Today Bitcoin subreddit moderator BashCo has disclosed taking a part time with ChangeTip, a social media company that has a substantial presence on Reddit. The disclosure, mirrored in full below, includes substantial flattery towards his new employer such as: Continue reading
Shavers Enters Not Guilty Plea
Yesterday the criminal case against Trendon Shavers has finally progressed to the point that Shavers could enter a plea of not guilty. This is in spite of his Ponzi scheme collapsing a full year before the arrest of Ross Ulbricht who has already been tried and convicted. Both Shavers and Ulbricht are targets selected for criminal prosecution by United States Attorney Preet Bharara. Criminal charges were filed against Shavers back in November 2014 in Manhattan after Shavers lost in a civil case brought by the SEC in September where he was ordered to pay 40 million dollars in damages. The SEC's civil case occurred in Shaver's home state of Texas. Continue reading
Hong Kong Says No To Regulation Of Bitcoin (For Now)
Amid calls for the regulation of Bitcoin in the aftermath of the MyCoin debacle, Reuters reports that the Hong Kong government has rebuffed requests for new legislation aimed at curtailing the use of Bitcoin because it is unlikely to have a significant impact on the Hong Kong financial system.
Responding to questions asked in the Legislative Council, Professor KC Chan of the Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau said that bitcoin is not legal tender, that the price is volatile and that its use as a medium of exchange in Hong Kong is negligible. For these reasons, Professor KC Chan believes there is no need for the government to consider the introduction of new legislation to regulate or prohibit Bitcoin at this time. Continue reading
Thermal Sidechannel Carries 8 Bits Per Hour in Proof of Concept
Researchers at Ben Gurion University in Israel have demonstrated an attack that allows malware to communitcate between air gapped computers in close proximity by using the machine's onboard thermal sensors. The demonstration required somewhat controlled conditions and only achieved a transmission rate of eight bits per hour. The slow rate of transmission could however over an extended period of time be sufficient to leak valuable information including cryptographic keys. Continue reading
Pogoplug & ODROID-C1 To Do Battle
In what is an obvious response to the crates of pogoplug based Bitcoin nodes that will soon begin to power the network and the hard fork missile crisis, the scam foundation sponsored Bitnodes has announced its intention to follow suit in distributing a plug and play node. While not yet available to purchase, Bitnodes is soliciting contact information for its ODROID-C1 based node which they claim will begin shipping mid 2015. Continue reading
Four New Jersey Schools Infected By Ransomware
NJ.com reports that four schools within the Swedesboro-Woolwich district were forced to suspend PARCC examinations last week after ransomware infected numerous computers at each school. Mistaking the shotgun approach as taken by ransomware authors for that of a targeted attack on the school by hackers, tech support for the district schools opted to work throughout the weekend so as to restore services and avoid paying a $500 ransom made payable in bitcoin. Continue reading
Empire in Decline: US Retreats From Yemen, ISIS Escalates to Doxxing
In a double blow to the United State's interests in the Middle East their Special Forces soldiers have been compelled to abandon Yemen while ISIS has escalated their hostilities to include doxxing a hundred members of the United States Armed Forces. Continue reading
Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Decreases For Second Time This Year
With what is the sixth adjustment in the Bitcoin mining difficulty for 2015, the difficulty has decreased to 46,717,549,645. This is a reduction of -1.50% over March 8th's all time high of 47,427,554,951. The hash rate as today's change stands at 334,417,246 GH/s.
Today's change also marks the 2nd time that the difficulty has adjusted downwards during 2015. For the sake of comparison, the mining difficulty only decreased twice last year. Despite this, 2015's hash rate has remained above levels seen throughout 2014.
Boost VC Embraces Child Founded Start Up
As the great Bitcoin recession continues, 17 year old Louison Dumont's Bitproof has caught the eye of VCs, having been accepted into the Boost VC incubator. The service allows users to certify and prove ownership of a document and its proof of existence. The company is attempting to raise VC capital although the service has struggled to find a monetization avenue
Document certification is a valuable service when done correctly, however at a first glance Bitproof.io seems to have a fundamental problem. The deedbot specification proposed on Trilema requires users to submit documents that are GPG signed, which creates a strong link between owner and document. Bitproof uses a username based identity to certify a document which lacks the non-repudiation strength GPG provides.
March 19th OpenSSL Vulnerabilities Overview
The pre-announced OpenSSL updates purport to address 13 vulnerabilities. Two of the vulnerabilities were graded as being of High severity by the OpenSSL project. The first, CVE-2015-0291 allows client connections to engage in a denial of service attack against servers running OpenSSL. The second high severity issue was the older CVE-2015-0204 where RSA connections could be silently degraded to export quality RSA, originally OpenSSL graded this as a low security vulnerability but reclassified this as a high severity vulnerability. Continue reading