The judicial system is, at heart, a method of resolving disputes. Sometimes those are disputes between civilians (civil suits) and sometimes they are criminal cases, disputes between people and the state.

The most obvious and easy place to start is with small claims courts. Commercial arbitration handles many disputes that would otherwise end up in small claims courts, but we don't exploit this anywhere near enough. Most people just rely on their bank to act as a dispute mediator via the credit card chargeback mechanism, but this is a one-size-fits-all solution and banks are often not good at mediating disputes. There's lots of fraud and problematic outcomes.

The place where most of the better-law-through-tech research is happening right now is the Bitcoin community, because of the general focus on decentralisation, global trade and frequent desire to avoid relying on government. So we have for example BitRated which is a platform for doing dispute mediated Bitcoin transactions, where anyone can be the dispute mediator. So you can get a fluid, international market of specialised judges who are experts in very particular types of transactions, like software contracts etc where "I didn't get software of sufficient quality" is not a dispute that makes sense to handle via a chargeback. And it can all happen over the internet.

That's a very simple example. More complex examples involve specifying a contract in the form of a computer program and then effectively having the program be the "judge". I wrote about how to implement this, again with Bitcoin, several years ago. The technology is not that complicated actually. The hard part is figuring out the right user interfaces to make it easy. Presumably only very simple and precise contracts could be managed that way, so there's still open research in how to craft these digital contracts such that you can escape back to human judgement if there's an exceptional case.

When it comes to criminal rather than commercial cases, probably the best way to apply technology to reduce costs is to allow remote lawyering. That is, you should be able to outsource your legal representation to someone who isn't physically present. They may be rather good and experienced, but just lives out in rural areas or in a country where the cost of living is cheaper. The issue here is not really technical but rather just institutional inertia.

The UK is putting its judicial system under tremendous financial pressure at the moment, to the extent that some criminal cases are just being abandoned because there's insufficient money to run them. They're (finally!) starting to experiment with allowing small claims court cases to be resolved over the phone, and also looking at decriminalising TV license violations to reduce pressure on the system. But you get the idea - the judicial system innovates extremely slowly even when being sliced to the bone. So don't hold your breath.

Zero day means the bad guys find out before the good guys do.

Snowden hasn't had any access to the NSA since he fled to Hong Kong.

However, the amazing thing about this dude is he was able to do full blown web crawls of the entire NSA and GCHQ intranets, including dumps/crawls of data he didn't have access to .... all without getting noticed or caught. He appears to have provided the journalists with what is quite literally a snapshot of their internal networks at the time he was operating. It's taking them years to go through it.

Rainbow tables only worked for GSM, which is now decades out of date. Most people are going to be connected to 3G or higher in urban areas (i.e. where all the action is), which isn't so easily hacked. Hence their interest. It's in the article, even.

Most businesses pass those worries along to payment processors like BitPay or Coinbase. It's still better because you can always in-source if you want to, so they have little leverage over you.

But yes, Bitcoin isn't an immediate replacement for cards for all online commerce. At least not yet. Volatility is a pain, but the current price is only about 5% off where it was a year ago. Presumably as Bitcoin gets older wild press-driven hype cycles will become rarer and the bubble/burst cycle of the past few years will calm down a bit. We'll have to wait and see.

I think better warnings about not updating would be good, something in the line "there are currently X known ways of compromising your system, please update to fix".

It was tried. Doesn't work. Lots of people don't even read security alerts. They just immediately find the X or close or cancel button and click it without even reading the thing they are dismissing.

The amount of time your average user wants to spend on maintaining their computer is zero. They have no notion that a computer is a thing that must be maintained and failing to do so can damage the internet. They just want to achieve their task.

The only correct way to do auto updates is automatically, silently, and not giving the user any choice in the matter. Everyone who has failed to accept this reality has ended up with their users running obsolete and insecure versions of their apps, and getting reamed in the court of public opinion as a result. If the Java team fixed their auto updater to be entirely silent and scrapped the Ask Toolbar malarky they'd have a pretty compelling platform still. But for as long as browsers are managing themselves and Java is asking permission, it will always lose.

Yes, that seems like a remarkably common problem and I'm not sure how people manage that. Serializing objects to the database? I guess if vendors get enough customer pressure to work better with Java updates they might put some effort into it, eventually.

But then the Java security holes are all sandbox escapes. You aren't using the sandbox for some enterprise time tracking app. So the need to update is less.

The fierce competition for Google Play is the iPhone app store.

So basically, you either get to bundle the best app store and go fully Google, or you get to cause your end users issues by bundling the second best app store but get to use your own solutions for other things such as search.

