China Weighs Slowing or Halting Purchases of U.S. Treasuries
January 10th, 2018Via: Bloomberg:
China added to bond investors’ jitters on Wednesday as traders braced for what they feared could be the end of a three-decade bull market.
Senior government officials in Beijing reviewing the nation’s foreign-exchange holdings have recommended slowing or halting purchases of U.S. Treasuries, according to people familiar with the matter. The news comes as global debt markets were already selling off amid signs that central banks are starting to step back after years of bond-buying stimulus. Yields on 10-year Treasuries rose for a fifth day, touching the highest since March.
Area 51 Flights? Top-Secret Government Airline Seeks Flight Attendant
January 9th, 2018Via: USA Today:
Are you a Las Vegas-based flight attendant looking for work and able to keep a secret(s)? Do you feel positively about working for an airline that sort of doesn’t exist? Happen to have a Top-Secret clearance with the U.S. government, or think you could snag one?
If so, the perfect job just opened up.
Janet, a classified airline that runs commuter flights to some of the most secretive and closely guarded government facilities in the U.S., appears to be hiring a flight attendant. The job posting appeared recently on the website for AECOM, which operates a small fleet of aircraft out of a discreet but heavily guarded terminal at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas.
Very little is known about Janet, which is so secretive that the U.S. government does not admit that it exists. The planes use the call sign “Janet,” which some suggest stands for “Just Another Non-Existent Terminal.”
U.S. Suspends at Least $900 Million in Security Aid to Pakistan
January 9th, 2018Hmm.
Via: Reuters:
The United States said on Thursday it was suspending at least $900 million in security assistance to Pakistan until it takes action against the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network militant groups.
The U.S. State Department announced the decision, saying it reflected the Trump administration’s frustration that Pakistan has not done more against the two groups that Washington says use sanctuaries in Pakistan to launch attacks in neighboring Afghanistan that have killed U.S., Afghan and other forces.
The department declined to say exactly how much aid would be suspended, saying the numbers were still being calculated and included funding from both the State and Defense departments.
Western Intervention Has Resulted in Afghanistan Becoming the World’s First True Narco-State
January 9th, 2018“How could this be possible?”
Simple. Because that’s the desired outcome.
Afghan Opium Production Rises by 61% Compared with 2010
Brother of Afghan Leader Is Said to Be on CIA Payroll
U.S.-Built Bridge is Windfall for Illegal Afghan Drug Trade
The Invisible Hand of the Market: British Troops Seize £50 Million of Afghan Opium
Officials Puzzle Over Millions of Dollars Leaving Afghanistan by Plane for Dubai
Afghans Believe U.S. is Funding Taliban
NATO Forces Supplied Food, Water and Arms to Taliban Forces in Southern Afghanistan
Blackwater Worldwide Changes Its Name to Xe; Same Mercenaries, but Now with More “Aviation Support”
$7 Billion U.S. Eradication Effort Delivers Record High Poppy Crop in Afghanistan
U.S. Funded, Trained and Equipped Afghan Air Force Running Guns and Drugs
Via: Guardian:
After fighting the longest war in its history, the US stands at the brink of defeat in Afghanistan. How could this be possible? How could the world’s sole superpower have battled continuously for more than 16 years – deploying more than 100,000 troops at the conflict’s peak, sacrificing the lives of nearly 2,300 soldiers, spending more than $1tn (£740bn) on its military operations, lavishing a record $100bn more on “nation-building”, helping fund and train an army of 350,000 Afghan allies – and still not be able to pacify one of the world’s most impoverished nations? So dismal is the prospect of stability in Afghanistan that, in 2016, the Obama White House cancelled a planned withdrawal of its forces, ordering more than 8,000 troops to remain in the country indefinitely.
In the American failure lies a paradox: Washington’s massive military juggernaut has been stopped in its steel tracks by a small pink flower – the opium poppy. Throughout its three decades in Afghanistan, Washington’s military operations have succeeded only when they fit reasonably comfortably into central Asia’s illicit traffic in opium – and suffered when they failed to complement it.
Research Credit: Jb
WD My Cloud NAS Devices Have Hard-Wired Backdoor
January 8th, 2018Via: Register:
If you have a Western Digital My Cloud network attached storage device, it’s time to learn how to update its OS because researcher James Bercegay has discovered a dozen models possess a hard-coded backdoor.
The backdoor, detailed here, lets anyone log in as user mydlinkBRionyg with the password abc12345cba.
