The Ethereum community has announced it will be shutting down it's official forums in two weeks, preferring to congregate with all the other crypto-cretins on Reddit. Ethereum price has been in a freefall for some time, prices having dipped 2.51% in the past 24 hours alone. The move seems to suggest that community funds are spread thin at the moment, with need to allocate their resources in other areas in order to keep the scam afloat. The information in the forums will be preserved on archive.org for those that need a good laugh in the future.
Category Archives: Shitware
More Sourceforge Fail
User d3k4y on reddit has reported that the Sourceforge version of pywallet contains malicious code that will send users private keys to a remote server located at bieber.atwebpages.com (source, archived). Once a well-known source for a variety of software downloads, the site has steadily declined into a haven for malware and other assorted junk. This incident serves as a reminder of the importance of always verifying checksums of any software before attempting to run it in a live environment.
Weak RNG Assists Man's Lottery Fortune
Iowa prosecutors have recently uncovered evidence that a former computer security worker modified a RNG used to pick numbers for several State lotteries. Eddie Raymond Tipton has already been tried and convicted on two counts of fraud, but officials only recently uncovered the manner in which he was able to produce the winning numbers for six different drawings worth millions between 2005-2011.
Investigators found that Tipton introduced a rootkit that used specially crafted DLL's to redirect drawings based on specific conditions, using an algorithm he could easily solve. ArsTechnica reported that it was unclear "if officials have tightened the requirements to make future tampering harder" by trashing all their Microsoft computers and using a more secure Linux-based distribution instead.
US Spy Agency To Demolish Low Income Housing
This week it was announced that the US National Geospatial-Intelligence agency is moving its western headquarters from the southern portion of Saint Louis, Missouri to an area in the north of the city (archived). Much of the chosen site is vacant land that was once home to failed the Pruitt–Igoe public housing, but in order to fully accommodate the spy facility a number of happily inhabited homes will be taken through eminent domain and demolished. Certain quirks of the neighborhood and their affect on property values mean that affected home owners will be unable to replace their commandeered housing with anything comparable when they are compensated according to their homes "fair market value" as is traditional in eminent domain cases. It turns out the property development tactics of Hussein Bahamas aren't all that different from those of serial scammer and bankruptcy artist Donald Trump-Clinton.
FBI Now Offering To Unlock iPhones Just Because It Can
With the iPhone Circle Jerk drawn to a close the FBI is showing off its newly revealed ability to independently unlock iPhones (archived).
Cloudflare Pressures Tor Developers and Users To Implement Identifiers
The Stack reports that Cloudflare co-founder Matthew Prince is pressuring Tor Developers and users to adopt some sort of "anonymous" identification scheme (archived). Prince is threatening more captchas and content blocks from Cloudflare if the firm's demands are not met. Cloudflare is a known enemy of internet privacy and generally a force for making the internet shittier. Tor on the other hand often fails to deliver its promised level of privacy and is likely socially and technologically compromised beyond repair. This declaration by Prince when considered alongside a "heated debate" continuing in the comments of a five week old Tor project blog post (archived) lead to this affair having a strong social engineering smell much like the recent iPhone Circle Jerk. Expect this ongoing discussion to lead to Cloudflare and Tor both getting shittier independently and when used in concert.
Hearn Can't Quit Maxwell, Declares Maxwell Bitcoin's Leader
Several hours ago on a heavily censored Y Combinator forum Mike Hearn declared that Gregory Maxwell is both the leader of Bitcoin and the source of all its problems:
Bitcoin's problem is not a lack of a leader, it's problem is that the leader is Gregory Maxwell at Blockstream and he's a terrible decision maker. Blockstream is the source of the refusal to bump the block size.
Indeed, the block size debate did not stalemate. It resulted in the small blockists winning, due to the much more aggressive tactics they used (e.g. hiring a bunch of developers then asserting they'd all quit forever if the block size were changed).
– Mike Hearn: Birth Unknown – January 15th 2015, He just couldn't Quit Greg Maxwell
Qualcomm "Snapdragon" Chips Allegedly Riddled With Vulnerabilities
Trend Micro in a blog post is alleging that Qualcomm's "Snapdragon" family of system on a chip computers are riddled with numerous security vulnerabilities, particularly when paired with Google's Android operating system (archived). The continued plagues of leaky abstraction and faux compartmentalization which require ever larger collections of "teams" to design new chips in the popular style as well as the war on computing suggest that we are going to increasingly see security vulnerabilities baked into silicon. Instead of celebrating the death of Moore's law as occasion to move towards saner architectural decisions, the trend appears to be favoring further insanity and a proliferation of nooks and crannies for culturing security holes organically or placing them deliberately.
US War On Physicians Escalates
The general war against sanity in the United States is escalating in its front against physicians. The Center for Disease Control, under the the direction of Hussein Bahamas's gang in Washington is proposing radical new guidelines which constrain physician judgement in prescribing pain relieving drugs (archived). Continue reading
'Anybody Can Learn' Gets It In The Breech
Hadi Partovi, (archived) Code.org CEO, reports on ANYBODY CAN LEARN (archived) that his site has been compromised. He regretfully informs us that twelve thousand volunteer email addresses were captured in the attack. A technical freelancing firm based in Singapore took credit for the breach in an unsolicited email sent to one of the effected volunteer engineers. Continue reading