It's not even good for that. Using Wiki for an internal documentation system is infinitely superior despite lacking WYSIWYG editting and drag-and-drop functionality. At least you have a built-in and obvious revision control system using Wiki. Wave just makes everything look like a mess. Not to mention, Wave-in-a-box is broken all over the place in its current state. Any of the killer features, like integrating various Google features like maps, etc just isn't there.

You're far better off using something like Sharepoint or OpenGroupware to manage corporate comms and the Wiki for documentation.

It's a fucking propaganda piece. It's quite easy to see right through the bullshit.

If a BIOS exploiting malware was a real threat where's the CVE for it? Where's the advisory?? A BIOS crippling virus released into the wild has no need for secrecy unless the NSA themselves released it. It's quite convenient they mention they thwarted a "major cyber attack" without releasing the name of the virus nor when this supposedly happened.

What a fucking joke that entire interview was....

I'd try filing it as a capital expense and see what happens. Just prepare for them to laugh at you.

ssshhh you're ruining the endless circle jerk over hash rates and peer-to-peer. This is /. karma gold.

Considering that's 1 out of 10000 in a country with 267 million privately owned firearms, that's not too bad.

I decided to look up some numbers just to make my point a little clearer.

Let's look at the global hash rate distribution of Litecoin. Right now, 57,508 MH/s - this works out to be the equivalent of 75,668 7970s or 280x ... lets multiply that by the price of the card, let's say even $550 to get the motherboard, some ram, a cpu, and 3 cards on each rig. We're looking at just shy of $42M USD.

Peanuts to them. It's just a matter of building those rigs fast enough, and supplying the electricity.

I bet Intel could design some really sick ASICs compared to Avalol.

Wonderful someone at least trying to refute my points.

Getting hundreds of thousands of ASIC hashers isn't out of their budget at all. And coercion of foreign companies is as easy as preventing them from doing trade in the USA if they wanted to take it that far. Realistically they wouldn't even need to threaten that, they just put the big money bags at the front steps of Global Foundries or Intel and they'll get all the 14 nm ASICs they want developed by hoards of mathematicians who probably have wet dreams over this stuff.

Also, the government wouldn't treat money laundering and tax avoidance en masse the same way as media piracy. One involves completely undermining their ability to exert control over the populace and generate revenue versus Hollywood missing out on few measly billion.

Shutting down a website in Finland is as easy as removing their record from the root DNS servers, which to my understanding reside within the reach of the US government. In addition to that, Finland is a signator to the same treaties governing global money laundering as many other countries. They would be bound to this law, again if the US government really sought to pursue it. I imagine the Finnish government would feel equally threatened by Bitcoins by the time the US federal government is. The US also has military bases and personnel still in Japan. I think they have influence still.

Litecoin is just as effected by this for the same reasons - the US government has more money at it's disposal than the entire capitalization of Litecoin. If it relies on consumer products, the US government has just as equal access to the equipment, and have more money to guarantee access to it. They would just keep playing wack-a-mole until crypto currencies become a serious pain in the ass to any investor completely devaluing it.

If any of this becomes enough of a threat to the status quo of the global banking system, it will get shut down. Keep in mind the pointless and never ending war on drugs still exists, that's why cocaine isn't on store shelves, just as easily bitcoins could be stopped from being accepted at the cash registers. Just wait and see when some terrorist camp gets raided and they find USB keys with bitcoins on them; it doesn't even really need to happen either, they could just fabricate the story.

In the short term, fuck I'd throw all my money behind crypto-currencies. Do I see it surviving past 10 years? Not that likely.

A government could take control of Bitcoin in multiple ways:

1) use massive budget spending to fund an organization to stage a 51% attack on the network. The NSA has the capability to do this. They can coerce private industry to develop ASICs in larger volume production than what currently exists, and shutdown any other ASIC reseller.

2) give power to police services to setup busts on individuals looking to sell/buy Bitcoins for cash, and shut down Localbitcoins.com or any other website that provides such services. It would be a cat-and-mouse game if sites like Localbitcoins were only in the Tor network, however this increases the difficulty to 'cash out' so it could effectively devalue Bitcoins.

