monerozcash

I mean, at that point, why wouldn't you just rely on a DGA? At least then you wouldn't be flooding block explorer sites with millions or potentially tens of millions of requests per day for your C&C traffic.

Essentially the exact approach you propose has been attempted in far cleverer ways, it did not work very well.

I'm not 100% sure I understand what you're saying, but I guess you're asking how this could be censored?

> you would have to extract the keys from the malware

Yeah? That happens all the time. If you're designing mechanisms like this, it's presumably specifically against adversaries which are doing exactly that.

> you would then have to implement the logic and announce it - then rely on blockchain exploreres actually using that data to block addresses in real time.

Someone would only have to do this once and all your bots would be gone.

Usually the whole point of these mechanisms is C&C resilience, and usually that only matters for really big botnets which face co-ordinated attacks.

Any good C&C system for a bigger botnet would seek to eliminate all meaningful external points of failure for C&C. Using a block explorer, or HN comments, does not achieve that.

There are much lighter alternatives though, why would you want to bother with cryptocurrencies when you could just use DHT?

I mean, even just shipping a Tor client embedded in your malware seems like a much better idea.

>just rely on explorers to query your own wallet

This kind of defeats the point, you get exactly 0 censorship resistance like this.

For what it's worth, that doesn't seem to ever have worked.

> physical address

Not unique to a person

> email address, phone number

Also often not unique to a person, although email addresses probably tend to have much longer lifespans as identifiers than phone numbers.

If the idea is to have a true opt-out system, it's really really difficult to implement given how these systems work.

If you look at the data provided by services like accurint, you'll frequently see the same SSNs used for decades by multiple different individuals, often with IDs from different states with the same name and DoB despite obviously being different people. With how the system works in the US, it can often be impossible for anyone to determine which physical person the SSN was actually originally assigned to.

Same obviously applies to other identifiers you suggested, but even the seemingly good ones are not very good at uniquely identifying people.

That may be, but you can't just keep going to the same US court for warrants.

> Once they finally have a solid court order to seize domains, generally the rate at which they get seized accelerates greatly.

Given that most ccTLDs live in different jurisdictions, that's not really a huge problem.

> I would have assumed that this function mainly migrated onto one of the popular blockchains with clients using one of thousands of available gateways for reading.

Why would you want to use blockchains for this? DHT has been used for distributed c&c for ages and is generally a much lighter option.

But no, P2P C&C is still not really typical. In practice, there's mostly not that much need for it. Also, FWIW, for practically all use-cases P2P C&C discovery is a vastly better option.

You could of course key on things like SSNs, but data brokers wouldn't be very happy about that because there are lots of SSNs tied to multiple different people.

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>Anyone who in 2025 still blindly believes what Donald Trump says is an idiot. And even if that were true, you'd still be an idiot for assuming that Trumps motivations are grounded in reality.

Oh wow, we're in 2026 already.

Not really, no. You'd need an avalanche for that

Based on the pictures of the car, I can't even imagine how you'd get the car stuck there, much less get stuck inside the car.

This was a rural area, but he was a few hundred meters from a big road. Surely he could have just exited the car and walked there.

Refreshing the page fixed that for me on Safari.

I somehow doubt anyone has ever experienced this problem with the 2006 Motorola Razr

Yeah, I seriously doubt that there's a single car with which this would actually be difficult to accomplish.

Even if you can't pull the modem or the sim card (less common now) directly, you can certainly always find and disable the antenna connection.

Any decent shop will be able to do this for a reasonable price.