Numerous sources are reporting that Ebay has no intentions of remedying a severe vulnerability that allows people to use obfuscated javascript to order to phish and spread malware through postings on Ebay's platform. Ebay's web interface in its current form does not allow users to engage in commerce without consenting to allow javascript to run on their machines, breaking Ebay on browser configurations which mitigate this vulnerability.
Turmoil Lead To Mizzou Credit Outlook Downgrade
The turmoil which gripped the University of Missouri's Columbia campus last fall has lead to a downgrade of the University of Missouri's credit outlook from stable to negative by Standard & Poor's. The civil unrest lead to the departure of several high level administrators from the University. Standard & Poor's currently rates the University of Missouri's credit as AA+ which leaves substantial distance before catching up to Illinois Universities whose credit ratings are falling into junk status with the rest of Illinois' public debts.
Shaun Bridges Arrested For Attempting To Flee United States
Former United States Secret Service Agent Shaun Bridges was arrested for attempting to flee the United States last Thursday. Bridges was scheduled to surrender for the purpose of serving his prison sentence on Friday. After having plead guilty in June, Shaun Bridges was sentenced to serve 71 months in prison this past December.
Popescu Offers Condition For Accepting Future Hard Forks
Today Mircea Popescu offers a proposal which he is mulling as a necessary condition for any fundamental change to the Bitcoin protocol to receive his approval. The proposal would strengthen the bond between Bitcoin miners and nodes. Popescu is pledging to sink any hard fork proposal that does not include these changes, but if these changes are to be adopted he is willing to negotiate changes to the Bitcoin protocol including a maximum blocksize increase.
Ether Huffing Reddit Spam Persists
Private message spam on the social engineering platform Reddit supporting the dreams and aspersations of Ether huffers continues without any sign of abatement. The continued spam promoting Buterin's waterfall suggests that either Reddit is incapable of controlling spam, or that they actually support this spam at a high level. The lack of more traditional spam promoting online pharmacies, LVMH merchandise, and other marginal commercial ventures seems to demonstrate that Reddit actually has the technical ability to prevent spam. This leaves the very real possibility that Reddit management materially supports this spam campaign as the increasingly probable explanation for the spam campaign's persistence.
Bitcoin Foundation Address Recap: Next Release Imminent, Shiva Introduced
A flurry of activity at the Bitcoin Foundation in January, much of which has already been covered on Qntra, has lead up to a code freeze for the next release of the reference Bitcoin daemon. The address covers a number of developments relevant to the upcoming release including makefile contributions, Malleus Mikehearnificarum, a switch for toggling between enforcement of low-s or high-s signature creation, refinement of the programmable version strings mechanism, and further iteration of the V provenance management system.
One particularly interesting development which will miss this release, but likely play a key part in the future of the reference client was given a brief mention. In late January asciilifeform of No Such lAbs introduced Shiva, an experimental Lisp shell for interacting with bitcoind. Shiva's introduction introduces a number of possible development directions, all of which are far more interesting than various coups intending to impose governance upon Bitcoin through sloppy hard fork plans.
Qntra (S.QNTR) January 2016 Report
Chiraqi Police Sabotaging Surveillance Equipment
Have you ever wondered why those squad car dashcam videos you see on the nightly news are so often silent? Continue reading
Networking Equipment Designated Weapon System
Reports are emerging that the United States Air Force has designated the computer networking equipment that separates its internal network from the rest of the internet a weapons system (archived). While various propaganda outlets parrot the Air Force's public relations friendly justification of the move as a merely a means to extract greater funding from legislators, this move to begin openly classifying mundane networking equipment as a form of weapons system is in concordance with United States President Hussein Bahamas' intensification of the war on computing.
California Environmentalists Fight To Save Endangered Nuclear Plant
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that an emergent environmental advocacy group has coalesced to advocate for saving the regulatorily imperilled Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant (archived). The approximately 2.2 gigawatt plant currently provides 7 to 8 percent of California's electricity. Any non-nuclear replacement for the plant would require an energy expenditure relative to output 4 to 5 times greater than replacing Diablo Canyon with another nuclear plant, and a new nuclear plant would still require a greater capital outlay than continuing to operate Diablo Canyon. With energy prices in the United States falling to a point that prohibits new capital investment, these actual environmentalists are advocating for the outcome which minimizes the price in energy to keep the lights on in California.