Flutterby™! : Malware on the blockchain

I've long been of the "own your own data" mindset, as is obvious from this blog that's been going for two and a half decades, and I've long thought that a distributed P2P sort of system that didn't depend on the DNS system for identity, and didn't require explicit hosting, would be a good thing. Decades of link rot have me thinking about archives, the centralization of social media has me thinking about how much of my conversations are guided in directions that "drive engagement" and sell to advertisers.

The growing Fediverse and Mastodon phenomenon are re-surfacing a lot of the issues involved with distributed social media, and the cryptocurrency fad displayed a lot of the problems P2P stuff, but security and safety are filtering higher to the list.

Krebs on Security: The Fake Browser Update Scam Gets a Makeover, on how blockchains are being used to host malware:

“These contracts offer innovative ways to build applications and processes,” Tal wrote along with his Guardio colleague Oleg Zaytsev. “Due to the publicly accessible and unchangeable nature of the blockchain, code can be hosted ‘on-chain’ without the ability for a takedown.”

Beginning to think the Internet was a mistake.