The article seems to be a plea to better inform law enforcement about technical specifics. In my experience, they often take everything that plugs in and then let their tech staff sort it out.
The first time I opened the link, it did a fullscreen click OK to ‘do something bad’. Killed the process. I tried to recreate it to show where it redirected but it didn’t do it again. Looking at the site, I would blame the ads.
That’s kind of scary, but probably not that unusual. ad networks are pretty shady, even if they’re trying to be legit. there’s some joke/analogy to be made relating them to the classic line “having sex with someone is like having sex with all of their partners too”.
There are lots of other assets to buy if you’re looking to get into a bubble while it’s hot. :)
Determining the intrinsic value of a bitcoin is pretty hard. The prevailing theory is that it’ll be the currency transfer mechanism of choice in the future. But that doesn’t say much about what a bitcoin is worth. If I want to transfer $100 to someone in Patagonia, do I or the recipient care whether a bitcoin is worth $200 or $0.00002? No. I buy the appropriate amount, transfer them, and the recipient cashes out. The only limitation is that there have to be enough bitcoins to cover all “in flight” transactions. If $100 million (to pick a number) is transferred every hour (assuming that’s how long verification takes), then each bitcoin (assuming all 21 million are in play) is worth about $5.
Or you could take the long view that bitcoins will replace all other currency in existence as not just a transfer mechanism, but also as a value store. If those 21 million bitcoins replace only the US $10 trillion that’s out there (ignoring other currencies), then each one would be worth around $475,000. Time to buy, baby!
Personally, my biggest hangup would still be the fact that buying or selling bitcoins means interacting with a bitcoin exchange at some point, and “bitcoin exchange” may as well be synonymous with “security catastrophe” at this point.
Interesting, just following it the last couple weeks is what caught my eye, even though I have read about it for years. The value nearly doubling is impressive even though it probably is more of an exchange mechanism rather than an actual currency. I agree with the “bitcoin exchanges”, with the only recommendation from a past video being “Coinbase” which is startup in San Francisco. I think I’ll rely on stocks as usual.
Well, there are those who talk about how committed they are to your privacy and security, and there are those who are actually committed to your privacy and security.
Unfortunately, most everyone prefers profitability to taking care of their users. You can see this even in the little things, like choosing to make a profitable exit over keeping a service with users running.
Couldn’t he say “Due to a legal matter the details of which I cannot disclose, I am seeking donations” and keep the service running? I think people would be smart enough to figure out what was happening, and then they could choose how to respond.
The cynic in me notes that this is basically the martyr play. He’s getting a lot of support in general, but the customers directly affected by it seem less enthusiastic. There are a lot of factors that go into choosing an email provider. Maybe some people trust the NSA more than the GOOG, for instance. They’ve basically been co-opted into this fight now too. At the same time, I can appreciate that he doesn’t want to be complicit in the NSA’s schemes, even if he could provide sufficient warning.
It’s a tough call, but I think I’d prefer to remain as the least worst email provider than to disappear. The minimum level of evil in the world just went up. Of course, I have the luxury of sleeping at night knowing I’ve never promised to even try protecting people’s secrets.
I think he just made it obvious and forced the issue. Something like “Due to a legal matter the details of which I cannot disclose, I am seeking donations” could be construed as a personal issue, or perhaps something related to the service. I think this is as obvious as he could make it without violating a gag order. I also imagine he didn’t have a huge time window in which to make a decision.
This being the first case I’ve heard of where someone chose to shut down over submit to top-level pressures, it’s not as if he had a whole lot of prior examples to work from.
Also,
Couldn’t he say “Due to a legal matter the details of which I cannot disclose, I am seeking donations”
Interesting, I literally just downloaded this PDF the other day from the school I attend. I never understood until recently the wealth of knowledge that exists within academic journals; the ones you cannot access unless you pay thousands in tuition.
Yeah but that’s what I mean about the VPN providers being shady, I don’t want to start a company that only attracts people using BitTorrent and doing illegal things.
Mostly just lobste.rs :)
Is this the top comment so that Big Brother won’t get upset? :-) Upvote!
I am the Architect. I created the ~~Matrix~~ Lobste.rs. I assume that’s what he says.
This was really good, definitely watch it if you haven’t already.
Congrats!!
Makes sense to me.
The article seems to be a plea to better inform law enforcement about technical specifics. In my experience, they often take everything that plugs in and then let their tech staff sort it out.
It appears to be at least similar to MIT App Inventor (Android) but for Microsoft Windows 8.
That kinda sucks. Seems like Apple could spare a few bucks, since Mac OS X was built on top of that OS originally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD
And Sony (PS4).
Link stealer! I kept checking marc waiting for that email to appear, but eventually gave up. :)
Hah! I waited for a bit to see if anyone was going to submit it, and when no one did I posted it ;)
While you two are trying to score magic Internet points, you left me do the dirty work of informing Bob that he misspelt “Bitcoin” ;)
Lobste.rs Achievements, it’s going to be big…
That link redirected to malware, of course only a problem if you are at work using IE.
What? Really? Details please. That’s kind of a big deal.
