July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

[tt] Chinabs All-Seeing Eye
by Arlind Boshnjaku 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

China Unveils Frightening Futuristic Police State at Olympics By Naomi Klein, Huffington Post Posted on August 8, 2008 http://www.alternet.org/story/94278/ So far, the Olympics have been an open invitation to China-bash, a bottomless excuse for Western journalists to go after the Commies on everything from internet censorship to Darfur. Through all the nasty news stories, however, the Chinese government has seemed amazingly unperturbed. That's because it is betting on this: when the opening ceremonies begin friday, you will instantly forget all that unpleasantness as your brain is zapped by the cultural/athletic/political extravaganza that is the Beijing Olympics. B Like it or not, you are about to be awed by China's sheer awesomeness. B The games have been billed as China's "coming out party" to the world. They are far more significant than that. These Olympics are the coming out party for a disturbingly efficient way of organizing society, one that China has perfected over the past three decades, and is finally ready to show off. It is a potent hybrid of the most powerful political tools of authoritarianism communism -- central planning, merciless repression, constant surveillance -- harnessed to advance the goals of global capitalism. Some call it "authoritarian capitalism," others "market Stalinism," personally I prefer "McCommunism." B The Beijing Olympics are themselves the perfect expression of this hybrid system. Through extraordinary feats of authoritarian governing, the Chinese state has built stunning new stadiums, highways and railways -- all in record time. It has razed whole neighborhoods, lined the streets with trees and flowers and, thanks to an "anti-spitting" campaign, cleaned the sidewalks of saliva. The Communist Party of China even tried to turn the muddy skies blue by ordering heavy industry to cease production for a month -- a sort of government-mandated general strike. B As for those Chinese citizens who might go off-message during the games -- Tibetan activists, human right campaigners, malcontent bloggers -- hundreds have been thrown in jail in recent months. Anyone still harboring protest plans will no doubt be caught on one of Beijing's 300,000 surveillance cameras and promptly nabbed by a security officer; there are reportedly 100,000 of them on Olympics duty. B The goal of all this central planning and spying is not to celebrate the glories of Communism, regardless of what China's governing party calls itself. It is to create the ultimate consumer cocoon for Visa cards, Adidas sneakers, China Mobile cell phones, McDonald's happy meals, Tsingtao beer, and UPS delivery -- to name just a few of the official Olympic sponsors. But the hottest new market of all is the surveillance itself. Unlike the police states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, China has built a Police State 2.0, an entirely for-profit affair that is the latest frontier for the global Disaster Capitalism Complex. B Chinese corporations financed by U.S. hedge funds, as well as some of American's most powerful corporations -- Cisco, General Electric, Honeywell, Google -- have been working hand in glove with the Chinese government to make this moment possible: networking the closed circuit cameras that peer from every other lamp pole, building the "Great Firewall" that allows for remote internet monitoring, and designing those self-censoring search engines. B By next year, the Chinese internal security market is set to be worth $33-billion. Several of the larger Chinese players in the field have recently taken their stocks public on U.S. exchanges, hoping to cash in the fact that, in volatile times, security and defense stocks are seen as the safe bets. China Information Security Technology, for instance, is now listed on the NASDAQ and China Security and Surveillance is on the NYSE. A small clique of U.S. hedge funds has been floating these ventures, investing more than $150-million in the past two years. The returns have been striking. Between October 2006 and October 2007, China Security and Surveillance's stock went up 306 percent. B Much of the Chinese government's lavish spending on cameras and other surveillance gear has taken place under the banner of "Olympic Security." But how much is really needed to secure a sporting event? The price tag has been put at a staggering $12-billion -- to put that in perspective, Salt Lake City, which hosted the Winter Olympics just five months after September 11, spent $315 million to secure the games. Athens spent around $1.5-billion in 2004. Many human rights groups have pointed out that China's security upgrade is reaching far beyond Beijing: there are now 660 designated "safe cities" across the country, municipalities that have been singled out to receive new surveillance cameras and other spy gear. And of course all the equipment purchased