Zamicol, I was going to suggest not using “satire” for Apr 1 submissions to make that a necessity. ;)

You mean the calendar?

You can click on the cliques and it will show you the characteristics/definition.

A hammer looking for a nail - A lesson I have heard before is to look for a problem with real value that hasn’t been solved, this doesn’t seem to be taking that approach.

Maybe start from problems: look for markets for lemons, adverse selection, agency costs. As a rough rule of thumb, any market in which someone can earn a commission. And focus really tightly - rather than land titles on the blockchain, attack mineral or oil rights. Look up what people are suing each other over and you know what corner cases to handle.

Things that might be useful:

• Many companies start from open-source projects aiming a niche, enhance them a bit/lot so it can be useful for companies.
• Others are just something that already exist but can be better/interesting on the blockchain. For example, several softwares to track authenticity of painting/sculpture transactions exist, but blockchain ones emerged and it’s a super neat application (imho).
• You probably do this already, but if you shift your view of the blockchain to either tokens or just a more realistic representation of the world, it might be easier.

What’s wrong with doing something that’s already been done? Unless you’re doing research, there’s usually room for more than one interpretation on how to solve a problem.

Although I warn it might be unpopular, you might want to try something similar in concept but not quite blockchain. The benefits of the blockchain without necessarily being one. Here’s a few I’ve heard or was pushing that may or may not be implemented by a startup by now:

1. Transactions are done with traditional databases that use a distributed ledger to tally up final results. This is similar to what banks already do where most transactions are hidden in their databases with some big chunks of money moved between banks. It works.

2. Instead of just a coin in the ether, Clive Robinson on Schneier’s blog suggested creating a financial instrument that is tied to a number of commodities or other currencies in such a way that it remains really stable. As in, not a speculator’s tool like Bitcoin. I found one company that did this with several currencies plus carbon credits. I just can’t remember name.

3. Instead of miners, might again use a low-cost technology for transactions but people need an account with the service to participate that costs about a dollar or so a month (or yearly). Kind of like with texts, they buy blocks of transactions. The providers are non-profits with chartered protections with the provisions or exchange being where the new tech comes in to provide accountability.

I’d do a combination of these if I entered the market. I’m not planning to right now. So, sharing the ideas with others in case someone wants to have a try at it while money is raining from the sky on those that utter the words “blockchain” or “decentralized.” ;)

The rules are different when the existence of a customer account should be a secret. But porn sites tend to be poorly written and/or covered in ads which will track you across the web anyway. Use a throwaway.

Users who would want to stay anonymous would probably scatter around and start promoting different and opposing projects depending on quircks and subtle advantages they have over each other. The effect would probably be that most of them die due to obscurity.

The majority would probably give up o cryptocurrencies, and such legislation could cause a massive loss in value, since all of trse “currencies” are incredibly volatile, that any measure against it can cause the bubble to pop and the market to crash (see 2012 banning of bt in china, it too years to recover).

So all in all pretty good, imo.

Agree. But I don’t want to install and run geth on the host machine.

This is a good point, I’ve actually never heard of XDG (I’m a daily user of Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu on a server…)

I don’t really know much about macOS/BSD/other niche systems.

Setting XAUTHORITY and ICEAUTHORITY to something sensible is only necessary because applications using those variables expect that they can create and delete authority files at the location specified. Without setting those, you wouldn’t be able to make $HOME read-only.

But if your operating system doesn’t have such applications in the first place, you can just skip this step.

I was going to write a long comment with a few subjective arguments and some code examples, but Reddit comments already did it better.

Personally, I believe YAML is a better choice as an end-user, as a person who creates/edits config files by myself. But it really depends on the project.

What I dislike most about TOML is how you have to repeat your “array of table” for every item you have. For example:

[[menu.main]]
name = "Home"

[[menu.main]]
name = "Posts"
weight = 10

[[menu.main]]
name = "Contact"

While YAML takes care of the ambiguity using spaces:

menu:
  main:
    - name: Home
    - name: Posts
      weight: 10
    - name: Contact  

Anyway. As an implementer (if you are writing a parser for these formats), TOML is notoriously easy to parse and write, due to the way it has been designed to be unambiguous; and YAML is notoriously hard to implement, because its specification is heavy and the format has a lot of features (references, anchors, nested values…).

I dunno why, but Firefox was absent from a lot of things[tm] in the past. It’s not part of the paper above, it’s not a big part of the recent Browser Security paper by Cure53 (https://github.com/cure53/browser-sec-whitepaper) and it wasn’t part of the latest pwn2own contests.

At the time the report was commissioned, I’m not sure Firefox had much sandboxing to speak of.

The cure53 paper mentions they really wanted to include it. Google was against it, citing a 2014 study about the Tor browser (which is pre-e10s, pre sandboxing etc.)

I personally think, that the goal of this paper is to get Enterprises switch from Edge/IE to Chrome. To make it easier for corporate decision makers, the comparison is only to their main rival for this specific market.