Gavin Andressen stated early on in his pursuit of a hard limit that he wanted Bitcoin to scale to Visa levels, stating the payment network's transaction throughput as a frame of reference. There is a common misconception about the structure of traditional electronic payment networks – this has caused the lemmings of the Bitcoin world to set an unrealistic goal of competing with an industry that is filled with holes. Bitcoin's decentralized ledger prevents it from ever being utilized as a retail payment network directly. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: September 2015
Enhanced Spyware Comes to Older Versions of Windows
The telemetry spyware which lead to Windows 10 users being banned from a number of torrent trackers has now arrived for Windows 7 and 8 in Microsoft's latest batch of "updates" (archived). Attempting to stop the reporting of data to Microsoft on infected machines requires a firewall between the machine and the wider internet, though euthanasia is likely the only effective remedy in the long run for machines subjected to this infection. Any operator of serious internet ventures ought to be giving serious consideration to following in the footsteps of the torrent trackers and deal with Windows users through shunning and the quarantine of their machines. It would also likely be prudent to consider any cryptographic key material living on a machine running Windows to be in the possession of Microsoft or soon to be in the possession of Microsoft.
Mozilla Vulnerability Hoard Compromised For a Year
This weekend news emerged that the Mozilla Foundation's Bugzilla tracker's hoard of vulnerabilities in the Firefox web browser had been breached for more than a year and potentially as long as two years. By Mozilla's own admission critical security vulnerabilities left unfixed for months had been available to the breaching party who had complete access to a goldmine of ways to abuse Mozilla users that Mozilla itself had been sitting on. Mozilla's handling of this episode has been nothing short of abusive to its users. Continue reading
Many Network Appliances Leak Master TLS Private Keys Through "Forward Secrecy"
Florian Weimer has published a paper (pdf, txt) showing that a wide variety of purpose built network hardware leaks transport layer security keys when forward secrecy is enabled. The leaks occur due to faulty RSA signatures produced when the RSA software uses an optimization derived from the "Chinese Remainer Theorem" without any further hardening or error checking. The problem with the Chinese Remainer Theorem optimization has been known since 1996 when Arjen Lenstra brought these concerns about faults during RSA signature generation into the literature (pdf, png). Two decades later GNUTLS, PolarSSL and Libgcrypt lack checks for this potential calamity by default, though other software implementations have ways to disable checks. With the affected appliances once the signature flaw occurs the "forward secrecy" key agreement protocol serves as a channel for acquiring the private key. Continue reading
Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Continues Growth Streak
The Bitcoin mining difficulty continues to grow, reaching a new all time high of 56,957,648,455 – an increase of 4.98% over the August 22nd adjustment. Today's change marks not just the fifth consecutive increase but also the largest increase in the difficulty since April 5th, 2015.1
5.84% ↩
XT Node Blacklists Fail to Prevent DDoS Attack
Mike Hearn and Gavin Andressen recently chose to use the Bitcoin-XT project to attempt to provoke a hard fork in the blockchain to increase the block size limit. Users who support Gavin's code to hard fork the network to increase the block size, began switching to, and launching Bitcoin-XT nodes. After Mike Hearn's declaration of war, the number of XT-Nodes on the network began to increase. However Mike Hearn began seeing a pattern of nodes getting attacked by heavy DDoS attacks. Continue reading
British and North Carolina Teens Prosecuted as Child Pornographers in Separate Cases
Two cases on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean have garnered attention this week with the common link that both cases involve criminal sanctions being imposed on teenagers under the age of legal majority for having nude images of themselves. In North Carolina two romantically involved 17 year olds faced charges when a search of one's phone lead police to discover their mutual exchange of nude photographs. One of the 17 year olds plead down to a lesser charge while the other still faces multiple charges of child exploitation almost all of them relating to his own self portraits (archived) making him legally the victim and perpetrator of his own exploitation. Meanwhile in Britain Continue reading
Obama Brings Fish to Orgasm In Alaska Vacation Hijinks
CNN and numerous other outlets are reporting that in a depraved act of bestiality the Commander in Chief of the American socialist state Barack Obama has brought a male salmon to orgasm in from of a crowd of spectators (archived). The event occurred during Obama's current vacation to Alaska where he went to an area known to have numerous horny stud salmon in mating form. In the brief time he handled on of the fish he was able to bring the fish to drip its seed all over his shoes. In the past Obama has made it known he is an enemy of Bitcoin and General Purpose Computing going so far as to issue oppressive instructions to law enforcement while denying mercy for a brave American patriot who had opposed his efforts to impose socialist hegemony in cyberspace. It is unknown at the present whether Michelle Obama had given her assent to Barack's hookup with the fish, or if she knew at all about Barack's sexual proclivities of the piscine variety.
Guilty Plea After Package Tracking Breaks Opsec in Darkmarket Drug Case
Harold Bates of Massachusetts plead guilty to drug charges relating to the importation of a half kilogram of methylone from China. Bates was implicated in the case when his residential IP address was discovered to have checked the tracking number on the USPS web portal of a package seized by postal inspectors containing the prohibited drug product. The package was intercepted in Hollywood, Florida. Bates faces three methylone related charges carrying a potential 20 years of prison each along with a separate charge for possessing a prohibited item as an inmate of a prison which carries an additional potential for 10 further years in prison. The three methylone related charges are conspiracy to import, importation, and possession with intent to distribute. Overseeing the case is Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts Patti B. Saris who is also the Commissioner and Chair of the United States Sentencing Commission. Bates is scheduled to be sentenced on December 10th in Boston.
Peoria Pays $125,000 in Satire Settlement
According to the Journal Star the city of Peoria, Illinois has agreed to pay an eighth of a million United States Dollars (archived) to Jon Daniel in order to settle a civil suit arising from the city's persecution of Daniel for daring to run a twitter account parodying Mayor Jim Ardis. Daniel's home was raided on April 15th, 2014 as a part of a police operation to identify and suppress the operator of a satire twitter feed for mocking Mayor Ardis. Daniel and his representatives provided by the ACLU alleged Daniel's 1st and 4th amendment rights were violated, that he was falsely imprisoned, and that his personal privacy was violated as a part of the manhunt and police raid directed at his parodic writing activities.