The Secret Network, a protocol focused on privacy for decentralized finance (DeFi), has launched SecretSwap, a front-running resistant and cross-chain decentralized exchange. It is now live on the Secret Network mainnet. SecretSwap uses the SNIP-20 secret token standard and Secret Ethereum bridge. “SecretSwap is the first front-running resistant, cross-chain [automated market maker]. Its architecture (being based on Secret Network) gives SecretSwap usability advantages, protects users from malicious bot activity, increases the availability of assets and keeps fees much lower than on Ethereum,” said Tor Bair, the Secret Foundation’s executive director and chairman, in a direct message. DeFi privacy According to Bair, […]
Benjamin Powers
60 posts
Android versions of popular cryptocurrency app Bitcoin Ticker Widget and a seeming clone of Steemit, Steemit Earn Money, included software development kit (SDK) tools that extract extensive data on users in the past and are potentially linked to location tracking code from X-Mode a notorious data tracking company, according to a new report from Express VPN Digital Security Lab. Two other personal finance apps also have been found to contain these data trackers. “We wanted to say to consumers: ‘This is a huge problem; you may not be aware of it,’” said Sean O’Brien, principal researcher at ExpressVPN Digital Security Lab. […]
The Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance (COPA) is striking back against a cease-and-desist order sent by nChain Chief Scientist Craig Wright with a counter-requirement of their own: First, prove you’re Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of the white paper. Source link
Another challenge to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects tech platforms from being liable for various forms of content posted on them, has re-emerged, with bipartisan support. It takes a page from the Banking Secrecy Act (BSA) but, rather than filing Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs), the bill would force tech companies to file “Suspicious Transmission Activity Reports” (STARs) for “illegal activity” on their platforms. This week, senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and John Cornyn of Texas reintroduced their “See Something Say Something Online” act, which would force tech companies “to report suspicious activity to law enforcement, similar […]
Bitcoin, while down from its all-time high, is still well above its previous highs over the past few years. And with any exponential rise in the price of BTC, the number of frantic people with bitcoin stashed somewhere in a crypto wallet protected by a password they’ve long since forgotten – well, that’s increased exponentially as well. This where “Dave Bitcoin,” comes in. The pseudonymous co-founder of Wallet Recovery Services helps people recover access to password-protected wallets, and with each bitcoin bull run, his inbox starts to fill up. “These days because of the price rise and just the increased interest, […]
While not many technical details of China’s plans for its central bank digital currency (CBDC) are publicly available, the digital yuan is already raising concerns around privacy, national security and political power. The Digital Currency/Electronic Payment (DCEP) system would give the Chinese Communist Party the powerful ability to monitor in real time the minute financial dealings of its citizens. The U.S. needs to accelerate its development of tools for dealing with CBDCs on the global stage. China is leading the world in the development and piloting of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). With that lead comes increased scrutiny and concerns […]
When it comes to the “next big thing” for independent platforms, the newsletter platform Substack has been at the forefront of the charge. The company has lured big-name independent writers such as Casey Newton and Glenn Greenwald to the platform to start their own newsletters. Substack is now also being leveraged for its ease of use and reach by scammers to impersonate various cryptocurrency projects, encouraging those it reaches to “upgrade their smart contracts” and send funds to a proxy contract ID. The language across multiple newsletter emails was similar, just plugging in and playing with different project names, suggesting they […]
Numerous exchanges, like Bittrex, have delisted coins that have features to protect user privacy. Explanations of why they’ve done so have been vague or non-existent. It has set up clashes between the exchanges and Zcash, Monero and Dash over whether there is actually regulatory pressure to do so. There is a question that no one seems to want to answer. Why are exchanges delisting zcash, monero, and dash (DASH)? On New Year’s Day, cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex announced it would be delisting these three so-called “privacy coins” as of Jan. 15, adding its name to a growing list of exchanges that have […]
Operating for a year now, insidious malware ElectroRAT is bringing 2020 into 2021 and targeting crypto wallets. A researcher at cybersecurity firm Intezer has identified and documented the inner workings of ElectroRAT, which has been targeting and draining victims’ funds. According to the researcher, Avigayil Mechtinger, the malware operation includes a variety of detailed tools that dupes victims, including a “marketing campaign, custom cryptocurrency-related applications and a new Remote Access Tool (RAT) written from scratch.” The malware is called ElectroRAT because it’s a remote access tool that was embedded in apps built on Electron, an app-building platform. Hence, ElectroRAT. “It’s unsurprising to […]
