Hemorrhaging social gaming "company" Zynga is seeking to top up on its diminishing funds by doing a sale and leaseback on its headquarters in San Francisco's Design district. This bezzle buck bolus should allow Zygna to continue bleeding well into the future. Zynga paid 340 United States dollars for each of the building's 670,000 square feet of floor space and may make up to 800 dollars per square foot in the sale based on local pricing trends (archived). This is a situation which could have created an opportunity to liquidate the firm and minimize losses for everyone, but it seems Zynga leadership has decided the bleeding must continue.
Category Archives: Shitware
Numerous Sites Explicitly Open To Cross Site Scripting
A survey of top websites has revealed many including unnamed Bitcoin holding websites have a header set which explicitly allows third party javascript to be run on their pages without any checks on the code's origin (archived). Web stack security is exactly as bad as you thought it was. Unless you didn't think it was this bad, in which case it is far worse than you think. Of course, Coinbase would never be the same if they removed their Gravatar integration.
Chainalysis Partners With Only Possible Customer
This past week it was announced that Bitcoin transaction tracking startup Chainalysis has partnered with Europol according to either multiple reports or numerous outlets parroting the same press release. Feeding the "law enforcement" quackery industrial complex is of course the only way for Chainalysis to meet its only natural customers. As there no serious phenomena known as Bitcoin taint, it can be assumed blockchain tracking is set to join handwriting analysis, psychics, lie detectors, and dowsing in the compendium of pseudoscience routinely entertained by "authorities" in the field of "law" enforcement.
Nth French Republic Officially Dumps Freedom
France’s Council of State rejected appeals to rescind the Ministry of Interior's perceived "authority" to order the blocking and the delisting of websites without a court order. People who want to visit sites thus blocked would be redirected to the Ministry of Interior’s website, potentially allowing it to know the IP addresses of persons visiting forbidden sites and to intercept their correspondence.
Such mechanisms are accentuated in these times of the everlasting State-of-Emergency (archived), which proceeds without any control.
Auschwitz Releases Political Language Software
The Stack reports that Auschwitz, the death camp turned memorial and museum, has released a software application for politically reshaping the use of language (archived). The purported aim of the software is to remove associations between the Polish people and the genocide committed by German National Socialists in death camps erected on Polish lands. It supposedly works to this end by substituting politically approved terms for otherwise descriptive labels like "Polish extermination camp" in documents on machines running the software.
Google Unveils Glibc DNS Client Vulnerability, Many Bitcoin Implementations Affected
Today Google's online security blog unveiled a buffer overflow in the Gnu C library's DNS client (archived). The vulnerability allows the getaddrinfo function to overflow opening the doors to all manner of malice. This vulnerability affects all Bitcoin implementations compiled against the GNU C library which invoke DNS. This includes Bitcoin Core and the clients programmed to eventually fork into altcoins including the "Bitcoin" XT and "Bitcoin" "Classic" network clients. The reference Bitcoin implementation maintained by the Bitcoin Foundation is unaffected as DNS was excised from that client,1 and scripts are available for building the reference implementation against the musl C library.2 It is strongly recommended that Bitcoin users patch their preferred client3 to remove DNS or move to a client maintained by a team that cares about security and eliminating unnecessary attack surfaces in advance.
Twitter Adopting Dangerous Benesch Speech Framework
As Twitter attempts to fix its struggling fortunes by positioning itself as a counter revolutionary institution of the extant socialist order, it has come out that Twitter will be adopting Susan Benesch's dangerous framework for evaluating speech. Benesch's dangerous framework provides a methodology for censors to grade speech utterances on their likelihood of affecting change in the world so that they might be censored while innocuous utterances of little impact may be permitted in order to create a simulacrum of free speech occurring. At the core of Benesch's framework which purports to be motivated by principles assuming equality among persons is a concession to the reality that speakers are fundamentally unequal. For interested entomologists the full text of a working paper by Benesch produced for the "World Policy Institute" in 2012 on her framework is submitted in full plaintext below: Continue reading
Clapper: "Internet Of Things" Offers Tempting Surveillance Opportunities
In testimony presented to the United States Senate, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper acknowledged that the horrifically insecure "Internet of Things" presents a target for United States surveillance operations (archived). In the same testimony Clapper noted United States activities in the United States were boosting the recruiting and resolve of organizations adversarial to the United States.
Intel Removes Skylake Feature Retroactively With Microcode Update
In further bad news for customers of Intel's Skylake chips, PC World is reporting that Intel has is issuing a microcode update which removes a feature present at shipping which allowed safely and easily overclocking the chips by increasing their base clock frequency (archived). Normally overclocking is done safely on other chips through increasing the multiplier applied to the base clock. This is because in other chips the base clock frequency is used to derive the frequency of a number of buses on the system which can begin exhibiting aberrant behavior when the base clock frequency is molested. Skylake however divorced the base clock from other system buses which reintroduced the possibility of overclocking the chips by increasing the base clock while leaving the locked multiplier alone. Continue reading
US Department Of Education Driving Tuition Increases
A working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research in the United States identifies financial aid policies of the United States Department of Education as the primary driver of runaway tuition increases (archived). Rather than being driven by payroll of other costs to higher education institutions, the availability of easy federal money instead has institutions raising tuition in order to grab every cheap dollar they can. Of course this creates the substantial moral hazard wherein the easy money for institutions becomes a millstone by which fledgling Americans are chained by debt to the Federal government.