Today Ellen Pao has dropped an appeal of her courtroom loss against one of her former employers, the firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and will have to pay the firm's costs related to the affair (archived). At trial her allegations of discrimination were determined to be unfounded and she was ordered to pay the firm's legal fees. Even though she had advanced her career at the firm to the point she was elevated to partner at the firm, she still alleged that systemic gender discrimination had limited her potential to advance her career. Pao was determined to appeal the ruling during her short tenure as CEO of the social media outlet Reddit where she advanced a censorship agenda which involved shuttering communities that celebrate healthy lifestyle choices and suppression of accurate legal analysis of her case. Near the end of her reign there was further a large rebellion of unpaid moderation staff as she cut a number of resources once available to support them. Pao's post Kleiner legacy as a business leader raises serious questions about the managerial competence at any firm that would elevate Ellen Pao to partner.
Coinwallet Turns Stress Test Into Dust Givaway
Spam generator Coinwallet has taken a different avenue to carry out its latest network "stress test" by presenting its latest round as a "giveaway" where they are posting private keys owning numerous dust outputs on the Bitcointalk forum. According to their announcement they intend to distribute roughly 200 Bitcoin in this manner. Attempts to claim these outputs may explain the recent increase in the number of weird non-standard transactions hitting certain Bitcoin nodes. Previously suggested countermeasures for surviving a transaction flood including demands for a higher base transaction fee per kilobyte of transaction data should still work to help keep nodes running happily throughout this event.
MIT Sacrifices Rag in XTCoin Push
Since the original XTCoin fork of Bitcoin was announced MIT's Technology Review has been the solitary media outlet of note lending its complete and unreserved support to XTCoin's social media propaganda war. MIT's rag has effectively sacrificed whatever reputation it may have still had as it attempts to force a narrative that frames Gavin Andressen and Mike Hearn's efforts as an attempt to somehow save Bitcoin. The once storied Massachusetts Insitute of Technology, which has taken money from the United States Military to research Bitcoin prices and rescued Gavin Andressen from poverty when the Vessenes' Foundation collapsed is now set on burning the last of its credibility in an attack on Bitcoin.
Consumers Begin Revolting, Bitcoin Is Not Visa
Gavin Andressen stated early on in his pursuit of a hard limit that he wanted Bitcoin to scale to Visa levels, stating the payment network's transaction throughput as a frame of reference. There is a common misconception about the structure of traditional electronic payment networks – this has caused the lemmings of the Bitcoin world to set an unrealistic goal of competing with an industry that is filled with holes. Bitcoin's decentralized ledger prevents it from ever being utilized as a retail payment network directly. Continue reading
Enhanced Spyware Comes to Older Versions of Windows
The telemetry spyware which lead to Windows 10 users being banned from a number of torrent trackers has now arrived for Windows 7 and 8 in Microsoft's latest batch of "updates" (archived). Attempting to stop the reporting of data to Microsoft on infected machines requires a firewall between the machine and the wider internet, though euthanasia is likely the only effective remedy in the long run for machines subjected to this infection. Any operator of serious internet ventures ought to be giving serious consideration to following in the footsteps of the torrent trackers and deal with Windows users through shunning and the quarantine of their machines. It would also likely be prudent to consider any cryptographic key material living on a machine running Windows to be in the possession of Microsoft or soon to be in the possession of Microsoft.
Mozilla Vulnerability Hoard Compromised For a Year
This weekend news emerged that the Mozilla Foundation's Bugzilla tracker's hoard of vulnerabilities in the Firefox web browser had been breached for more than a year and potentially as long as two years. By Mozilla's own admission critical security vulnerabilities left unfixed for months had been available to the breaching party who had complete access to a goldmine of ways to abuse Mozilla users that Mozilla itself had been sitting on. Mozilla's handling of this episode has been nothing short of abusive to its users. Continue reading
Many Network Appliances Leak Master TLS Private Keys Through "Forward Secrecy"
Florian Weimer has published a paper (pdf, txt) showing that a wide variety of purpose built network hardware leaks transport layer security keys when forward secrecy is enabled. The leaks occur due to faulty RSA signatures produced when the RSA software uses an optimization derived from the "Chinese Remainer Theorem" without any further hardening or error checking. The problem with the Chinese Remainer Theorem optimization has been known since 1996 when Arjen Lenstra brought these concerns about faults during RSA signature generation into the literature (pdf, png). Two decades later GNUTLS, PolarSSL and Libgcrypt lack checks for this potential calamity by default, though other software implementations have ways to disable checks. With the affected appliances once the signature flaw occurs the "forward secrecy" key agreement protocol serves as a channel for acquiring the private key. Continue reading
Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Continues Growth Streak
The Bitcoin mining difficulty continues to grow, reaching a new all time high of 56,957,648,455 – an increase of 4.98% over the August 22nd adjustment. Today's change marks not just the fifth consecutive increase but also the largest increase in the difficulty since April 5th, 2015.1
5.84% ↩
XT Node Blacklists Fail to Prevent DDoS Attack
Mike Hearn and Gavin Andressen recently chose to use the Bitcoin-XT project to attempt to provoke a hard fork in the blockchain to increase the block size limit. Users who support Gavin's code to hard fork the network to increase the block size, began switching to, and launching Bitcoin-XT nodes. After Mike Hearn's declaration of war, the number of XT-Nodes on the network began to increase. However Mike Hearn began seeing a pattern of nodes getting attacked by heavy DDoS attacks. Continue reading
British and North Carolina Teens Prosecuted as Child Pornographers in Separate Cases
Two cases on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean have garnered attention this week with the common link that both cases involve criminal sanctions being imposed on teenagers under the age of legal majority for having nude images of themselves. In North Carolina two romantically involved 17 year olds faced charges when a search of one's phone lead police to discover their mutual exchange of nude photographs. One of the 17 year olds plead down to a lesser charge while the other still faces multiple charges of child exploitation almost all of them relating to his own self portraits (archived) making him legally the victim and perpetrator of his own exploitation. Meanwhile in Britain Continue reading