Anthony Scaramucci’s SkyBridge Capital investment firm has invested $182 million in bitcoin, according to an investor brochure shared with CoinDesk about its forthcoming bitcoin fund. The bitcoin fund has already invested $25 million in bitcoin, it announced in the brochure. The new fund will be open as of Jan. 4 to outside investors putting up at least $50,000. Scaramucci’s fund investment is yet another traditional investment firm jumping on the bitcoin bandwagon, a trend that has driven the crypto’s price well north of $20,000 in recent weeks. In its brochure touting the bitcoin fund, the firm laid out the appeal of […]
New research from the cryptocurrency wallet ZenGo has shed additional light on front-running attacks happening on the Ethereum blockchain. First outlined in “Ethereum Is a Dark Forest,” DeFi investors Dan Robinson and Georgios Konstantopoulos called attention to a variety of attacks by bots that were roving the Ethereum blockchain in search of prey. The new report from ZenGo outlines how the researchers identified and isolated generalized front-running bots while evaluating their efficiency and how likely a transaction is to get hunted down, while also testing how to evade them. “Front-running in general is not something new on Ethereum,” said Alex Manuskin, […]
The charter makes GMO one of only 27 companies licensed in New York to engage in virtual currency activities. Source link
As soon as he learned he was among the thousands of Ledger customers whose personal information leaked online Sunday, JimboChewdip, as he’s known on Twitter, acted fast. Not fast enough. JCD, as we’ll call him, spent Monday morning changing his passwords, only to soon get a notification that a new device was added to one of his two-factor authentication (2FA) accounts. He then tried to log in to his email. It was locked. “Within minutes I started getting notifications about password changes on Coinbase, Binance, Dropbox,” he later told CoinDesk. “I tried to call T-Mobile over wifi, but it wouldn’t work […]
Google was down for only an hour, but Monday’s outage served as a jarring reminder of how much modern existence online depends on the centralized search engine colossus. From Gmail and Google Calendar to YouTube and even Google’s two-factor authentication, the outage temporarily ground online work to a halt for many, including publications that would have otherwise been reporting on the outage. Moreover, it underscored the hidden costs of the easy-to-use systems that permeate the web, and just how taxing or debilitating they can be when the head of the many-tentacled beast that is Google nods off, even for just an […]
On Dec. 8, Dutch cryptocurrency exchange LiteBit sent an email to its users stating it would be delisting the privacy coin firo (formerly zcoin). According to the email, the decision was made “partly due to the privacy aspect of this crypto. The regulator of crypto companies in the Netherlands has indicated that cryptocurrencies aimed at privacy are too high a risk.” LiteBit confirmed zcoin will be delisted on Dec. 22. This news comes a few months after Shapeshift delisted monero, zcash and dash. South Korea-based exchange Bithumb also dropped monero in June, continuing a trend of delisting privacy coins by cryptocurrency […]
A U.S. agency that fights financial crime is encouraging financial institutions, ranging from banks to cryptocurrency exchanges, to share customer information with one another to catch wrongdoers. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a bureau of the Treasury Department, issued a fact sheet Thursday spelling out that the 2001 Patriot Act gives institutions wide latitude in what kind of information they are permitted to share. Overall, the sheet seemingly lowers the obstacles for further sharing of personal customer information among banks, the threshold of what qualifies as “suspicious” activity and whether the entities sharing customer information even need to be financial […]
Existing decentralized digital identity standards are vulnerable to compromise and do not have privacy at their core: This is the central argument posed by a new paper presented by Harry Halpin, a visiting professor at research university KU Leuven, at the Mozilla-hosted Security Standardization Research Conference (SSR20). Proposals for vaccine or immunity passports, which would tie a person’s movements to their COVID-19 immunity status, have resurfaced with promising news about vaccines. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) announced it’s “in the final development phase” of a digital passport app that would receive and verify if someone has received a COVID-19 vaccine. […]
The privacy-oriented browser Tor (The Onion Router) is researching ways “anonymous tokens” could counter Denial of Service (DoS) attacks – a pressing issue for the network. Tor has been subject to DoS attacks, degrading its performance. While there are technical fixes Tor has worked to implement, the nature of the network and the anonymity of the traffic on it make it particularly susceptible to DoS attacks. In August, Tor introduced the idea of using anonymous tokens to counter such attacks, allowing them to differentiate between “good” and “bad” traffic, and to avoid implementing user accounts, which most sites and networks use […]
