Posts by doublelayer 9408 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Feb 2018
They probably just bought that one. I have a domain in operation that was created in the 1990s, but I didn't create it. I'm just operating it now, though in my defense I'm operating it for the same people and purpose as it was set up for back then. Any time a domain is bought from squatters, it will probably look like it's been in existence longer than it really has.
"I'm not sure why say a Catalan localisation of Mozilla needs to ship with trust enabled for some Turkish bank's CA)"
Two problems. First, it's not the bank's CA. That bank's certificate will be signed by a much larger root CA. My version of Firefox has 78 of those. They don't exactly hand them out to everyone, including Turkish banks. You need to prove quite a lot before you can issue certificates rather than just get some from an existing authority and use them.
But let's say there's one of these that's basically only used in Turkey. Why should the Catalan localization include it? Because if the average web user has to enable each new CA the first time they see it, they're going to get used to clicking the trust button on new CAs way too often. Yes, many won't use the Turkey-limited CA because they won't use any sites based there, but they'll have a reason to visit a Romanian site. And someone else will enable a Pakistani CA because they wanted to see something hosted over there. Someone in Catalonia set up a website of their own but used an Australian CA because their domain provider suggested it (or is it), so all their users will need to enable that one. And someone else speaks Catalan at home but moved to Sweden, so they'll have a few to turn on. And someone else set up that version as a way of practicing the language but lives in Senegal. If all of these people get used to trusting things their browsers wouldn't, then when they get a phishing site with its own untrustworthy CA, they might be more willing to trust that site's CA because they've been taught that sometimes you have to click that button for sites to load. That phishing site is now free to redirect them to more convincing fake pages which their browser trusts.
Except that's the way it has and will be for some time. Businesses already have several unmonitored ways to communicate. For example, an employee can just pick up the phone and call another one. Unless this business has a legal requirement to record all phone lines, it's likely they will have a record that a call took place but can't provide a tape of it on request. The same is true for most voice or video systems the company provides (yes, they all have a recording capability, but most meetings aren't recorded unless that's expected). If businesses have to find a way to prevent people from sending text messages through some system, why don't they have to record all calls, or for that matter find some way of preventing a covert conversation taking place in person?
In those businesses that don't have a legal requirement to record everything, this is not news (some evidence may not exist by the time law enforcement knows they want it) and even when such a requirement exists, it's still not (some people when doing illegal things will use a communication method that's not recorded). Any business that has a legal requirement and wants to adhere to it will have restrictions to enforce what they can, and there is no rule mandating anyone else to care.
Or alternatively, the author concerned was assigned to cover the Singapore Symposium on Blockchain and the main news they thought would interest the reader was the statements being made there by the speakers invited there. Since when did covering someone's statements about a specific technology become political, and why do two articles from a symposium somehow eclipse the many non-blockchain articles you can find on the home page?
This is true, but it works just as well with Bitcoin as with anything else. If it's a hitman I'm hiring, then I'm not likely to go to court and by my accusation prove culpability for a crime, but let's consider something legal. My domain registrar, Gandi.net, has a Bitcoin pay option. Let's say that for some reason I decided to abandon my simple credit card payment for whatever morass is involved to send them enough Bitcoin that it turns into the right amount of money when they're done converting it. If I send them Bitcoin and I don't get a domain name, I can take them to court and would send complaints to that effect. This works whether I paid them in Bitcoin, with a payment card, by mailing cash, or any other method. The fact that Bitcoin is decentralized and credit cards are not makes no difference, given that either way I'll be using a centralized court to resolve the contract dispute.
Ah. I saw "central and eastern Europe" and interpreted it as multiple countries, then made another leap from that to outsourcing. So two possibly wrong assumptions, sorry about that.
Maybe the original document is more specific about which jobs they're looking at. Whenever I see a single median number for what's almost certainly at least ten different jobs, it's a sign that somebody, either the original people or someone who summarized it, was cutting corners and giving simplistic results. I'm not in the UK either, which makes it harder to know what's a normal salary there for any given job, but even if I'm using local numbers, I only know a logical range for a few kinds of jobs similar to what I'm doing, not everything in IT.
