The Paderhorn Baskets of the German Basketball Budesliga face potential relegation to the lower ProB division after Windows Update forced a delay of game so severe the league had to penalize Paderhorn by reducing their points in the league's standings. While the disastrous security consequences of Microsoft Windows are often the focus of criticism, in this case the disaster was triggered by Window's automatic update functionality which is generally regarded as annoying though somewhat beneficial. In this case however, the rogue behavior of the Windows Updater went from merely annoying to economically and professionally damaging.
Category Archives: News
Local Police Arming Robots
In covering a story on the arrest of a political dissident (local mirror) in St Louis, the St Louis Post Dispatch managed to catch footage of local law enforcement officers working in tandem with a robot armed with a shotgun. This armed drone operating in an populated urban area by what is at least nominally a civilian law enforcement agency raises a number of disturbing questions about the future progression of the American Rogue State. Continue reading
ChangeTip Hires Bitcoin Subreddit Moderator
Today Bitcoin subreddit moderator BashCo has disclosed taking a part time with ChangeTip, a social media company that has a substantial presence on Reddit. The disclosure, mirrored in full below, includes substantial flattery towards his new employer such as: Continue reading
Shavers Enters Not Guilty Plea
Yesterday the criminal case against Trendon Shavers has finally progressed to the point that Shavers could enter a plea of not guilty. This is in spite of his Ponzi scheme collapsing a full year before the arrest of Ross Ulbricht who has already been tried and convicted. Both Shavers and Ulbricht are targets selected for criminal prosecution by United States Attorney Preet Bharara. Criminal charges were filed against Shavers back in November 2014 in Manhattan after Shavers lost in a civil case brought by the SEC in September where he was ordered to pay 40 million dollars in damages. The SEC's civil case occurred in Shaver's home state of Texas. Continue reading
Thermal Sidechannel Carries 8 Bits Per Hour in Proof of Concept
Researchers at Ben Gurion University in Israel have demonstrated an attack that allows malware to communitcate between air gapped computers in close proximity by using the machine's onboard thermal sensors. The demonstration required somewhat controlled conditions and only achieved a transmission rate of eight bits per hour. The slow rate of transmission could however over an extended period of time be sufficient to leak valuable information including cryptographic keys. Continue reading
Empire in Decline: US Retreats From Yemen, ISIS Escalates to Doxxing
In a double blow to the United State's interests in the Middle East their Special Forces soldiers have been compelled to abandon Yemen while ISIS has escalated their hostilities to include doxxing a hundred members of the United States Armed Forces. Continue reading
Boost VC Embraces Child Founded Start Up
As the great Bitcoin recession continues, 17 year old Louison Dumont's Bitproof has caught the eye of VCs, having been accepted into the Boost VC incubator. The service allows users to certify and prove ownership of a document and its proof of existence. The company is attempting to raise VC capital although the service has struggled to find a monetization avenue
Document certification is a valuable service when done correctly, however at a first glance Bitproof.io seems to have a fundamental problem. The deedbot specification proposed on Trilema requires users to submit documents that are GPG signed, which creates a strong link between owner and document. Bitproof uses a username based identity to certify a document which lacks the non-repudiation strength GPG provides.
March 19th OpenSSL Vulnerabilities Overview
The pre-announced OpenSSL updates purport to address 13 vulnerabilities. Two of the vulnerabilities were graded as being of High severity by the OpenSSL project. The first, CVE-2015-0291 allows client connections to engage in a denial of service attack against servers running OpenSSL. The second high severity issue was the older CVE-2015-0204 where RSA connections could be silently degraded to export quality RSA, originally OpenSSL graded this as a low security vulnerability but reclassified this as a high severity vulnerability. Continue reading
UK Regulates Self Out of Bitcoin
Regulators in the United Kingdom have announced they will begin applying anti-money laundering rules on digital currency exchanges. The British treasury offers that the move will magically promote innovation and lessen criminal activity. This move however in reality means something other than what Reuters' press release on behalf of the Treasury supposes. Continue reading
Bitcoin Foundation Reaches Release
The Bitcoin Foundation chaired by mod6 and ben_vulpes has announced its first release milestone. The release dubbed 0.5.3.1 by the foundation consists of a set of patches applied to the original 0.5.3 Satoshi codebase and recipe for combining it all into a static Bitcoin daemon build. This release removes a substantial amount of cruft from the original 0.5.3 release including hooks for Qt and Windows builds along with the problematic alert system and universal plug and play. This release works on Linux with supported release for other platforms planned in the future. The release tarball is available here.