Josh Greenberg a cofounder of the late music streaming service Grooveshark was found dead in his Florida home, and according to the BBC and his mother he had no ongoing health concerns. Grooveshark was founded in 2006 and closed this April after years of legal harassment by agents of the copyright regime culminating in a United States court finding Grooveshark liable for up to nearly three quarter of a billion dollars in damages. At its peak Grooveshark provided 145 people with employment.
Author Archives: Aaron 'BingoBoingo' Rogier
Microsoft Product Critical Vulnerability Week After Update End of Life
Microsoft has now announced a vulnerability in all of its Windows products a week after their Windows Server 2003 product has reached end of life for continued support. For what little it is worth Microsoft has issued an emergency patch to address this vulnerability in supported versions of their Windows family of products. The vulnerability exists in the way Microsoft products handle Microsoft's own "OpenType" format for fonts. This exploit via fonts affecting Windows desktops and servers follows an April exploit which rooted Windows servers using their flawed JPEG handling mechanisms. Microsoft stands to profit from users of Windows Server 2003 both upgrading to a supported version or opting for premium beyond end of life support contracts.
Kickass Torrents Dropped From Google Search Results
Torrent Freak and others are reporting that Google has dropped Kickass Torrents from its search results, describing Google's action as a "severe penalty" to its search rankings. After the final collapse of the Pirate Bay Kickass Torrents has ascended to become the most popular torrent site. Kickass Torrents as moved domains in its history but at the moment has settled at the domain kat.cr for the foreseeable future. Google over its decade and a half of existence has moved away from its PageRank algorithm which brought it to dominance instead favoring manual actions to shape search results. Immediately after dropping Kickass Torrents from search results the first result on Google for the query "Kickass Torrents" was a known malware site imitating the actual Kickass Torrents site.
Ashley Madison Hacked
Extramarital dating site Ashley Madison has been hacked according to a report by Brian Krebs. The hack also affects other niche social networking properties operated by Ashley Madison's corporate parent Avid Life Media. The actors behind the attack call themselves "The Impact Group" and along with releasing corporate data on Avid Life Media they have claimed that one of Ashley Madison's more profitable services, a $19 charge for fully deleting one's account, is a complete lie as the company retains user information. According to the Impact group in 2014 "Full Delete" netted Ashley Madison 1.7 million US dollars in revenue while they were still retaining user's real names, addresses, and full billing information. The Impact Team demands Avid life take Ashley Madison and another site "Established Men" offline permanently in order to prevent the release of all information taken from Avid Life's servers.
This incident is just another blow to the world consumers have come to expect. In a world with strong and readily accessible cryptography there is no longer any compelling reason for users to depend so entirely on a service like Ashley Madison and leaving their interests in and activities oriented towards extramarital dating exposed.
US Can't Retain Drone Pilots
This week the United States Air Force (archived) unveiled a new program attempting to address what they describe as a "critical shortage" of pilots for their unmanned aircraft. In their desperation the Air Force is offering up front retention bonuses of up to seventy thousand United States dollars with an equal amount of bonus pay spread out over the duration of a retained pilot's nine year contract. The Air Force is also directing graduates of its undergraduate pilot training programs increasingly to roles involving unmanned aircraft. The atypical nine year contracts, along with the substantial monetary incentives being offered to retain drone pilots suggests that the United States Air Force could be facing problems supplying manpower to operate their drone fleet well into the future.
Limits of Moore's Law Challenge Intel – Questions About Future Performance
There are numerous reports out today highlighting chip maker Intel's struggles in transitioning from a 14 nanometer to a 10 nanometer manufacturing process. Intel is addressing this challenge by introducing a third generation of chips produced on a 14 nm process. Traditionally Intel delivers two generations of chips at each node size. The first is a shrink of the previous generations chips followed by chips with architectural changes at the same node size, followed by a process shrink. This pattern of Intel's is typically referred to as "Tick" and "Tock" releases at each node size. Continue reading
Tsinghua Unigroup Flirts With Acquisition of DRAM Maker Micron
Chinese state owned enterprise Tsinghua Unigroup is rumored to be flirting with an acquisition of Micron Technology, the last maker of DRAM based in the United States. At the moment prevailing wisdom in the mainstream financial press appears to be that the US Treasury's "Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States" would block a sale to the state owned enterprise and if they don't the Department of Defense would likely block Tsinghua Unigroup or any Chinese firm from purchasing Micron. Continue reading
New Java Zero Day Discovered Targeting NATO
Trend Micro reports a zero-day vulnerability in Oracle's Java version 8 being used against NATO and United States Department of Defense targets. This incident further illustrates the stupidity of using the web browser as a run time for executing strange code as well as the special sort of idiocy that is running strange Java code.
Transaction Fee Market Develops Amid Surge in Transaction Volume
This week a flood of transactions which has alternately been called a spam attack or a stress test has forced Bitcoin users to adapt to a competitive transaction fee market for the first time since early 2013 when blocksize was consistently near default soft limit of 250 kilobytes. Numerous Bitcoin users and businesses are adapting to the flood of transactions by increasing their own transaction fees. At the present there are more than seventy megabytes of unconfirmed transactions leading to more naive users on Reddit and other social media to revert to speculating about blocksize hardforks which would merely amplify the problems this sort of flooding attack poses. Continue reading
Most Serene Republic Begins Advertising Public Blockchain Seed Nodes
In preparation for potential improvements to the Bitcoin reference client, citizens of Bitcoin's Most Serene Republic have begun establishing high availability Bitcoin nodes located in datacenters and hosted on dedicated hardware to serve as publicly advertised seed nodes from which Bitcoin users may sync their blockchains and more peers. The improvements to the foundation's reference implementation which spurred this move are the removal of all Domain Name System code from the client to allow an entirely statically built bitcoind as well as the removal of the legacy IRC initial peer discovery mechanism to reduce the attack surface bitcoind presents. Continue reading