Also important, what's your definition of "techie"? That could mean anything from programmer of safety critical equipment that only two hundred people worldwide understand at all to first line technical support at the ISP who read a script to people who don't have a clue how to troubleshoot other than recognizing that "My internet didn't work when I clicked on it". My guess is that the stuff you're outsourcing to eastern Europe is different from the median job they're talking about. For example, it seems more likely that you're outsourcing dev work than IT administration or support, and if you include the various levels of more entry-level support staff, that will pull the salary statistics down. We also don't have a great idea of what they included in "IT". I've seen many analyses disagree about whether programming is IT or not, and it doesn't stop there.
"We had to squeeze the best out of the computer with minimal onboard resources, so it had to be written efficiently - no wasted bytes or cycles. No wonder modern code is often so full of resource leaks and security holes."
In fact, it's often the code that cuts corners for efficiency that develops those behaviors. There's also just writing it wrong and failing to properly manage things, and old code is pretty good at making those mistakes too. Little tricks to get an operation done in ten fewer instructions rather than do the obvious way have often been the cause of vulnerabilities, and the cheapness of cycles on modern chips allows us to dispense with them and go for the one that wastes a few and doesn't have a hole.
You keep saying this stuff. You assume that there were no sockets, which isn't at all proven. It's a room full of electrical equipment. There are probably free sockets if you look hard enough. By the way, if you're in a room that has no sockets free, the answer is not to unplug something with a bunch of warnings saying not to because how bad could it be? The answer is to find the person who hired you and tell them that you need a socket. Then you can wait while they call the person responsible for the room who will find you one or unplug the least important thing for you, and if you're charging by the hour which such people often are, they pay for their lack of foresight. Look hard first, in case they come in, point to the one a little bit over from the one you were looking at, and get grumpy that you wasted their time.
"It relies on a diskette accidentally being present in the drive to write ouput."
Or it waits for one. I doubt it breaks before one's there, but has a thread or a check in a loop that starts the dump when a disk is inserted. Probably it's writing things to local storage and then copies the important or relevant ones to a disk because that's frequently used on a different system.
"It just trashes whatever it finds in the drive without warning?"
The operators probably don't consider that necessary if it's an off-limits machine, and having to manually start the dumping process is extra effort they don't really want. I've seen a program like this that worked with USB drives. No, it didn't erase them, but it did automatically start an operation when a disk containing a magic file was inserted. This was done because the program ran on a bunch of non-networked machines and plugging in a drive, waiting for a beep, and moving to the next one was faster than starting the operation manually each time as well. I wasn't running it, though, so I didn't get to decide.
"exactly how and why were they approved in the first place, considering both Google and Apple's claims of 'protecting users' by [supposedly] vetting these apps??"
Because nobody checked. The apps went through the review process alright: a script to check them against a list of banned packages, another script doing a quick scan to see if any of the assets were obvious unobfuscated malware samples, one to check for some trademarks in descriptions or images, passed all three and we're ready to go. It's pretty obvious that no rigorous check system is in place. Some reactive work is done, but even that can prove to be much less than the companies claim.
"So, Google and Apple, exactly how did you mess up"
We take our customers' security and privacy very seriously, and we're performing a full investigation into ... sorry, my boss has just informed me that I'm being replaced by an old tape recorder someone found and rearranged so it'd loop. Bye.
"and why aren't you claiming a mea culpa??"
We take our customers' security and privacy very seriously, and we're performing a full investigation into ...
A few practical difficulties arise. Probably the first is how are they going to send you money? Probably they deposit it into your bank account. That's a bit harder to fake than having a burner phone, and since they can show loan documents, they can attempt to charge that account for your repayment. Yes, they'll turn to fraud later, but based on the contracts they've shown you, they'll appear to be real creditors until they do. If they're not using a bank account, they still are using something where you can receive cash, and that's more likely attached to your identity because of restrictions on financial services. If they're operating outside the system entirely, they might hand out envelopes of cash, meaning you have to meet someone who can demand to see your identification and photograph everything before you get paid. If they're stupid enough to use a truly anonymous method for the initial payment, you could figure a way to get it, but they probably avoided an easily gamed method.