WD mostly markets the My Cloud range as suited for file sharing and backup in domestic settings. But several of the models with the backdoor are four-disk machines suitable for use as shared storage in small business and also capable of being configured as iSCSI targets for use supporting virtual servers. Throw in the fact that some of the messed-up machines can reach 40TB capacity and there’s the very real prospect that sizeable databases are dangling online.
Intel’s 49-Qubit Chip Shoots for Quantum Supremacy
January 8th, 2018Disclosure: I am long Quantum Resistant Ledger (QRL). Nothing that appears on Cryptogon should be considered a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
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Via: IEEE:
Intel has passed a key milestone while running alongside Google and IBM in the marathon to build quantum computing systems. The tech giant has unveiled a superconducting quantum test chip with 49 qubits: enough qubits to possibly enable quantum computing that begins to exceed the practical limits of modern classical computers.
Intel’s announcement about the design and fabrication of its new 49-qubit superconducting quantum chip, code-named Tangle Lake, came during a keynote speech by Brian Krzanich, Intel’s CEO, during 2018 CES, an annual consumer electronics tradeshow in Las Vegas. It’s a milestone that Google and IBM researchers have also been targeting because it could usher in the moment of so-called “quantum supremacy,” when quantum computing can outperform classical computing.
The More I Read About Meltdown And Spectre…
January 7th, 2018The more I wonder: Are these bugs, or features?
Breaking Bitcoin With a Quantum Computer
January 6th, 2018Disclosure: I am long Quantum Resistant Ledger (QRL). Nothing that appears on Cryptogon should be considered a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
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For commentary on this, I’m going to share excerpts from an email that I wrote to friends of mine back in November:
Hi, ***
*** asked me to let her know if I spotted anything interesting in the cryptocoin space.
Cryptocoins could be doomed when quantum computers become a reality. Seeing this piece about it drove the point home:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609408/quantum-computers-pose-imminent-threat-to-bitcoin-security
I started looking to see if anyone was working on a quantum resistant cryptocoin.
There is one. It’s called The Quantum Resistant Ledger (QRL).
It has not fully launched yet, but trades in token form on a cryptocoin exchange called Bittrex. When it launches, the QRL tokens will be redeemed for the actual QRL cryptocoins.
QRL tokens can be bought with Bitcoin and sold for Bitcoin on Bittrex in real time. Despite the fact that this coin is virtually unknown, there is decent liquidity on Bittrex. However, pricing could become extremely volatile with news or a whale investor buying or selling.
I have been warning people on Cryptogon that I believe that NSA already has a general purpose quantum computing capability, which threatens Bitcoin and other cryptocoins.
In the QRL whitepaper, I found the following interesting:
Public quantum computer development has not passed beyond 2^5 qubits or the factorisation of small numbers (15 or 21). However, in August 2015 the NSA deprecated elliptic curve cryptography ostensibly based upon quantum computing concerns. It is unclear how advanced quantum computing may be presently or that any breakthroughs in this field will be publicised to allow cryptographic protocols in common usage in the internet to be made post-quantum secure. With somewhat anti-establishment origins, bitcoin could find itself the earliest target of an adversary with a quantum computer.
If a significant quantum computing advance were to occur publicly, node developers could implement quantum-resistant cryptographic signature schemes into bitcoin and encourage all users to move their balances from ECDSA-based addresses to new quantum-safe addresses. To mitigate the proportion of effected addresses it would be reasonable to disable public key recycling at the protocol level. Such a planned upgrade would also result in the possible movement of the 1 million coins belonging to Satoshi Nakamoto – with associated price volatility.
A less favourable scenario would be a silent non-linear quantum computing advance followed by a nuanced quantum computing attack on bitcoin addresses with exposed public keys. Such thefts could have a devastating effect upon the bitcoin exchange price due to new heavy sell pressure and a complete loss of confidence in the system as the scale of thefts become known. The role of bitcoin as a store of value (‘digital gold’) would be very badly damaged with extreme consequences for the world. In this context the authors believe it is reasonable to experiment with quantum-resistant cryptographic signatures in a cryptocurrency ledger and potentially create a backup value store in the event of a black swan.
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“It is unclear how advanced quantum computing may be presently or that any breakthroughs in this field will be publicised to allow cryptographic protocols in common usage in the internet to be made post-quantum secure. ”
Well, it’s one thing for me to say it on my lunatic fringe conspiracy blog, but I’m clearly not the only one who suspects a covert quantum computing capability could emerge, or has emerged already. As of 2015, NSA stopped trusting the type of encryption that Bitcoin uses…
Hmm.
