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Submission + - The Dilbert ICO: Scott Adams' crypto offering analysed (davidgerard.co.uk) 2

An anonymous reader writes: Scott Adams, author of Dilbert, ran cartoons a couple of weeks ago about "blockchain." We now know why: he's put up an ICO, the "WhenHub SAFT". David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, analyses what's actually on offer here. Summary: questionable business plan — Fiverr but paying tokens instead of money — but the ICO itself looks legally solid, which is unusual for the space.

Comment Vivaldi is Blink too (Score 2) 160

The summary is wrong that Vivaldi is a fork of old Opera (the Presto engine), it is in fact the same Blink engine that powers Chrome and new Opera, but with brand new chrome (non-capital, aka the interface around the engine) which is recreating the power-user features of old Opera rather than the cut-down interfaces that other browsers are working towards:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Comment Re:FastMail (Score 1) 158

Well, yes. Obviously. If "they" compromise at a level below what we are capable of seeing - for example baseband controllers on every brand of motherboard that we own, then there's nothing we can do about it. There's nothing anyone can do about that, including the theoretical "run my own email server from home".

So I don't waste much sleep worrying about that case, because there's nothing I could about it. We do everything we can to ensure security - for example airgapped internal networks with physically separate switching hardware rather than VLANs to avoid the risk of compromised switch firmware.

If that's still too much risk for you, the choice is to get offline entirely. We're not in that business, we're in the business of providing a really usable email service with the best security protections that we can provide without compromising the usability to the point that people won't use it.

Comment Re:FastMail (Score 4, Informative) 158

Thanks for the plug. We definitely recommend that users who are concerned about security use GPG with our servers via the standard IMAP/SMTP protocols. We have very good standards support, and as others have pointed out in this thread - if we ran GPG server-side, you'd be delegating the security to us anyway, because we would see plaintext versions of your communication.

For the best security, you should definitely be running the encryption on equipment under your control (and not 0wned under you... which is your own lookout in that scenario)

Comment Re:What guarantees of longevity? (Score 2) 48

Honestly, I use FB's messaging interchangably with SMS. I don't expect to keep history of either of them. Anything I want to keep gets sent as email.

IRC is great for work. I don't use it for random people though. All my choir and gym friends are on Facebook, and coordinate things through there. I'm not going to cut myself off from that.

Comment What guarantees of longevity? (Score 5, Interesting) 48

The core question with running on anybody else's platform, unless they are a regulated carrier somewhere which is required by a law to carry your traffic, is what happens when they change the rules?

Would you be comfortable building your entire business on top of it? What if Facebook imposes new limits or rules that mean you can't use it any more.

I had a conversation with a friend back in 2008-2009 some time over Facebook Messanger. We tried to find it last year. It rembered a chat we had in 2007, then nothing until 2010. It's not your own immutable copy the way that email is. Every new messaging platform claims it will kill email, but funnily enough they never do, because they don't offer what email offers - your own immutable copy and interoperability with everyone else. Email actually is the real distributed social network.

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