Ethereum/TheDAO hack simplified
… Bitcoin is just
a public ledger (the "blockchain"), of all transaction there ever
was. This ledger is huge (80-gigabytes)
and growing, but Moore's Law says computers grow even faster, so that shouldn't
be a problem.
Each entry in the ledger says to move the coins received
in these previous entries, and give them to this recipient. In other words:
move these coins I received
there, to this guy here
… How did The DAO
get hacked?
When a member exits the investment scheme, they call the
function name splitDAO(). There
are two issues.
The first is that the member will supply some of their own
code with the transaction. Among the
things that code will do is tell the DAO code how to transfer Ethereum coin. It's a necessary feature, part of Bitcoin as
well.
The second issue is that Ethereum code is recursive.
That means when a function is running,
it may call itself a second time.
The bug is that when splitDAO() is
called, it will then call the recipients code to transfer Ethereum coin, after
which the recipients code will call splitDAO() again before
finishing. This causes the process to
repeat itself, transferring more Ethereum coin, then calling splitDAO() again,
which calls the hacker's code, which calls splitDAO(), which calls the hacker's
code, and so on. The process will continue endlessly, until it drains all of TheDAO's
coin.
A little something for our Ethical Hacking students.
Department of Defense expanding Hack the Pentagon program
The department announced today that it is expanding
its Hack the Pentagon program to include more DoD systems and
networks. Hack the Pentagon pays hackers
to find and report vulnerabilities in exchange for cash, and so far it’s proved
effective — the first bug was reported 13
minutes after the program launched.
… “Although the
pilot was a success, it only tested the crowdsourced security concept against
public-facing websites. We believe the
concept will be successful when applied to many or all of DoD’s other
security challenges,” a DoD spokesperson said in a statement.
Hack the Pentagon was administered by the bug bounty
platform HackerOne,
which reports that the pilot generated 138 unique bug reports and a total of
$71,200 in bounties paid to hackers.
Not much guidance out there.
Lisa M. Thomas of Winston & Strawn writes:
The Office of the Australian
Information Commissioner (OAIC) recently published a draft “Guide
to big data and the Australian Privacy Principles” (Guide), and asked
industry participants for comments. The
guide is intended to help companies understand how the Australian Privacy
Principles (under the Australian Privacy Act 1988) apply to big data that
contains information about “an identified individual, or an individual who is
reasonably identifiable.” Often, there
is a question whether or not information contained in big data is really
personally identifiable, or is “de-identified,” (Guide, p. 3) which to OAIC, is
information that is sufficiently de-identified that “the information is no
longer about an identified individual or an individual who is reasonably
identifiable.” (Guide, p. 3). When
sufficiently de-identified, the Guide indicates, the privacy principles would
not apply.
Read more on Winston
& Strawn.
The Sports Book is open!
OR: Oh look, an application for Watson!
New York State Lawmakers Vote to Legalize Fantasy Sports
… The businesses’
legislative backers in New York have insisted that fantasy sports is not
gambling — which is mostly barred by the state’s Constitution
— but rather is “based upon the skill and knowledge of the participants.” The widely advertised games, in which players
create imaginary teams using real players and win or lose depending on the
players’ statistics, would be classified as games of skill, not chance, a
distinction under a 2006
federal law governing online wagering.
An illustration of the old adage, “Cheaters never prosper!” (Unless they get away with it of course.)
VW Said Ready With $10 Billion Diesel Plan, to Devise Fix
Later
Volkswagen AG will submit its $10 billion plan this
month to fix a half-million emissions-cheating cars or get them off U.S. roads
even though it’s awaiting regulators’ sign-off on how to retrofit the vehicles,
a person familiar with the matter said.
About $6.5 billion will go to car owners and $3.5 billion
to the U.S. government and California regulators, said the person, who asked
not to be identified because the deal isn’t public yet.
Perspective. Successful
is not always profitable. A lesson for
my IT Architecture students.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/magazine/can-netflix-survive-in-the-new-world-it-created.html?_r=0
Can Netflix survive in the new world it created?
… Netflix, since
its streaming service debuted in 2007, has had its annual revenue grow sixfold,
to $6.8 billion from $1.2 billion. More
than 81 million subscribers pay Netflix $8 to $12 a month, and slowly but
unmistakably these consumers are giving up cable for internet television: Over
the last five years, cable has lost 6.7 million subscribers; more than a
quarter of millennials (70 percent of whom use streaming services) report
having never subscribed to cable in their lives. Those still paying for cable television were
watching less of it. In 2015, for
instance, television viewing time was down 3 percent; and 50 percent of that
drop was directly attributable to Netflix, according to a study by
MoffettNathanson, an investment firm that tracks the media business.
All of this has
made Netflix a Wall Street favorite, with a stock price that rose 134 percent
last year.
… At the moment,
Netflix has a negative cash flow of almost $1 billion; it regularly needs to go
to the debt market to replenish its coffers. Its $6.8 billion in revenue last year pales in
comparison to the $28 billion or so at media giants like Time Warner and 21st
Century Fox. And for all the original
shows Netflix has underwritten, it remains dependent on the very networks that
fear its potential to destroy their longtime business model in the way that
internet competitors undermined the newspaper and music industries.
(Related) Something else for my Architecture students. (Who are all too young to remember.)
How Mobile Today Is Like TV Six Decades Ago
In the early 1950s, television was popular, but
unsophisticated. This was a common
sentiment, even among the people who produced it—"a hybrid monstrosity
derived from newspapers, radio news, and newsreels, which inherited none of the
merits of its ancestors," as one CBS News anchor summed it up. But either despite its gimmicky shortcomings
or because of them, advertisers loved the little box. Revenue from ads increased more than 60 percent a year
for the first five years of the decade, so that by 1955, television accounted
for nearly 20 percent of total U.S. media advertising.
This year, mobile media accounts for the exact same share,
nearly 20 percent of total U.S. media spending. So, in a very real way, mobile is today where
television was exactly six decades ago.
In case you missed this yesterday…
Facebook Reveals How It Decides if a Research Project Is
Ethical
… Now, after nearly two years of
soul-searching, Facebook has revealed how it reviews and approves the
experiments the company runs on users without them knowing about it.In a new paper, called “Evolving the IRB: Building Robust Review for Industry Research,” company officials describe a process that loosely imitates the system used at universities, which convene institutional review boards, or IRBs, to evaluate research projects on their scientific and ethical merits.
At Facebook, which is constantly experimenting on its users, “expert” managers have to approve all research projects, according to the paper.
Many students use Chrome; not sure how many have a map-able
mind.
Connected Mind - A Mind Mapping App in Chrome
Connected
Mind is a free mind mapping tool that you can find in the Google
Chrome Web Store. Using Connected
Mind you can create free-form mind maps or use a template. A lot of mind
mapping tools lock you into using straight lines between elements, but
Connected Mind is not one of them. Connected Minds allows you to create mind
maps in any configuration that you like. As it is a Chrome Web Store app,
Connected Mind allows you to save your work online using your Google Account
credentials. The video below offers a demonstration of Connected Minds (there
is not any sound in the video).
This is not the future.
This is now!
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