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Qntra - Herald Of The Most Serene Republic |
AppleInsider is reporting that Apple Inc.1 is currently defending itself in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California against a class-action lawsuit accusing Apple of violating antitrust legislation. Continue reading
Apple is, of course, the company worth more than the entire Russian stock market. ↩
In a filing with the Australian Parliament the Tax Institute proposed a number of changes and suggestions for future measures the Australian Government could consider with respect to Bitcoin. Among those changes were treating Bitcoin as a currency rather than a good which would end the burden of processing GST taxes on Bitcoin purchases, a bane which has lead at least one startup to leave Australia. Also proposed is a "voluntary registry" of Bitcoin addresses in order to: Continue reading
The Los Angeles Times reports that a group calling itself #GOP or "Guardians of Peace" has compromised the ability of movie studio Sony Pictures to derive any utility from their information technology infrastructure. Allegedly the group behind the event has not made any concrete demands, but is threatening to leak internal information from the studio to the web if certain demands are not met. This event deviates from typical, far less selective, ransomware attacks which happen to affect single computers opportunistically and then demand a set monetary ransom to facilitate the recovery of files. Self Proclaimed "hack victim" Mark Karpeles have offered that the Sony hackers might be Chinese or Korean based on a text encoding error.
Vitalik Buterin beat Mark Zuckerberg for the 2014 World Technology Network award in IT software. The award is presented for Buterin's role as co-creator and inventor of Ethereum which has yet to exist and co-founding Bitcoin Magazine. The event was held at the Time & Life building which no longer houses Time Inc. Time was of course spun off Warner Communications earlier this summer to a chilly reception by investors.
According to the latest survey results from the USG's Bitcoin Foundation,1 only half of the 225 individual members surveyed even like USGavin et al.2 No report on whether this has anything to do with their insertion of Heartbleed into Bitcoin Core or their continued attempts to increase the block size and thereby compromise the Bitcoin network's security. Continue reading
Not to be confused with the Bitcoin Foundation incorporated on #bitcoin-assets. ↩
50.44% "like" or "strongly like." The rest either "strongly dislike," "dislike," or are "neutral." ↩
Alleged cryptocurrency exchange mcxNOW has shuttered again for a second consecutive winter, and purports to be reopening eventually under the new name mtMOX. The first winter shuttering occurred one month after conducting a public offering for "Fee Shares" on the platform. The announcement: Continue reading
Following in the wake of the Detroit Mayor's announcement that they were too poor to pay a ransom, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder has announced that the state plans to deploy "volunteer information security experts" in order to combat attacks on Michigan's information technology infrastructure. This announcement came at the same North American International Cyber Summit. Continue reading
According to The Detroit News and the Associated Press a city database was hit by ransomware this past April. According to Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan a ransom of 2,000 BTC was requested in order to restore access to the affected database. He also reported the ransom was not paid as the database was apparently not that important. This was revealed at the North American International Cyber Summit at Cobo Center. At the summit the Mayor also presented something else as problematic. Continue reading
This week Pando Daily's Yasha Levine wrote a follow up to a post from this summer where Yasha documented many of the numerous and transparent connections between the Tor developers and the United States Government. Nothing Yasha wrote in the original piece is particularly controversial, nearly all of it comes from public records, but still Yasha was able to write a follow up on all of the venom Yasha received from fans of Tor without any actual refutations of her points. The simple fact of the matter is that Tor was born of the needs of the United States Government's intelligence community, and continued funding to keep the main Tor developers fed, clothed, and sheltered largely comes from the coffers of those interests. Continue reading
The Memphis Business Journal reports that recently an employee of the Dickson County Sheriff's office invited ransomware to lock the department's case files. After consultation with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the FBI, the department paid the ransom.