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Qntra - Herald Of The Most Serene Republic |
A remotely-exploitable vulnerability for OpenSMTPD, OpenBSD's mail server, present since May 2018, has been made public (archived). It enables an attacker to execute arbitrary shell commands with root privileges.
Notably, the proof-of-concept exploit makes use of routines which first made an appearance in the Morris worm of 1988.
A shipping container from China was seized by US Customs and Border Protection officials after it was found to contain almost 1 Million USD in allegedly counterfeit single dollar bills (archived). The container arrived via the International Falls port of entry in Minnesota holding 45 packages of dollar notes totaling $900,000. Secret Service agents congratulated themselves on keeping the money out of circulation and upholding their appearance of monopoly on printing approximately 6.6 billion increasingly worthless notes every year.
Argentina's courts are paralyzed after the Lex100 system they use for everything stopped working six days ago (archived). This is not the first time the system has gone down (archived), but it is the longest time Argentina's courts have been without this one system they built everything they do around. This makes the pretense of Argentina having a legal profession still more laughable than it already was. Continue reading
Roger Ver (WoT:nonperson) and Jihan Wu (WoT:nonperson), have announced a 6 month plan to implement a 12.5% tax on block rewards in order to fund development on their ailing forkcoin project. The developer tax will fuck the altcoin's protocol layer to orphan blocks by miners refusing to participate in the redistribution of wealth towards an entity known only as the "Hong Kong corporation" at press time. Details regarding who will receive funding and how supposedly remains under discussion. Some BCH miners have expressed displeasure with the tax, though BTC.TOP mining pool founder Jiang Zhuoer (WoT:nonperson) claims the issue isn't up for debate, going so far as to quote former Chinese communist party leader Deng Xiaoping in defense of the move:
Non-debate theory is my invention. Non-debate, is to gain time to work hard. When you debate, everything becomes more complicated and it wastes time. Nothing can be done. Don’t debate, and just try. Be brave and experiment.
Plans are for the mandatory tax to become effective on May 15 when their biannual hard fork "update" is scheduled.
Fiat markets around the world fell today as panic spreads over the spread of a novel coronavirus (archived). The novel coronavirus has inflicted a few casualties and appears rather easily transmissible, but reaction to the virus has been incredibly disruptive as well. China has quarantined Wuhan where the first cases appeared, suspended the sale of packaged tours, and extended the Lunar New Year holiday through February 2nd keeping local Chinese markets closed for the holiday. Continue reading
In his continuing mission to wreck Bitcoin, Pieter Wuille (WoT:sipa) has submitted a final proposal for 3 new "BIPs" and a pull request to the "Bitcoin Core" Shithub that will introduce Schnorr signatures and a new mEthereum-like addition called taproot via a "soft fork" to the protocol. Schnorr signature schemes were discussed in #trilema as far back as 2017, and determined to be attractive to PRB users because they are a match made in heaven for individuals using Segwit, multisig, or other "anyone can spend" schemes. Taproot was proposed in January of last year by Greg Maxwell (WoT:gmaxwell) and is an attempt to add "smart contract" functionality to Bitcoin, supporters having quickly forgotten about the SFYL that occurs when one consciously chooses to huff "smart contract" Jenkem. As always, users of actual Bitcoin will not be affected.
USG spyware vendor Cisco has announced a vulnerability affecting their "Firepower Management Center" allowing unauthenticated control via specially crafted http requests (archived). No workaround to mitigate the vulnerability is being offered, only mandatory patches. Cisco claims no knowledge of the flaw being exploited in the wild despite it having the appearance of a bespoke USG NOBUS hole.
Some very inconvenient things happened to Anglophone fiatist and pantuitists this week. Here are a few of them: Continue reading
The "Royal Yachting Association" announced their recent discovery that someone managed to grab their member database back in 2015 (archived). The database includes names, email addresses, and a mix of salted and unsalted password hashes. Boating Brits have had their accounts frozen until they reset their passwords.
The Virginia State Senate has passed a measure which would allow firearms to be arbitrarily seized from residents (archived). The measure which has yet to pass the lower house would allow "law enforcement" agencies to execute firearms seizure raids against private persons on the basis of any intermeddler informing the cops that the target they would like to see victimized in the raid might use their weapons. In other states that have adopted similar laws, "law enforcement" routinely kills private individuals on the basis of intermeddlers telling them "maybe" (archived). Continue reading