2,063 karma · joined June 28, 2016
Yes, it's the Times Wedding announcements, which are always sort of like this, but it's hard for me to see this as anything other than an indicator that Clubhouse is a niche app for...influencers...who influence...other influencers? I guess?
Or perhaps I'm just old.
As a non-deliberate grift—I guess the same math applies? Wildly overpromising and underdelivering on a picnic cooler seems somehow less morally problematic than wildly overpromising and underdelivering on an effort to improve third-world childhood education.
Of course, the counterpoint is that Silicon Valley (or MIT Media Lab) bros whose hearts are in the right place deserve plaudits for their ill-informed-but-generally-well-meaning efforts, even if those efforts waste millions of dollars that could have gone to more effective altruistic endeavors.
Which, like, yeah, that's an argument, I guess?
I think token binding itself had some design flaws that made it hard to realize these improvements, but that's not to say that I think IP signals are better (or obviate) cryptographic replacements for bearer tokens—I don't think that. I just think it's an irony of token binding's design that the design suggested an implementation which in practice provided less value than IP binding.
Can be, indeed, but was not in existing implementations, to my knowledge. My point (perhaps I was more clear in my followup comment) was that we shouldn't shed too many tears given the actual implementations did not provide the promised security gains. Were they stepping stones? Maybe. But they didn't (yet) deliver.
> A client cert is also not shared among all users behind a NAT, can be durable across roaming across IPs, and is actually meant to be a security measure unlike IPs.
Yes, but, bizarrely, IPs actually provide more security against some threats, as I noted. I don't think this is because IPs are a great security measure--they're not!--but because token binding as implemented was pretty weak.
My point was only that lamenting the demise of TB as implemented is a bit overdramatic. Lamenting the demise of TB as (perhaps) dreamed about—yeah, I buy that.
For preventing malware from using stolen cookies on a botnet, it's reasonable to argue that it's easier for the malware to steal the TLS client cert (which is no less accessible than the cookie jar itself) than it is for the malware to maintain access to the "good" client IP. As silly as IP-binding of sessions is.
I think if this excluded users who turned off iCloud sync, I'd have no qualms about it, however; the tradeoffs seem ideal for giving users a secure recovery mechanism. But users who have turned off iCloud may not want this functionality, I agree.
Not sure your point on “resetting” passwords, though. This applies to any validation flow, i.e. just logging in.
Certainly it does increase attack surface, but if Apple said “now I-devices ship with 2 HSMs”, we’d be like, ok, shrug. No?
The fact that this is “remote” is sort of immaterial, I think. You’re trusting Apple’s (bespoke or acquired) stack the same either way, and as far as we can tell the security properties of both local and remote HSMs are the same.
If you don't rotate the six-digit code, the probability an attacker who tries sequential codes gets the correct code in 1M attempts is 1.
But if you do rotate the code, the Bayesian probability that an attacker who tries random codes gets the correct code in 1M attempts is still about 60%, if I did my math right (and of course it asymptotically approaches 1 with more attempts).
I think it's highly likely that Apple was being honest and that the HSM service was not vulnerable to this attack. That's consistent (as you say) with this being a separate, highly-audited implementation, and frankly consistent with what Apple said--and to save, what, $200k, they have no real reason to lie to a researcher here.
To your second point, while this is indeed a big change in attack surface, I am not sure it's as problematic as you say. Doesn't the iCloud backup basically contain (for most users) all of the device contents--photos, messages, etc--that an attacker would want? Conversely, users want to be able to restore their iCloud backups from a new i-device if they lose their existing one, ideally without having to know more than the lockscreen PIN.
Given that, the two systems--the cloud system and the i-device--are storing mostly-identical data, offering mostly the same security guarantees (hardware-backed key derivation from a weak PIN, rate limiting), and the only issue is that this is just a second hardware security module that's separate from the one in the i-device.
For users who have turned off cloud backup, this might be a bad tradeoff. (Maybe turning off cloud backup turns off the HSM/PIN syncing?) But for most users, the gain in usability seems likely to far outweigh the hypothetical additional risk.
It's likely a well-designed password (or similar) validation endpoint will both limit attempts per IP and per user, to avoid exactly the attack you describe.
This limit probably isn't permanent (though I think the design of Apple's HSM may be different here; too many attempts may lock or delete user data entirely?). Rather, it would be something like "allow 5 attempts per hour per user."
So, first, even if the attacker only exploits concurrency to speed things up--which implies the limits are only per IP--they can conduct attacks which are otherwise infeasible. (E.g. with 10k IPs at 5 attempts per hour per IP, they can brute force a six digit PIN in an average of an hour, as opposed to over a year.)
But second, what I think the attacker is describing is actually worse: he's saying that the quota "counter" is updated with a "read-modify-write pattern that's not safe for concurrent HTTP requests, so that you might have something like:
[request 0] read counter value = 0 [request 1] read counter value = 0 [request 0] set counter value = 1 [request 1] set counter value = 1
In this error, the counter is never incremented at all.
It's easy to imagine people making this mistake when they store the counter in something that does not support transactional updates.
I certainly agree with what you wrote. But I think the point still stands that this is hardly black and white—the shilling did supposedly stay in circulation, right?
The argument about taxes and legal tender certainly show ways to increase demand for a currency, but they appear to be somewhat unnecessary, as with BTC.
We may in fact be agreeing. My premise is that chartalism is an interesting idea which can help color questions of why a given currency becomes accepted, but ultimately isn't literally true—other mechanisms of increasing demand for a currency may also be effective.
If you started your own currency it would be worthless because of the lack of demand for it.
