Hemorrhaging social gaming "company" Zynga is seeking to top up on its diminishing funds by doing a sale and leaseback on its headquarters in San Francisco's Design district. This bezzle buck bolus should allow Zygna to continue bleeding well into the future. Zynga paid 340 United States dollars for each of the building's 670,000 square feet of floor space and may make up to 800 dollars per square foot in the sale based on local pricing trends (archived). This is a situation which could have created an opportunity to liquidate the firm and minimize losses for everyone, but it seems Zynga leadership has decided the bleeding must continue.
Monthly Archives: February 2016
Numerous Sites Explicitly Open To Cross Site Scripting
A survey of top websites has revealed many including unnamed Bitcoin holding websites have a header set which explicitly allows third party javascript to be run on their pages without any checks on the code's origin (archived). Web stack security is exactly as bad as you thought it was. Unless you didn't think it was this bad, in which case it is far worse than you think. Of course, Coinbase would never be the same if they removed their Gravatar integration.
US "National Security" Crippling Business Opportunities
News emerged today that Western Digital's planned acquisition of SanDisk has hit a snag with Chinese giant Unis withdrawing its potential investment in the deal over concerns about a United States "National Security" probe. Unis was set to bring 3.775 billion dollars to the table through an investment in Western Digital before the United States government introduced this friction. An optimistic press release was issued today asserting that Western Digital is still committed to making the deal, but without the additional money from Unis resources to make the synergy as sweet as possible may be lacking.
Asus Complaint Opens Door To Torts For Internet Of Shit Insecurity
Asus recently settled with the United States Federal Trade Commission over complaints related to the appalling security and security related instructions of its wireless home network routers. The complaint was sparked by an incident in February 2014 where numerous parties discovered a text file disclosing their router's status as open to exploitation by anyone were placed on hard drives attached to the routers for the purpose of shared storage. The attached hard drives serving as shared cloud storage for the entire world was contrary to expectations set in marketing literature for the devices. The action following the complaint which lead to this settlement creates a precedent for civil suits against various Internet of Shit device makers for their security lapses and negligent instructions provided to users. The potential for these torts to collide with backdoors created for "law enforcement"when those backdoors fall into public use is an exciting legal frontier. The full text of the consent order is presented below: Continue reading
British Pound Falling
Airstrip One's currency the pound, long detached from the sterling that is frequently mentioned in association with it, has fallen ~2% against the embattled United States dollar in today's trading. This would otherwise not be particularly notable as the pound has been falling against the United States dollar in the seven decades following the Bretton Woods accords, but this latest drop comes amid news that London mayor Boris Johnson have moved support the United Kingdom independence movement which advocates Airstrip One divorcing the failing European Union. Like other fiat powers Airstrip One and its entrenched order have been struggling in the face of Bitcoin's proposition of sound money. Airstrip One has also experienced increasing internal tension with northern portions of the archipelago seeking independence from London.
Emergency Physicians Fail Matt DeHart
On August 7th, 2010 paramedics and law enforcement personnel delivered former drone operator and journalist Matt DeHart to an Emergency Room after a harsh interrogation where he was drugged. He was mistakenly diagnosed as being in a psychotic break when he was actually being interrogated and persecuted by agents of the United States government from the FBI and other government agencies. This failure of clinical judgement and the legal persecution of DeHart which followed, where he was wrongfully targeted with assorted espionage and child pornography related charges as cover for the United States Government's effort to suppress his journalistic output and completely destroy his personhood raises serious questions. It is becoming increasingly imperative that medical practitioners seriously consider that patients presenting with complaints of Government persecution may be grounded in the reality of their circumstances. Clinicians would be well advised to explore means by which they may leverage resources including inpatient hospital placement to protect patients from hostile government agents in order to avoid malpractice torts in the future.
Tor And HTTP Gzip Leak Local Time Zone
Softpedia reports that an interaction between Tor and HTTP Gzip compression can narrow down the location of a server hosting Tor hidden services by leaking the local time zone (archived). This allows investigators to substantially narrow down the geographic location of a Tor hidden service server.
Linux Mint Server Compromised, Spread Malware
As reported by The Linux Mint Blog (archived), their own webserver has been compromised. An admin named Clem alleges that on February 20th, Bulgarian attackers changed a URL pointing to an ISO file for "Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon edition." Unsuspecting users were instead sent to "5.104.175.212" (archived) which hosted a modified file containing "Tsunami" (archived) malware. WordPress is blamed in the same blog post for having given unauthorized access to a www-data shell. Of course these kinds of tricks are easily defeated by the use of strong cryptography such as GPG, but that kind of hygiene is beyond the patience the typical Linux user can be expected to muster. The blog post also mentions various md5sum signatures of the supposedly correct files, but these unreliable checksums are not themselves contained within a signed statement.
Khmer Rouge Leader Pleas Social Justice In Court
Rare surviving Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan in appealing his life sentence for crimes against humanity plead to a United Nations supported court that his only fight was for "social justice" (archived). Of course the Khmer Rouge's atrocities were the natural end of the social justice agenda, an agenda which is returning to vogue in certain circles. The social justice agenda notably dismisses concerns over actual justice to instead elevate social equality as their first principle. In this way the Khmer Rouge was an exemplar! All are equal under the yoke, and the 750,000 to 3,000,000 who died1 in Khmer Rouge atrocities were the most equal of all!
The wide uncertain range persists because the Khmer Rouge was just that effective in suppressing the individual in the name of social equality/justice. ↩
Chainalysis Partners With Only Possible Customer
This past week it was announced that Bitcoin transaction tracking startup Chainalysis has partnered with Europol according to either multiple reports or numerous outlets parroting the same press release. Feeding the "law enforcement" quackery industrial complex is of course the only way for Chainalysis to meet its only natural customers. As there no serious phenomena known as Bitcoin taint, it can be assumed blockchain tracking is set to join handwriting analysis, psychics, lie detectors, and dowsing in the compendium of pseudoscience routinely entertained by "authorities" in the field of "law" enforcement.