A major paper trying to explain why security experts have so frequently failed. Cormac Herley: The Unfalsifiability of Security Claims paper /slides. It starts with a great classic, Karl Popper philosophy of science which would be the basis to say “security” is some sort of pseudo-science. We read that “there is no empirical test that allows us …
In the last 2 weeks it was possible to buy DAO tokens, a major new form of distributed business constructed to run on ETH blockchain. Until Friday 12 May 2016 some 50 M$ were invested. Then the price of these tokens has started raising [following the pre-determined rule] for the last 2 weeks of token …
Today the Economist publishes a picture of Craig Wright, who decided to confirm and embrace the claim that he is the mysterious creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. The picture and the paper portrays a sad man who is badly struggling “to convince the world that he is indeed who he claims to be”. He also …
Some work done at UCL regarding bitcoin and speed: HOW to crack bitcoin passwords at a very high speed: brainflayer cracker where we read that: “The bulk of Brainflayer was written by Ryan Castellucci. Nicolas Courtois and Guangyan Song contributed the code in ec_pubkey_fast.c which more than doubles the speed of public key computations compared with …
Two prominent bitcoin gurus Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn decided to release their own software distribution of bitcoin and ALTER the specification of bitcoin! There will be a possibility to mine blocks with a new version number and new rules. This is meant to make bitcoin more democratic: larger blocks, more transactions per second, lower fees, wider …
Researchers at UCL and in the US claim that the current systems for e-government citizen/user authentication (for example when dealing with taxes or public services), are deeply FLAWED. The main issue raised is that the current systems which are under roll-out in the UK and the US are very poorly engineered with respect to central server/hub …
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