in the name of Olympics safety -- iris scanners, "anti-riot robots" and facial recognition software -- will stay in China after the games are long gone, free to be directed at striking workers and rural protestors. B What the Olympics have provided for Western firms is a palatable cover story for this chilling venture. Ever since the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, U.S. companies have been barred from selling police equipment and technology to China, since lawmakers feared it would be directed, once again, at peaceful demonstrators. That law has been completely disregarded in the lead up to the Olympics, when, in the name of safety for athletes and VIPs (including George W. Bush), no new toy has been denied the Chinese state. B There is a bitter irony here. When Beijing was awarded the games seven years ago, the theory was that international scrutiny would force China's government to grant more rights and freedom to its people. Instead, the Olympics have opened up a backdoor for the regime to massively upgrade its systems of population control and repression. And remember when Western companies used to claim that by doing business in China, they were actually spreading freedom and democracy? We are now seeing the reverse: investment in surveillance and censorship gear is helping Beijing to actively repress a new generation of activists before it has the chance to network into a mass movement. B The numbers on this trend are frightening. In April 2007, officials from 13 provinces held a meeting to report back on how their new security measures were performing. In the province of Jiangsu, which, according to the South China Morning Post, was using "artificial intelligence to extend and improve the existing monitoring system" the number of protests and riots "dropped by 44 per cent last year." In the province of Zhejiang, where new electronic surveillance systems had been installed, they were down 30 per cent. In Shaanxi, "mass incidents" -- code for protests -- were down by 27 per cent in a year. Dong Lei, the province's deputy party chief, gave part of the credit to a huge investment in security cameras across the province. "We aim to achieve all day and all-weather monitoring capability," he told the gathering. B Activists in China now find themselves under intense pressure, unable to function even at the limited levels they were able to a year ago. Internet cafes are filled with surveillance cameras, and surfing is carefully watched. At the offices of a labor rights group in Hong Kong, I met the well-known Chinese dissident Jun Tao. He had just fled the mainland in the face of persistent police harassment. After decades of fighting for democracy and human rights, he said the new surveillance technologies had made it "impossible to continue to function in China." B It's easy to see the dangers of a high tech surveillance state in far off China, since the consequences for people like Jun are so severe. It's harder to see the dangers when these same technologies creep into every day life closer to home-networked cameras on U.S. city streets, "fast lane" biometric cards at airports, dragnet surveillance of email and phone calls. But for the global homeland security sector, China is more than a market; it is also a showroom. In Beijing, where state power is absolute and civil liberties non-existent, American-made surveillance technologies can be taken to absolute limits. B The first test begins today: Can China, despite the enormous unrest boiling under the surface, put on a "harmonious" Olympics? If the answer is yes, like so much else that is made in China, Police State 2.0 will be ready for export. B Naomi Klein's latest book is The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. _______________________________________________ tt mailing list tt(a)postbiota.org http://postbiota.org/mailman/listinfo/tt ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Re: [p2p-hackers] How Piracy Will Hyperlocalize with Mesh Networks
by Alexandre Dulaunoy 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 8:06 AM, David Barrett <dbarrett(a)quinthar.com> wrote: > It occurs to me that you could probably do most of this, today, using > Bluetooth. Indeed, does anybody know anything about the various > Bluetooth mesh networks / scatternets I see on Google? There are some experiments or academic test like piconetwork. There was one call NAN : Near-me area network but I don't know any public implementation. Piconet was something foreseen for Bluetooth but I don't know if there is current any use of it. In the same spirit (relying on any local IP networks), I prototyped Forban to share files in an opportunist way on temporary networks or mobile networks. The protocol is really simple : relying on HTTP for everything except the announce part in broadcast (in IPv4) and in multicast (in IPv6). http://www.foo.be/forban/ https://github.com/adulau/Forban I looked at the early beginning at Bluetooth but the most common network, where everyone is connected to, is more wireless local area networks using IP even recent phone are using plain standard IP over 802.11. If you have any ideas, let me know. Kind regards, -- -- Alexandre Dulaunoy (adulau) -- http://www.foo.be/ -- http://www.foo.be/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/Diary -- "Knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance -- that we can solve them" Isaac Asimov _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers(a)lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Re: [p2p-hackers] How Piracy Will Hyperlocalize with Mesh Networks
