Noble as in for the aristocracy, who have inherited and did nothing with their wealth but grew it anyway?
>Selfishness is continuing along the old broken road.
Biden has already left the old broken road.
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How do cryptocurrencies save you from a debt based economy or inflation? Don't you still need to pay for goods and services in the same debt-based economy? How does the flavor of money change whether someone needs to go into debt? What would prevent cryptocurrency values from inflating or deflating?
Inflation is mostly a monetary phenomenon. They'd limit creation of new money so it very rarely happens, and then we get deflation. Of course they'd end up printing money via some L2/L3 and we get the same deal. If we actually followed through, we'd get permanent deflation which is an obvious disaster even without accepting the Keynesian arguments against it (I find that part of Keynesian thinking to be mostly false)…
In an economy, where everything is scarce and people can't get enough of the things that they need. The US and EU economies are not like that. Turkey is like that, Zimbabwe is like that, Argentina is like that, Venezuela is like that.
In the US the only scarcity exists in housing and it is purely self inflicted. All inflations are caused by scarcity or shortages, solve the shortage and you solve the inflation. Covid won't be here forever, any shortages it causes won't be permanent but it may take years to recover if you are pessimistic.
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How do cryptocurrencies save you from a debt based economy or inflation? Don't you still need to pay for goods and services in the same debt-based economy? How does the flavor of money change whether someone needs to go into debt? What would prevent cryptocurrency values from inflating or deflating?
A large cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is entirely capable of functioning like gold as a hedge against fiat inflation. I'm not much of a crypto cultist (which is the latest trend here on HN, to tag anybody that defends crypto with that to shut down conversation), however it's extraordinarily obvious at this point how cryptocurrencies can help you evade inflation in eg USD or evade the debt damage to the US economy. Bitc…
Yes, that is what happens when your currency is the world reserve currency. Every nation exports their products to you but they never want to import anything from you. Therefore you run into a domestic unemployment problem and you must take on an increasing amount of debt just to keep your economy stable. That's the "exorbitant privilege" the privilege to be forced to take on debt.
It's called a privilege because smart leaders recognize that you can have your cake and eat it too but neither Obama nor Trump have taken advantage of that, all they did was let the disadvantages outweigh the benefits. Trump merely wanted to reduce the disadvantages by starting a trade war with China.
>that situation has been spurred on by the Fed's forever low interest rates,
Those low interest rates aren't spurred by government debt. They are spurred by low inflation, if possible the interest rates would be at -1% or deeper but things like treasury bonds, cash and in theory Bitcoin prevent interest rates below 0%.
>which encourages corporations to take on ever greater sums of debt because it's artificially cheap, which will ultimately lead to zombies ala Japan).
Yes, those corporations are supposed to grow their business and employ people, even if those companies are useless to society, because the beneficial effects of employment will completely outweigh the downsides of zombie companies. However, inflation never came and unemployment is taking forever to shrink. (precovid of course)
>The Federal answer to that is to print ever increasing sums of fiat USD, because there are no foreign buyers left that can absorb tens of trillions in new US government debt.
There are lots of foreign buyers for USD though which drags inflation way down.
>The Fed unavoidably becomes the primary buyer of the US Government's debt (this is where a nation begins eating itself; that began for the US over a decade ago now as a trickle, that trickle is picking up pace).
This argument makes sense when the debt is fueled by Trump style tax cuts because you are ruining your ability to pay the debt back in the future, I mean, how are you supposed to pay the debt back if not by raising taxes above previous levels?
If you spend it on one time stimulus the risk of the debt growing only exists until the economy has recovered. If you spend the money on infrastructure you can actually net a greater return in the future.
>Once upon a time not so long ago it was a huge deal that China held a trillion dollars of US government debt, now that sum is a joke, a mere portion of one spending program this week or next. That's how quickly the US is imploding fiscally.
It's a huge deal in the sense that it obligates the Fed to increase the money supply and the government to increase debt as mentioned in my first point. China buying US government debt IS the problem, in the sense that it forces the US government to go into more debt. If China is actively hurting the US economy, it is doing so by buying US debt which means it is not importing products from the US, which means China is not creating jobs in the USA. If China ever decides to unwind its US debt only good things will happen to the US economy.
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Inflation is mostly a monetary phenomenon. They'd limit creation of new money so it very rarely happens, and then we get deflation. Of course they'd end up printing money via some L2/L3 and we get the same deal. If we actually followed through, we'd get permanent deflation which is an obvious disaster even without accepting the Keynesian arguments against it (I find that part of Keynesian thinking to be mostly false)…
>Inflation is mostly a monetary phenomenon In an economy, where everything is scarce and people can't get enough of the things that they need. The US and EU economies are not like that. Turkey is like that, Zimbabwe is like that, Argentina is like that, Venezuela is like that. In the US the only scarcity exists in housing and it is purely self inflicted. All inflations are caused by scarcity or shortages, solve the s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its difficult to chastise a country that misses the forest for the trees, when that country has spent sixty years formenting a culture of blind consumption and wilful ignorance of anything STEM. instead of a flourishing culture of hacking and computing, the united states through DMCA and law relegated the notion to comic books and hollywood fiction. most of the public war drumming for 'hacking' (if it could be said t…
What are you talking about? The country has spent so much time on STEM, that we have a trade labor shortage. Please.
There is no shortage of labor for jobs paying high 6-figures … :-)