Re: e-gold exchange
At 07:22 AM 5/31/2005, Tyler Durden wrote: OK...what;s the best exchange service for transferring dollars (perhaps via paypal or credit cards) into egold? I haven't found anybody that'll take credit cards or paypal without either major hurdles or extremely high fees - there's too much risk of fraud including reneging on credit card charges. However, I've been very pleased with Goldage.net - they've got several mechanisms for paying them, including walking in to one of half a dozen major US banks and making a deposit to their account, as well as a few varieties of wire transfer. They're a transaction-based service rather than an account-based service, and support a variety of online gold currencies. I don't use e-gold myself - I get so much spam purporting to be from them that it's much simpler to discard all of it, since 99.9% is phishing. But a certain anonymous person with whom I might or might not be be familiar was able to use Goldage's online interface to set up a transaction, hand some dead presidents to a Bank that's in America, and a day or two later the transaction cleared and there was a deposit to an electronic currency company's account, which could allegedly be used to pay a merchant. Fees were pretty low, though for relatively small transactions the minimum fee is the main concern, rather than the percentages that matter more on larger transactions.
Fwd: Order of an integer
--- Cletus Emmanuel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Two conjectures (or are they?): 1. The order of an integer 'a' modulo P^m = P^(m-1)*(Order of a mod P); where P is an odd prime . 2. If a, m, and n are elements of Z and (a,mn) = 1, then Order of a mod mn = QR/(Q,R); where Q = Order of a mod m and R = Order of a mod n and (Q,R) is the greatest common divisor function. For example: Example 1:Let a =2 and P=7. Then the order of 2 mod 7 = 3 and the order of 2 mod 7^3 = 7^2(3)= 147. Example 2: The Order of 2 mod 11^2 = 11*(Order of 2 mod 11) = 110 Example 3: The Order of 2 mod (3*7) = (Order of 2 mod 3)*(Order of 2 mod 7)/(U,V) = 2*3/1 = 6; where U = Order of 2 mod 3 and V = Order of 2 mod 7. Are any of these two statements known? If so, could one point me in the direction? If not can anyone prove or disprove? ---Cletus __ Discover Yahoo! Find restaurants, movies, travel and more fun for the weekend. Check it out! http://discover.yahoo.com/weekend.html
Re: Trojan horse attack involving many major Israeli companies, executives
J.A. Terranson wrote: So, how long before someone, possibly even me, points out that all Checkpoint software is built in Israel? Nicely put, but I think not quite fair. From friends in financial and other companies in the states and otherwise, I hear that Trojans are very common there as well. In fact, based on my biased judgement and limited exposure, my impression is that security practice is much better in Israeli companies - both providers and users of IT - than in comparable companies in most countries. For example, in my `hall of shame` (link below) you'll find many US and multinational companies which don't protect their login pages properly with SSL (PayPal, Chase, MS, ...). I've found very few Israeli companies, and of the few I've found, two actually acted quickly to fix the problem - which is rare! Most ignored my warning, and few sent me coupons :-) [seriously] Could it be that such problems are more often covered-up in other countries? Or maybe that the stronger awareness in Israel also implies more attackers? I think both conclusions are likely. I also think that this exposure will further increase awareness among Israeli IT managers and developers, and hence improve the security of their systems. -- Best regards, Amir Herzberg Associate Professor Department of Computer Science Bar Ilan University http://AmirHerzberg.com New: see my Hall Of Shame of Unprotected Login pages: http://AmirHerzberg.com/shame.html
Re: Trojan horse attack involving many major Israeli companies, executives
Amir Herzberg wrote: Nicely put, but I think not quite fair. From friends in financial and other companies in the states and otherwise, I hear that Trojans are very common there as well. In fact, based on my biased judgement and limited exposure, my impression is that security practice is much better in Israeli companies - both providers and users of IT - than in comparable companies in most countries. For example, in my `hall of shame` (link below) you'll find many US and multinational companies which don't protect their login pages properly with SSL (PayPal, Chase, MS, ...). I've found very few Israeli companies, and of the few I've found, two actually acted quickly to fix the problem - which is rare! Most ignored my warning, and few sent me