@adlrocha - TWIL#3: This Week I Learned
Virtual worlds, vulnerabilities, zk-SNARKs, and lots of good papers.
Everyone needs a break, and this week is one of those weeks where I couldn’t find the energy to write a full-fledged publication. This week I was more into hacking than writing, but that doesn’t mean that I have stopped reading. This is my compilation of suggested readings for this week.
🛰️ Towards a New Internet
The Open Metaverse OS: Enter the brand new market of virtual worlds. The Open Metaverse OS is a shared and open operating system of sorts building upon the success of decentralised protocols, in particular DeFi and NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) emerging in the The Web 3 Stack based on blockchains and crypto-assets. Check out the whitepaper to make a better sense of what the Metaverse is. (Obviously I had to kick-off the publication with NFTs, did you know a NFT was sold this week for $69 million, crazy! 🤯 )
An updated “brief introduction” to zk-SNARKs by Vitalik Buterin. (I love how this guy explains maths).
Optical fiber programmable quantum circuits: Trapped ions are not sexy anymore, a team of researchers from Xanadu managed to produce a single integrated optical chip that generates eight qubits.
⚠️ Vulnerabilities Ahead
This folk managed to hack into Apple, Microsoft and a dozen of other companies using their dependencies in a really clever way.
An Exploration of JSON Interoperability Vulnerabilities: If you use JSON for the communication between your different microservices, be careful, you could be sharing inconsistencies and exposing certain vulnerabilities.
📰 The Papers of the Week
Flash Boys 2.0: Frontrunning, Transaction Reordering, and Consensus Instability in Decentralized Exchanges: “Blockchains, and specifically smart contracts, have promised to create fair and transparent trading ecosystems. Unfortunately, we show that this promise has not been met. We document and quantify the widespread and rising deployment of arbitrage bots in blockchain systems, specifically in decentralized exchanges”.
Scale invariant robot behavior with fractals: This one is not in my domain of expertise, but if you like complexity theory, fractals and robots, you’re gonna love it. “Robots deployed at orders of magnitude different size scales, and that retain the same desired behavior at any of those scales, would greatly expand the environments in which the robots could operate.”
A now a selection of papers about privacy I’ve been reading lately:
The Free Haven Project: Distributed Anonymous Storage Service: An oldie but goodie about privacy. Have a look also to all the papers from the Free Haven Project.
Comprehensive Anonymity Trilemma: User Coordination is not enough
💸 xkcd of the week!
💸 The Currency of Trust
And let’s wrap up the week with a pieces to make you think! See you next week!
Compensation as a Reflection of Values: Would this work in every company?
The Currency of Trust: Companies need either trust or transparency. This talk is eye-opening.