On 3 January 2014 05:45, Troy Benjegerdes <hozer@hozed.org> wrote:

On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 05:48:06AM -0800, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 5:39 AM, Drak <drak@zikula.org> wrote:
> > The NSA has the ability, right now to change every download of bitcoin-qt,
> > on the fly and the only cure is encryption.

No, the only cure is the check the hashes. We should know something
about hashes here. TLS is a big pile of 'too big to audit'. Spend
a couple of satoshis and put the hash of the source tar.gz and the
binaries in the blockchain. Problem solved.

Which is why, as pointed out several times at 30c3 by several renowned figures, why cryptography has remained squarely outside of mainstream use. It needs to just work and until you can trust the connection and what the end point sends you, automatically, it's a big fail and the attack vectors are many.

<sarcasm>I can just see my mother or grandma manually checking the hash of a download... </sarcasm>

Drak