No; Trail of Bits has always had multiple internal groups, including an OSS engineering group that does security and performance engineering. We still do plenty of audits as a company; you can see recent work on that front here[1] :-).
In addition to what Will posted, published reports for blockchain projects tend to be skewed compared to our other groups.
Blockchain clients tend to want to publish the report, but that isn't true for our business lines/projects/clients that are more interesting to HN's audience.
As someone who actually reads the Economist weekly, I would like to disagree. Also, _of course_ there was a series of articles on Qatar in 2022. Not all of them were positive, mind you.
Brendan Eich is also the inventor of JavaScript and the former CTO of Mozilla.
While I don't support Prop 8 personally, I don't think we should judge technical products on political opinions of their author. You may think it's funny to advocate for bans and boycotts, until the other side does it too and we get a world split in 2 (or more).
There is nothing funny here at all. I'm so cynical about all of it that, as a many years long Brave user, I'm actively discouraging people from using it, because if Brave ever has enough users to be a problem for adtech, it will be destroyed. So if the crypto stink or ancient crimes against the progressive project can help forestall this for a few years, then at least they're good for something.
As for Eich and JavaScript; technically, I doubt more that 0.1% of working coders are fit to lace his boots. Myself included.
> While I don't support Prop 8 personally, I don't think we should judge technical products on political opinions of their author. You may think it's funny to advocate for bans and boycotts, until the other side does it too and we get a world split in 2 (or more).
Eh. It's one to not knowingly support a bad person, e.g. if they kept their opinions to themselves. But once an individual has made their positions crystal clear, it's a lot harder to morally support their innovations. Someone can do great work in tech, but if they are a known total piece of shit, I may/probably will avoid their products. I find a lot of tech-types try hard to decouple the humanity aspect from the innovation aspect - I presume this is a veiled attempt to get an "be an asshole" pass. Reality is people won't want to be around us if we suck as a humans, no matter how much code any of us put down.
Brendan Eich was against Gay Marriage at the same time that Barrack Obama himself was against Gay Marriage. A detail often forgotten in the rehashing of old grievances.
IMO, calling Brendan evil or bad is the kind of moral shortcut that Progressives love taking. A microcosm of the election, really: all the capable moderates were effectively canceled or marginalized by self-righteous radicals, who deemed that the only "good" candidate was someone who couldn't even win a primary.
Report which you don't get from centralized exchanges. So you have to trust them and they should somehow be liable for the provenance of what they sell to you.
Probably most CEX don't allocate UTXOs upon buying, but only for withdrawals
If anything, from my personal experience, "crypto" brought financial resources to minorities, especially PoC in the US. Some of them would never had that chance in the traditional world if you identify to that cause.
It's not "old fashioned", I think you are being fed propaganda by these NGOs.
Sadly, same goes for a huge part of the mainstream media that becomes an echo chamber for them (Guardian, NYT for example that used to be reference of truth but lost that status).
Don't take my word for it, please take the time to read opposite views and try to honestly make your own opinion.
I didn't say it was old fashioned, I said I was old fashioned because I can't cheer for the government effectively 'disappearing' large numbers of people. In the US we've enthusiastically taken up arms against governments which did this type of thing. We have parades to honor people who died fighting against it.
Amnesty International isn't editorializing and this isn't a remotely controversial claim: the roundups happened via emergency powers which, by design, denied due process. It's not a secret, El Salvador wasn't trying to hide this.
The secret isn't that El Salvador is breaking human rights law, the secret is that El Salvador is an amazing place to visit and it won't break the bank. I can say first hand that Mexico and Ecuador have become sketchy; you can't feel completely safe anywhere IMO in those countries.
God you're dense. Who said I visited El Salvador? Even if I did, judge much? Are you on the way to jump off a cliff because of the arms we're gifting Israel?
If you wholeheartedly trust the government, this is obviously the way to go.
The problem, especially in Latin America, is there's a long history of guys taking power, "doing whatever needs to be done to get the bad guys," and then...never giving up power. Usually killing lots of people who might get in their way. Often with full support of backers in the US government.
> end result is a lot of good people’s lives are inconvenienced for the sake of protecting the rights of these bastards
To be fair, criminals in El Salvador weren’t getting off on legal technicalities. They were never seeing a court due to police corruption. Bukele had to be extreme because he had to sidestep the police-justice system. That leaves federal police and the military, coarse tools.
> See for example shoplifters who just take things off a shelf and walk out knowing no one will stop them because the law says you can’t go fuck them up.
I never understood how some parts of US just allow that. I live in a country where we have very poor property protection laws, and police still gets routinely called for underage kids stealing chocolates, actually comes, and a whole procedure is done, including parents, a judge, etc.
Influenced by movies, I always assumed that a shopkeeper in US would just do the cowboy thing (I know i'm exaggerating a bit) and take out the gun and make the thief put the stuff back, or worse. Watching videos of whole gangs of people just coming inside a store, filling their baskets/carts and leaving while noone does anything seemed so surreal. In a rich country, you'd expect property to be protected, but it doesn't seem so. Even in some of the poorest countries in the world, something like this wouldn't happen, because even random people in the street would go out of their way to stop (and beat) a thief, and the police wouldn't be arresting a passerby for tripping an escaping thief or tackling them to the ground, but would focus on the thief.
I mean sure... allowing people to steal offsets the "social security" from the government to retailers, but the safety issue remains.
> I never understood how some parts of US just allow that.
Most jurisdictions have 'shopkeeper's privilege' and stopping a shoplifter is 100% OK. I think most large businesses don't expect or even allow hourly employees to assume the risk of stopping shoplifters because, to insurers, that math doesn't math. If an employee is required to chase and restrain a shoplifter, there's a good chance they'll get injured, become exposed to the money incinerator that is the US health care system, etc. Maybe the supposed shoplifter didn't actually steal anything, but the employee thought they did and injured them while restraining them. So you could have an injured employee and an innocent injured shopper. Now you're paying multiple six figures for health care claims over a $20 steak that wasn't stolen.
"Do your own research" is a pretty thin rebuttal to "here's a source by a well regarded NGO".
And if you are saying Amnesty International is feeding propaganda through the mainstream media, that's also going to need some credible sources. They are generally considered a fairly highly factual organization.
Not just that, the tradeoffs in developing countries are different on the ground. They have to do practical decision making based on limited resources and issues. The alternative is simply criminals taking over.
Do you have evidence that basic human rights and due process is unusually expensive and not feasible for developing countries ?
Because that doesn't seem to be the case given we've seen much of the world become developed over the last 50 years. And almost all have a functioning judicial system.
It is not only in developing countries, even in developed countries it is a bit of a problem, the rise of “far right” in Europe etc is an example to this.
* Latin America has a sad history of using what's been called "enforced disappearance" [0]. It's sickening that it seems to be happening again in El Salvador in 2024.
* There's no justification for ethnic or ideologic cleansings of any type, period. No, making tourists happy is not a good reason for state terrorism (nothing is).
* Bukele is untrustworthy. See "liquid ideology" on [1], just for a start.
Imho, they are one of the best auditors out there for smart contracts. Wouldn't be surprising to see some of these talented teams find bigger markets.