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Wccftech: Starlink’s 649 Mbps Download Speed Is Eye-Popping & Blisteringly Fast!
by jim bell 19 Jun '21

19 Jun '21

Wccftech: Starlink’s 649 Mbps Download Speed Is Eye-Popping & Blisteringly Fast!. https://wccftech.com/starlinks-649-mbps-download-speed-is-eye-popping-blist…

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Vietnam's new social media code of conduct
by Douglas Lucas 19 Jun '21

19 Jun '21

Reuters 18 June 2021 By Phuong Nguyen, James Pearson. Dateline Hanoi/Reuters. === Vietnam introduced national guidelines on social media behaviour on Friday which encourage people to post positive content about the Southeast Asian country and require state employees to report “conflicting information” to their superiors. The code prohibits posts which violate the law and “affect the interests of the state” and applies to state organisations, social media companies, and all their users in Vietnam. “Social media users are encouraged to promote the beauty of Vietnam’s scenery, people and culture, and spread good stories about good people,” reads the code, which was contained in a decision from the information ministry and dated June 17. It was not clear to what extent the decision was legally binding, or how it would be enforced. Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party tolerates little criticism, retains tight control over media and has in recent years presided over an intensified crackdown on dissidents and activists, some of whom are serving lengthy jail terms for posts on Facebook and Google’s YouTube. In November last year, Reuters exclusively reported that Vietnamese authorities had threatened to shut down Facebook if the social media giant did not bow to government pressure to censor more local political content on the platform. Vietnam is a major market for Facebook, which serves about 60 million users in the country and generates revenue of nearly $1 billion, according to sources familiar with the numbers. The new code requires social media providers in Vietnam to “deal with users in accordance with Vietnamese law” when requested by authorities to remove content from their platforms. It encourages social media users to create accounts using their real identities, share information from official sources, and avoid posting content which violates the law, contains bad language, or advertises illegal services. In January, Vietnamese social media users used fake weather reports and football scores as a creative means to discuss Communist Party leadership wrangling after an official ban on speculation ahead of a Party congress. Reporting by Phuong Nguyen and James Pearson; Editing by Ed Davies === Music video, just under 4 minutes ,for R.E.M.'s satirical song "Shiny Happy People": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYOKMUTTDdA

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WIRED: GPS III’s Long Journey Is Picking Up Speed
by jim bell 19 Jun '21

19 Jun '21

WIRED: GPS III’s Long Journey Is Picking Up Speed. https://www.wired.com/story/gps-iiis-long-journey-is-picking-up-speed

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Cryptocurrency: Price Discovery Alive and Well
by grarpamp 19 Jun '21