Also, if they're profitable, they may have a respectable front that claims to give normal loans and may have a relationship with corrupt law enforcement not to investigate their fraud. They can use their front with the contracts you signed to request that the police investigate your theft. I'm not sure whether they have the power to make that happen, but if you got enough from them, they might want either to retrieve it or make an example of you. You'd need to be pretty certain that your method was perfect before making enemies of that nature, and given they're targeting low-income countries, it's possible they won't give you enough money to justify the risks you'd take.
"you can afford an iGizmo, but need a loan?"
Sure. Go find a second-hand old model iPhone with some damage. It will be cheap enough to buy. Then have a medical problem, eviction, etc or other large expensive situation that will be bad for you if you don't resolve it. Voila, you have an iPhone and need a loan. If you do these things in the order specified, then you didn't know you needed a loan when you got the iPhone.
Also, did you read the part in the headline, or the first paragraph, or the comment from the researchers, or the rest of the article that clearly indicated that there were Android variants as well? How about this part of the researchers' statement: "The focus on developing countries may also explain why we found more loan scam apps on Android than on iOS,".
Now I'm trying to imagine how they could possibly manage this and getting the mental equivalent of NaN results. There's just no practical way they can get a watch to hold earbuds without making the watch ridiculously thick or the buds so small they no longer fit in human ears, and I'm guessing they've done some (or a lot) of both given that if they did make the buds incredibly small and shrunk the watch to the thinnest they could manage, battery life to run and charge both isn't likely to be good.
Maybe as someone who doesn't wear watches I'm underestimating how thick of a watch people will put up with, but somehow I don't think so.
"5 days off grid last year, but POTS kept working. Mobile network? not so much."
So the PSTN has bigger batteries. This sounds like a lack of batteries problem, not a what's running from the batteries problem. Unless the PSTN is significantly more power efficient than anything else (I don't know but I do know there's a bunch of power hungry equipment on it), you could solve that problem by planning more backup power for the replacements.
On at least a few occasions, people who were too dangerous to approach directly have been contacted by sending in a robot carrying something they needed or demanded or just a phone. This starts the process of attempting to end the situation peacefully, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. I wonder if this law will lead to paranoia from hostage takers or similar people that every robot is armed with explosives. On the other hand, anyone insane enough to take hostages in the first place is probably not thinking too clearly, so even if any weaponized robots were illegal, they might assume whatever they wanted about any attempt to communicate. It's hard to legislate on the basis of what crazy people will think, but possibly worth considering whether there is an increased risk and whether that would outweigh the benefits they imagine.
Maybe I can clarify for you. He's already known for donating to Democrats. That's a thing he's talked about and since this collapse started, people have been making lots of connections based on that one party. The news, reported in the headline and the article, is that it wasn't just Democrats. If it helps, the following headlines would also be correct and deliver the same information to someone who was keeping up with the news: "SBF didn't just donate to Democrats, also gave to Republicans", "SBF's political donations less one-sided than previously reported", "SBF donated to Republican candidates at similar order of magnitude as he did to Democrats, didn't much mention that though".
It's as if we discovered that there's a glacier ice cap covering Ireland and a headline only mentioned that one, but someone complained because the one in Greenland is bigger. Yes, but we knew about that one already. If you care about who he was donating to, and I don't care very much, the news about Republicans would add to the news you already read about Democrats, and if you hadn't read that you'd get a background summary in the article.
To clarify, I'm not exactly taking an absolutist point of view, as there are ways that some speech implements something that's already a crime and should be punished as such. I certainly know people who take a much more restrictive view than I do, though. The point of my comment is to take exception with the idea that freedom of speech applies to something other than government reactions. Many people appear to take the point of view that such a freedom means they are allowed to say whatever they want and those who disagree with them aren't allowed to do anything, no matter how legal, in response. The logical inconsistencies are or at least should be obvious but given the prevalence of the argument, they're unfortunately not.
"Free speech means being able to put your name to your speech without having repercussions."
It's not, it never was, it never will be. Speech has repercussions. As long as the repercussions are legal, that's fine. This means that, if I go to the person who pays me and tell them that I hate them, I'm likely to suffer the repercussion that they don't want to keep paying me. If they respond with violence, that's not acceptable, but they have lots of legal options I wouldn't like. To have speech without any repercussions means that I should be able to bury you in a stream of whatever you find the most insulting, offensive, or off-putting and you have to stand there and deal with it because even asking me to leave your house would be a repercussion of my speech. Clearly, you are not restricted in that way and subjecting you to such a situation would be cruel. Free speech means that I have the right to say the things you don't like and not get arrested, not that I get to force you to never do anything I don't like in response.
And now the third party website knows who you are, what website you used, and when you used it. If and only if companies are not allowed to use their own does there remain any isolation, and that is isolation that can come down if the third party site is compromised by security breeches, controlled by governments (our own or someone else's), finds a way to sell the information, or just isn't extremely careful with the important data they've received.
"I see real benefit in a command-line server OS written in Rust because of its stability and security."
I see the potential as well. My point was not that nobody wants it, but nobody wants to test it on servers when it's still this experimental because it's not suitable for production and most people using a lot of servers need something that is.
"I'm pretty sure take-up will be much quicker than an incomplete graphical OS which can in no way compare to Windows or even Linux for another two decades."
It's incomplete as a command line one as well, which is why take-up is going to lag either way. Until they can enhance it a bit more, it's going to stay in the experimental box, and I think it's more likely to get new experimenters with a graphical layer than without it, since you can still use it as a CLI-only system if you like. Since those experimenters can turn into contributors to the OS itself or to software to run on it, that could make adoption and improvement faster. It's very possible that after some more of this, it becomes like Linux or BSD, where there's a graphical layer for those who want it but a lot of the systems don't have it installed or do but it's never in use.
You could make another server OS, but are more people going to use it as a desktop OS or a server OS? I contend that nobody will use an unsupported and mostly untested OS for a production server, but some would use it on a desktop if just to experiment with the chance that they like it and continue from there. People are more likely to experiment with an OS with both interfaces rather than one that only has a terminal option.
Embedded might work a bit better, but embedded OSes usually have pretty daunting hardware compatibility problems before they're useful, which is why a lot of embedded devices big enough to use a full kernel use projects like Yocto to build them from a lot of components which work with Linux because the manufacturers already thought of it. Meanwhile making it small enough to run for more restricted embedded systems would mean creating a completely different kind of program.
I don't understand some extroverts I know who think that fun is not only a massive party, but one at which no type of social interaction is practical. Aren't they supposed to be energized by interacting with people, in which case why did they decide that music loud enough to cause hearing damage and mandatory screaming directly into another's ears being the only feasible mode of conversation would work? In such parties, conversations naturally break into pairs, because it's difficult to have a larger group and understand one another.
There are lots of things I've seen companies do to encourage morale and friendships, and by far the most successful have been the most optional and flexible. Probably the one that worked best was just having a group who chose to eat lunch together, and the company didn't even have to pay for it.
Unless the job description was "provide business during the evenings to clubs and increase demand for alcohol", it's still a problem. Whether or not I drink isn't relevant to whether I can write code that solves your problems. It's not a legal requirement not to discriminate on drinking, but it is not only stupid for the company who will have more trouble finding employees but certainly won't feel fair to the candidate. If they're also stupid enough to fire or reprimand people who don't do it, then getting rejected during the interview is at least better than that, but I have to lower the bar so much to make that better that I'm not willing to condone the behavior.
"And this guy must have known this before taking on the job."
How, exactly? The only clues I can see are the stupid motto. The problem with that is that every company has a boiler plate descriptor of their environment that looks similar to everyone else's and means nothing. It often involves an attempt to praise the company as doing great work and to entice applicants by pretending the company cares about their happiness. Whatever the environment, whether it's the dream job where you do only the stuff you enjoy for a massive salary in a perfect environment or a job where you have a mandatory few hours unpaid overtime per day helping with the demolition of the company's old office, their website blurb will look about the same. You can't use that to know what the environment will be.
How does one tell what a company's environment is before taking on the job? I have two options. You could look them up online (which works badly if they're small enough that few have posted about it and also works badly if it's large because there will be a lot of conflicting reports from different teams that have different environments. You could also ask the people interviewing you, who will probably lie about anything negative because they think they want to hire you. I don't think it's that surprising he didn't know what their idea of fun was or how often they would subject people to it.
You act like Bitcoin is special. The only special thing about it is that it basically came first. It's not the only proof of work cryptocurrency, and there are other methods of securing a cryptocurrency that are valid. It's not the only limited-supply one either. It also has, in comparison to more modern ones, various core defects that make it even more unsuitable than others at being a practical medium of exchange for the economy as it exists in the real world or obtaining the goals in the paper you've linked. There are things that claim to be cryptocurrencies that are not, ones that are and are clearly worse, and ones that are and are better in various ways.
"At least with gold you have something you can hit someone over the head with, I suppose."
If you're in the blunt instrument weapon business, I advise you to think again. Gold's density means that a thing made of it large enough to be a useful club will be incredibly expensive, but even if gold becomes cheap or you have unlimited funds, actually wielding it as a weapon will require significant upper body strength to lift the massive weapon. It's also soft enough that striking something with it may cause damage that needs to be repaired or it becomes even more unwieldy.
"Funny, when Lehman Brothers bit the bullet I don't remember hearing about how Goldman Sachs suddenly froze customer access to their bank accounts."
Part of the reason for that is that central banks will lend out money for banks to handle runs like that, but obviously won't (and shouldn't) for cryptocurrency exchanges. There have been banks that had runs of this nature which would have collapsed but for that assistance and a time when that was a lot more common. Cryptocurrency has a lot of risks, but just because they've reinvented bank run 3.0 doesn't mean all the participants are as unethical as FTX was.
"I have never understood what backed cryptocurrencies."
Exactly the same as when gold or shells were used as the currency: nothing apart from the idea that this stuff is rare and people will always want it. Both ideas don't always work. When gold was used as a currency, weird things always happened where people found gold somewhere because it had become a lot less rare there until people managed to get it transported thoroughly around the national or global economy. A worse thing happened with silver which, by being stolen from South America by the Spanish managed to destroy several Asian and European economies (it's funny how global economic collapse was possible in the days of year-long ship journeys and could affect countries isolated from global trade. Cryptocurrencies have often been designed so that there's a finite amount of them and they can't be created easily or at all, thus limiting intentional inflation in the supply, but their value depends entirely on who wants them and they are subject to all the same problems that caused the end of the gold standard already.
"With a national currency there was always the government which could raise taxation to cover their currency."
Yes, but they generally don't do that. By the time there's a bad enough problem that spending down reserves of gold or securities isn't enough, the citizenry is unlikely to accept the level of taxation needed to resurrect that currency and have also probably started buying stable currencies with their savings. Current national currencies are mostly backed by their host governments' prudence in monetary policy, which means some countries have much lower trust scores than do others.
There are many international laws in the form of treaties about when you can legally invade, what reasons for doing so are valid, what you have to do when you're going to exercise that right, and what you may or may not do while fighting. Russia signed most of them, making them legally binding under the terms of the Russian constitution. They have broken almost all of them so far. Hence, illegal.
There is such a thing as international law, complete with international courts to make judgements based on it. It's weak because getting it enforced tends to be difficult. While some places may argue that the law doesn't apply to them based on their not agreeing to it, Russia did agree to it so they have no logical argument.
I suspect Apple would care, but that those who use them already value Apple more than Twitter so won't. Apple's seen lots of people shout angrily that they'll never buy Apple again after doing various things, and it's not been a problem for them in the last couple decades. I expect that most of the Musk fans who use iPhones will forget about their anger in a few weeks, and their iPhone won't have broken during that time, so the next time they go to replace it they'll buy another one.
Apple doesn't tie the Bluetooth and location permissions together, which could theoretically allow an app to use Bluetooth devices as the only method of tracking, but not as well. I generally prefer that to Android's method of making every app that interacts with a device have location either because they have to or because the app wants the data, and good luck finding out which it is. Still, what might be better is the OS allowing an app to request a Bluetooth connection and the OS goes and finds the device and connects it in. Instead of letting an app control the Bluetooth hardware directly if all it's going to do is open a serial port, the OS could do that and reserve the permission for apps that the user wants to have full control over the Bluetooth hardware.
The way I'd use the terms, it's only on prem if it's on your prem. If your admin can physically access the machine while working in your building, that's on prem. If it's in a colo somewhere, that's no longer your premises, with the difference that you're more likely to be accessing it remotely unless things are very messed up. Even before the cloud, having a machine that wasn't in a building you owned wasn't unheard of, and outsourcing email was similarly possible.
"Along the way I had a few mighty 5MB and 19 MB, and, dare I say it, 40MB hard drives. And some diskpacks, ranging up to the incredible, no way we could ever fill that up, 300MB."
I've heard stories like this before, and I have to ask whether that was true. Not so much for a 300 MB disk, as I can see how that would look pretty large compared to files, but people who express similar sentiments with 5-20 MB drives. I know I'm demonstrating my relative youth, a serious blow to my standing in this community, but did anyone who got such a disk really think it would be hard to fill that? A novel consists of about a hundred thousand words, probably with an average length of about six letters. So storing just a text file of a novel would use up an eighth of a 5 MB disk. Even with a 20 MB disk, you could store 40 uncompressed books if we're being charitable. The fact that this disk stores less information than my bookshelf would probably have made me think I could fill it up if I wasn't careful to compress and prune data.
Yes, I know you weren't storing novels on the disks, or at least you compressed them first, but business documents and memos are also on paper and stored on bookshelves so the parallel is still direct. Maybe I'm just not understanding what you were storing those days.
Other things to drink, toiletries that are liquids for longer stays than those tiny bottles work, probably some medications though fortunately not any I've ever needed, any liquid you intend to give someone (probably likely to be alcohol but who knows what people choose). Other options are available. I've certainly carried things through before where people would probably find it a bit strange, but all it has to do is fit the categories "I have it", "I want it there", and "It fits in my suitcase".
I don't think starting with coding necessarily means eliminating the thinking, and in fact doing it the other way around may not work. You need some understanding of how something can be done before you can successfully implement the solution, so learning what code does and where some limits are helps when teaching how to solve a problem with it. If you start with problem solving, you have to talk in generalities. You could say "there are limited resources so be aware of what you have to use efficiently and what you can waste harmlessly", but if they've been taught about the mechanics, you can give useful examples like showing them how much certain things use in RAM or CPU time and demonstrating how those limits come into play. You need to learn both, but practical details help give non-theoretical examples that can help get the lessons understood.
This approach defends against blindly throwing common passwords at it, but little else, and even with that there are problems as other replies have already explained. It does little against password reuse where an attacker obtains credentials from somewhere and tries one or two of them on lots of sites, as a successful access will log them in almost immediately.
You might respond that this doesn't require basic passwords, and you would sometimes be right, but it still increases the likelihood of an attack. If I use a secure password and the site doesn't properly salt and hash the passwords, I'm still out of luck and shouldn't have reused it, but if I use a simple password, whether the site does or doesn't hash them, they will be crackable from the leaked database quickly enough that they're likely to be used. Don't reuse passwords and don't use "Password" as the password to anything. Not all the high-security constraints are necessary, and enforced changes can be harmful, but the basics are still right.
If, for example, you're a person who makes their money by having a bunch of people engaged in something, you might use Twitter to attract customers or to generate fans. This is more likely the case for people who make their money by making music, art, or other media where the profit is determined by the number of people who view it. Not so much for those here who mostly make our money from making computers do stuff for people who have money they're willing to give us, so it seems unlikely, but there are more people in the former group than it would seem. I imagine some of them will suffer from this and end up relying more on other social media companies, although it's a thing they can and should be planning for since it doesn't look like things are going to stop.
Reporting on things you already know isn't a problem unless you're required not to disclose something for legal reasons. Since these are third parties, anything they know will already be public knowledge. Anything they make up will be fiction (they'll label the show as "inspired by a true story" to indicate that it's mostly lies that worked nicely in the script) which they will claim doesn't mean anything, and if it is likely to prejudice a jury then the lawyers for both sides will agree that they'll disqualify any possible juror who has seen the show. So probably it's not going to cause much of a legal problem unless someone involved decides to sue for defamation, but probably not the most accurate source of information about how FTX worked.
You want the gold standard? No problem. There's a reason that countries stopped doing it, and it wasn't just because they want to print money for free, but if you want it, you can have it. You don't need cryptocurrency for it either. People have been advocating for its return for some time, and they found a way to get it: pay with gold.
