Amazon has suffered a setback in its bid to open brick-and-mortar retail establishments when Ethereum-like bugs caused the store not to function if more than 20 people were inside at one time. Amazon hoped to roll out the stores, dubbed "Go" at the end of this month, but tests showed that their "shopper-tracking" technology was unable to follow people around the building. Tracking issues reportedly didn't end with just people, as the system also had difficulty locating products that were moved from their original places on a shelf. The stores would not have traditional cashiers, instead letting customers walk in, select items, then have the purchases charged against their Amazon account. The company did not say when, or if, the stores might actually be ready to open any time in the near future.
Author Archives: shinohai
Arkansas Facing Shortage Of Snuff Fans To Watch Executions
The US state of Arkansas is facing difficulties finding the required amount of citizen witnesses for a marathon execution session next month. State law requires that the prison director procure no fewer than six and no more than 12 citizen witnesses for each execution, and witnesses must not have a felony criminal record or be related to the condemned, evidently a problem in R-Kansas. Officials plan to perform 2 executions at a time over a 10-day period, which has prompting the condemneds' attorneys to file a petition with the U.S. Supreme court to reconsider their cases. "Executing eight men in ten days is far outside the bounds of what contemporary society finds acceptable," the petition read, and one attorney believes this is the reason why finding volunteer witnesses is proving to be a challenge. Arkansas has not performed any executions since November of 2005 following pseudo legal circlejerks over midazolam, which allegedly does not completely induce unconsciousness and allows condemned to suffer their condemnation.
Dying America Firm Nearly Robbed With Own Merchandise As Vultures Swarm
Sears, already running out of things to sell came close to losing over 750,000 US dollars1 worth of jewellery when a thief attempted to rob a Washington, D.C. area store on St. Patrick's day. The allegedly Daniel E. Grant managed to find a Craftsman hammer in the store and smashed display cases after the store closed. His plans were foiled by the store's motion sensing alarms. He allegedly abandoned his loot and the hammer and attempted to flee before being apprehended and charged with two counts of commercial burglary and one count of theft after police responded. (archived)
Figures were not available in an actual unit measuring value ↩
Shinohai's Shitcoin Roundup Xtend: Huffers Fail To Replicate Namecoin, "Just A Tip" Never Ceases, Venezuela Still Poor, And SEC/Silbert Drama
Deciding that regular DNS wasn't shitty enough, Ethereum developers have been working on a more polished turd known as ENS which was released last week. In true Ethereum style, bugs were discovered within a few hours, amongst them one that allowed anyone to claim a domain name without actually paying for it. The team shuttered the project the same day.
Redditards introduced a new native tipping service, known as MiniTip, which appears to be a clone of failed spam service ChangeTip. Victoria Van Eyk was unavailable for comment.
Venezuelan citizens have begun using Rare Pepes for currency as the Bolivar continues to remain in the toilet. (archived)
The U.S. SEC has decided to postpone a decision on Barry Shillbert's Bitcoin Investment Trust (BIT) until May 10th. The SEC recently denied the Winklevoss twins application of their similar ETF fund. Neither party seemed to have followed Mircea Popescu's excellent guide on interacting with fiat institutions.
Vermont Residents On State Run Job Board Hacked
Roughly 200,000 people in the US sub-territory of Vermont had their personal data stolen in a breach of the Vermont Job Link website according to the State's Labor Commissioner Lindsay Kurrie. The website is used by persons applying for unemployment benefits and allows employers to post job listings for those seeking employment. While the hack likely occurred days ago, the FBI was called in to investigate and did not release any details of the events until late Wednesday. The information likely contains names, addresses, and social security numbers of anyone who had ever used the system. Republican Governor Phil Scott stated that "We don't know still how much data was breached at this point time. We're still trying to gather information. We were lead to believe that it was a much smaller breach yesterday. Today, we were notified that it was significantly much larger." With the responsible parties having no clue as to what happened or how, potential victims have not yet been notified about the extent of their sorry for your loss.
Buttfunex Diversifying Bespoke "Butt Fun" Offerings While Walking Away From BTC
Buttfunex has introduced new scam tokens allowing users to bet on the future of a chain split between Power Range Coin and Roger Ver-ified UnlimitedSpamCoin. The "Chain Split Tokens" as they are called will be issued as follows:
BCC tokens, which will represent the "Bitcoin Core" fork
BCU tokens, which will represent the "Bitcoin Unlimited" altcoin
BTU tokens, which will represent any remaining BCU tokens remaining after the settlement of the contract.
