Cliven Bundy, who lacks a prior criminal record, was denied his 8th amendment constitutional right to make bail for reasonable pretrial release by United States Court judge Janice Stewart. Hope for constitutional justice which has long been endangered in the United States might have finally died under uncertain circumstances with its last strong champion this past weekend.
Monthly Archives: February 2016
KncMiner Cuts Of 20% Of Employees
Swedish sources are reporting the KncMiner has let go of 12 employees comprising 20% of their workforce (archived). CEO Sam Cole among other things blames the inability of operations in the Nordic country to compete with Chinese mining firms. Several days ago there was a stabbing reported at a datacenter associated with KncMiner. This new development suggests the pressures of working for a deeply struggling company contributed to the recent outbreak of violence.
Update: KncMiner is also one of the many mining operations listed to this day as supporting the ClassicCoin fork (along with Bitfury, which led the backpedalling effort after it became obvious Classiccoin does not have nor can acquire the support of key players in the market.)
Update 2: This struggling concern is now producing blocks containing votes for the doomed ClassicCoin fork.
Markets Favoring Man Over Machine In Upcoming Go Match
The prediction market BitBet is showing the money decidedly favors Lee Sedol over Google's AlphaGo to win their upcoming match in March. Early betting favored AlphaGo, as reported by Geekwire (archived), but continued betting has moved the odds to more than 2:1 in Sedol's favor.
Google Unveils Glibc DNS Client Vulnerability, Many Bitcoin Implementations Affected
Today Google's online security blog unveiled a buffer overflow in the Gnu C library's DNS client (archived). The vulnerability allows the getaddrinfo function to overflow opening the doors to all manner of malice. This vulnerability affects all Bitcoin implementations compiled against the GNU C library which invoke DNS. This includes Bitcoin Core and the clients programmed to eventually fork into altcoins including the "Bitcoin" XT and "Bitcoin" "Classic" network clients. The reference Bitcoin implementation maintained by the Bitcoin Foundation is unaffected as DNS was excised from that client,1 and scripts are available for building the reference implementation against the musl C library.2 It is strongly recommended that Bitcoin users patch their preferred client3 to remove DNS or move to a client maintained by a team that cares about security and eliminating unnecessary attack surfaces in advance.
Pravda: Missing Batteries Led Billion Dollar Blimp Astray
The Billion Dollar blimp which was the victim of a police shooting when Pennsylvania State Troopers repeatedly fired shotguns into its body until its complete deflation, now has an official narrative on why it defected and carved a trail of destruction across the eastern United States. Mainstream United States media sources are presenting as an explanation for the Blimp's final adventure missing batteries in an automatic deflation system (archived). If the batteries were installed it would have supposedly allowed the blimp to have been deflated remotely by its masters in the event of it going rogue. Instead when the blimp actually went rogue it lashed out using its flailing cable as a weapon of rebellion until it was brutalized by police in its final moments.
4th Amendment Champion Dies Under Uncertain Circumstances
This past weekend United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died under uncertain circumstances at a resort in Texas. Initial reports suggested Scalia died of a heart attack and then later clarification came to instead describe the cause of his death as the cessation of continued heart beats. Scalia was found with a pillow over his head wearing unwrinkled pajamas (archived). It has not yet been determined if an autopsy will be ordered to rule out the very real possibility of foul play.
Antonin Scalia's most pertinent legacy was his staunch defense of 4th amendment privacy rights, frequently rejecting "law enforcement" abuses of the American people. As technology has pushed the ways "law enforcement" could abuse the constitutional restraints on their power, Scalia was often a dissenting voice on the court insisting that adding a computer to an abuse of due process doesn't make it any less of an abuse. With the criminal overreach of law and law enforcement in the United States, the fourth amendment restrictions on police action were one of the few legal means of recourse available against injustice by the law.
The departure of Antonin Scalia drastically weakens the opportunity for actual justice in the Ross Ulbricht case should its appellate journey take it to the Supreme Court.
Optical Disc Software Approaching International Crisis
TorrentFreak reports that a substantial lobbying campaign is underway to push the United States Trade Representative to puntively place Antigua on the copyright Priority Watchlist (archived). The dispute centers around continued sales of Antigua based Slysoft's software for backing up the content of optical disc entertainment media. Adversarial legal proceedings are proceeding against Slysoft in Antigua, but through the wonders of this "Rule of Law" business Antigua is compelled to continue allowing Slysoft to continue sales as the courts make decisions according to Antiguan law. At the present Antigua has the blessing of the World Trade Organization to open an explicitly piracy related internet service as compensation for the United State's continued assaults on Antigua's online gaming industry. If the Trade Repesentative moves to sanction Antigua this would be yet another example of the United States refusal to accept that its jurisdiction ends where other state borders begin.
Government, Banks Assault Rural Indian Culture
The India Times reports that the government is calling on banks to assist an attack on thousands of years of cultural tradition by assualting the beloved practice of open defecation in rural India (archived). This call comes despite the fact that many toilets stand unused or abandoned as they are rejected by defenders of this cultural heritage (archived). A report released in 2014 by the World Health Organization and UNICEF states that India has a 50% open defecation rate.
Twitter Adopting Dangerous Benesch Speech Framework
As Twitter attempts to fix its struggling fortunes by positioning itself as a counter revolutionary institution of the extant socialist order, it has come out that Twitter will be adopting Susan Benesch's dangerous framework for evaluating speech. Benesch's dangerous framework provides a methodology for censors to grade speech utterances on their likelihood of affecting change in the world so that they might be censored while innocuous utterances of little impact may be permitted in order to create a simulacrum of free speech occurring. At the core of Benesch's framework which purports to be motivated by principles assuming equality among persons is a concession to the reality that speakers are fundamentally unequal. For interested entomologists the full text of a working paper by Benesch produced for the "World Policy Institute" in 2012 on her framework is submitted in full plaintext below: Continue reading
Stabbbing At KnCMiner Affiliated Datacenter
NSD in Sweden is reporting that a combatant in his 40s was arrested after allegedly stabbing a man in his 20s (archived). The stabbing supposedly took place in an area of the datacenter hosting servers operated by KnCMiner.