by Alexandre Dulaunoy 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 8:06 AM, David Barrett <dbarrett(a)quinthar.com> wrote: > It occurs to me that you could probably do most of this, today, using > Bluetooth. Indeed, does anybody know anything about the various > Bluetooth mesh networks / scatternets I see on Google? There are some experiments or academic test like piconetwork. There was one call NAN : Near-me area network but I don't know any public implementation. Piconet was something foreseen for Bluetooth but I don't know if there is current any use of it. In the same spirit (relying on any local IP networks), I prototyped Forban to share files in an opportunist way on temporary networks or mobile networks. The protocol is really simple : relying on HTTP for everything except the announce part in broadcast (in IPv4) and in multicast (in IPv6). http://www.foo.be/forban/ https://github.com/adulau/Forban I looked at the early beginning at Bluetooth but the most common network, where everyone is connected to, is more wireless local area networks using IP even recent phone are using plain standard IP over 802.11. If you have any ideas, let me know. Kind regards, -- -- Alexandre Dulaunoy (adulau) -- http://www.foo.be/ -- http://www.foo.be/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/Diary -- "Knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance -- that we can solve them" Isaac Asimov _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers(a)lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Verisign deep-hacked. For months.
by Jay Ashworth 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

Oh, my. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Key-Internet-operator-rb-2857339070.html Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra(a)baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274 ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Re: Face and fingerprints swiped in Dutch biometric passport crack (anothercard skim vulnerability)
by Jaap-Henk Hoepman 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

Actually, the international standards for the Machine Readable Travel Documents (passports, aka MRTDs) are written by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO). Both the US and EU passports comply to the ICAO standards. However, EU passports will be further protected by a so called Extended Access Control procedure. This procedure provides, among others, terminal authentication to the passport, to reduce the risk that biometric data is read by rogue readers. Also, there are many small details in which the passports from different countries may differ. For instance, the 'RFID' anti-collision identifier used when setting up a connection between the passport and the reader may either be fixed or generated randomly for each session. Or, as is indeed the case in the Dutch passport, the passport number may correlate with the issuing date, reducing the entropy of the key derived from the Machine Readbale Zone (MRZ). The "Riscure" attack is based on this correlation; they estimate the remaining entropy of the data on the MRZ to be roughly 2^35. This MRZ data is used to derive the symmetric session keys. Their attack works by recording (ie eavesdropping) a succesful communication session between a passport and a reader. Then, all possible combinations of the MRZ data can be tried off line to generate the corresponding session keys and check whether that succesfully decrypts the recorded session. Note that straighforward skimming, ie trying to access a passport with a fake terminal by trying all possible combinations of MRZ data is still impossible because the chip in the passport is slow to respond; even if you could try one MRZ access code every millisecond (totally unrealistic), you'd be busy half a year. This limits the usefulness of the attack a bit. Also note that an encrypted key exchange like protocol for deriving the session key from the MRZ access code would also have prevented this attack... Jaap-Henk On Thu, 2 Feb 2006 12:37:24 -0500 Adam Shostack <adam(a)homeport.org> writes: > On Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 02:03:10PM -0500, vin(a)TheWorld.com wrote: > | Anne & Lynn Wheeler pointed out: > | > | > Face and fingerprints swiped in Dutch biometric passport crack > | > http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/30/dutch_biometric_passport_crack/ > | > | Didn't the EU