I commend researchers in this field. Ransomware has a tangible impact on lives, particularly in cases involving healthcare facilities, for instance. Such criminals deserve harsh response for the chaos they create.
Also, I can’t help but thinking that the global internet that we’ve created is highly irresponsible. That criminals with sufficient skill and means can anonymously pull off these kinds of crimes with little chance for pursuing justice is indication of some fundamental flaw in the internet’s design. While people should have the right to be anonymous, there’s simply too much potential for abuse by such criminals. I wonder if the internet is ripe for disruption via redesign of core protocols. As I recall, this has been discussed on hn previously but I’ve lost track of such research..
Most property crime goes unpunished in the non-internet world. An anonymous someone walked off with my bike a few years ago, a crime unpunished to this day. Does this point to a fundamental flaw?
Yeah, I think it does point to a fundamental problem in our society. Check out your local Nextdoor and I think you’ll find people calling for very harsh punishment of bike thieves.
The difference is how malleable the internet infrastructure is compared to the real world. Would ransomware have taken off like it has without bitcoin? Is there some technical change to bitcoin that could make it less attractive to bad guys?
>The difference is how malleable the internet infrastructure is compared to the real world.
Just put up cameras with facial recognition everywhere, require every citizen to have biometric IDs (face from multiple angles, fingerprints, DNA), make covering your face illegal and bam you catch like 99% of bike thieves.
>Would ransomware have taken off like it has without bitcoin?
Probably, yeah. Gift cards work well too for example (they're just not as convenient), and I'm sure there are plenty of other ways to transfer money too if you're willing to incur like 50% transaction losses.
>Is there some technical change to bitcoin that could make it less attractive to bad guys?
Bitcoin already tracks every transaction ever. You'd have to somehow prevent mixers from existing, but I'm not sure how that'd be possible.
The first ransomware payment I saw predated Bitcoin, and had the victims use a Western Union money order.
It's definitely an inhibitor for the attacker. For a start, it took days for them to get payment. The current "our Onion site will detect the payment and release keys automatically" took a human workflow, which had to impact their scale. I have no doubt some sort of mule received the payment, but it's still much more traceable if overseas LE actually wanted to investigate. And managing that mule again had to hurt scale. The amount of ransomware we see today could never have happened without Bitcoin.
Edit: that too started with an open RDP server. All these years and we're seeing the same vectors in this write up.
Pointless at best and toxic to liberty at worst. Often these types of attacks come from comparatively poor nations. It costs the attackers a lot less to attempt the crime than for us to negate the crime via employees who are paid wages appropriate to our own economy. Anonymity certainly offers utility when it comes to cybercrime, but the real challenge is a resource matter not an intelligence matter.
My middle school years consisted of being bullied: verbally and physically abused.
I’ve been grinding my teeth since the first physical violence incident at age 11 that involved numerous full blast blows to my head. My response meanwhile was regretful bullying of a few other kids in response. The cap to this was additional physical violence against me before entering high school, in the presence of law enforcement who stood aside and allowed the punishment to be inflicted, likely due to the perception of me having been a scumbag to a popular kid in sixth grade, and/or an old school non-interventionist attitude.
By the end of middle school, the lifetime of suicidal ideation was cemented. The end result was extreme social immaturity entering high school and a downward spiral of an unwanted life drifting towards destitution and homelessness at middle age. My neighborhood peers were religious tribalists who looked down upon me and essentially formed my perceptions of the world as a religious outsider threatened by promises of eternal torture for non compliance. I dream of suicide around the clock and remain afraid of death and have zero desire for anything but preparing for death.
Needless to say, I don’t find this species to be very pleasant or deserving of my time or participation and certainly not of any offspring. This, of course, is sugar coating the reality: I think this species is total rubbish, and regardless of how many nice people exist, there’s been a never ending string of low quality people that I’ve encountered over the past 30 years, myself included. I remain fearful of facing the unknown of death despite decades dreaming of dying. Zero desire for help of any kind; I inherited a fortune and gave it away. I pray for forgiveness and mercy in the afterlife and remain eternally fearful, having been indoctrinated by peers with promises of eternal torture as a consequence for failure to engage in a particular belief system (coupled with the tribal violence by participants of said religion).
Fuck this species. Sorry: the solution is for me to die and wash away my broken brain. Some people simply don’t want to be helped. The natural laws of evolution are met with my lack of procreation and my suicide washes away my broken experience so others can have a better chance. Accordingly I’ve given away my inheritance and gone homeless in preparation. So thankful it’s almost over and infinitely scared nonetheless. At some point soon I’ll simply ask God or the universe to forgive me for failing to be “strong enough” to “overcome” my little not particularly uncommon tragedy. Sorry.
The wish breaks the natural order. Some people bounce back and prosper, rise above it. Their genetics are superior. Mine were not. It’s natural that I die now. It’s correct that I didn’t procreate.
