Since the original XTCoin fork of Bitcoin was announced MIT's Technology Review has been the solitary media outlet of note lending its complete and unreserved support to XTCoin's social media propaganda war. MIT's rag has effectively sacrificed whatever reputation it may have still had as it attempts to force a narrative that frames Gavin Andressen and Mike Hearn's efforts as an attempt to somehow save Bitcoin. The once storied Massachusetts Insitute of Technology, which has taken money from the United States Military to research Bitcoin prices and rescued Gavin Andressen from poverty when the Vessenes' Foundation collapsed is now set on burning the last of its credibility in an attack on Bitcoin.
Category Archives: North America
XT Node Blacklists Fail to Prevent DDoS Attack
Mike Hearn and Gavin Andressen recently chose to use the Bitcoin-XT project to attempt to provoke a hard fork in the blockchain to increase the block size limit. Users who support Gavin's code to hard fork the network to increase the block size, began switching to, and launching Bitcoin-XT nodes. After Mike Hearn's declaration of war, the number of XT-Nodes on the network began to increase. However Mike Hearn began seeing a pattern of nodes getting attacked by heavy DDoS attacks. Continue reading
British and North Carolina Teens Prosecuted as Child Pornographers in Separate Cases
Two cases on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean have garnered attention this week with the common link that both cases involve criminal sanctions being imposed on teenagers under the age of legal majority for having nude images of themselves. In North Carolina two romantically involved 17 year olds faced charges when a search of one's phone lead police to discover their mutual exchange of nude photographs. One of the 17 year olds plead down to a lesser charge while the other still faces multiple charges of child exploitation almost all of them relating to his own self portraits (archived) making him legally the victim and perpetrator of his own exploitation. Meanwhile in Britain Continue reading
Obama Brings Fish to Orgasm In Alaska Vacation Hijinks
CNN and numerous other outlets are reporting that in a depraved act of bestiality the Commander in Chief of the American socialist state Barack Obama has brought a male salmon to orgasm in from of a crowd of spectators (archived). The event occurred during Obama's current vacation to Alaska where he went to an area known to have numerous horny stud salmon in mating form. In the brief time he handled on of the fish he was able to bring the fish to drip its seed all over his shoes. In the past Obama has made it known he is an enemy of Bitcoin and General Purpose Computing going so far as to issue oppressive instructions to law enforcement while denying mercy for a brave American patriot who had opposed his efforts to impose socialist hegemony in cyberspace. It is unknown at the present whether Michelle Obama had given her assent to Barack's hookup with the fish, or if she knew at all about Barack's sexual proclivities of the piscine variety.
Guilty Plea After Package Tracking Breaks Opsec in Darkmarket Drug Case
Harold Bates of Massachusetts plead guilty to drug charges relating to the importation of a half kilogram of methylone from China. Bates was implicated in the case when his residential IP address was discovered to have checked the tracking number on the USPS web portal of a package seized by postal inspectors containing the prohibited drug product. The package was intercepted in Hollywood, Florida. Bates faces three methylone related charges carrying a potential 20 years of prison each along with a separate charge for possessing a prohibited item as an inmate of a prison which carries an additional potential for 10 further years in prison. The three methylone related charges are conspiracy to import, importation, and possession with intent to distribute. Overseeing the case is Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts Patti B. Saris who is also the Commissioner and Chair of the United States Sentencing Commission. Bates is scheduled to be sentenced on December 10th in Boston.
Peoria Pays $125,000 in Satire Settlement
According to the Journal Star the city of Peoria, Illinois has agreed to pay an eighth of a million United States Dollars (archived) to Jon Daniel in order to settle a civil suit arising from the city's persecution of Daniel for daring to run a twitter account parodying Mayor Jim Ardis. Daniel's home was raided on April 15th, 2014 as a part of a police operation to identify and suppress the operator of a satire twitter feed for mocking Mayor Ardis. Daniel and his representatives provided by the ACLU alleged Daniel's 1st and 4th amendment rights were violated, that he was falsely imprisoned, and that his personal privacy was violated as a part of the manhunt and police raid directed at his parodic writing activities.
Silicon Valley City Contemplates Surveillance Equipment on Garbage Trucks
The San Jose Mercury News reports that the government of San Jose is contemplating the use of garbage trucks as a platform for mounting license plate readers (archived). The plan involves piping data collected from garbage truck mounted surveillance equipment directly to the San Jose police department. Four police cars operated by the San Jose police department already are fitted with license plate readers, but expanding their deployment to the city's sanitation livery would allow for complete coverage of all of the city's streets every week. San Jose is currently currently struggling with ways to leverage technology to counteract the personnel losses in its police department which has roughly 950 officers this year, a number which is expected to contract to 800 officers sometime next year. San Jose has in the past been referred to as an unofficial "Capital" of Silicon Valley. Technology firms with a substantial presence in San Jose include Adobe, Xilinx, Cisco, and the North American headquarters for Korean firm Samsung.
Drone Update
Previously Qntra has brought you stories of how drones have revolutionized cross border drug shipments, a successful case of property defense against a drone, press photos of police arming ground based drones, and the failure of the United States military to retain trained drone pilots. Today Qntra brings two stories from the drone front. Continue reading
Teenager Receives Eleven Years Prison, Lifetime Supervision In Exchange For Guilty Plea
Former Coin Brief author Ali Shukri Amin, who pleaded guilty to a charge of "conspiring to provide material support to terrorists" in June of this year has been sentenced by U.S. District Judge Claude M. Hilton to a period of 11 years in prison. In addition to his prison sentence, the 17 year old will face a lifetime of supervised release with added redundancy in the form of monitoring any of his future internet activity.
Speaking to Amin's sentence, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Dana J. Boente remarked: Continue reading
Concerns for the Toomim Brothers Mining
BIP-101 requires 750 of the last 1000 consecutive blocks to have a version bits set to 0x20000007 in hex to trigger a hard fork to remove the block size limit. Qntra recently published an article indicating the negligible miner support for XT, of which Jonathan Toomim commented the brothers' mining initiative would be supporting BIP-101 with blocks they solve. This lead into a brief investigation of the Toomim brothers who use GPG, yet are not in the Web of Trust. Continue reading