First US Cop Faces Terrorism Charges, Crime: Buying Gift Cards

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In what mainstream media is reporting as the first case of terrorism charges targeting a law enforcement officer in the United States, a DC area transit cop bought ~250 United States dollars worth of gift cards (archived). Prosecutors allege he then distributed the gift card codes to FBI agents so that those FBI agents could buy paid mobile messaging apps for the Islamic State.

Law enforcement officers not facing terrorism charges in the United States include:

Those most be some serious mobile messaging apps.

Shapeshift.io Unveils Ether Cleaver

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ShapeShift.io has announced a new service making it easier to launder "clean" Ether-huffer's funds. (archived) The tool, located at split.shapeshift.io, says it can "safely separate or "clean" your Ethereum balances and avoid replay attacks and lost coins." The news comes too late to help chief ETH huffer Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, whose company is still rumored to be of questionable solvency due to not understanding how hard forks work.1

  1. Edit: Coinbase just announced it would be awarding users "credits" "soon" for the amount of Ethereum users have that wasn't subject to Buterin's time travel theft to bailout the DAO.  ↩

Bitfinex Director Claims 119,756 Bitcoins Lost

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Reddit user zanetackett, Director of Community and Product Development for Bitfinex, is now claiming that losses total 119,756 BTC in the hack reported on earlier today. Attackers were apparently able to obtain the offline keys used for the multisig setup used by the exchange, though Buttfinex officials have yet to comment on the exact attack vector. The company further states that "their insurance does not cover these losses" and that "Any settlements will be at the current market prices as of 18:00 UTC" which was just at $600 per coin.

Yet Another Underwhelming Effort To Fork Bitcoin Unveiled

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After the grossly underwhelming reveal of last month's "Terminator Plan" hard fork buzz this month brings yet another social engineering attempt. A new subreddit named "btcfork" was publicly announced and it swiftly filled with a bunch of activity from people who won't attach names to the positions they are trying to advance. Apparently having people with names was the problem this whole time! This latest attempt comes after Ethereum hard forked with substantial lulz. The nameless posters however insist that this will be different and successful. Sorry fork, your loss.

Network Difficulty Experiences Modest Drop Of ~5.4% In Second Change Post Halving

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Bitcoin network difficulty fell ~5.43 percent from 213492501107.51336670 to 201893210853.05895996 in its second adjustment following the second halving of the Bitcoin block reward subsidy. The first adjustment following the halving was a very slight increase in difficulty. Paired with the bleeding and breaking occurring among fiat/Bitcoin interfaces it looks like the short term forecast is "there will be lulz."

Phuctor Finds Seven Keys Produced With Null RNG, And Other Curiosities

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Phuctor is a public service, operated by S.NSA. It catalogues extant RSA public keys which are known to be inexpensively breakable.1

Recently, Phuctor's algorithmic arsenal was expanded to include a search for perfect squares, which was then further generalized to Fermat's factorization method. A perfect square RSA modulus results from an ill-conceived, subverted, or otherwise catastrophically-broken key generator where a cryptographic prime P is created and immediately re-used verbatim, as prime Q. An RSA modulus factorable via Fermat's method contains two factors which are dangerously (i.e., cheaply-discoverably) close together. This typically results from a lulzimplementation of RSA where prime Q is generated by finding NextPrime(P), rather than independently.

The perfect square finder immediately yielded up a modulus which consisted merely of the square of the next prime following 2^1023. This type of RSA public modulus is consistent with a scenario where a PGP client is operated on a system containing a null-outputting RNG. This trivially-breakable modulus was found to occur in no fewer than seven RSA public keys, claiming the following user IDs:

  1. Mahmood Khadeer <mhkhadee AT hotmail.com>
  2. none <algemeenoptie2 AT gmail.com>
  3. Godless Prayer <godless.prayer AT gmx.de>
  4. john <john.k.pescador AT hawaii.gov>
  5. Bjoern Schroedel <bjoern AT schroedel.cc>
  6. Bjoern Schroedel <bjoern.schroedel AT gmx.de>
  7. Nick Ruston <alliancemicro AT dodemall.redcheetah.com>

Mr. Pescador appears to be, or to have once been, an employee of the State of Hawaii, a curator of data.hawaii.gov (archived), and — apparently — of an empty GitHub repository. (archived). Mr. Khadeer is the President of the Muslim Association of Puget Sound (MAPS) in Redmond (archived), famous primarily for 'heartfelt condemnations' (archived) of this and that, published like clockwork for the past decade. Not much is publicly known about the other victims and/or perpetrators of brain-damaged cryptography in the above list.

The subsequent search for Fermat-factorable RSA moduli yielded exactly one additional result. This very peculiar PGP public key is suggestive of an aborted attempt at the development of a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack against PGP users who might decode the key and display its User ID field in certain WWW browsers.

