According to a recent report by Michael Gibson-Light, doctoral student at the University of Arizona’s school of sociology, the ubiquitous Ramen noodle pack is fast replacing tobacco as the currency of choice amongst US prisoners. Gibson-Light conducted the study over the course of a year while conducting research for another project, and attributes the rise in value being due to substandard nutrition that inmates are now receiving due to budget cuts in prisons nationwide. Inmates often exchange the soup packs, which cost less than $1 in prison commissaries, for items of much higher value. In the prison where the study was conducted, one pack could fetch an inmate 5 handmade cigarettes worth approximately $2, and other assorted sundries were often valued in soup packs. Other inmates used ramen to pay for such services as laundry or cell-cleaning. Violence has been known to erupt over ramen bought on credit when the noodly debts went too long unpaid. Mr Gibson-Light concluded the study by stating that "The shift from tobacco to ramen highlights how dire the nutritional standards at prisons has become." Gresham's Law bitch! Sorry for your loss.
Fratire Retailer Suffers Pervasive Malware Installation
Popular fratire retailer Eddie Bauer suffered a pervasive installation of malware that spanned all of its 350 retail locations according to Brian Krebs (archived). This is astounding normal in electronic fiat payment systems. Krebs however has not offered any words on his blog concerning a far graver malfeasance recently uncovered. Sorry for your loss.
Nth French Republic Sending Tourists To Belgium For Death
In an attempt to ease the pain of the lost business from folks who can no longer stand the stench of the Nth Republic centred in Al-Paris, Brugmann University hospital’s Michele Morret-Rauis wants to assure the world that all is well :
Of course, Belgium is not here to euthanize half the planet.
Of course! If half the planet lived under the unbearable burden of multicultural socialism, then maybe, but thankfully that's not the case, and only Europe and the Americas1 are so offensively afflicted. Nonetheless, "euthanasia tourists" are flocking to Belgium in droves, with assisted suicides doubling to 2`023 in the last five years alone, nearly half of which are French (archived). Rest in Peace in our Time.
Or just ~2/7 billion homo sapiens on Earth. ↩
No Arrests In Drug Drone Prison Crash And Mid-Flight Seizure
A drone carrying drugs and other contraband crashed near Her Majesty's Prison Pentonville in the United Kingdom on August 13th and later that day a second drone was seized mid mid-flight over the prison (archived). Police allegedly chased a suspicious person away from the prison and recovered drug material he allegedly ditched, but no arrests were made in the case. Peace in our time.
Turkish Wedding Wrecked By Tween Bomber
An alleged 12 to 14 year old suicide bomber killed 51 and wounded 69 at a wedding in southeast Turkey near the Syrian border (archived). The tween allegedly interupted the celebration by killing himself and others after the traditional "henna party" where hands and feet are painted. Peace in our time.
Not Quite News Roundup Xtend 2 (TM)(R)
Welcome to the second edition of the Qntra Not Quite News Roundup Xtend (TM)(R). These events of the past week happened, but didn't quite qualify as news on their own merits.
- On Thursday following their acquisition by Univision, Gawker media announced that their former flagship Gawker.com would be shuttered next week.
- RBS, the largest and most Anglo bank yet to do so announced it would be imposing negative interest rates on select major commercial depositors. Loss happens.
- Following the news of a serious RNG bug affecting all GPG versions a low energy shitgnome campaign of apologetics and "not that bad" followed.1
- Ethereum Huffing wank continues. It also was discovered that the "Robin Hood" group of Ethereum scammers dumped their classic ethereum tokens raided from the corpse of the DAO, which definitionally is empty.
- Darkcoin, a minor altcoin notable for containing a rapid inbuilt hard fork mechanism, is going through another round of pumping in the hotsheets. There has been insufficient interest in this altcoin for anyone to care to challenge any of its past hard forks.
- Trees near good looking soybean fields2 continue their decline. As harvest nears many corn fields are looking awfully weedy.
- At the moment all is quiet on the BitfinExodus front.
