skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Our Twofish cryptanalysis contest offers a $10K prize for the best negative comments on Twofish that aren't written by the authors. There are no arbitrary definitions of what a winning analysis is. There is no ciphertext to break or keys to recover. We are simply rewarding the most successful cryptanalysis research result, whatever it may be and however successful it is (or is not). Again, the contest is fair because 1) the algorithm is completely specified, 2) there are no arbitrary definition of what winning means, and 3) the algorithm is public domain.

This Telegram contest may seem superficially similar to that fair contest, but it differs in some important ways. First, this contest isn't rewarding "best effort". Second, this contest doesn't meet those criteria, because their central server isn't being tested here. The goal of a product like Telegram is to defend against adversaries like governments, and hence governments will be able to probe their servers for weaknesses. You may say that we, too, can do the same, but if that's the case, a test server should be made available and the contest should explicitly try to get as many people as possible to break it.

This contest is interesting, but it's too artificial. As just one example of why that's the case: breaking real-world crypto often relies on side channel attacks, for instance timing attacks, and there's no opportunity of employing those attacks here due to the artificial nature of the contest.

Once again, if people here are interested in a secure alternative to Telegram that doesn't rely on public stunts for cryptanalysis, then check out TextSecure. It was designed by cryptographers, is open-source, and has been studied in detail for years. https://whispersystems.org/

EDIT: It appears Telegram is also vulnerable to MITM attacks. This is the NSA's preferred method of gathering info, so this is the most likely attack vector against Telegram. Due to the design of the protocol, there seems to be no defense. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6931892

Telegram's response is "we protect against this because if you've initiated a secret chat previously, then you're protected." However, this isn't true. 1) a global adversary like the NSA can (and will, if they become interested in Telegram) simply MITM every secret chat session when they're first initiated; therefore if you use Telegram, you should assume the government has your data anyway, since this protocol offers no protection against mass snooping. 2) Secret chats aren't even the default type of chat in Telegram anyway, making it very unlikely that users will be protected by it. The defaults need to be secure.

References:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6931892

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6931961 (Telegram's response, which seems to verify that secret chats can be MITM'd on first initiation.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6931903 (Demonstrates that Telegram seems to be misunderstanding why someone breaking into the central server can MITM your chats.)
It will allow you to conduct a man-in-the-middle attack on all encrypted traffic though, which would certainly be enough to read messages in plaintext.
People incorporate Delaware because of Delaware's well-codified, well-understood corporate law, that simplifies things like investments, M&A and the like.

Incorporating in Delaware doesn't exempt you from NYC income tax if you do all your business in NYC.
You have very obviously never been to an actual networking event.
Enable 2 factor authentication. IIRC Coinbase doesn't use it per user action, but at least having it has the potential to save you some headaches.
Consider that the optical nerve is shut off when eyes move from one target to another. What human "sees" during that time is a retained image, so he is effectively blind. If you make something appear on screen away from his focal point it might distract user enough to be blinded while his focus moves across the screen, so the green dot won't be seen.
It's fine with me as long as oDesk remains the same..
This only makes them "more american". Many people feel that they are the extension of the US government abroad since they collaborate with the US so closely.
This doesn't cover the areas that most people highlighted as probable weaknesses which were largely related to the protocol rather than the cipher. There may be sufficient weaknesses in the protocol to expose the data with a passive analysis of the log but there are many more options if you can perform man in the middle attacks or find ways to change messages even without fully decrypting that would not win this competition but that would be widely regarded as breaking their system.
mining all coins instantly,

Ah, that's the part I was unsure about. Setting up a new block chain and instantly collecting all coin issuance sets up a lot of nice use cases.

Yes, that's amazing. If bitcoin ever does become widely accepted, it'll be because a new chain of coins is used that have been 100% mined by a private party (or government) handing them out.

When I was at IBM, each manager had fake "Blue Bucks" they used for internal cross-departmental services (moving a cubicle cost $100 "blue bucks," getting a new ethernet drop cost $50 "blue bucks," etc).
Sending $100 to Grandma via Western Union? Be prepared to spend $15-$20 for the privilege.

Or if you want to go the bank route, be prepared to drop $12-$30 for an international wire (depending on your bank). Oh, and she might have to pay a $15-$30 receiving fee for an incoming international wire, depending on her country and bank.