I think we all see the surface parallels with Microsoft, but the problem is that all Android's competitors are significantly MORE tied and MORE bundled. Historically Apple hasn't even let people put apps on their own app store that compete with their built in apps! Don't even think about carriers shipping iPhone's with customisations, let alone Yandex - it just doesn't happen. Microsoft also don't even support alternative app stores on Windows Phone at all.

In fact, Google is unique in allowing such a huge degree of customisation and unbundling of the core components. Any outcome that results in Google getting in trouble for being dramatically more open than their competitors can only be the result of horribly broken politics, not rational and even application of law.

The card signs the transaction data once the PIN is presented (the ARQC). The PIN never goes to the bank, and a MITM should not be able to modify the signature on the transaction data. So I'm not sure why you think it's vulnerable to MITM.

That's not correct. You can tip using chip and pin.

You sort of imply that this shouldn't be the case? I'm no expert but just wondering how a crook could get a PIN other than lack of reasonable protection from the owner?

There are ways but they are all incredibly convoluted. One famous scam in the UK involved a complicated phone hack involving several actors. It worked like this.

Scammer A calls the victim and claims to be from the police department. They say that there has been an outbreak of carding fraud and the victim's card needs to be replaced. Now at this point many people's BS meters go off because fraud requiring card replacement is practically non-existent. But the scammers have a neat trick - they say, you're quite right to be skeptical, why don't you call the police department back and ask for $NAME.

So the victim hangs up the phone. But unknown to them, the other side doesn't hang up and in the UK the line only closes if both sides hang up. Now the victim picks up the phone again and hears a fake dial tone played by the other side. They dial the number of the police department and hear a fake ringing. They talk to another scammer (different voice) who pretends to be a switchboard operator, who then routes them through to yet another scammer who pretends to be a detective. All on the same phone call as the first one.

The victim is now convinced that the fraud is real, because nobody could beat the callback check right? And the switchboard sounded very convincing. The detective tells them that a courier from the bank will come round to their address and issue them a replacement card soon, and the bank will be in touch shortly. At this point they hang up, now convinced. Yet another scammer phones them and claims to be from the bank. They ask for the PIN so the replacement card can be programmed correctly. Victim gives them the PIN. Then the final scammer rocks up on a motorbike with some fake delivery company logos and hands the victim a real-looking but useless card, taking their real card (with PIN) from them. Emptying the card up to its limit via an ATM happens shortly afterwards.

I don't recall who ended up being considered liable in this case, but I think the banks covered it just to avoid the bad PR. IIRC the crooks got caught anyway.

Will some Internet payment service please, please spring up and actually give Mastercard/Visa some real competition? Paypal has been largely co-opted, Bitcoin is a joke - we need something that your average Joe can and will use. So far, nothing...

You might think Bitcoin is a "joke" but it's all you're gonna get. PayPal wasn't co-opted - they settled down into the state you would expect given that they have little competition and ultimately still rely on the banking / credit card infrastructure. Why do you think any other outcome would be different? Apple isn't going to help. They aren't exactly famous for aggressively passing along cost savings to their customers, or being flexible with their policies.

The reason lots of people are working on Bitcoin, myself included, is that when you examine the problems underlying the current financial system it becomes clear that a slightly better credit card processor isn't going to cut it.

The reason you can't secure an NFC card, is that you can't generate enough power using an antenna to power up a chip which can do crypto. The most you can do is read/write a ROM, so it's not much better than an magnetic stripe.

Your info is a couple of generations out of date. Contactless EMV cards do ECDSA on chip.

So to answer your question: No, Javascript isn't really dangerous. Poorly written browser plugins are.

No, what's dangerous is software that doesn't silently auto update.

JavaScript vs Java vs ActionScript is largely irrelevant. Web browsers routinely ship fixes for dozens of JS sandbox escapes in every update they release. Web sandboxes aren't made of magic that is unavailable to other technologies. The reason most exploit kits still target Flash and Java is that modern web browsers keep themselves up to date a lot more aggressively than those plugins do/did - typically not asking for permission any more. If you dig in you'll usually find these exploit kits are exploiting bugs that were found and patched years ago. But they still work because some non-trivial fraction of the userbase always dismisses auto update requests.

In case you don't believe me, consider that in 2014 Java had no zero day exploits at all. But some people are still vulnerable to bugs from 2012. The ask forgiveness not permission auto update policy was pioneered by Google and unfortunately took a long time to become accepted as the standard due to the old mindset, especially amongst tech geeks, of "my computer is my castle".