US And China Play Naval Footsie

Substantial noise is being made this weekend over a game of Naval footsie between US and Chinese warships in the South China Sea (archived). The cause for the drama is the fact that US warships can no longer navigate the South China Sea on the strength of the US Navy's armament, in this young century their presence in the South China Sea has been reduced to a courtesy extended to the US ships by Chinese Armed Forces.

Forkcoin "Bitcoin Gold" Hit By 51% Attack

The worthless Forkcoin known as "Bitcoin Gold" is even more worthless having been hit by double spending and 51% attacks demonstrating that its deviant blockchain lacks sufficient interest and value to attract sufficient mining activity. Much like the Roger Ver-ified "Bitcoin Cash" Forkcoin, "Bitcoin Gold" was split from the Bitcoin Blockchain via hardfork by a marginal crew with odd politics and like "Bitcoin Cash" failed to attract sufficient serious interest to matter.

The hill on which the "Bitcoin Gold" crew chose to die was changing the mining algorithm to a GPU mining friendly memory hard algorithm of recent publication dubbed "equihash" leaving their blockchain's security to the mercy of altcoin miners with GPU farms and no particular loyalty to any of the non-Bitcoin blockchains they mine. The meteorological risk of circumstances aligning to make these attacks the natural, economically rational choice for miners looms over every purported "cryptocurrency" blockchain that fails to attract sufficient value to actually be Bitcoin.

Existence Of Big Botnet Made From Small Routers Announced

A great many types of vulnerability-by-design in consumer routers have been public for a rather long time: Linksys, MikroTik, NETGEAR, TP-Link, and other vendors, have — for the entire history of this product type — been selling boxes that are, essentially, public toilets, free for the remote taking by any reasonably-intelligent teenager.

It appears that this "news" has finally percolated down through the drains and into the dark cellars where USG gendarmerie dwell. As part of their regular work to force the replacement of systems containing old, burned NSA-authored vulnerabilities, with new and fresh ones — USG.FBI have recently turned their attention to consumer routers.

The lively petri dish of self-propagating shitware now commonly known to be dwelling in the NSA victims' home routers, has been officially blamed on Putin's omnipotent DNC-diddling brigade. Respectable, non-terrorist USG subjects will, presumably, be issued new, "clean" routers, in the nearest future.

The burning of these vulnerabilities was handled by having "researchers" affiliated with Cisco unveil the presence of a botnet populated by ~500,000 small routers commandeered by an artful piece of malware which persists across device reboots (archived). Meanwhile, Cisco continues having its own profound and self-inflicted security issues.

US Embassy Staff Member Suffers Alleged "Sonic Brain Injury" In China

A member of the US embassy staff in China has reported to have suffered a "mild brain injury" after experiencing a abnormal sound. Similar incidents in Cuba lead the US to depopulate its diplomatic mission in that country. That these incidents keep happening in US embassies raises the possibility that various surveillance and electronic warfare equipment maintained by the US empire in its embassies has adverse effects on human health.

German Cartoonist Fired By Paper That Published His Jew Cartoon

Stereotypical Jew In DragGerman daily newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung ran this rather credible cartoon featuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a sterotypical Jew in drag, following in a long German tradition of caricaturing Jews in drawings. However, uproar alleging anti-semitism over a German newspaper publishing a Jewish caricature lead the newspaper to fire 85 year old cartoonist Dieter Hanitzsch.

The editorial staff that published the cartoon for print distribution however apologized profusely while throwing the elderly cartoonist Dieter under the boxcars.

Dubious Yet Encouraging Report Supposes Bitcoin Mining Achieved Or Set To Promptly Achieve 0.5% of World Energy Consumption

A number of dubious publications this week floated a "research paper" of unclear origin, methadology, and conclusion. The popularly distilled headline they produced from the report is that Bitcoin has either achieved or is set to imminently achieve 0.5% of the world's energy consumption. Naturally pantsuit outlets editorialized this uncertain finding as "a bad thing" though few things are more encouraging.

Airstrip One To Arm Rural Police As Insecurity Grips The Land Of Ingsoc

Frontline rural police in Britain are likely to be routinely armed in the near future after an effort to recruit "specialist counter terrorist firearms officers" has failed (archived). When rural British police call for armed support, the current British SOP calls for "Armed response vehicles" with 13 "specialist firearms officers" to make their way to the scene.

Maduro's Gang In Venezuala Seizes Cereal Plant

Maduro's criminal gang in Venezuala has seized Kellogg's cereal production factories after the carbohydrate giant decided to quit Maduro's ongoing transformation of the petrostate into a Marxist Theocracy (archived). Maduro declared Kellogg's exit "unconsitutional" and proceeded to turn the means of production Kellogg left behind over to "the workers" according to what are surely Maduro's sincerely held religious beliefs.

Venezuala will be holding presidential elections on Sunday.

US Alleges Some Guy Leaked CIA Tools But Doesn't Allege Strong Enough To Bring Charges

Prosecutors working for the criminal gang commonly known as the US Government are alleging that Joshua Adam Schulte was somehow involved in leaking a suite of CIA hacking tools and other lulzy artifacts. These prosecutors however aren't making the allegations by actually filing charges against Schulte, just leaking their suspicions to Jeff Bezo's Amazon Presents Washington Post (archived). According to the leaks about the criminal case into the leaker, Schulte's apartment was raided late last year and the seizure of Schulte's computers, electronics, and handwritten notes failed to produce indictable evidence even by the low standards fashionable in US Courts these days.

The US case against Schulte appears to be anchored in Ulbrich type tor wank. Schulte remains in indefinite pre-trial detention on charges unrelated to the CIA leaks case.