At first, Paypal seems a little better -- only about $4.50 that you have to pay from your end. But Grandma still has to pay $2.50, and god help her if she needs any help from customer service. And then she still has to withdraw money to her bank account, since most international banks still charge up to $5-$10 for this. So in toto, Paypal might actually the two of you combined about the same amount as Western Union.
Exactly. Having grown up in between Albany and Saratoga, I'd be excited to see some more tech culture evolve there. I'm not tremendously optimistic, but if Atlanta can do it, why not Albany? (Atlanta being a similarly car-travel-intensive, sprawling pseudo-urban region)
How to make an app like Temple Run
I love how Telegram, at the beginning of a secret chat, says og is "200% secure". Right below the graphical representation of the cryptokey.
> Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are subject to the same Regulatory and market pressures as any other financial institution

No. Freddie and Fannie are force-backed government bureaus that risk/waste taxpayer money in the pursuit of American housing policy (i.e. that everyone needs to live in a standalone house).

They are not subject to market pressure, because they are part of the government. That is the very definition of not being part of the market.
Right, so Bash is Unix right? Bash does tcp connections. Oops!

Anyway, blindly following some theory is a bit strange. Systemd is several different components. Maybe you're heard of coreutils, kind of important on any Linux system. It doesn't do just one thing. I guess you think coreutils should be removed as well?

Anyway, no clue what GNOME has to do with systemd. As said: seems you're grasping at straws. Haters gonna hate :P
In b-school, we talk a lot about political risk - mainly in terms of emerging economies. The US government's actions are resulting in events that will heighten investor perceptions of political risk here too.
While I agree with your point, immediately jumping to the NSA and their bottomless pool of resources and talent is kind of the new Godwin's law.

Logan's law: In any given discussion tangentially related to security, the thing presented as "secure" will be soon declared "definitely not secure"... because...NSA.
Good, this clearly isn't going to change because of moral reasons. The only way the US government is going to change direction on this is if it hurts them where they really care, which is "their" pocketbooks. "Their" in quotes because really it's the pocketbooks of the companies that give them millions to re-elect them.
I had Coinbase honor a price favorable to me after initially being declined, and have heard of the same thing happening to others.
Вы офигенно придумали. Молодцы!

I personally think it's great that people are trying various solutions. Disclaimer: I know little about cryptography
CNET 100 - Hottest Tech Products Using CNET 100
The original person (maybe you, too lazy to check) was worried about millions of users. So I talked about a GUI, not a CLI. The CLI has existed for a long time as mentioned by someone else.
Why was the Great Depression so dang much worse than all the boom and bust cycles that came before? Could it be because of the government's massive economic intervention? I think so, and it's not like economists uniformly disagree with me.

The 2008 collapse is ultimately part of long-term stagnation in the economy. It would have been better to just take the medicine and build a healthy economy after that, that to keep living under the fantasy that government manipulation of the economy can help us in the long run.
> But it's still not a currency, kind of like how "alternative medicine" isn't really medicine.

All you're proving there is how educated people like ourselves don't take alternative medicines seriously (and for good reason too). However technically that example is actually countering your point since the "alternative" prefix just signifies another style of; such as "alternative music" is still music.
Peercoin, for one, has a 1% annual growth rate forever, and is designed to be more energy-efficient over the long term because it relies partly on "proof-of-stake" instead of just proof of work. There are a couple other proof-of-stake currencies too, and some unimplemented ideas like proof-of-burn. Another interesting currency is Freicoin, which uses proof-of-work but has demurrage.
Is that really the case? Would you mind linking to that? Because if that's true, then this contest is dangerously misleading.
Is anyone able to determine whos running this company? All the records seem to be anonymized.
Does anyone have this document as something better than a printout on a series of postage stamps that have been scanned at a 15 degree angle?
All the haters here can go pound sand. It's a cool project, and I like the mindset behind it: https://telegram.org/faq#q-how-are-you-going-to-make-money-o...
Not exactly, but consider that Brazil gains leverage simply by saying Boeing was in the running, even if they weren't. e.g., Brazil wants the NSA gone, but they don't have any means to apply the necessary pressure. Point at an already failed Boeing deal, and tada, now you have a pressure point.

Or possibly Brazil had promised to go with Boeing, but recently decided Saab was a better deal. Backing out would cost them whatever political capital is traded in smoky rooms. Now they can point to the NSA and save face.

