Andreas Antonopulus announced the launch of Third Key Solutions of which he is the Chief Technical Officer. The start-up is a Bitcoin "best practices" consultancy, which aims to set up an infrastructure for Bitcoin companies to establish policies and enforcements for the handling of funds. The consultancy provides services revolving around the management of funds with multi-signature addresses as described in a summary on their website: Continue reading
Category Archives: Shitware
PayPal Settles With US For Sanctions Violations
PayPal, an early and centralized attempt at establishing a primitive form of Internet money, has announced a settlement with the United States Treasury Department. PayPal will pay the Treasury Department 7.7 million United States Dollars for having disregarded sanctions enacted by the United States Government against Iran, Cuba, and others. Examples of transactions and accounts PayPal admits allowing span from 2009 to April 2013 when PayPal enacted a system to screen in real time for prohibited payments. PayPal reports spending substantial effort over the past two years to strengthen its ability to comply with sanctions.
Basketball Team Relegated to Lower Division by MS Windows Misbehavior
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.
Windows 'Stuxnet' Patch Left Vulnerability Open
Five years after Microsoft issued a patch (archived) to "close" the vulnerability that allowed the Stuxnet virus to propagate, Microsoft today issued another patch which purports to finish closing that same vulnerability. Reportedly rather than actually resolving the vulnerability the patch issued in 2010 merely increased the difficulty threshold for exploiting the open vulnerability. Continue reading
Tor Developers Set Funding Goal
The Daily Dot reports that the developers of the Tor software and network have decided to set an ambitious fund raising goal for this year. Specifically they aspire to reduce the portion of their funding which comes from the United States government to under half of their total. Last year roughly three quarters of their funding came from the United States Government. This follows another piece published by Yasha Levine on March 1st where Levine highlighted that the "activists" behind Tor, Open Whisper Systems, and other popular "privacy" ventures receive funding from the Broadcasting Board of Governors, a Federal Agency born in the CIA which specializes in propaganda and psychological warfare. Continue reading
Crapware Still Bundles Mining Software
The uTorrent software has been bundled with a cryptocurrency miner in its latest update. This inclusion has generated a number of user complaints as the mining software degrades the performance of the users computer while also not offering them any benefit. This sort of user abuse is par for the course with explicitly closed source and Windows software.
GPG Criticism Reaches New Low As Use Cases Expand
This week former Twitter engineer and microcelebrity Moxie Marlinspike unleashed a torrent of criticism against the Gnu Privacy Guard encryption software, which he loosely justified by confusing an etiquette problem with a technical problem. Continue reading
US Political Crisis May Impoverish Homeland Security Department
The New York Times reports that a legislative impasse in the United States Congress might leave the Department of Homeland Security without funds. If this comes to pass, roughly 30,000 employees in mostly administrative positions will be furloughed while the remaining 200,000 employees deemed "critical" would be compelled to report for work as normal. The "critical" employees would be working without the expectation of receiving a pay check.
The Superfish Funder List
In the wake of yesterday's disclosure of Lenovo's appalling inclusion of the Superfish malware on their OEM Windows installs, let us highlight the Venture Capital Firms which made Superfish possible: Continue reading
Windows Ecosystem Security Still Horrifying
Today it was revealed that Lenovo has been installing a piece of adware called "Superfish" which uses an SSL man in the middle attack to replace ads served to users and potentially engage in all kinds of other evil. Abuse of unaware users who run Microsoft Windows by computing vendors has a long history which includes many other notable episodes such as Sony proposing a lack of factory bloatware as a premium option to the entire existence of the venture known as "WildTangent." Continue reading