Encryption may not seem sexy, but it’s never been more important. Duality Technologies, a provider of privacy-enhancing tech, (PETs), is launching SecurePlus Statistics, a privacy-enhanced “statistical analysis solution” that uses Homomorphic Encryption (HE). While it may sound dry, it marks a step forward in practical uses of HE, which lets multiple actors conduct data analysis on a variety of datasets while keeping that information encrypted and protecting things like personally identifiable information. “HE is relevant for any industry dealing with highly sensitive data, such as health care and the financial services industry, but other regulated industries such as telecom, insurance and […]
Cory Doctorow doesn’t buy the hype. While many critics of Big Tech ascribe diabolical genius to the dominant internet firms of today, Doctorow sees a collection of mediocre sociopaths. This article is part of CoinDesk’s “Internet 2030” series, an examination at the technologies developed today that will power the economy of tomorrow. The polymorphous Canadian-British tech blogger, science fiction writer and co-editor of the blog Boing Boing is out with a new book called “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism.” Therein, he pushes back on the premise offered by Shoshana Zuboff’s influential tome “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” and argues that today’s […]
As media outlets waited to announce a winner until the Saturday following the election day, calls for how blockchains would have made this process easier emerged, most prominently perhaps by Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance, as well as Vitalik Buterin, who added that, though there are technical challenges, the call for a blockchain-based, mobile voting app “is directionally 100% correct.” A new report from MIT, however, strongly argues against the idea of blockchain-based e-voting, largely on the basis that it will increase cybersecurity vulnerabilities that already exist, it fails meet the unique needs of voting in political elections and it adds […]
Since 2011, $7.6 billion worth of cryptocurrencies have been stolen, according to a new report from Amsterdam-based blockchain analytics firm Crystal Blockchain. The total figure breaks down into two sadly predictable buckets – hacks and scams. The report found that $2.8 billion was stolen through security breaches, the most popular breach being via a cryptocurrency exchange’s security systems. In total, the firm documented 113 security breaches; the largest of these was the Coincheck breach in 2018, which saw hackers make off with more than $535 million worth of NEM coins. The United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, China and South Korea experienced […]
On Election Day, Californians chose not only the direction of their government but also the direction of some of the laws that government will administer. With 56% of voters approving it thus far, Proposition 24, also known as the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), is on its way to replacing key components of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), one of the more robust data privacy laws in the country. While the CPRA is not without controversy, it raises the stakes for non-compliance and encourages businesses, including cryptocurrency exchanges, to take additional steps to respect user privacy. It also has the […]
Wasabi Wallet, the privacy-focused bitcoin software wallet, has set a broad timeframe for the release of Wasabi Wallet 2.0. The goal is not only to make the wallet easier to use as more people start adopting bitcoin, but also to implement the privacy improvements of the WabiSabi protocol, including making CoinJoins automatic by default. In a blog post laying out the launch timeline of the wallet, Wasabi announced the updated version would get a full UI (user interface) rewrite and user experience improvements, as well as make a CoinJoin easier for your average user. At the moment the team is in […]
Nigerians are adopting more VPNs, including decentralized VPNs. The adoption comes as #EndSARS protestors are concerned the government may limit access to parts of the internet. Mysterium, a decentralized VPN, is trying to reach crypto users in parts of the world that grapple with actual and potential internet censorship. The decentralized virtual private network (VPN) Mysterium is seeing an increase in users in Nigeria over the last few weeks as protests have roiled the African country. Nigerians are protesting police corruption and specifically calling for the end to the special anti-robbery squad (SARS). In 2017, following protests, the government supposedly disbanded […]
Customers of Ledger, the hardware cryptocurrency wallet, are being targeted by a phishing attack posing as an email from Ledger support. The fake email ostensibly informs users their Ledger assets may be compromised. It states, “Our forensics team has found several of the Ledger Live administrative servers to be infected with malware.” This claim is false; while the email form looks professional, it is a phishing attempt to steal customers data. The email is so convincing that even wary users might be fooled. Ledger confirmed that, for the last week, a phishing attack has been targeting Ledger cryptocurrency wallet customers. “I […]
