Author Archives: Aaron 'BingoBoingo' Rogier

Some Other People Sentenced This Month in US Courts

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The Smith family kindercageA few hours ago Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to a life of incarceration for convictions related to operating a website. Let's look at some other sentences handed down by American courts recently:

Terry and Victoria Smith (archived) were sentenced to seven years in prison by a St Charles County, Missouri court for keeping their six year old child with autism in an excrement filled cage. The judge in the case, Ted house also imposed a fine of five hundred dollars on each parent. Back in 2010 police, paramedics, and a case worker visited the Smith's home after receiving a tip through a child abuse hotline and found the Smith's autistic son locked in the cage. The seven year sentence is the maximum that could be imposed in this case. Continue reading →

Gavin Threatens to Quit Bitcoin Development and Join Hearn's Fork

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Today on the Sourceforge hosted Bitcoin-development mailing list Gavin Andresen has threatened to leave his present group of Bitcoin software developers over their objections to his demands for a rapid hardfork of the Bitcoin network. In the event his demands are not met Gavin plans to join Mike Hearn's Bitcoin-XT project which is a fork of the Bitcoin client where Hearn implements patches that Gavin's current affiliated developers find too risky to implement in any mainline Bitcoin client. If Gavin defects to Bitcoin-XT he plans to work with Hearn to lobby merchants, miners, and businesses to move to Bitcoin-XT. Previously Mike Hearn was responsible for the March 2013 Bitcoin network crisis. The full text of Gavin's message is mirrored below for posterity. Continue reading →

Former US House Speaker Indicted on Attempting to Evade Financial Surveillance

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Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1999 through 2007, was indicted today on charges of structuring bank withdrawals  to avoid mandatory bank reporting and lying about the purpose of the withdrawals to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hastert is alleged to have made the cash withdrawals to "compensate for and conceal" some past transgression against an unnamed individual which ended with Hastert and the other party reaching a privately negotiated settlement. Prior to his career in politics Hastert was a teacher at Yorkville High School in Illinois where he additionally coached wrestling and football. Continue reading →

IRS Confirms Breach Reported 2 Months Ago

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The United States Internal Revenue Service has now confirmed that a March 30th report by Brian Krebs where he revealed an online portal operated by the IRS for disseminating tax transcripts had been leaking personal information and tax records to parties who ought not to have been authorized to view them. According to the the IRS more than one hundred thousand records were accessed in this manner. This news follows an epic volume of falsified tax returns filed this year sending tax overpayments to fraudsters to the point where major tax preparation companies had to stop handling state tax returns. The gravity of this leak's potential impact on the tenth of a million affected persons can not be underestimated considering the manner in which the fiat state handles identity: Continue reading →

Former Vault of Satoshi Customers Can't Collect

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The Brantford Expositor reports that Vault of Satoshi still has a number of customers whose funds have not been returned, even though Vault of Satoshi ceased operations back in February. Expositor reported Susan Gamble along with general allegations against Vault of Satoshi's operators present the story of a customer, Scott Campbell: Continue reading →

Ulbricht to be Sentenced Friday

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PreetWhile the world waits to see what might happen to the Ulbricht case over the likely next decade and a half it spends traversing appellate courts, Ulbricht must first pass the formality of sentencing after the show trial staged for him by Preet Bharara. Ulbricht won't be sentenced until this Friday, May 29th but the prosecution's continued shenanigans began a new nearly a month ago when Bharara's team introduced six overdose deaths they would like to pin on Ulbricht, but apparently weren't confident enough to present at trial in a manner reminiscent of that time they forgot to mention they were getting ready to arrest a number of Federal agents who investigated Ulbricht. Continue reading →

Lawsky Moves to Private Practice

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New York Department of Financial Services superintendent Ben Lawsky is stepping down to pursure a career in private practice. Some time in the near future the New York Department of Financial Services is anticipated to pass some variant of the previously revised "BitLicense" regulation removing their jurisdiction from any relevance with concern to Bitcoin's future.

St Louis Federal Reserve Bank DNS Hijacked Last Month

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This week the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis confirmed earlier rumours that they had been victims of a domain name server hijacking attack which compromised a number of user credentials related to their research services and products. The Bank has responded by resetting user passwords and emailing subscribers to alert them to the fact their credentials are likely in the hands of the hijackers.

Weak 4096 Bit RSA Key in Strong Set Factored, More Factored Keys Follow

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Update: No Such lAbs reports that other Phuctored keys have valid signatures.

Update 2: More factored RSA Keys and their purported owners have been disclosed

This morning the Phuctor operated by No Such lAbs broke its first RSA key. The compromised key in question which was a 4096 bit key which had a subkey divisible by 231, which is further divisible by 3, 7, and 11. This factorization was shortly followed by two other factorizations of identifiable keys. Each identifiable key has a companion which is similarly weak but they have yet to be identified. Continue reading →