In that last paragraph in the excerpt above, they’re laying out a scenario in which intelligence agencies can quietly steal money out of cryptocoin wallets from the public addresses alone! haha Ye olde covert bail in!
…
If you guys want to acquire any QRL, please keep in mind, this is maximum risk. It might not work, it could go to zero, maybe other coins can manage to implement quantum resistant measures…. Who knows…
However, to summarize:
1) Quantum computers are coming, or are already operational by NSA and possibly other intelligence agencies.
2) Quantum computers threaten all Bitcoin-type cryptocoins.
3) QRL is the only cryptocoin purpose built to resist attacks from attackers with quantum computers.
4) People are holding tens of billions of dollars in Bitcoin and other cryptocoins. If a tiny fraction of those people become paranoid about the the quantum threat, it would be an understatement to say that QRL could become very interesting very fast.
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Since I wrote that, other coins are mentioning adding quantum resistant capabilities, but I would take those claims with a grain of salt.
I had been planning to do more extensive research on QRL and their team and present that as a Cryptogon post, but events are moving faster than I anticipated, so this will have to do.
Via: Fortune:
Alex Beath, a Toronto-based physicist and pension fund analyst, is skeptical about Bitcoin but sees one useful purpose for the crypto-currency: It may detect when someone creates a working quantum computer.
“The second someone creates a viable quantum computer, the NP-complete math problems at the heart of Bitcoin mining tech become instantly solvable,” Beath notes. “In other words, one answer to the question ‘what’s the first thing you’d do with a quantum computer?’ is ‘mine all of the remaining Bitcoin instantly.’ Until that happens, nobody has a quantum computer.”
Beath’s off-the-cuff observation, which he made in response to a Fortune query about the security of bitcoin, is amusing. But it also underscores a serious problem: Namely, a new era of computing is fast-approaching and when it arrives, the system that gave rise to many crypto-currency fortunes will collapse.
This threat to Bitcoin and other software systems that use the same underlying encryption technique—a technique likely to crumble in the face of a quantum-based attack—is not new. Indeed, it was predicted decades ago, and Ethereum founder (and former journalist) Vitalik Buterin wrote about how to defend it in 2013.
The difference today, though, is that companies like Microsoft, Google and IBM are making rapid breakthroughs that could make quantum computing viable in less than 10 years.
Why Raspberry Pi Isn’t Vulnerable to Spectre or Meltdown
January 6th, 2018Via: Raspberry Pi:
Over the last couple of days, there has been a lot of discussion about a pair of security vulnerabilities nicknamed Spectre and Meltdown. These affect all modern Intel processors, and (in the case of Spectre) many AMD processors and ARM cores. Spectre allows an attacker to bypass software checks to read data from arbitrary locations in the current address space; Meltdown allows an attacker to read data from arbitrary locations in the operating system kernel’s address space (which should normally be inaccessible to user programs).
Both vulnerabilities exploit performance features (caching and speculative execution) common to many modern processors to leak data via a so-called side-channel attack. Happily, the Raspberry Pi isn’t susceptible to these vulnerabilities, because of the particular ARM cores that we use.
U.S. Government Searches of Travelers’ Phones and Computers Up Sharply
January 6th, 2018Via: cnet:
US Customs and Border Patrol searched more phones and laptops at the border in 2017 — 30,200 devices total.
The agency released those numbers Friday along with updated guidelines on how to conduct the searches, which have become a hot button issue under the administration of President Donald Trump. A lawsuit from the ACLU claims the searches violate constitutional rights to privacy, but the government says border searches are exempted from these protections for the sake of national security.
“In this digital age, border searches of electronic devices are essential to enforcing the law at the US border and to protecting the American people,” John Wagner, a deputy executive assistant commissioner at Customs and Border Patrol, said in a statement.
Travelers can be subjected to the searches whether or not they’re US citizens. Border Patrol agents have conducted the searches since before Trump’s election. The number of searches increased by about 59 percent from 2016 to 2017, the year Trump took office.
The searches can reveal everything on a traveler’s phone, tablet or computer, from vacation photos to potentially sensitive documents like business records or health information. In July, the US Department of Homeland Security said its authority to search electronic devices didn’t extend to information stored in the cloud that a device might be able to access. Customs and Border Patrol is run under the auspices of Homeland Security.