Right now Bitcoin has a market cap of about 800bn USD, which (coincidentally) is about the same value as the CHF M1. (M2 is a little over a trillion USD.) These are crude indicators that there's substantial aggregate demand for both assets.
What's interesting is how Bitcoin got to that point. Quite a few years ago, it wasn't worth much at all, and you could only use it to pay people who were ideologically motivated to accept it—your crazy coworker who'd let you pay him back for beers in BTC, for example.
Then you add in the people who will use it for practical reasons (they're criminals, they are underbanked, they want payments under the table), the people who will use it for reasons of mass delusion (they think they'll get rich), and suddenly you have substantial aggregate demand—enough that you can reasonably assume a BTC will be worth something in the future (though highly unstable demand still).
This seems to be (to my knowledge) an uncharted path to creating a "recognized" currency.
But as to your point about fiat: if the US government were nuked, you'd have massive economic disruption for other reasons. But this isn't per se why the USD is valuable (anymore?).
A sort of "just so" story about this would go something like (with much credit to David Graeber):
"Way back when, some Assyrian king got the great idea to, instead of giving their soldiers food and drink, give their soldiers tokens. They would then demand a certain number of those tokens per head from their subjects. Suddenly the tokens have value, and the subjects are put to work selling goods and services to the army."
I'm not an expert on this theory, but there are potential oddities, similar to your points:
* This would suggest the value of the currency is closely tied to the total taxation. (Why, for example, is the Swiss Franc highly valued by investors outside of Switzerland?) I guess you could validate or invalidate this by looking at whether the ratio of M2 to annual tax revenue is somewhat fixed (across currencies) or quite fluid?
* This fails to explain currencies which retain value after they are no longer in use by a central government (as with the Somali shilling, as noted in the Wikipedia article) or, indeed, Bitcoin.
Personally, my sense is that chartalism is correct as an explanation for one way to bootstrap a currency, but clearly (as Bitcoin shows) is not the only way to bootstrap a currency, and once you create a level of reliable demand, you no longer need it (hence the Somali shilling or, perhaps, the high valuation of the CHF outside of Swiss taxpayers).
The argument that the step up basis avoids double taxation appears to be slight of hand. By the same rationale, you should earn a tax credit for sales taxes paid during the tax year.
Admittedly, there’s a tragedy of the commons issue: I have no individual incentive to enable FLOC. But, similarly to your DRM example, at some point publishers could require it, no?
(In general, brokers and similar institutions track basis, so I don’t think the death of the owner makes determining the basis especially difficult.)
"It's true that a few (and very much declining) number of countries have some form of wealth tax that includes some amount of unrealized gains. The Netherlands, for example, marks-to-market on Jan 1st of the tax year then doesn't actually track gains/losses over the next 364 days. So that obviously isn't a direct tax on gains."
I wrote,
"What? How else would a tax on unrealized gains work if not mark-to-market at a fixed day of the year?"
How do you believe an unrealized gains tax would work if not mark-to-market on a fixed day of the year?
Backing up even further, as I said, this is extreme hair splitting. Major economies do have wealth taxes, which include a tax on unrealized gains via mark-to-market. Is your point just "lol ProPublica r idiots nobody taxes just unrealized gains"?
"lol at" = not actually denying it, so not technically lying, right? ;)
ProPublica even wrote a long statement on why they believe publishing this is ethical, legal, and in the public interest: https://www.propublica.org/article/why-we-are-publishing-the....
You can of course disagree with their reasoning, but Arnold—who claims to be, it is worth noting, a paid PR flack for tech companies—is being disingenuous* to suggest that ProPublica claimed their "sole criteria for publishing" is "truth".
* By which I mean, to be perfectly clear, he's a liar.
- Yes, I don't know exhaustively, but a number of countries with wealth taxes do not have gains taxes.
- Your comparison is a little bit mistaken, I think; you're looking at the tax only on the gain, whereas (obviously) the tax would be on the entire principle. I'm too lazy to do the math, but a wealth tax is easy to factor in, since it's a fixed reduction in total yield on wealth. The long-term historical return on capital in the west is about 4%/year; a 1% wealth tax is thus averaging about 25% of that. Gains taxes are typically lower than that amount. (Note that in the US the long-term gains tax is 20% at the upper bracket.)
Heh. Cui bono, am I right?
Adam Smith argued for a "land value" tax in "The Wealth of Nations", after all.
I think the ProPublica piece properly points out that such taxes are _unpopular_—justifiably or not; I have noted elsewhere that one of the primary concerns, of capital flight, is probably inapplicable to the US, which already has a global tax on residents and a burdensome reporting requirement in place.
What does "meta" mean in your usage? I may be missing some point you are trying to make. Personal wealth taxes encompass unrealized gains taxes, not in a "meta" sense, but in actuality.
Do you disagree?
> ProPublica says "we'd love to see more of A, which is separate from B, as B doesn't seem especially workable".
I took that to be ProPublica saying "one way to increase the total effective tax rate on the ultra-rich would be to tax unrealized gains. Wealth taxes do that; here are some downsides of wealth taxes as implemented elsewhere."
This strikes me as...fair and balanced reporting?
> A is actionable in a direct sense.
I don't know what this means. Hypothetically the US could have either a personal wealth tax or (only) a tax on unrealized gains.
> And if you wanted to do it in a direct sense, the M2M date you'd pick would not be the first day of the tax year.
No, I agree with this. The Swiss system uses mark-to-market at the end of the tax year. So...point you?
If ProPublica suggested the beginning of the year instead of the end of the year, I overlooked that. Good job catching them on this error, I guess? Or something?
> And you wouldn't use a fixed formula that ignored actual results of the asset.
I don't know what you mean by this. Can you rephrase?