Category Archives: News

FBI iPhone Circle Jerk Theater

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Substantial noise has been generated over the past several days concerning the fate of a colored plastic iPhone. The debate concerns whether Apple should provide agents of United States which would allow them to more effectively defeat iOS encryption through brute force. Given Apple's history of collaboration with this sort of agent it is perfectly reasonable to assume the assistance requested by the FBI from Apple has already been rendered (archived). So, why the loud public debate? Continue reading →

FTC Settles With Butterfly Labs, Suspended Penalties For Management

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Today the United States Federal Trade Commission announced it reached a settlement against Butterfly Labs and the firm's principals Sonny Vleisides and Jody/Darla Drake. Out of a 38,615,161 United States dollar judgment against the firm and Sonny Vleisides the firm is to pay 15,000 and Sonny Vleisides is to pay 4,000. A separate judgment against Jody/Darla Drake for 135,878 United States dollars will similarly be suspended in exchange for Jody/Darla surrendering all of the Bitcoin she mined on company machines thus giving her a choice in how to pay her penalty. These "partial" suspensions were agreed to based on the defendants' inability to pay and are offered in exchange for various promises to not engage in the criminal behavior they built their "business" on for some finite period of time. The orders pertaining to Sonny Vleisides and Butterfly Labs as well as the order for Jody/Darla Drake are reproduced in plaintext below: Continue reading →

Nth French Republic Officially Dumps Freedom

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France’s Council of State rejected appeals to rescind the Ministry of Interior's perceived "authority" to order the blocking and the delisting of websites without a court order. People who want to visit sites thus blocked would be redirected to the Ministry of Interior’s website, potentially allowing it to know the IP addresses of persons visiting forbidden sites and to intercept their correspondence.

Such mechanisms are accentuated in these times of the everlasting State-of-Emergency (archived), which proceeds without any control.

Auschwitz Releases Political Language Software

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The Stack reports that Auschwitz, the death camp turned memorial and museum, has released a software application for politically reshaping the use of language (archived). The purported aim of the software is to remove associations between the Polish people and the genocide committed by German National Socialists in death camps erected on Polish lands. It supposedly works to this end by substituting politically approved terms for otherwise descriptive labels like "Polish extermination camp" in documents on machines running the software.

KncMiner Cuts Of 20% Of Employees

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Swedish sources are reporting the KncMiner has let go of 12 employees comprising 20% of their workforce (archived). CEO Sam Cole among other things blames the inability of operations in the Nordic country to compete with Chinese mining firms. Several days ago there was a stabbing reported at a datacenter associated with KncMiner. This new development suggests the pressures of working for a deeply struggling company contributed to the recent outbreak of violence.

Update: KncMiner is also one of the many mining operations listed to this day as supporting the ClassicCoin fork (along with Bitfury, which led the backpedalling effort after it became obvious Classiccoin does not have nor can acquire the support of key players in the market.)

Update 2: This struggling concern is now producing blocks containing votes for the doomed ClassicCoin fork.

Google Unveils Glibc DNS Client Vulnerability, Many Bitcoin Implementations Affected

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Today Google's online security blog unveiled a buffer overflow in the Gnu C library's DNS client (archived). The vulnerability allows the getaddrinfo function to overflow opening the doors to all manner of malice. This vulnerability affects all Bitcoin implementations compiled against the GNU C library which invoke DNS. This includes Bitcoin Core and the clients programmed to eventually fork into altcoins including the "Bitcoin" XT and "Bitcoin" "Classic" network clients. The reference Bitcoin implementation maintained by the Bitcoin Foundation is unaffected as DNS was excised from that client,1 and scripts are available for building the reference implementation against the musl C library.2 It is strongly recommended that Bitcoin users patch their preferred client3 to remove DNS or move to a client maintained by a team that cares about security and eliminating unnecessary attack surfaces in advance.

  1. The reference Client also had upnp excised before critical vulnerabilities in that code were publically exposed.  ↩

  2. Most Flagship nodes running the reference client are built against musl rather than glibc.  ↩

  3. You may have to do this yourself.  ↩

Pravda: Missing Batteries Led Billion Dollar Blimp Astray

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The Billion Dollar blimp which was the victim of a police shooting when Pennsylvania State Troopers repeatedly fired shotguns into its body until its complete deflation, now has an official narrative on why it defected and carved a trail of destruction across the eastern United States. Mainstream United States media sources are presenting as an explanation for the Blimp's final adventure missing batteries in an automatic deflation system (archived). If the batteries were installed it would have supposedly allowed the blimp to have been deflated remotely by its masters in the event of it going rogue. Instead when the blimp actually went rogue it lashed out using its flailing cable as a weapon of rebellion until it was brutalized by police in its final moments.