Xiaoxing Xi isn't a Chinese spy after all

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Reports are coming in that the former1 Chairman of the Physics Department at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA – one Mr. Xiaoxing Xi – has had his U.S. Justice Department-drafted indictment2 for "wrecking"3 dismissed without prejudice to the refiling of charges4. Continue reading →

  1. Xiaoxing Xi was regrettably relieved of his leadership post at Temple in May 2015 following this indictment. ↩

  2. Full indictment document here. The observant reader will note that this indictment obliges Mr. Xi to forfeit any real or personal property "derived from the proceeds traceable to the commision" of the alleged offenses to the Federal Government of the United States of America, and that this property be obtained by any and all means necessary. Just like that. Just because Peter F. Schenck, on behalf of United States Justice Department Attorney Zane David Memeger, said so. ↩

  3. "Wrecking" became a term of art in the former Soviet Union, wherein a political undesirable could be branded as a "wrecker" for, say, using too much concrete and trying to bankrupt the glorious state of the USSR, or even using too little concrete and jeopardising the security of the glorious state of the USSR. Basically, it like every socialist term in all times and in all places : a term devoid of specific meaning and therefore used as a catch-all for the vague and whimsical ends of the soi-dissant powers-that-were. The funny/sad part of recalling this fragment of all-too-recent history is that the United States of America, the current soi-dissant power-that-be, is reimplementing the exact same strategy right before our very eyes. We see this with everything from "racist" to "cyberterrorist" and we'll continue to see it for some time to come. ↩

  4. Full dismissal document here. ↩

Former Reddit CEO Surrenders Legal Fight After Losing Media Outlet

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Today Ellen Pao has dropped an appeal of her courtroom loss against one of her former employers, the firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and will have to pay the firm's costs related to the affair (archived). At trial her allegations of discrimination were determined to be unfounded and she was ordered to pay the firm's legal fees. Even though she had advanced her career at the firm to the point she was elevated to partner at the firm, she still alleged that systemic gender discrimination had limited her potential to advance her career. Pao was determined to appeal the ruling during her short tenure as CEO of the social media outlet Reddit where she advanced a censorship agenda which involved shuttering communities that celebrate healthy lifestyle choices and suppression of accurate legal analysis of her case. Near the end of her reign there was further a large rebellion of unpaid moderation staff as she cut a number of resources once available to support them. Pao's post Kleiner legacy as a business leader raises serious questions about the managerial competence at any firm that would elevate Ellen Pao to partner.

Coinwallet Turns Stress Test Into Dust Givaway

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Spam generator Coinwallet has taken a different avenue to carry out its latest network "stress test" by presenting its latest round as a "giveaway" where they are posting private keys owning numerous dust outputs on the Bitcointalk forum. According to their announcement they intend to distribute roughly 200 Bitcoin in this manner. Attempts to claim these outputs may explain the recent increase in the number of weird non-standard transactions hitting certain Bitcoin nodes. Previously suggested countermeasures for surviving a transaction flood including demands for a higher base transaction fee per kilobyte of transaction data should still work to help keep nodes running happily throughout this event.

MIT Sacrifices Rag in XTCoin Push

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Since the original XTCoin fork of Bitcoin was announced MIT's Technology Review has been the solitary media outlet of note lending its complete and unreserved support to XTCoin's social media propaganda war. MIT's rag has effectively sacrificed whatever reputation it may have still had as it attempts to force a narrative that frames Gavin Andressen and Mike Hearn's efforts as an attempt to somehow save Bitcoin. The once storied Massachusetts Insitute of Technology, which has taken money from the United States Military to research Bitcoin prices and rescued Gavin Andressen from poverty when the Vessenes' Foundation collapsed is now set on burning the last of its credibility in an attack on Bitcoin.

Consumers Begin Revolting, Bitcoin Is Not Visa

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Gavin Andressen stated early on in his pursuit of a hard limit that he wanted Bitcoin to scale to Visa levels, stating the payment network's transaction throughput as a frame of reference. There is a common misconception about the structure of traditional electronic payment networks – this has caused the lemmings of the Bitcoin world to set an unrealistic goal of competing with an industry that is filled with holes. Bitcoin's decentralized ledger prevents it from ever being utilized as a retail payment network directly. Continue reading →

Enhanced Spyware Comes to Older Versions of Windows

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The telemetry spyware which lead to Windows 10 users being banned from a number of torrent trackers has now arrived for Windows 7 and 8 in Microsoft's latest batch of "updates" (archived). Attempting to stop the reporting of data to Microsoft on infected machines requires a firewall between the machine and the wider internet, though euthanasia is likely the only effective remedy in the long run for machines subjected to this infection. Any operator of serious internet ventures ought to be giving serious consideration to following in the footsteps of the torrent trackers  and deal with Windows users through shunning and the quarantine of their machines. It would also likely be prudent to consider any cryptographic key material living on a machine running Windows to be in the possession of Microsoft or soon to be in the possession of Microsoft.

Mozilla Vulnerability Hoard Compromised For a Year

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This weekend news emerged that the Mozilla Foundation's Bugzilla tracker's hoard of vulnerabilities in the Firefox web browser had been breached for more than a year and potentially as long as two years. By Mozilla's own admission critical security vulnerabilities left unfixed for months had been available to the breaching party who had complete access to a goldmine of ways to abuse Mozilla users that Mozilla itself had been sitting on. Mozilla's handling of this episode has been nothing short of abusive to its users. Continue reading →

Many Network Appliances Leak Master TLS Private Keys Through "Forward Secrecy"

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Florian Weimer has published a paper (pdf, txt) showing that a wide variety of purpose built network hardware leaks transport layer security keys when forward secrecy is enabled. The leaks occur due to faulty RSA signatures produced when the RSA software uses an optimization derived from the "Chinese Remainer Theorem" without any further hardening or error checking. The problem with the Chinese Remainer Theorem optimization has been known since 1996 when Arjen Lenstra brought these concerns about faults during RSA signature generation into the literature (pdf, png). Two decades later GNUTLS, PolarSSL and Libgcrypt lack checks for this potential calamity by default, though other software implementations have ways to disable checks. With the affected appliances once the signature flaw occurs the "forward secrecy" key agreement protocol serves as a channel for acquiring the private key. Continue reading →