The Bitcoin Foundation chaired by mod6 and ben_vulpes has announced its first release milestone. The release dubbed 0.5.3.1 by the foundation consists of a set of patches applied to the original 0.5.3 Satoshi codebase and recipe for combining it all into a static Bitcoin daemon build. This release removes a substantial amount of cruft from the original 0.5.3 release including hooks for Qt and Windows builds along with the problematic alert system and universal plug and play. This release works on Linux with supported release for other platforms planned in the future. The release tarball is available here.
Journalist Barrett Brown Bears Full Restitution Brunt
After a guilty plea that when presented to the judge assigned him 63 months of time spent in a Federal prison and ordered nearly a million dollars in restitution, Barrett Brown's effort to have the restitution reduced has been denied by the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas. Brown was ordered to pay restitution to Stratfor and others based on the full calculated damages for the crime of reporting on a crime where the actors responsible for committing the criminal act have not been found, convicted, or otherwise sanctioned. Continue reading
Security As A Coffin
On Thursday, Sakurity published an exploit on their blog regarding Authy's SMS 2-Factor Authentication API. The bug allows for an attacker to bypass the now notorious 2FA window with the string
../sms
Coinbase is one of Authy's customers, who claims to "take careful measures to ensure that your bitcoin is as safe as possible." The bitcoin webwallet provider has been a vocal advocate of 2FA, popularizing it to the point of Gavin proposing its inclusion in Bitcoin Core. Continue reading
Evolution Shuts Up Shop, Taking User Funds With It
In a forum where its users discuss the buying and selling of drugs in full view of the public, rumours are circulating that the darknet market place named Evolution has closed its doors with the owners taking with them anywhere up to 43,000 BTC in user funds.
Deepdotweb first reported yesterday on the difficulties Evolution users were facing in withdrawing their bitcoins. To placate those users, Kimble, one of the owners of Evolution provided this explanation for the delay: Continue reading
Largest Bitcoin Bet Resolved
The largest Bitcoin bet in terms of absolute value, where on BitBet.us Mircea Popescu laid down 1000 BTC of his own funds on the proposition that Bitcoin would outperform Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway class A stock has been resolved as "No" with Bitcoin's exchange rate having suffered over the past 12 months. A year ago Mircea announced the bet on his blog Trilema and further declared that to hedge the bet he had sold Berkshire. Asked about how he felt about the bet's final outcome he offered: Continue reading
Coinapult Reports Hot Wallet Compromise
Coinapult has halted its services after a compromise of its hot wallet lead to the theft of 150 BTC. Coinapult notified its customers via twitter to cease sending bitcoin to existing Coinapult addresses at this time. A notice on Coinapult's website currently reads: Continue reading
OpenSSL Severe Vulnerability to be Revealed March 19th
The OpenSSL project has announced that on March 19th they will be releasing updates to address what they are referring to as a "highest severity defect" affecting all of their supported versions. Details of the vulnerability are being kept under embargo until the patches are released, though this time the OpenSSL has had the courtesy to disclose the issue to the LibreSSL core team. Here's a snippet from the OpenSSL security policy on high security vulnerabilities: Continue reading
Coinbase Compliance Chief Resigns
The Washington Free Beacon reports that the Chief Compliance Officer of Coinbase has resigned. Chief Compliance Officer Martine Niejadlik resigned Coinbase after spending a bit more than a year with the organization. The Free Beacon notes that recently investors and regulators have been critical of Coinbase's "outreach" efforts where Coinbase has noted that Bitcoin does not respect international sanctions as well as Coinbase's failure to definitively achieve licensing in every US state it claims to operate.
Australian Drug Trafficker Sentenced To 12 Years Prison
An Australian man who late last month plead guilty to drug trafficking charges in relation to the importation of MDMA, cocaine and amphetamines into Australia was yesterday sentenced to 12 and a half years prison. Continue reading
Amid Decision To Close, AllCrypt.com Reports Hot Wallet Theft
Off the back of an announcement that the AllCrypt.com bitcoin/altcoin exchange would be going offline as of the 31st of March due to low trading volume, the site now reports that its hot wallet has been emptied to the tune of about 42 BTC 37 BTC1 The alleged theft comes just one month after AltCrypt.com's twitter account claimed that its users bitcoins were safe due to the site being "too small and insignificant" to matter. Continue reading
It was at first claimed on the AllCrypt.com website that the theft totalled 42 BTC – 12 BTC owned by the site and 30 BTC owned by users. The AllCrypt.com twitter account claims different figures. ↩