Author Archives: shinohai

Shinohai's Shitcoin Roundup Xtend(TM)(R): Antbleed, The Persistence of Winklevii, etc

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Bitcoin mining hardware manufacturer Bitmain came under fire this week when it was revealed their firmware contained code that could remotely shut down customers mining equipment. The affected miners check in to a central server at a random interval (between 1- 11 minutes) and transmits the miner serial number, MAC address and IP address. The Antbleed site stated that “Even without Bitmain being malicious, the API is unauthenticated and would allow any MITM, DNS or domain hijack to shutdown Antminers globally.” This is the second scandal to affect Bitmain in recent weeks since Greg Maxwell revealed the company had been using "ASICboost" to give themselves an unfair mining advantage of up to 20% over their customers.

The United States Security and Exchange Commission granted the Winklevii another review of their Bitcoin ETF, which was denied during it's first review.

Police in Mumbai arrested 18 individuals involved in the MLM altcorn Onecoin, and seized four bank accounts totaling $2.6 million USD.

Juan Benet (WOT: nonperson) announced he is working on vaporware called "Interplanetary File System" or IPFS which he hopes will allow users of such flaming-tires-in-shitpits as Ethereum and Zcash to access their scamcoins from one convenient location. (archived)

G Inflation Continues In Fiat RF Allocation With Austin, Texas Getting Fifth G

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AT&T has announced a "limited rollout" of their new vaporware 5G Evolution network for Samsung Galaxy S8 devices in Austin, Texas soon. The company, which is currently the second-largest mobile services provider in the United States, assures customers that speeds on the network will be "twice as fast" as their current 4G LTE network offerings though the fine print in their press release states that these are “forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially.” The announcement is likely a re-branding of their current 4G offerings created to foster competition with their main competitor Verizon Wireless, which outbid AT&T for a large portion of the 5G wireless spectrum in January. The goal is to have the non-existent network available in 20 metropolitan locations by the end of the year.

Plastc – Crowdfunded "Credit Card Of The Futures" Goes SFYL

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Backers of fiat vaporware company Plastc are feeling the sting of a 9 Million USD Sorry For Your Loss after their pre-orders were abruptly cancelled this week when executives announced instead a shutdown and bankruptcy filing. The company, which once promised consumers one credit and debit card to rule all their various cards, lost two investment deals back-to-back, of $3.5 million and $6.75 million USD respectively and filed for US Bankruptcy protection on Thursday. All customer support personnel and social media managers have been laid off, leaving persons who pre-ordered no product and no avenue by which to find out when, if any, of their monies invested will be recouped. (archived)

Shinohai's Shitcoin Roundup Xtend (TM)(R): Monero Ring Solution, Coinbase Presents GDAX Has Goxlike Phenomenon, And Another Hoaxtoshi

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A site surfaced recently known as "Monero Link" and claims to be able to uncover the precious ring signatures that have made Monero the darling of reddit privacy tards and users of darknet markets.

The Coinbase fiat interface GDAX suffered a bug on Sunday that sent Bitcoin prices plummeting down to $0.06 BTC/USD1 following "schedule maintenance". Brian Armstrong and the other Coinbase cryptcurrency expertsexchange did not wait to reopen market executions that allows orders to populate adequately, though margin trading companies said it "mattered little" because Coinbase is such a small player in the game.

Porsche, having already ruined transmissions with it's Tiptronic offerings, seeks to do the same with Bitcoin as it tries to entice developers and startup companies to provide "blockchain solutions" for the company.

A new, improved Hoaxtoshi has surfaced in Bali, and is meeting "community members" in his hotel and answering questions on Quora.com as the anonymous Bitcon founder. This Hoaxtoshi told bitcoin.com he was unable to sign either an early Bitcoin transaction or a statement with his original GPG key because “A sequence of events unfolded in 2010 that caused me the loss of all my keys.” He further claims only 2 copies of his Bitcoin private keys existed; one in an encrypted notepad document and the other was stored in his original GMX email account. "Mr. Nakamoto" conveniently is unable to access either source and alleges losing the data was what led to him leaving the Bitcoin project suddenly.

  1. Just like on Gox  ↩

US Department of "Justice" Absconding With Botnet In Spanish Arrest

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Fresh on the heels of an arresting alleged hacker Peter Levashov in Spain, the Department of Justice announced plans to disable a botnet – known as Kelihos – they claim was under his control and used to send spam emails and infect systems with ransomware. Acting assistant attorney-general Kenneth Blanco said the operation will "redirect Kelihos-infected computers to a substitute server", in order to block communications between infected devices and the botnet server, instead redirecting the compromised machines to the DOJ's own botnet servers. Levashov reportedly had been operating the botnet since 2010, and targeted computers running all variants of Microsoft Windows, the preferred target OS of botnet harvesters worldwide. The Department of Justice statement concluded by stating that "The US government will share samples of the malware with antivirus vendors in facilitate updates to their programs which will allow them to detect and remove Kelihos" while leaving government backdoors firmly in place.

Altcointradingbot.io Is Very Sorry For Your Loss

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Shitcoin traders using the altcoinbot.io system were reporting a series of losses this morning due to a "security flaw" that sold all their Bitcoin and other altcorn for obscure cryptocurrency Rubycoin (RBY). The bitcointalk announcement for the bot, naturally posted by a unknown newbie member with no credentials, bills itself as needing no human intervention and is designed for users "seeking for 20-50-200% profit per trade". The bot only trades using the Baloney exchange API, and the only response from the developer on tardstalk being a cryptic "WARNING! Please disable your API key ASAP! Site might have a security issue! Thanks!" At the time of this article, the altcoinbot.io site was down showing only a cloudflare "Web Server is Down" message and no information was available as to the total amount of Sorry for Your Loss that has occurred due to running untested software by persons not in the Web of Trust.

Dallas Storm/Raid Sirens Pose Interesting Ransomware Potential

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Dallas, Texas officials are still attempting to figure out who hacked into the city's emergency warning system Friday night, setting off all 156 sirens across the city and inundating the 911 center with calls from concerned residents. The warning system, which alert residents to severe weather or other public emergencies, was likely breached by someone within close proximity to the Dallas area according to city spokeswoman Sana Syed. Budding Sherlock and Mayor Mike Rawlings said this was "evidence of a need to upgrade and safeguard the city's technology infrastructure", since this obviously wasn't being done before.

The attacker was able to turn the sirens back on 15 times in a 90 minute period, thwarting technicians trying to stop them. City officials were forced to contact the Federal Communications Commission for assistance when it became obvious they were unable to prevent the hackers from rearming the system again once shut off, and were hopeful the system would be restored to "normal operations" again by the end of the weekend, likely meaning returning it to its former state and hoping no one breaks it again.

Prudes Attack Pence Security Detail

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A Secret Service agent assigned to Vice President Mike Pence's1 security detail has been suspended after allegations that he met a prostitute at a Maryland hotel. The manager of the unnamed hotel snitched on the pair after becoming suspicious of what two consenting adults might be doing behind closed doors on their own time. Police arrested the agent when he exited the motel and charged him with solicitation, and the matter is now being investigated by the "Office of Professional Responsibility". A spokesman for the Secret Service said "the full range of disciplinary actions" were being explored, though no word was available as to whether the agent and his female companion explored a full range of disciplinary actions on their own before the tryst was interrupted.

  1. Pence himself follows the "Billy Graham rule never spending time alone with women other than the Pencewife.  ↩

Shinohai's Shitcoin Roundup Xtend: Ver's Second Coming, PiTato Drama, Hash Shenanigans

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  • Buttcoin Unlimited fork supporters are still waiting for the second coming of their altcoin Jesus Roger Ver, hoping he makes good on a promise to trade all of his actual Bitcoins for BCU tokens on Buttfinex at a 1:1 ratio. A reddit user claiming to control an address with 40,000 BTC made the deal with the shitcoin slinger over a week ago, though the deal has to be finalized, likely due to the whole "deal" being nothing more than a social engineering attempt to shore up prices and support. Prices of the BCU tokens at the time of this article were sitting at 0.14 BTC per and a stagnant volume of less than 20 BTC in trading.
  • Reddit users finally start to suspect that, just maybe, 21co is nothing more than shit-as-a-service, with one user noting the only thing to come out of $121.5 million USD in venture capital funding being a paid inbox service and a $400 Raspberry Pi doorstop with no case and software cloned from other repositories on Github. (archived)
  • Syscoin announced it had received Microshit Azure product certification for 3 "blockchain technology" products, after initially partnering with the altcoin developers a year ago. The hope is that they can sell their particular brand of blockchain snakeoil as enterprise services, although users would likely be better off just using MySQL in the first place.
  • An unknown prankster hacked mining pools antpool, viabtc, and btctop and redirected the hashpower to f2pool. f2pool owner Wang Chun reported that their hashrate "Doubled Instantly". (archived)

The DAO Is Still Empty: Slock.it Derps Claim Anon Investor Interest

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An anonymous investor, evidently accustomed to flushing his money down toilets, has given $2 million USD to failed DAO creators slock.it in order to hire five new "developers" to build a "Universal Sharing Network". The goal of the project is to use smart contracts to monetize the "Internet of Things". Neckbeard Stephan Tual, who somehow still has the job as COO of slock.it stated:

"The smart contracts that we’re going to write as part of the USN are going to be written keeping in mind all the lessons that we’ve learned from The DAO, both in terms of how to write smart contracts, how to keep them safe."

Tual went on to detail a due-diligence process which included an auditing process that must detail where the company will spend funds and what, if anything, the founders have accomplished besides losing millions of dollars and writing shitware on top of an already buggy and unreliable platform. Mr. Tual, however, persists in the delusion that their security is top notch, telling CoinDesk: "There’s going to be top-notch security around the stuff and who’s in a better place to do it than us?". Criticisms regarding the platform and the slock.it team's track record were dismissed as simply foolish talk perpetuated by internet trolls.