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NFTs are still a thing?

I thought they were ugly, stupid, and pointless a few years ago, but apparently, there’s still a market for them.

Wait until they realize they don’t own them after all — they all belong to Amazon, and when Amazon sneezes, the bored apes all curl up and die.

Amazon owns everything, and the recent loss of service also meant that the Canvas application we use for teaching was having seizures, too. Fortunately, I wasn’t teaching this term, and even if I was, I go to class with all my teaching stuff stored locally on my laptop. Because I’m not a dumbass.

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Comments

  1. beholder says

    Bored apes fell for a silly fad. The technology it uses is interesting, though, and occasionally useful.

  3. killyosaur says

    Yeah the block chain continues to fail to find a use outside of speculative “currency” or the NFTs. a lot of it comes down to the promises not living up to the realities of the problems they are claiming to solve (smart contracts seem dumber than just regular contracts, I am not storing medical information on the block chain, no company worth its salt is going to put its distribution network on a public resource they can’t control, and for what it is worth, using a block chain for any of that is more costly than the solutions that already exist and work exceedingly well…)

    As to the PZ’s comment on Canvas, that’s nice but us remote and online students don’t necessarily have the luxury of flying to the college campus where our classes our taught IRL and attending classes. It’s not just about being smart or dumb…

  4. beholder says

    @3 RR Rabbit

    Append-only data structures have additional uses outside “The block chain”.

    soatok (dot) blog /2024/06/06/towards-federated-key-transparency
    soatok (dot) blog /2024/08/21/federated-key-transparency-project-update

    Soatok describes a protocol they’re working on for end-to-end-encrypted private messages in the Fediverse (Mastodon, etc.) They seem to know what they’re doing.

    Why is Public Key Management Hard?

    In a centralized service (think: Twitter, Facebook, etc.), this is actually much easier to build: Shove your public keys into a database, and design your client-side software to trust whatever public key your server gives them. Bob’s your uncle, pack it up and go home.

    Unfortunately, it’s kind of stupid to build anything that way.

    If you explicitly trust the server, the server could provide the wrong public key (i.e., one for which the server knows the corresponding secret key) and you’ll be none the wiser. This makes it trivial for the server to intercept and read your messages.

    If your users are trusting you regardless, they’re probably just as happy if you don’t encrypt at the endpoint at all (beyond using TLS, but transport encryption is table stakes for any online service so nevermind that).

    But let’s say you wanted to encrypt between peers anyway, because you’re feeling generous (or don’t want to field a bunch of questionably legal demands for user data by law enforcement; a.k.a. the Snapchat threat model).

    You could improve endpoint trust by shoving all of your users’ public keys into an append-only data structure; i.e. key transparency, like WhatsApp proposed in 2023:

    And, to be perfectly clear, key transparency is a damn good idea.

    …

    Oh, and best of all? You can get all these wins without propping up any cryptocurrency bullshit either.

    We need to design a specific kind of server that speaks a limited set of the ActivityPub protocol.

    I say “limited” because it will only not support editing or deleting messages provided by another instance. It will only append data.

  5. beholder says

    @3 killyosaur

    I am not storing medical information on the block chain

    I wouldn’t store it there either, but consider this: unless you’re storing that info yourself, what makes you think it’s being stored securely at all? Medical info notoriously has to be handed around to dozens of private third parties, few of which are interested in crypto beyond legal requirements. Chances are, they met HIPAA compliance by encrypting your medical info and storing the key unencrypted in the database for easy retrieval, which means anyone with access to the database can also decrypt it.

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