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no problemo. they will just buy the self-same info from facebook or amazon and it's "affiliates" (anyone with money).

To the extent that this fig leaf is accepted in place of having real security via the simple expedient of a secondary e-mail address for password recents means this is getting baked into the system and hard to unwind later.

to see what I mean look at the silly "application specific password" kludge Google introduced to let you collect e-mail bypassing two-factor ID, and password storage vulnerabilities. nuts.

it should be baked in that all sites that use 2-factor also allow (or require) a 2nd address for all password resets.

currently the paradigm is if someone has control of your cell phone your two factor ID becomes zero factor ID. This is because nearly all cell phones can collect e-mail, allowing a password reset to be performed. Likewise cell phones display text messages with the second factor. So you are hosed. Even if you have a screen lock on your phone, have you ever lent your phone to a stranger to "make a call" or take a photo?

The workaround for this is to have a second e-mail address that you don't have associated with your phone's e-mail program. Then you can send all your finanical accounts to the e-mail address. But that's not really very convenient (e.g. amazon and google wallet would be awkward to use that way).

What needs to be done is to have financial companies send all non-critical e-mails (e.g. paypay receipts and notices) to your general e-mail, but require a second e-mail address for all critical transactions where money is movable.

or even better, they could simply require that all password resets go to a secondary e-mail address. this would be even more convenient.

until then two factor ID using cell phones is just a very vulnerable layer of the security onion.

Also if the bit coin miners get concentrated into just a few, what happens if these 3 were to get DDOSed? if the big miners are off line then would the next largest miner have a window of time where they controlled more than 50% of the mine? Would they be able to pull off some shenanigans in that time?

I wonder what happens if someone with more than enough CPU power to get 99% of the mining jumps in one night. What kind of Damage could they do in a short interval before people notice? What if their goals were not to steal bitcoins but rather to snatch all the coins from, say, Kim Jong Un, or Al Queda. E.g. for example the NSA or Samsung or Saudi arabia. They would not care about the loss of value in their stolen coins, the point is to deprive an adversaries use of them.

Does the Amazon or Azure networks have enough rentable time to pull this off?

Having had had family members with whooping cough I looked into this. Adults are believed to be carrier's with silent symptoms. This year (2014) when adults get their physical they will very likely be offered an immunization for whooping cough. I just got mine since I was exposed to it. Although vaccines after the fact may not be useful for protection, the wisdom apparently is that the vaccine helps your body supress the silent infection. Not sure I understand why.

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I am amused that I'll be modded informative.

your question reminds me of the movie Brazil. How can someone have done something is the computer says they are dead?

There's two reasons

first Visa and MC both require merchants not to charge extra fro using their card. Thus there's no reason for consumers not to use the most widely accepted cards.

second, even though Visa is a franchise of issuers, the master company avoids putting them in competition.

Thus there's just no easy way for competition to breakout since merchants don't want to just restrict their sales to AMEX holders anymore.

It's also likely it's an illegal price fixed cartel but I don't have any evidence for that.

Once enough people switch to Amazon it will start squeezing merchants and consumers to pay more. See Hatchette

Won't get fooled again. Um this is what bus planners have always done with the best available data, in setting routes.

arbitrage === extremely good. Keeps markets liquid. but it only requires a response time of seconds to minutes to be useful. high frequency trading is pure parasitism and should be abolished. Delays in order would remove a lot of it. Random delays in orders would be slightly more effective. And a trading tax would remove the low margin high volume trading. I have no idea why they don't implement this as see what happens. Could always unwind it if something unforseen results.

It looks like you are trying to move the ball down court.
Would you like to dribble it?
make a pass?
take a 3 point shot?

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