Silent Circle has confirmed allegations that their privacy software has been completely useless. A memory corruption vulnerability allowed decryption of private messages to any attacker with the victim's user ID or phone number. The attacker can trigger the flaw by sending a hostile text message. Silent Circle is no stranger to this kind of embarrassment; a few months after receiving 30 million dollars in funding, a Blackphone was rooted by hackers at DEFCON. Discouraged former users of this pathetic device should be comforted to know that proper cryptography will likely be made user friendly by the end of the year. Until then, people who wish to obscure their messages from the prying eyes of big brother should stick to the classics.
Category Archives: News
Greece Taps Anti-Bitcoin Video Game Economist as Finance Minister
One piece of fallout from the recent SYRIZA win in Greece's election is the appointment of Yanis Varoufakis, most notable for tinkering with Valve's Steam video game marketplace to the position of Finance Minister. Yanis Varoufakis is much less notable for in the spring of 2013 writing one of the many essays naively assailing Bitcoin as some sort of impossible fantasy incapable of anything, an essay that safely could have remained entirely without note. Unfortunately someone decided to promote him from advising ways for an arcade could extract more money from chumps to managing the finances of a populated area that is still by some miracle, in some form a sovereign state with a government. Let us consider some excepts beginning with the title: Continue reading
Rumor: CenturyLink May Buy CoinTerra
A snippet of from the St Louis Business Journal offers that troubled Bitcoin mining firm CoinTerra might or may have been acquired by Louisiana based Internet Service Provider CenturyLink as it continues to progress through a Chapter 7 liquidation bankruptcy.
CSM Profiles Homero J Garza, Serial Entrepreneur
Today the Christian Science Monitor published an profile of Homero "Josh" Garza featuring selection from an interview they conducted before the North American Bitcoin conference. Most of the information in the profile is not going to be new to anyone who has been following the GAW saga, but the profile covers Garza's history of serial entrepreneurship from Optima Technology and Great Awk Wireless to GAW Miners. Continue reading
Winklevii Intend New York Based Exchange
The Winklevoss twins are reportedly working on a New York based Bitcoin exchange that will exist in submission to all United States regulations. This is in spite of New York doing everything it can to write itself outside of Bitcoin in both its regulatory environment and legal climate.
Drones Revolutionize Cross Border Drug Shipment
While the Silk Road trial is ongoing, San Diego's NBC news affiliate is reporting on a drone that crashed near the border crossing at San Ysidro while carrying more than 6 pounds of methamphetamine. The crash location itself was a Tijuana grocery store parking lot. This is far from the first report of drug trafficking across the United States – Mexican border using drones, and is largely notable because of the drone's crash. Continue reading
Bitcointalk is Down, Migrating? – Update – Disk Failure
Attempts to reach Bitcointalk.org now result in database errors. Whether or not this is a signal Bitcointalk is migrating to its new bespoke platform from Simple Machine Forums is unclear. As a reminder, a reputable mirror at http://bitcointa.lk exists. Update: They just experienced a disk failure.
Prosecutors Seek to Bar DPR Interview From Jury – Updated
In Wired Andy Greenberg writes that the Preet Bharara's team prosecuting the Silk Road case wants to bar the Jury from being exposed to the only interview done with the Dread Pirate Roberts of the Silk Road. The interview done by Andy Greenberg for Forbes is notable for sounding to Department of Homeland Security agents a lot like Mark Karpelès and containing a number of answers from the Dread Pirate Roberts which supports the argument presently being advanced by the defense that in spite of founding the Silk Road and being caught holding the bad for the Silk Road Ulbricht had little to do with the Silk Road for most of its history. Continue reading
LizardStresser Hacked, Customer Details Leaked
The Guardian reports that the Lizard Squad's LizardStresser serviced has been hacked, and reports of arrests of various members of the group continue to trickle in. All customer user names and passwords were stored as plaintext on the server. Postmortem statistics reported on the service include: Continue reading
Assbot Gains Web of Trust Functionality
Recent downtime for nanotube's gribble bot on Freenode demonstrated a critical single point of failure in Bitcoin infrastructure. Today as a remedy to the problem Kakobrekla unveiled asswot functionality in assbot greatly increasing the robustness of the infrastructure Bitcoin business builds on top of. In an important improvement in the authentication model, all Web of Trust operations are now authenticated by decrypting one time passwords. The one time passwords expire within 15 minutes of being invoked, but assbot supports receiving decrypted passwords out of order.