adopt the same design that the US uses? > > Passport standards are written by the International Air Travel > Association (IATA). > > | Am I right to presume that the passport RFID chip used by the Dutch is the > | same -- or functions the same -- as the one used in the new US digital > | passports? > | > | >From what I've read, it seems that the sequential numbering scheme the > | Dutch use on their passports may have made this attack easier -- but it > | was already feasible, and will be against the passports of other nations > | which did not so helpfully minimize their obfuscation technique with > | sequential numbering? > | > | Anyone got more details than those offered in the Rinscure press release? > | Thoughts? > > The papers explain the attack in fair detail. I blogged every useful > linksI could find a few days ago at > http://www.emergentchaos.com/archives/002355.html, and there's more > links in comments. > > Adam > > | _Vin > | > | > | > > | > The crack is attributed to Delft smartcard security specialist Riscure, > | > which explains that an attack can be executed from around 10 metres and > | > the security broken, revealing date of birth, facial image and > | > fingerprint, in around two hours. > | > > | > .. snip .. > | > | > | --------------------------------------------------------------------- > | The Cryptography Mailing List > | Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.com > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > The Cryptography Mailing List > Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.com > > -- Jaap-Henk Hoepman | I've got sunshine in my pockets Dept. of Computer Science | Brought it back to spray the day Radboud University Nijmegen | Gry "Rocket" (w) www.cs.ru.nl/~jhh | (m) jhh(a)cs.ru.nl (t) +31 24 36 52710/53132 | (f) +31 24 3653137 --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)metzdowd.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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Verisign deep-hacked. For months.
by Jay Ashworth 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

Oh, my. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Key-Internet-operator-rb-2857339070.html Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra(a)baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274 ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Re: <nettime> The Monetary Future: How Bitcoin Is Being Destroyed
by Eugen Leitl 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 07:22:15PM +0200, John Haltiwanger wrote: > On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 1:40 PM, Nick <nettime(a)njw.me.uk> wrote: > > > Interesting read. That said, I would love to read more about the > > interplay of traditional capitalist power structures and bitcoin. > > Bitcoin is fundamentally flawed as an emancipatory currency due to it's > reliance on processing cycles. When I first heard about it, I eagerly It doesn't rely on processing cycles for maintaining the log of transactions. It needs some processing for the distributed mint, but adaptively so (difficulty goes down if mining rate goes down) and processing cycles are fundamentally egalitarian. > downloaded the client to begin mining. With my (relatively, at the time) > powerful desktop, it was something like 2 years until I had my first coin. You were late to the party, and by that time you probably needed GPU clients (which will be soon useless, since ASIC miner rigs are ante portas) participation in a mining pool. > There are also a limited total number of bitcoins, which from my point of > view can only lead to the exact same zero-sum situation we have with > state-coerced currencies: if I am going to be rich, it is at the expense of > others having the same opportunity. This is a currency based on scarcity, just like gold or cowry shells. If you intended to become rich by mining, you should have been a year or two sooner to the party. The value of bitcoin is ability to do P2P transactions in real time without requiring a third party, using a naturally deflationary monetary system which however is highly frangible. That by itself is of obvious enough utility. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Re: [DIYbio] Removing watermarks from pdfs (pdfparanoia)
by Bryan Bishop 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 12:24 PM, Cathal Garvey wrote: > One reason I suggested exploding/recompressing is that by doing so, you > will naturally destroy lots of metadata that you might not have realised > was there, otherwise. One of the advantages of using pdfparanoia is that you can directly remove watermarks based on what we know about what publishers are doing, instead of blindly guessing. If there is metadata about ip addresses, write a plugin for pdfparanoia to detect it and remove it. (Also write a unit test, so that future contributors can make sure your code doesn't break). So far, I haven't seen evidence of metadata being used like this. Really, they are all extremely pdf servers like itext that are serving up http requests for unsuspecting scholars. My guess is that the most "advanced" watermarking infrastructure is just some LaTeX template that is being applied for each incoming http request. - Bryan http://heybryan.org/ 1 512 203 0507 -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups DIYbio group. To post to this group, send email to diybio(a)googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to diybio+unsubscribe(a)googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at https://groups.google.com/d/forum/diybio?hl=en Learn more at www.diybio.