Numerous sources are reporting that the Democratic People's Republic of Best Korea has launched a rocket into space, and that the government of Best Korea is declaring its effort to launch a satellite into space a success. Almost exactly one month ago the Democratic People's Republic of Best Korea claimed success in testing a hydrogen bomb. During the 20th century Cold War between the USSR and United Soviet Socialist America the capability to launch satellites into space was used as a proxy that demonstrated the ability to deploy nuclear weapons at any range. Continued space launches on the part of the Democratic People's Republic of Best Korea would indicate an aerospace industry significant enough to sustain the production and maintenance of intercontinental ballistic missiles and add further credibility to the nation's growing nuclear deterrent.
Foundation Co-Chair Publishes Introduction To V Provenance System
Today ben_vulpes of the Bitcoin Foundation published an introduction to the V code provenance management system. This introduction includes links to writing by others on the V system while itself covering what V is, what V does, and what underlies a functioning implementation of V.
Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Crosses 144 Billion With 20.06% Rise
Mining difficulty is now 144,116,447,847.34866333, 20.06% above the previous value. This is the largest increase since August 19th, 2014, and is thus the largest increase covered by Qntra to date. Transaction fees totalled 530.03566591 Bitcoins, comprising 1.04% of total miner rewards, a similar rate to the previous period; for context, this rate was 0.77% in the antepenultimate, and 0.83% at the close of yesteryear. Stay tuned as Bitcoin's supply inflexibility keeps increasing usage costs to compensate for impending disinflation.
Oracle Employee Wrecked Socat Security
Kaspersky's Threatpost reports that Oracle employee Zhiang Wang introduced a patch to the Open Source socat utility which broke its security by changing a hard coded Diffie-Hellman prime number to a 1024 bit number that is not prime (archived). While substantial discussion is occurring around whether the change was introduced to create backdoor, the change as a point of fact broke the security promised by socat.
Intel: Chips To Get Slower
William Holt, General Manager of Intel's Technology and Manufacturing group, has now gone on the public record declaring their future chips will be getting slower in the name of energy efficiency as Moore's law comes to an end (archived). Continue reading
Last Actual Mozilla Feature Removed
Mozilla is removing fine grained control of cookies from their Firefox web browser in version 44 after declaring the feature and the ~100 lines of code supporting it a bug (archived). Mozilla persisted in having a userbase on its largely fictitious reputation of being a venture that supports the needs of its users while actually cultivating memory leaks, remote access vulnerabilities, and other abuses of their users. The removal of fine grained cookie control in Mozilla Firefox represents the end of any pretense that Mozilla has any concern about the desires of actual users. While all of the "major" browsers including Google's Chromium family, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Edge browsers, Apple's Safari, and Mozilla's Firefox are irredeemable turds some saner browsers1 do in fact exist. There's even a GUI web browser that doesn't look too bad.
But do exercise caution because they are unfortunately still web browsers ↩
Popescu Opens Block Cipher Competition: 10 BTC Bounty + Peerage
Today Mircea Popescu opened a competition to find a block cipher suitable for advancing the causes of The Most Serence Republic.1 The rewards for the winner include a 10 Bitcoin payment and membership honoris causa in the peerage of The Most Serene Republic. Submissions with an implementation are preferred, but theoretical proposals will be considered.
This Republic, Most Serene is nothing other than Bitcoin. ↩
United States Capitol Region To Bribe Potential Repeat Criminals
Earlier this week the council governing the United States Capitol region approved a bill which would lead to stipends for up to 200 persons with a history of criminal convictions determined to be the most likely commit new crimes (archived). Criminals offered this fellowship stipend would maintain their fellowship through participation in their re-education curricula and avoiding capture in connection with the commission of new crimes.
Mercedes Joins German Carmaker Emissions Train
Never content to allow trends to pass it by without a full-throttle attempt at keeping up – be it luxury SUVs, hybrid cars, or überfragmentation of market niches – German firm Daimler AG, which oversees automaker Mercedes-Benz, has just been implicated in its own nitrous oxide (NOx) emissions scandal, following the lead of compatriot Volkswagen and overseas upstart Tesla Motors. Continue reading
Alan Reiner Quits Armory as Multi-Year Commercialization Effort Fails
Today Alan Reiner announced he is quitting Armory wallet development, and that efforts to commercialize the Armory Bitcoin wallet have failed. Armory started life as a promising wallet management tool that runs on top of a local Bitcoin daemon, but when a "phone home" feature became public knowledge any potential of trusting Reiner as a software developer or Armory as a software product was lost. Reiner with the help of serial fundraiser Trace Mayer raised funds in an attempt to make a business out of the Armory software. Reiner's announcement is presented in full below: Continue reading