3) coerce ISPs to install multiple Bitcoin p2p nodes with preferential network conditions so non-sanctioned p2p nodes connect to them first within the data centre and monitor which IP addresses are sending or receiving Bitcoins. Kind of a combination of MITM and setting up multiple wave detectors in a pond, then correlating the point source of the ripple.

4) use information gleaned from this monitoring to tie Bitcoin addresses to IP addresses, then coerce ISPs to hand over the subscriber information.

A few ways to to stop this: further decentralize the internet and establish a truly global peer-to-peer mesh network. A massive wireless ad hoc network would work if it can cross the ocean somehow. The other possibility is white listing IP addresses within the Bitcoin p2p mesh, but a white listed IP could always get compromised by the state for some unknown length of time. Namecoin might offer a reasonable solution if it also had a tie-in for tunnelling and rerouting traffic and never allowing 'exit node' like Tor does, however everyone would need to use it. I see it suffering from the same problems as Tor though.

The author makes one solid implied argument: the state has the ability to resort to threat of violence, detention, financial ruin, seizure of assets over its citizenship.

What I don't understand is why bother even pursuing the researcher, method and results? Just try to reproduce the work independently and publish the results. Hand over the project to someone who has little prior knowledge about the politics behind the topic and let them toil away at it. I'm sure there's plenty of underpaid graduate students willing to step up to the plate.

“A person has an obligation to do the right thing if they can,”

If she went about reproducing the experiment the benefits would've been: keeping her job, probably getting more funding, not wasting $200k of her own money, and having more papers published. The right thing here is reproducing the experiment by a wide margin.

And many of them go belly up soon after. All it takes is a slight popular shift and the whole thing falls apart - just look at MySpace. Snapchat I think made a big mistake holding out for another buyer, because I don't think any other company would offer the synergy that their service would have with Facebook.

Who're they going to sell to now? Yahoo? Google? Maybe Twitter... I think they missed their golden pay cheque.

From what I can see, Snapchat has no revenue. They don't get anything, zero, ziltch - unless image EXIF data is worth something. No ads, no software sales (it's free!). Unless they've been saving on their servers every single pic/video sent from people's phones to later use for extortion I'd say they are pretty worthless besides a user base that's already installed on Facebook.

The user base would likely go into free fall if Facebook took them over anyway, because we absolutely know those guys would archive every single piece of information.

The risk with GHB is that when consumed with alcohol the reaction is very very bad. So the issue is, if we were to supply GHB-based beverages on the market, even with a very controlled low dose, once mixed with alcohol the results can be instant blackout (the reason why GHB is used as a date rape drug), profuse vomiting, coma, seizures, and death. You're essentially asking to end up in the ER if you do this combination to even a bit of excess.

I personally know people who had the attitude of "oh i'm experienced using GHB, I can control myself from drinking too much alcohol while on it" ... right there is half the problem, once some people start drinking the subsequent drinks are consumed with less judgment - surprise surprise considering it inhibits your sense of judgment.

So we're not talking about high doses here, the LD50 for GHB is kind of low, combine that with alcohol and it's even lower.

And it would be damn expensive to do that.

Bitcoin is backed by the stakeholders - those who have invested money into mining and bitcoins. These people are citizens of a variety of countries, many of which offer legal rights for investments. The United States, being the very capitalist nation that it is, has many laws that protect its citizen's property. These citizens will be petitioning the government constantly through every legal avenue possible to insure their bitcoin holdings are not made illegal on a political whim. In Canada for example, the Canada Revenue Agency (Canadian IRS) are going to be passing out rules for reporting the income. It's capital gains once sold on the market, and in Canada that tax rate is quite high, however it is a legal avenue to cash out bitcoins.

There is an emerging marketplace for bitcoins, Baidu probably being the largest name to enter this market at the moment. This list may seem trivial now, but there is enough momentum now that it will likely take off. All it needs is the blessing of a major US political party - and to do that just keep sending them BTC donations. They aren't going to make their own hoard of money illegal.

Well he wrote that comment using language very reminiscent of Communist propaganda.