And, of course help was offered yet I reject it. I gave up in middle school when it was happening.
My new startup focuses on human nervous system faraday cages embedded into next generation fashion technology. This tech covers your entire body, keeping you safe from remote scans, and includes realistic facial and body disguises. For your safety, our tech constantly scans your thought patterns and memories and keeps them safe with a static filled triple scrambled encryption method, and encodes them into specially placed augmented cellular technology at undisclosed locations in the body.
An unfortunate consequence of fame is that celebrities are sometimes forced to take counter surveillance matters into their own hands.
As it’s difficult for a celebrity to accept new people into their inner circle without knowing their motives, pre-emptive measures can be used to vet outsiders. The unfortunate consequence of this is the application of questionable methods by shady security forces. Celebrities don’t have their own Secret Service detail so they end up relying upon their peers to perform investigations of outsiders entering their fold. This can be disastrous all around, particularly when there exists political and cultural disparities amongst involved parties. Speaking from experience.
This reminds me of Ana Delvey, the fake NYC socialite scammer of a few years ago. I originally thought it was funny that she had ripped all these ultra-wealthy people off, but the sad fact was that she scammed a lot of people who were wealthy enough to have a high limit on their credit cards (~50k), but not wealthy enough to have this kind of social sophisticated social infrastructure in place. She got by into the circles my making various friends that all suggested influence separately (investment banker, editor at Vogue, etc), and together gave her the appearance of legitimacy to all the other friends.
Seems to be a far cry from explaining the Hard Problem of consciousness.
As for the meat of the text (pardon the pun, I just re-read “they’re made out of meat” yesterday), my amateur understanding is that there may be some degree of quantum effects in the microtubules of the brain, but that decoherence is very localized and limited, thus unlikely to have broader impact on physical systems at large. To this end, it’s unclear how a shared physical reality such as ours would allow for quantum effects from a measurement experiment, through the non quantum systems to the brain. Can someone explain the basis of the hypothesis presented by the paper in simple terms?
That's because he's not trying to explain it. The article is about quantum determinism. He offers two explanations, depending on how one views the source of consciousness, dualistically or physically. IIT doesn't explain consciousness. It's merely a correlation.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but this is a great idea. Huge tech companies now worth trillions facilitate criminal activity at scale and wash their hands of any responsibility. E2EE at scale is problematic for maintaining sanctity in society, as people are terrible. Giving common folks easily accessible tools to engage in global secure comms has been a recipe for disaster. LE’s job has been made more difficult, and the tech companies should bear responsibility for policing their pipes.
Law enforcement has more tools for mass surveillance than ever before. The Stazi could only dream of what we have built. But it's not the job of tech companies to make policing easy, and it's not in the best interest of a free people to give their government too much power. Please look at the history of the FBI for examples.
Sorry for delay in responding. The issue is that there’s a huge proliferation of inaccessible comms which creates a growing sea of unchecked globally enabled online activity. This isn’t the same as allowing people to congregate in person and in private. The abstraction of privacy expanding on a virtual global scale presents unique challenges to law enforcement. This is independent from the proliferation of surveillance mechanisms at hand, and isn’t a valid counterbalance.
The tech companies assume power and disclaim responsibility. It is their job to police their pipes, so respectfully and urgently I disagree.
Concerns about historical corruption within three letter agencies is best addressed by working towards technical solutions that enable proper checks and balances amongst involved players: governments, tech oligarchies, and commoners. The current trend is towards a growing sea of entropy without checks and balances, and this is unacceptable to governments motivated to maintain/increase order and reduce suffering. Resistance via deployment of technical libertarian mechanisms at scale isn’t a solid long term solution.
The federal government isn’t aiming to ban math, encryption, pgp, one time pads, steanography, etc. Instead the goal is to prevent the proliferation of unbreakable encryption at scale, as that growing void enables criminal activity at scale, despite the growing surveillance apparatus.
Ten years ago I thought there would be a cultural shift towards wearable spy technology. Now I wonder if there will be a shift towards developing anonymous masks worn as part of a cultural norm.
It's illegal in Denmark to have your face covered. There are a few exceptions, but I don't think "I don't want my face identified" would fly. It seems to go directly against the intention of the law: https://apnews.com/9e5f787cdcc94c0c83210dbf275b715f/Danish-b...
soon, masks won't be enough... they will have x-ray-like methods to see you naked at all times (like they already have at airports). Who is going to wear a mask 24/7 anyways?
Also, I can’t help but thinking that the global internet that we’ve created is highly irresponsible. That criminals with sufficient skill and means can anonymously pull off these kinds of crimes with little chance for pursuing justice is indication of some fundamental flaw in the internet’s design. While people should have the right to be anonymous, there’s simply too much potential for abuse by such criminals. I wonder if the internet is ripe for disruption via redesign of core protocols. As I recall, this has been discussed on hn previously but I’ve lost track of such research..