Today it was revealed that Lenovo has been installing a piece of adware called "Superfish" which uses an SSL man in the middle attack to replace ads served to users and potentially engage in all kinds of other evil. Abuse of unaware users who run Microsoft Windows by computing vendors has a long history which includes many other notable episodes such as Sony proposing a lack of factory bloatware as a premium option to the entire existence of the venture known as "WildTangent." Continue reading
Category Archives: Software
PseudoNode Proxy Fools Bitcoin Full Node Incentive Program
Vessennes' Bitcoin Foundation recently sponsored a full node incentive program that pays full nodes registered with a Bitcoin address weekly if deemed eligible. The incentive program's goal is to estimate the size of the Bitcoin network by finding all reachable nodes running bitcoind version 0.8 or higher, likely in an attempt to lower the barrier necessary for a possible fork. Continue reading
Coinbase To Shut Down Tipping Button
In a move reminiscent of Reddit Note's much acclaimed launch yet quick demise, Coinbase today announced that they will shut down their tipping button as of the apt date April 1st 2015. The Coinbase announcement reads: Continue reading
A Discussion of Military Strategy in the 21st Century
Rehashing the "end of Linux" aspirations of systemd is probably not necessary, but another piece of the puzzle falls in place, with ESR's eminently quotable: Continue reading
Love Will Inc (Pheeva Wallet) Win 2015 Olin Cup
Love Will Inc, a startup known for producing products such as the Pheeva Bitcoin wallet, have won the top prize in the 2015 Olin Cup competition. The Olin Cup, a yearly event held by Washington University's Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, awards first place getters a total of $50,000 in investments: Continue reading
Foundation Releases Report and Bitcoin 0.5.3.1
The Bitcoin Foundation released their January 2015 report on their development efforts today. Among other accomplishments was iterating the version number of their reference implementation of the Bitcoin protocol to version 0.5.3.1 and subjecting it to further rigor. 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
Collected Points From the NSA's Recent Document Dump
Numerous media outlets are going deep into the NSA's recent Christmas Eve document dump while Der Spiegel is supposing itself to cover new Snowden documents.In addition to the unsurprising post-Snowden revelation that NSA analysts routinely acted outside of their legal ability to monitor, a number of technical revelations came out about the NSA's surveillance abilities as they care to disclose them two years ago. As this document dump was an official agency disclosure take it with a grain of salt or several trucks full of salt as you feel necessary. Continue reading
Discus Fish Donates Namecoins to Namecoin Developers
A posting on the official Namecoin forum reveals that Bitcoin mining pool Discus Fish has donated 20,000 Namecoins to developers to bring the Namecoin client in line with the current Bitcoin client developed by Vessenes' foundation. At present there is a Github repository where code committed to this effort so far is currently available.
Namecoin was the first credible fork of the Bitcoin codebase and remains one of the few altcoins of enduring interest. The Namecoin project was born out of a desire to expand the principles that laid the foundation for Bitcoin's success in reinventing money to doing the same for Domain and other name services. Namecoin was even early enough to get suggestions and code commits from Satoshi Nakamato himself. Continue reading
Four Bitcoin Based Projects From MIT Students
From MIT 6.858 comes four Final Projects which are using Bitcoin. They are:
- Dryer21 – A bitcoin mixing service.
- CheckBits – A guarantor system for retail payments so that customer information such as a Bitcoin address can be obfuscated.
- TorCoin – An altcoin used to achieve consensus on the Tor network.
- Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees.