81

Living Room / BitShares Login - New cryptographically secure non-3rd party login system

« on: December 25, 2014, 12:13 AM »

Everyone is familiar with sites that let you login with Google accounts, Facebook, Twitter, etc. That OAuth stuff.

This takes it to a new level where you can login without a 3rd party.

http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2014/12/22/BitShares-Login/

There's a lot of cool stuff in there, but I'll only paste one nifty snippet:

The other property it is important to highlight is a unique characteristic of the ECDSA signature verification algorithm. In most asymmetric cryptosystems, a function V(K, S, T) takes the public key, signature, and signed text as parameters and returns a simple true/false value indicating whether the signature is valid or not. This is the behavior of RSA, for example. In ECDSA, however, a verification function takes only two parameters, S and T, and returns K. The signature is valid if the returned K matches the signer’s public key. This is a significant difference, as both the client and server in the above Login protocol use signatures to recover the other party’s public key, which they then look up on the blockchain to determine the other party’s identity. In other words, the signature verification is not used to determine if the signature is valid, but to determine the identity of the other party.

Ok, 2:

Thus, given the semantic security of ECDSA and ECDH, the worst attack a malicious party with full control over the communication medium could leverage is denial of service.

And there's a Simple Machines Forum plugin!

https://github.com/BitShares/Bitshares-SMF-Login

tl;dr - A login system where YOU control your information, and not a 3rd party like Facebook.

82

Living Room / Slur you're going to hate it.

« on: December 24, 2014, 10:47 PM »

And the cryptoanarchists come out Wikileaks style with a decentralised information marketplace...

http://slur.io

Slur
you're going to hate it.

Introducing Slur
 
Slur is an open source, decentralized and anonymous marketplace for the selling of secret information in exchange for bitcoin. Slur is written in C and operates over the Tor network with bitcoin transactions through libbitcoin. Both buyers and sellers are fully anonymous and there are no restrictions on the data that is auctioned. There is no charge to buy or sell on the Slur marketplace except in the case of a dispute, where a token sum is paid to volunteers.

...

The types of information we expect to see on the Slur marketplace ;

•   Trade secrets.
•   Designs for every type of consumer product.
•   The source code for proprietary operating systems and high end CAD software.
•   Zero day exploits. For the market defined value rather than a price determined by the corporations under the guise of a bounty with the veiled threat of legal action should the researcher choose to sell elsewhere.
•   The details of backdoors covertly installed inside industrial and consumer hardware and software.
•   Stolen databases. Corporations will no longer be able to get away with an apology when they fail to secure their customers confidential data. They will have to pay the market value to suppress it.
•   Proof of tax evasion from disgruntled or underpaid employees. Both the IRS and the public have an interest in that information and the corporations will have to bid to suppress it - a very quantifiable and predictable payoff for the seller.
•   Military intelligence relevant to real-time conflicts.
•   Aerospace and defense designs.
•   Evidence relevant to ongoing trials.
•   Unflattering celebrity photos and videos.
•   The complete databases of social media sites like facebook.
•   Proof of government corruption. Close to an election.

More at the link.

Get your popcorn. Leaks are about to get very real.

83

Developer's Corner / Why do YouTube views freeze at 301? (Just computing history)

« on: December 17, 2014, 07:39 AM »

For those that have noticed how YouTube view counts freeze at 301, you'll likely enjoy this as a fun little tour through some obscure Internet history.

tl;dw - They have to scrutinise video counts, and decided on a threshold to do it. i.e. 300. However, the code was:

Code: Text [Select]

1. if (viewcount <= 300) { viewcount++; }
2. else {...

So, 301 got counted.

It has nothing to do with number types or data size limits or anything like that.

84

Living Room / 38 mi/62 km long 5.9 GHz link that supported ~ 1 mbps on HamWAN

« on: December 15, 2014, 05:38 PM »

This is pretty nifty. A HamWAN network, so, basically a network created by people independent of an ISP.

via /r/darknetplan - http://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/2pbl7w/today_i_made_a_38_mi62_km_long_59_ghz_link_that/

Somebody was saying about Internet censorship? It reminds me a bit of Ghost Gunner in that the cat is out of the bag.

85

Living Room / The Pirate Bay and EZTV down

« on: December 11, 2014, 05:57 AM »

In a recent raid The Pirate Bay and EZTV as well as a few other sites were taken down.

https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-goes-worldwide-141209/

For many years The Pirate Bay has been sailing by the seat of its pants so any downtime is met with concern from its millions of users.

This morning, for the first time in months, The Pirate Bay disappeared offline. A number of concerned users emailed TF for information but at that point technical issues seemed the most likely culprit.

However, over in Sweden authorities have just confirmed that local police carried out a raid in Stockholm this morning as part of an operation to protect intellectual property.

But of course, life goes on at http://www.demonoid.pw/ (and many others).

In other news, rumour has it that The Pirate Bay is relocating to somewhere in South America. (I have no secondary confirmation on this yet.)

https://torrentfreak.com/eztv-slowly-recovers-swedish-police-raid-141211/

EZTV SLOWLY RECOVERS FROM SWEDISH POLICE RAID

BY ERNESTO ON DECEMBER 11, 2014 C: 8
BREAKING

While there is still no sign of The Pirate Bay, another major torrent site is starting to recover following the police raid earlier this week. The popular TV-torrent distribution group EZTV is starting to upload new shows again as some of its servers come back online.

Earlier this week Swedish police raided a nuclear-proof data center built into a mountain complex in the city of Nacka.

The target of the raid was The Pirate Bay but collateral damage caused several other torrent sites to go down as well. This included EZTV, the go-to place for many torrenting TV fans.

After nearly two days of downtime EZTV is slowly starting to crawl back up. TF spoke to the EZTV crew who confirmed that several servers are up and running again and that the site’s services are coming back online.

Yeah, it's like that.

The main EZTV is still down for me, but it's up here: https://eztv-proxy.net

Oh! Another mole! ;D