Concerns about data collection and reporting tools Microsoft was embedded in Windows 10 has reportedly lead a number of top torrent trackers to ban users of Windows 10 from their services. While there are some amorphous concerns about a potential "piracy kill switch" Microsoft could trigger, there are concrete concerns about the level of information Windows 10 collects from installed systems and delivers to Microsoft. The debugging and performance related information collected by Microsoft presents a serious threat to the security of the torrent trackers as well as peers who connect to Windows 10 users in torrent swarms. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: August 2015
BitBet Prediction Market Opens XTCoin Bet, Pool already over 100 BTC
Today BitBet has opened a bet on whether Mike Hearn and Gavin Andressen's XTCoin forking effort will succeed. The bet which closes to new betting July 2nd, 2016 and resolves on August 1st, 2016 enumerates a number of conditions under which the XT effort could be considered a failure. These metrics include sufficient mining of XT blocks to trigger the fork, the mining of a block over 1000000 bytes with the XT block version number, the mining difficulty of the XTCoin chain, and the price of XTCoin compared to Bitcoin. Back in March the largest Bitcoin bet in terms of value was resolved on the BitBet platform with a total of 5514.62 BTC in wager on the proposition that Bitcoin would surpass Berkshire Hathaway as an investment. At the time of this writing 100.09 Bitcoin have been bet on the side of the XT coup failing, while only 1.02 Bitcoin have been wagered that XTCoin will succeed.
Mining Difficulty Advances For The Fourth Consecutive Time
Amongst a coup attempt which fell flat on its face, the Bitcoin mining difficulty continues to strive forward by way of reaching a new all time high of 54,256,630,328, an increase of 2.95% over the August 8th adjustment. Today's change also marks the fourth consecutive increase in the mining difficulty – a first for 2015.
A total of 3 BIP 101 blocks have been mined to date, representing an inconsequential 0.3% of the last 1000 blocks mined.
Hearn's Blacklist Shenanigans
Qntra and others have been detailing potential ulterior motives for the push for an XT hard fork. Populist support for "Bitcoin"XT tends to ignore code that has not been well publicized or that they find inconvenient to acknowledge. The code in question relates to the deanonymization of XT nodes running on Tor and the blacklisting of Tor exit addresses. This is achieved through an IP address blacklist of nodes which "misbehave" and checked daily against a list of nodes maintained by Mike Hearn which the XT client dutifully fetches. Continue reading
Collected Notes on the XT Client and XTCoin fork
Several days after the Mike Hearn and Gavin Andressen announced their coup attempt it is becoming clear that the XT effort is an effort to misrepresent a neutered, less robust, and rapidly changing system as Bitcoin. A number of parties are catching onto the false sense of urgency which has been pushed hard by Gavin Andressen over the past year and supported by a number of flooding attacks presented as "stress tests." Continually the coup's propaganda has been crashing into the hard face of reality as the reaction to the flooding attacks show Bitcoin works as advertised when the attack ends up allowing for a demonstration of transaction fee markets. Continue reading
Ashley Madison and Established Men Experience Data Liberation
In a PGP-signed statement,1 a group of freedom fighters2 known only as "The Impact Team" followed up on their promise to release the database of user information that they rightfully obtained from Avid Life Media's Ashley Madison, a popular dating website dedicated to fostering extramarital relations, and Established Men, a website dedicated to pairing up beautiful young women with successful older men. Continue reading
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Avid Life Media has failed to take down Ashley Madison and Established Men. We have explained the fraud, deceit, and stupidity of ALM and their members. Now everyone gets to see their data.
Find someone you know in here? Keep in mind the site is a scam with thousands of fake female profiles. See ashley madison fake profile lawsuit; 90-95% of actual users are male. Chances are your man signed up on the world's biggest affair site, but never had one. He just tried to. If that distinction matters.
Find yourself in here? It was ALM that failed you and lied to you. Prosecute them and claim damages. Then move on with your life. Learn your lesson and make amends. Embarrassing now, but you'll get over it.
Any data not signed with key 6E50 3F39 BA6A EAAD D81D ECFF 2437 3CD5 74AB AA38 is fake.
Naturally, the woefully incompetent Avid Life Media Chief Executive Officer Noel Biderman called the group "cyber-terrorists," very much in the same vein as Darkode or The Pirate Bay Four, but this is no more genuine than the marketplace thief who bumps into you, steals your wallet out of your pocket in broad daylight, and then screams "THIEF!" at you before he ducks into the shadows with your ID and money. ↩
Shutdown Notice Startup Shutdownify Lastest Failed Startup
In the world of Silicon Valley startups Shutdownify sought to make the process of failed startups shutting down a cleaner and more uniform process. Today Shutdownify announced it would be following in its customer's footsteps (archived) and utilizing its own services as the failure startup's niche was not sustainable as a business.
Coinwallet Plans Spam While the Spamming is Cheap
Last month a venture calling itself "Coinwallet" flooded the Bitcoin network with spam in what the company called a "stress test." The spam delayed underpaying transactions without fees insufficient to secure space to be confirmed in a block resulting in a scenario where a fee market for block space could develop. A Coinwallet representative recently stated the company will be performing another stress test in early September, claiming there will close to 4.6 GB worth of spam that will flood the network. Continue reading
No XTCoin Support Committed to the Blockchain Yet
Days after Mike Hearn and Gavin Andressen announced a not quite Bitcoin client that when triggered by a particular set of events create an altchain, miner adoption of their forking client remains so low not a single block containing a vote for their coup has been committed to the blockchain. This is in the face of a self declared mining operation claiming a third of a petahash swearing their fealty to Hearn and Andressen's new pet altcoin. In the time since Hearn announced the fork though a pseudonode implementation which passes most tests to be counted as a forking XT node has been published alongside a full node Bitcoin Client which appears to be an XTCoin node in everything except actually forking over to XTCoin if a fork is actually ever triggered. With this early reception to Mike Hearn and Gavin Andressen's fork ultimatum the chances of an actual XTCoin creating fork occurring appear to be low.
Hearn Releases Code to Potentially Fork XTC from Bitcoin
This weekend Mike Hearn announced the release of a version of his BitcoinXT client which would hard fork a new altcoin referred to here as XTCoin from the Bitcoin network. Should enough blocks be mined which profess to contain a vote to trigger Hearn's XTCoin fork, the XTCoin blockchain would split from the Bitcoin Blockchain an allow blocks to be mined at a maximum size of 8 megabytes each growing exponentially to a maximum size of 8 gigabytes 20 years after XTCoin forks should XTCoin somehow manage to keep enough hashpower to continue producing new blocks over the entire span of time. As mentioned in the Hard Fork Missile Crisis XTCoin, like any other altcoin forked from Bitcoin and fraudulently misrepresenting itself as Bitcoin would come under devastating economic attack which would almost certainly render further mining on the XTCoin chain a costly money losing endeavor. Continue reading