Good read.
“Perhaps most damning, leaked screenshots revealed more information about Twitter’s secretive abilities to control accounts and narratives on the site. The leaked internal dashboards (evidence of which Twitter is aggressively deleting from the site) contain keywords like “trends blacklist” and “search blacklist,” seemingly an admission that Twitter does exercise some editorial judgment when it comes to which concepts receive algorithmic boosting and which don’t.
The hack plainly illuminates issues that cryptocurrency and Web 3.0 enthusiasts have been raising for years. “Trusted third parties are security holes” isn’t just a slogan; it’s a concept that millions of people will have intuitively grasped for the first time yesterday. The sheer centralization at play evidenced by the godmode key is striking.
One wonders why it’s even possible in the first place for Twitter employees to commandeer any account on the platform. Everyone knows that Twitter is the political discussion platform of choice for world leaders. Had the attacker been more inclined towards chaos rather than entrepreneurship, they could have used their access to contrive an international incident among hostile nations.
Additionally, the accidental reveal of Twitter’s long-rumored deboosting tools will intensify the view among critics that Twitter is a partisan, editorializing service rather than the neutral one it claims to be. As many have pointed out, it invites governments to pressure or infiltrate the platform to obtain efficient tools to control speech.
A user-owned and operated social internet built on a public key infrastructure is an absolute necessity, if we are to resist tyrants both in the public and the private sector.”
“The social media platform confirmed that hackers responsible for the massive breach of high-profile figures’ accounts had conducted a ‘coordinated social engineering attack to gain access to internal systems and tools.‘
We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf. We’re looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted or information they may have accessed.
Employee admin panels targeted in the hack have significant access to a variety of tools to control the affected accounts, including posting messages on their behalf and changing the verification phone number and email address.
Sounds bad that a Twitter developer can just login to my account and tweet anything, read my private stuff and all.”
See Also: Chainalysis and CipherTrace Confirm FBI Investigation
See Also: Coinbase, Binance, BitGo May Know Hackers ID
See Also: Hidden Messages Found in Transactions to Twitter Hack Bitcoin Address
“The pandemic forced Congress to look at new technology for money in a sweeping way.
We have seen almost a 180 in that conversation. The pandemic has forced congress to go digital.
There is now consensus among policymakers that it is a good idea to upgrade our money, and that is progress.”
“One big factor was MakerDAO shifting the stability fee (SF) down to 0% following the mid-March crypto crash. The Dai Savings Rate (DSR), which was previously as high as 8%, also fell to zero as Maker battled to keep its dollar peg at the right place.
The move saw earnings for Maker fall from over $1.2 million in the first quarter down to around $150k for the second. Kyber was the highest earner for the period with $634,000 generated over the three months, while Compound came in a close second with just under $625,000.”
“Despite seeing very little controversy, the community is still debating on the proper procedure on how to implement it more than six months after the BIPs were published.
The issues stem from the necessity of conducting a soft fork that would be accepted by all relevant stakeholders. According to a Reddit thread pinned in the r/Bitcoin community, ‘the biggest problem with activating Taproot is PTSD from the previous softfork, SegWit.’
Despite the relatively uncontroversial and limited set of features, Taproot may take months — if not years — to be activated. The maximum length for this procedure would be 42 months, or three years and a half.”
“The United States Food and Drug Administration released a blueprint and pilot study for food safety.
The technologies mentioned include artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, sensor technologies and blockchain, and are looked at in relation to four topics: tech-enabled traceability, prevention and outbreak response, retail modernization and food safety culture.“
“This integration aims to provide a solution for Stellar end-users to store private keys on selected Galaxy smartphones.
Developers from the Stellar ecosystem will be able to create blockchain-related apps and services for Samsung Galaxy smartphone owners.”
The Disrupt 