jbaudanza

This is a proposal for changing some of the bad into good.

Thanks for clarifying.

My project depends on bitcoin-ruby, which uses OpenSSL's EC_KEY_generate_key to generate keys. EC_KEY_generate_key, as far as I can tell, uses OpenSSLs internal PRNG. If I understand you correctly, this is unsafe and it would be better to derive a key from urandom.

So code that I write that generates keys using OpenSSL isn't indirectly depending on OpenSSL's CSPRNG?

Sorry for all the questions. I just want to make sure I'm doing it right and I suspect I'm not the only one that is confused by the article's assertions.

That makes more sense. So which of the following is true: 1) I shouldn't be using OpenSSL to generate keys without somehow injecting bytes directly /dev/urandom 2) The article is wrong, using OpenSSL's CSPRNG is fine. 3) I still don't get it.

The article lists several userspace libraries (OpenSSL, SecureRandom) and then says not to use them. I had the same question as weavejester.

This is still better than a government bailout.

This is great. It looks like there is already functionality to connect to peers and send and receive transactions. Is there any functionality to store and query the blockchain as well?

Also the es5-shim library is quite nice, and includes a bind polyfill. https://github.com/es-shims/es5-shim

Do you think Heroku requires its employees to get permission before hacking on OSS on the weekend? Facebook? Twitter? Even Amazon, which contributes relatively little, only asks that its employees use their private email addresses.

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that you've decided to hold yourself above the lowest common denominator of tech companies. I just don't think you should be congratulating yourself publicly on HN for it.

In this industry, having a solid background in open source contributions is serious mark of credibility for any engineer. The rest of us are falling over ourselves to work with and encourage people that hack in their free time.

Are there any Rackspace engineers in the thread? Please tell me this is all legalese and nobody actually asks you to get your weekend pull requests approved by a legal department.

Rackspace, a company that is built on open source technologies, had a policy that required its employees to get permission from a lawyer before contributing back to any open source projects during their free time. And now one of their executives is patting himself on the back for relaxing this awful policy. Am I reading this correctly?

He doesn't say they are mutually exclusive, and it is a stretch to interpret it that way.

If you would like to help some of the low-income youth of San Francisco, consider donating to the education of one through Wishbone:

https://www.wishbone.org/campaigns?location=san-francisco

You don't need to be an entitled techie to be disgusted by people openly defecating in the streets.

I've had to slow down the polling so i don't overload the blockchain.info api. Bids should be showing up though. Email me at jon@jonb.org if it isn't

I'm donating some more to your message to knock off the scammer :)

Looks like i'm over the rate limit for the blockchain api. working on a fix

Yeah.. that's a bummer. Trying to take money from a charity :/ I haven't seen any payments to that address yet.

I'll investigate. what was your message?

Look at the Rakefile under `task :generate_keypairs`. It's using the bitcoin-ruby gem

Ok i think i fixed it now.. thanks!

Thanks!

also, the source is on github. https://github.com/jbaudanza/singleservingbitcoin

I've gotten 1,052 unique hits in the past 1 hour.

It's pretty simple. I generated a bunch of public/private keypairs. I kept the private keys offline and I hand out public addresses when people add a message.

Then I poll blockchain.info for payments.

Yeah, encoding issues :/ working on it

Your content stays up for 1 hour, or until someone outbids you.

All the proceeds are going towards wishbone.org. It's a great non-profit that helps low-income high school students attends after-school and summer programs.

haha.. well I guess I have nowhere to go but up then.

Except that rule about being able to cross 15km of snow, and do so within 8 minutes of the best skiers in the world. That's just hard work.

Go-go-gadget Docker. (according to mpotter below)