The first time I opened the link, it did a fullscreen click OK to ‘do something bad’. Killed the process. I tried to recreate it to show where it redirected but it didn’t do it again. Looking at the site, I would blame the ads.
That’s kind of scary, but probably not that unusual. ad networks are pretty shady, even if they’re trying to be legit. there’s some joke/analogy to be made relating them to the classic line “having sex with someone is like having sex with all of their partners too”.
Does anyone think it is worth it to currently buy bitcoin to see if will continue to inflate? Or is the bubble about to burst again.
There are lots of other assets to buy if you’re looking to get into a bubble while it’s hot. :)
Determining the intrinsic value of a bitcoin is pretty hard. The prevailing theory is that it’ll be the currency transfer mechanism of choice in the future. But that doesn’t say much about what a bitcoin is worth. If I want to transfer $100 to someone in Patagonia, do I or the recipient care whether a bitcoin is worth $200 or $0.00002? No. I buy the appropriate amount, transfer them, and the recipient cashes out. The only limitation is that there have to be enough bitcoins to cover all “in flight” transactions. If $100 million (to pick a number) is transferred every hour (assuming that’s how long verification takes), then each bitcoin (assuming all 21 million are in play) is worth about $5.
Or you could take the long view that bitcoins will replace all other currency in existence as not just a transfer mechanism, but also as a value store. If those 21 million bitcoins replace only the US $10 trillion that’s out there (ignoring other currencies), then each one would be worth around $475,000. Time to buy, baby!
Personally, my biggest hangup would still be the fact that buying or selling bitcoins means interacting with a bitcoin exchange at some point, and “bitcoin exchange” may as well be synonymous with “security catastrophe” at this point.
Interesting, just following it the last couple weeks is what caught my eye, even though I have read about it for years. The value nearly doubling is impressive even though it probably is more of an exchange mechanism rather than an actual currency. I agree with the “bitcoin exchanges”, with the only recommendation from a past video being “Coinbase” which is startup in San Francisco. I think I’ll rely on stocks as usual.
Well, this sucks. A notice would have been nice. I just paid 8$ a month ago for another year of service.
I imagine, given the circumstances, that Levison had to act pretty quickly to avoid giving the USG legal grounds to push him further.
Yeah, it sounds like he was out of options. I never knew how secure they truly were until now.
Well, there are those who talk about how committed they are to your privacy and security, and there are those who are actually committed to your privacy and security.
Unfortunately, most everyone prefers profitability to taking care of their users. You can see this even in the little things, like choosing to make a profitable exit over keeping a service with users running.
Well said. I didn’t think this would make the top post on Reddit,
http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1jz5lq/lavabit_the_email_service_used_by_snowden_shuts/
Couldn’t he say “Due to a legal matter the details of which I cannot disclose, I am seeking donations” and keep the service running? I think people would be smart enough to figure out what was happening, and then they could choose how to respond.
The cynic in me notes that this is basically the martyr play. He’s getting a lot of support in general, but the customers directly affected by it seem less enthusiastic. There are a lot of factors that go into choosing an email provider. Maybe some people trust the NSA more than the GOOG, for instance. They’ve basically been co-opted into this fight now too. At the same time, I can appreciate that he doesn’t want to be complicit in the NSA’s schemes, even if he could provide sufficient warning.
It’s a tough call, but I think I’d prefer to remain as the least worst email provider than to disappear. The minimum level of evil in the world just went up. Of course, I have the luxury of sleeping at night knowing I’ve never promised to even try protecting people’s secrets.
I think he just made it obvious and forced the issue. Something like “Due to a legal matter the details of which I cannot disclose, I am seeking donations” could be construed as a personal issue, or perhaps something related to the service. I think this is as obvious as he could make it without violating a gag order. I also imagine he didn’t have a huge time window in which to make a decision.
This being the first case I’ve heard of where someone chose to shut down over submit to top-level pressures, it’s not as if he had a whole lot of prior examples to work from.
Also,
He is soliciting legal defense funds.
Let’s cover the frontpage in posts about Erlang
And the latest news about who acquired who and what round of funding everybody’s in!
Also, let’s arbitrarily rename everyone’s submissions without cause or reason!
Away with that pesky moderation log!
Haha, good one!
Interesting, I literally just downloaded this PDF the other day from the school I attend. I never understood until recently the wealth of knowledge that exists within academic journals; the ones you cannot access unless you pay thousands in tuition.
There will be a market for more VPN services once people start getting their 5th strike. I may have found this PDF here, still an interesting read – https://www.usenix.org/conference/foci12/vpwns-virtual-pwned-networks
Yeah but that’s what I mean about the VPN providers being shady, I don’t want to start a company that only attracts people using BitTorrent and doing illegal things.
This is awesome.
Even still, I doubt it will hurt sales much.
It’s obvious we need more hackathons and more beer.
Maybe we should invite GNOME and Linux DRM developers to OpenBSD hackathons.
That would be a ball.
“CSS is what happens when a cat hoarder with Schizophrenia tries to make a fucking programming language” ha.