For many people arrested, especially low-income citizens, bail funds are their best hope for freedom while they await trial. Now, some of those funds are accepting cryptocurrency donations. Facilitated by crypto payment processor The Giving Block, the Bail Project, the Chicago Community Bond Fund and the Nashville Community Bail Fund, for example, accept cryptocurrency including bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH) and even basic attention token (BAT). They’ve taken in thousands of dollars in crypto donations since the summer, according to The Giving Block, which could be a sign of larger adoption in the space of bail funds. This summer saw a rise […]
Privacy means different things to different people. To some, it’s secrecy. To others, it means anonymity. To some others, it’s associated with criminality. But privacy is really about power. When the web was invented, its openness was key. “The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information,” Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, wrote in 1997. “Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished.” That openness encouraged people around the world to […]
Permission.io is a platform that pays users in ASK tokens for engaging with, or even looking at, ads. Built on a fork of the Ethereum blockchain, the Permission platform incentivizes users to grant advertisers and other merchant participants access to their time and data in a peer-to-peer way. Over the past 12 months, the startup has raised $5 million through a token pre-sale, and recently closed another round of funding that put the company at $47 million raised through equity financing. And since the platform came out of beta a few weeks ago, it has over 450,000 users, according to the […]
Privacy tech company Aleo has launched a data privacy-oriented blockchain and developer kit to make writing zero-knowledge proofs in web applications easy and scalable. The startup is releasing its first round of software tools to let developers write private applications for the web using a new programming language called Leo, as well as integrate these tools into pre-existing browsers’ functions. “I think it’s become very clear that the internet is broken,” said Aleo co-founder Howard Wu on a phone call. “As users of the internet, we give up our personal data in exchange for services from providers. This model is really […]
Political and social upheaval around the world can lead to internet censorship and interference by powerful actors. The Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) is allowing people around the world to monitor internet censorship and interference in their countries in a decentralized manner for free. It has created the world’s largest open dataset on internet censorship, with millions of measurements collected from more than 200 countries since 2012. Belarus residents are fighting back against the alleged illegitimate re-election of leader Alexander Lukashenko, otherwise known as the “last dictator of Europe,” since the election occurred Aug. 9. Lukashenko’s contested victory has led […]
Nym now allows bitcoin transactions and has an incentive program for people running its nodes. It is also enabling plugins that will allow users to plug in wallets and applications to run their traffic through its mixnet. What is a mixnet? Nym is a start-up software project working to obscure metadata tracking at a network level via the mixnet it enables. The mixnet itself is hosted by a decentralized network of volunteers. On a normal internet network, most traffic can be tracked. Browsers like Tor offer a degree of protection against network surveillance by running traffic through a number of relays […]
Twetch, a micropayment-based social network that runs on the Bitcoin SV blockchain, has introduced an encrypted direct-messaging function that lets users send each other money in the chat. Released Wednesday, Twetch Chat adds a layer of privacy and security to the Twitter alternative and is in line with a trend toward more private communications that have been a focus of companies in recent years. The twist is that you need a cryptocurrency wallet to take advantage of the feature – specifically, one that connects to BSV, a splinter network from Bitcoin Cash, which itself seceded from the main Bitcoin chain. “Unlike legacy internet […]
Hedge fund manager Arca is stepping up its campaign to overhaul Gnosis, claiming the decentralized exchange and prediction market platform has deviated from its original mission. The post describes Gnosis’ $12.5 million 2017 token sale (which valued the project at $300 million) as an “interest-free loan.” After borrowing the money, the team “failed to deliver the products laid out in its fundraising whitepaper,” Arca contends. The products Gnosis created generate value only for its management, Arca claims. In that article, Köppelmann is quoted as saying Gnosis “had already been working on an alternative path for the GNO token, which we think […]
After laying off a third of its staff in April, the project is looking for ways to increase the “diversity of funds” in its budget. Source link