International relations are complicated.
Because he is disconnected from reality. The post is absolutely chock full of mistaken and fantastic premises.

It's just an observation I've made. People will have to agree or disagree based on their own judgement.

I acknowledge that I am not providing any evidence for this. It wouldn't be worth the effort to me of deconstructing his post sentence by sentence.
I was surprised the first time I bit into a banana and it went crunch.

That particular variety had seeds about the size and hardness of cherry pits, but not as spherical, and several per bite.

It was still edible, but not particularly enjoyable to me.

Plantains are also not a good banana substitute - they are much more starchy than bananas. Think halfway between banana and potato (though I probably haven't let them ripen enough - probably need to wait until the skin is black...)
But Modus Ponens is the axiom here. Without it, boolean logic is just rearranging arbitrary symbols on a page. Axioms like it are necessary to link those symbols to reality in some way.
A 73 day deadline on no notice to crack the system in a very specific way with no pay for people who succeed after the first is not a very big incentive. How many highly compensated security experts do you expect to stop doing their jobs for the opportunity to work for free?
Let me respectfully disagree with you here. Secret Chats in Telegram provide users with a way to detect a server-side MITM attack. http://core.telegram.org/techfaq#q-how-are-telegram-users-pr...
I'm replying to you but this is meant for both of the current replies, genuinely curious:

What makes you guys think that businesses wont be built around simplifying and derisking BTC transactions? And wont this businesses have fees? Grandma certainly does not know how to use bitcoin.
The bulk of these are federal, and therefore unaffected by state & local policies. Agreed that they are much larger costs than state & local taxes for many/most startups.
The Gripen can land on a relatively short stretch of road, a team of six can get it ready for its next flight and it can take off from the same road. The F22 is not a STOL aircraft.

Given standard NATO practice of taking out the radar and the runways in the first few femto-seconds of a 'war', I think this feature makes the Gripen worthy of consideration.

That said, do features really matter in the arms trade?
This quote can be applied to anything, it's just as meaningless now as it was the 10,000th time someone used it on circa-1998 Slashdot in response to MS saying something bad about Linux (always a cause for comical levels of hand-wringing on 1998 Slashdot).

If I never see this quote used again on a tech forum it will be way too soon. That's not what I'm thinking now, that's what I was thinking 15 years ago. I can't even process a reaction to someone using it now.
Not sure this is anywhere as good as it sounds. Most startups aren't profitable for several years (if ever), so income tax would not be an issue during this period. Even after there is income, there would be loss carry-forwards that would have soaked up income taxes from the first couple of profitable years. So this probably doesn't produce much benefit for much/most of the 10 years.

Eliminating sales tax isn't that big a benefit either: SASS, social, or other popular startup types would not pay much of this anyway (on purchases of desks, computers, etc?).

Property tax benefits could be sizable, though many bootstrapped startups don't have this for a couple of years anyway.

Cutting franchise taxes provides a small benefit that would probably help all startups.

As others have pointed out, the non-tax costs of being in an expensive city like NYC are substantial. And don't forget, NY isn't waiving personal income taxes—so if your startup does hit a homerun, they'll take their pound of flesh on the back end.

For some startups (like the rare one with high anticipated sales tax costs), this program might be enough to tip the scales in favor of locating in NY. For most startups, however, state/local tax cuts in the first 10 years are just not that big a deal. As the saying goes: don't let the tax tail wag the dog.

Looking at the policy from a macro perspective, it looks a lot like what Swiss cantons do to negotiate tax breaks for a limited time based on anticipated future tax revenues and job creation. Also seems a lot like what Ireland has done to build up its tech sector (and been chastised for of late: see Apple, Google, etc.). So it could be produce benefits (for NY), but it would of course pull talent from other regions, thereby reducing the net benefit.
Or Apple.

(ducks)
You can't possibly be serious. You pocketed his ~$12K loss and you're giving him a $50 credit? Are you high?

Sloppiness like this wouldn't fly in actual finance. It would get you fined and possibly more. Lacking any sort of internal controls, even something as simple as balancing your books and verifying all transactions... It's shocking and negligent. Even more so for a YC company. Shame on you.
> Still think it's ok for journals to hinder sharing of knowledge by taxing it and thus increasing the cost of research??

