So, I had a interesting thought about a possible use for the blockchain. One thing it could be used for would be store known good signatures for applications – in this particular case, each time someone chose to run a application, you would look up the most recent block with that signature on it and you’d also run some hashes. As more and more hashes got run, the signature would become associated with a block starting with more and more zeros – the idea here is instead of letting Microsoft push a list of signatures as good (and after all, why should we trust them? They gave us windows 10, not to mention a long list of other stinkers) the group at large would decide which signatures were trustworthy. The idea here is that a attacker ideally would not be able to get a large enough bank of computers to do enough hashing to ‘legitimize’ a signature – you could also add things like a restriction of how many hashes per IP address per day could be registered etc.<\/p>\n
I would like for us to have some way of knowing which binaries we could trust, I just don’t want to have to trust vendors we already know we can’t trust (i.e. Microsoft) for those signatures.<\/p>\n
Another thought that came to me is how much better the world’s software would be if every ten years (say) everyone was *required* to release their source code and then anyone could develop it further. We’d end up with competing companies developing operating systems that ineroperated – it’s good that we have competing companies writing operating systems but it’s less than ideal that they can’t all run the same binaries (for example)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So, I had a interesting thought about a possible use for the blockchain. One thing it could be used for would be store known good signatures for applications – in this particular case, each time someone chose to run a application, you would look up the most recent block with that signature on it and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4088"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4088"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4088\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4089,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4088\/revisions\/4089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}