Hacker News Reader

BlueMatton Getting ready to operate GNU Taler in Germany

Almost a decade ago I had a conversation with a GNU Taler proponent in Germany. I pointed out the risks that come with additional government surveillance of payments in the face of potential future governments that may not value liberty as much as the current one does. His pushback was that the german voters would never elect someone as crazy and corrupt as Trump (this was during his first term) and he can fully trust the future german government. It was a somewhat surreal conversation, and feels more surreal with the current shift towards AfD...

BlueMatton ARIN Public Incident Report – 4.10 Misissuance Error

It was re-allocated to the new/wrong ARIN customer for seven days before they started announcing it, at which point the OP detected the issue. Prior to that their prefix was routing to them just fine, just without RPKI protection.

BlueMatton Et Tu, Signal?

What do you do differently from Stellar or Ripple at the consensus layer which both started out with similar ideas, but quickly found that their validators fall apart due to the strongly-connected validator set requirement not being met? In other words, how do you avoid the exact same fate that both Stellar and Ripple ran into in their consensus models when they also tried to let "node individually choose"?

BlueMatton Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

The revelations from the Platformer article [1] about how Signal works inside make it pretty clear that Moxie ~= Signal.

[1] https://www.platformer.news/p/-the-battle-inside-signal

BlueMatton Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

According to coinmarketcap, MobileCoin's "Fully Diluted Market Cap is $15,638,578,369.65". If we take a conservative assumption of a 1% advisor grant (which would be very conservative for a system that has been pitching signal integration as its primary feature for years), then that would put the value of the integration at around $150 million today (or tens of millions a few weeks ago).

BlueMatton How secure is TextSecure?

Ehh, seems they were talking about different HMAC parameters and I was thinking about the HKDF...sorry (see the moderncrypto discussion for more).

BlueMatton How secure is TextSecure?

(B) Used to be correct (there were some constants used in the HMAC constants which are supposed to be 1/2, but were actually 0/1, of course this makes no difference practically to security), but this has been changed in more recent versions.