According to WOOD News in Central Michigan, the local United States prosecutor's office managed to hook allege darknet firearms dealer Ben Cance into entering a guilty plea on charges related to international firearms trafficking and money laundering (archived). Prosecutors secured Cance's plea and his cooperation in other investigations by dropping charges of "machine gun possession" against Cance. The Judge allowed Cance's release on bond to continue so he could continue collaborating with prosecutors and inform on his past customers some of which are alleged to be in the United Kingdom and Poland. The 30 year old Cance is set to be sentenced by Judge Robert Holmes Bell on January 15th in the Grand Rapids United States District Court.
Category Archives: News
BitVPS Customers Unable To Access Services
BitVPS a company plagued by problems since it's beginnings has lost access to its servers providing hosting to customers. The client portion of the site has been down for maintenance for several days causing customers to show up in the company's IRC channel for support. Unfortunate for those users, arij of BitVPS stated the company in addition to having lost access to its servers has no redundant backups of the servers, making for a complete loss of all clients' data. arij stated on IRC: Continue reading
Foundation and No Such lAbs Continue Improving Bitcoin: V Ascendant
This past month's work by the Bitcoin Foundation and No Such lAbs shows substantial ground being laid for a better Bitcoin future with much of the work occurring on the V code management system and its reimplementations. The original V was authored by asciilifeform in Python and released at the end of August with the intent that it would be reimplemented numerous times by users seeking to understand its workings. In particular an implementation of V in perl by Bitcoin Foundation co-chair mod6 which is anticipated to be released for public consumption soon includes further advanced functionality including the production of flow graphs. Further work teased in the No Such lAbs September statement was the near completion of routing work for the Cardano boards and an Ada implementation of RSA encryption suitable for running on bare metal for the glory of the most serene republic. The Bitcoin Foundation intends to use V to package their bitcoind version 0.5.4 release.
Fiat Broker Broker Scottrade Hacked
This evening Fiat stock broker and online investment management portal Scottrade revealed it was hacked in an email to customers. The advised customers that critical personally identifying information was in all probability taken from their servers. In the email they offer that they have evidence they were breeched roughly around 2013 and 2014 without being more specific. Numerous fiat based financial services providers this year have not only had to weather attacks to their own infrastructure, but attacks which leveraged information attained in other breaches degrading their ability to provide services at all. Information publicly disclosed on the Scottrade breach so far was offered in an email to customers which availed them of a dubious credit monitoring service. Users of fiat services like Scottrade and of supposedly Bitcoin services that swear allegiance to customs of the fiat identity theft tradition are advised to stop doing that before you find yourself insolvent. The full text of the email is available below: Continue reading
Bharara Snubbed By Supreme Court
Bloomberg reports that the United States Supreme Court has refused to consider whether convictions won by Preet Bharara should not have been overturned on appeal (archived). While this decision to decline entertaining Bharara's zealotry only immediately rescues three defendants from the jeopardy of having their cases revived, it lays the groundwork for hundreds of other defendants to have their convictions or guilty pleas vacated under the higher standard for insider trading criminal liability established by the appellate court. This is a severe blow to the embattled Bharara's office which will now be burdened by the influx of defendants looking for freedom from the sanctions criminally imposed on them by Bharara. This is just the latest even in a long downward spiral of reality hitting Preet Bharara after his unjustly criminal prosecution of Ross Ulbricht.
USMS Schedules Final Silk Road Auction
The United States Marshals Service has announced its final Silk Road auction to sell 44,341 Bitcoins. The Auction will be held November 5th. The Bitcoins will be sold in 21 lots of 2,000 with a 22nd lot of 2,341 Bitcoin. Per the Marshals service this is the last planned sale of Bitcoins criminally seized from Ross Ulbricht by Preet Bharara and his co-conspirators. The full details of the sale along with a calendar of sale milestones is reproduced below: Continue reading
Vessenes' Foundation Drops Sponsorship of Node Explorer
The Vessenes' Foundation was revealed in a social media post to have dropped sponsorship for the Bitnodes.io Bitcoin node explorer, turning the project over to Raspberry Pi reseller 21.co's care. It is not yet entirely clear what this means for the Bitnodes.io Banana Pi reseller program.
Malleability Issues Continue Testing Zero-conf Faithful
Coinkite in a blog post revealed that a number of their customer's transactions are continuing to be affected by malleability issues (archived) which stem from valid signed transactions having more than one potential transaction ID number until mined. Previously malleability concerns stemmed from different possible valid encodings with MtGox being a noted transaction encoding deviant. The malleability issue affecting Coinkite is that a transaction ID may use either the low or high S value from the ECDSA signature of a transaction. Transaction ID's have never been a reliable tool for distinguishing unconfirmed transactions, and any service that depends on using them to distinguish unmined yet broadcasted transactions does so at their and their customer's peril. Considering the disastrous forking that resulted from the last attempt to soft fork away a malleability vector it is unlikely this can or will be addressed through a soft fork process. Transaction malleability is one of many reasons to wait for confirmation through mining before accepting a Bitcoin transaction.
Windows TrueCrypt Fatally Flawed
Continued research after the first TrueCrypt audit yielded inconclusive results has discovered fatal privilege escalation vulnerabilities allowing for complete takeover (archived). So far this is known to affect TrueCrypt on Windows boxes, but there is still potential for other flaws to be discovered in TrueCrypt on other platforms. Details of the vulnerabilities are not yet disclosed, but this supports the possibility that it may not be possible at all to develop software offering any level of security on the Windows platform.
Buterin's Waterfall Nearly Spent
In a post on the Ethereum foundation's blog Vitalik Buterin with substantial optimism announced that the Ethereum Foundation has nearly spent down all of its reserves (archived). The Vitalik claims Ethereum Foundation expenses of roughly 410,000 Swiss Francs per month though he assures readers he can bring that down to a third of a million Swiss Francs in the near future and a quarter of a million Swiss Francs per month further into the future. Buterin claims approximate reserves of 200,000 Swiss Francs, 1800 BTC which will continue to be dumped onto the markets, and 2,700,000 of their own Ether tokens. A further amount of roughly half a million Swiss Francs, or nearly a month of their operating costs is claimed to be held in reserve for legal contingencies. Buterin's own estimate for the depletion of his Foundation's funds is June of 2016 though their burn rate suggests insolvency may arrive much sooner. When paired with claims of extraordinarily desperate measures being taken by Confiscatory agents of the state to acquire more Bitcoin (archived), it appears Buterin's Waterfall may be nearing the end of its most effective days.