An indictment against BurtW AKA Burt Wagner related to the alleged operation of an unlicenced money transmitting business has been dropped after U.S. District Court Judge William J Martinez dismissed the case at the behest of the U.S. Department of Justice. Such a victory is bittersweet though as Burt's wife Jean writes (archive): Continue reading
Category Archives: People
Pirate Bay Four Acquitted Of Charges
The group known as "The Pirate Bay Four" – Gottfrid Svartholm, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström – accused of criminal copyright infringement and the abuse of electronic communications because prosecutors were able to download copyrighted files from the Pirate Bay website between September 2011 to November 2013 – were acquitted of criminal charges in Belgian court yesterday.
This was a significant legal victory for the four Swedish-born freedom fighters who have been involved in countless legal battles and under constant media scrutiny for nearly a decade for operating and financing the infamously agile and endlessly mirrored torrent site Pirate Bay. Continue reading
Greek Finance Minister Varoufakis Resigns in Failure
Greek banks continue to struggle beneath the onerous burden of financial debt imposed by their left-leaning welfarist government and as such are teetering on the brink of insolvency.1 Despite a slew of highly restrictive capital controls and out-of-the-blue "bank holidays" designed to maintain some modest levels of liquidity in the face of branch and ATM queues across the country, the condition of Greece's banks is less than ideal and quite possibly insufficient for long-term survival. Continue reading
The prospect of Greek debt default isn't just weighing down the local economy either. Inextricably intertwined as the global fiat economy is, the Euro has taken some damage, as have a number of stock markets around the world, as many are wondering aloud whether Greece is the canary in the coalmine of paper promises. ↩
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
Chain Fork Reveals BIP Process Broken
This weekend the Bitcoin Blockchain experienced a forking incident due a discrepancy between what the expectations of a group developing a Bitcoin network client named "Bitcoin Core" and the actual behavior of Bitcoin miners. The developers of the Bitcoin Core client through a process they refer to as "Bitcoin Improvement Proposals" or BIPs introduced a "soft" forking change into their client which would be triggered through a voting mechanism. In this case miners had appeared to vote in favor of BIP 66, which would have enforced stricter encoding of signatures in an attempt to address the transaction malleability issue which is most notable for having been used as a scapegoat by Mt Gox while actually having little to do with their collapse. Continue reading
Peter Vessenes Attempts To Revive CoinLab (Again)
Despite the bankruptcy of failed Bitcoin mining company Alydian and the inevitable collapse of the Bitcoin Foundation under his belt, Peter Vessenes and his company CoinLab would appear to be back. Hoping to strike it third time lucky, the CoinLab website (archive) came back online this past week now offering a blockchain analytic service for governments, agencies, industry and other investigations. Despite previously being quoted (archive) as saying that he stays away from companies which have questionable KYC policies, Vessenes now publicly appears eager to work alongside the biggest and most questionable company of all – government.
Further Reddit Outrage as Unpaid Moderators Rebel
Beginning yesterday Reddit's volunteer moderators have been rebelling over the firing of the one administrator that they liked. This latest crisis for Reddit follows a previous blunder which last month saw a substantial influx of users moving from Reddit's platform and settling on Reddit competitor Voat. Voat has been down intermittently as they massage and further expand their infrastructure to accommodate the influx of new users.
CUNY Keeps Bezzle Flowing to Krugman
The City University of New York at their latest Board of Trustees meeting has confirmed Paul Krugman's appointment as a "Distinguished Professor" at their Luxemborg Income Study Center. Krugman's work in the field of "Income Study" brings him 225,000 United States Dollars annually including a special 28,594 United States Dollar "honorarium" as a "Distinguished Professor" for serving in this part time position which Krugman hold on top of his primary job as a New York Times columnist. CUNY, an institution funded by New York City taxpayers, will be funnelling Krugman, a noted socialist and fan of inflationary monetary policy, this supplementary bezzle income indefinitely into the future.
OpenBSD Moving sudo to Ports
Earlier this month on a development mailing list Todd C. Miller, the current sudo developer and an OpenBSD contributor, announced that after consultation with Theo de Raadt the sudo utility in OpenBSD would be moving from the base system to the OpenBSD ports collection. The utility sudo was originally developed by Bob Coggeshall and Cliff Spencer at SUNY Buffalo for 4.1 BSD running on a VAX-11/750 sometime around 1980 and Todd C. Miller adopted sudo development in 1994. According to Theo de Raadt there are no immediate plans to introduce a tool to the base system as a replacement for sudo introducing a "gap" before considering potential base system replacements. The original superuser utility su will however remain a part of the base system.
Bryan Micon Seals The Deal
The Las Vegas Review reports (archive) that in an effort to avoid jail time, Bryan Micon has agreed to plead guilty to a charge1 he is facing in relation to the running of the now defunct Seals with Clubs bitcoin based poker website. As part of that deal, Micon faces an as yet to be determined period of probation, a USD $25,000 fine and agreed to forfeit his computers, $900 in cash and 3.0996 BTC.
Reduced to a gross misdemeanour. ↩