This week under the guise of a new "harassment policy" Reddit banned a number of forums from their site including the incredibly popular /r/fatpeoplehate which boasted more than 150,000 subscribed members. Substantial outrage ensued on the Reddit which lead to expressions of anger towards interim Reddit CEO Ellen Pao and classic fat hate images dominating the aggregated Reddit /r/all feed. While this may be Reddit's Digg inflection point which leads it to popular irrelevance, this episode exposes a larger long term trend of encroaching censorship in Silicon Valley companies and startups. Especially in ventures connected to startup fermenter Y Combinator. Continue reading
Category Archives: Shitware
Gavin Threatens to Quit Bitcoin Development and Join Hearn's Fork
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
Williams Pleas Guilty to Debunking Polygraph Pseudoscience
Douglas Williams, proprietor of the now defunct polygraph.com, has plead guilty in Federal court to five counts of obstructing justice and a single count of mail fraud on the second day of his trial. Williams had for years dedicated considerable time to the cause of debunking polygraph "lie detection" as a dangerous pseudoscience by coaching applicants for "national security" jobs with the United States Government in ways to pass the tests while providing answers with no connection to actual truth. Continue reading
BitGo Files MultiSig Patent Application Joining Other Bitcoin Patent Parasites
An application has been filed (local mirror) with the United States Patent and Trademark office by Bitgo Inc. of San Francisco which if accepted would assign patent rights over the process behind Bitcoin multiple signature addresses to BitGo. Titled "Virtual Currency Address Security" the application lists Michael A. Belshe and Joseph William Lee as inventors of the technology. A proof of concept implementation of multi signature addresses was incorporated into the BitcoinJS library in November of 2013. Continue reading
Google Password Alert Already Subverted
This week Google released a browser extension designed to warn users when they enter their Google password on any page that is not controlled by Google, and this piece of security theater has already been subverted. Researcher Paul Moore has already created of Proof of Concept (Not a Google Login Page) which subverts the browser extension using a few lines of Javascript. The snippet of Javascript in question is below:
<!-- BYPASS GOOGLE'S PASSWORD ALERT "PROTECTION" -->
<script type="text/javascript">
setInterval(function() {
if(document.getElementById("warning_banner")) {
document.getElementById("warning_banner").remove();
}
}, 5);
Windows Servers Pwn'd By JPEG Uploads
The Register reports that researcher Marcus Murray has demonstrated an attack which allows malicious parties to take control of servers running modern versions of Microsoft Windows Server by uploading JPEG images. Murray demonstrated this attack at the RSA San Francisco conference and asserts he used this same method on a photo upload portal to crack a United States Government agency's web server. This is one of many ways Microsoft Windows has shown itself to be unsafe for any purpose.
EFF Goes to Bat For Podcasters, Hits Homerun Against Patent Troll
Continuing to keep its shiva hands full and not content with just tackling the videogame industry, the EFF has just helped to win a decision with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) that invalidates the "podcasting patent" held by Personal Audio LLC, a Texas-based patent trolling firm. Personal Audio LLC is famous for having squeezed $8 mn from Apple Inc. in 2011 for the fruit company's use of "navigable playlists" on its iPod music players, as well as having sued American comedian Adam Corolla for distributing podcasts, only to be counter-sued before the two parties quietly settled. Continue reading
Obama Initiative Promotes Linkrot
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
Coinbase Outgoing Email Hacked
As noticed by #bitcoin-assets user fluffypony, and later confirmed by reddit user CoinbaseAdrian, a sendgrid.net account associated with em.coinbase.com has been compromised. The scammers behind this attack have used it to send email to a list composed mostly of, but not limited to, users of localbitcoins.com. Continue reading
Obama Orders War On Computing And Bitcoin With New "Emergency" Order (Full Text)
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