Not Quite News Roundup Xtend 15 (TM)(R) – Pence In Our Time

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Welcome to the fifteenth edition of the Qntra Not Quite News Roundup Xtend (TM)(R). The below events are alleged to have happened, but they are decidedly innocent of newsworthiness.

  • The United States President Elect has begun selecting personnel for appointed positions in the Trumpreich. The exodus of even unexpired appointees of the lame duck Hussein Bahamas regime means there are a substantial number of jobs to be filled. The application for appointments to the Trumpreich is available through GreatAgain.gov
  • The domain change.gov no longer resolves.
  • In a development of no surprise the US IRS has publicly requested all transaction records from Coinbase for the years 2013 through 2015 in order to check for compliance with fiat tax laws. Sorry for our complete lack of surprise.
  • Two notable persons made a bet.
  • Wailing, gnashing, and failure to accept the world as it is continues among the mainstream socialist media.
  • Wailing, gnashing, and failure to accept the world as it is continues among urban crowds in the United States as samples collected via arrest indicate 30 to 50 percent of the protesters did not care enough to vote.
  • A recent poll shows only 27 percent of Americans surveyed believe their personal finances would improve under Trumpreich, but an even more dismal 19% believed they would have benefited financially from a Clitler regime.
  • Trends on fiat/Bitcoin interfaces continue to show bull, but it would still be unsurprising if they gave up on their fiction1 and began reporting magenta, dove gray, or old hot dog as their exchange rate.
  • The cast and audience at a performance of the musical "Hamilton" shamed and booed Vice President Elect Mike Pence for deigning to watch their fruity paean to one of the most destructive men in American history.

Pence in our time.

  1. The one where the fiat US dollar is worth even 1/10,000th of a Bitcoin just as Hillary was 85+% likely winrar.  ↩

Bitcoin Network Difficulty Jumps ~10.675% In Latest Adjustment – Largest Jump Since Second Halving So Far

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Mining difficulty on the Bitcoin network increased to 281800917193.19580078 from 254620187304.06140137 for an approximately 10.675 percent increase. This is of course yet another all time high for the network mining difficulty and shows a substantial continued appetite for the extant 12.5 Bitcoin block subsidy.

Slock Prepares "Charity DAO" For Your Loss

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The slock.it team is gearing up for Sorry For Your Loss 2.0, announcing in a blog post that they are working on a new improved version called "Charity DAO". Exploits in the original DAO resulted in a US $60 million dollar loss, and led Ethereum developers to cement their status as a failed cryptocurrency. Slock.it CTO Christoph Jentzsch assured the community there would be a "security hatch" written into their code this round and that the amount of investment monies would be capped to avoid a repeat of the original DAO. Jentzsch is convinced that the team learned a lot from the past experience and can make the new version work, despite continuing to build on a platform that is riddled with bugs and been proven time and again to be woefully insecure.

Last Remains Of ChangeTip To Be Buried

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Spam "Bitcoin" tipping service ChangeTip has finally decided to bury the rotting corpse of its company, months after most of it's employees were acquired by AirBNB.

Reddit user Nick_Changetip stated the following in their reddit announcement:

In the spring of 2016, ChangeTip’s employees were acqui-hired by Airbnb, where most of us work today. Since then, we’ve been searching for the best outcome for ChangeTip, and unfortunately the only remaining option is to shut it down.

At the end of November 2016, all tipping functionality will be deactivated, and the site will be put into withdrawal-only mode for people to collect their funds. The site will remain up for a number of months to allow users to withdraw their funds, and we will be reaching out to users to notify them.

We recommend you close your ChangeTip account. You may withdraw any remaining funds via BTC withdrawal, or you can donate your funds to Charity when you close your account from the settings page.

The move marks an end to the lulz that have graced the pages of Qntra on several occasions. Victoria van Eyk (WOT:nonperson) was unable to be reached for comment on the announcement.

Still Another Fork Digs Into Overcooked Ethereum

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Ethereum developers have announced that another hard fork will be taking place on the platform at ETH block height 2,675,000, the fourth such hard fork applied to the platform this year alone. Following the usual Ethereum SOP, the update will be used to erase certain accounts that DoS attackers previously used to bloat the chain, the concept of immutability in blockchains having been lost to them long ago. Developers say that users are expecting the upgrade to fix the slow transaction and block times that occur due to the attacks. The fork also supposedly fixes the replay attack problem, which resulted in a plethora of sorry for your loss this past summer.

Phuctor Reveals 1 in ~2700 SSH-capable Machines On The Internet Still "Debianized"

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Phuctor is a public service operated by S.NSA. It catalogues extant RSA public keys which are inexpensively breakable by any known means.

A short "trip down memory lane" is in order. From 2006 to 2008, Debian shipped with a sabotaged SSH key generator — which was capable of producing strictly 32768 distinct private keys of any given length.

According to Official Truth, this particular story ended in 2008, when the Debian "bug" was fixed. But in reality, a carefully-engineered boobytrap is truly a gift that keeps on giving.

Phuctor has been digesting SSH keys obtained from a scan of the complete IPv4 space since June of 2016. These have yielded, and continue to yield, breakable RSA moduli.

