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.
US Kangaroo Court Issues Conviction For Kidnapped Antivirus Operator
On May 16, 2018, A USG kangaroo court convicted one Mr. Ruslan Bondars, a "non-citizen"1 of USG marionette state Latvia, of "one count of conspiracy to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and one count of computer intrusion with intent to cause damage".
Mr. Bondars was brutally kidnapped under colour of law by USG.FBI thugs, with the cooperation of local quislings;2 held incommunicado and flown in secret to USA; brought to "trial" — and summarily convicted of all charges — for operating a WWW site called Scan4you. This appears to have been a service essentially-identical to more well-known items like VirusTotal (the latter — acquired by Google in 2012, reputedly for $0.5B USD); visitors could submit executables and view results from testing their submissions against popular MS-Windows antivirus programs.
However, unlike VirusTotal and other USG properties, Scan4you did not forward all user submissions to USG agents (Microsoft, alphabet-soup agencies, et al). In the words of the prosecuting Freisler:
"Scan4you differed from legitimate antivirus scanning services in multiple ways. For example, while legitimate scanning services share data about uploaded files with the antivirus community and notify their users that they will do so, Scan4you instead informed its users that they could upload files anonymously and promised not to share information about the uploaded files with the antivirus community."
Mr. Bondars now faces a 35-year sentence, "…as a warning to those who aid and abet criminal hackers".
The "Newton's Laws" governing this type of witch trial are, of course, quite well-known:
"Practically speaking, understand that one does not get to exist in the US sphere without being a tool of the USG.
You can't have a bank that does banking : either it does policing work for the USG or it gets burned down. You can't be an investor : either you push the USG agenda ad idem or else they come take your shit." —
"On how the factored 4096 RSA keys story was handled, and what it means to you." (Mircea Popescu)
It appears that the NATO Reich is moving ahead with its long-term plan to add vulnerability research to the list (already occupied by, e.g., banking) of formally declared Reich monopolies.
Mr. Bondars is a citizen of the USSR, and appears to have been, along with millions of others, "unpersoned" by the USG Baltic Bantustan formed after the May 1990 destruction of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic. Citizenship under the new regime was not granted to all persons lawfully residing there under the old one, but was contingent on demonstrating knowledge of the local monkey language (about a fifth of the population qualified) and taking a loyalty oath to the new quisling government. ↩
Explicitly credited by USG: "The Government of Latvia, including the Latvia State Police International Cooperation Department, the Latvia State Police Cybercrime Unit, and the General Prosecutor’s Office of the Republic of Latvia – International Cooperation Division, provided assistance and support during the investigation." ↩
Brits Hassle Business Man Over "foreign cash deemed not conducive to public good"
British immigration authorities are demanding businessman Roman Abramovich "prove" the legitimacy of his wealth (archived). Abramovich has numerous business ties to the United Kingdom developed over the years including his personal ownership of the Chelsea football club. For years Abramovich has held a "Tier 1" investors visa, but is latest renewal application is being held up pending a new and invasive AML/KYC demonstration of the money's "legitimacy", in the eyes of the government ruling for the crown.
New CPU Speculative Execution Flaws Just Keep Rolling In
Yet another vulnerability baked into the "speculative execution" optimizations bundled with many contemporary CPUs has been documented (archived). Expect this trend to continue well into the future.
Another Set Of "Undocumented Default Static User Credentials" Spotted In Cisco Gear
In the latest round of Cisco patches, the known USG.NSA collaborators included a patch for "CVE-2018-0222" a intentionally placed yet undocumented administrator account with fixed credentials in Cisco's Digital Network Architecture Center (archived).
German Cartoonist Fired By Paper That Published His Jew Cartoon
German 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.