Lawsky Moves to Private Practice

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New York Department of Financial Services superintendent Ben Lawsky is stepping down to pursure a career in private practice. Some time in the near future the New York Department of Financial Services is anticipated to pass some variant of the previously revised "BitLicense" regulation removing their jurisdiction from any relevance with concern to Bitcoin's future.

St Louis Federal Reserve Bank DNS Hijacked Last Month

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This week the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis confirmed earlier rumours that they had been victims of a domain name server hijacking attack which compromised a number of user credentials related to their research services and products. The Bank has responded by resetting user passwords and emailing subscribers to alert them to the fact their credentials are likely in the hands of the hijackers.

Weak 4096 Bit RSA Key in Strong Set Factored, More Factored Keys Follow

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Update: No Such lAbs reports that other Phuctored keys have valid signatures.

Update 2: More factored RSA Keys and their purported owners have been disclosed

This morning the Phuctor operated by No Such lAbs broke its first RSA key. The compromised key in question which was a 4096 bit key which had a subkey divisible by 231, which is further divisible by 3, 7, and 11. This factorization was shortly followed by two other factorizations of identifiable keys. Each identifiable key has a companion which is similarly weak but they have yet to be identified. Continue reading →

Mining Difficulty Jumps By 2.44%

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With the tenth adjustment in the Bitcoin mining difficulty for 2015, the difficulty has increased to 48,807,487,245. Today's adjustment represents an increase of 2.44% over May 3rd's difficulty of 47,643,398,018. The global hash rate as of today's change stands at 349,377,603 GH/s.

Williams Pleas Guilty to Debunking Polygraph Pseudoscience

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Douglas Williams, proprietor of the now defunct polygraph.com, has plead guilty in Federal court to five counts of obstructing justice and a single count of mail fraud on the second day of his trial. Williams had for years dedicated considerable time to the cause of debunking polygraph "lie detection" as a dangerous pseudoscience by coaching applicants for "national security" jobs with the United States Government in ways to pass the tests while providing answers with no connection to actual truth. Continue reading →

US Poultry and Egg Prices Headed To The Moon

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A North American outbreak of the H5N2 avian influenza virus is expected to lead to much higher prices of eggs and poultry products as efforts to contain the outbreak so far have been unsuccessful. More than 32 million commercial birds have either been killed by the virus or culled in an attempt to slow its spread and contain the outbreak. The outbreak was first reported to have affected egg producing farms in Iowa, and the disease has since spread to neighbouring Nebraska. Continue reading →