19 Jun '21

https://mises.org/wire/why-wild-swings-crypto-prices-are-not-really-problem Price Discovery Is Alive And Well In Crypto “If the market continues to see wild swings based on Elon Musk tweets, it’s going to be a big setback for this asset class,” Matt Maley, chief market strategist for Miller Tabak + Co. told Bloomberg. “The fact that it sees such wild swings to the tweets from one person takes away the legitimacy of the asset class.” Reminds a bit of a financial planner who told me bitcoin is “manipulated” and followed up with the ultimate smear “unregulated.” Yikes. Then the Chinese government made all sorts of threats concerning the mining and holding of crypto's top brand. A wag on Twitter responded with words to the effect that when the Chinese banned Google in 2010 it didn’t seem to slow down the company. Weston Nakamura in an interview with Real Vision’s Jack Farley made the trenchant point, “This is what markets look like when you don't have global central banks artificially suppressing volatility, intervention of central banks buying every dip, putting a safety net under every single slight tremor or taper tantrum or whatever it may be, this is what happens.” Making money isn’t easy. Whether it be working 9 to 5 or trading markets. The Fed seeks to smooth every bump so everyone will stay calm and carry on, buying stocks. Perhaps a viewer or two of his recent 60 Minutes interview caught Powell’s off-hand comment that the central bank has bailed out money market funds twice in recent months. Money market funds? Most people believe that is cash. There was no mention of the Plunge Protection Team or other secret committees to ensure the safety and soundness of securities markets. Just keep plugging your savings into those 401(k)s, folks, and let the experts handle it. Cyrptoland is a little different. “This is a 70 vol asset, 80 vol, or whatever it is. What that means is that—forget what the volatility is, this is what freely trading markets look like. We haven't seen what freely traded markets look like for, I don't know, a decade or so,” Nakamura told Farley. “There's no Chairman Powell that needs to come out and announce something for you to put your capital to work. Free markets will do that. That was on display today. 70 vol assets don't exist except for here and this is what 70 vol assets behaves like. If there is a value proposition behind it, you will see investors take advantage of it.” Farley, somewhat of a financial history buff, chimed in, “Weston, who would say hey, we had this Wild West before the Federal Reserve, what we had was banking panics, we had deflation, we had banks issuing their own currency. One thinks of this whole, Dave Portnoy launching Safemoon, someone launching CumRocket, someone else launching—all these coins new every day, perhaps it would remind you of the Wild West of banking before the Federal Reserve.” That’s right, there used to be gold in them there banks. Unfortunately, not enough to cover all the paper notes these banks would issue. However, there wasn’t runaway asset inflation either. Having all of these different bank notes floating around might have been confusing. However, the market created note clearinghouses, what Murray Rothbard describes in A History of Money and Banking in the United States before the Twentieth Century as “A Free-Market ‘Central Bank.’” The Suffolk Bank and the Bank of New York, provided, as Rothbard wrote describing the former, “an island of monetary stability in an America contending with monetary chaos.” Professor David Howden writes in his chapter “A Pre-history of the Federal Reserve” (included in The Fed at One Hundred), of the New York clearinghouse created in 1853 “as a solution to a complex settlement process among New York City Banks.” He cites monetary scholar Richard Timberlake, who saw the Federal Reserve as no more than “an evolutionary development of the clearinghouse associations.” Today’s not-so-free-market central bank has two stated mandates, price stability and full employment, as well as a third that Mr. Nakamura calls out, “where asset prices can never go down for a certain cohort of investors.” If there is such a mandate, Nakamura says, just say so and then we’ll know “there really is no real market anymore when you have an unlimited non-economic actor in the market distorting prices, and furthermore, that other investors perceive them to be there, whether or not they're there. That is not a functioning market at all.” Meanwhile, when crypto collectively hit the ditch, “[w]hat you saw today was functioning markets, even not functioning platforms, but functioning markets,” Nakamura said. He explains, “Bitcoin is not a US asset, just like oil is not a US asset, just like gold is not a US asset. Now, those are denominated in USD.” Sure, Americans think in US dollars, but “it's BTC/fiat, and it's not an American asset. People need to get that in their head. If you actually look at BTC/JPY (Japanese yen), the levels make a hell of a lot more sense.” Investors are simply looking for ways to escape the US dollar and “What this crypto space does is it allows for 1 trillion or 2 trillion of that excess froth to be diverted away from stocks and from real estate and all that and to go into this very benign asset,” Nakamura told Farley. There will be a day when the Fed, the Treasury and the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) will stick their long regulatory snouts into crypto. It may not mean the digital party is over, but the markets will lose the price discovery elasticity that currently works so well. However crypto adoption could nullify such intrusion attempts...

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SciTechDaily: Impenetrable Encryption for Data Communication: Researchers Take Quantum Key Distribution Out of the Lab
by jim bell 19 Jun '21

19 Jun '21

SciTechDaily: Impenetrable Encryption for Data Communication: Researchers Take Quantum Key Distribution Out of the Lab. https://scitechdaily.com/impenetrable-encryption-for-data-communication-res…

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[ot][wrong][joke][spam] Classified Research
by Karl 18 Jun '21

18 Jun '21

Learning is classified research. We will have to close down the schools to protect the security of the nation.

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[wrong][spam] Cracking PGP
by Karl 18 Jun '21

18 Jun '21

PGP is a puzzle like any other. Let's break it open and destroy everyone's encryption! To perform this task, I will be using an i386 from 1989. The code will be written in qbasic and executed in ms-dos.

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[ot][wrong][spam] Classified Research
by Karl 18 Jun '21

18 Jun '21

The English alphabet is classified research. By reading and writing things on digital devices, or allowing other people to do so, you are endangering the security of the nation.

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Why are so few people signing their email?
by Karl 18 Jun '21

18 Jun '21

Does anybody know why this is? I receive a number of emails that have pgp keys associated but no signatures. I've been curious about this and realised I'd never asked.

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The Washington Post: The Cybersecurity 202: The Justice Department is racking up wins despite encryption concerns
by jim bell 18 Jun '21

18 Jun '21

The Washington Post: The Cybersecurity 202: The Justice Department is racking up wins despite encryption concerns. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/06/16/cybersecurity-202-justic…

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