There was no SQL injection. The attack was basically the same as if someone stole the password to a friend's Facebook account, and proceeded to scrape the posts everyone else had made visible to that friend.
Some would say SNP data is more valuable than your posting history. I'm not so sure, since after all 23andMe went bankrupt trying to monetize their data and reddit didn't. It seems possible to me that a post where you say you do X is more useful to advertisers and political propagandists/spies, than a SNP which suggests you're 20% more likely to do X.
I am reading more on the vector of attack used on 23andme and it seems they used credentials from other data breaches. This never would have happend with MFA, even SMS confirmation would've been enough.
It's insane that a company that literally stores DNA data didn't have the most basic defenses against data breaches that would take an intern 15 minutes to read about.
Yeah, I agree this is pretty overblown. On GEDmatch, you basically give everyone the information in your SNP reads - you can compare arbitrary people there, not just yourself to "close" relatives. The only condition is that you give others the same access as you want for yourself. It's very useful for genetic genealogy.
Technically, you could probably get access to and scrape all that data by uploading fake data, or someone else's. It will do very little useful unless you're into genealogy.
Always remember the magic words: dual use technology. The people pushing these aren't saying to you that they want to build data centers in space because conventional data centers are at huge risk of getting bombed by foreign nations or eventually getting smashed by angry mobs. But you can bet they're saying that to the people with the dual-use technology money bag. Or even better, let them draw that conclusion themselves, to make them think it was their idea - that also has the advantage of deniability when it turns out data centers in space was a terrible solution to the problem.
It is far easier to build them at remote places and bunkers (or both). Even at the middle of the ocean will make more sense and provide better cooling (See Microsoft attempt at that).
You can take out a data center in space with an accidental collision of a small runaway satellite. Taking out a data center in the middle of Oregon would be significantly harder and will invite massive retaliation.
At this point I wouldn't be surprised if a non zero number of pitch meetings start with, "in order to not disrupt your life too much as the mobs of the starving and displaced beat down your door"
The only vaguely valid dual use technology I can see coming out of this is improving space-rated processing enough that deep space probes sent out to Uranus or whatever can run with more processing power than a Ti-82 and thus can actually do some data processing rather than clogging up the deep space network for three weeks on an uplink with less power than a lightbulb
Nah, they are pretty similar in difficulty for interception - the first US ASAT program used essentially the same Nike Zeus missiles used for ABM duty during the late 50s
not really. Suborbital vehicles achieve orbital heights. It's actually probably easier since you don't need a payload. The velocity alone will do the trick.
Where would the trust come from? I mean the trust that people really do what they say they're going to do in the real world - like ship you the goods, do the work you paid for, don't immediately kick you out of the servers you paid to access etc. A shadow economy doesn't run itself, who's going to stick their neck out to even try to make it work?
That's a completely separate issue. It's got nothing at all to do with the currency being used. USD has exactly the same problems, as does every other currency on earth.
Society's answer to that is violence. More specifically, the threat of violence. If people don't do what's expected of them, at some point people with guns will show up and the violence will commence, and it will continue until the desired order is restored.
Stuff like laws and courts are just extra steps towards that violence. No matter the context, the threat of violence looms eternal and that's what makes people behave reasonably.
There is no threat of violence if the trading parties maintain anonimty. And even if they don't, there is little realistic threat unless the victim can prove to authorities who the offending party was.
Crypto lets you decouple trust from ownership, that's one of its main selling points.
You can have a Visa-like network that supports chargebacks, but design it in a way that the dispute arbitrators cannot seize your money. If you report a transaction, they can either decide to release the money to the merchant or return it back to you, but the contract logic prevents them from doing anything else with that money. If both sides agree that the transaction has successfully taken place, it can be released automatically, despite the arbitrators' wishes.
This is something you can't do in trad fi, so we use laws and legal contracts as "hacks" to make it somewhat possible.
This sounds terrible outside for very rare edge cases. It adds so much friction to disputed transactions. And in the end rather than beholden to the law you’re beholden to a third party arbiter. Sounds terrible in a sector rife with grifters and scams.
