A number of dubious publications this week floated a "research paper" of unclear origin, methadology, and conclusion. The popularly distilled headline they produced from the report is that Bitcoin has either achieved or is set to imminently achieve 0.5% of the world's energy consumption. Naturally pantsuit outlets editorialized this uncertain finding as "a bad thing" though few things are more encouraging.
Category Archives: Bitcoin
S/MIME And Poor OpenPGP Email Client Behavior Leak Plaintext
Today disclosure of two plaintext leaking behaviors in email clients handling OpenPGP and S/MIME encrypted messages has been released (archived). The vulnerability affecting S/MIME is baked into the S/MIME standard and may only be mitigated by abandoning S/MIME, no other mitigation is possible. Meanwhile the plaintext leaking behavior affecting OpenPGP encrypted emails requires certain common but very stupid behavior on the part of an email client and the user allowing the email client to be involved in decrypting the message.
The attack in OpenPGP encrypted email involves the message being molested on the wire in such a way the plaintext metadata surrounding the cyphertext is modified to engage your typical email client's HTML rendering engine. If the email client is allowed to be involved in decrypting the cyphertext as is common with various client "plugins", the email client can "phone home" the plaintext after decryption to the message's molester according to the spurious instructions delivered to the HTML rendering engine. The mitigation for this vulnerability is hygiene and not allowing your email client to be involved in cryptographic operations beyond sending and recieving cyphertext blobs encrypted and decrypted elsewhere.
Revived Phuctor Breaks A Big Pile Of Github Developer SSH Keys In Return
Today No Such lAbs principals Mircea Popescu and Stanislav Datskovskiy disclosed the existence of 192 weak Github developer SSH keys which were broken by the Phuctor, the RSA supercollider and numerical observatory operated by No Such lAbs. The keys all appear to be used by actual Github contributors with definite yet varying amounts activity.
Five Years Later Omidyar's Snowden Trickle Catching Up To Trilema Report On NSA In Bitcoin
Five years after Mircea Popescu reported state actor probing of the Bitcoin ecosystem, and 58 months after Edward Snowden flew to Hong Kong and handed over a bunch of USG.NSA secrets the curators of those secrets at Pierre Omidyar's fake Qntra The Intercept are finally leaking the ones concernbing NSA actions against Bitcoin (archived).
Omidyar would appreciate it if you could please ignore how the nearly five years delay on these leaks coincides with other recent Hail Mary attempts to delay the inevitable.
Mining Rig Heist In Iceland: Arrests Made But No Material Recovered
Reports are emerging that allege 600 Bitcoin mining rigs and other supporting materials were stolen from a data center in Iceland between December 2017 and January 2018 (archived). No materials have been recovered and out of 11 arrests related to the investigation, local police are only keeping two suspects in custody.
Favorable electricity prices in Iceland have set the island up to be one of the first regions where power consumption for Bitcoin mining exceeds power consumption for other purposes.
What Happened While Qntra Was Down
In The Most Serene Republic:
- Saint Stanislav began publishing literate code for performing arithmetic in finite fields.
- The Bitcoin Foundation continues refining the reference client with increasingly improved node sync behavior undergoing testing.
- Diana Coman of S.MG began publishing a cryptography library dubbed Eucrypt.
- Lobbes made an archive of Republican things.
- Your beloved Editor in Chief began a journey to bring Qntra back through the creation of a Republic ISP with substantial financial and moral support from Mircea Popescu.1
- And much more.
Outside the Republic:
- The wait for the increasingly unlikely Great Again continues as the pantsuit collapse also continues.
BingoBoingo: Attention Lords And Ladies of The Republic: You may add 161.0.121.253 to your hosts file as Qntra.net
Latest Bitcoin Network Difficulty Adjustment: Up ~19.58 Percent To New All Time High As Chicoms Push Out Local fiat/Bitcoin Trading Interfaces
Mining difficulty on the Bitcoin network skyrocketed nearly twenty percentage points to 1103400932964.29248047 from 922724699725.96276855 to a new all time high.
While mining difficulty sits at an all time high, the price of Bitcoin reported by fiat/Bitcoin interfaces is sitting roughly twenty percent below the most recent all time high established near the beginning of this month. The United States dollar recovered a small bit of ground against Bitcoin when the racist government of the People's Republic of China decided to ban trading on their local fiat/Bitcoin interfaces. This move by the Chicoms was followed by the a constant stream of "Bitcoin is valueless" editorials in the legacy USian "financial" fake news press.
Bitcoin Network Mining Difficulty Up ~3.9% To New All Time High
The mining difficulty on the Bitcoin network has risen ~3.9 percent to 922724699725.96276855 from 888171856257.32055664 for a new all time high. This is ever so slightly above the previous all time high of 923233068448.90527344 set in the first difficulty adjustment following the schism of a Roger Ver-ified altcoin away from the Blockchain. The continued efforts propping up the Roger Ver-ified chain is proving to be a very expensive proposition for the involved fiat interests.
No Such lAbs Posts Positive Cashflow On Continued FUCKGOATS Sales
No Such lAbs reports their first month of positive cash flow in their August 2017 statement. This marks a milestone in the development of this New World business. There are no signs of any actual movement by fiat concerns to enter the business space occupied by the ascendant No Such lAbs.
September Begins With Still Deepening Fiat Malaise
As September begins fiat/Bitcoin interfaces continue reporting all time lows for the United States dollar with values floating around 1/4800th to 1/4900th of a Bitcoin.