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "DIYbio" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to diybio+unsubscribe(a)googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to diybio(a)googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/diybio?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Re: Bitcoin And The Electronic Frontier Foundation
by slush 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 3:41 AM, Kyle Williams <kyle.kwilliams(a)gmail.com>wrote: > > So when the value of BTC's starts to be cut in half, and with INFLATION now > at a record high, the cost of electricity is NOT GOING DOWN. > Hence, the chance of you generating bitcoins will go down because a CPU can > not compete with someone else's GPU, more power/electricity is being used to > generate (or not generate) bitcoins, and after the last six month's of > running bitcoin, I haven't generated a single block in over two months > because someone has already cornered this market with GPU's. > Kyle, there was introduced GPU miner before few months, so your experience sounds reasonable. GPUs are approximately 100x faster on hashes than CPUs, so i7 probably won't help much. But almost everybody has now GPU capable for mining and code is opensource. Yours complaints are on the same level as if you say 'I have only 486DX, those guys with Quad cores driving me crazy'. Bitcoins are 'fair' on level that everybody can go to shop and buy strong GPU. There is also mechanism (called 'difficulty') which control amount of blocks mined every day. So nobody can buy extra-hyper-mega-gpu-cluster and get rich by finding millions of bitcoins per week. He will always find maximum ~200 blocks per day, because it is limit of network. And I'm pretty sure that it won't be profitable business, because current difficulty makes mining more expensive than actual price of bitcoins. Regards to wasting electricity. There are many kinds of wastes. Somebody waste electricity to finding bitcoins, somebody find UFO using seti(a)home.And our EU government spend bilions of EUR on 'green energy' using ineffective solar and wind technology. I think using nuclear energy and mine bitcoins (as government independent currency) is much better combination. So it is just another point of view to 'waste'. Marek ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Re: Bitcoin And The Electronic Frontier Foundation
by slush 05 Jul '18

05 Jul '18

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 3:41 AM, Kyle Williams <kyle.kwilliams(a)gmail.com>wrote: > > So when the value of BTC's starts to be cut in half, and with INFLATION now > at a record high, the cost of electricity is NOT GOING DOWN. > Hence, the chance of you generating bitcoins will go down because a CPU can > not compete with someone else's GPU, more power/electricity is being used to > generate (or not generate) bitcoins, and after the last six month's of > running bitcoin, I haven't generated a single block in over two months > because someone has already cornered this market with GPU's. > Kyle, there was introduced GPU miner before few months, so your experience sounds reasonable. GPUs are approximately 100x faster on hashes than CPUs, so i7 probably won't help much. But almost everybody has now GPU capable for mining and code is opensource. Yours complaints are on the same level as if you say 'I have only 486DX, those guys with Quad cores driving me crazy'. Bitcoins are 'fair' on level that everybody can go to shop and buy strong GPU. There is also mechanism (called 'difficulty') which control amount of blocks mined every day. So nobody can buy extra-hyper-mega-gpu-cluster and get rich by finding millions of bitcoins per week. He will always find maximum ~200 blocks per day, because it is limit of network. And I'm pretty sure that it won't be profitable business, because current difficulty makes mining more expensive than actual price of bitcoins. Regards to wasting electricity. There are many kinds of wastes. Somebody waste electricity to finding bitcoins, somebody find UFO using seti(a)home.And our EU government spend bilions of EUR on 'green energy' using ineffective solar and wind technology. I think using nuclear energy and mine bitcoins (as government independent currency) is much better combination. So it is just another point of view to 'waste'. Marek ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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