It has been an open secret in the cryptography community that Hal Finney was the designer of BitCoin from the very start. Hal died in 2014. Or at least he was frozen in liquid nitrogen so not talking either way.

Besides being the first person to be involved in BTC who didn't hide behind a pseudonym, Hal published a paper that describes essentially the whole BitCoin scheme two years before BTC was launched. And Hal never once accused Satoshi of stealing his work.

The reason Hal had to hide behind Satoshi is simple: The Harber Stornetta patent didn't expire until about 9 months after BTC launched. That covers the notion of the hash chain. There is absolutely no way anyone working in the field did not know about that patent or its imminent expiry. Hal certainly did because I discussed it with him before BTC was launched.

So the big question is why BTC was launched when it was, why not wait 9 months to have free and clear title? Well, Hal got his terminal ALS diagnosis a few weeks prior: He was a man in a hurry.

Having launched prematurely, Hal had to wait six years after the original expiry of the patent term to avoid a lawsuit over the rights to BTC from Surety. He died before that happened.

Oh and I have absolutely no doubt Hal mined the genesis blocks straight into the bit bucket. The key fingerprint is probably the hash of some English language phrase.

The real inventor of BitCoin wrote a paper describing the architecture two years earlier under his own name, Hal Finney. He got a terminal diagnosis of ALS a few months before he launched the BitCoin service, the pseudonym being necessary at the time because of the Haber-Stornetta patent on the BlockChain.

No, Hal, did not keep the coins. He invented BitCoin because he was a crank with weird ideas about inflation, not to get rich. Mining the coins and keeping them would have been a betrayal of his principles.

The proof of this is given by the fact that Hal did not in fact get rich from BTC despite being the ''second' person to join the project. Nor did Hal ever complain that Satoshi took the credit for what was very clearly his work. If Hal had been just another person coming along, there would have been every reason to keep the cash.

And we do in fact know Hal ran mining servers from the start and that he ended up in serious financial trouble due to his ALS. The freezing his head thing came from donations.

Craig Wright does seem to be the last of the three early advocates alive but that doesn't make him Satoshi. Wright has never shown the slightest sign of being the sort of person who builds such a thing and in any case, Hal's name is on the much earlier paper.

The people who buy electric cars are hip urban professional types. The people who support Brexit are pensioners and skin-heads.

Dyson's public support for Brexit meant that most people in his target market wouldn't ride in a Dyson car, let alone buy one. And of course buggering off to Singapore because the Brexit he campaigned for would make assembly in the UK a disaster only made things worse.

It was a stupid idea anyway. Musk was there ten years ahead of him and was already churning out electric cars as a new entrant. It is far from clear Tesla can survive as VW and the major manufacturers enter the EV market. Dyson stood no chance. Sticking an electric motor in a vehicle instead of a petrol engine is not a huge feat of engineering. There are significant design differences but the bulk of the design and assembly technology is unchanged.

Electric vehicles still have doors, monocoque, windows, seats, suspension, in car entertainment, etc. Ford, GM and the rest only need to change one small part of the package. Sure, they have been slow to adapt. But nobody is making EVs at a profit yet. VW and BMW look set to change that this year.

A German study in 2017 suggested that insect numbers have declined by 75% in the last 3 decades.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/19...

I don't know about you, but I remember when you couldn't go out in summertime without encountering insects all the time, and you couldn't drive for an hour without getting your car splattered with bugs. It definitely seems to me like we have a lot fewer insects these days.

hello.jpg on a million desktops

Only it will automatically update itself unless you stop it.

This is irritating as it upsets my plans for end-to-end Web encryption. By which I mean encryption of the data on the server so that the server has no access to it. The only things that are on the server are encrypted data blobs and a pile of random numbers.

By end-to-end Web I mean that you will be able to set up comment forums like slashdot, read email in a Web browser and everything else you are accustomed to doing on the Web but without any of the plaintext content being accessible to the server.

The technical basis for this scheme was worked out in the 1990s and then patented by a completely unrelated company which merely sat on the patent till it expired last year. It uses meta-cryptography which is a property of the Diffie Hellman schemes that if you add two private keys, the corresponding public key is the product of the public keys, etc. Matt Blaze, Torben Pedersen and others worked out how to apply these effects to achieve an effect they considered interesting but insufficient. My contribution is merely to show that the simple scheme is more than enough to do interesting things.

So now I need to work out how to hook into the browser. One possibility is to present the decryption module as a new compression scheme. It looks like a compression scheme in other respects. It just requires the host to have access to a private key capable of completing the decryption.

Any help would be appreciated: hallam@gmail.com

The project site is mathmesh.com but that is of the previous approach which has been superseded in the reference code but not yet documented.

[Oh and yes, I do know what I am doing sort of, I have probably considered the corner case you have just thought up. This has been in discussion for many years with serious protocol design people.]

Motorola's handset update track record was spotty — my wife had one. Lenovo didn't sell their handsets in the US, or I'd have bought one, as I get discounts on Lenovo hardware.

Android One wasnâ(TM)t around in the US until last year, and then only via Project Fi. Iâ(TM)d given up and switched by then. And Google still donâ(TM)t have anything like Android One for tablets.

I use both on a regular basis, and Face ID is vastly more reliable than the fingerprint reader.

Dry skin from ambient weather? Sorry, your fingerprint isn't recognized. Damp skin from washing your hands? Sorry, your fingerprint isn't recognized. Got out of the pool less than an hour ago? Sorry, your fingerprint isn't recognized.

I thought Face ID was stupid until I used it.

I was a happy Android user for 7+ years. But to reliably get OS updates and upgrades, and not have to put up with a botched Android UI and bloatware, that meant buying a Nexus phone and tablet. Which I did, every 2 years or so.

But then Google decided to give up on Android tablets entirely, and give up on mid-price phones. They jacked up their prices, and a Pixel 3 now starts at $799. Well, guess what, that's the same price as an iPhone XR. And Google's last Android tablet offering before they gave up was actually more expensive than an iPad. So I switched.

With computers, nobody else is even offering a good Unix-based computer. Linux isn't competitive -- I use it for work, but sound and video are still a dumpster fire and don't count on hibernation working as well as a Mac either. If I didn't need to edit 4K video and work on music, I'd probably buy a ChromeBook, and sales of ChromeBooks seem to suggest that indeed there's an underserved market there.

Basically, nobody is putting in the time and money to clean up Linux (or BSD) and offer systems where sound and video editing, hibernation, and all the other basic functionality of a Mac is right there and just works. If you want that, you either have to put up with Windows and its myriad deficiencies, or you have to buy a Mac.

I'm a little surprised that nobody's deliberately setting out to build laptops that have exactly the same hardware as a Mac and are perfectly suited to hackintosh use. Give me a laptop with a proper keyboard and hardware that all worked properly with macOS and I'd be very tempted.

Kensington Expert Mouse.

Have been using them for 20 years.