In most places, you can carry as much gold as you like, you can pay banks to store excess gold, and you can give people gold. All you need to do now is start carrying it and convince people to take it in exchange. If you want to use cryptocurrency, you have to do both of the same things. If you don't like using gold, use any other metal you like. You asked for copper coins, so get some copper and pay with that. Of course you may find that your copper fluctuates in value with relation to gold, but that's what you get when using mineral currency. I'll also point out that copper wasn't coined (as in used for its monetary value) under the gold standard. It was made into coins which were valued in gold. Your suggestion might end up being even worse than the gold standard, but you can have it.
Alright, I'm back for the next point, specifically this allegation: "One [cryptocurrency] being oppressed by the government."
You need to learn what oppression is like. Here's a hint. Being regulated for environmental damage is not oppression. The same things apply to any large power-hungry industry. If someone wanted to set up an aluminium smelting operation in New York, they'd need permits and would be heavily regulated. Smelting uses a massive amount of power and produces pollution. Running a coal powered mining operation does both of the same things. There's a reason you need permits and why such things are limited.
Here's what oppression would look like. If the U.S. wanted cryptocurrency to die, they would ban transactions in it. Or they could create new tax laws to take it. Or they would ban mining outright, rather than just restricting building power plants for the purpose. Some people would welcome those moves, but I would not. There's a marked difference between those moves and a sane and entirely precedented environmental regulation. Painting this as oppression suggests you either have no idea what oppression is or that you feel there would be a benefit in advertising something with fake enemies. Far from oppressing cryptocurrency, most countries have been facilitating it both directly such as the incentives given by Kentucky in this article or indirectly through lax regulation on connected industries allowing legitimate exchanges and scams alike to thrive.
The politician can make the following statements based on the cryptomining operations:
1. Anyone mining coal: look, I've made it so these coal power plants will never shut down by attracting users. Your jobs are safe. Don't think about whether that's actually likely given how easy it is to move the equipment.
2. Anyone unemployed: look, I'm attracting new industries to this area, both in running plants and operating mining equipment. Don't think about how many jobs that actually is.
3. Anyone in state government: look, by giving them a tax break, I've attracted the business of people who make lots of money. Imagine how much they could bring to the local economy that's still taxed. Don't think about the fact that none of the rich people are actually needed here to run their expensive equipment.
4. To opponent for next election: look, under my leadership, we're bringing high-tech industries and jobs to revitalize our economy. Don't think about the fact that the high-tech part was written by programmers and made by ASIC designers all over the place and is done now.
That is unless the cryptocurrency investors cut out the political angle and gave the politicians a more direct incentive to be nice with the taxes.
You can let cryptominers or anyone else you want use this excess. There's a big difference between that and letting them turn on new power plants for their own steady use. One of the differences is that cryptominers don't tend to want to do the former if they can do the latter. While they can switch on or off at will, they've bought equipment and they want to run it as much as they can. Being told to turn off now because demand is increasing isn't something they want, which is a reason the rich ones have been buying power plants.
These people aren't running power plants because the rest of the grid needs them. In some cases, they're not even connected to the grid. They're running the plants for their own use, and as with any particularly costly activity, governments regulate such things.
"Or is this too conspiratorial?"
Sorry, but yes it is. Some of your arguments would have some validity if it weren't for two problems: you haven't done anything to calibrate your assumptions and cryptocurrency isn't working.
We'll start with the one about datacenter power usage. They use a lot of power to run a lot of things. Not all datacenter power bills are to run the financial system, in fact few of them are for that. However, you assume, based on not looking up any numbers, that cryptocurrency mining is a lot less. While identifying which servers are part of the financial industry is hard, it's not hard to understand that something that uses power on the scale of a developed country isn't going to be dwarfed by much. An argument for cryptocurrency gave a number of 26 TWH for financial industry server usage in 2020. I don't know where they got it, but they're arguing for cryptocurrency being small in comparison, so let's let them have their number. Bitcoin mining, note not all cryptocurrencies, used 90.6 TWH. Not small in comparison. The people arguing for cryptocurrency used various other estimated numbers to try to bring the finance industry up, such as estimating power used by bank branches (valid, but hard to guess at) and payment terminals (invalid, as cryptocurrency would need terminals as well). Even with all their numbers taken into account, including invalid ones, the finance industry used 125% of Bitcoin's usage.