coupons :-) [seriously] Could it be that such problems are more often covered-up in other countries? Or maybe that the stronger awareness in Israel also implies more attackers? I think both conclusions are likely. I also think that this exposure will further increase awareness among Israeli IT managers and developers, and hence improve the security of their systems. there is the story of the (state side) financial institution that was outsourcing some of its y2k remediation and failed to perform due diligence on the (state side) lowest bidder ... until it was too late and they were faced with having to deploy the software anyway. one of the spoofs of SSL ... was originally it was supposed to be used for the whole shopping experience from the URL the enduser entered, thru shopping, checkout and payment. webservers found that with SSL they took a 80-90% performance hit on their thruput ... so they saved the use of SSL until checkout and payment. the SSL countermeasure to MITM-attack is that the URL the user entered is checked against the URL in the webserver certificate. However, the URL the users were entering weren't SSL/HTTPS ... they were just standard stuff ... and so there wasn't any countermeasure to MITM-attack. If the user had gotten to a spoofed MITM site ... they could have done all their shopping and then clicked the checkout button ... which might provide HTTPS/SSL. however, if it was a spoofed site, it is highly probable that the HTTPS URL provided by the (spoofed site) checkout button was going to match the URL in any transmitted digital certificate. So for all, intents and purposes .. most sites make very little use of https/ssl as countermeasure for MITM-attacks ... simply encryption as countermeasure for skimming/harvesting (evesdropping). in general, if the naive user is clicking on something that obfuscates the real URL (in some case they don't even have to obfuscate the real URL) ... then the crooks can still utilize https/ssl ... making sure that they have a valid digital certificate that matches the URL that they are providing. the low-hanging fruit of fraud ROI ... says that the crooks are going to go after the easiest target, with the lowest risk, and the biggest bang-for-the buck. that has mostly been the data-at-rest transaction files. then it is other attacks on either of the end-points. attacking generalized internet channels for harvesting/skimming appears to be one of the lowest paybacks for the effort. in other domains, there have been harvesting/skimming attacks ... but again mostly on end-points ... and these are dedicated/concentrated environments where the only traffic ... is traffic of interest (any extraneous/uninteresting stuff has already been filtered out).
Re: /. [Intel Adds DRM to New Chips]
Le samedi 28 mai 2005 à 21:53 +0200, Eugen Leitl a écrit : > Link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/28/1718200 > Posted by: Zonk, on 2005-05-28 17:37:00 > >from the get-you-where-you-live dept. >Badluck writes "Microsoft and the entertainment industry's holy grail >of controlling copyright through the motherboard has moved a step >closer with Intel Corp. now embedding [1]digital rights management >within in its latest dual-core processor Pentium D and accompanying >945 chipset. Officially launched worldwide on the May 26, the new >offerings come [2]DRM -enabled and will, at least in theory, allow >copyright holders to prevent unauthorized copying and distribution of >copyrighted materials from the motherboard rather than through the >operating system as is currently the case..." [3]The Inquirer has the >story as well. > > References > >1. http://www.digitmag.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=4915 >2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management >3. http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23548 it seem more compagny are going to put protection and drm in hardware, to avoid bypassing or cracking it. I ask myself from times about such systems bypassing with emulators use. The role of an emulator is to work "as" a real cpu. What would be the usability of such an emulator with cpu-drm enabled emulation ? The emulator work with real instructions of drm-cpu, the os belive as a real one. But the emulation software can give access of such drm datas to softwares running in the host os to access or modify them. What people here that certainly have better experiences than me in crypto think about such system ? Is it a possible flow in new drm protected systems ? -- "Perhaps one day "computer science" will, like Yugoslavia, get broken up into its component parts. That might be a good thing. Especially if it meant independence for my native land, hacking." (hackers and Painters) [ Paul Graham ]