The same way a bank account can be seized, despite not existing as a tangible object.

In this case, it appears the suspect actually made an account transfer to a DEA agent, making it extra trivial to seize the bitcoins.

Another way to size bitcoins is to obtain the suspect's bitcoin wallet (essentially a private key). Of course, multiple copies of the private key may exist, allowing other people than the DEA to access the bitcoins even after seizure. The obvious solution is for the DEA to immediately transfer the bitcoins to a new, DEA controlled, wallet.

Actually, what happened in the 70's was that IBM learned of differential cryptanalysis, at a time where the technique was not publicly known. At that point, the NSA had known about it for some time already. But yes, the gap has closed considerably in the mean time.

A more recent example is SHA-0, which was published in 1993 but withdrawn shortly thereafter by the NSA, because they had discovered flaws in the algorithm. It was only in 1998 that academia identified a flaw in the algorithm. So in the 90's, there was still a gap of 5 years between the NSA and the public.

Anyway, it's clear that cryptography has reached a level where attacking the algorithms is a waste of time. Sidechannel attacks, on the other hand, are numerous and easily exploited, and you can bet that the NSA is hard at work developing such attacks.

Yeah, and afterwards he's likely going to Denmark, to stand trial there for breaching servers belonging to the Danish police (hosted by the ever-incompetent CSC).

Remember, he's not serving time for his Pirate Bay involvement (yet?); he's serving time for breaching bank systems and using the access in an attempt to steal millions. Since he was extradited for this case, not the Pirate Bay case, it seems that the Swedish prosecutors actually consider this worse than file sharing. (Who would've thought?)

So, instead of making up a translation, why not try it out?

becomes

or

which are arguably much worse...

No. Getting credit for you work falls under the legal umbrella of moral rights, which is related to, yet separate from copyright, which is about getting paid for your work.

Sigh. The fact that you think British time equals GMT speaks volumes to your lack of understanding of the complexities of time.

(And what is "British time"? Do you mean UK time? What about overseas territories?)

More importantly, if the clock on the user's own computer isn't "good enough", what is? Just agreeing on the requirements could easily take 100 staff days.

The US government has http://www.time.gov/ which has most definitely taken 100 staff days to create, plus on-going maintenance.

"SiteKey" only marginally improves security compared to regular TLS/https and notably doesn't help against a MITB attack as described in TFA. If this malware is worth anything, that picture will still be there.

Ooh, two-factor authentication. That's been mandatory in Danish banks for years, but hey, good to see some American banks actually providing security beyond "mother's maiden name"... even if the user has to opt-in.

Simple two-factor authentication still doesn't help against MITB attacks, of course. ("VERY good online security", indeed.)

The Tesla Model S includes free battery replacements under warranty for the first 8 years or 125,000 miles for the 65 kWh battery (the 85 kWh battery warranty has no mileage limit). After 8 years, you can extend the warranty period for $7,500 for 3 years or 36,000 miles, which is ~10% of the Model S (85 kWh) purchase price.

(An average car does 12,000 miles per year, so one is unlikely to hit the 125,000 miles limit on the 65 kWh model. People who drive a lot will probably want the 85 kWh model anyway.)

Then you want DCIE (Data center infrastructure efficiency). It's the inverse of PUE and it is expressed as a sensible percentage figure where 93% is current state of the art and 100% is perfect efficiency. But PUE is the metric people are using, whether it makes sense or not.

I don't think it's an US vs European thing. Personally, I've always had trouble with Europen fuel efficiencies, specified in "fuel per distance", because I find it weird to have "lower = better" when comparing efficiencies (and also because of the weird "L/100 km" unit). The American "miles per gallon" is more sensible in comparisons, despite the screwed up base units.

If you spend 1 watt on cooling for every 4 watt of heat (i.e. every 4 watt of computing), you have a PUE of 1.25. Not too bad, but far from state of the art.

The efficiency of the computers do not impact PUE, since PUE only looks at the power ratio between computing equipment and the rest of the data center (which is primarily cooling).

If that's their intent, they'll be sorely disappointed, since D-Wave's machine has only 512 qubits (where as all new SSL certificates are at least 1024 bits). More importantly, the machine is not a general purpose quantum computer and can't run Shor's algorithm.

Besides, NSA is already able to break 1024 bit RSA using conventional computing (not to mention the possibility of much cheaper side channel attacks). See e.g. Schneier.

- Kleinjung et al., 2010, my emphasis

The same paper gives an estimated difficulty of 2 million CPU years for factoring 1024 bit RSA. Sure, that's about $500 million on Amazon EC2, but the NSA have dedicated data centers, dedicated ASICs, smarter algorithms, and money to burn. Realistically, breaking 1024 bit RSA may be as cheap as $50,000 a pop to the NSA... and remember, they only have to break it once per HTTPS certificate, not once per connection.

(As for Google, they're already have your email and knows every page you visit that contains a YouTube video, a +1 button, or Google Analytics... Why would they waste time breaking RSA when the sidechannel attacks are cheap and plentiful?)

Prostate cancer is very common among older men, but it's more often an annoyance than a killer, since people usually die of other causes before the cancer can kill them.

To quote the doctor treating one of my relatives, it's a cancer you die with, not of.

(US numbers)

That's why prostate cancer has low priority, compared to e.g. breast cancer, which has a relative 1-year survival rate of 96%, and 85% for 5 years (UK numbers).

Correct. This is the Danish postal service.

To put things in perspective: Shortly after September 11, 2001, a friend of mine figured it might be a funny joke to send me a "fake anthrax letter" though the mail. When the flour leaked from the envelope during shipping, the entire post office was shut down and evacuated, and my friend was arrested in the middle of the night, prosecuted... and cleared of all charges. Because, y'know, it was just flour. No harm, no foul.

So feel free to try this at home, if you live in Denmark.

Wait, is this quote about the USA or Ecuador?

Those who live in glass houses...