Peace in our ctime();

  1. For the comedic gold let it be pointed out that prior to Phuctor's existence this kind of key simply did not exist, as per official truth. Nowadays they "obviously" do exist, but after the failure of embrace-extend-hijack attempts spearheaded by Hanno Böck, the deceitful shitbag they're simply "not interesting" as per the same official narrative ; and moreover, systematic causes for their existence still do not exist, at any rate not past "Cosmic Rays did it". Certainly the involvement of the usual array of inept USG agencies can not possibly be suspected. Isn't official nonsense ever so fascinating ? ↩

Bitfinex Breaks: Fiat Exchange That Never Had Anything To Do With Bitcoin Finally Goes Away

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To quote from 2013 :

MPOE-PR AvatarI. Self-moderated "support thread", filled with a bunch of socks posting nonsense. This is standard scammer operating procedure.
II. Running stolen, bug ridden software (the old Bitcoinica codebase) that has already proven itself useless in the marketplace (three times!)
III. Scammers themselves admit to crediting "investors" infinite USD/BTC to execute the naive users.
It's true that scammer tags aren't really given out much anymore, but that's no reason to allow well known scammers run amok. You have been warned.

To quote from 2016 :

We are investigating the breach to determine what happened, but we know that some of our users have had their bitcoins stolen. We are undertaking a review to determine which users have been affected by the breach. While we conduct this initial investigation and secure our environment, bitfinex.com will be taken down and the maintenance page will be left up.

Sorry for your loss.

Coinbase Engineering Director Jokes That Roger VERified Their Coins Are Safe

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Coinbase Director of Engineering Charles Lee1 (WOT:coblee) today joked on Twitter that Roger Ver has VERified the Coinbase coins are safe. Roger similarly VERified that the coins at Mt Gox were safe and present in their reserves up until the moment Mt Gox died and even then for a bit of time after that. The history of Roger VERified jokes stretches back to December of 2012.

In December 2012 Roger Ver (WOT:nonperson) used his access to the administrative panel of Blockchain.info in order to compromise the supposedly secret information of a user of that service following a dispute over a payment error made by an unrelated venture of Roger Ver's (archived). The payment error was for 4.5119 Bitcoin, an amount that summed to less than 50 United States dollars at a time when buying that amount of Bitcoin was still an easy task.2

Compounding Roger Ver's mistake was his attempt at a cover up insisting that he was a sufficiently special snowflake to have all threads discussing the matter retitled, locked,  and deleted (archived). At the time MPOE-PR (WOT:hanbot) wrote of his efforts:

We're not discussing the "change the thread title" part of your statement. We're discussing the "better yet, lock the thread and ask the mods to delete it" part of your statement.

It is not this thread that is causing undue alarm. The alarm is very much due, this BS of divulging customer details is widespread to the point of universality. Aurum did it, MtGox did it, the list is pretty much "everyone except MPEx". This has to cease, universally, as it has no place in BTC.

The other thing that has to cease is the unwarranted delusions of self importance. You personally are not great enough to request moderators to delete the signs of your stupidity "so as not to harm bitcoin". Should you want to request it, do it in the adequate terms, which are "I've been really stupid, please delete this before it ruins my reputation".

That aside, you personally are not big enough to harm Bitcoin, for one, and moreover this "too big to fail" mentality and the corresponding expectation of throwing everything to the wind for the sake of propping up random doods with self-awarded VIP status is completely irrational.

Since the Blockchain.info episode Roger Ver has continued his pursuit of pennies at the expense of potential fortunes. He publicly defended the insovlent Mt Gox, engaged in premature passport shennanigans that greatly restricted his ability to travel, further sold his illusion of credibility in the XTCoin and ClassicCoin pushes, and jumped on the ether huffing train shortly before their huffing bag detonated. Sorry for your Roger VERified loss.

  1. Of "Litecoin" infamy. Litecoin was this "better Bitcoin" endorsed by Wired Magazine in August 2013 much like DogeCoin and Ethereum would later be "better Bitcoins" endorsed by mainstream media rags until they sunk.  ↩

  2. It was indeed less that four years ago that a person could acquire 5 whole Bitcoins for less than the price of a nice restaurant meal.  ↩

Gawker Media's Nick Denton Personally Files For Bankruptcy

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Gawker Media founder Nick Denton (WOT:nonperson) filed for bankruptcy protection. This follows Gawker Media's filing back in June. This bankruptcy filing follows Denton fraudulently misrepresenting to the court value of the Gawker Media stock posted as bond following the loss by his company and himself personally to Hulk Hogan. The day after Denton posted the Gawker media stock as bond, Gawker media filed for bankruptcy. Failing to take personal responsibility for his failings, Denton blames fellow homosexual in tech Peter Thiel (WOT:nonperson) for using his play money to support litigation against Denton and Gawker Media for outing Thiel's homosexuality. Sorry for your loss.

Tree Nuts Liberated In California

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In a state known for enviro-mentalism, exorbitant housing prices, inoffensive wine, and year-round surfing, a $9.3 bn per year industry is being skimmed by asset liberators other than those in Sacramento and Washington (archived). These non-violent crimes – stealing truckloads of physical altcoins in the shapes of almonds, pistachios, and a variety of other tree nuts – are apparently being conducted using falsified documentation, laptops, and cell phones, tools widely known to be used by scammers and terrorists and probably next in line for the political firing squad after the beloved AR-15. Last year, 310.847 tons of untraceable anonymous tree nuts valued at $4.6 mn were reported stolen.

Unable to contend with unknown bands of brazen thieves stomping on their turf, California's State Assembly is looking to flush even more taxpayer money it doesn't have down the drain by creating an "Agricultural Cargo Theft Task Force" to contend with the rising challenge. Sorry for your nuts.