I remembered my login, my UID is in the 200,000s so I’m not as cool as you.

The place doesn’t seem to have changed at all, and that’s not necessarily a good thing.

Wait, Slashdot is still around?

I think these guys are overstating things a bit. The whole reason technical standards exist is to facilitate interoperability, and in most cases this interoperability leads to increased trade. It’s no accident that the first standards were developed during the industrial revolution, where we first started using machines to make parts, and they needed to fit together (like screws and nuts). Then, when the railroads came along, we needed new standards for things like track gague, because without it one countries’ trains couldn’t use the next countries’ track, making cross-border commerce more expensive. It’s also when we started to standardize time (because before the railroads, “noon” was whenever the sun was directly overhead, so varied by region).

These standards weren’t developed altruistically, they were developed to generate more trade. There is a cost to developing them, and companies spend that money in the hopes of making more later. In theory, anyone can access the standards that the ITU or IEEE create, but to participate you need to show up at their meetings, and there is a cost to that. Large companies can afford to send key smart people to those meetings, out of the profit from the products they sell. What is more capitalistic than that?

The standards process is anti-monopolist, though. The reason why they are as “open” as they are is to prevent a single entity from patenting key parts of the standard and gate-keeping access. There have been patented things in standards, but the SDO mandates that the parent-holder disclose it up front, and will not let it in the standard unless certain terms are met (which vary by SDO). It is not anti-capitalist, though, but rather it is a cabal of companies agreeing they won’t let any one of them gatekeep the rest.

In recognition of this awesome development, I promise not to shit talk about NJ for the rest of the day. Hopefully I don’t have to make any left turns…

But if you know how much filament you have, it takes all the fun out of playing Filament Chicken…

Check Elon’s basement

I know plenty of people with a critical outlook on crypto who have a clue what they are talking about.

I shouldn’t feed the troll, but there is a teachable moment here.

Crypto transactions that are direct on a Blockchain, by design, are immutable. Once they are validated in a block, and future blocks are validated on top of that, it is impossible for any entity to change that history unless they control a majority of the validation power of that network. Yes, even the NSA can’t do it. It’s math.

Yes, if the government wants your crypto, it will get it. But the only way to do that is to obtain your private keys. It cannot reverse a transaction, nor reverse-engineer your private keys from a transaction. Yes, not even the NSA can do it. It’s math.

Governments do have other tools at their disposal. But those tools must center on obtaining the key. They cannot “hack” it any other way.

Well, nothing anyone says is going to convince you, because you’re obviously correct. How silly of me to question you!

No, but if the US government sends money into your bank account, they can just as easily take it back.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2025/02/12/trump-administration-takes-back-80-million-in-fema-money-from-nycs-bank-accounts-city-alleges-highway-robbery/

Crypto was designed to be a peer-to-peer method for immutable transactions. Crypto transactions are irreversible, even for governments.

I’ve used crypto for legitimate transactions in the past. It bailed me out once, big time, when I had to top up a foreign SIM card while abroad and their website wouldn’t take my US credit card. I found a site selling top-up codes that took crypto and sent some from my phone, and I was back in business. (The site was legit, but even if it turned out to be a scam I knew they could never take anything more than what I sent them because of the way crypto worked.) But this was back when people were still using it to transact.

The worst thing that ever happened to law-abiding people using crypto was when it’s price zoomed up. Because for all those early adopters, every individual transaction now has a considerble capital gain attached. That’s why people don’t spend crypto anymore, because it’s been turned by the market into a Store of Value. (And by developers, but that’s a different thread).

This seems to be all about a technicality involving how these sanctions are applied. Sanctions are meant to be applied to people and the companies they run, and a US court ruled that these sanctions couldn’t be applied to a smart contract because it’s just a bunch of code, and not the property of a sanctioned individual. This ruling was made back in November, they are just getting around now to removing the sanctions. From what I can tell, the sanctions against the people involved in running the service are still in effect.

These agencies are sometimes able to retrieve stolen funds. In the case of the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack in 2021, the Department of Justice (DOJ) was eventually able to recover almost 85% of the bitcoin (BTC) ransom paid to Russian cybercriminal group Darkside. It’s unclear how investigators obtained the hacking group’s private keys.

Probably the old-fashioned way

I can believe areas of the White House have no cell service, on purpose. Remember when they found those fake cell towers around DC?

https://www.wired.com/story/dcs-stingray-dhs-surveillance/

I bet at some point they installed some cell phone jammers specifically to limit the amount of foreign spying that could be done by fake towers, and they simply “forgot” to tell the incoming Trump administration…

But this is exactly what AI is being marketed toward. All of Apple’s AI ads showcase dumb people who appear smart because the AI bails out their ineptitude.

Actually, this is good news, because they were able to fulfill all those redemptions. It means they were not doing shady things with all those deposits.

Do I understand this correctly, then, that this was some sort of MITM attack where valid requests to the multisig parties were replaced by malicious code while still appearing to be valid to the signers? That must be an inside job.

And this is the first time I have heard the word “musked” in this context…

Well, either it wasn’t as offline as they all thought, or someone pulled off an epic inside job.

Ah, I know a bit about Kodak, being a resident of Rochester, NY (and a former employee). Go back 100 years, and George Eastman was the Steve Jobs of his day. Kodak was just like Apple, bringing the obscure technology of photography to the masses.

But that tech was very much dependant on chemical processes, specifically the Silver Halides used in film. Although Steve Sasson invented the digital camera whike at Kodak, Management basically told him “Great job! Here’s a bonus. We’re not gonna sell it, though, this will ruin our film business”.

Ridge Road in Rochester is full of factories with large roll coating machines to make film which are now functionally obsolete. As far as I know many of those buildings are still there, but in truth its been a while since I’ve been up there. Kodak sold off bits and pieces of that factory space over the years, even before the bankruptcy. But they tore down much more factory space, entire buildings, because the property taxes were cheaper on vacant lots than on buildings. Yet they haven’t gotten around to divesting it all.

Kodak still technically exists after the bankruptcy, but is far less relevant to the local economy now. Back in the day, when Kodak Park ran 3 shifts making film, local car dealers timed their promotions around Kodak’s “Wage Dividend” bonus. But it turns out their technological advantage had an expiration date.

George Eastman’s influence is seen all over Rochester, though. His name is all over various buildings in town, as well as the University of Rochester and the Eastman School of Music. And when he decided his health was declining and his work was done, he shot himself to end it all in the most efficient matter possible. Even most Lemmings, who abhor the rich, might have a soft spot for an insanely rich person who not only gave back to his community, but also took it upon himself to end it without being a burden to anyone.

Kodak’s value is as a film company. Now that film is a niche product, their brand name has no value whatsoever, except for the fact that it’s still familiar. If you see Kodak branding on a consumer product, I doubt it was actually developed by Kodak, I would bet they just licensed the name.

The Internet was designed to be somewhat decentralized. Some administrative aspects are centralized, like public IP address allocation, Top Level Domains, and common TCP/UDP port assignments for essential services. But the operational aspects are very decentralized. When an organization wants to connect directly to the Internet, they “just” need to connect with sufficient bandwidth, and then start broadcasting the IP address ranges they are assigned, and the routing protocols figure it all out. If all you want is a private Internet, you can even dispense with the routing protocols and set up static routes yourself, although that won’t scale up.

No matter what happens in the world, there will always be an Internet, as long as the equipment exists and there are enough furries to run it.