Where does the trust come from for transacting in dollars, or Spanish pieces of eight? I'm not saying the monero economy is likely but there's absolutely no reason why it couldn't theoretically happen
Courts, law enforcement and contract law. All of which will take a dim view of using a currency which appears designed wholly to make their function harder.
That's the wrong answer. The existence of tokens predates the existence of government. It's the next step after barter. The correct answer is reputation. A vendor who cheats his customers builds up a bad reputation, and the only way he can keep doing it is by changing customer bases, for example by moving to a different town. Think of the traveling snake oil salesman who moves on once people realize his remedies don't work.
The courts etc are there so we don’t have to create a posse and ride out to find the snake oil salesman. You _can_ have commerce without them but it’s much higher friction. So if a crypto wants me to abandon the existing systems it needs to show it creates less friction.
Crypto’s use case isn’t for the layman. It’s for countries that aren’t aligned with America to have a separate currency system. Doubly useful for bypassing sanctions.
There's no need for a mob, government-backed or not. A vendor who scams his customer base is harvesting its good will, and eventually it will run out and he'll no longer able to do business.
A crypto advocate would argue smart contracts can fulfil that role, but also that applies in developed countries but not in the countries where the vast majority of the world population lives.
I think if a true crypto economy does emerge anywhere it's likely to be Nigeria, Lebanon etc - places with a significant population of educated entrepreneurial people but where the state is run abysmally and you can't rely on those institutions anyway
It seems to me that the crypto absolutists have it backwards. You can’t solve the problem of failed states by changing the technology of currency, because the state is there to solve for the counterparty risk at the point of exchange.
The alternative to governments monopoly on violence for enforcement, no matter if you exchange in monero or giant stone discs, is broad use of vigilante violence.
So while crypto seems like an interesting technology for moving money around, it seems like it doesn’t solve for the point of exchange problem and thus crypto that focuses on making that difficult for government mediation are bound to be only useful for illegal activities.
There is no counterparty risk for the seller in the traditional sense with bitcoin or monero, they're bearer assets, once the transaction is confirmed in your wallet there's no risk for you. You don't need to use violence to make sure you get paid?
What you actually have is the opposite problem (in a sense) - the transaction is irreversible, the seller will receive payment and keep it even if they shouldn't (i.e fraud). So there is more risk for the buyer than in a fiat system where transactions can be reversed by legal processes
That’s all counterparty risk. If you deliver the payment before the service/good the buyer takes on the risk. The opposite is true if the payment or good is delivered first.
You can dial the risk in either direction with any payment scheme (20% down balance due on delivery etc) but you can’t eliminate it.
Right yep, I understand what you mean. Yes, ultimately you need some kind of dispute mechanism that probably requires actual human intervention.
A good example is how disputes work on P2P crypto exchanges like bisq - you have a crypto contract of some kind that holds funds in escrow, but ultimately disputes are resolved by a team of actual humans who look at the facts and make a decision, not everything can be "code is law"
Courts and law enforcement certainly provide these things, but they are not required. The inherent design of blockchains makes them trustworthy (an oversimplified statement), which is even better.
Blockchains don’t, and can’t, solve for the risk of the off chain component of an exchange.
The transactions aren’t atomic so someone is taking on counterparty risk. One of governments prime responsibilities is dealing with that risk, no matter the currency in question.
Yeah, from that it sounds like the main advantage of this mold is that it gets some compensation from all that deadly radiation, and thus does better than mold which doesn't.
Differences between men and women are down to the situation.
Sometimes the long situation. When a situation has lasted a long time, it sticks, and turns into culture, gender roles.
When a situation has lasted a really long time, it sticks hard, and becomes biology.
But most of the time, it's neither culture or biology which decides what men and women do. It's the immediate situation.
And even if you think it's culture, even if you think it's biology, if you don't like how men are (or how women are) you have to start with changing the immediate situation. The others will follow - eventually.
Those descriptions themselves would be a major archaeological find if they were preserved at all. But chances are that those detailed descriptions would be lost even if the original artifacts would have still been preserved had they not been looted.
Some would say SNP data is more valuable than your posting history. I'm not so sure, since after all 23andMe went bankrupt trying to monetize their data and reddit didn't. It seems possible to me that a post where you say you do X is more useful to advertisers and political propagandists/spies, than a SNP which suggests you're 20% more likely to do X.
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