Brief items

• Partition attack: Any ISP can partition the Bitcoin network by hijacking few IP prefixes.
• Delay attack: Any ISP carrying traffic from and/or to a Bitcoin node can delay its block propagation by 20 minutes while staying completely under the radar.

The Internet has turned that thinking upside-down. Our cell phones know who we talk to and, if we're talking via text or e-mail, what we say. They track our location constantly, so they know where we live and work. Because they're the first and last thing we check every day, they know when we go to sleep and when we wake up. Because everyone has one, they know whom we sleep with. And because of how those phones work, all that information is naturally shared with third parties.

More generally, all our data is literally stored on computers belonging to other people. It's our e-mail, text messages, photos, Google docs, and more ­ all in the cloud. We store it there not because it's unimportant, but precisely because it is important.

The stated purpose of this data collection includes gathering insights into how users interact with websites and discovering broken or confusing pages. However the extent of data collected by these services far exceeds user expectations; text typed into forms is collected before the user submits the form, and precise mouse movements are saved, all without any visual indication to the user. This data can't reasonably be expected to be kept anonymous. In fact, some companies allow publishers to explicitly link recordings to a user's real identity.

So to you, the big win is when the access is _stopped_. That's the end of the story from a security standpoint - at least if you are one of those bad security people who don't care about anything else.

But from a developer standpoint, things _really_ are not done. Not even close. From a developer standpoint, the bad access was just a symptom, and it needs to be reported, and debugged, and fixed, so that the bug actually gets corrected.

So from a developer standpoint, the end point of hardening is just the starting point, and when _you_ think you're done, we're really only getting started.

And from a _user_ standpoint, it's something else altogether. For a user, pretty much EVERY SINGLE TIME, it wasn't actually a security attack at all, it was just a latent bug that got exposed. And the keyword here is that it was _latent_, and things used to work, and the hardening patch did something - probably fairly drastic - to turn it from "dangerous" to "benign" from a security perspective.

Ever since I read that, I've been collecting my own ridiculously long routes. ssh bouncing from country to country, making letters I type travel all the way around the world until they echo back on my screen. Tasting the latency that's one of the only ways we can viscerally understand just how big a tangle of wires humanity has built.

Yesterday, I surpassed all that, and I did it in a way that hearkens right back to the original story. I had two computers, 20 feet apart, I wanted one to talk to the other, and the route between the two ended up traveling not around the Earth, but almost the distance to the Moon.

[...]

• And finally, after 178000 and change miles of data transfer, the letter I'd typed a full second ago appeared on my screen.

tl;dr: You can pry 7c00h and INT xx from my cold, dead hands.

Okay, to be specific (and perhaps a touch less alarmist), the power supplies on cheap, untested devices are often a bit on the dreadful side, and that's where a risk of things bursting into flames resides. Beyond that, we assure you that the Kodi software remains friendly, docile, free-range, and free of any killer instinct.