RNG Whitening Bug Weakened All Versions of GPG
Werner Koch, maintainer of Libgcrypt and GnuPG, announced today:
"Felix Dörre and Vladimir Klebanov from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology found a bug in the mixing functions of Libgcrypt's random number generator: An attacker who obtains 4640 bits from the RNG can trivially predict the next 160 bits of output. This bug exists since 1998 in all GnuPG and Libgcrypt versions. … All Libgcrypt and GnuPG versions released before 2016-08-17 are affected on all platforms. A first analysis on the impact of this bug in GnuPG shows that existing RSA keys are not weakened."
However, in the text of one of the patches (archived) which accompanied this announcement, we find a slightly different statement:
"This bug does not affect the default generation of keys because running gpg for key creation creates at most 2 keys from the pool: For a single 4096 bit RSA key 512 byte of random are required and thus for the second key (encryption subkey), 20 bytes could be predicted from the the first key. However, the security of an OpenPGP key depends on the primary key (which was generated first) and thus the 20 predictable bytes should not be a problem. For the default key length of 2048 bit nothing will be predictable."
In effect, this means that no key created with GPG to date carries more than 580 bytes of effective entropy (e.g., all 4096-bit and above RSA keys have 'subkeys' which – we now find – mathematically relate, in a possibly-exploitable way, to the primary key.)
It should be remembered that, due to the structure of the OpenPGP format, breaking a GPG subkey is often quite nearly as good as breaking the primary key – i.e. it will allow the attacker to create valid signatures, in the case of a signature-only subkey, or else to read intercepted ciphertext, or both.
And thus we find that, due to the staggeringly-braindamaged design of the protocol and of this implementation, GPG users who elected to use longer-than-default GPG keys (Phuctor presently contains 1,090,450 RSA moduli which exceed 2048 bits in length1) ended up with smaller-than-default effective cryptographic strength.
Likewise noteworthy is the fact that this bug was contained in an RNG 'whitening' routine. The popular but wholly-pseudoscientific practice of RNG 'whitening' creates the appearance of an effective source of entropy at times when – potentially – none exists2, at the cost of introducing a mathematical relationship (sometimes, as in the case at hand, a very exploitable one) between RNG output bits, which by their nature are intended to be wholly uncorrelated.
Not all of these moduli were generated using GPG. ↩
A whitened (walked over with, e.g., RIPEMD – as in GPG, or SHA2, or AES) stream of zeroes, will typically pass mathematical tests of entropy (e.g., the Diehard suite) with flying colors. While at the same time containing no meaningful entropy in the cryptographic sense. ↩
Univision Beats Ziff Davis In Bidding Battle For Gawker Media Corpse
After everyone had come to expect Ziff Davis would cleanly take ownership of Gawker Media's corpse as the sole bidder at auction, Univision emerged as a second, higher bidder. Surpise!
Github Enforces USG.NSA Copyright And Other Lols, Roundup Xtend'd
Following the initial announcement of "Shadow Broker's" (WOT:nonpeople) planned auction of alleged NSA surveillance tools and miscellanea, further lulz emerged. Here they are Roundup Xtend'd:
- Github effectively and proactively enforced a potential copyright claim by the United States National Security Agency by booting the information off their platform.
- Numerous media outlets are skirting around where the goods came from by tenaciously using the "Equation Group" moniker for the group with which the tools originated.
- The issue of whether the teasers offered of the goods for sale are novel or rehashes of previous leaks has not yet been definitively established given the sheer amount that has been leaked already.
- A suggested price of One Million Bitcoin has been floating around. The price, which represents a substantial percentage of the best money's monetary mass, reeks of insanity and a deep povertree of the sort that makes a supposed person incapable of market participation.
Buterin's Previous Waterfall Exposed
Today's altcorn report is brought to us by Gregory Maxwell, who earlier today in a reddit post outed Vitalik Butterin as mastermind of a quantum computer simulation scam. (archived) Maxwell stated
Vitalik's project immediately before Ethereum is that he was collecting investments from people to fund building a computer program to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time.
No flaming tire in a shipit ever ascended from investor monies, furthering proof that Buterin worked hard at producing vaporware long before pushing the Ether huffing scam.