Still Tenser, Said the Censor.
Stay classy, YCombinator.
Stay classy, YCombinator.
The WWW of Brian Krebs, perhaps the second-most-worshiped1 patron saint to all English-speaking “computer security” charlatans — is sitting sadly offline today on account of a ~TB/sec DDOS flood.2
His titanic bandwidth, it turns out, was provided gratis by Akamai – spamatronicists par excellence and industrial-scale enablers of everything that makes the modern-day WWW a rancid [...]
But, of course – it won’t.
But let’s imagine that it were in someone’s financial – hell, geopolitical! interest – to convince the public that it will. The New York Times editorial might go like this: ‘you may have heard of tungsten, a metal, just like gallium; the latter, a favourite among stage magicians for melting at body temperature…’
Now, it [...]
From the ‘Dear Idiots, ‘1984′ is Not a How-To Guide’ department:
He might turn the speech into the usual denunciation of traitors and thought-criminals, but that was a little too obvious, while to invent a victory at the front, or some triumph of over-production in the Ninth Three-Year Plan, might complicate the records too much. What [...]
A reader recently asked me to comment on the demise of MtGox and its implications for Bitcoin enthusiasts.
I refused to do so, on account of the MtGox scam having been thoroughly beaten to death elsewhere – long before the recent and final convulsive fit people erroneously describe as ‘its demise.’ – The unwashed masses, eager [...]
The following is a conversation I recently had with an alert and inquisitive reader. It has been redacted for brevity; handles/names/irrelevant things have been removed. Some text has been turned into links to relevant material.
Anyone still reading this page for reasons related to its original purpose is encouraged to read this; it may help to [...]
If you came here via a search engine, you were probably looking for Pierre Cartier’s wonderful mini-biography of the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck – from which I shamelessly stole the title. Please go straight there. Otherwise…
“And so no one, except for two people, enters the top floor of the Aedificium. …”
The abbot smiled. “No one should. [...]
Your kitchen is alive with vermin! Who is to blame? The cruel forces of nature? Or, might it be you – the fellow who scattered delicious crumbs everywhere; spilled honey a thousand times without picking up a mop once; and kept a mountain of old newspapers around for rodents to chew into nest liner? [...]
The Bitcoin Kill Switch is quite alive, well, and waiting to be pressed:
“I can’t assure with 100% certainty that the all the black dots are owned by Satoshi, but almost all are owned by a single entity, and that entity began mining right from block 1, and with the same performance as the genesis block. [...]
“The most important thing a crook needs is an impeccable reputation.”
(Attributed to Agatha Christie.)
Bitcoin interests me as an obvious example of a technological jewel tossed around aimlessly by the brutal hands of cave men. I can’t help but picture a flashlight or a radio set, left behind in the wilderness by geologists, to be [...]