"Pokemon Go" Ushers In New Phase Of Smartphone Surveillance

Posted on by

This past week's release of the smartphone gamified reality app "Pokemon Go" heralds the beginning of a new phase of the smartphone surveillance era. Billed as an "augmented reality" game the app uses in game incentives to direct users to physically visit locations that they would not otherwise. The app has already lead to a teenager discovering a dead body in a location she would have not otherwise visited.

In addition to directing users to physical locations the app encourages users to enable their smartphone's camera so that they may see pokemon "appear" in the real world. This active scanning of the real world by app users presents far greater potential for image collection than the typical social media app which relies on the user's vanity to get them to use their smartphone's camera.

It almost makes the app's requirement to turn on the smartphone's location services, one that will likely snare low intelligence "criminals", seem mundane.

Pokemon Go was preceeded by an alternate reality game called Ingress also developed by Pokemon Go creator Niantic. Ingress however lacked tie ins to any popular media franchises1 which would have delivered a ready made user base in the manner Pokemon Go has. Peace in our time!

  1. Deepening the rabbit hole is Nintendo's long refusal to allow media properties they have a stake in to run on devices that aren't also sold by Nintendo.  ↩

Derp Summit At Bretton Woods Begins Today

Posted on by

A large number of derps from obeastly regulatory bodies, hamplanetary legislative bodies, and mayogendered figures declaring themselves to be from the blockchain industry are meeting at Bretton Woods. According to CoinDesk the aim of this meeting at Bretton Woods is to produce a "white paper" for presentation at a "payments industry" conference this October. Attendees are reported to include:

the US Federal Trade Commission; US Department of Commerce; and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, as well as US Representatives Mick Mulvaney (WOT:nonperson) and David Schweikert (WOT:nonperson) and members of educational groups including Coin Center and MIT Media Lab

The amount of detail offered by CoinDesk further suggests that Barry Silbert (WOT:nonperson) or representatives of zher ventures will be in attendance.

Brettons Woods is a resort in Carroll, New Hampshire that offers skiing and conferences that attempt to pervert the meaning of money. A July 1944 conference at Bretton Woods set the stage for the purely fiat currency which would come to fruition over the next several decades. The setting chosen for this gathering suggests those in attendance intend to subvert the actual future of Bitcoin regulation.

Given the short hours long life of the "Kimberly Process for Bitcoin" meme, expect the mayogendered forces of shitgnomery to begin pushing a "Bretton Woods of Blockchain" meme. The delay between this conference in July to the paper's presentation in October suggests that the meme will have at least three months to live, if only in their own heads. The conference begins today and continues through Wednesday. Sorry for your laws.

Meh Of The Week: Coinbase Can't Serve Canada

Posted on by

Coinbase has announced that it will no longer be servicing Canadian customers after August 1, 2016. Canadian fiat interface Vogogo abruptly decided to shut down it's service, leaving Coinbase no way to hawk it's imitation Bitcoin to users located there. Current users have been given a deadline of July 29th to convert their Canadian dollars to Bitcoin, or withdraw to a bank account. Users who fail to do so will be subject to account suspension, leaving remaining users in the scheme forced to pay exorbitant fees to recover their finds. Coinbase notably supported the failed XTCoin and ClassicCoin coup attempts which both failed like their Canadian fiat interface Vogogo. Sorry for your loss.

Phuctor Finds RSA Collision In SSH Key Dump

Posted on by

Today the Phuctor discovered two SSH keys sharing a common factor while working on a dump of SSH public keys discovered during a scan of the IPv4 address space. The shared factor is:

10783613970442413934143578906158089830375140508817221044708965087575877867311152108386754333184784039689570945854780881166021712179361227812154341718049279

The keys (Key A and Key B) correspond with IP addresses assigned to the internet service provider "Frontier Communications" which may translate to shitty DSL modems. Phuctor has factored interesting keys before, but this compromised pair is notable for the size of the factor discovered through Phuctor's relentless search for common denominators. Phuctor has broken 249 RSA moduli as of the time of this publication. Beyond the common factor both keys share the RSA exponent 35, previously noted to be suspicious.