What the hell does that have to do with anything?
http://core.telegram.org/techfaq#q-how-are-telegram-users-pr...
Stride, A Bootstrapped CRM Service, Acquired By Founders of KISSmetrics
Bergaffe - a simple tube with lots of possibilities
Helianthus:

>Chase has 2.5 trillion in assets. It does not care about Bitcoin.

You sure about that? Check out this thread, and all the Bitcoin businesses who have been shut down. Chase has banned all Bitcoin-related businesses. Doesn't sound like ignoring to me.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1t0yk5/final_word_f...

Truth is, anyone who's been paying attention knows that banks have been systematically shutting down Bitcoin related businesses for the past few months. Again, not ignoring.
Wow now I'm pissed. I had the same issue but didn't make a public stink about it. Just got my coins today with no credit for the mistake and the same issue of my coins being frozen at a higher price. Looks like I should have been more rude about it.

Not only that, but I was told that my coins could not be released earlier because "they needed to be removed from cold storage". So now we have 2 different excuses for failures in the same time period. The cold storage excuse seemed completely bogus to me too because we're talking about crediting a number to my account, not getting actual Bitcoins. They don't become Bitcoins till I send them out of Coinbase.
Apple forced to increase warranty to two years in Australia
Nope. The paper explicitly states their assumptions. Asking for admin password (root) is not one of them. If you can get them to run a game (for example), you can pwn them.
Now all you have to do is warn users that the one LED is important and means something.

There is already a common pop-culture shorthand for "now recording," the blinking red light. That's cheap and simple, and everyone already knows what it means, particularly when it's on a camera.

The real question, in my mind, is how the world-renowned user-experience and user-interface experts at Apple decided to use anything else.
Says uNdoware...

I tend to evaluate a service based on what they provide, their reputation and sometimes the care put into their branding, but rarely do I make a blanket judgement on name alone. Anyone on HN should know how challenging it is to pick a name in the competitive domain landscape.
> I simply disagree.

The only way you seem to disagree, now that you provide more detail, is that you use the word "love" in a bizarre way.

> I think most people believe that without taxation (i.e. without forcefully taking funds from people who aren't willing to give, even if that's only a small portion of the tax base), many things which are generally considered good (like care for the poor, infrastructure, public defense, etc.) simply cannot exist.

That's exactly what I said -- people believe that some government functions are desirable, and that taxation is necessary to those functions. That's very different than loving taxation, by any normal use of language.

> To me, that is equivalent to "loving taxes."

This is where we disagree. I think that, as I am overweight, continuing to lose weight is desirable. I believe that without controlling both the quantity I eat and what it is that I eat, that weight loss will not occur.

This is not equivalent to "loving dieting".

> Granted, the word "love" is a very complex and vague one, so perhaps I should have phrased it differently, like "people are intensely thankful for government."

I think you'd still be wrong.

People aren't "thankful for government" in some generalized sense, they are thankful for particular governments taking particular actions (and, quite often, the same people are also resentful of the same government taking different actions, and often broadly disapproving of even the existence of many other governments.)

This is essentially (among other errors) the fallacy of composition -- taking something that is true of some component (some particular action by some particular government) of a larger category (government in general) and treating it as if it was true of the larger category as such.

I've frequently seen this in the particular area of feelings about government from people whose own feelings are anti-government, and I think its easily understandable as an instance of the natural tendency to think that the things one thinks of as important subjects of positive or negative (in this case, "government" as such) are the same thing others think of as important, and that differences are all in the direction of feelings rather than their subject.
How is that supposed to be secure? All I need to snoop on your conversations is access to your phone for 1 minute to receive the activation code and delete message about new device connected to the account.
I don't know if the reference to mises.org is sarcastic, but pointing to that site to learn about economics is like referring to Glenn Beck's site to learn about President Obama. Obviously, most economists have some ideology, but I think you should try to learn from people are are at least not so fanatic.
I stand corrected, have an upvote.
The world is not a computer (or else AI would be easy).
Pedantically, the name of the city is just New York. Given the context ("or San Francisco"), I think it's clear he didn't mean to include Buffalo. "New York or California" would have meant the entire state.
Elephant.

I'll take my $2k now.
I'm coming across a lot of anti-bitcoin articles today. It alls seems very similar to the anti-linux FUD from 15 years ago.