Last week journalist Barret Brown was sentenced to 63 months in prison after entering a guilty plea. In contrast to Government approved journalists handling information unfavorable to the regime, Barret Brown was charged as an accessory to activities he reported on while New York Times reporter James Risen was not charged as an accessory for the "espionage" he reported on. Being completely at the whims of the sentencing court the court determined: Continue reading
Category Archives: Security
BlackPhone Less Opaque Than Promised
Silent Circle has confirmed allegations that their privacy software has been completely useless. A memory corruption vulnerability allowed decryption of private messages to any attacker with the victim's user ID or phone number. The attacker can trigger the flaw by sending a hostile text message. Silent Circle is no stranger to this kind of embarrassment; a few months after receiving 30 million dollars in funding, a Blackphone was rooted by hackers at DEFCON. Discouraged former users of this pathetic device should be comforted to know that proper cryptography will likely be made user friendly by the end of the year. Until then, people who wish to obscure their messages from the prying eyes of big brother should stick to the classics.
LocalBitcoins.com Compromised, Bitcoins Stolen
It appears that LocalBitcoins LiveChat feature was compromised earlier today and that the attacker fooled some users with a trojan and proceeded to withdraw coins from their accounts. An administrator for LB posted the following message on the LB forums: Continue reading
Amid Domain Name Hijacking, CoinFire's Alleged SEC Source Is Revealed
Repeated attacks on the Bitcoin news site CoinFire today culminated with the theft of the coinfire.cf domain and twitter account @coinfireblog. If the individual or group who took over the @coinfireblog twitter account is to be believed, the attackers have also gained access to CoinFire's email inbox and published the alleged name of their SEC source who leaked documents confirming that scammer Josh Garza and his string of shell companies are currently being investigated by the SEC. Continue reading
Troubled EgoPay cries "Hack"
Payments processor EgoPay which has been troubled since at least December recently issued a blog post stating that they have fired employees likely responsible, and that the source of their problems was likely internal to their company. The full text of the post is preserved below for posterity. Continue reading
Group Proposes Bitcoin Wallet Privacy Ratings Criteria
A group referring to itself as the Open Bitcoin Privacy Project has recently released a draft set of criteria for comment that they would like to use for evaluating and rating different Bitcoin wallets from a privacy perspective. The criteria include a number of points about wallet behavior alongside a number of other factors. The heading under which their proposed criteria fall include: Continue reading
LizardStresser Hacked, Customer Details Leaked
The Guardian reports that the Lizard Squad's LizardStresser serviced has been hacked, and reports of arrests of various members of the group continue to trickle in. All customer user names and passwords were stored as plaintext on the server. Postmortem statistics reported on the service include: Continue reading
Roger Ver and America's Emigration Dilemma
Last week Roger Ver revealed that the United States Embassy in Barbados has denied his requests for a visa to attend some Bitcoin related conferences in the United States. As reported by Ver his requests for a visa are denied because in the Embassy's determination he lacks sufficient connections to his new homeland of St Kitts and Nevis to prevent him from overstaying his visa and essentially immigrating back into the United States illegally. This incident highlights a number of ways in which the United States acts on the international stage not as a peer state with others, but as a rogue state. Continue reading
Transaction Fees and the Future of Bitcoin
An interesting side effect of the recent Bitcoin price crash as reported by exchanges has been the drop in hashrate which has created a glimpse into the future of Bitcoin. A future where transaction fees serve their intended purpose as both an antispam measure and valuable component of the miner reward. Continue reading
Pierre Omidyar also started a Qntra back in October. His failed.
We find via Conde Nast's1 Wired that something something Racket something something soft launch something something closed. Their glee is hardly concealed, but it will be short lived. Everyone in your school failing the same exam you marginally passed once does not really mean all that much ; there's other schools out there. The better parts : Continue reading
Also owners of Reddit, and generally a stronghold of all that is evil in the world. Check out The Awl's recent leak of their upcoming three-rule-binder for office drones to get an idea. Golden bits in there like
Please. WIRED is no longer a pirate ship. It's the home of world-changing journalism.
and
And it's increasingly a place where we, and our New York colleagues and owners, host artists, founders, CEOs, and advertisers.
Obama's "close down the world, mulatto in chief's coming for a visit" is slowly but surely trickling down through the entire stack of utterly corrupt, government-sponsored, government-backed, QE-fed leeches and aparatchicks. It's arrived to the point where Conde Nast is actually kicking out the last remaining workhorses in the stables to make room for Barnum. ↩