On Wednesday, November the 16th, factors from 168923 trivially-breakable "Debianized" RSA keys1 were added to Phuctor's database. This resulted in a discovery of 1366 distinct hits, distributed across 689 newly-broken RSA moduli. The count of RSA SSH keys (each found at a particular scanned IP, and not necessarily unique) present in Phuctor's database at the time was 2941798. The 689 moduli represented a set of 1074 IP addresses where a machine had responded to an SSH query.2

This leads us to an interesting conclusion: roughly 1 in 2700 SSH-capable machines in the IPv4 space is actively making use of a "Debianized" SSH key, even today; its traffic is effortlessly transparent to enemy eyes.

Peace in our time, shitgnomes!

  1. Many of these Linux boxes are likewise using a "Debianized" SSH key for remote login. And if you, the reader, can find and forensically-instrument such a machine, it may prove to be an excellent source of NSAware for the discerning entomologist.  ↩

  2. Plus one other very peculiar key, appearing to belong to a USG provocateur organization called "Mayfirst". It seems to have started life as an SSH key, and is clearly Debianized, but it is not part of the set we converted to RFC4880 format for digestion in Phuctor. Instead, it had been gathered from SKS as part of Phuctor's original working set!  ↩

James Clapper, Chief US Spook Resigns

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Today United States Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (WOT:nonperson) announced his resignation effective at the conclusion of lame duck Hussein Bahamas' term as president. This is the latest in a long series of resignations allowing space for the President elect to reshape the former United States Government into the Trumpreich in order to better summon The Great Again. Peace in our time.

Twitter Purges "Alt-right" Members As It Intentionally Contracts Audience

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In line with its adoption of the dangerous Benesch framework and its continued surrender to leftist media pressure this week, Twitter undertook a purge of "Alt-right" members. Among those banned was former Business Insider CTO Pax Dickinson (WOT:nonperson) who sought refuge in the embrace of the budding Alt-right following an organized social media shaming campaign against him (archived) lead by writers for the now defunct socialist rag Gawker. This continues the trend of Twitter and operator Jack Dorsey (WOT:nonperson) intentionally contracting the platform's userbase and alienating users while wondering why their one time fortunes are shrinking.

ViaBTC Enters Contract Mining Scamspace

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ViaBTC has announced their entry into the world of Bitcoin cloud-mining scams, offering hashrate sales of their S9 mining power for 0.21 BTC per 1 TH/s. The announcement also stated that users would be able to trade mining contracts in a similar manner to failed mining exchange cex.io.

Our cloud mining exchange platform is under development and will be soon integrated into www.viabtc.com. At that time users can freely trade their cloud mining contracts. Early-stage contract holders can direct their contacts to www.viabtc.com then by signing their wallet addresses.

ViaBTC further stated that "Redemption of miners and change of mining pool are not available for the contract" ensuring that suckers for the scam are not able to use the purchased hashpower on any competing pool or fork.

The recent moves seem to be the death rattles of Roger Ver's latest attempt to stage a coup, having failed to bribe Venezuelan miners to join his revolution. ViaBTC pool stands at ~7% of total network hashrate at the time of this article.

Vilsack Attempts To Whitewash Hussein Bahamas Rural Legacy

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Outgoing United States Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack (WOT:nonperson) issued a statement this week attempting to whitewash the legacy of destruction wrought by the Hussein Bahamas administration upon rural America.1 Vilsack's statement however completely fails to mention anything about agriculture.

Between unsustainable subsidized grain markets that force farmers to plant crops with an eye for minimizing their inevitable loss while hungry hungry hamplanets can't eat fast enough to make a meaningful dent in the glut of stored grain from years past to so called "employment growth" that consists of small towns landing bigger Walmarts,2 Vilsack's statement is out of touch with rural American reality.

Is it any wonder rural America voted to summon The Great Again? Soy for your loss.

  1. In full:

    Statement by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on Rural America at a Glance, 2016 Edition

    WASHINGTON, Nov. 14, 2016—Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today released the following statement on Rural America at a Glance, 2016 Edition, an annual report by USDA's Economic Research Service:

    "At the depths of the Great Recession, rural counties were shedding 200,000 jobs per year, rural unemployment stood at nearly 10 percent, and poverty rates reached heights unseen in decades. Many rural communities were ill-positioned to bounce back quickly.

    "Over the course of the Obama Administration, USDA has made targeted Federal investments in rural areas to create jobs, generate economic opportunity, and strengthen rural communities. This strategy, focused on production agriculture, the biobased economy, local and regional food systems, and conservation and natural resources, is helping the rural economy retool itself for the 21st century.

    "Today's report underscores the result of these efforts: rural America has begun a remarkable comeback. Key economic indicators continue to show that rural America is rebounding. Rural unemployment continued to decline in 2015, dropping below 6 percent for the first time since 2007, and rural poverty rates have fallen. Median household incomes in rural areas increased by 3.4 percent in 2015, and rural populations have stabilized and are beginning to grow. Child food insecurity nationwide is at an all-time low.

    "The future of rural America looks much brighter today than when President Obama took office. The incredible results highlighted in the new report demonstrate how long-term government investment and positive partnerships with public institutions are central to rural America's continued progress."

    The Rural America at a Glance, 2016 Edition report can be viewed on the ERS website. To read more about USDA's investments in rural America and its successful turnaround, visit USDA's entry on Medium.com, Rural America Is Back in BusinessThis is an external link or third-party site outside of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) website..

    #

    USDA is an equal opportunity provider, employer and lender.

     ↩

  2. On this front Obamacare has been employment figures up by making incentives for hiring more warm bodies and scheduling each warm body for less hours. Thusly one full time employee is replaced by 3-4 quarter time employees which means more people are employee in absolute terms.  ↩