YouTube has long struggled with disinformation, misleading content and outright scams on its site. Despite lawsuits and Google’s own ad policies, cryptocurrency scam ads are still making it through the gates and circulating for days. In April the CEO of Ripple, Brad Garlinghouse, filed a lawsuit against YouTube, alleging the company’s inaction against fraudulent content on its platform has damaged Ripple’s reputation by not curbing scam “giveaways” of XRP. According to the complaint, in one instance a scammer stole $15,000 worth of XPR from a victim. Garlinghouse is not alone. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is also suing YouTube and its parent […]
Next time your phone rings and the caller ID says it’s your bank, telecom company or employer’s IT department, it might be someone else. That’s because little-discussed types of SIM cards offer the ability to spoof any number, can be encrypted and in some cases allows the user’s voice to be altered and cloaked. Such SIM cards are favored by criminals, and they can make social engineering attacks like those that struck Twitter last month easier to execute. A SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card is essentially what stores information about a phone’s user, including country, service provider, and a unique idea […]
The teenager arrested for allegedly masterminding the recent Twitter hack comes from a community that’s been targeting crypto users for years. The group’s attacks have one big thing in common: They take advantage of human fallibility rather than code vulnerability. These so-called social engineering attacks are growing in sophistication, and while the Twitter case is being prosecuted vigorously, the broader problem is unlikely to end soon, security experts said. The New York Times reported the alleged mastermind was a part of the “OG” users community, which traffics in short unique online handles, such as a single character or word on social […]
When I answer the phone, Zephyr Teachout quickly explains our call might be shorter than planned. Both she and I are at the whim of her two-year-old toddler, who is sleeping and could wake at any time. Teachout, a law professor at Fordham University in New York, is best known for her runs for governor of the state and for Congress from New York’s 19th district (both races she lost). She has also written numerous books, including her latest, “BREAK ‘EM UP: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money.” Our discussion comes the day after historic Big […]
The FBI and local officials have arrested three individuals who allegedly committed the largest hack in Twitter’s history. Florida resident Graham Clark was arrested Friday morning, according to Florida news channel WFLA. State Attorney Andrew Warren filed 30 felony charges, including organized fraud, communications fraud, fraudulent use of personal information and access to computer or electronic devices without authority, WFLA reported. Federal officials are also charging Nima Fazeli and Mason John Sheppard with aiding in the “intentional access of a protected computer” and conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering, according to criminal complaints published Friday. Warren intends to try […]
The community behind “secret contracts” is moving forward after months of delay. The Secret Network, an open source network that protects data for users of decentralized applications, known as “Secret Apps,” has started a token burn and is welcoming players such as Binance, Staked and Figment to its testnet of “secret contracts.” The network’s protocol lets decentralized applications use encrypted data without revealing it on a public blockchain, or even to nodes themselves, using smart contracts that use private data termed “secret contracts.” This is one of the main selling points of the Secret Network, a decentralized community that includes contributors […]
Last week the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) struck down a key data-sharing agreement between the United States and European Union, with possible implications for U.S. blockchain companies that serve EU customers. The 2016 agreement, known as the Privacy Shield, lets American companies self-certify they are complying with data privacy laws, like the General Data Protection Act (GDPR). GDPR gives end users greater control over data held by companies like Google and Facebook. Steven Blickensderfer, a technology and privacy lawyer at the firm Carlton Fields, said the decision dramatically alters how companies can process data and impacts not […]
Wednesday’s Twitter hack would seem to spell regulatory doom for Bitcoin, which is widely distrusted in Washington. Some lawmakers – and U.S. President Donald Trump himself – associate it with crime. In 2019 Trump tweeted he is not a fan of bitcoin and that “unregulated crypto assets can facilitate unlawful behavior.” He also reportedly told Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to “go after Bitcoin.” But immediately following the hack, lawmakers seemed more focused on Twitter’s security problems rather than cryptocurrency’s role in the hack. On Wednesday, high-profile accounts belonging to Elon Musk, Kanye West, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, cryptocurrency exchanges and many others […]
