Last week United Kingdom prime minister David Cameron issued an ultimatum (archived) directed at internet porn sites demanding they voluntarily produce an "effective" regime for restricting access based on age or he would act legislatively to either force such a scheme or shut them down. Of course "effective" age filters would necessarily mean the creation of a larger online identity regime. The United Kingdom already forces Internet Service Providers to filter internet connections to block pornography unless service subscribers explicitly opt out of the filtering. Further the United Kingdom late last year restricted the kinds of sex acts which may be included in pornography produced in the United Kingdom for online Video on Demand consumption. Continue reading
Australian Faces 88 Charges Related To Darknet Child Pornography Sites
Australian newspaper the Herald Sun reports (archive) that 22 year old Melbourne man Matthew David Graham appeared in court last week to face 88 charges related to the operation of 12 darknet child pornography sites. Graham is also accused of providing instruction on the abduction, rape and murder of a five year old girl in Russia.1 Continue reading
I am unable to find a newspaper article reporting such an event took place. Perhaps the discussion was mere fantasy or reporting of the case remains suppressed as was the case with this one. ↩
Scottish Bank, Police & Court Harass Bitcoin Trader, Conspire To Steal His Cash
The Herald Scotland reports (archive) that a bitcoin trader recently had £5,500 seized by Scottish police under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 after his bank closed his account and requested he attend the branch to collect his cash. Having collected his cash as requested, Max Flores left the bank branch only to be greeted by police who absconded with the money despite not placing him under arrest. This act of theft was further supported by a court which allowed the thieves to keep Flores' cash for a period of three months while an investigation was carried out to established whether or not Flores was involved in money laundering. Continue reading
New Per Block Transaction Highs Wedge Some Nodes: Patch Available
In the past several hours there have been at least two blocks with a sufficient number of transactions per block to leave bitcoin nodes relying on Berkeley Database for block handling to wedge when set to the post March 2013 limit of 40,000 database locks and objects. For a few hours doubling that amount to 80,000 sufficed until a still more complex block arrived. A patch has recently been published which should remedy this issue until such a time the universe undergoes heat death. The patch works by raising the maximums Berkeley Database is configured with in order to handle any number of transactions that can fit into a Bitcoin block. On some platforms like OpenBSD which aggressively allocate memory in advance for safety reasons Bitcoin's RAM usage is increased noticeably with this patch. If your system enforces low per-process memory limits you may have to edit you system's settings.
Qntra (S.QNTR) July 2015 Statement
France Seeks to Impose "Right to be Forgotten" Globally – New Order
The French Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés has issued an order (archived) to Google demanding that the search provider enforce European "right to be forgotten" protections globally in its search results. Such extraterritorial aggression on the part of regulatory bodies in recent times has been more characteristic of United States government action that that of European governments. There will likely be further confrontation as the French CNIL works to make Google results even more useless than Google itself already has. France has escalated their previous demands to an order. Google intends not to comply with this order.
Selkis Tips Fiat Agenda For Bitcoin
Ryan Selkis, known on social media as @TwoBitIdiot, has begun concern trolling over "wealth concentration" in Bitcoin and proposed moving Bitcoin to a permanently inflationary reward schedule by 2020. Such a change would of course never be implemented in actual Bitcoin, but the fact that it is being introduced by someone titled "Director of Investments" at some organization calling itself the "Digital Currency Group" strongly suggests that fiat interests in the United States that would like to not only inflate the blockchain in order to force centralization. It suggests United States based fiat interests would like to destroy the very image of what Bitcoin is. Continue reading
WikiLeaks Stratfor Dump Contains Malware
Josh Wieder wrote in to Cryptome describing that while examining documents contain in WikiLeaks full Stratfor email dump he has so far identified 18 pieces of malware embedded in documents and WikiLeaks has taken no actions to warn potential views of the hazards these documents might present. Weider notes particularly that Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Excel documents have been found with embedded malware in the dump. These of course are all file formats which should be quarantined any time the are encountered in the wild and not opened in their intended runtimes without thorough examination. One particularly interesting tidbit is that according to Weider's initial analysis, it appears that the first infected files were introduced to Stratfor's email system through their Chief executive's wife as early as 2003.
Karpeles Facing Charges in Japan?
Mark Karpeles the CEO of the infamously defunct Mt. Gox is facing charges on fraud based on a
report released this week. An anonymous translation of the report can be seen below: Continue reading
Cecil the Lion is a Pretext for Expanding Extraterritoriality of US Law
Recent social media uproar over a dentist's alleged killing of an African Lion referred to by persons as Cecil, in honor of Cecil Rhodes. Cecil was killed outside of the sanctuary within which his typical range was in Zimbabwe, a country which was also once named for Cecil Rhodes. The story was picked up by the social media outrage machine and amplified by mainstream media organs. Continue reading