Trend Micro reports a zero-day vulnerability in Oracle's Java version 8 being used against NATO and United States Department of Defense targets. This incident further illustrates the stupidity of using the web browser as a run time for executing strange code as well as the special sort of idiocy that is running strange Java code.
UK Student Convicted On Darknet Drugs Purchase
Having plead guilty (archive) to a charge of importing a Class B drug into the UK, 25 year old student Gary Trouve now faces 250 hours of community service as punishment for the 145 grams of "herbal cannabis" he purchased using bitcoin via an unnamed darknet market.
Trouve came to the attention of the UK authorities earlier this year when a parcel pertaining to contain specialist welding equipment was intercepted by customs officers who instead found it to contain cannabis. Having been notified, Humberside Police subsequently attended the residence of Trouve who then gave a full confession of his crime. Continue reading
US Missiles Carry Out "unexplained" Commands in the Field
Reports are coming in that Patriot missile systems located in Turkey and operated by the German Bundeswehr have been the target of computer hackers.
Though details are scarce, the German media outlet Behörden Spiegel is indicating that "unexplained" commands were remotely issued to the US-produced weapons systems by an unknown individual or group of hackers. Though as yet unconfirmed, there remains some cause for concern that the Patriot (MIM-104) missile systems deployed in the field, which consist of six launchers, each with four missiles designed for either anti-air or long-range tactical ballistic missile interception, and several radar systems, could fall into enemy hands without a battle ever taking place.1 Unlike the US HUMVEEs now in the hands of ISIS, this attack demonstrates the possibility that no physical interaction would have to take place for NATO technology to turn on its creators2 and deployers.3 Continue reading
The Patriot missile system is also highly mobile as it's carried on M860 semi-trailers, which are then towed by large M983 HEMTT trucks. ↩
The Patriot missile systems are produced by Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Fire Control on US soil. ↩
Current operators of this system include Bahrain, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Jordan, Japan, Israel, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates, and of course the United States of America. ↩
Mining Difficulty Reaches New High
Today sees the Bitcoin network enter new territory with the mining difficulty advancing to 51,076,366,303, crossing the 50 billion difficulty mark for the first time in its history. Today's increase represents a 3.39% increase over June 28th's difficulty of 49,402,014,931.
Pirate Bay Four Acquitted Of Charges
The group known as "The Pirate Bay Four" – Gottfrid Svartholm, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström – accused of criminal copyright infringement and the abuse of electronic communications because prosecutors were able to download copyrighted files from the Pirate Bay website between September 2011 to November 2013 – were acquitted of criminal charges in Belgian court yesterday.
This was a significant legal victory for the four Swedish-born freedom fighters who have been involved in countless legal battles and under constant media scrutiny for nearly a decade for operating and financing the infamously agile and endlessly mirrored torrent site Pirate Bay. Continue reading
Transaction Fee Market Develops Amid Surge in Transaction Volume
This week a flood of transactions which has alternately been called a spam attack or a stress test has forced Bitcoin users to adapt to a competitive transaction fee market for the first time since early 2013 when blocksize was consistently near default soft limit of 250 kilobytes. Numerous Bitcoin users and businesses are adapting to the flood of transactions by increasing their own transaction fees. At the present there are more than seventy megabytes of unconfirmed transactions leading to more naive users on Reddit and other social media to revert to speculating about blocksize hardforks which would merely amplify the problems this sort of flooding attack poses. Continue reading
Most Serene Republic Begins Advertising Public Blockchain Seed Nodes
In preparation for potential improvements to the Bitcoin reference client, citizens of Bitcoin's Most Serene Republic have begun establishing high availability Bitcoin nodes located in datacenters and hosted on dedicated hardware to serve as publicly advertised seed nodes from which Bitcoin users may sync their blockchains and more peers. The improvements to the foundation's reference implementation which spurred this move are the removal of all Domain Name System code from the client to allow an entirely statically built bitcoind as well as the removal of the legacy IRC initial peer discovery mechanism to reduce the attack surface bitcoind presents. Continue reading
Another Post BIP 66 Fork Dies after 3 Blocks
A second fork has followed the initial post BIP 66 fork further highlighting the continued danger of so called "soft" forking changes to the consensus code of Bitcoin network clients. The second fork persisted from 21:50 through to 23:40 on July 5th, 2015. Implementing the rather non-controversial change proposed by BIP 66 to enforce strict DER encoding on ECDSA signatures has without a doubt increased the fragility of the Bitcoin network such that users of all Bitcoin clients ought to consider waiting beyond the traditional 6 mined blocks before considering a transaction confirmed. Unless all major miners begin mining with fully validating node software, this instability is likely to continue indefinitely into the future with users of the latest versions of "Bitcoin Core" at risk of finding themselves stranded, maybe even permanently on the short side of an enduring fork.
Greek Finance Minister Varoufakis Resigns in Failure
Greek banks continue to struggle beneath the onerous burden of financial debt imposed by their left-leaning welfarist government and as such are teetering on the brink of insolvency.1 Despite a slew of highly restrictive capital controls and out-of-the-blue "bank holidays" designed to maintain some modest levels of liquidity in the face of branch and ATM queues across the country, the condition of Greece's banks is less than ideal and quite possibly insufficient for long-term survival. Continue reading
The prospect of Greek debt default isn't just weighing down the local economy either. Inextricably intertwined as the global fiat economy is, the Euro has taken some damage, as have a number of stock markets around the world, as many are wondering aloud whether Greece is the canary in the coalmine of paper promises. ↩
French TV Venture CANAL+ Hacked, Suppresses News with DMCA
TorrentFreak reports major French television Canal+ hits Github with DMCA complaint after experiencing a severe AWS breach. The hacker, who ran the “hooperp” Github repository, was able to steal “all the data and codes” regarding its new CRM project “Kiss deploy”, before using the server’s key to mine Bitcoin. Legal counsel for Canal+ revealed: Continue reading