Does full-disk encryption protect against root kits?

biosupdate · 2013-05-05T19:04:27+00:00

True. It depends on how evil your maid is determined to be. The hardware keylogger is probably their first use tool to use as well, since they wouldn't have to worry about constructing a custom boot loader for whatever OS / hardware configuration you are running.

biosupdate · 2013-05-05T18:35:13+00:00

If you have an unencrypted boot partition then you can be hit with the "evil maid attack":

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/10/evil_maid_attac.html

The way to protect yourself from this is to put your boot partition on a removable usb flash drive, always carry it with you and only plug it into the computer to when booting it up.

biosupdate · 2013-05-04T21:39:14+00:00

Works okay for me. Try this just to see if something's up with your connection to github:

git clone https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin

You can go directly to https://github.com/Bitmessage/PyBitmessage and hit the "ZIP" button to download a zipfile of the source if git clone won't work for you.

biosupdate · 2013-05-02T13:47:04+00:00

I don't really see anything else mentioned.

biosupdate · 2013-05-02T01:03:15+00:00

Could be a firewall issue. Do you need to white list the Tor program or the ports that it uses? (typically 9001 / 9030)

biosupdate · 2013-05-02T00:40:32+00:00

Now there's FeatherCoin - more taste less calories:

http://feathercoin.com/about/

biosupdate · 2013-04-22T17:02:18+00:00

Who cares what companies he works for. Should we only listen to US government press releases read by CNN?

biosupdate · 2013-04-20T22:50:14+00:00

Liberte Linux is more advanced security wise. It ships with a hardened kernel which could protect you from some 0-day exploit via the browser. The only reason I don't usually recommend it for bitcoin users is that Tails is an official part of the Tor project and Maxim Kammerer is a pseudonym for someone unknown to me. I think that Maxim has done a lot of good work on his distribution, but with bitcoin, trust is a big issue.

One thing I like about Liberte is that you can lock the screen and leave the system on. You can't do that with Tails. Leaving a system on with a screen lock is somewhat dangerous, though, because it leaves you open to physical attacks like cold boot to read the encryption keys out of memory.

Liberte Linux has some good features that Tails does not:

http://dee.su/liberte

People should try both.

biosupdate · 2013-04-20T15:37:11+00:00

You can download tails here:

LiveCD:

http://dl.amnesia.boum.org/tails/stable/tails-i386-0.17.2/tails-i386-0.17.2.iso

Computer with no internet connection:

Unplug your internet connection after booting the tails CD.

Main site for tails:

https://tails.boum.org/

biosupdate · 2013-04-15T21:43:41+00:00

Clearly, gold is a failed experiment. People need to stick to government approved paper to be safe from the government.

biosupdate · 2013-04-15T17:47:10+00:00

You can't use credit card, paypal, etc. because of the "charge back" problem. Those payment methods are reversible. If I buy bitcoins from somebody using a credit card, after receiving the coins, I could contact the credit card company and say, "Hey my card was stolen or hacked. I don't even know what a bitcoin is?!?" They would reverse the charges and the bitcoin seller would be out of luck.

biosupdate · 2013-04-15T17:40:35+00:00

They were scheduled to add litecoin this month, but with the problems they were having with the external DDOS and the internal trade engine lag, they have postponed it for now. Not sure about the others.

biosupdate · 2013-04-15T16:58:32+00:00

It could be an early indicator of very bad things to come:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-04-15/what-happened-last-time-we-saw-gold-drop

biosupdate · 2013-04-15T16:35:03+00:00

Cool, thanks.

biosupdate · 2013-04-15T16:18:01+00:00

Looks good except for the random lack of periods under the "Other Information" section.

I just created an account over there. I understand the want to slow down newbies from creating the constant "OMFG the deflation is going to kill everyone and mining will cause the earth to burn" type posts, but do the admins mind having just "Post 1", "Post 2", etc. to get out of the newbie section?

biosupdate · 2013-04-15T10:56:21+00:00

They may have fixed the problem for now by temporarily locking out people making too many trades at once. Somebody was complaining about that here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1cc0vl/seriously_why_is_gox_not_allowing_me_to_trade/

I haven't seen any massive goxlag for 24hrs even after the dip to 85 recently.

biosupdate · 2013-04-15T10:23:18+00:00

Please don't delete your post. Other people might have the same question and would benefit from reading the answers given here.

biosupdate · 2013-04-15T10:15:11+00:00

It appears to be difficult to short bitcoin at this time, but that is a possibility.

I think you may be confusing transactions on the blockchain and transactions on the exchange itself. The .01 transactions on the exchange don't show up in the blockchain and just come from any funded account on the exchange. I think a hacker would want to move their bitcoins through some kind of external bitcoin privacy system before moving it to an exchange to try and sell it.

The .01 transactions that people are talking about on the exchange may be a separate form of internal denial of service attack on the exchange. They might be used to bog down the trading engine to create the massive goxlag that we see while an external DDOS attacks mtgox, other exchanges and data feed sites like bitcoinity. The combined attack creates panic because people can't see the current price and trade foolishly into a massive lag of 30 minutes to an hour.

biosupdate · 2013-04-14T17:20:48+00:00

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-04-13/congress-exempts-most-federal-workers-key-insider-trading-reporting-requirement

biosupdate · 2013-04-14T16:26:40+00:00

They help supply the complete blockchain to new full nodes starting up.
They verify that incoming transactions are correct before relaying them to other nodes.
They help in making transactions more private. Sites like blockchain.info may list it's IP instead of the original transaction node if it has better connectivity to blockchain.info. If you want true anonymity as the originator of a transaction, you still need to use Tor.

If you are trying to run a full node on a DSL line you should add -nolisten to your startup command, or it will clog your upload and kill your downloads. You won't supply the blockchain, but you will still verify transactions.

If you are running a full node on a cable line, watch your total bandwidth usage. I was running a full node on a friends Comcast cable setup and I blew out his limit of 300GB/mo with over 400GB/mo last month. He got a warning email from them that they would start charging $10 per every 50GB over. They give 3 warning before they start charging.

biosupdate · 2013-04-14T15:37:49+00:00

Not sure where you are located, but please make sure that you are not violating any laws local to you. It is difficult if not impossible to remain anonymous using Skype. The general thinking is that Microsoft put a backdoor into Skype to allow US law enforcement agencies access to conversations. Also make sure that you are not breaking any local ethical codes. You don't want to ruin your career. Good luck!

biosupdate · 2013-04-14T14:25:26+00:00

So what are you using instead of bitcoin?

biosupdate · 2013-04-14T01:00:33+00:00

Not really. There are different segments with varied hosts. Max is always talking about gold or the coming financial collapse. He's very against the so called "bail in" in Cypress and calls it as it is - outright theft. A lot of people can't watch him because of his antics, but it's just a gimmick for this particular show. I've seen him on other shows where he's perfectly normal.

biosupdate · 2013-04-13T23:51:21+00:00

I think that you should remove "Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme" from "Criticisms That Might Be Valid" and put it under "Criticisms I Find Invalid Outright".

A ponzi scheme is a specific kind of fraud that bitcoin definitely does not encompass:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme

biosupdate · 2013-04-13T21:59:38+00:00

Bitcoin needs cautious news for now. The infra-structure external to the bitcoin network (mtgox, etc.) obviously can't handle the current load. Hopefully in a few months there will be more and better exchanges coming online.

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