Let's also consider what that difference entails. The finance industry does a lot of things wrong, which it can manage because it does a lot of things. It manages transactions from nearly everybody to nearly everything. Cryptocurrency doesn't. Cryptocurrency is not used for average transactions on the scale of existing systems, or by anything near as many people. Except with a massive overhaul, cryptocurrency cannot serve the purpose of the financial system without scaling up a lot, with significantly more power usage required.
This comment got long, so I'll leave it here and come back to other parts later.
In order to fit the exapartition that would make, you're going to need a new kind of partition table. If we scale it in the same way that GPT does, that will take us from needing 16 KiB for GPT's current 128-partition limit to needing 128 EiB for the partition table assuming we don't want any more. That is unless you're comfortable nesting partitions and getting the OS to accept and perform well with partitions that contain partitions that contain partitions that contain ... eight levels deep.
It has nothing to do with how many bits are in a byte. You can use decimal or binary multiplication but each will use 8-bit bytes. Meanwhile, if you did have 10-bit bytes, a kilobyte would still be 1000 or 1024 bytes depending on whether you made a disk or RAM. It would store more stuff, and it would have grown from 8 to 10 kilobits, and it would require a lot of hardware and software changes, but those two ratios are independent.
The modification of the prefixes to use 2^10 instead of 10^3 as a factor leads to some interesting names if you use the insertion of "bi" into the second syllable. If you can find a way to pronounce "quebibyte, robibyte, zebibyte, exbibyte, pebibyte, tebibyte, gibibyte, mebibyte, and kibibyte" without sounding crazy, you get a prize.
At one point, we didn't need tera as a prefix either. Who has a terabyte of storage after all when disks were 5 MB slabs, and when you get to the point of terameters different units start being used instead. Still, although any one of us could have done it, nobody talks about their 2*10^12 B drives. The shortened forms are useful for brevity if the measurement becomes common, whereas scientific papers can use alternate notations as they have done and still do. You also don't have to remember the units; by the time you need them very often, you'll come to know them. Few average people in the 1980s would have used giga or tera, hence the famous mispronunciation of giga in Back to the Future which nobody would make today, but now that they're more common, people understand what they mean. If we get to the point where we need quettabytes, we'll learn the prefix. Until then, nothing will require you to know it.
Except we eventually needed numbers large enough that that wasn't a great solution. A quadrillion is not a number we need very often, but with the frequency with which we use trillion, we are likely to see it cropping up and it does happen now and again. It would get a bit old to call it a thousand million million every time.
You're proving that you don't understand what time is for.
"We might as well get rid of leap days too. Yes, this will make the new year slide more quickly from the winter solstice, but why should this matter? It's not like people sow and harvest according to the calendar any more."
Because "A January day in Australia" means something about the likely weather these days, but if we let January slide around the year, it stops meaning that thing. We use seasons, and having to look at season tables to figure out what was summer a couple decades ago will make things like predictions about weather and proper categorization of that data harder. And by the way, people do plant by the calendar as much as they once did and more in some cases. They always made adjustments for local conditions to optimize the harvest, but the general time of year is still used very often when deciding when to plant, and the main change is increased use of predicted weather which I've already pointed out relies on a calendar that matches the sun, because the sun is the primary determiner of our climate.
"Time zones are now oddly shaped and some even differ only by 30 minutes from the neighbouring zones (and there are more than 24 zones)."
Yes, and those could be solved best by making them better match geography. You'll get no argument from me about that and if you ever control the world, I'm happy to give you 24 nicely-sized ones respecting borders and we can reserve a punishment for the guy who decided that China (which needs three time zones) would only use one and it wouldn't even be the middle one.
"We could get rid of this complexity by using TAI globally (without offsets). So what if school starts at 14:00 some places on earth and at 04:00 in other places?"
Midnight is the problem. The people around the prime meridian get to be asleep while days change, but everyone else gets the days switching while they're working. If you live in eastern Australia and the days switch at what would have been 10:00, do you stop working in mid morning when Friday ends? It also means that you can describe a time and everyone knows what that means in relation to the day without having to ask you where you were at the time.
"Let us have twelve 30-day months per year, even if this slides by 5.256 days relative to solstice every year."
Ah, so you're looking for months to slide around the solar year every five decades, reversing seasons from summer to winter three or four times in a lifetime. If I ever get to assign people to fix the time system, I'm afraid you're ineligible to work on calendars.
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