Multiple bills that threaten encryption are moving through the U.S. Senate and could pose a threat to technology that protects users’ privacy, industry pros say. These bills include the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data (LAED) Act and the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (“EARN IT”) Act. While the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act was only recently introduced to the Senate, the EARN IT act has been in the works for months, and has been amended a number of times. Privacy advocates and product designers say such legislation would also curtail people’s privacy to a huge degree, fundamentally […]
A Colorado company is betting it can make the decentralized web more accessible with a no-frills server you can install in your own home. Start9 Labs’ Embassy server, housed in a Raspberry Pi, sets up its own private internet network and comes with its own operating system as well as an expanding range of services such as bitcoin transactions, messaging and password management that cut out middlemen and use the Tor network to communicate. People use the Tor network because it makes it incredibly difficult to trace internet activity to a user, encrypting it multiple times and hiding a user’s location. […]
The crackdown on alleged hate speech is intensifying as social media platforms either expand their policies or step up enforcement of their terms of service. Reddit banned over 2,000 subreddits as part of a focus on what it deemed hate speech, including The_Donald as well as the subreddit for the leftist podcast Chapo Trap House. Twitch temporarily banned President Trump. Facebook booted a “boogaloo” group (part of a loose affiliation of anti-government forces that vie for a second civil war), citing its promotion of violence. And YouTube banned a group of far-right content creators, including white nationalists such as David Duke. […]
What’s in a name? The power to render someone mute. Last week, Scott Alexander, the author of the influential rationalist blog Slate Star Codex (SSC), abruptly shut down (perhaps temporarily) his blog in advance of a New York Times (NYT) story on him and SSC that would include his real name. “Scott Alexander” is the pseudonym he has written under for years. As a practicing psychiatrist, he said, what amounts to “doxxing” him would damage his livelihood. In addition to professional repercussions, Alexander said in his final blog post explaining the situation that: “..[S]ome people want to kill me or ruin […]
Facebook, Accenture, IoTeX, Nvidia and six other companies are joining the Linux Foundation’s Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC), increasing the size of the privacy-focused group by 60 percent. The addition of members IoTeX, which leverages blockchain to secure the internet of things, and R3, an enterprise blockchain company, nearly doubles the number of blockchain companies involved. Created in late October 2019, the CCC aims to bring developers together to accelerate the use of Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) technologies and standards. A TEE sequesters code and data away from applications on the main operating system, so they’re protected from adversaries who may gain […]
Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, recently re-tweeted a call for fact checking through open source tech rather than new intermediaries, like Twitter. Dorsey’s message came at the end of May, after Twitter factchecked tweets by President Trump about mail in voting, leading to Trump to sign an executive order attacking Section 230 protections. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects platforms from civil liability for the content on them and has enabled companies such as Facebook and Twitter to thrive. A decentralized approach to fact-checking is likely to be popular in the blockchain community, which has long championed ideas like […]
Alethea AI, a synthetic media company, is piloting “privacy-preserving face skins,” or digital masks that counter facial recognition algorithms and help users preserve privacy on pre-recorded videos. The move comes as companies such as IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon announced they would suspend the sale of their facial recognition technology to law enforcement agencies. “This is a new technique we developed inhouse that wraps a face with our AI algorithms,” said Alethea AI CEO Arif Khan. “Avatars are fun to play with and develop, but these ‘masks/skins’ are a different, more potent, animal to preserve privacy.” See also: Human Rights Foundation Funds […]
Coronavirus is ravaging the globe, canceling presidential primaries in the U.S. and calling into question the wisdom of having lawmakers, many of them elderly, sitting close together as votes are held in Congress. Lawmakers, especially Democrats, have sought to expand mail-in voting, and perhaps give some voters the opportunity to vote digitally through their laptops or even their smartphones. Polling on the latter idea has shifted during the pandemic, with more people prepared to trust cyberspace with their vote. Forty-two percent of U.S. voters were “confident that votes cast online would be counted accurately,” according to a March Morning Consult poll, […]