Frontier Communications previously was best known for being the venture that runs wired telecommunications services in territories that Verizon decides it doesn't want any more.

Bitcoin Foundation Chair On Bitcoin's Second Halving

Posted on by

Today, Saturday, July 9th 2016, the Bitcoin block reward subsidy has been halved from 25 BTC per block, to 12.5 per block. This is the second block reward halving event to have occurred during the time of our most serene republic. The first reward halving was nearly four years ago on November 28th, 2012, which reduced the subsidy from 50 BTC to 25 BTC per block. The Bitcoin protocol schedules these reductions automatically: every 210,000 blocks.

At the time of this writing, we are currently at block 420,011. The total number of bitcoins in circulation is 15,750,050, or about 75% of the total 21 Million coins to be mined.

Today, we diligently watch the blockchain and celebrate in our chamber, #trilema. Join in, or follow along by reading the congressional transcript.

Starting with block 630,000, the next reward subsidy will become 6.25 BTC per block. See you then!

Viva Bitcoin y La Serenissima

mod6 (WOT:mod6) is a co-chair of the Bitcoin Foundation

The Bitcoin Block Reward Has Halved A Second Time

Posted on by

As of the recently mined block 420,000 the Bitcoin network has now halved its mining subsidy from 25 Bitcoin to 12.5 Bitcoin. The first halving took the subsidy from the 50 Bitcoin reward this new world was born with to 25 Bitcoin. As always miners are still free to take less than the maximum subsidy when mining a block though few seem to ever make this choice. This second halving also marks three quarters of all Bitcoin to ever exist having been introduced into circulation. Hodl up!

Multiple Ambush Attacks On Police Officers Today

Posted on by

Following the sniper versus drone incident last night there were at least two incidents of police officer being shot in ambush style attacks. In Georgia a man reportedly called 911 and when a police officer arrived at the scene shot the officer who ended up wounding him too, both are reportedly expected to survive. In Ballwin, Missouri a police officer seems to have been lured into pulling over a car where a man shot him in the neck before fleeing. A suspect in the Ballwin ambush was taken in after being subdued by electroshock weapons. The Ballwin incident is notable as during the past several weeks predominately black churches around the Saint Louis area have been subjected to fires and graffiti sympathizing with the Black Hebrew nationalist cause, a factor likely to further aggravate tensions in the region which is also home to Ferguson. Peace in our time.

Dallas "Black Lives Matter" Sniper Killed In Drone Bombing

Posted on by

Following a short standoff with a suspect who allegedly killed 5 Dallas police officers and wounded 7, Dallas police resolved the situation by sending a bomb squad robot to the suspects location and detonating a lethal explosive killing the suspect. This drone killing followed an incident where police officers supervising a Black Lives matter protest were fired upon by one or more persons operating from elevated sniper positions.1 At a press conference today the chief of the Dallas police department confidently reported that the victim of the drone bombing expressed a desire to kill white people while disavowing membership in the "Black Lives Matter" movement. Peace in our time.

  1. Details will likely remain hazy even after the Zapruder film, congressional inquiries, and Oliver Stone (WOT:nonperson) film are completed.  ↩

Water Charity Maximizes Their Marketing On Paypal's Venmo

Posted on by

A charity group has reportedly unwittingly used a vulnerability in Paypal's Venmo service to spam users, and perform a DoS attack on it's own network. waterislife.com reportedly used the loophole to automatically send 1 cent to a person every time they used the service to purchase products online, with one example message stating "“1 cent can’t buy you pizza. But for just 3 cents, you can buy someone clean water for a day.” There is no current restriction on the number of successive requests allowed by a single user, leaving one to expect other mass advertisers will quickly follow suit. Venmo has yet to offer word as to whether imitating the mass spam transaction service ChangeTip will be considered a bug or a feature. WaterIsLife did not disclose how much the campaign cost them to run, but reportedly received $400 USD in donations on the first day.