This evening Fiat stock broker and online investment management portal Scottrade revealed it was hacked in an email to customers. The advised customers that critical personally identifying information was in all probability taken from their servers. In the email they offer that they have evidence they were breeched roughly around 2013 and 2014 without being more specific. Numerous fiat based financial services providers this year have not only had to weather attacks to their own infrastructure, but attacks which leveraged information attained in other breaches degrading their ability to provide services at all. Information publicly disclosed on the Scottrade breach so far was offered in an email to customers which availed them of a dubious credit monitoring service. Users of fiat services like Scottrade and of supposedly Bitcoin services that swear allegiance to customs of the fiat identity theft tradition are advised to stop doing that before you find yourself insolvent. The full text of the email is available below: Continue reading
Monthly Archives: October 2015
Bharara Snubbed By Supreme Court
Bloomberg reports that the United States Supreme Court has refused to consider whether convictions won by Preet Bharara should not have been overturned on appeal (archived). While this decision to decline entertaining Bharara's zealotry only immediately rescues three defendants from the jeopardy of having their cases revived, it lays the groundwork for hundreds of other defendants to have their convictions or guilty pleas vacated under the higher standard for insider trading criminal liability established by the appellate court. This is a severe blow to the embattled Bharara's office which will now be burdened by the influx of defendants looking for freedom from the sanctions criminally imposed on them by Bharara. This is just the latest even in a long downward spiral of reality hitting Preet Bharara after his unjustly criminal prosecution of Ross Ulbricht.
USMS Schedules Final Silk Road Auction
The United States Marshals Service has announced its final Silk Road auction to sell 44,341 Bitcoins. The Auction will be held November 5th. The Bitcoins will be sold in 21 lots of 2,000 with a 22nd lot of 2,341 Bitcoin. Per the Marshals service this is the last planned sale of Bitcoins criminally seized from Ross Ulbricht by Preet Bharara and his co-conspirators. The full details of the sale along with a calendar of sale milestones is reproduced below: Continue reading
Vessenes' Foundation Drops Sponsorship of Node Explorer
The Vessenes' Foundation was revealed in a social media post to have dropped sponsorship for the Bitnodes.io Bitcoin node explorer, turning the project over to Raspberry Pi reseller 21.co's care. It is not yet entirely clear what this means for the Bitnodes.io Banana Pi reseller program.
Malleability Issues Continue Testing Zero-conf Faithful
Coinkite in a blog post revealed that a number of their customer's transactions are continuing to be affected by malleability issues (archived) which stem from valid signed transactions having more than one potential transaction ID number until mined. Previously malleability concerns stemmed from different possible valid encodings with MtGox being a noted transaction encoding deviant. The malleability issue affecting Coinkite is that a transaction ID may use either the low or high S value from the ECDSA signature of a transaction. Transaction ID's have never been a reliable tool for distinguishing unconfirmed transactions, and any service that depends on using them to distinguish unmined yet broadcasted transactions does so at their and their customer's peril. Considering the disastrous forking that resulted from the last attempt to soft fork away a malleability vector it is unlikely this can or will be addressed through a soft fork process. Transaction malleability is one of many reasons to wait for confirmation through mining before accepting a Bitcoin transaction.
Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Tops 60 Billion For The First Time
The Bitcoin mining difficulty has increased for the 7th consecutive time with the difficulty now standing at 60,813,224,039 – a gain of 2.49% over the September 17th adjustment.