A recent report by ESET security suggests that the TorrentLocker ransomware enjoys a 1.44% rate of success in converting victims into ransom payments. This discouraging figure suggest that there are still far too many people subsidizing this phenomenon. As noted in the guide to protecting yourself from ransomware, paying ransoms only encourages the continuation of this activity. Don't be like the Sheriff's department that admits it paid to subsidize criminal activity.
Category Archives: Software
Blockchain.info Discloses Vulnerability Window
On their blog, Blockchain.info has disclosed that a routine update left them serving insecure code to customers using their wallet between 12:00 AM and 2:30 AM GMT today. All customers who used the Blockchain.info web wallet to interface to create wallets, generate addresses, or send transactions are reported to be affected. The problem given the scope appears to be that Blockchain.info was serving weak pseudo-random number generating software.
Coinapult Relaunch Their Bitcoin SMS Service
Coinapult, which first introduced its BTC to SMS service in May 2012 to users in the US and Canada, has relaunched the service, making it available to users across the globe excluding the United States. Coinapult cited the regulatory minefield in the US as one of the reasons why the service is unavailable for use there. Continue reading
After Survery Vessenes' Foundation "Pivots"
In a blog post the communications and marketing director of Vessenes' Bitcoin Foundation Jinyoung Lee Englund announced that they would be shifting their focus almost entirely towards the goal of funding "core development" in the wake of results from a member survey. In the past this Foundation has engaged in a mix of activities including lobbying, marketing, and "outreach" in addition to providing Gavin Andressen a salary to work on the Foundation's fork of Satoshi's Bitcoin codebase. After justifying the move in their post they offer the following: Continue reading
Buterin Beats Zuckerberg for Award
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.
Introducing A New Bitcoin Foundation
Vessenes's Bitcoin Foundation maintains a notoriety for many questionable actions and behaviors. There is even a candidate running for the foundation's board on the platform of dissolution. Due to the oversights of Vessenes's Bitcoin Foundation, #bitcoin-assets recently formed its own foundation for the preservation of the Bitcoin reference implementation. Continue reading
New Bitcoin Deed System Launches
Blocks in the blockchain serve as a distributed timestamp consensus: a block is a definitive record of time. punkman from the #bitcoin-assets irc channel launched a system today which allows users to prove through the blockchain the date of publication of a document. Continue reading
7th Underhanded C Contest Going on Now
The Underhanded C contest opened to challengers yesterday and continues though New Years day 2015. This year's challenge features oversharing sites and National Security Letters in its theme, but with a twist in that the surveillance function is to subtly leak information about the act of surveillance. Last year's challenge involved a social media theme as well, though with a different angle for mischief. Challenges from past years are featured on the site which feature solutions perfect for ramping up a person's paranoia about software quality.
GNU wget Vulnerability
A vulnerability in GNU wget which allowed a potential attack by maliciously crafted urls has been found and patched. Not every implementation of wget had this flaw at the time GNU wget was patched, OpenBSD's version was patched five years ago.
Conformal Release Bitcoin Transaction Simulator
Conformal Systems, creators of the alternate Bitcoin full-node implementation written in Go, has released a bitcoin transaction simulator called btcsim. Created by interns Javed Khan and Michalis Kargakis, the transaction simulator has been used by Conformal to test a variety of claims about how the Bitcoin network might function when transaction volume mirrors that of the 3000 transactions per second credit card companies such as Visa and Mastercard process. Continue reading