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wdvh

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The obvious solution to this and other problems is to get these other people into the first world. Free immigration isn't just an ethical issue, it's also a practical solution to a lot of the problems that we as a society face.

[dead] 12 years ago

Please, Pakistan is warlike and aggressive because they have been manipulated by the US into believing they can take on India (with US support).

genocidal violence against Muslim Indians.

What's this about? Partition killed as many Hindus and Sikhs as Muslims and pre-Independence India had little communal violence that wasn't explicitly fomented by the British in order to serve their own ends.

If you're so well read in south asian history, you should also know that there are more muslims in India than in Pakistan and that pretty much none of them would like to switch places with their Pakistani siblings.

[dead] 12 years ago

There's a satirical Hindi movie called Tere Bin Laden [1] about a bunch of bumbling journalists who find a Bin Laden lookalike and then attempt to trick the US into thinking he's the real Bin Laden.

I watched the movie after Bin Laden was killed and while it's reasonably funny, the part that I found hilarious is this sentence one of the protagonists utters when they run into the lookalike for the first time. In Hindi/Urdu it goes, "Gore saale isko Tora Bora mein dhoond rahe hain aur yeh saala yahan Lahore mein murgi paal raha hai." Translation: "So these fucking americans are looking for him in Tora Bora but who'd have guessed this fucker is raising chicken in Lahore?!" Note the movie came out before he was captured and I found it hilarious that a random Bollywood storyline turned out be the best guess about where Bin Laden was actually hiding.

EDIT: More seriously though, there's nothing surprising here. US agencies funded Islamic extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan for decades because it suited their geopolitical interests. They were happy to turn a blind eye to the violence caused by Islamic militancy in Kashmir in the 90s. It's only when the Frankensteinian monster got out of hand and turned on the US itself that they started paying attention. But by then damage was already done.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1629391/

The least you should expect when you upload something onto a cloud service is that your data will be subject to all kinds of algorithmic analysis.

And it's just not tenable for Google to not do this kind of matching. Imagine the flak they would get if they refused to match against a database of child porn citing "privacy concerns." Such a refusal would be neither pragmatic nor ethical.

How do you propose to spend money from your underworld wallet to buy real things - say to buy a car - without revealing your identity to the merchant? And once your identity is out in the open, how do you propose to evade the undisclosed income investigation that will be inevitably follow.

DES was broken about 23 years after it was designed.

I'd be surprised if 30 years into the future (probably earlier given the incentives we have to break crypto today are so much than those we had in '98) if these algorithms weren't broken.

There is actually no precedent of a cryptographic system relying on computational hardness surviving for more than a generation. And given that our fundamental theoretical understanding hasn't really evolved beyond, "we think a bunch of these problems are hard", things are likely to stay that way for a while.

I understand it isn't saved, I meant you could connect to the network and listen in on transactions.

And what percentage of bitcoin nodes use Tor? With NSA-like global passive logging, I think even Tor could be vulnerable.

Thanks, I did not know that. But there's little reason to believe that whatever encryption that bitcoin uses (presumably EC?) won't be vulnerable at some point in the future.

Given tptacek and colleagues' paper on the RSA-doomsday scenario that might not be too far out in the future, I think it might be possible to reclaim (steal?) that money in the future.

Obviously when RSA's end nears, assuming bitcoin is still around then, we'll see some sort of managed transition to a newer cryptosystem. I imagine the network will probably support announcing transactions saying something like, "Wallet X will now be known as wallet Y" where Y uses the new cryptosystem. And presumably only the first valid signed announcement will count and make its way into the block chain. It's at this point that I think people with enough compute power might be able to "steal" lost wallets.

Can we link IP addresses and hence approximate locations to these wallets using announced transactions on the network? That might be an interesting visual. Maybe not because I doubt anybody was logging bitcoin network traffic in the early days. But doing that even starting today might turn out to be useful. And there's little doubt NSA and friends are likely already doing this.

What is the actual security concern here? Do you think they are storing passwords in cleartext? It's not clear that is the case because they generated the password. Suppose they chose a password for you and stored a secure salted hash in the their database, they would still be able to tell you what the password is because they generated it.

Are you concerned they sent you the password over e-mail? E-mail is insecure anyway and sending you a reset or create account link wouldn't be any better. If you're concerned about e-mail snoopers, what's is to stop the MITM from clicking on the link in your e-mail?

Are you concerned that they cc'd your contact person? If you don't trust your payment provider to not execute insider attacks, you shouldn't use them. Period.

The only advantage I can see to sending a password reset/create type of link is protection against shoulder surfing attacks. But if you have malicious insiders in your company trying to steal access to things they shouldn't have access to, you have way bigger problems than this.

ed: tbh, it's just as likely they fired you as a customer because they felt you aren't worth the trouble of dealing with.