Author Archives: Aaron 'BingoBoingo' Rogier

Judge: Preet Bharara's Brinkmanship Endangers Fair Trials

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PreetPreet Bharara, the United States premier inquisitor for prosecuting Bitcoin cases, was reprimanded by United States District Court Judge Valerie Caproni for endangering the former New York Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver's right to a fair trial by making public statements endangering his right to a fair trial by jury. Caproni in ruling on a motion by the defense offered:

"In this case, the U.S. Attorney,1 while castigating politicians in Albany for playing fast and loose with the ethical rules that govern their conduct, strayed so close to the edge of the rules governing his own conduct that Defendant Sheldon Silver has a non-frivolous argument that he fell over the edge to the Defendant’s prejudice."

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  1. Bharara  ↩

Obama Initiative Promotes Linkrot

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More than one thousand websites in the United States .gov top level domain have gone offline since a 2011 memorandum (archived) issued by the President Obama with the stated intent of "improving online services." While the utility of many of the particular domains and sites hosted on them is debatable, Obama's aggressive culling has the primary effect of making the internet presence of the United States government less useful and far less reliable. Continue reading →

Vessenes Foundation Attempts Janssens Rebuttal

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This weekend Vessenes' Bitcoin Foundation board member Oliver Janssens offered a scathing critique of the "non-profit" organization.  The attempted rebuttal (archived) rather than refuting, merely edged Janssens's points. The foundation's four points are offered in condensed form below: Continue reading →

Tewksbury Police Pay Ransom

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Local weekly newspaper the Town Crier reports that Tewksbury, Massachusetts police have paid a $500 ransom after a version of the CryptoLocker ransomware encrypted essential files and rendered their network unusable. The initial infection was determined to have happened on December 7th when it entered the police department's network through the computer of the Officer in Charge. The malware's presence was not discovered until the next day. Continue reading →

TI-89 Bitcoin Diceware Tool Released

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Matt Whitlock has recently released a diceware tool for generating Bitcoin address and private key pairs on the venerable Texas Instruments TI-89 portable general purpose portable computer commonly marketed as a "graphing calculator." The software takes input derived from analog dice rolls. The source code, written in C, is available here and it compiles with TIGCC. Whitlock previously worked on the Lamassu Bitcoin ATM. A video where Whitlock demonstrates the key generation process at 10x speed is embedded below: Continue reading →

Silk Road Sealed Document Dump Day (Full Text)

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Today Cryptome released 122 pages of documents (local mirror plaintext) related to Ross Ulbricht's Silk Road trial which had been sealed due to the ongoing investigation of Carl Mark Force IV. The order to unseal (local mirror) came into effect with his arrest. For what it is worth Preet Bharara's minions can be seen pleading to Judge Forrest that the terminally corrupted Baltimore investigation some how touches their investigation in no way. The full extracted text of the unsealed documents is below: Continue reading →

Obama Orders War On Computing And Bitcoin With New "Emergency" Order (Full Text)

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Today United States President Barack Hussein Obama has issued an executive order under which he claims emergency power in order to direct the Treasury Department to take action against the property of persons engaged in "malicious" computing related activity. The description of activities determined to be malicious under the order includes is so vague as to potentially include any user of a computing system, but especially targets the normal work of security researchers in civilian employment as Rob Graham (local archive) highlights. The declaration of National Emergency establishes "hackers" as a clear and present danger to the point that people who have merely associated with or even unknowingly contributed any form of support to "hackers" can be subjected to sanctions typically reserved for war criminals, terrorists, and the leaders of drug cartels. Continue reading →

OpSec Lessons From Carl Mark Force IV

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Yesterday's news about two Federal Agents arrested for various allegedly corrupt and self serving actions has introduced a substantial number of complications that could jeopardize the government's case on appeal. The charging document (plain text document image) rather than merely affecting the future disposition of the Ulbricht Silk Road case offers a number of lessons on operational security people involved with can take to heart as well as a good number of laughs. Continue reading →

March Bitcoin Foundation Update

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March was an eventful month for the Bitcoin Foundation as mod6's latest update informs us. The highlight of the month was the release of a Bitcoin software reference implementation as version 0.5.3.1 which includes a build script to create statically linked binary executables from the foundation's source code release. Since the month's release work has continued on building and testing the reference software on a number of platforms, and work to continue porting the software to more software platforms and hardware architectures is planned for the future. Now that the foundation has released a reference implementation, they plan to develop a roadmap of future development goals and projects to pursue next. The full statement contains a number of acknowledgements recognizing the substantial number of people who have contributed to the Foundation success and accomplishments it has enjoyed in its first five months.