It's not infinitely divisible. Each coins is divisible into 100 million subunits. On the wire value is represented with an int64.

They know the outputs in the guys wallet - if that money were to suddenly start moving, it would eventually (probably quickly) have to turn up at one of the Bitcoin exchanges, given how tiny the Bitcoin economy is and how much more useful a state backed currency is (today). Those exchanges are all well known, registered with their local governments, etc. Figuring out who is trying to cash out would not be very hard.

You'd have put money away and bonded lawyers so they could "spring you"? How exactly are these lawyers going to do that? Ulbricht is guilty as fuck and clearly knows it. The two criminal complaints are overflowing with evidence and that's not going to be all the Fed's have got. I have a hard time seeing how any lawyer is going to wriggle out from under all that stuff. Doesn't matter if you somehow managed to bond the best of the best ahead of time.

Also, you seem to have overlooked the fact that the guy was poor. Given he had explicitly stated in the past that he was motivated by money, that rather implies he was afraid of converting large chunks of his Bitcoin wealth into dollar wealth, probably because he wasn't sure he could beat the ID verification and AML checks the exchanges all do these days. If a bank sees an unemployed guy who lives with flatmates suddenly start receiving enormous wires from a Bitcoin exchange, and then sending money on to law firms, that's the kind of thing that triggers them filing a "suspicious activity report" with the US Treasury. It's actually not so easy to cash out large illegal holdings of Bitcoin, you'd have to find someone to do it on your behalf who doesn't mind potentially being hit with a money laundering charge if you were to go down. That's not easy.

That said, I'll agree that the guy was a walking cliche. The only thing unclear to me is how many criminals out there aren't - whenever we see cases like this, it always seems like the gangsters literally started speaking like a bad movie character. Is it that the movies are so accurate, or the bad guys learn how to behave by watching films?

Because he knew that if there was an indiscriminate data dump, governments would use that to distract from the real meat. By getting professional journalists to digest the data into understandable stories, he ensured that would not happen. Also he feels details about specific operations or sites or whatever isn't really important to the debate, which is what he cares about the most.

Now that said, we'll have to see if he is happy with the current level of disclosures. My impression so far is that he has been very happy with how things worked out. But this is a guy who had EFF and Tor stickers on his laptop. If he knows Tor is broken and the Guardian do stories implying that it's not, it'll be interesting to see if he has any reaction to that. Right now he's lying low because he wanted to fade away so the stories focus on the material - and that's something he has done amazingly well.

A few days ago a well known Tor developer was getting angry on Twitter because he thought the Guardian was holding back a story on Tor due to redacting requests and pressure from governments.

The presentations cited date from 2007. That's 6 years ago and tells us diddly squat about their current capabilities. All it tells us, really, is that in 2007 they had developed some working techniques in the lab, and were talking about the same kinds of attacks that were being discussed in public. It also tells us they use custom malware - but that was already revealed previously.

The Snowden files contain a complete copy of GCHQ's internal wiki. It seems highly unlikely that there is no further information on Tor after 2007. Rather, it feels like the British and American governments treat their capabilities against Tor as one of their most valuable secrets and applied significant pressure, the resulting compromise being "you can make a story about Tor, as long as it's based on old information that is no longer relevant".

.... however, you can install apps from outside the Play Store on Android.

It's also rather duplicitous. This study shows a graph that clearly indicates a bloodbath in recorded music sales, and then says "the drastic decline of revenues warned of by the lobby associations of record labels is not in evidence". The reason for this conclusion is that concert revenues went up. But perhaps those revenues would have gone up even in the absence of widespread music piracy. Regardless, it is irrelevant - the record labels (which are remember fairly small companies whose clients are actual artists) predicted a drastic decline in the thing that suddenly became easy to steal, which is exactly what happened. It does not change the brutal fact that income from recorded music halved once mass piracy became easy thanks to fast internet and MP3.

Does anyone believe the world consumes half the amount of recorded music as it did in 1999? No.

The debate on piracy is important because although music felt the sharp edge of the sword first, ultimately all creative industries have to suffer from it. OK, so parts of the music business that happen to put on good concerts might have been able to replace losses from piracy by travelling more. But TV shows don't put on concerts. Movies don't put on concerts. Video games certainly don't.

Trying to make an argument about piracy and copyright based purely on the fact that (parts of!) the music business found ways to replace lost revenue is pointless - it ignores all the other industries that rely on working copyright.

Nowadays I know most of the Circle by their real names, and have trouble remembering their /. usernames. D'oh! :P

-MT.
(Alan Ralph)

In all seriousness, I - as a researcher myself - understand the need of easy access to publications. However, I never supported the open access models that came into existence and are being built and pursued today. Why? Because it's all about the money and a lot of such journals absolutely do not care about quality, or about having big name editors who'd perform very thorough revision of reviews and make proper decisions about paper acceptances. Big journals have good editorial and review staff, and they simply can't allow them to be bad and irresponsible, because they actually care about their reputation and credibility. New breed open access journals on the other hand only care about revenue.

The instititue I work at has mandated open access publication as well as others did, however, they did not provide funding for us to actually publish open access versions at big name journals, so we try to play the system whenever we can, and publish in traditional journals with traditional publication schemes. I do not care about some politician-flavored scientists' (most of them not even publishing) dreams about some utopistic open access world. I care about publications appearing in credible journals, reviewed by credible people, producing quality publications - even if they are only attainable for money.

(Just popping in for a flying visit to Slashdot)

deviantART has been getting a LOT of spam and phishing attacks, in part because there are so many users on their likely to fall for such things. Hence disallowing posting from newly-created accounts. They also have an interstitial screen for all outbound links, which is annoying to say the least, and the latest has been to add a link symbol next to outbound links in messages.

Unfortunately, there are still ways around the spam filters. Most spam accounts I spot have laid low for a while before posting, so they don't get closed until people have reported the messages, by which time they've probably gotten what they came for. :( And the actual reporting system still needs some works.

(I'll have been a dA member for 10 years in a few weeks time. The site does look a lot better than it did back them, unlike a certain tech news site I can think of...)

-MT.

"the damage that has become visible over the past few months means that we need to start planning for a computing world with minimal trust"

Oh, come on. I mean I don't know about most people, but there has been no day during my life around computers during which I would've ever thought that computers, the networks, the internet, and/or services were more secure or more trustworthy than that 'minimal' the poster talks about. And I'd expect everyone with enough experince and insight to feel the same. So this 'waking up' one day and being dumbstruck of evaporating trust and security just feels weird and even funny. They were actually never there, just the illusion of some, mostly for the average non-caring crowds, but that's really easy to lose. Also, current generation 'westerners' are the worst in such matters, since they have no more memories of times not-so-long-past when survaillance - covert or open - was the norm. Thinking you live in freedom and liberty can be blinding. Take care, people.

PFS would not help in this case. The FBI asserted that a pen register (which is not a warrant and merely requires the government to assert "relevance") is sufficient to obtain the SSL keys for an entire service, because they choose to implement it via an SSL interceptor. LavaBit argued the pen register does not grant such broad power, so then they went and got a search warrant for it instead.

Obviously if the FBI has the SSL key, they can impersonate LavaBit and intercept everything at that point. It helps only to prevent the NSA reading their old packet logs.

The news here is not change your crypto - it doesn't work in the face of the $5 wrench attack (more accurately, $1000 fine per day). The news is that the FBI believes (and the court agreed) that the only thing they have to do to obtain an SSL key is assert that it is "relevant" to an ongoing investigation, an extremely low standard that is almost meaningless.