News: Petro and Russia, illegal porn on the blockchain, Tether, Mt. Gox, Twitter bans crypto ads, NSA scans Bitcoin, Kodak earnings call, Sierra Leone election not on the blockchain

  • The Venezuelan Petro, one of the more weirdly stupid cryptocurrency ideas of late, is apparently a Russian plot to weaken US sanctions in general. Or so Time thinks. Apparently, Russia didn’t want to risk destabilising the actual ruble with a cryptoruble, so they tried the experiment on their good friend Venezuela, who had nothing to lose.
  • And President Trump has emphasised that even touching this Petro thing is a sanctions violation.

Illegal and Condemned Content. Bitcoin’s blockchain contains at least eight files with sexual content. While five files only show, describe, or link to mildly pornographic content, we consider the remaining three instances objectionable for almost all jurisdictions: Two of them are backups of link lists to child pornography, containing 274 links to websites, 142 of which refer to Tor hidden services. The remaining instance is an image depicting mild nudity of a young woman. In an online forum this image is claimed to show child pornography, albeit this claim cannot be verified (due to ethical concerns we refrain from providing a citation). Notably, two of the explicit images were only detected by our suspicious-transaction detector, i.e., they were not inserted via known services.

  • Return of the Tether Printer! 300 million Tethers printed, each and every one presumably backed by a US dollar. Possibly held in Puerto Rico.

 

 

  • Apparently the Mt. Gox bankruptcy trustee, Nobukai Kobayashi, did not liquidate the Bitcoins by selling them to an exchange — he sold them privately. It looks like it was that buyer that then dumped them. “Following consultation with cryptocurrency experts, I sold BTC and BCH, not by an ordinary sale through the BTC/BCH exchange, but in a manner that would avoid affecting the market price, while ensuring the security of the transaction to the extent possible.”
  • New York to upstate Bitcoin mining operations: get knotted — cities can charge a swingeing electricity tariff for local crypto miners. (Original document from the New York Public Service Commission.)

 

 

  • Scarlett Johansson’s Picture Got My Postgres Database to Start Mining Monero — a file containing both a JPEG image and an exploit binary, picked up by a database left open to the hostile Internet as a honeypot.
  • The Internet Society is not optimistic either. “Despite early excitement about their general security properties, on closer inspection we find that the original public blockchains are generally not a good fit for Identity and Access Management.”

 

 

 

 

  • And now, the weather.

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/973988660637876224

 



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