Signature operations or "SigOps" in Bitcoin transaction scripts requires checking ECDSA signatures to assure a Bitcoin transaction is valid. This is computationally expensive work making it an avenue of potential disruption on the Bitcoin network. The possibility was known for months (archived). Yet little attention was paid until yesterday's events caused ineffective block filling. The mining side was amply discussed there, and can be easily fixed by miners who know their stuff. I rather wish to shed some light on network propagation of these transactions, as the burden of signature checking rests on full nodes, too. Continue reading
Category Archives: Software
"Core" Bitcoin Client to Drop Transaction Priority
According to a mailing list post by Matt Corallo plans are in the works to drop transaction priority relay and mining code from the Bitcoin client "Core" in its 0.12 release (archived). "Core" is the Bitcoin Client whose development was formerly supported and directed by the Vessenes' Foundation, in contrast to the bitcoind client 'therealbitcoin' maintained by the Bitcoin Foundation. Earlier this week the developers of the "Core" client released a version 11.2 which introduces soft forking code to implement a time locking feature referred to as "Check Lock Time Verify" and designated BIP 65. This summer a soft forking change designated BIP 66 lead to several chain splits and reorganizations when it was triggered.
Torrent Infrastructure Hindered as Demonii/YIFY/YTS Fall
Late in October the torrent outfit YIFY took down their website and mysteriously ceased operating. TorrentFreak is now reporting the operator of the outfit has reached an undisclosed settlement with the MPAA (archived). A substantial casualty of this settlement is Demonii, the largest public torrent tracker which had been operated by persons affiliated with YIFY. The unprecedented settlement is suggestive of the possibility that the entire YIFY operation may have been a false flag for its entire duration. Readers using torrent software are advised to block connections to the Demonii tracker as it may be used as a data collection tool by the MPAA and other Copyrast operations.
Busybox Drops systemd Support
In a commit dated October 22nd, BusyBox maintainer Denys Vlasenko announced the removal of systemd support from the minimalist unix toolkit (archived). Vlasenko offered as a comment on the commit:
systemd people are not willing to play nice with the rest of the world. Therefore there is no reason for the rest of the world to cooperate with them.
AP: Hillary Clinton Horrible Sysadmin, Had RDP Open
According to the Associated Press, Hillary Clinton's private email server ran with ports for the Remote Desktop Protocol and other unsecured services open to the public internet (archived). Hillary's sysadmin qualifications had been questioned before when she chose Microsoft Exchange as an email server and when she requested over email a book on the subject of deleting email. It is becoming clear that Hillary Clinton is grossly under qualified to operate technology at an infrastructure level.
Windows TrueCrypt Fatally Flawed
Continued research after the first TrueCrypt audit yielded inconclusive results has discovered fatal privilege escalation vulnerabilities allowing for complete takeover (archived). So far this is known to affect TrueCrypt on Windows boxes, but there is still potential for other flaws to be discovered in TrueCrypt on other platforms. Details of the vulnerabilities are not yet disclosed, but this supports the possibility that it may not be possible at all to develop software offering any level of security on the Windows platform.
Microsoft Preemptively Downloads Windows 10 On Windows 7 and 8 Boxes
In it's latest abuse of people commonly thought to be its customers, Microsoft is pre-emptively downloading gigabytes of Windows 10 installation files (archived) onto the machines of people who have expressed no interest in transitioning to Microsoft's newest software. This follows Microsoft's recent move to push telemetry, the greatest anti-feature of Windows 10 onto users who are declining the "free" upgrade to Windows 10. According to the Inquirer's report Windows users are complaining about this Microsoft compelled download unknowingly forcing some users on quota enforced broadband to exceed their usage limits and further exhausting some user's storage space. The situation of users still subjecting themselves to Windows has long been tenuous with serious ongoing security concerns, yet Microsoft keeps doubling down with the abuse.
Surviving a Transaction Flood
As populist noisemakers continue to push for blocksize inflation and services set to benefit from forcing users off of full nodes announce "stress tests" composed of transaction floods, the issue of making sure your transactions propagate with timely confirmations and your node stays online come to the forefront. Thankfully there are measures that can be taken now to which can provide benefits during a transaction flood and as fuller blocks becomes a more normal state for the Bitcoin network. Continue reading
Windows 10 Banned From Numerous Torrent Trackers
Concerns about data collection and reporting tools Microsoft was embedded in Windows 10 has reportedly lead a number of top torrent trackers to ban users of Windows 10 from their services. While there are some amorphous concerns about a potential "piracy kill switch" Microsoft could trigger, there are concrete concerns about the level of information Windows 10 collects from installed systems and delivers to Microsoft. The debugging and performance related information collected by Microsoft presents a serious threat to the security of the torrent trackers as well as peers who connect to Windows 10 users in torrent swarms. Continue reading
Hearn's Blacklist Shenanigans
Qntra and others have been detailing potential ulterior motives for the push for an XT hard fork. Populist support for "Bitcoin"XT tends to ignore code that has not been well publicized or that they find inconvenient to acknowledge. The code in question relates to the deanonymization of XT nodes running on Tor and the blacklisting of Tor exit addresses. This is achieved through an IP address blacklist of nodes which "misbehave" and checked daily against a list of nodes maintained by Mike Hearn which the XT client dutifully fetches. Continue reading