Sale of the token contracts began on March 17th and will end at 11:59:59 pm UTC on December 31, 2017, and are being offered at the rate of 1 Bitcoin for 1 BCC + 1 BCU. The exchange says the Unlimited tokens will only be valid if "the blockchain …. has diverged incompatibly from the blockchain defined by Bitcoin Core."1 Per Buttfunex policy, they will not be responsible for any Sorry For Your Loss that may occur from gambling with their tiddlywinks. (archived)
Note that it is possible for both "CoreCoin" and "UnlimitedSpamCoin" to both diverge from Bitcoin as defined by the reference Bitcoin network client ↩
Shinohai's Shitcoin Roundup Xtend: BTU Breakage Heat, Zcash Instamine Lulz, And More
The "Bitcoin Unlimited" development team will be releasing their token, $BTU, on April Fool's day of this year in what will surely be hailed as one of the most fitting release dates for a team ever. Unlimited node count dropped significantly this week after the discovery of a remote crash vulnerability. Core developer Greg Maxwell stated on reddit earlier this week that “There are vulnerabilities in Unlimited which have been privately reported to you in Unlimited by Bitcoin Core folks which you have not acted on, sadly. More severe than this one, in fact.” which should ensure a steady supply of lulz in the weeks to come.
Zcash's Zooko, deciding his coin doesn't have a scammy enough image, announced this week the formation of `The Zcash foundation` which will supposedly "promote a healthy and diverse zcash community" Zooko stated he will fund the foundation with half of his "founders reward" instamine, the total amounting to 273,000 coins currently worth $13 million USD at current trade prices. Matthew Green, assistant professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, is reputed to be one of the foundation members, which the group hopes will add an air of legitimacy to the scheme.
A new type of ransomware, dubbed "Kirk", has surfaced in various corners of the internet demanding payment via Monero instead of Bitcoin.
Never missing an opportunity to hard fork their flaming-tire-in-a-shitpit, the Ethereum development team announced that their latest fork, codenamed "Metropolis" is now back on their roadmap after being forced to postpone the "improvements" due to The DAO hack
Shinohai's Shitcoin Roundup Xtend: Bitfinex's Token Addiction, Transaction "Acceleration", and itBit Rounding Bug
Bitfinex, hoping to offer it's userbase more scam tokens to choose from, added cryptocurrency Dash back to it's roster against USD and BTC trading pairs. Bitfinex added the coin in 2014, only to remove it in August of the following year due to low trade volumes. Dash rose to the #3 spot on coinmarketcap.com with a nearly $300 million USD market cap, though price was down -9.04% in the past 24 hours of trading.
BTC.com mining pool, advocates of the Bitcoin Unlimited fork, started offering a new service that allows users to "accelerate" their transactions on the network by paying a fee using a credit card. Pools mining with the Unlimited software claim that blocks are "full" and that an unsafe hard fork is necessary while consistently mining empty blocks.
A hacker known as 4lemon discovered a flaw on itBit exchange that allowed users to send funds that didn't exist from one account to another due to a rounding bug. The user demonstrated he could send 0.000000005 XBT (Less than the trade minimum of 0.00000001) without triggering any sort of error in itBit's trade engine, resulting in SFYL.
Hoaxtoshi Returns With Fiatist Patent Wank, Forgets Tissues
Hoaxtoshi has resurfaced from exile, this time teaming up with internet gambling entrepreneur Calvin Ayre in a bid to publish "Bitcoin and blockchain technology" patents. Wright has been working from offices of The Workshop Technologies, located in the UK, on the development of the patent applications according to the investigative report by Reuters. Hoaxtoshi also allegedly had plans to make a presentation to the Government of Antigua in an attempt to make Bitcoin the official currency of the Caribbean nation, though no information exists to document that the presentation actually took place. Ayre coincidentally set up a multi-million dollar call center in the region, though it was shuttered in 2012 to "source more cost effective customer service suppliers" elsewhere. Neither Wright nor Ayre provided comment to reporters for the article. (archived)
Great Flood Exhibit Becomes Great Leak For Home County
Grant county, Kentucky – home of Ken Ham's Ark replica – is praying for a torrent of revenue after the Christian themed exhibit has failed to provide a significant amount of money into the town despite an $18 million US dollar tax break. County Judge-Executive Steve Wood said “It’s been a great thing but it’s not brought us any money". A Great Flood of debt is now threatening to sink the town, as the County is on the brink of bankruptcy and is slated to propose job cuts and a 2% payroll cut for all employees. The controversial theme park was funded using $62 million US dollars in Tax Increment Financing granted to the organization by the City of Williamstown.