Vessenes' Foundation director Bruce Fenton has proposed a voluntary code of conduct that would adopt a form of historical revisionism as its first principle (archived). Fenton proposes that everyone who wants to be involved in Bitcoin let go of the past, forgive, and ignore the fact that in the past year numerous parties hostile to Bitcoin have engaged in attacks attempting to subvert the Bitcoin network. Continue reading
Category Archives: The Law
Embattled Ferguson Defies United States Department Of "Justice"
The embattled city of Ferguson in the frontier province of Missouri has refused to issue its consent to a "consent decree" sought by the United States Department of "Justice" which would end the troubled city as a going concern (archived). Since civil unrest struck Ferguson the small city north of St Louis has suffered financially with Moody's dropping Ferguson's credit rating seven steps, from a respectable Aa3 to Ba1 "junk" status all in one fell swoop this past September. The city with 21,000 residents and a roughly 12 million United States dollar annual budget if it consented to the decree would have been forced to, among other things, raise its level of "law enforcement" officer pay to the to 25th percentile for the region. The payroll bump alone is projected to generate approximately a million dollars worth of expenses for the city on its own. Other costs would include monitoring fees paid to the Department of "Justice" and an inevitable stand off with the firefighter's union over their salaries if a pay raise for police officers goes through. Ferguson's city government has resigned itself to Federal monitoring and other onerous provisions of the agreement, but they are taking a stand on the financial aspect as the numbers involved could lead to no outcome other than the dissolution of the city.
Cattle Rancher And American Patriot Cliven Bundy Arrested In Portland
American Patriot, Cattle Rancher, and inspiration for the militia liberation in Oregon Cliven Bundy was arrested in Portland after travelling from Nevada to support his sons (archived). He had travelled to Portland with his Nevada State Assembly member Michelle Fiore to seek the release of his children from Federal Prisoner of War1 camps. This round of militia liberation may be reaching its end. For 40 days and forty nights in the high desert of Oregon brave militia men and women have taken a stand supporting the Spirit of the United States Constitution and the American People against the crimes committed by the Federal Government. Since the dark day that Lavoy Finicum was slaughtered by Federal Forces and other militia leaders were captured with Ryan Bundy sustaining a gunshot wound, only four brave souls remained to continue the liberation and they have continued to maintain it under a constant state of seige. If the Oregon liberation ends today, may the American people honor the sacrifices of these brave militia souls have undertaken on their behalf.
What war? The war on America's productive citizens where they are deprived of the fruits of their labor in order to better support clerks and other socialist bureaucrats. ↩
Bitcointalk Default Trust Member Escrow.ms Arrested For Debit Card Fraud
Pankaj 'escrow.ms' Bhardwaj was arrested by police for participating in a fraud ring that used cloned debit cards to withdraw money from other people's accounts at automated teller machines (archived). Under his forum username escrow.ms, Bhardwaj was a member of the "Default Trust" list used to seed the reputation ratings system on Theymos's Bitcointalk forum. He enjoyed a stellar reputation on that forum as evidenced by a thread on that forum discussing recent developments in the life and times of escrow.ms forum escrow, default trust member, and apparent fiat payment card cloner. Escrow.ms is not the first member of Bitcointalk's default trust list to undergo a sudden transition from trustiness to ignominy. Shortly after the creation of the default trust list, inaugural member member TradeFortress operated node.js based webwallet service Inputs.io for only a few short months before 4,100 Bitcoins disappeared from the service on November 7th, 2013.
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
Dotcom Extradition Appeal Set To Begin August 29
Denying a request by United States agents to expedite the matter, Justice Raynor Asher of the High Court in Auckland has set Kim Dotcom's appeal to begin on August 29th, 2016 (archived). Lower Court Judge Nevin Dawson ruled in favor of extraditing Dotcom in the initial hearing, but so far appellate courts have ruled more favorably for Dotcom in this case than the lower courts have.
Tribulations Of Nordic System Affecting Universities
The declining economic fortunes of economies subscribing to the Nordic System is trickling down institutions of higher education in those countries (archived). At the end of January the University of Helsinki announced it was preparing to purge nearly 1000 positions from its payroll (archived) and now the University of Copenhagen is preparing to remove more than 500 positions from its payroll (archived). In its English language press release the University of Copenhagen notes that annual funding decreases are its normal expectation and that among other measures they plan to "makeover" their medical science programs as the equipment and laboratories they demand at present is too expensive for a proper Nordic System university to maintain.
Oracle Employee Wrecked Socat Security
Kaspersky's Threatpost reports that Oracle employee Zhiang Wang introduced a patch to the Open Source socat utility which broke its security by changing a hard coded Diffie-Hellman prime number to a 1024 bit number that is not prime (archived). While substantial discussion is occurring around whether the change was introduced to create backdoor, the change as a point of fact broke the security promised by socat.
Intel: Chips To Get Slower
William Holt, General Manager of Intel's Technology and Manufacturing group, has now gone on the public record declaring their future chips will be getting slower in the name of energy efficiency as Moore's law comes to an end (archived). Continue reading
United States Capitol Region To Bribe Potential Repeat Criminals
Earlier this week the council governing the United States Capitol region approved a bill which would lead to stipends for up to 200 persons with a history of criminal convictions determined to be the most likely commit new crimes (archived). Criminals offered this fellowship stipend would maintain their fellowship through participation in their re-education curricula and avoiding capture in connection with the commission of new crimes.