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Even though many people scoff at the idea of government regulations, the economic incentives in IoT security are really all messed up and it's not really clear that the market will fix itself because so much of the damage can be externalized somehow. Does the manufacturer of a cheap and outdated IoT device care if it's participating in some ddos attack? Or like Schneier said, does the consumers care if they don't notice?

There seem to be some soft mechanisms that governments could explore. Maybe something like demanding opening the source code once security updates for the device stop, so consumers could help themselves. Or at least, an even more modest regulation, simply allowing all consumers to hack their own devices without fear of violating any laws.

One thing that could hurt the market is maybe making manufacturers liable for the damages caused by security holes in their devices, but regulation doesn't have to go that far to make an impact.

Is there a good Vimperator replacement for the new webextension addon system?

A sufficient number of people seem to enjoy the games in the end. I guess mission successful for EA?

Any reason Intel doesn't just offer IME-free CPUs too? There's obviously interest considering the lengths organisations like Google go to to disable it and Intel supposedly already has such offers for governments.

> In addition, if Bitcoin disrupts the banking industry and a portion of wall street, we'd have to subtract their energy consumption.

Do you seriously think that? The cost of stuff like VISA's server farms or office buildings (and the rest of the financial industry) is probably globally negligible. Not to mention similar institutions would inevitably appear for cryptocurrencies (or already have, like Exchanges, etc.).

What remains is the horrendous cost for a Bitcoin transaction vs. the negligible cost for a 'normal' transaction in most trust-based systems.

People are always quick to point out that this is just what it takes to build a trustless and decentralized currency, which is probably correct, but it's not clear whether such an extreme level of trustlessness is even necessary (if you are not a crypto-libertarian on principle).

The benchmark for Bitcoin are normal financial transactions as they exist today (and work quite well, most of the time). So the question really is: Are you ready to have humanity spend the additional energy consumption of a country (or many countries if Bitcoin were to scale up) to run a system that offers only very limited throughput (relative to established systems) and hasn't even proven yet that it's even a viable alternative to fiat money from an economic perspective? Not to mention the scaling issues that come with such broadcast protocol.

I don't really see the widespread use, at least as envisioned by Bitcoin proponents. If it's just the decentralized aspect and transparency that you want, you can relax your trust assumptions and implement something like a distributed ledger with known identities which doesn't need proof-of-work to prevent sybil attacks (identities which of course would have to be certified in some way, unfortunate).

Oh well, it's still a very cool technology, but I hope for the planet's sake that cryptocurrencies stay in their niche of anonymous transactions for those who actually need it.

I wonder in what form they store what the article calls a hash. Certainly no simple file hash - I guess it's some kind of feature extraction that lets them match the image against others?

Facebook probably is even just reusing the same systems that flag child porn or other illegal images. One of their better and more user-friendly ideas for sure (if you are locked into their ecosystem anyway, you might as well use their surveillance expertise to control the content you spread there.)

I imagine if it ever comes to that, society is likely to stagnate intellectually. People grow more conservative and reactionary as they grow older (I don't just mean that in the political sense), what would happen if all there is are infinitely old people?

I think young generations are necessary, but if everyone lives forever, there's hardly space in the world for them.

Maybe it's the fate of humanity and a singularity will just mean that we have reached our limits.

The user experience really is just so good. Put in a paywalled link to a paper and out pops the PDF. I think the ease of use really contributes to its popularity a lot.

Although I don't like the thought of my body rotting somewhere, I do think it's probably just fair if my available biomass is turned after something useful after I'm dead, considering how much I will have consumed during my life. It's still only a symbolic gesture, but in that sense I'd prefer being liquefied and used as fertilizer to just being burned to relatively useless ash.

I wonder what the most ecologically useful way of disposing of a body is.

I find it is a hard balance to strike, because on the one hand I think you certainly need input, inspiration or feedback from other people and people smarter or more accomplished than you, but on the other hand you it's not good to get self-conscious about your ideas or achievements relative to theirs.

In principle those to things could be unrelated, but in practice it can be hard to separate those two aspects.

I don't disagree, but I suppose on a technical side it's possible to allow inflation in a cryptocurrency. The rate could possibly also be determined via some distributed consensus approach, though this again would likely not be particularly democratic without some central instance to keep track of voting identities (else you have to use stuff like proof-of-work which definitely isn't democratic in the least).

Sometimes I wish Spotify added a bit more 'noise' to their recommendations, so to speak. If I don't listen to much music except Discover Weekly for a few weeks, I (subjectively) find that what's recommended to me more or less sounds the same after a while. Either they are afraid to insert new things that stray too far from an optimal recommendation or they forget too much of my listening history.

I thought this superficial kind of learning was more due to the necessity of being brief than the conviction that it's the best way to learn about a topic. We really don't have enough time in our lives to acquire an in-depth understanding of very many things.

You can trade learning more things superficially with learning fewer things in but in greater detail, but if you don't want to make a career out of your knowledge (where specialization is best) it seems like either way is fine if you just do it for fun. (Though I agree that specialization probably is more intellectually fulfilling that fact collecting.)

Stuff like that is a bit at odds with the pro-privacy marketing that Apple has been pushing recently. Guess it shows how important certain high-profile apps are for smartphone ecosystems when Uber even got Apple to give them access to features like that.

I can second this. It's a book written by capable people who do some research in the area too and they don't unecessarily hype the technology like so many resources you find about cryptocurrencies.

Pre-registration of studies is an interesting concept in that regard (also briefly mentioned in the article), where researchers can submit their study design and goals to a journal before conducting the study. It will then be accepted or rejected for publication based on the study design etc., not on the eventual outcome (as long as the study was actually conducted as promised and with care, of course).

The idea is probably only applicable to a small subset of scientific work (not good for exploratory and very novel stuff, for instance), but in certain specific areas it might make publication of negative results a more viable path for scientists because they don't have to fear that their idea was bad or they seem incompetent because of a negative result. (Since their design was accepted, at least some other people thought it was a good idea too.)

The morning paper had a post about it the other day[1], but I'm not sure if the solution is acceptable to the usual cryptocurrency crowd because it depends on running the useful code on a secure enclave (like Intel's SGX) to ensure single-threading and correct count of useful instructions that were executed. The miners are then rewarded according to number of useful instructions they executed. (The correctness of the instruction count and the work done can be validated cryptographically with SGX). I thought it was an interesting concept nonetheless.

[1]https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/09/06/rem-resource-efficient-m...

Very interesting, thanks for the answer. I'll read the papers you linked.

Why are distributed filesystems like IPFS so popular again these days ? Freenet has been around (and super niche) for close to 20 years soon. Is it because the Bitcoin hype has reinvigorated crypto-anarchists?

Someone has to have replicated the file though, else it can be lost. Yeah, you still have the hash, but if no one is left that stored the file, what are you gonna do - brute-force search for a preimage of the hash to get your content?

As long as IPFS requires replication to be voluntary on the side of the nodes, the argument of the parent holds.

Government could probably just block any DNS requests that want to resolve the ipfs.io domain. Though Spain probably does not have the censorship infrastructure deployed for that the way a country like China has.

Well, America had something going for it, especially when reports came back from the early explorers that it's lush and habitable (in many areas at least).

On the other hand, people know what to expect from the rock that is Mars. If Mars was an unknown and people would want to go there to discover what's there, then the analogy would be correct.

Of course, people will still go, but reaching a critical mass for an unnecessary settlement (at which point it might turn slightly more alluring for more immigrants) remains to be seen. But I guess what happens happens, we'll see.

Maybe you're right, but I'm thinking more along the lines of "autonomous life outside of earth is impossible in the foreseeable future, so optimizing for existential crises that threaten life on earth is pointless". The only thing we can avoid is that we ourselves destroy earth. Basically, if an asteroid hits us or something it's over anyway.

Yeah, I'm aware of that. That's why I mentioned in the end that Musk is of course free to pursue his ambitions - in the grand scheme of things money is spent on much more pointless things, so him investing in science and space exploration is surely a comparatively good investment of his money.

Making life multiplanetary seems like one of the least important issues of our times to me: either we figure out how to make life on earth sustainable in the medium term (next 50-100 years) or we do not have enough time to become multiplanetary anyway (since that will take centuries, and we will likely never leave the solar system anyway).

So it seems a bit premature to concern yourself with interplanetary ambitions before we are even sure if we can maintain our own planet (which is, and will remain for an extremely long time, the only place for autonomous life in space that humanity has).

Then again, maybe I'm nitpicking since it's not like Musk demands the whole world to commit its resources to his ideas. If he wants to play around with adventurous Mars trips that's fine.

Edit: Of course I'm also aware that Musk is still using his money better than many other wealthy people, so more power to him. This comment was mostly about space exploration vs. sustainable life on earth, all other things being equal.

Cool idea. When I read the title I thought that maybe they have discovered a practical private information retrieval method or some oblivious transfer-based method after all since their 2014 blog post (well, they kinda do something like that with oblivious accesses to the RAM I guess), but using the secure enclaves for running verifiable code seems like a very pragmatic and creative solution too.

Granted, how secure those enclaves against state-level attackers also remains to be seen (that recent attack on ARM Trustzone was pretty cool and effective), but it surely is an improvement after all if you want some defense in depth.

I'd also be interested in someone knowledgeable weighing in on the quality of those books.

My first world problem with somewhat random information dumps like that is usually that I don't really find that it's a lack of resources holding you back from learning about certain topics, it's a lack of time. The quality of those books really has to significantly eclipse what's available on the internet (especially in terms of presentation of the material) before it seems worth buying them (to be fair, price is not a real issue here, just in principle). For instance, I don't really see the value of software reference manuals (unless you already know the software and just need the reference, but then you would likely own it already and not buy it from humble bundle, right?).

The article mentions that, as in years before, the Chinese tighten censorship when important party meetings or other events of political significance come up. But does anyone know if the longer term trend is toward more isolation of the Chinese internet (or intranet, almost) or did the overall level of censorship stay constant over the last few years?

Really interesting paper. When I first heard about what WebAssembly was trying to achieve, I naively wondered why people didn't just slap some existing interpreter for bytecode into browsers (JVM, .NET, maybe even adapt LLVM?) and go with that. I knew people had been burned by Java applets, but I was still curious why they invented something new again instead of possibly adapting existing stuff.

Of course I accepted that they surely had some good reasons for doing it the way they did, but the paper has some interesting specific points in favor of the Webassembly and against existing stuff like the JVM (easier verification of the bytecode etc.).