This weekend Vessenes' Bitcoin Foundation board member Oliver Janssens offered a scathing critique of the "non-profit" organization. The attempted rebuttal (archived) rather than refuting, merely edged Janssens's points. The foundation's four points are offered in condensed form below: Continue reading
Category Archives: People
TI-89 Bitcoin Diceware Tool Released
Matt Whitlock has recently released a diceware tool for generating Bitcoin address and private key pairs on the venerable Texas Instruments TI-89 portable general purpose portable computer commonly marketed as a "graphing calculator." The software takes input derived from analog dice rolls. The source code, written in C, is available here and it compiles with TIGCC. Whitlock previously worked on the Lamassu Bitcoin ATM. A video where Whitlock demonstrates the key generation process at 10x speed is embedded below: Continue reading
Olivier Janssens: Bitcoin Floundation Out Of Money, Hates Transparency
A mere month after having been elected to the Bitcoin Floundation, Olivier Janssens has gone public to announce what most of us already knew – the scam foundation has very little money left and that the way in which it has been run to date is to blame for its coming bankrupty.
Janssens writes: (archive) Continue reading
Federal Agent Sells Firearms Via Darknet Market
Patch.com reports the arrest of a Massachusetts man who sought to purchase a firearm and silencer from a darknet market website. Unfortunately for 21 year old felon Justin Moreira, the Walther PPK he ordered was sold to him by none other than a federal agent masquerading as a legitimate arms dealer.
Moreira is believed to have paid USD $2,500 in bitcoin for the firearm and silencer which was then shipped by federal agents to a post office box in Hyannis, MA. Upon Moreira retrieving the package, federal agents moved in to arrest the young man. Continue reading
Silk Road Sealed Document Dump Day (Full Text)
Today Cryptome released 122 pages of documents (local mirror plaintext) related to Ross Ulbricht's Silk Road trial which had been sealed due to the ongoing investigation of Carl Mark Force IV. The order to unseal (local mirror) came into effect with his arrest. For what it is worth Preet Bharara's minions can be seen pleading to Judge Forrest that the terminally corrupted Baltimore investigation some how touches their investigation in no way. The full extracted text of the unsealed documents is below: Continue reading
Obama Orders War On Computing And Bitcoin With New "Emergency" Order (Full Text)
Today United States President Barack Hussein Obama has issued an executive order under which he claims emergency power in order to direct the Treasury Department to take action against the property of persons engaged in "malicious" computing related activity. The description of activities determined to be malicious under the order includes is so vague as to potentially include any user of a computing system, but especially targets the normal work of security researchers in civilian employment as Rob Graham (local archive) highlights. The declaration of National Emergency establishes "hackers" as a clear and present danger to the point that people who have merely associated with or even unknowingly contributed any form of support to "hackers" can be subjected to sanctions typically reserved for war criminals, terrorists, and the leaders of drug cartels. Continue reading
Socialist Shill Announces Launch of Third Key Solutions
Andreas Antonopulus announced the launch of Third Key Solutions of which he is the Chief Technical Officer. The start-up is a Bitcoin "best practices" consultancy, which aims to set up an infrastructure for Bitcoin companies to establish policies and enforcements for the handling of funds. The consultancy provides services revolving around the management of funds with multi-signature addresses as described in a summary on their website: Continue reading
OpSec Lessons From Carl Mark Force IV
Yesterday's news about two Federal Agents arrested for various allegedly corrupt and self serving actions has introduced a substantial number of complications that could jeopardize the government's case on appeal. The charging document (plain text document image) rather than merely affecting the future disposition of the Ulbricht Silk Road case offers a number of lessons on operational security people involved with can take to heart as well as a good number of laughs. Continue reading
March Bitcoin Foundation Update
March was an eventful month for the Bitcoin Foundation as mod6's latest update informs us. The highlight of the month was the release of a Bitcoin software reference implementation as version 0.5.3.1 which includes a build script to create statically linked binary executables from the foundation's source code release. Since the month's release work has continued on building and testing the reference software on a number of platforms, and work to continue porting the software to more software platforms and hardware architectures is planned for the future. Now that the foundation has released a reference implementation, they plan to develop a roadmap of future development goals and projects to pursue next. The full statement contains a number of acknowledgements recognizing the substantial number of people who have contributed to the Foundation success and accomplishments it has enjoyed in its first five months.
Private Lawsuit Dismissed Because of State Secrets Privilege
The New Zealand Herald brings us the story of a lawsuit between a Greek shipper and an advocacy group which was dismissed by a Federal court in New York after the Department of Justice invoked the state secrets privilege. Neither party to the lawsuit is a part of the government or a contractor known to be conducting national security work on behalf of the United States Government. For a lawsuit between private parties to end upon the invocation of the State Secrets privilege is unprecedented. Continue reading