Researchers in Australia have identified a bug that caused that country’s contact tracing app to malfunction, it was announced Monday. Governments around the world have introduced contact tracing apps to track the spread of the coronavirus. But, as in Australia, so far it’s unclear how much of a benefit these systems are having. Critics complain about risks to privacy and centralization of sensitive data, and note that intrusive technologies rarely work as expected. COVIDSafe, Australia’s contact tracing app, was rolled out in April. But its latest version has not been working properly due to a bug, Richard Nelson, a software engineer, […]
When Shoshana Zuboff returns my call 15 minutes late, it’s because her previous call with an organization in Israel dropped halfway through and it took them a while to reconnect. Such is the peril of functioning in quarantine, even as tech companies exert more power than ever. Rather than having time over the summer to reflect and plan her next book as she intended, Zuboff has been very busy with people wanting to speak with her and do virtual events. It’s part of the reason that for the last four months we’ve been trying to schedule a call, only to have […]
For would-be U.S. lawmaker Jonathan Herzog, financial exclusion isn’t just a talking point, it’s lived experience. When launching his congressional run, he said, Herzog went to Bank of America and Citibank and tried to open a campaign checking account, but was denied. Herzog saw it as an example of the ways centralized institutions can hold power over people, even someone like him who is privileged. That’s in part why he’s stumping for open, permissionless financial systems as part of his campaign. “There’s acute urgency to ensure that Bitcoin and cryptocurrency have mass adoption and have a regulatory framework that enables their […]
At a press conference Sunday Minnesota Department of Public Safety commissioner John Harrington compared the methods police were using to identify protestors to those used to track COVID-19 cases. We’ve “begun analyzing the data of who we have arrested, and begun, actually, doing what you would think as almost pretty similar to our COVID. It’s contact tracing. Who are they associated with? What platforms are they advocating for?” he said. The Department of Public Safety works in partnership with local state and federal law enforcement and emergency response agencies. Public health and privacy experts reacted with alarm, saying that conflating law enforcement and contact […]
Cynthia Lummis was the U.S. Representative for Wyoming from 2009 to 2017, and is now running for U.S. Senate. A budget hawk and founding member of the Freedom Caucus, she first bought bitcoin in 2013 after a tip from her son-in-law. She’s been an advocate ever since. A rancher with sandy blonde hair and a warm chuckle, Lummis spoke over the phone while she was looking out her window at hundreds of heads of steer. Birds were chirping in the background. We discussed what is a good store-of-value, how she thinks about her digital assets and running a senate campaign in […]
U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday, seeking to amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Section 230 prevents social media companies from civil liability for the content posted on them. The order targets Twitter and Facebook after Twitter fact-checked two of the President’s tweets. The text emphasizes Trump’s “commitment to free and open debate on the internet.” Trump said that “we are here today to defend free speech against one of the gravest dangers it has faced in American history” before going on to identify that threat as a “small handful of social media monopolies.” Lawyers who […]
A member of the ID2020 Alliance, which aims to bring digital identities to billions of people who don’t have them, has resigned over the organization’s direction on digital immunity passes and COVID-19. In her resignation email last Friday, Elizabeth Renieris cited ID2020’s opacity, “techno-solutionism,” and corporate influence along with the risks of applying blockchain to immunity passes. Renieris (an occasional CoinDesk contributor) was one of six members of ID2020’s technical advisory committee. She is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and an expert in cross-border data protection and privacy issues. She was previously […]
Citizen, the mobile application that alerts its more than two million users to crime and disaster around them, has launched a contact tracing functionality, called SafeTrace, in the fight against the coronavirus. Now it’s just a matter of the New York City-based startup finding a customer for the product, which has raised privacy red flags among civil liberty lawyers and technologists. A review of internal Citizen documents and the privacy policy related to the contact tracing function gave privacy advocates plenty of causes for concern. These included how data collected through contact tracing would be used and shared via both GPS […]
Zoom, the popular-by-necessity video conferencing service, has acquired crypto key directory Keybase in a bid to bring end-to-end encryption to its paying customers. “We are working on a detailed cryptographic design to be published by May 22 for public review,” tweeted, Alex Stamos, a former chief information security officer of Facebook who joined Zoom as a consultant. “This will be an open and transparent design process as Zoom builds something both unique and impactful to the privacy of millions.” Keybase, the secure messaging and file sharing platform, is taking on a challenging task because multiparty video conferencing is incredibly difficult to […]