Altcoin Monero has suffered a blow in its push to become the dominant currency of darknet markets, with reddit users reporting that the owners of Oasis market have apparently pulled an exit scam, absconding with around 150 Bitcoin and a yet undetermined amount of Monero. Reports from reddit also indicate that users attempting to withdraw Monero from the Alpha Bay marketplace are meeting similar frustrations, though the site is still online. This news caps a very bad week for XMR, with the MyMonero web wallet service run by developer fluffypony (WoT:fluffypony) also being was offline for several days now, with users reporting silence from support channels and inability to withdraw funds, though private keys can still be recovered and imported into an actual wallet. These particular wallets have been target by hackers several times in the past few months, resulting in several millions of USD vanishing. At the time of the writing of this article, the sorry for your loss was at -17% and continued to plunge.
Monthly Archives: October 2016
Kim Kardashian Bound, Gagged, and Robbed After Social Media Use
Kim Kardashian was bound, gagged, and robbed during a home invasion of the Parisian hotel apartment she shares with Yeezus (archived). The heist has been described in the populist media as "well planned" an attribute likely assisted by Kardashian's prolific use of social media. Using social media Kardashian uploaded substantial photo and videographic information of the residence that was likely of tremendous value for the home invaders, 10 million1 United States dollars of informational value if the reports circulating in the popular press are to be believed. Sorry for your loss.
My has the value of these things dropped. ↩
After Recent Leak North Sea Lubricated To Spec Per BP's Assessment
A BP oil platform located in the North Sea experienced Sorry For Your Loss on Sunday by leaking 95 tons of oil following a technical issue. The spill is being monitored by air and the company "believes that allowing the oil to disperse naturally at sea is the best way to deal with the spill, although other options have not been ruled out." The release was contained within approximately an hour of it occurring though officials said the platform, located about 46 miles off the coast of Shetland, is still offline. Scottish officials with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds are said to be investigating what impact the accident would have on wildlife in and around the Atlantic. The spill is said to be around two times smaller than another similar spill that occurred on Shell’s Gannet platform in 2011.
Ethereum "Come At Me Bro" Patch Attacked As Invitation Is Taken
Less than 24 hours after Ethereum developers boldly announced their come at me bro fix for the geth client, an attacker decided to come at them with yet another previously undiscovered attack vector. Pope Vitalik himself announced on reddit:
Basically, it's a quadratic attack where the culprit this time is a series of SUICIDE calls followed by a DELEGATECALL tower. SUICIDE creates dirty objects much more cheaply than any other opcode, and this creates a memory blowup. We have identified two possible fix strategies and are starting work on implementing them.
Ether huffers were quick to praise the efforts of their dear leader, while other users were quick to offer tips on setting up nodes on the parity platform. Parity is written in rust which has yet to be tested extensively, attackers having too many lulz watching the rats scramble scramble to plug holes on that sinking ship.
Dam Panic Spreads Among "Environmentalists"
A number of self described "environmentalists" are spreading panic about the atmospheric carbon released by microbes consuming organic debris in reservoirs created by dammed rivers and streams. The conclusion being pushed with this finding is that other sources of "carbon emission" must be still further limited. Sorry for your lues.
Colombian Electorate Votes To Continue War Against FARC
The leftist rebel group FARC and the leftist Colombian government were dealt a serious blow after voters rejected a peace deal at the ballot box. For 52 years FARC has been terrorizing rural Colombia in the name of Marxist Leninism and for the last four of those years alleged Colombian president and noted leftist Juan Manuel Santos Calderon has been negotiating a peace deal centered around "truth and reconciliation" rather than "retributive" justice with the rebels. Apparently "truth and reconciliation is not popular with voters. Peace in our time, ballots in Colombia's.
Ethereum Developers Reach Violent Part Of Huffing Binge With "Come at me bro"
Ethereum developers announced an update to their flaming-tire-in-a-shitpit geth implementation today, which supposedly fixes the recent spate of DoS attacks that have affected the network. The hotfixes, dubbed "Come at me bro" by its authors, are just one of many pieces of ductape continually applied to the popular golang client which is the go-to choice for attackers wishing to demonstrate the overall brokenness of the platform. The release nodes on Github assured users that "Further optimizations will most probably follow as we comb the code for bottlenecks" which has historically been translated as developers scrambling to fix issues that no one could have predicted being exploited. (archived)
Not Quite News Roundup Xtend 8
Welcome to the eighth edition of the Qntra Not Quite News Roundup Xtend (TM)(R). The below events are alleged to have happened, but they are decidedly innocent of newsworthiness.
- The only point of contention from the first United States presidential debate which persisted in mainstream discussion through the end of the week was an accusation that twenty years ago Donald Trump-Clinton fatshamed a beauty contest winner after she rapidly put on weight post contest. The weight gain was in violation of a contract which stipulated that while holding the contest's title the winner must continue to carry the shape of a beauty contest winner.
- Hillary Rodham-Clinton was discovered to have alleged that many young American leftists were basement dwellers on tape. This follows her putting the few remaining working Americans into a basket labelled deplorables during the weekend her legs buckled at Ground Zero.
- The developers behind the UnlimitedSpamCoin fork are allegedly distributing "research grants" in order to reward efforts to discover just how much spam they can harbor in the event they manage to fork their desired altcoin off of the Bitcoin blockchain.
- Chronically troubled transaction intermediary Purse.io released a javascript library purporting to be for use with Bitcoin through deficiencies without possible remedy in javascript developers, runtimes, and the language itself render javascript especially unsuitable for applications touching Bitcoin.
- An oddly specific prediction alleging a future Bitcoin price in the 800 United States dollar per coin range has been circulating with enthusiasm through certain outlets alleging they report Bitcoin news. As the prices reported on fiat/Bitcoin interfaces are notoriously weak in their relationship to reality it is likely this price will appear on such an interface at some point eventually. It is similarly likely that because numbers are so unfair one of these interfaces will at some point report "magenta" as a price.
- Silbert and others are dumping capital into an Indian venture dubbed "Unocoin" as self declared "Venture Capitalists" turn their attentions to the birthplace of bureaucracy.
- The criminal payment of a sex offender for babysitting services by the still more criminal gang in Springfield, Illinois came to public attention after the sex offender kidnapped his 13 year old stepdaughter and her infant son who he may have fathered (archived). He fled to rural West Virginia where he was likely lured by the popular myth that recursive familial relationships were more openly accepted there, but instead he was arrested.
- Rumours are circulating that Deutsche Bank will soon be saying Auf Wiedersehen to solvency.
Bitcoin Foundation Celebrates Month Of Activity And RELEASE Milestone
In their September state of Bitcoin address the Bitcoin Foundation was able to celebrate a substantial milestone in the clean up of the reference Bitcoin implementation. A flurry of testing and tweaking has lead to foundation co-chair mod6 (WOT:mod6) declaring the project has finally reached its long awaited milestone of version 0.5.4 RELEASE. Though most of the functional improvements to the reference implementation have long been enjoyed on actual running of Bitcoin nodes, the title of RELEASE was withheld until sanity could be brought to the makefiles and build process at large. Substantial contributions in time, sweat, and blood were made by ben_vulpes (WOT:ben_vulpes), shinohai (shinohai), and trinque (trinque).