The already dismal outlook for United States agriculture got dimmer today as John Deere cut its sales forecast for the rest of the year (archived). Paired with the decline of the United States energy industry it is becoming clear that actual, productive economic activity the sectors of the United States economy most fundamental to sustaining civilized life is stalling.
FBI iPhone Circle Jerk Theater
Substantial noise has been generated over the past several days concerning the fate of a colored plastic iPhone. The debate concerns whether Apple should provide agents of United States which would allow them to more effectively defeat iOS encryption through brute force. Given Apple's history of collaboration with this sort of agent it is perfectly reasonable to assume the assistance requested by the FBI from Apple has already been rendered (archived). So, why the loud public debate? Continue reading
Growing Bitcoin Game Hits High for Single Day Play-Seconds
Eulora, the flagship game produced by The Ministry of Games, clocked a single-day play-seconds record of 510`537 earlier this week. Continue reading
FTC Settles With Butterfly Labs, Suspended Penalties For Management
Today the United States Federal Trade Commission announced it reached a settlement against Butterfly Labs and the firm's principals Sonny Vleisides and Jody/Darla Drake. Out of a 38,615,161 United States dollar judgment against the firm and Sonny Vleisides the firm is to pay 15,000 and Sonny Vleisides is to pay 4,000. A separate judgment against Jody/Darla Drake for 135,878 United States dollars will similarly be suspended in exchange for Jody/Darla surrendering all of the Bitcoin she mined on company machines thus giving her a choice in how to pay her penalty. These "partial" suspensions were agreed to based on the defendants' inability to pay and are offered in exchange for various promises to not engage in the criminal behavior they built their "business" on for some finite period of time. The orders pertaining to Sonny Vleisides and Butterfly Labs as well as the order for Jody/Darla Drake are reproduced in plaintext below: Continue reading
Nth French Republic Officially Dumps Freedom
France’s Council of State rejected appeals to rescind the Ministry of Interior's perceived "authority" to order the blocking and the delisting of websites without a court order. People who want to visit sites thus blocked would be redirected to the Ministry of Interior’s website, potentially allowing it to know the IP addresses of persons visiting forbidden sites and to intercept their correspondence.
Such mechanisms are accentuated in these times of the everlasting State-of-Emergency (archived), which proceeds without any control.
UClibc Fixed getaddrinfo() Flaw Six Years Ago
This week brought news of a severe vulnerability in the Gnu C library's DNS handling functions. The UClibc maintainers received a ticket for this problem and corrected it in their C library six years ago (archived).
Auschwitz Releases Political Language Software
The Stack reports that Auschwitz, the death camp turned memorial and museum, has released a software application for politically reshaping the use of language (archived). The purported aim of the software is to remove associations between the Polish people and the genocide committed by German National Socialists in death camps erected on Polish lands. It supposedly works to this end by substituting politically approved terms for otherwise descriptive labels like "Polish extermination camp" in documents on machines running the software.
US Marshalls Join Student Debt Collection Racket
In Texas the United States Marshals have moved on from collecting fugitives to collecting student loan debts while armed and dressed in the manner that they collect fugitives (archived). The United States government must be far more broke, both financially and morally, than it appears on the surface.
Western Constitutional Hero Denied 8th Amendment Right To Make Bail
Cliven Bundy, who lacks a prior criminal record, was denied his 8th amendment constitutional right to make bail for reasonable pretrial release by United States Court judge Janice Stewart. Hope for constitutional justice which has long been endangered in the United States might have finally died under uncertain circumstances with its last strong champion this past weekend.
KncMiner Cuts Of 20% Of Employees
Swedish sources are reporting the KncMiner has let go of 12 employees comprising 20% of their workforce (archived). CEO Sam Cole among other things blames the inability of operations in the Nordic country to compete with Chinese mining firms. Several days ago there was a stabbing reported at a datacenter associated with KncMiner. This new development suggests the pressures of working for a deeply struggling company contributed to the recent outbreak of violence.
Update: KncMiner is also one of the many mining operations listed to this day as supporting the ClassicCoin fork (along with Bitfury, which led the backpedalling effort after it became obvious Classiccoin does not have nor can acquire the support of key players in the market.)
Update 2: This struggling concern is now producing blocks containing votes for the doomed ClassicCoin fork.