Developers attempt to resurrect Namecoin after fundamental flaw discovered
Namecoin, the basis of a decentralised domain name system (DNS), has been found to have a fundamental flaw which allows any .bit domain to be taken over ... by anyone. There are over 103,000 .bit domains, and while evidence suggests none of them have been maliciously taken over, the protocol that governs those domains cannot be trusted until fixed. While Namecoin was a coin that could be traded like any other cryptocurrency, it had a much nobler function in life than being a mere commodity to trade and spend. The raison d'etre of Namecoin was to provide a decentralised and....
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A security flaw in a key cryptographic program has been revealed in the Linux gnuTLS package, an optional component for third-party bitcoin and altcoin client applications. The gnuTLS SSL library is included in many open-source packages such as those in Red Hat, Ubuntu and Debian distributions of Linux. Originally discovered during an audit of gnuTLS for Red Hat, the effects of the flaw are wide-reaching for developers. Explained Ars Technica in its report: "[The] attacks circumvent the most widely used technology to prevent eavesdropping on the Internet, thanks to an extremely critical....
Just prior to the height of the holiday spirit, Namecoin developers got a special surprise in their wallets courtesy of not-so-secret Santa, Discus Fish. Also known as F2Pool, Discus Fish provided the developers with 20,000 Namecoins to fund a reimplementation based on mainline Bitcoin. According to the developer blog, Christmas officially came early for Namecoin. "What's more is that chief Namecoin scientist Daniel Kraft has been working so hard that the code is already usable! Indeed, Discus Fish has been using it in production for a few weeks." The code is still in the experimental....
Michael Dean is host of the Freedom Feens podcast, but more importantly, he was one of the earliest (and loudest) advocates of Namecoin as a decentralized DNS system. But according to Dean, Namecoin has not taken off as he'd hoped, nor will it ever. Why? “It's a pity, because these guys are all absolutely brilliant computer scientists, but they have zero idea how to spread something and get adoption.” Dean told CoinTelegraph where he thinks Namecoin went wrong, what developers of other crypto projects should learn from their mistakes, and his own idea of a decentralized DNS alternative.
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